Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens

Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens PDF Author: Stephen Pimpare
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190660740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to today. It provides a novel kind of guide to social policy, exploring how ideas about poor and homeless people have been reflected in popular culture and evaluating those images against the historical and contemporary reality. Richly illustrated and examining nearly 300 American-made films released between 1902 and 2015, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens finds and describes representations of poor and homeless people and the places they have inhabited throughout the century-long history of U.S. cinema. It moves beyond the merely descriptive to deliberate whether cinematic representations of homelessness and poverty changed over time, and if there are patterns to be discerned. Ultimately, the text offers a preliminary response to a handful of harder questions about causation and consequence: Why are these portrayals as they are? Where do they come from? Are they a reflection of American attitudes and policies toward marginalized populations, or do they help create them? What does this all mean for politics and policymaking? Of interest to movie buffs and film scholars, cultural critics and historians, policy analysts, and those curious to know more about homelessness and American poverty, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens is a unique window into American politics, history, policy, and culture -- it is an entertaining and enlightening journey.

Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens

Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens PDF Author: Stephen Pimpare
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190660740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to today. It provides a novel kind of guide to social policy, exploring how ideas about poor and homeless people have been reflected in popular culture and evaluating those images against the historical and contemporary reality. Richly illustrated and examining nearly 300 American-made films released between 1902 and 2015, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens finds and describes representations of poor and homeless people and the places they have inhabited throughout the century-long history of U.S. cinema. It moves beyond the merely descriptive to deliberate whether cinematic representations of homelessness and poverty changed over time, and if there are patterns to be discerned. Ultimately, the text offers a preliminary response to a handful of harder questions about causation and consequence: Why are these portrayals as they are? Where do they come from? Are they a reflection of American attitudes and policies toward marginalized populations, or do they help create them? What does this all mean for politics and policymaking? Of interest to movie buffs and film scholars, cultural critics and historians, policy analysts, and those curious to know more about homelessness and American poverty, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens is a unique window into American politics, history, policy, and culture -- it is an entertaining and enlightening journey.

Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens

Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens PDF Author: Stephen Pimpare
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190660724
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
"Explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to today"--Front jacket flap.

The Ghetto

The Ghetto PDF Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192538004
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European “ghettos”, which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America “the ghetto” has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world. In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Precarity in European Film

Precarity in European Film PDF Author: Elisa Cuter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110707810
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This volume brings together renowned scholars and early career-researchers in mapping the ways in which European cinema —whether arthouse or mainstream, fictional or documentary, working with traditional or new media— engages with phenomena of precarity, poverty, and social exclusion. It compares how the filmic traditions of different countries reflect the socioeconomic conditions associated with precarity, and illuminates similarities in the iconography of precarious lives across cultures. While some of the contributions deal with the representations of marginalized minorities, others focus on work-related precarity or the depictions of downward mobility. Among other topics, the volume looks at how films grapple with gender inequality, intersectional struggle, discriminatory housing policies, and the specific problems of precarious youth. With its comparative approach to filmic representations of European precarity, this volume makes a major contribution to scholarship on precarity and the representation of social class in contemporary visual culture.

New Rural Cinema

New Rural Cinema PDF Author: Tim Lindemann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110779439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
n the past decade, spanning from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, rural poverty in the United States has risen dramatically. The impact of the pandemic is set to intensify these inequalities as the decades of neoliberal dismantling of public healthcare and other social institutions leave inhabitants of impoverished rural areas particularly vulnerable. Even before this current exacerbation, representations of rural landscape in American cinema have sought to spatially visualize the country’s social inequalities and focus on the victims of poverty and marginalization. The films discussed in this monograph, Ballast (2008), Winter’s Bone (2010), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Leave No Trace (2018), address deep rural poverty in a complex manner and facilitate an interactive, social understanding of landscape. New Rural Cinema suggest a novel way of looking at landscape in cinema that responds to and guides its readers through this recent development in American Independent film. It views the chosen films as expressions of a growing awareness of the dire inequality caused by neoliberal capitalism in the United States and the role landscape plays both in its mechanisms of social exclusion as well as in its collective contestation.

