Public Spectacle Research Articles

Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo by Thomas S Anderson

Reviewed by: Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo by Thomas S Anderson Celucien L. Joseph (bio) Anderson, Thomas S. Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. In Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo, Thomas Anderson analyzes the relationship between Cuban culture and national identity in ten carnival-inspired poems influenced by Afro-Cuban customs and cultural manifestations in the works of six well-known Afrocubanismo writers, spanning from 1916 to 1953. Anderson underscores the sociopolitical and historical contexts of these poems which have shaped the literary production and message of the Afrocubanismo movement. Chapter 1 registers the racially-motivated stereotypes and negative attitudes, what Anderson calls “strong prejudices,” toward the Afro-Cuban population and the African customs and cultural expressions in the Cuban society. Anderson argues that Felipe Picardo Moya’s poem “La comparsa,” a precursor to Afrocubanismo poetry, reveals deep-seated biases against Afro-Cuban carnival celebrations and other related cultural expressions, was instrumental in the cultural suppression of Afro-Cuban customs, and ultimately “led to official bans against them during the early decades of the twentieth century” (20, 43). [End Page 498] Chapter 2 underscores the influence of Alejo Carpentier in the genesis of Afrocubanismo; careful attention is given to the significance of his religious-inspired poems and particularly the overlooked poem “Juego santo.” Anderson argues cogently that Carpentier was the first Afrocubanismo poet to focus on the sacred Afro-Cuban rituals, and to attempt to interpret the esoretic rites of the Abakuá secret society in poetry (20–21, 54). He elaborates upon this thesis by a careful reading of “Liturgia” and “Juego santo” in which Carpentier melds poetically two public spectacles: sacred Abakua processions and secular carnival comparsas—what the author phrases “an act of poetic syncretism.” Chapter 3 moves the discussion forward by a painstaking analysis of Nicolás Guillén’s most widely read and anthologized poem “Sensemayá: canto para matar una culebra.” Anderson’s creative interpretation of “Sensemayá” is both brilliant and persuasive. By examining “Sensemayá” in relationship to nineteenth-century celebrations of Día de Reyes, the author declares that the poem is closely linked to traditional twentieth-century’s Afro-Cuban comparsas. Anderson contends that the poem is a polemically and “carefully constructed response to the many bans that were enacted against Afro-Cuban carnival processions during the early decades of the twentieth century” (80). He also suggests that the well-known “killing” the snake ritual in Afro-Cuban carnival celebrations as poetically featured in “Sensemayá” should rather be understood as the poet’s interpretation of the ceremonial as a symbolic act of Cuban cultural renewal, representing both by the anticipating creature’s rebirth and its ensuring survival. Chapter 4 explores the contribution of Emilio Ballaga to Afrocubanismo by engaging his 1934 famous anthology Cuaderno de poesía negra. Andersons remarks that Ballaga’s poem “Comparsa habanera” counters racial bigotries and misapprehensions of African-derived customs by acknowledging their importance to the Cuban experience and by supporting the “unity of blacks and whites in the forging of the Cuban community that was culturally mulatto” (108). On the other hand, Anderson criticizes Ballaga for his hypocrisy and his deployment of racial slurs. He observes that while in this poem, Ballaga attempts to “replace negative portrayals of black Cubans by authors of previous generations with sincere and authentic images,” he nevertheless marks Afro-Cuban comparseros with “bozal speech, ignorance, primitive superstitions, drunkenness, and unrestrained sexuality” (139). Chapter 5 outlines the political aspect of comparsas associated with chambelonas, Cuba’s Liberal Party politicians. Anderson exposes the double standards of white politicians who, on one hand, despised Afro-Cuban customs and carnival traditions, and on the other hand, exploited Afro-Cubans’ votes to “drum up support” for their campaigns and to promote their own political agendas during the formative years of the Cuban Republic (142). In “Quintin Barahona,” José Zacarías Tallet represents Afro-Cubans with broken Spanish, stupid, uneducated, highly exaggerated bozal speech, and with “Congo” lips (143–44). On the other hand, he advocates a black political consciousness by encouraging black Cubans to be actively involved in the political life of...

The Media Audience: A Brief Biography—Stages of Growth or Paradigm Change?

The concept of audience was widely adapted from its earlier origins in public spectacles and performance to apply to the new circumstances of mass media reception in the early 20th century, and especially to the public for film and broadcasting. It could even be applied more generally to include print media. The then novel usage of the term was a component in the larger paradigm of mass communications that in turn rested on certain preconceptions about its ‘mass’ character. These preconceptions have been challenged by subsequent research and theory. More recently, however, the ongoing transformation of the means of communication may have rendered the whole mass communication paradigm itself obsolescent, and with it the concept of a mass audience. In this article it is argued that paradigmatic change in ideas about the audience may be less due to a shift in technology than to the more fundamental theoretical changes of the intervening period.

Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre by Jean-Claude Yon

Reviews 247 Yon, Jean-Claude. Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7007-0188-3. Pp. 437. 29 a. Yon offers a valuable compendium of information about the underpinnings of nineteenth-century Parisian theater. This is a wonderfully informative book for those of us who have taught plays such as Hernani, La dame aux camélias, or La fille Élisa and longed to know more about the behind-the-scenes battles over censorship, theater construction and personnel, authors’ and actors’ rights, patronage, and the theatrical experience itself. This is not an histoire of Paris’s greatest theatrical works, but of its theaters. Yon adopts a resolutely historical approach, considering plays themselves as historical documents (259). He provides a comprehensive overview of the social and cultural forces that influenced theaters and their operation in nineteenth-century Paris.Although Yon uses the term théâtre largely to refer to state-sanctioned structures until 1864, he also discusses a variety of other spectacles including cafés-concerts, circuses, and sports, particularly in sections devoted to the Belle Époque. The book’s first section, “L’État face aux théâtres parisiens,” develops chronologically from 1791 to 1914, tracing theater’s fate in the hands of each political regime. The second, “Les structures de la vie théâtrale,” evokes the way theaters were laid out, operated, frequented , and supervised (fire laws for example), explains how authors and personnel collaborated to bring texts to the scene, describes the working conditions of performers and stage hands,and the experience of the theater-going public.The third part,“Répertoires et diversité des spectacles,” provides a thematic overview of different generic categories of the 32,000 pièces performed in Paris from 1800–1900 (259): they ranged from tragedy and opera to melodrama, vaudeville, dance, pantomime, panorama, circus, and sports.Yon’s conclusion describes the controversial droit des pauvres, the tax levied on theaters to support charitable activities, and interprets its unpopularity as symptomatic of the tenuous associations between theaters and their perceived social utility. Each section of Yon’s book draws upon a wealth of archival materials (letters from Haussmann to ministers, from the police to ministers, among writers and actors), to reveal the book’s overarching thesis: that nineteenth-century French theater was a dramatocratie, meaning that theater was at the heart of public life and informed public opinion (7). Indeed, he shows that all nineteenth-century French rulers were concerned by theatrical spectacles’ influence on the lower classes, and the threat that such a dramatocratie represented for the state. Even Third Republic leaders were concerned by the shape and form exerted by theater and struggled (ineffectually it would turn out) to control public spectacles. But Yon also perceives the Third Republic as the moment when theater lost this social privilege, when it morphed into one among many attractions in a developing société du spectacle (351). Yon’s work is thus not a neutral accounting of the development of bourgeois Parisian theaters, le grand théâtre, but a commentary on theater’s implications for nineteenth-century French society as a whole. This book will be a valuable resource for teachers and students alike. It is published in an affordable paperback edition, it is well-documented, contains a useful index,and is full of interesting excerpts from historical documents and correspondence. While sometimes a bit technical, it would make an excellent French-language historical resource for literature courses dedicated to nineteenth-century French theater and theatrical history. Montclair State University (NJ) Elizabeth Emery Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner Beffa, Jean-Louis. La France doit choisir. Paris: Seuil, 2012. ISBN 978-2-02-106499-5. Pp. 287. 18 a. Ce choix crucial est celui du type de capitalisme que la France devrait adopter. Ex-PDG de Saint-Gobain (1996–2007) et conseiller politique actif, Beffa analyse clairement la mondialisation, dissèque le mal économique français, et propose des solutions. Il distingue entre les “métiers mondiaux [...] où la production d’un pays donné est en concurrence directe avec les productions d’un autre pays” (17), et les métiers régionaux o...

Reading The Black Book : Between the Lines of History

Reading The Black Book: Between the Lines of History Cheryl A. Wall (bio) When ‘The Black Book’ was Published in 1974, with Toni Morrison as its in-house editor, it was an immediate commercial and critical success. With the hardcover priced at $15.00 and the paperback at $5.95, an eye-catching cover that echoed the design of a quilt, and an introduction by Bill Cosby, it was aggressively marketed to a mass audience. Cosby recorded five radio commercials: 160 press kits containing the book, the Cosby tapes and scripts, and quotes from an array of black artists and celebrities (including Muhammad Ali, B. B. King, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Alex Haley, Max Roach, and Alice Walker) were mailed to disk jockeys at black-oriented radio stations across the country. A “Black Book” record was cut, with lyrics based on the poem—written by but not attributed to Morrison—that graced the back cover. Morrison made numerous media appearances to promote the book. Parties were held in Chicago and New York; the star-studded gala at Charles Gallery, a restaurant on Harlem’s 125th Street, on 4 March 1974 was widely reported by local media, including television, radio, and newspapers. The effort paid off: on 15 April 1974, The Black Book was number nine on The New York Times trade paperback best seller list (Random Box 1146). Co-edited by collectors Middleton Harris, Morris Levitt, and Roger Furman, the self-described “scrapbook” of African American history, won critical acclaim. In a competitive season, The Black Book garnered a nomination for the 1975 National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category, alongside Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Pirsig’s counterculture classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Woodward and Carl [End Page 105] Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, and Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, which won the award. In recognition of its stunning design, The Black Book also received an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Several critics were effusive: Newsweek reviewer Margo Jefferson found that, like the best histories, “it informs, corrects and even inspires”; she also noted that the material required “a reader’s interpretation” (104). Donald Bogle in a review, “The Whole Black Catalogue,” whose title riffed on The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968), one of the era’s most successful publishing ventures, summed up The Black Book as “oversized, rambling, ambitious, and stubbornly brilliant.” It was, he averred, “much too dazzling and personal to sit unread on anyone’s table.” Doris Grumbach, the regular reviewer for The New Republic, made an apt judgment and an accurate prediction: “the book is fine and, like its subject, I suspect will endure” (31). The Black Book went through twelve printings, and a 35th anniversary edition was issued in 2009.1 The Black Book documents the history of African Americans through an array of verbal and visual texts: posters, newspaper articles, letters, speeches, bills of sale, spirituals and blues, work songs and folk tales, children’s rhymes, drawings, advertisements, photographs (both family pictures and documentary photographs of quilts, tools, furniture, and other artifacts), recipes, patent applications, sheet music, playbills and movie stills, formulas for conjure, and dream interpretations. The past unwinds in what historian Elsa Barkley Brown might describe as a polyrhythmic record that shifts abruptly from triumph to tragedy, degradation to betrayal, from the trivial to the profound. Like its quilt-like cover, the entire book offers a visual metaphor for history as “everybody talking at once” (85). It reproduces hand-written letters and pages from tax ledgers and family Bibles. Facsimiles of published material are produced in a range of fonts, as are the columns of factoids composed by the editors. The Black Book reproduces newspaper accounts of lynchings that capture the peculiar confluence of barbarism and propriety attendant to the public spectacles. One front-page article describing a lynching in Pennsylvania notes the deference shown the white women in attendance, as white men “stepped back even as the women came forward and led them to points of vantage where they could obtain the best view...

Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers

ArgumentThis article explores the history of mummy unwrappings in the West, culminating in Margaret Murray's public unrolling of two mummies in Manchester in 1908. Mummy unwrappings as a practice have shifted often between public spectacles which displayed and objectified exotic artifacts, and scientific investigations which sought to reveal medical and historical information about ancient life. Although others have looked at Murray's work in the context of the history of mummy studies, I argue that her work should be viewed culturally as poised between spectacle and science, drawing morbid public interest while also producing ground-breaking scientific work that continues to this day. Murray's main goal was to excite the interest of the public while at the same time educating them in the true history of ancient Egypt, while ascertaining new scientific information and contributing to the scholarly interpretations of ancient Egypt.

Singing praise in the streets: Performing Canadian Christianity through public worship in Toronto's Jesus in the City parade

Festivals, parades and other public cultural spectacles are important sites in which communities demarcate their boundaries and attempt to expand them by claiming public space. This article draws from ethnographic fieldwork at Toronto's Jesus in the City parade, an annual event in which Toronto-area Christians take their message to the city's downtown in a Carnival-style procession, to explore what Amanda Weidman has called the ‘politics of voice’ in the parade: how religious participants create, contest and negotiate various affiliations in the public sphere through their musical performance of congregational songs. Exploring what sounds are produced and why reveals how parade participants use musical performance on the city stage in their quest to define what it means to be a Christian, an ethnic minority and a Canadian in the twenty-first century.

Beaten into action: A perspective on blood sports

Beaten into action: A perspective on blood sports

Early Medici Patronage and the Confraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino

Medici confraternal patronage is usually associated with public spectacle. Nevertheless, the bonds that this family forged with smaller lay brotherhoods (though the intent was perhaps equally political as with larger groups) can reveal a contrasting view of the clan. Previous studies concerning the confraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino are few and fall primarily within the field of social history. This interdisciplinary article considers the form and function of the fresco decoration in the confraternity’s oratory in tandem with fresh, unpublished archival data. This, in turn, provides historical, factual information about the structure and activities of the confraternity, its cultural environment and the generosity of its illustrious patrons. Concentrating on Medici confraternal patronage from 1469 to 1492, this article explores changes in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s confraternal needs and ultimately demonstrates how the munificence of il Magnifico and his assassinated brother, Giuliano, was recorded and celebrated by the Buonomini.

Responding to Organized Crime in Australia and New Zealand

On 22 March 2009 a brawl erupted at Sydney domestic airline terminal between two outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs), the Hells Angels and Comancheros, during which a participant was stabbed and bludgeoned to death with a metal bollard in front of travelers. A few days later his brother, a Hells Angel who had also participated in the melee, was shot and seriously wounded outside his home. The extraordinary open violence at the airport was the subject of intense media attention already attracted by longstanding tensions between the Hells Angels and Comancheros and incidents of armed conflict between rival OMCGs the Bandidos and Notorious. The public spectacle of this murder constituted a turning point in Australia’s approach to OMCGs. It was the trigger for changing a measured inquiry into controversial new laws on serious and organized crime passed in South Australia in 2008 into the rapid adoption of laws similar to those in South Australia in three other Australian jurisdictions, with others foreshadowing such laws. The Premier of New South Wales reflected public alarm when he announced new legislative measures to address the OMCG problem the following day: I was sickened by this brazen attack. Violence of this nature particularly in front of families and children is nothing short of disgusting (Welch 2009). Although the additional police powers (discussed below) were widely criticized, bi-partisan political support enabled them to be rushed into law. It was also a catalyst for a wider debate about organized crime in Australia, and hastened the adoption of a nationally coordinated approach between each of Australia’s nine jurisdictions (comprised of six states, two territories and the federal jurisdiction) to combat organized crime.

Jacques Louis David's Madame de Pastoret and Her Son

Jacques Louis David's <i>Madame de Pastoret and Her Son</i>

“You are one of us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability, and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

“You are one of us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability, and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace Maria J. Lopez (bio) It is revealing that Margaret Atwood should have chosen for her 1996 novel the title of Alias Grace, which points to two central and interrelated aspects of this literary work. On the one hand, it indicates that the fictional world it denotes revolves around one individual, namely, the historical figure of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant in Canada sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted in 1843 for her involvement in the murder of her household employer, Thomas Kinnear, and of his housekeeper and lover, Nancy Montgomery. On the other hand, the introduction into the title of the term “alias” suggests that in their search for the truth about Grace Marks, both readers and characters may be frustrated by their continuously encountering duplicity and falsity. This process takes place because Grace resists being comprehended by the knowledge and discourse of what I would like to call communities of power, namely, the scientific, religious, and legal communities and by the Foucauldian disciplinary system created by them. She belongs, on the contrary, to the marginal communities of immigrants, servants, and mad people, who share strong bonds of solidarity based upon vulnerability and secrecy and who challenge the rigidity of social categories, together with official middle- and upper-class constructions of national identity. [End Page 157] In her essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” Atwood asserts, in relation to Canadian history and historical writing, that “it’s the very things that aren’t mentioned that inspire the most curiosity in us. Why aren’t they mentioned? The lure of the Canadian past, for the writers of my generation, has been partly the lure of the unmentionable—the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (218). In her novel, Atwood is precisely concerned with a mysterious story, Grace Marks’s, an individual who escapes all attempts to enclose and apprehend her. The textual excerpts and fragments that we find at the beginning of each chapter, coming from newspapers, letters, poems, and other textual sources, denote a collective eagerness to translate her story into meaningful and articulate terms, although the fragmentary and incoherent result points to the impossibility of doing so. In this sense, the scrapbook owned by the penitentiary governor’s wife, a collection of newspaper cuttings on famous crimes and criminals, can be seen as a microcosm of the novel as a whole. Grace herself has looked at it many times, finding both “lies” and “true things” and what constitutes the “chief concern” of “the gentlemen and the ladies both”: not whether or not she killed anyone, but whether or not she was “really a paramour” (30). The scrapbook underlines, then, where Grace stands in relation to social class divisions: as a marginal figure on which the upper- and middle-class desire for sensationalism and feminine stereotypes comes to be projected. The scrapbook also presents Grace as spectacle, an object everyone can look at and examine. This condition is one of which she is aware, as we see her reflecting upon the hanging of James McDermott—the fellow servant who supposedly committed the murders and with whom Grace is complicit—in front of the jail in Toronto: “It was raining, and a huge crowd standing in the mud, some of them come from miles away. If my own death had not been commuted at the last minute, they would have watched me hang with the same greedy pleasure” (32). Not only were executions public spectacles, but so too were penitentiaries and asylums. It is in this way that the nineteenth-century settler Susanna Moodie approached Grace Marks, to whom she refers in Life in the Clearings (1853), the text in which Atwood first encountered Grace’s story, as she explains in the “Author’s Afterword.” Pointing to Moodie’s descriptions, in Life in the Clearings, of the provincial penitentiary in Kingston and the lunatic asylum in Toronto, Atwood explains that “such public institutions were visited like zoos, and, at both, Moodie asked to see the star attraction, Grace Marks” (538). Grace, as a low-class woman, becomes the object...

Theatre of Crisis: The Performance of Power in the Kingdom of Ireland, 1662–1692 (review)

Reviewed by: Theatre of Crisis: The Performance of Power in the Kingdom of Ireland, 1662–1692 Penelope Walrath Cole Theatre of Crisis: The Performance of Power in the Kingdom of Ireland, 1662–1692. By Patrick Tuite. Apple-Zimmerman Series in Early Modern Culture. Selingsgrove: Susquehana University Press, 2010. Cloth $65.00. 250 pages. Focusing on the interrelationship between cultural and political events in Ireland from 1662–1692, Patrick Tuite’s new book is a welcome addition to existing scholarship in theatre and performance in Ireland. Framed by the Restoration and the Williamite War, Tuite deftly negotiates the complicated and dynamic landscape of Irish political and cultural geography, providing in-depth historical context, new readings of play texts and performances, and a fresh look at the performative aspects of the various media available in the late seventeenth [End Page 225] century. While the work of Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre provides the foundation for Tuite’s explorations, he also identifies print media, state pageantry and military displays, civic building projects, and Church of Ireland rituals and sermons as cultural productions—performative media through which cultural codes of behavior and an understanding of social stratification were delivered. Tuite lays out his argument and methodology in a comprehensive introduction. Noting the political instability of Ireland in the seventeenth century, he asserts that cultural productions “served to establish an authoritative description of Ireland’s social structure” (19). Tuite focuses primarily on the efforts of the conforming Protestant minority of Ireland, who employed every available means to demonstrate, inculcate, and validate behavioral codes in order to establish and maintain their political and cultural superiority. To explain and amplify the ways in which the various media operated, Tuite indicates that he will examine the historical context surrounding cultural productions, as well as the messages generated, and the methods through which each medium distributed those messages to its audience. Chapter one delves more deeply into the historical circumstances leading up to the Restoration as well as the events that occurred between 1662 and 1692. Additionally, the production of plays, the writing and publishing of histories of Ireland, and the drawing of maps are all discussed as ways in which the struggle to control Ireland’s government is evident. In a very interesting discussion of a production of Othello in 1691, Tuite suggests that this play “provided the means to express the kingdom’s newly established power structure, a hierarchy that depended upon the identification of distinct ethnic, confessional, and political differences among the kingdom’s various subjects in order to remain stable” (30). In chapter two Tuite details the people responsible for the productions at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre. While this information has certainly been covered in other accounts of Irish theatre, Tuite points out that “no history has examined how ideological concerns shaped the production and reception of these narratives during this period” (59). A discussion of the ideological differences of two of Dublin’s leaders and the effects of their conflicting beliefs on these productions is particularly enlightening. Chapter three, according to the introduction, “provides a close reading of the plays staged at Dublin’s theatre” and examines “[h]ow the performance of specific texts in an Irish context supported the Anglo-Protestant discourse found in other media” (22). Although there is a great deal of information regarding the physical aspects of the theatre and a helpful breakdown of the types of plays produced at the Smock Alley Theatre during this time, there is little to be found by way of a close reading of any one play. Instead, many different plays are referred to briefly in support of one idea or another. Many of these ideas are interesting, but it is difficult at times to make the connections Tuite seemingly takes for granted. [End Page 226] “The City as Stage,” chapter four, expands the discussion to include public spectacles, pageants, military displays, and religious ceremonies. In one of the most clearly written chapters, Tuite aptly describes the close ties many of the men behind these spectacles had to England and the influence those ties had on what, who, where, when, and for whom these large-scale spectacles were performed. Tuite concludes the book...

Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775-1815

Model Experts is a welcome addition to scholarship on the history of the wax anatomical collection of ‘La Specola’ in Florence (Museo di Storia Naturale, Sezione Zoologica). Studying the emerging role of the expert in state service through archival records, reports, gazettes, letters and ephemera from 1775 to 1815, Model Experts opens perspectives on the social and political conditions of the Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, relationships among scientific experts and the state, and notions of public education. The first section of the book examines relationships among the major figures in the development of one of Europe's first public science museums, Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo's Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History, along with the ‘politics of nature’ (p. 39) that underpinned that project. Chapter 1 sets the famed anatomical collection in that museum—with its languid decomposable wax ‘Venuses’, flayed men, and individual anatomical studies—within Pietro Leopoldo's vision of the utility of public spectacle. Ordering an end to competing popular entertainments in Tuscany, including charlatans, puppeteers and itinerant storytellers, the Grand Duke instituted a vigorous project of public entertainment and education designed to ‘enlighten the public and make it happy by making it educated’ (p. 20) as a contemporary gazette reported. That enlightenment, promoted through the institutional display of wax anatomical models at La Specola, simultaneously legitimised the ruler and the state as the executors of natural laws. Chapter 2 examines the contributions of the physician Antonio Coccchi, the obstetrician Giuseppe Gallettti, and director Felice Fontana to the development of medicine in the service of the state.

Bystander Reaction to Women Fighting

This article explores accounts of bystanders to female-on-female public violence. Group interviews with participants in the night-time economy are carried out. Whereas men tend to respond to the discussion topic of female-on-female violence with laughter, this laughter reveals ambivalence and discomfort as much as amusement. Men seem to negotiate the tension between the expectation that they should intervene in emergencies and a catalogue of costs that attend intervention. Female bystanders appear to have a different set of concerns. They talk about feelings of shame at the interpersonal and the group level. Women cite the public spectacle, and the opportunity for men to demean or sexualize women, as reasons for intervention. The article concludes with some recommendations about the importance of exploring female violence in its own terms, beginning with a series of identified moral and social dilemmas incurred within possible third-party intervention.

Ukiyo-e Landscapes and Edo Scenic Places (1914)

Ukiyo-e Landscapes and Edo Scenic Places (1914) Nagai Kafū Translated by Kyoko Selden (bio) and Alisa Freedman (bio) I As the name suggests, ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) originally specialized in depictions of the manners and customs of women and children, as well as portraits of actors, but later the changing tastes of the era and artists' maturing skills led to the production of great landscapes. From the start, ukiyo-e and Western painting have been quite similar in that both emphasize shasei (realistic representation of nature). Landscape in Western painting emerged out of the background portions of portraiture and gradually became an independent subject. This separation began in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, continued through the eighteenth century, and was perfected in nineteenth century French Romanticism. In other words, landscape painting arose after the development of portraits. Our ukiyo-e shares this characteristic. The fūzokuga genre (pictures of manners and customs) of ukiyo-e developed with Suzuki Harunobu (1725?-70), Katsukawa Shunshō (1726-93), and Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815), reaching its height of maturity with such masters of the Kansei period (1789-1800) as Kitagawa Utamaro (circa. 1753-1806), Katsukawa Shunchō (?-1821), Chōbunsai Eishi (1756-1829), and Utagawa Toyokuni (1769-1825). At that point, the two great masters appeared—Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Ichiryūsai Hiroshige (1797-1858)1 who perfected landscape as an independent ukiyo-e genre, adding a final magnificence to the Edo period history of commoners' art. In discussing landscapes by Hokusai and Hiroshige, I would like to first inquire into the course of the development of ukiyo-e landscapes. I find one source to be uki-e (literally, "floating pictures," or perspective pictures)2 of distant views, prolific since Okumura Masanobu (1686-1764), and I consider the second source to be the influence of kyōka (comic poetry in 31 syllables) that flourished in Edo during the Tenmei period (1781-88). Following Suzuki Harunobu, artists like Katsukawa Shunshō and Isoda [End Page 210] Koryūsai (1735-90) added sophistication to ukiyo-e in composition and coloring. In the Tenmei period, the background of some fūzokuga had already begun to constitute perfect landscapes. Examples are the backgrounds of Torii Kiyonaga's triptych A Pilgrimage to Enoshima (Jijo Enoshima-mōde, about 1789) and Kitagawa Utamaro's Ferry Across the Sumida River (Sumidagawa watashibune, date unknown). The trend of the era finally came to demand landscape representations independent of genre pictures. Now, since the Genbun (1736-41) and Kyōhō (1716-36) periods, there has been a kind of panoramic painting called "uki-e" (floating picture). This genre represented interior and exterior views of brothels and theaters, scenes from The Treasury of 47 Loyal Retainers (Chūshingura, first performed in 1748) and The Soga Felling Ten Enemies (Soga jūbangiri, 1720)3 and famous places and religious sites. Urushi-e and beni-e (pictures colored with lacquer and safflower, respectively)4 from around the Kanpō (1741-44) and Enkyō (1744-48) periods already skillfully depicted distant scenes and crowds of people based on techniques of Western perspective drawing. Artists like Okumura Masanobu and Torii Kiyomitsu (1735-85) created such block copies in addition to portraits, but during the An'ei period (1772-81), Utagawa Toyoharu (1735-1814) exclusively produced distant views of famous places, which became fashionable. The Kansei period had already seen a trend toward mass production of inferior work. Click for larger view View full resolution Kitagawa Kuninao (Shidan-me), from the series Treasury of 47 Loyal Retainers in Perspective (Uki-e-Chūshingura). Wikimedia Commons. From Allen Hockley, Public Spectacles, Personal Pleasures: Four Centuries of Japanese Prints from a Cincinnati Collection, Cincinnati Art Museum, 2006. [End Page 211] Click for larger view View full resolution Utagawa Kunisada, The Soga Brothers Fell Ten Enemies (Soga jūbangiri, between 1827 and 1848). Courtesy of Odawara City Digital Archive, private collection. Click for larger view View full resolution Katsushika Hokusai, Chūshingura, Act Two (Kanadehon Chūshingura, Nidan-me, around 1806). Courtesy of Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon. [End Page 212] Viewing the most dexterous uki-e from the An'ei period, it becomes clear that the dominant...

