As Muslim American representation becomes more prominent in popular culture, how are they continued to be portrayed? Rosemary Pennington's new book Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media (Indiana University Press, 2024) explores the “trap of hypervisibility” faced by Muslims in popular media and the burden of representation that follows them. More representation may not always be generative, if there is not an intentional move away from stereotypes or caricatures of Muslim humanity to portraying real complicated and diverse human beings.Using a wide variety of case studies from prime-time television shows, such as Lost, 24, or Ramy to stand-up comedians such as Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani to Zainb Johnson, reality shows (like Project Runway or Top Chef), magazines (like Teen Vogue) and comic books (Ms. Marvel), Pennington carefully guides us through some of the binary representations we continue to see in popular culture around us, especially those that are framed as portraying "authentic" Muslims. Thus representation may not be the only answer, as Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence continues to grow, but more is needed as we more forward, as the book contends. This book will be of great interest to those who work on popular culture, media, comedy, gender, and Islam, and a great addition to courses on Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.In this episode, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh joins our host, Zehra Husain, to discuss her latest book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).Over the course of the interview, you’ll learn about: The origins of the book and how Ghosh became interested in the body as a material medium The importance of conceptualizing global epidemics in multiscalar ways What Ghosh means by multispecies relationality and “lively media” The distinctions between the “global” and the “planetary” Ghosh’s research process for the book and her thoughts on using an ethnographic mode The media archive Ghosh assembled while conducting research for the book How and why Ghosh conceptualizes blood as media in the book The expansive sites, scales, and temporalities that Ghosh tracks across The Virus Touch …and much more!About the book“In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.” Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website!Guest BiographyBishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy (NYU Press, 2024), Jonathan Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, TV comedy duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, “man-baby” film star Seth Rogen, and chiseled film star Zac Efron.Branfman argues that despite their differences, each star’s success depends on how they navigate racial antisemitism: the historical notion that Jews are physically inferior to Christians. Each star especially navigates racial stigmas about Jewish masculinity―stigmas that depict Jewish men as emasculated, Jewish women as masculinized, and both as sexually perverse. By embracing, deflecting, or satirizing these stigmas, each star comes to symbolize national hopes and fears about all kinds of hot-button issues. For instance, by putting a cuter twist on stereotypes of Jewish emasculation, Seth Rogen plays soft man-babies who dramatize (and then resolve) popular anxieties about modern fatherhood. This knack for channeling national dreams and doubts is what makes each star so unexpectedly marketable. In turn, examining how each star navigates racial antisemitism onscreen makes it easier to pinpoint how antisemitism, white privilege, and color-based racism interact in the real world.Jonathan Branfman is the Eli Reinhard Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Stanford University.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the 20th century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial–often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers.In British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2022), Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the 20th Century. Considering British cinema in the wake of one of the most familiar of cinematic reference points–Alfred Hitchcock–Barr traces how British cinema has developed its own unique path, and has since been celebrated for its innovative approaches and distinctive artistic language.Charles Barr worked for many years at the University of East Anglia, helping to develop one of the first UK programs in film studies at the graduate and undergraduate level. He has since taught in St. Louis, Galway, and Dublin, and is currently a Research Fellow at St. Mary's University, Twickenham. Much of his published work has been on British cinema, including the books Ealing Studios and English Hitchcock, and he was cowriter, with director Stephen Frears, of Typically British, part of the centenary history of cinema broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995. He has continued writing on Hitchcock, with a study of Vertigo in the BFI Classics series and Hitchcock: Lost and Found, coauthored with the Parisian scholar Alain Kerzoncuf.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His writing and other interviews about literature and film can also be found on Pages and Frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Sören Schoppmeier discusses how open-world video games reproduce American culture. He highlights ambient operations in games like Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs, and Red Dead Redemption, exploring themes of systemic racism, neoliberal capitalism, surveillance, and the Western genre. The podcast also delves into the future evolution of gaming in cultural representation and influence.

