bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Feminism and Women’s Film History in 1980s Turkey
Authors: Atakav Eylem
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the relationship between feminism and women's film history in the context of 1980s Turkey. In discussing women's film history, the chapter includes not only the history of women filmmakers and the films they have made but also the link between the history of Turkish film industry and feminism. It begins with a historical overview of the feminist movement in Turkey and then examines its visible traces in film texts produced during the 1980s in order to argue that those films can be most productively understood as explorations of gendered power relations. The chapter then considers how the enforced depoliticization introduced in Turkey after the 1980 coup opened up a space for feminist concerns to be expressed within commercial cinema. It also shows how this political context gave rise to the newly humanized, more independent heroine that characterized Turkish cinema during the period, but suggests that the films were nevertheless made largely within the structures of a patriarchal commercial cinema.
American Women Screenwriters in the 1920s
Authors: Muscio Giuliana
Published: May 2017

This chapter contextualizes the work of American women scriptwriters within the gendered liberalization of an emerging consumer capitalism during the 1920s. More specifically, it examines the major role played by women writers in the American film industry of the period to the development of “classical Hollywood narrative,” both as a social force and a form of storytelling. It suggests that women screenwriters contributed to the maturation of narrative construction—from its origins to the introduction of sound, when Hollywood completed the conquest of the world market. In addition to significantly contributing to film history, American women screenwriters played a crucial role in modernizing society, not only through the stories they wrote but also through their very presence in Hollywood.
“Cain’s Ring”
Authors: Mariani Giorgio
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the juxtaposition of war and sacrifice in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Melville has been often identified as a forerunner of later anti-war writers—as an artist engaged from early on in his literary career in denouncing the destruction unleashed on the world by “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth”: “white, civilized man.” Moby-Dick casts serious doubts regarding the possibility of curbing a violence that keeps frustrating mankind's best hopes from time immemorial. This chapter first considers Father Mapple's sermon and the concept of monstrous double in Moby-Dick, along with the logic of primal sacrifice and the link between sacrifice and survival in the text. It then explores how, in Melville's world, resistance to violence seems to entail further violence, in an endless, tragic cycle of aggressions and counteraggressions, as well as the cultural and narrative logic behind the paradox that no one can be entirely innocent and yet felt spotless as the lamb.
“Curious Anesthetics”
Authors: Mariani Giorgio
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the juxtaposition of war and gender in The Backwash of War, a collection of thirteen short stories by Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873–1961) based on her experience as a volunteer nurse in Belgium at a hospital behind the French lines during World War I. La Motte's stories literally devoted to the wounds of the Great War, as well as the psychological and moral degradation caused by the conflict. Yet La Motte also acknowledges how even her own critiques, no matter how intransigent, are always at risk of feeding back into the machinery of war on both ideological and practical grounds. As a woman, she understood quite well how war discourse strategically exploits the opposition it sets up between the peaceful virtues of womanhood and the warlike instincts of masculinity by constructing the protection of the former as a license for the latter. This chapter also considers the themes of medicine and torture in The Backwash of War.
Integrating the Team
Authors: Chudacoff Howard P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the racial integration of college sports starting in the 1950s. The racial integration of teams, accelerating in the North and beginning in the South, altered the quality of games as well as the composition of rosters. By the 1970s, football and track squads contained two dozen or more black athletes, and on some basketball teams blacks constituted a majority. To a considerable extent, the opening up of these rosters spelled the decline—or at least inability to compete at the highest levels—of historically black college teams. Meanwhile, coaches, though they lost some of the battles against assertive black athletes, and though their sensitivities on race matters were raised, most often emerged with their authority not only intact but enhanced by control of scholarships and by increasingly independent athletic departments. The college athletic enterprise was opening a new playbook in which money and media would be involved as never before.
The Second-Wave Sandbox
Authors: Botshon Lisa
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a reading of Anne Richardson Roiphe's novel Up the Sandbox! (1970). The novel creates a split narrative for its main character, one of liberation and social change juxtaposed against one of middle-class domestic life, to demonstrate the cultural minefields in place for women who challenge patriarchal norms. Roiphe's ambivalent ending tests traditional notions of the consciousness-raising novel and points to a nuanced view of white liberal motherhood. It is argued that, in her portrayal of the monstrous cleaved self of the mother, Roiphe attempts to wrestle mothering from its patriarchal moorings and set it loose in the playground of feminist politics.
