Tasha Oren

... I will lay the groundwork for why we should care about the increas-ing politicization of technology and ... DESTRUCTION OF THE DIGITAL COMMONS 15 A PERSONAL STAKE ... AND THE LIMITS OF TECHNOLOGY As a technologist who has been following civil liberties issues for ...

... Jordan, Denis Provencher, Mark Netzloff, and Amanda Selig-man, for their enthusiasm, brilliance, insightful comments, and rau-cous camaraderie ... Thanks to Pat Mellencamp, Sandra Braman, Mat Rappaport, Marilu Knode, Toby Miller, and Peter Paik for giving so generously of ...

<p>Tasha Oren conducts close readings of the television documentaries <italic>Stairway to Heaven</italic> (Errol Morris, Bravo, 2000) and <italic>The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow</italic> (Emma Sutten, BBC, 2006) and the fictionalized biopic <italic>Temple Grandin</italic> (Mick Jackson, HBO, 2010). These representations of Temple Grandin—prolific author, professor of animal science at Colorado University, and famous Autist—are used to explain shifts in popular understandings of autism in the 21st century. This chapter illustrates how close attention to film style and cultural representations can be used to understand larger social shifts in the meanings of disability.</p>

Introduction: Television Formats--A Global Framework for TV Studies Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf I. Format Theories and Global Television 1. More than Copycat Television: Format Adaptation as Performance Vinicius Navarro 2. Calling Out Around the World: The Global Appeal of Reality Dance Formats Dana Heller 3. Television Formats and Contemporary Sports Tony Schiarto 4. A Political Economy of Formatted Pleasure Eddie Brennan 5. Interpreting Cubanness, Americanness, and the Sitcom: WPBT-PBS's Que Pasa USA? Yeidy M. Rivero II. Transnational Formats: Historical Perspectives 6. From Discrete Adaptations to Hard Copies: The Rise of Formats in European Television Jerome Bourdon 7. "National Mike": Global Host and Global Formats in Early Italian Television Chiara Ferrari 8. Telenovelas in Brazil: From Traveling Scripts to a Genre and Proto-Format both National and Transnational Joseph Straubhaar 9. Reversal of Fortune? Hollywood Faces New Competition in Global Media Trade Paul Torre III. Case Study: The Idol Franchise 10. Idol Worship: Ethnicity and Difference in Global Television Biswarup Sen 11. NZ Idol: Nation Building through Format Adaptation Joost De Bruin 12. Global Television Formats in Africa--Localizing Idols Martin Nkosi Ndlela 13. We Are the World: American Idol's Global Self-Posturing Erica Jean Bochanty-Aguero IV. Trans-Formats: Local Articulations and the Politics of Place and Nation 14. The Social and Political Dimensions of Global Television Formats: Reality Television in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia Marwin M. Kraidy 15. A Revolution in Television and a Great Leap Forward for Innovation? China in the Global Television Format Business Michael Keane 16. Global Television Formats and the Political Economy of Cultural Adaptation: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in India Lauhona Ganguly 17. Global Franchising, Gender, and Genre: The Case of Domestic Reality Television Sharon Sharp 18. Reiterational Texts and Global Imagination: Television Strikes Back Tasha Oren

... Jordan, Denis Provencher, Mark Netzloff, and Amanda Selig-man, for their enthusiasm, brilliance, insightful comments, and rau-cous camaraderie ... Thanks to Pat Mellencamp, Sandra Braman, Mat Rappaport, Marilu Knode, Toby Miller, and Peter Paik for giving so generously of ...

Through an in-depth look at the history of US food television, this essay elucidates the extent to which contemporary television relies on the structural (and narrative) logic of the format. Focusing on contemporary food television's radical evolution with the introduction of competition programmes and formats, the essay accounts for the move away from female-centred, domestic ‘How-to’ cooking programmes in favour of restaurant-set competition shows that highlight professional, high-stakes performance, criticism, stress, and risk. This shift from the aspirational aesthetics of ‘Gastro Porn’ to the psychological endurance of what I (albeit playfully) term ‘Culinary S&M’ illustrates how contemporary cooking competition programmes in the multi-platform media marketplace help re-align cultural meanings of food, pleasure, taste, identity, labour and consumption.

This dissertation is dedicated to the love of my life and “war-time consigliere”, Gil Shahaf, and to our little miracle-baby, Ella, who participated in utero and as a newborn in the writing efforts. Without your love and support none of this would have been possible. Acknowledgments The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the support and help of a great many people- family, friends and colleagues. I wish to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all those people who made it possible. My deepest gratitude is to my advisor, Dr. Shanti Kumar. I feel immensely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such an outstanding scholar, whose wisdom, brilliance, and knowledge are surpassed only by his profound humanity. To say that Shanti has been an invaluable source of guidance, inspiration, and support through some of the most intense and exciting years of my life would be an understatement. As an excellent, rigorous, and insightful academ...

