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In Grime, Glitter, and Glass, Nikki A. Greene examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture. Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual's sonic possibilities with the Black body's physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap, along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba, within art historiography. From Bailey's use of multilayered surfaces of glitter, mud, and recycled materials to meditate on Sun Ra's Afrofuturism to Stout's life-size cast of her own body that recalls funk musician Betty Davis to Campos-Pons's performative and sculptural references to sugar that resonate with the legacy of Celia Cruz, Greene outlines how these artists use mediums such as molded glass sculptures, viscous wet plaster, and dazzling mannequin heads to enhance the manifestations of Black identity. By foregrounding the sonic elements of their work, Greene demonstrates that these artists use sound to make themselves legible, recognizable, and audible.

Unlike their European predecessors, many Latin American and North American authors turned to hallucinatory substances as elements of their own hemispheric heritage. The twentieth-century narratives analyzed in Visionary Art of the Americas: Hemispheric Transculturations, Hallucinogens, Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Consumer Culture in the United States, Mexico, and Colombia acquire their true depth only within a much wider realm of visionary traditions spanning Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Socially and culturally marginalized alongside users, hallucinogens—simultaneously a colonial anathema and a sacred pre-Columbian ritual—have gained increased mainstream acceptance. The various films and texts analyzed in this book attest to the true heterogeneity of hallucinogenic experience in the Americas at a time when scholarly attention to hallucination and visions as a survival adaptation of organic intelligence is crucial to understand its differences from A.I.

This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic decline that are apparent in America today.Connecting the works of these artists through a fictional country – the ‘Other America'– the book shows how they have refuted middle-class values and goals of success, money and social affirmation to unveil the less celebrated, dark side of contemporary America, which, despite the troubles currently faced, never loses hope for a better future. This utopic vision in the face of adversity is explored through the plots, characters and mis-en-scène of Auster and Jarmusch's work and Waits's lyrics and sound. This vision challenges the dominant narratives of America as the land of opportunity and values democracy, civic engagement, communitarianism and egalitarianism.Offering an important new perspective to literature on contemporary American culture, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies, film studies, popular music, postmodern literature, cultural studies and sociology.

This book offers a general historical overview of the Dada movement and presents the individual destinies of some of its major players against the background of the historical, political, and cultural trends which dominated the twentieth century in Europe as well as in America. The author discusses in depth the reciprocal interaction between Dada as an avant-garde movement and its environment, as well as a number of the emerging phenomena born during this interactive process. Dada is viewed as a complex phenomenon dominated by the emergence of hard-to-extrapolate effects; one hundred years of history enable us to ascertain the depth and the extent of this extremely significant socio-cultural event which was Dada and its relevancy to our post-modern and in the future—perhaps—post-human societies.

During the early part of the Cold War, Japan emerged as a model ally, and Japanese Americans were seen as a model minority. From Confinement to Containment examines the work of four Japanese and Japanese/American artists and writers during this period: the novelist Hanama Tasaki, the actor Yamaguchi Yoshiko, the painter Henry Sugimoto, and the children's author Yoshiko Uchida. The backgrounds of the four figures reveal a mixing of nationalities, a borrowing of cultures, and a combination of domestic and overseas interests. Edward Tang shows how the film, art, and literature made by these artists revealed to the American public the linked processes of U.S. actions at home and abroad. Their work played into—but also challenged—the postwar rehabilitated images of Japan and Japanese Americans as it focused on the history of transpacific relations such as Japanese immigration to the United States, the Asia-Pacific War, U.S. and Japanese imperialism, and the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans. From Confinement to Containment shows the relationships between larger global forces as well as how the artists and writers responded to them in both critical and compromised ways.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit's decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit's abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit's deterioration as either inevitable or the city's own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Harry Fenn was one of the most skilled and successful illustrators in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time when illustrated periodicals and books were the primary means of sharing visual images. Fenn's work fostered pride in America's scenic landscapes and urban centers, informed a curious public about foreign lands, and promoted appreciation of printed pictures as artworks for a growing middle class. Arriving in New York from London in 1857 as a young wood engraver, Fenn soon forged a career in illustration. His tiny black-and-white wood engravings for Whittier's Snow-Bound (1868) surprised critics with their power, and his bold, innovative compositions for Picturesque America (1872--74) were enormously popular and expanded the field for illustrators and publishers. In the 1880s and'90s, his illustrations appeared in many of the finest magazines and newspapers, depicting the places and events that interested the public -- from post--Civil War national reconciliation to the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 to the beginnings of imperialism in the Spanish-American War.This handsomely designed volume documents Fenn's prolific career from the 1860s until his death in 1911. Sue Rainey also recounts his adventurous sketching trips in the western United States, Europe, and the Middle East, which enhanced his reputation for depicting far-flung places at a time when the nation was taking a more prominent role on the world stage.

From the dawn of the atomic age, art and popular culture have played an essential role interpreting nuclear issues to the public and investigating the implications of nuclear weapons to the future of human civilization. Political and social forces often seemed paralyzed in thinking beyond the advent of nuclear weapons and articulating a creative response to the dilemma posed by this apocalyptic technology. Art and popular culture are uniquely suited to grapple with the implications of the bomb and the disruptions in the continuity of traditional narratives about the human future endemic to the atomic age. Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future explores the diversity of visions evoked in American and Japanese society by the mushroom cloud hanging over the future of humanity during the last half of the twentieth century. It presents historical scholarship on art and popular culture alongside the work of artists responding to the bomb, as well as artists discussing their own work. From the effect of nuclear testing on sci-fi movies during the mid-fifties in both the U.S. and Japan, to the socially engaged visual discussion about power embodied in Japanese manga, Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future takes readers into unexpected territory

In the 1970s, while politicians and activists outside prisons debated the proper response to crime, incarcerated people helped shape those debates though a broad range of remarkable political and literary writings.Lee Bernstein explores the forces that sparked a dramatic'prison art renaissance,'shedding light on how incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art. These included everything from George Jackson's revolutionary Soledad Brother to Miguel Pinero's acclaimed off-Broadway play and Hollywood film Short Eyes. An extraordinary range of prison programs--fine arts, theater, secondary education, and prisoner-run programs--allowed the voices of prisoners to influence the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican writers,'New Journalism,'and political theater, among the most important aesthetic contributions of the decade. By the 1980s and'90s, prisoners'educational and artistic programs were scaled back or eliminated as the'war on crime'escalated. But by then these prisoners'words had crossed over the wall, helping many Americans to rethink the meaning of the walls themselves and, ultimately, the meaning of the society that produced them.

Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States is the first book to provide a comprehensive and lively analysis of the contributions of artists from America's newest immigrant communities--Africa, the Middle East, China, India, Southeast Asia, Central America, and Mexico. Adding significantly to our understanding of both the arts and immigration, multidisciplinary scholars explore tensions that artists face in forging careers in a new world and navigating between their home communities and the larger society. They address the art forms that these modern settlers bring with them; show how poets, musicians, playwrights, and visual artists adapt traditional forms to new environments; and consider the ways in which the communities'young people integrate their own traditions and concerns into contemporary expression.

An exciting new work on how black and Asian racial structures were woven together within US theatrical practices in the run up to the Second World War, Steen uses this history to model how we might use performance histories to more carefully assess how racial formation occurs on the boundaries between racial groups in an international context.

Launched by Hugh Hefner in 1953, Playboy promoted an image of the young, affluent, single male-the man about town ensconced in a plush bachelor pad, in constant pursuit of female companionship and a good time. Spectacularly successful, this high-gloss portrait of glamorous living and sexual adventure would eventually draw some one million readers each month. Exploring the world created in the pages of America's most widely read and influential men's magazine, Elizabeth Fraterrigo sets Playboy's history in the context of a society in transition. Sexual mores, gender roles, family life, notions of consumption and national purpose-all were in flux as Americans adjusted to the prosperity that followed World War II. Initially, Playboy promised only'entertainment for men,'but Fraterrigo reveals that its vision of abundance, pleasure, and individual freedom soon placed the magazine at the center of mainstream debates about sex and freedom, politics and pleasure in postwar America. She shows that for Hugh Hefner, the'good life'meant the'playboy life,'in which expensive goods and sexually available women were plentiful, obligations were few, and if one worked hard enough, one could enjoy abundant leisure and consumption. In support of this view, Playboy attacked early marriage, traditional gender arrangements, and sanctions against premarital sex. The magazine also promoted private consumption as a key to economic growth and national well-being, offering tips from'The Playboy Advisor'on everything from high-end stereos and cuff-links to caviar and wine. If we want to understand post-war America, Fraterrigo shows, we must pay close attention to Playboy, its messages about pleasure and freedom, the debates it inspired, and the criticism it drew--all of which has been bound up in the popular culture and consumer society that surround us.

This book offers a social and cultural history of American culture in the formative years of the twentieth century, examining forms such as vaudeville, early film, popular songs, modernist art, and many others in the context of contemporary social changes.

Pop Modernism examines the popular roots of modernism in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Juan A. Suárez reveals that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life. Suárez demonstrates how modernist writers and artists reworked pop images and sounds, old-fashioned and factory-made objects, city spaces, and the languages and styles of queer and ethnic “others.” Along the way, he reinterprets many of modernism's major figures and argues for the centrality of relatively marginal ones, such as Vachel Lindsay, Charles Henri Ford, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. As Suárez shows, what's at stake is not just an antiquarian impulse to rescue forgotten past moments and works, but a desire to establish an archaeology of our present art, culture, and activism.

