bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
An Affirmative Act?
Authors: Harris Cheryl I.
Published: May 2017

This chapter first offers an overview of contemporary debates over affirmative action to situate Obama's position on the issue. Obama's views on affirmative action expressed before and during the presidential campaign laid the foundation for his policies as president. Despite previously expressing support for affirmative action, Obama has eschewed mounting a vigorous defense of race-based remedies because in his assessment they are politically freighted, yield limited gains, and can be replaced by race-neutral measures that reduce overall inequality. The administration's position—which is ambivalent at best—has largely left uncontested the dominant color-blind framework and its affiliated racial narratives about “racial preferences,” thereby narrowing the space for broader social and economic reform.
Puerto Rican and Chicano Crossovers in Latino Film and Music Culture
Authors: Zimmerman Marc
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the implications of Puerto Rican pop artists becoming marketed as Latinos. In spite of the U.S. Puerto Rican erasure in the very epistemology of Anglo America, and in spite of the negligible and negative representation of Puerto Ricans in film, Puerto Ricans, ironically enough, have participated significantly in subsuming Mexican and Chicano spaces in the configuration of Latino identities in United States and mainly Hollywood cinema. The chapter then argues that all the manipulations and appropriations labeled Hispanic or Latino are not simply imposed or created but are based on certain commonalities or affinities of identity that result not from some racial or otherwise essentialist base, but rather from the imposition, however uneven, of similar, Iberian-based cultural patterns emanating from the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Becoming Mapuche
Authors: Course Magnus
Published: May 2017

This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life—eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun. The book explores the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations.
Eluwün
Authors: Course Magnus
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the Mapuche funeral practices (eluwün). Whereas the Hertzian model suggests that funeral practices serve to generalize and “disintegrate” the deceased person, Mapuche funeral practices do the exact opposite: they seek to outline the uniqueness and partiality of the deceased. Meanwhile, the Bakhtinian concepts of consummation and transgredience help make it clear that the funeral discourses (amulpüllün) are necessary to “finish” the person and detach the person from the relations through which the person has constituted himself or herself during life. The finished person is therefore necessarily incongruent with the paternally and maternally derived aspects from which they arose.
The Triptych and the Screenplays
Authors: Raubicheck Walter , Srebnick Walter
Published: May 2017

This chapter establishes three of Alfred Hitchcock's films—Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964)—as the focal points of this study. At the same time the chapter explores his professional relationships with the three screenwriters who had worked on these films (Joseph Stefano, Evan Hunter, and Jay Presson Allen), and the historical and cultural contexts in which these writers worked and within which these films are situated. These films thus constitute a “triptych”—a grouping of films illustrating a time when American culture and filmmaking were changing and the director was eager to move his films in a new direction in terms of content and technique.
Final Drafts
Authors: Raubicheck Walter , Srebnick Walter
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the characters and themes of the shooting scripts rather than of the three films themselves. It considers whether or not the screenwriters had written for Hitchcock in ways that suited his own particular visual style. These scripts represent the fullest extent of the collaborative process that began when the writer first sat with the director in his office to discuss the possibilities for narrative and character development inherent in the source material; they also highlight the particular verbal talents of the writers, talents that Hitchcock himself did not possess; and they demonstrate how the characters existed in Hitchcock's mind before the actors began to mold them to their own styles and personalities.
The Black Lawyer
Authors: Mitchell Koritha
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the shift in the community conversation from an emphasis on black soldiers who return from fighting overseas and must be defended by white attorneys to the increasing visibility of black lawyers. Crisis magazine coverage notes this shift, and lynching dramas similarly identify the black attorney as a figure embodying the race's faith in truth and justice. The mob's target in A Sunday Morning in the South (of which author Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote white-church and black-church versions) aspires to be a lawyer. In For Unborn Children by Myrtle Smith Livingston, the mob's victim is already an attorney. Placing a spotlight on these men, the scripts preserve community perspectives that are rejected by courts of law and the court of public opinion.
Lorraine Hansberry’s Existentialist Routes to Black Internationalist Feminism
Authors: Higashida Cheryl
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Lorraine Hansberry's investments in existentialism in order to show that her play about African revolution, Les Blancs (1970), is a culmination of both her Black queer feminism and her internationalism. Hansberry framed Les Blancs as a response to Jean Genet's internationally acclaimed play, The Blacks—an absurdist meditation on power and race in the context of African decolonization; she attacked what she saw as the corrosive effects of The Blacks' existentialist despair and negation of revolutionary praxis. The chapter then argues that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex provided theoretical scaffolding for Hansberry's Black internationalist feminism. As such, Beauvoir helped Hansberry interrogate dominant views of tragic lesbians, critique heteropatriarchal norms, and represent homosexuality as a political choice with implications for revolutionary movements.
Negotiating Jamaican Masculinities
Authors: Hall Maurice
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents an analysis of Jamaican masculinity. It begins by asserting that both gender and culture are largely intersecting discourses, and that the only way to make sense of Jamaican masculinity is to view it through the intersections of colonialism, race, and class. It locates U.S. male “leadership” models of masculinity within colonialist ideals that assume a universalized, idealized subject. It investigates sites of resistance among two iconic Jamaican figures: the late reggae artist Bob Marley and the late, former Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley. Using these examples, it weaves together a deeply textured account of Jamaican life, and charts the construction of masculinity among three groups: the Rastas, rude boys, and mimics. It examines differential male and female socialization patterns and argues that among the rude boys, masculinity is constructed through the use and control of public space. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the scholarly debate about the implications of the masculinities in present-day Jamaica.
Disposable Masculinities in Istanbul
Authors: Mutluer Nil
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the intersections of gender, ethnicity, nationalism, sexuality, and class interactions among Kurdish minorities who were victims of forced migration. These men and their families were relocated to the Tarlabaş ı section in the center of contemporary Istanbul, Turkey. The chapter not only articulates the institutional forces that oppressed this minority, but documents and analyzes the counter discourses and tactics that the Kurdish minority used to subvert and resist Turkish nationalism. Using Mignolo's concept of “border thinking,” it lays out the various ways internally displaced Kurdish men negotiated their identities between these binaries. The analysis enables readers to comprehend the social structures that impinge on these men, while at the same time it keenly observes them as agents that contest and reshape traditional, national, and neoliberal formations.
Wounded Masculinity and Nationhood in Peru
Authors: Saona Margarita
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a historical and literary analysis of the representation of masculinity in Peru. Using a feminist psychoanalytic frame, it examines Peruvian literature to make sense of Peru's recent brutal past, which culminated in the confrontation between the Shining Path, the Tupac Amaru guerrillas, and the government-armed forces that resulted in 69,000 deaths. It posits that a homology exists between masculinity and the nation state. It reads the executions of indigenous Peruvian leaders by the Spanish as castration myths and traces these Peruvian castration myths to argue that they produce simultaneously a failed masculinity as well as a failed state. The failed nation and the failure of masculinity are rooted in the legacy of colonialism. Resolving this oedipal dilemma would be a first step in resolving gender inequality and creating a more just nation.
5. “Chased Out on the Slippery Ice”
Authors: Grivno Max
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how landless workers survived in an economy whose defining characteristics were scarcity and uncertainty. Unskilled and unorganized, rural free laborers faced a desperate struggle for survival; they were buffeted by seasonal and cyclical unemployment, and their nonwage economic activities were constricted by a legal system that was designed to maintain slaveholders' authority. The prospects for single women and free African Americans were particularly dim in a labor market that restricted their opportunities in favor of white men, thus limiting their options and relegating them to the margins of the rural economy. In the end, these workers were often left with the mere gleanings of freedom.
The Republic Saved
Authors: Lause Mark A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies the emergence of Unionist secret societies. Secret societies among Unionists emerged directly from the exclusionist and repressive ideology of the secessionists. Even more secretive “Union Leagues” appeared in Tennessee among those Unionists who “sought refuge in inaccessible places and caves in the mountains of their State,” where they gathered around “improvised altars, covered with 'Old Glory,' on which lay the open Bible,” and formulated rituals similar to those of the old Brotherhood of the Union, which had several circles in the state before the war. Many Southern members of unauthorized secret societies became actively engaged in espionage and sabotage on behalf of the Union. Many of these ventures seem to have been freelance and fostered more by adventurers than agents of their respective governments.
Somatic Poetry
Authors: Uzendoski Michael A. , Calapucha-Tapuy Edith Felicia
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the poetic qualities and nuances of the art of ritual healing, a genre termed as “somatic poetry.” Flowing out from the emphasis of the body as a site of social and cosmological action in the Amazonian world, somatic poetry is multimodal art created by listening, feeling, smelling, seeing, and tasting of natural subjectivities, not just those emanating from human speech or from the human mind. Somatic poetry involves the creative use of words and music and also plants, animals, and the landscape—entities recognized as having subjectivity and creative powers, powers that are internal rather than external to the art. The chapter provides one example of Amazonian somatic poetry, a healing practice called kushnirina, a medicinal vapor bath designed to cleanse and provide energy for the body. It then comments on Federico Calapucha's manioc story and a shamanic song performed by Lucas Tapuy in 2007. These examples show that somatic poetry is about creating loops of intersecting relationships with different species and unseen subjectivities of the landscape and the spirit world.
The Twins and the Jaguars
Authors: Uzendoski Michael A. , Calapucha-Tapuy Edith Felicia
Published: May 2017

This chapter employs the verse analysis method developed by Dell Hymes to analyze an Amazonian Quichua myth-narrative, “The Twins and the Jaguars,” from the province of Napo. The narrative's theme, “becoming a jaguar,” is expressed through a rhetorical logic of onset, ongoing, and outcome that unfolds as a structural transformation relation between humans and mythical jaguars. This structural transformation relation is mediated by a third element, the twins, who not only lend movement to structure but also advance the development of drama by obviating previous relations as a dynamic synecdoche. The chapter demonstrates the major contours of performative complexity involved in Amazonian Quichua narration of traditional mythical knowledge and the importance of the jaguar as an active and dominant symbolic “sign” of “becoming” in Napo Runa cosmology and culture. It shows that narrative performance emerges as an important artistic, cultural, and religious tool for experiencing the “transcendence” of everyday human form.
The Petroglyphs and the Twins’ Ascent
Authors: Uzendoski Michael A. , Calapucha-Tapuy Edith Felicia
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents two stories about the twins, a story about the petroglyphs they left here on the earth and their conversion into stars. Both of these stories reveal the inscribed textuality of transformations embodied in the “twins” stories. The examples show how Quichua speakers “read” their stories from experience within a living landscape that is rich with the presence of mythological beings and transformations. The presentation of the final episode of the twins cycle, their ascent into the sky, also forces us to confront the question “What is to be done once all the myths have been told?” For myths force one to ask, “Who am I?” and “What is my relation to the world”?
Conclusion
Authors: Uzendoski Michael A. , Calapucha-Tapuy Edith Felicia
Published: May 2017

This book was concerned with discussing how Quichua speakers use storytelling to make sense of experience and create poetic, spiritual relations among people, ecology, and the larger world they inhabit. The authors tried to convey not just the stories but also the stories behind the stories. This concluding chapter summarizes in detail the stories and different Amazonian Quichua genres presented in this book and their relations, the flow of materials and the story within. It argues that somatic poetry—the thread that ties together all the materials in this book—is a shared philosophy of life and art that connects the individual life to the history of a community and its landscape. It also calls for a more nuanced and sympathetic treatment of the communicative practices of other cultures, different forms of textuality, and the poetic power of the multimodal bodily expressions.
Her Standing in Poughkeepsie
Authors: McLeod Jacqueline A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the Bolins' lineage and legacy and Jane Bolin's place in it as a biracial child coming of age in early twentieth-century Poughkeepsie, New York. It examines her relationship with her siblings—Anna, Ivy, and Gaius Jr.—and with her father, who became the family's primary caregiver upon their mother's death. This very special relationship between father and youngest daughter was tested and strengthened as Jane Bolin ventured out into the world beyond Poughkeepsie for college and law school. Jane chose to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts over Vassar College; she could not have attended Vassar either way since the school's unofficial policies barred the admission of African American students.
Politics of Preparation
Authors: McLeod Jacqueline A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Jane Bolin's career in the legal profession and the lived experiences that produced her as the nation's first African American woman judge. A member of a small unit of black women lawyers, Bolin's early practice mirrored that of other black women lawyers who gained entrance, but not full integration, into the legal profession. Jane's strides in the legal profession from 1931 to 1939 were made relatively quickly, suggesting a tale of easy access and an unobstructed path. However, an examination of her professional life beyond the pioneering peaks reveals the pervasive discrimination that Bolin overcame, and unravels the threads of gender, class, race, credentialism, and politics that colored the fabric of her professional life.
Speaking Truth to Power
Authors: McLeod Jacqueline A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter delves into Jane Bolin's tenure on the bench and analyzes her public and professional voice against social injustice. A sample of Bolin's judicial decisions that were selected for publication due to their usefulness as precedent, along with her speeches and letters of communication, convey the determination of an ardent integrationist and the immense compassion and intellect that endeared her to La Guardia and her judicial peers. Judge Bolin was committed to making the law an instrument of fairness but did not confine her activism to the physical halls of justice. A staunch integrationist, she confronted discrimination throughout municipal government and the private sector without regard for the security of her reappointment.
Persona Non Grata
Authors: McLeod Jacqueline A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers Jane Bolin's service within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her relationship with the NAACP's national leadership, and how she became “persona non grata” to an organization with which she was affiliated since childhood. By examining Bolin's membership and leadership in the New York branch, the chapter uncovers her philosophy of leadership and its authority over her abrupt resignation from the NAACP in 1950. Such an examination would enrich any analysis of a NAACP leadership model and even complicate the tendency to essentialize early black leadership. The key point here is not about how an independently vocal female African American jurist rose to prominence in the NAACP, but how and why she plummeted to the depths of its disregard.
From Richmond to Ithaca
Authors: Armfield Felix L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides a contextualized background for the life of Eugene Kinckle Jones. Although circumscribed by the limits of Jim Crow, Jones made key decisions that affected his entire life. Thus, this chapter details his life from its beginnings in Richmond, Virginia, and as he matriculated through Virginia Union College for Negroes and later Cornell University. Both institutions helped to shape his life and opinions. In 1908, after graduation from Cornell University with a master's degree in economics and social science, Jones would have to put the ideals and motto of the new fraternity to work: “We shall be first of all, servants of all, we shall transcend all.” Eventually, his educational experience would propel him before the nation as a leader of social work and an advocate for institutional cooperation among the races..
Building Alliances
Authors: Armfield Felix L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the history of the National Urban League with a specific focus on Eugene Kinckle Jones's leadership. It covers the decade of the 1920s and the many issues that Jones and his contemporaries confronted, as social workers faced the dual challenge of adjusting their tactics to meet the growing needs of a black migrant population and establishing themselves as professionals. Ultimately, the duties of black social workers and the aims of the NUL included evaluating and reviewing settlement houses, in addition to other specific concerns of migrating blacks. Here, Jones made headway for the social-work movement by establishing professional training for black social workers, tackling the problem of housing to cope with the influx of black migrants from the South—among many other efforts on behalf of black social workers, which eventually made him one of the prominent social workers in America..
Barack Obama and the Politics of Anger
Authors: Patterson Tiffany Ruby
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers the Jeremiah Wright controversy against the background of historical stereotypes of black men as angry, irrational, and dangerous—stereotypes that have long been used to call into question the fitness of African Americans for full citizenship. Displaying his characteristic calm demeanor, Obama had resisted any hint of anger or rage over the historic issues confronting black Americans in the 2008 elections. Indeed, in his well-known autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he had rejected those black thinkers and leaders who failed to overcome their anger and disappointment and embraced instead those who found reasons for hope. The chapter thus asserts that, while Obama, as a candidate in 2008 and as president afterward, may need to deal with racial injustice dispassionately, genuine healing can take place only after African Americans are able to give full voice to their anger over generations of wrongs done.
Hillary Clinton’s Candidacy in Historical and Global Context
Authors: Hartmann Susan M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the ways in which Clinton's campaign both built upon and departed from the campaigns of previous female contenders for the presidency, including Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Chase Smith, and Patricia Schroeder. It shows that Clinton's comparative success can be explained by her unprecedented ability to raise funds and mobilize party networks. Yet while Clinton's tremendous success set her apart from her predecessors, her candidacy did not represent a total break with the past. Her failure to win the presidency and join the ranks of Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and other female heads of state can be explained in part by the peculiar demands of presidential elections in the American constitutional system.
Populist Currents in the 2008 Presidential Campaign
Authors: Formisano Ronald P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter highlights the populist strains in the 2008 campaigns and connects them to the nation's long history of politics “for the people.” When “Joe the Plumber” heckled Obama in Toledo, when Clinton hoisted a brew at a bar in Indiana, when Palin proudly introduced herself to the nation as a “hockey mom,” they were participating in a tradition of populist electoral appeals that can be traced back to the Whig Party's “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign of 1840. Though populist campaigning took a digital turn in 2008 with the emergence of campaigning via interactive digital communications technologies, this chapter concludes that, as in the past, the populist rhetoric of the 2008 campaigns often had very little to do with policies that promoted the greatest good for the greatest number.
The Difference that “Difference” Makes
Authors: Perry Elisabeth Israels
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explores whether the categories of difference that set Americans apart from one another will ever, or should ever, cease to figure in assessments of a person's qualifications for office. It reflects upon what the chapters of this book can teach us about the stereotypes that surfaced during the 2008 campaign, the influence of past political struggles of white women and women and men of color on the election results, and the possible effect of that experience on future presidential races and on the larger political culture within which we live. Arguing that the elimination of categories of difference is neither reasonable nor necessarily desirable, this chapter suggests that the acknowledgment of and respect for difference might be a better goal.
No Fixed Address
Authors: Cook Pam
Published: May 2017

This chapter draws on post-structural conceptions of the mutability of gendered and sexualized identities in order to question cinematic identification with one's gendered like, an assumption underpinning categorization of genres by gender. Speculating that we go to the cinema to lose rather than confirm identities, it opens a conceptual space for male masochism and female violence, thus challenging a dominant binary in feminist thinking. In questioning the gendering of genres, the chapter notes shared structures and affects between the western and women's picture, normally posed in antithetical terms. Arguably, such similarities can be traced to their common foundation in melodrama conceived as a mode underpinning Hollywood's genre system.
100% Pure Adrenaline
Authors: Collins Luke
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the quintessential action movie, Point Break (1991), arguing that we experience the film as generic surface. Despite critical efforts to construct the film as a creative play with masculinity or with the action genre, the film remains culturally and politically ambivalent. As is often noted, Point Break repeats the “vessel” of the action genre without rupture, spillage, or slippage. In this sense, Point Break expresses an awareness of its cultural/commercial form by filling out the homosocial trope latent in the action genre's intense male relationships and fetishization of the male body. However, at no point does it seek to exceed, parody, ironize, or reflect upon its genre. The fullness that this produces is a flatness: a surface. This surface is not a negative construction but provides a way to address the network of relations between film, audience, and industry.
Up Close and Personal
Authors: Thomas Deborah
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the reverberating impact of the Vietnamese female rape victim in Casualties of War (1989). The film concerns a patrol of GIs who, during a reconnaissance mission, kidnap, rape, and murder an innocent Vietnamese girl, a story that is embedded in another story about how one of them, Private Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), who tried unsuccessfully to prevent these events, eventually brings the others to justice. The film invites audiences, irrespective of gender, into more diffusely feeling territory. It moves beyond melodrama's universalizing symbol of female victimhood. Haptic amplification of the close-up on the woman's face and insistence on her individuality through restoration of her name while diminishing the hero's attempt to bring justice, readjusts the conventional gender dynamics of the war film, converting melodramatic pathos—reassuring us of our own humanity—to discomfiture and shame.
Femme Fatale or Lesbian Femme
Authors: Straayer Chris
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the neo-noir Bound (1996). It shows how the splitting of sex from gender liberates generic conventions in the service of protagonists who, enacting a lesbian romance in film noir, avail themselves of generic formulas to double-cross the villains. Analyzing the creative capacity of noir gender “to turn cartwheels on both male and female characters within a system of sexual difference,” the chapter shows how Bound—self-consciously playing on the debated identities of butch, femme, and feminine—generates different-sex erotics through same-gender protagonists. Through such playful manipulations, the film opens up flexible reimaginings of sex and gender across the spectrum of gay and straight as alternatives to rigidifying heterosexual and homosexual binaries.
From Jim Crow to Jay-Z
Authors: White Miles
Published: May 2017

This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, misogyny, and excess. Broadening the significance of hip-hop culture by linking it to other expressive forms within popular culture, the book examines how these representations have both encouraged the demonization of young black males in the United States and abroad and contributed to the construction of their identities. The book traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, the book establishes a sophisticated framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. Arguing that black music has undeniably shaped American popular culture and that hip-hop tropes have exerted a defining influence on young male aspirations and behavior, the book draws a critical link between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity.
Jacques Rivette
Authors: Wiles Mary M.
Published: May 2017

As a pioneer of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette was one of a group of directors who permanently altered the world's perception of cinema by taking the camera out of the studios and into the streets. His films, including Paris nous appartient, Out 1: Noli me tangere, Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris, La belle noiseuse, Secret défense, and Va savoir are extraordinary combinations of intellectual depth, playfulness, and sensuous beauty. This book provides a thorough account of the director's career from the burgeoning French New Wave to the present day, focusing on the theatricality of Rivette's films and his explorations of the relationship between cinema and fine arts such as painting, literature, music, and dance. The book also explores the intellectual interests that shaped Rivette's approach to film, including Sartre's existentialism, Barthes's structuralism, and the radical theater of the 1960s. The volume concludes with an insightful interview with Rivette.
An Interview with Jacques Rivette*
Authors: Wiles Mary M.
Published: May 2017

Café de la Bastille, Paris, June 1999 (Translated by Yolanda Broad and Mary Wiles.)

MW:How did you come to make films?JR:It was Cocteau, le coupable [the guilty one].1 It was while reading Cocteau’s La belle et la bête [his journal written between 1945–1946 as he was filming ...
The Chosen Instrument of the Revolution?
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines whether television news was “the instrument of the revolution” during the civil rights era. It first considers early television news coverage of the civil rights story, focusing on the seminal news documentary series, See It Now (1957) and its strategy to privilege the white moderate. It then turns to television coverage of the James Meredith crisis at the University of Mississippi, along with network news' ambivalence with black activism and CBS Eyewitness coverage of the Albany Movement. The chapter asks whether television news amplified and publicized the goals, politics, and agendas of the civil rights movement, its activists, demonstrators, and spokespeople for the cause of voting rights, desegregation, and African American empowerment. It suggests that news reporting, whether print or television, is obviously not a neutral mirror reflecting reality.
Bringing “Urgent Issues” to the Vast Wasteland
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how entertainment television addressed the theme of race relations and “black and white together” by focusing on CBS's East Side/West Side, one of the first prime-time shows to feature an African American in a continuing role. Many cultural critics complained about the perceived decline in quality of television programming. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow even described network television as “a vast wasteland.” This chapter considers the television networks' inauguration of a new form of programming dubbed “New Frontier character dramas” as they tried to soothe their presumed white audiences about race relations. It explores how East Side/West Side presented to its viewers issues of racism, black rage, white guilt, the place of African Americans in American society, and the appropriate response by white liberals. It explains how East Side/West Side became a terrain of struggle for mostly Northern, mostly white Americans trying to negotiate positions around race and Kennedy-era liberalism. It also argues that the series was out of step with the story that television really wanted to tell.
Connections across Sumatra
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter highlights some of the connections between the traditional styles and genres of the performing arts across Sumatra, paying attention to the impact of indigenous religions and Islam as well as classification of the musical instruments and ensembles. It also considers how the musical arts are linked to myths and legends, and how myths and art forms are related to indigenous religious beliefs. Finally, it discusses Hindu myths and art forms; Muslim-associated myths and legends and art forms; Chinese myths and art forms; dances and music-dance relationships; connections between the performing arts in Sumatra's Malay subgroups and social classes; gender factors; signal items of Sumatran identity and local uniqueness; and major changes in the performing arts since around 1900. The chapter suggests that more research into the whole of greater Sumatra is needed in order to elucidate the extent to which an understanding of these connections can contribute to a concept of Sumatra's performing arts as a unified whole.
Stolen Moments
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter details Mancini's career in the late 1980s. The 1980s was another transitional period in the whole field of film scoring. The intrepid John Williams still ruled with one prestigious assignment after another, prodded by but not dependent on his associations with directors Spielberg and Lucas. Other veterans enjoyed renewed success during these years: John Barry's Oscar win for Dances with Wolves and Dave Grusin's scores for The Fabulous Baker Boys and The Firm. The new breed was beginning to take over, though; James Horner wrote blandly but appropriately for Field of Dreams, Hans Zimmer similarly for Rain Man. Meanwhile, Mancini was scoring three limited-release films: Physical Evidence, Fear, and Welcome Home.
A Closing Door That Wasn’t There Before
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes four films that made Mancini feel so betrayed that he would wish seriously to have his name removed from being credited at all. These are Blake Edwards' Skin Deep (1989), Sidney Poitier's Ghost Dad (1990), Blake Edwards' Switch (1991), and Arthur Hiller's Married to It (1991). Mancini's yearning for reprieve from that pinched prosaic kind of scoring—having to fight for every thirty-second cue of synthesized filler, working for those New Hollywood committees that made films by compromise and that certainly had no commitment to the value of a narrative music score—can be felt in the last two pop music albums he would record in 1992 under his aforementioned renewed RCA contract: two programs of old, old songs from the so-called Great American Songbook.
