The Cultural Production of Mumia Abu-Jamal
1
The Cultural Production
of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Archaeology of audio recordings shows
- relationships between bodies in space
- how the 1994 NPR decision moved his oeuvre from audio to textual dominance
Archaeology and genealogy of his writing shows
- how textual body of work operates as a temporal praxis
- construction of argument and persuasion through non-linear temporality
Genealogy of online discourse shows
- recursive iterations of his cultural figure
- how his figure takes on larger social and cultural values
- how Others encode meaning
1. media interconnectedness
2. study of prison media
3. objective study of Abu-Jamal's media
4. introduction of theoretical combination
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Literature Review
*Structuration (Orlikowski 2000)*
Dependency Relationships (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur 1976)
Third Person Effect (Davison 1983)
Gaps
*Disciplinary and Regulatory Power* (Foucault 1975)
*Archaeology and Genealogy* (Foucault 1978)
- Deleuze 1988
- Butler 1990, 1993
- Haver 1996
- Agamben 2009
Research Questions
Media
Body
Oeuvre
Figure
- Media Production from Prison
- Microscopic, Qualitative approaches
- Alterity, Access, and Time.
*"Body Without Organs"* (Deleuze and Guattari 1986)
Genres:
- Journalism (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007)
- Black Power manifesto (Corrigan 2008)
- Prison Literature
Antonio Gramsci
Martin Luther King
Malcom X
Eldridge Cleaver
How does he produce artifacts?
What effects do those artifacts have?
How has he been produced as a figure?
What is his relationship to production?
What do his figure and media stand for?
*Database and Narrative* (Manovich 2001)
Visual Culture Studies
- Mitchell 2006
- Wallace 2004
- Nakamura 2007
Media History
- Debray 1996
- Gitelman 2006
- Jenkins 2007
Semiotics
- Benveniste 1966
- de Saussure 1978
- Barthes 1978
- Lotman 1989
Who He Is
- Born in 1954
- Teenage Black Panther - Philadelphia chapter co-founder
- Public radio journalist - talk show host
- Fired for sympathetic coverage of MOVE - cab driver (1981)
9 December 1981:
Arrested for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
Tried, convicted, and sentenced
Remains on Death Row today.
1994: NPR hires Abu-Jamal,
then cancels his broadcasts
before they air.
- Short, op/ed commentaries
- Collections of commentaries
- Popular and scholarly literature
Of artifacts
After NPR's decision, he publishes six books.
The three most recent are longer, more complex,
more focused, and he writes them faster.
Audio
Textual
Digital
Cultural PRoduction
Neither the incarcerated Abu-Jamal,
nor the deceased Daniel Faulkner
can access the conversations about them online:
They experience a radical digital divide.
of Figure
- Discursive
- Heteronomous
- Synecdochic
Research Methods
Qualitative:
Archival, Textual, and Observatory
Informal Interaction
Medium-Specific Practices
(listening, reading, and viewing)
*from archaeology to genealogy*
MAIN POINTS
And So...