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This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's ideological projects with respect to race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to maximize profits or consolidate power. Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the television industry and the civil rights movement as a knot of overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the civil rights movement during 1955-1965 encouraged viewers to identify with black protestors and against white police, including such infamous villains as Birmingham's Bull Connor and Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s encouraged viewers to identify with police against putatively criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police brutality. Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to its fields. It challenges television scholars to consider the historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's genres, visual conventions, and industrial structures. And it displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung assessments of television's depiction of African Americans, concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and their political collectives have actively shaped that depiction to advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's ongoing role in the organization and disorganization of U.S. racial politics.

I grew up on the West Side of Chicago, where it was infested with gangs and drugs and violence. But I was always the type of person that wanted to be better than my environment, and I was also the type of person that didn’t want people to underestimate me because of where I came from. And so I made up in my mind, even as a young child, that I wanted to be somebody. I love making movies. I’ve wanted to be who I am ever since I saw Sidney Lumet’s movie The Wiz (1978).

In 2005 Angela Robinson released her spy spoof, D.E.B.S. (2004). Robinson first realized the project as the short film D.E.B.S. (2003) through a training program with POWER UP (Professional Organization of Women in Entertainment Reaching Up), the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit film production company and educational organization for women and the GLBTQ community. In 2005 she also became the second black woman and first black lesbian to direct a studio feature, the Disney film Herbie Fully Loaded starring Lindsay Lohan. This moment marked the beginning of the black lesbian media maker hyphenate as Angela Robinson moved to television and began working on The L Word as a writer, director, and eventually producer. Patricia White's essay in this section, "'Invite Me In!': Angela Robinson at the Hollywood Threshold," offers an in-depth exploration of her career trajectory.

The Mammy has been in our field of vision as a popular icon representing black womanhood for more than a century in literature, film, and television and in consumer and material culture.¹ Described as an asexual, rotund slave of older age whose sole responsibility is to take care of her master’s children, Mammy is a beloved character who represents all that is nurturing and maternal. She is dark-skinned and boisterous and thought to have mannish features such as large feet and hands. Mammy wears a large skirt, hiding her sex, and covers her nappy hair with a bandanna or handkerchief.

The Prince of Persia in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Ubisoft 2003) is ever reluctant to accept an ignominious end to his story, whether after a fall from atop a tower or after being killed by the sand demons. Every time he fails, the Prince exclaims ‘no no, that is not how it happened at all’. Like the videogame player controlling his avatar, the Prince wants the game sequence to be reloaded and replayed; only he appeals to an entity that the player often does not notice – memory. The Prince justifies the reload because he does not remember the events as they happen and he hankers for a return to a ‘true’ memory. There is an implicit problem here, however. We cannot ask the Prince what he remembers and during the game the player ends up remembering the ‘false’ memories, albeit often unconsciously. To progress further in the game, the player needs to have learned from his mistakes or, in other words, to have remembered the previous iterations of gameplay. According to the Prince’s memory, these failed instances of gameplay never happened; yet they happened in the gameplay and are remembered by players.  Often, many players share the same experience and this exists as a shared memory. Players might also be drawing on collectively recorded memories – the written step by step guidelines in a walkthrough and the comments left by players on various gaming forums or wikis.  What the player remembers is also often influential in determining the in-game identity of the player. Videogames themselves, such as Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft 2008) and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (GSC Gameworld 2007) have started self-reflexively exploring memory in their plots. Therefore, it will be useful to move the study of memory in videogames out of its relative obscurity and explore its multi-layered complexity.

Although gamers of color constitute a large part of the digital gaming player base in the US, they are systematically and enormously underrepresented by in-game characters in AAA titles. To extend these findings to indie games, we examine 80 titles and show that the pattern of lack of racial diversity holds. We discuss implications for the industry and players, and present challenges that must be addressed to increase diversity in racial representations of characters in games.

Today’s explosion of Swedish films made by and about transgender people is sometimes considered in a vacuum. This article explores the long history of cross-gender performance in Swedish cinema and the relationship of these new films to older traditions. In this article, I will outline the contours of cross-gender performance in Swedish films from the 1908 to today, using some exemplary films to display the variety of styles, genres, and meanings that can be found: the short dance film Dances Through the Ages ( Skilda tiders danser , Walfrid Bergström, 1909); the swashbuckler Lasse-Maja (Gunnar Olsson, 1941); the romantic comedy Up With Little Märta ( Fram för Lilla Märta , Hasse Ekman, 1945); the dramatic art film The Magician ( Ansiktet , Ingmar Bergman, 1958); the recent romantic comedy Cockpit (Mårten Klingberg, 2012); and the trans art film Everything Falls Apart ( Nånting måste gå sönder , Ester Martin Bergsmark, 2016). I will show that the two main shifts in Swedish cinema’s representation of cross-gender performance occurred in the mid-1950s and in the 1990s, due to social changes and changes in the structure of the Swedish film industry. In Swedish cinema, as elsewhere, cross-dressing has never meant any one thing, so we must attend to the specific contexts of its expression in order to understand what it meant.

