Public Persona Research Articles

African American Gay Men

African American Gay Men

The Magic of Beverly Sills

The Magic of Beverly Sills

Making an American Opera Career: Conductor May Valentine (1890–1974) and a Woman's Role(s) in the Business of Opera

Making an American Opera Career: Conductor May Valentine (1890–1974) and a Woman's Role(s) in the Business of Opera

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman

Reviewed by: Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman Audrey Goodman (bio) Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 THROUGH A NATIVE LENS DEMONSTRATES the many ways that Native people in North America practiced photography, participated in image production and exchange, and integrated photographs into their communities. By design, it is not a comprehensive study. Instead, it offers a selective, well-paced overview of situations, practices, and interpretations of images made of Native subjects and/or by Native photographers between 1840 and 1940. It presents a clear critical framework or "rubric" for approaching both familiar and archival images, and the extensive illustrations in the book complicate and enrich existing published records and recent museum exhibitions. Rather than delve into the politics of repatriation, develop a sustained theoretical argument, or explore in detail the ongoing social lives of the images, the book realizes the value of the author's extensive archival research by concentrating on the conditions and contexts of image production. Strathman examines in detail how Indian subjects crafted their public personas and identities on many scales. With its wide range of visual materials, appealing design, high-quality reproductions, and clear structure, this informative and well-researched book is a pleasure to view and read. Strathman worked extensively in state, territorial, and tribal archives, including the Autry National Center's Braun Research Library, the National Anthropological Archives, the Oklahoma Historical Society, the American Heritage Center, the University of Wyoming, the Yukon Archives, and the Cherokee National Archives. The book shares her discoveries through narrative sketches of each photographer's experience. Divided into two parts, "Native Participants" and "Native Practitioners," the book distinguishes between the agency exercised by subjects and that exercised by creators. Within those parts, each chapter assembles topics, figures, and visual materials according to the degree of the subject's public notoriety or the photographer's professional expertise. It reports on the origin and status of each archival collection and invites readers to view, interpret, and delight in the array of photographs on display. The book contends that Native subjects and photographers "used photography to assert their right of self-representation," whether through small [End Page 154] gestures of resistance visible in the photographs themselves, negotiations for payment, or running a successful studio (179). Part I advances this claim through discussions of leaders such as Red Cloud (Oglala), the Hawaiian royal family, and Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute), each of whom used portrait photography to craft political strategies and public personas. Other examples reveal how Native people negotiated with non-Native photographers to control the production and circulation of images: at times they restricted the events that outsiders could photograph, or adapted rituals to make only secular elements visible, or chose whether to admit a photographer to witness and record family life. While many of the images reproduced in this section will be familiar to readers, they continue to command attention and have a cumulative power. The most original and rewarding chapters of the book are found in Part II, where Strathman explores a broad cross-section of practices by semi-professional and amateur Native photographers: visual ethnographers and collectors such as Louis Shotridge (Yeilgooxu); Bureau of Indian Affairs employee Richard Throssel (Crow/Scottish/adopted Cree); Benjamin Haldane (Tsimshian), owner of a photography studio in Metlakatla, Alaska; Jennie Ross Cobb (Cherokee), whose archive flaunts the confidence, independence, and personal style of young Cherokee women during the Progressive era; and George Hunt (Tlingit/British), whose snapshots convey the Tlingit community's pride in hunting and other rituals. For each, Strathman deftly assesses the archive, probes the limits of the historical record, teases out stylistic and rhetorical contrasts between the Native photographers and their mentors, and summarizes the political, commercial, and cultural pressures of each location and moment. Through a Native Lens is a fascinating and beautifully produced record of Native photography as a diverse enterprise. As Strathman writes in the conclusion, "There is no single Native American way of practicing photography but, instead, multiple photographies" (177). The study is a substantial contribution to recent and ongoing appraisals and revisions of Native photographic histories by a diverse group of...

