Aesthetic Codes Research Articles

“Les Névroses” de Maurice Rollinat: une tentative de retour/recours fin-de-siècle à la nature

Maurice Rollinat’s Les Nevroses (1883) exhibits a distinctively original feature as a work of poetry; it draws on two kinds of inspiration that are usually regarded as categorically opposed if not categorially exclusive, that, artificialist, of decadent poetry, on the one hand, and that, naturist, of rustic poetry, on the other. A close reading of the work suggests that the relationships between these two poetic trends are to be conceived not only in terms of opposition, as critics would normally do, but also in terms of hybridization. We intend here to draw attention to the main aspects of this singular hybridization of aesthetic codes and values, and to capture its global symbolic motivation by presenting it as a tentative decadent return/resort to nature. Through this aesthetic gesture, as we will suggest, Rollinat extends the “quivering” of modern sensitivity to natural order. By doing so, he allows for the use of pastoral and animal motifs which are usually excluded from poetic representation of fin-de-siecle modernity. Conversely, he also provides a new possibility of revitalisation or regeneration for the Baudelairian poetic paradigm. We will postulate that the fact that this possibility remains in the end unexploited by other poets and that Rollinat came to be associated, both in the eyes of his contemporaries and in the memory of posterity, with a rather unfortunate epigone of Baudelaire could be attributed to two reasons: his poetic ethos generally maladapted to decadent aesthetics and, more importantly, the radicalism of his endeavour which brings the decadent logic of the sensation to a point of self-contradiction pragmatically untenable.

La reconstruction des Grecs anciens chez Alma-Tadema : enjeux et résistances

This article addresses Alma-Tadema’s reconstructions of scenes set in ancient Greece. His Greek subjects raise issues pertaining to the transition in the contemporary pictorial context from history painting to historical genre. Alma-Tadema was influenced by the Flemish genre painters and by the French Néo-Grec movement and his reconstructions of Greek history are in fact everyday-life scenes. They privilege social experience over noble action and simple emotions over elevated sentiment, and so fitted the Victorian taste for genre. Yet perusal of the critical reception of his works shows that the commentators still established distinctions between Greek and Roman subjects—notably because Greece was still expected to conform to a number of aesthetic conventions as well as to gendered or racialist considerations. Moreover, because Alma-Tadema and a number of critics frequently established analogies between the ancients and Alma-Tadema’s contemporaries, the painter in fact held an ambiguous mirror up to his contemporaries. His reconstitutions of Greece tackle unorthodox sexual mores and depicted physical types that were perceived as inappropriate for the Greeks. They therefore went against the aesthetic codes that subsisted when representations of the Greeks were concerned, which raised aesthetic and ideological expectations that were less prominent in the case of Roman subjects.

Decolonizing Time

Critiques of anachronism have been used to dismiss art made in the Caribbean since the arrival of Christopher Columbus. This article argues that in order to render Caribbean art in the critical imagination, one must first decolonize notions of time foundational to the discipline of art history. Through a series of portraits of black subjects produced in Haiti during the nineteenth century, it sets aside temporally bound notions of innovation and avant-garde aesthetics that center art history and considers the manner in which these portraits defused the authority of Western frames of looking. The portraits demonstrate how postrevolutionary Haitians appropriated the seemingly hegemonic aesthetic codes of Western art in ways ambivalent to, if not wholly detached from, their temporal-bound values of origins, the singular or original work of art, and the linear concept of formal innovation. Instead, these portraits are works generated and thus rendered within a different value system, where the copy and the ability of a work of art to be reproduced across time was prized far more than a singular, original, individually authored object, and where the literal work of art superseded its materiality and form and in every sense transcended linear time.

Institutional Aesthetics: Embodied Ways of Encountering, Evaluating, and Enacting Institutions

The cognitive turn in institutional theory has led to the systematic neglect of people’s sensory capacities. In this paper we offer a cross-level theory of the role in institutional processes of sensory and evaluative forms of knowledge. Called here the aesthetic mode, this way of knowing combines humans’ innate sensory capacity to engage the world with their learned capacity to evaluate what they encounter. We argue that people evaluate the world’s natural, social, and spiritual phenomena through the lenses of a personal aesthetic, each person’s distinct internalization of the institutional aesthetic codes of the communities in which they are in embedded. A personal aesthetic informs and animates people’s internal conversations as they evaluate the social arrangements they encounter and deliberate over how they should participate in the institutional processes of maintaining, disrupting, or creating social arrangements. Attending to people’s aesthetic ways of knowing positions us to better understand when, why, and how people deliberate about institutional values and arrangements and choose to engage in purposive institutional work. It also offers a way of conceptualizing and examining the reflexivity said to be at the heart of embedded agency. We discuss the implications for understanding of institutional work, institutional biography, and of how people experience institutional disruption and re-creation.

Playing in cyberspace: the social performative on Heidelberg Street

ABSTRACTThe Heidelberg Project is an outdoor art installation in Detroit, MI, which is frequently experienced through Google Street View, offering media and spatial scholars a fascinating text in which to explore the evolution of our experience of place in the face of new technologies. The author argues that the virtual space of Heidelberg Street articulates a transgressive rhetoric for virtual tourists through appropriation, juxtaposition, play with postmodern aesthetic codes, and ephemerality. These elements may help to disrupt the spatial politics which sustain economic, social, and racial stereotypes about the city of Detroit and encourage visitors to engage other places in similar ways. To further this argument, the author theorizes and conducts what she terms a virtual spatial study. This methodology introduces a less stable notion of presence and invites attention to a virtual analysis of emplaced aesthetics. Finally, this analysis offers scholars a useful perspective on how the slippage between materiality and virtuality embedded within new technologies frames our experience of reality, transgression, and social change.

SOCIO-CULTURAL VALUE OF TELEVISION AS A SCREEN FORM OF ART IN SHAPING THE OUTLOOK OF A YOUNG SPECTATOR

The purpose of the article is to investigate the influence of television on a child. The methodology of the research consists in application of general scientific and specific scientific methods: analytical - for the study of philosophical, cultural, literary literature on the topic, the disclosure of the essence of television as a socio-cultural phenomenon; theoretical - to generalize the theoretical positions and observations on the nature of the influence of television broadcasting on television audience; historical - to systematize information on the history of the development of television broadcasting and floating; comparative - to determine the general and specific features of the programs of modern television in different countries of the world. Scientific novelty consists in the study of television as an on-screen art tool that can influence, in particular, the outlook of the young viewer and shape the outlook of a new generation of screen culture consumers. Television is a young form of art, so the means of its influence on a viewer are in the stage of development and improvement. One of them is the phenomenon of absolute realism. But, at the same time, television in its daily interpretation of reality predicts a certain emotional and psychological effect in the audience, having in its basis a creative idea that re-integrates the whole process of communication. The most noticeable and visible this effect is in the cell of a young spectator, since it is the children, who are open to perceiving new information and do not have a critical percepti on of reality. With the advent of new forms of art, the person himself, and his means to perceive the world around him, has changed. There was a new generation of heat consumers in the world. That is why it is important to find out what a young spectator watches today and what images and emotions these television broadcasts bring out. Conclusions. T elevision is an independent form of screen art that uses visual images as its language. Today, virtually the entire broadcasting network carries some kind of messages, on which the viewer is reacting delicately. The system of values that is born during this dialogue has an important information component, which is crucial for the further development of communication. Aesthetic codes addressed to the audience are not just a tongue of television. They are a peculiar clue to the viewer's self-awareness with the reality that gives him television. Television becomes the reality that the young spectator perceives without critical analysis and rethinking. Ho wever, one should not accept TV as a universal evil. The super-fast present, puts certain conditions of informatization of society, giving birth to a new culture – this is television. In Ukraine, this culture is actively developing. However, today there is an acute shortage of educational and science-popular programs of good quality that younger generation needs. And children's products for preschoolers of their own production are practically absent.

SUNDANESE AESTHETICS IN DARSO�S VIDEO CLIP DULANG KURING 2

Abstract This paper aims to see how the aesthetics in the video clip Dulang Kuring 2 which was popularized by Alm.Darso. We used qualitative method as a method in collecting related data and to analyze video clip DulangKuring 2, we use Homi K. Bhabha Post-Coloniam theory about mimicry, hybridity, and �the third space�. The analysis focuses on Darso, the location (landscape), and the setting-property in the video clip. From the analysis that has been done, the aesthetics in the music video clip DulangKuring 2 is paradoxical because it mixes the local and global aesthetic codes. While through the Bhabha postcolonial, we find that the place (landscape), and setting-property gradually mimicry then after that we�ll see another step which is a hybridity that produces �the third space�. From the analysis, the video clip DulangKuring 2 is aesthetically very paradoxical yet hybrid because it targets the contemporary Sundanese society.Keywords: Aesthetic, Communication, Darso, Post-colonialism

Mapping the Impact of ISIS Propaganda Narratives : Evidences from a Qualitative Analysis in Italy and France

The increasingly worsening threat posed by terrorism in Europe has led the media to focus their attention on the issue of violent radicalisation. Although this phenomenon includes different forms of violent extremism – from extreme right-wing movements to catholic movements, eco-terrorists, etc. – today the question of violent radicalisation is mainly related to Jihadism, and ISIS is the most recent and, from the perspective of its media use, intriguing expression. However, radicalisation is a debatable topic whose dramatic consequences invite a deeper analysis of both driving and enabling factors. Within theoretical debate, there is the well-known querelle between Oliver Roy (2016) and Gilles Kepel (2016), two French authors who underlined several factors. These include ISIS’ ability to persuade its martyrs, thanks to a skilful use of aesthetic codes of modernity to spread the underlying principles of an obscurantist interpretation, or the role of Salafism in enlarging the gap between the second and third generation immigrants and western societies, those considered the manifestation of moral and spiritual decadence. Furthermore, social relations established on Internet, group dynamics and the inclination to crime have been interpreted by Anglo-Saxon scholars as enabling factors (Neumman, 2013, 2015, Berger & Stern 2015; Klausen 2015). The essay presents the key findings of qualitative research carried out within the EU SAFFRON Project. The empirical research included seven focus groups in Italy and France which involved 47 individuals: 17 experts or qualified testimonials and 30 young people (age between 16 and 32) selected among second and third generation immigrants, political refugees, university students from Iraq, Pakistan, Senegal and Iran, secondary school students, and Italian youths converted to the Muslim faith. The theme of motivations or driving factors has been analysed using a participatory approach aimed at studying in depth the main rhetoric and narratives of online propaganda spread by the ISIS organisation for the purpose of recruitment. Research findings identified some specific factors as crucial: for example, the role of social media considered by young people as reliable sources of information versus mainstream media, which described as responsible for the dissemination of false stereotypes related to Islam; the theme of pseudo-heroism as promoted by skilful storytelling techniques; the patriotism which drives young immigrants and refugees to “take a position” in relation to conflicts in their countries of origin; and even existential and identity problems – almost always intertwined with the religious dimension – that apparently find an easy and immediate solution in the choice to radicalise.

Gadamerian Hermeneutics in An Artistic Process of Retno Maruti And Bulantrisna Djelantik’s Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang

<p class="Default">The research is to investigate the existence of <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang</em>,<em> </em>as a dance piece, which its creation based to reinterpretation towards tradition and indigenous wisdom. The dance brings Indonesian classical idioms and mythological sphere into a dynamic contemporary. The dance attempts to avoid either the clichés or<em> </em>destructive forms. It is imperatively seeking the ontology of <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang </em>through investigating hermeneutical aspects in the process of creating, conceptual sphere, and spectacle representation. The juxtaposition, in which the dance is presented, is a unique way to accommodate the process of inter-subjective understanding respectively amongst choreographers, aesthetical values of Java and Bali, the myth of <em>Calonarang</em>, and today’s reality.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p class="Default">A philosophical qualitative is the foreground to investigate a new understanding about artworks through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Such perspective provides the interwoven understanding towards contemporary (of art-works), the critique of aesthetics, revitalizing the tradition, and dialogical pattern inside the effort of the fusion of horizons. Gadamerian hermeneutics is confidentially constructed through identifying choreographic concept and aesthetic codes from the analysis of dance structure and representation. <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang</em> achieves its innovative, artistic ontological existence and its spiritual field, in the middle of Indonesian contemporary society. Its concept assertively suggests Indonesian choreography to accommodate contemporary innovation, while it also conveys its cultural identity into broader implementation of multicultural state.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p>Keywords : Gadamerian hermeneutics; choreographic process; dialogical sphere; The <em>Bedoyo-Legong Calonarang.</em></p>

Iconicidad y Sistematicidad en ABCDario

The main objective of this study, framed in a semiotic and poststructuralist context, is to analyze how the alphabet, central motif of ABCDario (2015) by Calleja et. al., becomes a systemic and techno-visual language without abandoning its verbal nature. This compilation maximizes the experimental use of algorithmic language and graphic design, as well as symmetrical and asymmetric formal processes that activate a polyvalent relation between letter, sign, and code. In this context, iconicity and systematicity cease to be paralinguistic elements to become aesthetic codes and operate in meta-writing. The inclination for these technical-compositional procedures constructs an autopoietic writing throughout the book and is a central element in the process of signification that confers a privileged and autonomous status in each of the four compilations. This analysis aims to contribute to more general theoretical discussions between text and image.

Order and otherness in a photographic shot: Italians abroad and the Great War

This article explores the meaning of photographic portraits of First World War Italian migrants, in terms of the tensions that emerge from their visual codes and the extent to which the subject’s interior reality and individuality might emerge from the reassuring surface imagery of photography and war. By analysing photographs of Italian migrants who either joined Italy’s army or enrolled in their adopted country’s army, we can see how the ‘otherness’ of the war – its artificial face of idealised glory, honour, and ordinariness, as presented through the portrait’s aesthetic codes – supplants the ‘otherness’ of the migrant individual, that is, their ambivalent life in between different cultures, traditions and identities. Yet, beyond the physical and psychological annihilation of the modern war, the photographic portrait, with its fabricated order and ‘otherness’, becomes, for the migrant soldier, a means of giving coherence to his dislocated existence. The nostalgic visual codes of the photograph, however, evoke an order that is now denied by the destructive mobility and mobilisation of both migration and war.

Woza! Sweetheart! On braiding epistemologies on Bree Street

African hair braiding on Bree Street offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, spaces, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of urban studies itself.

America’s first climate change refugees: Victimization, distancing, and disempowerment in journalistic storytelling

The article to follow aims to delve deeper into the underexplored but critical role visual representations play in constructing a public narrative of climate change relocation in the United States. Through a visual discourse analysis of American news sources that portray ‘America’s first climate change refugees,’ the article explores how media outlets are using images to construct perceptions of meaning, purpose, and power in stories of climate relocation. It argues that journalistic storytelling of sea level rise and relocation has employed a formula of crisis, ‘othering,’ and victimization in representing the nexus of environmental change and culture in communities across the United States. Through this, the article shows that images and aesthetic codes have constructed and conditioned perceptions of agency in America’s climate discourse that distance and disempower at-risk coastal communities from the reader.

The Rhetoric of Visual Play: An Analysis of Postsubject Voice in New York City

Through an analysis of the street artist Banksy's 2013 residency of New York City, I identify two major rhetorical themes: Images of Discontent and Re-Visions of the City. I argue that the Banksy images exert an influential postsubject voice into the visual discourse of New York City, which I define as a visual articulation that resists traditional markings of identity in favor of visual play. In visual play, elements of the city are turned into toys through a critical orientation towards the urban landscape, postmodern aesthetic codes, participatory rhetoric, and the logics of the virtual. I conclude by arguing that play may offer an effective and transgressive mode of engaging contemporary rhetorical argument, particularly within the materiality of place.

Transgression of Postindustrial Dissonance and Excess: (Re)valuation of Gothicism in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive

The paper gives insight into the revaluation of popular Gothic aesthetics in Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 production Only Lovers Left Alive. Drawing on critical theory and the postmodern theoretical framework, the article suggests that the film transgresses contemporary culture immersed in a “culture of death” that has produced a vast amount of cultural texts under the rubric of “Gothicism.” By considering Jean Baudrillard’s concept of transaesthetics and Judith Halberstam’s writings on contemporary monstrosity, the paper shows that a commodified Gothic mode has lost its older deconstructive functions that operated on the margins of the mainstream. Now entirely focused on the duplication of the same aesthetic codes and signs, Gothic productions conform to the rules of postindustrial culture, enriching entertainment imagery with the neutralized concept of “otherness.” Hence, the article engages primarily with Jarmusch’s indie aesthetics that goes beyond easily recognizable patterns and generic conventions and allows the director to emphasize that the arts are rejuvenating forces, the antidote to a commoditized environment. Then, the focus is on the construction of main characters—Adam and Eve, ageless vampires and spouses—who thanks to nostalgic theatricality and performance reconfigure the mainstream monstrosity. Ultimately, the article emphasizes that Jarmusch’s film, to a large extent, becomes a warning against the inevitable results of advanced capitalism practiced on a global scale.

Directorial style and stylization:‘The photographic synthesis’ in Felix Okolo’s dramaturgy on the Nigerian theatre stage

The creation of theatre directors like other artistes in Nigeria and the world at large have been known to be influenced by a variety of choices. From the varying choices available, theatre practitioners strive to make the best decisions to achieve greater aesthetic value in their production. In effect, relating the script to stage by the modern day director is not without its challenges as the study of styles of directors in Nigeria has been chiefly ignored in scholarship. This study examines the styles of directing on the Nigerian stage through the works of Felix Okolo with a view to documenting the various directorial codes, directorial signals and prospects of directing in Nigeria and the director’s artistic choices. This research adopts analytical, participant observation and interview methods. Productions of Felix Okolo were previewed and evaluated. Felix Okolo was purposively selected as the case study because of his professional proficiency and consistency. Structured and unstructured interviews were conducted with selected director, crew and cast to elicit relevant information. Data were content-analyzed. The style of directing is a highly individual art and no two directors can direct works in the same manner given the same cast, background or the same material. Basically, six aesthetic codes were found to make up the style of Okolo. These codes are the Total Theatre Aesthetics, the Multitasking Aesthetics, Design and Technical Compactedness, Non-Static Photographic Aesthetics, the Actor-Audience Appeal and the Line cum Demonstration Aesthetics. From the directorial codes prevalent in the works of Felix Okolo, the ‘Photographic Synthesis’ seems the most appropriate to name his style. With this style, Nigerian and indeed African theatre directors could easily learn the various codes that make up Okolo’s ‘Photographic Synthesis’ and pass on to younger generations of artistes and directors such artistic nous.Keywords: Nigerian theatre directors, Felix Okolo, Photographic Synthesis, Artistic inventiveness

Stories from Poland by a Welsh Soldier–John Elwyn Jones’s Translations

Abstract The majority of translations from Polish into Welsh published so far are the works of John Elwyn Jones (1921-2008), who learned Polish in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. His translations include Storiâu Byr o’r Bwyleg, a collection of short stories by two of the classic authors of the Polish Positivist period, Bolesław Prus and Henryk Sienkiewicz. This paper analyses two stories from the collection, Ianco’r Cerddor “Janko Muzykant” and Y Wasgod “Kamizelka”, within a comparative functional model of translation criticism. The texts are analysed in the light of lexical-semantic, cultural and aesthetic codes. A great number of modifications to the source texts introduced in the Welsh translation places them on the border between free translations and adaptations. While some of the alterations are tokens of a specific translation strategy, others can be regarded as translation errors. Although the Welsh version retains the primary message of the original stories, much of their culture-specific dimension, historical context and artistic value is not conveyed in the translation.

Playing both sides of the field: The anatomy of a ‘quality’ bestseller

This article analyses some aspects of the contemporary logics of literary recognition. It does so through a case study of the production and critical and editorial reception of a successful British debut novel, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I argue that a literary bestseller is a two-sided cultural product that aims at long-term consecration based on autonomous literary criteria and short-term commercial success thanks to wide-ranging marketing strategies. The research is mainly based on studying media coverage and on an in-depth analysis of the novel in relation to the dominant literary aesthetic codes at the time of publication. First, the article underlines the mechanisms enabling a work to have it ‘both ways’: reaching a large audience quickly while gaining literary recognition. Second, it analyses the categories of perception of the editor of the novel itself and scholars who took part in the process of recognition; it also highlights some of the preconditions for betting on a ‘promising’ rookie novelist at an early stage. The analysis explores the writing, publishing, framing and reception processes which are often kept separate in studies of literary appreciation.

Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic since 1988

As a popular “scientific” and educational journal, National Geographic, since its founding in 1888, has positioned itself as a voice of authority within mainstream American print media, offering what purports to be an unprejudiced “window onto the world.” Previous scholarship has been quick to call attention to the magazine’s participation in an imperialist representational regime. Tamar Rothenberg, Linda Steet, and Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins have all argued that National Geographic’s distinctive, quasi-anthropological outlook has established hierarchies of difference and rendered subjects into dehumanized objects, a spectacle of the unknown and exotic other. A more nuanced understanding can be reached by drawing upon the theoretical concept of an “aesthetics of garbage,” first employed by North American scholar of Brazilian film, Robert Stam. Stam used garbage in a positive sense, to articulate the subtle nuances and complexities of re-used aesthetic codes and conventions that have arisen from global exchanges and interactions between the United States and Brazil. Photographs since National Geographic’s centenary edition in September 1988 encapsulate an “aesthetics of garbage,” and have traced the beginnings of a different view of global encounters between the United States and Brazil, driven by the forces of globalization. These images have resisted the processes of objectification, appropriation and stereotyping frequently associated with the magazine’s distinctive, rectangular yellow border. This is because they have provided evidence of a fluid and various population, which has selected and experimented with preferred elements of American and European dress, and used it to fashion their own, distinctly Brazilian, identities.

Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley

Reviewed by: Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley Brian J. Lefresne (bio) McGinley, Paige A. Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. Critics and scholars have begun to focus on the visual, gestural, and performative elements that comprise an indelible component of African American popular music such as traditional blues, jazz, and hip hop. This trend toward the non-sonic components of musical performance provides the opportunity to discuss how these artists crafted their stage identities, and in turn affected the reception and dissemination of their public personae and musical performances. Paige A. McGinley’s Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism is one such example. Placing elements of the theater at the fore of her analysis, McGinley shifts the study of the blues away from that of a singular sonic medium and toward that of a diverse and cross-disciplinary performance practice. Spread over four chapters and segmented into short digestible sections, Staging the Blues is not a retelling of the history of the blues through a performance or theater studies framework, but rather an examination of key performers and moments that complicate and challenge commonly accepted narratives of blues performance. This text explores the ways in which staging and theatricality have shaped the performance and reception of blues performers from the early-twentieth century to the present day. Wrestling with accounts that reinforce divides along gender, geography, and genres, McGinley looks to overcome the surfeit of histories and accounts that “marginalize or sidestep histories of theatrical practice” (3). Opening with a survey of blues performance and historiography, the author asks succinctly “what happens when we subject the mise-en-scene of blues performance to critical analysis” (4). Using language and the terms of the theater to guide her narrative, McGinley deftly touches upon how issues of racial authenticity, working-class and vaudevillian entertainments, African American social uplift ideology, folklore, sound recordings, gender, and mobility have singularly or in combination shaped histories of the blues. Each one of these approaches to accounts of blues performance carries its own particular agenda for effacing theatrical and performative elements of blues performance. Returning the theatrical aspect of blues performance to center stage allows for a more rich and nuanced account of blues performers and performances. In chapter 1, “Real Personality,” McGinley details how early female blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith used trappings of the theater and theatricality in their [End Page 712] performances. Often seen as a footnote, the theatricality of Smith’s and Rainey’s performances are treated as a crucial component. As McGinley notes, omitting these aspects is problematic: “theatrical blues singing developed during a period when popular music and popular theater were deeply intertwined” (35). Generic divides did not exist for performers or for their audiences. McGinley highlights how Smith and Rainey incorporated theatrical trappings such as stage props, costuming, and technology into their public personae and performances to evade and resist dominant social and aesthetic codes of the era. Most intriguing about this chapter was calling attention to these artists’ deployment of recording technology and photography to enhance their performance careers. The second chapter examines male blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s performance career during the 1930s and 1940s. Rather than adhering to conventional approaches surrounding Ledbetter, McGinley positions the theatrical elements of his performances on the forestage. The rise of folklore studies and the quest for the authentic and the real lead to an erasure, or in McGinley’s words, “abjection” of the theatrical elements of blues performance (83). Countering traditional accounts of Ledbetter as solely a blues musician, McGinley highlights how Ledbetter’s performance career was “deeply indebted to theatrical traditions” such as dance, comedy, and spoken monologues. It is quite clear after reading this section that one must view Ledbetter not just as a musician, but also as a consummate professional who was well versed in multiple modes of popular entertainment. The middle-section of the chapter explores Zora Neale Hurston’s and Alan Lomax’s approach to the role and place of the theater and theatricality in folklore studies. In spite of Lomax’s abjuration of...