Bill Yousman Libros

The Spike Lee Enigma is an exploration of ideology and political economy in the films and career of one of America's most controversial filmmakers. Since the 1980s Spike Lee has created numerous films that are socially challenging, some would even say radical, while simultaneously maintaining a collaborative relationship with mainstream Hollywood and the global advertising industry. Lee, thus, seemingly represents an enigma – operating on the margins of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural production.This book incorporates multiple perspectives, ranging from media effects theories, critical cultural studies, and the political economy of media, to semiotics and ideological, auteurist, and feminist approaches to film theory and analysis. Early chapters provide a clear explanation of these theoretical and methodological approaches while later chapters explore several of Lee’s films in great depth. In a social environment where popular culture has supplanted education and religion as a primary force of socialization and enculturation, this book demonstrates why a popular filmmaker such as Spike Lee must be taken seriously, while introducing readers to ways of viewing, reading, and listening that will allow them to achieve a new understanding of the mediated texts they encounter on a daily basis.

Bill Yousman has written arguably one of the best books I have read in years on the American prison system. Analyzing the horror, brutality, and racism at the heart of this system through the media, especially television, he beautifully constructs how the politics of governing through crime and punishment is largely shaped by our ever expansive screen culture. This book is beautifully written, provides a model for sophisticated cultural analysis, and makes clear how any understanding of both politics and prisons has to be examined with great care through the notion of culture as a form of public pedagogy. This book should be read by anyone concerned about the shame of incarceration in the United States, the power of the media to legitimate it, and the role that culture plays as a major force for influencing how we understand and respond to the racialized prison industry and the punishing state. (Henry Giroux, Global Television Network Chair Professor, English and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada) While police procedurals and law and order programming have dominated U.S. television since the early 1980s, representations of the material effects of law and order culture - the dramatic increases in prisons and prison populations - remain few. Contrasting the narratives told about prisoners and prisons on television with the material realities of incarceration, this book casts a brilliant and painful light on the framing of issues related to prisons and the consequences that follow from such distorted images and representations. (Carol Stabile, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon)