Culture Association Conference Research Articles

Cultural and Linguistic Misrepresentations in Disney's The Princess and the Frog

Cultural and Linguistic Misrepresentations in Disney's <i>The Princess and the Frog</i>

Winner of the William M. Jones Award at the 2021 Popular Culture Association Conference

An array of 22 dancers stride cheerfully in unison across the proscenium stage toward a jam-packed audience, often as richly diverse as the dancers themselves. Audience members take to their feet, singing, clapping, dancing in the aisle, an experience--that by choreographer's intention--recalls the celebratory abandon of a Black church revival. The magnetism of Ailey's Revelations has captivated audiences worldwide for over six decades. Through extensive domestic and international touring by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Revelations has appeared on six continents since its premiere. Revelations (1960) is the most performed and most viewed choreographic work of the twentieth century. During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, a full-length recording of Revelations streamed on YouTube for over a year, providing hundreds of thousands of viewers free access to the piece from their computer screens.

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2019 Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference: Collaborating in a Continuous Present: Language and the Performing Body in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts

The Journal of American CultureVolume 42, Issue 4 p. 335-344 Original Article Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2019 Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference: Collaborating in a Continuous Present: Language and the Performing Body in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts Jocelyn E. Marshall, Jocelyn E. MarshallSearch for more papers by this author Jocelyn E. Marshall, Jocelyn E. MarshallSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 December 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13096Read 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 Volume42, Issue4December 2019Pages 335-344 RelatedInformation

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2018 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference: The “Amusement Economist:” J.H. Haverly and the Modernization of the American Minstrel Show

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2018 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference: The “Amusement Economist:” J.H. Haverly and the Modernization of the American Minstrel Show

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2017 American Culture Association Conference

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2017 American Culture Association ConferenceThe figure of the nanny looms large in the popular imagination. From popular films and stories about nannies (Mary Poppins, The Help, The Nanny Diaries, Nanny McPhee, Supernanny) to Nannygate scandals over cheating celebrity husbands and illegitimate children (Ben Affleck, Gavin Rossdale, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to name just a few), the nanny is and long has been a site of contestation: beloved, treasured, neglected, threatening, comforting, working, and domestic woman. Although male nannies can and do exist-as do racialized, underpaid, unregulated, and/or migrant domestic workers (Leonard; Romero)-the popular imaginary prefers its nannies to be white, often British, heterosexual, and, increasingly, young and sexualized women (Leonard).Nannies are central to discussions about working families and, more specifically, working mothers. What does it mean for children, for families, and for patriarchy to have women out of the house, working? What does it mean for capitalist patriarchal societies to have often female workers entering into the domestic family space and providing paid caregiving? As recent work on recession-era western society has observed, the divides between public/private spheres, domestic/paid labor and home/work lives are becoming increasingly precarious in neoliberal societies (Weber, Reality Gendervision). The broadening insecurity of work; the rise of affective forms of labor; and the imperative to work longer, harder and in newly monetized ways have unsettled long-standing gender roles in relation to work (Negra and Tasker). As popular culture struggles to reflect and assuage these concerns, the romanticization of the nanny figure might be subsiding. A new iteration of the young white female nanny has emerged in an unlikely place-posttelevision.1Netflix's sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-), which was cocreated by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock (the same team behind NBC's 30 Rock), speaks to concerns over domesticity, entrapment, and female caregivers. Perhaps because of its unique platform, Kimmy is a comedy series that centers on a rather unpalatable premise-the aftermath of one woman's escape from captivity. Under the pretense of an impending apocalypse, Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (played by Jon Hamm) kidnapped and held four women in a bunker in Durnsville, for fifteen years before they were rescued in the first episode of the series. Upon being set free, one of the so-called Indiana Molewomen, Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper), decides to move to New York to start her new life. Her new job, however, puts her right back into another domestic setting-a rich New York mother hires her as nanny.This move from enforced domesticity to chosen (professionalized) domesticity is unique in popular representations of nannies, and could perhaps point to some of the ways in which alternative or posttelevision platforms are offering more progressive content than that screened on mainstream networks and cinemas. By breaking with common tropes that infantilize, sexualize and glamorize domestic workers, Kimmy challenges traditional conceptions of gendered labor, the pitting of mothers and nannies against one another, and the Cinderella narrative that has come to dominate postfeminist popular culture. Instead of offering retreatism as the solution to the violence faced by women everyday-both at work and at home-Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt refuses the work/home divide that is central to capitalist patriarchal logic and offers its audience a unique, if somewhat ambivalent view on working life for women in America today.Nannies and Feminism OnscreenPostfeminist popular culture is one arena in which the ambivalence toward women's working life has been depicted. Such portrayals reflect the long-standing concerns of and around western feminism of the relationship between women and work. …

