American Popular Culture Research Articles

From ‘Madonna’ to ‘Whore’: Sexuality, pregnancy, and popular culture

Pregnant bodies are often perceived to be sites of reproductive beauty in American popular culture; however, the intersection of pregnancy and sexuality elicits reactions ranging from cultural disgust to fetishization. Using Foucauldian discourse theory, I look at how cultural ambivalence about pregnant women who have sex manifests in varied popular culture texts. Ambivalence, I argue, appears through the medicalization of pregnant sexuality (asexualizing), compulsory heterosexuality and pregnancy pornography (hypersexualizing). I also include feminist responses that disrupt the asexual/hypersexual binary.

A Furious Battleground: World War I and the Development of Jazz in American Popular Culture

Any examination of jazz in the 1910s routinely includes some discussion of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) and Lieutenant James Reese Europe. The ODJB, often decried as imitators rather than innovators, occupy a precarious position in the jazz narrative. While scholars generally recognize the ODJB as the first band to release a jazz recording, this recognition is tempered by ongoing debates as to the appropriateness of labeling their music as jazz, at all. James Reese Europe also holds a precarious place in the history of jazz as scholars struggle to meaningfully place his music within the transitional ether separating jazz from the ragtime craze that preceded it.While these discussions are well-worn to many, there is another aspect to any understanding of jazz in the 1910s, including the roles played by the ODJB or James Reese Europe, which needs to be more fully explored—the impact of World War I on American society, and how the development of jazz intersected with the war itself (rather than simply as a result of the massive social upheaval in the conflict's aftermath). By exploring the social tensions at play on the home front and the unprecedented experience of Americans on the warfront, the Great War context from which jazz emerged provides new insights into the jazz narrative of these critical early years.

Jumping Publics: Magdy El Shafee's Cairo Comics

This essay proposes that “circulation” is a useful rubric for thinking about the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel and its relationship to democracy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new generation of Cairo-based writers employed innovative forms and linguistic experimentation drawn from a global cultural palette while exploring domestic or local themes. Like their Egyptian literary forerunners, these young writers addressed social and political questions, but both the urban and the geopolitical context within which they worked had altered dramatically as a result of the impact of the digital revolution. Much of the new Egyptian literature employs or invokes American forms or is in dialogue with American literary genres, software, and popular culture, all made newly or more easily accessible via digital and Internet technologies. The ways in which foreign or outside forms are taken up in the work of these writers is, in turn, more complex than simple appropriation and requires developing a method for reading that takes circulation into account. By way of example, the second part of the essay focuses on the comics of Magdy el Shafee (1961–), whose 2008 work Metro is generally considered the first Egyptian graphic novel, and includes shorter discussion of fiction by Ahmed Alaidy (1974–) and literary nonfiction by Omar Taher (1974–). The essay argues that readers must take questions of circulation and the interplay of transnational and local publics into account in order to appreciate the changed contexts within which Egyptian literature operates in the twenty-first century.

Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture

Review of: Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture by Anna Thompson Hajdik.

Gangstagrass: Hybridity and popular culture in Justified

Abstract This article looks at the role of two of the most iconic figures in American popular culture: the gangster and the westerner. Drawing on genre theory from film and television, the way in which the westerner has been displaced by the gangster as the most common signifier of American identity is explored, focussing specifically on the television series Justified (2010-). The southern location of the series further complicates the set of referents by mobilizing aspects of Southern Gothic. While the western and the gangster film have often been viewed as oppositional in terms of location, era and their respective musings on and articulation of American identity, this article argues that the hybridity of genres in popular culture opens up a wider space in which to address aspects of myth, history and social concerns.

