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The US-Mexico border zone is one of the most visualized and imagined spaces in the United States, not just for the mythology of the Southwest as the cornerstone of US identity but as a place under continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense. Border Optics argues that the border is both a laboratory and an archive that indexes an optical regime and a way of seeing drawn from maps, geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations, photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television—all of which combine fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance and survey. Optics signals a complete visual apparatus, from recording and representation to the infrastructure and institutions that support the visual regime. The border optic refers to the expanded vision of the border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology, and the media archive of the region. The primary aim of this complex of industry, state, and private endeavors is not simply enforcement but control, particularly of the movement of goods and people in accordance with the split codes of the border-security imaginary. This book explores several related cultural media and apparatuses that have shaped a dominant way of seeing informed by the history of the region. This includes a countervision apparent in revisionist border historical accounts, art, media, architectural design, and activist movements, along with the strains of subversion within the dominant view.

Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But Black women’s relationship with technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,”Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the U.S. to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on- and offline. Digital Black Feminism positions Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, offering a through line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. The blogosphere provided Black feminist writers a unique space to draft principles for a new generation of Black feminist thought, while other online communities offer practical lessons on the praxis of digital Black feminism. Steele makes connections between the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. As Black feminist writers’ work now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers hopefulness and caution on Black feminism becoming a product for sale in the digital marketplace.

Marshall McLuhan is best known as a media theorist but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan’s work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan’s entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan’s own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan’s influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan’s ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art.

After Reconstruction, white publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South that lasted for generations. Black journalists fought these regimes as they were being built. The stakes could not have been higher: The future of liberal democracy in the newly restored United States was on the line. Journalism & Jim Crow is the first extended work to examine the foundational role of the press at this critical turning point in U.S. history. It documents the struggle between two different journalisms—a white journalism dedicated to building an anti-Black, anti-democratic America and a Black journalism dedicated to building a multiracial, fully democratic America. The southern white press and its political and business allies carried the day, effectively killing democracy in the South for nearly a century and crafting a racial hierarchy that inflected modern America and endures today. This study of journalism, democracy, and race during a tragic, consequential moment in our nation’s past, as the ideology of the New South spread throughout the country, will help readers think in new ways about two important concerns: the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy and the systems and structures of white supremacy in American life. The unpleasant truth is that journalism in America has often not been devoted to democratic values.

Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics explores how fantasy—especially superhero comics, which are usually derided as naïve and childish—is a catalyst for engaging the black radical imagination. Such engagements prompt “fantasy-acts” against antiblackness, a transgressive way of “reading” beyond the comic-book page to envision and to experience alternate, and potentially more just, realities. Fantasies about superhero characters are not just or even primarily forms of escape, Scott argues, but are active reshapings of readers and their worlds. Keeping It Unreal offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality and between the imagination and being, as it weaves Scott’s personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther, Luke Cage, Nubia, and Blade and theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry, including African American and African diaspora studies, media studies, comics studies, queer theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and black feminism.

Pain Generation troubles the phenomenon of feminists turning to social media to respond to and enact the political potential of pain inflicted by acts of sexual harassment, sexual violence, and sexual abuse. Anchoring its analysis in theories and criticisms of neoliberal feminism, this book illustrates the complexity of how, in using digital platforms such as Instagram and Twitter that are governed by neoliberal logic, the antiracist and decolonial feminists it discusses take on a “neoliberal self(ie) gaze” in their social media activism—and the dangers of doing so. To put forward such an argument is to claim that the stakes here are high: if feminists do not recognize and seriously challenge how neoliberalism structures our activism on social media and thereby alters our online activism practices, it may undercut our work toward social justice. This book offers a fresh perspective on contemporary feminist activism by making visible the neoliberal self(ie) gaze that is pervasive on social media, even and especially in progressive and decolonial feminist spaces; by pointing out the practice of racial oscillation as a technology of the neoliberal self(ie) on social media; by proposing the term “the sharing economy of emotions” to highlight the importance of emotion, which has been overlooked in much previous scholarship; by claiming the significance of “silence as testimony” in articulating feminist agency in online spaces; and by imagining a new practice on social media called vigilant eco-love that can potentially subvert the neoliberal self(ie) gaze.

Rebirthing a Nation unmasks how white nationalist women refine racism through colorblind values, ideologies, and classifications to validate, promote, and sustain a white identity politic. Analyzing web rhetorics of white nationalist, alt-right, and conservative white women, Wendy K. Z. Anderson reveals how white women sustain institutional white supremacy through coded language and digital design. The close textual analysis of GUI texts and instruction sets, organization of digital infrastructures, and easter eggs hidden within digital code offer critical, procedural, and infrastructural insight as to how white women facilitate whiteness. Contributing to conversations about agency and privilege, Anderson clarifies how gendered rhetoric and infrastructure is used to protect and preserve the centrality of whiteness. Rebirthing a Nationenriches discussion about institutional and infrastructural racism by engaging how white women perpetuate racism. Anderson argues that once we understand how white privilege functions through white women’s voices, we can better advocate for strategies that resist problematic agencies and white privilege.

This book analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shockwaves throughout the Atlantic world. However, despite its historical significance, this revolution is less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black History.  Despite Hollywood’s near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist—from directors in Haiti, the U.S., France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made.  In addition to studying cinema, the book breaks ground in examining video games. It scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin’s Creed series which have reached millions more individuals than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the Revolution, this book calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings. It also contributes to important conversations about how Hollywood depicts Black History, as well as to research on slavery and memory, Haitian Studies, France, French colonialism, the French Revolution, Film and History, Cinema and Media Studies, Africana Studies, Caribbean literature, American culture studies, Francophone cinema, and Game Studies.

Sounds Senses is about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound studies, it dismantles the retinal paradigms and oculocentrism of francophone postcolonial studies. By shifting the sensory hermeneutics of perception from the visual, the textual, and the graphemic to the sonic, the auditory, and the phonemic, the book places cultural production that privileges or otherwise exaggerates æstheticized sensorial experiences at the forefront of francophone postcolonialism. In the process, it introduces two primary theoretical thrusts—the unheard and the unintegrated—to the project of analyzing, extending, and rejuvenating francophone postcolonial studies. The book reevaluates francophone culture in relation to sound and the experience of sound, situating it along the fluid axes of paralingual utterance, audio-vision, voice, and narrative speakers. Through a range of case studies focusing on parafrancophonics, poetry, world music, cinema, the graphic novel, popular speech phenomenæ, and the poetics and politics of transcolonial identification, Sounds Senses demonstrates how francophone postcolonial culture is satiated with a glut of unexplored sonic significance.

Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr. , and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.