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2016 American Culture Association Conference

The Journal of American CultureVolume 39, Issue 3 p. 313-322 Original Article Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2016 American Culture Association Conference “This is the End, My Friend”: Aural Focalizations of Trauma in Apocalypse Now (1979) and Vietnam Combat Films Amanda Greer, Amanda GreerSearch for more papers by this author Amanda Greer, Amanda GreerSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 September 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12571Read 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 Volume39, Issue3September 2016Pages 313-322 RelatedInformation

Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos

Did you see the videos where the cat jumps in the box, attacks the printer or tries to leap from the snowy car? As the availability and popularity of watching videos on the Internet has risen rapidly in the last decade, so has the prevalence of cat videos. Although the cuteness of YouTube videos of cats might make them appear frivolous, in fact there is a significant irony at their heart: online cat videos enable corporate surveillance of viewers, yet viewers seem just as oblivious to this as the cats featured in the videos. Towards this end, I consider the distinguishing features of contemporary cat videos, focusing particularly on their narrative structure and mode of observation. I compare cat videos with the “Aesthetic of Astonishment” of early cinema and with dog videos, to explore the nexus of a spectatorship of thrills and feline performance. In particular, I highlight a unique characteristic of these videos: the cats’ unselfconsciousness. This, I argue, is rare in a consumer culture dominated by surveillance, where we are constantly aware of the potential for being watched. The unselfconsciousness of cats in online videos offers viewers two key pleasures: to imagine the possibility of freedom from surveillance, and to experience the power of administering surveillance as unproblematic. Ultimately, however, cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box

From Acid Revolution to Entheogenic Evolution: Psychedelic Philosophy in the Sixties and Beyond : Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2013 American Culture Association Conference

From Acid Revolution to Entheogenic Evolution: Psychedelic Philosophy in the Sixties and Beyond : Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2013 American Culture Association Conference

Critical interpretive synthesis for informing collection decisions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report on the use of the critical interpretive synthesis (CIS) method as a potential tool for aiding library selection decisions.Design/methodology/approachCIS was used to model research trends in the intersection of journalism and popular culture using presentation titles collected from five years of Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference programs (2007‐2011).FindingsCIS was determined to be effective for focusing a subject selector's current awareness activities.Research limitations/implicationsConsidering the limited information provided in the PCA/ACA programs, the researchers were required to analyze the intent of many of the presentations from their titles and the titles of the sessions where they were given.Originality/valueCIS is a flexible means of systematically producing explanatory theories directly from the data that, while new to library and information science, is useful for modeling cutting‐edge research for current awareness activities.

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2010 American Culture Association Conference : American Nightmare: Images of Brainwashing, Thought Control, and Terror in Soviet Russia

This manuscript was winner of the 2010 William M. Jones Award for the Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in American Culture at the American Culture Association Conference.

