NEOLIBERALISM, NOSTALGIA, RACE POLITICS, AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SPHERE
2007; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502380701241069
ISSN1466-4348
Autores Tópico(s)Social Media and Politics
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Many thanks to my mother-in-law, New Orleans native Clarita MacDonald Reed, whose four-month displacement from her home due to Hurricane Katrina added a deep personal element to my political outrage and spurred me to finish this piece. Thanks also to friends, colleagues and students whose critical readings or sources improved the work: Jane Collins, Craig Tower, Chris Kuzawa, Ana Croegaert, Anneeth Hundle, Richard Iton, Tamara Roberts, Brett Williams, Della Pollock. Special thanks to the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, during part of whose fellowship year I researched and wrote this article, and to SAR and Northwestern University librarians Laura Holt and Kathleen Bethel, respectively, for source help beyond the call of duty. Notes 1. All transcriptions are by the author, done contemporaneously with broadcasts. Ellipses indicate gaps in transcription. The TJMS does archive a small portion of each show on its website, blackamerica.com, but rarely the spontaneous political conversations that constitute the bulk of the broadcast material in this study. 2. Clear Channel is a corporate media giant made possible by the deregulations of the 1980s and 1990s (see fn 4), and does indeed have a policy of rightist political interference with its affiliate stations. See McChesney (2004 McChesney , Robert W. (2004) The Problem of the Media: Communication Politics in the 21st Century . New York : Monthly Review Press . [Google Scholar]), pp. 279–80). 3. Arbitron's Black Radio Today 2005 report identifies the Urban Adult Contemporary audience as fundamentally middle-aged – only 4% teenagers – and working-class – 70% are high school grads or have some college (2005, pp. 71, 75). At 9.5 million, this audience is second only to the rap/hip hop Urban Contemporary audience, which clocks in at 11 million, 19% of whom are black teens (2005, p. 75). 4. Susan Douglas makes it clear that Fowler, as FCC Chair, reigned over the demise of the federal government's efforts to prevent oligopoly in radio station ownership, as well as its efforts to maintain the provision of public programming and opposing political views (1999, pp. 295–97). 5. Re majority black working-classness, see Zweig (2000 Zweig , Michael (2000) The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret , Ithaca, NY : ILR Press . [Google Scholar]), pp. 32–33). My evaluation of the class status of the TJMS audience is based both on Arbritron's 2005 study of varying black radio audiences, and my own decade-long observation of TJMS callers. Re black American political orientation, aside from Kinder & Winter (2001 Kinder , Donald R. & Winter , Nicholas (2001) ‘Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites, and Opinion on National Policy’ , American Journal of Political Science , vol. 45 , no. 2 , pp. 439 – 456 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), see CNN CNN (2004) ‘CNN.com election results: American Votes 2004’ . http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html [Google Scholar]'s exit polling after the Bush/Kerry presidential race (2004). Black American status determined a reported vote for Kerry by a greater margin than any other identity category – including gender, income, education, union membership, and ideology – except Democratic Party affiliation. 6. I discuss the issue of the TJMS and the real limits of political critique in commercial media in a neoliberal age in two other pieces. See ‘Whose Homeland?: The New Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the American Public Sphere’, in Jeff Maskovsky and Ida Susser, eds., Rethinking America: The Imperial Homeland in the 21 st Century. New York: Paradigm Press, under review; and ‘The Neoliberalization of Minds, Space and Bodies: Rising Global Inequality and the Shifting American Public Sphere’, in Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams, eds., New Landscapes of Global Inequality. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, under review. 7. See Perry (2005 Perry , Suzanne (2005) ‘“Shell-Shocked Into Action:” Black groups, critical of slow response to Katrina, vow to strengthen their own relief efforts’ , The Chronicle of Philanthropy , 29 September , pp. 10, 22 . [Google Scholar]), Applebome (2005 Applebome , Peter (2005) ‘Storms Stretch Thin Safety Net For 2 Colleges’ , New York Times , 25 September . [Google Scholar]), Dobrzynski (2005 Dobrzynski , Judith H. (2005) ‘Shock of Katrina Pushes Black Charities to New Fund-Raising’ , New York Times , 14 November . [Google Scholar]). The latter piece mentions Joyner only en passant. Perry, in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, covers a number of black charity efforts whose fund-raising results are pitiful compared to the TJMS numbers, but never mentions Joyner. Only Curtis (2005 Curtis , Bryan (2005) ‘Tom Joyner: The Voice of Hurricane Katrina. Slate’ , 21 September . http://slate.msn.com/id/2126688/ [Google Scholar]), in Slate, actually notes that the TJMS was ‘the voice of Hurricane Katrina’, but then identifies it as black-nationalist and ‘altruistic’, entirely missing its progressive politics. 8. See Watkins (1994 Watkins , Mel (1994) On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying – the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, From Slavery to Richard Pryor , New York : Simon and Schuster . [Google Scholar]) for an historical review of the development of black American humor.
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