When Mariah met Lutie – Luke Cage, The Street and the cultural capital of TV comic adaptation
Content Warning: Graphic Images (violence, severed heads) Netflix released the first series of Luke Cage in September 2016 to immediate acclaim. Cheo Hodari Coker, the producer of the Marvel comic adaptation, uses the richness of African American culture to create a hyper-real Harlem as the backdrop for his eponymous hero. Along with one of the best soundtracks of any of the Marvel shows, Luke Cage is replete with visual references to twentieth century Black America, blurring the distinction between the fictional setting of the characters and the actual world of the audience. Luke is more than just a muscle man, and at various points we see him with books; these are usually incidental to the plot but are deliberate additions to the depth of the scenario that presents the viewer with a literary geography of Harlem. Across the two seasons Luke is discovered reading Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016) and […]
Continue ReadingWatchmen and Hunters: Reading Nostalgia, Repair, and Heroism in American Historical Fiction
Watchmen (2019 and Hunters (2020) are both TV shows that engage with a deep sense of nostalgia and reparation: whether it is their counterfactual worldmaking with an ‘American god’ or a group of Jews who are on the ‘hunt’ to kill Nazis in post-war America, they both demonstrate how a longing for a different personal or historical past is inextricable from a desire to ‘repair’ the linear course of time. The insistent attempt to re-create personal and collective histories against the pervasive and overwhelming myth of American exceptionalism is symptomatic of a particular kind of cultural longing. Svetlana Boym’s useful categorisation of nostalgia into two kinds, restorative and reflective, along with her understanding of nostalgia as a longing for a home that ‘may or may not have existed,’ is central to the re-construction of a lost past both TV shows attempt (in their counterfactual worldmaking).[i] They speak back […]
Continue ReadingU.S. Television, Nostalgia and Identity – Editorial
The ubiquity of television has been written about extensively in both scholarship and popular writing; ever since the first commercial sets began replacing the hearth as the centrepiece of any American living area, television has dominated how we write and think about the United States. In 2020, a time unlike any other in recent memory, more people than ever stayed indoors with the television on, streaming platforms open, and consumed entertainment insatiably. Was it comfort and nostalgia for a pre-pandemic time that saw record viewing figures? A distraction from the uncertainty of the present? Or, simply, that more entertainment is being produced than ever and to stay afloat and abreast of popular culture one has to consume quicker than ever before? This USSO Special Series brings together 10 scholars and their respective research into the televisual landscape of America both past and present, examining how nostalgia, revisionism, and other ideological […]
Continue Reading‘Heart’, ‘Hope’, and ‘Tombstones’: Donald Trump and Populist discourse
Like other actors in the public sphere, politicians manipulate our emotions to achieve an “emotional re-framing of reality”[i]. Either in their spontaneous or prepared addresses, those in public office usually trigger a myriad of emotions ranging from fear, anger, frustration, resentment, happiness, grief to nostalgia. This chameleonic communication is often vital to any successful politician’s career, and its legacy is vast. The use of conceptual metaphors that invoke emotions in political discourse has been the subject in many classical fields of study. It lies in Ancient tradition when emotions, or Pathos in Aristotelian terms, were one of the three persuasive appeals. Emotions have always been central to political communication. “Few would deny that political rhetoric often has an explicitly emotional purpose”, wrote James Martin[ii]. President Lincoln, President D. Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr are examples of politicians who were invested in cultivating positive emotions. Martha Nussbaum[iii] calls these figures […]
Continue ReadingEssentialism and the Revival of Black Power: Re-inventing American Integrationist Discourse
On July 24 2015, around 500 advocacy groups representing African American communities from all over the country met in a three-day conference at Cleveland State University to deliberate on the creation of a unified political front. Outside the conference facilities, demonstrators shouted slogans decrying what they perceived as deliberate institutional indifference to the plight of their communities in face of the dramatic upsurge of anti-Black racism, police brutality and violence committed by white supremacist groups. The slogans echoed in essence those raised the year before in what historians now call the “Ferguson unrest” in reference to the riots which broke out in two waves over the next four months following the death of 18-year old Michael Brown. The effervescent crowd fuelled further enthusiasm for the participants at the CSU conference who were by now intent on launching a political resistance platform to translate the slogans that had for long remained […]