Edwards
Authors: Ferguson Gillum
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes Ninian Edwards' long political career: as chief justice of Kentucky, as territorial governor for nine years, as U.S. senator, as U.S. minister to Mexico, and as third governor of the State of Illinois. Despite those distinguished titles, however, his record in office rarely rose above the uninspiring and occasionally descended into the ridiculous. Edwards sometimes acted foolishly, and some of the political difficulties in which he later found himself resulted from his own bad judgment. Moreover, his frequent displays of vanity, pomposity, and cynicism can make it hard to feel much warmth for him as a man. But despite all the obstacles placed in his path, Edwards strove to do his full duty toward the territory that had been entrusted to his care. For that, Ninian Edwards will always deserve the gratitude of the people of Illinois.
Headwinds
Authors: Ferguson Gillum
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how the loss of Prairie du Chien dealt a heavy blow at the British stronghold on Mackinac Island. Construction of Fort Shelby threatened the route by which the British supplied their Indian allies on the Mississippi. Supplies could still be distributed at Green Bay, Chicago, but for western tribes such as the Sioux and the Sauk, the Wisconsin River route was essential. Even to supply his own soldiers with food proved a constant struggle for the British commandant at Mackinac, and the constant throng of hungry allied Indians, usually accompanied by their families, often forced him to choose between depriving his own troops and alienating the Indians. The other danger threatening Mackinac was an American task force gathering under the command of Colonel George Croghan to retake the island.
Affect, Discourse, and Dance before 1900
Authors: Thurner Christina
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes aesthetic treatises that historicize claims that see dance as an art of expression that projects emotions in an immediate fashion. Such a mythical understanding often prevails up to today. It emphasizes that important aspects of a major event in the history of dance—ballet reform in the eighteenth century—were actually prescribed in aesthetic discourse before their implementation on stage. The chapter also provides crucial historical background to the renewed interest in expression in dance after 1900. It shows that, from the eighteenth century onwards, the discourse of dance for the most part ignored the parameters that allow us to perceive the interaction between dancers and audience as immediate, as the double movement of an emotional relationship in motion. This made perfect sense in the context of ballet reform, and the associated paradigm shift toward a sensualist aesthetic, but it has only limited application to later developments in the art of dance.
Back Again? Valeska Gert’s Exiles
Authors: Elswit Kate
Published: May 2017

This chapter questions what exile means for an artist whose performances relied on a strategy of estrangement. In so doing, it follows Valeska Gert (1892–1978) through her American exile and back to Germany, exploring the shifting dynamics of her reception abroad and upon her return to a very changed homeland. Gert came into the public eye as a soloist in the late teens, touring mostly through Germany but also abroad during the Weimar Republic. From 1933 to 1938, Gert appeared in European cities, including London, Paris, Budapest, Krakow, and Prague, as well as in New York. In 1939 she emigrated to the United States and eventually ran one of the more successful exile cabarets in New York from 1941 to 1945, named the Beggar Bar. After the Beggar Bar closed for licensing problems, she decided to return to Germany.
Warfare over Realism
Authors: Cramer Franz Anton
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the development of East German dance after the proclamation of national independence in 1949. This development was constructed within a larger debate about realism and the role of art-making in a socialist state. The importance of these questions inspired leading authors to attempt to define the meaning of realism in dance over a period of twenty years. These ideologies evolved along with the broader political and economic situation in the German Democratic Republic. The chapter focuses on the significant 1966 founding of the Tanztheater company at East Berlin's Komische Oper and the role played by its artistic director and chief choreographer, Tom Schilling. The unstable legacy of his work reveals that the question of how to create dances that are both politically effective as well as successful works of art has yet to be resolved.
Toward a Theory of Cultural Translation in Dance
Authors: Klein Gabriele
Published: May 2017

Looking at the history of dance in the modern West, and especially in Europe, where aesthetic modernism began around 1900, there are two characteristics of dance. Whether it is so-called popular dance or a more artistic form, from a sociological perspective, the history of dance is the history of globalization and transnationalism. It is also the record of how urban experiences have been expressed physically. This chapter addresses tango as a specific example of urban transnationalism in dance. In particular, it explores the relevance of a theory of cultural translation for the analysis and historiography of dance and shows how such a theory can arise from the embodied practice of tango.
Saving the World
Authors: McAnany Emile G.
