American Popular Culture Research Articles

“I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity by Rachel Clare Donaldson (review)

Reviewed by: “I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity by Rachel Clare Donaldson Denise Meringolo “I HEAR AMERICA SINGING”: Folk Music and National Identity. By Rachel Clare Donaldson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 2014. Many scholars and music enthusiasts alike use the term “folk music revival” to describe the popular ascendancy of performers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the early 1960s. Indeed, folk music experienced a brief period of commercial success in the United States after the rise of rock-and-roll in the 1950s and before the British invasion of the mid-1960s. By viewing the revival through a tight chronological lens and measuring its influence in terms of popularity, historians have convincingly argued that folk music—and folk musicians—played a critical role in popularizing and expanding a variety of social and political movements. Yet, narrowly associating the revival with the social and cultural movements of the early 1960s has truncated our understanding of the larger cultural significance of American folk music. Further, the over-emphasis on popularity as a measure of influence has made it difficult to recognize the way folk music has both shaped and reflected diversity as a consistent, if sometimes marginalized, aspect of American national identity. Rachel Clare Donaldson has written an intellectual history of the American folk revival, I Hear America Singing, that addresses both of these shortcomings. Donaldson has made at least three important and intelligent choices about how to examine her subject. Rather than focusing on commercial success or other measures of popularity, Donaldson approaches the folk revival from the top down. She analyzes the work of a variety of leaders who shaped the way folk music was defined, collected, and disseminated. In turn, Donaldson’s focus on folklorists, anthropologists, and other organized leaders in the field, allows her to expand the chronology of the folk revival. She identifies the roots of the revival in the first decades of the twentieth century and explores its full emergence in the 1930s. Finally, by taking seriously the motivations of a diverse—and often divergent—group of leaders, Donaldson can identify the core philosophy underneath their work. Taken together, these choices allow Donaldson to argue that the folk music revival is important as a window not only into American popular culture, but also into the formation of American national identity. Donaldson’s work provides a new context for understanding the significance of American folk music. I Hear America Singing makes clear that the folk music revival was not simply a brief and isolated phenomenon that emerged in tandem with 1960s social justice movements. Rather, the individuals who sought to collect, preserve, and disseminate folk music gradually gave form and content to pluralistic nationalism. At first, collectors were largely interested in identifying cultural continuities between the United States and Great Britain, a project that reflected the nativism and racism of the World War I era. But, Donaldson argues, it was the more systematic work undertaken by musicologists, folklorists, and anthropologists that shaped the revival. Franz Boas is at the center of this story. Boas insisted that culture should not be conflated with evolution, and he collected music from groups of people that his contemporaries were loath to recognize as influencing American culture. His efforts led to the creation of national, regional, and local folk music organizations dedicated to collecting a variety of musical forms. At the micro level, these groups disagreed fiercely. Some argued that the only true American folk music came from indigenous Indian peoples. Others recognized the cultural value of African American music. Still others gathered songs and music from various immigrant populations. Despite their disagreements over the precise content of the American folk music catalog, these organizations played a crucial role in shaping a particular set of beliefs about American national identity. Donaldson argues convincingly [End Page 156] that the folk music revival was an ongoing dialogue that articulated what we now recognize as multiculturalism. I Hear America Singing also fits well with current trends in public history. For decades, public history was misrepresented in the scholarly literature. At best, it appeared as a less legitimate branch of the larger discipline of history because it did not have...

Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer by Michelle Ann Stephens

Reviewed by: Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer by Michelle Ann Stephens Brandon J. Manning (bio) Stephens, Michelle Ann. Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. In Skin Acts, Michelle Stephens explores the labor and function of the corporeal, specifically the epidermis, and how it is imbricated in the black masculine performances of Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley. Stephens centers Paul Gilroy’s and Franz Fanon’s earlier exploration of the “epidermalization” of blackness in order to theorize the intersections at which black skin informs the reception, performance, and meaning of black masculine performance throughout the twentieth century. In a theoretically heavy introduction, titled “Fleshing Out the Act,” Stephens cogently articulates a theoretical terrain that better understands the relationship of black subjects’ minds and bodies and their proximity to a world that mediates its understanding through skin, complexion, and facial expressions by highlighting historical theories of the skin and body with the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In the first chapter, “Seeing Face, Hearing Sings,” Stephens analyzes the importance of facialization in black face minstrelsy by critically engaging the performance, portraiture, and fictionalized biography of Bert Williams. Stephens highlights the falsity of blacks donning blackface to portray a perception of blackness put forth by white minstrel actors and rounds out her conversation by pulling from other historical and literary engagements of Bert Williams—specifically Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005). Here, Stephens troubles Ralph Ellison’s repudiation of the black minstrel performer to demonstrate an “ironic performing consciousness in the songs and lyrics created by the musicians and composers who produced black minstrel acts” (53). In addition to convincing readings of In Dahomey (1903) and Dancing in the Dark, Stephens includes portraiture and song sheets to demonstrate moments of resistance in Williams’s minstrel performances. Stephens asserts that within the parodic work on the minstrel stage Williams attempts to reclaim the black male body at the expense of his voice and body. “Bodylines, Borderlines, Color Lines,” Stephens’s second chapter, “mark[s] an important shift in the visual culture of modernism” by deconstructing the centrality of skin in Paul Robeson’s artistic works (72). Stephens cogently argues that this shift from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ emphasis on the face within a black minstrel tradition, as typified by Bert Williams, was broadened to the entire body by early modernism. Thus, it is Robeson’s body—his physique—and not simply his face that American popular culture was interested in during this early modernist moment. To underscore this point, Stephens analyzes Antonio Salemme’s full-length nude statue of Robeson, Negro Spiritual, and then interrogates the modernist gaze of Salemme’s statue of Robeson with H. D.’s Red Roses for Bronze (1931) to elucidate how a modernist gaze of Robeson was invested in “a more intimate form of recognition” (77). After discussing the white gaze of Robeson’s body, Stephens analyzes Robeson’s films Borderline (1930) and Song of Freedom (1936) to engage the title of the chapter and work through the formal aspects of framing in film, and theorize the boundaries of bodies and complexions on the screen. Stephens ends the chapter discussing the importance and intention behind Robeson’s blurry body in Song of Freedom and the distance it creates between him and his audience. The author’s third chapter, “The Problem of Color,” explores the shift in technologies in film production—specifically Technicolor—and how the 1950s and film technologies [End Page 715] ushered in a new white gaze “reifying and phallicizing blackness as ‘color’ in a new social and political ideal” (120). Stephens begins the chapter by retelling a story of Baldwin and the racial dynamic of what he refers to as a schizophrenic gaze at a civil rights march in Montgomery, Alabama, and how the audience’s—specifically white women’s—contempt shifted to adulation at the sight of Harry Belafonte. Indeed, Stephens’s reliance on the writings of James Baldwin function as a sort of through line for the chapter, making her contributions to the iconicity of Harry Belafonte a project that extends...