Introduction
Authors: Risse Guenter B.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter lays out the major themes and context that will supplement discussion in the succeeding chapters. It considers the implications of the linkages between health and politics and what they might mean for America's present and future. At the same time the chapter also turns toward the past, to San Francisco's early public health initiatives, in order to illuminate ideologies and agencies concerned with human disease, public health, and medical practice. The chapter then launches into a broader discussion on emotions and sentiment—particularly of aversive emotions such as fear and disgust—in order to set up the context upon which this study is based—on the plasticity and contingency of emotion-driven behaviors as they manifest themselves in the moral and political judgments that human beings make in confronting and seeking to control contagious diseases.
Italian Irredentism and French Patriotism in the Côte d’Azur
Authors: Sica Emanuele
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Italian irredentist groups in the French Riviera and how they lobbied on both sides of the border as part of their campaign for the incorporation of the County of Nice into the new Fascist regime. To further undermine the French state in preparation for a possible annexation of the French Riviera at the end of World War II, and in spite of the aristocratic disdain they harbored for the local Italian immigrants, officials of the Commissione di Armistizio con la Francia (CIAF) attempted to fully mobilize local Fascist militants. In spite of being united by a common goal, however, CIAF officials despised the irredentists. This chapter examines how the mobilization of local irredentists in the Côte d’Azur turned out to be a double-edged sword. It also considers how French nationalism in the region was stirred by Italian irredentism. Finally, it discusses the disputes between Italian representatives in France and the local population, not only in the Alpes-Maritimes but in other parts of the country.
Life Under the Occupation
Authors: Sica Emanuele
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the daily interaction between occupiers and the occupied as the Italians and French battled over the most precious resource in the French Riviera: food. When the Italian Army arrived in November 1942, the Côte d’Azur was already experiencing serious food shortages. Southeastern France’s agricultural production was severely underdeveloped, as all the prewar investment had been allotted to building tourism infrastructure. This chapter shows how the increasing food deficit of the region fueled an already thriving black market in the Côte d’Azur. Disregarding the strict prohibition on any kind of transaction between Italian soldiers and French civilians, a mutually beneficial barter system came into being as soon as the Italian units settled in the former free zone. Italian soldiers blended perfectly with the shady atmosphere of the Côte d’Azur by smuggling goods into and out of France and engaging in cheap scams and outrageous thefts.
Sea of Suburbia
Authors: Watson John Scott
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Prairie Crossing development's primary land conservation practices: wetland and prairie restoration, open-space preservation, and plant and animal biodiversity. It first considers two contrasting models of environmental protection in the United States: land advocacy and land trusts. It then discusses two primary conservation goals sought by George and Vicky Ranney in developing the Prairie Crossing property: “environmental protection and enhancement” and to “change the culture”—to demonstrate not only that urban development can be compatible and complementary with the environment, but that whole communities would come to view themselves as part of the natural environment, with roles and responsibilities to act responsibly as stewards of the world in which they live. The chapter also describes water quality as a motivation for the Prairie Crossing project, along with the area's biodiversity and biotic corridors.
Changing the Culture
Authors: Watson John Scott
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the environmental impact of residents' behavior and the Prairie Crossing Homeowners Association's conservation management practices. Prairie restoration and preservation at Prairie Crossing plays a secondary role, mainly cultural in nature—and equally as important as the development's primary ecological purpose. The prairie acts as the symbol of Prairie Crossing, giving the development not only a name but also a character, the first impression a prospective buyer assimilates. The prairie and open space provide a positive feedback loop for the conservation agenda, offering for adult residents a sense of connection to the land, and for children a playground to stimulate the natural experience. In addition to the Prairie Crossing Homeowners Association's conservation practices and residents' conservation practices and behaviors, this chapter considers how Prairie Crossing combats knowledge deficits with both formal and informal educational settings. It also describes energy conservation as a guiding principle of Prairie Crossing as well as the project's economic viability.
Radio Beckons
Authors: Williams Sonja D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Richard Durham's involvement with the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Illinois Writers' Project (IWP). Created by the federal government in 1935, the WPA funded construction and other public works projects, as well as programs for writers, musicians, and theater and visual artists. By the time Durham applied to the WPA, several of his poems had been published in the Chicago Defender newspaper, as well as in Youth and New Masses magazines. Under Arna Bontemps's supervision, the IWP undertook The Negro In Illinois study, a comprehensive examination of black life throughout the state. In 1941, Durham met Clarice Davis, and they married on June 19, 1942. He also began writing scripts for the WMAQ radio station's weekly program called Art for Our Sake, renamed At the Foot of Adams Street in February 1943.
