Media@the Margins – Philip Kay

Media@the Margins

College of Staten Island

The fact of being separate

enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture

—a chest of seventeenth-century wood

from somewhere in the North.

It has a huge lock shaped like a woman’s head

but the key has not been found.

In the compartments are other keys

to lost doors, an eye of glass.

Slowly you begin to add

things of your own.

You come and go reflected in its panels.

You give up trying to keep track of anniversaries,

You begin to write in your diaries

more honestly than ever.

Adrienne Rich. From “When Dead Awaken,” 1971

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Media @ the Margins is an exploration of how people with limited power have captured the popular imagination throughout history and of the mechanisms by which they have managed to find their voices and assert themselves in the face of those limitations—often appropriating the very cultural forms that serve to distort, marginalize and disenfranchise them. We’ll discuss how media producers operate at the margins of society and how beleaguered groups form themselves into publics. Finally, we’ll feel our way toward an understanding of what “mainstream” and “margins” even mean in an era of online pornography, home cooked YouTube videos gone viral, globalization and the Arab Spring.

We’ll begin briefly with antiquity, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, studying the Tales of the Arabian Nights, the Aztec chroniclers of the conquest of Mexico and anonymous pamphlets filled with salacious gossip about the king of France that circulated among the working classes in pre-revolutionary Paris. From there, we will move quickly to 19^th century America and focus our attention on two particular groups: women and African Americans. We’ll peruse the abolitionist and penny press treatment of two gruesome antebellum crimes and the media circuses that surrounded them: the 1836 ax murder in New York City of the prostitute Helen Jewett and the killing of Mary, a 3-year-old slave child, in Cincinnati twenty years later by the hand of her own mother, Margaret Garner, as the family faced imminent capture and return to the South under the Fugitive Slave Act. Later in the semester, we’ll also look at the sensational coverage of the Central Park Jogger and the five young men falsely convicted of gang raping her in 1989 and consider how the mass media had evolved over the previous 150 years.

Along the way, we’ll study the subversive roles of women as both producers and consumers of moving pictures and other forms of popular culture, the institutions of the black press and the way figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to play the new medium of television like a musical instrument in their freedom struggles. We’ll touch on the newsletters of the clandestine Mattachine Society of the 1950s and the “bar rags” of post-Stonewall gay rights movement as well as on underground high school newspapers and the recent Occupy Wall Street Journal. Finally, we’ll turn our attention to the global south, digital culture and emerging forms and definitions of both marginality and media.

READINGS

With the below exceptions, most readings will be excerpted from longer works and posted on the course Blackboard site (see schedule below). You are required to bring them to class prepared to discuss them in detail and to follow along. Readings are subject to change.

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. New York: Vintage, 2007.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. New York: Random House, 2012.

Schedule of Readings

1/28	Origins/Tropes
	Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles, 4^thCentury B.C.) Greek Tragedy
	The Parables of the Lost Sheep and Prodigal Son (2^nd Century A.D.) Parables

1/30	Tales of the 1001 Nights (8^th Century A.D.) Folk Tales
	The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Miguel León-Portilla (1528)
	Diaries and Letters. Christopher Columbus and Hernán de Cortés (1493-1524) Chronicles

2/4	“Of Cannibals.” Michel de Montaigne (1562) Essay
	The Tempest. William Shakespeare (1610) Modern Drama
	Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe (1719) Novel

2/6	The Emergence of Democratic Forms
	Remonstrance of the Inhabitants of the Town of Flushing to Governor Stuyvesant (1657)
	Journey to the Hebrides. Samuel Johnson (1773) Travelogue

2/11	“An Early Information Society: News & the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” Robert Darnton
	The Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, et. al. (1776)

2/13	An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. David Walker (1829) Pamphlet
	There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. Vincent Harding (1981)

2/20	Audience/Publics. The murder of Helen Jewett
	Selections from the New York Herald. (1836)
	Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness & the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium. Andie Tucher (1994)
	The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life & Death of a Prostitute in 19^th-Century New York. Patricia Cline Cohen (1998)

2/25	Audience/Publics (cont.) The case of Margaret Garner
	Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
	Selections from the abolitionist and southern press. (1856)
	Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery & Child Murder From the Old South. Steven Weisenburger (1998)

2/27	Slumming
	Ten Days in the Madhouse. Nellie Bly (1887)
	How The Other Half Lives. Jacob Riis (1890)
	Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)

3/4	Chick Flicks, Chick Lit
	“City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies.” Elizabeth Ewen (1980)
	The Runaway Bride, Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s. Elizabeth Kendall (1990)

3/6	Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. Janice Radway (1991)

3/11	Midterm Exam

3/13	Media Institutions
	The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. (2007)

3/18	The Race Beat (cont.)

3/20	The Race Beat (cont.)

Spring Break
4/3	Screening: Control Room. Noujaim, Jehane. Magnolia Pictures. (2004)

4/8	The Race Beat (cont.)

4/10	The Race Beat (cont.)

4/15	Whose Language? Whose Images?
	“Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” June Jordan (1985)
	The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America. Robert Entman, and Andrew Rojecki. (2001)

4/17	“Mute in an English-Only World.” Chang-rae Lee (1996).
	“A Tale of Two Cultures: Palisades Park Grapples with Change.” Elizabeth Llorent (1998)

4/22	Subcultures and Liberation Movements
	TBD

4/24	TBD


4/29	Victims & Perps: The case of the Central Park Five
	Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. Helen Benedict. (1992)
	The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding. Sarah Burns (2011)
	“Wolfpack: The Press and the Central Park Jogger Story.” LynNell Hancock
	“One Violent Crime.” Bruce Shapiro
	“The Good Victim.” Gary Younge
	“The Boston Hoax: She Fought It, He Bought It.” Christopher Lydon. In Journalism: The Democratic Craft.

5/1


5/6	14. Rethinking the Media

5/13	15. Rethinking the Margins
	Behind the Beautiful Tommorows: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. Katherine Boo. (2012)

REQUIREMENTS

Reading/Quizzes. Expect to do approximately 50 to 75 pages of careful reading per week. We will have frequent short quizzes promptly at the beginning of class. These quizzes cannot be made up.

Attendance/Participation. Students are required to come to class on time and prepared and to contribute actively and thoughtfully to group discussions. The quality of your contributions is every bit as important as the quantity. Do your best to both participate and allow others to speak their turn.

Discussion questions. On a rotating basis, students will be asked to post questions based on that week’s reading and to kick off the class discussion. Discussion questions must be posted no later than 7 p.m. on the night before class.

Response papers. You will be assigned two to three two-page papers in response to assigned readings. These assignments will be staggered throughout the semester and given out during the first two weeks of class.

Midterm Exam. The midterm exam will take place in class on March 11 and will cover all assigned readings and class discussions up to that point.

Research Paper. This 12- to 15-page research paper is an opportunity to identify and comment on contemporary manifestations and trends in media at the margins and to situate them in a broader socio-historical context. Written proposals are due on March 20 and must be approved by the professor.