The Art of Fran Lebowitz’s Public Persona

The Journal of American CultureEarly View Original Article The Art of Fran Lebowitz’s Public Persona Victoria Surliuga, Corresponding Author Victoria Surliuga victoria.surliuga@ttu.edu surliuga@yahoo.com Search for more papers by this author Victoria Surliuga, Corresponding Author Victoria Surliuga victoria.surliuga@ttu.edu surliuga@yahoo.com Search for more papers by this author First published: 06 March 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13312Read 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 onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

"Almighty Dirt": A Report on "Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium," Trinity College Dublin, 5-7 May 2022

"Almighty Dirt":A Report on "Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium," Trinity College Dublin, 5-7 May 2022 James Green For the first time in around three years, I attended an in-person conference. Instead of an abrupt transition from the world of online symposia, this move into the reality of dear dirty Dublin felt, thankfully, smooth and natural. The first thing to say about "Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium" is that the conference could easily not have happened at all. Obstacles facing speakers included visa problems and an ongoing global pandemic, and panels as advertised on the website had to be changed as and when needs arose, calling for altruism from one attendee, Jinan Ashraf, who volunteered to move her paper on Joyce's influence on Indian modernism to one of the final panels. That the conference went ahead at all is due to the heroic efforts of its organizers, Casey Lawrence and Graham Price, with assistance from Sam Slote, who managed to put it together while not being in the country, for example, and even picked up a dislocated knee right on the eve of the conference. The second thing to note is that, despite being the first conference to focus specifically on the connections between Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, it felt entirely right that such a comparison be made. In fact, multiple attendees noted almost immediately that it is surprising such a conference had not happened sooner. Joyce treated the topic of Wilde in his Trieste lecture "La Poetà di Salome" and his A Portrait echoes, at least in title, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. The two cultivated a dandyish public persona and foregrounded questions of aesthetics in their work. In light of the difficulties raised by the conference gods, all who attended remain grateful to the organizers and fate itself to allow us to talk about this subject at length. The conference also was marred by the shocking loss of John Paul Riquelme, who was due to give a fascinating paper on Wilde's use of Platonic dialogues in his critical essays, echoed in Joyce's "Scylla and Charybdis." The abstract he submitted is available to view on the conference website, making it likely his final published work. Noting his generosity and enthusiasm, Graham and Casey fondly dedicated the conference to his memory. But his paper showed the richness and queerness of the comparisons to be made between these two bodies of work. On the first day, there was a panel on such queer comparisons: Michael F. Davis queered the complex genealogy of "The Dead" by looking at Wilde's and Anatole France's depictions of Judea in Salomé and The Procurator of Judea, Maureen de Leo considered Wilde's and Joyce's shared silences over homosexuality, while Tim Ziaukas and [End Page 404] Christopher Wells both offered particularly fruitful, searching, and witty readings of Buck Mulligan via Wilde. This panel set the tone of much of the conference's proceedings––rigorous and humorous, politically charged and pleasurable. Another vital theme of the first day was exile. Adrian Howlett, James Green, and Emma Marns, who shared her first-ever conference paper, considered the various routes into Joyce and Wilde's shared status as exiles. One undeniably positive facet of the conference was how welcoming an environment it was for graduate students and early-career researchers. Their papers sat productively alongside those of more senior colleagues, who responded warmly to the insights of junior colleagues. The first day's roster evinces such a range. These talks were then followed by Margot Gayle Backus's enthralling keynote: "James Joyce and Oscar Wilde: Modernism and the Politics of Punitive Child Removal." Spurred by political fury at the practice of child removal as a systematic form of social engineering, from Tudor Ireland to Francisco Franco's Spain and more recent pink scares in the United States, Backus considered with wit, attentiveness, and fluency the shared anxieties of Wilde and Joyce over the loss of children (which, for Wilde, became an all-too-grim reality in his life). In Backus's reading, Joyce's reaction to Wilde's fall became most pronounced...

State containment and closure of gendered possibilities among a millennial generation: On not knowing Muslim young men

Within a British context, the South Asian Muslim community is currently a significant media spectacle with a millennial generation of British-born young men inhabiting public personae that officially are perceived as being a ‘suspect community’. An epistemological assumption of this perception appears to be that religion is the dominant and exclusive social category shaping their behaviour. Using qualitative research that synthesizes postcolonial and critical men’s studies, this article explores how Muslim millennial men are ‘categorically’ contained with accompanying forms of (de)gendering. The article is based upon research with Birmingham-born millennial young men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, aged 18–25. The research found that a major effect over the last few years of establishing a securitized regime involving ascribed values, reviled violent bodies and designated locations has been to circumscribe the spaces within which Muslim young men are able to perform masculinities in public spheres. The ‘no-go’ spaces of hard physical borders and the increasing complexity of imagined (post-Brexit) borders have imposed racially intensified patterns of stratification in austerity Britain. We conclude by arguing that young men are subjectively negotiating the discursive construction of Muslim identities. This negotiation engages with dynamic dissonances that are (re)constituting their remembering of the past and the living and doing of the present and their imagined futures.

