Desert Island Comics (Issue 1) Joan Ormrod

Image designed by Rutherford.

Like many comics readers, I love hearing recommendations from other scholars and fans. It’s never healthy for the bank balance, but as Henry once said to me, “it’s expensive if you do it right.” (He was referring to superhero comics, but the sentiment is true for the medium in general, I’d say). Over the past two weeks, I’ve been involved in the virtual book-club on Henry’s new monograph, Comics and Stuff, and let me tell you: it’s a dangerous place to be! With so many references and recommendations flying around, I found myself heading frantically to online shops afterwards. (I know, I know, a first-world ‘problem’ to be sure.) One thing is abundantly clear: we’re gonna need a bigger house!

To RSVP for the final panel on Tuesday June 30th at 10 a.m (Pacific ST)/ 18:00 (British ST), head here to register for the Zoom link. We would be honored if you would join us.

When Julia Round and I ran a series on British Comics late in 2019 on this website, I began asking contributors to discuss some of their favorite comics, comic strips, and/ or graphic novels. In today’s first installment, we have Dr Joan Ormod sharing some of her favorites (and it’s great to see Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland in there, which is one of Henry’s case studies in Comics and Stuff).

—William Proctor, Associate Editor.

Joan Ormod

It’s tough deciding on the top five comics and so I tried to have a reasonable spread of comics that have inspired or awed me. The choices are in no particular order but can be viewed in linear time. So, some of the first comics I read to the latest. One thing I noticed is the necessity of the words and images working together and the first of these choices illustrates this really well.

1.     ‘Sandra of the Secret Ballet’ – art by Paddy Brennan, story unknown

Sandra Wilson appeared in Judy from issue #1 (16/01/1060) and for most of the 1960s to the 1980s, the latter in reprints of the earlier stories when Judy merged with Emma. She was a great role model for girls in that era as she was brilliant dancer, created ballets and had adventures (not for her a husband two children and domestic bliss).  

Her first adventure was to be kidnapped by Nina Sierra, a famous ballerina, who spirited orphans away from their abusive homes and trained them to become ballet dancers.  Ok so in the post Jimmy Savile era there would be all sorts of social services and police investigations going on but this was the innocent 1950s.  The stories and the images worked organically – Paddy Brennan was, in my opinion, the best artist at representing ballet. Ron Smith who drew the much more famous Moira Kent, just couldn’t get the feet and the positions right.  It is such a shame that the writer was unknown, but they obviously knew what would appeal to young girls – a secret castle on a secluded island, loads of orphan girls who were fabulous dancers and a heroine who toured the world, saved her ballet teacher from ritual sacrifice in Spain and foiled numerous evil plots.  

There was also a cast of visitors to the castle from Boris Rambine (modelled on Boris Karloff) who hypnotised the girls, a princess in hiding and a Billy Butlin clone who wanted to turn the castle into a holiday park.  Somehow the series lost its magic when Sandra graduated and became a star.

I have included a few pages of Sandra stories. From #30 (06/08/1960), pages 2 and 3 – this is the story that introduces Alicia, queen of an Eastern European country, who happens to be a brilliant dance in hiding in the castle.  

Brennan is a master of the black and white on the comics page and his drawings of the secret passages make you believe this is a real place.

The second story is the culmination of Sandra’s journey to Spain to save her dancing teacher, Nina Sierra from being forced to dance to death in the Ritual of the Flaming Sun.  Gypsies in this story come from a long line of gypsies in British children’s literature.  They were an exotic and ancient people with strange and sometimes cruel customs. Sandra, of course, saves Nina Sierra by taking her place and dancing through the night.  Spain at this time was also an exotic destination as package holidays were only just becoming possible for mass tourists.  Brennan’s use of tonal line work gives this story its atmosphere.  Somehow, when his work was colored, for reprints in the 1980s, it lost some of its magic.

What I said earlier about the organic nature of stories and art can be seen in some of the Sandra stories with artwork by a different artist.  They just weren’t the same.

2.     Lois Lane – art Kurt Schaffenberger, stories diverse

I included Lois Lane because of the art by Kurt Schaffenberger which fit the sappy stories so well.  His style was clean and uncluttered and he seemed to take some of the idiotic stories seriously.  Schaffenberger was one of the writers and artists who transferred to DC after Fawcett was closed when they lost a court battle against DC for copyright to Captain Marvel (now called Shazam).  Some of the Lois Lane stories were written by Otto Binder, also from Fawcett and that innocent vibe from Captain Marvel comes through in a lot of these stories.

Superman and Lois Lane’s relationship was quite toxic. She was always being tested by Superman and punished for the most slight of reasons.  It was similar to the sex comedies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day (without the sex, of course) in a battle of the sexes.  Lois loved Superman but not Clark, Clark loved Lois but wouldn’t reveal he was Superman until she showed him she preferred him. The colour was startling on the news rack and much more glamourous than the UK comics which were often in black and white inside.

The editor of this series, Mort Weisinger, always had the most alluring premises.  This cover from Lois Lane #44, October 1963 shows Lois and Lana Lang, her rival, tricking Superman into taking a lie detector.  When I saw this cover in a newsagent window, I had to have the comic to find out whom he preferred.  In 1964 comics were sold by the yard and you took pot luck which ones were available in any shop.  Unfortunately, by the time I saved enough money to buy it, it had been sold and I never saw it again, until a few years ago when I managed to get a copy. You got your money’s worth too.  There were three stories in each issue.  Here’s the first page with Schaffenberger’s signature telephone panel.  He was also allowed to sign his name – a practice that few artists were allowed to do until Marvel opened up the way for artists and writers to get credits.

3.     Wonder Woman – art and stories George Pérez

I spent several years writing a book on Wonder Woman, a character who fascinated me as she was different from every other female character I’d encountered.  I had a sneaky liking for the early 1960s stories on Paradise Island when she was written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Mike Esposito and Ross Andru.  But she never really came to life until the title was taken over by George Pérez in the 1987 post Crisis reboot under Karen Berger’s brilliant Vertigo line.  For the first time the Wonder Woman I imagined became real. She was a naïve, kind and empathic person who was often bewildered by the cruelty and suffering she encountered in man’s world. 

The stories by Pérez were sensitive and beautifully drawn but the characters came to life when he worked with Mindy Newall. The best of these was ‘Chalk Drawings’ (#46 September 1990) in which there is little superheroic action.  In it, Vanessa, Wonder Woman’s young friend, attends the funeral of her best friend, Lucy Spears, a girl who has it all but who commits suicide.  The story explores some of the toxic themes surrounding fame, fandom, beauty and consumerism.  Lucy’s parent don’t understand why she committed suicide but the subtext tells it all, when someone has it all and its just never enough.  Jill Thompson’s sensitive artwork was just right for this story.

4.     Here – Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’ first appeared in Art Spiegelman’s Raw v.2, n.1, 1989.   At first glance ‘Here’ (1989) appears an unremarkable (and rather confusing) account of the history of a space, rendered in a clean line style, each page consisting of 6 panels.  However, the aim of Raw was to produce commix that pushed the boundaries of the medium and challenged the reader.  ‘Here’ is certainly a challenging read for there is no clear cause and effect to direct the narrative and no protagonist to incite action.  Rather, McGuire uses 36 panels to show the formation of the world, to reflect on evolution, vast time spans encompass the rise and decline of human cultures down to the lifespan of a human being.  This comic is as much about time as ‘here’. It is impossible to describe a specific story from the comic but I love it because it show the potential for the form to express more than simple stories.

McGuire claimed he conceived the idea when he saw all the screens open on an Apple computer – a few pages show how this is reflected in the construction of the panels.  He spent several years developing his original six pages into a book. The book does expand the ideas but, in my opinion, its nowhere as powerful as the comic.  You can get the full six pages here 

There is also a film produced by art students attempting to adapt the comic into a film:

An article by Chris Ware on the book Here; and a film of the book. 

5.     Alice in Sunderland, Bryan Talbot

Every Desert Island castaway needs a book that will keep them engrossed for many years (and doesn’t it feel like we’re in that situation at the moment when we are in lockdown?  The one that I would still keep coming back to is Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot.  Like ‘Here’, Alice in Sunderland is more than just an exploration of Alice in Wonderland.  It is about telling stories and is described by Talbot as ‘an entertainment’. He starts off in the Sunderland Empire introducing the reader to his stories.  They span the history of the North East (which naturally draws me in since that’s where I come from), folk tales and legends such as the Lampton Worm (a precursor of Jabberwocky), the history of comics all wrapped into the story of the genesis of Alice. His art styles are gloriously diverse and experimental. His tales something like the Borges ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ with infinite possibilities and often ventures into cul-de-sacs and alternate storylines.  

I enjoyed this so much that after reading it I tried to find some of the places in Sunderland.  I have one disagreement with Bryan and that is in his affirmation that Bede lived in Sunderland.  He lived for most of his life in Jarrow St. Paul’s monastery.  Nevertheless, this book would keep me occupied for many years just in awe of its rich imagery and stories. 

This page shows the complexity of the images as it collages photos, drawings and paintings on the page and shows the plasticity of the comics form.

This page is a mixture of different Bryans as audience member, as actor, as artist.  It captures the fantastic nature of Alice in Wonderland’s dream world.

Returning to my original statement, it was only when I began to compile these comics that I realised how much I enjoy a comic where the art and story work well together.  They are also inspirational.  The list is unadventurous – Alice in Sunderland would likely feature in several top ten lists of any comics reader.  But I make no apologies.  The first two are comics I grew up with and inspired me to think beyond what was expected of me as a girl.  Wonder Woman was meant to inspire women to become empowered.  The last two are inspirational because they prompt me to think and wonder.

Dr Joan Ormrod is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media at Manchester Metropolitan University.  She specializes in teaching subcultures, comics, fantasy and girlhood.  She has published widely on these topics and she has edited books on time travel, superheroes and adventure sports. Her latest monograph, Wonder Woman, the Female Body and Popular Culture was published in February 2020 and is available now.  Joan is the editor of Routledge’s Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and she is on the organizing committee of the annual conference of Graphic Novels and Comics.  She is currently researching girlhood and teenage comics in the UK 1955-1975.