Women and racial/ethnic minorities account for a growing percentage of video game players in the USA. The economic future of the video game industry may, in part, depend on the industry's ability to adapt marketing efforts to appeal to the growing female and racial/ethnic markets. Contrary to these efforts, however, is advertisers' reliance on stereotypes in advertisements to quickly establish a common understanding and wide appeal to a mass audience. This study investigates how race and gender intersect in the stereotypical character depictions used to market video games to consumers. A systematic content analysis was carried out of 383 US magazine advertisements of console, mobile, and PC video games. Stereotyping and intersectionality literatures were used as theoretical guides for this research. Findings reveal that the marketing of video games in the USA upholds some longstanding media stereotypes of minorities and women, including that of the White male hero, submissive sexualized female, Asian ninja, and deviant Black male. The potential social and economic implications of the video game industry's reliance on character stereotypes for the marketing of video games are discussed.

"The Routledge Companion to Media and Race serves as a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, and media professionals who seek to understand the key debates about the impact of media messages on racial attitudes and understanding. Broad in scope and richly presented from a diversity of perspectives, the book is divided into three sections: first, it summarizes the theoretical approaches that scholars have adopted to analyze the complexities of media messages about race and ethnicity, from the notion of 'representation' to more recent concepts like Critical Race Theory. Second, the book reviews studies related to a variety of media, including film, television, print media, social media, music, and video games. Finally, contributors present a broad summary of media issues related to specific races and ethnicities and describe the relationship of the study of race to the study of gender and sexuality"--Provided by publisher.

This book seeks to interrogate the representation of Black women in television. Cheers explores how the increase of Black women in media ownership and creative executive roles (producers, showrunners, directors and writers) in the last 30 years affected the fundamental cultural shift in Black women’s representation on television, which in turn parallels the political, social, economic and cultural advancements of Black women in America from 1950 to 2016. She also examines Black women as a diverse television audience, discussing how they interact and respond to the constantly evolving television representation of their image and likeness, looking specifically at how social media is used as a tool of audience engagement.

There are clear challenges posed by rural and remote education in Australia. These challenges are caused both by physical and material factors, but more importantly epistemological divisions that have created a separation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. Video games have the potential to bridge this epistemological gap by explicating the differences between different knowledge systems and engaging students in exploring these differences. Crucially, these projects need to be co-constructed to ensure that not only the representations of Indigenous people surpass some dubious traditions, but that different epistemologies are adequately framed. There is an urgent need for research-informed game-based learning projects to begin to address the ‘epistemology gap’ and the challenges faced by all Australians.

Dragon Age: Inquisition s (2014) release opened a new world of character creation for the single-player RPG genre. Upon release, it allowed the player an extensive amount of customization. In addition to the typical variety of choices associated with hairstyle and color, face structure, tattoos, eye color, scarring, etc. the game also provides in-game unique sexuality quest lines that highlight the spectrum of sexual choices, race-defined features, different class options, and body-positive representations, which the player could project onto their avatar. However, in a game heralded as groundbreaking for representation, the creators fail to acknowledge the non-binary gender expressions of their players, instead, forcing the player to choose between the traditional male and female characters. This paper seeks to explore the different ways in which Dragon Age: Inquisition (DAI) purports to incorporate modern notions of representation in the sphere of gender and sexuality but fail to do so, instead, reinforcing traditional binary representations of gender and sexuality informed by racial and religious assumptions

This study compared the effects of episodic framing of the Checkpoint scenario and the Military Raid scenario in Global Conflicts (2010), a computerized simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on developing impartial attitudes towards this conflict. The former presents a more human, individual and personal framing of the conflict than does the latter. Two hundred and ten Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian undergraduate students participated in the experiment. They filled in questionnaires measuring attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before and after playing the scenarios. Results suggested that participants playing the Checkpoint scenario became more impartial toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unlike those playing the Military Raid scenario. The results show that computerized simulations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be used for attitude change intervention, but the framing of the story in the game may be crucial in determining whether the players become impartial regarding the situation or not.

Analyses the narrative and formal elements of Kim Kyung-mook's "Stateless things" (2011) to argue how it critiques South Korea’s ethnocentrism and homophobic social structures by delineating a queer use of space. Gives recent examples of homoeroticism in commercial and independent South Korean cinema. Argues that Kim's film expand the definition of queer Korean cinema by deconstructing and reconstructing the heteronormative, progress-driven cityscape of Seoul.

