bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Walking Woman
Authors: Beal Amy C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Bley's first few years in New York. She was most likely eighteen years old when she arrived in the city but it is not clear exactly when Bley first got there. New to the city, she slept temporarily in Grand Central Station and then paid for an inexpensive hotel room near Times Square. She then began working at the jazz clubs Basin Street and Birdland. Shortly after turning twenty-one, during the summer of 1957, she officially changed her name to Carla Borg and started composing regularly. Carla Bley was further encouraged by musicians in Los Angeles. But perhaps most important, her encounter with Charlie Haden marked the start of a lifelong friendship, one that has resulted in some of the most innovative recordings ever made by large jazz ensembles, namely, the Liberation Music Orchestra projects beginning in 1969.
Sing Me Softly of the Blues
Authors: Beal Amy C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Bley's early compositions. According to Bley, her earliest mature work is the twelve-bar blues in F called Donkey, which she probably composed in Los Angeles in 1958. In a collection of her piano music published in 1981, Bley called the melody of the piece “a blues line,” even though it flies by at a rapid pace and seems more akin to bebop melodies than to anything else. Likewise, the short explosion of Ictus (also dated 1958) is to be played “as fast as possible.” Unlike Donkey, which she considered a blues, Ictus does not have chord symbols written in the way then standard for jazz scores. Indeed, many of her early works have a tendency to obscure any sense of metrical regularity through irregular placements of short phrases, held notes across the bar lines, and plenty of rests.
Not a Smooth Flight for Boeing and the Union
Authors: Cloud Dana L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter begins with the narrative frames of company and union, describing the rise to power of the Boeing Company and of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW). Known for its militancy, the IAMAW has enacted a history paralleling the turbulence of the larger labor movement. Throughout its history, the leadership of the IAMAW at Boeing has cooperated with concessions unless forced to do otherwise by the rank and file of the union. At key moments, such as the 1995 strike at Boeing, rank-and-file workers can push their leaders from below, putting out educational flyers, petitioning against concessions, and organizing union members into an anticoncession caucus.
The Beginnings and Ends of Union Democracy
Authors: Cloud Dana L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter assesses the situation of the dissident Machinist movement at Boeing today. There are a number of important and poignant lessons from this struggle for democratic reformers inside unions. These lessons speak to how reformers can push their official leadership while staying focused on the company; prioritize long-term organizing and contract cycle agitation above electoral bids and legal strategies; and recognize that unions—and dissident movements inside of unions—are only democratic and vital to the extent that they involve large numbers of their members and represent their demands. The chapter considers the question of whether one can speak legitimately for the rank and file without their active involvement in the movement from a dissident position any more than one should do so from a business union position. The credentials and, more important, the power of a dissident union movement depend upon taking advantage of critical rank-and-file consciousness to build an organization that restores a balance of power between union leadership and the rank and file in the longer term. Only then can the rank and file become ready, when the time comes, to make their own history.
Mike Leigh
Authors: O'Sullivan Sean
Published: May 2017

This much needed examination of Mike Leigh reclaims the British director as a practicing theorist—a filmmaker deeply invested in cinema's formal, conceptual, and narrative dimensions. In contrast with Leigh's prevailing reputation as a straightforward crafter of social realist movies, the book illuminates the visual tropes and storytelling investigations that position Leigh as an experimental filmmaker who uses the art and artifice of cinema to frame tales of the everyday and the extraordinary alike. Concentrating on the most recent two decades of Leigh's career, the study examines how Naked, Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, and other less-discussed films such as Four Days in July and The Short and Curlies engage narrative convergence and narrative diffusion, the tension between character and plot, the interplay of coincidence and design, cinema's relationship to other systems of representation, and the filmic rendering of the human figure. This volume also includes key selections from the author's several interviews with Leigh.
Stories of Harm, Stories of Hazard
Authors: Underwood Doug
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the life stories of journalist–literary figures in the context of childhood history, mental health symptoms, and categories of traumatic experience that today are recognized as “triggers” of psychic conflict. More specifically, it considers the ways that journalists have coped with childhood stress and professional trauma throughout their careers. The chapter first explains the historical limitations of our understanding of trauma's role in the lives of early journalist–literary figures such as Charles Lamb, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, and William Dean Howells before discussing religion as the early framework for understanding trauma and traumatized emotions. It then explores the link between trauma and the romantic movement, and between trauma and psychological writing, and proceeds with an analysis of psychological themes in the fiction of journalists, such as parental and family loss, abandonment, family breakup, and/or living with psychologically ill and/or alcoholic parents. It also outlines what novel writing could do that journalism did not in terms of conveying the emotional impact of traumatic experience.