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (3 of 3)

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (3 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

User Interfaces: Interactive Library vs. Isolated Metrics 

In this brief section before the conclusion, I navigate the user interfaces of Thematic afforded to both Music Artists and Content Creators to simply exhibit how this inequality between the two groups is embedded into the platform itself. Returning to Terranova’s idea of the translucent commodity, the labor that shines through the platform is truly spectacular for the Content Creator. The main page shows “Recent Pickups” to display songs that were recently used in influencer videos, “Selected for [Content Creator]” and “Top Projects for [Content Creator]” to direct the Content Creator to other songs and playlists based on their previous downloads, “Staff Picks” to let the Content Creator know what the Thematic team is currently backing, and “New Music”, which speaks for itself. Upon clicking the “Browse Music” tab, there is a seemingly endless list of songs, each with their own beautiful album cover provided by Music Artists, which can then be filtered according to genre, community, vocal, tempo, and mood. The “Projects” tab allows the Content Creator to create personal playlists, and the “Downloads” tab lists recent downloads. For the Content Creator, Thematic serves as an easy-to-use, beautiful, and interactive library and personal storage of free songs. 

Music catalogue for Content Creators (hellothematic.com)

Filters for searching music (hellothematic.com)

The interface for the Music Artist is in comparison quite dry. Once logged in as Music Artist, the user no longer has access to any parts of the vast library of music, which even the general unregistered visitor can browse, and only has access to two pages: the submission portal through which the Music Artist submits music to be reviewed by Thematic’s A&R team, and the statistics page, which shows the specific metrics of the number of times their songs were used and the number of views of the videos their songs are featured on. In contrast to the democratic rhetoric of community that Thematic employs in its promotion, Music Artists have no real access to the broader community that their music and Content Creators operate in. They are closed off behind walls of numbers that don’t necessarily directly translate into other forms of valuable quantification like revenue or social media following. The labor that shines through here is anything but spectacular, with most of the services offered being relegated to algorithms. This is not to say that the maintenance and development of algorithms is not labor-intensive, but it pales in comparison to the coupling of both the human-intensive labor of curation, quality control, and organization with algorithmically derived personal picks for Content Creators. With these additional absences of avenues for engagement with the broader community shown through the design of the actual user interface, the uneven terms of participation between the Music Artist and Content Creator as well as the contradictions between promotion and actual user experience become ever more apparent. 

Tracking page for Music Producers

Conclusion

“From the very beginning, I’ve always wanted to empower and give back to creators,” Michelle Phan told us. “Since uploading my first video 12 years ago, I’ve experienced lawsuits and seen first-hand what happens when big music labels come in and make copyright infringement claims.” 

“I understand intimately the challenges facing creators today. Through Thematic, I hope to protect creators and artists and provide a platform where they can connect, safely and free.” (Resnikoff, 2019) 

While I don’t intend this paper to be a direct challenge against Michelle Phan’s motives, I do think that in her efforts to empower Content Creators, such as herself, she overlooks some of the pressing ramifications that those efforts can entail for Music Artists. As I showed through my examination of the forward-facing promotional materials, to the underlying contractual agreements, and finally to the separate user interfaces themselves, the terms of participation on Thematic are not always communal and democratic nor are they mutually beneficial for both Music Artists and Content Creators. Although the broader social conditions in which the cultural industries operate that Terranova, Hesmondhalgh, and McRobbie, among others, have outlined, may have normalized such precarious work to a certain extent, as an influential figurehead of a rapidly growing platform like Thematic that stands to advocate for the democratic production of culture on digital platforms, Michelle Phan has the power to at least begin to veer us in a direction that resists or circumvents those oppressive social conditions. 

Finally, even though I take in this present paper a critical stance towards Thematic, I acknowledge that at the time of writing, the platform is still in public beta testing, and there is thus ample opportunity for improvements to be made. Especially as the platform garners more serious investors, for which the recruitment process has just ended, and the platform inevitably moves from a free one to a paid, most likely subscription-based one, it will be imperative for the Thematic team led by Michelle Phan, CEO Marc Schrobilgen and COO Aubrey Marshall, to be adamant in their support for the increased protection of Music Artists on the platform. This may take the form of technical interventions I suggested earlier to more safely deliver the music content uploaded, a broader application of the approval feature that allows Music Artists to also have a say in which videos their music can be featured, easier access for Music Artists to engage with the broader community, and an overall re-evaluation of the separate Artist and Creator Agreements that more thoroughly hold Thematic responsible in protecting and crediting Music Artists. It may also take the form of introducing new services altogether such as the feature for Content Creators to also provide their video-making services to Music Artists who want content released under their name – i.e. lyric videos or music videos. There are indeed many practical ways for the Thematic team to truly better democratize the platform. To this end, I want to conclude on a more hopeful note and write that, moving forward, I trust Phan and her team will take these many possibilities into consideration, and truly use Thematic to build, in their own words, “a community for the community” (Thematic). 

References

Andrejevic, M. (2009). Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of user-generated labor. In P. Snickars, & P. Vonderau (Eds.), The YouTube Reader (406-423). Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. 

Andrejevic, M., Banks, J., Campbell, J. E., Couldry, N., Fish, A., Hearn, A., & Ouellette, L. (2014). Participations: Dialogues on the participatory promise of contemporary culture and politics: Labor. International Journal of Communication, 8, 1089–1106. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2724/1118

Banet-Weiser, S. (2012). AuthenticTM: The politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. New York, NYU: New York University Press. 

Baym, N. K. (2018). Playing to the crowd: Musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. New York: New York University Press. 

Bruns, A. (2006). Towards produsage: Futures for user-led content production. In Sudweeks, Fay and Hrachovec, Herbert and Ess, Charles, Eds. Proceedings Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006, pages pp. 275-284, Tartu, Estonia.

Demers, J. T. (2006). Steal this music: How intellectual property law affects musical creativity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. New York, NY: Vintage Books.  

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2010). User-generated content, free labour and the cultural industries. ephemera, 10(3/4), 267-284.

Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative labour: Media work in three cultural industries. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. 

Jenkins, H. (2012). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (Original work published in 1992) 

Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2015). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Jenkins, H., & Ito, M. (2015). Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Kücklich, J. (2005). Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry. Fibreculture,

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Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy, Volume I. (B. Fowkes, Trans.). New York, NY:Penguin Press. (Original work published in 1867) 

McLeod, K. (2001). Owning culture: Authorship, ownership, and intellectual property law. New York, NY: Peter Lang Inc.

McLeod, K. (2005). Freedom of expression®: Resistance and repression in the age of intellectual property. New York, NY: Doubleday.

McLeod, K. (2011). Creative license: The law and culture of digital sampling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

Resnikoff, P. (2019, June 7). Thematic Surpasses 1 Billion Song Plays for Repped Artists.

Retrieved from https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/06/06/thematic-billion-plays/. 

Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sinnreich, A. (2010). Mashed up: Music, technology, and the rise of configurable culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Sinnreich, A. (2013). The piracy crusade: How the music industry’s war on sharing destroys markets and erodes civil liberties. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. 

Sinnreich, A. (2019). The essential guide to intellectual property. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Terranova, T. (2012). Free Labour. In T. Scholz (Ed.), Digital labor: The internet as playground and factory (pp. 67-114). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (Original work published in 2000)

Thematic. (n.d.). Retrieved from: http://hellothematic.com/. 

Thompson, E. P. (1971). The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, (50), 76-136.

Weiss, G. (2018, July 2). Michelle Phan's Latest Startup Helps Creators Find Free Music For

Their YouTube Videos. Retrieved from:  https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/06/28/michelle-phan-thematic-music-youtube-videos/. 

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (2 of 3)

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (2 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

*Contracts: Intellectual Property, Precarity, and Expropriation 

Thus far, my questions primarily concerned the forward-facing aspects of Thematic. What does it claim to do? How is it promoted? Who is it promoted to? In this section, I take as my focus, the underlying agreements and contractual terms that govern the actual rules of operation on the platform. What does using Thematic actually entail? For the Music Artist? For the Content Creator? To what extent is Thematic legally bound to the promises they make on their site? Who gets paid? What are users giving up in exchange for access to the platform? Are there consequences of using Thematic that extend beyond the platform? Does Thematic take responsibility for misuse? I will inevitably touch on all of these necessary and important questions by the end of this paper, but I begin, here, with this generic but powerful line taken from their general Terms of Use agreement: 

All intellectual properties featured on and incorporated into the Website are owned and controlled exclusively by Thematic and/or its licensors, which includes materials protected by copyright, trademark, patent laws and state and federal intellectual property laws. (Thematic, “Terms of Use”, 2019) 

The ramifications of such a statement are far-reaching. Thematic’s primary currency is intellectual property – the music uploaded by Music Artists – so understandably, there’s a lot of it on the site. Apart from the small number of songs actually uploaded by the Thematic team (Michelle Phan produces some of her own lo-fi hip-hop beats), the majority of the tracks that populate Thematic’s vast collection are created and uploaded by independent music producers who sign up for Thematic as Music Artists. This means that by agreeing to use Thematic, those Music Artists are sharing the exclusive rights to their works with both Thematic and Content Creators. This sharing of intellectual property rights, however, is not reciprocal, as Music Artists have no rights to the videos of Content Creators that their music is featured on since the videos exist on channels external to Thematic. If we take a look at the separate user agreements, the uneven terms of participation become more apparent. 

Under the Grant of Rights of the Artist Agreement, it reads: 

… you hereby grant Thematic, and its licensee Creators respectively, a non-exclusive worldwide right and license, on a royalty free basis, to make copies of the Works, and use, license, copy, transmit, broadcast, stream, and publicly perform such Works… Notwithstanding any term of this Agreement, each Creator shall have the right to stream, download and utilize such Works and use all Credit information in Creator Videos and meta data, on a royalty free basis in each case… (Thematic, “Artist Agreement”, 2019). 