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction John Kinder (bio) Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture. By Gwyneth Anne Thayer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2013. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. By Adam Rome. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 2013. Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement. By David Naguib Pellow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014. On June 19, 2015, a team of biologists, including Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the 1960s bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), published a brief study in [End Page 17] Science Advances on the future of life on the planet. Their forecast was dire: the world is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, a cataclysmic biotic collapse on par with the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Since 1900, more than 450 vertebrate species have disappeared, an extinction toll that will continue to increase over the next few centuries. “If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue,” they warn darkly, “humans will soon (in as little as three human lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits” (read: the basic ecological conditions necessary to sustain life as we know it). And it is not like we can simply wait for things to improve: “On human time scales, this loss would be effectively permanent because in the aftermath of past mass extinctions, the living world took hundreds of thousands of years to rediversify.”1 As if that were not enough, the report’s authors blame human activity for the looming crisis. In their reckoning, global society has exploited the Earth’s living systems to the breaking point—and everyone, every thing, will pay the price. Ehrlich and company are the latest in a long line of commentators to raise the specter of anthropogenic (human-induced) extinction. As journalist Sarah Kaplan points out, a 1998 poll of four-hundred scientists taken by the American Museum of Natural History found that “70 percent believe the Earth is in the midst of one of its fastest mass extinctions, one that threatens the existence of humans as well as the millions of species we rely on.”2 Since that time, warnings of global catastrophe have only gotten louder. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), writer Elizabeth Kolbert predicts the current extinction event will “continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”3 Recently, world leaders have also begun to raise alarms about the implications of environmental destruction. At the 2015 graduation of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Barack Obama called climate change a “serious threat to global security.”4 And just one day before the release of the Science Advances report, to the outrage of climate-change deniers and Earth exploiters worldwide, Pope Francis issued a more than one-hundred page encyclical condemning human destruction of the world’s ecosystems.5 Meanwhile, twenty-first century popular culture churns out apocalyptic visions of mass extinction and environmental collapse. Looking toward the future, films like John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), David Michôd’s The Rover (2014), and Frank Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) paint a grim picture of a biosphere on the brink of destruction. And yet, when confronted with the most important topic of our time—possibly of all time—the field of American Studies has largely responded with silence.6 In a recent article in American Quarterly, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson observes, “American studies, the academic discipline arguably most dedicated to progressive political engagement, social justice, and activism, has for the most part ignored climate change and the still-accelerating consumption of fossil fuels despite our awareness of the catastrophic environmental and human consequences.”7 Much the same can be said about American Studies’ engagement [End Page 18] with human-animal studies (HAS), an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex relationships between human and nonhuman animals. Over the last two decades, HAS...

Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science. by Lindsay Steenberg

Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science. by Lindsay Steenberg

Breaking Down What Matters: Welcome to COMpostINGS

Breaking Down What MattersWelcome to compostings Michaela Castellanos (bio) This issue of Resilience features the first installation of a new series called compostings. Two at a time, the essays in this series will explore concepts that influence how we think about our myriad relationships with our animate and inanimate nonhuman others. They will do so, for example, by reflecting on unwieldy and polysemous concepts in a way that appreciates their complexity. Will Abberley's essay on biological mimicry starts off the series in this spirit. Based on the assumption that insects and plants intentionally disguise themselves to trick predators, the idea of protective mimicry at first seems to derive from an anthropocentric bias. Yet mimicry undermines the human/animal binary, Abberley argues, as it frames animals as interpretive agents rather than passive machines. Probing the entanglement of mimicry with intentionality, anthropomorphism, umwelt, and finally empathy, he shows that this concept challenged the growing discourse of scientific objectivity and rejection of anthropomorphism already in the nineteenth century. The compostings series also emphasizes transcultural flows in environmental thinking. Jonathan Beever's essay points out a historical connection between American conservationist Aldo Leopold and Estonian-born biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Beever identifies a pivotal shift in Leopold's developing thought about the moral value of the natural world. Arguing that Leopold's ethical attention turns from the biotic whole to living individuals, he links this change to the intellectual influence of Uexküll, which he then shows in Leopold's private and public writing. [End Page 60] Literature is central to both Beever and Abberley's explorations. When approaching the individual/whole dichotomy as an ethical problem, Beever turns to the iconic "green fire" passage in A Sand County Almanac (1949); Abberley traces the anxieties about mimicry in Tomas Belt's The Naturalist in Nicaragua (1874). On a subordinated level, both essays reflect on the Uexküllian notion of umwelt from a particular disciplinary perspective—ethics and literary studies. The essays thus come together in an unexpected way, which creates a productive synergy that I hope will also emerge from future compostings. In "An Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto,'" Bruno Latour praises the term compositionist for the variety of connotations it imports, and among those is the "pungent but ecologically correct smell of 'compost,' itself due to the active 'de-composition' of many invisible agents."1 If compostings decompose concepts in order to reassemble them in different form, the series responds to Latour's call to cultivate compositionism as a successor to nature and as an alternative to critique.2 In Latour's words, It is a really mundane question of having the right tools for right job. With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together.3 A heartfelt thank you to the first contributors for breaking down and reassembling what matters to them! Michaela Castellanos Michaela Castellanos is a PhD candidate in English at Mid-Sweden University in Sundsvall, Sweden. Her main areas of academic inquiry are animal studies and the environmental humanities. Her current research project is concerned with representations of cetaceans in contemporary American popular culture. She is the current webinar coordinator for the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (easlce) and the European editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. notes 1. Latour, "Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto,'" 473–74. 2. Latour, "Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto,'" 477. 3. Latour, "Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto,'" 475. [End Page 61] references Belt, Thomas. The Naturalist in Nicaragua. London: John Murray, 1874. Google Scholar Latour, Bruno. "An Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto.'" New Literary History 41 (2010): 471–90. Google Scholar Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. [End Page 62] Google Scholar Copyright © 2017 University of Nebraska Press

Indigenous Knowledge in the Production of Post-Frontier American Culture

This paper looks at the interaction of indigenous and Euro-American actors in creating a post-Frontier American popular culture around the turn of the 20 th century. A number of aspects characterize this particular historical period: newly emerging media technology (especially photography and film); rapid industrialization and the invention of leisure time; the end of the so-called “Indian Wars” and the opening up of the vast American interior for touristic exploration; new arenas of cultural representation such as rodeos, fairs, and exhibitions, and a shift in American politics towards a more or less forced integration of the diverse American populace under the umbrella of American patriotism. This paper argues from a media anthropological point of view that indigenous actors played a crucial role in bringing about the new creative forms which marked this era and subsequently evolved into what we now call “global media culture.”

Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect ‐ by Kantaris, Geoffrey and O'Bryen, Rory

Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect ‐ by Kantaris, Geoffrey and O'Bryen, Rory

Left Behind or Left Below? Parodies of Christian End‐Times Fiction in American Popular Culture

Christian dispensational ?end times? fiction has found particular pop culture currency through the success of the Left Behind series of post-rapture novels in the 1990s and early 2000s. This has led to a number of parodic re-readings of the novels in contemporary entertainment media. This article examines several recent parodies of Christian ?end times? fiction in American popular culture, including episodes of The Simpsons and American Dad, 2013 movie This is the End, graphic novels such as The Chronicles of Wormwood and Sword of My Mouth and Tom Perotta?s 2011 novel The Leftovers. These works critique ?end times? fiction, but do not abandon its central apocalyptic form. Their parody works as a theological critique of the tradition in three ways: through reimagining the role of clergy and media in a post-apocalyptic world, debating the hermeneutical position of dispensationalists, and commenting upon the role of popular culture in influencing contemporary apocalyptic thought. While the parodies are designed to entertain, each is also ?apocalyptic? in a theological sense, in that they claim to offer clear revelations of the true nature of the world.

Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture GwynethAnne Thayer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 38, Issue 4 p. 423-424 Book Review Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture , Gwyneth Anne Thayer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Daniel S. Margolies, Daniel S. Margolies Virginia Wesleyan CollegeSearch for more papers by this author Daniel S. Margolies, Daniel S. Margolies Virginia Wesleyan CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 15 December 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12471Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume38, Issue4December 2015Pages 423-424 RelatedInformation

‘This is what I’ve always wanted’: Bromance and the evolution of male intimacy in the Jump Street films

Abstract For over a decade now, American popular culture has registered its fascination with the relationship between heterosexual men through the film genre of the ‘bromance’. We might have predicted the development of this genre, for it mirrors our recent shift in twenty-first century masculinities not only towards renewed fraternal connection but also towards more open emotional connection. This article focuses on the recent Jump Street movies as both nods to their ‘bromantic’ predecessors and responses to the established narrative boundaries of the genre. 21 and 22 Jump Street not only test the limits but, we would argue, explode them via three distinct but interrelated strategies: through the narrative structure of the films themselves, particularly in their representation of the bromantic relationship and the lack of heterosexual narrative closure; through their mixing of genres (buddy movie/action movie/romance/bromance); and through the queer inter- and extratextual narrative generated by what film critic Richard Dyer calls the ‘star power’ of the two leads, especially Channing Tatum. An examination of these strategies will reveal that the Jump Street films both define and defy bromantic conventions, contributing to a new understanding of male intimacy in US mainstream culture.

Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture

Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture

Hollywood in China: How American Popular Culture Shapes Chinese Views of the “Beautiful Imperialist” – An Experimental Analysis

AbstractWhile most mainland Chinese today have extremely few direct contacts with either America or Americans, their indirect contacts with both, via globalized American popular culture, are increasing rapidly. Do daily parasocial contacts with American celebrities shape Chinese views of America? Based on two experimental studies, this paper argues that even indirect, subconscious exposure to American celebrities via popular magazine covers shapes Chinese views of America. However, the impact of that exposure depends upon both the specific nature of the bicultural exposure and the psychological predispositions of the Chinese involved. Not all Chinese are alike, and their personality differences shape whether they experience American popular culture as enriching or threatening, leading to integrative and exclusionary reactions, respectively.

Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures

Gatsby: <i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i> <i>Beyond</i> Gatsby: <i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i> <i>So We Read On: How</i> The Great Gatsby <i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

Gatsby:The Cultural History of the Great American NovelBeyondGatsby:How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American CultureSo We Read On: HowThe Great GatsbyCame to Be and Why It Endures

Gatsby:<i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i><i>Beyond</i>Gatsby:<i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i><i>So We Read On: How</i>The Great Gatsby<i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: Fake Orgasm, Affectation, and Other S(t)imulations

Affects may dissemble, but they can be very hard to fake. Take, for example, orgasm. Understood as affect, or series of intersecting affects bundled under the auspices of named intensity, orgasm presents useful problems regarding apparent oppositions between simulation and authenticity, intentionality and reflex, fake orgasm and the real thing. The most iconic representation of fake orgasm in popular American culture is likely Meg Ryan's magisterial performance at Katz's Deli in When Harry Met Sally. Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Ryan) are proud of defied convention by building sexless friendship across gender lines, though they both recognize the fragile indeterminacy of such relation. Sally's fake orgasm begins over sandwiches, precipitated by Harry's apparent callousness toward women: he beds them and leaves them before the sun comes up. Initially, Sally wants to shame Harry for his selfishness in the wake of intimate encounters, denouncing his post-coital flightiness as a human affront to all women. Then Sally shifts the conversation to fake orgasm, staging assault on Harry's manhood by disrupting his fantasy of sexual connoisseurship. When Harry defends his late-night departures by bragging that he doesn't hear anyone complaining, Sally wonders how he could possibly know that the women he sleeps with are really an okay as he smugly attests. Harry: What do you mean, do I I know. Sally: Because they ... Harry: Yes, because they ... Sally: And how do you know they're really ...? Harry: What are you saying? That they fake orgasm? Sally: It's possible. Harry: Get outa here. Sally: Why? Most women, at one time or another, faked it. Harry: Well they haven't faked it with me. Sally: How do you know? Harry: Because I know. Sally: Oh. That's right, I forgot-you're man. Harry: What is that supposed to mean? Sally: Nothing. It's just that all men are sure it doesn't happen to them, but most women at one time or another done it, so you do the math. Harry: You don't think that I could tell the difference? Sally: No. Harry: Get outa here. Sally then acts out raucous spectacle of feminine ecstasy, complete with moans, shouts, convulsions, and invocations of God. As her performance builds momentum, surrounding conversations hush and Sally's climax draws the rapt attention of every deli patron, one of whom deadpans to her waiter, I'll what she's having. What exactly is it that Sally is which inspires the woman next to her to it too? Can the enigmatic quality of her simulated pleasure be understood as more than spectacle for others' consumption? And in what ways do the conventions of her affectation (the moans, shouts, convulsions, and invocations of God) mimic the lived conventions of orgasm itself, determined reflexively by simulated representations of orgasm they aspire, or been disciplined, to match? To what extent does the nearby patron's desire to have what she's having express the contagious property affect and its mimetic other, affectation? I take fake orgasm as this essay's primary analytic instance because, I argue, the enigmatic enjoyments it produces are affective consequences of simulated affect. In other words, its pleasures are occasioned by, rather than antithetical to, affectation. The relationship between affect and affectation turns on the question of intentionality, highly contested concept in recent literature associated with the diverse field of affect theory. (1) The scholarly interest in affect has proven particularly influential in the study of gender and sexuality, in some ways reformulating feminist theory's long-standing attention to lived experience. At the same time, affect theory marks significant site of interdisciplinary engagement between the hard sciences and the humanities, shifting away from expressive models of affect toward theories of biological autonomy. …

Molas: Displaying the quotidian before Andy Warhol

Abstract Mola blouses have become identified with both the Kuna Indians and the nation of Panama. The iconography on mola blouses has included images from North American and Latin American popular culture since the early twentieth century. This article explores the selection and display of images of consumer and popular culture by Kuna women with the later depiction of similar quotidian images in the early work of Andy Warhol.