Reading Machines
Authors: Ramsay Stephen
Published: May 2017

Besides familiar and now commonplace tasks that computers do all the time, what else are they capable of? This study of computational text analysis examines how computers can be used as “reading machines” to open up entirely new possibilities for literary critics. Computer-based text analysis has been employed for the past several decades as a way of searching, collating, and indexing texts. Despite this, the digital revolution has not penetrated the core activity of literary studies: interpretive analysis of written texts. Computers can handle vast amounts of data, allowing for the comparison of texts in ways that were previously too overwhelming for individuals, but they may also assist in enhancing the entirely necessary role of subjectivity in critical interpretation. This book discusses the importance of this new form of text analysis conducted with the assistance of computers. The book suggests that the rigidity of computation can be enlisted by intuition, subjectivity, and play.
Neither Mainstream nor Alternative
Authors: Emerich Monica M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines LOHAS as a bridge between the two poles of the American marketplace—the “alternative” market and the “mainstream” or conventional market. This market-based binary shaped and informed many of the industries now considered part of the domain of LOHAS. These companies and industries once purposefully positioned themselves as alternative. “Alternative” defined their intended consumer base, their company missions, and even, in many cases, the founder's personal values. Today, however, LOHAS organizations regard this alterity as more of a handicap than an advantage. Moreover, the so-called mainstream is actively adding LOHAS products and services to product inventories and marketing materials, blurring the boundaries even further. The chapter historicizes this, following the emergence of The LOHAS Journal, the first truly public and mediated circulation of the word.
A Vision of Health
Authors: Emerich Monica M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter articulates the LOHAS vision of health as a three-part holistic model of self, society, and the natural world. In turn, “holistic” has been described in LOHAS more through Eastern perspectives rather than Western religious traditions in that it presupposes a state of interconnectedness of all phenomena—mind and matter, animal and human, global cultures and ecosystems. For example, the holistic worldview of Buddhism (a frequently called-upon tradition in LOHAS literature), understands that interdependence means that “humanity is only one actor” in the environment and that all actors must remain in balance for the system to be healthy. But this flies in the face of late consumer culture, where the individual reigns supreme, and where LOHAS is predominantly lodged. The final section examines how that problem is overcome, how Mother Nature becomes intertwined with the healed self as part of the healing and a vital component of the model of holistic health. It shows how healing the self becomes exonerated from the “narcissism” of the New Age and instead becomes reframed as the stepping stone to a collective good, capable of initiating global transformation based on the notion of holistic health.
Introduction
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter sheds light on mountaintop removal coal mining and the ways people have reacted to it, including reimagining profound social and personal ideas like identity, history, and landscape. From a different perspective, it looks at the social processes that help create and continue to justify a monster like mountaintop removal, and about the social resources communities assemble to combat those processes. Conflicts of this sort are often associated with globalization. The chapter reveals how people experience in their daily lives the local effects of global processes. In their opposition to mountaintop removal and other coal industry practices, citizen activists narrate a revised version of local and regional history, in order to situate themselves and their position in relation to the black rock and its industry that had fed them for generations.
The Chase
Authors: McNeil Bryan T.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the bureaucratic maze of state regulations that community activists face. It quickly becomes clear that procedures within the state Department of Environmental Protection funnel citizen input away from critical decision making. Activists are told that only in the state legislature can they argue that mountaintop removal should not be allowed. That same legislature is awash in political campaign contributions from coal companies, and in fact populated with many members who are themselves tied to the industry. From the shady dealings of land companies in the nineteenth century to the shady dealings of Governor Moore, West Virginians are accustomed to Coal's institutional dominance over their politics and economics. Ultimately, layers of bureaucracy make it difficult to hold politicians or the industry accountable.
The Meanings of Latino
Authors: Ramirez-Valles Jesus
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the ways in which Latino GBT activists live their lives as “Latinos” in a racial social system. In a parallel fashion to stigma related to gender nonconformity, it treats the racial labeling of groups as stigma. That is, to call someone Latino or to use the label Latino is part of the process of marking differences between groups, creating social separation, and establishing discriminatory practices. This stigmatization reinforces, if not creates, relations of power. From the viewpoint of the labeled group, stigma can take the form of actual experiences; perceptions about how others or the society at large see them; and internalization of the negative views others have in the self.
