Imagining the American death penalty : the cultural work of popular visual representations / Birte Christ.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Christ, Birte, 1977- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Capital punishment in motion pictures--History--20th century.

Capital punishment in motion pictures.

Capital punishment in popular culture--United States.

Capital punishment in popular culture.

Capital punishment--United States--Public opinion.

Capital punishment.

Capital punishment--Public opinion.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (unpaged)

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2025]

Summary:

The book traces the U.S. American cultural imaginary of capital punishment through popular visual representations from the 1890s to the twenty-first century. It focuses on three generic and historical clusters of representations: early film from the 1890s through Intolerance (1916), crime film noir of the 1950s and 1960s, and legal TV series from the 1990s through the early 2000s. The book makes two central arguments. First, it demonstrates that an increased concern with the death penalty in popular media does not mean that these texts promote an abolitionist agenda: their cultural work is ambiguous at best. Early film is enchanted with its own representational possibilities due to the progress of technology and, in analogy, with the progress in execution technique, specifically the electric chair. In film noir, genre conventions and the legal back-and-forth before and after Furman predicate ambiguity. In legal TV series, the genre's ensemble casts and its focus on conversational exchange invite open debate. The second argument is that popular visual representations consistently whitewash the death penalty. The book demonstrates that this is the case because the most common narrative around executions in film and TV is to cast the condemned man as a hero who defies the violence of the state, gains dignity by accepting his fate and faults, and in some ways triumphs over death. The American imaginary, until very recently, did or could not imagine Black men to possess that measure of agency that it attributed to its white heroes.

Contents:

New technologies of representation and death

Scenes of execution

Before Furman : ambiguity in law and film

Hollywood’s “mixed verdict”

New abolitionism, new genre

Multiple audience positions in legal series

Conclusion : entertaining ambiguity, and imagining new Black men and women.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on May 14, 2025).

Other Format:

Print version: Christ, Birte, 1977- Imagining the American death penalty

ISBN:

9780198935117

0198935110

9780198935094

0198935099

9780198935100

0198935102

OCLC:

1517009166

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license