Mass Cultural Forms Research Articles

Sovereignty, Surveillance, and Spectacle in South Vietnamese Spy Fiction

This essay develops a reading of Bùi Anh Tuấn’s Ian Fleming–inspired Specter over Red Square (Bóng Ma trên Công Trường Đỏ). Published during the war in Vietnam, the novel was one of the most successful examples of the new forms of mass culture that emerged in the context of the US military intervention in South Vietnamese cities. In the novel, the character of the Vietnamese superspy appears as a figure for the ambivalent political situation of the Republic of Vietnam within the geopolitics of the Cold War.

Tórtola Valencia and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent: Celebrity and Self-Plagiarism

Tórtola Valencia and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent:Celebrity and Self-Plagiarism Jeffrey Zamostny On March 25, 1913, the Spanish writer Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent published the short novel La primera de abono in the kiosk literary collection El Libro Popular. Mobilizing Hoyos's signature blend of folkloric costumbrismo and cosmopolitan Decadence, the narrative recounts the tragic demise of a love affair between an amateur bullfighter and a famous dancer. On February 12, 1915, Hoyos republished the text under the title La zarpa de la esfinge in another short novel collection, Los Contemporáneos. Apart from some small revisions and typographical corrections, the rebaptized text features a new dedication to the modern dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia as well as fourteen new portraits of Tórtola by renowned painters and illustrators. La primera de abono and La zarpa de la esfinge contain nearly identical texts, but the latter novel's paratexts contribute new meaning by encouraging readers to associate the female protagonist with Tórtola, a prominent dancer in Spain at the time. Not coincidentally, Tórtola was at the height of her celebrity when La zarpa de la esfinge hit kiosks in 1915. On the one hand, the republication of La primera de abono followed standard practice in kiosk novel collections such as El Libro Popular and Los Contemporáneos. As we shall see, prolific contributors often resorted to dubious means of churning out novels, not least of which was to publish the same text multiple times under different titles. The editorial paratexts of La zarpa de la esfinge give no indication that the text had been published previously as La primera de abono. Moreover, [End Page 297] Hoyos discussed the later novel without acknowledging its origin, making way for early reviewers to present it as an original work.1 On the other hand, the circumstances surrounding the transformation of La primera de abono into La zarpa de la esfinge make this case of self-plagiarism into something more than a commercially motivated ruse. The paratexts of the latter publication do not simply package the text in new trappings; rather, they modify its meaning to the point that La zarpa de la esfinge is a significantly different novel. This article analyzes the variations between La primera de abono and La zarpa de la esfinge while situating the novels in a larger textual corpus that attests to the long-term friendship between Hoyos and Tórtola and their mutual desire for celebrity. The aim is to elucidate the possible motivations behind the recycling of La primera de abono as well as the aesthetic and sociocultural effects of its metamorphosis into La zarpa de la esfinge. Together, the two novels furnish a fascinating case study into the intimate relationship between kiosk literature and celebrity in the context of two important novelistic subgenres of Silver Age Spain, the novela taurina and the roman à clef. Hoyos and Tórtola, Celebrities Hoyos and Tórtola rose to celebrity in Spain, especially in Madrid, in the years before and during World War I. By that time, the Spanish word celebridad had undergone a shift in meaning to a definition that remains recognizable today. Noël Valis notes that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this word applied to individuals who were celebrated for their virtue, heroism, or noble lineage. With the growth of commercial print culture and the decline of the aristocracy in the late nineteenth century, new usages began to shed these previous meanings, such that modern celebrity referred less to accomplishment and high birth than to the generation of widespread attention by the nascent mass media (Valis 130–32). In this context, celebrity involves the "attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere," an attribution that may derive from the celebrity's "special talent or skill," but that may just as well hinge on scandal and sensationalism (Rojek 10, 18). As deft manipulators of celebrity culture, Hoyos and Tórtola drew attention to themselves by means of their art, their unconventional public personae, and their [End Page 298] sustained engagement with mass cultural forms such as kiosk literary collections and illustrated magazines. Antonio de Hoyos y...