Published: May 2017

Drawing on the pioneering works of Daniel Lerner, Everett Rogers, and Wilbur Schramm as well as the author's own personal experiences in the field, this book builds a new, historically cognizant paradigm of communication for development and social change for the future that supplements technology with social entrepreneurship. Summarizing the history of the field of communication for development from Harry S. Truman's Marshall Plan for the Third World to the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, the book argues that the communication field can renew its role in development by recognizing that large donors of development aid have a difficult time promoting genuine transformation. The book ultimately suggests an agenda for improving and strengthening the work of academics, policy makers, development funders, and others who use communication in all of its forms to foster social change.
Past, Present, and Future
Authors: McAnany Emile G.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the lessons that can be drawn from the history of communication for development (c4d) and makes a number of policy suggestions of how the c4d field might meet the challenges of 2015 and beyond. It first considers two approaches to development and change that major development aid institutions take into account: policy and funding. It argues that the major funders are the ones that have defined the field from the beginning and will most likely continue to do so for some time to come. It then expounds on five lessons that may be taken from the book's historical chapters, presented as challenges that will persist in the next decade of both general development practice and especially that of c4d and social change: who will be in charge of funding sources and control; who defines success and how it is measured; what role innovation plays in c4d projects; how people and technology relate to each other; and whether good ideas can solve problems in different contexts.
Nationalism, Racial Difference, and “Egyptian” Meaning in Verdi’s Aida
Authors: Gauthier Christopher R. , Mcfarlane-Harris Jennifer
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the dynamics of race and race relations in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida in the context of nationalism in nineteenth-century Egypt. The world premiere of Aida took place at the Cairo Opera House on December 24, 1871. However, there seems to be little information available on the opera's Cairo production, particularly with regards to Egyptian reaction to this first performance. Focusing on its Cairo premiere, this chapter analyzes Aida's libretto and music in order to elucidate the workings of racial difference as it lies on the surface of the opera. It suggests that, for Egyptians, Aida may have spoken to a sense of emergent Egyptian identity. It also reveals Aida's racial dynamics by linking it to discourses of light-skinned Egyptian superiority and dark-skinned African inferiority. Furthermore, the relationships between characters in the opera highlight the specificities of Egypt's relations with its racial-national Others, implying a larger project of Egyptian identity formation through “racial fabrication.”
Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga! in the World of the Harlem Renaissance
Authors: Bryan Karen M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga! in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. Produced by White in collaboration with John Frederick Matheus, Ouanga! is an important example of African American opera in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It draws upon Haiti's role as the first independent black-ruled state in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the prominence of its African heritage and the voudon religion. This chapter first provides a brief synopsis of the impact and legacy of the Haitian revolution on American society in the 1920s before discussing the genesis of Ouanga!, along with its use of physical representation and description to heighten the contrast between the concepts of old and new. It also considers social and religious structures represented in Ouanga! as well as its musical representation of Haitian culture. It argues that Ouanga! illuminates the history, heritage, and complexity of Haitian culture by combining two conceptions of Haiti: a highly romanticized view of Haiti's revolutionary history with an African American response to twentieth-century society and culture.
The Politics of Color in Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones
Authors: Boyd Melinda
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the politics of color in Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones by focusing on the various layers of representation in its stage and film versions. Carmen Jones uses lyrics that adopt common clichés of Negro speech and equates Georges Bizet's sexually liberated gypsy in Carmen with a lower-class African American woman. After providing a background on the circumstances, precedents, and models that inspired Hammerstein's conception of Carmen Jones, the chapter considers Hammerstein's transformation of the plot and his text-translation practice, along with the opera's exoticism, stereotypes, and problematic representations of blackness and black Other. It then discusses the critical reception of Carmen Jones in light of the socioeconomic status and race of its 1943 audience. It also analyzes Otto Preminger's 1954 film version of Carmen Jones and how he was able to capture the spectacle of its Technicolor bodies on the big screen with the aid of CinemaScope.
Il Rodolfo Nero, or The Masque of Blackness
Authors: Shirley George
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, the author reflects on the issue of race in opera and its impact on black singers. He first recounts his European operatic debut in Milan in 1960, singing the role of Rodolfo in Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, and how his performance prompted numerous references to “il Rodolfo nero”(“The black Rodolfo”) in many Italian newspapers. The author reveals how blackness has figured in his theater performances since he entered the singing profession, including those with the Scottish Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. He notes that black singers of opera remain minorities in the profession numerically and racially; they are rarely, if ever, selected to interpret white roles in operas that focus on life in contemporary white society. He concludes by saying that he will not discourage young black singers from following their dreams of singing the great roles, and that the profession must respect what the artist brings vocally, musically, and dramatically as well as the opera-loving public's voracious appetite for great singing.