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This chapter explores the impact of white appropriation and commercial interests on the evolution of jazz. They long contributed to the economic exploitation of black musicians and in imposing white values and preferences over jazz. Free jazz musicians show awareness of their economic position in the music business and their music can be read as a political decision to break from it.

Chapter 2 performs close readings of transcriptions of a nationally syndicated, travel themed radio show—to which Kinship Records president Jon Cohen was a regular contributor—and of the recent popularity of the “Afro-Indie” genre, which is understood as those African-derived musics in U.S. indie rock. This chapter develops the concept of “aural imaginary” as that mechanism through which the aural other is instrumentalized in the constitution of a listening self not simply through appropriation but through incorporation into the subject. This chapter narrows in on sound’s capacity to materially structure social relations, formations, and actors. The WMCI, as represented in Kinship Records, has disassociated itself from the shunned and taboo practice of cultural appropriation and has assumed a new business model, described in this chapter as “aural incorporation.” Aural incorporation represents that means by which listeners structure racialized sounds to which they may have no birthright into their origin narratives laying claim to various musical traditions as their own. This chapter explores these various biopolitical tactics employed by the WMCI.

This chapter traces Amichai's reception and appropriation as a “national poet” of official celebrations in Israel and as a poet of simple religiosity in the Jewish American synagogue. Arguing that revolutionary poetry is too “dangerous” to be left alone to do its work, the chapter interrogates these misreadings not as mistakes that should be corrected but as informative expressions of hegemonic processes of canon formation. By contrast, the chapter illustrates the wrath with which early critics received his work, labeling it revolutionary and heretical – all this in an attempt to restore our ability to perceive these features in Amichai's poetry even today, despite its massive cooptation. The chapter also critiques the over-emphasis on thematics in literary studies, theorizing from Amichai's work a model for the politics of poetic form.

This chapter begins with an overview of La Meri’s life and career and her contribution to the spread of knowledge about different cultures around the world, including world dance and culture. It then discusses her work in relation to modern concerns with theoretical issues—such as appropriation, cultural imposition, orientalism, and so forth—and relates it to concepts that have been investigated in gender and cultural studies. It is important to note that she performed non-Western and Western dances in both Western and non-Western locations. After La Meri settled in the United States, she performed her international repertoire to American audiences, most of whom would have known little or nothing about the foreign cultures where the dances originated. But it’s equally important to understand that both the briefness of La Meri’s actual training in the various dance forms and her minimal or non-existent knowledge of any of the local verbal languages would have limited her understanding of the foreign cultures whose dances she studied, performed, and taught—and about which she wrote.

Sentimental obituaries published after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 remark that phrases and characters from his fiction “[mingle] with our daily converse and our daily life” (Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun. 1870, p. 4). This is certainly true. However, the convivial tone of this eulogy obscures how literary afterlives were appropriated to argue for material changes to London’s built environment, the effects of which were often misaligned with Dickens’s broadly humanitarian ethos. For example, tropes, extracts, and characters from his novels were mobilised to advocate the demolition of insanitary and overcrowded slum areas, but such modernisations were rarely accompanied by the building of new housing for the displaced population. The introduction to Dickens and Demolition introduces these central concerns of the book: to trace Dickensian afterlives across multiple media and fora; to examine what role these afterlives played in urban development discourses; and to argue that fiction was part of the dialectical relations between past, present and future, through which London’s modernisation was conceived and represented. The chapter also introduces key terminology, such as remediation, appropriation, and adaptation.

Field Lane was envisioned as a nexus of crime, overcrowding, foreignness, social unrest and insanitary conditions in representations of the district in multiple media and contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. In London more widely, these anxieties helped to shape how improvements were conceived, and which places were targeted for demolition. This chapter presents evidence that the improvements promised by advocates of Field Lane’s redevelopment were repeatedly articulated and conceptualised through references to Oliver Twist. For example, by emphasising its association with Fagin and Bill Sikes to draw attention to the slum as a dangerous locale. Focusing on appropriations of Dickens’s works in newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary debates, the chapter traces a proliferation of Dickensian afterlives in commentaries on Field Lane’s improvement before, during and after its demolition. Of course, as is the case with all the afterlives analysed in this book, the novel was variously appropriated, even when users commented on the same site or descriptive passage. However, it is in this instability that we can see how Dickensian afterlives were put to work in arguments for Field Lane’s demolition. His fiction provided a mobile and rhetorically effective vocabulary, which was easily manipulated to serve numerous interests.