Corporate Calling Cards: Advertising Trade Cards and Logos in the United States, 1876–1890

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2009 American Culture Association Conference On May 10, 1876, the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia opened its doors to an excited and enthusiastic public. The Exposition marked the explosion of large-scale corporate capitalism and consumerism after the Civil War and functioned as both a self-congratulatory political event and a showcase for industrial capitalist progress in the United States. Exhibit organizers designed the program to highlight American progress as part of the commemoration of the Revolution, dividing the displays into departments such as manufacturing, textiles, furniture, tools, motors/transportation, engineering, public works, and graphic arts, and intellectual, moral, and physical improvement. The fair introduced a host of new technologies and other developments that would have lasting impacts on the lives of Americans, including the telephone and various refrigeration processes. Exhibitors traveled from every corner of the country and abroad to present their information and products to fairgoers (Rydell 10-21). Many of them clamored for fairgoers' attention and trust, promoting unfamiliar brandname products such as Fleischmann's yeast and Libby's canned meats. These exhibitors distributed pocket-sized advertisements called trade - 3 x 5 in. lithographed with colorful images and descriptive text that authenticated the wares for sale with testimonials and expert advice. Visitors moved through the Exposition collecting these portable lithographs along with holiday greeting cards, calling (similar to today's business cards), and other printed materials from the fair. Indeed, the nation's centennial celebration marked the beginning of the widespread commercial use of trade and a popular cultural fascination with them as reflected in the art of scrapbooking. At his booth at the Philadelphia Exposition, lithographer Louis Prang distributed trade to the public along with his art prints, catalogs, and sample greeting cards. Traveling to the fair from Boston, Prang had learned the fundamental principles of color mixing, dyeing, printing, and engraving from his father, a Prussian textile printer. The young Prang opened his own lithographic firm in 1860 and began publishing chromolithographie art prints, calendars, and greeting before expanding his operation to produce advertising material in the early 1870s. Capitalizing on the growing popularity of trade in American culture, Prang developed the trade card (Figure 1), a blank card with a generic image and a space where a retailer could add his own information and location (McClinton 73-74). Many fairgoers saved these colorful alongside greeting and other printed ephemera as memorable souvenirs of the Exposition by pasting and preserving them in scrapbooks. Indeed, the 1876 fair marks a watershed in the popularity of scrapbooking as a leisure practice among middle-class consumers, women, and children as the moment when cards were introduced to the general public by Louis Prang. By the 1880s, trade were distributed by nearly every retailer across the United States and collected by countless Americans for scrapbook use (Jay 99). This study traces the use of stock and custom trade as advertisements from the introduction of stock at the 1876 Exposition to trade cards' decline as popular collectibles in the 1890s. The year 1876 marks a moment in the early formation and integration of the national market through newly formed transportation and communication networks, when mass production made possible competition between nationally marketed and locally produced goods, and when large-scale manufacturers realized that, in order to compete with local goods, they had to win the confidence of individual consumers. How did manufacturers authenticate their products to win over skeptical consumers? …

Be‐in‐tween the Spa[ ]ces: The Location of Women and Subversion in Jazz

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2007 American Culture Association Conference It is surprising and disturbing to find an area of discourse where the location of women and questions of gender have seldom been addressed, especially one as large and as problematic as jazz. Rather like the Bermuda Triangle, is a mysterious, curious area of complicated intersections where women frequently disappear. However, within the vanishing point, and within the representations of its location on the map of music history, is a site of subversion in performance and language, where power is asserted and appropriated and undermined. Like elusive and untranscribable blue notes, women in exist, invisible, in-between the spaces, creating voices through subversion and speaking in ways that are nearly impossible to transcribe into a discourse traditionally owned by men, and where questions of gender are nearly always overshadowed by questions of race. Language surrounds and is embedded within it, in ways that frequently intersect and interweave, and ways that often become problematic because of these very intersections and inter-weavings. These intersections in the discourse are part of why jazz, why music not just passively reflect society; it also serves as a public forum within which various models of gender organization (along with many other aspects of social life) are asserted, adopted, contested, and negotiated (McClary, qtd. in Heble 142). The avoidance of jazzwomen-and more particularly, jazzwomen instrumentalists - is a deliberate lack constructed in the hegemonic discourse to veil the crisis of identity within jazz. Identity comes to crisis when an idea assumed to be static is displaced, and replaced, with doubt and uncertainty (Mercer, qtd. in Heble 11). Because the area of discourse surrounding women questions constructions of gender-and of race - the women instrumentalists must be removed from the discourse of so that the construction of as a masculine space cannot be destabilized. Women have been playing and singing since began in the late 180Os, but in order to play women have had to pass as men, perform as men, pass as white, and pass as black. By performing aspects of identities that are generally naturalized, according to hegemonic white male discourse, women have had to be largely written out of jazz, in order to prevent them from rewriting the power structure of discourse itself. Jazz in/as Language-Masculine Space To musicians, jazz is the system of language surrounding the music, the language used to describe the music, to discuss the music (Monson 85). Even within language, systems for talking about can differ significantly, from in academic language, in music critic's/reporter's language, and in the slang language of the musician's community. With the acceptance of into the university, music departments have created not only majors, but also academic language for discussing jazz. The distinction between academic language and the critical language of newspapers and magazines is important because although the language in academia is not necessarily jargon packed, it does revolve around a white European musical tradition and also creates the canon of sanctioned by university music scholars. The language used by newspapers and magazines does not create the same sort of intellectually sanctioned canon, although the two languages are similar in that they are predominately used by white men, and both languages can be said to center around exclusion. Within the space created by these two languages, singers are not real musicians, women are largely ignored, and men are portrayed according to how well they can play-the better a male musician's chops, the more likely he is to be idolized within the canon. Color becomes problematic within these languages because male musicians are put into color binaries, either misrepresenting musicians as black, or overlooking musicians that are nonwhite and nonblack, with few exceptions. …