Rare Broadcasts
Authors: Williams Sonja D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Richard Durham's budding career as a scriptwriter for radio, including his role as the primary writer of Democracy USA episodes. Durham's scripts dramatized the triumphs and struggles of Negro leaders. He soon started sharing scriptwriting duties with freelance writer Perry Wolf. The synergy between these writers and the hard work of the show's multiracial cast and production staff eventually paid off. During this time, Durham had a rarefied place in radio, since only a tiny cadre of African Americans, including Robert Lucas, Roi Ottley, and occasionally Langston Hughes, wrote for the medium. While Durham searched for ways to increase his income, he met Irna Phillips, dubbed the “Queen of the Soaps.” He also created, together with his theatrical friends, a soap opera called Here Comes Tomorrow, first aired by Chicago station WJJD on September 8, 1947. This was followed by Destination Freedom.
Introduction
Authors: Wu Ka-ming
Published: May 2017

This book explores the role of folk cultural discourse and practices in the cultural politics of post-Mao China by focusing on Yan'an, headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1937 to 1947. It examines the relation between the government and local communities for heritage preservation and cultural tourism in the age of runaway urbanization by focusing on the moments of mobilizing and representing folk traditions in both socialist and late socialist Yan'an. It articulates the cultural logic of the late socialist Chinese society that corresponds to a new form of political economy through an analysis of three rural cultural practices in Yan'an and their entanglement with political, capital, and local forces: folk storytelling, folk paper-cuts, and spirit cult practices. This introduction discusses historical events and narratives that contribute to the development and modern meanings of folk culture and Yan'an. It also provides an overview of the author's fieldwork and research methodology as well as the chapters that follow.
Public or Private? The Battle over Channel 10
Authors: Connell Tula A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how moderate conservative activists united with the far-right conservative local media, which sharply opposed the Frank Zeidler administration, to challenge the role of the public sector in providing educational television—a seemingly innocuous issue that far less liberal cities like Houston addressed without controversy. The battle over Channel 10 was part of the larger struggle between proponents of an expansive public sector and champions of limited government. Working with the Common Council and supportive community groups, commercial broadcast interests turned what could have been a simple process of accepting federal provision of airspace for nonprofit use into a years-long ideological struggle between supporters of publicly funded services and their opponents.
Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction
Authors: Irizarry Ylce
Published: May 2017

This book moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. The book establishes four dominant categories of narrative—loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory—that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As it shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins. The book provides a background of Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, which particularly demonstrate the increasing focus on empowerment—economic, political, and sexual—within Chicana/o and Latina/o America, not within Anglo-America.
Belonging in Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction
Authors: Irizarry Ylce
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explores how the narrative of new memory is a locus for empowerment. The more frequent development in the narrative of new memory in Cuban American literatures and literatures about or portraying Central American characters has everything to do with the specificity of difference among immigrants, exiles, and refugees. Indeed, the portrayal of exiles and refugees can offer authors the space to write new memories of their relationships to their own nations of origin, to nations they have emigrated to, or to nations with which they may wish to develop solidarity. Because of the generational and cultural variations between their literatures, the critical models currently existing for understanding US multiethnic literatures need revision.
Painting the Gospel
Authors: Pinder Kymberly N.
Published: May 2017

Innovative and lavishly illustrated, this book offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about black art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. It escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's black churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, the book explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. It also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, the book reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery. The book includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.
Palimpsestic Embodiment
Authors: Smith Christen A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at the repetition and performance of antiblack violence over time and the relationship between space, time, the body, and the visual. It analyzes photographs of state violence as archives of black pain and suffering on the one hand, and historical documents that reveal hidden truths on the other. The twentieth-century images examined were published in local newspapers and can be read as part of an image world of black suffering that circulates, producing narratives of the black body in pain across time and space. It is not accidental that these photographs conjure memories of lynching photography in the United States. Spectacular images of the black body in pain reveal the performative, transnational nature of Afro-paradise at the same time that they speak to us about the nature of race and antiblackness in Brazil.