Cecil Beaton, Richard Hamilton and the Queer, Transatlantic Origins of Pop Art

Significant aspects of American pop art are now understood as participating in the queer visual culture of New York in the 1960s. This article suggests something similar can be said of the British origins of pop art, not only at the time of, but also prior to, the work of the Independent Group in post-war London. The interwar practices of collage of the celebrity photographer Cecil Beaton prefigured those of Richard Hamilton in that they displayed a distinctively British interpretation of male muscularity and female glamour in the United States. (Homo)eroticism in products of American popular culture such as advertising fascinated not only Beaton but also a number of members of the Independent Group, including Hamilton. The origins of pop art should, therefore, be situated in relation not only to American consumer culture but also to the ways in which that culture appeared, from certain British viewpoints, to be queerly intriguing.

Classical Traditions in Science Fiction ed. by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (review)

Reviewed by: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction ed. by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens Sarah Annes Brown Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (eds.). Classical Traditions in Science Fiction. Classical Presences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 380. $35.00 (pb.). ISBN 978–0-19–022833–0. The fourteen essays which this volume comprises explore different intersections between two fields that might at first seem worlds apart. However, there is a long tradition of harking back to the classical past when speculating about humanity’s possible future. Explorations both backwards and forwards in time are, in their different ways, speculative journeys to an “undiscovered country” (7): “The strangeness of images of the ancient past is marked by the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of futures imagined in modern SF” (18). Frankenstein, subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” is a locus classicus of this synergy between the classics and SF. An equally apt illustration is Mary Shelley’s less well known novel, The Last Man: the frame narrative, set in Shelley’s present, documents the chance discovery of a cache of Sibylline documents from the distant past which reveal mankind’s future extinction in the twenty-first century. The volume opens with four essays on “SF’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn” before addressing more recent examples of classical presences in television, film, and literary science fiction. Whereas some contributors focus on SF texts whose debt to classical culture is unmissable, others track looser ties between these two traditions, and demonstrate how each may become an illuminating lens through which to view the other. Rebecca Raphael and Brett M. Rogers offer thought-provoking discussions of shifts in the way hybridity and post-human identity have been conceptualized. George Kovacs proposes an irresistible parallel between myth-making in the classical world and Star Trek’s later myth-building. In both cases the “mythology” [End Page 131] first develops organically, before being refined in a more self-conscious age; Hellenistic sophisticates and avid Star Trek fans alike are fully aware of the divergences, contradictions, and subtexts within their traditions (203). Sometimes, where a more direct link is claimed between a SF text and a classical source, the argument seems more tenuous. Although he has interesting things to say about both works, some of the connections Joel P. Christensen identifies between Dune and the Iliad are a little generic. Erik Grayson draws suggestive parallels between the fall of Rome and the post-apocalyptic America of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz but seems to be clutching at straws in some of his attempts to tease significance out of Miller’s classicizing names. Jesse Weiner’s evidence for identifying Lucretius as a key intertext for Frankenstein is strained in places. He makes a better case, however, for the presence of Lucan’s necromantic witch Erichtho in the novel, a parallel that amplifies the monstrosity of Frankenstein himself. Although it rests on just three quotations from the Aeneid, Benjamin Eldon Stevens’ essay on Journey to the Center of the Earth presents a meticulously argued case for seeing Verne’s narrator, Axel, as a “rewritten epic hero” (91) whose own katabasis offers not a prophetic glimpse of his people’s future (as granted to Aeneas), but a scientific revelation of humanity’s past through the living fossils who dwell in the underworld. The monstrous proto-human who shepherds mastodons is a figurative father figure who replaces the ghostly presence of Anchises. There are many other highlights in this consistently stimulating collection. Tony Keen makes a thoroughly convincing case for Lucian as a significant influence on H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Marian Makins demonstrates how Panem, the dystopian society of The Hunger Games, synthesizes elements from both the historical Rome and “misrepresentations” of Rome in American popular culture in order to create “a carefully constructed hybrid reconfiguration that implicates aspects of contemporary society” (304). Gaël Grobéty offers a crisply argued analysis of how Dan Simmons, in Ilium and Olympos, both restages Homeric epiphanies and demystifies them, replacing awe at divine intervention with wonder at human ingenuity. Inevitably, any reader who already has an interest in both classical traditions and science fiction will...

Pop, Collaboration, Utopia: Bruce Conner's BREAKAWAY in 1960s Los Angeles

San Francisco artist Bruce Conner established himself as a major figure in postwar underground cinema with his first film, A MOVIE (1958), a masterpiece of found-footage montage. Yet Conner also shot several films with his own camera, many of which feature a nude or partially clothed female performer and, in some cases, a pop music sound track; these films include COSMIC RAY (1961), VIVIAN (1964), EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966), and THE WHITE ROSE (1967). This essay examines a work by Conner that combines all of these elements, 1966's BREAKAWAY, an experimental dance film he made in collaboration with Los Angeles choreographer and actress Toni Basil. Shot over a period of two years in Santa Monica, BREAKAWAY draws from Conner and Basil's mutual involvement in both the Hollywood entertainment industry and the West Coast artistic underground through its curious fusion of pop and avant-garde sensibilities. This essay argues that BREAKAWAY is an inherently collaborative and cross-disciplinary work that self-reflexively invokes the utopian aspirations of the American underground and popular culture during the mid-1960s, especially through its utilization of rock and roll, a genre rooted in vernacular African American music. To unpack these connections, BREAKAWAY is analyzed in the context of two contemporary films in which Basil played significant roles: The T.A.M.I. Show (dir. Steve Binder, US, 1964), a groundbreaking concert film that signaled a new era of on-screen racial integration, and the classic psychedelic road movie Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, US, 1969).

Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American CultureAaronLecklider. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture Aaron Lecklider. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.Although the use of the term dates back to the 1950s, the negotiation of what Lecklider calls in the US has existed since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. On one hand, there are intellectual elites such as writers, journalists, scholars, and others with formal education who often account for a large part of the upper and upper middle class. On the other hand, there are those who are frequently categorized as working class laborers and are not engaged in intellectual work. The sheer number of these laborers is large, despite their limited socioeconomic impact. Lecklider argues that the rise of mass culture and waves of social transformation helped the eggheads lose their control over cultural productions as the masses increasingly determined how a culture would develop. Consequently, the brainpower of the non-elites started to overpower that of those who were considered to be out of touch with reality. In Inventing the Egghead, Lecklider examines the history of American popular and mass culture in the twentieth century to chronicle how this negotiation occurred and how traditional intellectual minorities-working class Americans, women, racial minorities, and others -acquired intellectual authority.The author uses the term to refer to intelligence that empowered ordinary Americans who did not have access to formal higher education. Brainpower challenged existing social and political hierarchical structures and oftentimes led to their demise. This shift occurred when popular and mass culture, and not formal educational and political institutions, became the means of sharing knowledge. From Coney Island to Albert Einstein, the array of evidence the book provides is broad. For example, Luna Park at Coney Island was where tens of thousands of people, if not more, gathered for both simple and educational amusement. Early in the twentieth century, intellectual experiences at an amusement park did not top formal intellectualism. However, the fact that ordinary citizens could obtain education and intellectual experiences through mass popular culture signaled the egghead negotiation which was to come during the following century. For example, even though many intellectuals at the time were confused by intricate works by Einstein, Lecklider argues that he simultaneously gave a sense of hope to many Americans that perhaps one day they would become intellectuals like himself. In other words, Einstein embodied the negotiation between the intellectual elites and non-elites, enemies and friends, and fear for and the fascination of the unknown. …