Published in Association with Theory, Culture & Society

1 primary work • 3 total works

Images of Postmodern Society

by Norman K. Denzin

Published 27 August 1991

By using a series of studies of contemporary mainstream Hollywood movies - Blue Velvet, Wall Street, Crimes and Misdemeanors, When Harry Met Sally, Sex Lies and Videotape, Do the Right Thing - Norman Denzin explores the tension between ideas of the postmodern, and traditional ways of analyzing society. The discussion moves between two forms of text: social theory and cinematic representations of contemporary life. Denzin analyzes the ideas of society embedded in poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies and Marxism through the ideas of key theorists like Baudrillard, Barthes, Habermas, Jameson, Bourdieu and Derrida. He relates these to the problematic of the postmodern self as exposed in cinema centering on the decisive performance of race, gender and class.

The Cinematic Society

by Norman K. Denzin

Published 28 March 1995

Ranging over a rich variety of material from film and film literature, and encompassing a critical interrogation of traditional realist ethnographic and cinematic texts, this book highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society.

The cinema not only turns its audience into voyeurs, eagerly following the lives of its screen characters, but casts its key players as onlookers, spying on other′s lives. The nature of the cinematic voyeur is examined in depth, as are its implications for contemporary society. Norman K Denzin analyzes Hollywood′s manipulations of gender, race and class, and, drawing on the work of Foucault, argues that the cinematic gaze must be understood as part of the machinery of surveillance and power which regulates social behaviour in the late twentieth century.

Reading Race

by Norman K. Denzin

Published 1 January 2001

In this insightful book, one of America′s leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture.

Norman K Denzin argues that the cinema, like society, treats all persons as equal but struggles to define and implement diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism. He goes on to argue that the cinema needs to honour racial and ethnic differences, in defining race in terms of both an opposition to, and acceptance of, the media′s interpretations and representations of the American racial order.

Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.