"We can remember it for you wholesale": Lessons of the broadcast blacklist
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Date
2011
Authors
Stabile, Carol A.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Marquette University Press
Abstract
The following essay considers the ways in which the broadcast
blacklist affected how media studies scholars think about and study
the 1950s, as well how we understand the role of gender and family
in 1950s popular culture. At the start of the 1950s--at the very moment
in which television was emerging, in the words of blacklisted
writer Shirley Graham DuBois, as "the newest, the most powerful, the
most direct means of communication devised by Man ... .[whose] potentialities
for Good or for Evil are boundless"--a massive ideological
crackdown occurred in broadcasting (Graham 1964. By focusing
on how the blacklist made struggles over gender, race, and class unspeakable
in the new medium, this essays seeks to restore the memory
of these struggles and their participants to accounts of the 1950s, to
underscore the strategic manipulation of culture and memory by conservative
forces, and to remind us just how crucial historical research
is for media studies.
Description
14 pages
Keywords
Blacklisting of entertainers -- United States, Popular culture -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Citation
“’We Can Remember It For You Wholesale': Lessons of the Broadcast Blacklist", Moment of Danger: Critical Communication History, Ed Janice Peck and Inger Stole, Marquette University Press, 2011