The key here is “royalty free” – this directly bars Music Artists from effectively monetizing on Thematic the works they upload to the platform. Read in conjunction with the “free promotion” offered by Thematic in its marketing materials, it’s easy to see that Music Artists are essentially paying for that free promotion by relinquishing the rights to all avenues of possible royalty-related compensation on Thematic. There is, however, an ambiguous component under the Grant of Rights that claims Thematic will collect the Gross Revenue, defined as “all revenue remitted by YouTube and/or Instagram and received by Thematic exclusively in connection with the exploitation of the Works (e.g. their recording and publishing components) on YouTube and/or Instagram” (Thematic, “Artist Agreement”), and transfer it to the Music Artist’s account. I say this is ambiguous because not only is there no option to link any kind of bank account, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), or BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) membership details when signed in as Music Artist, but there are also no mentions of “splits” agreements (industry jargon for how royalties/revenue will be split) between Music Artist and Content Creator. Splits agreements are important here because it has already been established that all of the music on Thematic is royalty-free, which means that the revenue defined by Gross Revenue is primarily dependent on the revenue generated by the video itself, and not by the copyrighted music. This too, however, is unclear because if we recall from earlier, one of the first things marketed towards Content Creators on Thematic’s landing home page is “no rev-shares”. How, then, is revenue split between Music Artist and Content Creator? What is the source of Gross Revenue for Music Artists if not from video and also not from royalties? Thematic suggests the Content ID feature for YouTube, which allows “copyright owners who meet specific criteria” (YouTube Help), to claim and monetize off their intellectual property on that specific platform, but what about for Instagram, the other platform that Thematic allows Music Artists’ music to be featured on? The platform thus does not actually provide a regulated monetization model of its own and outsources this key function to either the stringent qualifications for Content ID on YouTube or Facebook’s Rights Manager for Instagram, for which it also provides no reference or guide. Exactly how this lean platform logic (Srnicek, 2017) operates is left for the users to figure out on their own. In light of this ambiguity, there have yet to be any discernible reports of Music Artists successfully using Thematic as a means of effective revenue despite its industry-wide use as a music market for Content Creators. 

In fact, even Thematic doesn’t see direct monetization as its primary offering – in response to the question “What value do I get from submitting music to Thematic?” in the Artist Help Center, they write: 

Our primary conversion metric for artists is in the value of the promotion and audience reach… That new audience can then be monetized via music streams & downloads, merchandise sales, and live events. 

… Thematic is meant to get artists' music in front of influential creators (who are often paid for their promotion) who will in turn share the music to their engaged audiences. You can even think of the music as "product placement" within these tastemaker videos - but the artist (aka the brand) is securing that placement for free. (Thematic, “Artist Help Center”) 

Although the primary selling point to Music Artists is consistently framed under promotion, based on the Artist Agreement, Thematic actually does not guarantee and sufficiently enforce credits and acknowledgments to Music Artists by Content Creators: 

…no inadvertent failure by Thematic or any Creator to provide such Credit, and after our receipt of formal notice shall constitute a breach hereof, Artist’s only remedy shall be to notify Thematic in writing, and upon which notice Thematic shall use good faith reasonable efforts to cure such failure. (Thematic, “Artist Agreement”, 2019)

Even promotion, which is inherently dependent on proper credit, is apparently not guaranteed. Read next to the barring of royalty-based revenue, the ambiguity of platform-generated revenue, and the lack of guarantee for proper artist credit, the Music Artist unambiguously takes on a precarious position by choosing to participate in the Thematic community. 

McRobbie (2016) thoroughly recounts these developments in the cultural industries, unpacking how the creativity dispositif (Foucault, 1980) or passion ‘ethos’ (p. 74) promoted by the creative economy draws upon neoliberal ideologies to direct individuals to tolerate such precarious positions enticed by the celebratory rhetoric of the ‘dream job’ or ‘pleasurable work’: 

I argue that the call to be creative is a potent and highly appealing mode of new governmentality directed to the young in the educational environment, whose main effect is to do away with the idea of welfare rights in work by means of eclipsing normal employment altogether… this mode of neoliberal governmentality is also a general and widespread process of precarization.(p. 14)

Reframing the creative economy as a mode of labor reform, she points to the current movement as one in which the discursive prioritization of creativity specifically strips the creative class of previously hard-won social welfare and job security benefits. She thus directs us to the brainchild of late capitalist neoliberalism, ‘self-invented work’, emphasizing that “in this rhetorical world it is business and entrepreneurship that now count… [There] is an anticipation of reward and a series of invitations to take part, all of which go some way towards making risky jobs with uncertain outcomes nevertheless appealing and exciting” (p. 61). In foregrounding this entrepreneurial venture capitalist mindset – voluntarily embracing precarity and risk in the present with hopes of greater returns in the future – as an integral component of the workings of the current cultural industries, McRobbie provides a generative starting point from which we can unpack the Music Artists’ precarious position within the Thematic community.

The Music Artist is essentially operating within this same investment logic of high-risk-high-returns. There are no guaranteed rewards in exchange for uploading and providing the rights to their songs on Thematic. It is rather the “anticipation of reward” (p. 61) that Thematic offers and the Music Artist accepts. Perhaps as McRobbie somewhat satirically writes, “the seemingly exciting compensation for work without protection is the personal reward of ‘being creative’” (p. 35). And while this personal reward as Hesmondhalgh reminds us, should not always be discounted, he also points out “that it is in the realms of intellectual property that a more convincing critique of contemporary capitalism might be mounted, rather than unpaid labour” (2010, p. 279). Following this, if we move beyond Terranova’s critique of free labor and acknowledge that Music Artists are, in classic Marxist terms, alienated from the products of their labor (Marx, 1976) – intellectual property – it becomes easier to see how Thematic may indeed be pushing expropriative terms on to Music Artists who do choose to opt in. In fact, looking at Thematic’s response to two similar questions on the Artist Help Center that read, “Can I choose which creators use my music?” and “Can I choose which videos my songs appear in”, it becomes apparent that Music Artists actually have no control over the specific uses of their songs either: 

We currently do not provide a content filtering option for our artists unless you are interested in exploring a paid placement. Any creator in Thematic is allowed to use the music in Thematic in their videos. (Thematic, “Artist Help Center”)

Without additional payment, for which they evaluate all tailored promotions on a “case-by-case basis”, Thematic thus does not even guarantee any form of basic quality control for Music Artists – their music can be used by “any creator” registered with Thematic. Even here, the uneven terms of participation surface, as all music submitted to Thematic is reviewed by the A&R team – i.e. quality control – before it is uploaded to their royalty-free collection available to Content Creators. Content dictates music. There are a few Music Artists who are granted the “Approval” feature, which means their songs can only be used in videos upon their approval, but Thematic unabashedly states that this feature is reserved for “Top 40” artists who are commercially signed to major record labels, effectively excluding the vast majority of all Music Artists on the platform. In this way, the Music Artist, like McRobbie’s artist subject does indeed become a “symbol of labour reform, someone willing to ‘live on thin air’” (p. 86). 

Finally, before I move on to the next section, I also want to briefly mention the lack of protection for the Music Artist in the Artist Agreement against uses of the song beyond intended contexts outlined in the agreement. Although the Artist Agreement does explicitly state that Thematic only sanctions use of any uploaded songs by Content Creators in their content on either YouTube or Instagram, the technical method of delivery of the songs – providing direct downloads to the master tracks as either MP3 or WAVE files – is one that exposes the songs to numerous methods of potential repurposing, none of which can be directly monitored or regulated by Thematic. Considering how easy it is to sign up and download these tracks, the tracks are effectively available as high-quality free audio on the Internet. What can Thematic do other than say “you can ONLY use our music in your YouTube and Instagram videos” (Thematic, “Creator Help Center”)? Is it on the burden of Music Artists to constantly monitor the Internet to see if their music starts to appear, most likely without credit, on other platforms like Vimeo? How does Thematic prevent the use of these audio files in other music projects? It is common industry knowledge that in the hands of a skilled technician, these high-quality music uploads provide valuable source materials to cut close-to-untraceable samples for “original” music. The only measure Thematic takes in trying to prevent such uses is to say it is prohibited in their agreements, without implementing any technical infrastructures to actually forbid them. In this way, Thematic fails to reasonably offer even the little protection that current intellectual property law, which on the most part actually does not benefit independent musicians (Demers, 2006; Sinnreich, 2013), does provide to music producers not backed by major record labels: the right to control the uses of their original songs. 

By examining the contractual terms to which all users of the platform must subscribe, I sought to bring to our attention the inevitably precarious position that the Music Artist is expected to tolerate in the Thematic community. While it is true that the Music Artist voluntarily opts in under these terms, the argument can also be made that the broader social conditions that glorify high-risk work in the cultural industries outlined by McRobbie, among others, play a significant role in pressuring the Music Artist to have little choice but to accept these terms in fear of obsolescence. Even if we try to take a more open-minded approach as urged by Hesmondhalgh, in the absence of guaranteed revenue, recognition and thus opportunity, or protection from misuse or theft provided by Thematic, I find it difficult to push for alternative forms of overall well-being that participation in Thematic provides for Music Artists. To this end, an inspection of these expropriative contractual terms further exposes the lopsided conditions of participation between Music Artists and Content Creators discussed throughout this paper. 

Bio

Edward B. Kang is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Communication. His research engages the cultural and infrastructural dimensions of digital media and digital surveillance technologies with a specific focus on the relationship between sound/music, identity, platform logics, and platform anatomies. He is thus interested in navigating the socialities that emerge at these knotty intersections of technology and culture. Apart from his own research, he has served as a committee member for Annenberg’s annual Communication and Cultural Studies graduate student conference Critical Mediations, as well as led Music Production workshops for Annenberg’s Critical Media Project with California Humanities. 

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (1 of 3)

The following paper was written for my Fall Seminar on Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0. I have decided to share this particular paper here because of this blog’s ongoing interest in issues of fan labor and creator rights, because it is timely given the ongoing roll out of this particular platform, and because it does such a fine job combining legal and technical tools to understand what is at stake for participants at various levels.

—Henry Jenkins

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (1 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

Introduction

Hi Edward Kang, 

My name is Stephanie and I'm on the team here at Thematic. I wanted to reach out and personally welcome you and tell you that we're so excited to have you be a part of our community! We can't wait to see the videos you create.

If you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to email me.

Best,
Stephanie

This was the welcome email I received from Stephanie Leyva, the community manager of Thematic, when I registered for the platform as “Content Creator”. I then signed up for the platform with a different email as “Music Artist”. I received nothing. 

