Duke University Press Log

Linda Williams on The Wire

In today's guest post, Linda Williams, Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about why she loves the HBO series The Wire. Her new book is On The Wire, the latest installment in our Spin Offs series.

In the fall of 2007, I was laid up in bed. For the first time in my life since childhood I had time to watch television. A friend had brought me an inspired gift: bootlegs of the first three seasons of The Wire. I proceeded to watch an episode each evening until I ran out. As soon as I could I purchased the last two seasons and continued to steadily feed a growing habit. The series ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, but ran in a more concentrated time on my bedroom TV from 2007 to 2008. By the time I finished watching I was more than a fan, I was a convert. The project of my book, On The Wire, has been to understand to what I had been converted.

Through the microcosm of one decaying American city, The Wire reveals the interconnected truths of many institutional failures: a rampant drug trade that police cannot curtail, the devaluation of work measured in declining unions, a cynical city government that raises and then crushes the hope of reform, the poignant waste of schools and the failure of education and, finally, a media that cannot report on the truth of any of the above, let alone see the connections among them, although The Wire itself does. The series digs deeply into character without making private virtue or evil the final cause of narrative outcomes, thus putting an unusual spin on melodramatic conventions. I have never seen anything so absorbing, so complex, so simultaneously challenging and gratifying coming from either the big or little screen.

Subtle nuances of race, class and language are made possible by a locale in which blacks are the majority of the citizens, yet fixing things is not a matter of simply electing more black politicians. The usual racial melodramas of black vs. white are thus not the crude affairs they have tended to be in most movies and television. Race, for example, cannot be reduced to a problem of “racism.” It is inseparable from class, the plague of drugs, the decline of work and the failures of government, education and media. Nevertheless, the series tantalizingly holds out the hope of change, the hope of a better social justice. Indeed, it is simultaneously animated by the quest for this justice and deeply cynical about its achievement. A profound understanding of education both in and out of school makes learning, as it should be, the key to change while a distinctive rootedness in the specific locality of Baltimore gives the series a social solidity lacking in any other work on television.

Journalist Joe Klein claims in the DVD features on the final episode that “The Wire should win the Nobel Prize for literature!” Simon himself calls the work a “visual novel” (though sometimes also a Greek tragedy). Literary critics, such as Walter Benn Michaels, have followed suit. In a lament about the failure of the American novel to tell stories that matter to the neoliberal present, Michaels has claimed that The Wire is the “most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the twenty-first century.” Sociologists Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson also see the series as literature, arguing that it “is part of a long line of literary works that are often able to capture the complexity of urban life in ways that have eluded many social scientists.”

The series has the ability, like Dickens, Wright, Zola and Dreiser, to give dramatic resonance to a wide range of interconnected social strata, and the different behaviors and speech of these strata over broad swaths of world and time. Yet at the same time it seems feeble to describe The Wire as our greatest novel (never written), or, as Fredric Jameson does, to extol its “refusal to be ‘realist’ in the traditional mimetic and replicative sense.” Like the comparison to Greek tragedy, much of this praise borrows a literary prestige that corresponds to the series’ excellence but not closely enough to its actual serial television cultural form. Instead, I argue that we should attend to how The Wire grew and what it grew out of—first as a form of journalism, then out of the conventional melodrama of crime genre. In seeking to articulate what is so exceptional about The Wire, I believe it is first necessary to appreciate what is conventional about it: seriality, televisuality and melodrama.

Duke Journals in the Wild

At Duke University Press, we always appreciate when our books and journals are recognized, even in the most round-about ways. When we see a DUP journal in the wild, it’s always a thrill, even more so when that ‘wild’ is in popular culture.

Our journal New German Critique makes a cameo in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book The Lowland, when several issues of the journal are given to a character for her studies: 

“He returned to the desk and wrote down the names of a few books he recommended, telling her which chapters were most important. From the shelves he lent her his own copies of Adorno and McTaggart, with his annotations. He gave her copies of New German Critique, indicating some articles she should read.” (Lahiri, 2013)

Another reference to our journals in popular culture comes from the movie, Stranger than Fiction, released by Colombia Pictures in 2006. Dustin Hoffman carries around his copy of Poetics Today while advising Will Ferrell’s character on his possible status as a fictional being.

Duke University Press author Sol Yurick, who passed away in 2013, had his most famous novel, The Warriors, made into a movie in 1979.The film holds a cult classic place in cinema history and is referenced countless times in media and pop culture. One of Yurick’s other novels was also adapted into the movie The Confession in 1999, starring Ben Kinglsey and Alec Baldwin. 

Around the Press, Yurick is known for writing quite a few articles for our journal Social Text, including:

• "Some Notes on Iraq" (#27)
• "How the Athenians Planned to Colonize the West and Immortalize Themselves" (#23)
• "The Destiny Algorithm" (#19/20)
• "Faust's Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and the Takeoff into Transcendence" (#17)
• "The Other Side" (#9/10)

Have you seen our books and journals referenced in pop culture? Send us a photo on Twitter—we want to know! @DUKEpress

 

The Cultural Impact of the Olympics

Over the years, several Duke University Press journal articles have addressed the cultural impact of the Olympics. Take a break from watching the 2014 Winter Games to sample these articles.

Erica Rand, "Court and Sparkle: Kye Allums, Johnny Weir, and Raced Problems in Gender Authenticity," in "The Athletic Issue," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 19 and issue 4, 2013.

Read an excerpt from the article:

At a press conference he initiated to address the gender-test incident, Weir called the terms masculine and feminine "very old fashioned," adding, "There's a whole generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with." My own paradise would not involve throwing out masculinity and femininity or sex and race all together. They can serve as sources of pleasure, strength, community, and solidarity, inside and outside the sport, in ways that do not require policing them. If people of all genders could express, present, or perform in sport in whatever gendered ways they wanted to--which might or might not match up with the way they present themselves in other contexts--that would make for a more joyous sport. But Weir's distaste for having people define others by those terms gestures to effects of gender policing beyond fitting people into categories. As he states in Welcome to My World, being called "flamboyant" instead of "athlete" is another.

To read more from "Court and Sparkle," click here. 

 

Sally Anne Duncan, "Souls Grown Deep and the Cultural Politics of the Atlanta Olympics" in "Performance, Politics, and History," a special issue of Radical History Review, number 98, Spring 2007.

Read an excerpt from the article at the African American performance group Souls Grown Deep:

Unprecedented as it was, Souls Grown Deep was forced to the periphery of the Olympic stage. A vital opportunity was missed to give international visibility to the South’s unique community of African American self-taught artists. This essay examines the social and cultural processes that exalted a banal global art show while suppressing a landmark African American visual performance. This is a case study of the cultural politics of Atlanta, the vested interests of the fine art and folk art worlds, and, most of all, of the performative power of art exhibitions themselves. In Atlanta, the experiential knowledge embedded in the African American artists’ modes of creation and communication in Souls Grown Deep provided a potent social counterpoint to a falsely transcendent Olympic vision embodied in Rings.

To read more from "Souls Grown Deep," click here.

Amy Bass, "Objectivity Be Damned, or Why I Go to the Olympic Games: A Hands-On Lesson in Performative Nationalism," in "The Pleasure Principle: Sport for the Sake of Pleasure," a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, volume 105 and issue 2, 2006.

Read an excerpt from the article:

My relationship with the Olympics continued after my dissertation was complete and I began my life as a professor at Plattsburgh State University. Within months of arriving in Plattsburgh, I audaciously asked if I could leave the following fall semester to go with NBC in a supervisor role to the Sydney Games. I was indoctrinated: I was part of a small group of highly specialized people who drop everything for several weeks during an Olympic year and gather together, working for whatever network is broadcasting the Games. It is a unique group, knowledgeable in multiple languages, geography, world politics, and specific random sports (from gymnastics to curling to judo, in which it is legal, by the way, to break your opponent's arm as a means to win). Plattsburgh graciously worked out a way for me to go, which included teaching an honors seminar--The Black Athlete--online from Sydney. I returned with more life-altering experiences: watching Marion Jones run, sitting in the bleachers as the United States beat Cuba for the baseball gold medal and listening to rumors that Castro was in the house, and again witnessing a spectacular Closing Ceremony. I reworked the dissertation after returning from Sydney, and by the time Salt Lake City rolled around I was in the final editing phases of my book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, more confident than ever of the viability of sports, especially the Olympics, as a fruitful site to examine how the world works, whether in terms of my own focus on exploring how ideas of race and nation are culturally manufactured, or the broader goals of determining where in the world politics exists.

To read more from "Objectivity Be Damned," click here.

December Events

 We have a few great events in December. If you're in New York City, Philadelphia, or Sault Ste. Marie, read on for a chance to see some of our authors. But hurry, two of them are today!

Sarah Schulman has two events for her new book Israel/Palestine and the Queer International this week. You can catch her tonight at 7 pm in New York City at the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, a new space for books and events at Strange Loop Gallery on Orchard Street. And Philadelphia fans can see her tomorrow evening at 5:30 pm at Giovanni's Room, where she will be in conversation with Rabbi Linda Holtzman. Read previews of the event in Philadelphia Gay News and Philadelphia Weekly.

Today at 3pm at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, Thuy Linh Tu will be participating on a panel entitled "The New Economies of Sex and Beauty." Tu is the author of The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion.

Also at NYU, next week on December 13th at 6 pm, Ann Cvetkovich will be reading from her new book Depression: A Public Feeling. The event is sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.  

And one last event before the semester wraps up: if you're in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, you can catch Murray Forman speaking about the early days of televison, the subject of his book One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount, on Monday, December 17 at 7 pm at the Centennial Public Library.

Conference Marks Julia Child's Centenary

August 15, 2012 marks the centenary of Julia Child's birth. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which houses Child's papers, will be marking the occasion with a symposium in September entitled "Siting Julia." Writers, academics, chefs, and friends of Child will be speaking, among them Dana Polan, professor of Cinema Studies at NYU and author of Julia Child's The French Chef. Polan argues that Child was key to a transformation in instructional television (not just around food but around all sorts of television in the service of instruction) from bland, anonymous lecture to dynamic and exciting demonstration. "Julia Child made personality matter in the realm of talking-head television and she established TV cooking as a venue for homespun celebrity.  In this way, she prepared the path for later celebrity-chefs on TV and had a key role to play in early TV's maturation," he says. Polan is available to comment on Child's media legacy. Contact Laura Sell at [email protected] for more information.

Christine Yano on the Premiere of "Pan Am"

ABC-TV’s new series Pan Am is generating a high level of buzz.  Entertainment shows preceding the premiere featured not only clips of the show, but also interviews with former stewardesses, infamous author Donald Bain (Coffee, Tea, or Me), and others from the generation characterized as the “swinging 60s.”  What these previews suggest is an amalgamated, nostalgized view of an era when – as they say – people knew how to dress, knew how to travel, knew how to treat the service providers.  Many Americans of a certain age can sympathize with the source of the nostalgia, given the demeaning experience that commercial air travel has become these days.  However, this is nostalgia for specific class and race experiences that many could not share. The nostalgia of Pan Am positions the 1950s and 1960s as an era of domestic “innocence” – when women could still be women and men could still be men.  This is painted as an era when lines and lives were more clearly drawn, etching in gender roles as clearly as racial roles.

The innocence does not extend to the international scene.  Pan Am situates itself within the Cold War era of espionage, political intrigue, and the airline’s (and some of its personnel’s) role within these.  What the show does not depict are the incipient seeds of domestic social change.  With black-white race relations simmering not far from the surface, with ethnic revitalization movements waiting in the wings, with feminist movements just underway, the “swinging 60s” of Pan Am skirts the deep national contradictions of the era.  Here were working women in that very modern of industries that relied upon them playing traditional hostess roles, even while traveling the world.  This included women of Asian ancestry who I wrote about in my book Airborne Dreams.  While stewardesses were getting their hair coiffed and girdles checked, other women were beginning to reject those very bodily accoutrements as symbols of patriarchal control.  Indeed, the so-called swinging era was riddled with numerous contradictions and ironies if we take off the spectacles of nostalgia.