Finding Compañeros
Authors: Ramirez-Valles Jesus
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the changes brought about by community involvement. Community involvement works as an epiphany for Latino GBT activists. It is a process whereby the “old self” is transformed into a new and different self. Indeed, the organizations these Latinos belong to—as well as the larger AIDS and gay movements—shape the personal changes activists undergo. The group provides them with information, a set of meanings, and a direction to change their lives. The group also helps them to reinterpret old and new behaviors and to build an identity based on the group culture. The process of change is thus set up and made possible through the acquisition of a new set of meanings and acts. These newly gained elements are not individual. Rather, they are created and shared by compañeros in a group or organization.
Opportunity Costs
Authors: Robinson Scharn
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Bill Clinton's role in the 2008 campaign and his special relationship to Black voters. As he left office in 2001, Clinton's positive legacy of social and economic inclusiveness was very much intact in the African American community. Moreover, his relationship with and treatment of African Americans stood as a shining part of what would become the Clinton legacy. However, when President Clinton waged war on behalf of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination during 2008 presidential campaign season, he found that the political landscape had changed. He appeared to make little accommodation in his combative campaign style for the fact that Obama was being treated like the crown prince by American journalists and the Democratic Party. As a result, Clinton found himself explaining incidents of political sparring between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp that needed no explanation against other opponents. He also made gross miscalculations about the nature and strength of the Clintons' support among African Americans.
Barack Obama’s Anomalous Relationship with the Hip-Hop Community
Authors: Ossei-Owusu Shaun
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the hip-hop community's relationship with Obama. The hip-hop community was generally supportive of Obama as the first prospective black president and an imagined emblem of hope and change, while Obama acknowledged the phenomenal power of hip-hop and admitted that he is a fan of distinguished contemporary artists in the genre. Adversely, hip-hop is highly skeptical and critical of government, and Obama has voiced disdain for the negative content and misogynist messages in hip-hop music. Now that Obama is elected, how will this anomalous relationship impact the collective posture of the hip-hop community? How will he communicate and approach the hip-hop community? Will the presence of Obama and his positive messages make the typical outlier of drug dealer passé and make it cool to be informed, articulate, and befittingly ambitious?
Afterword
Authors: Raubicheck Walter , Srebnick Walter
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter presents the criticisms, objections, and retrospectives gleaned from Stefano, Hunter, and Allen through interviews as they look back on their time working with Hitchcock, and on the final cuts of the films they had helped to create. It includes both their early assessments of these films and also looks at how their opinions have changed over time. All three writers looked back upon their collaboration with Hitchcock as a golden moment, a time when they had the opportunity to share and participate within a singular creative vision. The chapter also briefly discusses Hitchcock's other films after Marnie and how they had fared, as well as the enduring legacy of his triptych for film history.
Whose Evidence? Which Account?
Authors: Mitchell Koritha
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter contends that lynching plays served as mechanisms through which African Americans survived the height of mob violence—and its photographic representation—still believing in their right to full citizenship. Lynching plays survive in the archive to enhance our understanding of the United States at the turn into the twentieth century; the genre was developed by African Americans aware of their communities' strategies for living with lynching—strategies that required a keen understanding of U.S. culture. As a genre, black-authored lynching drama sheds unique light on the New Negro, the New South, and the New Woman. As African Americans who had never known legal bondage came of age, they laid claim to unprecedented educational opportunities, and like other Americans, they went about the business of defining the contours of their modern identities.
Redefining “Black Theater”
Authors: Mitchell Koritha
Published: May 2017

This chapter demonstrates that the first black-authored lynching play, Rachel, by Angelina Weld Grimké, emerged in 1914 partly because the mainstream stage accepted black actors but limited them to comedy or white-authored material. Grimké and others thus began privileging playwriting over acting in order to control the race's representation. Nevertheless, African American intellectuals and artists came to value black dramatists because of the success of performers—even minstrels and musical comedians. Moreover, Grimké's Rachel proved influential enough to initiate the genre of lynching drama because other poets and fiction writers also began writing plays. As Grimké's successors offered generic revisions, their efforts helped to redefine black theater again. The chapter therefore identifies the differences and commonalities between their work and Grimké's.
The Black Soldier
Authors: Mitchell Koritha
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines together the first two one-act lynching plays to appear in periodicals. These scripts' presence in the archive offers access to the playwrights' willingness to maximize periodical culture and the diversity of perspectives encouraged by it. Dramatic revisions of Grimke's Rachel began with Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Mine Eyes Have Seen, a play that compares lynching to black military service in World War I. This 1918 one-act soon inspired Mary Burrill's similarly themed script, Aftermath, published in 1919. Heated debate drives the action of both plays, prompting honest, painful conversation in black communities not unlike that among the characters. The plays question to varying degrees black patriotism in a country that tolerates lynching, but they equally underscore the importance of the black soldier.
Rosa Guy, Haiti, and the Hemispheric Woman
Authors: Higashida Cheryl
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Rosa Guy's Black feminist and queer engagement with tropes and discourses of twentieth-century radical literature about Haitian Revolution generated by the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1918–1934) and interwar anticolonialism. Although Guy is a little-known figure of the post-World War II Black Left, she cofounded two of its influential institutions: the Harlem Writers Guild and the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage. Over thirty years after the height of this activism, Guy reflected on the limitations of Black nationalism and its Left articulations in her novel, The Sun, The Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995). Guy's novel revises Black masculinist messianism, and in representing the ongoing history of American military intervention in the Caribbean, makes critique of U.S. imperialism central to Black feminism.
Diaspora Dance: Courageous Performers
Authors: Daniel Yvonne
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the foundation of Diaspora dance and its relationship to African dance and music. It first considers the importance of dance in the African Diaspora and its relation to Caribbean dance before discussing the emergence of several types of African movement styles that echo across the Diaspora today, along with the introduction of African-derived dance practices to the mainstream European, Asian, and American dance worlds. It then takes a look at some of the performers who have brought Caribbean dance into global view and goes on to analyze particular ways of moving and preferences for certain dance formations. It also reviews some important assumptions that accompany Diaspora dance and its performance and concludes with an assessment of the consequences of Diaspora performance, noting how the efforts of Diaspora performers reinforce dance practices across the Diaspora as resilient and joyful body communication.
Tourism, Globalization, and Caribbean Dance
Authors: Daniel Yvonne
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Caribbean dance in the context of tourism and globalization. In particular, it looks at the interaction between tourism enterprises and dance genres, dance artists, and island governments as well as its implications for cultural and economic globalization. After providing an overview of human and natural resources available on the Caribbean islands and how they have been developed toward tourism, the chapter discusses the integration of Caribbean dance and music making into regional development as aids to differing types of tourist planning. It then considers the globalization of Caribbean dances such as merengue, mambo, salsa, and reggae and how Caribbean sacred dance, concert dance, and popular dance fare within cultural globalization or homogenizing trends, local market structures and tourism. It also analyzes the impact of globalization on Caribbean dancers and the local and global tensions brought on by globalization as they relate to Caribbean dance and tourism. The chapter concludes by offering suggestions for confronting pressures from cultural and economic globalization.
Prologue: Old World Contours
Authors: Lause Mark A.
Published: May 2017

This prologue discusses the proliferation of revolutionaries and revolutionary secret societies in America in the wake of the revolts of 1848–49. Americans initially shared with Europe the mechanisms by which republicans sought to reconstruct their civilizations. Masonry, the earliest model of a secular voluntary association, emerged from the Old World Enlightenment with unavoidable implications for the political organizations built in its wake and for the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century. For the defenders of the status quo, the membership, influence, and agendas of secret societies might be unknown, but it seemed wisest to assume them to be massive, pervasive, and insidious. On the other hand, some participants sought to turn a Masonic model to revolutionary purposes, with goals that ranged from the mere displacement of a regime to a thorough social transformation.
Universal Democratic Republicans
Authors: Lause Mark A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Universal Democratic Republicans, which formed the core of the union of “liberal societies” by early 1854. The listed participants included both the “Free Democratic League (Americans, opposed to the Extension of Slavery)” and the “Ouvrier Circle (American workmen).” Given that the personnel of these groups overlapped, the Brotherhood of the Union in New York saw itself alongside the revolutionary secret societies of Europe and their successors and, in an American context, as part of the radical wing of the antislavery movement. This coalition addressed American politics on its own. That July, it recommended Hugh Forbes's Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer as “indispensable for the Revolutionists” and endorsed the view of American politics reflected in Forbes's “Catechism” that described the Democrats and Whigs as existing “to procure public occupation in the diplomatic service, custom house, post office, treasury, patent office, land office, municipality, police, or any other where salary and profit can be enjoyed.”
Lone Stars and Golden Circles
Authors: Lause Mark A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Knights of the Golden Circle. George Washington Lafayette Bickley became one of the most famous members of the Brotherhood of the Union after he founded his own Knights of the Golden Circle. In a nation of “self-made men,” the founder of the Knights of the Golden Circle so persistently and frequently remade himself that many contemporaries remained at a loss as to who he actually was. Nevertheless, by any measure, the Knights of the Golden Circle became much more well known and accorded vastly greater importance than the organizations of George Lippard or Hugh Forbes. While Giuseppe Mazzini's idea of a mystic national destiny rested, in part, on the cooperation of nations, Bickley worked where nationhood grew pure without feudal or monarchist constraints. In his mind, an American “Manifest Destiny” unfolded in an unbounded fashion that would be not only unique but exceptional.
The Counterfeit Nation
Authors: Lause Mark A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that secession transformed the Knights of the Golden Circle from a political confidence game into a multipurpose tool for a nation-building enterprise. That is, the Knights of the Golden Circle eased the effort of the Southern elite to build a nation by secession from a country it could no longer control and acquire the new territory they believed they could. Over time, George W. L. Bickley fine-tuned his flattery of the Southern elite, shaping for them a tool that appealed to popular prejudices against republican ideology. In response, the masters of the new Confederate nation found the Knights of the Golden Circle most useful as an all-purpose label for its enforcement arm at the defining margins of the new Confederate States of America.
Introduction
Authors: Armfield Felix L.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter lays out a brief biography of Eugene Kinckle Jones and his work in black social reform, including his affiliation with the National Urban League (NUL). It laments the lack of scholarship on Jones's role in both the NUL and the American social-work movement. Moreover, the chapter narrows the focus of this book—not to the NUL in particular—but to Jones and his role in the professionalization of black social work, in order to increase our understanding of the “urban black experience”—the processes of migration and of migrants becoming black urbanites. The chapter furthermore attempts to illustrate how social work as a profession engaged black Americans and how it was administered during its infancy. It then closes with a brief overview of the following chapters.
Obama 2.0
Authors: Baker Paula
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes a critical look at the internet fundraising techniques the Obama campaign perfected and argues that such techniques, combined with federal campaign contribution reporting requirements, pose an important challenge to political values that Americans have long embraced. Not only do the stunning amounts raised render obsolete the nation's four-decades-old system of public campaign financing; the fact that much of this money was raised from a large number of small donors, and that these donors can be readily identified in online campaign finance reports, challenges one of the most important innovations in the electoral process of the late nineteenth century, the secret ballot.
Emotion, Subjectivity, and the Limits of Desire
Authors: Bhaskar Ira
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes three Bombay melodramas: Mahesh Kaul's Gopinath (1948), Kamal Amrohi's Daera (1953), and Bimal Roy's Devdas (1955). These films represent the tragic denouement of their protagonists, bringing into sharp relief a particular melodramatic embodiment of gender and identity in Bombay cinema of the 1940s and 1950. The chapter addresses the following questions: What are the issues at stake? What is the historical conjuncture that pressures gender and genre to take such forms? What significances does the aesthetic mode employed here press forth from the situations that the films outline? What specific contours does the Indian melodramatic form take to signify its historical meanings?
Epilogue
Authors: White Miles
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter examines how, in the post-MTV world of video culture and the post-hardcore rap world of commodity thugs, mediated images of the black male body remain a fantasy of masculine desire that encapsulates extreme alternatives of heroism and villainy for white and other youth who often have few other references for black American culture. It reiterates on the conclusions drawn from the previous chapters; and furthermore examines the implications of Barack Obama's 2008 electoral victory, his engagement and association with hip-hop culture, his triumph over American power expressed through whiteness, and his overall role as what the author here terms as “the first hip-hop president.”
To Be Free and Lucumí
Authors: O’Toole Rachel Sarah
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the development of African diasporic identities in colonial Peru by focusing on the case of Ana de la Calle. In 1719, Ana de la Calle paid a notary in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo to compose her will. She identified herself as a free morena of casta lucumí from the Yoruba-speaking interior of the Bight of Benin. Before deconstructing the terms “lucumí” and “morena” as used together by Ana de la Calle, this chapter first provides an overview of slavery and freedom in colonial Peru. It then considers lucumí as an elite status, as well as how Ana de la Calle's claim to be free and Lucumí made her unique and perhaps isolated her from other free women of color in colonial Trujillo. By analyzing why Ana de la Calle used morena and lucumí together, this chapter shows how casta terms were harnessed by both enslaved and free people of the African Diaspora.
