Subversive Messages Research Articles

Hermann Gross, A Descendant of the German Expressionist Movement, Who Made his Home in the North of Scotland

This paper presents a brief biographical account of the life and work of Hermann Gross – a German Expressionist artist – who was born in 1904 in Lahr, Baden-Württemberg. The nature and extent of his professional training with a succession of distinguished teachers are outlined. With the outbreak of WW2, he was conscripted in January 1941 and joined a Luftwaffe propaganda unit. Attention is drawn to a number of sketches drawn by Gross, which were discovered long after the end of the war, and which appear to show a series of subversive messages. In the latter stages of WW2, Gross was transferred to the Russian front and was involved in the subsequent and calamitous retreat of the German army. This latter experience proved deeply traumatic for Gross and from which he did not fully recover for two decades. Partly in an attempt to address his impaired mental health he emigrated to the USA with his wife. Although he had two exhibitions of his work at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, where his work was highly commended by a number of leading American art critics, he never truly settled and returned to Germany to live a quiet and undemanding life. Then in 1966 he was invited by Dr Karl König, founder of the Camphill community in Scotland, to come to Aberdeen and to act as an artist-in-residence. For the next two decades, with his artistic drive and enthusiasm fully restored, Gross was actively engaged in a wide range of artistic work: none of which he chose to publicly exhibit beyond the Camphill community. He died in 1988 and is buried in Maryculter kirkyard, Aberdeenshire.

DEFIANT DEVIANT IMAGES: SCANNING A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE FANART

Fan studies is the scholarly analysis of fans and fandom. The engagement of individuals or groups with a particular text or cultural phenomenon with which they have formed an emotional attachment becomes the focus of study. The object of fandom can be any work of literature, film, music, or other media; an activity such as a sport; or even a famous person. Fans move from being mere consumers of the culture industry to becoming producers in their turn or “prosumers”. They produce stories and songs and art centred around their fan object, which are circulated and critiqued by other fans in the safe space of digital fandoms. In this process fans also become performers. Fan art can be anything from portraits of characters to depiction of meaningful moments in the source text or images of wish fulfilment. A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of five fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin published from 1996 to 2011, which has become a cultural phenomenon and has spawned several fandom sites online. This paper examines the fanart produced by A Song of Ice and Fire fans, which are circulated in tumblr.com, deviantart.com and reddit.com to understand the subversive messages they convey.

Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair

Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair

How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet by Olga Peters Hasty

Reviewed by: How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet by Olga Peters Hasty Hilde Hoogenboom HOW WOMEN MUST WRITE: INVENTING THE RUSSIAN WOMAN POET, by Olga Peters Hasty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. 248 pp. $120.00 hardback; $39.95 paperback; $39.95 ebook. In her prize-winning book, How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet, Olga Peters Hasty establishes new connections among four major women poets. She pairs Evdokiia Rostopchina (1811-1858) with Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893) in the nineteenth century and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) with Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) in the twentieth century. The pairing of these poets is a cultural habit that Hasty finds useful if problematic because critics pushed women poets to compete with each other. In a major reconfiguration of this dynamic, Hasty shows that Tsvetaeva broke the competitive cycle, as she aligned herself with Pavlova's ideal of the poetic craft and wrote poems and letters to Akhmatova. Poets in Russia occupy a prestigious place in literature and among feminist scholars. In her groundbreaking study Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (1987), Barbara Heldt argued that Russian women writers found their voice most convincingly in poetry and autobiography rather than fiction. Heldt singled out Rostopchina, Pavlova, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova among her pantheon, as does Hasty. In her new work, Hasty applies the lens of gender to these well-known writers and their anthologized poems. For her opening chapters on Rostopchina and Pavlova, Hasty builds on Diana Greene's Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2004), which asks how class and gender affected the education, publication, and reception of fourteen women poets, especially Rostopchina, Pavlova, and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia. Hasty calls her critical method "deep reading"—a Russian twist on close reading (p. xi). In a culture used to reading between the lines for hidden political messages, readers have failed to imagine that women wrote [End Page 403] political poetry. They have also failed to detect women poets' subversive messages about gender. Hasty argues that readers at the time missed those messages because they imposed their own gendered censorship. They did not recognize how women poets subverted gender norms and engaged in "skillful negotiation" over the "multifaceted indeterminacy" of the term "woman" (p. 3). Women poets found their voice and agency through coded dialogue with each other. They protested against men's stereotypes of women's poetry, which "inhibited their unmediated self-realization" (p. 10). Hasty draws on an eclectic mixture of methodologies: the close reading of New Criticism; Wolfgang Iser's reader response theory from the 1970s; masquerade theories from the 1980s; and notions of women's agency that arose from feminist and Marxist rebuttals to structuralism. Rostopchina, like Akhmatova two generations later, embraced writing as a woman. It is Rostopchina's poem "How Should Women Write" (1841) that provides the book's title and its conundrum: women poets reveal "the feminine world" that must remain "modestly veil[ed]" (p. 62). Hasty deduces that in this poem, Rostopchina is asserting that men cannot decode women's poems because they have declared that women should only write about their hidden inner world. But the dictates of male culture did not always succeed in shaping how women wrote. Rostopchina's next poem eluded the censors, was soon confiscated, and cost her access to the royal courts of Nicholas I and Alexander II. She published her incendiary poem "A Forced Marriage" (1845), which alluded to Poland's political submission to Russia, in a conservative journal that likely had misunderstood the political subtext—not because she was a woman but because she chose to submit it to a conservative journal. Hasty shows that Pavlova and later Tsvetaeva presented themselves as poets first and women second. Pavlova famously dubbed Rostopchina an acolyte of George Sand in "We Are Contemporaries, Countess" (1847), after her political scandal. Hasty interprets this as an attack on Rostopchina as a feminist when it was most likely aimed at her liberal politics. Sand's politics and relationship with the Polish pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin galvanized Russians. Presenting herself as a dutiful wife, Pavlova declared she was a purely intellectual poet in the...

Las dos caras de la subversión

Within the study of the Spanish women's press, the magazines published during the Second Republic, until recently, have gone relatively unnoticed since they are rarely included in press history manuals. However, these magazines provide extraordinary information not only as documentary sources of daily life but as vehicles for subversive messages. In this sense, they even cover important news such as the rise of Nazism or they circumvent censorship to give voice to personalities with a belligerent anti-republicanism. One of the main themes will be the arrival of the “modern woman” prototype, which concentrates numerous debates around the aesthetic and behavioral transgression of women, which, in turn, becomes a representation of other topics such as family, nation or religion and whose perception in the articles is never absolute, but hinted at in the intense dialectic between tradition and modernity.

Subversion - The Secret Power of the Message Enlaced with the Power of the Internet and Information Technology

Subversion! Is it the symbol of invisibility, or the symbol of the secret power? What does it represent, the ability to carry the messages secretly, or the power to change the world? What are the ideas or objects that subversion challenges? The authority, people, tradition, institution, or the whole of humanity. Can it be considered as a way to brainwash or as a means to manipulate the thoughts and opinions of people? Is the power used by people to hide their feelings from others, be subversive? Is it the point where the change and progress meet? There are a lot of numerous and different questions that can be born from just a simple word subversion. At first glance, we think it is something simple, but its true meaning has power and many methods of expression. The whole idea and aim of subversion are to overthrow the existing state or situation and bring a functioning or desired change. It also supports the idea of staying behind and moving by one's own beliefs and choices. One of the common ways that we are exposed to subversive messages is through advertisements for different products, and the messages they carry on. Because of them, our subconscious mind is made to believe and desire things that we do not truly need or want. In the age of information technology and social media, subversive messages are carried much easier and shaped based on the characteristics of target audiences. Nowadays, advertisement and political campaigns directly respond to the individual requirements of target audiences, making their messages much more acceptable and influential.

‘Ain’t misbehavin’

Jazz music in children’s television communicates complex and subversive messages about the constructed notion of the child. As a musical and visual style, jazz has the potential to create a semiotic space for young viewers to explore a range of issues in ways not possible by more widely used genres of music for children. Whether as soundtrack, theme song or live performance on children’s television, jazz music provides the opportunity for resistant readings that undermine the very construction of childhood. I examine the use of jazz in early Hollywood cartoons and in the Hanna-Barbera productions of the early 1960s (The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear and Top Cat) in order to explain how sub-genres of jazz were used to signify age, social status, race and gender. This is followed by a discussion of jazz on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and how it has been used in didactic, instructional and progressive educational programming, often strategically for its connotations of race and sexuality. I argue that jazz in children’s television offers a forum in which often-complex and contradictory issues of adulthood can be accessed, contextualised and negotiated by the child. The experience that jazz represents negates innocence, the main defining quality of Western childhood. However, as an abstract art form, jazz on television captures the fluidity of childhood and challenges the puritanical and Romantic foundations of its white hetero-normative construction.

When Workers Toil Unseen, Artists Intervene: On the In/visibility of Labor in the Arabian Gulf States

Although the insufficient labor standards in the Arabian Gulf countries are hypervisible, laws have not improved to the benefit of workers. In this article, I examine art practices from Gulf-based artists that address this invisibility by replicating the conditions of the laborer in their artworks, a process I term “total replication.” In contrast to the art historian Schaffer’s argument that art must subvert hierarchies, I show how artworks that replicate work conditions also have the potential to create appreciatory visibilities. I argue that these artworks contain subversive messages in such a way that they become consumable in the context of the Arabian Gulf’s art scene.

“God within Us”: Christianity and Subversion in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's Fiction

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's paradoxical engagement with Christianity and its topology. Against his increasingly hostile attitude towards the Christian establishment in a post-colonial space, the paper interrogates how this writer, who has been dubbed a “religious writer,” deploys Christianity and its topology as a conduit for his subversion in his fiction. Partly informed by Stephen Greenblatt's seminal essay “Invisible Bullets” and its conception of containment and subversion, the article examines how Ngũgĩ uses Christianity and its topology to advance his literary and rhetorical agenda of exposing and questioning colonial and neo-colonial social injustices, hence turning such imagery and topology into powerful literary and rhetorical tools that embody the subversion of his works. Although colonialism and its link to the spread of Christianity has been exploited by many African writers in dialogical and syncretic ways characterised by subtle shades of meaning and expressions, Ngũgĩ has gone a step further to deploy to his aesthetic and rhetorical advantage the same Christianity that he attacks so fiercely. The paper also examines how the purpose and degree to which Ngũgĩ deploys Christianity as a constant subject and conduit of his subversive writing varies from his apprentice novels to his hard-hitting and ideologically astute and conscious novels. It contends that Ngũgĩ's subversion lies in both the implicit and explicit use of Christian imagery and typology as a conduit for conveying subversive messages that denounce manifestations of exploitation found in his native Kenya, in particular, and other African nation-states in general.

Paradise Returned: Hardy's The Return of the Native

Abstract Paradise Lost is a primary intertext for The Return of the Native. Though the novel is often faulted for its obtrusive allusions to classics, ancient and modern, Hardy's deft use of Milton stabilizes a notoriously elusive narrative that lacks a clear protagonist and includes comfortable narrative “Aftercourses” that the author repudiated many years later. Specifically, Hardy fuses Miltonic oppositions into a monolithic, “modernist” landscape, from which not only God but also Satan has disappeared. To this Victorian wasteland, all natives who attempt to leave must return because there are no exits, except perhaps suicide. Yet the Miltonic text is so subtly rewritten, that it tends to mask too well the novel's subversive messages, especially in its transformation of the apparently selfish, lazy, and mischievous Eustacia Vye into one of the first modernist heroines.

Paradise Returned: Hardy's The Return of the Native

Abstract Paradise Lost is a primary intertext for The Return of the Native. Though the novel is often faulted for its obtrusive allusions to classics, ancient and modern, Hardy's deft use of Milton stabilizes a notoriously elusive narrative that lacks a clear protagonist and includes comfortable narrative “Aftercourses” that the author repudiated many years later. Specifically, Hardy fuses Miltonic oppositions into a monolithic, “modernist” landscape, from which not only God but also Satan has disappeared. To this Victorian wasteland, all natives who attempt to leave must return because there are no exits, except perhaps suicide. Yet the Miltonic text is so subtly rewritten, that it tends to mask too well the novel's subversive messages, especially in its transformation of the apparently selfish, lazy, and mischievous Eustacia Vye into one of the first modernist heroines.

A visual semiotic analysis of sperm donors’ baby photos as major marketing material at the s[u]permarket

This article presents a semiotic visual analysis of 48 sperm donors’ baby photos from six of the largest American sperm banks, using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s method of ‘reading images’ described in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006). Donor baby photos, conceptualized as self-advertisements, serve to engage prospective sperm users because of their liminal nature. The following issues are addressed: How do sperm donors use baby photos to transmit messages to prospective recipients? What are the cultural values conveyed via the photos? Is there a correspondence between donors’ verbal narratives and meanings encoded in baby photos? Furthermore, a new category of ‘chosen/selected’ images is proposed for classifying photos that were neither made for the purpose of the study nor found by the researcher. The photo selection is strategic and serves to engage sperm recipients in imaginary relations with donors. Furthermore, subversive messages tacitly transmitted in baby photos desemiotize some of the stated values in the verbal narratives.

