Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture after 1945

by Sara Blair (Editor), Joseph B. Entin (Editor), Franny Nudelman (Editor)

Overview

After World War II, U.S. documentarians engaged in a rigorous rethinking of established documentary practices and histories. Responding to the tumultuous transformations of the postwar era—the atomic age, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the emergence of the environmental movement, immigration and refugee crises, student activism, the globalization of labor, and the financial collapse of 2008—documentary makers increasingly reconceived reality as the site of social conflict and saw their work as instrumental to struggles for justice. Examining a wide range of forms and media, including sound recording, narrative journalism, drawing, photography, film, and video, this book is a daring interdisciplinary study of documentary culture and practice from 1945 to the present. Essays by leading scholars across disciplines collectively explore the activist impulse of documentarians who not only record reality but also challenge their audiences to take part in reality's remaking.

In addition to the editors, the volume's contributors include Michael Mark Cohen, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Jonathan Kahana, Leigh Raiford, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Noah Tsika, Laura Wexler, and Daniel Worden.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469638690
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	04/09/2018
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sara Blair is the Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. Joseph B. Entin is associate professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Franny Nudelman is associate professor of English at Carleton University in Canada.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This up-to-the-minute book traces a postwar history of "the documentary idea" as it has evolved to fit our changing social and political circumstances and occasioned new aesthetic and activist demands/uses.—Martha Rosler, photographer and writer



A valuable addition to the literature on documentary culture—well-written, cogent, and fully focused on the contemporary context.—Michael Renov, University of Southern California



A critical resource for readers from a wide range of disciplines.—Erina Duganne, Texas State University

Editorial Reviews

Remaking Reality's achievement is its spirited effort to understand the practices of documentary, in all of their creative rhythms and strategic discord. The editors succeed in documenting what Wexler describes as 'unique, individual, personal lives that could be rendered only in particularity.'—The Journal of Southern History



[Remaking Reality] leaves both uninitiated readers and documentary experts with a plethora of new ideas and questions in regard to how documentary making has changed over time, how new and inherited methods of documentary have influenced the activist culture of today, and how tradition and new technologies will change the nature of documentary culture in the United States as the twenty-first century progresses.—H-Net Reviews



Remaking Reality resonates with both past and present realities, while it also points toward the imminent future. . . . It provides readers with historical depth and perspective, while also turning our attention toward the recent technological developments enabling new forms of media activism within and across diverse communities.—American Literary History

From the Publisher