American Culture in Fascism’s Final Years, 1938–1943

This thoroughly absorbing and astutely argued book contributes substantially to our understanding of the world of (English) letters in South Africa from around the middle of the 1930s to the late 1...

At any stage of the Cold War, Soviet film culture was inevitably influenced by the political and ideological content of the conflict and by fluctuations in its course. Soviet films represented confrontation with the West with various degrees of directness, dealing with such issues as ideological struggle, espionage, the fear of global hostilities (influenced by traumatic memories of the past world war), and ostentatious or genuine attempts at rapprochement with the other side. Soviet ideologues and commentators from different cultural fields were mobilized to defend Soviet filmmakers and film audiences from possible contamination. Western cinema was condemned as a source and emblem of bourgeois decadence and regarded as a tool of enemy propaganda. Films produced in the United States were the main targets of this condemnation: in stark contrast to the general friendliness which had characterized Soviet attitudes toward American filmmaking during World War II, with the advent of the Cold War they were commonly described as a filthy torrent of slander against humanity produced by Hollywood's conveyor-belts. (1) Against considerable odds, however, during the Cold War American cinema remained an important presence within Soviet culture and generated a significant effect on its Soviet counterpart even during the conflict's most difficult periods, when most American cultural products were rejected as unfit for Soviet consumption. (2) Even in the conditions of growing ideological repression and thorough filtration of anything that was perceived as a product of American capitalism and a tool of imperialist subversion, American films reached the Soviet intelligentsia, as well as common Soviet viewers. The new xenophobic atmosphere (fueled by anti-cosmopolitan witch hunts and courts of honor) did not prevent Soviet filmmakers, who since the earliest days of Soviet cinema had demonstrated enthusiastic interest in American representations of dynamic modernity and American film techniques, from being perceptive observers and processors of America's cinematic achievements. (3) Moreover, in spite of the declared intent to fence out contaminating Western influences, Soviet ideologues paid close attention to the developments in American cinema, sanctioning the use--for very different ideological aims--of stylistic and narrative patterns commonly associated with Hollywood. (4) This article examines certain channels and mechanisms of American cinema's penetration of the Soviet realm at the Cold War's initial and, arguably, most acute stage, the parameters of which were shaped in the last years of Stalin's rule by the most violent official rejection of Western culture. It explores two interrelated issues: patterns of Soviet bureaucratic, intellectual, and popular reception of American films; and U.S. efforts to secure a position in the Soviet film market. The first issue opens another perspective on the two superpowers' ideological and cultural rivalry; the second specifies the problem of cultural influences in a situation when the influencer has to circumvent powerful mechanisms of defense. By demonstrating and explaining diverse responses of Soviet audiences, authorities, and filmmakers to one of the most popular and accomplished products of American culture and one of the most powerful instruments of U.S. cultural policy, I aim to give a more nuanced picture of a period traditionally regarded as one of the lowest points in the relationship between the USSR and the United States. American Films in the USSR during World War II The history of Soviet attitudes toward American cinema in the early course of the Cold War would be incomplete without a look at its reception in the Soviet Union during World War II. (5) First, positive attitudes toward American cinema prevalent at that time provide a dramatic contrast to the mood of the subsequent Cold War. Second, the wartime access to allied countries' films, and the fact that large numbers of foreign movies were obtained as war trophies, profoundly influenced postwar Soviet filmmaking and the general cultural situation in the USSR. …

In the years surrounding the turn of the millennium, there emerged an assemblage of American and Spanish horror films fixated on uncanny child characters. Caught in the symbolic abyss between death and life, these figures are central to the films’ building of suspense and Gothic frisson—they are at once familiar and unfamiliar, vulnerable and threatening, innocent yet unnervingly inscrutable. Despite being conceived and produced in two very different cultural climates, these films construct the child as an embodiment of trauma in parallel ways. In turn, these Gothic children express the wavering of narratives of progress which suffused the liminal moment of the millennial turn. Steven Bruhm suggests that there is “a startling emphasis on children as the bearers of death” (author’s emphasis 98) in popular Gothic fiction at the turn of the new millennium, and that this contemporary Gothic “has a particular emotive force for us because it brings into high relief exactly what the child knows ... Invariably, the Gothic child knows too much, and that knowledge makes us more than a little nervous” (103). A comparative analysis of trans-millennial American and Spanish supernatural horror films reveals the specifically threatening register of the Gothic child’s knowledge, and that the gradual revelation of this knowledge aestheticizes the mechanics of trauma. This “traumatic” aesthetic also entails a disruption to linear progress, exposing the ways in which Gothic representations of the child’s uncanny knowledge express anxieties about the collapse of temporal progress. The eeriness associated with the child’s knowledge is thus tied to a temporal disjuncture; as Margarita Georgieva explains, child-centred Gothic fiction meditates on the fact that “childhood is quickly lost, never regained and, therefore, outside of the tangible adult world” (191). American films such as The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) and Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999), and Spanish films The Nameless (Jaume Balagueró, 1999) and The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001), and also American-Spanish co-productions such as The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) and Fragile (Jaume Balagueró, 2005), expose the tangle of contradictions which lurk beneath romanticised definitions of childhood innocence and nostalgia for an adult’s “lost” childhood. The child characters in these films tend to be either ghosts or in-between figures, seemingly alive yet acting as mediators between the realms of the living and the dead, the past and the present. Through this liminal position, these children wreak havoc on the symbolic coherence of the films’ diegetic worlds. In so doing, they incarnate the ontological wound described by Cathy Caruth in her definition of trauma: “a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” caused by an event that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself ... repeatedly ... in the nightmares and repetitive actions” (4) of those who have experienced trauma. The Gothic aesthetic of these children expresses the ways in which trauma is locatable not in the original traumatic past event, but rather in “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance”, through revealing that it is trauma’s unassimilated element which “returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth, author’s emphasis 4). The uncanny frisson in these films arises through the gradual exposition of the child character’s knowledge of this unassimilated element. As a result, these children trouble secure processes of symbolic functioning, embodying Anne Williams’ suggestion that “Gothic conventions imply a fascination with … possible fissures in the system of the symbolic as a whole” (141). I suggest that, reflecting Bruhm’s assertion above, these children are eerie because they have access to memories and knowledge as yet unassimilated within the realm of adult understanding, which is expressed in these films through the Gothic resurfacing of past traumas. Through an analysis of two of the most transnationally successful and influential films to emerge from this trend—The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001)—this article explores the intersecting but tellingly distinctive ways in which the American and Spanish horror films figure the child as a vessel for previously repressed trauma. In both films, the eeriness of the children, Cole and Santi respectively, is associated with their temporal liminality and subsequent ability to invoke grisly secrets of the past, which in turn unsettles solid conceptions of identity. In The Sixth Sense, as in other American ghost films of this period, it is an adult character’s subjectivity which is untethered by the traumas of the uncanny child; Bruhm suggests that the contemporary Gothic “attacks adult self-identity on multiple fronts” (107), and in American films the uncanny child tends to launch this traumatic assault from within an adult character’s own psyche. Yet in the Spanish films, the Gothic child tends not to threaten an individual adult figure’s self-identity, instead constituting a challenge to secure concepts of socio-cultural identity. In The Sixth Sense, Cole raises a formerly repressed trauma in the mind of central adult character Malcolm Crowe, while simultaneously disturbing the viewer’s secure grasp on the film’s narrative world. Ultimately, Cole raises Freudian-inflected anxieties surrounding childhood’s disruption to coherent adult subjectivity, functioning as a receptacle for the adult’s repressed secrets. Cole’s gradual exposure of these secrets simulates the effects of trauma for both Malcolm and the viewer via a Gothic unsettling of meaning. While The Sixth Sense is set in the present, The Devil’s Backbone is set during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39)—a violent and traumatic period of Spain’s history, the ramifications of which have been largely unexplored in Spanish popular culture until very recently as a result of forty years of strict censorship under General Franco, whose dictatorship eroded following his death in 1975. Unlike Cole, Santi does not arouse a previously submerged trauma within an adult character’s mind, instead serving to allegorically raise socio-cultural trauma. Santi functions as an incarnation of Gilles Deleuze’s “child seer”, a figure who Deleuze claims first emerged in Italian neo-realist films of the 1940s as a response to the massive cultural rupture of World War II (3). The child seer is characterised by his entrapment in the gap between the perception of a traumatic event, and the understanding and subsequent action required to move on from it. Thus, upon experiencing a disturbing event, he suffers a breach in comprehension which disrupts the typical sensory-motor chain of perception-understanding-action, rendering him physically and mentally unable to escape his situation. Yet in experiencing this incapacity, the seer gains a powerful insight beyond the limits of linear temporality. On becoming a ghost, Santi escapes coherent space-time, and invokes the repressed spectre of Spain’s violent Civil War past, inciting an eerie collision of past and present. This temporal disruption has deep allegorical implications for contemporary Spain through the child’s symbolic status as vessel for the future. Santi’s embodiment of cultural trauma ensures that Spain’s past, as constructed by the film, eerily folds into the nation’s extra-diegetic present. The Sixth Sense In The Sixth Sense, adult protagonist Malcolm Crowe is a child psychiatrist, thus unravelling the riddles of the child’s psyche is positioned as the central quest of the film’s narrative. The dramatic twist in the film’s final scene reveals that the analysis of the child Cole’s “phobia” has in fact exhumed dormant spectres within Malcolm’s own mind, exposing the Gothic mechanisms whereby the uncanny child becomes conflated with the adult’s repressed trauma. This impression is heightened by the narrative structure of The Sixth Sense, in which the twist in the final scene shifts the meaning of all that has happened before. Both the audience and Malcolm are led to assume that they have uncovered and come to terms with Cole’s secret once it becomes clear two-thirds into the film that he “sees dead people”. However, the climactic twist exposes that Cole has in fact been hiding another secret which is not so easily ameliorated: that Malcolm is one of these dead people, having died in the film’s opening sequence. If the film’s narrative “pulling the rug out” from under the audience functions as intended, at the climax of the film both Malcolm and viewer simultaneously become privy to a layer of Cole’s secret previously inaccessible to us, both that Malcolm has been dead all along and that, subsequently, the hidden quest underlying the surface narrative has been Malcolm’s journey to come to terms with this disturbing truth. Thus, the uncanny child functions as a symbolic stage for the adult protagonist’s unassimilated trauma, and the unsettling nature of this experience is extended to the viewer via the gradual exposure of Cole’s secret. Further intensifying the uncanny effects of this Gothic disruption to adult knowledge, Cole also functions like a reincarnation of the crisis which has undermined Malcolm’s coherent identity as a successful child psychiatrist: his failure to cure former patient Vincent. Thus, Cole is like uncanny déjà vu for Malcolm and the viewer, an almost literal re-evocation of Malcolm’s past trauma. Both Vincent and Cole have a patch of grey hair at the back of their head, symbolising their access to knowledge too great for their youth, and as Malcolm explains, “They’re both so similar. Same mannerisms, same expressions, same things hanging over their heads.” At the opening of the film, Vincent is depicted as a wretched madman. He appears crying and half naked in Malcolm’s bat

By this study it is aimed the solution of problems in the teaching of lexis in Italian and any other language. From a didactic and educational viewpoint it is aimed the students’ acquaintance with these levels of research, the students’ improved ability with these tasks and studies of similar nature so that they may be able to solve on their own problems in the field of culture and civilization. Polysemy in the general framework in Albania in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The difficult problematic of polysemy in the learning of foreign languages and languages in general in intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced level. An in-depth analysis of its explanation using scientific and research means. Polysemy is a lexical and semantic mechanism, which is a key to the enrichment of a foreign language dictionary, as well as to the Albanian one. In the framework of teaching of foreign languages, the lexis remains a very difficult aspect to solve, because there are involved other important teaching processes such as education, civilization which are not considered as primary goals. The scientific research will be done through a detailed research in the Italian language dictionaries and in literary texts. The methodology is focused on the analysis of the polysemantic structure of words from the viewpoint of etymology, grammar, semantics, meaning definition, examples and their phraseology. I will also illustrate it based on theoretical literature. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n2p265

Discourse markers (DMs) are significant for fluent speech. Furthermore, they are important elements of language for conversation organization, reciprocal relation among interlocutors, and productive speaking and comprehension. Although, they have very important functions for pragmatic development, they seem to be neglected in language teaching either because of the belief that they are difficult to teach, or as a result of the focus on grammatical competence in language teaching. This study examined the use and functions of micro-level. DMs in British and American feature-length films and it provided implications for using feature-lengths films as a source of authentic language input for explicit or implicit teaching of DMs. The scripts of four films (two British and two American) were analyzed using the AntConc Concordance program. The results show  that there is not a significant difference between British and American films in terms of the frequency of DMs well, like, and you know .  On the other hand, it is found that oh is used significantly more frequently in British films than American films. The functional analysis of the DMs showed that, both British and American feature-length films represent the use of English DMs in native discourse. Therefore, the study concludes that the films could be used for teaching and learning of DMs in foreign language teaching. The results are discussed in terms of pedagogical implications.Â

Regarding the multi-cultural patterns in the world today, the most influential cultures are the European and the American cultures, which can be called the ‘‘two poles’’ of world culture. With its grand tradition developed over thousands of years, Chinese culture can be called the ‘‘Third Pole’’ for its unique characteristics, as well as its influence on and contributions to the world. The Chinese culture influences, conflicts with and learns from European, American and other cultures, thereby forming a varied cultural landscape. The Chinese culture has an independent, deep-rooted tradition and exhibits continuing vitality. Traditional Chinese culture survived centuries-long, unyielding struggles and trials and, at present, requires reform and innovation. Exploring the road to a renaissance is the essence of Chinese culture today. This ‘‘Third Pole’’, independent of the other two, is constantly absorbing the world’s advanced cultures and going its own way and has already begun to show signs of flourishing. The ideas and feelings that this culture carries forward are consistent with the core values of traditional Chinese culture, which is based on the pursuit of ‘‘harmony’’, reflecting a new cultural paradigm and style of humankind in the process of modern civilization. As the carrier and expression of culture, the worldwide film culture similarly reflects world cultural patterns. The medium of film was born in Europe, and European and American films have constituted the mainstream of world cinema. Although European and American films are characterized by different features and influences, they are intertwined, forming two ‘‘poles’’ of world film culture. If European film stands as one ‘‘pole’’ with its artistic ideas and cultural expression, then American film is another important ‘‘pole’’ with its mature industry and great influence. Outside the mainstream film culture led by Europe and America, Asian films (including those of India, Japan, South Korea, and Iran), as well as the films of South America and South Africa, although developed independently over the years,

A who's who of scholars, authors, and journalists examines the contributions of the Jewish people to American culture, from film, food, and fiction to television, music, sports, and humor. Since they first began arriving in the United States in large numbers at the end of the 19th century, Jewish Americans have played a significant role in shaping American culture. The influence of the Jewish people is deeply and richly felt in many realms, including art, literature, politics, humor, and sports, to name just a few. The American film industry was pioneered by the likes of Adolph Zukor, Harry Cohn, and Jack Warner. Tin Pan Alley and Broadway sparkled with the creativity of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Stephen Sondheim. Where would rock 'n' roll be without Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and the Beastie Boys?Jews and American Popular Cultureexamines the influence of a highly creative and resilient people who have flourished despite the myriad forms anti-Semitism has taken since their earliest arrival. Chapters explore topics across a range of time periods and genres, including assimilation, stereotypes, and the Holocaust. In addition to examining the works of such compelling figures as Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Hank Greenberg, the Three Stooges, Allen Ginsberg, Wendy Wasserstein, and Ann Landers, a team of unparalleled scholars explains how a comparatively small, initially underprivileged group of people managed to overcome great odds and wield wide-ranging influence on contemporary culture. Shut out of more traditional fields, Jews in the final decades of the 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th century embraced the new technologies of film, radio, and television, as well as new industries and areas of commerce, from the department store to novelty toy distribution. What resulted is an American culture shaped by a resilient minority population. From Betty Boop to Barbie, fromThe HoneymoonerstoFriends, the creative spirit of American Jews defines our culture. Edited by acclaimed author Paul Buhle, featuring the work of leading scholars and journalists, and presenting a never-before published comic strip by Harvey Pekar (whose life was featured in the filmAmerican Splendor), this definitive, comprehensive three-volume set represents the first-ever work of its kind.

Studies is rather like standing before the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. The observer is confronted with the necessity of stepping into two rivers at once or not getting wet at all. Film Studies is as integral a part of American Studies as American Studies is a part of Film Studies; the separate currents are so commingled at their meeting point that the waters can no longer be clearly distinguished. A look through the convention programs of the American Studies Association and the Society for Cinema Studies reveals how frequently the two disciplines converge in their subject matter, interests, and methods.1 American Studies and Film Studies are differentiated by their respective goals and emphases; the former would potentially study all that is American (including the art and artifact which is American film), while the latter would study all that is cinematic (including, in the case of American film, the aesthetic, cultural, and historical context of American experience). However, the similarities that the disciplines share far outweigh their differences. Both are unruly, broad, fluid. Both are synthetic, and, as such, face similar problems of legitimacy, scope, philosophy, theory, and the demands of their interdisciplinary nature. As well, both have always been highly dependent upon

Reviewed by: Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI Breanne Robertson Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. By Dean Rader. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 304 pages, $27.95. Dean Rader begins his book Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI with a brief history of the Ghost Dance, a nineteenth-century religious movement whose promise of restoring the earth to Native Americans through ceremonial dance represents the earliest pan-Indian act of colonial defiance. This performative mode of resistance serves as a leitmotif throughout Rader’s book, which elucidates anticolonialist strategies in contemporary Native American poetry, fiction, film, and visual arts. Through a series of case studies, Rader demonstrates that “resistance in the symbolic field can be as powerful as resistance on the battlefield” (109). His insightful readings of Native texts and symbols are sensitive and accomplished, and he convincingly argues for a distinctly American Indian form of aesthetic activism that he terms “engaged resistance.” Rooted in indigenous ideologies and archetypes, the discourse of engaged resistance cleverly subverts the mainstream language of dominance—both verbal and visual—by dismantling its traditional frames of knowledge through blended genre, circular time, trickster tropes, and communal storytelling. In so doing, American Indian artists, writers, and filmmakers at once enhance and defend Native dignity and cultural autonomy. Taking a cue from the indigenous works he studies, Rader positions his book as an activist intervention in the popular discourse about American Indian peoples and culture. The gusto with which Rader undertakes this task is palpable. He strenuously condemns the US historical record of Native genocide and its continuing legacy of cultural hegemony, and he champions contemporary American Indian tenacity and aesthetic ingenuity in countering mainstream tendencies of assimilation and erasure. Yet Rader’s ebullience also does a disservice to his project. By arguing for the exceptionalism of Native American aesthetic activism, Rader crafts his own “trap of receptive determinacy” that posits a singular, “correct” way to understand American Indian cultural production (93). First, Rader refers to the United States and to popular culture in general as the enemy of Native American culture. This binary construct implies that the reader must ultimately agree with the author, thereby joining an enlightened minority, or accept guilt by association. Indeed, [End Page 326] Rader repeatedly disparages scholars and critics who, in his opinion, fail to situate Native works within an indigenous context or who acknowledge but are not adequately sympathetic to American Indians’ anticolonialist project. Second, Rader proclaims the aesthetic excellence of Native American art by invoking Georgia O’Keeffe, Spike Lee, and other non-Native cultural leaders, but he refuses any extended comparative analysis, explaining that American Indian artworks reflect indigenous ontologies and thus “operate outside Anglo [and other ethnic] conceptions” (139). Rader’s narrow focus attempts to situate Native American literature and film beyond Western scrutiny, to evaluate these works on their own terms. However, the author finds himself in an interpretive catch-22, as his primary thesis rests on the idea that contemporary indigenous art expresses a hybridized aesthetic derived from American and Native aesthetic traditions. Rader even identifies historical sources and modern affinities with non-Native works as part of his analyses, thus rendering his decision to neglect comparison all the more perplexing and, at times, damaging to his argument. For example, Rader correctly observes the visual similarities between the map paintings of Jasper Johns and Flathead-Cree-Shoshone artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, but whereas Smith “indigenizes the lower forty-eight,” Johns merely “empties out his states” to create “innocuous” maps from an “unaltered perspective” (53). Certainly, Johns’s paintings do not explicitly evoke colonial transgressions as Smith’s paintings do, but Rader ignores postmodernist readings of Johns’s paintings, whose parallel project of challenging the authority of place names and blurring the distinction between maps/objectivity and paintings/subjectivity not only predated but also likely served as a model for Smith’s paintings. While this scholarly oversight might be attributed to Rader’s lack of art historical training, his assumption of Native essentialism nevertheless denies a larger understanding of recent American...

In this chapter, O’Melia analyzes the final years of Saturday Morning in the United States. Deviating from her previous chapters’ model that focuses on a Japanese phenomenon and the popular programs that emerged around it, she concentrates on how the tropes and conventions of Japanese media as presented in the ascension of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! had become the common narrative culture of Saturday Morning. She does this by demonstrating it was these tropes and conventions that acted as the unifying force between Tai Chi Chasers, a South Korean program, and Justice League Unlimited, The Spectacular Spider-Man, and Iron Man: Armored Adventures, all American superhero programs based on intellectual properties that were not strangers to Saturday Morning scheduling.

Reviewed by: World of Letters: reading communities and cultural debates in early apartheid South Africa by Corinne Sandwith Rachel Matteau Matsha (bio) Corinne Sandwith (2014) World of Letters: reading communities and cultural debates in early apartheid South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Corinne Sandwith’s book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of work in the field of book history in South Africa. Her book, entitled World of Letters: reading communities and cultural debates in early apartheid South Africa, examines selected South African cultural and intellectual spaces from late 1930s to early 1960s. In eloquent and compelling language, Sandwith provides a critical overview of debates that occurred in literary and cultural journals such as The South African Opinion, Trek, Fighting Talk, The Voice, Spark, and Liberation; organisations such as the Non-European Unity Movement, the Communist Party of South Africa, the Cape Literary and Debating Society, and radical theatre groups; and intellectual traditions such as Stalinism, Africanism, Marxism, Liberalism, Afrikaner nationalism, and Leftism, to name but a few. Divided into six chapters, the book examines–through case studies, archival and textual analysis–how the printed text became a public space where discourses were articulated and debated, and ultimately influenced the course of South Africa’s cultural and political history beyond the printed world. Based on textual and cultural artefacts such as literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, Sandwith discusses the genesis of the construction of contemporary South African English literary canons and aesthetics; the heavily debated role of arts and artists in mid-twentieth century South Africa; and the polarised position of South African artists and cultural practitioners within the broader imperial and colonial contexts. In doing so, Sandwith’s argument resonates with contemporary debates in [End Page 120] terms of a redefinition of issues of citizenship, culture, civilisation, and democratic ideals (Sandwith 2014:29), as well as definitions of ‘South Africanness’ (33). Definitions of South African national cultures and literatures are understood in the light of public debates facilitated by communities revolving around literary and cultural periodicals, and although often exclusionary in nature, these projects–and Sandwith’s analysis thereof–provide a fascinating overview of the fluctuating definitions of South African literatures and aesthetics, and the complexity and plurality inherent to South African cultural criticism. The link between the role of print and national identities is emphasised, with readers activating texts and performing readings aligned to their reality. Sandwith explores the reading strategies aligned to various intellectual strands, for example in chapter four, where she discusses a postcolonial reading of The Tempest, illustrating how readings of international literary texts were politicised, which is, as she puts it, ‘one indication of the way in which local struggles were elaborated within an internationalist frame’ (159). Sandwith however cautions against homogenising and simplifying South Africa’s social history, opting to ‘offer a history of divergent and contradictory orientations’ (258), which constitutes one of the strengths of her study. She successfully presents a varied portrait of the intellectual formations that shaped South African cultural and literary discourses, offering examples from a wide variety of contexts, disciplines and ideologies. Her argument is robustly built on archival material, enabling a reconstruction of ‘what it left of the historical remains’ (174), thus regrouping individual and collective endeavours within the web of cultural, political, social, and intellectual networks as articulated in the publications studied. Reproductions of archival material, showing pages of some periodicals discussed in the book and dating as far back as the mid-1930s, add to the argument, offering a visual glimpse of their editorial lines through extra textual elements such as headers, adverts, cartoons, etc. A valuable aspect of Sandwith’s book is her analysis of the various voices interacting in the world of letters, such as editorialists, authors, columnists, and readers from diverse intellectual traditions. Readers’ letters, for instance, through which she analyses reading strategies and interpretative protocols, contain a wealth of information on ways in which texts and discourses were adapted, discussed and interpreted by the general public and specialists in the field, and how reading was politicised. Similarly, debates relayed through print media are also studied, shedding light on the [End Page 121] early stances adopted by prominent...

World of Letters: Reading Communities and Cultural Debates in Early Apartheid South Africa

Magical American Jew: The Enigma of Difference in Contemporary Jewish American Short Fiction and Film

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2018 and is divided into three sections: 1. Art and the Internet; 2. Art and Society, and 3. Artists and Their Environment. The books under review cover a broad range of subjects within their specialities, but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section explores how art critics and those in the field are continuing to deal with visual culture’s relationship with the Internet and digital media (Daniel Birnbaum, Michelle Kuo, eds. More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age; Eva Respini, ed., Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today). The second section looks at books about art in the social sphere (Kim Snepvangers and Donna Mathewson Mitchell, eds., Beyond Community Engagement: Transforming Dialogues in Art, Education, and the Cultural Sphere; Ole Marius Hylland and Erling Bjurström, eds., Aesthetics and Politics: A Nordic Perspective on How Cultural Policy Negotiates the Agency of Music and Arts; Gary Alan Fine, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education). The third and final section looks at how artists negotiate their environment, responding to and altering their surroundings (Sarah Lowndes, Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City: Creative Retreat; Gabriel N. Gee and Alison Vogelaar, eds., Changing Representations of Nature and the City: The 1960s–1970s and Their Legacies).