Search results
James Baldwin Review editors Douglas Field and Justin A. Joyce interview author and Baldwin biographer James Campbell on the occasion of the reissue of his book Talking at the Gates (Polygon and University of California Press, 2021).
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. The subject topics covered are wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. The duality indicated by the book’s title reflects its themes. It is an experiment in writing an American sexual history that refuses the confines of identity sexuality studies, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly ‘normal’. What unites this project is a fascination with sex at the margins, refusing the classificatory frameworks of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and demonstrating gender and sexual indecision and flexibility. And the book is also an exploration of the role of the archive in such histories. The sex discussed is located both in the margins of the archives, what has been termed the counterarchive, but also, importantly, in the pockets of recorded desire located in the most traditional and respectable repositories. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow’s archive. The market is potentially extensive: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
’ identity. 16 Markovits approvingly quotes Norman Mailer’s observation – made in 1984 on the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Twain’s classic – that ‘Riding the current of [ Huckleberry Finn ], we are back in that happy time when the love affair [between whites and blacks] was new and all seemed possible’. 17 This sounds a lot like Leslie Fiedler’s earlier judgement of Huck and Jim’s friendship, and Markovits surveys the contemporary literary scene for updated portrayals of this archetypal interracial ‘love affair’. He discusses Nathan and Coleman
): Maurice Béjart, Max Frisch, Walter Gropius, Norman Mailer, Rufino Tamayo, Pierre Boulez, Richard Smith, Sonny Rollins, Oscar Niemeyer, Jacques Lipchitz, James Jones, Victor Vasarely and Sean Kenny. Each programme was approximately 28 minutes in length, with the exception of the Norman Mailer programme, which was a double-length episode entitled Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up. While Who Is? was more recognisable as an ‘arts programme’ than New Tempo, it did experiment with the more conventional, humanist templates within which it worked. Like New Tempo, it
fiction, journalism compelled him. If the novelist has the ‘cachet for historical reasons, the journalist captures the moment’. And he very much wanted to be a ‘witness to the age in which [he] lived’ (Diary 8 September 1986). Long inspired by Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe's ‘new journalism’ blurring fact and fiction, he admired Shiva Naipaul's travelogue North of South: An African Journey (1978) and Martin Amis's collection of essays The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), which combined reportage, literary criticism and humour
, irrationality, insecurity, insanity) and the impossibility of imaginary, fictional identifications that made of Fuller’s films a battleground of tones, colours, movements, shocks that resonated with some of the most important artistic aspects of modern painting (the exaggerations of Pop Art, the immediacy and violence of Abstract Expressionism) and the American novel (Dos Passos, Norman Mailer). As with Nicholas
bringing about change in the law or politics of the government’ (Rawls 1971, 364). Civil disobedience of such a kind is related to the idea that democracy is criticism – that people disagree with their leaders, voice criticisms through formal as well as informal channels. As Norman Mailer has put it: ‘When you have a great country it’s your duty to be critical of it so it can become even greater’ (2003, 15). Dissent, therefore, is not necessarily a threat to the system. It is increasingly recognised that for ‘many individuals and groups conventional political activity is
faculty without tenure supported the student protests, they lost their jobs. 11 This dual influence of literary criticism and sixties radicalism shined through in Sexual Politics . Millett opened the book with a close analysis of sexual violence in the work of Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. Unlike Firestone, Millett spent considerably more time analyzing the role of rape in maintaining sexual divisions, but like other early radical feminists, she focused more on exposing the cultural work that reinforced the so-called naturalism of gendered divisions