Caps, Canes, and Coonskins: Princeton and the Evolution of Collegiate Clothing, 1900–1930

Winner of the Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2007 American Culture Association Conference The study of fashion is proving to be far less capricious than it was considered two decades ago; the subject has received attention from scholars ranging from anthropologists (e.g., Tranberg Hansen; Eicher) to sociologists (e.g., Davis; Crane) to scholars of material culture (e.g., Barnard; Steele). However, it is the visual manifestations of fashion that have most often caught the eye of scholars; fashion photographs, designer's illustrations, magazine layouts, and the garments themselves document the dramatic shift in the American wardrobe over the course of the twentieth century. While the evolution of the era's aesthetic is well-studied, questions remain as to how specific trends evolved and came to national prominence. There has been limited inquiry into the social, cultural, and economic forces that bring fashion trends to life and inexorably lead to their demise.1 This is a case study of the clothing worn by students at Princeton University between 1900 and 1925. It aims to demonstrate how the University's homogenous student body actively crafted a clothing style to fit their leisure-focused lifestyle. Long before sportswear was acceptable street attire, Princeton men wore it on a daily basis to socialize and to study. Clothing carried much currency on the Princeton campus and one's tie, hat, or lapel decoration told of his social standing. Yet not everyone enjoyed the privilege of participating in the campus's fashion system. Freshmen were forced by convention-and roving bands of sophomores-to wear a specified uniform, consisting of a black sweater, corduroy pants, and black shoes. This well adhered to pecking order actively controlled the clothing of all students. Each class was allowed more and more freedom, and, by the spring of their senior year, students earned the right to wear the coveted beer suit-a white canvas suit perfect for protecting Brooks Brothers jackets from leaky keg taps. Both gender and class provide analytical frameworks for this study. The sportswear worn on the campus year-round signaled a dramatic shift in menswear styles and in notions of manhood. The article explores how the University's elitist and self-regulating student culture played a pivotal role in redefining the American man as youthful, leisure focused and casually, yet carefully dressed. Class is central to understanding how students were able to indoctrinate and monitor newcomers. Unapologetically homogenous, Princeton was a rich boy's university; in the period studied, more than eighty percent of its students came from private high schools. Fashion flourished in this well funded and fertile ground. The focus here is twofold. First, this study considers the elite nature of the Princeton student body and the role private high schools and selective eating clubs played in keeping it so. In this birds of a feather environment, club-associated regalia took on increased meaning, as it connoted belonging and honors earned. Varsity sweaters and sports team blazers spoke of an involvement with sports. Princeton men were avid sportsmen who took to the links and courts with fervor-and they dressed the part. The dominance of leisure clothing illustrates the interface between class and gender; fashions associated with elite sports, such as golf and tennis, were worn around the clock and across the seasons. Princeton men implemented casual attire such as knickers and oxfords into their wardrobes on a year-round basis, a harbinger of the casualization of menswear. The second aim is to understand how the University's elaborate social hierarchy served as a means of turning a Princeton boy into a Princeton man. Regulating what freshman could and could not wear was part of the initiation into a campus culture that stressed the importance of clothing. The cultural significance of these rituals was seen when their usefulness was called into question by the students themselves. …

