WHERE TO? FILMING EMIGRATION ANXIETY IN PREWAR LEBANESE CINEMA

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-201
Author(s):  
Ghenwa Hayek

AbstractI propose that careful reading of films and film coverage provides a new research avenue for scholars interested in the social and cultural history of the 1950s and the 1960s in Lebanon. Looking specifically at the manner in which George Nasser's 1957 filmIla Ayn?(Where To?) embraces and modifies the generic conventions of neorealist melodrama to articulate anxieties over the effects of emigration on Lebanon, this article explores the manner in which contemporaneous cultural critics used the film to, in turn, express their dismay at migration from Lebanon. Reading the film closely for the affects it contains and for those it produced in its readers, I argue that this technique, attendant to both sides of this dynamic, affords us new insights into the manner in which cinema produced during Lebanon's golden period interacted with and complicated the dominant cultural narratives of that era.

Author(s):  
Alan M. Wald

A history of Irving Howe and Dissent magazine is used to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the social democratic alternative that became the Left wing of the New York intellectuals during the 1950s. This is followed by an examination of the life and work of Harvey Swados, which also express the ambiguities that would render this tradition problematic during the era of new radicalization in the 1960s.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Fleming

AbstractAlthough the “new social history” of the 1960s and 1970s quickly bequeathed its universal ambitions to a “new cultural history” in the 1980s, the attraction of the social historical category for study of the ancient Near East remains its potential to transform how we see the entire landscape of each past setting, still evoking E. P. Thompson’s history “from the bottom up.” Cuneiform writing offers a wealth of materials from the transactions of everyday life, in spite of the fact that the scribal profession served the centers of power and families of means, and a social historical perspective allows even documents from administrative archives to be viewed from below as well as from the rulers’ vantage. The potential for examining ancient society from below, in all its variety and lack of order, is illustrated in the archives of Late Bronze Age Emar in northwestern Syria. It is to be hoped that specialists in the ancient Near East will join a larger conversation among historians about how to approach the movement of societies through time.


Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Redacción CEIICH

<p class="p1">The third number of <span class="s1"><strong>INTER</strong></span><span class="s2"><strong>disciplina </strong></span>underscores this generic reference of <em>Bodies </em>as an approach to a key issue in the understanding of social reality from a humanistic perspective, and to understand, from the social point of view, the contributions of the research in philosophy of the body, cultural history of the anatomy, as well as the approximations queer, feminist theories and the psychoanalytical, and literary studies.</p>


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.


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