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Browsing Faculty Publications by Author "Aoki, Eric, author"

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    Counter-imagination as interpretive practice: futuristic fantasy and The Fifth Element
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2004) Aoki, Eric, author; Ott, Brian L., author; Organization for Research on Women and Communication, publisher
    This essay concerns the relationship between popular cinematic visions of the future and present day identity politics. The authors argue that despite its futuristic setting celebrating technological progress and multiculturalism, Luc Besson's 1997 film The Fifth Element constructs sexual and racial difference in a manner that privileges and naturalizes White heterosexual masculinity. The essay offers counter-imagination as an interpretive practice that destabilizes the categories of sexual and racial difference as they are negotiated within appeals to popular imagination.
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    Memory and myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2005) Aoki, Eric, author; Ott, Brian L., author; Dickinson, Greg, author; Western States Communication Association, publisher
    Few places tell the myth of the American frontier more vigorously than the Buffalo Bill Museum does in Cody, Wyoming. Traveling to the museum through the 'Western' landscape of Wyoming into the foothills of the Rockies prepares visitors for the tale of Western settlement. This narrative, which works to secure a particular vision of the West, draws upon the material artifacts of Cody's childhood and his exploits as scout, Pony Express rider and showman. The museum retells the story that Cody first told to millions at the turn of the twentieth century in his Wild West arena show. In this paper, we argue that the museum privileges images of masculinity and Whiteness, while using the props, films, and posters of Buffalo Bill's Wild West to carnivalize the violent conflicts between Anglo Americans and Native Americans.
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    Popular imagination and identity politics: reading the future in Star Trek: The Next Generation
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2001) Aoki, Eric, author; Ott, Brian L., author; Western States Communication Association, publisher
    Through an analysis of the popular syndicated television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, this essay begins to theorize the relationship between collective visions of the future and the identity politics of the present. Focusing on the tension between the show's utopian rhetoric of the future and its representational practices with regard to race, gender, and sexuality, it is argued that The Next Generation invites audiences to participate in a shared sense of the future that constrains human agency and (re)produces the current cultural hegemony with regard to identity politics. The closing section calls for critics to continue politicizing mediated images that appeal to popular imagination and to develop and implement a pedagogical practice of counter-imagination.