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick

Reviewed by: British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick Kristina Straub (bio) Frederick Burwick. British Drama of the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 310. $103.00. This book examines provincial theatres' role in the formation of working-class identity and consciousness in the industrial age. Burwick begins his study with the proliferation of provincial theatres after the Theatrical Representations Act of 1788, which gave the power of licensing theatres to localized authorities throughout the provinces. This act eroded the state's stranglehold on theatrical representation after the Licensing Act of 1737 and opened opportunities for productions of old and new plays reflecting the world of working men and women. Burwick's research into more than sixty provincial theatres shows us how the oppression of workers and, sometimes, their radical resistances to that oppression became part of performances between 1790 and 1840. Burwick is not making a blanket claim for these theatres as venues for radicalism; however conservative or progressive the politics of the plays, theatre was a space in which industrial, working-class experience was represented and shared. For example, the old themes of anti-theatricality could be invoked against pro-labor messages when they played on the stage. Ironically, however, anti-theatrical attacks foregrounded subversive messages even as they decried them. The most compelling argument in the first chapter of this book shows us the contingency of plays' themes on the politics of local playhouses, players, and their audiences. Plays like Fielding's Tom Thumb; or, Tragedy of Tragedies, and Samuel Foote's The Mayor of Garratt adapted their performance to current politics. For example, a comic character could, through the mimicry of the actor, reference a local MP. Burwick makes the point that while the Licensing Act of 1737 assumed that plays were stable products, the realities of performance suggest their contingency on local contexts, a contingency that is all the more apparent after the Theatrical Representations Act of 1788. [End Page 119] A chapter on early nineteenth-century theatres and their diverse audience begins with nostalgia for David Garrick's "easier time" (48) in managing status divisions in his theatre. While Burwick might be downplaying the violence that Garrick often met with, his point is well taken that these differences became increasingly infused with local political conflicts between workers and the landowning gentry. A theatre located in an area dominated by the military reflected different social concerns than one in which textile workers were dominant. What unites these local differences is the struggle to create what Arthur Murphy referred to as the "Fourth Estate" of the theatre, an audience in which opinion could form across social differences. Plays could reflect the conflicts in a local community; for example, a play called The Hunchback drew on the Shakespearean precedent of Richard III as well as Victor Hugo's recent reversal in The Hunchback of Notre Dame to pose a critique of aristocratic privilege over the merchant and tradesmen class. Adaptations of plays such as The Merry Wives of Windsor incorporated advertising for local merchants, eliciting support from them and strengthening ties to the community. "Combination Acts and Friendly Societies" maps the formation of these social organizations and their influence on the theatre. Burwick looks at a wide political range of organizations, from the Masons and the Odd Fellows to the Manchester Female Reform Group. Their overall importance is that, conservative or radical, they created permeability between theatre and politics, both through a shared constituency (Burwick documents the participation of many theatrical professionals in these societies) and through performances in the theatre that were directed by and to various audiences of members. The more radical groups, of course, encouraged the performance of politically subversive plays such as The Mutiny at the Nore (1837), The Press-Gang; or, Archibald of the Wreck (1830), and Rent Day (1832), which often drew on recognizable conditions of class-based oppression. Burwick gives us a fascinating peek at the role of women in organizing their own groups for radical reform and the unsettling presence of angry women workers in the theatre and on the street, especially in areas dominated by the textile industry. This chapter gives us a...

Redrawing craft: Archival sources and the mark in the work of artist Danica Maier

Abstract ‘Stitch & Peacock’, the title of this recent exhibition by UK-based American artist Danica Maier, at The Collection and Usher Gallery, Lincoln, alludes equally to the craft, the imagery and the subversive messages hidden in her drawings for this show. The result of a seven month residency by Maier, the exhibition is the latest in a series of invitations to contemporary artists by curator Ashley Gallant to respond to objects held in the archives, as a means of presenting new perspectives on historic artefacts. Maier chose a Jacobean crewel work bedspread and a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century samplers, and by making work in response to these fragile objects, develops a dialogue that allows her to repeat and refract the textiles through the lens of drawing, and to make critical comparisons and equivalences between the stitch, the pixel and the drawn mark. Through her juxtapositions and reworkings, she asks us to reflect on the social context of the original female makers; to speculate on their potentially supressed frustrations, and their subversive power. Her wider drawing practice also critically invokes notions of labour, craft and technology, through her mining of a variety of archives.

