Savoring Authenticity: Food Consumption and Nostalgia in Japan

The Japanese culinary tradition and contemporary food-related values are often characterised by an emotional and evocative tone that can be traced back to nostalgia, a global multidimensional phenomenon that blends cultural anxieties, sentimental values and sense of place. The desire to remember home through food consumption, as a valuable way of approaching the past, enables the construction or redefinition of ethnic identities, cultural boundaries and a sense of uniqueness. This paper offers some introductory reflections on present-day practices and affective aspects related to Japanese food culture from the point of view of their symbolic meaning in media narratives.

Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Cato and the Crisis of Rhetoric

Reading Addison’s Cato (1713) as dramatizing a sequence of failed speech acts, this chapter finds the manifest ambivalence towards rhetoric in the play to be symptomatic of pervasive cultural anxieties about the nature of speech in an age marked by ‘the rage of party’. Addison’s tragedy asks: in a world in which eloquence no longer serves to defend or illuminate truth, can words do any good? In such a world, can words any longer serve the good man? Yet Cato does far more than merely reflect contemporary concerns about eloquence. It searches for a means of reclaiming the civic utility of rhetoric and tentatively incubates an alternative model of speech: one capable of persuading, moving, and unifying competing constituencies within the publics of and beyond the playhouse.

Robot death care: A study of funerary practice

Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.

“You’re the Puppet”

In primetime US political discourse, across liberal and conservative outlets alike, accusations of puppetry and ventriloquism proliferate. Despite invoking an anachronism, the ventriloquial metaphor furnishes a reliable means of discrediting presidential candidates and presidents-elect by conjuring the figure of the dummy who speaks in a voice not his own. At the same time, the presidential voice’s constant mediation invites material comparisons to the channeling of voices through dummy and human bodies practiced in stage ventriloquism. This chapter examines how technologies of the voice, from microphones to speech aids such as earpieces and teleprompters, have figured into popular framings of the last three US presidents as speaking puppets, arguing that bipartisan charges of ventriloquism reflect twinned national-cultural anxieties about the voice’s constitutive mediation and power’s constitutive decentralization in late capitalism. Through analyses of liberal speculations about George W. Bush’s use of listening devices, conservative claims about Barack Obama’s dependence on teleprompters, and bipartisan responses to Donald Trump’s self-presentation as a leader whose mediated voice remains perpetually unfiltered, the chapter proposes a new theory of the politics of voice that acknowledges the voice’s technicity and power’s distribution.

Anarchy in the UK

This chapter will contextualise the film within the time of its production and release and consider how its themes and focuses are as much as product of their time as there are of the early 18th Century. This chapter will explore how the film mediates British seventies cultural anxieties around the counterculture and youth movements. It will consider how this cultural zeitgeist has affected the film’s nihilistic tone and ambiguous ending, as well as the depiction of the children and the authority characters in the film. This chapter will include a close analysis of the influence of two specific cases on the film’s development and that had been identified as especially influential by writer Robert Wynne-Simmons: the Tate-LaBianca murders and Mary Bell. The chapter will conclude with a consideration of the film as part of a revival of interests in British folk and vernacular heritage in the sixties and seventies.

The Female Sublime: Domesticating Luigia Todi’s Voice

This article delves into the puzzling reception of opera singer Luigia Todi (1753–1833) in order to explore how the traces left by pre-phonographic voices contain long-forgotten cultural histories. Operagoers in 1790s Venice claimed that Todi’s moral qualities allowed her to overcome her “vocal defects,” and, in turn, taught her listeners to become good citizens. Hearing vocal difficulties as a manifestation of interiority, rather than as poor training, marked a significant departure from what were then the predominant aesthetics of operatic voice. In attempting to smooth over this gap, listeners pieced together narratives about Todi’s subjectivity based on the unstable, fragmented sounds of her voice. This article argues that such remediations of Todi’s singing were subtended by two seemingly irreconcilable ontologies of female voice, one of them rooted in ancient myths of sublime song and the other born of Enlightenment ideologies of domesticity. I thus read inscriptions of Todi’s voice through a network of late eighteenth-century Italian cultural anxieties, drawing on literary reimaginings of Sappho, debates over the nature of musical skill, discourses on women’s education, and more. By interrogating the narratives about one woman’s unusual voice, I offer a new origin story for still resonant assumptions about the relationships between gender and disability, politics and domestic labor, and, fundamentally, bodies and voices.

BLOWING UP THE NUCLEAR FAMILY: SHIRLEY JACKSON’S QUEER GIRLS IN POSTWAR US CULTURE

This paper intends to analyze the representation of girlhood as a liminal space in three novels by Shirley Jackson: The Bird’s Nest (1954), The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Bearing in mind how nuclear fears and national identity are configured around the ideal of a safe domestic space in US postwar culture, the paper explores cultural anxieties about teenage girls who refuse to conform to normative femininity, following Teresa de Lauretis’s conception of women’s coming-of-age as “consenting to femininity” (1984). I will argue that Jackson criticizes the rigid possibilities for women at this time, and I will show how her representations of deviant femininity refuse and subvert the discourse of the nuclear family and, therefore, of the nation.

Visualizing Shame: Menstruation, Graphic Medicine, and the Discourse of Lycanthropy

Beyond its medical definition as a natural phenomenon concerning the female body, menstruation is a term that is overburdened with a plethora of distorted cultural and religious meanings. Through the centuries, the biological process of the monthly expulsion of non-pregnant women’s uterus lining is popularly misunderstood as a profane activity. Despite the surplus of awareness measurements to educate masses about menstruation’s biological underpinnings, societal negligence towards women’s incapacitating experiential realities associated with menstruation continues even in the twenty-first century. Accordingly, Paula Knight’s graphic medical memoir on infertility, titled The Facts of Life (2017), offers a distinctive perspective about menstruation through the creative deployment of the lycanthrope metaphor. By depicting her menstruating self as a lone werewolf, Knight offers a compelling representation of menstruating women’s abysmal corporeal and cultural anxieties. By close reading relevant images from Knight’s memoir and drawing theoretical insights from Victoria Louise Newton and Elizabeth El Refaie, this article analyses how graphic medicine necessitates a humane and non-stigmatizing approach to menstruation.