Religion in Vogue

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Specific Element ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
The World ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Religious Elements ◽  
Religious Landscape

Religion in Vogue provides readers with a unique approach to the study of popular culture and American religion. Through its analysis of numerous primary sources ranging from fashion magazines to runway shows, the book traces how Christian symbols and imagery became an increasingly prominent part of the fashion industry and designer apparel. Examining this trajectory illuminates the longstanding and evolving relationship between Christianity and fashion. To capture this complexity, each chapter focuses on a specific element of fashion that mediates Christian ideas and images, including print articles, advertisements, jewelry, and fashion designs. Religion in Vogue examines in-depth religious elements in fashion advertisements, the popularity of cross jewelry, Catholic inspirations in designer collections, and, of course, the appearance of the divine on designer garments. Chronicling this trajectory highlights how the fashion industry constructs a vibrant textual, visual, and material discourse on Christianity that exists alongside and intersects with more dominant and familiar religious narratives. This fashionable religion, an aestheticized Christianity, offers spiritual seekers a way to be simultaneously stylish and religious. In doing so, the world of fashion both shapes and reflects trends toward religious individualism and religious eclecticism that have dominated the religious landscape of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first. Religion in Vogue helps us better understand the changing American religious landscape in a novel and fascinating way.

Popular Culture and US Foreign Relations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Falk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Information Campaigns ◽  
The World ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Third World

Americans in and out of government have relied on media and popular culture to construct the national identity, frame debates on military interventions, communicate core values abroad, and motivate citizens around the world to act in prescribed ways. During the late 19th century, as the United States emerged as a world power and expanded overseas, Americans adopted an ethos of worldliness in their everyday lives, even as some expressed worry about the nation’s position on war and peace. During the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, though America failed to join the League of Nations and retreated from foreign engagements, the nation also increased cultural interactions with the rest of the world through the export of motion pictures, music, consumer products, food, fashion, and sports. The policies and character of the Second World War were in part shaped by propaganda that evolved from earlier information campaigns. As the United States confronted communism during the Cold War, the government sanitized its cultural weapons to win the hearts and minds of Americans, allies, enemies, and nonaligned nations. But some cultural producers dissented from America’s “containment policy,” refashioned popular media for global audiences, and sparked a change in Washington’s cultural-diplomacy programs. An examination of popular culture also shows how people in the “Third World” deftly used the media to encourage superpower action. In the 21st century, activists and revolutionaries can be considered the inheritors of this tradition because they use social media to promote their political agendas. In short, understanding the roles popular culture played as America engaged the world greatly expands our understanding of modern American foreign relations.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
Primary Sources ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Religious Landscape ◽  
Religiously Unaffiliated

This introduction describes the book’s fashion-focused approach to religion and its central argument. It sets up the concept of fashionable religion, which highlights how fashion constructs a specific vision of Christianity that celebrates beauty and wonder, innovation and enchantment. To establish this, the introduction provides an overview of the book’s primary sources and identifies how the book’s approach differs from existing scholarship on religion and dress. Rather than focusing on what religions do with or say about dress, the introduction highlights the importance of the fashion industry for thinking about the changing religious landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the rise of spirituality and the increase in the religiously unaffiliated or “nones.”

Blackness, Jazz, and Globalization

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Music ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Pan African ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Over Time

The globalization of jazz was also the globalization of black US popular culture. This essay discloses, and provides a model for, the ambiguous dynamics of popular music migrations and the race politics that frame them. In diasporic destinations, those politics are generated by cultural histories very different from that of the United States, and which also exhibit their own synchronic and diachronic heterogeneities, thus introducing distinctive local complexities. In the context of the black-centered jazz canon, these circumstances have produced regional jazz narratives that are derived from the US model, but with often radically different inflections from place to place, and over time. Apart from documenting the perennial ubiquity of the blackness/jazz nexus, the study identifies a broad historical trajectory, in which the focus shifted from African American blackness to a pan-African model that anticipated the World Music phenomenon.

Change Is in the Air: The Smell of Marijuana, after Legalization

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 995-1026
Author(s):  
William Garriott
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Everyday Realities ◽  
Drug Policy Reform

Marijuana continues to be legalized throughout the world. In the United States, a unique approach to legalization is taking hold that focuses on the creation of commercial marijuana markets. This article examines the everyday realities of this approach to legalization through a focus on one of marijuana’s most legally significant attributes: its smell. In the context of prohibition, the smell of marijuana was a key tool of criminal law enforcement. In the context of legalization, its significance has expanded to include nuisance laws governing the presence of unwanted odors and commercial laws that facilitate economic activity in the marijuana market. By focusing on the sense of smell in the context of marijuana legalization, this article shows the implications of the market-based approach for drug policy reform. More broadly, this focus highlights the importance of the senses to sociolegal change and the ongoing construction of legality in the context of capitalism.