Walk like a woman, talk like a man: Ivy Queen’s troubling of gender

This article examines how Ivy Queen deploys particular codes of masculinity and femininity in her music and performances. By drawing comparisons with other singers, I analyze what this deployment reveals about gender and its role in reggaeton, in music more generally, and in mass culture. I argue that Ivy Queen’s particular engagement with gender opens up a space to interrogate gender norms and their relationship with power in the consumption of mass cultural forms.

Tsipursky, Gleb Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1945–1970 (review)

REVIEWS 583 Tsipursky, Gleb. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1945–1970. Pitt Series in Russian and EastEuropeanStudies.UniversityofPittsburghPress,Pittsburgh,PA,2016. x + 366 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95 (paperback). Gleb Tsipursky’s Socialist Fun examines the changing face of Soviet youth mass culture after World War Two and shows how, in response to changing political and social norms and a cultural onslaught from the West, the Soviet authorities attempted to create new popular cultural forms that would promote socialist values while keeping at bay the capitalist threat. Focusing on the period from the end of World War Two to the aftermath of the Prague Spring, Tsipursky shows how official youth culture changed over a quarter of a century that saw the Stalinist obsession with vigilance and ideological conformity give way to more heterogeneous mass cultural forms under Khrushchev. However, as Tsipursky shows, in a period of often violent ideological swings, the creation of a coherent and mobilizing policy proved to be a challenging task. Following an introductory chapter which discusses the state’s role in youth culture from the revolution until 1946, the following seven chapters take us from the aftermath of World War Two up to 1970. Recurring themes are the contested role of Western culture in Soviet life (those interested in Soviet jazz will find plenty of interest in this volume), and the Komsomol’s role in creating forms of mass culture which would provide outlets for young people’s creative energies while channelling them in socially useful directions. To this end, Tsipursky analyses the development of a number of ‘clubs’ that aimed to ignite citizen energies from below, as well as the ‘youth café’ initiative of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which sought to create spaces for sociability. Within these chapters, the many twists and turns of Party and Komsomol policy are placed at the fore, and they illustrate the difficulties encountered by the authorities in attempting to loosen cultural restrictions while maintaining Soviet culture’s activist direction. Based on extensive archival research, from the Komsomol Committee of the Saratov Third State Ball-Bearing Factory to the Central Committee of the Communist party, and several dozen interviews, Socialist Fun’s originality lies in its focus on the cultural mainstream of lectures and debates, Komsomolsponsored dances, and civic activities, rather than the ‘alternative’ youth practices on which recent scholarship has predominantly focused. Tsipursky does a sterling job of assessing the Komsomol’s changing priorities, placing these within the broader context of young people’s concrete practices and the changing goals of central government. Of particular interest is Tsipursky’s discussion of schemes for promoting grassroots agency through Komsomol clubs, a subject which broadens scholarly understanding of the state’s attempts to create new forms of civic life after Stalin’s death. SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 584 Tsipursky coins the term ‘socialist time’ to describe the Komsomol’s goal of having its members spend as much time as possible participating in the organization’s own activities, but his primary interest is the nexus of socialist time and socialist space. In other words, Tsipursky’s interest is in those activities — whether lectures, theatre performances, or dances — that saw individuals having ‘socialist fun’ within public spaces. However — and perhaps my own scholarly interests are coming to the fore here — in a period where broadcast media was emerging as a powerful cultural force and the popular press was rapidly expanding its readership, it is a shame that the study does not consider the role of mass media in embodying and promoting new forms of state-sponsored leisure and allowing individuals to spend ‘socialist time’ in other spaces. Doing so would have allowed for a more nuanced understanding of ‘state-sponsored leisure’ and of the ideological mechanisms that governed individual behaviours within socialist space. Beyond the story of state policies, Socialist Fun seeks to describe the changing ‘emotional regimes’ of the post-Stalin period. However, emotion appears to be rather peripheral to the book’s concerns, and is referred to fitfully across the book’s eight chapters. While Tsipursky is able to draw on an extensive range of interviews, he elicits...

