Description: How popular media cultivates genealogy but buries its cultural context
Brief description: Christine Scodari is professor at Florida Atlantic University and author of Serial Monogamy: Soap Opera, Lifespan, and the Gendered Politics of Fantasy. She has published many articles, including an award winner on genealogy television in the Journal of American Culture and a chapter in the edited volume Aging, Media, and Culture.
Review Quotes: This slim, engaging volume tracks the development and spread of practices related to genealogies using an autoethnographic, textual approach. Scodari (media and women's studies, Florida Atlantic Univ.) makes the case for conducting family histories in her role as a scholar, tracing how her interest emerged. While providing an overview of the major impetuses, players, and trends in genealogy, the book also interrogates their precepts. Popular engagement with family history can preclude a critical stance, which is why an autoethnographic, theoretically grounded approach to a genealogical excavation merits interest. Four chapters address media representations and practices. In two others Scordari emphasizes 'race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities' in the areas of 'family history television' and 'genealogy television migration narratives, ' along with related practices and texts. The remaining two chapters deal with 'identity and genetic ancestry' in either 'digital media' or 'genealogy television.' By way of pointing up certain critical trajectories and applying practices, methods, and discoveries to her own life history, Scodari models the ways students can engage their own genealogies. The pointed critique of these practices is self-reflexive without being stymieing, certainly an aspiration for undergraduate research. Useful for collections in history, American studies, ethnic studies, and anthropology.--E. Pappas, University of Virginia "CHOICE, February 2019, Vol. 56 No. 6"