THE NINA VANCE ALLEY THEATRE PAPERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-128
Author(s):  
Tammy Ravas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
University Of Houston ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Artistic Director

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries' Special Collections possesses several groups of papers and other items related to theatre and the performing arts, one of which is the Nina Vance Alley Theatre Papers. These items were donated to Special Collections in 2000. What follows is a brief biography of Nina Vance and history of the Alley as well as some highlights of items contained within this collection. Nina Vance was the Alley's first artistic director, from 1947 until her death in 1980. Along with Margo Jones and Zelda Fichandler, she helped shape the American regional-theatre movement in the later twentieth century. During her tenure at the Alley she directed 102 plays, produced 245 shows, and was awarded major grants, including significant funding from the Ford Foundation. Despite Vance's achievements in these areas, as well as in establishing the Alley as a respected theatre in the United States and across the world, few works of scholarship exist on her career. This could be partially due to the fact that many primary sources on the Alley Theatre and its founder, such as those found at the UH Libraries' Special Collections, have not been well publicized.

‘To the benefit of Africa, the world, and ourselves’: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) Mission to Nigeria, 1966–1968

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
James Austin Farquharson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Military Government ◽  
The World ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Conflicting Discourses

Abstract Far from having only marginal significance and generating a ‘subdued’ response among African Americans, as some historians have argued, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) collided at full velocity with the conflicting discourses and ideas by which Black Americans sought to understand their place in the United States and the world in the late 1960s. One of the most significant aspects of African American engagement with the civil war was the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa peace mission that sought to bring the Federal Military Government of Nigeria and the secessionist leadership of the Republic of Biafra together through the mediation of some of the leading Black civil rights leaders in the United States. Through the use of untapped primary sources, this article will reveal that while the mission was primarily focused on finding a just solution to the internecine struggle, it also intersected with broader domestic and international crosscurrents.

Anticipating the Postwar World

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-179
Author(s):  
Robert L. McLaughlin ◽  
Sally E. Parry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
The United States ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Special Interests ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Return Home

Social anxieties about the war and about what it was doing to the country permeated America. What would happen when the war was over? The plays at the end of the war ask what kind of country the United States will be after the war is won, what form postwar democracy will take, and what the county's relationship with the rest of the world what will be. Taken together, the plays produced near and just after the end of the war spend little time celebrating the Allies' victory. Rather, they look at the challenges that returning servicemen will face in trying to reestablish family relationships and trying to heal from psychological wounds. They look at the difficulties families will face when their serviceman doesn't return home. They look at how those on the home front have had to remake their lives in ways that the returning serviceman will have trouble recognizing. They look at how old prejudices will create new social divisions as black and Jewish servicemen return home. They look at how selfish special interests, political naivete, and sheer love of power may undermine the democratic cause for which the nation had fought the war. While much of the country's popular culture was ringing victory bells, along Broadway, many playwrights were sounding alarms.

Ana Mauad on Bán and Ellis

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Hemispheric Studies ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
The U.S

This essay asks whether the world could be (or could become) its own imagined community in the 21st century. Thinking with and through Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Mauad contemplates Anderson’s shift from defining the “nation” from a political perspective to defining it in cultural and symbolic ways, and uses that to examine both Ban’s essay and Ellis’ essay in the book Global Perspectives on the United States. Mauad is interested in the large gap that has opened up between the kinds of global emphasis one sees nowadays and the relatively established “new American intra- and contingent hemispheric studies” on the other. Both essays, she writes, raise the issue of how cultural expression can suggest meanings and even proposals for a new world in a new century, whether drawing on popular culture or on “high art.” But Mauad also brings into the discussion ideas developed by Brazilian anthropologist Renato Ortiz on mundializacao and ways this differs from what is commonly called globalization (at least in the U.S.).

Prison uniforms on the outside: Intersections with US popular culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Akou
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The World ◽  
The Look

With the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world ‐ peaking in 2008 at 755 prisoners for every 100,000 residents ‐ it is not surprising that American popular culture is saturated with images of prison. Although the experience of being in prison is associated with humiliation, punishment and a lack of choice (which is antithetical to the existence of fashion), numerous films, television shows, music videos, designers and retailers have demystified and even glamorized the ‘look’ of prison. This article explores how Americans outside of prison are able to engage with this imagery ‐ not just as passive consumers of media, but through buying and wearing prison uniform costumes, fashions inspired by prison uniforms, clothing made by prisoners and clothing formerly worn by prisoners.

THE WORLD BANK LENDING AND NON-LENDING TO LATIN AMERICA: THE CASE OF ARGENTINA, 1971-1976

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-138
Author(s):  
Claudia Kedar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
World Bank ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Bank Lending ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Constraints

AbstractThrough the analysis of Argentina-World Bank (WB) relations between 1971 and 1976, this article examines how democracies and dictatorships, as well as political and economic constraints did (or did not) impact WB lending to Latin America. This period is especially revealing. Between May 1971 and September 1976, the WB did not grant any new loans to Argentina, thereby generating an exceptional and unusually long break in WB lending to the country. Drawing on previously undisclosed files from the WB Archives and additional primary sources from Argentina and the United States, this article unveils the actual mechanisms, criteria and justification that stood behind the decision to lend or not to lend to Argentina. It maintains that the WB’s self-imposed principle of «neutrality» played a crucial role in facilitating the WB’s relations with Argentina during the politically and economically unstable early 1970s.

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