In and Out of the Ineffable
Authors: Smith Christen A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the gendered impact of state violence on the black family. If Afro-paradise is the nation's disavowal of blackness—its celebration of black culture coupled with the imperative to kill black people—then both physical and spiritual violence are essential to this project. This state violence in Bahia is a kind of terrorism, which is political in nature, but should not be read solely as a performance intended for “the victims” (those killed). Instead, the political targets of this violence are the communities and families of those who die. The families of those killed are often the hardest hit. The trauma that this war produces is not only physical but also spiritual, and witnessing is then a political and spiritual response to this terror. And while one of the effects of Afro-paradise is the social and physical death of black people, blackness is not reducible to these effects.
Bringing Spirituals to the Concert Stage
Authors: Snyder Jean E.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the popularity of Harry T. Burleigh's spirituals in recitals and other concerts. Burleigh published his first solo arrangement of spirituals from 1911 to 1916, at a time when the tide of interest in African American folk music, especially spirituals, was gathering momentum. At least nineteen white American composers joined the stream. Black composers also produced compositions reflecting their folk heritage during these years. From the 1916–1917 concert season, when his solo arrangement of “Deep River” became the hit of the recital season, Burleigh's role as pioneer arranger and interpreter of spirituals began to eclipse his role as recital singer and art song composer. This chapter explores how the recurring controversy over the origins of African American music made Burleigh a spokesman for the uniquely expressive gifts of African Americans who, he argued, had created America's first genuine folk music. In particular, it considers Burleigh's view that the spirituals were the primary artistic contribution of African Americans. It also discusses the influence of Edward MacDowell on Burleigh's movement toward arranging spirituals as art songs.
The Rise of the New Korean Wave
Authors: Jin Dal Yong
Published: May 2017

This chapter first discuses the rise of Korean popular culture and its dissemination in Asian countries, known as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu. It characterizes the Korean Wave into roughly two major historical developments: the Hallyu 1.0 era (approximately between 1997 and 2007) and the Hallyu 2.0, New Korean Wave, era (mainly from 2008 to the present). Although these two periods share some common phenomena, they are dissimilar in their major characteristics, such as the major cultural forms exported, technological developments, fan bases, and government cultural policies. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the recent evolution of Hallyu in a socioeconomic context alongside its textual meanings. The chapter then discusses the hybridity in Korean popular culture followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.
Cultural Politics in the New Korean Wave Era
Authors: Jin Dal Yong
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates the role of the nation-state in the cultural industries and the Korean Wave in the context of the broader social structure of society amid neoliberal globalization. It articulates how the Korean government has developed the cultural industries and the ways in which the government has cultivated its cultural policies in global trade, such as export promotion, direct and indirect export subsidies and supports, and the promotion of the nation's cultural image abroad. It especially analyzes whether neoliberal ideologies, emphasizing a small government regime, have completely altered state interventionism, known as developmentalism, in the Korean Wave, leading to further discussion of the role of the nation-state. The chapter historicizes the Korean Wave phenomenon according to major policy shifts surrounding media ecology, driving the change and continuity of Hallyu over the past eighteen years.
Discovering Working-Class Religion in a 1950s Auto Plant
Authors: Pehl Matthew
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how the Detroit Industrial Mission (DIM) was unable to sort out its own web of middle-class values to truly share the religious world of the working class. However, in making the effort, its ministers left a vital record of the workers' cosmologies in the mid-twentieth century. DIM's experience reminds historians of the power and importance of class as a historical construct. Too often, historians of religion have been eager to marginalize class in favor of other sociohistorical identities like race, ethnicity, or denomination. DIM illustrates the dangers of this tendency; if anything, DIM's ordeal suggests that class is perhaps even more central to shaping religious experience than these other social markers.
Inventing Sexual Liberalism
Authors: Leck Ralph M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the invention of new nomenclatures for sexual minorities in the works of Ulrichs and Karl Kertbeny (1824–1882). Due to a personal tragedy—a close friend, who was a homosexual, committed suicide—Kertbeny decided to join Ulrichs' fight for homosexual rights. Kertbeny embraced Ulrichs' contention that, in order for sexual minorities to gain equal rights and social acceptance, dominant stigmatizing classificatory idioms must be replaced by new scientific terminology. Before they appeared in Kertbeny's anti-Prussian essays of 1869, the words heterosexuality and homosexuality did not exist. These words are used today in the absence of the knowledge that their invention signaled a post-Prussian liberal sexual politics of inclusion and equal rights.
Here Come the Bolsheviks!
