Results by title

52 books match the query 'Idea' and 4 start with f

cover of Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America

Faith, Family, and Flag

Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America

Joanna Dee Das

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Sons of Britches. The Great American Chuckwagon Dinner Show. The Haygoods. The Grand Jubilee. These are just a couple of the many shows performed in Branson, MO, a popular tourist destination that has played a role in the nation’s culture wars for over one hundred years.
 
Branson, Missouri, the Ozark Mountain mecca of wholesome entertainment, has been home to countless stage shows espousing patriotism and Christianity, welcoming over ten million visitors a year. Some consider it “God’s Country” and others “as close to Hell as anything on Earth.” For Joanna Dee Das, Branson is a political, religious, and cultural harbinger of a certain enduring dream of what America is. She takes Branson more seriously than the light-hearted fun it advertises—and maybe we should too.
 
For Das, Branson’s performers offer visions of the American Dream that embody a set of values known as the three Fs: faith, family, and flag. Branson boosters insist that these are universal values that welcome all people; the city aims to capture as many tourists as possible. But over the past several decades, faith, family, and flag have become markers of contemporary conservatism. The shows and culture of Branson, for all their fun and laughter, have been a galvanizing political force for white, working-and-middle class, Christian Americans. For social and economic conservatives alike, Branson is practically proof-of-concept for America as they want it to be. 
 
Faith, Family, and Flag is a comprehensive history of the Branson entertainment industry, within the context of America’s long culture wars. Das reveals how and why a town known for popular entertainment, a domain associated most often with the political left (“Hollywood liberals”), came to be so important to the political right and its vision for America.
[more]
cover of Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America

Faith, Family, and Flag

Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America

Joanna Dee Das

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Sons of Britches. The Great American Chuckwagon Dinner Show. The Haygoods. The Grand Jubilee. These are just a couple of the many shows performed in Branson, MO, a popular tourist destination that has played a role in the nation’s culture wars for over one hundred years.
 
Branson, Missouri, the Ozark Mountain mecca of wholesome entertainment, has been home to countless stage shows espousing patriotism and Christianity, welcoming over ten million visitors a year. Some consider it “God’s Country” and others “as close to Hell as anything on Earth.” For Joanna Dee Das, Branson is a political, religious, and cultural harbinger of a certain enduring dream of what America is. She takes Branson more seriously than the light-hearted fun it advertises—and maybe we should too.
 
For Das, Branson’s performers offer visions of the American Dream that embody a set of values known as the three Fs: faith, family, and flag. Branson boosters insist that these are universal values that welcome all people; the city aims to capture as many tourists as possible. But over the past several decades, faith, family, and flag have become markers of contemporary conservatism. The shows and culture of Branson, for all their fun and laughter, have been a galvanizing political force for white, working-and-middle class, Christian Americans. For social and economic conservatives alike, Branson is practically proof-of-concept for America as they want it to be. 
 
Faith, Family, and Flag is a comprehensive history of the Branson entertainment industry, within the context of America’s long culture wars. Das reveals how and why a town known for popular entertainment, a domain associated most often with the political left (“Hollywood liberals”), came to be so important to the political right and its vision for America.

[more]
cover of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

Film Blackness

American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film

Michael Boyce Gillespie

Duke University Press, 2016

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.
[more]
cover of Flesh Becomes Word: A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea

Flesh Becomes Word

A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea

David Dawson

Michigan State University Press, 2013

Though its coinage can be traced back to a sixteenth-century translation of Leviticus, the term “scapegoat” has enjoyed a long and varied history of both scholarly and everyday uses. While WilliamTyndale employed it to describe one of two goats chosen by lot to escape the Day of Atonement sacrifices with its life, the expression was soon far more widely used to name victims of false accusation and unwarranted punishment. As such, the scapegoat figures prominently in contemporary theories of violence, from its elevation by Frazer to a ritual category in his ethnological opus The Golden Bough to its pivotal roles in projects as seemingly at odds as Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics and René Girard’s theory of cultural origins. A copiously researched and groundbreaking investigation of the expression in such wide use today, Flesh Becomes Word follows the scapegoat from its origins in Mesopotamian ritual across centuries of typological reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ death, to its first informal uses in the pornographic and plague literature of the 1600s, and finally into the modern era, where the word takes recognizable shape in the context of the New English Quaker persecution and proto-feminist diatribe at the close of the seventeenth century. The historical circumstances of its lexical formation prove rich in implications for current theories of the scapegoat and the making of the modern world alike.
[more]