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D'Albuquerque's Children: Performing Tradition in Malaysia's Portuguese Settlement (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)
by Margaret SarkissianWhen the Portuguese seafarer Afonso de Albuquerque conquered the bustling port of Malacca in 1511, he effectively gained control of the entire South China Sea spice trade. Although their dominance lasted only 130 years, the Portuguese legacy lies at the heart of a burgeoning tourist attraction on the outskirts of the city, in which performers who believe they are the descendants of swashbuckling Portuguese conquerors encapsulate their "history" in a cultural stage show. Using historical and ethnographic data, Margaret Sarkissian reveals that this music and dance draws on an eclectic array of influences that span the Portuguese diaspora (one song conjures up images of Lucille Ball impersonating Carmen Miranda on "I Love Lucy"). Ironically, she shows, what began as a literate tradition in the 1950s has now become an oral one so deeply rooted in Settlement life that the younger generation, like the tourists, now see it as an unbroken heritage stretching back almost 500 years. A fascinating case of "orientalism in reverse," D'Albuquerque's Children illuminates the creative ways in which one community has adapted to life in a postcolonial world.
Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (Big Issues in Music)
by Fabian HoltFor decades, millions of music fans have gathered every summer in parks and fields to hear their favorite bands at festivals such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Glastonbury. How did these and countless other festivals across the globe evolve into glamorous pop culture events, and how are they changing our relationship to music, leisure, and public culture? In Everyone Loves Live Music, Fabian Holt looks beyond the marketing hype to show how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades, as sites that were once meaningful sources of community and culture are increasingly subsumed by corporate giants. Examining a diverse range of cases across Europe and the United States, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a pioneering theory of performance institutions. He explores the fascinating history of the club and the festival in San Francisco and New York, as well as a number of European cities. This book also explores the social forces shaping live music as small, independent venues become corporatized and as festivals transform to promote mainstream Anglophone culture and its consumerist trappings. The book further provides insight into the broader relationship between culture and community in the twenty-first century. An engaging read for fans, industry professionals, and scholars alike, Everyone Loves Live Music reveals how our contemporary enthusiasm for live music is more fraught than we would like to think.
Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (Big Issues in Music)
by Fabian HoltFor decades, millions of music fans have gathered every summer in parks and fields to hear their favorite bands at festivals such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Glastonbury. How did these and countless other festivals across the globe evolve into glamorous pop culture events, and how are they changing our relationship to music, leisure, and public culture? In Everyone Loves Live Music, Fabian Holt looks beyond the marketing hype to show how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades, as sites that were once meaningful sources of community and culture are increasingly subsumed by corporate giants. Examining a diverse range of cases across Europe and the United States, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a pioneering theory of performance institutions. He explores the fascinating history of the club and the festival in San Francisco and New York, as well as a number of European cities. This book also explores the social forces shaping live music as small, independent venues become corporatized and as festivals transform to promote mainstream Anglophone culture and its consumerist trappings. The book further provides insight into the broader relationship between culture and community in the twenty-first century. An engaging read for fans, industry professionals, and scholars alike, Everyone Loves Live Music reveals how our contemporary enthusiasm for live music is more fraught than we would like to think.
Who Wrote the Book of Love?
by Lee SiegelWho Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex—beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love. Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love. "Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.
Who Wrote the Book of Love?
by Lee SiegelWho Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex—beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love. Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love. "Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.
TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television
by Lynn SpigelWhile critics have long disparaged commercial television as a vast wasteland, TV has surprising links to the urbane world of modern art that stretch back to the 1950s and ’60s During that era, the rapid rise of commercial television coincided with dynamic new movements in the visual arts—a potent combination that precipitated a major shift in the way Americans experienced the world visually. TV by Design uncovers this captivating story of how modernism and network television converged and intertwined in their mutual ascent during the decades of the cold war. Whereas most histories of television focus on the way older forms of entertainment were recycled for the new medium, Lynn Spigel shows how TV was instrumental in introducing the public to the latest trends in art and design. Abstract expressionism, pop art, art cinema, modern architecture, and cutting-edge graphic design were all mined for staging techniques, scenic designs, and an ever-growing number of commercials. As a result, TV helped fuel the public craze for trendy modern products, such as tailfin cars and boomerang coffee tables, that was vital to the burgeoning postwar economy. And along with influencing the look of television, many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—also participated in its creation as the networks put them to work designing everything from their corporate headquarters to their company cufflinks. Dizzy Gillespie, Ernie Kovacs, Duke Ellington, and Andy Warhol all stop by in this imaginative and winning account of the ways in which art, television, and commerce merged in the first decades of the TV age.
