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This study analyses the historical development of South African cinema up to he book's original publication in 1988. It describes the films and comments on their relationship to South African realities, addressing all aspects of the industry, focusing on domestic production, but also discussing international film companies who use South Africa as a location. It explores tensions between English-language and Afrikaans-language films, and between films made for blacks and films made for whites. Going behind the scenes the author looks at the financial infrastructure, the marketing strategies, and the works habits of the film industry. He concludes with a discussion of independent filmmaking, the obstacles facing South Africans who want to make films with artistic and political integrity, and the possibilities of progress in the future. Includes comprehensive bibliography and filmography listing all feature films made in South Africa between 1910 and 1985 together with documentary films by South Africans, non-South Africans, and exiles about the country.
The Eiffel Tower—this symbol of industrial development and the French Republic is now associated with a romantic vacation in Paris. Nelson Mandela—the hero of the struggle against apartheid was featured in a British Airways magazine article called “The Power of Brand Mandela.” This book explores these and other contemporary cultural icons that, over time, have been endowed with a complex and powerful layering of meanings. The authors analyze the way in which such icons, whether objects or persons, living or mythical, are constructed and disseminated. They also critically investigate the implications, in semiotic and cultural terms, of the accretion of meaning and popular recognition attached to them, their moral and aesthetic ambiguity, and their enduring appeal to a fascinated public. This slim and provocative volume is ideal for courses in and related to cultural studies.
Using a large number of filmic examples, Keyan Tomaselli forcefully underlines the relevance of a semiotic approach to visual representations.
Studies of cultural tourism and indigenous identity are fraught with questions concerning exploitation, entitlement, ownership and authenticity. Unease with the idea of leveraging a group identity for commercial gain is ever-present. This anthology articulates some of these debates from a multitude of standpoints. It assimilates the perspectives of members of indigenous communities, non-governmental organizations, tourism practitioners and academic researchers who participated in an action research project that aims to link research to development outcomes.
Provides the first book-length examination of the political economy of media transformation in South Africa. By locating South Africa within continental and global contexts of changes and with theoretical incisiveness and praxis-oriented understanding, the authors depict a media system at the forefront of transition both in terms of shifting representations of race and class and in terms of ownership and readership changes.
Cultural Studies has evolved and continues to evolve primarily along regional lines. However uncomfortable this might be, the genie of British cultural studies cannot be returned to the bottle of history. Thus, national versions of cultural studies have arisen in a few African countries. This book engages two critical and seemingly contradictory tasks: i) to contribute to the development of cultural studies from the perspectives of African experiences and indigenous frames of reference; and ii) to examine these in terms of transnational trajectories of the field in ways that do not reduce them to one or other context. Much cultural studies remains concerned with Texts, often disconnected fro...
This book examines China's identity transformations with a focus on self-perceptions and their representations and communication in the mass media. It explores the emerging multifaceted 'China brand'. The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Arts.
This handbook attempts to fill the gap in empirical scholarship of media and communication research in Africa, from an Africanist perspective. The collection draws on expert knowledge of key media and communication scholars in Africa and the diaspora, offering a counter-narrative to existing Western and Eurocentric discourses of knowledge-production. As the decolonial turn takes centre stage across Africa, this collection further rethinks media and communication research in a post-colonial setting and provides empirical evidence as to why some of the methods conceptualised in Europe will not work in Africa. The result is a thorough appraisal of the current threats, challenges and opportunities facing the discipline on the continent.
In Media in Postapartheid South Africa, author Sean Jacobs turns to media politics and the consumption of media as a way to understand recent political developments in South Africa and their relations with the African continent and the world. Jacobs looks at how mass media define the physical and human geography of the society and what it means for comprehending changing notions of citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Jacobs claims that the media have unprecedented control over the distribution of public goods, rights claims, and South Africa's integration into the global political economy in ways that were impossible under the state-controlled media that dominated the apartheid years. Jacobs takes a probing look at television commercials and the representation of South Africans, reality television shows and South African continental expansion, soap operas and postapartheid identity politics, and the internet as a space for reassertions and reconfigurations of identity. As South Africa becomes more integrated into the global economy, Jacobs argues that local media have more weight in shaping how consumers view these products in unexpected and consequential ways.