The Beatles' Public Personas as Representatives of Age-Old (and brand New) Four-Part Typologies of Personality

The Beatles' Public Personas as Representatives of Age-Old (and brand New) Four-Part Typologies of Personality

American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives by Heather Ostman

Reviewed by: American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives by Heather Ostman Ana Belén Martínez García (bio) American Women Activists and Autobiography: Rhetorical Lives Heather Ostman Routledge, 2022, viii + 183 pp. ISBN 9781032050768, $160.00 hardcover. American Women Activists and Autobiography examines six case studies of women activists' lives as written by themselves. Heather Ostman approaches the autobiographical projects of Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan by looking at what they shared and what they did not, especially regarding the authors' feminist rhetorics and the various ways their lives and social justice causes were entangled. This premise is particularly exciting for scholars interested in the relationship between life writing and social justice. Ostman's volume can be read as an evolution of themes (womanhood, sisterhood, motherhood, marriage, class, race, gendered body, conversion) threaded along each chapter. Surprisingly, it does not proceed chronologically, which might be interpreted as the author's intent to make readers reflect on the ebbs and flows in feminist activism as it moves from the early twentieth century and into the present. The book is structured into six main chapters, each focusing on the autobiographical work of a single activist. There is an introduction to the volume that guides the reader and offers an overview of the rationale of the book as well as of each woman's life and lifewriting project. The introduction also makes a potent claim—that American women activists ignited the now-common utilization of self-narration in the context of advocacy. Interestingly, Ostman suggests that the "narrative 'self'" of these autobiographies does not conform to the "American individualistic self" typical of canonical male autobiography, and instead points to "situated feminist rhetorics" (1). After this eloquent start to the volume, Ostman draws on scholarship from James Olney and Sidonie Smith, but ultimately relies on the work of Lindal Buchanan and Dana Anderson on women's rhetorical strategies, particularly conversion as a trope. Some more nuance would have been helpful in Ostman's observation of the specific area of women activist autobiographies: "With the exception of Martha Watson's Lives of Their Own (1999), no other volumes have considered the rhetorical value of women social activist autobiography" (12). [End Page 374] The first chapter, "The Progressive Cassandra: Rhetoric in Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull-House," explores Jane Addams's advocacy for welfare, education, peace, women's and workers' rights, and the settlement house movement via her autobiographical work. The apparent contradiction between Addams's self-portrayal as a maternal figure and her public persona as "the Mother of Social Work" (18) while she did not have children of her own is connected to biological mothers being shown as powerless in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Addams becomes, by contrast, what Ostman labels a "moral mother" (38), capable of aiding those in need on the streets of Chicago in the early twentieth century. The trope of Cassandra, subject of Addams's 1881 namesake essay, is employed to counter patriarchy, for "an intuitive perception committed to a woman's charge is not a prejudice or fancy, but one of the holy means given to mankind in their search for truth" (20). Thus, Ostman continues, rhetorical success as expounded by Addams hinges upon "one's rhetorical abilities and one's moral assertion to claim the right to speak" (20). In the second chapter, "Anarchism and the Rhetoric of Womanhood: Emma Goldman's Living My Life," we are presented with yet another kind of figurative mother: "the Mother of the Cause" for anarchist supporters (45). Ostman categorizes Goldman's discourse in Living My Life (1931) as that of "rhetorical motherhood" (69), distinguishing it from that of the preceding chapter, even as both Addams and Goldman share the reliance on motherhood as a trope. Rejecting the values her father, a Jewish immigrant, tried to impose on her, in her two-volume autobiography Goldman depicts how she converted, ideologically, to anarchism following the Chicago Haymarket Riot in 1886, then becoming one of the most notorious anarchist women in the United States. Ostman weaves in other writings by Goldman to account for the evolution of her thinking...

Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America by Teresa A. Goddu

Reviewed by: Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum Americaby Teresa A. Goddu Matthew Fox-Amato (bio) Antislavery, Slavery, Abolition, Media, American Anti-Slavery Society, Print culture, Material culture, Visual culture Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America. By Teresa A. Goddu. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 344. Cloth, $55.00.) The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), for Teresa A. Goddu, was more than an influential organization in the 1830s: It was also a cultural machine. The scale and diversity of the AASS's cultural production back this point. Established in 1833, the AASS had reached an estimated circulation of 725,000 copies of its publications per year by the end of the decade. Its many publications included monthly periodicals such as Human Rightsand The Emancipator, the yearly American Anti-Slavery Almanac, and the widely read American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses(1839). It published images such as the broadside Slave Market of America(1836) and organized well-attended fairs in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia, where attendees could buy all kinds of consumer goods to support the cause. In Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America, Goddu asks how AASS representations mobilized opposition to slavery while shaping the identities of the abolitionists who consumed them. One of the many virtues of Selling Antislaveryis how it treats abolitionist [End Page 154]literary texts as one of many cultural forms produced by the movement. After a chapter on the publishing strategies and distribution networks of the AASS, Goddu examines its representations in three sections: print culture (almanacs and slave narratives); material culture (consumer goods at fairs and the fairs as symbolic sites); and visual culture (images in publications and prints). A concluding chapter explores how Black artists and writers not affiliated with the AASS appropriated and contested its aesthetics. Blending business history with wide-ranging cultural analysis, Selling Antislaveryis a compelling contribution to our view of abolitionist media. The book joins a growing body of scholarship stressing the importance of visual and material culture to antebellum activists fighting for abolition and racial justice. Work over the last decade includes Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade(Chicago, 2011); Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity(Durham, NC, 2012); Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery(Philadelphia, 2013); John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American(New York, 2015); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance(Chicago, 2015); and Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century(Chapel Hill, NC, 2020). Though not limited to abolitionism, these and other works have shown how abolitionists were keen to use images and ephemera to denounce slavery, define their public personas, and forge political bonds. Selling Antislaveryunderscores these insights while deepening our understanding of how, precisely, abolitionists were able to blanket the nation with representations in the 1830s. This was possible, for Goddu, because the AASS employed "innovative organizational structures, new technologies of reproduction and publicity, and systematized distribution" (10). The organization's top-down management structure, which started with the executive committee in New York, catalyzed expansion. The New York office took the lead in strategizing fundraising, planning the production of texts, and training paid lecturers. The AASS also embraced new media technologies, such as the steam press. Once created, AASS texts circulated across the North, to Europe, and even into the slave [End Page 155]South, as in the case of the 1835 postal campaign. Goddu describes the personnel who enabled such distribution and the actual places where people encountered media, including the many reading rooms and bookstores housed in offices of local societies. Grounded in extensive research in newspapers, personal papers, and the records of the AASS executive committee, Selling Antislaveryoffers an invaluable resource for those interested in how the AASS produced and circulated abolitionist texts with great variety, over a vast geography, in...

Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Reviewed by: Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle Renata Lucena Dalmaso (bio) Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle Routledge, 2021, ix + 236 pp. ISBN 9780367893477, $170 hardcover; ISBN 9781032335919, $48.95 paperback. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle's Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator investigates life narratives by women who have attempted to counter discourses about womanhood and personhood in Latin American dictatorships. Throughout its five chapters, the author explores different dictatorial contexts in the Americas and how women have employed innovative techniques of self-representation to establish themselves as subjects against authoritarian regimes or in the aftermath of regimes that spanned most of the twentieth century. Each chapter presents the historical context of a specific country and its corresponding dictatorship, along with works by writers who sought to overwrite the constraints of writing the self in such repressive situations. The efforts of these writers in finding novel ways to approach life writing—be it through poetry, aliases, or autofiction—subvert what Ortiz-Vilarelle refers to as the impossible character of autobiography under autocratic governments. The book's main question is how these authors have been able to write the self in the midst of censorship and the actual danger of challenging expectations of womanhood in repressive contexts. However, the book does not only include those who opposed dictatorial regimes. It also explores how the wives, children, siblings, and grandchildren of dictators have attempted to overwrite history through their own perspectives. These works offer ambivalent memories of the dictatorships, ones often imbued with nostalgia for the rulers they represent. The impossibility of writing can be seen both in the works that write against authoritarianism as well as those narratives that attempt to deny, downplay, or even defend these regimes. Faced with such impossibility, Ortiz-Vilarelle argues that the "diversity of voices and experiences represented here demonstrates how autocratic methods of control can actually give way to autobiographical methods of self-construction and establish shared, global-practice autobiographical work for Américanas both in their countries and in exile" (5). The first chapter, "I Remember Trujillo/Trujillo en Mis Memorias: Denial, Shame, Martyrdom, and Nostalgia in Dominican Women's Memoir," explores the impossibilities in life writing by women dealing with Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Specifically, it focuses on the publications [End Page 107] marking the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. Four works that examine the "Era of Trujillo" are analyzed: one of artful abnegation by his granddaughter Aída Trujillo (2008); one of shame and psychological trauma by his troubled daughter, Flor de Oro Trujillo (2009); one of testimony and martyrdom by Dédé Mirabal, sister of the three murdered heroines involved in an assassination attempt against Trujillo (2009); and one of privileged nostalgia by his favored daughter Angelita Trujillo (2010). (18) Each memoir proceeds from a different perspective of memory in relation to the Era of Trujillo, competing for the authority of remembering the dictator, the closeness to his many public and private personas, and the impact of his years in power. The second chapter, "Dueña y Señora de Su Canto: Autobiographical Depictions of the New Nicaraguan Woman," focuses on Nicaragua, which was controlled by the Somoza Dynasty from 1936 to 1979, a period combining the dictatorships of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, his older son, Luis Somoza Debayle, and his younger son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Fighting against the dynasty was the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) movement, in which women played a strong role. Drawing from the Sandinista movement and its poetry programs, Ortiz-Vilarelle analyzes six authors published between the 1960s and 1990s—Vidaluz Meneses, Daisy Zamora, Gioconda Belli, Yolanda Blanco, Michele Nails, and Rosario Murillo—who attempted to reconcile their womanhood with the Somoza years through autobiographical writing. Their autobiographical poetics overwrite the restrictions forced on the female subject by both the Somoza family and the Sandinista regimes that followed. In the third chapter, "'Distinguished Ladies' and the Doctrine of Chilean Womanhood: The 'Anti-manuals' of Diamela Eltit, Isabel Allende, and Marjorie Agosín," Ortiz-Vilarelle explores the three authors' works for "echoes" of...

The Most Famous Costume Designer: Reviewing Edith Head's Career through a Contractual Lens

ABSTRACT: Edith Head, possibly Hollywood's most iconic costume designer, won a record eight Oscar statuettes for Best Costume Design. Despite her popularity, Head has also sparked controversy; many detractors question her talent as a designer by arguing that her success rested merely on her self-promotional efforts rather than her work inside the wardrobe department. This article explores Head's career vis-à-vis the discourses surrounding her public persona to understand how she constructed her image as Hollywood's most famous costume designer, surviving for over five decades in an industry fraught with constant economic and political turmoil. In doing so, this article will shed light on the activities assigned to her as head of costume during and after the studio era.

‘I’m not a tech person’

AbstractThis study contributes to existing research on polymedia by probing into what we callacademic polymedia, investigating the constant availability of interpersonal, professional, and social media for constructing scholarly personas. Drawing on the technobiographical narratives of a group of Hong Kong bilingual academics, we analyze academics’ perceptions of their media choices as situated in their professional polymedia environments. In particular, we examine how choices between public and private media shape academic persona development, and the way polymedia engagement impacts the participants’ language choice for academic purposes. This study sheds light on existing research on workplace discourse and identity in sociolinguistics by offering a polymedia dimension that draws on people’s media ideology in developing their professional identities.

대서양 흑인 여성의 이산 경험과 정체성

Autobiographies and travel writings of Mary Prince, Nancy G. Prince, and Mary J. G. Seacole, in the early nineteenth century show transatlantic diaspora journey of colored women. They constructed mobile subjectivity based on experiences in West Indies, America, Russia, and Europe, meeting diverse people of nation and race. Mary Prince, a West Indies slave, showed strong racial solidarity with slaves while adapting and resisting to slavery, and chose Antigua rather than England as her place. Seacole and Nancy Prince had a strong desire to leave homeland crossing national boundaries to live in Russia and work in Crimean Peninsula, landing in England and the United States. Their attitudes toward Atlantic black community differed in that Seacole didn’t care much about racial enhancement of West Indies while showing strong affinity toward U.S blacks. Nancy Prince had a great concern for Jamaicans helping their betterment, but failed to build up racial trust. This tells us the challenge to which black cosmopolitanism faced. They also crossed gender norms of Victorian domesticity realizing public persona in social activities, and showed gender identity of strong confidence in self-independence of widows.

The Effects of the Internet on Celebrification and Mental Health: From Britney Spears to the Vatican

Though superficially secular, celebrification is an intrinsically religious phenomenon. Though celebrities fashion mighty podiums out of public personas of otherness, these platforms of deification can also quickly become their public gallows. Cyclical religious themes like idolization, impersonation, sacrifice, and redemption shape the career arcs and mental health of many high-profile figures because society craves drama. Therefore, this analysis will explore how digital media mediates and expedites cycles of sacrifice and redemption with secular and religious icons and institutions alike by increasing the resolution of private life and exposing fissures in supposedly airtight public appearances.

Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems


 Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems
 
 The title of the book of poems published in 1941, The Double Man, defines much of W.H. Auden’s life, constantly driven by a sense of duality and paradox. The double functions as a complex, subtle phenomenon in Auden’s case: It highlights an unresolvable tension between his private and public persona. The search for a compromise between personal wishes and social duties is a recurring theme in Auden’s later works but appears with particular intensity in the poems of his youth, resulting in a complex entanglement in which the poet’s identity is often (traumatically) negotiated. Since Auden’s life extended throughout most of the 20th-century—he was born in 1907, in York, and died in Vienna in 1973—his work provides a useful lens through which to examine some of the events that would change the world in unprecedented ways. For much of his career, he was worried about the impact his homosexuality would have on his attempt to fashion himself as a public poet, as the risk of public scandal and even imprisonment was high in Britain and the US until the late 1960s, and the issue of his homosexuality remains one of the most significant contexts for the study of Auden and of the ways he imagined himself. The impossibility of coming out in the 1920s, when he was an adolescent, posed a heavy burden on him and determined to a great extent his future identity and thus his way of life as a whole. Until now, however, the question of how Auden’s earlier poetic output, that is the 1922-1927 poems, has been “marked and structured and indeed necessitated and propelled by the historical shapes of homophobia, for instance, by the contingencies and geographies of the highly permeable closet” (Sedgwick 165), has remained largely overlooked, and much uncertainty still exists about the extent to which the poet’s “coming out” experience circulated in the vicinity of trauma and was marked by it.

The Marchesa Casati as Fashion Plate and Fashion Muse

The Marchesa Luisa Casati has become a perennial muse of fashion designers in recent decades, from haute couture to High Street brands. Collections inspired by the Marchesa link to her background and the history of the spaces that she inhabited. Casati was born in Italy but lived and traveled between France, Italy and Britain, among other countries, where the cachet of her name has been combined with that of the fashion houses citing her as an inspiration. Despite her enduring reputation as an avant-garde style icon and a singular dresser who was just as likely to wear elaborate costumes as nothing at all, her engagement with fashion was not always as visibly eccentric as her posthumous impact suggests. Nor was it strictly within the binary of fashion and “anti-fashion”. Casati was at once a “disruptive” body and a conventionally stylish one. Popular memory has focused on the more “spectacular” and stylized elements of her esthetic. Archival evidence and artistic representation demonstrate how Casati constructed a wardrobe that melded the conventional and shocking, and how fashion played a role in the emergence of her chimerical public persona.

Poser, Norman S. The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick.

Poser, Norman S. <i>The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick</i>.

‘Happy Monday friends! Coffee?’ Matteo Salvini, good morning selfies, and the influencer politician

ABSTRACT Social media have reshaped how people achieve, retain, and perform celebrity. This, in turn, has re-shaped how celebrity and politics intersect. We contend that the established concept of the ‘celebrity politician’ no longer captures all of the most common celebrity practices of highly visible political figures. This is because politicians increasingly model their public personae on internet celebrities. We substantiate this argument with an analysis of a specific micro-celebrity practice adopted by Italian populist leader, Matteo Salvini: the ‘good morning selfie.’ We argue that Salvini borrows the practice of good morning selfies from social media influencers to build perceived interconnectedness and affective intimacy with his audience of (prospective) constituents. We conclude that the ideal type of the celebrity politician can and should be updated for the digital age with a new figure we tentatively call the ‘influencer politician’.