Papers by Amanda Nell Edgar
Southern Journal of Communication, 2022
Using interviews with twenty-eight people who watched fictional outbreak narratives early in the ... more Using interviews with twenty-eight people who watched fictional outbreak narratives early in the Covid-19 pandemic, we argue that the genre helped viewers process the abstract uncertainty of the time through concrete sound and imagery. Viewers used critical distance to separate the real life horrors of the moment and the mediated “horrors” of the films. In doing so, audiences simultaneously pulled the films close to build their own pandemic grammar and held the films at a distance to reassure themselves about their own – and society’s – odds for survival. This approach to media selection and consumption has implications for media studies during times of collective trauma, as it demonstrates the ways narratives about suffering inform social response in sometimes unexpected ways.
In this article, we propose an understanding of parasocial relationships, in which fans build an ... more In this article, we propose an understanding of parasocial relationships, in which fans build an affective relationship with characters and television programmes, as fandom's emotional interior. Rather than being structured by fan productivity and community, parasocial relationships exist in a private, intimate space as fans develop deep emotional bonds with characters. When a series concludes, fans must therefore reconcile the dissolution of these relationships in a personal way, a process called the parasocial break-up. However, the current media landscape fosters the sense that the fan object is never truly 'over', which tempers the negative emotions of the parasocial break-up. Interviews with fans of The Office revealed that this process is paradoxical, as fans assert both the devastation of loss and the agency of denying that loss.
Popular Music and Automobiles, 2020
In this chapter, I argue that the intersection of automobiles and popular music should be underst... more In this chapter, I argue that the intersection of automobiles and popular music should be understood as deeply entrenched in US America’s history of white supremacist violence. Specifically, the discourses surrounding black teenager Jordan Davis’s murder at the hands of white vigilante Michael Dunn demonstrates harmful everyday white American logics that position the ‘open road’ as white public space. Within this space, hip-hop music is audible only through a lens of criminality and positioned as oppositional to black middle- class respectability. Together, these three socio-spatial logics, of the white open road, the ‘thug’ space of rap, and the ‘polite society’ of a gun-saturated culture, work to frame the contemporary musical space of the automobile as violent and unfriendly to black travellers, thereby connecting contemporary US American culture with the supposedly vestigial violence of Jim Crow. As a result, I argue that within US American history the technologies of cars and music cannot be understood as separate from racist logics of white supremacy.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2019
Recognizing the complex interplay between country music, lifestyle, and identity, and the dispara... more Recognizing the complex interplay between country music, lifestyle, and identity, and the disparate nature of these texts and their producers, we center our analysis of the politics of contemporary “country” in the accounts of country music listeners. Through this lens, “country” foregrounds a portrait of precarious labor and white rural economies. Precarity is held up as aspirational, facilitated by the relative structural support of whiteness and masculinity that simultaneously leverages economic hardship to obfuscate these privileged positions. “Country” elides experiences of class marginalization, white rurality, and masculinized labor with mythologized narratives that position simplicity and work as “the good life.”
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2018
We consider the ways intimacy with pop cultural icons works as a type of heritage. Based on inter... more We consider the ways intimacy with pop cultural icons works as a type of heritage. Based on interviews with Tupac Shakur fans about his recent biopic and their histories with the rapper’s music, we demonstrate the emotional investments fans have in the artist’s image and their individual and communal connections to his memory. The 2017 biopic All Eyez on Me (AEoM) sparked public discussion of Shakur’s legacy and prompted his fans to reflect on the importance of his work in their identity development. Specifically, they connected with him through deeply felt moments of commonality and family experience. Revisiting their connection to Shakur through the biopic functioned as intimate heritage, as fans used a variety of mediated forms to reflect on their lives through the symbolic record of Shakur’s life. Therefore, the movie’s content was secondary to the ways a mediated discussion of the artist facilitated fans’ self-reflection.
At the request of United States Central Command (USCENTCOM), the Joint Staff, Deputy Director for... more At the request of United States Central Command (USCENTCOM), the Joint Staff, Deputy Director for Global Operations (DDGO), jointly with other elements in the JS, Services, and U.S. Government (USG) Agencies, has established a SMA virtual reach-back cell. This initiative, based on the SMA global network of scholars and area experts, is providing USCENTCOM with population based and regional expertise in support of ongoing operations in the Iraq/Syria region.
This is Part 1 of a 9 part series of SMA Reach back responses to questions posed by USCENTCOM. Each report contains responses to multiple questions grouped by theme.