Continue Reading“The Greatest Infomercial in Political History”: A Presidency in the Age of Entertainment
‘Do me a favor. Do you paint houses too? What is this?’ asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her final speech at the 2020 impeachment of Donald Trump.[i] By thus referencing Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman, Pelosi likened the president’s language in his notorious phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to that of a mafia goon. This incident is symptomatic of a remarkable symbiosis: while Hollywood has consistently reflected on U.S. politics, American political discourses have habitually drawn on tropes made in Hollywood. Hence, Trump’s reputation as a ‘reality TV president’ distracts from the fact that framing politics as just another form of entertainment is far from being exclusive to his governing style. To cite recent examples from the opposite political camp, 2021 impeachment managers announced ‘a fast-paced, cinematic case aimed at rekindling the outrage lawmakers experienced on Jan. 6’[ii]. And when asked to compare both Trump […]
Continue ReadingUSSO Call for Editors
USSO is excited to announce our new Call for Editors to fill one vacant role on our editorial team. We are seeking a Co-Editor to replace outgoing Co-Editor Will Carroll and to work with extant Co-Editor Sarah Collier and the current editorial team at USSO. Here is a brief survey of the role: Co-Editor duties: Liaising with fellow Co-Editor in the editing and commissioning of research articles for USSO Working alongside the full editorial team in ensuring the smooth operation of USSO on a daily basis Organising the shared Google Drive, including the creation of agendas ahead of monthly editorial meetings Working alongside Guest Editors for USSO Special Series, and typesetting / scheduling their articles for publication Managing USSO’s email communications, including any queries and / or requests All editors at USSO operate on a voluntary basis. Please click here to download the full application: Call for Editors Application Form […]
Continue ReadingPlaying Paranoid in The Lighthouse
If the 2000s were infested with zombie horror and alien invasions, what can we make of the recent resurgence of Lovecraftian tentacled monsters in film and television? In a blog post from October 2016, Roger Luckhurst traces the re-emergence of Lovecraftian themes to Netflix’s Stranger Things, arguing that the series conjures a ‘sense that humans have irreversibly broken the planet, and that Nature is coming back to exact a terrible revenge’.[i] Writing on the eve of Trump’s election, Luckhurst’s diagnosis seems at once prescient and premature: the years that followed would see more popular re-imaginings of the Lovecraft mythos such as Color out of Space (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020). Yet in retrospect, such narratives seem to align less with impending climate disaster than they do with Trump’s election and presidency. These re-imaginings of Lovecraftian horror generate diverse responses to the Trumpian age; indeed the ‘Cthulhu for President’ parody’s […]
Continue ReadingThe Golden Years: Hollywood’s Fairy Tale History in the Age of Donald Trump
It is obviously not advisable to get your historical knowledge from cinema, but during the presidency of Donald Trump, this became more tempting than normal. The chance to not only escape from reality, but into a different version of it, was hard to resist, and two films served this purpose in distinct and explicit ways. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (both 2019) allowed audiences to indulge in the fantasy of a different America. Despite few aesthetic similarities, they both presented alternate histories, representing oases of calm during the incessant media, and often real-life, spectacle of the Trump presidency. Hollywood allows us to imagine that the Sixties, with its music, sexual liberation, and good times (Tarantino is acutely aware that he is working within an established, simplified narrative) not only continued, but was able to absorb America’s reactionary elements with minimal disruption. […]
Continue ReadingAssassination Nation, Young Female Anger and Futurity in the Wake of Trump’s America
“Don’t take your hate out on me, I just got here.” — Assassination Nation On 21 September 2018, Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation was released into American cinemas.[i] With its hyper-stylised neon party scenes, soundtrack of push notification pings and extreme violence, some critics were quick to dismiss the film as a ‘badly bungled attempt at social commentary’ with an objectifying gaze.[ii] However, these voices tended to overlook or belittle the central female characters’ Gen Z status and its significance in their angry retaliation against an adult-led reign of misogynistic violence. Positioned as an excuse to trivialise Levinson’s use of social media in his storytelling, the central characters’ youth is often taken-for-granted rather than appreciated as fundamental to the film’s depiction of female rage.[iii] This article reframes Assassination Nation’s portrayal of specifically teenage female anger as a political force; a force necessary for survival and for futurity. Set in the […]
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