Popular Culture

Colloquium Series Coordinator:
Nicholas Ware
nware@bgsu.edu

All colloquia will run approximately from 11:00am to 12:00pm followed by an informal "brown bag lunch" from 12:00pm until 1:00pm. The Center will provide dessert and beverages. All events will take place on the Bowling Green State University Main Campus. 

FALL SEMESTER 2009:

September 17, 2009
Location : 201A Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenter: Dr. Esther Clinton, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Popular Culture
Presentation Title: “Interdisciplinary Collaborations, or, How a Popular Culture Scholar Got Published in a Medical Journal”
Abstract: Many patients with lung cancer choose not to have surgery because they believe that when lung cancer comes into contact with the air it suddenly spreads. Some of these patients refuse to listen when their doctors argue that surgery is only recommended when it is expected to be beneficial. Three medical doctors and Dr. Clinton looked at the medical history, social context, and Charles Sanders Peirce's theories of belief to trace the history, development and logic of this belief. Then they struggled for several years to find a publisher. The article finally came out in The Journal of the National Medical Association in August of 2009. This talk considers not only the belief in question but also the nature of collaborative work and stresses the need for persistence when trying to get an article published.

October 15, 2009
Location: 314 Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenter: Dr. Michael Butterworth, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication & Associate Director, School of Media and Communication
Presentation Title: “Sport, the Myth of Meritocracy, and the Election of Barack Obama”
Abstract: During and after the 2008 presidential election, one of the theories that explained the popularity of Barack Obama was that the success of African American athletes had paved the way for the election of a black president. It is fair to say that sport has contributed to improved race relations in the United States. From Jack Johnson to Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali, black athletes have challenged and thus weakened the structures of racism that characterize American society. Nevertheless, there is a popular perception that racism in baseball ended the day Robinson took the field or that the superstardom of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods provides evidence that African Americans have an equal chance to succeed on their own merits. There is considerable risk, therefore, of ignoring the structural aspects of racism in favor of an idealized democratic narrative. Accordingly, the argument that sport somehow facilitated the election of the nation’s “first black president,” merits rhetorical consideration. In this talk, Dr. Butterworth will map the articulation of sport to the election of Barack Obama, thus spotlighting this disconnect between the myth of meritocracy and the persistence of racial inequalities. As many observers already have noted, an Obama presidency is not a signal that the United States has now entered a “post-racial” society. Dr. Butterworth’s argument, then, helps to explain the rhetorical means by which such a notion is advanced, while also offering a reconsideration of the mythology upon which it is premised.

November 19, 2009
Location: 207 Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenter: Mr. Mark Bernard, Doctoral Candidate, American Culture Studies Ph.D. Program
Presentation Title: "The Golden Avenger and the Dark Knight: Superheroes and National Security Cinema"
Abstract : The 2008 summer movie season was bookended by the blockbuster successes of two superhero movies: Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) and The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008). In addition to scoring a combined worldwide gross of over a billion and a half dollars, these films were also showered with critical praise that heralded the maturation of the superhero movie genre. Unfortunately absent from many of the discussions surrounding these films are their insidious ties to – and oftentimes endorsement of – the United States’ National Security policies. Mark Bernard will explore these connections by contextualizing the films within the genre of “National Security Cinema,” films that justify homeland security policies and military action abroad by depicting the US as vulnerable and under attack.

December 10, 2009
Location: 207 Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenter: Dr. Katherine Meizel, Instructor, Ethnomusicology, College of Musical Arts
Presentation Title : “"California Dreamin’: American Idol, Hollywood, and the Apotheosis of the American Dream”
Abstract: Every summer, 100,000 young men and women crowd into sports arenas and convention centers around the United States, sing their hearts out for twenty seconds, hold their breaths, and hope to hear this congratulatory pronouncement: You’re going to Hollywood! Those happy few who do are sent forth, “golden tickets” in hand, to retrace the path of the ultimate American narrative—a story in which Manifest Destiny, the spirit of capitalism, and the allure of seizing the microphone lead inexorably West, to California. The journey fulfills more than Idol dreams; it’s centuries of imagining America and Americans, embodied on a millennial stage at Television City, broadcast weekly to 30 million viewers in the U.S. and to more than a hundred nations abroad. The televised singing competition American Idol reiterates old mythologies of migration and immigration, reconfirming deeply embedded ideas of Hollywood as the locus of the American Dream, as the site where that Dream becomes reality (or, at least, reality programming). This presentation addresses how the Dream and the Dream Factory, invented in times of national crisis, persist as models of American success—and excess—in the shaky new twenty-first century.

