Continuities and contrasts in American racial politics.

2005 ◽  
pp. 233-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
David O. Sears
Keyword(s):  
Racial Politics

Screened Anxieties: Affect and Temporality in The Birth of a Nation

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-150
Author(s):  
Tim DeJong
Keyword(s):  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Impossible Task

This essay examines attitudes toward the future in D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation, focusing in particular on the opposed emotions hope and fear. In doing so, it establishes critical connections between the film's aesthetic philosophy – which is marked by an attempt to control its characters, its audience, and even history itself – and the film's troubling and much-discussed racial politics. Griffith's stated beliefs in the ability of cinema to fully capture the past and in turn to dictate to its audience the terms of the future, manifest themselves everywhere in The Birth of a Nation not only thematically but formally. However, the film sets an impossible task for itself, and where it falls short, its own hopes and fears become dramatically visible. This failure indicates that The Birth of a Nation is ultimately imbricated in the modernist episteme of uncertainty it works to deny and disavow.

Putting Donald Trump in Historical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug McAdam
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Behavior

The tumultuous onset of Donald Trump’s administration has so riveted public attention that observers are in danger of losing a historical perspective. Trump’s rhetoric and behavior are so extreme that the tendency is to see him and the divisions he embodies as something new in American politics. Instead, Trump is only the most extreme expression of a brand of racial politics practiced ever more brazenly by the Republican Party since the 1960s. His unexpected rise to power was aided by a number of institutional developments in American politics that also have older roots. In the spirit of trying to understand these historical forces, the chapter describes (a) the origins and evolution of the exclusionary brand of racial politics characteristic of the Republican Party since the 1960s, and (b) three illiberal institutions that aided Trump’s rise to power, and that, if left unchanged, will continue to threaten the survival of American democracy.

The Red King's Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675-1678.

1991 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Harold E. Selesky ◽  
Russell Bourne
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Racial Politics

Did you call in Mexican? The racial politics of Jay Leno immigrant jokes

2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
OTTO SANTA ANA
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Immigrant Rights ◽  
Political Comedy ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Television Audience ◽  
The U.S

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes a set of anti-immigrant jokes with which Jay Leno entertained his national television audience in 2006, when the U.S. public was focused on unprecedented demonstrations urging justice for immigrants. Leno adroitly mocks immigrants and their cause to give his audience emotional release by distancing them from immigrants. It is argued that political comedy can be an insidious discursive practice that reduces its audience’s critical judgment as it signifies social boundaries. It should be carefully scrutinized because, with a few laughs, Leno can steer sentiment about public policy and instantiate divisiveness for an audience of 6 million who, in the words of Leno’s official website, “are drifting off to dreamland.” (Humor, political comedy, late-night television, immigrant rights marches)*

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