Latinos and American popular culture

Latinos and American popular culture

Ruinopolis: Post-Imperial Theory and Learning from Las Vegas

This essay foregrounds a dimension of Las Vegas that other authors only touch on inpassing: its connections to empire. The authors propose a post-imperial analysis of thecity based on a reconstruction of its history and a reading of the traces of this history inthe city’s architecture and its self-presentation in American popular culture. Thisanalysis of Las Vegas as ruinopolis draws attention to the ruin sites of the city and itshinterland, reading them through the lens of empire. We work out the imperialterritoriality of Las Vegas, including the derelict space of the Las Vegas Paiute IndianColony, the ‘Pentagon Desert’around the city with its so-called ‘national sacrifice zone’,and the Strip, with Caesars Palace. We conclude with a post-imperial reading of Venturi,Scott Brown and Izenour’s canonical Learning from Las Vegas and of the ruin signs ofthe Neon Boneyard.

Pirates and Piracy in American Popular Culture

Abstract Piracy is both an ancient and a modern social ill. Yet in American popular culture pirates have emerged as dashing heroic figures and Robin Hoods of the Sea. Some examples of this transformation of the pirate image from criminal to popular hero are explored in British and American fiction, cinema and other forms of popular culture.

Going to the dogs: greyhound racing, animal activism, and American popular culture

Going to the dogs: greyhound racing, animal activism, and American popular culture

The Emergence of Basketball as an American National Pastime: From a Popular Participant Sport to a Spectacle of Nationhood

Invented in the USA in 1891, basketball immediately proved a popular pastime among those who played the game but it did not initially rank in the estimation of most American observers as a national pastime. By the twenty-first century, however, basketball had become acclaimed by the media and fans as one of a trio of team sports that stood as national pastimes, alongside baseball and American football. Promoters of basketball have since its invention promoted it as worthy of national pastime status but for much of the first century of its existence it did not quite meet that threshold. Beloved in certain regions and among certain groups, widely played but not as widely watched, basketball remained until the last quarter of the twentieth century outside of the boundaries that denoted national pastime status to most observers in the USA. Beginning in that era, however, a confluence of forces catapulted the game into national pastime status, a new eminence in American popular culture underscored by the debut of Michael Jordan and the ‘Dream Team’ at the 1992 Olympics.

The Portrayal of White Anxiety in South Park’s “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson”

Humor lends itself as a convenient tool to address sensitive issues such as race. Since 1997, the TV series South Park with its brash satire and rampant irony has been a prime example of how such issues are negotiated in American popular culture. However, the utilization of highly rhetorical devices such as satire or irony has divided scholars on whether the series promotes or stifles social discourse on race and ethnicity. In this article, I examine the episode “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson” (2007), focusing on how white feelings of anxiety are portrayed in this episode that is permeated by racial tension. The particular representation wavers between a social critique of the state of race relations in the United States and a portrayal of white anxiety as hindering open discourse on the topic. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that the scenes containing elements of white anxiety are portrayed in such a way as to critique the current dysfunctional state of race relations in the United States, urging viewers to critically consider issues of race rather than to inhibit such discourse.

American Indians and Popular Culture. Vol. 1, Media, Sports, and Politics, and vol. 2, Literature, Arts, and Resistance. edited by Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman

American Indians and Popular Culture. Vol. 1, Media, Sports, and Politics, and vol. 2, Literature, Arts, and Resistance. edited by Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman

<em>Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World</em>, Eric Charry, ed.