Authors: Fischer Nick
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia contributed to the rise of the Red Scare. On November 7, 1917, revolutionaries from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party seized power in Petrograd and proclaimed the world's first socialist government. The Bolsheviks endorsed violent, class-based insurrection and policies of land and resource nationalization. News of the Bolshevik uprising intensified the wartime atmosphere in the United States, in which fear of treachery was rampant. This chapter first considers American intervention in Russia during the period 1917–1920 before discussing the emergence of the Red Scare in 1919–1920 and of anticommunism in the labor movement. It also looks at the strikes, bombings, and deportations in 1919 that offset whatever prestige the American Federation of Labor (AFL) accrued during the First World War. Finally, it describes the end of the Red Scare following US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer's fall and the release of the National Popular Government League report.
The Spider Web Chart
Authors: Fischer Nick
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the anticommunist movement created the so-called Spider Web Chart that articulated its narrative of a vast and deadly conspiracy against America mounted from within by Bolshevik spies, agents, and dupes. Representatives of government, big business, high finance, and the military were linked ever tightly by the rallying cause of anticommunism. The anticommunist movement sought to coherently define their cause and promote it in the wider community. Soon enough, the movement produced its ideal propaganda in an image that satisfied its members' political and psychological needs: the Spider Web Chart. Produced by the Chemical Warfare Service of the US Army, the chart proved to be a scheme of unique power, ideal for spreading the message of anticommunism. This chapter first considers how the Spider Web Chart was conceptualized before discussing its enduring effects. It shows that the Spider Web Chart encouraged anticommunists to develop an extensive and highly connected network of kindred associations and a monolithic ideology.
Mapping a Political Network
Authors: Fischer Nick
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the significance of the Anticommunist Spider Web to anticommunism. Members of the Anticommunist Spider Web formed a conspiracy against democracy that was far more influential than the “communist” conspiracy they fought. Protecting economic advantage was only part of the Anticommunist Spider Web's purpose. Business and political interests also used anticommunism as a tool to control foreign and domestic policy in the challenging environment created by the Great War, socialist revolutions in Europe, and the bitter industrial disputes of the postwar downturn. Government intelligence operatives were among those most concerned by anticommunism, and the Red Scare put state and military intelligence services at the heart of the Spider Web. This chapter discusses the relationship between the Bureau of Investigation, the US Army Military Intelligence Division, the US Navy Office of Naval Intelligence, and the private intelligence networks run by the Spider Web.
Intersectionalities Lost and Found
Authors: Brandzel Amy L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter situates the struggle over same-sex marriage as a matter of anti-intersectional, normative citizenship, arguing that marriage has been used by the nation-state as an effective means to produce a particularly racialized, gendered, heterosexualized, and colonized citizenry. Same-sex marriage advocacy has also exposed a somewhat surprising anxiety in that it points toward the intersectionality of gender, sex, and sexuality, thereby challenging the hegemonic anti-intersectional norm that these categories are separable and discrete. The second half of the chapter discusses how same-sex marriage rights has completely altered the terrain for queer critique of normative citizenship. By reframing Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai's analyses of monstrosity, it argues that queerness has lost its power of monstrous difference, which has been the performative modality by which queers have been able to launch progressive left critiques of the nation-state.
Fort Napier
Authors: Dominy Graham
Published: May 2017

This book traces the social history of the imperial garrison in the Colony of Natal in order to elucidate the reproduction, adaptation, and modification of Victorian British society on southern African soil. More specifically, it examines the divisions in colonial society and the influence of the garrison in shaping those divisions. The book considers a number of interrelated themes: class and gender, hierarchy and discipline, race and labor, pageantry and government, and the economic impact of garrisons and their costs. These themes are contextualized in relation to the distinctive role of Fort Napier as a garrison center. This chapter compares Fort Napier with other garrisons worldwide, including those in Gibraltar, Halifax, and Montreal; the jailer garrisons in Australia; and the garrison in New Zealand. It argues that Fort Napier and its garrison are unique because they influenced not only a settler society but also a major African society.
Media and Contested Christian Identities
Authors: Ntarangwi Mwenda
Published: May 2017

This chapter turns to the world of social media and how it shapes Christian identities in Kenya, including Juliani's. It explores how even urban churches are tapping into such media to engage youth on matters of faith and lived sociocultural issues. Many Kenyan youth get access to the internet and such social-media platforms as Twitter and Facebook through their cell phones. Some service providers, such as Safaricom (the largest cell-phone company in Kenya), offer Facebook as part of their already installed applications for subscribers. Through mobile phone-based access to these kinds of platforms, Kenyan youth are able to virtually enter the wider world beyond their immediate environs, see life or constructions of it in other locations, imagine how it relates or contrasts or both with their own lives, and engage with it either by making meaning of their own lives or constructing it as they choose.