Beyond the Furnace:

The year 2009 was especially significant for Pittsburgh. The city had just celebrated its 250th anniversary with a year-long series of concerts, parades, and other public spectacles. Among these were renovations to the iconic Point State Park, the completion of the Great Allegheny Passage bicycle trail to Cumberland, Maryland, and a “Parade of Champions” at the Senator John Heinz History Center featuring the legends of Pittsburgh sports. City leaders saw in these festivities an opportunity for fostering “improved regional perceptions of Pittsburgh” and “defining a vision for our region’s future.” The marketing blitz paid quick and unexpected dividends when in May the Obama administration announced the community would host an upcoming G20 Summit. The president’s emphasis on “the green economy” meshed perfectly with the booster narrative of Pittsburgh as “a great poster child [for] economic transformation.” Combined with the Steelers’ Super Bowl victory and the Penguins winning the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup, by the end of the year residents of the ’Burgh had plenty to justify claims that they were back from the ruins of deindustrialization. Though marked by less fanfare, 2009 also witnessed the publication of two fascinating books by the University of Pittsburgh Press that drew heavily on these same themes of economic and environmental transformation. Designed explicitly for an audience beyond the confines of the academy, Franklin Toker’s Pittsburgh: A New Portrait and Edward K. Muller’s edited volume, An Uncommon Passage: Travelling through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail , are also of importance to scholars for their insight into the process of community and regional regeneration in the postindustrial era.

Tausend Jahre epigraphische Kultur im römischen Hispanien: Inschriften, Selbstdarstellung und Sozialordnung

Tausend Jahre epigraphische Kultur im römischen Hispanien: Inschriften, Selbstdarstellung und Sozialordnung

Agency Problems in China’s Disaster Response: The Adaptation Quandary for a Nondemocratic Government

This research explores agency problems in disaster management in China. In this era of global interdependence, reputation takes an increasingly significant role in economic and diplomatic affairs. Therefore, the Chinese authority spares no effort to turn disaster management into a public spectacle. On the other hand, it is reluctant to abandon the familiar authoritarian approaches of exerting power and manipulating information. Thus, the government is unable to display coherence and consistency in its practices. Through a close examination of the Chinese government’s handling of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this study argues that the various agency problems, like disregard for rules, formalism, hypocrisy, responsibility-shirking, etc. were innate to a process whereby the government attempted to adapt to a new international environment with its old survival strategies.

Guantánamo does not exist: Simulation and the production of ‘the real’ GlobalWar on Terror

Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantánamo, the high-profile US military detention and interrogation operation, was established in January 2002 to house the ‘worst of the worst’ of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It nevertheless became a public spectacle that was essential for constituting the reality of a Global War on Terror. Through evolving media and VIP tours of the facilities coupled with the Bush administration–s military analyst programme (a system of reverse embeds used to promote Pentagon messages within the U.S. media), Guantánamo became a simulation essential for producing the reality of the war. It became a key way to convince the public that the war was real and necessary, but also that its conduct was just and humane, and therefore, by extension, that the United States can be understood as ‘good’. Through a triple screen of the tours, the visitors and their mediation, the telegenic spectacle of Guantánamo was transmuted into a reality of Guantánamo as ‘safe, humane, legal and transparent’. The importance of this for producing understandings of the Global War on Terrorism (GWoT) bears closer examination. Without this triple screen, Guantánamo does not exist.

Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish SpectacleModernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. PaigeReynolds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+257.

<i>Paige Reynolds,</i> Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle<i>Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle</i>. PaigeReynolds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+257.