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What queer lives, loves and possibilities teem within suburbia's little boxes? Moving beyond the imbedded urban/rural binary, Relocations offers the first major queer cultural study of sexuality, race and representation in the suburbs. Focusing on the region humorists have referred to as Lesser Los Angeles-a global prototype for sprawl-Karen Tongson weaves through suburbia's nowherespaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.
Otis, Cody, and Rae are thrilled to fly down to the Amazon, where the twins dad has a commission to paint a portrait of coffee baron Enrico Estevez. But then a speeding car tries to run down Mr. Estevez and an overnight in the jungle turns terrifying when the kids encounter deadly animals…and even deadlier smugglers.
A queer genealogy of the famous performance space and the nuyorican aesthetic One could easily overlook the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a small, unassuming performance venue on New York City’s Lower East Side. Yet the space once hosted the likes of Victor Hernández Cruz, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka and is widely credited as the homespace for the emergent nuyorican literary and aesthetic movement of the 1990s. Founded by a group of counterculturalist Puerto Rican immigrants and artists in the 1970s, the space slowly transformed the Puerto Rican ethnic and cultural associations of the epithet “Nuyorican,” as the Cafe developed into a central hub for an artistic movement encompassing quee...
A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework explores the ways specialists and institutions in the fine arts, curation, cultural studies, and art history have attempted to situate art in a more global framework since the 1980s. Offering analyses of the successes and setbacks of these efforts to globalize the art world, this innovative volume presents a new and exciting way of considering art in its global contexts. Essays by an international panel of leading scholars and practicing artists assert that what we talk about as ‘art’ is essentially a Western concept, thus any attempts at understanding art in a global framework require a revising of established conceptual definitions....
From risqué cabaret performances to engrossing after-hours shop talk, Trade of the Tricks offers an unprecedented look inside the secretive subculture of modern magicians. Entering the flourishing Paris magic scene as an apprentice, Graham M. Jones gives a firsthand account of how magicians learn to perform their astonishing deceptions. He follows the day-to-day lives of some of France’s most renowned performers, revealing not only how secrets are created and shared, but also how they are stolen and destroyed. In a book brimming with humor and surprise, Jones shows how today’s magicians marshal creativity and passion in striving to elevate their amazing skill into high art. The book’s lively cast of characters includes female and queer performers whose work is changing the face of a historically masculine genre.
What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Tara Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalizes on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today.
Few topics in the news are more hotly contested than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and news coverage itself is always a subject of debate. But rarely do these debates incorporate an on-the-ground perspective of what and who newsmaking entails. Studying how journalists work in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus, and on the tense roads that connect these cities, Amahl Bishara demonstrates how the production of U.S. news about Palestinians depends on multifaceted collaborations, typically invisible to Western readers. She focuses on the work that Palestinian journalists do behind the scenes and below the bylines—as fixers, photojournalists, camerapeople, reporters, and producers...
Dr. Jud Tyler had almost decided that it had been a mistake to come back to Framingham, and his first sight of the old hospital building—in an advanced stage of dilapidation—only strengthened that conviction. But waiting inside those grimy walls was a world Dr. Tyler had never known, and Dr. Tyler's confrontation with it would leave them both profoundly changed forever. Some of the people in that world: Chuck Rogers: Jud Tyler's Army Chaplain in Vietnam, now fighting another kind of war in a slum hospital. Asa Ford: the Superintendent of St. Luke's Hospital whose ethics have slipped so far that he is about to fall over them. Samantha Fellowes: rich, young, beautiful divorcee whose ...
Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force. Petty focuses on five performers whose Hollywood film careers flourished during this periodÑLouise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln ÒStepin FetchitÓ Perry, Bill ÒBojanglesÓ Robinson, and Hattie McDanielÑto reveal the Òproblematic stardomÓ and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color. She maps howÊthese actorsÑthough regularly cast in stereotyped and marginalized rolesÑemployed various strategies of cinematic and extracinematic performance to negotiate their complex positions in Hollywood and to ultimately Òsteal the show.Ó Drawing on a variety of source materials, Petty explores these starsÕ reception among Black audiences and theorizes African American viewership in the early twentieth century. Her book is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on the movies.