Poverty in American Popular Culture

Poverty in American Popular Culture PDF Author: Wylie Lenz
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476639035
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an "unconditional war" on poverty in the form of sweeping federal programs to assist millions of Americans. Two decades later, President Reagan drastically cut such programs, claiming that welfare encouraged dependency and famously quipping, "Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won." These opposing policy positions and the ideologies informing them have been well studied. Here, the focus turns to the influence of popular art and entertainment on beliefs about poverty's causes and potential cures. These new essays interrogate the representation of poverty in film, television, music, photography, painting, illustration and other art forms from the late 19th century to the present. They map when, how, and why producers of popular culture represent--or ignore--poverty, and what assumptions their works make and encourage.

Du Bois

Du Bois PDF Author: Reiland Rabaka
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509519289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
W.E.B Du Bois is widely considered one of the most accomplished and controversial African American intellectuals in U.S. history. A pioneering historian, sociologist, political economist, and civil rights activist, his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk remains one of the most widely read books in the history of American literature. In this new book, Reiland Rabaka critically explores Du Bois’s multidimensional legacy, lucidly introducing his main contributions in areas ranging from American sociology and critical race studies to black feminism and black Marxism. Rabaka argues that Du Bois’s corpus, particularly when attention is given to his contributions to the critique of racism, sexism, capitalism and colonialism, can be persuasively interpreted as both an undeniable and unprecedented contribution to the origins and evolution of one of our most important contemporary critical concepts: intersectionality. Du Bois: A Critical Introduction is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of history, sociology, politics, and economics. It will also be very valuable for those working in interdisciplinary fields, ranging from African American studies, critical race studies, and critical white studies to black feminism, black Marxism, and black internationalism.

The Shame Game

The Shame Game PDF Author: O'Hara, Mary
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447349261
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
What does it mean to be poor in Britain and America? For decades the primary narrative about poverty in both countries is that it has been caused by personal flaws or ‘bad life decisions’ rather than policy choices or economic inequality. This misleading account has become deeply embedded in the public consciousness with serious ramifications for how financially vulnerable people are seen, spoken about and treated. Drawing on a two-year multi-platform initiative, this book by award-winning journalist and author Mary O’Hara, asks how we can overturn this portrayal once and for all. Crucially, she turns to the real experts to try to find answers – the people who live it.

Unhomed

Unhomed PDF Author: Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520390369
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
In this rich cultural history, Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along.

Poverty and Power

Poverty and Power PDF Author: Edward Royce
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538167573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Poverty is a serious problem in the United States, more so than commonly imagined, and more so than in other industrialized nations. Most Americans adhere to an individualistic perspective: they believe poverty is largely the result of people being deficient in intelligence, determination, education, and other personal traits. Poverty and Power, Fourth Edition challenges this viewpoint, arguing that poverty arises from the workings of four key structural systems—the economic, the political, the cultural, and the social—and ten obstacles to economic justice, including unaffordable housing, inaccessible health care, and racial and gender discrimination. The author argues that a renewed war on poverty can be successful, but only through a popular movement to bring about significant change in the workings of American economic, political, and cultural institutions. New to this Edition Enhanced conversation on why the cultural theory of poverty has such a strong appeal to the American public develops students’ critical thinking skills (Chapter 3) New segment on the influence of job seekers’ physical appearance on hiring decisions showing that success is not simply a matter of education, skills, and training (Chapter 4) New data on the “job availability problem” explains in detail why the monthly headline unemployment number is misleading, and new content on the 2021 upsurge of quits on the part of American workers portrays efforts on the part of ordinary people to improve their lives (Chapter 5) New content on how corporations have become increasingly assertive political players explores the dramatic increase in corporate lobbying efforts, the rise of billionaire political activists, and the creation of a powerful conservative political infrastructure in the United States (Chapter 6) Greater attention to racially segregated and resource-deprived Black communities covers the extraordinary hardships experienced by the residents of these areas, while a new section on the geographical isolation of the affluent discusses how isolation affects wealthy people’s beliefs and perceptions about poverty and what policies they deem acceptable (Chapter 8)