This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. In this excerpt from that work, the author considers the issues at stake in videogamic representations of colonial Saint Domingue and its denizens, particularly for their depiction of the prehistory of the Haitian Revolution. In two mainstream videogames, both part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the history of Saint Domingue, its legacy of slave resistance, and the Haitian Revolution are made into fodder for an interactive entertainment experience that intervenes in and reshapes history in a complex manner. There are several issues at stake, which the author focuses on exclusively in terms of the commodification of Saint Domingue. First, the games place the history of slave revolt into the hands of game players of diverse ancestry, allowing for a redistribution of ownership over narratives of emancipation and empowerment. Second, the games identify themselves as tampering with history, and their mélange of fictional characters and real personages seems to risk rewriting the history of Saint Domingue’s legacy of slave revolt and—by extension—of the Haitian Revolution itself. Given recent events in the United States, and increased attention to strategies of black resistance such as the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems all the more imperative that our depiction of slave revolts in popular culture be handled with care. And yet, the author finds a subversive maneuver visible in the games: the use of untranslated language, especially Haitian Kreyol, may work to preserve and limit the player’s mastery over these histories. This article provides a tour of this complex territory of digital Saint Domingue.

Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero's The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie's ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties--ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism--has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other.

Gaming Representation' offers a timely and interdisciplinary call for greater inclusivity in video games. The issue of equality transcends the current focus in the field of Game Studies on code, materiality, and platforms. Journalists and bloggers have begun to hold the digital game industry and culture accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged behind. Contributors to this volume examine portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, 'Gaming Representation' pushes gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

Video games, even though they are one of the present's quintessential media and cultural forms, also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past. From seminal series like Sid Meier's Civilization or Assassin's Creed to innovative indies like Never Alone and Herald, games have integrated heritages and histories as key components of their design, narrative, and play. This has allowed hundreds of millions of people to experience humanity's diverse heritage through the thrill of interactive and playful discovery, exploration, and (re-)creation. Just as video games have embraced the past, games themselves are also emerging as an exciting new field of inquiry in disciplines that study the past. Games and other interactive media are not only becoming more and more important as tools for knowledge dissemination and heritage communication, but they also provide a creative space for theoretical and methodological innovations. The Interactive Past brings together a diverse group of thinkers -- including archaeologists, heritage scholars, game creators, conservators and more -- who explore the interface of video games and the past in a series of unique and engaging writings. They address such topics as how thinking about and creating games can inform on archaeological method and theory, how to leverage games for the communication of powerful and positive narratives, how games can be studied archaeologically and the challenges they present in terms of conservation, and why the deaths of virtual Romans and the treatment of video game chickens matters. The book also includes a crowd-sourced chapter in the form of a question-chain-game, written by the Kickstarter backers whose donations made this book possible. Together, these exciting and enlightening examples provide a convincing case for how interactive play can power the experience of the past and vice versa. Source: Publisher

En esta conversación entre la cineasta documental Marta Rodríguez y Pedro Pablo Gómez, antes que hacer un recorrido cronológico por el trabajo la artista, se abordan problemas tranversales que están presentes a lo largo de su obra: el cine documental como modo de representación; la construcción de una metodología del cine documental latinoamericano; el carácter decolonial de la obra de Rodríguez y su compromiso indeclinable durante más de cuatro décadas de acompañar las luchas de campesinos, indígenas y afrodescendientes, entre otros. Y es en este abordaje donde Marta Rodríguez, haciendo uso de una memoria extraordinaria, puede tejer un relato en el que se destaca la ética de la artista y su compromiso indeclinable de denuncia de las injusticias sociales, utilizando las tecnologías del cine, no para hablar por las víctimas, sino para hacer escuchar sus voces y mantener vivas sus imágenes; unas imágenes que interpelan el discurso colonial mediante el cual se ha tejido nuestro relato de nación. Dans cette conversation entre la cinéaste documentaire Marta Rodríguez et Pedro Pablo Gómez, avant d'entreprendre une tournée chronologique de l'œuvre de l'artiste, nous traitons les problèmes transversaux présents tout au long de son travail : le cinéma documentaire comme mode de représentation ; la construction d'une méthodologie du documentaire latino-américain; la nature décoloniale de l'œuvre de Rodríguez et son engagement pendant plus de quatre décennies pour accompagner les luttes des paysans, des indigènes et des Afro-descendants, entre autres. Et c'est dans cette approche que Marta Rodríguez, avec une mémoire extraordinaire, peut tisser une histoire qui souligne l'éthique de l'artiste et son engagement indécelable à dénoncer les injustices sociales, en utilisant les technologies du cinéma –pour ne pas parler en lieu des victimes, mais pour faire entendre leur voix et garder leurs images vivantes. Des images qui contestent le discours colonial par lequel notre récit de nation a été tissé.

This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism. Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience ? including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses.