Author : Caroline Guthrie
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 40,78 MB
Release : 2022-10-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1978818807
The American Historical Imaginary: Contested Narratives of the Past in Mass Culture analyzes the shared understanding of America's past that is formed through entertainment, education, and politics. Caroline Guthrie examines our historical imaginary and argues it is crucial to understanding our national identity.
Author : Caroline Guthrie
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 49,13 MB
Release : 2022-10-14
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1978818823
In The American Historical Imaginary: Contested Narratives of the Past in Mass Culture Caroline Guthrie examines the American relationship to versions of the past that are known to be untrue and asks why do these myths persist, and why do so many people hold them so dear? To answer these questions, she examines popular sites where fictional versions of history are formed, played through, and solidified. From television’s reality show winners and time travelers, to the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, to the movies of Quentin Tarantino, this book examines how mass culture imagines and reimagines the most controversial and painful parts of American history. In doing so, Guthrie explores how contemporary ideas of national identity are tied to particular versions of history that valorize white masculinity and ignores oppression and resistance. Through her explanation and analysis of what she calls the historical imaginary, Guthrie offers new ways of attempting to combat harmful myths of the past through the imaginative engagements they have dominated for so long.
Author : Pauline Turner Strong
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 24,2 MB
Release : 2015-11-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1317263855
American Indians and the American Imaginary considers the power of representations of Native Americans in American public culture. The book's wide-ranging case studies move from colonial captivity narratives to modern film, from the camp fire to the sports arena, from legal and scholarly texts to tribally-controlled museums and cultural centres. The author's ethnographic approach to what she calls "representational practices" focus on the emergence, use, and transformation of representations in the course of social life. Central themes include identity and otherness, indigenous cultural politics, and cultural memory, property, performance, citizenship and transformation. American Indians and the American Imaginary will interest general readers as well as scholars and students in anthropology, history, literature, education, cultural studies, gender studies, American Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. It is essential reading for those interested in the processes through which national, tribal, and indigenous identities have been imagined, contested, and refigured.
Author : Deborah Barker
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 48,43 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0820337102
"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --
Author : Michael M. Seidman
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 47,20 MB
Release : 2004-08
Category : History
ISBN : 1571816852
The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement changed little that had not already been challenged and altered in the late fifties and early sixties. The workers' strikes led to fewer working hours and higher wages, but these reforms reflected the secular demands of the French labor movement. "May 1968" was remarkable not because of the actual transformations it wrought but rather by virtue of the revolutionary power that much of the media and most scholars have attributed to it and which turned it into a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer society in France and beyond.
Author : Adina Ciugureanu
Publisher : Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,14 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783631753064
The essays in this volume examine aspects of the ever-changing American imaginary over the last two centuries from the cultural perspectives of the present age, in which transnational approaches have vigorously challenged American exceptionalist narratives. It is a time in which uncertainties and reappraisals of group and national identity, both within the US and abroad, are part of the framework of a comprehensive field of research for scholars in American Studies, in the social sciences and the humanities alike. While situated in the current tumultuous century, the contributors of this volume focus on specific issues of the US defining and redefining itself from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
Author : Elizabeth S. Goodstein
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 15,17 MB
Release : 2017-01-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1503600742
An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena—including money, gender, urban life, and technology—that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.
Author : Courtney Weikle-Mills
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 27,30 MB
Release : 2013-01-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1421408074
How did Ichabod Crane and other characters from children’s literature shape the ideal of American citizenship? 2015 Honor Book Award, Children's Literature Association From the colonial period to the end of the Civil War, children’s books taught young Americans how to be good citizens and gave them the freedom, autonomy, and possibility to imagine themselves as such, despite the actual limitations of the law concerning child citizenship. Imaginary Citizens argues that the origin and evolution of the concept of citizenship in the United States centrally involved struggles over the meaning and boundaries of childhood. Children were thought of as more than witnesses to American history and governance—they were representatives of “the people” in general. Early on, the parent-child relationship was used as an analogy for the relationship between England and America, and later, the president was equated to a father and the people to his children. There was a backlash, however. In order to contest the patriarchal idea that all individuals owed childlike submission to their rulers, Americans looked to new theories of human development that limited political responsibility to those with a mature ability to reason. Yet Americans also based their concept of citizenship on the idea that all people are free and accountable at every age. Courtney Weikle-Mills discusses such characters as Goody Two-Shoes, Ichabod Crane, and Tom Sawyer in terms of how they reflect these conflicting ideals.
Author : John Eperjesi
Publisher : Dartmouth College Press
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 37,97 MB
Release : 2004-12-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 158465435X
In a groundbreaking work of "New Americanist" studies, John R. Eperjesi explores the cultural and economic formation of the Unites States relationship to China and the Pacific Rim in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eperjesi examines a variety of texts to explore the emergence of what Rob Wilson has termed the "American Pacific." Eperjesi shows how works ranging from Frank Norris' The Octopus to the Journal of the American Asiatic Association, from the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to the travel writings of Jack and Charmain London, and from Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--and the cultural dynamics that produced them--helped construct the myth of the American Pacific. By construing the Pacific Rim as a unified region binding together the territorial United States with the areas of Asia and the Pacific, he also demonstrates that the logic of the imperialist imaginary suggested it was not only proper but even incumbent upon the United States to exercise both political and economic influence in the region. As Donald E. Pease notes in his foreword, "by reading foreign policy and economic policy as literature, and by reconceptualizing works of American literature as extenuations of foreign policy and economic theory," Eperjesi makes a significant contribution to studies of American imperialism.
Author : Diana R. Hallman
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 14,48 MB
Release : 2022-05-17
Category : Music
ISBN : 1783277009
Following the American Revolution, French observers often viewed the United States as a laboratory for the forging of new practices of liberté and égalité, in affinity with and divergence from France's own Revolutionary ideals and experiences. The volume examines French views through musical/theatrical portrayals of the American Revolution and Republic, soundscapes of the Statue of Liberty, and homages to the glorified figures of Washington, Franklin and Lafayette. Essays investigate paradoxical depictions of slavery in the United States and French Caribbean colonies of 'Amérique'. French critiques of American music and musicians, including the reception of Americanized or Creolized adaptations of European art traditions as well as American popular music and dance, are also presented. The subject of race features prominently in French interpretations of American music and identity. These interpretations see French constructions of the Indigenous American and African American "exotic" that intersect with tropes of noble, pastoral savagery, menacing barbarism, and the "civilizing" potency of French culture. The French reinterpretation of African American music and dance reveals both a revulsion of Black alterity and an attraction to the expressive freedom, and even subversiveness, of these "foreign" forms of music and dance. Contributions include essays by music, dance, theatre and opera scholars, and the volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of these disciplines.
