Browsing by Subject "9/11"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Humor Alert: Muslim and Arab Stand-Up Comedy in Post-9/11 United States(2012-07-16) Micu, AndreeaAfter 9/11, American stand-up comedy includes an increasing presence of Arab and Muslim comedians whose humor engages some of the recurring Islamophobic stereotypes circulating in the United States. These comedians combine self-deprecating humor and critique of American society. In doing so, they continue a rich tradition of American ethnic comedy, first used by other minorities to negotiate positive recognition of their ethnicities in American society. Although Arab and Muslim American stand-up comedy continues to grow, there is little academic analysis of it. My research attempts to fill this gap. I examine two video-recorded comedy tours, Allah Made Me Funny and The Axis of Evil, and draw on my experiences as participant observer at the 8th annual edition of the New York Arab American Comedy Festival. In my examination, I explore Arab and Muslim American stand-up comedy after 9/11 as a set of performances that challenge Islamophobic political discourses and contest stereotypical representations of Arabs and Muslims circulating in the media and popular culture. I begin this thesis with a discussion that defines Islamophobia after 9/11 as a pervasive ideological formation and explores the relationship between Islamophobia and stereotypical representations of Arabs and Muslims in the media and popular culture. Second, I identify political activism, personal narrative, as well as both artistic and historical opportunism as complex and interrelated dimensions of this stand-up comedy. Third, I examine how Arab and Muslim American comedians use humor to navigate the poles of their hyphenated identities and negotiate their belonging in American society. Finally, I examine the ways in which stand-up comedy reverses the discourses and representations of Islamophobia by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque.Item The Ludic wars : the interactive pleasures of post-9/11 military video games(2011-08) Payne, Matthew Thomas; Strover, Sharon; Straubhaar, Joseph; Kackman, Michael; Tyner, Kathleen; Cloud, DanaThis dissertation examines how commercially successful military-themed video games produced after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are crafted, marketed, and played with the goal of understanding the interlocking technological, cultural, and social practices that contribute to their interactive pleasures. The systematic inquiry into the production and experience of media pleasure carries with it vexing questions about how such affect is created and how it is situated within broader cultural fields. This interdisciplinary project accordingly utilizes multiple methods including close textual readings of seminal games, a critical discourse analysis of marketing materials, and an ethnography and focus group of a war gaming fan community to track how these sites of practice give post-9/11 military-themed gameplay its distinctive experiential character and cultural import. The case studies examined herein reveal that the affective dimensions of militarized gameplay are intimately linked to the political and cultural forces undergirding their production, marketing, and reception, and that the games industry mobilizes anxieties about terrorism to entice gamers into virtually striking back against foreign aggressors.Item “More than memory” : haunted performance in post-9/11 popular U.S. culture(2010-05) Manis, Raechelle Lee; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Wolf, Stacy Ellen; Cvetkovich, Ann; Dolan, Jill; Gunn, Joshua; Jones, Joni L.This dissertation combines performance analysis, rhetorical criticism, and psychoanalytical theory to analyze three performance “texts” as sites of haunting in post-9/11 America: Tony Kushner’s 2001 U.S. debut of Homebody/Kabul, the Broadway musical Wicked, and ABC’s television drama Lost. It contributes a nuanced, theorized reading of the civil implications of post-9/11 popular American culture as “more than memory” by demonstrating how these performances suggested “what might be” in ways that subverted Bush’s responses to the attacks. The first chapter reads Homebody/Kabul against the national addresses delivered by Bush in the first weeks after the attacks and argue that the 2001 New York Theatre Workshop performance created a space for audiences to reconsider the version of “mourning” encouraged by the Bush administration. The type of mourning modeled/enabled by Homebody/Kabul, I assert, is different from that against which Derrida warns. Rather than “silencing ghosts” (Gunn 82) through the integration of loss, Homebody/Kabul makes a space for conversing with, and models living with, ghosts. The second chapter argues that the Wicked’s Ozians are stuck in a state of melancholia, refusing to speak to/with the ghost of Elphaba. Because they refuse to reckon with Elphaba, they literally finish exactly where they began—with “No One Mourn[ing] the Wicked.” By reading Wicked against the celebratory rhetoric of the Bush administration after declaring “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, we can understand the way the United States as a nation was (and may still be, in 2010) haunted by the Bush administration's failure to lead the nation in mourning effectively and ethically and by its incessant rhetoric of evil. The third chapter advocates for Lost as a hauntological reckoning with 9/11 that models ethical witnessing as a potentially generative meeting of human beings across cultures at the site of trauma. An alternative to the fear that the Bush administration encouraged leading up to Lost’s premiere and through its final season, ethical witnessing as modeled on Lost suggests that civilization stands to thrive where difference is honored—and risks toppling into chaos where the alternative “us against them” mentality (Other anxiety) prevails.Item “Nothing’s been the same since New York” : the Marvel Cinematic Universe's engagement with 9/11 and the War on Terror(2015-05) Bograd, Natalie Kate; Perren, Alisa; Schatz, ThomasThis thesis explores how the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has engaged with 9/11 and the War on Terror since its inception in 2008. This thesis examines industrial and cultural factors affecting the way these post-9/11 superhero films engage with contemporary sociopolitical concerns and argues that the Marvel Studios films both attempt to engage with said concerns and also sanitize and rework references to terrorism, war, torture, and destruction in order to remain palatable for the widest possible audience (including a family audience and a growing international market). In contrast to other superhero franchises, several of which intentionally play on post-9/11 feelings of vulnerability and terror, the MCU films and television series use a combination of humor, a brightly colored comic book aesthetic, and impressive visual spectacles in order to ensure that the primary focus is on entertainment. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the characters, ideological content, and visual elements of the MCU as they relate to 9/11 and the War on Terror.