Beyond Uhura
Author: Nichelle Nichols
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn text and photographs the author discusses her life and professional career.
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Author:
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Published: 1994-11-14
Total Pages: 64
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.
A Different Trek
Author: David K. Seitz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2023-07
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 1496236599
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different “Trek” is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.
Speculative Blackness
Author: André M. Carrington
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2016-02-29
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1452949751
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction—including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures—to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Carrington’s argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the original Star Trek television series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title, Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series. Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.
Encyclopedia of African American Actresses in Film and Television
Author: Bob McCann
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2022-09-23
Total Pages: 463
ISBN-13: 1476691401
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first work of its kind, this encyclopedia provides 360 brief biographies of African American film and television acPER010000tresses from the silent era to 2009. It includes entries on well-known and nearly forgotten actresses, running the gamut from Academy Award and NAACP Image Award winners to B-film and blaxpoitation era stars. Each entry has a complete filmography of the actress's film, TV, music video or short film credits. The work also features more than 170 photographs, some of them rare images from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Gettin' Around
Author: Jürgen E. Grandt
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2018-12-15
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 082035435X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGettin' Around examines how the global jazz aesthetic strives, in various ways, toward an imaginative reconfiguration of a humanity that transcends entrenched borders of ethnicity and nationhood, while at the same time remaining keenly aware of the exigencies of history. Jürgen E. Grandt deliberately refrains from a narrow, empirical definition of jazz or of transnationalism and, true to the jazz aesthetic itself, opts for a broader, more inclusive scope, even as he listens carefully and closely to jazz's variegated soundtrack. Such an approach seeks not only to avoid the museal whiff of a "golden age, time past" but also to broaden the appeal and the applicability of the overall critical argument. For Grandt, "international" simply designates currents of people, ideas, and goods between distinct geopolitical entities or nation-states, whereas "transnational" refers to liminal dynamics that transcend preordained borderlines occurring above, below, beside, or along the outer contours of nation-states. Gettin' Around offers a long overdue consideration of the ways in which jazz music can inform critical practice in the field of transnational (American) studies and grounds these studies in specifically African American cultural contexts.
Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before
Author: Diana Adesola Mafe
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2018-03-01
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 1477315233
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency. Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before shows why heroines such as Lex in AVP and Zoë in Firefly are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.
To Boldly Go
Author: Nadine Farghaly
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-06-09
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 1476629315
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 2016, Star Trek--arguably the most popular science fiction franchise of all time--turned 50. During that time the original series and its various offshoots have created some of the genre's most iconic characters and reiterated a vision of an egalitarian future where humans no longer discriminate against race, gender or sexuality. This collection of new essays provides a timely study of how well Star Trek has lived up to its own ideals of inclusivity and equality, and how well prepared it is to boldly go with everyone into the next half century.
Star Trek, History and Us
Author: A.J. Black
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2021-03-29
Total Pages: 203
ISBN-13: 1476643229
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSince 1966, the Star Trek television franchise has used outer space and the thrilling adventures of the crews of the U.S.S. Enterprise to reflect our own world and culture. Kirk and Spock face civil rights issues and Vietnam war allegories while Picard, Data, and the next generation seek an ordered, post-Cold War stability in the Reagan era. The crews of Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise must come to terms with our real life of war, manifest destiny in the 21st century, and the shadow of 9/11. Now, as the modern era of the franchise attempts to portray a utopia amidst a world spinning out of control, Star Trek remains about more than just the future. It is about our present. It is about us. This book charts the history of Gene Roddenberry's creation across five decades alongside the cultural development of the United States and asks: are we heading for the utopian Federation future, or is it slipping ever further away from reality?
The Kelvin Timeline of Star Trek
Author: Matthew Wilhelm Kapell
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2019-02-28
Total Pages: 198
ISBN-13: 1476636230
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn an era of reboots, restarts and retreads, J.J. Abrams' Star Trek trilogy--featuring new, prequel adventures of Kirk, Spock and the rest of the original series characters, aboard the USS Enterprise--has brought the franchise to a new generation and perfected a process that is increasingly central to entertainment media: reinvigorating the beloved classic. This collection of new essays offers the first in-depth analysis of the new trilogy and the vision of the next generation of Star Trek film-makers. Issues of gender, race, politics, economics, technology and morality--always key themes of the franchise--are explored in the 21st century context of "The Kelvin Timeline."
