Showcasing new scholarship by emerging and established art historians, Cases of Citation tracks a history of artists who incorporated literature into their work. In doing so, this collection investigates why literary citation emerged as a viable and urgent strategy in art made during and after the 1960s, and explores how we can account for such citational practices in contemporary scholarship. By spotlighting new voices in the field of art history, this book makes a significant, topical, and, above all, current contribution to a fast-growing field of inquiry. Structured as a series of in-depth case studies, the essays that form this volume generate their own specific questions about the relationship between art and literature through the analysis of a single artwork. The collection covers a diverse group of artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including David Wojnarowicz, Marcel Broodthaers, Lis Rhodes, Romare Bearden and Silvia Kolbowski. Cited authors range from Oscar Wilde to Frank O’Hara, Mary Shelley to Jean Genet. And together, the artworks and cited texts are approached from various critical angles, with each author questioning and complicating the ways in which we can ‘read’ textual citations in art. The book concludes with a richly illustrated conversation between the editors and the pioneering feminist artist Elaine Reichek, whose lifelong engagement with text serves as a foundational art historical touchstone for the collection as a whole.
This chapter shifts the focus from individual and domestic concerns to a broader international stage. It demonstrates a crystallising of the conceptual work that emerged in World War I through a series of controversies and catalysts surrounding the design and construction of Herbert Baker’s Assembly Chamber for the new city at Delhi in 1923. Baker’s Assembly Chamber was regarded as a scientific experiment (from drawing board to construction), and rather unusually, as this chapter demonstrates, scientists as well as architects were involved in its design. In the process, architectural acoustics was re-categorised from ‘special intelligence’ to ‘fundamental’ investigation, becoming embedded into a national programme of government-funded research, which marked the beginnings of formalised research in environmental science within the construction industry in Britain. Taking the Assembly Chamber at Delhi as a pivot point, this chapter explores the changing position of acoustics as a branch of environmental science in 1920s Britain. It demonstrates the manner in which the political and economic controversies surrounding the design and construction of the chamber acted as catalysts for the instigation of a new laboratory – located in a disused munitions factory near Perivale in London – and stimulated a broader programme of acoustic research. With reference to unpublished papers held in archives, this chapter brings to light the tensions that sustained early official research in the discipline of architectural acoustics.
Fusing a distinctive feminist aesthetic with a startling vision of twentieth-century Spain, the work of Cecilia Bartolomé casts a new light on the histories of both Spanish national film and transnational women’s cinema. This book, the first in English on the director and only the second in any language, analyses her shorts, medium- and feature-length films, television work, as well as unfilmed scripts, in order that she may take her place among other key auteurs of Spanish and feminist cinema. It explores Bartolomé’s sustained ideological commitment to defending feminism and opposing Francoism, as well as her dynamic aesthetic invention, especially in the areas of music and comedy, including the esperpento. However, while an auteurist framework allows for an analysis of the aesthetics and vision of her filmed work, the nature of Bartolomé’s career subjects it to severe strain. The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé adopts, then, a mindful auteurist approach. Readers will find in these pages close readings of commercially released films, but also sustained analysis of the director’s Film School pieces as finished work, rather than merely developmental. The book also innovatively includes creative exploration of her unfilmed scripts, where we only have the word, and must imagine the image and sound. The nature of Bartolomé’s career forces us critically to adapt, to fill gaps, to read between the lines and to imagine: it aims to show that such a critical approach is thereby stronger for the adaptation. The book also includes a new interview with the director as an appendix.
This essay uses the publication of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to consider the changed status of citations in art made during and after the 1960s. Setting the scene for the ensuing essays, Julius argues that each of the instances of citation explored by the contributing authors variously belongs to an intellectual landscape shaped by the questions Barthes posed in this essay, questions that the American art critic Craig Owens claimed that ‘the art frequently referred to as “postmodernist”, can perhaps best be understood as a response or series of responses to.’ Owens’s name recurs throughout the collection; his writings toward a theory of postmodernism from the late 1970s and 1980s help to draw out the art-historical implications of Barthes’ essay. Although Owens’s vision for art after ‘The Death of the Author’ never came to pass, his art criticism reveals the context in which citations erupted into the expanded field of post-1960s art.
Emigration formed a cornerstone of the GFS’s imperial work. In 1883 the GFS established the Department for Members Emigrating to ensure the safe passage of girls and young women travelling between various parts of the empire. The previous chapter examined how whiteness was central to imaginings of settler colonial societies, and this chapter considers how the GFS tried to make these imaginings a reality through its emigration programmes and the building up of settler societies. The chapter begins by outlining the wider contexts in which the GFS’s emigration programmes emerged and situates their development in relation to similar emigration schemes for girls. It then traces the different motives that informed the development of the GFS’s programmes. Child rescue and emigration organisations argued for the necessity of removing girls from the perceived dangers of poverty and urban life in England to the more wholesome environment of the colonies. Girls also provided valuable labour to colonial societies and were integral in making the empire white by ensuring the construction of English households abroad. Despite the high demand for emigrants in settler colonies, the GFS and other emigration organisations faced myriad difficulties, which were rooted in broader class and racial anxieties and specifically concerns about the whiteness of emigrants and white prestige in colonial societies. These challenges also reveal the competing, rather than complementary, objectives among emigration organisers, settlers, and girl migrants and fault lines within emigration programmes and the settler colonial project.
Chapter 5 explores the implications of learning from knowledge produced beyond the academy and by Global South movements, specifically MAB. The chapter shows how the what and how of the study (i.e., the questions asked and methodologies used) cannot be separated from the who and why. Taking a collaborative and solidarity-based approach to knowledge directly shapes the theories and methods of analysis. The chapter builds on the previous by focusing on the following question: How could the study of social movements be transformed utilizing methodologies other than theoretically based analysis that is produced exclusively inside the university, and within the “Global North,” and what might this mean for organizing for the right to water? The chapter examines the potentials of using categories of analysis that emerge beyond the academy and Global North university. It is both methodological and analytical, and examines knowledge production and, specifically, how MAB’s work is grounded in theory (Marx, Gramsci, Fernandes, Freire, liberation theology, and many others) and praxis, and is led by many young people who are adding to, critiquing, and changing theory. In doing so, it is building a national (and international) movement for the right to water. MAB’s focus on liberatory education and consciousness-raising is counter-hegemonic work that is critical to creating the conditions for change. In this sense, MAB’s focus is as much about process as outcomes – which is also an example of counter-hegemonic logics.
Volume 10’s From the Field section consists of provocations and talking points from roundtable discussions on the Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley film I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982) hosted by James Baldwin Review at three different conferences—the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Denver in 2023; the Modern Language Association’s 2024 conference in Philadelphia; and the American Literature Association’s 2024 conference in Chicago. These roundtables provided stimulating public conversation, bringing together scholars to provide new takes on this extraordinary but little-known film. The panelists—Simon Abramowitsch (Chabot College), Douglas Field (University of Manchester), Monika Gehlawat (University of Southern Mississippi), Melanie Hill (Rutgers University), Josslyn J. Luckett (NYU), D. Quentin Miller (Suffolk University), Jared O’Connor (University of Illinois at Chicago), Hayley O’Malley (Rice University), Robert Reid-Pharr (NYU), Karen Thorsen (independent filmmaker), Kenneth Stuckey (Bentley University)—have each agreed to share here their opening remarks from these conferences in hopes of furthering discussion on this vital film.
The conclusion provides an overview of the organisation’s history since the interwar years and the ways that it has adapted – and not – to broader social changes. Following the Second World War the GFS, like Britain, struggled to find its place and redefine itself in a post-imperial world. It shifted its imperial work to focus on missionaries and developed a World Council, its own version of a Commonwealth, to connect its branches worldwide. Yet it still grappled with systemic problems, including the perception that it was an outdated organisation. The organisation continues to exist today with around twenty thousand members in branches throughout the world, but it looks very different from the GFS of 1875. The nucleus of power within the GFS has shifted from England, and branches in Africa account for over 70 per cent of the GFS worldwide membership. As the GFS prepares to mark its sesquicentennial in 2025, it is confronted with old and new questions, including its relationship with the Anglican Church and whether single-gender organisations are still relevant. The Black Lives Matter movement led the GFS to reflect on racism within the organisation. The conclusion reflects on how the legacies of colonialism continue to shape girls’ lives and frame the contemporary politics of girlhood.
The conclusion considers the implications of the previous chapters for histories of religion, the supernatural and the body. It surveys historical change between the 1830s and the 1930s, pointing out how the themes and emphases in public debate shifted over time and between different (confessional, regional, temporal, case-related) contexts. It also thematises the reasons that the public sphere was ‘loud with recrimination’ every time stigmata appeared on the radar. Stigmata were so controversial at least in part because as a phenomenon they were imported from continental Catholic Europe. In a first instance, they proved useful in reinforcing religious stereotypes, especially in public expressions of anti-Catholicism. Such understandings were not static but were remade continuously, in public, in conversation with the larger cultural changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stigmata became an argument in discussions about denominational identities, the perceived (ir)rationality of the Churches and (the limits of) scientific expertise. The conclusion ends with suggesting ways forward for scholarship.
London’s Royal Festival Hall opened its doors on 3 May 1951. The first concert hall to be built in Britain after World War II, Festival Hall was not just an iconic piece of architecture but also an archetype of designing for musical tone. Its design fused architecture, music, and science, and its construction process was interspersed with a series of tuning concerts that were implemented throughout 1950 and 1951 to allow for acoustic adaptation as the building was finalised. Drawing on the trajectory of experimental work and interdisciplinary collaborations that were explored in previous chapters, the Conclusion demonstrates how these informed the process at Royal Festival Hall. It also explores the differing forms of experience and expertise that formed a valid part of the hall’s construction. and the contemporary social and cultural priorities which were brought to the fore as a result. This is the point when international knowledge-sharing was becoming a reality, and when the formal and informal work of the preceding decades was ultimately expressed in a landmark building. This is the contemporary era of architectural acoustics.