SPRING SEMESTER 2010:

January 21, 2010
Location: 207 Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenter: Dr. Jeremy Wallach, Associate Professor, Department of Popular Culture
Presentation Title : “Of Remixes and Robots: Analytical Approaches to Asian Popular Culture"
Abstract: The explosion of mass-mediated popular entertainment forms in postwar Asia was originally produced by national culture industries inspired by the cultural products of the western world, especially the United States. Common themes have emerged in the scholarly exploration of Asian popular cultures, including their relationships to politics; worldview; local constructions of masculinity and femininity; ethnicity, class, religion (and other pre-existing sources of social difference); and patterns of global dissemination of cultural artifacts. This colloquium presentation will survey the current state of research in this growing field and discuss the reasoning behind the Department of Popular Culture's upcoming Asian Popular Culture Symposium.

February 18, 2010
Location: 201A Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenter: Dr. Christopher Williams, Center for Popular Culture Studies Resident Fellow
Presentation Title :  "Homeland, Authenticity, and Liberation: Vocal Style, Song Construction, and Edification in 1950s Hindi Film
Abstract: While there have been several studies of the longer history of film in India, the role of music in that history has been less well-served, with disproportionate attention paid to recent popular cinema. This presentation looks at the musical representations of class and the development of an epic sensibility in two, widely contrasting films from the 1950s, neither of which is discussed in many studies nor appears regularly on "best of" lists: "Jis Desh men Ganga Behti Jai (I Come From Where the Ganga Flows)" and "Adalat (The Law Court)." In both cases, a careful balance between traditional elements and the sensibilities of Western film score usage frames a subtext in which the audience is "instructed" to embrace modern values as authentically Indian.

March 18, 2010
Location: 207 Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenters: Department of Popular Culture M.A. 2nd Year Graduate Students
Presentation Title : Thesis Research Presentations
Four of the 2nd Year Master's students will be presenting research related to their thesis topics: Mallory Jagodzinski's presentation, "Is My Chemise Showing?: Playing with Cross-Dressing Conventions in Celeste Bradley's The Spy," will be a case study on the importance of clothing in both achieving and resisting gender fluidity in the romance novel The Spy by Celeste Bradley. In "Now the Nightmare's Real": The Virtual and Actual in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Meredith King will use the title character of "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" to explore the duality of offline and online life of individuals heavily involved in Internet communities and online communication. Elizabeth Mason's "Of Shattering Glass and Superheroes: Trauma, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Popular American Film" will explore the three blockbuster superhero films of summer 2008 (Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Hancock) in visual and narrative motifs concerned with masculinity in crisis as well as trauma. The presentation will utilizes a close textual reading of all three films in order to situate the cultural climate of American in the months before the 2008 Presidential Election in the consumption of popular superhero films. Nicholas Ware's presentation, "Joysticks and Spinkicks: The Body and Street Fighter," places playing the Street Fighter video game series as a cyborgian exercise where actual and represenational player body movement create a dynamic in which the real rules of game design and the fictional world of game narrative intersect with player identity.

April 15, 2010
Location: 207 Bowen-Thompson Student Union
Presenter : Dr. Satomi Saito (Asian Studies Program, Department of GREAL)
Presentation Title : "Time Continuity in Japanese Animation"
Abstract: Dr. Saito will examine some of the techniques Japanese animators developed in the 1970s in order to compensate for material limitations in producing TV animation on a weekly basis. Particular focus will be given to “depth cues,” which introduced the sense of depth in flat animated images. Depth cues, especially those achieved by the multiplane camera, are one of the milestones in the history of animation. If we look at Japanese animation production today, their reluctance in incorporating 3D digital images is particularly conspicuous. Dr. Saito argues that this tendency in Japanese animation gives us an insight not necessarily into Japan’s cultural particularity in accepting technology but rather into a peculiar mode of consumption practices that have more affinity with the age of digital media distribution and consumption. What we see in the culture’s strong insistence on preserving flat compositions of analogue animation is that the new technologies such as digital painting, digital editing, 3D modeling, etc are subservient to the old mode of representation established decades ago. To understand the proliferation of flat Japanese animation and its idiosyncratic use of depth cues, we have to look at the trajectory of Japanese animation history in which a particular mode of representation hegemonized the contesting modes, thereby generating the trans-media fan communities that consume overtly flat composition with peculiar time continuity. Dr. Saito will examine the Japanese animators’ construction of screen space by separating the image into multiple planes referring to several canonical directors, such as Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, and Makoto Shinkai and argue it was not only the apparatus but time continuity derived from the particular use of multiplaner images that determined the mode still dominant in Japanese animation.

[Updated April 14, 2010]


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