Bryan J Mccann
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 4078609 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Bryan J Mccann |
| NOMBRES | Bryan J |
| APELLIDO | Mccann |
| FIRMA | MCCANN B J |
| AFILIACIONES | Louisiana State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5012-6072 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 49 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 49 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Rio de Janeiro
What do nineteenth-century fiction, early twentieth-century popular music, 1930s soccer, 1950s film comedy, 1960s experimental art and 1970s soap operas have in common with one another? Each reveal the deep patterns structuring social and cultural life in Rio de Janeiro. Bringing a fresh perspective to one of the most visited cities in South America, Bryan McCann explores each manifestation in turn, mining their depths and drawing connections bet…
Dialogue on difference
Making Embrace Possible
When QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking launched in 2013, I was still drinking and would continue doing so for three more years. By this time, it was apparent to those close enough to me—a group whose numbers I kept intentionally low—that my drinking had become a problem. I was not always unhappy during my last three years of drinking, but those periods of despair grew steadily darker. By the time I ceased drinking and sought help, I was suicida…
Jennifer Adair. In Search of the Lost Decade
Journal Article Jennifer Adair. In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina.Natalia Milanesio. Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina. Get access Jennifer Adair. In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. Pp xiii, 188. Paper $34.95. Natalia Milanesio. Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictator…
Economies of misery
This article draws on the author’s experiences with alcoholism and mental illness to critique narratives of merit and success in the research university. Theorizing what the author calls economies of misery, the article describes anxiety, depression, and substance abuse as manifestations of the affective surplus that remains after one has achieved what the research university characterizes as success. The article ends with a call to reclaim this …
Serial Murder as Modernist Ritual
This essay argues that the serial murderer's rituals are homologous to those that structure the more quotidian or administrative, but equally sadistic, forms of violence against fungible bodies in US civil society. At stake in this homology is recognizing that the sadism publics so readily associate with the depraved serial killer are present in the many cruelties that such publics enthusiastically condone and enjoy. Serial murder is a modernist …
The Map, the Photograph and the BRT
Rio de Janeiro's Bus Rapid Transit system, implemented in the years before the 2016 Summer Olympics, reproduces and expands inequalities long associated with the city's traditional bus system. This article explores the middle ground between structure and subjectivity in order to reveal these patterns. To begin, it contrasts the BRT system's schematic map with the photography of Yan Carpenter and the analytical maps of Lucas Faulhaber. It then mov…
When We Come Together, We Build Theory
Situated in a forum dedicated to the reflexive analysis of academic labor, this piece takes stock in the salience of space and place for the kinds of work we can collaboratively perform, and when and where such work can occur. Much of what follows approximates conversations we have had with each other and fellow activist colleagues in campus hallways and offices, at each other’s houses, in local coffee shops or hotel bars at national conferences,…
Harvey Weinstein, monster”
Rape myths are prominent social narratives that circulate harmful stereotypes that normalize and even sanction sexual violence. In this essay, we argue that the myth of the monstrous rapist in US rape culture rhetorically functions as an antiblack symbolic structure that circulates across historical and contemporary discourses. We outline the rhetorical norms of the myth through an analysis of discourses surrounding convicted serial sexual predat…
Duplicity and the Depraved Uncanny in Mediations of Ted Bundy
This article attends to the role of duplicity in managing serial killer Ted Bundy’s uncanniness. Texts such as Joe Berlinger’s Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile (2019) discuss acts of gendered violence that, though they differ in degree, are homologous to more quotidian performances of White masculinity. In so doing, they produce encounters with the depraved uncanny, or the aff…
Lynching and the University
Before readers engaged Ersula J. Ore’s Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity, her powerful rhetorical history of antiblack violence and U.S. national identity, many of us knew that on
Lonely Young American
The trope of the Child is contradictory and marked by considerable ambivalence. To reckon with the Child’s place in public culture is to bear witness to its myriad permutations. One such permutation presents itself in the story of “Alex,” a 23-year-old white U.S. American woman who nearly left her Washington State home to join the Islamic State (ISIS) after sustained online contact with several Caliphate members. Alex’s story is a representative …
Steven Universe
Steve Striffler and I were each hired as assistant professors at the University of Arkansas in the spring of 1999, Steve in anthropology, and I in history. By the time I arrived in Fayetteville, two weeks before the start of classes in August of that year, Steve was already leading a job action by faculty, staff, and graduate assistants, protesting against recent antilabor measures taken by university administration. He showed immediately that he…
Communication's quest for whiteness
This essay examines communication's historical anxieties regarding disciplinary legitimacy as an investment in whiteness. We argue that such anxieties are predicated upon a normative ideal of citizenship. As such, rhetorics of disciplinary legitimacy enact white civil society's originary exclusion, which is antiblackness. To illuminate the ways antiblackness finds expression in these anxieties, we engage the field's lengthy archive of public musi…
Live, virtual, and spectral
Drawing on several years of bringing students on a tour of a maximum security prison, I posit the prison (tour) as a live performance that is only legible through distinct but interlocking registers of presence. I argue that the prison (tour) positions and assembles recalcitrant bodies conditioned by live, virtual, and spectral encounters with each other. The convergence of present and absent bodies at the site of the prison and the intermingling…
Recalling Persky
By attending to the successful campaign to recall and unseat Judge Aaron Persky in retaliation for his sentencing decision in the sexual assault trial of Stanford University athlete Brock Turner, we argue that the campaign constituted a White intimate public that directed White rage toward the judge for his perceived betrayals of a White paternal social contract. Because the campaign posited Persky’s willingness to inflict carceral violence upon …
Critiquing state and gendered violence in the age of #MeToo
Contracultura
As Brazil's right-wing military dictatorship tightened the screws in the late 1960s, popular musicians, visual artists, and authors on the left produced an outpouring of vital work. This cultural production challenged and provoked the military government but also offered penetrating criticism of flaws and failures within the Left, or the multiple Lefts. Scholars have analyzed this rich, complex cultural production created under the shadow of dict…
The Mark of Criminality
The Mark of Criminality
"The Mark of Criminality illustrates the ways that the "war on crime" became conjoined--aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically--with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop. In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era's worst racial stereotypes. Rat…
Strictly an act of street violence”
On May 12, 2013, two men opened fire on a Mother’s Day second line parade in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward. This essay attends to discourses from public officials and news media following the shooting that reified what we describe as affective divestment from the suffering of historically marginalized bodies and communities. Specifically, public discourse characterized the shooting as an episode of “street violence” that did not warrant sustained na…
Securing Sex
Securing Sex is a major contribution to our understanding of the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, using balanced, rigorous interdisciplinary methodology to offer new perspectives on a dark period in Brazilian history. The book explores the evolution and adaptation of a highly flexible and sometimes inchoate political right wing to cultural change, and the subsequent articulation of understandings of sexuality, decency, and citizen…
Holding Each Other Better
Research Article| February 01 2016 Holding Each Other Better: Discussing State Violence, Healing, and Community with BreakOUT! Bryan J. McCann Bryan J. McCann Bryan J. McCann is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. His scholarly interests and activist commitments largely focus on the intersectional politics of crime and public culture in the United States. His published work has appeared in…
Entering the Darkness
The 2003 film Monster depicted events in the life of executed murderer Aileen Wuornos. While many gender theorists describe the Wuornos case as a site of gender trouble vis-à-vis violence in public culture, discourse surrounding the film focused primarily on Charlize Theron's portrayal of Wuornos. Her performance was largely framed as a temporary voyage into an amorphous “darkness” that physically and emotionally transformed her. The resulting na…
Prisoners of Conscience
Affect, Black Rage, and False Alternatives in the Hip-Hop Nation
This essay looks to the work of iconic rap artist Tupac Shakur to illuminate the role of Black rage as a common denominator between rap's most conscious and gangsta iterations. Specifically, by theorizing Black rage as the founding affective impulse of the hip-hop nation, critics can identify common affective threads across the genre and spy emancipatory potential in hip-hop's most jarring excesses, as surely as its more lucidly political iterati…
The Mystery of Samba
This fascinating and elegant study of transformations in attitudes about race, popular culture, and national identity in Brazil suffers from a misleading title. It is not a book about samba, and to the degree that it is a mystery story it is unsatisfying, for it fails to offer a convincing explanation of the mystery to which the title refers (how samba evolved from a marginal genre of a few predominantly black neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro into…
Critiquing state and gendered violence in the age of #MeToo
Turning Silence into Speech and Action
Based on almost 50 years of combined experience as prison activists and prison teachers, the authors offer three case studies of prison activism and pedagogy in action. The first case study, by Hartnett, details the “artistry of agency” as enacted in poetry workshops in prison and in public poetry events, thus illustrating artistic communication. The second, by Wood, examines how friendship becomes political in the epistolary communication betwee…
Entering the Darkness
The 2003 film Monster depicted events in the life of executed murderer Aileen Wuornos. While many gender theorists describe the Wuornos case as a site of gender trouble vis-à-vis violence in public culture, discourse surrounding the film focused primarily on Charlize Theron's portrayal of Wuornos. Her performance was largely framed as a temporary voyage into an amorphous “darkness” that physically and emotionally transformed her. The resulting na…
Harvey Weinstein, monster”
Rape myths are prominent social narratives that circulate harmful stereotypes that normalize and even sanction sexual violence. In this essay, we argue that the myth of the monstrous rapist in US rape culture rhetorically functions as an antiblack symbolic structure that circulates across historical and contemporary discourses. We outline the rhetorical norms of the myth through an analysis of discourses surrounding convicted serial sexual predat…
Communication's quest for whiteness
This essay examines communication's historical anxieties regarding disciplinary legitimacy as an investment in whiteness. We argue that such anxieties are predicated upon a normative ideal of citizenship. As such, rhetorics of disciplinary legitimacy enact white civil society's originary exclusion, which is antiblackness. To illuminate the ways antiblackness finds expression in these anxieties, we engage the field's lengthy archive of public musi…
Therapeutic and Material hood
This article analyzes the struggle over the ideograph following former Illinois Governor George Ryan's decision to commute all state death sentences in 2003. A therapeutic rendering of the ideograph typified mainstream opposition to Ryan's move. This approach personalized the death penalty at the expense of discussing its social and political implications. In contrast, the discourse of George Ryan and his supporters offered a material hood ground…
Carlos Lacerda
President Getúlio Vargas’s suicide on August 24, 1954, has long been recognized as the pivotal moment of Brazil’s Populist Republic—the tumultuous two decades between the fall of the Estado Novo dictatorship in 1945 and the military coup in 1964. His suicide—clearly as much grand political gesture as personal tragedy—passed almost immediately from current event to popular myth, interpreted in various ways according to fundamentally opposed vision…
Serial Murder as Modernist Ritual
This essay argues that the serial murderer's rituals are homologous to those that structure the more quotidian or administrative, but equally sadistic, forms of violence against fungible bodies in US civil society. At stake in this homology is recognizing that the sadism publics so readily associate with the depraved serial killer are present in the many cruelties that such publics enthusiastically condone and enjoy. Serial murder is a modernist …
Strictly an act of street violence”
On May 12, 2013, two men opened fire on a Mother’s Day second line parade in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward. This essay attends to discourses from public officials and news media following the shooting that reified what we describe as affective divestment from the suffering of historically marginalized bodies and communities. Specifically, public discourse characterized the shooting as an episode of “street violence” that did not warrant sustained na…
Cinematograph of Words
The Mystery of Samba
