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"By bringing together a provocative selection of essays and images, Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self addresses the issues of nation, race, and selfhood and how they are depicted in ways that are challenging and informative, prompting readers to consider the impact of photography on our everyday lives." "If photographs are chiefly responsible for perpetuating myths of American identity, can a different reading of these representations break down distorting stereotypes? This is the central question posed by Only Skin Deep. The authors in this book forcefully argue that race and nation - and, indeed, photography itself - are fictions, cultural constructions that shape our social interactions. Even as symbols, these photographic depictions of ethnic difference and cultural superiority have very real consequences. This collection of works and essays addresses, for example, the lingering consequences of American colonial expansion; the conflict between public and private visualizations of individuals; the role of commercial imagery in shaping gender roles; the impact of fantasy in ethnic or ethnographic photography; and the uses of science to provide justification for politicized depictions of "race."" "Accompanying a major exhibition of the same name, Only Skin Deep offers a critical rereading of the archive of the history of photography. This applies to the works of famous photographers - such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, and Edward Steichen - as well as lesser-known historical figures, including Charles Eisenmann, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Will Soule, and Toyo Miyatake. A substantial part of the book is devoted to contemporary artists and photographers who have moved beyond the multicultural approach to representations of "race" and have made an investigation of the semiotics of cultural identity a prevalent theme over the past decade. Among the recent photographers included are: Nancy Burson, Nikki S. Lee, Glenn Ligon, Paul Pfeiffer, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Andres Serrano."--(BOOK JACKET)

Samella Lewis has brought African American Art and Artists fully up to date in this revised and expanded edition. The book now looks at the works and lives of artists from the eighteenth century to the present, including new work in traditional media as well as in installation art, mixed media, and digital/computer art. Generously and handsomely illustrated, the book continues to reveal the rich legacy of work by African American artists.

Why is the hit Singapore edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? must-see TV?1. Watch it so that you can hold the ‘hottest topic’ with your friends. 2. So you can be encouraged by the courage of some contestants who are bold enough to brave national TV when apparently they have not read enough. 3. So you can judge for yourself if you are bold (and knowledgeable) enough to brave national TV for your possible 1st million. 4. So you can call the number on screen and make your 1st million. 5. Finally, watch it to see for yourself that Singaporeans are not as well read and as globalized as we all think we are.

From the 1967 live satellite program "Our World" to MTV music videos in Indonesia, from French television in Senegal to the global syndication of African American sitcoms, and from representations of terrorism on German television to the international Teletubbies phenomenon, TV lies at the nexus of globalization and transnational culture. Planet TV provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field. Organized thematically, the volume explores such issues as cultural imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, ethnicity and cultural hybridity. These themes are illuminated by concrete examples and case studies derived from empirical work on global television industries, programs, and audiences in diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts. Developing a new critical framework for exploring the political, economic, sociological and technological dimensions of television cultures, and countering the assumption that global television is merely a result of the current dominance of the West in world affairs, Planet TV demonstrates that the global dimensions of television were imagined into existence very early on in its contentious history. Parks and Kumar have assembled the critical moments in television's past in order to understand its present and future. Contributors include Ien Ang, Arjun Appadurai, Jose B. Capino, Michael Curtin, Jo Ellen Fair, John Fiske, Faye Ginsburg, R. Harindranath, Timothy Havens, Edward S. Herman, Michele Hilmes, Olaf Hoerschelmann, Shanti Kumar, Moya Luckett, Robert McChesney, Divya C. McMillin, Nicholas Mirzoeff, David Morley, Hamid Naficy, Lisa Parks, James Schwoch, John Sinclair, R. Anderson Sutton, Serra Tinic, John Tomlinson, and Mimi White.

According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined. Juana María Rodríguez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields. As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.

This essay examines the cultural specificity of the gangster genre. In hip-hop gangsta films, the inclusion of black women as central to the gangster business not only transforms the gangster genre but, more important, adheres to black cultural norms. The films New Jack City, Sugar Hill, and Set It Off serve as case studies.