The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War by Sharalyn Orbaugh

Reviewed by: Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War by Sharalyn Orbaugh Jonathan Zwicker (bio) Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen-Year War. By Sharalyn Orbaugh. Brill, Leiden, 2015. xii, 365 pages. €119.00. Over the last two decades, the work of literary historians has increasingly turned to the interrogation of "the great unread": those works of a popular register that were once widely read, occupying an important place in how people experienced the world in the past but that now have been all but forgotten.1 As the work of literary scholars has moved beyond the canon, the study of literary works has also abutted the study of other forms of mass culture, everything from the cinema and television to animation and the graphic novel, and this expanded range of subjects has required a broader set of interdisciplinary tools. And while arguments about media specificity mean that an attention to what makes these forms distinct from one another has been an important part of academic disciplines (as well as interdisciplinarity), it has also become impossible to cordon off these various media from each other as their historical consumption (and quite often production) was never premised on these easy distinctions. In her Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen-Year War, Sharalyn Orbaugh uses her training as a literary historian to analyze a genre of performance all but forgotten by the scholarly world in which a narrator performed a story that was illustrated by a series of paper slides. While the focus of Orbaugh's book is the wartime period, this form of narration has important connections back to the use of magic lantern slides in both the Edo and Meiji periods. This book is part of a renewed interest in the larger history of these modes of performance but also an important contribution in suggesting a way of approaching a broader set of issues related to how we can account for storytelling as a part of a history of culture (both literary and performance) over the last two and a half centuries.2 The body of the book provides a historical overview of kamishibai from the 1920s through the end of World War II and an extended analysis of wartime plays that focuses on different thematic elements within the plays [End Page 428] themselves. Orbaugh also situates her reading of these plays within a theoretical discussion of propaganda and, in the book's conclusion, begins to think about what might be the neurobiology of propaganda and how this, in turn, can shape our reading of history. One of the most intriguing problems raised by Propaganda Performed is a question that is at once historical and formal. As Orbaugh points out in her introduction, these works are of a "hybrid nature," sitting at an unusual crossroads of academic disciplines: "part script, part picture, part performance, it falls somewhere between literature, art history, and theater" (p. 2). Situated at a crossroad of disciplines—but not, in an obvious way, belonging to any one—forms like kamishibai have been especially vulnerable to being simply written out of history. Part of what Orbaugh is doing in this book, then, can be thought of as an act of recovery, though, it is important to point out, not recovery for the sake of recovery but always as part of a larger project of understanding how this form can be analyzed as part of a larger framework of wartime propaganda and how propaganda itself is an integral part of the twentieth century. But formally this subject also poses a challenge: how do we address a subject that likely will be unknown by our audience? Is it enough to analyze these plays at the textual and graphic level without also presenting or representing them to the reader? In this sense, the book is itself an experiment in form, interweaving a historical and critical introduction to the genre with the presentation of seven kamishibai from Japan's 15-year war, the period between 1931 and 1945. Each chapter which treats a historical or generic aspect of the plays is followed by the presentation of a complete play that both reproduces the images used and translates...

Everyday leisure and Northernness in Mass Observation’s Worktown 1937–1939

Much leisure history deals with specific forms of activity or with the macro social and cultural patterns which mark leisure behaviours. However, as historians have turned to the micro-history of the everyday, individuals have become visible as producers and not only consumers of leisure. Mass Observation’s Worktown archive offers unique insight to the leisure lives of Bolton’s working class population between 1937 and 1939. Bound to the culture of the cotton industry and the spatial confines of Bolton, leisure served to form overlapping identities around work and neighbourhood. Everyday leisure accommodated mass cultural forms, while also remaining part of a local northern culture which grew from its industrial environment. The ‘up-close’ nature of the history of the everyday afforded by the Worktown archive provides new insights to leisure practices which become defined not only in terms of activity, but also involve conviviality, conversation and custom. This article argues that leisure was not so much a field of resistance but a sphere in which ordinary people were able to create their own leisure spaces through customary practice, language and an adaptation of employer-based facilities. Everyday working-class leisure was not confined to an illusory escapism of passive consumption but was active and engaged, forming social contexts, shared places and communal activities which helped form a collective consciousness and a sense of social and cultural identity.

