1922 and the problems of docudrama

SUMMARY

In this article the authors use 1922, (a ‘true story’) to probe the social function of television in South Africa. In particular they examine the transformations effected on historical “fact” by the genre of docudrama and the kinds of preferred readings this offers television viewers. The popularity of this form, they suggest, is that in this world of uncertainty, the docudrama gives viewers both pleasurable access to, and a moral orientation towards, the ‘real’.     

Book Reviews

Leonard S. Spector and Jacqueline R. Smith, Nuclear Ambitions: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 1989–1990 (Boulder: Westview, 1990), 450 pp, $49.95.

David D. Newsom, Ed., The Diplomatic Record 1989–1990 (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 272 pp, $49.95.

Roger Hilsman, American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines (Washington, DC: Brassey's, Inc., with the Association of the United States Army Institute of Land Warfare, 1990), 312 pp, $12.95.

Janne E. Nolan, Trappings of Power: Ballistic Missiles in the Third World (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1991), 210 pp, $29.95.

Max G. Manwaring, Ed., Uncomfortable Wars: Toward A New Paradigm of Low Intensity Conflict (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 139 pp, $24.95.     

In Defense of the Standard Picture: Overcoming Death by a Thousand Cuts

In a previous article, I defended the standard picture of law (or SP), so labeled by its foremost critic, Mark Greenberg. In that article, I addressed Greenberg's root-and-branch critique of the SP and, to a much lesser extent, a related critique by Scott Hershovitz. But the Greenberg and Hershovitz frontal attacks on the SP are not its only threats. Some theorists, while not attacking the SP directly, give accounts of law that the SP cannot accommodate. Those theorists will be challenged here, because if they are correct, the SP is not a tenable account of law.