Racist Love

In Racist Love Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence. By outlining how attraction to popular representations of Asianness cloaks racial resentment and fears of globalization, Bow provides a new means of understanding the ambivalence surrounding Asians in the United States while offering a theory of the psychological, affective, and symbolic dynamics of racist love in contemporary America.

From Pari Khanas to Lal Bazaars and Further Away: Female Performers in Nineteenth Century Awadh

While there are a lot of contestations over the identity and subjectivity of women performers and entertainers of Awadh, three terms denote the most popular representations of these women in the nineteenth century. These are: the trained and sophisticated tawaʾif of the Nawabi court, the vulgar and titillating ‘nautch’ girls of the city and the ill-mannered and promiscuous “prostitute” of the British cantonment. For long, these terms have been used to weave a linear narrative about the courtesan’s eventual fall from grace, which does not take into account the politics behind these categorisations nor women’s participation therein. This paper focuses instead, on the making and unmaking of these ontological categories to argue that, while these categories are neither exhaustive nor holistic, they are reflective of the institutions wherein they flourished, the cultural specificities of their existence and the peculiarities of their labour practices. An analysis of these dynamics shall present a more detailed and genealogical history of how women inhabited, embodied, extended and/or negotiated with power structures. This holds the utmost importance in the context of contemporary reminiscence of Lucknow’s past, which, while being marked by a celebration of the courtesan culture, is often accompanied by erasure of their lived experiences, presenting unidimensional imagery that is both unhistorical and ahistorical.

Muslim Girlhood, Skam Fandom, and DIY Citizenship

While fandom is a dominant girlhood trope, few accounts examine faith in the context of girls’ fandom. Addressing this gap, using a feminist poststructural analysis, I draw on interviews and participant observation to locate fan communities as a space in which Muslim girls can enact citizenship. Combining youth cultural studies, girlhood studies, and fan studies, I explore how Muslim fangirls of the Norwegian teen web-drama Skam (2015–2017) draw on their desire for recognition and their creativity as cultural producers to engage in participatory storytelling that challenges popular representations of Muslim girls. This process enables the production of communities rooted in shared interests, experiences, and identities. I suggest that fandom should be recognized for its capacity to generate new meanings of citizenship for minority youth.

Not So Beautiful Life: A Study on the Treatment of Black humour in Life is Beautiful

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic events ever happened in the human history. It was a systematic, bureaucratic and state sponsored persecution and murder of around six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Our memory of Holocaust, especially of the people belonging to this generation has been shaped more by popular representations, especially in films. The film Life is Beautiful directed by Robert Benigni portrayed the horror of Holocaust connotatively using black humour as its main medium. A short analysis of how Benigni uses black humour and other visual-cinema techniques in bringing out the terror of Holocaust among audience is studied in this article. Though the movie seems to fall under the genre comedy, it discusses connotatively the serious issues related to the life of Jews under Nazi regime without any use of violent images or scenes that reflect the real terrors of Holocaust.

(Un)seen difference, i.e. regarding the image of persons with physical disabilities in selected feature films

The paper presents the results of a qualitative research on a topic of the film imagery of people with physical disabilities. Selected feature films were analysed on the basis of specific questions regarding femininity, masculinity and sexuality of persons with physical disabilities. Additionally, the research was also based on three imagery stages: the early-exploitation, the super-cripple and normality. The main result of the analysis is to settle two discourses: the main and the alternative. Despite the social changes, most popular representations are stereotypical, presenting disability as a total category and are shown from the masculine perspective. The most important presentation within the alternative discourse must include disability as a transparent, unseen difference.

Ethnomusicology, Music Education, and the Power and Limitations of Social Media

This chapter looks at the field of ethnomusicology and its unique contributions to music education, with specific attention to how both fields are impacted by social media. It explores relationships between them and demonstrates both how social media have transformed musical experience and the ways that “glocalization” theory helps shed light on the diverse impacts of social media on music production and consumption. In addition, the chapter explores how the popularization of social media has changed notions of ethnomusicological fieldwork, access to music for teaching and learning, and popular representations of musical knowledge and performance.

Ballet Bodies

Dance is a fundamentally embodied art, and the ballet body has always been a contested site. Modern dance pioneers distinguished their fledgling art form by denouncing ballet as unnatural and particularly unsuited for the modern American dancer. Concerns about the pernicious effects of the idealized ballet body, especially on girls and young women, led to sharp medical and psychological concerns that seeped into popular representations of ballet class. Feminist critiques of ballet for supposedly oppressing women gained currency at the end of the twentieth century. Whatever the merits of such critiques, ballet can also be empowering for women in terms of bodily strength and artistic integrity, as seen in the controversial figure of the ballerina.

Tête-á-tête: Popular representations of the romantic dinner in post-war Australia

This article examines the notions of the romantic dinner in post-war Australia, using material culture in the form of Australian food writing and advertisements in cookbooks and popular magazines from the post-war period (in this case, 1945–68). It investigates three closely related aspects of the ‘romantic’ dinner for two: the similarities and contrasts between the courtship restaurant ‘date’ and a specially prepared dinner at home; the way in which gendered roles are performed, confirmed and contested in these events; and the influence of American advertising, and its promotion of American cuisine and lifestyle, on the way the domestic meal was conceptualized and presented to housewives at this time. Bearing in mind that the social importance of food is reinforced because its preparation occurs on a daily basis and that the informative power of food and the material culture around food production is as yet only partially tapped, this analysis attempts to answer the question: was the romantic dinner for two an opportunity for romance, or was it a creation that reinforced post-war gender roles in Australia?