Концептуальные средства анализа российской культуры

<p>В России сегодня много делается важного и значимого для ее будущего. Но вместе с тем официально признаны падение культурного уровня в условиях распространения массовой культуры, недостаточность культурного и символического капитала, незнание истории своей страны, ее достижений и тех распространенных в мире продуктов духовной и материальной культуры, авторство которых принадлежит России. Это относится не только к повседневности, к публичному пространству, но и к научной деятельности, в которой не осуществлена систематизация категориального аппарата исследований культуры.</p><p>Показывается, что наукой мало изучены способы исследования и методологии анализа культуры как ресурса развития. Дается анализ культурных ресурсов российского развития, выявленных на основании комплексного исследования и применения мало известных или недостаточно используемых категорий «прецедентные феномены культуры», «культурный и символический капитал», «российская идентичность и ее процессуальный характер», «коды культуры», «константы культуры», «мягкая мощь». В статье предпринята методологическая попытка исследования и систематизации этих категорий.</p><p>Подчеркивается, что проанализированные категории взаимосвязаны и позволяют найти меру соотношения конструктивистской переделки культуры и сохранения ее основополагающих основ. А значит, они могут рассматриваться как новый аппарат исследования культуры и работы с ней.</p>

Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay by Katherine Roeder (review)

Reviewed by: Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay by Katherine Roeder Matt Johnston Roeder, Katherine. 2014. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $60 hc. 221 pp. Over the past few decades, scholars in a range of disciplines have increasingly directed their attention to various mass cultural productions emerging in the modern era, seeing them as worthy objects of study in their own right. Rather than adopting a Baudrillard-like perspective that tends to see mass culture as an undifferentiated accumulation of simulacra, merely brute tools or unreflecting symptoms of industrialization and commercialization, they have taken its varieties seriously as quasi-artistic forms with complex modes of expression. However, in analyzing this artistry, such studies often problematically identify a self-conscious and critical authorial voice usually associated with modernist high art forms. If such a voice is accorded to a maker of popular films or advertisements, does this identification detract from an understanding of the work as a distinctly mass cultural form? Conversely, if such a voice is ignored or denied, how can the producer of popular entertainments be understood to offer any special insight into his or her world? As Bill Brown observes in A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), analyses addressed squarely at the “things” of mass culture, engaging with the objects of mass culture on their own terms, might paradoxically leave “things behind, never quite asking how they become recognizable, representable, and exchangeable to begin with” (4). Katherine Roeder’s Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay (2014) is an admirable attempt to resolve this dilemma. Best known for his strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1914 (and briefly from 1924 to 1927), McCay is an acknowledged founding figure of the modern-day newspaper cartoon. But, as Roeder points out, although his work has been reissued numerous times and he invariably finds his place in cartoon and comic anthologies, “no study as of yet gives critical, art historical attention to his work” (5). More specifically, though, Roeder wants to foreground “the modernist sensibility present in McCay’s comics, in an effort to position mass culture and modernist art in conjunction” and thereby avoid “the false dichotomy between mass culture and modernism” (5). In other words, [End Page 178] her study endeavors to uncover McCay’s modernist authorial voice while simultaneously being attentive to the specificity of the conventions of the medium in which he worked and which he helped put into place. Although Roeder runs into some substantial, perhaps unavoidable, methodological problems (discussed below), her book brings a needed complexity of analysis to McCay’s cartoons in terms of their own internal mechanics and the way they intersect with other popular entertainments of the time. The study enacts a valuable model of interpretation that should be of interest to other scholars of mass culture. Many of the details of McCay’s life, including his pioneering work with not only newspaper cartoons and illustrations but also vaudeville performance and animated shorts, has been covered in John Canemaker’s Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (1987). While acknowledging this useful source and being careful to cite it when she covers similar aspects of McCay’s career, Roeder makes a substantial addition from a research standpoint by more fully exploring how McCay’s cartoons intersect with a variety of early twentieth-century entertainment and commercial forms, conveniently organized into separate chapters. Thus, one chapter is devoted to “popular amusements,” including not just vaudeville but also circus performance and amusement parks. A real strength of Roeder’s approach lies in her close analysis of McCay’s pictorial choices in individual cartoons, married to an equally sensitive examination of the emerging conventions of these “popular amusements,” including the kinds of print advertising used to promote them. (Unfortunately, the original size of the cartoons makes it difficult to reproduce them clearly, although the 8 1/2 × 11 format used in Roeder’s book minimizes this loss of detail.) A similarly nuanced chapter looks at...

The TV Version of a Literary Work as a Form of Mass Culture <I></I>

Studies the television series as a form of mass culture within the framework of cultural anthropology. A special attention is paid to the problem of interaction between literary fiction and genre of television serial. In this regard, the author addresses “The Master and Margarita” serial directed by Vladimir Bortko and based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov as a particular case of interpretation which is related to the general problem of cultural codes “translation”.

Media modeling of cultural identity

Contemporary society propagates flexible identity, which is susceptible to trends and images of the world created by the media. The media have an increasing role in shaping people, especially young people, which are one of the most important consumers of content placed in media. Young people become just one of the expedient of manipulation controlled by the media, and as such they are a perfect target for shaping. Style of life that propagates main stream culture is widely accepted because it is closely related to consumer society and capitalism that are our everyday life. The globalization of the media industry has brought negative changes when it comes to the quality of media content, such as globalization of taste and unification of product, all of which are a result of commercialization and monopolization in the sphere of media content distribution. The personality of the modern age is a kind of' ''electronic individual'' whose identity is shaped by the media. Technological advancement and profitability as the underlying logic of capital, particularly contribute this. Since the media are not a passive reflection of society, but its active and dynamic factor instead, it is important to study the mass media feedback to society as well. The goal of any society should be to create a media-conscious individual able to critically observe the forms of mass culture. That individual becomes an active member of society who deliberately uses forms of mass culture in order to achieve progressive social change.

The Banality of Degradation : Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and the trash aesthetic

The American 1960s has become closely associated with moral crusades that strove for Civil Rights for the black community and protested against the conflict in Vietnam, with the peace and love gestures of the hippies to the fore, particularly in the latter part of the decade. This essay argues, however, that the seeds of a more subversive underground movement would be sown during the period and a new approach to art creation, centred on an emerging trash aesthetic, would not only challenge the psychedelic utopianism of the organised counterculture but actually leave a longer-lasting mark on left-field creative activity in the final quarter of the century. As Andy Warhol’s art and film projects were re-shaped as multi-media experiences, the importance of the Velvet Underground, the rising house band at the artist’s Factory headquarters, was magnified. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a performance work inspired in part by early-decade Happenings, would be unveiled in 1966, combining Warhol’s underground cinema projections, light shows, dancers and the cacophonous sound of the Velvets. This radical piece of stage art was filmed by the director Ronald Nameth and his account remains a key document of the live venture. The article proposes that while Warhol and the band built on traditions from Dada to the Beats to build a form of anti-art, it was during this key time that the ideas of trash – from the Pop Art celebrations of mass cultural forms to the darker delvings of his movies, and his adopted rock group, into the decadent realms of drugs and sexual perversity – took crucial shape. This anti-aesthetic would have an enduring impact beyond the subterranean avant garde of New York City in the years that followed as music and cinema, art and literature were all shaped by this brand of expression and examples of its legacy are suggested.

