Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9397115
J. Florêncio, Ben Miller
Despite being a widely consumed genre of visual culture, pornography remains a touchy subject in contemporary queer historiography. Queer archives overflow with it, but queer histories don’t. Historically associated with low culture and distrusted by value systems that have tended to privilege the “high” faculties of reason to the detriment of the “base” materiality of the body, its affects and appetites, porn is too rarely approached as a legitimate source with which to think cultural, affective, intellectual, and sexual histories. This article draws from porn studies and queer historiographies to draw some methodological considerations about the value, benefits, and challenges posed by porn archives to the writing of queer subcultural histories. Rather than trying to solve porn’s double ontological status as both documentary and fantasy, the authors locate in that defining feature of the genre porn’s value as a historical source. Simultaneously a document of sex cultures and of the edges of morality, and a historically and culturally situated speculation on what bodies and sex may become, porn offers both cultural critics and historians a rich archive for deepening their knowledge of the intersections of culture, morality, pleasure, community, embodiment, and the politics of belonging.
{"title":"Sexing the Archive","authors":"J. Florêncio, Ben Miller","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9397115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9397115","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Despite being a widely consumed genre of visual culture, pornography remains a touchy subject in contemporary queer historiography. Queer archives overflow with it, but queer histories don’t. Historically associated with low culture and distrusted by value systems that have tended to privilege the “high” faculties of reason to the detriment of the “base” materiality of the body, its affects and appetites, porn is too rarely approached as a legitimate source with which to think cultural, affective, intellectual, and sexual histories. This article draws from porn studies and queer historiographies to draw some methodological considerations about the value, benefits, and challenges posed by porn archives to the writing of queer subcultural histories. Rather than trying to solve porn’s double ontological status as both documentary and fantasy, the authors locate in that defining feature of the genre porn’s value as a historical source. Simultaneously a document of sex cultures and of the edges of morality, and a historically and culturally situated speculation on what bodies and sex may become, porn offers both cultural critics and historians a rich archive for deepening their knowledge of the intersections of culture, morality, pleasure, community, embodiment, and the politics of belonging.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46465725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170710
A. Perlman
This article investigates the history of the International Television Federation, or Intertel. A collaboration between telecasters from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, Intertel throughout the 1960s produced and distributed public affairs documentaries for an international audience. Intertel’s members positioned public affairs programming in the 1960s as an “effective weapon for peace.” By making the nations of the world legible to one another, Intertel programs sought to deploy the international circulation of television texts as a means to diminish tensions in a world defined by uneven economic growth, Cold War ideological battles, and the specter of nuclear warfare. Drawing on archival materials, press reports, and the programs themselves, this essay offers an institutional history of the program’s development, expansion, and demise, as well as an analysis of its politics and ideological premises.
{"title":"Telecasting an “Effective Weapon for Peace”","authors":"A. Perlman","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170710","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article investigates the history of the International Television Federation, or Intertel. A collaboration between telecasters from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, Intertel throughout the 1960s produced and distributed public affairs documentaries for an international audience. Intertel’s members positioned public affairs programming in the 1960s as an “effective weapon for peace.” By making the nations of the world legible to one another, Intertel programs sought to deploy the international circulation of television texts as a means to diminish tensions in a world defined by uneven economic growth, Cold War ideological battles, and the specter of nuclear warfare. Drawing on archival materials, press reports, and the programs themselves, this essay offers an institutional history of the program’s development, expansion, and demise, as well as an analysis of its politics and ideological premises.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46442877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170808
Rosemary Pennington
Breaking news is hard to define, though the Associated Press has framed it as “news of transcendent importance.” Generally, it is news that provides information about an issue or an event the public did not already know, and it is increasingly tied to a feeling of “liveness.” Because breaking news situations evolve quickly, the ability of journalists to cover them depends in part on the sources a journalist trusts and can access. All too often, those sources are people who have historically held power in a community. This essay argues that an ethics of empathy would help journalists move away from privileging the perspectives of the powerful in breaking news coverage, thereby making space for alternate understandings of the situation.