Acknowledgments Foreword Robert G. LeeIntroduction Shilpa Dave, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha G. OrenPart I: Globalization and Local IdentitiesTrance-FormationsSunaina MairaMaking Transnational Vietnamese MusicKieu Linh Caroline ValverdePlanet BollywoodJigna DesaiModel Minorities Can CookAnita Mannur"pappy's house"Vicente M. DiazPart II: Cultural Legacy and Memories"Within Each Crack/A Story"Victor Bascara"A Woman Is Nothing"Christine SoBetween Yellowphilia and YellowphobiaHye Seung ChungWhose Paradise? Morris YoungMiss Cherry Blossom Meets Mainstream America Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'RiainHow to Rehabilitate a MulattoHiram PerezPart III: Ethnicity and Identi?cationBruce Lee in the Ghetto ConnectionAmy Abugo Ongiri"Alllooksame"? Lisa NakamuraGuilty PleasuresLeiLani NishimeCibo Matto's Stereotype AJane C. H. ParkApu's Brown VoiceShilpa DaveSecret Asian ManTasha G. OrenAbout the Contributors Index

... lower half of the screen, the caption identifies the trespassing signal as 'Belly Dancer from Cairo: Channel 8' (Ben-David, 1966) The ... an Israeli television service seemed nearly preposterous, dismissed within the government and by most public figures as the ultimate 'idiot box': a ...

Essay from Global Asian American Popular Culture (ed. by S. Dave, L. Nashime and T. Oren) newly out from NYU press

The chapter traces the hisotries of Asian American chefs/cooks on TV and links these with both the history of cooking competitions and the development of Asian American cuisine. It argues that the specific and politically laden history of "Asian American food" and cooking practices produced discourses about culinary style, tradition, and individual biography that lend themselves particularly well to the  televisual identity-based conventions of the cooking competition format.

This book serves up an accessible, critical introduction to food television,
providing readers with a solid foundation for understanding how culinary
culture became pop culture via the medium of television.
The book follows FoodTV’s journey from purely instructional resource to a
wide variety of formats, from celebrity chef and restaurant profiles to culinary
travel and every manner of cooking competition from kids to cannabis. Tasha
Oren traces the generic expansion of cooking on television as she argues for its development as a uniquely apt lens through which to observe and understand television’s own dramatic extension from network to cable to streaming platforms. She demonstrates how FoodTV became popular commercial television through its growth beyond instruction, response to industrial and cultural change, and a decisive turn away from an association with domesticity or femininity. The story of FoodTV offers a new understanding of how certain material, stylistic, and textual practices that make up television emerge as conventions, and how such conventions both endure and evolve.
This book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of media studies,
television studies, food studies, and cultural studies.

Tasha Oren is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Film
and Media Studies Program at Tufts University. Her books include Demon in
the Box: Jews, Arabs, Politics and Culture in the Making of Israeli Television, the edited collections The Handbook of Contemporary Feminism (with Andrea Press), Global Asian American Popular Cultures (with Shilpa Davē and Leilani Nishime), Global Television Formats—Understanding Television Across Borders (with Sharon Shahaf), and other edited collections, essays, and articles.

What does a country's television programming say about its deep character, beliefs, dreams and fears? Here, Tasha G. Oren recounts the volatile history of Israeli television and aiming to reveal the history of the nation itself. Initially rejected as a corrupting influence on "the people of the book", television became the object of fantasies and anxieties that went to the heart of Israel's most pressing concerns: Arab-Israeli relations, immigration and the forging of a modern Israeli. Television broadcasting was aimed toward external relations - the flow of messages across borders, Arab-Israeli conflict, and the shaping of public opinion worldwide - as much as it was toward internal needs and interests. Through archival research and analysis of public scandals and early programmes, Oren traces Israeli television's transformation from a feared agent of decadence to a powerful national communication tool, and eventally, to a vastly popular entertainment medium.

Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation. Essayists in "Global Currents" argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today.

From henna tattoo kits available at your local mall to “faux Asian” fashions, housewares and fusion cuisine; from the new visibility of Asian film, music, video games and anime to the current popularity of martial arts motifs in hip hop, Asian influences have thoroughly saturated the U.S. cultural landscape and have now become an integral part of the vernacular of popular culture.

By tracing cross-cultural influences and global cultural trends, the essays in East Main Street bring Asian American studies, in all its interdisciplinary richness, to bear on a broad spectrum of cultural artifacts. Contributors consider topics ranging from early Asian American movie stars to the influences of South Asian iconography on rave culture, and from the marketing of Asian culture through food to the contemporary clamor for transnational Chinese women’s historical fiction. East Main Street hits the shelves in the midst of a boom in Asian American population and cultural production. This book is essential not only for understanding Asian American popular culture but also contemporary U.S. popular culture writ large.

Winner of the 2013 SCMS Best Edited Collection Award
For decades, television scholars have viewed global television through the lens of cultural imperialism, focusing primarily on programs produced by US and UK markets and exported to foreign markets. Global Television Formats revolutionizes television studies by de-provincializing its approach to media globalization. It re-examines dominant approaches and their legacies of global/local and center/periphery, and offers new directions for understanding television’s contemporary incarnations.



The chapters in this collection take up the format phenomena from around the globe, including the Middle East, Western and Eastern Europe, South and West Africa, South and East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Contributors address both little known examples and massive global hits ranging from the Idol franchise around the world, to telenovelas, dance competitions, sports programming, reality TV, quiz shows, sitcoms and more. Looking to global television formats as vital for various cultural meanings, relationships, and structures, this collection shows how formats can further our understanding of television and the culture of globalization at large.