Popular Literature, the City and the Memory of Vanished Others in Poland and Ukraine: The Cases of Marek Krajewski and Iurii Vynnychuk

A comparative analysis is made of the evocation of urban memory in the work of the Polish author of detective fiction Marek Krajewski and the leading Ukrainian writer of postmodernist fiction and popular historical publications Iurii Vynnchyuk. The cities that form the focus of the work of these writers, Wroc/law for Krajewski and L′viv for Vynnychuk, both experienced massive population shifts after World War II, meaning that the postwar populations had little or no memory of the pre-war cities. The legacy of this disjunction can be felt to this day. This study demonstrates how both writers re-create a sense of memory through a number of similar memory strategies and concludes that the recreation of memory in these writers’ work can be understood as what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, yet that this is postmemory removed from the traumatic context of Hirsch’s original concept. It is also argued that these writers demonstrate that an effective ‘cultural memory’ can be produced in a situation when ‘communicative memory’ is lacking, through an imaginative and accessible representation of the ostensibly inaccessible past. This is achieved through the utilization of mass cultural forms, which some theorists of urban memory see as conducive only to forgetting.

Fashioning an Ex-crook Self: Citizenship and Criminality in the Work of Netley Lucas

This essay uses the autobiographical and journalistic work of the confidence trickster Netley Lucas to explore the possibilities and problems of writing as an ex-crook in inter-war Britain. In so doing, it considers the intersections between emerging forms of mass culture, popular and scientific narratives of criminality, and increasingly heated debates about the social and institutional management of crime. This case study provides an opportunity to think critically about the extent to which inter-war criminology was the modernizing project it often claimed to be. In the hands of Lucas and others, different modes of writing about crime bled into one another. Older forms of criminal confession coexisted with 'modern' criminological knowledge as mutually constitutive ways of apprehending the social.

La conquista de las vacaciones. Breve historia del turismo en la Argentina Elisa Pastoriza. Buenos Aires, Edhasa. 2011. ISBN:978-987-628-115-7

Without a doubt, there is no better way to understand the evolution of tourism than to enter and discuss in depth good work in the field, such as that of Professor E. Pastori- who presents a synthesized but eloquent history of tourism as part of a phenomenal greater than what he calls leisure. Initially, E. Pastoriza (2011) recalls in his work The Conquest of the holidays the strange tension that occurs in the first summer zones in Argentina from the end of the 19th century since one of the biggest challenges was to adapt the conditions- The Committee on Legal Affairs and Citizens' Rights, Justice and Home Affairs, register as massive. In this way, summer holidays, the custom of the more affluent classes, gave rise to a less stylized form of mass culture, tourism. The conquest of the holidays in France in 1936, together with technological advances, laid the foundations for the advent of a new form of recreation that through the journey generated a great expectation. The process of democratization involving tourism brought benefits because the holiday culture (originally given for 3 months) was expanded by means of a true demonstration effect to other classes, but these social conquests brought certain frictions and tensions with other groups.

The dead end of the enlightenment

In this paper we tematise the critic of the project of the Enlightenment as implemented by the critical theory of the Frankfurt Circle. In their attempt to solve an unexpected event of perverting fundamental ideals of Modernism, the Frankfurters placed a special emphasis on the categories of rationality and freedom, then practical manifestations of those ideals such as cultural proliferation in the form of mass culture. All these ideals were betrayed in concrete historical events in XX century. The results of researches undertaken by the Frankfurt Circle show, that such betrayals are not the consequence of random characteristics of the environment, but originate from the very logic of Modernism, whose key ideals, through their inner logic, tend to turn into their contradiction.