Reviewed by: Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World ed. by Eric Charry Nana Abena Dansowaa Amoah Charry, Eric, ed. 2012. Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 404 pp. $25.16 Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World, edited by Eric Charry, is a set of twelve essays on rap and hip-hop on the African continent. Charry, a distinguished professor of music, contends, “American rap was the source for African rap” (p. 3). Consequently, he has assembled remarkable essays by experts who offer deep historical and cultural connections showing how Africans shape rap to fit their local circumstances. Invariably, the volume offsets the attention that is unequally paid to the experiences of African hip-hop music from the continent. Toward that end, most of the essays focus on compelling stories of how “the genre has become one of the most relevant forms of expression for African youth” (p. 1). According to Charry, “African youth continually search for new ways to make rap relevant and unique, which often means digging through local culture, almost like American DJs will crate-dig; search through crates of obscure vinyl record albums for new sounds” which eventually helped the connection with African culture through rap (p. 18). In varied ways, the essays collected here consider rap as “appropriating, integrating, and transforming a foreign art form into a locally meaningful genre . . . [providing] a rich laboratory in which to view [the] process of change” (p. 300). These essays—contributed from Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Côte d’lvoire, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania—examine the conditions, motivations, and experiences that attended the birth of hip-hop in Africa. The contents of the book, grouped into six parts, show that rap is not limited to American popular culture, but has exponents in Africa. The authors become conversant with young hip-hoppers in Africa, looking to the United States for legitimization of their own culture—perhaps an issue for urban elites more than rural Africans. This phenomenon underscores everyday popular culture. As a result, several of the essays demonstrate how a focus on African hip-hop expands the range of plausible responses embraced in contemporary music. The essays essentially argue that rap is a “recent tradition, originally associated with a specific place and culture but rooted in aesthetics that developed in the Americas” (p. 308). Part one of the volume has two chapters. The first, “The Birth of Ghanaian Hip Life: Urban Style, Black Thought, Proverbial Speech,” contributed by Jesse Weaver Shipley, an anthropologist, discusses the “confluence of styles” (p. 30) that led to the birth of hip life in the late 1990s. It demonstrates [End Page 85] how the naturalization of this genre builds upon such important genres as “elite youth transformation of American hip hop,” “privatization of media,” and “state appropriation of youth taste” (p. 30). In combining such an eclectic mix of performance traditions into a locally significant form, it emphasizes that hip life intermingles African diasporic influence with the legacy of proverb-based Akan language performance genres and the rapid development of commercial electronic media in Accra. Subsequently, hip life is not characterized by a particular rhythm or lyrical flow, but by a creative style for mixing diverse African and diasporic performance practices and signs. The second chapter in this part, “A Genre Coming of Age: Transformation, Difference, and Authenticity in the Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture of South Africa,” is contributed by Lee Watkins, an ethnomusicologist, who here unveils the authenticity of rap music, expressively mobilized and contested in various spheres and spaces. For example, Watkins examines South African hip-hop in the late 1990s in the light of such issues as “racism, marginalization, and musical creativity embedded in local and global frames” (p. 58). For a deeper and easier understanding, he discusses this chapter in sections, including “a description of the numerous hip hop scenes in South Africa, including Cape Town, Johannesburg, [and] Durban[,] and the seriously neglected music studies of the Eastern Cape such as Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth” (p. 58). The second and third sections explore the issues emerging in these locations, contextualizing hip...

Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868 by Courtney Weikle-Mills (review)

