Uncanny Histories in Film and Media brings together a stellar lineup of established and emergent scholars who explore the uncanny twists and turns that are often occluded in larger accounts of film and media. Prompted by fresh archival research and new conceptual approaches, the works included here probe the uncanny as a mode of historical analysis that reveals surprising connections and unsettling continuities.  The uncanny stands for what often eludes us, for what remains unfamiliar or mysterious or strange.  Whether writing about film movements, individual works, or the legacies of major or forgotten critics and theorists, the contributors remind us that at the heart of the uncanny, and indeed the writing of history, is a troubling of definitions, a challenge to our inherited narratives, and a disturbance of what was once familiar in the uncanny histories of our field.
 

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel characterized Unsecular Media as a book that "leaves you thinking about the saintly role that religion has acquired in our allegedly irreligious media."

Mark Silk's book is the first to offer a comprehensive description and analysis of how American news media cover religion.
 

By analyzing how various media told stories about Jewish celebrities and incest, Unsettling illustrates how Jewish community protective politics impacted the representation of white male Jewish masculinity in the 1990s. Chapters on Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, and Henry Roth demonstrate how media coverage of their respective incest denials (Allen), allegations (Barr), and confessions (Roth) intersect with a history of sexual antisemitism, while an introductory chapter on Jewish second-wave feminist criticism of Sigmund Freud considers how Freud became “white” in these discussions. Unsettling reveals how film, TV, and literature have helped displace once prevalent antisemitic stereotypes onto those who are non-Jewish, nonwhite, and poor. In considering how whiteness functions for an ethnoreligious group with historic vulnerability to incest stereotype as well as contemporary white privilege, Unsettling demonstrates how white Jewish men accused of incest, and even those who defiantly confess it, became improbably sympathetic figures representing supposed white male vulnerability.
 

Known for its elaborate spectacle of music, dance, costumes, and fantastical story lines, Bollywood cinema is a genre that foregrounds narrative rupture, indeterminacy, and bodily sensation. In Untimely Bollywood, Amit S. Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema are emblematic of the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. Through analyses of contemporary media practices, Rai shifts the emphasis from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of audiovisual media to the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of media events. He uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage as a model for understanding the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes that give rise to contemporary media practices. Exploring the ramifications of globalized media, he sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces in order to manage the risky excesses of power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy.

Rai recounts his experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theater in Bhopal: the sensory experience of the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. He considers media as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading, connecting human bodies, organizational structures, and energies, thus creating an inextricable bond between affect and capital. Expanding on the notion of media contagion, Rai traces the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.

This book offers a critical road map for understanding and researching “social innovation media”—initiatives that look for new solutions to seemingly intractable social problems by combining creativity, media technologies, and engaged collectives in their design and implementation. Presenting a number of case studies, including campaigns dealing with young people, Indigenous peoples, human rights, and environmental issues, the book takes a close look at the guiding principles, assumptions, goals, practices, and outcomes of these experiments, revealing the challenges they face, the components of their innovation, and the cultural economy within which they operate.