Juliani
Authors: Ntarangwi Mwenda
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Juliani's songs that tackle issues of love, sex and sexuality, politics, religiosity, and economics, along with his ability to play with words to make even more intriguing inroads into Kenya's sociocultural planes. It also highlights Juliani's ability to engage with tough social issues through creatively woven lyrics and rhyme. By analyzing Juliani's songs from his three albums (Mtaa Mentality, Pulpit Kwa Street, and Exponential Potential) as well as his mixtape (Vultures vs. Voters), this chapter identifies certain recurrent themes that appear in almost all of his work. Some of the themes are sexuality, love, and relationships; tensions between perceived and real social practices; masculine and feminine identities; socioeconomic and political challenges; and the everyday experiences of spiritual life.
Music in the Age of Anxiety
Authors: Wierzbicki James
Published: May 2017

Derided for its conformity and consumerism, 1950s America paid a price in anxiety. Prosperity existed under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Optimism wore a Bucky Beaver smile that masked worry over threats at home and abroad. But even dread could not quell the revolutionary changes taking place in virtually every form of mainstream music. This book sheds light on how the Fifties' pervasive moods affected its sounds. Moving across genres established (pop, country, opera, experimental, rock, jazz) the book delves into the social dynamics that caused forms to emerge or recede, thrive or fade away. Red scares and white flight, sexual politics and racial tensions, technological progress and demographic upheaval—the influence of each rooted the music of this volatile period to its specific place and time. Yet this book also reveals the host of underlying connections linking that most apprehensive of times to our own uneasy present.
Prologue
Authors: Wierzbicki James
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter explains how music is considered less as a phenomenon unto itself than as a manifestation of the conditions under which it emerged or receded. The music under consideration represents a wide range of styles that attracted the attention of a wide range of audiences, which sounds have little in common. What these types of music do have in common is the fact that all of them sprang up in a particular cultural environment: the postwar Fifties. A great many forces—technology; the economy; domestic and international politics; relationships between black and white people, between men and women, between young and old—animated American society during the Fifties. The lenses through which the whole of American music in the Fifties is examined here represent forces whose interconnected dynamics between 1945 and 1963 are linked to the fact that, for America, the war ended the way it did.
The Pop Music Mainstream
Authors: Wierzbicki James
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the two most successful commodities in the field of popular music in 1950: “The Tennessee Waltz” and “Goodnight, Irene”—both of which are composed in 3/4 time. In terms of meter alone, these two extraordinarily successful songs stand as much in contrast to the rock 'n' roll music that captured the attention of American teenagers later in the decade as to the swing music that appealed to Americans of diverse age groups in the years leading up to and including World War II. But meter is not the main thing that distinguishes “The Tennessee Waltz,” and “Goodnight, Irene.” Rather than meter, or tempo, or even rhythm, what most distinguishes these songs from earlier and later efforts is their treatment of rhythm.
Rock ’n’ Roll
Authors: Wierzbicki James
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the romantic genealogy of rock 'n' roll and how its style resulted from the happy integration of white hillbilly music with black “race music” or, as it came to be known in the 1950s, “rhythm and blues.” Supported by recent scholarship that has delved into the files of record companies, analyses affirm that rock 'n' roll represents a blatant appropriation of black music by white entrepreneurs. A postmodern view might regard rock 'n' roll not even as music, but as simply “a marketing concept that evolved into a lifestyle.” The chapter also analyzes how Bill Haley's recording of “Rock Around the Clock” turned the tide of American popular music in late 1955.
Jazz
Authors: Wierzbicki James
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers how in America's postwar years, the idea of Negro music (Jazz) as a somehow natural response to centuries of official oppression had currency not just with self-defined hipsters, but also with intellectuals who in most ways swam with the cultural-political mainstream. Whether praising the music or decrying it, white authors during the so-called Jazz Age of the 1920s tended to regard the period's eponymous music as something that perhaps originated in the African American community, but that, by the time of their writing, had been fully integrated into the American cultural mainstream. Jazz was essentially the product of a music industry made up of not just performers and composers but also publishers and record labels, an industry whose prime objective was to make a profit by catering to audience tastes.
