The contributors to Fabulous! Divas I (the first in a two-part series) address how Baker’s dual image as sexualized black woman and multicultural mother has been used to question and invert stereotypes, how the diva witches in the Broadway musical Wicked have developed a cult following among adolescent girls, and how fans mix irony and sincerity in their admiration of daytime soap divas. One contributor explores the cultural work of camp, while another considers hair as a fetish item for diva devotees. Among the diva appreciations are a look at the life of the cross-dressing black disco diva Sylvester, a reading of Garland as a lesbian diva par excellence, an examination of Courtney Love as a martyr diva, and a consideration of how loving Julie Andrews can make people queer.
Contributors. Alexander Doty, Brett Farmer, Joshua Gamson, Chuck Jackson, Ramon Lobato, Edward R. O’Neill, Ann Pellegrini, Julie Levine Russo, Nick Salvato, Jeanne Scheper, Edward Baron Turk, Stacy Wolf
In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film—the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life—mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales.”
Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.
This book discusses the figure of the unchaste woman in a wide range of fiction written between 1835 and 1880; serious novels by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Meredith, and George Eliot; popular novels that provided light reading for middle-class women (including books by Dinah Craik, Rhoda Broughton, and Ouida); sensational fiction; propaganda for social reform; and stories in cheap periodicals such as the Family Herald and the London Journal, which reached a different and far wider audience than either serious or popular novels.
Fandom, Now in Color gathers together seemingly contradictory narratives that intersect at the (in)visibility of race/ism in fandom and fan studies. This collection engages the problem by undertaking the different tactics of decolonization—diversifying methodologies, destabilizing canons of “must-read” scholarship by engaging with multiple disciplines, making whiteness visible but not the default against which all other kinds of racialization must compete, and decentering white fans even in those fandoms where they are the assumed majority. These new narratives concern themselves with a broad swath of media, from cosplay and comics to tabletop roleplay and video games, and fandoms from Jane the Virgin to Japan’s K-pop scene. Fandom, Now in Color asserts that no one answer or approach can sufficiently come to grips with the shifting categories of race, racism, and racial identity.
Contributors: McKenna Boeckner, Angie Fazekas, Monica Flegel, Elizabeth Hornsby, Katherine Anderson Howell, Carina Lapointe, Miranda Ruth Larsen, Judith Leggatt, Jenni Lehtinen, joan miller, Swati Moitra, Samira Nadkarni, Indira Neill Hoch, Sam Pack, Rukmini Pande, Deepa Sivarajan, Al Valentín
This volume aims to uncover the many reasons why the Middle Ages have proven so applicable to a variety of modern moments from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. These “medieval” worlds are often the perfect ground for exploring contemporary cultural concerns and anxieties, saying much more about the time and place in which they were created than they do about the actual conditions of the medieval period. With over 140 color illustrations, from sources ranging from thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts to contemporary films and video games, and a preface by Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages will surprise and delight both enthusiasts and scholars.
This title is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 21 to September 11, 2022.
"The films of Pare Lorentz are acknowledged masterpieces of world cinema. They are groundbreaking documentary records of our country in the hard years of the Depression." —William M. Drennen, Jr.In the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. Government produced a series of films about the pressing problems facing the nation—drought, flood, poverty, and slums. Starting with a minuscule initial budget of $6,000, Lorentz, a young film critic from New York who had never made a motion picture, was hired to head the project. The first fruit of his labor, The Plow That Broke the Plains, was a moving and dramatic account of the Dust Bowl that met with immediate and critical acclaim. Lorentz followed up his first film with The River, a history of the Mississippi River Basin and the effect of the Tennessee Valley Authority on the area. Both films demonstrated the potential of the documentary as a powerful impetus to social change, prompting widespread discussion not only of the problems they presented but also of the documentary form itself. This book combines the autobiographical history of a creative communicator and pioneer documentary filmmaker with the full scripts of The Plow That Broke the Plains, The River, Ecce Homo, and The Fight for Life.
Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.
Feeling Backward makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.
Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, Feeling Backward argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.
In this remarkable sequel to his Films of the Seventies: A Social History, William J. Palmer examines more than three hundred films as texts that represent, revise, parody, comment upon, and generate discussion about major events, issues, and social trends of the eighties.
Palmer defines the dialectic between film art and social history, taking as his theoretical model the "holograph of history" that originated from the New Historicist theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. Combining the interests and methodologies of social history and film criticism, Palmer contends that film is a socially conscious interpreter and commentator upon the issues of contemporary social history. In the eighties, such issues included the war in Vietnam, the preservation of the American farm, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, changes in Soviet-American relations, neoconservative feminism, and yuppies.
Among the films Palmer examines are Platoon, The Killing Fields, The River, Out of Africa, Little Drummer Girl, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Silkwood, The Day After, Red Dawn, Moscow on the Hudson, Troop Beverly Hills, and Fatal Attraction. Utilizing the principles of New Historicism, Palmer demonstrates that film can analyze and critique history as well as present it.