We of Film &amp; History Have Been Busy. .. The Editor's Reflections and Reports

NEW MASTHEAD Although some things may change, others do not and we have been busy as usual at Film & History. Peter Rollins has become the Director of the Center for the Study of Film and History, allowing him the time to orchestrate larger projects while advising us here at the journal. As the new Editor-in-Chief, I am delighted to continue the outstanding thirty-seven year tradition of Film & History with the help of Cynthia Miller of Emerson College, our new Associate Editor-in-Chief. Cindy now wears two hats, as she continues to be one of our busy film review editors with the help of Solomon Davidoff (Suffolk University-Boston), who has joined our editorial crew. Mathew J. Bartkowiak (Michigan State University) will now assist our longtime, hard-working book review editor, Robert Fyne. To better live up to John E. O'Connor's founding mission for Film & History, our Pedagogy and Syllabus editorial staff has been expanded to include veteran Associate Editor Ron Briley, who will now tap the expert help of Alan Marcus (University of Connecticut) and Scott Metzger (Pennsylvania State University). Other new and skilled editorial staffers are Associate Editor, Ken Dvorak (San Jacinto College), who many of you probably know as the able organizer of the annual Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association conference and Keith Wheelock (Raritan Valley Community College), our Associate Editor who is a filmographer extraordinaire. We celebrate our good fortune to have all these energetic scholars here at Film & History. FILM & HISTORY LEAGUE CONFERENCE ON THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION (NOVEMBER 2006) We are delighted to report that Film & History sponsored yet another successful biennial conference in 2006, this time on Documentary Tradition. This thematic umbrella allowed a wide range of panels that you might like to review by visiting our website at www.filmandhistory.org. Much of that success is due to the large attendance, with over 500 participants, consisting of both august senior scholars and energetic graduate students. Convening at the Dolce Center in Dallas provided us with our own campus, with meeting rooms aplenty and an auditorium that accommodated all of our attendees for the many special events scheduled throughout the conference. Plenary sessions included both film scholars and filmmakers. The conference opened on Wednesday with two awardwinning documentarians, Allen and Cynthia Mondell of Media Projects, Inc. (Dallas), who have for twenty-five years produced films that address important social and cultural topics. Introduced by Barton Weis, president of the Video Association of Dallas, the Mondells presented film clips and offered insights into the challenges of independent documentary distribution. Wednesday evening, Jim Welsh, Editor Emeritus of Literature/Film Quarterly, with his usual aplomb, chaired a mega-panel of editors who offered advice on publication and overviews of the work of these journals. Editors included: Kathy Merlock Jackson of the Journal of American Culture, Gary Edgerton and guest editor John Tibbetts of the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Brett Bowles and Roel Vande Winkel of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Gerald Duchovnay of Post Script, and many from the Film & History editorial ranks. Thanks to all of these editors for sharing their expertise! The Thursday plenary sessions were equally edifying. In the afternoon, a special panel on the PBS documentary The March of the Bonus Army traced the process of bringing history to the screen with comments from historians and filmmakers. Lucy Barber, historian and National Archives staff member; author and producer Paul Dickson; assistant producer David Seitz, and the producer, Glenn Marcus, who brought his experience with PBS and the NEH, described the work they undertook to develop this film from conception to completion. In addition to the film, our readers may want to read The Bonus Army: An American Epic (Walker 2006), the book which provided the research base for this film. …