“ If you run the math,” says Brad Udall, “You sort of go, wow, Arizona, they may be totally out of their Central Arizona Project water.” Udall is referring to Arizona’s unenviable position as California’s aquatic whipping boy. The two states have long fought over water, and although Arizona has won a battle or two, it has taken a beating in the war. A key result of their combat has been to make the majority of Arizona’s Colorado River water rights expressly junior to California’s. This means that during inevitable and possibly imminent periods of shortage, the people of southern California, under a strict interpretation of the law, will be able to wash their cars, water their lawns, and keep their showers streaming while the millions who live in Phoenix, Tucson, and points between watch the flow from their taps slow to a dribble. Fortunately, events are unlikely to turn out so apocalyptically. When crisis comes, emergency negotiations will produce a less black-and-white outcome, and Arizona’s groundwater reserves (some of them recharged in recent years with CAP water) will be tapped to meet priority needs—at least for a time. Nevertheless, the potential for a winner-take-all showdown between large populations highlights the vulnerability of the urban centers of the arid West in an era of climate change. Fates are hardly fixed. How the cities of the region grow and change in the years ahead will significantly determine their ability to withstand the shocks of a hotter and drier future. How well they respond to the challenges ahead will also determine the future of their states and of the entire West, for in an arid land, a modern society is obliged to be an urban society. The survival of aridland cities and the struggle to preserve their quality of life will become a matter of national concern, even obsession, and the entire world will watch their stories unfold. Arizona has always been jealous of California’s economic power, its political heft in Congress, and its early and abundant claims to Colorado River water.

This chapter analyses Hsiung's success by locating it in the context of the revival of a fashion for China in the 1930s and broader geopolitics up to the Second World War. While the 1935 Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy is often seen as a pivotal event in improving views of the Chinese, this chapter shows that with the success of Lady Precious Stream, premiering a year earlier, it was Shih-I Hsiung who played a major role in shifting attitudes. This chapter discusses how his success was dependent on, and also became an agent in a series of intersecting socio-economic, cultural and political forces at work in Britain, China and internationally at the time. Specifically, it examines how he had conjured an image of China as Old Cathay that was seized upon as a vital political tool by various actors, especially the Chinese government as a propaganda tool in the Sino-Japanese war, but also in British and US domestic and international politics. It considers the diverse interpretations of Lady Precious Stream as it was appropriated into various political causes through various discourses on race, nation and cultural difference.

Following the publication of Flowering Exile, the Hsiungs retreated into the literary shadows. This chapter tracks their latter years, as modern Chinese subjects, as they went their separate ways. Abandoning her qipaos for baseball caps and trainers, Dymia spent her days in London, playing mahjong and hosting feasts for a small circle of Chinese female friends, until her death in 1987. Hsiung had left London for Singapore in 1956, to set up a university with Lin Yutang. When the plan failed, he made a film version of Lady Precious Stream, and, moving between Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US, increasingly lived in the memories of his lost fame. Having once arrived in London, sporting a western suit and clutching a modern realist play, Hsiung now rarely strayed from the ‘really Chinese and traditional’. Sweeping his traditional Chinese robes and jingling his bracelets wherever he went, the only place he refused to go, as a defiant anti-Communist, was China. Yet, at the age of ninety, he visited Beijing and died there two weeks later.

This chapter discusses ideas of China and Chineseness beyond Europe, Asia and the US, by examining how, after its initial worldwide furore in the 1930s, Lady Precious Streamcontinued to be republished and performed across the globe. By considering productions in Israel, Nairobi, Ghana and South Africa from the 1950s onwards, this chapter shows how the play resurfaced in unexpected localities across the globe and often at extraordinary historical moments. It focuses specifically on how the play was appropriated as means of claiming or contesting a range of vastly different cultural and political identities. It ends by discussing how ideas of China and Chineseness continue to be contested in the twenty-first century, by examining the revival of Hsiung's legacy today.

There are a multitude of jazz dance labels and descriptions. Acknowledging the entirety of the genre allows us to establish historical, cultural, social, and kinetic continuity, also called a continuum. When the primary cultural sources of jazz dance remain unacknowledged, the continuum is disrupted. However, once we recognize the relationships between traditional African cultural dances and African-American vernacular dance, as well as the influence on American social, popular, and theatrical dance, the continuum is established. Whether via appropriation or blending, jazz dance evolved through the first half of the 20th century to include elements of both Africanist and European dance. When we accept the concept of jazz dance as a continuum based in West African roots with diverging vernacular and theatrical branches, each of which is continually creating new offshoots that gradually but inevitably generate newer blended jazz dance forms, we may also accept a broader definition of jazz dance.

These chapters discuss NLRB Chairman Bill Gould’s politically charged appointment process. They explain how significant doctrinal and administrative accomplishments occurred during the Gould Chairmanship but were less than they could have been due to self-destructive inside-the-Board hostility coupled with ideologically–driven, outside-the-Board opposition.

This introduction explores the circulation and appropriation of Charlotte Brontë’s image, from her professional portrait sketched by George Richmond in 1850, through to the re-discovery of Branwell’s family portraits in the early twentieth century and a host of subsequent discoveries, forgeries and adaptations. Recognisable iconography is a valuable commodity, but Brontë portraiture must (re-)construct Charlotte’s image from the evidence and narratives of a dual biographical tradition, caught between competing claims and representations of private domesticity and public authorship. Brontë’s face may now seem familiar to public audiences, but she is a mutable and malleable icon: she is constantly seen anew, bespeaking our persistent desire to re-imagine her life and work. Brontë’s bicentenary in 2016 provides the cue and occasion for a critical re-assessment of these legacies and cultural afterlives, and this introduction concludes with a survey of research themes identified and explored by the collection’s contributors.

This chapter explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Brontë's discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on The Professor, Jane Eyre and Shirley, this chapter proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.

This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analyses of three Brontëan afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant (Thornfield Hall), Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Gail Jones (Sixty Lights). This chapter explores the impact of Charlotte Brontë’s writing upon the field of neo-Victorian fiction—and vice versa. How has Brontë’s Jane Eyre been reflected upon and invoked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels about the Victorians, and with what range of textual and wider cultural effects? This chapter shows that re-workings of Jane Eyre often speak directly to the accreted meanings of prior neo-Victorian revisions (such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), as well as their critical contexts; reveals the way the allusive power (or broad communal meaning) of an archetypal text can be contingent upon the oversimplification of literary and cultural complexities; and contends that recent engagements with Brontë’s life and fiction by creative writers have much to reveal about nostalgia and our own cultural moment. A recognition of the nuances and unresolved tensions of the Victorian original is crucial in fostering a debate on the ethics of appropriation, particularly the question of whether certain neo-Victorian novels may best be seen as acts of respect or retaliation, nostalgia or theft, or something in between.

This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate her degradation on the grounds of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and dis/ability. Focused upon portrayals of her appearance, madness and death, this chapter charts the evolution and variation of Bertha’s character from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracing the impact of feminist and postcolonial theorising upon creative engagements with Brontë’s novel. Encompassing a wide variety of adaptations across different media, including Young Adult and neo-Victorian fictions, film, television, theatre and the visual arts, it argues that recreations of Bertha point to an ongoing desire to recover this character from the margins of Brontë’s novel.

The ongoing interest in Jane Eyre and its various adaptations, appropriations, mash-ups and sequels are indicative of the fact that the story and the main character have loosened themselves from literary forms and have become transmedia phenomena. Taking into consideration the independent web series The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, and the media discussion it generated among online communities, this chapter argues that in contrast to popular screen adaptations of the novel, the web series disentangles the heroine from the romantic plot and re-positions her within a network of relationships that encourage her growth. In this way, the series bypasses gender critiques levelled at Charlotte Brontë’s text and the majority of its mainstream adaptations. The web series’ media format and exploration of authorship enables its viewers to treat it both as an adaptation and a fictional vlog, highlighting the complex ways in which this classic of Victorian literature continues to matter today.

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.