Abstract
Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth; that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true… (Foucault, 1980, p. 131)
The above quote from Foucault's Power/Knowledge is emblematic of the complexity of truth. While some people would like to believe there is a neutral, nonideological, objective truth out there, Foucault reminds us that truth is a function of power and dominance. What is accepted as true in a society is determined by power structures within which truth operates, so that truth—as in the discourses considered as valid, the distinction between falsehood and verity, and who is authorized to speak or expected to remain silent—is a matter orchestrated by the almighty forces guiding social production and regulation (i.e., all of us, really, but most especially the most powerful among us). We produce truth, we regulate truth, we consume truth, we give meaning to truth. When we say, for instance, that a doctorate degree is a requisite for a successful academic career, we are validating an idea deemed as truth by dominant groups of the past, and we reproduce this view of academic success through validation, transmission, and ongoing embodiment of this ideal.
Foucault's notion of truth regimes is especially useful for understanding how media representations work. Through the production and reproduction of narratives, myths, and deep-rooted ideologies, media producers and consumers assert the truth of certain cultural realities—like the idea that too much blackness or foreignness on screen is unpalatable, or the notion that celebrities, no matter how they transgress, are untouchable beings. Critical cultural scholarship, such as the ones we publish in this journal, invite us to attend to enduring regimes of truth and actual/potential oppressions, victimizations, and erasure of bodies and thoughts that occur as a result. The essays and articles in this issue do justice to this agenda: they focus our attention on the workings of hegemony in media production and consumption, illuminating how hegemonic configurations dominate, oppress, and exclude. They additionally offer some semblance of hope by highlighting what resistance looks like and how counter narratives and a diversity of voices challenge hegemonic notions of truth.
In This Issue
The issue begins with a fascinating essay, “When the exception to the rule proves the rule: Parasite's paradoxical Academy Awards best picture win and American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC),” in which Christof Demont-Heinrich articulates the unspoken rule of cultural production and consumption in the United States and how Parasite, a South Korean comedy thriller that swept up the Best Picture and Best Director awards at the 2020 Academy Awards, proves the rule. According to Demont-Heinrich, Americans are more likely to consume more American cultural media products and few cultural media products from other countries, compared to many people in other countries who consume a lot more cultural media products from other countries. He calls this American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC), a conceptual framework that he carefully defines, illustrates, and problematizes in this essay.
Next, Anh A. T. Nguyen interrogates binary oppositions in identity politics that conceive Asian/Americans as a homogenous group of “Orientalized and foreignized others.” Employing an intersectional lens in the paper titled “Representational Politics in the Film Series ‘Asian Americans’: The Contestation of Identity Essentialism,” Nguyen advances representational complexity as an analytic for unveiling power relations in representation and argues identity is not static or apolitical but heterogeneous, hybrid, dynamic—“responding to historical, geographic, physical, linguistic, political, economic, material, symbolic, and discursive space over time.”
The third essay, “(in)Fidelity: The Narrative Rationality of Tiger Woods” by Noah Franken, is a bit of a detour though it similarly explores narratives and ideologies in the media. In this interesting study, Franken applies the narrative paradigm to Tiger Woods’ documented life and asserts Woods is a mythic hero who has gone through rituals of violation and reconstruction, with implicit consequences for public perception of the relationship between means and ends. The next article, “Rape, Popular Culture, and Nirbhaya: A Study of India's Daughter and Delhi Crime” by Benson Rajan, Devaleena Kundu, and Sahana Sarkar, examines the intersection of rape and popular culture in India. This study is so timely and important given the rising incidence of rape in India. Investigating how patriarchy, rape culture myth, gender norms, and sexual violence are treated in two documentaries, the authors argue the ongoing discourse in popular culture sustains and furthers rape culture.
The remaining two articles document acts of resistance. In “Black Media Reporting on Theater, Dance, and Jazz Clubs in Canada: From Shuffle along to Rockhead's Paradise,” Cheryl Thompson and Emilie Jabouin bring Black Canadian media studies into being by engaging with Black Canadian history and centering Black Canadian voices. The study creates “a historical argument for unpacking Black Canadian content production, media ownership and storytelling.” Similarly, Megan M. Cox explores how the Cherokee Nation uses biographical storytelling to resist the suppression and erosion of authentic Native American culture in “Cultural Continuance and Agency in Cherokee Biographical Digital Storytelling.” Through an insightful analysis of news releases and documentary videos, Cox underlines the importance of agency and voice in countering settler colonialism's domination and cultural imperialism.
The issue closes with Mel Monier's thoughtful review of Celebrity Rhetoric and Sexual Misconduct Cases: Discursive Self-Cleaving by Andrea McDonnell. Monier writes that the book's key contribution is the notion of discursive self-cleaving in which celebrities strategically employ their public personas as shields and recommends the book for introductory Communication/Media Studies courses and to researchers interested in media, celebrity, and gender.
A huge thanks to the authors, our ever-resourceful reviewers, our advisory board members, JCI management team, and Sage production staff who make the work we do in this journal possible. And to you, dear reader, we offer our sincerest gratitude for engaging with the work we publish in this journal. Until next issue, be well.