The Politics of Melodrama
The Politics of Melodrama

Author: Jonathan Smolin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2024-12-17

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 1503641287

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (1919–1990) is the most popular and prolific writer of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century. The Politics of Melodrama is the first book to take on this giant of Arabic fiction and consider both his outsized cultural influence and consequential position in Egyptian politics. Jonathan Smolin frames the work of Abdel Kouddous not only as romantic melodrama, but as an entirely new model of Arabic fiction as dissent—contesting the fate of the 1952 revolution, condemning Nasser's betrayal of democracy, and grappling with depths of guilt at what Egypt had become. Smolin reveals the surprisingly close relationship between the famed writer and Nasser. He offers a new reading of fiction during the Nasser era that inserts the importance of non-elite culture in the history of the period and reevaluates the production of Nasserism. Unearthing Nasser's repeated interventions both to shape the work of Abdel Kouddous and to discipline him personally, this book demonstrates how the media and popular fiction became spaces of negotiation between the intellectual and the state, contesting Nasser and his politics during a period that has been widely assumed to be devoid of dissent.

Martial Law Melodrama
Martial Law Melodrama

Author: José B. Capino

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0520314611

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Lino Brocka (1939–1991) was one of Asia and the Global South’s most celebrated filmmakers. A versatile talent, he was at once a bankable director of genre movies, an internationally acclaimed auteur of social films, a pioneer of queer cinema, and an outspoken critic of Ferdinand Marcos’s autocratic regime. José B. Capino examines the figuration of politics in the Filipino director’s movies, illuminating their historical contexts, allegorical tropes, and social critiques. Combining eye-opening archival research with fresh interpretations of over fifteen of Brocka’s major and minor works, Martial Law Melodrama does more than reveal the breadth of his political vision. It also offers a timely lesson about popular cinema’s vital role in the struggle for democracy.

Politics and Sentiments in Risorgimento Italy
Politics and Sentiments in Risorgimento Italy

Author: Carlotta Sorba

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 3030697320

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book investigates the narrative of nationhood during the Italian Risorgimento and its ability to reach a new and wider audience. In Italy, an extraordinary emotional excitement pervaded the struggle for national independence, suffusing the speeches and actions of patriots. This book shows how this ardour borrowed the tones, figures and spectacular nature of the melodramatic imagination feeding the theatre and literature of the time, and how it could resonate with a largely uneducated audience. An important contribution to the new historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it offers a fresh perspective on the public sphere during the Risorgimento, focusing on the transnational links between political mobilisation and the growth of new media and burgeoning mass culture.

Dramas of Nationhood
Dramas of Nationhood

Author: Lila Abu-Lughod

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780226001968

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Television is the cultural form that binds together the nation of Egypt. This text analyses Egyptian TV, not only to provide an understanding of the effect of the medium on Egyptian people, but also to examine TVs greater role in culture.

Melodrama Unbound
Melodrama Unbound

Author: Christine Gledhill

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 761

ISBN-13: 0231543190

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional crises, either subversively excessive or narrowly focused on the dilemmas of women. Drawing on new scholarship in transnational theatrical, film, and cultural histories, this collection demonstrates that melodrama is a transgeneric mode that has long spoken to fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. Pointing to melodrama’s roots in the ancient Greek combination of melos and drama, and to medieval Christian iconography focused on the pathos of Christ as suffering human body, the volume highlights the importance to modernity of melodrama as a mode of emotional dramaturgy, the social and aesthetic conditions for which emerged long before the French Revolution. Contributors articulate new ways of thinking about melodrama that underscore its pervasiveness across national cultures and in a variety of genres. They examine how melodrama has traveled to and been transformed in India, China, Japan, and South America, whether through colonial circuits or later, globalization; how melodrama mixes with other modes such as romance, comedy, and realism; and finally how melodrama has modernized the dramatic functions of gender, class, and race by orchestrating vital aesthetic and emotional experiences for diverse audiences.

