Africana Race and Communication: A Social Study of Film, Communication, and Social Media focuses on the areas of History, Ethos, Motif, and Mythology-Philosophy. This study is an interdisciplinary study, which surveys the collection, interpretation, and analysis of Black communication and culture. Likewise, the intellectual dexterity of Africana Studies as an interdisciplinary body of knowledge postures alternative ways of probing Africana phenomena. This volume provides a categorical lens...

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

There's no denying that men's involvement and interest in feminism is key to its continuing relevance and importance. Addressing the question of why men should care about feminism in the first place, Men and Feminism lays the foundation for a larger discussion about feminism as a human issue, not simply a women's issue. Men are crucial to the movement—as fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends, and friends.From "why" to "how" to "what can men do", Men and Feminism...

An in-depth look at America's changing gay neighborhoodsGay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are "gayborhoods" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why the...

In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

Considers the misappropriation of African American popular culture through various genres, largely Hip Hop, to argue that while such cultural creations have the potential to be healing agents, they are still exploited -often with the complicity of African Americans- for commercial purposes and to maintain white ruling class hegemony.

Television entertainment rules supreme, one of the world’s most important disseminators of information, ideas, and amusement. More than a parade of little figures in a box, it is deeply embedded in everyday life, in how we think, what we think and care about, and who we think and care about it with.But is television entertainment art? Why do so many love it and so many hate or fear it? Does it offer a window to the world, or images of a fake world? How is it political and how does ...

Since first going on the air in 1972, HBO has continually attempted to redefine television as we know it. Today, pay television (and HBO in particular) is positioned as an alternative to network offerings, consistently regarded as the premier site for what has come to be called "quality television."This collection of new essays by an international group of media scholars argues that HBO, as part of the leading edge of television, is at the center of television studies’ interests in...

Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay AnthropologistsWinner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities SectionWinner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable MentionFrom Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker's Clubs, Out in the Country off...

Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism? In this thought-provoking study, Carolyn Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans. Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacie...

The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of st...

American viewers are attracted to what they see as the non-scripted, unpredictable freshness of reality television. But although the episodes may not be scripted, the shows are constructed within a deliberately designed framework, reflecting societal values. The political, economic and personal issues of reality TV are in many ways simply an exaggerated version of everyday life, allowing us to identify (perhaps more closely than we care to admit) with the characters onscreen.With 1...