Tensions of Race, Gender, and Midwifery in Colonial Cuba
Authors: Reid-Vazquez Michele
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines representations of honor, gender, race, and labor in colonial Cuba through the lens of midwifery. More specifically, it considers how free women of African descent used occupational choice as a marker of identity and honor despite the limits of race and gender within Cuba's slave society. Using the tensions surrounding local and international debates over parteras (midwives) in the nineteenth century, the chapter looks at the ways that free women of color resisted the efforts of the colonial state to diminish their participation in midwifery. It also discusses the professionalization in medicine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and its impact on midwifery in Cuba, along with the colonial state's attempts to regulate midwives. Finally, it considers how free black and mulatto women appropriated elite discourses of honor and created a labor niche that challenged established socioracial codes of conduct. It shows that medical professionalization, feminine ideals, honor, occupational whitening, and racial denigration converged to shape the social and economic parameters for free women of African descent in colonial Cuba.
Moving Backstage
Authors: Wiles Mary M.
Published: May 2017

In the spring of 1957, Jacques Rivette had just completed his first short 35 mm film, Le coup du berger (A Fool’s Mate; 1956), and was in the planning stages of his first feature, Paris nous appartient, while continuing to write incisive critical pieces for the Paris film journal ...
Equal Time
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This book explores the crucial role of network television in reconfiguring new attitudes in race relations during the civil rights movement. Due to widespread coverage, the civil rights revolution quickly became the United States' first televised major domestic news story. This important medium unmistakably influenced the ongoing movement for African American empowerment, desegregation, and equality. The book brings to the foreground television news treatment of now-famous civil rights events including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration riots at the University of Mississippi, and the March on Washington, including Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech. It also examines the most high-profile and controversial television series of the era to feature African American actors—East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times—to reveal how entertainment programmers sought to represent a rapidly shifting consensus on what “blackness” and “whiteness” meant and how they now fit together.
The March on Washington and a Peek into Racial Utopia
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how television networks handled the coverage of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 to a national audience of millions. The March on Washington drew a quarter of a million civil rights activists who converged on the nation's capital to press for “jobs and freedom.” Television cameras and reporters focused on the demonstrators' placards and signs. All three networks broadcast the event live. With the exception of presidential inaugurations and nominating conventions, no single event had ever commanded such extensive television coverage. This chapter first considers how the CBS news team framed and packaged the March on Washington as a news story, and particularly Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech, before discussing various responses to the television news reporting of the march in the African American press. It suggests that the March on Washington functioned as a paean of “black and white together,” as the networks invited viewers to share in a utopian taste of achieved equality.
Prime Time, Good Times
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how the CBS family sitcom Good Times turned into an important site of contestation and struggle over questions of “blackness,” the black family, “authenticity,” and black-versus-white control in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement. Good Times “answered” the vehement criticisms about Julia. Whereas Julia gave viewers a simulacral “Super Negro” to inspire blacks and comfort whites, Good Times presented a more “realistic” image of the challenges, struggles, and poverty that many blacks actually encountered in their daily lives. In addition, the CBS comedy pointedly addressed hot-button issues such as school busing, teen pregnancy, and street gangs. This chapter assesses the cultural legacy of Good Times's racial imagery and asks whether the show was a victory for African Americans in the struggle for “positive images.” It concludes with a discussion of the sitcom's significance for post–civil rights race politics and argues that it was ultimately both a success and a failure.
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Authors: Gardner Jared
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant shift from novel-writing to periodical culture. In particular, the chapter examines the career of Charles Brockden Brown as he draws influences from other writers during the time while also developing an editorial function which he would work to define in his last fictions and in his periodical work of his final years. This chapter also explores the writings of a particular author whom Brown has read—Hannah Webster Foster, whose career witnesses an even more abrupt turn away from the novel.
Musical Journeys in Sumatra
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

Although Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world and home to an estimated 44 million Indonesians, its musical arts and cultures have not been the subject of a book-length study until now. Documenting and explaining the ethnographic, cultural, and historical contexts of Sumatra's performing arts, this book also traces the changes in their style, content, and reception from the early 1970s onward. The book offers a fascinating ethnographic record of vanishing musical genres, traditions, and practices that have become deeply compromised by the pressures of urbanization, rural poverty, and government policy. It showcases the complex diversity of Indonesian music and includes field observations from six different provinces: Aceh, North Sumatra, Riau, West Sumatra, South Sumatra, and Bangka-Belitung. Featuring photographs and original drawings from Kartomi's field observations of instruments and performances, the book provides a comprehensive musical introduction to this neglected, very large island, with its hundreds of ethno-linguistic-musical groups.
