Tracks the influence of Italian cinema on American film from the postwar period to the present. In The Transatlantic Gaze, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan documents the sustained and profound artistic impact of Italian directors, actors, and screenwriters on American film. Working across a variety of genres, including neorealism, comedy, the Western, and the art film, Carolan explores how and why American directors from Woody Allen to Quentin Tarantino have adapted certain Italian trademark techniques and motifs. Allen’s To Rome with Love (2012), for example, is an homage to the genius of Italian filmmakers, and to Federico Fellini in particular, whose Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik (1952) also resonates with Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as well as with Neil LaBute’s Nurse Betty (2000). Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga (2003, 2004) plays off elements of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), a transatlantic conversation about the Western that continues in Tarantino’s Oscar-winning Django Unchained (2012). Lee Daniels’s Precious (2009) and Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008), meanwhile, demonstrate that the neorealism of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, which arose from the political and economic exigencies of postwar Italy, is an effective vehicle for critiquing social issues such as poverty and racism in a contemporary American context. The book concludes with an examination of American remakes of popular Italian films, a comparison that offers insight into the similarities and differences between the two cultures and the transformations in genre, both subtle and obvious, that underlie this form of cross-cultural exchange.

Winner of the 2008 Gradiva Award, Theoretical Category, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis The Real Gaze develops a new theory of the cinema by rethinking the concept of the gaze, which has long been central in film theory. Historically film scholars have located the gaze on the side of the spectator; however, Todd McGowan positions it within the filmic image, where it has the radical potential to disrupt the spectator's sense of identity and challenge the foundations of ideology. This book demonstrates several distinct cinematic forms that vary in terms of how the gaze functions within the films. Through a detailed investigation of directors such as Orson Welles, Claire Denis, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Federico Fellini, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and David Lynch, McGowan explores the political, cultural, and existential ramifications of these differing roles of the gaze.

At the dawn of a reimagined 20th century, one girl must become the reluctant symbol of a new world. The year is 1908. Seventeen-year-old Rosalind Wallace’s blissful stay in England with her best friend, Cecily de Vere, ends abruptly when her father books Rosalind on the maiden voyage of his fabulous Transatlantic Express, the world’s first railroad to travel under the sea. Rosalind is furious. But lucky for her, Cecily and her handsome older brother, Charles, volunteer to accompany her home. But when Charles disappears and Cecily and her housemaid, Doris, are found stabbed to death in their state room, Rosalind finds herself trapped undersea, in a deadly fight to clear herself of her friend’s murder and to thwart a sinister enemy.

New York City witnessed a dazzling burst of creativity in the 1920s. In this pathbreaking study, Carol J. Oja explores this artistic renaissance from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music, who along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. She also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein, Marion Bauer, George Antheil-these were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies--such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts--to promote the performance of their music, and they nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. They showed exceptional skill at marketing their work. Drawing on extensive archival material--including interviews, correspondence, popular periodicals, and little-known music manuscripts--Oja provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the "Machine Age" and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitisim, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume's 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.

Set against the background of nighttime encounters in the rough streets of Brazil's Salvador da Bahia, this experimental ethnography explores how certain transnational characters are at once co-constructed and reinvented through the legacy of conquest and the global inequalities of late capitalism. Theorizing the desires that drive these encounters as forms of colonial violence and sincere emancipatory strategies, author Samuel Veissiere's gaze travels outward across the Atlantic and the historical violence of empire, and then turns back inward to revisit the violence of his own white colonial desires. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 3)