Founded by YouTuber Michelle Phan along with Chief Executive Officer Marc Schrobilgen and Chief Operating Officer Aubrey Marshall, Thematic launched in 2018 as a “free peer-to-peer music marketplace that seeks to help content creators find music for their videos while concurrently promoting aspiring musicians” (Weiss, 2018, para. 3). It reads on their home page: 

Thematic is all about connecting creators and music artists. You need great songs to soundtrack your videos. Music artists need promotion. Thematic makes it happen. Simple. With songs curated by content type and theme, you’ll spend less time searching for that perfect song and more time creating. Safe. All of our songs are pre-cleared so you are able to fully monetize your videos without worrying about licenses, claims, or disputes. Collaborative. During our public beta, you’ll have access to Thematic for free – no membership fees, no licensing fees, no rev-shares. (Thematic) 

The site quite markedly mobilizes the democratic rhetoric of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006) to frame the platform as a “safe”, “simple” and “collaborative” space that serves both the interests of Content Creators and Music Artists alike. Content Creators have access to pre-cleared high-quality music for free, and Music Artists get exposure and promotion – it’s meant to be a win-win situation. The “you” in their promotional text (quoted above), however, which directly speaks to the content creator, perhaps hints otherwise. In fact, all of the resourceful things that “you” get, come at the expense of their– “Music Artists’” – labor. “Pre-cleared” songs with “no licensing fees” and “no rev-shares” (revenue shares) can only be achieved if Music Artists surrender significant portions of their rights and ownership of the music they create. Departing from Jenkins’ understanding of participatory culture, then, which explicitly emphasizes the generative potentials of collaboration made possible by the diverse skills and voices accessible through digital user networks, Thematic strategically seems to only mobilize the democratic rhetoricthat accompanies participatory culture without actually allowing for a bi-directionally generative and participatory community to manifest on its platform. It thus ultimately advocates for a digital marketplace in which the generative potentials of collaboration are vastly unequal for the participating members. 

There have been numerous studies since the advent of Web 2.0 that have interrogated these very questions and concerns of uneven participation and digital labor that lie at the intersections of digital technology and the creative industries (e.g. Andrejevic, 2009; Andrejevic et al., 2014; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Baym, 2018; Bruns, 2006; Hesmondalgh, 2010, 2011; Jenkins, 2006; McRobbie, 2016; Sinnreich, 2010, 2013, 2019; Terranova, 2012 etc.). Many of these works have rigorously tried to trace the exploitation-cooperation continuum of arguments that occupy these discussions, while also positioning themselves within it to better nuance and contribute to the complex conversations that are required to parse the entangled web of relationships found at this intersection. 

Jenkins’ (2006) canonical text, Convergence Culture, for instance, elaborates on the notion of participatory culture, further expanded in Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013), to describe the productive negotiations and increasingly collaborative and interactive relationships forged between media consumers and producers. It thus critically acknowledges the unequal power dynamics that inevitably emerge in these producer-consumer relations, but ultimately seeks to look beyond a solely economic model of profit, foregrounding the generative potentials of a community of participants, allowing us to focus on the diverse skills, motivations, and incentives of the various players that comprise the network of participants. Nancy Baym (2018) also contributes to this discussion as she explores the newfound intimacy between music artists and their fans afforded by the rise of digital communication platforms as well as the demands and resources of the gig economy that have come to increasingly define the creative industries. In so doing, she offers a nuanced account of the new forms of labor imposed on musicians today by the evolving conditions of the music industry. 

Other scholars like McRobbie and Andrejevic, for instance, contrastingly position themselves closer to the other end of the spectrum. McRobbie (2016) examines the increasing precarity of the gig-economy in correlation with the neoliberalist entrepreneurial ideology that has become part and parcel of working in the cultural industries (elaborated upon later on), while Andrejevic (2009) observes the expropriative data mining practices of digital platforms by pointing out that users’ “free participation is redoubled as a form of productive labor captured by capital” (p. 419), thus shifting the focus away from “user-created content [to] user-generated data” (p. 418). As more and more such studies in the fields of cultural studies, critical information studies, communication studies, and the digital humanities, among others, have come to take this intersection of digital technologies and the cultural industries as their focus, a spectrum comprised of numerous scholarly voices has formed to better nuance and understand both the generative and oppressive potentials of digital communities. In my examination of Thematic as a platform born out of these dynamic interactions between the digital and the cultural, I thus also seek to put myself in conversation with these various scholars. 

I begin by conducting a critical discourse analysis of the Thematic website to examine the way in which the platform is promoted to both Content Creator and Music Artist. In so doing, I specifically shed light on the necessary free labor and uneven terms of participation hidden behind Thematic’s strategic use of democratic rhetoric to frame the space as “safe”, “simple”, and “collaborative”. Once the discursive regime and theoretical frameworks within which Thematic operates are established, I dig deeper into the underlying agreements that range from its Terms of Use to the specific Music Artist and Content Creator Agreements to unearth the lack of protection and expropriative terms that Music Artists subscribe to in their choosing to join Thematic. Finally, I compare the distinct user interfaces of Artist and Creator through a platform analysis to further emphasize this inequality. Ultimately, I hope to shed light on the dependence of Thematic as a representative platform that strategically siphons the neoliberal ideology of the new cultural industries and the outmoded regime of current intellectual property law to mobilize the free labor of its users for its own sustenance, all the while masking these expropriative terms under a democratic and participatory rhetoric of community. 

 “Try Thematic”: Free Labor, Labor as Spectacle, and High-Quality Work

Tiziana Terranova (2012) was one of the first scholars (originally published in 2000) to apply a labor framework to the digital economy, presciently claiming that most of the value in digital spaces is generated by the “voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (p. 68) – i.e. free – labor of users. In what is perhaps her most referenced line, she writes that “free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (p. 74). Reductively put, voluntary user activity on a digital platform essentially redoubles as productive activity – labor – vital to the platform’s fundamental maintenance. She does not, however, limit her discussion of labor to that of only the users, and in a comparably less referenced segment of her seminal text, also points to the spectacle of labor that shines through the translucency of commodities in the update culture of the digital economy: 

It is not enough to produce a good website; you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence… It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website, and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labor that goes into it. (p. 93) 

By foregrounding both the labor of users in keeping a site alive through their consumptive labor –  “the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations” (p. 94) etc. – as well as the continuous labor of updating these sites required by designers, Terranova points to the digital space-commodity as inherently dependent on a spectacle of rigorously co-operative labor.

Thematic is not exempt from this dependence. Even before one decides to use Thematic as either a Music Artist or Content Creator, the landing home page – i.e. the “Try Thematic” (Thematic) promotional page – cleverly interweaves the different kinds of free labor at play along with the spectacle of labor that its own team provides to urge a potential user to literally tryThematic. Each type of user is enticed with the free labor of her counterpart: “You need great songs to soundtrack your videos. Music Artists need promotion. Thematic makes it happen” (Thematic). The promotion promised to the Music Artist is unavoidably dependent on her uploading of free music to Thematic that is then used by “you”, the Content Creator, in “your” video. Free music for free promotion. It seems here that there is a logical balance of cultural exchange, in which Thematic’s specific “moral economy” (Thompson, 1971) – i.e. “the social norms and mutual understandings that make it possible for two parties to conduct business” (Jenkins, 2013, p. 52) – appears undisrupted. If, however, we examine Terranova’s take on labor as spectacle, it becomes more apparent that Thematic does not position the two parties on equal, or even close-to-equal, terms.

Revisiting the idea of the translucent commodity, a labor as spectacle framework points to the idea that the designers of a platform are also compelled to package their labor to sell to potential users. It thus doubly intensifies the labor required to keep the site alive – the free labor of user activity and the constant updates the platform requires of designers. In the case of Thematic, other than the given labor of maintaining the basic functions of the site, its “spectacular” labor is essentially the continuous update, curation, organization, clearing, and display of songs for Content Creators to browse and download: “Simple. With songs curated by content type and theme, you’ll spend less time searching for that perfect song and more time creating. Safe. All of our songs are pre-cleared…” (Thematic). As is already apparent in its rhetorical use of “you”, Thematic’s spectacle of labor, cleverly repackaged with the democratic rhetoric of “simple” and “safe”, is meant to “keep the [Content Creators] coming back” (Terranova, 2012, p. 93). So where is the labor spectacle for Music Artists? They are, after all, offering up labor-intensive products in their music that serve as the material for the labor spectacle sold to Content Creators. What is meant to bring them, the Music Artists, back? To address this question, we must briefly depart from Terranova’s framework of labor and attend to Hesmondalgh (2010) in his efforts to direct us beyond “wages as the only meaningful form of reward” (p. 278). 

Hesmondhalgh challenges the frequent conflation of free labor and exploitation in extant academic critiques by pointing out that “most cultural production in history has been unpaid, and that continues to be the case today” (p. 277). In speaking directly to Terranova’s discussion of the unpaid labor necessary to functionally maintain the Internet, he writes: 

But it may be said in response that those who undertook such unpaid digital labour might have gained a set of rewards from such work, such as the satisfaction of contributing to a project which they believed would enhance communication between people and ultimately the common good; or in the form of finding solutions to problems and gaining new skills which they could apply later in other contexts. (p. 278) 

In this way he emphasizes the danger of reducing meaningful compensation for work to simply wages, emphasizing that “it would surely be wrong to imply that any work done on the basis of social contribution or deferred reward represents the activities of people duped by capitalism” (p. 278). Although Terranova also acknowledges that “free labor… is not necessarily exploited labor” (2012, p. 93), she explicitly contains it within her description of the construction of early virtual communities where the pleasures of communication and exchange were the fruits of that labor, thus eliding a more nuanced discussion of how such pleasures or non-financial motivations might be meaningful in other contexts. 

To further elaborate on such non-economic forms of compensation Hesmondhalgh moves away from discussions of free labor and shifts his focus to the precarity of the cultural industries: 

Many workers tolerate poor pay, long hours and difficult conditions in order merely to gain jobs with very poor levels of security and protection. In other words, to achieve the possibility of self-realization through creative work seems to require what some recent critics, as I pointed out earlier, have called self-exploitation. (2010, p. 281)

He evidently acknowledges, here, the appropriation by those who hold power in the cultural industries of the “self-realization” aspect of creative work to force workers into tolerating precarious working conditions. That being said, he also further highlights in his book with Sarah Baker, Creative Labour(2011), the importance of high-quality work in these industries as a potentially significant motivator for creative workers. Understood both in terms of Sennett’s (2008) craftsmanship as well as the “opportunities for workers to do work that they consider to be of social, cultural, and political significance” (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011, p. 21), high-quality work as such a form of meaningful wage-alternative compensation thus forces us to rethink and more rigorously define how exactly self-exploitation manifests in these contexts. In urging us to think about the actual lives of the workers and the meaning they attribute to their work, he reminds us that “to treat these positive components of creative work as mere sugar coatings for the bitter pill of precariousness is surely too dismissive of the genuinely positive experiences that some creative workers have in their jobs and careers” (2010, p. 282). 