This fascinating and elegant study of transformations in attitudes about race, popular culture, and national identity in Brazil suffers from a misleading title. It is not a book about samba, and to the degree that it is a mystery story it is unsatisfying, for it fails to offer a convincing explanation of the mystery to which the title refers (how samba evolved from a marginal genre of a few predominantly black neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro into…
The South and the Caribbean
The South and the Caribbean. Edited by Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez and Charles Reagan Wilson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii, 208. $35.00.) More so than by geographical proximity, the U.S. South and the Caribbean are linked by the legacies of plantation slavery-by the complex codes of racism reinforcing hierarchical and exclusive societies on the one hand, and by extraordinarily rich African-American cultures on the other…
Guerra Sem Guerra
It is a curiosity of Brazilian popular memory that among residents of São Paulo, the Constitutionalist Revolt of 1932 –in which Paulistano rebels took a drubbing from Getúlio Vargas's federal government, sacrificing all their objectives in a quick surrender– has a cherished place in local lore, while World War II, in contrast, is remembered as someone else's fight, despite the fact that thousands of Brazilian soldiers, many of them Paulistanos, f…
Black Pau
Black Pau
Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle
Stimulating and insightful, these essays on the relationship among the media, popular culture, and the postwar African American freedom struggle offer new perspectives on the nature of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacies. At the same time, they suggest how much the struggle itself shaped important trends in American culture and mass media in the 1950s and 1960s. Bringing together a range of voices seldom heard together, this book challenge…
Culture Wars in Brazil
Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization
The editors of this exciting volume recognize a long-standing Brazilian tension between incorporation of foreign musical influence and anxiety over national musical heritage and explore the place of this tension in recent popular music. How have Brazilian musicians negotiated globalization and emerged with creative responses that speak deeply about local concerns? How do consumers of popular music perceive processes of globalization, and how do t…
Radio Nation
The convergence of emerging broadcasting industries and centralizing states in the 1930s–50s had enormous consequences for the industrializing nations of Latin America. In Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, in particular, the rise of radio appeared to go hand in hand with a newly powerful federal bureaucracy’s desire to mold the political, economic and cultural nation. Radio’s significance is axiomatic and oft-mentioned, but rarely studied in depth. …
Cuban Fire
The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon of the late 1990s—which rescued from obscurity a group of aged Cuban musicians and brought them to Carnegie Hall and beyond in the company of a globetrotting North American guitarist and a German filmmaker with a romantic fondness for Old Havana—provoked two competing reactions among lovers of Cuban music. On the one hand, it generated a keen hope that Buena Vista’s rising tide would lift the boats of other …
Carlos Lacerda
President Getúlio Vargas’s suicide on August 24, 1954, has long been recognized as the pivotal moment of Brazil’s Populist Republic—the tumultuous two decades between the fall of the Estado Novo dictatorship in 1945 and the military coup in 1964. His suicide—clearly as much grand political gesture as personal tragedy—passed almost immediately from current event to popular myth, interpreted in various ways according to fundamentally opposed vision…
Strong Roots. Directed by Maria Luisa Mendonça. New York
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The City of Musical Memory
The musical genre known as salsa emerged from the experimentations of Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians in East Harlem in the late 1960s and thus could plausibly be said to have its home in New York, or at more of a stretch, in San Juan or Havana. Yet by the early 1980s, residents of Cali, Colombia, were referring to their city as the World Capital of Salsa. They did so in full awareness that they had not invented the genre and that Caleño musicia…
The Political Evolution of Rio de Janeiro's Favelas
The Political Evolution of Rio de Janeiro's Favelas Recent Works Reviewed by Bryan McCann Georgetown University A Favela Fala. Edited by Dulce Chaves Pandolfi and Mário Grynszpan. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2003. Pp. 364.) Integração Perversa: Pobreza E Tráfico De Drogas. By Alba Zaluar. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2004. Pp. 440.) Lucia: Testimonies of a Brazilian Drug Dealer's Woman. By Robert Gay. (P…
Therapeutic and Material hood
