Images of Insurgency: Reading the Cuban Revolution through Military Aesthetics and Embodiment

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-241
Author(s):  
Jane Tynan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
The 1950S

A growing global visual culture in the 1950s and 1960s made image and self-presentation techniques critical to the transnational impact of the Cuban revolution. This chapter explores how popular culture shaped the interpretation of events by photographers, journalists and designers, who were often inspired by the anarchic forms of militarism the rebels adopted. When the rebels came into view, they were hypermasculine, complete with cowboy hats, long hair, cigars, and a cheerful contempt for uniformity; they created images of insurgency that were a compelling form of cultural exchange for revolutionary Cuba. They appeared to highlight creativity and subversive visual practices, but their performances were also raced and gendered. The chapter draws on a range of primary sources to consider the significance of aesthetics and embodiment to understanding the images, textures and experiences that characterised the Cuban revolution, but also what it reveals about the shape of twentieth century military insurgencies.

Rosarium – a text encoding project curating popular writing on roses online

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (7) ◽  
pp. 24-28
Author(s):  
Julia Rachel Tryon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Text Encoding ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Garden History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Popular Writing ◽  
Principal Researcher

Purpose The aim of this paper is to describe the Rosarium Project which is currently curating nonfiction materials about the genus Rosa written at the turn of the twentieth century and published in popular American periodicals. This is achieved by encoding the texts following the guidelines set forth by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI). Design/methodology/approach This paper explains what text encoding is and why following the guidelines set forth by the TEI Consortium was the best choice for the Rosarium Project. It then goes on to outline the workflow and choices made by the principal researcher which are needed to move the project steadily forward. Findings The principal researcher on the Rosarium Project has found that encoding with the TEI was easy to learn and fun to do, as well as intellectually stimulating. Librarians should find text-encoding projects of their own specialist subjects equally doable. Originality/value The Rosarium Project is unique, in that it is curating early twentieth century articles on the subject of roses that appeared in popular magazines. These materials are hidden away in online repositories and libraries worldwide. This project is of value, in that it provides primary sources to researchers in areas of popular culture, horticulture and garden history and also acts as an example of what librarians can contribute to the Digital Humanities.

Golden-Age Thinking: Updated Stagings of Gianni Schicchi and the Popular Historical Imagination

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Music History ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The Way

AbstractSince 2000 a notable trend has emerged in the way in which Italian comic operas by composers from Donizetti to Puccini are staged. In British and American productions, such works are consistently updated to the mid-twentieth century, usually the 1950s. This article explores what such stagings – and their implied intertextual references to wider representations of the era in popular culture – can tell us about the reception of opera today and the ways in which opera is used to create romanticised notions of historical time. Specifically, the article considers the implications for Puccini historiography of updating Gianni Schicchi, an opera whose Renaissance setting might at first glance seem essential. Considering changing attitudes towards historicism from the nineteenth century to the present, the article proposes that ‘retro’ mid-twentieth-century stagings of Gianni Schicchi compel us to hear the opera itself in new ways and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about Puccini's place in music history.

Floating on oil and antiquities: Iraq Petroleum, Al Amiloon Fil Naft and Iraqi cultural modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Tiffany Floyd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Cultural Ideologies ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Petroleum Company

The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) played a paradoxically contentious and constructive role in the development and distribution of Iraqi modern art and visual culture during the twentieth century. During the 1950s and 1960s, the IPC sponsored a wide-ranging public relations platform that not only advanced the company’s agendas but also opened spaces for Iraqi artists, writers and thinkers to articulate their own cultural ideologies. In its publicity campaigns, the IPC often triangulated oil, antiquity and modernity into narratives of sociocultural progress to promote its brand. This article explores how the Baghdad-based editors of the IPC’s Al Amiloon Fil Naft reformulated this vision of Iraq’s ancient and modern history to fit within the locally constituted cultural trends, fashioning Al Amiloon Fil Naft into a cultural journal that circulated a nationalist vision of Iraqi modernism.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

The Influence of the Infomercial in New Zealand

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Rosser Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
As If

New Zealand television networks introduced infomercials (30 minute advertisements designed to appear as if they are programmes) in late 1993. Although infomercials date from the 1950s in the USA, they were unknown in this country and quickly came to be seen as a peculiarly “intense” form of hyper-commercial broadcasting. This article aims to sketch out the cultural importance of the infomercial by analysing historical published primary sources (from the specialist and general press) as they reflect the views and opinions that resulted from the introduction of the infomercial. Specifically, it outlines the three main areas where that cultural importance was located. It concludes by analysing the significance of the cultural impact of the infomercial, both within broadcasting and within wider society.

Frontiers of Visibility

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Cinematic Technology

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.

Nashville Cats

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis D. Stimeling
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Global View ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Hall Of Fame ◽  
The City

Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first history of record production during country music’s so-called Nashville Sound era. This period of country music history produced some of the genre’s most celebrated recording artists, including Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Floyd Cramer, and marked the establishment of a recording industry that has come to define Nashville in the national and international consciousness. Yet, despite country music’s overwhelming popularity during this period and the continued legacy of the studios that were built in Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s, little attention has been given to the ways in which recording engineers, session musicians, and record producers shaped the sounds of country music during the time. Drawing upon a rich array of previously unexplored primary sources, Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first book to take a global view of record production in Nashville during the three decades that the city’s musicians established the city as the leading center for the production and distribution of country music.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 734-743
Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Arabic Speaking

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

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