“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses bak.ma, a digital media archive born out of the social movements in Turkey, to guide us through a journey in which archives become sites of other kinds of stories—some of solidarity, activism, and the commons. Çelikaslan uses the concept of archives of the commons reimagining archives as dynamic spaces of commoning in which creative, autonomous platforms are generated collectively to perpetuate knowledge and sociopolitical relations grounded in solidarity and an ethics of care, not in some distant future but in the here and now.Özge Çelikaslan is a scholar and practitioner whose research interests encompass media historiography, critical audiovisual archival studies, and research-based film/video practices.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them.Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Alessandra Montalbano examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilised citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiography, law, literary criticism, trauma studies, phenomenology, and political philosophy. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy traces how and at what price Italians became aware of living in a country that was being blackmailed by criminal organisations that arguably jeopardised the nation even more than terrorism.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.In this episode, our host, Kinjal Dave, sits down with filmmaker, artist, and writer Paromita Vohra for a wide-ranging conversation about the artist’s career. As an artist, Vohra has worked across a variety of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. In this interview, she reflects on the provocations and practices that have shaped her approach as an artist, as well as the pedagogical possibilities that multimodal artworks provide in the classroom.Over the next forty-five minutes, you will hear about: What inspired Paromita Vohra to pick up a camera The challenges of building and sustaining a career as an independent filmmaker Social, political, and cultural shifts in the India during the 1990s that informed Vohra’s media production How digital media technologies and the Internet shaped Vohra’s work How Unlimited Girls sought to capture a particular moment within a globalizing feminist discourse, How Vohra has rejected certain aesthetic and narrative paradigms to craft her own style and voice as an artist, straddling comedy, irony, and politically incisive commentary Vohra’s digital platform Agents of Ishq and the sense of community the project has built How to cultivate and encourage complex conversations about gender, sex, desire, and politics in the classroom Building intimacy with audiences and being vulnerable to criticism Vohra’s upcoming projects …and more!Guest BiographyParomita Vohra is an artist who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. Her extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations, television programming and writing have made sense of feminism, love, sexuality, urban life and popular culture for a diverse and loving audience for over 25 years.Host BioKinjal Dave is a PhD Student at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches critical perspectives on gender, technology, and labor in the South Asian diaspora at the intersection of Media and Communication Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Diaspora Studies. She is a fellow with the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and an affiliate of Data & Society Research Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. Today, I will be talking to Columbia University professor Ying Qian about her new book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2023). The volume enriches our understanding of media’s role in China’s revolutionary history by turning to documentary. Qian guides readers through early documentary practice, left- and right-wing Republican documentary, and documentary as it functioned in the socialist and early postsocialist periods. In reference to socialist documentary, she writes, “As the vanguard of cinema, documentary in the Mao era meant, in principle, to facilitate the dialectical relationship between the masses and the party, not only to aid in their mutual constitution, but also to facilitate a collective formation of knowledge and priorities to direct the unfolding of the revolution” (249). In our interview, we will discover how crucial this understudied genre has been in the 20th century and learn how the mutually constitutive dialectic between documentary form and revolution worked in practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What would it be like if scholars presented their research in sound rather than in print? Better yet, what if we could hear them in the act of their research and analysis, pulling different historical sounds from the archives and rubbing them against one another in an audio editor?In today’s episode, we get to find out what such an innovative scholarly audiobook would sound like–because our guest has created the first one! Jacob Smith‘s ESC (University of Michigan Press) is a fascinating sonic exploration of postwar radio drama and contemporary sound art, as well as a meditation on how humans have reshaped the ecological fate of the planet. Before we listen to an excerpt of ESC, Mack interviews Jake about how his skills as a former musician came in handy for his work as an audio academic.You can listen to ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene in its entirety for free courtesy of the University of Michigan Press.You can also watch Jake’s 90s band The Mysteries of Life perform in the “bad music video” Jake mentions or on Conan O’Brien.Jacob Smith is founder and director of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries, and professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is the author of three print-based books on sound: Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (University of California Press 2008); Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures(University of California Press 2011); and Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015). He writes and teaches about the cultural history of media, with a focus on sound and performance.Today’s show was edited by Craig Eley and featured music by Blue Dot Sessions. Our intern is Gina Moravec. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications