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Honorable Mention of the 2023 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

• Longlist Finalist of the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Moving Image Book Award

Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries.

Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

    Little Caesar, a 1931 Hollywood gangster classic, is viewed in revivals today with nearly as much audience enthusiasm as it enjoyed a half-century ago, in the depths of the Great Depression.
    In general, the Hollywood film industry responded to the dark economic conditions of the 1930s with escapist and non-topical films. The fascinating exception was the gangster film, through which the studios joined in the debate over the spiritual and economic health of the nation. Little Caesar, considered by many to be an architype of the genre, is one of the most memorable dramatizations of the discontent and alienation, the deep anxiety and hostility shared by millions of Americans during those dark years.

Lives in Play explores the centrality of life narratives to women's drama and performance from the 1970s to the present moment. In the early days of second-wave feminism, the slogan was "The personal is the political." These autobiographical and biographical "true stories" have the political impact of the real and have also helped a range of feminists tease out the more complicated aspects of gender, sex, and sexuality in a Western culture that now imagines itself to be "postfeminist."

The book covers a broad range of texts and performances, from performance artists like Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Bobby Baker to playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sarah Kane. The book examines biography and autobiography together to link their narrative tactics and theatrical approaches and show the persistent and important uses of life writing strategies for theater artists committed to advancing women's rights and remaking women's representations.

Lives in Play argues that these writers and artists have not only responded to the vibrant conversations in feminist theory but also have anticipated and advanced these ideas, theorizing gender onstage for specific ends. Ryan Claycomb demonstrates how these performances work through tensions between performative identity and the essentialized body, between the truth value of life stories and the constructed nature of gender and narrative alike, and between writing and performing as modes of feminist representation.

The book will appeal to scholars in performance studies, women's studies, and literature, including those in the growing field of auto/biography studies.

With a breadwinner dad, a homemaker mom, and squeaky-clean kids, the 1950s television family has achieved near mythological status as a model of what real families "ought" to be. Yet feature films of the period often portrayed families in trouble, with parents and children in conflict over appropriate values and behaviors. Why were these representations of family apparently so far apart?

Nina Leibman analyzes many feature films and dozens of TV situation comedy episodes from 1954 to 1963 to find surprising commonalities in their representations of the family. Redefining the comedy as a family melodrama, she compares film and television depictions of familial power, gender roles, and economic attitudes. Leibman's explorations reveal how themes of guilt, deceit, manipulation, anxiety, and disfunctionality that obviously characterize such movies as Rebel without a Cause,A Summer Place, and Splendor in the Grass also crop up in such TV shows as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,Father Knows Best,Leave It to Beaver,The Donna Reed Show, and My Three Sons.

Drawing on interviews with many of the participants of these productions, archival documents, and trade journals, Leibman sets her discussion within a larger institutional history of 1950s film and television. Her discussions shed new light not only on the reasons for both media's near obsession with family life but also on changes in American society as it reconfigured itself in the postwar era.

In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens.

The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00.

An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.

While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, 26-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge’s order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.
 
Locker Room Talk is Ludtke’s gripping account of being at the core of this globally covered case that churned up ugly prejudices about the place of women in sports. Kuhn claimed that allowing women into locker rooms would violate his players’ “sexual privacy.” Late-night television comedy sketches mocked her, as newspaper cartoonists portrayed her as a sexy, buxom looker who wanted to ogle the naked athletes’ bodies.  She weaves these public perspectives throughout her vivid depiction of the court drama overseen by Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve on the federal bench. She recounts how her lawyer, F.A.O. “Fritz” Schwarz, employed an ingenious legal strategy that persuaded Judge Motley to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in giving Ludtke access identical to that of her male counterparts. Locker Room Talk is both an inspiring story of one woman’s determination to do a job dominated by men and an illuminating portrait of a defining moment for women’s rights.  

A multifaceted portrait of the great Japanese director

For years, Akira Kurosawa resisted writing about himself. “It would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies,” he said. “In other words, take myself, subtract movies, and the result is zero.” The memoir he finally started serializing in 1978, Something like an Autobiography, ended with Rashomon, the film that launched him on the world’s stage in 1950. Long Take, first published in Japan shortly after Kurosawa’s death in 1998, at last tells the story of the rest of his life.

By turns intimate, provocative, and revealing, Long Take creates a dynamic portrait of Kurosawa from his own writings; his conversations with writer Inoue Hisashi and director Yamada Yōji; and essays by his daughter and colleague Kurosawa Kazuko, who details the collaborative history of the “Kurosawa crew.” It features a wealth of industry lore, cultural reference points, inside jokes with other filmmakers and writers, and backstories for his own productions, from the earliest to the last. Of particular interest to all cinephiles is an annotated list of Kurosawa’s 100 favorite films.

A survey of Kurosawa’s prodigious career, this book situates the visionary in the media milieu of his youth, in the literature and performing arts of twentieth-century Japan and Hollywood, and among the myriad films he loved, admired, and referenced, including Japanese silent film and comedy as well as productions from India, Iran, and Soviet-era Russia. Now available to English readers for the first time, Long Take offers a lasting picture of the peerless filmmaker in his element.

If your childhood friends were Agapito, the bombastic, bilingual lion; Campamocha, the fix-it man; Caracoles, the restaurant owner; Uncle Andy, the shoe seller; Berta and Dyana, the life-size dolls; and Señorita Barrera, then you grew up watching Carrascolendas. This award-winning show, which originally aired on PBS in the 1970s and was subsequently broadcasted throughout the country in the 1980s and 1990s, was the first Spanish and English children's educational television program broadcast to national audiences in the United States.

In this engagingly written memoir, creator-producer Aida Barrera describes how the mythical world of Carrascolendas grew out of her real-life experiences as a Mexican American child growing up in the Valley of South Texas. She recalls how she drew on those early experiences to create television programming that specifically addressed the needs of Hispanic children, even as it remained accessible and entertaining to children of other cultural backgrounds.

In addition to her personal story, Barrera recounts the long-term struggles for network acceptance and funding that made the production of Carrascolendas something of a miracle. This off-camera story adds an important chapter to the history of Anglo-Mexican cultural politics during the 1970s. Given the fact that Latino characters are still under- and stereotypically represented on network television, Carrascolendas remains an important reminder of what is possible and what has been lost in authentically multicultural television programming.

A critical investigation into how modern myths shape interpretations of the ancient past.

Lost City, Found Pyramid delves into the fascinating world of sensational “pseudoarchaeology,” from perennial discoveries of lost pyramids or civilizations to contemporary ghost-hunting and reality TV. It examines how nonscientific pursuit of myths and legends warps both public perceptions of archaeology and of human history itself.

A collection of twelve engaging and insightful essays, Lost City, Found Pyramid does far more than argue for the simple debunking of false archaeology. Rather, it brings into focus the value of understanding how and why pseudoarchaeology captures the public imagination. By comprehending pseudoarchaeology’s appeal as a media product, cultural practice, and communication strategy, archaeologists can enhance and enliven how they communicate about real archaeology in the classroom and in the public arena.

The first part of Lost City, Found Pyramid provides numerous case studies. Some examine the work of well-intentioned romantics who project onto actual archaeological data whimsical interpretative frameworks or quixotic “proofs” that confirm legends, such as that of the Lost White City of Honduras, or other alternative claims. Other case studies lay bare how false claims may inadvertently lead to the perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes, economic exploitation, political adventurism, and a misunderstanding of science.

Offering much of interest to scholars and students of archaeology, archaeology buffs, as well as policy-makers involved in the discovery, curation, and care of archaeological sites and relics, Lost City, Found Pyramid provides an invaluable corrective and hopeful strategy for engaging the public’s curiosity with the compelling world of archaeological discovery.

The long-awaited republication of this captivating account of the star’s life.

Louise Brooks left Wichita, Kansas, for New York City at age fifteen and lived the kind of life of which legends are made. From her beginnings as a dancer to her years in Hollywood, Berlin, and beyond, she was hailed and reviled as a new type of woman: independent, intellectually daring, and sexually free. In this widely acclaimed, first and only comprehensive biography, Barry Paris traces Brooks’s trajectory from her childhood through her fall into obscurity and subsequent "resurrection" as a brilliant writer and enduring film icon.

Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo sees her mission as "channeling the hopes and dreams of a people." Clearly, political commitment has inspired her choice of subjects. With themes ranging from state repression to AIDS, Portillo's films include: Después del Terremoto, the Oscar-nominated Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead,The Devil Never Sleeps, and Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena.

The first study of Portillo and her films, this collection is collaborative and multifaceted in approach, emphasizing aspects of authorial creativity, audience reception, and production processes typically hidden from view. Rosa Linda Fregoso, the volume editor, has organized the book into three parts: interviews (by Fregoso and Kathleen Newman and B. Ruby Rich); critical perspectives (essays by Fregoso, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Sylvie Thouard, Norma Iglesias, and Barbara McBane); and production materials (screenplays, script notes, storyboards, etc.).

This innovative collection provides "inside" information on the challenges of making independent films. By describing the production constraints Portillo has surmounted, Fregoso deepens our appreciation of this gifted filmmaker's life, her struggles, and the evolution of her art.

Traces the surprising connections between silent films and the rise of bureaucracy

Arguing for a sweeping new consideration of the shift from print to cinema as a governing system for organizing modern American social relations, this book uncovers an intimate connection between Hollywood romances of the silent era and the empowerment of a managerial class.

Essential writings by this icon of the silent era—rereleased in print and now available as an e-book 100 years after Louise Brooks arrived in Hollywood

Lulu in Hollywood is an intimate collection of eight autobiographical essays by Louise Brooks, silent film darling and icon of the flapper era. Ranging from her childhood in Kansas and her early days as a Denishawn and Ziegfeld Follies dancer to her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, William Paley, G. W. Pabst, and others, Brooks’s writing offers a rare glimpse into her extraordinary life. Including her revelatory “Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs,” Lulu in Hollywood also features Kenneth Tynan’s 1979 essay “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” which revived interest in Brooks’s work and was the best discussion of her film work to appear in her lifetime.

Vibrant and strikingly original, Lying in the Middle discovers some of the most potent musical theater taking place in the hoping, beating hearts of Americans.