1st Edition
Racial Spectacles Explorations in Media, Race, and Justice
Biography
Jonathan Markovitz is a lecturer in the departments of Communication at the University of California, San Diego and at California State University, San Marcos. He received his PhD in Sociology from UCSD in 1999. He has published articles on race relations in the United States, collective memory, film, gender, and popular culture. He is the author of Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
"In this book some of our nation's most infamous racial spectacles explode into complex assemblages of meanings and counter-meanings. With dexterity and an eye for the overlooked, Markovitz traces the trajectories of testimony, examines the ephemera of media, and pieces together the ever changing fabric of collective memories - both black and white. The Scotsboro Nine, the Ramparts scandal, the Abu Ghraib photos - these are not singularities, nor even closed cases. Rather, they reverberate out of the past to shape and reshape our understanding of race and sense of justice." -Susan Willis, Duke University
"Jonathan Markovitz judiciously examines how spectacles of raced and sexualized violence permeate popular and political culture.
Drawing on dramatic case studies from different eras, this compact and clearly argued book presents valuable insights about the "changing same" that shapes the racial imaginary of the U.S." -George Lipsitz, UCSB, author of How Racism Takes Place