At this point we can return to the question: what brings Music Artists back? When understood through Terranova’s framework of labor as spectacle, Music Artists were evidently sidelined in our discussion of Thematic’s promotional landing page, and even, unexplainable with regards to why they would “Try Thematic”. But if we re-examine their position under Hesmondhalgh’s lens of high-quality work, and thus foreground the particularities and diverse motivations of individual Music Artists, it allows us to bring them back into the conversation. This is not to say, in any way, that Hesmondhalgh urges us to see the Music Artist and the Content Creator as operating on equal terms within the Thematic community. Rather, the concept of high-quality work allows us to better frame and situate Music Artists’ participation on the platform beyond an exploitation framework, thus very much in line with Jenkins’ take on participatory culture, and at least speculate in similar fashion to Hesmondhalgh and Jenkins, as to what their incentives might be in the explicit absence of labor as spectacle. Perhaps, the mere satisfaction of receiving credit on well-made YouTube videos is enough, or perhaps they make music anyways as a pleasurable hobby and want to donate the products of their hobbies, similar to what Kücklich (2005) calls playbour, to the creative community accessible via Thematic. While it is difficult to pinpoint what individual Music Artists seek to gain from their participation in Thematic without actually speaking with each individual Artist, Hesmondhalgh reminds us that we should not be too quick to dismiss their activities as self-exploitation (which is, of course, not to say that we should rule it out altogether) and acknowledge the potentially other more meaningful forms of compensation that their participation might entail: “which political projects may best enhance human well-being and social justice with regard to work?” (2010, p. 282) To this end, by putting Hesmondhalgh’s framework of high-quality work and his consequential push to look beyond wage as meaningful compensation for labor in conversation with Terranova’s understandings of free labor and labor as spectacle, it becomes possible to sketch a comparably more coherent, albeit not complete, map of the imbricated relations between Thematic, Content Creator, and Music Artist laid out in Thematic’s promotional materials. 

Bio

Edward B. Kang is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Communication. His research engages the cultural and infrastructural dimensions of digital media and digital surveillance technologies with a specific focus on the relationship between sound/music, identity, platform logics, and platform anatomies. He is thus interested in navigating the socialities that emerge at these knotty intersections of technology and culture. Apart from his own research, he has served as a committee member for Annenberg’s annual Communication and Cultural Studies graduate student conference Critical Mediations, as well as led Music Production workshops for Annenberg’s Critical Media Project with California Humanities

Comics and Stuff: A Virtual Book Club

Comics and Stuff: A Virtual Book Club

Please join me and a range of interesting guests for what we hope will be a lively discussion of my book, Comics and Stuff, and more broadly, of comics, comic studies, and living with our stuff. Each sessions will feature voices from multiple disciplinary backgrounds whose work as scholars and artists helped to shape this book.  Those attending any given Zoom session will get the most out of the experience if they have read the relevant passage from the book, but, of course, we welcome people who are encountering these ideas for the first time.

What’s the Big idea?

For most of their history, comics were widely understood as disposable―you read them and discarded them, and the pulp paper they were printed on decomposed over time. Today, comic books have been rebranded as graphic novels―clothbound high-gloss volumes that can be purchased in bookstores, checked out of libraries, and displayed proudly on bookshelves. They are reviewed by serious critics and studied in university classrooms. A medium once considered trash has been transformed into a respectable, if not elite, genre.

Contemporary culture is awash with stuff. Contemporary graphic novels give vivid expression to a culture preoccupied with the processes of circulation and appraisal, accumulation and possession. By design, comics encourage the reader to scan the landscape, to pay attention to the physical objects that fill our lives and constitute our familiar surroundings. Because comics take place in a completely fabricated world, everything is there intentionally. Comics are stuff; comics tell stories about stuff; and they display stuff. In this book, stuff refers not only to physical objects, but also to the emotions, sentimental attachments, and nostalgic longings that we express―or hold at bay―through our relationships with stuff.

Host—Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California, is the author or editor of 20 books on various aspects of media and popular culture. Among them are Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. 

Moderator—Drew Morton is an Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University–Texarkana. He is the author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and cofounder and coeditor of [in]Transition, the award-winning journal devoted to Videographic Criticism. He is currently editing an anthology on the Watchmen sequels.  

Audience Chair—William Proctoris Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema(with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 

Weds. June 17 10-11:30 a.m. (Pacific)

How to Look at Stuff

(Introduction, Chapter One)

In this session, we will discuss, among other things, how the features of comics as a medium create particular relationships to the objects that are being depicted; what comics scholars can learn from earlier moments of art history about the relationship between material culture and visual representation; how new configurations of knowledge and expertise are forming online as collectors come together to discuss meaningful “stuff.” 

Nick Sousanis

Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor in Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he runs an interdisciplinary Comics Studies program. He is the author of Unflattening, originally his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote and drew entirely in comics form. Published by Harvard University Press in 2015, Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Association Humanities award for Scholarly Excellence and the 2016 Lynd Ward prize for Best Graphic Novel. Sousanis’s comics have appeared in Nature, The Boston Globe, and Columbia Magazine. More at http://www.spinweaveandcut.comor Tw @nsousanis

Lisa Pons

Lisa Pon is a historian of European art, architecture and material culture made between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and professor of art history at USC.  Her research and teaching focus on the mobilities of art, artistic authority and collaboration, and the Renaissance concept of copia or abundance.  Her most recent book, Printed Icon:  Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire, examined an early print on paper that did not burn in a fire in 1428, and the consequences of that survival.

Will Straw

Will Straw is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill University in Montreal.  His interests include magazine history, theories of collecting and the culture of the urban night. 

Tuesday June 23rd 10 a.m. (Pacific)

Collecting Stories

(Chapters 2-5)

In this session, we will discuss how contemporary graphic novels have explored themes of collecting and accumulation; how collecting comics has been a central aspect of how comics artists orient themselves to their medium’s history; why artists are motivated to pay special attention to the material objects with which they populate their worlds; and how shared experiences of collecting helps to bridge between writers and readers of comics.

Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot has written and drawn comics and graphic novels for over 40 years, including Judge Dredd, Batman, Sandman, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland,Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes(written by Mary Talbot and the winner of the 2013 Costa Biography Award)and five volumes of his Grandville series of steampunk detective thrillers. He is published in over twenty countries, is a frequent guest at international comic festivals, and has been awarded an honorary Doctorate in Arts and an honorary Doctorate in Letters and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. http://www.bryan-talbot.com

Lincoln Geraghty

Lincoln Geraghty is Professor of Media Cultures in the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Major publications include Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe(IB Tauris, 2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television(Berg, 2009) and Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (Routledge, 2014). 

Jared Gardner

Jared Gardner is Professor of English and director of Popular Culture Studies at Ohio State University, where he spends all the time he can at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. He is the author and editor of a few books on comics, including Projections: Comics and the History of 21st-Century Storytelling.

Bart Beaty

Bart Beaty  is the author, editor, and translator of more than twenty books in the field of comics studies, including Twelve-Cent Archie (2015) and Comics versus Art (2012). He is the general editor of the Critical Survey of Graphic Novels (2012; revised 2018–2019) and the lead researcher on the What Were Comics? project (whatwerecomics.com).

William Proctor

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema(with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 

Tuesday June 30 10 a.m. (Pacific)

Object Lessons

(Chapters  6-8, Epilogue)

In this session, we will discuss how scrapbooks helped to inform the aesthetics of women’s graphic storytelling practices; the ways the depiction of “stuff” in graphic stories has been tied to family history and more generally, aspects of the past that sit uneasily in the present; the different kinds of stories women and artists of color have told about their relationships to the material world.

Rebecca Wanzo

Rebecca Wanzo is professor and chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (SUNY, 2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU 2020). Her essays have been published in journals such as American Literature, Camera Obscura, differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,  The Journal of Popular Culture, Women and Performance, and numerous edited collections. Her research interests include popular culture, African American literature, critical race theory, and feminist media studies. 

Hillary Chute

Hillary Chute is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. She is the author or editor of six books on comics, including, most recently, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere(Harper, 2017). She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for the New York Times Book Review. 

Joyce Farmer 

Joyce Farmer has been a cartoonist since the series, Tits and Clits (1972-1987). Controversial at first,  she is now considered a pioneer of underground comix.  Her graphic memoir Special Exits (2010) won the Reuben and was nominated for the Eisner. The book has been translated into five languages.

For more information on registration go to the RVSP link at the following:

Part I: How to Look at Stuff

Part II: Collecting Stories

Part III: Object Lessons

Newsboys in America: An Interview with Vincent DiGirolamo (2 of 2)

What factors led to the rise of the newsboy in America?

Newspaper hawkers first appeared as a distinct urban type in New York in the 1830s. They were products of the penny press—cheap newspapers for the masses, which were themselves products of the Market Revolution—the commercial expansion of agriculture and manufacturethat transformed the American economy, polity, and culture. Newsboys facilitated the flow of goods and information across the country, and they quickly caught the eye of artists and writers who transformed them into symbols of Young America—brassy but virtuous strivers who were always on the lookout for the next main chance. Articles about newsboys appeared in the new penny dailies and the scandalous Sunday papers and flash press, as well as in Whig and Democratic journals like Knickerbocker Magazine and US Magazine and Democratic Review. They also inspired the vogue for what I call “urchin art”—genre paintings of street children by the likes of Henry Inman, J. G. Brown, and many others. These youths proved useful as workers and symbols.

Were newsboys a mostly urban phenomenon?

Newsboys were primarily but not exclusively children of the city. They also worked in small towns and rural areas, distributing local papers and the big city dailies that were shipped in. 

Poverty haunted communities of every size and locale. Sherwood Anderson, for example, grew up so poor in Clyde, Ohio, in the 1880s that he sometimes ate grass. He not only delivered the Cleveland Plain Dealerand Toledo Blade, but he also herded cows, toted water, and acquired, sold, and sublet so many jobs that he earned the nickname “Jobby.” Newsboys also trod the dusty streets and plank sidewalks of western boomtowns, cow towns, and military posts. Some boys serviced their routes on horseback. These kids were key players in the development of the urban frontier because every town needed a newspaper to stimulate settlement. 