Reviewed by: Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868 by Courtney Weikle-Mills Martha Coralynne Rapp (bio) Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868, by Courtney Weikle-Mills. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. I never imagined a book on early American children’s literature could so inform the course I teach on contemporary American popular culture. The argument sustained throughout the discussion of early American texts in Imaginary Citizens substantiates my contention that our nation is founded on contradictions that have to be accepted as such. Courtney Weikle-Mills deftly balances existing scholarship with unique historical insights, engages traditional theory (Locke, Rousseau) as well as contemporary thought (Foucault, Bhabha), and maintains a lucid objectivity that encourages the reader’s own subjective response. Yet, at the same time, she argues for blurriness; from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, the distinction between adult and child waxes, wanes, and at times overlaps. The comparison between children and citizens—between freedom and subjection—became one of the primary anxieties about American citizenship. According to Weikle-Mills, the nation’s most lasting preoccupation is “the simultaneous fantasy and fear that American citizenship might be naive, immature, and juvenile at its heart” (94). Currently, scholars from various disciplines debate the infantilization of American society, with fingers often pointed at visual media. Imaginary Citizens enters into the conversation by providing historical context for this concern, revealing an elemental conflict at the root of the American mindset. The title connotes Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”: people without face-to-face contact who imagine themselves as part of a collective social unit due to shared ideologies disseminated by print capitalism. Like Anderson, Weikle-Mills does not use the term “imagined” to mean unreal or illusory; instead, imagination is a way of seeing or understanding. As seventeenth-century colonists transitioned from subjects to citizens, children presented a problem of political identification. As inheritors of the new nation, it was imperative that they envision themselves as part of the collective pronoun in “We the [End Page 275] People”: “early American texts placed pressure on private relationships and public printed materials to produce citizens who would consent imaginatively to that contract and would understand themselves as participating even when they could not do so directly” (66). Weikle-Mills argues that literary texts designed for and read by children were fundamental in creating “imaginary citizens” at a time when actual citizenship had not yet been defined. The Puritans of the New England colonies were more concerned about their children’s religious affiliation than their political allegiance, although the two were related. Considered too young to have had a conversion experience, children were barred from church membership, and thus from civic participation. Yet the roles of adults and children often overlapped, as the latter who held property were allowed to vote. Laws passed in the early 1640s required children to learn to read the Bible; in Massachusetts, they were required to learn the common laws of the state. Even while civic membership was still rooted in religion, these laws gave rise to imaginary citizenship in its nascent form. It was not until 1868 and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution that a formal definition was instituted: all who are born in the nation are American citizens. Instead of ameliorating confusion, however, the amendment established a contradiction that the nation has attempted to balance ever since. It reflects Locke’s philosophy that children are born with the right to independence; however, Locke also maintained that children must submit to the governance of their parents until they are old enough to have developed the capacity for Reason. The amendment also reflects the spirit of the Revolution, during which British newspapers portrayed the American colonies as unruly children rebelling against their parents, the patriarchal monarchy. Since the nation’s inception, the child has metaphorically represented the American citizen—both are free, but necessarily subjected to governance. This contradiction can only be overcome in the mind: “[i] maginary citizenship is what happens when political ideals come up against their practical limitations, causing crises of legitimization” (25). As the infant nation grew, it met challenges...

From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira from Origin to Oblivion

From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira from Origin to Oblivion Christopher Bolton (bio) Let me begin with my own origin story. It was in March 1990 at the Music Box Theater in Chicago that I first saw Akira, and as the anime unfolded from its astonishing opening sequence, it set off a reaction in me. It was one of a series of encounters with Japanese film and fiction that year that propelled a software engineer improbably into graduate school in Japanese literature, as if the light coming off the theater screen had changed me in parallel with the film’s story of psychic radiation, mutation, and transformation. 1 And clearly I was not alone. For anyone seeking the origins of the anime boom in the United States, Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s 1988 film is an irresistible starting point. One of the most lavishly produced anime to date, Akira brought anime from U.S. TV screens onto movie screens, a format suited to the epic physical scale of Ōtomo’s story. Even its limited U.S. theatrical release in 1989 and 1990 attracted wide attention from audiences and critics. This has led many to identify Akira as the origin or ground zero for the explosion of anime’s popularity in North America in the 1990s. 2 In what follows I will examine Akira’s critical reception in the United States, to ask what was unique about this film at the time and what remains remarkable twenty-five years later. Paradoxically, Akira has been regarded [End Page 295] both as a watershed moment in the history of anime and as an attempt to erase history itself, based primarily on its frenetic visuals and complex plot. I would like to look more concretely at the visual language of Akira by comparing it with a similar story in a different medium, the epic Akira manga that Ōtomo authored in parallel with the film. The comparison shows more specifically how the visual language of the film and the manga support or undermine the search for the kind of historical and political narratives we might associate with decisive origins or causes. GROUND ZERO: AKIRA’S NUCLEAR ORIGINS The characterization of Akira as a kind of bombshell that set off the anime boom is all the more tempting given the film’s opening sequence, which is a literal explosion. The film fades in on an aerial view of a city, with the superimposed title “1988.7.16. Tokyo” (the date of the film’s Japanese release). As the camera pans up to take in more and more of the distant city, there is the sound of wind on the otherwise silent soundtrack, and then a dome of alternating light and darkness appears at a distant point in the city’s center. It illuminates the entire city in a harsh glare and then expands toward the viewer, sweeping away the city, until the light fills the frame (Figure 1). Slowly, an aerial view of a new, transformed city resolves itself out of this whiteness. An echoing drumbeat marks a transition to a more musical soundtrack, and a second title appears: “31 years after WW III. AD 2019 Neo Tokyo.” This ninety-second opening image—of a detonation that heralds violent change and renewal—became a metaphor for the influence of Akira on North American popular culture and anime’s fortunes in the United States. As one popular guide to anime has it, “Just as the bubble of Japan’s economy of the 1980s was about to burst, a bomb of a more positive nature detonated, with the premier of Akira.”3 But of course the more disturbing parallel is between this opening detonation and the atomic bombings of Japan. To see Akira in the United States in 1990 was to be transported back in history to the moment of Hiroshima at the very same instant one seemed to be lifted out of the story and out of the theater to see a flash of a new future for Japanese film (Figure 2).4 In fact, these two senses of the explosion—as a celebratory, artistic, even metatextual one that seems to productively explode the rules or boundaries a...