How animation can reconnect us with bodily experiences
Film and media studies scholarship has often argued that digital cinema and CGI provoke a sense of disembodiment in viewers; they are seen as merely fantastic or unreal. In her in-depth exploration of the phenomenology of animation, Sandra Annett offers a new perspective: that animated films and digital media in fact evoke vivid embodied sensations in viewers and connect them with the lifeworld of experience.
Starting with the emergence of digital technologies in filmmaking in the 1980s, Annett argues that contemporary digital media is indebted to the longer history of animation. She looks at a wide range of animation—from Disney films to anime, electro swing music videos to Vocaloids—to explore how animation, through its material forms and visual styles, can evoke bodily sensations of touch, weight, and orientation in space. Each chapter discusses well-known forms of animation from the United States, France, Japan, South Korea, and China, examining how they provoke different sensations in viewers, such as floating and falling in Howl’s Moving Castle and My Beautiful Girl Mari, and how the body is mediated in films that combine animation and live action, as seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Song of the South. These films set the stage for an exploration of how animation and embodiment manifest in contemporary global media, from CGI and motion capture in Disney’s “live action remakes” to new media installations by artists like Lu Yang.
Leveraging an array of case studies through a new approach to film phenomenology, The Flesh of Animation offers an enlightening discussion of why animation provides a sensational experience for viewers not replicable through other media forms.
Interest in the conjunctions of film and folklore is stronger and more diverse than ever. Ethnographic documentaries on folk life and expression remain a vital genre, but scholars such as Mikel Koven and Sharon Sherman also are exploring how folklore elements appear in, and merge with, popular cinema. They look at how movies, a popular culture medium, can as well be both a medium and type of folklore, playing cultural roles and conveying meanings customarily found in other folkloric forms. They thus use the methodology of folklore studies to “read” films made for commercial distribution.
The contributors to this book look at film and folklore convergences, showing how cinema conveys vernacular—traditional and popular—culture. Folklore/ Cinema will be of interest to scholars from many fields—folklore, film studies, popular culture, American studies, history, anthropology, and literature among them—and will help introduce students in various courses to intersections of film and culture.
Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes.
In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s.
Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichéd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever.
George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).
The canon of popular cinema has long been rife with fantastic tales, yet critical studies have too often expediently mixed the fantasy genre with its kindred science fiction and horror films or dismissed it altogether as escapist fare. Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation reconsiders the cultural significance of this storytelling mode by investigating how films seemingly divorced from reality and presented in a context of timelessness are, in fact, encoded with the social practices and beliefs of their era of production.
Situating representative fantasy films within their cultural moments, Joshua David Bellin illustrates how fantastic visions of monstrous others seek to propagate negative stereotypes of despised groups and support invidious hierarchies of social control. In constructing such an argument, Framing Monsters not only contests dismissive attitudes toward fantasy but also challenges the psychoanalytic criticism that has thus far dominated its limited critical study.
Beginning with celebrated classics, Bellin locates King Kong (1933) within the era of lynching to evince how the film protects whiteness against supposed aggressions of a black predator and reviews The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a product of the Depression’s economic anxieties. From there, the study moves to the cult classic animated Sinbad Trilogy (1958–1977) of Ray Harryhausen, films rampant with xenophobic fears of the Middle East as relevant today as when the series was originally produced.
Advancing to more recent subjects, Bellin focuses on the image of the monstrous woman and the threat of reproductive freedom found in Aliens (1986), Jurassic Park (1993), and Species (1995) and on depictions of the mentally ill as dangerous deviants in 12 Monkeys (1996) and The Cell (2000). An investigation into physical freakishness guides his approach to Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Beauty and the Beast (1991). He concludes with a discussion of X-Men (2000) and Lord of the Rings (2001–2003), commercial giants that extend a recent trend toward critical self-reflection within the genre while still participating in the continuity of social alienation.
Written to enhance rather than undermine our understanding of fantastic cinema, Framing Monsters invites filmmakers, critics, and fans alike to reassess this tremendously popular and influential film type and the monsters that populate it.
Can Muslims ever fully be citizens of the West? Can the values of Islam ever be brought into accord with the individual freedoms central to the civic identity of Western nations? Not if you believe what you see on TV. Whether the bearded fanatic, the veiled, oppressed female, or the shadowy terrorist plotting our destruction, crude stereotypes permeate public representations of Muslims in the United States and western Europe. But these "Muslims" are caricatures—distorted abstractions, wrought in the most garish colors, that serve to reduce the diversity and complexity of the Muslim world to a set of fixed objects suitable for sound bites and not much else.
In Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin dissect the ways in which stereotypes depicting Muslims as an inherently problematic presence in the West are constructed, deployed, and circulated in the public imagination, producing an immense gulf between representation and a considerably more complex reality. Crucially, they show that these stereotypes are not solely the province of crude-minded demagogues and their tabloid megaphones, but multiply as well from the lips of supposedly progressive elites, even those who presume to speak "from within," on Muslims' behalf. Based on nuanced analyses of cultural representations in both the United States and the UK, the authors draw our attention to a circulation of stereotypes about Muslims that sometimes globalizes local biases and, at other times, brings national differences into sharper relief.
