How the internet transformed television     Before HBO's hit show Insecure, Issa Rae's comedy about being a nerdy black woman debuted as a YouTube web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, her response to the absence of diverse black characters on the small screen. Broad City, a feminist sitcom now on Comedy Central, originated as a web series on YouTube, developed directly out of funny women Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson's real-life friendship. These unconventional stories took advantage of the freedom afforded outside the traditional television system: online.     Open TV shows how we have left "the network era" far behind and entered the networked era, with the web opening up new possibilities for independent producers, entrepreneurs, and media audiences. Based on interviews with writers, producers, show-runners, and network executives, visits to festivals and award shows, and the experience of producing his own series, Aymar Jean Christian argues that the web brought innovation to television by opening up series development to new producers, fans, and sponsors that had previously been excluded. Online access to distribution provides creative freedom for indie producers, allows for more diverse storytelling from marginalized communities, and introduces new ways of releasing and awarding shows.     Open TV is essential reading for anyone interested in the changing environment of television and how the internet can inspire alternatives to what's on TV tonight.  

Written by scholars of various disciplines, the essays in this volume dig beneath the veneer of Hawai'i's myth as a melting pot paradise to uncover historical and complicated cross-racial dynamics. Race is not the primary paradigm through which Hawai'i is understood. Instead, ethnic difference is celebrated as a sign of multicultural globalism that designates Hawai'i as the crossroads of the Pacific. Racial inequality is disruptive to the tourist image of the islands. It ruptures the image of tolerance, diversity, and happiness upon which tourism, business, and so many other vested transnational interests in the islands are based. The contributors of this interdisciplinary volume reconsider Hawai'i as a model of ethnic and multiracial harmony through the lens of race in their analysis of historical events, group relations and individual experiences, and humor, among other focal points. Beyond Ethnicity examines the dynamics between race, ethnicity, and indigeneity to challenge the primacy of ethnicity and cultural practices for examining difference in Hawai'i while recognizing the significant role of settler colonialism. This original and thought-provoking volume reveals what a racial analysis illuminates about the current political configuration of the islands and, in doing so, challenges how we conceptualize race on the continent. Recognizing the ways that Native Hawaiians or Kānaka Maoli are impacted by shifting, violent, and hierarchical colonial structures that include racial inequalities, the editors and contributors explore questions of personhood and citizenship through language, land, labor, and embodiment. By admitting to these tensions and ambivalences, the editors set the pace and tempo of powerfully argued essays that engage with the various ways that Kānaka Maoli and the influx of differentially racialized settlers continue to shift the social, political, and cultural terrains of the Hawaiian Islands over time.

Originally published in 1942 and now reprinted for the first time, They Knew Lincoln is a classic in African American history and Lincoln studies. Part memoir and part history, the book is an account of John E. Washington's childhood among African Americans in Washington, DC, and of the blackpeople who knew or encountered Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. Washington recounted stories told by his grandmother's elderly friends - stories of escaping from slavery, meeting Lincoln in the capitol, learning of the president's assassination, and hearing ghosts at Ford's Theatre. He also mined the US government archives and researched little-known figures inLincoln's life, including William Johnson, who accompanied Lincoln from Springfield to Washington, and William Slade, the steward in Lincoln's White House. Washington was fascinated from childhood by the question of how much African Americans themselves had shaped Lincoln's views on slavery andrace, and he believed Lincoln's Haitian-born barber, William de Fleurville, was a crucial influence. Washington also extensively researched Elizabeth Keckly, the dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, and advanced a new theory of who helped her write her controversial book, Behind the Scenes, or ThirtyYears a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868). Firm in his conviction that the history of Lincoln's presidency must include the history of African Americans, Washington sought advice and support from the white establishment and obtained an introduction to his book by writer Carl Sandburgand a preface by Lincoln scholar James G. Randall. A new introduction by Kate Masur places Washington's book in its own context, explaining the contents of They Knew Lincoln in light of not only the era of emancipation and the Civil War, but also Washington's own times, when the nation's capital was a place of great opportunity and creativity formembers of the African American elite. On publication, a reviewer noted that the "collection of Negro stories, memories, legends about Lincoln" seemed "to fill such an obvious gap in the material about Lincoln that one wonders why no one ever did it before." This edition brings it back to print fora twenty-first century readership that remains fascinated with Abraham Lincoln.

Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry "[Trethewey's poems] dig beneath the surface of history--personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago--to explore the human struggles that we all face." --James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress   Layering joy and urgent defiance--against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone--Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey's first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love.   In this setting, each section, each poem drawn from an "opus of classics both elegant and necessary,"* weaves and interlocks with those that come before and those that follow. As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poet's remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future.   *Academy of American Poets' chancellor Marilyn Nelson