Dr Antonia Mackay

This book examines American screen culture and its power to create and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism. Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout franchise and more. -- Provided by publisher.

Reading Westworld is the first volume to explore the cultural, textual and theoretical significance of the hugely successful HBO TV seriesWestworld. The essays engage in a series of original enquiries into the central themes of the series including conceptions of the human and posthuman, American history, gaming, memory, surveillance, AI, feminism, imperialism, free will and contemporary capitalism. In its varied critical engagements with the genre, narratives and contexts of Westworld, this volume explores the show’s wider and deeper meanings and the questions it poses, as well considering how Westworld reflects on the ethical implications of artificial life and technological innovation for our own futurity. With critical essays that draw on the interdisciplinary strengths and productive intersections of media, cultural and literary studies, Reading Westworld seeks to respond to the show’s fundamental question; “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” It will be of interest to students, academics and general readers seeking to engage with Westworld and the far-reaching questions it poses about our current engagements with technology. 

This edited collection examines the culture of surveillance as it is expressed in the built environment. Expanding on discussions from previous collections; Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (2017) and Surveillance, Race, Culture (2018), this book seeks to explore instances of surveillance within and around specific architectural entities, both historical and fictitious, buildings with specific social purposes and those existing in fiction, film, photography, performance and art. Providing new readings of, and expanding on Foucault’s work on the panopticon, these essays examine the role of surveillance via disparate fields of enquiry, such as the humanities, social sciences, technological studies, design and environmental disciplines. Surveillance, Architecture and Control seeks to engender new debates about the nature of the surveilled environment through detailed analyses of architectural structures and spaces; examining how cultural, geographical and built space buttress and produce power relations. The various essays address the ongoing fascination with contemporary notions of surveillance and control.--Supplied by publisher.

This collection of essays engages with a wide range of disciplines including art, performance, film and literature, to examine the myriad effects of contemporary surveillance on our cultural psyche. The volume expertly articulates the manner in which cultural productions have been complicit in watching, seeing and purporting to ‘know’ race. In our increasingly mediated world, our sense of community is becoming progressively virtual, and surveillant technologies impact upon subjectivity, resulting in multiple forms of artistic and cultural expression. As such, art, film, and literature provide a lens for the reflection of sociocultural concerns. In Surveillance, Race, Culture Flynn and Mackay skilfully draw together a diverse range of contributions to investigate the fundamental question of exactly how surveillant technologies have informed our notions of race, identity and belonging. 

In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, watching and being watched are the salient features of the lives depicted in many of our cultural productions. This collection examines surveillance as it is portrayed in art, literature, film and popular culture, and makes the connection between our sense of ‘self’ and what is ‘seen’. In our post-panoptical world which purports to proffer freedom of movement, technology notes our movements and habits at every turn. Surveillance seeps out from businesses and power structures to blur the lines of security and confidentiality. This unsettling loss of privacy plays out in contemporary narratives, where the ‘selves’ we create are troubled by surveillance. This collection will appeal to scholars of media and cultural studies, contemporary literature, film and art and American studies.   

By utilising the theories of Slavoj Žižek (Welcome to the Desert of the Real [2002], The Sublime Object of Ideology [1989], The Plague of Fantasies [1997]) this paper will focus on Westworld’s human visitors and read them as “mechanised” by the park’s ideology—one Žižek would characterise as an “archideological” fantasy, where we are split between self-awareness and unconscious fantasy. If the human bodies are indeed “mechanised” by Westworld’s ideology, rather than read the relationship between androids and humans as Other, my methodology proposes the possibility of a bridge between humans and androids, where Westworld’s space acts as the catalyst for bodily control. The space of the park is one characterised by surveillance and penetrability from the “real” world beyond, where lifts break the park’s surface; where software “upgrades” are performed in glass offices; and where the overseers observe and monitor bodies via the dome at Westworld HQ. The penetrability of space by those in control of the park, therefore suggests the impossibility of the freedom the park purports to offer, and such spatial surveillance and territorialisation is not only enforced on Ford’s androids, but also on the human visitors who must accept the park’s ideology (in Eco’s words, the “force of the fake”). It is the humans who must also become part of Westworld’s mechanised landscape in order to achieve their fantasy.

In line with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum, this chapter investigates the hyperconsumerism and commercialisation of bodies in reality television programs, specifically those set in American prisons. Using popular shows such as Cops and Lockup, the analysis contained here examines the manner in which African American male bodies are both framed and objectified by the surveillance of television cameras. With reference to both Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1986), the analysis unearths the role of the surveillant gaze in determining racial narratives and framing bodily identity.