Coverage of Mexican-American youth gangs has been a staple of local television news in the United States for decades, and its form and content have come to embody many journalistic cliches: the rising tide of violence, the spread of drug addiction, the alienated minority youth. But as this bold new study argues, these stories contain gross exaggerations that lead to the reinforcement of stereotypes about Mexican-American young people and the Mexican-American community in general. Indeed, the police and community leaders greatly influence the content of this coverage by deciding what information to make available to the news media, while reporters select certain sources and ignore others, thus slanting the story even further. Source: Publisher

Singapore has changed dramatically in the last forty years, moving in the 1960s and 1970s from domestic import substitution to low-cost exportoriented goods. Then in the 1980s developing a regional financial and business hub and now increasingly positioning itself as an exporter of capital and expertise (Courtenay 1995: 90). With exceptionally high economic growth rates most years, a GNP per capita of US$6,000 more than Australia and three times Australia’s annual average growth, Singapore has attracted a high percentage of foreign direct investment. Despite exhibiting similar advantages to Australia in terms of a well-educated workforce, competitive pricing, developed transport and telecommunications and citizens from culturally diverse business, family and personal networks throughout the region, Singapore’s media and resultant civil and civic development has not been as progressive and liberal as Australia’s and indeed has not kept pace. So it would appear that state existence, security and prosperity as desired ends for Singapore do not necessarily rely on an equal strengthening of the public sphere, or at least this is not evident to date.

Japan in the 1990s differs vastly from what it had been two or three decades earlier. The Japanese state has undergone such a fundamental change that it has been described as a ‘regime shift’ (Pempel 1998). Although the longterm ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has returned to power after its defeat in 1993, it no longer has an absolute majority in the Cabinet. Surrounded by numerous scandals and corruption charges, both the government and bureaucracy have undergone major reforms to increase transparency and reduce bureaucratic influence over the policy-making process. The Japanese Diet has, for example, passed the Information Disclosure Law to increase openness in the administration. Economic policies have also been transformed to cope with the malaise characterised by continuing problems of bad loans in the financial sector, rising unemployment and declining manufacturing productivity.

The question of why civil society presents such appeal for commentators, scholars and journalists writing about developing nations is an important one. The most likely explanation is that a kind of global faith exists in civil society as the driving force of a new world order. This global transformation, exemplified by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, celebrates people’s freedom to participate in public discourse, and ultimately in processes of directly electing political representatives. In this sense the concepts of civil society and the public sphere come together to describe a global anti-authoritarian groundswell where the power of ideas is linked to global cultural development.

Television was introduced to Indonesia in 1962 as part of President Sukarno’s flurry of nationalistic ‘symbol wielding’ associated with the Fourth Asian Games (Feith 1963). Televisi Republik Indonesia’s (TVRI) legal status as a creature of the president was reinforced further in Presidential Decree #27, 1963, when it was absorbed after the Games into the ‘Spirit of Sukarno Foundation’, a highly personalised institution under the direct control of the President. TVRI was established as a Foundation in its own right on 20 October 1963, with the President as General Manager (Presidential Decree #215, 1963). Article 3 nominates TVRI as the sole organisation authorised to establish and develop television stations in Indonesia, a highly significant provision which made the commercial broadcasters established in the 1990s dependent on TVRI. TVRI’s status as an activity of the TVRI Foundation was not formally revoked until the enactment of Broadcasting Law #24, 1997, although in administrative practice it came under the control of the Department of Information in 1966.

Modern Malaysia was established in 1963 following a drawn-out struggle against British interests which had occupied territory on Penang and Singapore and the Straits of Malacca in 1786, 1819 and 1824 respectively. In 1867 these outposts came under the control of the British Colonial Office and were governed as a Crown Colony. Although Britain did not directly colonise the Malay States, which remained legally autonomous, it imposed effective administrative control over Malaya and the Borneo territories from the late 1870s until the Japanese occupation in 1942.

Since the Korean War (1950-53), South Korea (hereafter Korea) has undergone a series of political changes. The move towards democratisation was largely spurred on by the demonstrations and riots occurring throughout the 1980s. In 1987 massive demonstrations forced the then President Chun DooHwan to call a new presidential election, and President-elect Rho Tae-Woo to implement more social reforms. The notion of civil society in Korea has been a relatively new concept until very recently, mainly because it has not achieved wide recognition from the public, media or the state. The development of a people’s movement advocating democracy could be said to be the foundation of ‘civil society’ in Korea.