„Na ducha Lenina!” Historia sowieckich bohaterów komiksowych w popkulturze amerykańskiej

Napięcie między Związkiem Radzieckim a StanamiZjednoczonymi, definiujące światowy polityczny krajobrazdrugiej połowy dwudziestego wieku, miało swoje wyraźneprzełożenie na sposoby postrzegania i kreacji sowieckichbohaterów w ramach amerykańskiej kultury. Pierwszymi podstawowym celem naszego artykułu jest prześledzeniei opisanie funkcjonowania konkretnego motywu – figurRosjan, w szczególności zaś rosyjskich meta-ludzi w przestrzeniamerykańskiej kultury popularnej, przede wszystkimkomiksu głównonurtowego. Kwerenda ta ma w miarę możliwościwykazać podstawowy wymiar historyczny tj. okresywzrostu i spadku popularności, a nawet całkowitego zanikuposzukiwanej figury. Celem drugim jest analiza sposobówkonstrukcji komiksowych bohaterów związanychze Związkiem Radzieckim i postawienie ich w szerszymkontekście historyczno-kulturowym. Te zabiegi umożliwiąz kolei zasygnalizowanie zmieniającej się w czasie konstrukcji,na którą składają się wartości, stereotypy i popkulturoweklisze właściwe dla kultury amerykańskiej. Tym samymmamy nadzieję, że artykuł ten stanie się ważnym przyczynkiemdo dalszych badań nad omawianymi zagadnieniami.

Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film by Shilpa S. Davé (review)

Reviewed by: Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film by Shilpa S. Davé Sara Humphreys Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film. By Shilpa S. Davé. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2013. In The Company We Keep (1989), Wayne Booth narrates a poignant anecdote that provides insight into the importance of Shilpa Davé’s Indian Accents: at a meeting to decide which texts to include for the upcoming academic year, Dr. Paul Moses, an African-American professor, stated that he could not teach Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) because of Twain’s minstrel representation of black masculinity. His colleagues, including Booth, were outraged—could he not see the importance of Huckleberry Finn as an example of good American literature? However, the academic value of the book was not so much of a concern to Dr. Moses as the book’s cultural work. Davé clearly has a similar goal in Indian Accents. She is concerned about the ways in which the formulaic modes of South Asian masculinity in popular American culture affects readers/viewers, and, as a result, she provides a perceptive reading of who gets to be called fully “American” and who does not. By providing cultural readings of what are, quite frankly, beloved characters that are embedded in American culture, Davé explains that these venerable characters, such as Apu in The Simpsons, narrate a monological version of South Asian masculine identity. She also clearly shows through a wide-ranging list of examples, from Peter Sellers’ turn as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968) to Mike Myers’ portrayal of Guru Maurice Pitka in The Love Guru (2008) that the visual markers of race are harnessed to linguistic performance. Unfortunately, except for the excellent chapter on Apu, most of the book is under-theorized. While Davé claims to be analyzing accents, she does not use the tools of sociolinguistics as effectively as she needs to in order to develop her arguments fully. Further, she engages very few, if any, of the major theorists one might expect to see, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Teun van Dijk, and Norman Fairclough. It’s not simply the lack of a clear theoretical framework that hampers the book, but there is little in the way of linguistic analysis of a character’s actual language, such as her analysis of the John Wayne accent Apu affects in the episode “Much Apu About Nothing.” What lexis does Apu use? How are the words emphasized? How does the accent linguistically affect the relationships between characters in the scene? Why not provide more discussion of his accent particularly in post-9/11 episodes, in which his character undergoes certain linguistic changes? In sum, this book offers a much needed corrective to the portrayal of South Asian masculinity in American popular [End Page 181] culture and is, therefore, a valuable addition to the field. However, the book’s claims to supply a sociolinguistic analysis of these characters is overblown. This is a book that offers limited linguistic analysis of “Indian accents”; a great deal of valuable cultural analysis of “Indian accents”; and important explanations of the social and historical contexts of “Indian accents” in the U.S. Sara Humphreys Trent University, Canada Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

