The wire
Subtitle: race, class, and genre
By: Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, editors
Series: Class: culture
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press; University of Michigan Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780472071784; 9780472051786
Subjects: Social classes on television; Race relations on television; Wire (Television program)
Description: Few other television series have received as much academic, media, and fan celebration as The Wire, which has been called the best dramatic series ever created. The show depicts the conflict between Baltimore's police and criminals to raise a warning about race; drug war policing; de-industrialization; and the inadequacies of America's civic, educational, and political institutions. The show's unflinching explorations of a city in crisis and its nuanced portrayals of those affected make it a show all about race and class in America.The essays in this volume offer a range of astute critical responses to this television phenomenon. More consistently than any other crime show of its generation, The Wire challenges viewers' perceptions of the racialization of urban space and the media conventions that support this. The Wire reminds us of just how remarkably restricted the grammar of race is on American television and related media, and of the normative codings of race--as identity, as landscape--across urban narratives, from documentary to entertainment media.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: all the pieces that matter / Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro; title: Form and genre. The wire in the context of American television / Jason Mittell; title: The Wire and its readers / Frank Kelleter; title: Rewiring Baltimore: the emotive power of systemics, seriality, and the city / Marsha Kinder; title: "The game is the game": tautology and allegory in The wire / Paul Allen Anderson; title: Neoliberal capitalism and the urban order. The case against Kojak liberalism / Carlo Rotella; title: The wire: Bush-era fable about America's urban poor? / Peter Dreier and John Atlas; title: Tales of the neoliberal city: The wire's boundary lines / Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro; title: Elasticity of demand: reflections on The wire / John Kraniauskas; title: Race, ethnicity, and class. Tracing The wire / Gary Phillips; title: Drinking with McNulty: Irish American identity and spaces in The wire / Ruth Barton; title: Contested memories: representing work in The wire / Sherry Linkon, Alexander Russo, and John Russo; title: Policing the borders of white masculinity: labor, whiteness, and the neoliberal city in The wire / Hamilton Carroll.