The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination
by Philip Ball"Impressive. . . . Rich in cultural history and imagination. . . . To Ball, mythic writing is where the conditions of irrationality, superstition, and enchantment persist: forms of wonder that depend on the disconnect between what we know for sure and what we simply believe.”—New York Times Book Review Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.
Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Cinema and Modernity)
by Garrett StewartItalian director Michelangelo Antonioni claimed, three decades ago, that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And as Garrett Stewart argues here, this transatlantic division has persisted since cinema’s 1995 centenary, made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip. Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent films—from Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, and The Sixth Sense to La mala educación and Caché —Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film’s original rolling reel to today’s digital pixel. He goes on to show—with 140 stills—how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly afterlives, psychotic doubles, or violent time travel, their European counterparts more often feature second sight, erotic telepathy, or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots, in exploring temporality, gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so, he provocatively continues the project he began with Between Film and Screen, breaking new ground in visual studies, cinema history, and media theory.
Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Cinema and Modernity)
by Garrett StewartItalian director Michelangelo Antonioni claimed, three decades ago, that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And as Garrett Stewart argues here, this transatlantic division has persisted since cinema’s 1995 centenary, made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip. Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent films—from Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, and The Sixth Sense to La mala educación and Caché —Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film’s original rolling reel to today’s digital pixel. He goes on to show—with 140 stills—how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly afterlives, psychotic doubles, or violent time travel, their European counterparts more often feature second sight, erotic telepathy, or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots, in exploring temporality, gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so, he provocatively continues the project he began with Between Film and Screen, breaking new ground in visual studies, cinema history, and media theory.
Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Cinema and Modernity)
by Garrett StewartItalian director Michelangelo Antonioni claimed, three decades ago, that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And as Garrett Stewart argues here, this transatlantic division has persisted since cinema’s 1995 centenary, made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip. Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent films—from Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko, and The Sixth Sense to La mala educación and Caché —Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film’s original rolling reel to today’s digital pixel. He goes on to show—with 140 stills—how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly afterlives, psychotic doubles, or violent time travel, their European counterparts more often feature second sight, erotic telepathy, or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots, in exploring temporality, gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so, he provocatively continues the project he began with Between Film and Screen, breaking new ground in visual studies, cinema history, and media theory.
Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States
by Thomas StreeterIn this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold. With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.
Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States
by Thomas StreeterIn this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold. With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.
Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States
by Thomas StreeterIn this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold. With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.
Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea
by Adrienne J. CohenIn Guinea’s capital city of Conakry, dance is everywhere. Most neighborhoods boast at least one dance troupe, and members of those troupes animate the city’s major rites of passage and social events. In Infinite Repertoire, Adrienne Cohen shows how dance became such a prominent—even infrastructural—feature of city life in Guinea, and tells a surprising story of the rise of creative practice under a political regime known for its authoritarianism and violent excesses. Guinea’s socialist state, which was in power from 1958 to 1984, used staged African dance or “ballet” strategically as a political tool, in part by tapping into indigenous conceptualizations of artisans as powerful figures capable of transforming the social fabric through their manipulation of vital energy. Far from dying with the socialist revolution, Guinean ballet continued to thrive in Conakry after economic liberalization in the 1980s, with its connection to transformative power retrofitted for a market economy and a rapidly expanding city. Infinite Repertoire follows young dancers and percussionists in Conakry as they invest in the present—using their bodies to build a creative urban environment and to perform and redefine social norms and political subjectivities passed down from the socialist generation before them. Cohen’s inventive ethnography weaves the political with the aesthetic, placing dance at the center of a story about dramatic political change and youthful resourcefulness in one of the least-studied cities on the African continent.
Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea
by Adrienne J. CohenIn Guinea’s capital city of Conakry, dance is everywhere. Most neighborhoods boast at least one dance troupe, and members of those troupes animate the city’s major rites of passage and social events. In Infinite Repertoire, Adrienne Cohen shows how dance became such a prominent—even infrastructural—feature of city life in Guinea, and tells a surprising story of the rise of creative practice under a political regime known for its authoritarianism and violent excesses. Guinea’s socialist state, which was in power from 1958 to 1984, used staged African dance or “ballet” strategically as a political tool, in part by tapping into indigenous conceptualizations of artisans as powerful figures capable of transforming the social fabric through their manipulation of vital energy. Far from dying with the socialist revolution, Guinean ballet continued to thrive in Conakry after economic liberalization in the 1980s, with its connection to transformative power retrofitted for a market economy and a rapidly expanding city. Infinite Repertoire follows young dancers and percussionists in Conakry as they invest in the present—using their bodies to build a creative urban environment and to perform and redefine social norms and political subjectivities passed down from the socialist generation before them. Cohen’s inventive ethnography weaves the political with the aesthetic, placing dance at the center of a story about dramatic political change and youthful resourcefulness in one of the least-studied cities on the African continent.
How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today
by Simon GoldhillFrom the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today. In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor’s role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe. One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers—not to mention the growing audiences—of ancient Greek theater.
How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today
by Simon GoldhillFrom the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today. In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor’s role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe. One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers—not to mention the growing audiences—of ancient Greek theater.
How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today
by Simon GoldhillFrom the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today. In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor’s role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe. One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers—not to mention the growing audiences—of ancient Greek theater.
How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today
by Simon GoldhillFrom the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today. In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor’s role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe. One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers—not to mention the growing audiences—of ancient Greek theater.
Bette Davis Black and White
by Julia A. SternBette Davis’s career becomes a vehicle for a deep examination of American race relations. Bette Davis was not only one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but also one of its most outspoken advocates on matters of race. In Bette Davis Black and White, Julia A. Stern explores this largely untold facet of Davis’s brilliant career. Bette Davis Black and White analyzes four of Davis’s best-known pictures—Jezebel (1938), The Little Foxes (1941), In This Our Life (1942), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)—against the history of American race relations. Stern also weaves in memories of her own experiences as a young viewer, coming into racial consciousness watching Davis’s films on television in an all-white suburb of Chicago. Davis’s egalitarian politics and unique collaborations with her Black costars offer Stern a window into midcentury American racial fantasy and the efforts of Black performers to disrupt it. This book incorporates testimony from Davis’s Black contemporaries, including James Baldwin and C. L. R. James, as well as the African American fans who penned letters to Warner Brothers praising Davis’s work. A unique combination of history, star study, and memoir, Bette Davis Black and White allows us to contemplate cross-racial spectatorship in new ways.
Bette Davis Black and White
by Julia A. SternBette Davis’s career becomes a vehicle for a deep examination of American race relations. Bette Davis was not only one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but also one of its most outspoken advocates on matters of race. In Bette Davis Black and White, Julia A. Stern explores this largely untold facet of Davis’s brilliant career. Bette Davis Black and White analyzes four of Davis’s best-known pictures—Jezebel (1938), The Little Foxes (1941), In This Our Life (1942), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)—against the history of American race relations. Stern also weaves in memories of her own experiences as a young viewer, coming into racial consciousness watching Davis’s films on television in an all-white suburb of Chicago. Davis’s egalitarian politics and unique collaborations with her Black costars offer Stern a window into midcentury American racial fantasy and the efforts of Black performers to disrupt it. This book incorporates testimony from Davis’s Black contemporaries, including James Baldwin and C. L. R. James, as well as the African American fans who penned letters to Warner Brothers praising Davis’s work. A unique combination of history, star study, and memoir, Bette Davis Black and White allows us to contemplate cross-racial spectatorship in new ways.
Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Routledge Library Editions: Cinema Ser.)
by Yuri TsivianEarly Cinema in Russia chronicles one of the great lost periods in cinema history, that of Pre-Revolutionary Russia. In contrast to standard film histories, Yuri Tsivian focuses on reflected images: it features the historical film-goer and early writings on film as well as examining the physical elements of cinematic performance. "Tsivian casts a probing beam of illumination into some of the most obscure areas of film history. And the terrain he lights up with his careful assembly and insightful reading of the records of early film viewing in Russia not only changes our sense of the history of this period but also . . . causes us to re-evaluate some of our most basic theoretical and historical assumptions about what a film is and how it affects its audiences."—Tom Gunning, from the Foreword "Early Cinema in Russia . . . reveals Tsivian's strengths very well and demonstrates why he is . . . the finest film historian of his generation in the former Soviet Union."—Denise Y. Youngblood, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television "A work of fundamental importance."—Julian Graffy, Recent Studies of Russian and Soviet Cinema
The New Female Antihero: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television
by Sarah Hagelin Gillian SilvermanThe New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television. The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable. In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.
The New Female Antihero: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television
by Sarah Hagelin Gillian SilvermanThe New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television. The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable. In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.
Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media
by Giuliana BrunoBringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment. Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their “environmentality” produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.