Reconstructive Realism: Satire in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Winner of Best Graduate Student Paper Award at 2006 American Culture Association Conference ... I never forgot that my main duty should consist in educating entire population around me to settle their differences by civil law; in other words, I considered myself an instrument of reconstruction. -John W. De Forest, Union Officer (29) Already a promising author when he was commissioned as Captain of Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers, John W. De Forest turned a writerly eye on war he began fighting in 1862. Then, after Appomattox, De Forest moved to South Carolina in 1866 to serve as a subassistant commissioner for Freedman's Bureau, giving him rare insight into, as well as an active role in, Reconstruction. He recorded his experiences both in and after war in a series of articles for Harper's New Monthly Magazine (and published in book form posthumously as A Volunteer's Adventures and A Union Officer in Reconstruction). De Forest's nonfiction accounts of his service constituted much of raw material for Miss Ravenel's Conversion from secession to Loyalty, his attempt at The Great American Novel (a term he would coin in 1868). De Forest, in his dual role of author and officer, is an important cultural-historical figure whose life and work highlight potential connections between political and aesthetic attempts at rebuilding Union. Because initial ideas for Reconstruction were speculative visions of a new nationhood, articulations of these ideas-even though they derived from military or political viewpoints-can themselves be considered imaginative works. Conversely, De Forest's Miss Ravenel, as an imaginative work about Civil War and Reconstruction, in a sense enacts practical politics through literary means. As we will see, De Forest's literary agenda is also a political agenda: national unification through satire. In short, politics of De Forest's aesthetic Reconstruction and aesthetics of his efforts at onthe-ground political Reconstruction collapse distance between aesthetic products and realworld politics. De Forest uses satiric realism in an aesthetic attempt to implement a conciliatory Reconstruction as imagined and expressed by his Commanderin-Chief, Abraham Lincoln. Throughout Miss Ravenel, De Forest relies on satire to reveal distance between reality and idealistic presentations of it, to aesthetically undermine what he sees as limited, socially conservative worldview of popular sentimental novels. De Forest fears that sentimental fiction's privileging of private sphere encourages provincialism and insularity, and as a result endangers what he sees as ultimate goal of postbellum art and politics: political and moral reconstruction of national Union. Through satire of sentimental novels and notions, as well as of provincial characters and feminine, domestic institutions, De Forest in Miss Ravenel purports to neutralize their political power. In their stead he imagines a Union based on trust in public institutions of a national scope, a vision of American life and literature consistent with views of Reconstruction that President Lincoln expressed before he was assassinated. Like Lincoln, De Forest-in both his war novel and his memoirs from his days in Freedman's Bureau-advocates Reconstruction through legislation that stresses the law of solidarity and fact that the perfect prosperity of whole depends on prosperity of all parts (Union Officer 198). Miss Ravenel and Satire as Realism Miss Ravenel's marriage plot-designed, like that of many Civil War-era novels, to signify an end to animosities between North and Southwas in some ways quite familiar to readers of Civil War romances, as postbellum reconciliation romance was a popular genre in years after war. Such romances, according to critic Gregory S. Jackson, elided sectional differences by staging elaborate plots in which love, sorrow, and grief-induced insanity transcended (or obscured) racial and cultural difference, interregional animosity, sectional ideology, and ultimately even internecine conflict (284). …

The Ideology of Terror: Why We Will Never Win the “War”