River-Crabbed Shitizens and Missing Knives: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Trends in Chinese Language Use Online as a Result of Censorship

Abstract In today’s digital age, the online public domain, particularly social networking websites, is the new frontier for the battle between censors and dissidents. This paper examines linguistic trends in the ways in which Chinese web users exploit Chinese phonology, morphology, and orthography to avoid notice by online censors through the lenses of pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. The linguistic transformations can be divided into 1) phonologically derived transformations, e.g. the well known “river crab” (héxiè, 河蟹) in place of the word “harmony” (héxié, 和谐); 2a) character suggestion (phono-orthographical) e.g. referring to former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (Wēn Jiābǎo, 温家宝) as “Teletubby” (tiānxiàn bǎobǎo, 天线宝宝) because of the two names’ shared character 宝 (bǎo); and 2b) character suggestion (morpho-orthographical) e.g. the made-up word 目田 (mù tián, “eye field”) being substituted for 自由 (zìyóu, “freedom”). Consequently, introducing multiple linguistic transformations, in particular introducing elements of foreign languages and ideograms, drastically increases the level of encoding. This paper presents examples of combination methods, including Chinese-English compound words that connote disparate yet interdependent meanings in multiple languages meanings, as well as the youth culture phenomenon of Martian language, or 吙☆魰 (火星文, huǒxīng wén). In characterizing the ways in which web users manipulate Chinese language, this paper aims to demonstrate that these transformation techniques are inherent to the Chinese language as well as a byproduct of the relationship between web users and censors, reflected in the encoded subversive messages heavy reliance on political and cultural references. Thus, interpreting the output strings of subversive messages requires both linguistic knowledge and social context.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: RACIAL IDENTITY IN ALICE PERRIN'S THE STRONGER CLAIM

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God by Gail Turley HOUSTON (review)

HOUSTON, Gail Turley. Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. 181 pp. $55.95. In Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God, Gail Turley Houston presents a fascinating but neglected piece of feminist history. In chapter one, Houston introduces readers to a group of women who were active in millenarian and socialist feminist movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This group included outspoken prophets like Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharpies, Ann Lee, and Frances Wright. By imagining feminine manifestations of the divine and reconfiguring Eve as a deity or tragic heroine, these women ministered to what Houston calls the mother-god-want experienced by their followers, who felt alienated by the male-dominated Protestantism of their era (I). These Romantic-era radical grandmothers also paved the way for later feminist authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, and George Eliot, whose works expand[ed] the divine metaphor to include women as omnipotent beings (14). In so doing, these Victorian women writers not only legitimated their own authorial voices within a patriarchal culture, but also paved the way for extraordinary paradigm shift in which women's rights gradually became normalized (14). This last claim is not entirely substantiated by the chapters that follow, which deal primarily with literary manifestations of worship rather than tracing the effects of this practice on nineteenth-century culture more broadly. Nor does Houston concern herself with the modern goddess movement, although the history she uncovers is surely an important precursor to this trend (2). Instead, chapters two through six demonstrate the connections between prophets like Southcott and Lee and a range of Victorian women writers who internalized their messages and adapted them for new audiences. These mid-nineteenth-century authors were careful to disguise their sources, knowing as they did that Sharpies, Southcott, and other Romantic-era feminists were ridiculed by the popular press of their day. Thus, each author had to revise the subversive messages of her forebears in order to find a receptive audience. Bronte, for instance, heavily edited passages in Shirley (1849) dealing with the heroine's visions of a titanic Eve, a prophetic figure foreshadowed both in Sharples's utopian feminist writings and in Bronte's juvenilia (45). …

Recurrence, Remediation and Metatextuality in Queer As Folk

This article examines how recurrence functions diegetically within the series Queer As Folk (Showtime, 2000-2005), and how variations on the same event – the gay-bashing of Justin – are deliberately woven into the narrative. As a charged element within the soap opera framework of the series and within its political discourse, the bashing is reprised in a series of inset remediations (comics, theatrical show, storyboard to a Hollywood film, short sequences of animated film). This intermediality can be read as a form of hypertext and of multiplatform storytelling, as well as the series’ metatextual image for itself. I will argue that remediation allows the series to articulate subversive messages, both in highlighting the queer subtext in established mainstream popular culture genres (comics, action hero films) and in highlighting the series’ own singular achievement, beyond the creation of an “out” gay comics hero: the queering of soap itself.