This article analyzes the struggle over the ideograph following former Illinois Governor George Ryan's decision to commute all state death sentences in 2003. A therapeutic rendering of the ideograph typified mainstream opposition to Ryan's move. This approach personalized the death penalty at the expense of discussing its social and political implications. In contrast, the discourse of George Ryan and his supporters offered a material hood ground…
The throes of democracy
In the 1980s, Brazil emerged from two decades of military dictatorship and embarked on an experiment in full democracy for the first time in the nation's history. Since then, Brazilians have sought to live up to the ideals of this experiment while negotiating dramatic economic and cultural transformations. In The Throes of Democracy Bryan McCann gives a panoramic view of this process, exploring the relationships between the rise of the political …
Vargas and Brazil
Brazil’s Vargas period, beginning with Getúlio Vargas’s rise to power in 1930 and ending with his suicide in office in 1954 (spanning the interregnum of 1946 – 50, when he was out of presidential office), has long been recognized as Brazil’s tortured passage to modernity. Urbanization, industrialization, centralization of power, and nationalist cultural projects transformed Brazil on Getúlio’s watch and to varying degrees following his direction.…
A bossa nova e a influência do blues, 1955-1964
Este artigo considera as conexões entre blues e bossa nova, pouco reconhecidas na literatura sobre bossa nova mas muito importantes para o desenvolvimento do estilo. Analisando as gravações do circuito samba-jazz em Copacabana nas décadas de 1950 e 1960, o artigo traz à luz uma prática de blues, tanto na estrutura de doze compassos como na utilização da escala blues como matéria de improviso, bastante comum naquela época. O artigo explica o papel…
Turning Silence into Speech and Action
Based on almost 50 years of combined experience as prison activists and prison teachers, the authors offer three case studies of prison activism and pedagogy in action. The first case study, by Hartnett, details the “artistry of agency” as enacted in poetry workshops in prison and in public poetry events, thus illustrating artistic communication. The second, by Wood, examines how friendship becomes political in the epistolary communication betwee…
African Rhythms in Brazilian Popular Music
As diferenças entre o maxixe e o tango brasileiro se definem mais claramente nos padrões de acompanhamento do violão. Este estudo define esses padrões e mostra a importância de entender as sutilezas das heranças Africana e Européia na música brasileira. Uma análise da evolução desses padrões de acompanhamento ilumina o desenvolvimento da música brasileira entre o fim do século XIX e os meados do século XX. A compreensão desses padrões influencia …
A View from the Corner Bar
This article explores the nature and influence of the satirical journalism of Sérgio Porto, alias Stanislaw Ponte Preta, in Brazil from 1964 to 1968. Porto's daily column in the Última Hora newspaper lampooned the Brazilian military dictatorship for its corruption, self-satisfaction, and ignorance and denounced its violence. At the same time, Porto carefully distanced himself from the radical left, appealing to a moderate popular audience. This s…
Culture of Class
This innovative book builds on and goes beyond recent scholarship on the rise of mass culture in Latin America. Matthew Karush offers a thorough yet nimble investigation of both the cinematic, popular musical, and theatrical products of Argentina’s emerging culture industry and the heated critical debates about the nature and effects of these products. He follows interweaving cultural and political trajectories from the birth of Argentine radio t…
Affect, Black Rage, and False Alternatives in the Hip-Hop Nation
This essay looks to the work of iconic rap artist Tupac Shakur to illuminate the role of Black rage as a common denominator between rap's most conscious and gangsta iterations. Specifically, by theorizing Black rage as the founding affective impulse of the hip-hop nation, critics can identify common affective threads across the genre and spy emancipatory potential in hip-hop's most jarring excesses, as surely as its more lucidly political iterati…
Entering the Darkness
The 2003 film Monster depicted events in the life of executed murderer Aileen Wuornos. While many gender theorists describe the Wuornos case as a site of gender trouble vis-à-vis violence in public culture, discourse surrounding the film focused primarily on Charlize Theron's portrayal of Wuornos. Her performance was largely framed as a temporary voyage into an amorphous “darkness” that physically and emotionally transformed her. The resulting na…
Sociology (38 obras) · Political science (33 obras) · Art (27 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Politics (19 obras) · History (16 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Media studies (14 obras) · Psychology (13 obras) · Criminology (12 obras)