The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment

Funny Business: Popular Comedy and Entertainment Culture in Northern Ireland Lance Pettitt (bio) This essay offers a case study of a comedy performer within the entertainment culture of Northern Ireland (NI) between 1949 and 1974. Over a decade ago, Sean Connolly outlined some of the definitional difficulties faced by “the would-be historian of popular culture” in Ireland; he observed that the “issue of cultural interaction across social boundaries” (Connolly 1996:83–90) at particular historical conjunctures and specific locations was central to cultural history. Popular comedy (Palmer 1994:7) is replete with representations of social taboos and taste limits made visible and audible, but its production and audiences also involve complex processes of boundary reformulation. This essay explores how an entertainment business was structured during a period of political rule in NI that was dominated by Ulster unionists. Often fiercely, unionists upheld the position of NI within the United Kingdom (UK) after Ireland was partitioned in 1920. This case study is therefore set within an overarching narrative of a unionist political history—from the postwar reassurance about the “permanence” of the union (the Ireland [End Page 123] Act of 1949 with its “guarantee”) to the traumatic dissolution of the NI parliament (1972) at the height of the “Troubles.” It explores how an entertainment business was distinguished by “degrees of shifting attachment and interaction” (Williams 1958:310) with formal and informal political and cultural institutions. And it analyzes the cultural hegemony enacted in comic performance (McConachie 1989:48) by investigating the multiple institutional and cultural contexts in which such entertainment took place. The historiography of social and cultural life in NI before 1968 remains under-researched. Leslie Clarkson has advised that academics “should not partition social processes, nor impose patterns on the past where none existed, but [try] to understand the nature of human activity in the mundane matters of getting and spending” (Clarkson 2000:12). But this model for analyzing material production and consumption seems to capture only partially the role of culture in the social processes of NI. Grey (1983) has surveyed how the urban population of Belfast routinely spent its leisure time on popular entertainment up until 1914, and Bardon has addressed the comedy and entertainment programming of the BBC (Bardon 2000). Non-academic collections of reminiscences of popular hobbies and pastimes from the 1930s to the 1960s (Love 1982) provide insights into the everyday economics of leisure. Such demotic cultures, produced and consumed as inconsequential fun, including those mediated via radio, film, and television, potentially provide rich resources for understanding cultural history and for developing cultural theory (Graham 2001:155).1 The transformations of entertainment culture after 1945 may be usefully tracked through the career of James Young (1918–74), the dominant comic figure within the NI entertainment industry. Though Young has been much celebrated in popular memory, there has been little sustained academic analysis of his significance to a [End Page 124] wider cultural history (Cranston 1996; Bardon 2001; Moore 2003; Pettitt 2005). While The Force of Culture (1999) shows how unionist elites attempted to produce a cohesive political identity out of literary and cultural activities, including various public rituals and BBC programs (McIntosh 1999:2–3), my emphasis here lies in exploring the cultural significance of an entrepreneur-performer operating in a “business” that presented itself as apolitical and was experienced by its audiences as “only entertainment” (Dyer 1992:11–18). I suggest below how one might understand a transitional phase in the contemporary history of the popular culture of a region—a juncture where residual forms of live performance coexist with and are transformed by broadcast transmission; a period of cultural history defined as existing between the lived memories and the electronically recorded traces of comic performance. Though it is axiomatic that to better understand filmed and broadcast comedy, we need to know about prior live entertainment forms (Medhurst 1986:185), we also need to locate such performances, “to make the interpretation conscious by showing historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests,” while avoiding the sense that we can “return” the performance to its period (Williams 1961:69). More broadly, within cultural studies there...

Over the past 70 years, considerable attention has been paid to the ways in which was portrayed during the colonial era (1826-1948). However, to date no-one has looked in a systematic way at how Western music played a role in influencing and reflecting popular perceptions. This is curious, as during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries music was a powerful cultural vector, strongly affecting public attitudes to foreign places and events. Images of the Orient, and of Oriental women in particular, were conveyed thr ough songs a nd popular ent ertainments. T o a sur pr ising ext ent, this included portrayals of Burma, and Burma girls. From the publication of Rudyard Kipling's enor mously popular ballad Mandalay in 1890, until regained its independence from Britain in 1948, more than 180 songs and tunes were published with Burmese themes, helping to create a codified image of Burma's women as demure, attractive and available. In doing so, however, these compositions probably revealed as much about contemporary Western society as they did about the Far East.The Research ProblemFor decades, scholars and commentators have tried to answer the questions: how was colonial perceived in and by the Western world, how did people in countries like the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) form their views, and how were they manifested?Historians led the way, not only by infor ming Western audiences about developments in but also by describing how European contacts over the centuries gave rise to a wide range of myths and misconceptions.1 Other social scient ists ma de useful contributions. In 1985, for example, Josef Silverstein discussed the portrayal of in a number of novels by European and American authors.2 Clive Christie and Stephen Keck later surveyed the travel literature produced during the colonial period, and weighed its impact on Western perceptions of Burma.3 Deborah Boyer searched through Victorian-era periodicals for references to and its role in the British Empire.4 In 2009, this author examined the way in which had been represented in Hollywood movies and how this might have influenced views of the countr y. 5 Others ha ve comment ed on the paintings of Bur ma a nd Burmese people produced by British artists during the colonial period. 6 Engravings, photographs and picture postcards also influenced the way in which was seen in the UK, US and elsewhere.7To date, however, no-one has looked in a systematic way at how Western views of colonial were influenced by popular music. Indeed, music has been absent from almost all overviews of the country.8 This is surprising, as during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries songs and tunes were powerful cultural vectors, highly influential in shaping not only attitudes to domestic developments but also perceptions of foreign places and events.9 As well as live performances, both in public and in private, broadsides and commercial sheet music were important means of conveying ima ges and ideas about the countries and peoples that were being conquered as part of Britain's second great burst of imperial expansion. The transmission process rapidly increased in scope and pace after the turn of the twentieth century, encouraged by the development of gramophone records, commercial radio stations and talking pictures. Music became an even more important vehicle for reflecting - and influencing - popular perceptions.This phenomenon has been recognized by cultural historians and musicologists in other fields, but so far its implications for seem to have escaped their attention.10One r eason why Bur ma s eems to have been over looked as a discr ete subject for analysis in this regard is that it was never seen as a noteworthy example of wider historical and socio-cultural trends. The nineteenth century was a time of far-reaching political, economic and social change. It was also a time of vigorous Western expansion into other parts of the world, including the so-called Far East. …

In 1972, Martha Vicinus edited Suffer and Be Still, a groundbreaking collection that introduced Victorian women into mainstream historical scholarship. Five years later, Vicinus brought out A Widen...

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

Literary optics: staging the collective in the Nahda; The Arab Nahda as popular entertainment: mass culture and modernity in the Middle East

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

Audiences in popular theater are much more prepared to surrender themselves to a composer going down the route of the opera. On 9 January 2006 Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera (1986) became the longest-running theatrical event in Broadway history. Reporting the fact, the BBC characterized The Phantom as the “most successful entertainment venture of all time,” observing that it had earned nearly three times more than the most lucrative film, James Cameron's Titanic (“Phantom musical surpasses record,” BBC News 2006). Lloyd Webber's earlier Cats (1981) ranks as the third most popular theatrical work ever written (behind Les Misérables), and several of his other musicals—Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Starlight Express—have also enjoyed phenomenal success. But despite unprecedented popular acclaim, or because of it, the development of a significant body of Lloyd Webber criticism has been remarkably slow. As recently as 2006 Jessica Sternfeld could state, with only slight exaggeration, that “Andrew Lloyd Webber … exists in a research vacuum” (5), contrasting that fact, as others had done, with the critical attention given to Lloyd Webber's American rival, Stephen Sondheim. The only serious critical book to appear in the decade of Lloyd Webber's greatest triumphs was Michael Walsh'sAndrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works (1989), and when that book—still unique as a full-length critical study—went into a second, expanded edition in 1997, Walsh ruefully noted that he had been “widely taken to task by critics for the effrontery of treating Lloyd Webber and his work seriously” (256). Only in the last few years has Lloyd Webber finally been treated “seriously,” in a manner befitting his amazing prominence in the modern cultural landscape, and several fine studies have emerged: Stephen Citron'sSondheim and Lloyd-Webber[sic]: The New Musical (2001), John Snelson'sAndrew Lloyd Webber (2004), and Sternfeld'sThe Megamusical (2006). These scholars agree that Lloyd Webber's works are much finer than his many detractors have allowed; but also that, qualitative issues aside, the popularity and influence of the musicals make them worthy of study. Lloyd Webber's critical reception has been fraught with contradictions. Like his most obvious British forbears, Henry Bishop (1786–1855) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900)—both knighted, incidentally, while Lloyd Webber has been made a Lord—he has been intent on bringing increased artistic respectability to popular theatre. In fact, Andrew Pinnock's astute comment on what Bishop was trying to achieve in the 1810s and 1820s exactly describes Lloyd Webber's career in the 1970s and 1980s: “Bishop understood his audience. He did nothing to shock them; he tried, over time, to widen their range of musical experience and to raise their expectations” (5). But the result of Lloyd Webber's reformist project was a series of works so popular that their artistic agenda was generally overlooked, and he has been repeatedly criticized, often in vituperative terms, for cynically pandering to the supposedly corrupted taste of what Michael Feingold specifies as “[t]he semi-educated middle-class world” (Village Voice, 2 February 1988; quoted in Sternfeld: 267). Of course, there are other ways of assessing such popularity. George Perry, an admirer, finds an “insight into prevailing tastes … met with offerings of impeccable quality,” and in this compares Lloyd Webber to the American filmmaker Steven Spielberg (81). Glancing in a different direction, Keita Asari, who was instrumental in popularizing Lloyd Webber's works in Japan, attributes the latter's “universal” success to the fact that he is a “genius who unfolds melodies through various modes that somewhere reverberate classical music” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 58). From almost any critical point of view, Lloyd Webber's central opus is The Phantom of the Opera. It has proved, by a wide margin, his greatest success, and his ambition to “raise the expectations” of his audience is most clearly displayed here. More than any of his previous musicals, The Phantom came close to winning over the critical establishment, with even hostile critics immediately recognizing it as the key work in his career, the one on which his reputation would ultimately rest. “Mr. Lloyd Webber's esthetic has never been more baldly stated than in this show,” maintained the influential and generally negative Frank Rich, sensing that Lloyd Webber's career to that date had reached a logical conclusion in The Phantom. An artistic trajectory that began with Lloyd Webber hitching his wagon to late 1960s “progressive rock,” with its clear “classical” (for want of a better word) pretensions, that evolved through Evita (1976), boldly described as “an opera,” had now produced the most operatic musical ever heard. Early reviews repeatedly referred to The Phantom's operatic dimension, sometimes questioning whether it might be called an opera. Lloyd Webber himself suggested that it could, perhaps should be: “What do we mean by opera, anyway? And where does that put Phantom? Obviously there is a world of difference between Phantom and something like Sugar Babies. But there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 60). Jerrold Hogle gets it right, I think, when he defines the Lloyd Webber Phantom as a “popular opera,” a work that embodies “many of the contradictions behind the deeply troubled forms of entertainment in middle-class Western culture” (203). He might, though, have said “world culture,” for The Phantom has fared exceptionally well outside the West: it has, for example, been running in Japan since 1988, and for many young Japanese defines what “theatre” is. Such an international impact sharply raises the questions of where the appeal of the show ultimately resides, and what sort of cultural work The Phantom does. The present article is an engagement with those questions. It would be impossible to write a definition of an opera that, while including all those works defined as such in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, somehow excluded The Phantom of the Opera. It is safe to assume, in fact, that those who reject the notion of The Phantom being an opera do so not because of concern about generic niceties, but on the assumption that a “true” opera could not possibly be so outrageously popular. But a “popular opera” (allowing, for the sake of argument, the possibility of such a thing) must, by definition, be popular; significantly, many of those “semi-educated middle-class” people who have embraced The Phantom understand it to be an opera. In April 2007, for example, a Yahoo! Canada discussion board addressed the question: “What is your favorite opera?” Many of the respondents made fairly predictable choices from the classical repertoire: Mozart's Nozze de Figaro and Don Giovanni, Verdi's La Traviata, and Puccini's La Bohème. But three people chose The Phantom of the Opera (making it the favorite of these favorites), and one chose Les Misérables. Internet searches reveal the same pattern: many bloggers, amateur reviewers, and participants in online discussions, from all around the world, make the claim that The Phantom (and rather less often Les Misérables) is their “favorite opera.”1 There is little to be gained from arguing that all these “ordinary” music lovers are mistaken in their understanding of what opera is, but a good deal to be obtained from the recognition that The Phantom satisfies a craving many people have for the experience of opera, or, more precisely, of liking opera. It is (at the least) a work of popular musical theatre that attempts to be as operatic as possible without, however, repelling an audience who would ordinarily consider the idea of “opera” intimidating. Cathleen Myers has described The Phantom as “an opera lovers' dream musical”: it would be more accurate to call it a musical lovers' dream opera. The suggestively titled collection High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment (2002) is useful in clarifying the cultural issues involved here. The book makes no mention of The Phantom of the Opera, or indeed of Lloyd Webber, but the writers establish a larger narrative of cultural shifts that valuably illuminates this musical's unprecedented success. That narrative starts with the “sacrilization of culture” (Collins 4) in the nineteenth century, sees that influentially challenged by the arrival of pop art in the mid twentieth century, with its “determination to move the popular into the world of legitimate culture” (6), and then presents “high-pop” as a “reversal of that flow … transforming Culture into mass entertainment” (6). “High-pop,” which is viewed as having started in the 1980s, before becoming fully visible in the 1990s, involves a wide range of interconnected phenomena: from lavish film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays and Jane Austen's novels, to “blockbuster” art exhibitions attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers, and the advent of bookstores with sofas and cafes. The book spells out and explores the contradictions: “high-pop” likes to present itself as offering “refined” cultural experience superior to that afforded by “mass” commercial culture, yet its products are aggressively branded and marketed, and it tends to become a form of “quality” consumerism. The cover illustration, a photograph of a number of T-shirts printed with Shakespeare's portrait, encapsulates some of these contradictions. One of the contributors to High-Pop writes specifically on opera, and his essay provides a useful context for the more operatic aspects of The Phantom of the Opera. John Storey's“‘Expecting Rain’: Opera as Popular Culture?” begins with the recognition that for many people opera is “the very embodiment of ‘high culture’,” but proceeds to argue that in recent years it has become “more and more a feature of everyday cultural life” (32). Storey points to the increasing use of opera extracts in films and advertising, the emergence of opera singers with pop-star status, and the proliferation of recordings (especially “highlights” collections) and introductory books (Teach Yourself Opera, Opera: A Crash Course, etc.). Much of this, he argues convincingly, is aimed squarely at the culturally aspirational instincts of the “high-pop” sensibility. For example, the 1997 publication Opera for Dummies has a cover blurb defining “Who You Are”: “For starters you're an intelligent person. We can sense it, and we're never wrong about such things. After all, you picked up this book, didn't you?” (quoted in Storey: 38). My conclusion from the evidence Storey presents, however, is that the desire to like opera is far stronger than actual opera appreciation. This has led to a great proliferation of what might be termed “entrance level” materials (“highlights” collections and so on), while making comparatively little difference to such “advanced” forms of opera appreciation as actually sitting through one. As Storey's figures show, opera attendance in Britain increased by less than 3% during the 1980s. Moreover, recent interest in opera, and advertisers' and filmmakers' willingness to make use of opera, does not apply to all opera, but is essentially concentrated on opera from Mozart to Puccini, or from about 1780 to 1930. These limits to the scale and scope of “high-pop” appetite for opera actually come close to defining the audience to which The Phantom of the Opera principally appeals. Lloyd Webber never presumes too much on his audience's desire for opera, and even offers his own little “crash course” in the art form from Mozart to Puccini. To get some purchase on these issues, it is useful to return to Lloyd Webber's previously quoted claim that “there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater.” That statement is absurd if understood, with grammatical literalness, as meaning today's “serious musical theater” (i.e., works like The Phantom) is no different from today's opera. The Phantom of the Opera is stylistically a world apart from contemporary “serious” opera, such as the works of Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies in Britain, or of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Philip Glass elsewhere. What Lloyd Webber obviously meant is that serious musicals “today” (specifically the late 1980s) speak with the sort of voice opera used to employ when it was a popular art form. Hal Prince, who directed Phantom, had earlier made the same argument in relation to Evita: “opera is and always has been musical theater of its time in a form with limited dialogue. … Puccini and Verdi were pop composers of their era … those operas were the showbiz musicals of their times” (quoted in Walsh, Andrew Lloyd Webber: 105). Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused, one of the recent guides discussed by Storey, advised its readers: “don't be afraid of opera because some force has foolishly built it up as the ultimate in refinement. Opera has historically been a popular art form that aimed to entertain ordinary people” (quoted in Storey: 40). Opera scholars would want to qualify all these claims, but they are partly true, and essentially well-intended. As a “popular opera,”The Phantom of the Opera seeks to join—quite explicitly—that older tradition of popular operatic entertainment, one best exemplified, as Prince suggests, in the Italian tradition from Rossini to Puccini. As such, it employs a distinctly old-fashioned operatic sound, for which the story, set in the Paris Opera House in 1881, provides the perfect excuse: Lloyd Webber's operatic musical aligns itself with the glamour of opera in its most glamorous period. Puccini's death in 1924 has often been seen as marking the end of opera as “a popular art form.”Storey follows a number of American scholars in attributing the process by which “opera was transformed from entertainment enjoyed by the many into Culture to be appreciated by the few” (37) to the cultivation of exclusivity by operatic institutions. This argument seems more than problematic in the American context,2 and certainly makes no sense in Italy, and little in France or Britain. It is more the case that first operetta, then cinema, drew off much of the popular following opera had enjoyed in its heyday of broad appeal. At the same time, Wagner and the academically trained composers who followed him (many of whom had little practical experience of theatre) tended to introduce advanced music into their operas, thus establishing an increasing divide between “serious” opera and more popular forms of musical theatre. The Phantom of the Opera does not try to close that gap (in the way Michael Nyman's operas do, say), but rather returns to a reference point prior to the moment when that gap became a yawning gulf. In commercial terms, it bears the same sort of relation to “serious” opera that operetta bore a century ago, but while operetta became popular by consciously distancing itself from opera, The Phantom has courted popularity precisely by gravitating toward opera. In a sense, what operetta stole from opera— the “middle-brow” audience, the hummable tune—The Phantom of the Opera gives back, at the same time picking up just enough “elitist” glamour to satisfy “high-pop” aspiration. The Phantom of the Opera is not just “operatic”: it also plots its own relationship to opera, and in doing so invents a tradition for the modern “high-pop” musical. Gaston Leroux, who wrote the French novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (1910, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, 1911) on which the Lloyd Webber musical is based, worked for many years as a theatre critic, and knew a great deal about contemporary opera. His novel is accordingly (and appropriately) of to various composers and their operas, popular being the most musical Phantom of the Opera (in its which first Lloyd Webber's attention to the theatrical of the story, opera there is, a good deal from as well as from operas by and Lloyd Webber's Phantom very little in the way of “opera though, and does not in any way from earlier This artistic that Lloyd Webber was not with to opera lovers in the way and he three little of operas that the and opera of the These have some critical most of it and with the of which composers Lloyd Webber is of the musical of these and their in the work as a is to be from for while the meaning of the in their to the larger musical of story, I a set of in which these comment on musical theatre and the audience's not only about opera, but about its modern “high-pop” After the the on the of the Paris in where a opera, by a composer is in The is from like any number of earlier operas, and the lavish and with and even a the have repeatedly as the opera composer though, as “[t]he operatic is not to be down to one In any in operatic as a sort of for French of which are specifically in Le and La More though, Lloyd Webber's audience is to about Frank Lloyd Webber's opera … at the of such less than as But this the the of the of people who have seen (and The Phantom of the Opera well this is Lloyd Webber's I not because it makes of This mass audience, the as a of the sort of opera that might have been seen in Paris in And what the is that in the world of opera, the and the are often The of the of as well as the great of and is by a Italian who to his and finds it even to the of his always an audience As has recently defining the of often for the they and generally if you understand the that they what they is not to be … And so The or of opera something that very the few lovers of as much as it the many lovers of Lloyd One of the the to fine in of then starts to of of A few into the there is an by the Phantom, which to any the one of the is then given the to the and does so with such that is given the to the at that to it to the and it before an As often in Lloyd Webber's musicals, the or does a good deal of up with and establishing relationship with de who in to the same from his But at the of the is even more critics have that it is not at all like and some have tried, to it down to Michael for example, it “a of the or Stephen (Village 2 February 1988; quoted in Sternfeld: the first to actually the the But he is to argue that the its that gap between the operatic world and the In other it the audience from the of to the of Lloyd Webber's own and it is safe to that of people have at this point in the with a sort of this is what come The almost of is indeed a very Lloyd Webber a fact that has been more obvious to hostile For the serious opera this first of The Phantom of the Opera is rather On one the is an accurate of French on the other it a that seems Lloyd But the larger for whom The Phantom was are less to be about such than that something so as had should out to such an In other this first to an that many musical are to have absurd and then them to that it The Phantom thus a on opera to be by many of the audience, while at the same time the idea that the “highlights” in opera are the As noted the “high-pop” many people the world of opera precisely through the experience of opera lovers the is to out the limited not interest in opera that the audience aimed at That audience starts to that it might like to more of the what it gets is Lloyd Webber's own “popular opera” that up the most immediately aspects of lavish the But of does something in fact, not a opera but a musical it invents a tradition for the modern musical and it with the of the In doing it to the culturally aspirational instincts of the audience, discussed The musical is no a to opera, but a modern development of A useful on the cultural of Lloyd Webber's is obtained if one on the fact that the most successful of British musicals in the when Lloyd Webber was his was best as the composer of so of the of music that he could not the was in the of the music and had made his reputation in the late with a of His musicals were in the sense that their with the popular music of the was immediately In other the British musical by it more to the of the music and and in a sense it can be said he too a tradition for it, his to that what they were was somehow in in the of One could a with the from Lloyd Webber's opera The first of The Phantom of the Opera begins with and with the very different but by an Italian composer is as an opera a Italian that had in the and produced in Mozart's three operas and its most of the of is but the proceeds far enough for the audience to understand that it is about a a with a who is as and that he has to to of while actually to in the to It has often been suggested that is a of Mozart's Le Nozze Figaro where there is a who and is in with a are for critics have the for that can only be Sternfeld The for the a with Le from in the same way that from As Le Nozze is one of the operas in the classical this is as close as Lloyd Webber to to the of opera by some of his audience. can be understood as a sort of of in Le Nozze the is the of and a in the is a while is “the of the But The Phantom as a is certainly not a with a agenda and the of this of elsewhere. As with the earlier the theatrical experience of The Phantom is by of the operatic in But Lloyd Webber his audience too well to make the of that they much about opera. by an he gives his audience some idea of opera over with little of operatic assume, from the and of that is an earlier opera than In any the Phantom them in no for is made to to his like the There is no that there are and lavish in as there were in so in the that Lloyd Webber is an operatic tradition for the modern the audience is to that the of opera evolved into the of opera that in evolved into the modern Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. There is art in the way The Phantom of the Opera key in operatic in just a few Opera lovers and opera critics would certainly the broad just from Mozart to to Lloyd Webber, as a but a argument might be made that it is an in of the and of the audience for opera. Audiences to the of The Phantom of the Opera, which can be characterized as Puccini with might have been to if “opera” is this they had a the art form in the first In a sense, Lloyd Webber that with the third of his Don This is different from the in being much more to the story, and in being written by the Phantom rather than a supposedly opera In the described as having worked for years on an opera of that He to it to in the of first to his on the that it is a of music of an is not “there is some music

Reviewed by: Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America by Tanya Sheehan Julie K. Brown Tanya Sheehan. Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. xiv + 202 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-0-271-03793-6). Historians of photography in recent years have moved beyond conventional single-focused approaches to their subject as technology, art, or even social history in favor of a more inclusive cultural history, which delves deeper and more broadly into the factors that pervade all aspects of this elusive visual medium. For historians of medicine familiar only with the mechanistic role of “photography in medicine,” Tanya Sheehan inverts this paradigm in her new book The Medicine of Photography, a cultural history of commercial portrait photography set in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Drawing on recent literary and visual studies for theoretical underpinnings in her lengthy introduction, Sheehan argues that photography “as a discrete concept and institution” contributed “to the formation of a cultural discourse on the diseased and disordered body in America” (p. 11). Sheehan draws her evidence for historically linking photography with health and medicine from textual metaphors, similes, analogies, and personifications that appeared in selected professional photographic trade journals and manuals between 1860 and 1890. This figurative language, Sheehan argues, was not just a linguistic expression, but was meant to implement a series of specific strategies directly identifying photography with the work of medicine and health as a profession, practice and process. In chapter 1, for example, she examines the medical metaphors used to enhance the professional status, authority, and educational efforts of commercial portrait photographers and describes similar experiences facing professional medicine in this period. Chapter 2 focuses on the medical metaphors used to characterize the practical work of physical posing by commercial portrait photographers in studio settings. This includes a discussion of the Army Medical Museum’s photographic documentation of the war injured along with the work of commercial studio photographers in the manipulation of bodies and their “surgical rehabilitation” (p. 68). In chapter 4 Sheehan connects Philadelphia’s urban health reforms with efforts to improve the safety of the laboratory/ darkroom and the use of medical metaphors to refer to photographic processes and their use in personifying traditional photographic materials. Chapter 3, “Light as Medicine in the Photographic Studio,” is a more broadly conceived essay on the similarities of light technologies used in alternative medical therapy (e.g., “blue glass” phototherapy associated with “quack medicine” of the period p. 83) and lighting in studio portrait photography. Sheehan acknowledges that this analogy “was never explicitly articulated by photographers or their public” (p. 84). A detailed discussion on the facial lightening for African American photographic portraiture underlines the strong social and cultural pressures of divisive racial and ethnic anxieties current in Philadelphia in this period. Sheehan’s final chapter, the fifth, shifts her time frame abruptly to contemporary issues centered on the transitions from analog to digital photography and the use of medical metaphors to characterize the practices of photographic “doctoring” and image manipulation. Sheehan sees this as a “reemergence” of the [End Page 610] metaphor of “medicine as photography” (p. 135) especially in the prevalence of medicalized language adapted from cosmetic surgery descriptions appearing in digital “how-to-do” manuals, articles, and popular entertainments that contribute to our current “makeover culture” (p. 143). I endorse Sheehan’s efforts to develop a much needed and broader cultural investigation of how photographic authority is constructed, the factors affecting its practice, and the various ways in which the public engages as subject and spectator. However, I find that Sheehan’s reliance exclusively on figurative language and metaphorical strategies for textual evidence of “photography as medicine” has its limitations. Sheehan’s literal transcription of these metaphors often lead to overstatements, and her own language often merges too easily with the rhetoric of the texts on which she relies for evidence. Photography certainly had to contend with competing models from both science and the arts in the nineteenth century, and as Sheehan acknowledges, this issue remained an open question, which did not prevent commercial portrait photographers from engaging “in fantasies of competition with” the American medical profession (p. 47...

E. W. Hornung's Raffles stories bring together several key nineteenth-century cultural currents, including major changes in emerging genres and the nature of the fin-de-siècle marketplace. They were a great success as popular entertainment, but they also deserve sustained critical attention because of the quality of the writing at a less ephemeral level than the merely escapist. Ludic, allusive and metafictive, the stories benefit by being read with and against influential nineteenth-century texts—in particular Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray—in terms of their revisionist interplay with the idea of the aesthetic “hero” and a subversive relationship to aestheticism. My analysis is written within, and indebted to, the changing nature of Victorian studies, in which popular fiction is being recognized as fundamental to the range and cultural significance of the literature of the nineteenth century. Neglected or “minor” writers were significant agents of change and experimentation within a period that thrived on the buying power (and seemingly insatiable textual appetite) of ordinary readers and on the more rarefied energies of experimentation and hybrid forms.

Vn The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas, James Schultz offers a unique pictorial study of a cultural movement that started in 1904 and spread across the country. For almost thirty years, tent shows known as brought popular education and entertainment to small towns of America from coast to coast. With more than 100 photographs and other illustrations from the era, the book presents a captivating overview of the tent Chautauqua movement from its inception to its demise in 1932. These traveling chautauquas - which were an outgrowth of the Lyceum movement - evolved in the early part of the twentieth century. Keith Vawter, owner of the Chicago Branch of the Redpath Lyceum, came up with an idea that would bring to rural America the same quality of lectures and other forms of entertainment that were available through the lyceum. His concept was a circuit of traveling tents that moved from town to town. Vawter named his traveling circuits chautauquas, modeling them after the Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York State, an intellectual community with summerlong programs of lectures, seminars, and workshops. The tent chautauqua offered a variety of cultural events by politicians, writers, and theologians, filling a void in the lives of rural residents who did not have access to the array of talent available to city dwellers. The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas contains many previously unpublished photographs that reflect the styles and customs of a bygone era, as well as photos and anecdotes about many people of prominence who toured as speakers or entertainers. These included individuals such as President Warren G. Harding, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, journalist and historian Ida Tarbell, poet Carl Sandburg, and many others. Schultz provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature on chautauquas. He also utilizes files he obtained from his father and uncle, both of whom were involved in the management of the Redpath Chautauquas, as well as interviews he conducted with old-timers who remember attending chautauqua performances. Exploring a fascinating chapter of America's cultural history, The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas will appeal to students of American history and chroniclers of the entertainment industry.

The entertainment industry is a component of the tertiary sector of the economy that includes the performing arts. When new technologies and concepts arise, the entire corporate world transforms. The industry is thriving financially and in terms of the talented artists and programmers it employs. Increased globalization and the subsequent elimination of market constraints resulted in astronomical growth. This research explores the origins, current conditions, hazards, potential solutions, future trends, and potential effects of foreign direct investment in India’s entertainment business. This research investigates the effects of globalization and its potential to provide new job possibilities. The data shown here has been gathered from secondary sources (the internet and published articles). The first form of entertainment was the transmission of cultural norms and beliefs from one generation to the next via the telling of stories. Since the arrival of the television triggered a seismic upheaval in the industry, distribution methods for entertainment have evolved gradually. While the epidemic has disproportionately affected certain areas of the industry’s workforce, others have been able to prosper because of the relative anonymity and safety of online venues. Television remains the most frequently consumed form of media, despite the advent of digital media and online gaming as more popular entertainment than film. As video streaming and other forms of online entertainment become popular, the OTT platform is anticipated to experience parabolic growth in the coming years. Due to the absence of references, the lack of emphasis on essential concerns, and the overall obsolescence of the accessible material, it was difficult to locate pertinent information. To support the nascent Indian entertainment industry and ensure the safety and stability of all its stakeholders, especially in challenging times like the ongoing pandemic, this paper highlights the significance of the government and regulatory bodies actively considering implementing incentive measures.

Opium improved sex. It also generated literature, both classical and vernacular. This chapter explores the different kinds of literature that opium inspired. 'Language is of critical importance in cultural transmission', Evelyn Rawski writes. Opium-generated literature will allow us to see this importance. Opium helped to electrify a leisure revolution; it was also involved in a cultural revolution, namely the modernisation of the Chinese language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The late Qing was an outstanding period. At this time the Chinese language was simplified and vernacular literature flourished. Newspapers, magazines, popular fiction and local dialect drama became available, as governments, institutions and individuals embarked on a crusade to enlighten the poor. Scholars have made comprehensive studies of the literature of the late Qing, including Keith McMahon, whose recent book looks specifically at opium smoking in late Qing fiction. Whilst the enlightenment undoubtedly enlightened the poor, it also helped to further spread the gospel of opium. Men of letters found a new fountain of inspiration. Opium fared well in their hands, not only because it accompanied them in their lettered pursuits but also because it reinvented their talents and identities. Some sang praises to opium, some denounced it, some were anti-British, others were popular entertainers. The literature generated by opium can be placed in various different categories.

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy, music, and race through a theory of Blacksound. Blacksound is the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States. As a hermeneutic tool, Blacksound is an epistemology designed to historicize and redress how we conceive the formation of race and property laws throughout the nineteenth century via aesthetics. In particular, this tool analyses the construction, consumption, and erasure of black people and blackness out of blackface minstrelsy—the first original form of popular entertainment in North America. Blacksound is an open concept that challenges fixed notions of intellectual property by pointing to the role that the performance of race and the making of racism in popular music plays in copyright laws that have developed throughout the nineteenth century.

Popular culture is a central part of everyday life to many Americans. Personalities such as Elvis Presley, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan are more recognizable to many people than are most elected officials. With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, dance, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, technology, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms culture, revealing that the world of entertainment constantly evolves as it tries to meet the demands of a diverse audience. Trends in popular entertainment often reveal the tensions between competing ideologies, appetites, and values in society. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Americans embraced self-made men such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie: the celebrities of the day were circus tycoons P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey, Wild West star Buffalo Bill Cody, professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding, and prizefighter John L. Sullivan. At the same time, however, several female performers challenged traditional notions of weak, frail Victorian women. Adah Isaacs Menken astonished crowds by wearing tights that made her appear nude while performing dangerous stunts on horseback, and the shows of the voluptuous burlesque group British Blondes often centered on provocative images of female sexual power and dominance. Ashby describes how history and politics frequently influence mainstream entertainment. When Native Americans, blacks, and other non-whites appeared in the nineteenth-century circuses and Wild West shows, it was often to perpetuate demeaning racial stereotypes-crowds jeered Sitting Bull at Cody's shows. By the early twentieth century, however, black minstrel acts reveled in racial tensions, reinforcing stereotypes while at the same time satirizing them and mocking racist attitudes before a predominantly white audience. Decades later, Red Foxx and Richard Pryor's profane comedy routines changed entertainment. The raw ethnic material of Pryor's short-lived television show led to a series of African-American sitcoms in the 1980s that presented common experiences-from family life to college life-with black casts. Mainstream entertainment has often co-opted and sanitized fringe amusements in an ongoing process of redefining the cultural center and its boundaries. Social control and respectability vied with the bold, erotic, sensational, and surprising, as entrepreneurs sought to manipulate the vagaries of the market, control shifting public appetites, and capitalize on campaigns to protect public morals. Rock 'n Roll was one such fringe culture; in the 1950s, Elvis blurred gender norms with his androgynous style and challenged conventions of public decency with his sexually-charged performances. By the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan introduced the social consciousness of folk music into the rock scene, and The Beatles embraced hippie counter-culture. Don McLean's 1971 anthem American Pie served as an epitaph for rock's political core, which had been replaced by the spectacle of hard rock acts such as Kiss and Alice Cooper. While Rock 'n Roll did not lose its ability to shock, in less than three decades it became part of the established order that it had originally sought to challenge. With Amusement for All provides the context to what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships between social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the way in which the entertainment world has reflected, refracted, or reinforced the values those forces represent in America.

Argentina occupies a prominent place in Latin American historiography. Latin Americanists as well as historians of other world regions are less familiar, though, with the intensity of cultural, political, and economic flows that defined the broader region of the Río de la Plata, comprising today’s Uruguay and Argentina specifically, as well as Paraguay and southern Brazil more generally. Such exchanges of goods, ideas, and people were especially true of the late colonial period and the nineteenth century. Yet in this equation studies of Uruguay have remained on the margins in historical scholarship. This essay focuses on three core areas of research in the recent historiography of Uruguay as a gateway to nineteenth‐century cultural history of the Río de la Plata region. These areas are: (1) the African diaspora and blackness; (2) political culture and cultural history; and (3) a revitalized political history that draws from intellectual history and new energy surrounding the bicentennials of independence throughout Latin America. Knowledge of the historical forces shaping nineteenth‐century Uruguay not only contributes to a more complete understanding of the region’s cultural history; it also allows for the development of a historical perspective that is much more in tune with the historical experience of the region’s inhabitants throughout the long nineteenth century. Moreover, students and scholars of Argentina will note some parallels in research problems, though seeing them through the Uruguay prism can yield alternative approaches and point to previously unknown or under‐utilized source bases.