Media Studies

Catherine Knight Steele is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park, with affiliate appointments in the American Studies department, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

DIGITAL BLACK FEMINISM

CATHERINE KNIGHT STEELE

Traces the longstanding relationship between technology and Black feminist thought

Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But, Catherine Knight Steele argues that Black women’s relationship to technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,” Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity— both on and offline.

Positioning Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, Steele offers a through-line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. Linking narratives and existing literature about Black women’s technology use in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century, Digital Black Feminism traverses the bounds between historical and archival analysis and empirical internet studies, forcing a reconciliation between fields and methods that are not always in conversation. As the work of Black feminist writers now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers both hopefulness and caution on the implications of Black feminism becoming a digital product.

October 2021 208 pages • 6 x 9 5 black & white illustrations Paper • 9781479808380 • $27.00S(£20.99) Cloth • 9781479808373 • $89.00X(£71.00) In Critical Cultural Communication

Media Studies

KEEPING IT UNREAL

Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics DARIECK SCOTT

Explores Black representation in fantasy genres and comic books

Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as the catalyst for engaging the Black radical imagination. Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy is an exploration of how fantasies of Black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It examines representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits. Darieck Scott offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as he weaves his personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther and Blade, as well as theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, Blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry. Reading new life into Afrofuturist traditions and fantasy genres, Darieck Scott seeks to rescue the role of fantasy and the fantastic to challenge, revoke, and expand our assumptions about what is normal, real, and markedly human.

Darieck Scott is Assistant Professor of African American studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of the novels Hex and Traitor to the Race, and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica.

January 2022 288 pages • 6 x 9 42 black & white illustrations Paper • 9781479824144 • $29.00S(£21.99) Cloth • 9781479840137 • $89.00X(£71.00) In Sexual Cultures

Media Studies

September 2021 416 pages • 6 x 9 5 black & white illustrations Paper • $35.00S(£26.99) 9781479806782 Cloth • $99.00X(£79.00) 9781479806775 In Critical Cultural Communication

Media Studies

DIGITAL MEDIA DISTRIBUTION

Portals, Platforms, Pipelines Edited by PAUL MCDONALD, COURTNEY BRANNON DONOGHUE, and TIMOTHY HAVENS

A deep dive into the new era of digital content production and distribution

Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines provides a timely examination of the multifaceted distribution landscape in a moment of transformation and conceptualizes media distribution as a complex site of power, privilege, and gatekeeping. Drawing on original research into distribution practices in industries as diverse as television, film, videogames, literature, and adult entertainment, each chapter explores how digitization has changed media distribution and its broader economic, industrial, social, and cultural implications.

Paul McDonald is Professor at King’s College London. Courtney Brannon Donoghue is Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas. Timothy Havens is Associate Professor at the University of Iowa.

January 2022 272 pages • 6 x 9 30 black & white illustrations Paper • $30.00S(£22.99) 9781479833894 Cloth • $89.00X(£71.00) 9781479868650 In Critical Cultural Communication

Media Studies

LATINO TV

A History MARY BELTRÁN

The history of Latina/o participation and representation in American television

The first-ever account of Latino/a participation and representation in US English-language television, Latino TV: A History offers a sweeping study of key moments of Chicano/a and Latino/a representation and authorship since the 1950s. Drawing on archival research, interviews with dozens of media professionals who worked on or performed in these series, textual analysis of episodes and promotional materials, and analysis of news media coverage, Mary Beltrán examines Latina/o representation in everything from children’s television Westerns of the 1950s and sitcoms that spanned half a century, to Latina and Latino-led series in the 2000s and 2010s on broadcast, cable, and streaming outlets, including George Lopez, Ugly Betty, One Day at a Time, and Vida.

Mary Beltrán is Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film and affiliate of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meaning of Film and TV Stardom and co-editor of Mixed Race Hollywood.