Connecting The Wire : : Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore / / Stanley Corkin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press Complete eBook-Package 2017
• VerfasserIn: Corkin, Stanley,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Texas Film and Media Studies Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (241 p.)

Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society riven by racism and inequality. In Connecting The Wire , Stanley Corkin presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show’s depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire’s creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social “givens.” In The Wire’s gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life, and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One. Season 1: Drugs, Race, and the Structures of Social Immobility -- Chapter Two. Season 2: The Wire, the Waterfront, and the Ravages of Neoliberalism -- Chapter Three. Season 3: Drugs, Space, and Redevelopment -- Chapter Four. Season 4: A Neoliberal Education— Space, Knowledge, and Schooling -- Chapter Five. Season 5: The Demise of the Public Sphere— News, Lies, and Policing -- Conclusion. The Wire and the New Dawn (Maybe) -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index