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As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
familiar and dangerous, harbingers of emergent powers (the dead, the Fathers) that Olson must take account of personally and as a watchman for society at large. In its first publication, ‘The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs’ itself acted as a harbinger of Olson’s pivotal role in postwar American avant-garde poetry, leading off the fourth issue of Evergreen Review. By virtue of the journal’s fame and wide circulation and the prominence of the poem in this issue, it was, in Ralph Maud’s words, ‘Olson’s most conspicuous publication to that date’ (SL, 273).13 A pioneering literary
The Chicago group of Surrealists has been overlooked in accounts of Surrealism’s legacy in America, which have tended to delimit the movement’s impact to the visual arts alone and neglect Surrealism’s appeal to radicals and activists outside of cultural institutions. This essay argues that the Chicago group’s interpretation of word-image combinations drawn from American popular and vernacular culture constitutes a challenge to Eurocentric understandings of avant-gardism. It imbues Surrealism with a distinctive currency and profile in postwar America, one that brings it closer to grass roots activism as well as casting the movement’s significance in terms of the reception rather than production of cultural artefacts. Exploring the role of comics in Chicago Surrealism, as Pawlik demonstrates, sheds new light on the role of image-text relations in mediating the passage of European avant-gardism to America, as well as occasioning new interpretative possibilities of the dynamics between art and politics, and high and low culture in twentieth century America.
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.
This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural design in the developmental context of Iran. It is the first of its kind to utilize a multidisciplinary approach in probing the complex relationship between architecture, development, and heritage. It uses established theoretical concepts including notions of globalism, nostalgia, tradition, and authenticity to show that development is a major cause of historical transformations in places such as Iran and its effects must be seen in relation to global political and historical exchanges as well as local specificities. Iran is a pertinent example as it has endured radical cultural and political shifts in the past five decades. Scholars of heritage and architecture will find the cross-disciplinary aspects of the book useful. The premise of the book is that transposed into other contexts, development, as a globalizing project originating in the West, instigates renewed forms of historical consciousness and imaginations of the past. This is particularly evident in architecture where, through design processes, the past produces forms of architectural heritage. But such historic consciousness cannot be reduced to political ideology, while politics is always in the background. The book shows this through chapters focusing on theoretical context, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and symbolic public architecture intended to reflect monumental time. The book is written in accessible language to benefit academic researchers and graduate students in the fields of heritage, architecture, and Iranian and Middle Eastern studies.
In 1960–62, a large number of white autochthonous parents in Southall became very concerned that the sudden influx of largely non-Anglophone Indian immigrant children in local schools would hold back their children’s education. It was primarily to placate such fears that ‘dispersal’ (or ‘bussing’) was introduced in areas such as Southall and Bradford, as well as to promote the integration of mostly Asian children. It consisted in sending busloads of immigrant children to predominantly white suburban schools, in an effort to ‘spread the burden’. This form of social engineering went on until the early 1980s. This book, by mobilising local and national archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals the extent to which dispersal was a flawed policy, mostly because thousands of Asian pupils were faced with racist bullying on the playgrounds of Ealing, Bradford, etc. It also investigates the debate around dispersal and the integration of immigrant children, e.g. by analysing the way some Local Education Authorities (Birmingham, London) refused to introduce bussing. It studies the various forms that dispersal took in the dozen or so LEAs where it operated. Finally, it studies local mobilisations against dispersal by ethnic associations and individuals. It provides an analysis of debates around ‘ghetto schools’, ‘integration’, ‘separation’, ‘segregation’ where quite often the US serves as a cognitive map to make sense of the English situation.
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.
after the first great wave of American artists went to Italy, that country has become again a strong magnet for young American artists’. He explained that modern American artists were especially drawn to Italy’s ‘humanistic background’ as an ‘inspiration for personal development’. 17 This transatlantic cultural ‘phenomenon’ of postwar American artists working in
. The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together.8 J. K. Galbraith argues that in the ‘Affluent Society’ of postwar America, production came to be the test of performance. Production, he argues, ‘only fills a void that it has itself created’, merely burying the wounds of the war under so many consumer items.9 Horror, however, makes it clear that what is buried will not necessarily stay that way forever; that, as Roger North put it in 1744, ‘men that are buried have a
construction of historically specific identities’ ( 2009 : 46). Moreover, as Craps writes, it is necessary to be cautious regarding the application of such ‘single, uniform, timeless, and universal’ Western readings of trauma, which often result as ‘culturally insensitive and exclusionary’, incurring ‘charges of cultural imperialism’ and ‘uncritical cross-cultural application’ (2014: 3). In this case the very specific trauma of the Nagasaki bomb, here framed within the context of postwar American occupation and a neo-imperialist narrative of Oriental fragility and Western