{"title":"Teaching Breaking News","authors":"Rosemary Pennington","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170808","url":null,"abstract":"Breaking news is hard to define, though the Associated Press has framed it as “news of transcendent importance.” Generally, it is news that provides information about an issue or an event the public did not already know, and it is increasingly tied to a feeling of “liveness.” Because breaking news situations evolve quickly, the ability of journalists to cover them depends in part on the sources a journalist trusts and can access. All too often, those sources are people who have historically held power in a community. This essay argues that an ethics of empathy would help journalists move away from privileging the perspectives of the powerful in breaking news coverage, thereby making space for alternate understandings of the situation.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44314949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170682
A. Bauer
In the late 1940s, conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. was embroiled in controversy after publicly criticizing consumer cooperatives for taking advantage of a federal tax loophole. Coinciding with the Federal Communications Commission’s reconsideration of its Mayflower doctrine—a ban on broadcast editorials—the dispute served as fodder for New Deal–era progressive media reformers. This article unpacks Lewis’s mostly forgotten role as an unwitting catalyst of progressive media regulations through reconsidering the FCC’s 1948 Mayflower hearings, which resulted in the fairness doctrine (1949–87). This doctrine mandated that broadcasters present controversial issues of public concern in an ideologically balanced manner. Lewis’s news-breaking thus became framed as a problem in need of federal regulatory solution by reformers who sought to sublimate radio into an idealized liberal public sphere. These reforms, however, framed political disagreement as an epistemological crisis and, in doing so, unintentionally bolstered a conservative critical disposition toward the mainstream press, exemplified in the “liberal media” trope.
{"title":"Propaganda in the Guise of News","authors":"A. Bauer","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170682","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the late 1940s, conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. was embroiled in controversy after publicly criticizing consumer cooperatives for taking advantage of a federal tax loophole. Coinciding with the Federal Communications Commission’s reconsideration of its Mayflower doctrine—a ban on broadcast editorials—the dispute served as fodder for New Deal–era progressive media reformers. This article unpacks Lewis’s mostly forgotten role as an unwitting catalyst of progressive media regulations through reconsidering the FCC’s 1948 Mayflower hearings, which resulted in the fairness doctrine (1949–87). This doctrine mandated that broadcasters present controversial issues of public concern in an ideologically balanced manner. Lewis’s news-breaking thus became framed as a problem in need of federal regulatory solution by reformers who sought to sublimate radio into an idealized liberal public sphere. These reforms, however, framed political disagreement as an epistemological crisis and, in doing so, unintentionally bolstered a conservative critical disposition toward the mainstream press, exemplified in the “liberal media” trope.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49210137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170766
Adam E. Quinn
Incarcerated people in Washington have published a variety of periodicals, ranging from general prison news to radical newspapers that debated ideologies like communism, anarchism, and Black nationalism. This article examines radical periodicals published in and concerning prisons to better understand struggles over the prisoners’ press in Washington. First, it contextualizes this history with a discussion of militant prisoner support movements in the 1970s. These movements included the Sunfighter, an underground newspaper; and the George Jackson Brigade, a guerrilla group, whose members were involved with both the Sunfighter and subsequent prison newspapers. This article then analyzes the politics, inside-outside relationships, and censorship of two radical prisoner quarterlies: the Marxist-Leninist Red Dragon and the Anarchist Black Dragon. Influenced by their prison environment, these newspapers provided space for networks and writings that sought to address interconnected problems such as mass incarceration, sexual violence, and racism. Ultimately, these newspapers demonstrate how prisoners’ politics are worthy of closer consideration by historians, as their ideas and actions shaped news, public discourse, and movements on both sides of the prison walls.
{"title":"“Aboveground, Underground, and Locked Down”","authors":"Adam E. Quinn","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170766","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Incarcerated people in Washington have published a variety of periodicals, ranging from general prison news to radical newspapers that debated ideologies like communism, anarchism, and Black nationalism. This article examines radical periodicals published in and concerning prisons to better understand struggles over the prisoners’ press in Washington. First, it contextualizes this history with a discussion of militant prisoner support movements in the 1970s. These movements included the Sunfighter, an underground newspaper; and the George Jackson Brigade, a guerrilla group, whose members were involved with both the Sunfighter and subsequent prison newspapers. This article then analyzes the politics, inside-outside relationships, and censorship of two radical prisoner quarterlies: the Marxist-Leninist Red Dragon and the Anarchist Black Dragon. Influenced by their prison environment, these newspapers provided space for networks and writings that sought to address interconnected problems such as mass incarceration, sexual violence, and racism. Ultimately, these newspapers demonstrate how prisoners’ politics are worthy of closer consideration by historians, as their ideas and actions shaped news, public discourse, and movements on both sides of the prison walls.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48365647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170780
Jorge E. Cuéllar
This article examines the work of the popular education collective Equipo Maíz headquartered in El Salvador. Equipo Maíz is noteworthy for its contributions to the analysis of Salvadoran and Central American politics, economics, and society since its formation in the early 1980s. This article situates the Equipo Maíz project, which uses plainspoken text paired with political cartooning, within a deep historical memory of opposition geared at demystifying the fictions that sustain capitalist sociality and its class antagonisms. Drawing on examples from Equipo Maíz’s weekly newsletter La página de Maíz and other select publications, the article demonstrates how the collective addresses a variably literate Salvadoran readership with the goal of imparting radical interpretative strategies geared toward the creation of an engaged political culture, despite the challenges of a closed media system.