« IRISH ACCENTS DRIVE ME NUTS »: THE REPRESENTATION OF IRISH SPEECH IN DC COMICS

This article investigates the depiction of Irish speech and Irishness in American popular culture. It compares the language of Irish superheroes in the Marvel universe with that of Irish characters who appear in DC comics. It shows that the linguistic description of the characters hinges on perceived salient features and it discusses differences between the two comic-book worlds, as well as the question of to what degree the two representations are grounded in reality.

EDITORIAL: Trials of celebrity

THIS ISSUE of Pacific Journalism Review engages with the theme of the dynamics of fame in a small country. In contrast to the dominant focus in the newly emergent field of Celebrity Studies on celebrity as a global phenomenon, the emphasis in this issue is on the interface between the global and the local; on questions of how the distinctiveness of national and local values fares when caught up in or of willingly imitating the circulation of global fame and influence. Accounts of celebrity often focus on the notion of fetishism—the complex process through which specific idols become objects of veneration on whose admirable or even infamous qualities are presented as emanating from the inner recesses of a luminous personality. The importance of this aspect of celebrity and celebrity worship is not to be denied. But there is another feature of celebrity and stardom that complements and energises the engagement of fans, the interest of the general public and the ambitions of the press and media to create and sustain a market for copy. Celebrities and stars are also totems that create a sense of unity, an imagined community. Individuals express and explore a sense of collective identity, define rituals of belonging, separate themselves from others and manage the relationship between society and nature—in the case of celebrities, the nature in question, is most often, human nature (Rojek, 2012, pp. 130-131). In the case of small countries, like New Zealand, the internal impact of Hollywood stars and celebrities on American popular culture is intensified by the fact that the celebrity system is a totemic import. Patterns and processes for rewarding talent and ascribing fame that have reached the acme of intensity in Global Hollywood, interface with locally situated systems of beliefs and values. This might be seen as a process of colonisation—and to an extent it is.

Kookie Thoughts: Imagining the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble)

In 1967, at the International and Universal Exposition (Expo 67 in Montreal), American government planners and their collaborators in the private sector revolutionized how the United States participated at world's fairs. They transformed the ways in which architecture, design, and exhibits could come together in a stunning visual endpoint. The choice of 1960s social visionary and design guru F. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome (“Bucky’s Bubble”) for the US Pavilion structure proved a coup, as did the Marshall McLuhan-inspired Cambridge Seven design team that created the Pavilion interior of platforms joined by criss-crossing bridges and escalators. This article incorporates an analysis of four linked elements of the US Expo 67 design project. First, it conceives of the US Pavilion at the edge of US empire. Second, it suggests that, improbably, planners found success in the mix of earlier world’s fair grand designs with a new minimalist modernity. Third, Pavilion design and content reflected the influence of Andy Warhol and other artists whose work was transforming gay camp into mass camp in American popular culture. Finally, the project drew on a secret World War II US army collaboration between three key Expo 67 planners, whose wartime specialty had been in military deception, to complete the visual revolution at the US Pavilion.