She can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and please her man: The popular media influence perceptions of women and their role(s) in society. But what of men? Indeed, men and masculinity have been the norm, the yardstick against which women--and the women′s movement--have been measured. Although the development of men′s studies has gained momentum, little has been published that focuses on the media and their relationship to men as men. Men, Masculinity, and the Media addresses this shortcoming. Scholars from communication studies, sociology, social studies, humanities, and political science investigate past media research on men and masculinity. They also examine how the media serve to construct masculinities, how men and their relationships have been depicted, and how men respond to media images. From comic books and rock music to film and television, this ground-breaking volume scrutinizes the interrelationship among men, the media, and masculinity. ". . . ambitious in scope." --Journalism Quarterly "This volume, inaugurating Sage′s Research on Men and Masculinity series, will be highly effective in mass media courses dealing with gender, an area where useful collections are sorely lacking. These essays vary in their degree of theoretical and methodological sophistication. Some will be sufficiently complex for graduate courses, while undergraduate students will appreciate others either for their discursive straightforwardness or for their grounding in cultural genres that undergraduates are seldom allowed to study, from sports coverage to heavy metal music. And since, among them, these essays cover such a large territory, the composite bibliography at the end will well serve those interested in further reading and research." --Journal of Communication "This volume is both evenly written and exceptionally readable. Key concepts are presented clearly, but they are not overly simplified. This book′s strong conceptual and empirical foundation, in conjunction with the sophistication of its content, make the text ideal for graduate and advanced graduate students. Scholars will find [the book] a valuable reference." --Communication Quarterly "Men, Masculinity, and the Media is a welcome corrective. Collected here are articles that range widely in topic as well as in theoretical and analytical complexity, from straightforward content analyses of images of masculinity in comic books to feminist poststructuralist explorations of the male gaze in prime-time television programming. The strength of the volume is in both the range of theoretical orientations included and the representation of scholars from a variety of disciplines including sociology, communications, political science, and the humanities." --American Journal of Sociology "A valuable and needed anthology which investigates the many, intricate ways in which mass media contribute to social construction of masculinity in western, industrialized countries. . . . An excellent reference section is included." --Communication Booknotes ". . . Steve Craig′s volume offers a comprehensive overview of recent research on masculinity and the media. It is accessible for both undergraduate and graduate students, and lends itself well to classroom teaching. The book also includes an extensive bibliography. Located at the intersection of communications and gender studies, Men, Masculinity, and the Media will further our understandings of the ways in which gender is both reproduced and contested. The collection will also stimulate further research in the field." --Canadian Journal of Communication

Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze even more deeply, the book centers how the oceanic transport of human cargoes--infamously known as the Middle Passage--comprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage. Sowande' Mustakeem's groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery. Mining ship logs, records and personal documents, Mustakeem teases out the social histories produced between those on traveling ships: slaves, captains, sailors, and surgeons. As she shows, crewmen manufactured captives through enforced dependency, relentless cycles of physical, psychological terror, and pain that led to the the making--and unmaking--of enslaved Africans held and transported onboard slave ships. Mustakeem relates how this process, and related power struggles, played out not just for adult men, but also for women, children, teens, infants, nursing mothers, the elderly, diseased, ailing, and dying. Mustakeem offers provocative new insights into how gender, health, age, illness, and medical treatment intersected with trauma and violence transformed human beings into the world's most commercially sought commodity for over four centuries.

"John James Audubon's paintings of birds are as familiar as they are beautiful. But even among his admirers, many may be surprised to learn that Audubon was a gifted writer. In this one-of-a-kind anthology, Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King have curated a collection of Audubon's coastal and sea writing, which represent Audubon's most compelling and evocative depictions of the natural world and early nineteenth-century American life. The collection is geographically diverse, bringing to light the variety of people and wildlife Audubon met or observed, pulling from the massive Ornithological Biography (1831-1839) as well as the "Autobiography" and journals. The editors supplement the selections with an instructive introduction and powerful coda, section headnotes, explanatory notes, and an appendix linking Audubon's species to current taxonomy and geographic ranges. The book is lavishly illustrated as well. There is much more in Audubon at Sea than descriptions of birds: we have stories of life aboard ship, of travel in early America and Audubon's work habits, the origins of iconic paintings, and, in the end, the carefully drawn commentary on a flawed and, at best, ambiguous hero"--

The contributors in this book discuss images of aging which have come to circulate in the advanced industrial societies today. They address such themes as gender images of aging, images of health, illness and death.