Television first appeared in Hong Kong in 1957. It was a cable television service run by the Rediffusion Company which had operated a highly successful wired sound broadcasting service since 1949. Hong Kong was the first British colony to have television. But the Rediffusion television service was very expensive. Its monthly subscription fee was HK$55. In 1958, a technical worker’s monthly wages were HK$360 and an unskilled worker earned only HK$75 (Hong Kong Government 1959: 32). A year before the introduction of free-to-air television in 1967, Rediffusion television had only 67,000 subscribers (Hong Kong Government 1967: 206). Thus before 1967 television was an elite medium and its social impact was minimal.

The reform of media regulation can be read as part of the wider movement towards democratisation in Thailand in the 1990s. Real progress was made in media reform, yet as the traditional control of the Army has been reduced, the power of commercial media monopolies has grown. The main threat to further media liberalisation is now the growth of private monopolies. This was exemplified by the election of Thaksin Shinawatra in January 2001, as he is a media magnate on an international scale comparable with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Both men have used their communications business as a path to political power. The first part of this chapter will summarise Thai ideas about civil society, television regulation and the political context of media reform, followed by an analysis of how civil society issues are represented on Thai TV. Broadly, there are urban news and current affairs programmes of an investigative nature, and then there are rural-oriented programmes featuring community participation, notably Lan Ban Lan Muang. Finally, the prospects for media regulation since Thaksin’s election will be considered. The progress towards media reform made in the second half of the 1990s has since stalled under Thaksin’s new government.

In the uprising of 16-20 January 2001, which ousted former Philippine President Joseph Estrada from power, two forces stood out as pivotal: television (specifically the coverage of the impeachment trial which was the centre of public attention) and civil society (which was instrumental in the uprising itself). In this chapter I argue that notwithstanding the central importance of television in this most recent national political change, the regulation of the sector and its long-term associations with crony capitalism have established barriers to civil society finding its voice on television.

Since its invention, television has been one of the biggest influences on American culture. Through this medium, multiple visions and disparate voices have attempted to stake a place in viewer consumption. Yet even as this programming supposedly reflects characteristics of the general American populace, television-generated images are manipulated and contradictory, predicated by the various economic, political, and cultural forces placed upon it. In Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade sets out to dissect images of the African American woman in television from the 1980s. She calls their depiction "binaristic," or split. African American women, although an essential part of television programming today, are still presented as distorted and deviant. By closely examining the television texts of African-American women in comedy, music video, television news and talk shows (Oprah Winfrey is highlighted), Smith-Shomade shows how these voices are represented, what forces may be at work in influencing these images, and what alternate ways of viewing might be available. Smith-Shomade offers critical examples of where the sexist and racist legacy of this country collide with the cultural strength of Black women in visual and real-lived culture. As the nation's climate of heightened racial divisiveness continues to relegate the representation of Black women to depravity and display, her study is not only useful, it is critical.

In January 1987, the Indian state-run television began broadcasting a Hindu epic in serial form, The Ramayana, to nationwide audiences, violating a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship. What resulted was the largest political campaign in post-independence times, around the symbol of Lord Ram, led by Hindu nationalists. The complexion of Indian politics was irrevocably changed thereafter. In this book, Arvind Rajagopal analyses this extraordinary series of events. While audiences may have thought they were harking back to an epic golden age, Hindu nationalist leaders were embracing the prospects of neoliberalism and globalisation. Television was the device that hinged these movements together, symbolising the new possibilities of politics, at once more inclusive and authoritarian. Simultaneously, this study examines how the larger historical context was woven into and changed the character of Hindu nationalism.

'One of the most important books on race, representation and politics to come along in a decade' - Henry Giroux, Penn State University Representing Black Britain offers a critical history of Black and Asian representation on British television from the earliest days of broadcasting to the present day.

What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality. In what follows, my primary aim is to open up some of the theoretically necessary questions about the implications of coloniality of power regarding the history of Latin America.