Boys also worked for the newspaper distribution firms that supplied small towns. These youths folded, bagged, and hauled papers to the railroad depots, or rode the cars and tossed bundles to carriers waiting at the various whistle-stops. Railroads also gave rise to tramp newsboys who hopped freight and passenger cars to work the crowds at horse races, boxing matches, state fairs, and political conventions. More respectable were the uniformed train boys who sold newspapers, magazines, and other items to rail passengers. These “news butchers” represented the aristocracy of newsboy labor, yet many ended up in debt to their companies for unsold or spoiled goods. Others lost their lives in rail accidents. Their families sometimes received compensation, but a common condition of employment as a train boy was to sign a liability waiver. I found that a few girls did this kind of work disguised as boys, but they were promptly fired when their true identities were discovered.

What were some of the risks of being a newsboy and why did they develop such a reputation for being rough and tumble?

Aside from the daily risk of getting robbed, run over, or run off, newsboys had to contend with the ever-present possibility of "getting stuck"— buying more papers than they could sell. Hence their motivation to hustle and shout, “flip” streetcars and dodge oncoming traffic. Progressive Era reformers enumerated the hazards of newsboy life, dividing them into two categories: physical and moral. Physical hazards included flat feet, curved spines, sore throats, skipped meals, stunted growth, and venereal disease. The moral dangers included a propensity to smoke, swear, steal, gamble, fight, drop out of school, and fraternize with hoodlums and prostitutes. Child labor reformers felt that the excitement and relative autonomy of street hawking ruined children for steady work. All of these concerns raise questions about the differences between working-class and middle-class attitudes and values, which I try to examine fairly, without deifying reformers, demonizing publishers, or censuring parents. 

One of the first stories you share is about a news boy who jumped the gun on announcing the first shots of the Civil War by almost two weeks. This raises the question of what role newsboys played in the sensationalism of the American press or what today we might discuss as “fake news.”

The fake news of today bears no resemblance to the fake news of yesteryear when it was shouted by hungry kids who knowingly sought to make a few extra nickels by bilking a gullible public until someone got wise and thrashed them for their deception. It was a risky business, good for a fleeting thrill more than a steady income, as it would ultimately lead to a loss of credibility and customers.  So yes, some kids falsely announced the sinking of the Atlantic and the murder of General Grant, or prematurely blared the fall of Fort Sumter and the death of President McKinley. It helps to remember that news peddling was a kind show business or street theater. Growing up in Philadelphia, William Dukenfield (W.C. Fields) would juggle rolled-up newspapers to gather a crowd and then invent silly headlines like “Amos Stump Found in an Eagle’s Nest.” It was part of his shtick. Yet newsboys who later took liberties with the facts during World War I faced threats of prosecution under the Espionage Act.

It’s also true that newspapers sometimes printed false news as hoaxes. All journalism students learn about the New York Sun’s moon hoax in 1835. Edgar Allan Poe perpetrated a similar fraud in the Sun in 1844 with a story about a transatlantic balloon crossing. And the New York Herald scared the bejesus out of Gothamites with its 1874 hoax of a mass escape of rhinos, baboons, and jungle cats from the Central Park Zoo. Newspaper publishers usually defended such fictions as satires or entertainments. 

More damaging were the sensationalist reports of Spanish perfidy during the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and other yellow press lords engaged in exaggeration and outright fabrication to bolster nationalist pride and imperialist aims. The 1920s represents another journalistic low point when truth took a backseat to sales. The New York Daily Graphic specialized in doctored photographs it called “composographs.” The National Enquirer continued this tradition with its “coverage” of alien abductions and other nonsense. Even respected papers succumbed to sensationalist strategies. I remember buying a copy of the San Jose Mercury in the 1970s with the banner headline “SOVIET SUB FOUND IN BAY.” It turned out to be a bay in Finland. That was the last time I bought the Mercury, even though I had been a stringer for it in high school.

Today’s fake news, as generated on Facebook by Russian bots and right-wing hacks who make no pretense of journalistic integrity, is more insidious. It’s also the label our tweet-mad president applies to any news item he doesn’t like. These falsehoods are more injurious to democracy than any lie that ever passed the lips of a newsboy.

Most accounts of the struggles over child labor emphasize the stories of children working in factories during the Industrial Revolution. How would this story look different if we centered on the news industry?

I approached newsboys not just as objects of reform, but as complex historical actors who worked, played, swore, gambled, struck, and developed their own occupational subculture. Yet in so doing, I think I shed light on the child labor reform movement as well. Newspaper peddling challenges historians’ tendency to draw clear distinctions between child labor and adult labor, work and play, wages and profit, selling and begging, opportunity and exploitation. News peddlers blur the line between these activities. The fact that their workplace was the street also raises questions about what constitutes endangerment or supervision, not to mention employment. Newsboy labor was also much more romanticized than other forms of child labor due to the influence of novelists like Horatio Alger and artists like J.G. Brown. The newspaper industry participated in this line blurring. Many newspapers sponsored newsboy bands and commissioned newsboy marches and “galops” at a time whena “Breaker-Boy March” or a “Mill Girl Galop” would have been inconceivable. 

The other thing that stands out in studying child street laborers, especially in the Progressive Era, is the prominent role played by socialists in this reform movement. Ardent socialists such as Florence Kelley, Scott Nearing, Robert Hunter, and Upton Sinclair provided much of the intellectual energy and documentary evidence that drove the crusade. Sinclair, of course, went on to write a stinging critique of the capitalist press in his book The Brass Check.

But newspapers were not just exploiters of the children they relied on. We have to take into account that the newspaper industry was, arguably, one of the most influential child welfare institutions in the United States. Newspapers were pioneers of corporate welfare and scientific management schemes. They provided newsboys with banquets, excursions, entertainments, and educations in the form of night schools and scholarships. Indeed, one could argue that newspapers exerted a greater influence on American boys than the YMCA, Boy Scouts, or Little League Baseball combined.

Let’s focus on the boy in the newsboy. What myths about masculinity in America have clung to this figure through the years? Were there newsgirls and if so, how were they perceived?

There were always girls and women who sold papers, but the news trade was dominated by boys and it became a kind of school for masculinity. Boys learned not just how to hustle, make change, and predict sales, but also how to smoke, swear, and fight. They learned about sex on the job, dealing with the sexual advances of co-workers, customers, and bosses. The film director Frank Capra routinely fended off drunk pedophiles while working nights in Los Angeles. Girls in the news trade encountered sexual propositions and assaults as well. They were often blamed for their own troubles. “A girl who starts out selling papers ends up selling herself,” said a police chief in Buffalo, New York.  Their labor was sexualized in prose and pictures, so they were the first targets of reformers, who pressured lawmakers and publishers to remove girls from the streets.

Your book traces a history which runs for more than a century, despite some significant shifts in the news industry over that period. Why did this figure persist for so long and what led to its demise?

Despite the tremendous growth of newspapers throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century, in terms of number, circulation, capitalization, and employees, their proprietors faced the basic journalistic challenge of getting a highly perishable product to market. The cheap labor of children remained integral to this process for several reasons. First, children were abundant; the steady influx of poor immigrant families up to 1924, especially in cities, ensured an ample labor supply. Second, children proved adaptable to new modes of distribution and new sites of retail exchange, such as railroads, streetcars, bicycles, subways, automobiles, and even airplanes. Finally, the emotional appeal of needy children increased their effectiveness as hawkers and carriers, transforming each purchase into an act of charity, especially when accompanied by a tip, which in many cases made up half their earnings. 

The newspaper industry remained largely impervious to child labor reforms, even during the Progressive Era when the removal of youngsters from mines, mills, and factories often sent them into the less regulated street trades.  Despite the tireless efforts of the National Child Labor Committee and its photographer Lewis Hine, the public never really saw newsboys and newsgirls as exploited victims. NCLC investigator Edward Clopper called this misperception the “illusion of the near.” They were too close to us, he said. Conditions changed during the Great Depression. jobs were so scarce that adults now flocked into the trade. But children were still expected to “pitch in” and “help out,” or else make themselves scarce at suppertime. 

Only after World War II did the corner newsboys became less ubiquitous due to the spread of newsstands and vending machines and mandatory school attendance. Suburbanization and Schwinns enlarged the fleet of after-school route carriers in the 1950s, ‘60s and '70s. Many of my friends had paper routes then. They never earned much but they got their pictures in the paper once in a while. Adults deliverers with cars were always more reliable and became increasingly preferable after a rash of newsboy kidnappings and murders in the 1980s and '90s. Declining birthrates, increased youth hiring by fast-food chains, and the siphoning off of readers and advertisers by internet companies (that bear no distribution costs) put the final nail in the coffin of America’s newsboys.

Today, those of us who grew up in the post-war era have a certain nostalgia for kids having their own paper routes. What relationship do you see between newsboys and paper routes? How did the latter become associated with the middle class and its assumed virtues?

The contrasting cultural attributes of route carriers and street hawkers is often exaggerated. Many boys did both jobs in the 19th and early 20th centuries; they delivered (or rented!) papers to regular customers and peddled them on the side to random pedestrians. Yet carriers gradually acquired more positive reputations because they tended to rise early, keep regular hours, and go about their business quietly, while hawkers peddled erratically, often late into the night, and made as much noise as possible. When carriers started to outnumber hawkers in the 1920s and ‘30s, they became the focus of new federal regulations. In response, circulation managers emphasized that the boys’ work was a form of public service and vocational education. They started calling them “newspaperboys” and refused to use the old terms of newsboys or newsies, as these words conjured up images of street arabs and guttersnipes. The industry successfully lobbied Congress to have October 4, 1941 declared the first National Newspaperboy Day. It persuaded the U.S. Postal Service to issue a newspaperboy stamp in 1952. And it established a Newspaperboys’ Hall of Fame in 1960. These tributes were publicized annually in radio broadcasts, newspaper editorials, and galas featuring Abbott and Costello, Red Skelton, and other celebrities. So the virtuous middle-class suburban paperboy of our childhoods is not just a happy memory but the product of a public relations machine working overtime to eclipse the disorderly working-class newsboy. Nostalgia, like newspapers, is a manufactured good. 