A taste for greeting cards: Distinction within a denigrated cultural form

Greeting cards are a denigrated product category in the USA, and yet consumers use them at high rates across taste formations. Consumers with relatively high cultural capital place a premium on originality in their self-expression, hence greeting cards present a consumption problem because they are a mode of expressing the self through mass-produced means. Based on interviews with 46 women, I show that consumers with higher cultural capital are more likely to prioritize card design over sentiment; select smaller, simpler designs and sentiments; prefer cards that are handmade, look handmade, or remind them of fine art; and are more likely to use cards ironically. In this way, consumers perform exclusivity through their taste, even through a form of mass culture. However, the social embeddedness of greeting card communication means that many consumers balance considerations of taste with the requirements of effective interpersonal communication. The ability to self-consciously modulate signifiers of taste is itself an indication of cultural knowledge and therefore of cultural capital.

Continental Britons: Historical Facets of Male Effeminacy and Queer Influences from Abroad

This paper supports the claim that effeminacy is neither unprecedented nor exceptional, and, accordingly, that contemporary representations of queerness, either in elite or mass cultural forms, reveal significant correspondences to older visual paradigms and social conventions. No longer invisible and no longer ignored, contemporary effeminacy is now an entity to be investigated from different scholarly and theoretical perspectives, in particular, the exploration of effeminacy's latent as well as manifest meanings in the queer culture of the past may yield crucial insights for its current manifestations.

The Speeds of Ambiguity: An Interview with Paul Virilio

This interview was conducted on the assumption that for all their seeming pessimism, Virilio's technocultural writings are more productively understood as a “Dionysian yes” than as a simple assertion of the no as such. In other words, they presuppose that the specificity of his thought derives not from “the political” itself (as it is explicitly stated) but from the aesthetic as itself political. The interview considers the extent to which Virilio in Deleuze's terms, “has placed the negative at the service of the power of affirming,” even though he has done so in a subterranean manner that largely remains unnoticed by most of his commentators. The assumption that his concept of speed is unidimensional, that he conceives no alternative to the contemporary technoscientific order, and that all forms of mass culture are denounced as equally complicit with late modern power are thus destabilized with the first several questions. Similarly, the notion that Virilio holds that the manipulation of emotion negates democratic possibility as such, that citizenship is entirely incompatible with globalization, and that the only option in our time is to either entirely converge virtual and actual reality or to abandon one in favor of the other are complicated in the remaining ones. Overall, the interview suggests that Virilio himself must be considered as a vector whose concepts are always already in motion, indeed as one who may seem to be making a definitive statement at one moment, but who complicates that very assumption at another. Thus, while the many criticisms of his work are certainly formidable, it seeks to show that they can never adequately represent the composite nature of his thought itself, even when they go to great pains to avoid the suppression of ambiguity.

The Preachers’ Blues: Religious Race Records and Claims of Authority on Wax

AbstractAs one of the first nonessential commodities marketed to African Americans, the race record industry provides historical insight into the cultural ethos and competing ethical values of black communities during the interwar period. Both ethnomusicologists and historians have discussed the ways race records articulate intraracial conflicts that were exacerbated by social factors such as migration and urbanization. But like all forms of mass culture, religious records served multiple purposes and were interpreted by listeners at varying registers. For many, religious recordings were spiritually edifying and liberating, just as they were wildly entertaining. And some may feel that these religious recordings contested the aesthetic values of the black middle class even as they reinforced prescriptive bourgeois behavioral codes. While the purpose of this essay is not to give voice to the listeners of religious race records, this essay does offer an initial attempt to illumine the broader cultural contexts in which these records, namely, recorded sermons, were both produced and consumed toward providing tenable interpretations of these recordings based on resonant religious beliefs and meanings of the historical moment. This essay is concerned with such questions as: What theological and political discourses were these preachers participating in on wax? What cultural symbols, explicit and implicit, did these preachers commonly reference? And what were the possible ideological implications of these cultural significations? Despite the many interpretive possibilities of recorded sermons and even the “folk” aesthetic that defines them, this essay suggests that the religious race record industry served as a productive force in encouraging systems of social control over raced, classed, and gendered bodies during the interwar era. And the industry’s decision to focus on theologically conservative sermons stressing personal piety cast a powerful ballot in the cultural debates concerning the style, content, and purpose of black preaching in the previous century.