Loopholes, Sanctuaries, and Silences: Pedagogical Media Economies from the 19th Century to Today

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

This roundtable examines the way a range of media producers create spaces of dissent in a shifting media landscape. Placing media’s pedagogical role in historical context—from newspapers to podcasts, literary books to radio shows, scholarly articles to blog posts—panelists analyze the material conditions of media production and the constitution of discursive communities of dissent. Each panelist examines a specific moment when a marginalized group has exploited or constructed a material or discursive loophole, sanctuary, or moment of silence amidst the noise of mainstream, (neo-)liberal culture, or a counter-example where the mainstream has worked to sell itself as a pedagogical sanctuary of financial or psychological common sense.

Janet Neary considers the ways black newspapers present California as a brief loophole of economic opportunity for black citizens in the expanding and consolidating nation before the arrival of federal civil rights legislation. Although these newspapers articulated economic mobility with legal enfranchisement, California’s idiosyncratic response to Reconstruction paradoxically shut down certain avenues of opportunity for black citizens, consolidating wealth production for the state, whose “abstract, ideal” citizen was the white property owner.

Samantha Simon discusses the emergent black nationalisms of The Colored American Magazine between 1901-1904, exploring how the literary magazine theorizes the relationship between U.S. racism at home, and imperial expansion abroad. While on one end the magazine’s internationalism takes up the ambitious goal of revising world history to situate what Pauline Hopkins calls “The Dark Races of the World” at its center, certain institutional critiques of U.S. racism get lost as the magazine’s focus grows more international.

Jennifer Garcon examines the activities and intellectual impact of New York based anti-Duvalier radio programming, L’Heure Haïtienne and Radio Vonvon. Recovering the dynamism of grassroots anti-government activism in radio archives, she explores exiled intellectuals’ deployments of broadcast strategies to mobilize audiences against dictatorship.

Tanja Aho investigates the pedagogies of neoliberalism in contemporary blog posts and online forums, arguing that anti-neoliberal discourses oftentimes use mental illness to teach the pernicious nature of neoliberal policies and their effects on individual subjects. In so doing, they continue liberal investments in racialized rationality that pathologize states of intensity.

Naomi Greyser maps unjust distributions of block and flow in the raced, gendered terrain of a neoliberal academy, examining what these experiences feel like for scholars: awareness of inquiry in space (self-negation, displacement or compression) and time (backtracking, stilling, stuck-ness). Greyser builds on a history of rhetoricians who have exposed writing as a source of institutional violence and an artful practice of what Aristotle calls eudaemonia, or human flourishing.

Michelle Chihara examines the implicit role of anti-political-correctness and behavioral economics in stress aesthetics and entrepreneurial narratives. Focusing on the fourth season of the podcast Start Up, Chihara argues that the podcast recuperates Dov Charney, the abusive sexual harasser and former CEO of American Apparel, as a charismatic business genius who gave women and immigrants jobs, a presentation which displaces any real investigation of Charney’s impact as a “job-creator,” thus reaffirming the (limited) economic “common sense” that framed discourse on business and gender in 2016.

Together, our roundtable invigorates discussion of the role of media in pedagogies of oppression and dissent.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Matt Sandler, Columbia University

Panelists

• Janet Neary, Hunter College (CUNY)

• Samantha Simon, University of Washington Seattle

• Tanja Aho, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

• Naomi Greyser, University of Iowa

• Michelle Chihara, Whittier College