Opera
Authors: Wierzbicki James
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the two most celebrated American composers of “serious” music, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, whose music today is still most regularly programmed not just in the United States but around the world. Not widely known during the homophobic Fifties is the now well-documented fact that Copland and Bernstein were closeted gays. Much publicized at the time, on the other hand, was the non-secret that Copland and Bernstein, along with numerous less-stellar composers, held decidedly left-leaning political views. Likely not just by coincidence, then, both Copland and Bernstein in the mid-1950s produced operas that, in a general way, critically comment on anticommunist red-baiting and the Cold War culture of fear. These operas are Copland's 1954 The Tender Land and Bernstein's 1956 Candide.
Licentious Harmony and Counterpoint in Porter’s “Love for Sale”
Authors: Buchler Michael
Published: May 2017

No one would mistake Cole Porter's “Love for Sale” for a love song. Yet this less-than-subtle song about the world's oldest profession, from the 1930 musical The New Yorkers, confronts the nature of love and, by extension, the love song genre. Because of its daring text, it not only was banned in Boston but was considered so risqué that at the time radio stations across America refused to play it. Porter's musical setting of his infamous lyrics also deviated from the normative structures found in contemporaneous popular—and especially love—songs, and his structural departures were not simply motivated by relatively obvious concerns for text painting. This chapter attempts to unpack and understand these musical anomalies through close analyses of harmony, counterpoint, and text.
Jazzing
Authors: Greenland Thomas H.
Published: May 2017

How do we speak about jazz? This book turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing them as active performers in their own right who witness and thus collaborate in a happening made one-of-a-kind by improvisation, mood, and moment. The book shines a spotlight on the constituency of proprietors, booking agents, photographers, critics, publicists, painters, amateur musicians, fans, friends, and tourists that makes up New York City's contemporary jazz scene. Drawn from deep ethnographic research, interviews, and long-term participant observation, the book charts the ways that New York's distinctive physical and social-cultural environment affects and is affected by jazz. Throughout, it offers a passionate argument in favor of a radically inclusive conception of music-making, one in which individuals collectively improvise across social contexts to co-create community and musical meanings. An odyssey through the clubs and other performance spaces on and off the beaten track, this book is an insider's view of a vibrant urban art world.
Listening to Jazz
Authors: Greenland Thomas H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses some of the ways in which individual listeners interface with, understand, and thereby appreciate improvised jazz performances. It first considers the different explanations for the role of listener agency in the act of musical perception, along with musical “facts” associated with a given performance. It then examines musical elements that resist analysis and classification, including timbre, nonstandard pitches or tunings, and rhythmic flexibility. It also explains how jazz musicians respond to emergent developments in a group improvisation and how people's ways of comprehending jazz are informed by the various contexts of listening. Finally, it looks at the elements of surprise that contribute to the overall immediacy of a performance.
Developing “Big Ears”
Authors: Greenland Thomas H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how jazz fans, especially the most active concertgoers (the regulars), respond to a musical performance. It first considers how fans become part of jazz communities and how they contribute to the New York City jazz scene. It then shows how nonperforming musicians fill the performance space, suggesting that these offstage participants, who are also “performing” jazz, constitute the unseen scene, the silent and not-so-silent majority that forms an integral part of communal music-making. It also explains what happens when fans are in the house: how their musical tastes develop, how they view performers and performances, and how their private and public listening practices inform their understandings of and appreciation for jazz and jazz performances. The chapter concludes that when jazz audiences with “big ears” attend to and interact with live music and musicians, it creates a sympathetic environment where jazz can come alive.
The Claim of Innocence
Authors: Avilez GerShun
Published: May 2017

This chapter tracks how artists inhabit the subjective space of whiteness as a closing ranks move. This idea may seem counterintuitive, but for many thinkers, exploring whiteness is useful in determining the conventional parameters of Black identity. The act of identifying and challenging these boundaries creates the opportunity for imagining a unity not plagued by restrictive conceptions of blackness. Therefore, turning inward does not appear as a mere rejection of whiteness in favor of shoring up blackness. The chapter then highlights how the rhetoric of White innocence provides the foundation for both racial and gender frameworks in the U.S. social imaginary. The desire to generate a radical Black identity includes dismantling this rhetoric, which permeates media and popular thought.