Vincent DiGirolamo has published essays on a wide array of subjects, including child vagrants, Wobbly strikes, Ashcan artists, and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. His work has appeared in Labor History, Journal of Social History, Radical History Review, San Francisco Sunday Examiner-Chronicle, and several anthologies. He also co-produced Monterey’s Boat People (1984), an award-winning PBS documentary on Vietnamese refugee fishermen, and published the middle-grade novel Whispers Under the Wharf (1990). His contributions to the digital humanities for CUNY’s American Social History Project comprise essays, podcasts, and teaching modules on the Sand Creek massacre, Jacob Riis, Ellis Island, and the 1934 West Coast maritime strike. DiGirolamo has held research and writing fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, American Antiquarian Society, Bentley Historical Library at University of Michigan, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Crying the News also received support from the NEH, PSC-CUNY, and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, as well as a 2015 Leonard Hastings Schoff Trust Publications Award from the Columbia University Seminar on the City, a 2017 Furthermore Grant from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and a 2018 Book Completion Award from the CUNY Office of Research.

Newsboys in America: An Interview with Vincent DiGirolamo (1 of 2)

Vincent DiGirolamo's Crying the News is an epic account of the rise and fall, life and times of the American newsboy (and newsgirl) which has already received significant recognition from the scholarly community, including Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, the Philip Taft Award for the best book on labor and working class history, and the Frank Luther Mott/ Kappa Tau Alpha Award for the best book in journalism and mass communication. I initially approached the book in relation to my current writing project, which is looking at American boyhood, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, but which has led me to read more extensively in the fields of children's studies and history.  I loved this book because of the wealth of details it offers into working class boyhood across the years and because of the ways that it takes these young workers seriously on their own terms and helps us to read through the myths and approximate their place in the history of American journalism. The writing has a quiet verve -- it makes it pleasurable to read without calling attention to that -- and you can get a sense of that style in his expressive and generative response to my questions here. I have tried to frame my questions with an eye to readers of this blog who are potentially interested in the representation of the paper boy (and in the case of one recent comic series I admire, Paper Girls), the nature of paper boy masculinity, how it models the gig economy, and what glimpse it offers into sensationalism and deception (i.e. fake news) in other historical periods.  Hope you enjoy—

Henry Jenkins

The newsboy became and remains, as you note, a mythic figure in American culture down to the present day, whether embodied as Newsies on Broadway or the comic book series, Paper Girls. What core national values got encoded in that myth? 

That’s part of what intrigued me about these kids, the relationship between the myth and the reality. I wanted to know about their lives on the streets and their economic importance to their families and the newspaper industry. But I was also curious about how these poor, often exploited and self-exploiting children came to represent the spirit of capitalism. What accounts for this irony? Was it the result of some amorphous cultural process or the deliberate attempt of interested parties to define the meaning of their work? And how did this myth affect the children’s actual experience, either by generating sympathy for them, undermining reform efforts, or actually inspiring the children to strive and succeed? Some famous ex-newsboys such as Walt Disney and Eddie Rickenbacker subscribed to the myth and attributed their adult success to the lessons learned selling newspapers. They became useful symbols of American enterprise.But most newsboys kept within their social class and grew up to become teamsters, mechanics, and work in similar trades.

Understanding the persistence of this myth required tracking its changing function in society and the ways in which nostalgia helps gloss over past injustices. I compare the stereotypical newsboy to the happy darky or noble savage—figures that obfuscate the horrors of slavery and genocide. The mythic newsboy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps similarly distorts our understanding of class exploitation—and the resistance it provoked. Many newsboys engaged in strikes and formed unions that affiliated with the Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, and Industrial Workers of the World, but their stories are not part of the myth. Others newsboys, such as Jack London in Oakland, California, and Norman Thomas in Marion, Ohio, become prominent socialists. I contend that news peddling influenced children in profound and enduring ways, depending on their race, ethnicity, region, gender, and generation. But the self-made man narrative is just that—a story wielded selectively to laud individual initiative and minimize the underlying structures of economic opportunity.

You compare the American newsboy to his old-world counterpart, the ballad singer. How might this comparison give us some insights into how news was circulated in the two cultures?

Yes, I mention that America’s newsboys were direct descendants of the ballad singers, mercurie girls, and flying stationers who distributed news sheets in Europe beginning in the 15thcentury. These were Gutenberg’s first children, though most were adults. They made up what historian Robert Darnton calls the “forgotten middlemen of literature.” They share several things in common with their American counterparts, including an initially low reputation as scoundrels and vagabonds who avoided real work by trafficking in rumors, lies, and half-truths, often of a seditious nature. Yet carriers and postriders who distributed newspapers and pamphlets during the American Revolution and subsequent wars raised their status as patriots who personified freedom of the press. Another key difference between European and American news peddling was the higher literacy rates in the United States due to the importance placed on Bible reading. Newspapers and newspaper reading flourished in the United States compared to England, where newspaper duties and other “taxes on knowledge” restricted readership until the mid-1850s. 

What are some of the challenges of researching this topic? What are some of the resources and techniques you deployed to address those challenges?

My research began in the pre-digital age. I started out following footnotes to the published and unpublished reports of child welfare societies and child labor committees. I consulted municipal histories, city guides, trade journals, and the memoirs and private papers of editors and publishers. Newspapers were valuable sources, too, as they often ran feature stories and crime reports about newsboys. Finding these stories was hit and miss at the beginning. Fortunately, some municipal libraries compiled handwritten indexes of local newspapers. I also relied on colleagues and strangers who would send me the odd newsboy reference they came across in the course of their research. 

My best source of visual material was Peter Eckel, a collector whose devotion to Father John Drumgoole, director of St. Vincent's Newsboys' Home in Gilded Age New York, led him to haunt the book stalls on Fourth Avenue looking for prints related to newsboys. He amassed an amazing collection that included badges, statues, and a scrapbook assembled by the superintendent of another Newsboys' Home. Peter shared his archive with me while I was writing my dissertation at Princeton. After he died I helped Firestone Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections acquire and catalog it.

Everything changed with the digitization of newspapers, periodicals, diaries, and images in the early 2000s, which made thousands of documents and collections word-searchable. I could now find needles in archival haystacks throughout the country. This technology led to my discovery of newsboy strikes, boycotts, murders, accidents, unions, clubs, lodging houses, and reading rooms in scores of cities where my source material was originally quite thin. The hidden history of working-class youth seemed suddenly accessible, and I fell victim to what Ludmilla Jordanova calls the "chimera of comprehensiveness."

Then there's the question of how to read these sources—how to make sense of children's lived experience, and trust the voices embedded in human-interest stories and reform tracts. Visual images also posed challenges in that they reflect generic conventions and political agendas as well as providing glimpses of real children. But that's the fun part: analyzing how a certain social practice—child news peddling—could alternately be viewed as a social evil and a public good. I found that this tension existed in every decade. For example, during the progressive era, when muckraking journalists were producing shocking exposés and disturbing photographs of ragged newsboys, images of happy, energetic newsboys circulated widely in advertisements, calendars, board games, and children’s books. These images virtually neutralized the impact of reports produced by the child labor reformers.

You frame the newsboy as both laborer and entrepreneur within what you describe as “penny capitalism.” Explain this concept and how it might shed light on today’s “gig economy.”

“Penny capitalism” is a term coined by anthropologist Sol Tax (a former Milwaukee newsboy) in the 1950s to describe small-scale trading among indigenous peoples. It was revived by British historian John Benson in the 1980s to call attention to the various entrepreneurial activities of working-class people to supplement their meager wages. They took in borders, sold victuals, opened pubs in their homes. Benson correctly notes that the industrial working-class has never lived by wages alone. The question he raised is how does this kind of economic activity affect their class identities and affinAs workers and merchants, newsboys epitomize this blend of labor and commerce. Yet in the course of my research I found that they also toiled in a variety of labor systems, in slavery, apprenticeship, and the padrone system, as wage workers, piece workers, and unpaid family labor. Editorial writers liked to call them “little merchants” and equate them with Wall Street speculators because they had to buy and sell again. This propaganda had real consequences in that it contributed to the legal fiction that newsboys were not employees but independent contractors and thus exempt from minimum wage standards, maximum hour laws, workers’ compensation coverage, and other workplace protections. In this sense, newsboys were the prototypical gig workers of their day. Newspaper publishers and circulation managers exaggerated the degree of autonomy they had on the job in order to deny them wages and benefits, especially after the passage of New Deal legislation in the 1930s. Like them, today’s gig workers—including most newspaper deliverers—are subject to a host of fines, work rules, and schedule demands that undermine their vaunted independence as independent contractors.

Biography

Vincent DiGirolamo has published essays on a wide array of subjects, including child vagrants, Wobbly strikes, Ashcan artists, and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. His work has appeared in Labor History, Journal of Social History, Radical History Review, San Francisco Sunday Examiner-Chronicle, and several anthologies. He also co-produced Monterey’s Boat People (1984), an award-winning PBS documentary on Vietnamese refugee fishermen, and published the middle-grade novel Whispers Under the Wharf(1990). His contributions to the digital humanities for CUNY’s American Social History Project comprise essays, podcasts, and teaching modules on the Sand Creek massacre, Jacob Riis, Ellis Island, and the 1934 West Coast maritime strike. DiGirolamo has held research and writing fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, American Antiquarian Society, Bentley Historical Library at University of Michigan, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Crying the News also received support from the NEH, PSC-CUNY, and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, as well as a 2015 Leonard Hastings Schoff Trust Publications Award from the Columbia University Seminar on the City, a 2017 Furthermore Grant from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and a 2018 Book Completion Award from the CUNY Office of Research.

Stuart Hall: Island Boy (1 of 1) by Keesha Wallace

The following paper was written by Keesha Wallace, a student in my seminar this term, exploring the roots of the Cultural Studies Tradition. Her own "island" background led her to interesting insights about Stuart Hall, a key figure running across the class, resulting in a memorable paper that I wanted to share with my readers.

Stuart Hall: Island Boy

By Keesha Wallace

“The idea that, because I moved, from colony to metropole, there were no connections between them, has always seemed inconceivable to me. But others have tended to see these worlds as much more compartmentalized. And to someone who doesn’t know the interior life and spaces of the colonial formation, and how its antinomies were forged, the connections may not appear to be evident, or as evident to them as to me. To me, their interdependence is what defines their respective specificities; in everything they reverberate through each other”—Stuart Hall (2017, 11)

Stuart Hall and his mother Jessie Hall on the boat to England, 1951

As a Jamaican, there is something slightly amusing and a little insulting in the way academics speak of Stuart Hall’s Jamaican identity.  “Born in Jamaica” is a throwaway line. Perhaps it is because they are speaking about the work and not so much the man, but I don’t think it can be separated. Hall might agree. 