As we approach the new millenium, the moral, intellectual,and spiritual crisis of our time is visible most plainly in the sickness of the arts. The'postmodern'cultural establishment is philosophically empty and esthetically corrupt. But no one has been able to explain this decline or give a satisfying answer to the question of the proper role of the arts in our society. Now, in The Culture of Hope -- a manifesto for a new vision of culture that is both radical and classical -- Frederick Turner goes beyond the stale dichotomies of Left and Right to take the'third side'in the culture war: the side of art itself.Great art can never be politically correct, Turner reminds us, whether the correction comes from Right or Left, because its sources are deeper than politics. The visionary modernists (Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky) understood this, but their successors today, as well as their conservative opponents, have forgotten. Turner sharply indicts the bankrupt tribe of venal mediocrities who now infest the arts, citing their naive rejection of morality, their ignorant denial of scientific truth, and their lazy dismissal of the Western cultural heritage. On the other hand, conservatives who call for a return to traditional values seek a socially'safe'vision of art that has never existed and never can.In the past, the arts have flowered when they drew their inspiration from new scientific visions of the cosmos. Thus Turner argues that the revolution in cosmology that is occurring today in the frontier fields of scientific thought will powerfully invigorate the artists of the future. A new esthetic synthesis arising from the unexpected convergence of religion, art, and science will restore a hopeful vision of the cosmos as intelligent, creative, and self-ordering and provide the missing ground for the recovery of classical values in the arts, such as beauty, order, harmony, and meaning. Turner points to new developments in chaos theory, neurobiology, evolution, and environmental science, among other fields, to offer us a guide to the emerging art of the'radical center'which he predicts will shape the culture of the future.

Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People is a groundbreaking collection that explores the “visual” in defining the kaleidoscope of American experience and American identity in the 20th century. Covers enduringly important topics in American history: nationhood, class, politics of identity, and the visual mapping of “others” Includes editorial introductions, suggested readings, a primer on how to'read'an image, and a guide to visual archives and collections Well-illustrated book for those in American Studies and related fields eager to incorporate the visual into their teaching—and telling—of the American story.

He was a friend of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Irving Berlin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--and the enemy of Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken, and Ernest Hemingway. He was so influential a critic that Edmund Wilson declared that he had played a leading role in the'liquidation of genteel culture in America.'Yet today many students of American culture would not recognize his name. He was Gilbert Seldes, and in this brilliant biographical study, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen recreates a singularly American life of letters. Equally important, Kammen uses Seldes's life as a lens through which to bring into sharp focus the dramatic shifts in American culture that occurred in the half-century after World War I. Born in 1893, Seldes saw in his lifetime an astonishing series of innovations in popular and mass culture: silent films and talkies, the phonograph and the radio, the coming of television, and the proliferation of journalism aimed at mainstream America in such venues as Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire. (His monthly column in Esquire was called'The Lively Arts.') Seldes was more than a witness to these changes, however; he was the leading champion of popular culture in his time, and a skilled practitioner as well. Kammen, the first scholar to enjoy access to Seldes's unpublished papers, illuminates his immense influence as the earliest cultural critic to insist that the lively arts--vaudeville, musical revues, film, jazz, and the comics--should be taken just as seriously as grand opera, the legitimate theatre, and other manifestations of high culture. As he traces Seldes's remarkable evolution from an acknowledged aesthete and highbrow to a cultural democrat with a passion for the popular arts, Kammen recaptures the critic's prescience, wit, and generosity for a newly expanded audience. We witness Seldes's triumphs and travails as managing editor of The Dial, the most influential literary magazine of its time, and read of New York's endlessly feuding publications and literary rivalries. Kammen offers wonderfully detailed accounts of The Dial's introduction of'The Wasteland'in its November 1922 issue; Seldes's review of Ulysses for The Nation, one of the first (if not the very first) to appear in the U.S.; and the complete story of the writing, publication, and critical reception of The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes's most influential book. And Kammen also covers Seldes's astonishingly versatile later career as a freelance writer (on every conceivable subject), historian, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, radio scriptwriter, the first program director for CBS Television, and the founding dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. One of popular culture's earliest and most eloquent champions, Seldes was nonetheless publicly worried as early as 1937 that the popularity of radio, film, and television would mean the demise of the'private art of reading.'By 1957 he was warning that'with the shift of all entertainment into the area of big business, we are being engulfed into a mass-produced mediocrity.'At a time when many thoughtful Americans despair of popular culture, The Lively Arts revisits the opening salvos in the ongoing debate over'democratization'versus'dumbing down'of the arts. It offers a penetrating and timely analysis of Gilbert Seldes's pioneering conviction that the popular and the great arts must not only co-exist but enrich one another if we are to realize the innovation and intensity of American culture at its best.