New Books in Film

Wakanda Dream Lab’s anthology, Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda, features the work of writers, artists, and activists, as they imagine gender justice through the framework of Wakanda. The various stories and pieces are creative and thought-provoking as they center the voices, experiences, and visions of Black and Native women, femmes, girls, and trans and gender non-confo...

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to id...

In Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture in Central Asia (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Rico Issacs uses cinema as an analytical tool to demonstrate the constructed and contested nature of Kazakh national identity. By first tracing the evolution of Kazakh national identity formation and then analyzing data from individual interviews and the Kazakh films themselves, Issacs demonstra...

How did American elites change the meaning of Art? In Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2019), Jennifer C. Lena, associate professor of arts administration at Colombia University, charts the history of American arts and cultural policy, interrogating the institutions, practices, and technologies underpinning the development of American Art....

Cars promise freedom, autonomy, and above all, movement but leave whole cities stuck in traffic, breathing polluted air, exposed of deadly crashes, and dependent on vast the vast infrastructures of road networks, and oil production. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) examines the paradoxes and ambivalences of automobility through the lens of...

How does thinking about gender and work help to rethink cultural hierarchies? In Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Film and Literature(Routledge, 2019), Polina Kroik, who teaches at Fordham University and Baruch College, CUNY, explores the relationship between work and gender in American culture. The book offers a wide-ranging discussion, from early twentieth century...

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016),  recent films Django Unchained (2012), The Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion, and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018), violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however,...

David Resnick combines two of his passions, movies and education, in his book, Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Films are powerful messengers which both project and reflect particular values, ideas and social behavior. Using many examples of Hollywood movies, Resnick analyzes the way movies perform in a vari...

The Holocaust was and remains a central trauma in Israel’s national consciousness. It has found ample expressions in Israeli documentary cinema from 1945 until the present. Third-generation Holocaust survivors were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. They grew up in a society which acts out the trauma and since the 1990s they have related to the Holocaust in a range of cultural fields...

In Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019), Jinah Kim explores questions of loss, memory, and redress in post WWII Asian diasporic decolonial politics. Through a close analysis of seminal cultural works that range from theory, short stories, film noir, documentaries, plays, and novels, Kim makes legible how Korean and Japanese diasporic...

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an almost revolutionary work of theory and critique: Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Ornamentalism offers arguably the...

Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West.  A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers.  A year after Stalin’s death, author and commentator Ilya Ehrenburg published the novel that would give a name to this era, “The Thaw,” which probed the limi...

Convinced that sexual immorality and unstable gender norms were endangering national recovery after World War One, German lawmakers drafted a constitution in 1919 legalizing the censorship of movies and pulp fiction, and prioritizing social rights over individual rights. These provisions enabled legislations to adopt two national censorship laws intended to regulate the movie industry and retail t...

The television comedies of the 1960s set in the American South epitomize American innocence. But in their original historical, social, and commercial context, their portrayals of southern life and their omissions of political events and people of color raise questions about how these television programs have been embraced, then and now. How were these shows a response to the Red Scare of the 1950s...

Brian Cremins' book Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) explores the history of Billy Batson, a boy who met a wizard that allowed him to transform into a superhero. When Billy says, “Shazam!” he becomes Captain Marvel. Cremins explores the history of artist C.C. Beck and writer Otto Binder’s Captain Marvel comic book character who outsold Superman comics...

When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly explained the 2008 crisis and the financialized economy, was written by an English professor. It was Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Stanford University Press,...

Although not all that well known to English-speaking audiences, cultural critic and Peking University professor Jinhua Dai’s incisive commentaries and critiques of contemporary Chinese life have elevated her to something akin to ‘rock star’ status in China itself. As Lisa Rofel discusses in this podcast, and in her introduction to After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke Univer...

In 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the Star Wars franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to the release of a new movie trilogy, two stand-alone films, and two animated series. In Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy(University of Minnesota...

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media env...

The U.S. Constitution is often depicted in popular films, teaching lessons about what this founding document means and what it requires. The United States Constitution in Film: Part of Our National Culture (Lexington Books, 2018) examines several different areas of the Constitution to illuminate how films in each area have tried to engage the document and teach the viewer something about it. Begin...

Michael Benson talks about the making of 2001, a movie inspired by the collaboration of American director Stanley Kubrick and British futurist Arthur C. Clark. Benson is a writer, artist, and film maker. He is the author of Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clark and The Making of a Masterpiece (Simon and Schuster, 2018). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, Unive...

Audrey Hepburn was justly known for her long acting career, yet her early life is largely unknown. In his book, Robert Matzen describes how she lived during the World War II period in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Based on many interviews and other primary sources, Robert shows how she was affected by the war. Listen in as we talk about his new book Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II (GoodKn...

Racquel J. Gates’ new book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018), interrogates understandings of African-American representations on screen.  This book is an important analysis of the concepts of negative and positive representations, especially in regard to the narrow space that these binary classifications create. Gates takes on not only the concept...

Most of the time, this podcast focuses on the products of those who create historical fiction—specifically, novels. But what goes into producing a work of historical fiction—especially in a dictatorship where the wrong choice, or even the right choice at the wrong moment, can send the unwitting author to the Gulag? And what if the creator is not an unknown toiling in the dark to produce manuscript...

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Pr...