I explore nationalism within popular United States' history and analyze the nationalistic rhetoric within a popular novel, film, television documentary, and computer game that use the Battle of Gettysburg as their subject. With these examples I argue that popular history and entertainment cultivate social conditions amenable to war. Rather than strictly focusing on overtly and officially sanctioned political arguments, I interrogate recurring defenses of United States' nationalism within popular history and entertainment using the concepts of sociological propaganda and collective memory to further my argument. By focusing on popular representations of a seminal event in United States' history, I contend that such an event has been used to affirm nationalistic hegemony in the present.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 resulted in a massive population loss that revolutionary officials sought to replace with a generation of active citizens. This dissertation demonstrates that the child's role from 1920 to 1940 transformed from that of an individual bounded by the family to that of a member of the community, the nation, and a transnational generation. Children entered the historical record in unprecedented numbers. Due to the impressive expansion of public education and the increased civic engagement that it yielded, children produced a rich cache of documents--letters, drawings, plays, and speeches--that provide a measure by which to gauge their responses to revolutionary programs.First, I explore adult-produced rhetoric and policies that placed children at the center of plans for creating new revolutionary citizens. Lawmakers, professionals, and governors attempted to construct a homogeneous generation of citizens through the balanced application of sound pedagogy, firm ideology, and modern medicine. Adults transformed public space and assumed new rhetorical styles that refashioned the child as a metaphor for the nation's future.Second, I measure children's responses to government and popular efforts to construct a universal childhood, and I demonstrate the uneven process of cultural dissemination. Unexpected reactions by younger children to itinerant educational puppet shows revealed age as a factor in reception. Children's letters to radio officials demonstrated that middle class children had greater access to the new media. Contributions to the art magazine Pulgarcito suggested a romanticization of rural children.Third, I reveal the ways that participation in civic activities expanded children's social networks and allowed them to imagine themselves as part of a national and international community of their peers. Children's conferences, literacy campaigns, and anti-alcohol marches, allowed children to sample national political culture and gain exposure to its hierarchies and bureaucracy. Pan-American exchanges between schoolchildren meant that Mexican youth saw themselves as part of a hemispheric family, united by a common race and common colonial heritage. The children growing up during these decades learned skills, gained a sense of political awareness, and absorbed and created cultural expressions that became recognized the world over as being distinctly Mexican.

This work fills a gap in research on Indonesian popular culture by delving into the presentation of femininity and masculinity in Indonesian music videos. Through a textual analysis of four videos, a survey of the video YouTube comments, and interviews with Indonesians about these videos, the author examines the presentation of Order/Chaos and other Male/Female binaries in the music videos and their relationship with the current pop culture and political environment.

This study investigated the relationship between masculinity, cultural worldviews, and societal risk perceptions in a sample of school-going boys between the ages of 17 and 18 years old. The main objective was to examine the nature of the relationship between these variables of interest with the purpose of gaining insight into the type of societal risks that are of most concern and those risks that are rejected by males conforming to traditional masculine norms. Furthermore, this study compared the pattern of societal risk perceptions held by males conforming to the traditional masculinity type with the risk perceptions of males adhering to the accommodating and progressive masculinity types. This study also attempted to identify the type of cultural worldviews that were held by individuals adhering to traditional masculine norms and values. One hundred and fifty seven adolescent boys participated in the study and were given two questionnaires and two psychometric scales to complete. The findings of this study showed that males embracing traditional masculine norms and values were more likely to endorse hierarchical and individualist worldviews and to be less concerned about a variety of societal risks and the impact these posed for the South African public. In contrast, participants conforming to progressive masculine norms were more likely to be risk sensitive, showing heightened concern for the negative impact of a number of societal risks on the South African public. In accordance with cultural theory of risk, the risk ideologies upheld by each of the masculinity types were found to be functional in the sense that they supported the core values and agenda of that masculinity type. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

My dissertation is motivated by two general problems within contemporary North American racial politics. First, the increasing ideological impetus of a “post-racist” society contradicts a spate of events that are symptomatic and constitutive of racial and ethnic essentialisms. Second, the logic of multiculturalism and antiracism has often been expressed in a language of race and identity rooted in a rigid system of immutable differences (Hall, 1997; Ang, 2001). The challenge is to deconstruct race and ethnicity in a language that is critical of new racisms as well as the ways in which racial and ethnic difference is seized and diffused by market multiculturalism. While some theorists have used elements of postmodern theory to develop a “resistance multiculturalism” sensitive to shifting social meanings and floating racial signifiers (see McLaren, 1994), they have rarely explored the political possibilities of “ludic postmodernism” (parody, pastiche, irony) as a critical response to multicultural ideologies. If part of postmodernism as an intellectual movement includes self-reflexivity, self-parody, and the rejection of a foundational “truth,” for example, the various racial and ethnic categories reified under multiculturalism are perhaps open to revision and contestation (Hutcheon, 1989). To develop this particular postmodern critique of multiculturalism, I draw on three case studies concerned with identity and representation in North American popular media. The first case considers vocal impersonation as a disruption to the visual primacy of race by examining the stand-up comedy films of Dave Chappelle, Russell Peters, and Margaret Cho. The second case turns to the postmodern bodies of cyborgs and humanoid robots in the science fiction film I, Robot (2004) as a racial metaphor at the crossroads of whiteness, inhumanity, and redemption. The final case discusses the politics of irony in relation to ethnolinguistic identity and debates surrounding sports mascots. Each case study recycles racial and ethnic stereotypes for a variety of political purposes, drawing out the connections and tensions between postmodernism and multiculturalism. A postmodern critique of multiculturalism may offer antiracist politics an understanding of race and ethnicity rooted in a strategic indeterminacy, which allows for multidimensional political coalitions directed against wider socioeconomic inequalities.

