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Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular—and controversial—writers in the Asian American literary tradition. This book traces her development as a writer and cultural activist through both ethnic and feminist discourses, investigating her novels, occasional writings, and her two-book ‘life-writing project’. The publication of The Woman Warrior not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity—or fakery—of her cultural references. This book traces the debates through the appearance of China Men (1981), as well as the novel Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and her most recent work The Fifth Book of Peace.
centre of discourses surrounding popular culture. As has already been suggested in the introduction to this book, through his cultural references and influences Kassovitz makes a conscious effort to place his films in the realm of mass popular culture. He does so in order for them to engage with as wide an audience as possible (both in France and abroad). Nevertheless, his cinematic
. A la folie is set in Paris in a vague contemporary present which provides even fewer socio-cultural references than Après l’amour. Alice, significantly, owes both her living and working spaces to the benevolence of her agent, a surrogate father figure. She has a well-equipped artist’s studio and a large attic flat only a short walk away, with a magnificent rooftop view over the Eiffel tower which contrasts with the
Afterword The cultural impact of punk: an interview with Jon Savage Matthew Worley Among the numerous accounts of punk’s origins and early development that now exist, Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1991) is peerless. Combining sharp critical analysis with participatory insight, it locates British punk squarely within its socio-economic, cultural and political context. Indeed, Savage’s reading of punk may be traced back to his 1976-produced fanzine London’s Outrage, which interspersed media clippings and pop cultural references with an essay forewarning Britain
curatorial control of audience reception. Instead, I explore how museum publics form individual responses to cultural heritage, sometimes rejecting official interpretation and drawing upon wider cultural references and experiences. Collections of non-European material culture were important in establishing British perceptions about the peoples of their empire: through objects, visitors were able to glean information about diverse peoples’ cultures and climates, make assumptions about their relative positions in socio
FEW PEOPLE appreciate the skill required to read political cartoons. Unlike the background information that accompanies newspaper articles or the captions that frame newspaper photographs, editorial cartoons provide readers few identifiers or descriptors needed to identify new actors or concepts. Instead, cartoons use a combination of physical distortion, cultural references and visual
in its shift away from rigid boundaries of art cinema, while retaining some of its characteristics, to create a form of cinema which has resulted in increased global consumption. Thus, aspects of El laberinto can be neatly fitted into Bordwell’s formulation of ‘realism, authorship, and ambiguity’, and Neale’s notion of the ‘primacy of art’. Art cinema audiences have their expectations met by cultural references from the realms of ‘high art’, the use of the colour palette, and the engagement with serious social issues. Nonetheless, other elements of del Toro’s film
one hand, its (sometimes deceptive) simplicity of sitcom format, plot structure and comedy performances, and, on the other, its (sometimes obscured) complexity, particularly in relation to the intertextual, social, political and cultural references woven through the series’ structure and content. The chapter closes with a consideration of Father Ted 's more contemporary complexity, specifically in relation to gender performativity, and examines how a series purporting to be almost entirely about men can develop a wider resonance in terms of the politics of
literature) is the inclusion of cultural references detached from their contexts and histories; the other is the use of transformational staging moments as attempts to sum up a production’s meanings, which can lead to erasure of possible significations and the connection of affective response with semiotic meaning that registers as prescription rather than invitation. To begin with, I argue that a thorough consideration of Lepage’s engagement of the spectator must take on board questions of feeling. A theatre of meaning Making people feel things strongly is an articulated
This book explores how contemporary observers located criminal poisoning within a multi-layered network of historical and cultural references. It focuses on the painstaking attempts to construct a 'modern' conceptual and legislative framework for containing the threat posed by criminal poisoning. The book discusses the efforts to delineate the terms of scientific engagement with modern poison and then presents an analysis of how toxicological work was undertaken and represented. In motive and means, William Palmer's was the quintessential 'crime of civilization', and it shows how his case was enmeshed with a core set of concerns about the social and cultural underpinnings of a self-consciously 'modern' Britain. The book examines toxicology in the aftermath of the Palmer trial, showing how the tensions it highlighted within the imaginative landscape of Victorian poisoning led to an implosion of the toxicological project. The epic framing of toxicology's struggles with poison and the poisoner yielded to two (seemingly contradictory) revisions: on the one hand, to a more modest, less individually heroic role for the poison hunter, a vision of expertise as the collective application of consensually developed knowledge; and, on the other, to a literary reworking of the constitutive elements of toxicology's quest for mastery, a transposed re-articulation of the fraught relationship between poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination.