Anita Mannur
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823278602
- eISBN:
- 9780823280629
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823278602.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and ...
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Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and programmatic levels. This chapter also considers how other interdisciplines—namely Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies—face similar crises with regard to funding, appointments, and co-optations.Less
Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and programmatic levels. This chapter also considers how other interdisciplines—namely Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies—face similar crises with regard to funding, appointments, and co-optations.
Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520295049
- eISBN:
- 9780520967946
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520295049.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Radio
Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century - by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass ...
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Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century - by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating “Fall Guy” character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack’s pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering “showrunners” combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors’ products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932’s depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s.Less
Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century - by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating “Fall Guy” character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack’s pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering “showrunners” combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors’ products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932’s depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s.
J. Michelle Coghlan
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474411202
- eISBN:
- 9781474426800
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411202.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between ...
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In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. It offers fascinating, remarkably accessible readings of a range of literary works, from periodical poetry and boys’ adventure fiction to radical pulp and the writings of Henry James, as well as a rich analysis of visual, print, and performance culture, from post-bellum illustrated weeklies and panoramas to agit-prop pamphlets and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows. Throughout, it uncovers how a foreign revolution came back to life as a domestic commodity, and why for decades another nation’s memory came to feel so much our own. This book will speak to readers looking to understand the affective, cultural, and aesthetic afterlives of revolt and revolution pre-and-post Occupy Wall Street, as well as those interested in space, gender, performance, and transatlantic print culture.Less
In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. It offers fascinating, remarkably accessible readings of a range of literary works, from periodical poetry and boys’ adventure fiction to radical pulp and the writings of Henry James, as well as a rich analysis of visual, print, and performance culture, from post-bellum illustrated weeklies and panoramas to agit-prop pamphlets and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows. Throughout, it uncovers how a foreign revolution came back to life as a domestic commodity, and why for decades another nation’s memory came to feel so much our own. This book will speak to readers looking to understand the affective, cultural, and aesthetic afterlives of revolt and revolution pre-and-post Occupy Wall Street, as well as those interested in space, gender, performance, and transatlantic print culture.
Bryce Lease
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784992958
- eISBN:
- 9781526115263
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992958.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After ...
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This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, Lease argues, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease suggests that a radical democratic pluralism is only tenable through the destabilization of attempts to essentialize Polish national identity, focusing on the development of new theatre practices that interrogate the rise of nationalism, alternative sexual identities and forms of kinship, gender equality, contested histories of antisemitism, and postcolonial encounters. Lease elaborates a new theory of political theatre as part of the public sphere. The main contention is that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalized identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.Less
This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, Lease argues, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease suggests that a radical democratic pluralism is only tenable through the destabilization of attempts to essentialize Polish national identity, focusing on the development of new theatre practices that interrogate the rise of nationalism, alternative sexual identities and forms of kinship, gender equality, contested histories of antisemitism, and postcolonial encounters. Lease elaborates a new theory of political theatre as part of the public sphere. The main contention is that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalized identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.
Elyce Rae Helford, Shiloh Carroll, Sarah Gray, and Michael R. II Howard (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781496808714
- eISBN:
- 9781496808752
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496808714.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
In chapters devoted to individual television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, the authors collected in The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture discuss ...
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In chapters devoted to individual television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, the authors collected in The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture discuss feminist negotiation of today’s economic and social realities through the image of the fantastic female. Senior scholars and rising academic stars address figures from Wonder Woman and She-Hulk to Talia Al Ghul and Martha Washington; from Battlestar Gallactica’s female Starbuck to Game of Thrones’ Sansa; and from Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville to Cinda Williams Chima’s The Seven Realms.Less
In chapters devoted to individual television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, the authors collected in The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture discuss feminist negotiation of today’s economic and social realities through the image of the fantastic female. Senior scholars and rising academic stars address figures from Wonder Woman and She-Hulk to Talia Al Ghul and Martha Washington; from Battlestar Gallactica’s female Starbuck to Game of Thrones’ Sansa; and from Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville to Cinda Williams Chima’s The Seven Realms.
Stacy Alaimo
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816621958
- eISBN:
- 9781452955223
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816621958.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, ...
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Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, the book calls for an environmental stance in which humanity thinks, feels, and acts as the very stuff of the world. As a work within the environmental humanities, it grapples with climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, ocean conservation, environmental activism, and the depiction of the anthropocene. And as a study in new materialism it focuses on how the materiality of human bodies provoke modes of posthumanist pleasure, environmental protest, and a sense of immersion within the strange agencies that constitute the world.Less
Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, the book calls for an environmental stance in which humanity thinks, feels, and acts as the very stuff of the world. As a work within the environmental humanities, it grapples with climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, ocean conservation, environmental activism, and the depiction of the anthropocene. And as a study in new materialism it focuses on how the materiality of human bodies provoke modes of posthumanist pleasure, environmental protest, and a sense of immersion within the strange agencies that constitute the world.
Kathleen M. Gough
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813044378
- eISBN:
- 9780813046471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813044378.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both ...
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Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both Black and Green Atlantics. By exploring their work and subsequent public reputations, it reveals how powerful notions of Irish and black, especially southern black, identity have been generated, disseminated, and redeployed around the Atlantic World, often with recourse to similar invocations of agrarianism, religiosity, and resistance (cultural and political) to oppression. The chapter also offers a pointed critique of the tendency to ignore or marginalize women in much Atlantic Studies.Less
Drawing on insights from gender and performance studies, this chapter uses the careers and writings of Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston and Ireland’s Lady Augusta Gregory to examine the creation of both Black and Green Atlantics. By exploring their work and subsequent public reputations, it reveals how powerful notions of Irish and black, especially southern black, identity have been generated, disseminated, and redeployed around the Atlantic World, often with recourse to similar invocations of agrarianism, religiosity, and resistance (cultural and political) to oppression. The chapter also offers a pointed critique of the tendency to ignore or marginalize women in much Atlantic Studies.
Ryan Szpiech
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823264629
- eISBN:
- 9780823266821
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823264629.003.0014
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
This introduction lays out the key issues at stake in the study of medieval exegesis and in the comparative study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions of scriptural commentary. It frames the ...
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This introduction lays out the key issues at stake in the study of medieval exegesis and in the comparative study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions of scriptural commentary. It frames the studies in this book not as parts of a comprehensive overview or introduction to medieval exegesis, but rather as a series of interconnected studies on different aspects of scriptural commentary in different faith traditions. It probes the conceptual foundation of such a comparative approach, criticizing any appeal to a shared “Abrahamic” tradition (also rejecting notions such as “religions of the book” and “the three cultures”). Rather than following a theologically based model in which Jewish, Christian, and Muslims traditions are linked according to a shared history of prophecy or an overlapping concept of historical revelation, the chapters in this book are linked according to concrete historical circumstances in which authors and texts circulated. Exegesis is thus proposed as a point of contact between historical communities as well as a discourse by which those communities sought to differentiate themselves from one another.Less
This introduction lays out the key issues at stake in the study of medieval exegesis and in the comparative study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions of scriptural commentary. It frames the studies in this book not as parts of a comprehensive overview or introduction to medieval exegesis, but rather as a series of interconnected studies on different aspects of scriptural commentary in different faith traditions. It probes the conceptual foundation of such a comparative approach, criticizing any appeal to a shared “Abrahamic” tradition (also rejecting notions such as “religions of the book” and “the three cultures”). Rather than following a theologically based model in which Jewish, Christian, and Muslims traditions are linked according to a shared history of prophecy or an overlapping concept of historical revelation, the chapters in this book are linked according to concrete historical circumstances in which authors and texts circulated. Exegesis is thus proposed as a point of contact between historical communities as well as a discourse by which those communities sought to differentiate themselves from one another.
Daniel F. Silva
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941008
- eISBN:
- 9781789628999
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941008.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines how the novel combines the religious with elements of the fantastic in staging the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Placed within an existing field of global meanings, especially ...
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This chapter examines how the novel combines the religious with elements of the fantastic in staging the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Placed within an existing field of global meanings, especially pertaining to notions of morality and propriety underpinned by racial and sexual discourses, Jesus confronts a world of stigma and suffering. As millions of people flock to Lém to seek out the messiah, many of which requesting miracles, Jesus comes face to face with imperial categorizations of bodies in terms of not only race and gender, but also of disease and disability. In doing so, she is forced to grapple with the construction and lived consequences of particular notions of normativity – of corporal ability, skin color, and gender – that inform privilege within Empire. The resolutions she seeks reveal a mission against what Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak call the epistemic violence of power, namely that of Empire.Less
This chapter examines how the novel combines the religious with elements of the fantastic in staging the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Placed within an existing field of global meanings, especially pertaining to notions of morality and propriety underpinned by racial and sexual discourses, Jesus confronts a world of stigma and suffering. As millions of people flock to Lém to seek out the messiah, many of which requesting miracles, Jesus comes face to face with imperial categorizations of bodies in terms of not only race and gender, but also of disease and disability. In doing so, she is forced to grapple with the construction and lived consequences of particular notions of normativity – of corporal ability, skin color, and gender – that inform privilege within Empire. The resolutions she seeks reveal a mission against what Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak call the epistemic violence of power, namely that of Empire.
Stacy Alaimo
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816621958
- eISBN:
- 9781452955223
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816621958.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, ...
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The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.Less
The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.