The Riau Indragiri Sultanate’s Nobat Ensemble and its Suku Mamak Stalwarts
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the gendang nobat ensemble in two of Riau's musico-lingual subgroups: the Indragiri-Kuantan Malays, represented by the descendants of the former Indragiri palace at Rengat, and their forest-dwelling loyal Suku Dalem (or Suku Mamak) subjects. Tradition holds that ever since the Malay palace at Malacca was founded in the fifteenth century C.E., the gendang nobat (nobat drums) have served as an indispensable symbol of the regalia that authorized the ruler's sovereignty. If a nobat was stolen or lost, the sultan who had owned it lost all his power. The chapter first describes the gendang nobat ensemble at Indragiri, with particular emphasis on the features of of the royal Malay nobat drums, before discussing the history of the Indragiri kingdom and its nobat. It suggests that followers of the former lndragiri palace, especially the Suku Mamak people, still feel a warm nostalgia for the old palace culture, and that aspects of the royal nobat rhythms may live on in Suku Mamak drumming in other ritual contexts.
From Singkil to Natal
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the two main musical genres performed at northwest-coastal Sumatran weddings and baby thanksgiving ceremonies between Singkil and Natal: lagu sikambang asli (original sikambang songs) and lagu sikambang kapri (sikambang songs with violin, harmony, and couples dancing). It considers the vocal style of the sikambang asli songs and how the harmonically generated violin accompaniment is blended with the Malay vocal style and frame-drum part in the sikambang kapri songs. The chapter begins with a discussion of “Buai,” a ceremonial lullaby, the Penang Island Song and the Umbrella Dance, and “Lagu Sikambang Tarian Anak” (“Sikambang Song-Dance [to celebrate the birth of a] Child”). It then describes some Pasisir song-dances that are also performed by artists in and around other Malay areas, along with the spread of the violin and couples dancing to the Pasisir Sumando coast. The chapter hypothesizes that the musical genre's harmonic elements and use of the violin are derived from Malay-Portuguese contact during the Portuguese colonial era in Southeast Asia (1511–1641).
Looking Back, Looking On
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the legacy of Henry Mancini. Mancini should be remembered for three contributions to popular culture: first the reinventing, the freshening of film scoring in the 1960s. Mancini offered to the young Kennedy-era generation his own bright and clear sophisticated style—as clean and courteous as mainstream pop, but as cool and knowing as modern jazz. His second contribution was his repackaging of the melodic material from those colorful scores into jazz-pop record albums for home listening (coinciding with the invention of the stereo vinyl disc and high-fidelity recording techniques) that put his memorable tunes and orchestral inventiveness directly into people's lives and gave him, unlike past film composers, fame under his own name. Third was his reintroduction of lyricism into popular music—of carefully composed, personally expressive, harmonically interesting melody writing that had flourished once, then dried up in the 1950s when a cold war reigned between capitalism and communism as between one war-torn generation and their anxious offspring.
Evening
Authors: Ferguson Gillum
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at how, for the Indian tribes, the coming struggle would be one for their very existence. Their population is hard to estimate, because contemporary estimates vary significantly and, in any case, usually account only for the number of warriors in a tribal group. Nevertheless, it may be fair to estimate that the number of Indians in the territory probably did not far exceed the number of white and black Americans. Except for the remnants of the Kaskaskia and Piankashaw in southwestern Illinois and along the Wabash, respectively, few tribes had permanent villages south of a line drawn across the state through the present Springfield and Decatur, although either war or hunting might carry parties of Indians deep into the southern part of the territory.
Howard
Authors: Ferguson Gillum
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the new commander in the Illinois and Missouri territories—Brigadier General Benjamin Howard, a native Kentuckian. Although no professional soldier, in his youth Howard had fought Indians in his state's border warfare and he is said to have commanded volunteers attached to Anthony Wayne's army. After peace was restored, Howard entered a career in his native Lexington as a lawyer and, briefly, as a judge. In 1800 he was elected to the Kentucky legislature and in 1807 to the United States House of Representatives. Howard served in the Tenth and Eleventh Congresses, but in 1810 he resigned from Congress to accept appointment as governor of Louisiana (soon renamed Missouri) Territory, a post in which he succeeded the ill-fated Meriwether Lewis.
