The Suspended Spectacle of History

Author(s):  
James Tweedie

This chapter examines both the history of the tableau vivant as an art form and its remarkable revival in the cinema of the late twentieth century. At once a quotation of an existing work of art and an always imperfect copy, the tableau vivant recognizes the persistent power of the original but transforms or parodies its source, creating something new even when it returns to old and familiar models. The chapter charts the development of a cinema of painters in the late twentieth century and identifies the tableau as one of its key strategies precisely because it exists at the threshold between citation and innovation. Focusing on the work of Jean-Luc Godard and especially Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio, it emphasizes the archaeological and social possibilities of this return to painting, as filmmakers confront both the aging of cinema and the necessity of radical historical models in a moment of political retrenchment.

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-41
Author(s):  
Michael H. Carriere

This essay uses the history of Touch and Go Records – an independent record label founded in 1981 – to show how the late twentieth-century environment of Detroit became fertile ground for the rise of hardcore punk. As the landscape of the post-industrial city was transformed by such developments as deindustrialization and white flight, a cadre of white, suburban youth transformed spaces of abandonment into places of innovation and alternative urban redevelopment, particularly in the city's troubled Cass Corridor neighborhood. Such urban spaces provided the room for musical experimentation in ways that were not possible in the postwar American suburb. Such a process was undoubtedly informed by the economic and political histories of post-industrial Detroit. Yet this essay argues that the rise of hardcore punk was more than an indicator of economic and political transformation; it was also a moment of cultural rupture. Viewed from such a perspective, one sees a group of musicians, writers, and others set on creating a new, viable art form, one that sought to critique and replace an older dominant musical culture that had come to be perceived as lacking vitality and originality. This moment of cultural realignment came to play a great role in the evolution of late twentieth century American culture.


2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...


Author(s):  
James Tweedie

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.


Author(s):  
Lara Freidenfelds

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy is a history of why Americans came to have the unrealistic expectation of perfect pregnancies and to mourn even very early miscarriages. The introduction explains that miscarriage is a common phenomenon and a natural part of healthy women’s childbearing: approximately 20 percent of confirmed pregnancies spontaneously miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Eight topical chapters describe childbearing and pregnancy loss in colonial America; the rise of birth control from the late eighteenth century to the present; changes in parenting from the early nineteenth century to the present that increasingly focused attention on the emotional relationship between parent and child; the twentieth-century rise of prenatal care and maternal education about embryonic growth; the twentieth-century blossoming of a consumer culture that marketed baby items to pregnant women; the abortion debates from the mid-twentieth century to the present; the late twentieth-century introduction of obstetric ultrasound and its evolution into a pregnancy ritual of “meeting the baby” as early as eight weeks’ gestation; and the late twentieth-century introduction of home pregnancy testing and the identification of pregnancy as early as several days before a missed period. The conclusion offers suggestions for how women and their families, health-care providers, and the maternity care industry can better handle pregnancy and address miscarriage.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Schechner

This essay by Richard Schechner dedicated to a mythical figure of the theater of the late twentieth century; a work of critical reconstruction that has contributed decisively to consolidating the legacy of Grotowski, just a few months after his death. In addition to fixing some essential terms of the vocabulary, together with the contents and the periodization of the Grotowskian work (aspects that Grotowski in life were entrusted exclusively to oral transmission), the essay retraces the formation of Grotowski, the aspects linked to his character, the specific forms of his research and his transmission of knowledge, the exercise of leadership, the role of his collaborators, the sources, the mystical side, his relationship with the spirit of time, the importance (and weakness) of his opera, in the history of twentieth century theater.


Author(s):  
Athena Athanasiou

This chapter engages the discursive conditions that made ethno-nationalist ideologies and armed conflicts of the 1990s possible and probable. Indeed, the question of how to recall the late twentieth-century history of former Yugoslavia constitutes a central aspect of the Women in Black labour of memory. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, especially the normalization of nationalist military violence in the mid-1990s, has manifested gendered norms as constitutive of nationalist discourses. Drawing on the ways in which the movement performatively brings forth an alternative public to embody the potentiality of displaced memory, this chapter argues in favor of breaking through the universalist, moralist, and humanist scripts of mourning. It seeks to make sense of the politically enabling ways in which these activists stage mourning as a site of agonistic resignification in order to interrogate the injustices and foreclosures which sustain dominant regimes of grievability, in Judith Butler’s terms.


Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Marion

This chapter explains Marion’s intellectual, cultural, and religious background and academic pathway. It provides an account of French intellectual life in the late twentieth century, including the student revolutions and the movement of the “New Philosophers.” It also discusses the contribution of several prominent French intellectuals. Marion outlines the history of the founding of the Catholic lay journal Communio and comments on the importance of several twentieth-century theologians. He also discusses the French academic system and its future.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


2018 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
David Biggs

The environmental history of war, especially its impacts on landscape, encompasses a much broader scope than the conflicts and the historiography of the late twentieth century. Ideas on the social and environmental processes of conflict draw from a much longer, global discourse. This chapter uses the ancient-to-modern conflict landscape of central Vietnam to argue for a multi-layered, broader analysis of the environmental history of conflict.


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