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama

Author: Carolyn Williams

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 110709593X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

The Fluoride Wars
The Fluoride Wars

Author: R. Allan Freeze

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-04-29

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 0470463678

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A lively account of fluoridation and its discontents Since its first implementation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945, public drinking water fluoridation and its attendant conflicts, controversies, and conspiracy theories serve as an object lesson in American science, public health, and policymaking. In addition to the arguments on the issue still raging today, the tale of fluoridation and its discontents also resonates with such present concerns as genetically modified foods, global warming response, nuclear power, and environmental regulation. Offering the best current thinking on the issue, The Fluoride Wars presents a witty and detailed social history of the fluoridation debate in America, illuminating the intersection of science and politics in our recent past. This reader-friendly assessment explores the pro- and anti-fluoridation movements, key players, and important events. Full of amusing and vivid anecdotes and examples, this accessible recounting includes: A careful and non-condescending look at the hard science, popular science, pseudo-science, and junk science involved A look at fluoride issues including dosage, cost, financial and funding interests, fluorosis, and problems of risk-cost-benefit analysis The back-and-forth drama between pro- and anti-fluoridation factions, with all its claims, counterclaims, insults, acrimony, and lawsuits Case studies of various cities and their experiences with municipal water fluoridation initiatives Fluorophobia and popular conspiracy theories involving fluoride The colorful characters in the debate including activists, scientists, magicians, and politicians A richly and considerately told tale of American science and public life, The Fluoride Wars offers an engrossing history to both interested general readers and specialists in public health, dentistry, policymaking, and related fields.

Re-Imagining Black Women
Re-Imagining Black Women

Author: Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1479824380

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

WINNER OF THE W.E.B. DUBOIS DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD, GIVEN BY THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BLACK POLITICAL SCIENTISTS A wide-ranging Black feminist interrogation, reaching from the #MeToo movement to the legacy of gender-based violence against Black women From Michelle Obama to Condoleezza Rice, Black women are uniquely scrutinized in the public eye. In Re-Imagining Black Women, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd explores how Black women—and Blackness more broadly—are understood in our political imagination and often become the subjects of public controversy. Drawing on politics, popular culture, psychoanalysis, and more, Alexander-Floyd examines our conflicting ideas, opinions, and narratives about Black women, showing how they are equally revered and reviled as an embodiment of good and evil, cast either as victims or villains, citizens or outsiders. Ultimately, Alexander-Floyd showcases the complex experiences of Black women as political subjects. At a time of extreme racial tension, Re-Imagining Black Women provides insight into the parts that Black women play, and are expected to play, in politics and popular culture.

Ugly Freedoms
Ugly Freedoms

Author: Elisabeth R. Anker

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 147802240X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.

Nazi Film Melodrama
Nazi Film Melodrama

Author: Laura Heins

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2013-09-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0252095022

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cultural productions in the Third Reich often served explicit propaganda functions of legitimating racism and glorifying war and militarism. Likewise, the proliferation of domestic and romance films in Nazi Germany also represented an ideological stance. Rather than reinforcing traditional gender role divisions and the status quo of the nuclear family, these films were much more permissive about desire and sexuality than previously assumed. Focusing on German romance films, domestic melodramas, and home front films from 1933 to 1945, Nazi Film Melodrama shows how melodramatic elements in Nazi cinema functioned as part of a project to move affect, body, and desire beyond the confines of bourgeois culture and participate in a curious modernization of sexuality engineered to advance the imperialist goals of the Third Reich. Offering a comparative analysis of Nazi productions with classical Hollywood films of the same era, Laura Heins argues that German fascist melodramas differed from their American counterparts in their negative views of domesticity and in their use of a more explicit antibourgeois rhetoric. Nazi melodramas, film writing, and popular media appealed to viewers by promoting liberation from conventional sexual morality and familial structures, presenting the Nazi state and the individual as dynamic and revolutionary. Some spectators objected to the eroticization and modernization of the public sphere under Nazism, however, pitting Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda against more conservative film audiences in a war over the very status of domesticity and the shape of the family. Drawing on extensive archival research, this perceptive study highlights the seemingly contradictory aspects of gender representation and sexual morality in Nazi-era cinema.