Engagements with the Past in Contemporary Dance
Authors: Hardt Yvonne
Published: May 2017

For a long time, what has been considered “avant-garde” embodied the “new” and was perceived as different from those dance forms considered traditional, historical, or marked by ethnic inheritance. This chapter traces how contemporary dance performances and dance historical writing have challenged these demarcations as one detects a remarkable trend toward evoking the past in contemporary dance. Numerous artists and festivals increasingly feature works that address the past, having discovered the potential for a self-reflexivity of dance in conversation with its history. From this larger group of artists, the chapter focuses on four contemporary European choreographers: Jér ô me Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Eszter Salamon, and Martin Nachbar to discuss what working with the past in contemporary performance can entail. These choreographers expose different modes of taking up the past; however, they all engage a concept of history understood as a construction based on the needs of the present.
How Did Poetry Survive?
Authors: Newcomb John Timberman
Published: May 2017

This book traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. With a particular focus on four “little magazines”—Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Masses, Others, and Seven Arts—the book shows how each advanced ambitious agendas combining urban subjects, stylistic experimentation, and progressive social ideals. All four were profoundly affected by World War I, and the poetry on their pages responded to the war and its causes with clarity and strength. While subsequent literary history has favored the poets whose work made them distinct—individuals singled out usually on the basis of a novel technique—the book provides a denser, richer view of the history that hundreds of poets made.
There Is Always Others
Authors: Newcomb John Timberman
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the experimental verse of Others, the quintessential aestheticist-modernist little magazine of American poetry, emerges from and responds to the climate of metropolitan activism that links it to The Masses. Others, published between July 1915 and July 1919 by Alfred Kreymborg and various friends, published works by such distinguished poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Carl Sandburg. This chapter argues that Others's commitment to stylistic experimentalism possessed a strong social dimension by showing how its verses addressed the conditions of urban-industrial modernity. It also describes the magazine's poetics of modernity as it extends across three interdependent registers: formal, thematic, and metapoetic. Finally, it discusses Others's contribution to the expansion of modern poetic form by cultivating a distinctive innovation, the vers libre variation sequence.
Volunteers of America, 1917
Authors: Newcomb John Timberman
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the odyssey of the Seven Arts, led by its editor-in-chief, James Oppenheim, from naïve nationalism to radical dissent that ultimately led to its demise. It emphasizes the important role played in this project by verse texts and by “poetry” as a metaphor for national identity, as well as the far-reaching cultural impact of the New Verse movement. The Seven Arts's life can be divided into two halves: an initial phase of utopian cultural nationalism between November 1916 and March 1917, followed by a steadily intensifying oppositional phase between April and October. Defying conventional views of the modernist little magazine as a fugitive publication, the Seven Arts became an ideal destination for formally experimental American poetry owing to its amateur status. This chapter considers the impact of World War I on the Seven Arts and cites its demise as evidence of the limits and weaknesses of American free-speech traditions and the end of the utopian moment of early American modernism.
Subway Fare
Authors: Newcomb John Timberman
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the poetics of rapid transit that emerged in the early twentieth century, including the verses of William Carlos Williams. Wishful civic boosters of the early twentieth century discerned signs of financial utopia in the “symbiotic relation” between skyscrapers and urban railways. These interdependent social forms were viewed as hallmarks of twentieth-century urban modernity. Rapid-transit poems of the period feature close-up encounters mingling people of different classes, races, and genders with unprecedented frequency, unfathomable swiftness, and sometimes uncontrollable force. This chapter first considers the differences between skyscraper verses and rapid-transit verses in terms of engagement with the modern urban landscape fashion before discussing “rapid-transit verse” in greater detail. It explores American poetry's fascination with rapid transit as a central theme, focusing on poems that dealt with subjects ranging from commuting to subways. It also analyzes William Carlos Williams's rapid-transit poetry to demonstrate the impact of the New Verse movement's passionate engagement with urban-industrial space as the site of modern experience.
Rickey, Race, and “All Deliberate Speed”
Authors: Nathanson Mitchell
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how the burgeoning civil rights fixated its glare upon Major League Baseball (MLB), whose owners and executives soon realized that eventually, they were going to have no choice but to accept integration. Although powerless to stop the onrushing tide, they were nevertheless able to control how the story of the game's integration was going to be told. The story they perpetuated is one of the most affirming morality tales in American history—the story of Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and the integration of MLB in 1947. Because baseball in America had reflected the nation's racial practices for decades, the event was perceived as momentous and precipitous because here, baseball foreshadowed nationwide, federally imposed and endorsed desegregation, coming as it did before the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.