So Close to Paradise (1999) and The Missing Gun (2002): Hollywood Models and the Production of Film Noir in Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

Film noir is new to the cinema of the People’s Republic of China. It was not easy for noir’s dark themes and nihilistic tone to get past the state’s strict censorship; however, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a few noir films were produced. Chinese noir has a strong affinity with American film noir in its representation of social and spatial transformation and exploration of critical issues under strict censorship. This essay presents a close analysis of So Close to Paradise (Wang Xiaoshuai, 1999) and The Missing Gun (Lu Chuan, 2002) and argues that Chinese noir is a creative and localized adaptation of a Hollywood genre. Innovative in their application of noir form and style, these films criticize corruption and class conflict in contemporary China and reflect ordinary people’s feelings of alienation and frustration provoked by the transformation of urban space. This essay also studies the strategies the two films employ, such as ambiguity and genre hybridity, to get past official censors while still maintaining their critical depth and subversive messages.

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals (review)

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals. By Scott Miller. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2011. [v, 281 p. ISBN 9781555537425 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9781555537432 (paperback), $24.95.] Scott Miller, founder and artistic director of New Line Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri, brings his directorial and artistic insights to ten post-Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, ably demonstrating their social references and resonances through the popculture triumvirate of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Miller asserts that the infusion of rock music styles into the musical vocabulary, along with their often sexually related subject matters, ushering in new golden age for the genre. (The classic mid-century musicals of Rodgers and Hammer stein and their contemporaries are generally thought of as the first golden age of the musical.) In Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, Miller champions each of the shows he presents and provides insights into their backgrounds, musicaldramatic dimensions, and reception histories. Miller has directed many of these shows, and his familiarity with the works as performance pieces makes his vantage point stand out from those of other writers on musical theater. His commentaries will be of interest to performers, directors, students, and scholars who are interested in any of these shows as well as to readers who enjoy musicals, particularly more recent ones. While many of the musicals included here have played on Broadway, this certainly not always the case. Indeed, it the inclusion of wider span of musical theater works, namely those with healthy lives in regional theaters and off-Broadway, that contributes to this book's value. The book has twofold organization. At first the chapters seem to be arranged according to the musical style of the focal works. The book begins with recent show, The Wild Party, one whose music largely rooted in the 1920s. The next chapter concerns Grease and its evocations of late 1950s rock. The author's approach then shifts to an essentially chronological one and becomes survey of rock musicals from Hair through High Fidelity. Andrew Lippa's aforementioned The Wild Party opened off Broadway in 2000 and ran for just 54 performances. The story set in the 1920s, and Lippa creatively employs period music for external action and more contemporary sounds for the characters' interior moments. Miller asserts that Lippa's fluid score is as close to jazz opera as it can be without actually crossing that line (p. 12). A cast album was released, although, as Miller discloses, it includes only some of the score and listeners cannot therefore hear much of the show's extraordinary music. Grease, which began life in 1972 as a rowdy, rebellious, oversexed, and insightful piece of alternative theatre (p. 25), strove for authenticity in its depiction of teenage life in 1959. Miller posits the show as concerning itself fundamentally with the shift from sexual repression in the 1950s to sexual adventuring in the 1960s and furthermore, with how rock and roll itself changed concepts of sex in America. He effectively argues that Grease concept musical, combination of plot-driven show and concept-based revue. The epochal Hair opened off Broadway at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre in 1967 and moved to Broadway the following year. Miller places Hair within the social and spiritual influences of the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, as well as in New York's experimental movement. He addresses the show's innately ritualistic elements, drawing parallels to Christian theology-Claude as Jesus, Berger as John the Baptist, and Jeanie as Mary Magdalene (p. 77)-and illuminating its subversive messages concerning race and sexuality. As in Grease, authenticity paramount in Hair, according to Miller, who claims the show is not musical; it happening (p. 82). Miller's passionate prose on Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) begins Here's the truth: Jesus Christ Superstar about politics, not religion, about political activist, not the son of God. …