Historically, obituaries were created as news items and published in print media with the intentions of informing an audience of public hangings or similar sensational deaths. Over the years, obituaries changed in form to become a way of publicly notifying audiences of one’s life upon their death, focusing more on biography and familial structure than sensation. However, with advancements in communicative mediums, including the increased popularity and easy accessibility of the Internet, traditional understandings of the term ‘obituary’ are challenged to include all forms of media publications that draw on elements of sensation and biography. The combination of this new, inclusive definition and the increasing popularity and advancement of technological mediums has republicized deceased celebrities as marketable and profitable brands that rely on subject formation through media and participatory fandom. However, the branding of celebrated, deceased figures through processes of social subjectification often remains embedded within cultural texts. As a result, audiences are often unaware of their ability to shift or influence identities of the deceased, and their fandom becomes the target of alternative messages embedded in sites of obituarization. By applying Marshall McLuhan’s theory of technology as an extension of human consciousness in addition to Roland Barthes’ theory of mythologisation when examining Michael Jackson’s 2009 death, this thesis explains how the subject formation of deceased individuals becomes so powerful and globalized that their death becomes a positive and beneficial occurrence with regards to the profitability and marketability of their brand. Therefore, the subject formation of celebrated, deceased figures is a fragile process that is altering how North Americans mediate the culture surrounding death and dying. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-08 22:49:48.239

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South African political elites framed the country’s successful bid to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup in terms of nation-building, evoking imagery of South African unity. Yet, a pre-season tournament in 2008 featuring the two glamour soccer clubs of South Africa, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, and the global brand of Manchester United, revealed a racially fractured soccer fandom that contradicted these notions of national unity through soccer. This thesis examines the racial divisions in Johannesburg soccer fandom, exploring the continuing wider importance of racial identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Sport is not merely a leisure activity but a space in which everyday identities are negotiated and contested. Specifically, soccer in South Africa has been a site in which racial divisions have been both entrenched and subverted, spanning the colonial era to the present day. However, in focusing on race, this thesis seeks to move beyond simple binaries that have characterised the debates on identity in South Africa; particularly race versus class. Race, through the perspective of creolisation, becomes unfixed and fluid. However, despite reinterpreting race, racial divisions still scar the post-apartheid city. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork with the supporters’ organisations of Kaizer Chiefs, Bidvest Wits and Manchester United football clubs in Johannesburg draws out narratives of fandom often marginalised in Africanist scholarship. Drawing on wide-ranging sources including participant observation, semi-structured interviews and local newspapers, themes of racial difference and otherness emerge. The divided Johannesburg soccer landscape reinforced feelings of disenfranchisement and marginalisation in everyday life from the predominantly white Manchester United supporters while the exclusively black Kaizer Chiefs constructed the domestic game as a black cultural space. While Bidvest Wits offers a symbolic case of multi-racial interaction, certain supporters began to challenge such fractures; some United supporters showed interest in attending domestic games while the Chiefs supporters viewed the researcher as a conduit to attracting these white supporters. Furthermore, the national euphoria generated during 2010 World Cup did temporarily alter perspectives of the city and how the supporters travelled through it, challenging perceived barriers. Yet, themes of exclusion and division remained, brought back to the fore after the tournament.

This thesis aims to provide an insight into the stereotypical imagery of journalists on the screen and its changes in popular culture, namely in film. Much research has been done on categorising different filmic characters and on journalist in popular culture as well as in real life, but from my knowledge no comparative approach focussing on the changes in the filmic stereotypes has been undertaken yet. Therefore my literature review covers existing research on journalists in film and the various categories scholar do put these characters in. Using qualitative content analysis, namely by watching and opposing sixteen selected movies, this study aims to give some in-depth view into the question if and how filmic stereotypes have changed over the approximately seventy years that lie between the films from the first (1930-1949) and second (1990-2004) period of analysis. In eight comparative chapters this study argues that some stereotypes have changed while others remain the same. Influential factors for these changes as found in the thesis are for example history, culture and audience expectation. The reason some stereotypes do not change is that they are deeply embedded in American myth that is even harder to change than stereotypes. The thesis concludes that most journalistic figures underwent considerable changes or even disappeared with only the crusading journalist, as a mythical heroic figure, hardly changed at all.