The complete reports can be accessed at: http://nsiteam.com/sma-reachback-cell/
Based on interviews with 35 audience members, this essay argues that audiences used Beyoncé's hou... more Based on interviews with 35 audience members, this essay argues that audiences used Beyoncé's hour-long visual album, Lemonade, as a Two-Way Mirror to understand racial and gendered identities through the lenses of social movements, identity politics, and relationality. Our findings support Sandvoss (2005) and other audience scholars in that the Black women we interviewed used the album's emphasis on Black femininity as a 'mirror' that uplifted their own racial and gendered identities. White and male audiences, on the other hand, used the album less for fashioning their own sense of self, instead using Lemonade as a lens to gaze into a realm of Black femininity as presented by Beyoncé, a Black woman herself. While in some cases, this perspective drove White and male participants' empathy and support of the Black women's experiences represented in the album, their understandings also risked one-dimensionality.
We argue that place offers an effective framework for connecting popular culture with social just... more We argue that place offers an effective framework for connecting popular culture with social justice narratives by exploring audience interpretations of Lemonade in 2016’s tumultuous racial climate. Working from interviews with 35 of Lemonade’s listeners/viewers regarding their understanding of the album, we argue that audience members used Lemonade to plot spaces of racial pride, community, and equality. Supporting previous audience studies’ findings, Beyoncé’s audiences engaged actively with the text and explored the complex symbolism through interpretive communities, but the audiences we spoke with also transcended these spaces. Using Lemonade as a tool to understand and reimagine historical social movements, audiences deployed the album to cultivate an anti-racist habitus in attempts to make their worlds more just.
This article combines a sound studies perspective with a television industry approach by placing ... more This article combines a sound studies perspective with a television industry approach by placing interview data from prominent television music supervisors in conversation with textual analysis of their projects. Using interview and textual data from cathartic moments in television dramas like Six Feet Under, Nip/Tuck, and Breaking Bad, I argue that the structural logics of subordination in the American television industry contribute to an imagocentric culture. Specifically, the music supervisors I interviewed emphasised music’s separation from and subordination to television’s storytelling function and believed that artful music design should use music as a “flavour” or “texture”, offering synaesthesia as a way of bypassing the discussion of sound as a constitutive element in the narrative resolution. Finally, the supervisors foregrounded financial constraints as a primary influence on their creative labour, using licensing discussions to decentralise the creative contributions of music in the television narrative. Themes of subordination, synaesthesia, and financial constraint worked together to decentralise the importance of music to the creative professionals responsible for this work. By putting music supervisors’ perspectives in conversation with textual analysis of their projects, this article demonstrates the disconnection between music’s crucial role in shaping television messages and the devaluing of sound in the television landscape.
This essay argues that corporeal sound, including the spoken voice and the auscultated heartbeat,... more This essay argues that corporeal sound, including the spoken voice and the auscultated heartbeat, can be understood as material rhetoric, and that material rhetoric, by extension, should be understood as both a force and a networked fluid. I illustrate this argument through the case study of abortion practices and policies, arguing that both mandated heartbeat auscultation and physician speech-and-display provisions represent the forceful fluidity of material rhetoric and demonstrate the power of such rhetoric to carve out networks of meaning. Through this networking, sound’s material role in defining autonomy takes on a powerful role in debates over fetal personhood.
Analyses of extremist video messages typically focus on their discursive content. Using the case ... more Analyses of extremist video messages typically focus on their discursive content. Using the case of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), this study instead draws upon the emerging subfield of genosonic analysis to understand the allure of extremist videos, as well as the ineffectiveness of US video messages designed to 'counter violent extremism' (CVE). Through a genosonic analysis of three high-profile ISIL videos and five popular US State Department CVE videos, the study advances two concepts – sonorous communality and sonic unmaking – to help explain ISIL's appeal. The lack of equivalent dimensions in US CVE videos renders them sonically sterile in comparison to those of ISIL. The implications of this analysis for scholarship and practice conducted at the intersection of media, war and conflict are discussed.
This essay argues that videos of N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” uploaded to YouTube represent a form ... more This essay argues that videos of N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” uploaded to YouTube represent a form of performative and spatial audience resistance within a neoliberal context. Drawing my analysis from audience comments on YouTube, I argue that audiences use the four “Fuck tha Police” videos’ YouTube sites as landmarks of resistance through mediated emotional excess. This expression, in turn, reestablishes the public community discourses missing from neoliberal culture, reintroducing the systemic context of racial police brutality. Finally, I argue that audience comments work as testimonials, recasting the space of YouTube to mirror the mock courtroom presented in the original N.W.A. video. In each of these performances of resistance, though, audiences must work within neoliberal institutional media structures to carve out an audience ownership of N.W.A.’s message. Audience messages of resistance, then, should be understood as ambivalent, since they challenge neoliberal culture but only within structures supported and facilitated by neoliberal economic policy.
Popular Music and Society, 2013
... Michael Saffle's work similarly links “rural music” with the “hillbilly” stereotype while... more ... Michael Saffle's work similarly links “rural music” with the “hillbilly” stereotype while coming up just shy of an explicit ideological discussion of this musical genre's class and regional implications, and while Colin Roust's essay on NBC's news documentaries touches on the Cold ...
