Synopses & Reviews
A reporter for the
Los Angeles Times once noted that “
I Love Lucy is said to be on the air somewhere in the world 24 hours a day.” That Lucys madcap antics can be watched anywhere at any time is thanks to television syndication, a booming global marketplace that imports and exports TV shows. Programs from different countries are packaged, bought, and sold all over the world, under the watch of an industry that is extraordinarily lucrative for major studios and production companies.
In Global TV, Denise D. Bielb and C. Lee Harrington seek to understand the machinery of this marketplace, its origins and history, its inner workings, and its product management. In so doing, they are led to explore the cultural significance of this global trade, and to ask how it is so remarkably successful despite the inherent cultural differences between shows and local audiences. How do culture-specific genres like American soap operas and Latin telenovelas so easily cross borders and adapt to new cultural surroundings? Why is The Nanny, whose gum-chewing star is from Queens, New York, a smash in Italy? Importantly, Bielby and Harrington also ask which kinds of shows fail. What is lost in translation? Considering such factors as censorship and other such state-specific policies, what are the inevitable constraints of crossing over?
Highly experienced in the field, Bielby and Harrington provide a unique and richly textured look at global television through a cultural lens, one that has an undeniable and complex effect on what shows succeed and which do not on an international scale.
Review
"Global TV is a major contribution to the important but neglected topic of globalization in cultural industries. Bielby and Harrington demonstrate the major role of distribution in shaping the characteristics and meanings of cultural exports. Through extensive field work they have obtained a rich body of insights into the perspectives of both television buyers and sellers in an industry that is changing rapidly over time and that varies greatly from one country to another." - Diana Crane, author of The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts
Review
"Bielby and Harrington bring their sociological perspective and methodology to the study of internationalized television cultures, providing a fine grained net of evidence which test theories of globalization and cultural imperialism. This book should recast the landscape of global television studies." - Christina Slade, author of The Real Thing: Doing Philosophy with Media
Review
Through an ethnographic examination of the social organization of the global television marketplace, Bielby and Harrington make an important contribution that furthers understanding of the nature of global television business. - Choice
Review
"Global TV offers a richly textured account of the professional practices and protocols that govern the television marketplace. . . . A must read for those wishing to understand the complex cultural dynamics of globalization."
"Global TV is a major contribution to the important but neglected topic of globalization in cultural industries. Bielby and Harrington demonstrate the major role of distribution in shaping the characteristics and meanings of cultural exports. Through extensive field work they have obtained a rich body of insights into the perspectives of both television buyers and sellers in an industry that is changing rapidly over time and that varies greatly from one country to another."
"Bielby and Harrington bring their sociological perspective and methodology to the study of internationalized television cultures, providing a fine grained net of evidence which test theories of globalization and cultural imperialism. This book should recast the landscape of global television studies."
Through an ethnographic examination of the social organization of the global television marketplace, Bielby and Harrington make an important contribution that furthers understanding of the nature of global television business.
Review
"The central objective of Voices of Emancipation is to expose readers to a sample of the Civil War pension file of ex-slaves in order to learn more about their individual and personal experience during slavery, wartime, and the postwar era." -Jeffrey R. Kerr Ritchie,H-Net Reviews
Review
"An immensely useful reader that showcases the kinds of information the records contain about the men who served in the US Colored Troops.... Collectively, these records document the soldiers' experiences under slavery and during the emancipation process; marriage, family, and community relationships before, during, and after emancipation; African Americans military service; and postwar employment, geographic mobility, and health....Essential."-Choice,
Review
"This collection will speak in an entirely unique way. . . . There is no question that this will be an important contribution to historians."-Stephanie Camp,University of Washington
Review
"Civil War pension records offer an unrivaled view into the lives of ordinary Americans during the nineteenth century, and Regosin and Shaffer, scholars who have published important books drawing largely from the pension records, have unrivaled familiarity with them. Their selections and annotations provide a fascinating glimpse not only into a complex and deeply moving historical process but also into the lives of persons who experienced it at the cutting edge. Voices of Emancipation is a treasure trove of insights that will surely appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike."-Joseph P. Reidy,professor of History, Howard University
Synopsis
Voices of Emancipation seeks to recover the lives and words of former slaves in vivid detail, mining the case files of the U.S. Pension Bureau, which administered a huge pension system for Union veterans and their survivors in the decades following the Civil War. The files contain an invaluable, first-hand perspective of slavery, emancipation, black military service, and freedom. Moreover, as Pension Bureau examiners began interviewing black Union veterans and their families shortly after the Civil War, the files are arguably among the earliest sources of ex-slaves reflecting on their lives, occurring decades before better-known WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s took place.
Voices of Emancipation explores the words of former slaves topically, beginning with recollections of slavery, moving on to experiences of military service in the Civil War, the transition to freedom, and finally to reflections on marriage and family before and after emancipation. With an introduction that places the pension files in context and presents the themes of the book, and historical commentary interwoven throughout the excerpts of the interviews themselves, Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer effectively introduce the files and the treasures they contain to students and general readers, but also provide specialists with an indispensable research tool.
About the Author
Denise D. Bielby is professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the co-author (with
C. Lee Harrington) of
Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life and co-editor of Popular Culture: Production and Consumption.
C. Lee Harrington is professor of Sociology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In addition to her books with Denise Bielby, she is co-editor (with Jonathan Gray and Cornel Sandvoss) of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007).