I was fortunate enough to watch the premiere of ABC-TV’s Pan Am with a group of people (147 strong) whose ties to the era and this television show are extra special – the Pan Am Association - Aloha Chapter in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Gathered at the Hawaii Yacht Club for the occasion (some in uniform!), they relished those spectacles of nostalgia affording them yet one more occasion to shout out, “Pan Am lives!” “Gone but not forgotten!”  They scrutinized ABC-TV’s show for inaccuracies (color of uniform, length of stewardess’s hair, use of a Jetway during that period).  They cheered at depictions of bygone icons – the Pan Am building in New York with its rooftop helipad, even the pilfering of fancy food and drink in First Class by stewardesses (one overheard comment: “Now it’s getting real!”).  Pan Am reassures them all that at least for one television season on Sunday nights, their display of loyalty to the airline of a past era – “the best years of their lives!” – may be shared by viewers nationwide.

New ABC Series on Pan Am Will Focus on Glamour, Not Reality

Variety reports today that ABC has greenlighted a new series to revolve around the pilots and stewardesses of 1960s Pan Am. Reporter Michael Schneider writes that the show will focus on "what it meant to be a flight attendant in the go-go days of flight travel." We wonder if it will reveal the ugly sexism and racial stereotyping behind the glamour. In her book Femininity in Flight, Kathleen Barry revealed the many indignities that women working in the airline industry had to endure in the 1950s and 60s: weigh-ins, forced retirements upon marriage, skimpy uniforms and sexual abuse by passengers. She details the important role of unions in changing most of these policies and turning the sexy stewardess into the safety-conscious flight attendant. In her forthcoming book Airborne Dreams, Christine R. Yano tells another Pan Am story, that of second-generation Japanese-American women ("Nisei") recruited to staff Pan Am's Asia routes. They were ostensibly  hired for their language skills, but since many of them hardly spoke any Japanese, their more important role was to bring an "exotic" appeal to the routes and play into stereotypes about Asian women. They endured all the same indignities of other flight attendants; one woman Yano interviewed remembered the pilot-conducted girdle checks. Now there's something that should be featured on the new show!

Flight Attendants Still Stereotyped in Media

In the news, we read about flights all over Europe delayed by striking British Airways flight attendants, but in popular culture, people seem to long for the old days. We all know not to call them "stewardesses" anymore, right? Apparently not, according to a new reality show on the CW network called Fly Girls. The show follows five Virgin Atlantic flight attendants who share a "crash pad" in Los Angeles. In one scene they roll their eyes at who call them "air hostesses," but reviewer Hank Steuver believes overall the show reinforces old stereotypes of "airheads" in the air. The New York Times Magazine focuses on fashion rather than hard work and safety, with a slide show of Delta uniforms over the last sixty year. For insight into the history of flight attendants, check out Kathleen Barry's Femininity in Flight. Barry traces the evolution of their glamorized image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists and feminists, helping us to understand both the struggle of the British Airways crews, and our own nostalgia for the bygone era of beautiful young women in chic dresses.

Sammond on new Disney Museum

The Chronicle Review examines the new Walt Disney Family Museum, which opened in October in San Francisco. The museum's focus on a single person makes it unusual, reporter Randy Malamud writes. He interviews Nicholas Sammond, author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960, who says the museum does not challenge Disney's self-creation narrative, in which the founder is "an American genius, a born tinkerer and inventor, like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison," with a dash of "the qualities of Horatio Alger (entrepreneurial determination) and Abraham Lincoln (humble origins and hard work)." The museum will also have an archive, but scholars Malamud interviews seem skeptical that they will have complete access to its treasures. Disney is protective of its corporate image, and much scholarship, including Sammond's book, sometimes presents a bit too much complication for them. Still, Malamud concludes, "the museum energizes the fascinatingly charged scholarly debate that the Disney phenomenon has provoked, shaking the worn, staid, sometimes cynical images we have of Disney and his empire, bringing to them renewed color and motion."

Brenda R. Weber tackles Makeover TV

Check out our new YouTube video! Brenda R. Weber, author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (2009), answers questions about her new book, the makeover tv genre, and the influence the concept of makeovers has on popular culture and thinking.