“I’ve never been persuaded by the orthodox social science division between the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’. It’s always seemed to me that even the most abstract theories are, to varying degrees, informed by their subjective conditions of existence: by, that ism the inner psychic dynamics of the theorist. I’ve felt this to be true of my own life….We need to  consider how we are inserted into the social processes of history and simultaneously think about the mental means we, as subjects, employ to explain to ourselves where, in history, we find ourselves” (Hall 2017, 63).

In the first paragraph of the New Yorker article marking his death,  they noted Hall was “born in colonial Jamaica to mix raced parents who worried that his dark complexion would be an impediment to ascending the island pigmentography, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship to study literature when he was 19” (Hsu, Hua 2017, July 17).

It's not directly stated but there is a slightly odd implication that he was fleeing a Jamaican bias as if England had evolved beyond pigmentation in 1954 when we know it still hasn’t done so today. (Smith 2019).

And, this isn’t an isolated incident. His “brown” or mixed-race parents are often mentioned immediately followed by discussions of his not feeling accepted by “Black Jamaica.”  Another repeatedly mentioned anecdote – “as a child, his skin was darker than the rest of his family’s, prompting his sister to tease, ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ It became a family joke—one he would revisit often.” (Hsu, Hua 2017, July 17). 

It is worth noting that “Black Jamaica” wasn’t and still isn’t the only Jamaica. There was definitely a space in Jamaican society for the Halls of the world. In fact, there was a space in all of the Caribbean for them, the West Indian intellectual expats he’d eventually find and develop life-long bonds with  once he got to Oxford. 

It’s also important to know that in terms of literal meaning, brown and mixed raced are often one in the same in Jamaica. Brown is generally used to signify a lighter complexion and mixed race is rarely as clearly delineated as black and white. Both are extremely common. On small islands when the moral policing of the colonizers is removed there are offspring of many shades.  I am the last of four and was often called coolie by my siblings. Coolie is a derogatory term used to describe the Indian popular that had migrated to Jamaica as indentured servants. It’s not as withering an attack as suggested. Not as alienating as presented.

There was nothing particularly radical or unusual about Stuart Hall’s ethnicity in a Jamaican setting. Malcolm Gladwell’s mother is Jamaican. Zadie Smith’s mother is Jamaican. Both authors discuss their inherited ideas on colorism at length. Shades of black and brown definitely make a difference and are mentally noted on the island but should be kept in perspective. He might not have felt a part of “Black Jamaica” but it was about much more than race. 

Wide colour variations are a common feature within families across Jamaica’s uncertain color spectrum. My grandmother on my mother’s side, the notably fair-skinned part of the family, was an expert in racial classifications, as that master of structural anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, would have appreciated.  

It’s highly doubtful that Hall’s journey to England, as a Rhodes scholar no less, was any different from other brilliant Third World immigrants looking for opportunity in the First World. The only difference might have been his initial inability to realize that although he was born under the crown, it was never attempting to be his home. If that was his view, he was quickly disabused of such notions. 

Caribbean migrants journey to England

“What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It’s the summit of something else. It’s distilled Englishness.”  

Hall was part of the Windrush Generation, a time of mass migration of nearly half a million people moved to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1970.[†]While other intellectuals from the colonies studied hard sciences, Hall looked to culture. I’m interested in the ways his Jamaican heritage influenced this area of study. Hall never claimed Jamaica as the place where he belonged. But I hear it in his voice and I know there is nothing more island intellectual and Jamaica College alumnus than his entire perspective.

I can imagine that when Hall first read Williams and Hoggart he must have seen similarities. Hoggart’s working-class neighborhood in Leeds, William’s Welsh border town might have been equally as foreign to Oxford tea shops as Hall’s childhood home in Kingston, Jamaica. When Hall wrote of a “ subjective rupture” in Hoggart and Williams. “The contrast between these two cultural experiences and their inevitable impact on one another is not unlike the experience of migration – from one class to another, from one town  to another, from the country to the city, or from the periphery to the center. It makes you instantly alive to the forms and patterns which have shaped you and which you have left behind, intellectually at the very least, for good.” He could have been talking about himself (Hall 2016, 57).

Yet there is no Caribbean equivalent to Shakespeare. Hall understood he was from a different space. We are an imported people, purposefully fragmented stripped of a collective consciousness of any culture high or low brow.   If the Arawak and Taino natives had scholars, they were killed before anyone thought about classifying them as such. We don’t have a past to draw on.  I believe that was one of the reasons the colonial education system was so important. It was the only way “natives” made themselves worthy of heading back to the colonizer, becoming civilized. 

In an interview between Hall and Trinidadian scholar CLR James[6] you feel the kinship of that unwritten agreement. They bond over their uniquely English educations that took place against tropical backgrounds. They laugh as they remember the shock in metropole elite inner circles when they knew the work of historical scholars better than British or French born. They laugh as if they had both over-prepared for a test, a test they soon realized they didn’t care to pass or fail.   

In contrast to Hoggart and Williams, Hall’s perspective might have been more complicated. When Mary Louise Pratt talks about  contact zones as “ Social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power (Pratt, Mary Louise,(1991)p34)” It is applicable to Hall’s life on many levels but it’s not immediately clear to me where England would fall in its relation to his Jamaica. 

Hall writes":“Privately it must be said, the English aroused ambivalent feelings. They were deferred to because of their power, colour, wealth and exalted social position and due to their leadership of every aspect of our lives. At the same time they constituted for us ‘natives’ a sort of running joke, a constant source of casual humour,  even ridicule, which made us feel superior. They appeared to us so foreign in their dress, manner and behavior, so uptight, so profoundly in the wrong place!” (Hall 2017, 20).

He knew that even if we weren’t publicly acknowledged England appreciated the differences of the West Indies.  Clearly the islands had something, because if we didn’t so many wouldn’t have stayed so long. 

There is an ego involved in being a colonizer. An ego Hall saw and questioned, “That was what was so baffling about the English when I first arrived: the contrast between the ordinariness – dreariness, even – of much everyday life and the certainty possessed by the English of their exalted place in the world (214).

Hall’s position as a native elite child of the commonwealth left him with so much to grapple with. At home and abroad. “Jamaica’s intricately articulated social hierarchies were characteristic of what Mary Louis Pratt calls the colonial ‘contact-zone’, in which different national, social, economic, ethnic, gendered and racially defined groups were obliged by the imperial system to inhabit the same space.”

There is something about being of two worlds that forces an examination of culture. As a product of colonial Jamaica on the brink of demands for independence, his identity was a constant negotiation. A position that made him uniquely qualified to look at everything a little differently. He took his place amongst outsiders but with a slightly different gaze. 

This post serves as a call for the repatriation of Stuart Hall. My unscientific polling of Jamaicans’ knowledge of Hall was  terribly disappointing. The island doesn’t know about his work. We all know of CLR James. We know Franz Fanon was from Martinique not France. That as problematic as he might have been in his views, VS Naipaul was a child of Trinidad and Derek Walcott a St. Lucian. The world needs to know Stuart Hall was Jamaican, and I think, if the discussions of Hall happened a little differently, they would. 

His heritage isn’t a footnote, it’s the whole thing. An instinct I had from my first discovery of Hall that was confirmed after reading his work I’ve heavily quoted “Familiar Stranger – A Life Between Two Islands.”

From the beginning of the book he gives a nod to the erasure of his Jamaican-ness, deliberate or not. 

“Jamaican graduate students studying in North America in the 1980s discovered Cultural Studies, with which I had become identified, as a product of an English university, the University of Birmingham – only to find, when I turned up to lecture, that a black Jamaican had somehow been involved with the enterprise form the beginning!” (Hall 2017, 11).

He acknowledged the erasure of his blackness a subject that he would write about later in his career but was aware of the entire time. “I remember reacting with disproportionate rage to one of my earliest reviews, an intelligent and broadly sympathetic English sociologist, who had said he didn’t understand why I kept banging on about being colored, since I was from a well-to-do middle-class family, had been educated at a good, English-type school and studied abroad at Oxford” (12).

People tire of calls for diversity, but what has been lost through interviews of brilliant minds of color by members of the establishment that never understood basic points of entry cannot be overstated. It was so amazing to see Jamaican food discussed in such detail by a man who is studied at universities. I had to pause to smile when I found out Hall’s cousin was my old headmistress from high school . It made me so happy. 

We need to see ourselves in new spaces, we need to know we belong. We need to make sure everyone in a position to cover our subjects ask the right questions. 

There is a sad but weirdly funny recent example I think of often. During an interview with Quincy Jones, a young white male reporter from GQ Magazine had a moment of disbelief when he found out Quincy’s grandmother was biracial. Quincy waited a beat to then explain that no, it wasn’t something that had been discussed. No, it hadn’t been some unspoken love across the forbidden racial lines. His grandmother had been a slave who was raped by her master with little choice but to birth the result.

——

Appendix

‘Colonization in Reverse’ By Louise Bennett written in 1966

Brief History of Miss Lou

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs’

Jamaica people colonizin

Englan in reverse.

By de hundred, by de t’ousan

From country and from town,

By de ship load, by de plane-load

Jamaica is Englan boun.

 Dem a-pour out o’Jamaica,

Everybody future plan

Is fe get a big-time job

An settle in de mother lan.

CLR James Talking to Stuart Hall

Hall, Stuart. 2017. Familiar Story: A Life between Two Islands. Duke University Press.

Hall, Stuart. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983 A Theoretical History. Duke University Press

King, Anthony D. 1997. Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pratt, Mary Louise. (1991) Arts of the Contact Zone.Modern Language Association.

Smith, F. 2019. BBC puts focus on Windrush scandal. Shropshire Star.

Yardley, W. (2014, Feb 18). Stuart hall, trailblazing British scholar of multicultural influences, is dead at 82. New York Times (1923-Current File) Retrieved from http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/1941469117?accountid=14749 

Biography

Writer. Publicist. Creative. After 10+ years in NYC, Keesha Wallace recently relocated to LA to continue her work in the entertainment industry amplifying marginalized voices and making sure Caribbean culture is getting the love it deserves. She’s currently pursuing a MA in Strategic PR at USC Annenberg School of Communication and plans to continue on to a PhD.