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The Wallflower Avant-Garde argues for the importance of a strain of modernist formalism based in ekphrasis, the literary imitation of the visual arts. Often associated with a conservative aesthetic of wholeness, permanence, and autonomy, ekphrastic writing also involves excess, failure, and mimesis, conjuring an aesthetic sense of closure and unity out of impossible imitations. This choreography of imitation and autonomy resonates with many of the foundational insights of queer theory: the way it situates identity as an effect of performativity, artifice, and mimesis. Unlike many queer theorists, however, this book insists that we value both the imitations and the aspirations that guide them, underlining not only the illusoriness of identity but also its allure. This more capacious formalism allows aspects of modernists aesthetic that have seemed regressive or repressive to be read as generative forms of stasis, quiet, reserve, shyness, and so on.
Annotation Few aspects of American military history have been as vigorously debated as Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan. In this carefully crafted volume, Michael Kort describes the wartime circumstances and thinking that form the context for the decision to use these weapons, surveys the major debates related to that decision, and provides a comprehensive collection of key primary source documents that illuminate the behavior of the United States and Japan during the closing days of World War II. Kort opens with a summary of the debate over Hiroshima as it has evolved since 1945. He then provides a historical overview of thye events in question, beginning with the decision and program to build the atomic bomb. Detailing the sequence of events leading to Japan's surrender, he revisits the decisive battles of the Pacific War and the motivations of American and Japanese leaders. Finally, Kort examines ten key issues in the discussion of Hiroshima and guides readers to relevant primary source documents, scholarly books, and articles.
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
This introduction to contemporary digital cinema tracks its intersection with video art, music video, animation, print design and live club events to create an avant-garde for the new millennium. It begins by investigating digital cinema and its contribution to innovations in the feature-film format, examining animation and live-action hybrids, the gritty aesthetic of the Dogme 95 filmmakers, the explosions of frames within frames and the evolution of the ‘ambient narrative’ film. This study then looks at the creation of new genres and moving-image experiences as what we know as ‘cinema’ enters new venues and formats.
Avant-Gardes in Crisis claims that the avant-gardes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are in crisis, in that artmaking both responds to political, economic, and social crises and reveals a crisis of confidence regarding resistance's very possibility. Specifically, this collection casts contemporary avant-gardes as a reaction to a crisis in the reproduction of life that accelerated in the 1970s—a crisis that encompasses living-wage rarity, deadly epidemics, and other aspects of an uneven management of vitality indexed by race, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability. The contributors collectively argue that a minoritarian concept of the avant-garde, one attuned to uneven patterns of resource depletion and infrastructural failure (broadly conceived), clarifies the interplay between art and politics as it has played out, for instance, in discussions of art's autonomy or institutionality. Writ large, this book seeks to restore the historical and political context for the debates on the avant-garde that have raged since the 1970s.
"The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives." --
From 1941 to 1943, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein translated for an American audience thirty-two speeches in which Marshal Philippe Petain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government, outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements" from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with its Nazi occupiers. Why and under what circumstances would Stein undertake such a project? The answers lie in Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Faÿ, her apparent Vichy protector. Barbara Will outlines the formative powers of this relationship, treating their interaction as a case study of intellectual life during wartime France and an indication of America's place in the Vichy imagination.
This text examines the aesthetics of Soviet cinema during its golden age of the 1920s, against a background of cultural ferment and the construction of a new socialist society.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another, brought together through the socialist internationals. Juno Jill Richards argues that these movements were not just socially linked but also deeply interconnected. Each offered the other an experimental language that could move beyond the nation-state’s rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual vocabulary for women’s rights. Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action. It offers an alternative history of women’s rights, practiced by female arsonists, suffragette rioters, industrial saboteurs, self-named terrorists, lesbian criminals, and queer resistance cells. Richards also examines the criminal proceedings that emerged in the wake of women’s actions, tracing the way that citizen and human emerged as linked categories for women on the fringes of an international campaign for suffrage. Recovering a transatlantic print archive, Richards brings together a wide range of activists and artists, including Lumina Sophie, Ina Césaire, Rosa Luxemburg, Rebecca West, Angelina Weld Grimké, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun, Paulette Nardal, and Leonora Carrington. An expansive and methodologically innovative book, The Fury Archives argues that the relationship of women’s rights movements and the avant-gardes offers a radical alternative to liberal discourses of human rights in formation at the same historical moment.
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace—and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"— the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured. Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury— John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others—and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her last, Between the Acts.