Winner of the Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2005 American Culture Association Conference A few days after the criminal attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush declared a metaphorical on terror. The word was once again applied to a nebulous concept in hopes of rallying support to Bush's plans. President Johnson's on poverty and the on drugs of Presidents Nixon and Reagan served the same rhetorical purpose. However, Bush's word choice possesses further significance. Bush declared on an emotion-intense fear-that always and will always exist (Terror). Bush could have named a martial act (i.e., Terrorism) as the theater of his war, but he did not. Perhaps War on sounded better. Catchy as it may be, the phrase makes no sense, even to those who find wars-against concepts feasible. Significantly, had Bush declared on terrorism, a noun that denotes physical acts of violence, then the would have remained attached to the material world. By declaring on terror, America's enemy became ephemeral and eternal. The terror ideological apparatus was born. Terror was not only the most significant topic of debate in the 2004 presidential election, but it was also the biggest influence on the swing voter. The candidate who most effectively employed the terror ideological apparatus won the election. The war against terror is no longer a political endeavor; terror become a national figure, a celebrity, an autonomous reality beyond any person's control. Instead, terror controls. this article, I argue that terror become the dominant pillar of our society's ruling ideology. A reading of Louis Althusser suggests that, in this conception, terror can be called an ideological state apparatus (ISA). Althusser explains that ISAs are realities, which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions (96). Althusser states, In the pre-capitalist historical period . . . there was one dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Church (102, emphasis in original). He then suggests that, at the time he wrote Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, education has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations (103, emphasis in original). I maintain that, at the moment that Bush declared on terror, terror became the dominant ISA in American culture. Althusser explains that ISAs massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by (98). The terror ideological apparatus ensures its own perpetuation through both ideology and repression. The force of ideology alienates America's allies through rampant national egotism and derogates the feminine with an insistence on a myth of masculine strength. Its repression stifles dissent by means of public and private censorship and compromises our civil liberties in the name of national security. The State perpetuates terror through force, both brute and rhetorical, within and without our borders. fact, borders have ceased to matter. The ruling ideology presents terror as a universal, eternal Evil and invites those with (fire)power-white, Western, American-to scorch the earth on terror's heels. The terror ideological apparatus created a language to ensure its own survival. All people can cloak themselves with terror's power by employing the language of terror. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Bush used the language of terror well; Senator John Kerry used it poorly. The election results prove that language become terror's most valuable commodity. To speak of terror employing its own language is to remain under terror's control. Furthermore, the language of terror is inescapable so long as we do not recognize that we are using it. The most powerful aspect of the language of terror is the power to name. However, only names that are within the language of terror are acceptable; only they will stick. …

Introduction: Whither Shakespop? Taking Stock of Shakespeare in Popular Culture

I saw my first Hamlet when I was about eight. It was a musical adaptation, set to Bizet's Carmen. To emphasize the indecisive nature of Hamlet, Gilligan was cast in the title role. Mr. and Mrs. Howell played Claudius and Gertrude, Ginger was totally miscast as Ophelia, and the Skipper's Polonius gave fatherly advice to Mary Ann's Laertes. Even now, whenever I hear Bizet's Toreador Song, I sing: Neither a borrower, nor a lender be. Do not forget-stay out of debt.The successful comic integration of this lowbrow American sitcom with Hamlet is indicative of the familiar relationship American culture has with the shreds and patches of this complex tragedy, its strong identification with a collection of cultural signfiers, often independent of any real understanding of the play as a unified text. As Michael Bristol writes: Shakespeare's name, together with his image, has extraordinary currency at a time when the practice of reading and careful study of his works appears to be in decline (1996, 4).Annalisa Castaldo (co-guest editor of this issue) and I began our work interrogating position in American popular culture nine years ago, when we put together a panel for the West Virginia Shakepeare Conference. Annalisa and I came to our studies from complementary positions: Annalisa is a Renaissance scholar, specializing in film; I study American culture, drawing on my previous experience as a theater administrator. Both of us had problems squaring with our own experiences Lawrence Levine's characterization of position in twentieth-century America as solely highbrow, a position that he documented first in his 1984 essay William and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation and then more fully in his 1990 book Highbrow /Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierachy in America. Despite his thorough research, the picture seemed somehow incomplete. Annalisa was well aware that Capt. James T. Kirk (and the writers of Star Trek) shared her affinity for Shakespeare, and that the Bard's presence was accepted by the series' fans. Rebecca Steinberger (a valuable reader for this collection) also joined us on this panel, discussing further examples of Shakespearean sci-fi; in the discussion that followed, the scholars and teachers debated the value of appropriations: did it move beyond the famous quotes? did the appropriating authors know beyond their forced high school experience? had replaced the Bible as the common moral source? were these new texts re-energized or the equivalent of bad quartos or the Restoration's bowdlerized versions? and of particular importance, can popularized aid in the teaching of or does it merely create new challenges? Over the past eight years, the Shakespeare in Popular area has attracted 3-4 panels each year at both the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Conference and the Popular Culture/American Culture Conference where scholars have continued to examine Shakespeare-infused texts, and asking these and further questions about the significance of the growing presence of in popular culture, particularly in North America. Frequent and key presenters at these conferences have included Michael Marier, the other tireless reader for this collection, and the duo Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, who consistently and interestingly represented the Canadian perspective. The essays that comprise this special issue of College Literature both represent and extend these conversations with which I have been privileged to participate.This introductory essay will trace the roots of integration into current popular culture and the American imagination, and the challenge to define the Bard's position as we move into the twenty-first century.The Return of the GroundlingsLawrence Levine documents how during the first part of the twentieth century American popular culture excluded the Bard, relegating him to distinct theatrical productions in select, major cities, attended by well-behaved, passive, highbrow audiences. …

Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Want to Know (review)

Reviewed by: Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Want to Know. Revell Carr Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Want to Know. Ed. Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello. (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2000. Pp. 299, foreword, introduction, 21 photographs, 8 tables, references, index.) Imagine a community where, seventy times a year, tens of thousands of people wear colorful clothing, ingest hallucinogenic drugs, and dance wildly to rhythmic, improvised music. That community would be swarming with anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists. At a recent Popular Culture Association conference, writer Steve Silberman used this idea to highlight the fact that, for thirty years, the rock band the Grateful Dead and its legions of devoted fans known as Deadheads have been engaged in these very rituals. Only since the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, and the subsequent dissolution of the band in the summer of 1995, have scholars begun looking more seriously at the Dead and Deadheads. Unfortunately, the opportunity for social scientists to study the Grateful Dead and Deadheads in the field has passed. Those of us who want to make sense of this phenomenon now are forced to rely on the memories of those who were there. During the summer of 1989, Rebecca Adams, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, rented a bus and took a class of 21 students "on tour" with the Grateful Dead. Adams had been working on a study of friendships among academics at conferences when one of her students suggested that the same sort of long-distance friendships are created among Deadheads at Grateful Dead concerts. This idea was attractive to Adams because she wanted a project that would both inspire her students and allow them to take an active role as partners with her in field research, while also fulfilling her own academic goals (p. 18). Deadhead Social Science, edited by Adams and Robert Sardiello, is extremely valuable as a document of Deadhead culture, but it is Adams's commitment to partnership with her students that makes this an indispensable book for social scientists of all interests and fields. Now a tenured professor, Adams has been a mentor to over two hundred students writing term papers, master's theses, and doctoral dissertations on the Grateful Dead. A few of those works are featured in this new book, as are a few of the papers that came out of her 1989 class. While there is some unevenness to the essays, attributable to the authors' varying levels of scholarship, overall the book works well as a primer on the culture of the Deadheads, but more importantly as a pedagogical model for fieldwork studies. The book is divided into six thematic sections, the first of which is Adams's introduction where she explains her theoretical orientations and reflects on the dilemmas she faced as a collaborator with her students. She outlines some of the "negative sanctioning" (p. 40) that she has encountered in the academy, but also discusses the rapid growth of interest in the Dead among scholars, especially since 1995. While Adams has fascinating insights into friendship and community building among Deadheads, her real message is that "faculty should encourage students to engage in research related to their personal passions and should support them while they are doing so" (p. 37). Finding the balance between passion and scholarship can be problematic, as a number of the book's essays illustrate, but it can also be extremely rewarding. In the book's second part, "Music," Gary Shank and Eric Simon use semiotics and statistical analysis to develop a "grammar" that illustrates how the Dead structured their concerts, and how Deadheads perceived and interpreted [End Page 497] that structure. The second essay, by folklorist Robert Freeman, looks at improvisation as practiced by a Grateful Dead cover band called "The Other People," analyzing their approach to the Dead's music. One gets the impression from these two essays that the music of the Dead itself is not as important as how that music is understood by Deadheads. The next set of essays explores Deadhead spirituality. Shan Sutton shows that Dead concerts function...