Charles E. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Delaware, definitively transformed study of the novel Frankenstein with his foundational volume The Frankenstein Notebooks and, in nineteenth century studies more broadly, brought heightened attention to the nuances of writing and editing. Frankenstein and STEAM consolidates the generative legacy of his later work on the novel's broad relation to topics in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). Seven chapters written by leading and emerging scholars pay homage to Robinson's later perspectives of the novel and a concluding postscript contains remembrances by his colleagues and students. This volume not only makes explicit the question of what it means to be human, a question Robinson invited students and colleagues to examine throughout his career, but it also illustrates the depth of the field and diversity of those who have been inspired by Robinson's work. Frankenstein and STEAM offers direction for continuing scholarship on the intersections of literature, science, and technology.
Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey—not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator, it tells the curious story of the quality stored inside: freshness.
We want fresh foods to keep us healthy, and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient, pretty, and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption, when freshness seemed both proof of and an antidote to progress. Susanne Freidberg begins with refrigeration, a trend as controversial at the turn of the twentieth century as genetically modified crops are today. Consumers blamed cold storage for high prices and rotten eggs but, ultimately, aggressive marketing, advances in technology, and new ideas about health and hygiene overcame this distrust.
Freidberg then takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Fruit, for instance, shows why beauty trumped taste at a surprisingly early date. In the case of fish, we see how the value of a living, quivering catch has ironically hastened the death of species. And of all supermarket staples, why has milk remained the most stubbornly local? Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.
Pessar combines cultural history spanning the colonial period to the present; comparative case studies of the Canudos, Contestado, Juazeiro, and Santa Brígida movements; and three decades of ethnographic research in the Brazilian Northeast. Highlighting the involvement of a broad range of individuals and institutions, the cross-fertilization between movements, contestation and accommodation vis-à-vis the church and state, and matters of spirituality and faith, From Fanatics to Folk reveals Brazilian millenarianism as long-enduring and constantly in flux.
From Jim Crow to Jay-Z traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, White establishes a sophisticated framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. Arguing that black music has undeniably shaped American popular culture and that hip-hop tropes have exerted a defining influence on young male aspirations and behavior, White draws a critical link between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity.
Throughout Front Yard America, Schroeder inquires into the functions, values, and meanings that Americans have found in the domestic landscapes of back yards and front yards, walls and fences, porches and patios.
The United States Social Science Research Council (SSRC), founded in 1923, was the first national social science institution in the world and might be said to represent the creation of a "science of society." In Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences , Donald Fisher shows how this institution, under the considerable influence of Rockefeller philanthropy, shaped an entire discipline.
Fisher demonstrates that the creation and growth of the SSRC during the 1920s and 1930s is essential to our understanding of the major developments in the social sciences since World War II. He shows that during this period, the place of social science and social scientists in American society was fixed in a way that has had substantial, lasting impact.
The author weaves a number of larger, related issues into his account of the wide-ranging influence of the SSRC: the role of social scientists in the political life of the societies in which they live; the way in which knowledge systems develop and change; the role of philanthropy in industrialized societies; and the formation and preservation of the modern capitalist state.
Donald Fisher's discussion of how an American institution sculpted an entire discipline will be of interest to all social scientists and historians of social science.
Stallings uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in Black cultural and political movements, debunking "the truth of sex" and its histories. Brandishing funk as a theoretical tool, Stallings argues that Western theories of the erotic fail as universally applicable terms or philosophies, and thus lack utility in discussions of black bodies, subjects, and culture. In considering the Victorian concept of freak in black funk, Stallings proposes that black artists across all media have fashioned a tradition that embraces the superfreak, sexual guerrilla, sexual magic, mama's porn, black trans narratives, and sex work in a post-human subject position. Their goal: to ensure survival and evolution in a world that exploits black bodies in capitalist endeavors, imperialism, and colonization.
Revitalizing and wide-ranging, Funk the Erotic offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a reexamination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.
A provocative peek into this complicated film as a space for subversion, activism, and imaginative power
While both fans and foes point to Mad Max: Fury Road’s feminist credentials, Furious Feminisms asks: is there really anything feminist or radical happening on the screen? The four authors—from backgrounds in art history, American literature, disability studies, and sociology—ask what is possible, desirable, or damaging in theorizing feminism in the contested landscape of the twenty-first century. Can we find beauty in the Anthropocene? Can power be wrested from a violent system without employing and perpetuating violence?
This experiment in collaborative criticism weaves multiple threads of dialogue together to offer a fresh perspective on our current cultural moment.
Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
The widespread legalization of gambling across the U.S. has produced concerns for serious social, economic, and health problems. For the first time in this country, an entire generation of young people has reached adulthood within a context of approval and endorsement of gambling as a source of entertainment and recreation. Compared with their adult counterparts, these young people have evidenced a higher level of gambling related problems. In Futures at Stake, specialists in psychology, medicine, law, public health, economics, casino management, psychiatry, and criminal justice examine this problem from the perspective of their various disciplines, producing an intelligent, thought-provoking, and valuable survey of what is fast becoming a leading social-health problem across the nation. Foreword by Thomas N. Cummings.
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