Racial Spectacles: Explorations in Media, Race, and Justice by Jonathan Markovitz (California State U, San Marcos) will be published by Routledge
in August. Racial Spectacles examines the crucial role the media has played in circulating and shaping national dialogues about race through demonstrations of crime and racialized violence. Markovitz argues that mass media 'racial spectacles' often work to shore up racist stereotypes, but that they also provide opportunities to challenge prevalent conceptions of race, and can be seized upon as vehicles for social protest. This book explores a series of mass media spectacles revolving around the news, prime-time television, Hollywood cinema, and the internet that have either relied upon, reconfigured, or helped to construct collective memories of race, crime, and (in)justice. The case studies explored include the Scottsboro interracial rape case of the 1930s, the Kobe Bryant rape case, the Los Angeles Police Department’s "Rampart scandal," the Abu Ghraib photographs, and a series of racist incidents at the University of California.
