The New World Presses

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-105
Author(s):  
Brian Fox
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
New World ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Broadway Musicals

Chapter 2 examines allusions to American popular culture in Joyce’s work. A potentially voluminous subject given the sheer range of references, the chapter narrows it down to areas which show a continued engagement across Joyce’s works. One of the most significant examples of this is blackface minstrelsy. Indeed, Joyce, it would appear, is particularly drawn to a specific kind of American popular culture, one with a strong sense of a connection with a history of colonialism, empire, and race. Within this framework, Joyce appropriates and renegotiates Irish relations to not only blackface minstrels, but also the Mutt and Jeff comic strip, Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, cowboys and Indians, jazz, flappers, speakeasies, and myriad other markers of American popular culture.

The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Naomi Iwamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Image ◽  
Dalai Lama ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Asian Religions ◽  
History Of

This chapter analyzes the history of representation that has contributed to the current image of the Dalai Lama. We “know” the Dalai Lama, not simply because of the fact that we may understand his views and admire his actions, but also because we are familiar with the particular role he plays in the popular consciousness of the United States—the type of icon he has become—the icon of the “Oriental Monk.” To get a sense of what makes the Dalai Lama so popular, we need to get a sense of the history of this icon and how it has been used to express and manage our sense of Asian religions. The chapter asks: How did the Dalai Lama come to represent all that he does for Americans? Indeed, what exactly does he represent? How have we come to “know” him? Is our ability to embrace someone and something (Tibetan Buddhism) once considered so foreign, anything other than a testimony to a newfound openness and progressive understanding?

Ukraine in Blackface: Performance and Representation in Gogol'’s Dikan'ka Tales, Book 1

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roman Koropeckyj ◽  
Robert Romanchuk
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Blackface Performance

In this article, Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk present a Lacanian reading of the preface and “The Fair at Sorochintsy” from Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka, vol. 1 (1831), viewed through the prism of American blackface minstrelsy. They trace representations of ethnicity and class in Gogol'’s “performance” of Ukraine. Their analysis of the preface demonstrates how Pan'ko’s Ukraine reaches a Russian lowerclass audience through the intervention of the gaze of an Other, an elite nonreader. The self-absenting of this Other opens a space for the audience’s imaginary identification with the Ukrainian minstrel, while structuring this space symbolically. Their analysis of “The Fair” demonstrates how this “opening” creates a fantasy of Ukraine as a world of unbridled sexuality, simultaneously repressed and re-presented by the story’s Russian- language fabula and elegiac “bookends.” The repressed Ukrainian content irrupts, symptomatically, in the story’s epigraphs. Akin to minstrelsy’s “blackening” of American popular culture, the tension between the repressed and the expressed adumbrates the “Ukrainianization” of Russian national culture.

Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Midcentury Sex

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Judith G. Coffin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Francois Mauriac

This chapter mentions Alfred C. Kinsey's 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was one of the most prominent research on sexuality that François Mauriac associated with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. It analyses Kinsey and his team of American scientists' investigation of sexual acts, practices, inclinations, and tastes they had discovered among their fellow citizens. It also talks about critics who were deeply invested in the role of literature, and the responsibility of the writer who warned that The Second Sex and the Kinsey report debased the public. The chapter likens The Second Sex and the Kinsey report to the “erotic jungle” of American popular culture and fashion magazines, and to a world of commerce, sensationalism, and prurience. It explores the scholarly study of sexuality and the public's fixation on the subject that situates The Second Sex in the larger history of contemporary culture.

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