This essay proposes the notion of the "jazz vernacular" as a tool specific to the Creole culture ... more This essay proposes the notion of the "jazz vernacular" as a tool specific to the Creole culture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability both geographically and historically. We argue that the jazz vernacular is a discourse structured by musical repertoire. The jazz vernacular provides a channel for the historical pain of the black diaspora by playing in the background, both literally and figuratively, of communication in and about New Orleans. This essay considers Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke to understand how the jazz vernacular frames hurricane Katrina as well as how it frames Lee's film as an intervention into "neoliberal" racial discourses. We argue that Lee's film utilizes the jazz vernacular as a metdiscourse to reinforced the ways in which residents used jazz to restructure cultural memory around the rhetoric of the dispossessed in New Orleans after Katrina. When the Levees Broke uses testimonials and affective communication to structure the narrative of Katrina through elements of the jazz vernacular like: displacement, embodiment, brashness, and improvisation to connect contemporary Creole New Orleanians to a long history of structural oppression and violence. By harnessing performative elements, Lee's film performs a jazz intervention into neoliberal discourses about freedom, defense, safety, and heroism that contrasts these discourses with the despair and the resistance of black America. Consequently, Lee's use of the jazz vernacular relies on narrative musical culture to recontextualize what neoliberalism has erased.
Women's Studies in Communication
This article offers a contextual perspective on the rhetorical mechanisms of victim blaming in pu... more This article offers a contextual perspective on the rhetorical mechanisms of victim blaming in public sphere discourses. By supplementing Burke's dramatistic rhetorical analysis with critical race theory, I trace the changing popular press conversation from Chris Brown's 2009 assault on Rihanna through coverage of their relationship in 2012. In doing so, I identify both the racial undertones of reductionist interpretations of R&B culture and the shift from supporting to blaming the victim. The popular press contextualized Brown's attack and the subsequent events through a racially stereotypical discussion of Brown and Rihanna's R&B performances. Though initially this press framing emphasized Brown's guilt, Rihanna's career advancements eventually recontextualized her performance as a manipulation of Brown, conjuring historical imagery of the racist Jezebel archetype. By examining this transformation, this article aims to intervene into both popular press constructions of victim as agent and racially reductionist interpretations of the R&B genre and its performers.
Critical Studies in Media Communication
In this essay, I use Adele's 2012 Grammy performance as a case study to examine the racialized vo... more In this essay, I use Adele's 2012 Grammy performance as a case study to examine the racialized voice and the meaning of authenticity in cases of vocal racial passing. The juxtaposition of Adele's white appearance with a vocal tone and style that approximates black blues performers prompted enactments of white musical bordering, a rhetorical move to classify vocal performances according to race. I adapt a musicological perspective for critical communication studies to highlight the ways ambiguously raced bordering rhetorics prompt questions about the authenticity of “black” and “white” vocal performance. By approximating (what certain audiences understand to be) black female performance, Adele challenges popular music's racial bordering. Although this transgression is ultimately silenced through her ascribed visual whiteness and relegation to the white female-dominated pop category, this act of passing opens a space for discussion about the raced voice and the bordering practices that surround white musical authenticity.
While the political aspects of parody have been widely researched, this work has generally focuse... more While the political aspects of parody have been widely researched, this work has generally focused on institutionally circulated parodies on shows like Saturday Night Live and The Colbert Report. Fewer projects have explored the political potential of fan-created parody videos on social media outlets. In order to gain a fuller understanding of parody's political potential within the YouTube community, this case study puts Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" music video in conversation with fan-created parodies. The author argues that the feminist rhetoric in Lady Gaga's video is disciplined by fan parodies' repressive vernacular, demonstrating the transformative power of usergenerated videos. Social media publication is a powerful force to both progress social change and to recoup transformative messages in the mainstream media. L ess than two months after Interscope Records released Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" music video, a group of college students created a low-budget copy in which they reenacted the original video with near frame-by-frame precision. For two days, this video circulated YouTube without much fanfare. Then Lady Gaga posted the video's link on her Twitter feed. Within 10 days, the video had Amanda Nell Edgar is a doctoral student at the University of Missouri, where she studies gender, race, and sexuality as represented in popular culture. Correspondence can be directed to [email protected].
Uploads
Papers by Amanda Nell Edgar
This is Part 1 of a 9 part series of SMA Reach back responses to questions posed by USCENTCOM. Each report contains responses to multiple questions grouped by theme.
The complete reports can be accessed at: http://nsiteam.com/sma-reachback-cell/
This is Part 1 of a 9 part series of SMA Reach back responses to questions posed by USCENTCOM. Each report contains responses to multiple questions grouped by theme.
The complete reports can be accessed at: http://nsiteam.com/sma-reachback-cell/