Hala Auji, Raphael Cormack og Alaaeldin Mahmoud (red.). The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment. Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East. I.B. Tauris, 2023

The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East, edited by Hala Auji, Raphael Cormack and Alaaeldin Mahmoud

What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity’s anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century’s transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for ‘translocal/transnational’ cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.

Reviewed by: Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay by Katherine Roeder Matt Johnston Roeder, Katherine. 2014. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $60 hc. 221 pp. Over the past few decades, scholars in a range of disciplines have increasingly directed their attention to various mass cultural productions emerging in the modern era, seeing them as worthy objects of study in their own right. Rather than adopting a Baudrillard-like perspective that tends to see mass culture as an undifferentiated accumulation of simulacra, merely brute tools or unreflecting symptoms of industrialization and commercialization, they have taken its varieties seriously as quasi-artistic forms with complex modes of expression. However, in analyzing this artistry, such studies often problematically identify a self-conscious and critical authorial voice usually associated with modernist high art forms. If such a voice is accorded to a maker of popular films or advertisements, does this identification detract from an understanding of the work as a distinctly mass cultural form? Conversely, if such a voice is ignored or denied, how can the producer of popular entertainments be understood to offer any special insight into his or her world? As Bill Brown observes in A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), analyses addressed squarely at the “things” of mass culture, engaging with the objects of mass culture on their own terms, might paradoxically leave “things behind, never quite asking how they become recognizable, representable, and exchangeable to begin with” (4). Katherine Roeder’s Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay (2014) is an admirable attempt to resolve this dilemma. Best known for his strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1914 (and briefly from 1924 to 1927), McCay is an acknowledged founding figure of the modern-day newspaper cartoon. But, as Roeder points out, although his work has been reissued numerous times and he invariably finds his place in cartoon and comic anthologies, “no study as of yet gives critical, art historical attention to his work” (5). More specifically, though, Roeder wants to foreground “the modernist sensibility present in McCay’s comics, in an effort to position mass culture and modernist art in conjunction” and thereby avoid “the false dichotomy between mass culture and modernism” (5). In other words, [End Page 178] her study endeavors to uncover McCay’s modernist authorial voice while simultaneously being attentive to the specificity of the conventions of the medium in which he worked and which he helped put into place. Although Roeder runs into some substantial, perhaps unavoidable, methodological problems (discussed below), her book brings a needed complexity of analysis to McCay’s cartoons in terms of their own internal mechanics and the way they intersect with other popular entertainments of the time. The study enacts a valuable model of interpretation that should be of interest to other scholars of mass culture. Many of the details of McCay’s life, including his pioneering work with not only newspaper cartoons and illustrations but also vaudeville performance and animated shorts, has been covered in John Canemaker’s Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (1987). While acknowledging this useful source and being careful to cite it when she covers similar aspects of McCay’s career, Roeder makes a substantial addition from a research standpoint by more fully exploring how McCay’s cartoons intersect with a variety of early twentieth-century entertainment and commercial forms, conveniently organized into separate chapters. Thus, one chapter is devoted to “popular amusements,” including not just vaudeville but also circus performance and amusement parks. A real strength of Roeder’s approach lies in her close analysis of McCay’s pictorial choices in individual cartoons, married to an equally sensitive examination of the emerging conventions of these “popular amusements,” including the kinds of print advertising used to promote them. (Unfortunately, the original size of the cartoons makes it difficult to reproduce them clearly, although the 8 1/2 × 11 format used in Roeder’s book minimizes this loss of detail.) A similarly nuanced chapter looks at...

Reviewed by: Dickens and Mass Culture Elaine Freedgood (bio) Dickens and Mass Culture, by Juliet John; pp. xi + 321. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, £50.00, $99.00. Charles Dickens, Disney, Barbie, Madonna: in Dickens and Mass Culture, Juliet John presents us with a crackling continuum of cultural entrepreneurs and many questions about branding, commercial culture, mass reading publics, and celebrity. Dickens and Mass Culture also makes me wonder what "Dickens" meant and what he (or it) means to those of us who have read lots of him and to those of us who know his work at a remove. His celebrity—his brand, if you will (and I don't know that I will)—makes questions about reading, literacy, and knowledge resonate from the nineteenth century, when poor readers largely had access to Dickens through plagiarisms like Oliver Twiss (1841) and non-readers could listen to Dickens read aloud by their employers, tavern-keepers, or tea-shop owners, to the present, when non-readers can rent Oliver! (1968) from Netflix, watch the Masterpiece Theater Our Mutual Friend (1999), or visit Dickens World. What is Dickens? Dickens and Mass Culture asks this question in terms of print, public readings, film, the theme park, and the market. The title of this book is confusing, even misleading. Although Dickens used the words "mass" and "masses," he didn't use the phrase "mass culture" because "mass" used as an adjective—as in mass appeal, hysteria, propaganda, and public—is a twentieth-century formulation. John's smoothing over of this problem suggests an alternate title: "Dickens himself uses the terms 'mass' and 'masses' prominently in his early writings on America, and on his first visit to the States, he is centrally concerned with mass culture understood as commercial market-driven culture" (76). Dickens and Commercial Culture would have been a better title for this book, as it better identifies Dickens's concern; Dickens is a possible avatar of Barbie, then, but not of Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer. Indeed, Victorian culture becomes "massified," to use Sally Ledger's terminology from Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination ([Cambridge, 2007] 143), but there are continuing tensions and efforts associated with defining and categorizing popular, radical, and elegant entertainments, literary and otherwise. In Ledger's book, which one cannot help comparing to Dickens and Mass Culture, she works through these categories, carefully delineating the audiences, effects, and changes occurring in the middle of the century and placing Dickens in a rich historical context of radical publishing. John, on the other hand, gives us Dickens almost entirely in his own words, which are treated as though they are transparent. His varying feelings toward his readers, auditors, and other consumers of his work in plagiarized and popularized forms lead John to describe Dickens as at one and the same time utopian and commercial, humanitarian and profit-driven, charitable and misanthropic. A new kind of celebrity, he had to learn how to deal with the mob, the crowd, and the public, as he variously experienced his loving readers; in John's description of his responses, his values clash, collide, and otherwise behave like errant motor vehicles. But these contradictory feelings are not analyzed in any rigorous way. The worst mob was in America, where Dickens found his fans so suffocating that he had to retreat to Harvard and the "enlightened" company of its faculty (86). American fans instigated in Dickens a "repressed, subterranean rage against the kind of mass culture [he] perceived there and a yearning for a culture that somehow transcends the market" (87). This description is odd since John gives us plenty of evidence that Dickens repressed very little of his rage against mass culture; it may also be that his rage against [End Page 378] American culture was connected to the fact that he was not collecting royalties there. To see the floods of fans and then receive money for his readings, but not for his texts, must have been painful to a man whom John represents as enamored of money in a physical way: Dickens wrote, "the manager is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like a sofa-cushion, but...

Reviewed by: Cultura de masas, reforma y nacionalismo en Chile 1910-1931 J. Pablo Silva Cultura de masas, reforma y nacionalismo en Chile 1910-1931. By Stefan Rinke. Santiago: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, 2002. Pp. 174. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. This collection of essays is the fruit of tremendous research. Stefan Rinke has reviewed a wide range of primary and secondary sources in order to compile what he calls "a first approximation and basic information" on the topic of "sociocultural change in Chile" (p. 30). Most scholars of Chile would agree with him that nationalism, reform, and mass culture were all central elements of the sociocultural change that took place from 1910 to 1931. And Rinke does an effective job of summarizing the key events and intellectual currents in these three fields. Indeed, the book is filled with interesting observations and anecdotes and draws effectively on the existing literature. But the book coyly refuses to draw the separate threads together and reach a new synthesis. As his title implies, the work is divided into three parts with two essays each on mass culture, reform, and nationalism. The first essay is a somewhat scattered review of different facets of urban life including media, consumption, popular entertainment, and construction and urban planning. The second essay provides a fascinating overview of movies and the movie business in Chile. This chapter offers the book's most original contributions and to my knowledge represents the most accessible and thorough statement on the topic. In Part II, the book presents a chapter on employer paternalism and employee resistance in the mining sector, followed by a chapter on urban reform movements including the women's movement, temperance movement, and movements for health and sanitation. In the last part of the book, Rinke has a chapter on the competing intellectual discourses on Chilean identity and another chapter on economic nationalism. Although these essays on nationalism draw heavily on earlier works, they do offer a systematic comparison of the different intellectual currents that made up the debate over Chilean nationalism at the time. Overall, Rinke's message seems to be that in this period Chilean modernist ambitions did not play out in the way that intellectuals and politicians had hoped. Beyond that, Rinke seems content to provide a set of parallel narratives. Within these narratives he amasses a lot of interesting detail, and future students of Chilean nationalism and movie culture would do well to start with those chapters of this book. But [End Page 174] given Rinke's obvious mastery of the material, one could have hoped for a bit more. Although I was willing to believe that all these narratives were interrelated and mutually reinforcing, I would have appreciated some specifics on the relations between the different spheres of nationalism, social reform, and mass culture. Rinke could have clarified his own position by more clearly situating himself within debates in the secondary literature. J. Pablo Silva Grinnell College Grinnell, Iowa Copyright © 2006 Academy of American Franciscan History

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Plastic Madonnas, packaged holy tours, and biblical theme parks can arouse discomfort, laughter, and even revulsion in religious believers and nonbelievers alike. Scholars, too, often see the intermingling of religion and commerce as a corruption of true spirituality. Suzanne K. Kaufman challenges these assumptions in her examination of the Lourdes pilgrimage in late nineteenth-century France.Consuming Visions offers new ways to interpret material forms of worship, female piety, and modern commercial culture. Kaufman argues that the melding of traditional pilgrimage activities with a newly developing mass culture produced fresh expressions of popular faith. For the devout women of humble origins who flocked to the shrine, this intensely exciting commercialized worship offered unprecedented opportunities to connect with the sacred and express their faith in God.New devotional activities at Lourdes transformed the act of pilgrimage: the train became a moving chapel, and popular entertainments such as wax museums offered vivid recreations of visionary events. Using the press and the strategies of a new advertising industry to bring a mass audience to Lourdes, Church authorities remade centuries-old practices of miraculous healing into a modern public spectacle. These innovations made Lourdes one of the most visited holy sites in Catholic Europe.Yet mass pilgrimage also created problems. The development of Lourdes, while making religious practice more democratically accessible, touched off fierce conflicts over the rituals and entertainments provided by the shrine. These conflicts between believers and secularists played out in press scandals across the European continent. By taking the shrine seriously as a site of mass culture, Kaufman not only breaks down the opposition between sacred and profane but also deepens our understanding of commercialized religion as a fundamental feature of modernity itself.

Reviewed by: Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists by Michael Malek Najjar Sarah Fahmy MIDDLE EASTERN AMERICAN THEATRE: COMMUNITIES, CULTURES, AND ARTISTS by Michael Malek Najjar. London, England: Metheun Drama, 2021; pp. 256. Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists offers a comprehensive overview of the state of Middle Eastern American theatres since the late nineteenth century. It articulates critical perspectives from the genre, including contentious debates, thematic analysis, play excerpts, and invaluable interviews with prominent Middle Eastern American directors. As a Middle Eastern theatre scholar this is a book I have long yearned for, and I can only imagine the impact it will have on shaping the next generation of Middle Eastern thespians, and for envisioning an equitable American theatre. To situate the theatres of the Middle Eastern American communities, Najjar succinctly describes the often overlooked “complex tapestry” of the region’s politics and histories. Offering the framework of “polyculturalism” (11), Najjar articulates the “vast and virtually limitless definition to the peoples, cultures, and religions that are present” (1). He asks readers to imagine the scope of a group that includes “Armenians, Ashkenazi Jews, Turks, Egyptians, Bedouins, Yemani Arabs, Muwahhidun/Druze, Qashqai, Baluch, Turkoman, Hazaras, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Iranians/Persians, March Arabs, Kurds, Lurs, Moroccan Arabs, Berbers, Haratins, and Sephardic Jews,” (1) and complicates the wide multiplicities of religious and ethnic groups of each of those communities: identifications that go beyond state lines and simple binaries. Starting with critiquing the common name itself—the Middle East, which “carries tremendous cultural baggage that includes colonialism, Orientalism, and perverse notions of the region that have been perpetuated through scholarship, popular entertainment, and the arts”—enables the reader to reflect on the historic and contemporary representations and Othering of these communities (3). Najjar encourages readers to situate the evolution of Middle Eastern American theatre within the context of generational trauma and impact of various socio-political events, from two world wars to the spike in anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh hate crimes post 9/11, to the community’s lack of representation on the US Census since its inception in 1790 and their complicated relationship to whiteness and assimilation. Among many poignant remarks, he asks “Can one be a Middle Eastern American theatre artist and an accepted ‘American’ artist?” (18) Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists is an essential read for all theatre makers from academic institutions to professional companies. Its accessible language and vast scope offer spaces for Middle Eastern Americans to see themselves represented in the theatre archive, and for non-Middle Eastern Americans to learn about the evolving field. Showcasing Middle Eastern American artists commitment to “telling stories of those who are often neglected, unseen, or omitted from American theatre cultural discourses,” (15) Najjar demonstrates their persistence to challenge their misrepresentations. This book, has the potential to become a canonical text, as it provides insight to the arduous, gradual progress required to establish a new genre—the same state that “other great theatre communities (such as African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Native American) were in decades ago” (xv)—and calls upon the necessity of publishing and producing more plays if this genre is to reach its “fullest potential.” The book is split into nine chapters, including an introduction. In the introduction, readers learn about the major groups producing Middle Eastern theatre: Arab American, Iranian American, Jewish and Israeli American, and Turkish American theatres. Najjar traces each to their unique cultural production legacies and range, from the oldest and largest genres such as Jewish American (1870s) and Arab American (1896) productions, to the least documented like Turkish American productions. He contends with the most pressing issues facing the community, the most controversial being casting (32), and references the formidable “Middle Eastern American Theatre, on Our Terms,” an open letter and Bill of Rights, published in American Theatre (30) as a call for action to equitable representation across all facets of theatre. [End Page 112] The first chapter pays homage to sixteen of the most notable Middle Eastern companies in the United States demonstrating their diverse structures. They range from longstanding theatres like Golden Thread Productions, “the first American theatre company...

TWENTY YEARS AGO, LAWRENCE LEVINE--esteemed cultural historian and winner of MacArthur genius fellowship--described his colleagues' nervous laughter when he classified certain popular entertainers as great artists. Levine asked himself why it mattered so much to distinguish between and and he set out to discover when the categories crystallized in the United States and whose interests they served. The result was Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book zeroes in on mid-nineteenth-century phrenology, which measured cranial dimensions to establish hierarchy of racial types, from the high brows of European Caucasians to the low brows of alien races: Coombs' Popular Phrenology of 186s typically illustrated the domed forehead of Shakespeare against the flat-headed skull of A Cannibal New Zealand Chief (Levine 222). As the century wore on, that distinction was increasingly wielded by class of old stock Anglo-American gentlemen who sought to shore up their privilege in the face of threats posed by galloping immigration, industrialization, and technology. Levine closely documents how this class succeeded in fissuring what had been a rich shared public culture, removing Shakespeare, symphonic music, opera, and the fine arts to pantheon of inaccessible high culture (9). Other scholars of the late-nineteenth-century U. S.--such as Ellen Gruber Garvey, Kathy Peiss, and Richard Ohmann--have traced parallel power relations in struggles between established middle--class book publishers and the makers of mass magazines, in the gendered division of commercialized leisure, and in the commodification of audiences by advertisers. 'The eastern establishment sought both to distance itself from and to control this new mass culture marketplace, and new class alignment--sometimes named the professional-managerial class--emerged. Repeatedly, the cultural categories which crystallized in this period--highbrow/lowbrow, literary/commercial, elite/mass, serious/popular--served to widen the gap between us and them. In period which saw the collapse of Radical Reconstruction, the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, the violent suppression of labour action, and the first wave of women publicly agitating for suffrage, these categories did crucial cultural work. They naturalized the hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and their divisions underwrote other forms of segregation. Some, of course, refused such distinctions and their own relegation within the cultural hierarchy. S. Alice Callahan (Muskogee)--currently identified as the first Native American woman to publish novel, Wynema (1891)-used the popular sentimentalism associated with white middleclass women to launch an excoriating attack on the genocidal policies and practices of the government of the day. In the same period, African-Americans across the country did an end-run on the white monopoly on publishing and distribution, seizing the new tools of mass publishing for their own ends. The Colored Cooperative Publishing Company in Boston, James McGirt in Philadelphia, and Sutton Griggs in Tennessee all produced and marketed popular magazines and books to Black communities, heroizing African-American and mixed-race figures and raging, in their various ways, against racial inequities. Along the fault lines and colour lines of cultural hierarchy, such creative forces marshaled solidarity and resistance. What has all this, an argument from U.S. studies, to do with our position as academics, in Canada, right now? Ohmann argues that mass culture emerged hand in hand with the modern research university, each shaping and serving the other. To simplify his argument: the new universities trained the professional--managerial class which shaped and consumed the new commercial culture which, in turn, helped corporate capitalism to find stability in the economic chaos of the post-bellum U. …

Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism By Joshua Yumibe Rutgers University Press, 2012 230 pp./$72.00 (hb), $29.95 (sb) Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity By Lauren Rabinovitz Columbia University Press, 2012 256 pp./$82.50 (hb), $27.50 (sb) Oftentimes the study of earl silent cinema is more akin to archeology than it IS to traditional modes of cinema studies. Most (roughly eighty percent) of the films of the era are gone; many primary records have long been destroyed. What remains for researchers are fragments, traces, and gleanings from other media. It is not surprising, then that historians and cultural critics have still only scratched the surface of both the cinema and other popular entertainments of the turn of the last century: a lot of deep digging and careful piece work is required. Two new books, Mating Color: Early Film, Mass. Culture, Modernism and Electric. Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity, are vital contributions to our understanding or the American cultural landscape a century ago. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At first glance, they are concerned with disparate subjects the use of color in early silent film and the relationship between early cinema and amusement parks but, both are ultimately about the complex connections between silent film, popular culture, technology., and questions of modernity. Joshua Yumibe's Moving Color explores the use of applied color techniques hand coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning) in silent film. Yumibe frames his subject with considerations of changes in color theory and beliefs about the nature of visual perception in the nineteenth century and with a broader look at the increasing prevalence of color in daily life in advertising, postcards, wallpaper, etc.) Thanks to technological and chemical improvements. He positions color cinema as part of a larger popular assimilation of color in society cinema, and especially color cinema, was an acclimatizing agent to the rapid transformations wrought on society by modernism, whether it be a new sense of urban spaces, growing understandings of the body as a gendered and sexual site, or new moral and behavioral codes. Yurnibe intertwines these social and cultural consequences of color cinema and other concomitant popular entertainments.) With impressive research into the history and technology of these varied color processes. He explores not only how they were used, but why they were used--again, drawing upon newly developed nineteenth-century ideas about color theory, psychological and therapeutic uses of color, and color as a tool for moral uplift. …

On Lassner's Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film. By Phyllis Lassner. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 272 pp., ISBN 9781474401104 (hc); 978-1474416733 (ePub); 978-1474401111 (PDF). £70 (all editions).This important book is testament to a growing-and welcome-tendency to analyze the espionage genre as a political phenomenon. In Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film, Phyllis Lassner does not view spy fiction and film as disposable entertainment, as mass culture, or through the filter of genre (in all of which tends to disappear), but as widely disseminated products, reflectors, and even shapers ofhistory and politics. In her words: fictions construct a multivocal form of cultural production that commingles propaganda, popular entertainment and cultural history (3). Lassner's central argument is original, productive, and persuasive, if not always easily grasped: how espionage fiction intersects with Jewish experience from the 1930s to the 1960s -what Lassner calls as a political condition and a state of being and identity (3) versus the 'fixed' dominant position of totalitarian nationalism (8).Lassner's incorporation of cinema alongside literary fiction reflects not token interdisciplinarianism but a sure grasp ofthe reality ofhow spy stories are consumed. The hybrid literary-cinematic legacy ofJames Bond has become paradigmatic, with filmed versions of John le Carre's work, from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, France, UK, Germany, 2011) to The Night Manager (Susanne Bier, UK, BBC, 2016), disseminating-and, yes, sometimes distorting-their literary originals. Using the contemporary TV series The Americans (USA, FX Network, 2013-)-inspired by real-life Soviet sleeper agents in Cold War America-as a jumping-off point, Lassner emphasizes how exile is the lived reality of secret agents but also, more audaciously, argues that such separation from nation-states also creates distance from national ideologies. Thus Lassner argues that spies and Jews occupy a shared liminal political space in espionage fiction.Lassner's approach is highly effective in reframing the 1930s novels of Eric Ambler, wherein the recurring figures of the stateless, the exiled, and the persecuted-conventionally critically figured as amateurs or innocents-now function as cyphers for the Jew amid the upheavals of asylum-less 1930s Europe. Lassner shows how, far from being sublimated British state propaganda, Ambler's fiction argued fervently against the British state's appeasement of Germany. German expressionist cinema (referenced throughout the book) and Ambler's work is particularly effective: Crepuscular imagery and gothic architecture capture a paranoia, an existential malaise, as filmmakers and novelist look over their shoulders at the materializing specter of fascism. Also somewhat shadowy in Lassner's analysis, however, is Ambler's Popular Front politics, however, in which communism was a key component.A chapter on women espionage fiction writers Pamela Frankau, Ann Bridge, and Helen MacInnes is also important, given these writers' critical neglect in the male-dominated world ofspy fiction. Here the Jewish connection is intrinsic rather than metaphoric, and Lassner convincingly argues that exile, by displacing women from domestic gender roles, also uncouples national-patriarchal ideology. The heroines in Bridge's A Place to Stand (1953) and MacInnes's While We Still Live (1944) become Polish refugees in solidarity, while MacInnes's Above Suspicion (1941) uses the city of Nuremberg to obliquely highlight the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany. …

Reviewed by: The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, and: Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood Paul Monticone (bio) Rob King . The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 376 pp. $26.95 (paper), $60.00 (cloth). Mark Garrett Cooper . Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 264 pp. $27.00 (paper). Two recent studio histories provide valuable contributions to our understanding of the emergence of studio-era Hollywood and revivify a genre of film history still—long after the so-called historical turn—too thick with annotated filmographies, biographical chronicles, and narrow industrial histories. The significance of the 1910s to the shape that popular cinema would take has long been known, and among the decade's most significant innovations were the emergence of the feature-length film, the studio system's hierarchical division of labor, the star system, the acceptance of cinema as a legitimate cultural form, and the victory of southern California over other production centers. At first glance, the subjects of Rob King's The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) and of Mark Garrett Cooper's Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (University of Illinois Press, 2010) would appear to reside outside the industry's mainstream. But in accounting for practices seemingly out of step with much of the industry, both books advance our understanding of how that mainstream formed. By the midteens, mainstream cinema had largely abandoned the working-class and immigrant audiences of the nickelodeon era and had excluded women of the nickelodeon era and had excluded women from positions of authority. However, as these two books establish, at Keystone and Universal such configurations did exist—at least for a time. Both books share a similar structure: six chapters in two sections, the first accounting for the presence of unrefined, working-class cultural forms and female directors, and the second charting how these studios came into alignment with the rest of the industry. In neither case is this latter process construed as a simple surrender to an exogenous dominant, and this is the principal virtue shared by both volumes. For King, the transformation of [End Page 61] Keystone's brand of slapstick from a popular entertainment to mass culture required complex hybridizations of cultural forms, and, for Cooper, the fortunes of female filmmakers were determined by complex institutional practices, such as the geography of the workplace, management hierarchies, and the function genre would perform in feature production. The tight focus shared by the two works—each treats one studio and covers about half a decade—permits the authors to demonstrate how two particular features of mainstream cinema were instituted at two particular studios. King's The Fun Factory argues that Keystone should not be recalled nostalgically for its pratfalls and bathing beauties but, rather, should be understood as instrumental to the early twentieth century's most significant cultural shift, from a "hierarchical cultural order that reinforced social divisions to a commercially driven 'mass' culture that tended to obscure those divisions" (8). Keystone, at first, exploited those divisions, as King demonstrates in his first chapters. Shortly after its founding in 1912, Mack Sennett's Keystone found a niche as a working-class reply to the uplift movement's genteel pretensions (like those of Sennett's former employer, Biograph). Moral melodramas were countered with slapstick spectacles that often dismissed narrative development and frequently burlesqued the conventions of Griffith's last-minute rescues. The second chapter traces how, at Keystone, humor initially centered on ethnic stereotypes of Germans, Irish, and Jews (all staples of nineteenth-century popular entertainments), but these images were supplanted by classed figures, such as Chaplin's paradigmatic tramp, as immigrant and native-born workers began to forge a common, working-class identity. Pushing ethnic humor to the margins also helped expand Keystone's audience into the middle class. Paradoxically, at the moment when Keystone most clearly foregrounded class as comedic content, it also began to modify the working class's popular...

Plastic Madonnas, packaged holy tours, and biblical theme parks can arouse discomfort, laughter, and even revulsion in religious believers and nonbelievers alike. Scholars, too, often see the intermingling of religion and commerce as a corruption of true spirituality. Suzanne K. Kaufman challenges these assumptions in her examination of the Lourdes pilgrimage in late nineteenth-century France.Consuming Visions offers new ways to interpret material forms of worship, female piety, and modern commercial culture. Kaufman argues that the melding of traditional pilgrimage activities with a newly developing mass culture produced fresh expressions of popular faith. For the devout women of humble origins who flocked to the shrine, this intensely exciting commercialized worship offered unprecedented opportunities to connect with the sacred and express their faith in God.New devotional activities at Lourdes transformed the act of pilgrimage: the train became a moving chapel, and popular entertainments such as wax museums offered vivid recreations of visionary events. Using the press and the strategies of a new advertising industry to bring a mass audience to Lourdes, Church authorities remade centuries-old practices of miraculous healing into a modern public spectacle. These innovations made Lourdes one of the most visited holy sites in Catholic Europe.Yet mass pilgrimage also created problems. The development of Lourdes, while making religious practice more democratically accessible, touched off fierce conflicts over the rituals and entertainments provided by the shrine. These conflicts between believers and secularists played out in press scandals across the European continent. By taking the shrine seriously as a site of mass culture, Kaufman not only breaks down the opposition between sacred and profane but also deepens our understanding of commercialized religion as a fundamental feature of modernity itself.

This article assumes that cinema is one of society's media for self-reflection, reaffirmation of values and charting alternative courses of action. Specifically, I focus on female characters in Ira...

This article investigates the coinciding of the mass migration from Europe to the Americas and the emergence of mass culture, two developments that shaped everyday life, popular entertainment, and Jewish and non-Jewish relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Jewish actors and actresses were among the most prominent performers who staged in Orpheums, Varietés, and vaudevilles on both sides of the Atlantic. In their performances they drew on the notion of a new quality of mobility that society was experiencing, utilizing it to negotiate issues such as of the cultural construction of identities and Jewishness, or to critically reexamine antisemitic and nationalistic attitudes. On the one hand, mobility enabled negotiations of controversial issues. On the other hand, mobility led to accusations against popular entertainment, both legitimate and erroneous—for example, that vaudevilles functioned as covers for clandestine prostitution. Therefore, the article examines the question of how mobility influenced popular culture. What were the controversial issues that mobility raised, and what accusations did these evoke? In what ways did actors and actresses in popular culture address gender and Jewishness? To answer these questions, the article analyzes the spaces of popular entertainment in Budapest, Vienna, and New York through close examinations of newspapers, manuscripts, playbills, and records of censorship.