Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Antonio Maceo Grajales (1845–1896) is one of the most celebrated heroes of Cuban independence. Though he died before he could see the dawn of a sovereign, if U.S.-occupied, Cuba, Maceo would become an important node of nationalist commemoration. Throughout this process, Maceo's blackness represented both a source of his prestige—the struggle against African slavery had been intimately tied to independence—and a barometer of lingering racial inequalities. Posthumous depictions thus tended to downplay racial tensions in a unifying vision of nation. Yet Maceo's martyrdom in the Spanish-Cuban-American War also reverberated in more uncanny registers. Before and after his death, apocryphal sons emerged periodically from the shadows, opening battles over Maceo's legacy. In their movement across borders, these real and apocryphal children gave voice to silences around race and sovereignty as they converged on the body of their lionized "father," while also opening up narrative spaces wherein the status quo could be reimagined.

In this paper, I will examine the myriad and often internally contradictory ways in which nineteenth-century "abolitionist" Cuban elites theorized the culpability and perversion of white male sexuality in the slave system. Their discourse evolved over the course of the century to incorporate emerging positivist/scientific thinking about racial types, including the idea of the mulata as an instrument of social/sexual contagion. This intervention obscured the question of the white man's sexual volition, as "abolitionist" thinkers attempted to reconcile their presumptions of mulata victimization with a newly cohesive belief in the essentially predatory sexuality of the mulata. I will approach these questions through a close reading of a curious pamphlet, La mulata by Eduardo Ezponda, and an analysis of its relationship to an abolitionist novelistic tradition including the works of Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Antonio Zambrano, and Cirilo Villaverde. Ezponda's call to rehabilitate white masculinity by purging it of the decadent and perverse qualities it had acquired under the sugar/slavery regime aligns with the political imperative to fashion a new masculinity in the rapidly changing political and social contexts of the late nineteenth century. The paper will also consider how items and texts that resonated more strongly with non-elite Cuban audiences—tobacco marquillas and popular poetry, especially—challenge and complicate the picture of white male sexuality as crafted in the canonical novelistic tradition of nineteenth-century Cuba.

This study investigates the roles of multiple factors, including audience factors, content factors, and third-person perceptions, in predicting support for content restrictions on mass-mediated information, entertainment, and propaganda. Survey data collected from student and non-student adult groups show that both groups support more extreme forms of content restrictions for propaganda than for information or entertainment content. However, closer examination reveals that students and adults differ on factors predicting their support for content restrictions.

Abstract
Are conservatives more likely than liberals to oppose celebrity political expression? And if so, is this attributable to the overwhelmingly liberal ideology of the actors, musicians, and athletes who speak out on political matters? The hybridity hypothesis suggests that opposition to celebrity political expression might also be grounded in individuals' psychological predispositions and resulting aesthetic preferences. Using 2018 national CCES data (N = 1000), we test the relationships between political beliefs, psychological traits, and support for celebrity political expression. Results indicate that need for cognitive closure is significantly negatively associated with support for celebrity expression, and that this relationship functions independently of the political leanings of the audience and of the political nature of the expression being made. The notion that a psychological need for closure is associated with less approval of certain forms of political discourse has important democratic implications, especially given the documented link between need for cognitive closure and political conservatism.

This study examines the implications of messages within a fragmented media environment for public opinion about net neutrality. Drawing on media effects theory and an analysis of media messages, it argues that different forms of media use—including consumption of traditional news, partisan cable news, political satire, and streaming video services—can exert distinctive effects on public familiarity with and support for net neutrality. Moreover, it extends research on information subsidy and intertextuality to argue that political satire use can interact with other forms of media use in shaping public responses to complex policy issues such as net neutrality. Using original data from national telephone surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015, the analyses reveal that various forms of media use predicted familiarity with and support for net neutrality. The findings also suggest that exposure to political satire can shape the translation of information obtained from other sources into opinion.

Public perceptions of candidates' personality traits play important roles in shaping vote choice. Previous accounts point to authenticity as one key trait, but little research has systematically investigated perceptions regarding candidate authenticity. This study uses data from a telephone survey to show that political predispositions (trust, external efficacy, interest, partisanship, and ideology), and television news use (broadcast and cable) predicted perceptions of candidate authenticity in the context of the 2012 presidential campaign. A question‐wording experiment also showed that perceptions regarding the authenticity of political messages varied across source (Obama or Romney), substance (working for "the middle class" or "job creators"), and the receiver's partisanship.

AbstractVoters and political candidates increasingly use social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook. This study uses data from an online posttest-only experiment (N= 183) in analyzing how exposure to supportive or challenging user comments on a fictional candidate's Facebook page influenced participants' perceptions of and willingness to vote for the candidate, as well as whether candidate replies to each type of user comments affected these outcomes. Participants who viewed a page with supportive comments and "likes" reported more favorable perceptions of and greater support for the candidate, relative to participants who viewed a page with challenging comments. Thus, the appearance of interactivity between a candidate and other users on the candidate's Facebook page can shape the responses of those viewing the page. However, exposure to candidate replies to either supportive or challenging comments did not lead to significantly more favorable perceptions or a greater likelihood of voting for the candidate.