Browsing by Subject "Cultural history"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Aesthetic fandom : furries in the 1970s
(2021-05-06) Dunn, Kameron Isaiah; Davis, Janet M.
This report offers a cultural history of the furry fandom by analyzing their emergence in the 1970s within broader transnational economic and cultural flows. The furry fandom is a community of people interested in anthropomorphic animals, the kind you see in Disney animated films and newspaper cartoons. This aesthetic interest differentiates furries from other fandoms emerging at this time whose congregation is normally predicated on an interest in a particular piece of media, such as Trekkies and their love of Star Trek. Furries’ interest in the aesthetics of anthropomorphic animals can be transformative and places them within a group of people who foster this niche interest as well as aspects of their queerness. Indeed, the furry fandom is majority LGBTQ+-identifying. This history examines niche interest and the queerness of the furry fandom, placing these facets into broader conversations of queer theory and consumer capitalism. Ultimately, this report shows how furries co-construct a sort of utopic reality within larger society’s political and economic anxiety in the 1970s, and how these originating practices continue today. Furry cultural production demonstrates elements of American cartoons as well as Japanese anime made manifest in their art, such as their alter-egos known as “fursonas.” This blending of anthropomorphic styles into something uniquely furry is a practice that is ongoing. This report utilizes a mixed methods approach including historiography and visual analysis to tell this story of furries’ origins in the 1970s and their persistence to today.
Based on a true story : "The Gezi Film Poster Series" and the role of narrative in cultural history
(2015-05) Aksu, Leyla Aylin; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Fuller, Kathryn
Focusing on a series of hypothetical film posters titled the "Gezi Movie Theatre Poster Series," commissioned by Istanbul's independent magazine Bant Mag, this thesis is a multi-methodological, exploratory case study utilizing ethnographic methods, as well as visual, textual, and document analysis. The posters within this series narrativize and encapsulate instances that took shape on the ground during the Gezi protests in Turkey in the Summer of 2013. Embodying the confluence of larger contextual events through the micro-lens of a singular organization and cultural product, the series provides an instance in which key and complex factors regarding social structure, political activism, and cultural production come together in the form of visual narrative. This undertaken analysis seeks to bring together theoretical constructs of social structure, historicization, alternative media and cultural resistance, material culture, artistic creation, and the imaginary, and apply them, in order, to Turkey, Gezi, Bant Mag, and the posters themselves, in order to create an understanding of how they each play a role within the series and its archival formation. Utilizing a critical analytical framework by focusing on the series as art, artifact, and action, after firmly contextually situating the film poster series within Bant Mag's own organizational framework, internal discourse, and history as a magazine, zine, and online resource, this study hopes to demonstrate the affordances of art, imagination, and subjectivity in the creation, documentation, and conservation of historical micro-narratives.
The British experience with American independent photography, 1944-1980
(2014-05) Jones, Andrew Wyn; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Abzug, Robert H; Lewis, Randolph; Hake, Sabine; Meikle, Jeffrey L
This dissertation explores the ways in which US-based photographic practices shaped British independent photography from the late stages of the Second World War to the beginning of the 1980s. America had become the center of the Western artistic and literary universes by the late 1940s, and the US had led the way in photography from at least the 1930s and arguably from the 1910s. American photographic technology, education, and aesthetics looked enviously advanced to Britons for most of the twentieth century, and those on the photographic vanguard in Britain cultivated relationships with their transatlantic counterparts in the hope of effecting change in British institutions. During the period studied, photographic traffic mostly emanated from the US, accompanying a broader stream of ideas, capital and cultural products that were eagerly consumed by many and resisted in other quarters as the pernicious products of American cultural imperialism. As ideas, images, and technology flowed into Britain from the US, photographic collections and personnel from Britain flowed out. American photographic practice in Britain was promulgated as much by its British recipients as their US counterparts. Influential professionals like magazine editor Bill Jay, Arts Council officer Barry Lane and freelance photographer Tony Ray-Jones sought to stimulate British independent photography by importing American institutional and aesthetic models. This catalytic process had the effect of invigorating photography in Britain which both developed along and ultimately diverged from American models. This work contributes to a larger body of scholarship examining the transnational lineages of artistic and cultural production through analyzing how actors in this flow of information sought to rework and domesticate artistic forms and ideas to suit their own purposes.
Electronic bits and ten gallon hats : Enron, American culture and the postindustrial political economy
(2012-05) Benke, Gavin; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Smith, Mark; Bremen, Brian; Bsumek, Erika
This dissertation uses the Enron Corporation as a case study to examine the ways in which large-scale corporations become cultural actors in pursuit of establishing favorable regulatory environments, and how Enron's collapse in 2001 allowed United States citizens to protest and express anxiety over a national and international economic shift towards postindustrialism that began in the early 1970s. Through a consideration of materials such as marketing literature, correspondence between Enron executives and state and federal government officials, and the entire run of Enron Business, the employee magazine, as well as popular cultural texts, including, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as film and book-length narrative accounts of the company, this study contributes to an understanding of the cultural work that must be performed in order to establish and maintain political economic systems, as well as the ways in which cultural production is used to make sense of economic change. In many ways, Enron manifested a number of prominent political economic changes during the late twentieth century that have been identified by scholars such as David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. From the 1980s onward, the company increasing eschewed large-scale industrial operations in favor of information-based businesses that mirrored industries such as finance. Enron’s concomitant rhetorical shift to an emphasis on information technologies worked to mask and render culturally palatable the spatial, economic and political implications of this change. Because Enron was a company that engaged in cultural production, and because its transformation from a pipeline operator to a derivatives trading house was so dramatic, the company became an ideal site for Americans to express cultural anxieties about the move away from Fordist, material production and towards an emphasis on working with complicated pieces of information. However, despite the company's symbolic value, no coherent criticism of the economic features Enron embodied emerged in the public outcry, suggesting that the cultural materials needed to advance a sustained critique of late capitalism had not yet developed.
The multi-sensory object : jazz, the modern media, and the history of the senses in Germany
(2014-08) Schmidt, Michael James; Crew, David F., 1946-; Coffin, Judith G.; Miller, Karl H.; Hake, Sabine; Matysik, Tracie
This dissertation traces the perceptual history of jazz in Germany between 1918 and 1960. It argues that jazz was a multi-sensory cultural object: jazz was never just sound but was fundamentally composed of many different media and their respective combinations of sensory address. This work follows the major transformations of the perception of jazz. During the 1920s, it argues, jazz was primarily a visual and textual phenomenon; by 1960, its audience considered sound to be its most important attribute and its consumption involved a well-developed hermeneutics of listening. As an intersection point for multiple media—it was a subject in newspaper articles, books, street advertisements, film, radio, and sound recordings—jazz opens a window onto the larger history of media and perception in Germany. During the twentieth century, Germany witnessed a shift in its dominant media regime. Before the rise of sound film, Germans public communication was dominated by images and text; between 1929 and 1940, German society became inundated with sound. These media regimes shaped both the contours of perception and the form and presence of cultural objects.
Reconsidering the cultural history of West Germany from 1945 to unification : a historiographical review of recent works
(2017-05-05) Cincotta, Natalie Rose; Crew, David F., 1946-; Lichtenstein, Tatjana
This report surveys recent directions in cultural-historical approaches to the historiography of West Germany. While yielding important insights, institutional and economic histories have been preoccupied with the “democracy problem,” concerned with whether it had a chance, how it took root, and when it became successful. More recently, scholars have emphasized the importance of cultural-historical approaches in writing about the Federal Republic, often forging new ways to understand economic history itself. These scholars, including Moritz Föllmer, Anna Parkinson, Paul Betts, Elizabeth Heineman, Dagmar Herzog, and Timothy Scott Brown, have shown that the project of creating individual subjectivities after 1945 was also a cultural project, carved and contested in arenas ranging from industrial design to sexual politics. In reviewing these recent works, I propose that cultural approaches allow us to frame the historical problem less as a project of forming subjectivities in an attempt to be model democrats, which can take on a teleological tone, and more as a project of forming subjectivities in an attempt to distance oneself from Nazism, and in doing so imagine what it could mean to be West German.