The Space of Sex
Authors: Avilez GerShun
Published: May 2017

This chapter shows how artists recognize the political reading of sex and use it to examine the social realm and the intimate realm simultaneously, ultimately illustrating a disintegration of the distinction between the two. Cecil Brown's Black Arts novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969) provides an extended look at hypersexual masculinity in hopes of exhibiting its flaws. On the other hand, Jayne Cortez's Black Arts poetry collections Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares (1969) and Festivals and Funerals (1971) turn their attention to limiting constructions of Black femininity and sexual minority existence that impede self-definition. The chapter also highlights Darieck Scott's experimental novel Traitor to the Race (1995) because it presents queer desire specifically as having the potential to disrupt social meaning.
Diasporic Fragility and Brokenness
Authors: Kim Christine
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines works by Korean Canadian artist David Khang and Korean American writer Susan Choi through the lens of fragility in order to understand the complexities of diasporic publics as formations of feeling. Khang's art installation Mom's Crutch (2004) and performance art project Wrong Places (2007–14) and Choi's 1998 novel, The Foreign Student, underscore the need to spatialize discussions of postcolonial intimacies and affect by reminding that diaspora is an affective formation whose participants are situated within diverse national contexts, and that this tension shapes global politics and possibilities. Indeed, their projects speak to the geopolitics of feeling and the local, national, and global structures that shape delicate memories, racialize social intimacies, and formulate Asia as a site of alterity.
Ephemeral Publics and Roy Kiyooka’s StoneDGloves
Authors: Kim Christine
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter outlines a form of ephemeral intimacy that emerges within racialized publics and that might also potentially be extended to include dominant publics by examining the work of poet and visual artist Roy Kiyooka and his influence on Asian Canadian creative and critical work. Kiyooka's work operates as an Asian Canadian archive for how it historicizes racialized logics that are often at odds with racialized representations. The chapter then focuses on Kiyooka's StoneDGloves (1997), which, as an experimental piece of visual art and poetry, explores the limits of aesthetic and social representation—a concern that is also at the heart of Asian Canadian publics.
John Lasseter
Authors: Neupert Richard
Published: May 2017

Celebrated as Pixar's “Chief Creative Officer,” John Lasseter is a revolutionary figure in animation history and one of today's most important filmmakers. Lasseter films from Luxo Jr. to Toy Story and Cars 2 highlighted his gift for creating emotionally engaging characters. At the same time, they helped launch computer animation as a viable commercial medium and serve as blueprints for the genre's still-expanding commercial and artistic development. This book explores Lasseter's signature aesthetic and storytelling strategies and details how he became the architect of Pixar's studio style. The book contends that Lasseter's accomplishments emerged from a unique blend of technical skill and artistic vision, as well as a passion for working with collaborators. In addition, the book traces the director's career arc from the time Lasseter joined Pixar in 1984. As it shows, Lasseter's ability to keep a foot in both animation and computer-generated imagery allowed him to thrive in an unconventional corporate culture that valued creative interaction between colleagues. The ideas that emerged built an animation studio that updated and refined classical Hollywood storytelling practices—and changed commercial animation forever.
The British Army of the Rhine
Authors: Speiser Peter
Published: May 2017

Between 1945 and 1957, West Germany made a dizzying pivot from Nazi bastion to Britain's Cold War ally against the Soviet Union. Successive London governments, though often faced with bitter public and military opposition, tasked the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) to serve as a protecting force while strengthening West German integration into the Western defense structure. This book charts the BAOR's fraught transformation from occupier to ally by looking at the charged nexus where British troops and their families interacted with Germany's civilian population. Examining the relationship on many levels, the book ranges from how British mass media representations of Germany influenced BAOR troops to initiatives taken by the Army to improve relations. It also weighs German perceptions, surveying clashes between soldiers and civilians and comparing the popularity of the British services with that of the other occupying powers. As the book shows, the BAOR's presence did not improve the relationship between British servicemen and the German populace, but it did prevent further deterioration during a crucial and dangerous period of the early Cold War. An incisive look at an under-researched episode, this book sheds new light on Anglo-German diplomatic, political, and social relations after 1945, and evaluates their impact on the wider context of European integration in the postwar era.
The British
Authors: Speiser Peter
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the portrayal of Germany and its people in Britain in order to shed light on the views that would have influenced young Britons joining the BAOR. The focus is on media that are likely to have been encountered by young British men, such as the British press, nonfictional and fictional literature, and war films. The chapter also considers the impact of Germany's economic recovery on British opinion. With regard to cultural and more personal relations between the BAOR and the Germans, a number of relevant publications point to factors that potentially influenced the view of the general British public toward Germany and that of individual soldiers stationed in Germany.