{"title":"How to Read Equipo Maíz","authors":"Jorge E. Cuéllar","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170780","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the work of the popular education collective Equipo Maíz headquartered in El Salvador. Equipo Maíz is noteworthy for its contributions to the analysis of Salvadoran and Central American politics, economics, and society since its formation in the early 1980s. This article situates the Equipo Maíz project, which uses plainspoken text paired with political cartooning, within a deep historical memory of opposition geared at demystifying the fictions that sustain capitalist sociality and its class antagonisms. Drawing on examples from Equipo Maíz’s weekly newsletter La página de Maíz and other select publications, the article demonstrates how the collective addresses a variably literate Salvadoran readership with the goal of imparting radical interpretative strategies geared toward the creation of an engaged political culture, despite the challenges of a closed media system.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46769673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170668
Steven Fabian, Marissa J. Moorman, J. Shepperd
{"title":"Editors’ Introduction","authors":"Steven Fabian, Marissa J. Moorman, J. Shepperd","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170668","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46735179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170696
S. Nelson
International news, and the technological infrastructures required to collect, distribute, and publish it, have long been battlegrounds of imperial ambition and anticolonial contestation. In the early 1960s, press professionals, engineers, and telecom officials from the global South elaborated a wide-ranging structural critique of the status quo, arguing that developing mass media required decolonizing international networks and global governance practices that perpetuated media inequality. But over the course of the decade, UNESCO began to invite research and expertise from American social scientists and engineers, who came to define UNESCO’s approach to satellite-based media development. By redefining the scope of media development to an instrumentalist vision of Westernization, such research eclipsed a broad, structural vision of reform, casting southern experts’ more radical designs into shadow. By recovering this history, the article tells a new story of the ideologies and governance practices that helped sustain global news inequality in the satellite age.
{"title":"A Dream Deferred","authors":"S. Nelson","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170696","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 International news, and the technological infrastructures required to collect, distribute, and publish it, have long been battlegrounds of imperial ambition and anticolonial contestation. In the early 1960s, press professionals, engineers, and telecom officials from the global South elaborated a wide-ranging structural critique of the status quo, arguing that developing mass media required decolonizing international networks and global governance practices that perpetuated media inequality. But over the course of the decade, UNESCO began to invite research and expertise from American social scientists and engineers, who came to define UNESCO’s approach to satellite-based media development. By redefining the scope of media development to an instrumentalist vision of Westernization, such research eclipsed a broad, structural vision of reform, casting southern experts’ more radical designs into shadow. By recovering this history, the article tells a new story of the ideologies and governance practices that helped sustain global news inequality in the satellite age.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48805015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9170724
Marian Ferenc, P. Laskowski
This article analyzes the phenomenon of false news circulating in theWarsaw ghetto in the critical period of the first months of 1942. At that time, members of the underground and ordinary people learned about the mass extermination of Jews in other towns and provinces of German-occupied Poland. The first part of the article discusses production of false news as a response tomarket demand for optimistic “breaking news” that strengthened the hope for the imminent end of war. The second part focuses on the political context and identifies political stakes and actors behind the production of false news. The article demonstrates that responding to market demand and political use and abuse of false news are not mutually exclusive but can reinforce one another. It also shows that dependence on false, optimistic news could not only make people psychologically resilient but also more vulnerable since it made them susceptible to political manipulation.
{"title":"“Each Day the Ghetto Has to Find Consolation in Something”","authors":"Marian Ferenc, P. Laskowski","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9170724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9170724","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article analyzes the phenomenon of false news circulating in theWarsaw ghetto in the critical period of the first months of 1942. At that time, members of the underground and ordinary people learned about the mass extermination of Jews in other towns and provinces of German-occupied Poland. The first part of the article discusses production of false news as a response tomarket demand for optimistic “breaking news” that strengthened the hope for the imminent end of war. The second part focuses on the political context and identifies political stakes and actors behind the production of false news. The article demonstrates that responding to market demand and political use and abuse of false news are not mutually exclusive but can reinforce one another. It also shows that dependence on false, optimistic news could not only make people psychologically resilient but also more vulnerable since it made them susceptible to political manipulation.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43863279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}