"Surrealism and Post-World War II Culture: journals and exhibitions as sites of discourse, 1952–1969"
(2020-08) Howard, Claire Fontaine; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple,1948-; Shiff, Richard A; Taylor, Michael R; Cauvin, Jean-Pierre B; Flaherty, George F
This dissertation argues that in the 1950s and 1960s the Surrealist group around André Breton revitalized the movement through engagement with their post-World War II cultural context. As a result, this overlooked period in the movement’s history does not represent a retreat from the revolutionary principles on which Surrealism was founded in 1924, but rather a reinvestment in and expansion of its commitment to human liberation that was responsive to its times. Examination of Surrealist journals and exhibitions between 1952 and 1969 reveals the group’s interactions with specific postwar social, political, and artistic issues that demonstrate that while the membership and manifestations of Surrealism in this period were different from those of its interwar years, late Surrealism was no less engaged. While both mid-century and contemporary critics have charged post-World War II Surrealism with irrelevance, new, younger members helped to reestablish the movement in Paris. Until the group’s 1969 dissolution, they pursued collective activities that challenged the culture of their day. Approaching late Surrealism from the perspective of its cultural history reveals how the movement’s members navigated the shifting social and political landscape of post-World War II France within an international framework. In their journals, the Surrealists addressed topics including decolonization, the space race, abstract painting, formalism, sexual liberation, and Black Power. Surrealist exhibitions in Paris (1959, 1965), New York (1960), and Czechoslovakia (1968) amplified the journals’ discourse, exploring these and other current cultural issues through innovative exhibition design, collaboratively produced objects and installations, and performance. While these exhibitions paid homage to Surrealism’s history, its new members were unafraid to retheorize Surrealist tenets, stressing both continuity with Surrealism’s founding principles and their contemporaneity. Beyond rethinking the history of Surrealism itself, this dissertation reinserts Surrealism into the postwar era as both historical touchstone for and contemporary of tendencies including Neo-Dada, Lyrical Abstraction, installation, and performance art. What emerges from this study is a vastly different—but more complete—picture of Surrealism than has previously been known.
The good guys win : Ronald Reagan, fiction, and the transformation of national security
(2018-06-22) Griffin, Benjamin, Ph. D.; Suri, Jeremi; Lawrence, Mark; Inboden, William; Brands, H.W.; Wilson, James
The dissertation examines how Ronald Reagan made use of fiction in developing his world view and grand strategy. It argues his use of narrative played an essential role in shaping his vision and in how he communicated with the American public. In particular, the works of Tom Clancy, westerns, and science-fiction novels provided synthetic experiences and creative space that helped Reagan contextualize information and imagine the near-future. Fiction also helped Reagan develop empathy for peoples behind the Iron Curtain leading to a nuanced policy that clearly distinguished the people from their government. The creativity and imagination of Reagan’s vision caused him to break with orthodox conservative positions and hastened the end of the Cold War. The dissertation will also examine how Reagan’s use of fiction proved damaging in the developing world as his narrow reading reinforced tropes and stereotypes leading to ineffective policies that contributed to great suffering in Latin America, South Africa, and the Middle East. The dissertation argues that policy makers read a broad amount of fiction from diverse sources and actively seek to incorporate it into their strategies.
The re-presentation of Arabic optics in seventeenth-century Commonwealth England
(2015-05) Elghonimi, Reem; Spellberg, Denise A.; Levack, Brian
Arabic Studies experienced a resurgence in seventeenth-century English institutions. While an awareness of the efflorescence has helped recover a fuller picture of the historical landscape, the enterprise did not foment an appreciable change in Arabic grammatical or linguistic expertise for the majority of seventeenth-century university students learning the language. As a result, the desuetude of Arabic Studies by the 1660s has been regarded as further evidence for the conclusion that the project reaped insubstantial benefits for the history of science and for the Scientific Revolution. Rather, this inquiry contends that the influence of the Arabic transmission of Greek philosophical works extended beyond Renaissance Italy to Stuart England, which not only shared a continuity with the continental reception of Latinized Arabic texts but selectively investigated some sources of original Arabic scientific ideas and methods with new rigor. The case study at hand demonstrates how one English physician in the Commonwealth period turned to a medieval Muslim author of optics to dispel reliance on either mechanical, deterministic or occult explanation of natural phenomena.