“The Mondo Cane films were an important key to what was going on in the media landscape of the 1960s, especially post the JFK assassination. Nothing was true, and nothing was untrue...” J G Ballard Being the first ever English-language title devoted exclusively to the controversial and influential mondo documentary film cycle, this revised edition of Sweet and Savage remains the only serious study of mondo as a global film phenomenon, and includes a detailed examination of the key films of this cult genre. Sweet and Savage identifies the principle stylistic aspects of the mondo genre through a fascinating ‘non-linear’ approach that echoes the collage shock effects of the original films. In so doing it features exclusive interviews and many unique material contributions. It is lavishly illustrated with rare photographs, stills, posters, and record sleeves. Foreword by Jeremy Dyson.
BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS, one of the most perceptive and interesting journalists writing today, takes us into some unusual precincts of American society in American Voyeur. Denizet-Lewis made news with his New York Times Magazine cover story "Double Lives on the Down Low," included here, which ignited a firestorm by revealing a subculture of African-American men who have sex with other men but who don’t consider themselves gay. In American Voyeur, he also takes us inside a summer camp for pro-life teenagers, a New Hampshire town where two young brothers committed suicide, a social group for lipstick lesbians, a middle school where a girl secretly lives as a boy, a college where fraternity boys face the daunting prospect of sobriety, a state where legally married young gay men are turning out to be more like their parents than anyone might have suspected, a high school where dating has been replaced by "hooking up," and other intersections of youth culture and sexuality. Peer behind the curtain of modern American life with this remarkable collection.
From 24-hour-a-day "girl cam" sites on the World Wide Web to trash-talk television shows like "Jerry Springer" and reality television programs like "Cops," we've become a world of voyeurs. We like to watch others as their intimate moments, private facts, secrets, and dirty laundry are revealed. Voyeur Nation traces the evolution and forces driving what the author calls the 'voyeurism value.' Calvert argues that although spectatorship and sensationalism are far from new phenomena, today a confluence of factors-legal, social, political, and technological-pushes voyeurism to the forefront of our image-based world. The First Amendment increasingly is called on to safeguard our right, via new technologies and recording devices, to peer into the innermost details of others' lives without fear of legal repercussion. But Calvert argues that the voyeurism value contradicts the value of discourse in democracy and First Amendment theory, since voyeurism by its very nature involves merely watching without interacting or participating. It privileges watching and viewing media images over participating and interacting in democracy.
Savage Constructions challenges the popular Western assumption that violence is an essential quality of darker-skinned populations, arguing that Western imperialist projects are largely responsible for the current violences that 'rebound' in victim societies of the post-colonial world. 'Rebounding violence' expresses victim abjection and overly aggressive 'identity work' in survivors of repressive regimes after long-term exposure to denigrating myths that cast the victims as morally wanting and deserving of the abuse they suffered.
These essays by Philippine and U.S.-based scholars illustrate the dynamism and complexities of the discursive field of Philippine studies as a critique of vestiges of "universalist" (Western/hegemonic) paradigms; as an affirmation of "traditional" and "emergent" cultural practices; as a site for new readings of "old" texts and "new" popular forms brought into the ambit of serious scholarship; and as a liberative space for new art and literary genres.
Has its close connections with academe enriched or diminished Philippine literature in English? Are there alternatives to academe as literary arbiters? How do contemporary Filipino women writers "perform" the modern wonder tale? These are some of the questions that Hidalgo asks in her latest book.
In his new book, leading medievalist A. C. Spearing provides the only study of the many scenes of secret watching and listening in medieval love-stories, and of the way that the central importance of these scenes encourages both the poets and their readers to imagine themselves as voyeurs in relation to what they read.