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Academic ballet is one of the iconic manifestations of High Culture. In Nineteenth-century Spain, it failed to take root in the form of stable companies, schools, and venues. There were various soc...

In the wider context of ways that Literacy works to enforce control by elites, the maintenance of high culture, racial stratification, national identity and social injustice through education, this...

This article examines the Sentimentalist contribution to the pursuit of high culture in Ukrainian literature of the early nineteenth century. It treats this endeavour as a reaction against Ivan Kot...

‘If you loved me just a little bit, hey, if you loved me as much as you don’t love me’, sang the popular Polish band Breakout in the 1960s about the challenged potential of finding mutual understan...

We are still living in the situation informed by the Cold War in art: The Cold War between good and bad, between dispassionate contemplation of the medium and use of this medium for propagation of ...

A characteristic of Heidegger was his contempt for German high culture. In particular he shunned eighteenth-century Humanity, Humanitat. The idea that the beautiful work of art reconciled the human...

This essay both inaugurates the editorship of Ted Striphas and reflects on the contributions of Cultural Studies’ longtime editor, Lawrence Grossberg. It opens by reflecting briefly on the journal'...

Since its first publication in 1678, La Princesse de Cleves has inspired an exceptionally rich corpus of criticism, numerous literary variations and, over the last decades, several cinematographic adaptations: Jean Delannoy’s historicizing, fairytale-izing La Princesse de Cleves (1961); Manoel de Oliveira’s A Carta/La Lettre (1999), an eminently textualized film, accentuating the plot’s religious dimension; Andrzej Żulawski’s La Fidelite (2000), problematizing also adaptational ‘fidelity’ between esprit and lettre; Christophe Honore’s La Belle Personne (2008), a ‘proposition de lecture’ of Lafayette’s novel in the context of the notorious Sarkozy affair; finally, Regis Sauder’s documentary Nous, princesses de Cleves (2011), restaging Lafayette’s royal court in northern Marseille’s ZEP-Lycee Diderot and, thus, raising controversial topics concerning the transmission of a common cultural heritage, the ambivalences of ‘high culture’ between symbolic violence and emancipatory potential. This article proposes ...

Discrimination experienced by Latino youth in school has been explored in past research although the interrelatedness of culture and educational stress—the stress due to Hispanic culture not being acknowledged in school and racial tensions in school—has been less studied. The current study examines the effect of this stress on internalizing symptoms among 58 low-income Latino adolescents (Mage =13.31, 53% male) and tests whether ethnic identity moderates this association. Results show that culture and educational stress is associated with worse mental health. Further, a significant ethnic identity X stress interaction was found for somatic problems showing that youth high in ethnic identity exploration reported more somatic problems in the face of high culture and educational stress. Hence, youth who are more actively exploring their identity may be more vulnerable to the damaging context of culture and educational stress. Implications for multicultural consultation are discussed.

This study focuses on the 1950 introduction of the commercial radio station, Springbok Radio, into the South African Broadcasting Corporation, a Commonwealth inspired public service broadcaster (PSB) resulting from the Schoch Commission (1948). The paper argues that the introduction of Springbok Radio was prompted by the financial crisis faced by the Corporation; the broadcaster’s attempt to broaden its appeal beyond elite audiences serviced by PSB; and the national imperative to centralise and control the broadcast sector by dominating it completely. Thus, the study examines the motifs of PSB versus commercialisation; high culture versus popular culture; and nationalism versus internationalisation.

This paper makes an attempt to understand the stardom of the Bengali film-maker and actor Aparna Sen, who has been associated with the industry for 55 years. We argue that Sen’s star persona is bas...

This essay reflects on the lives of two people whose publications, pedagogy, lectures, and crucially, whose experiences helped set the terms of the debate about so-called high culture in Cultural S...

We summarize three perspectives on cultural entrepreneurship (CE). Originating in sociology, CE 1.0 focuses on making culture, or the processes by which high culture organizations and popular culture products are created. With roots in strategic management and organization theory, CE 2.0 focuses on deploying culture, or the processes by which culture constitutes a toolkit for legitimating new ventures. We interpret recent scholarship as suggesting the emergence of a third wave, CE 3.0, which emphasizes cultural making, the distributed and intertemporal processes whereby value is created across multiple and fluid repertoires and registers of meaning. We close by speculating on two issues: the performativity of cultural entrepreneurship, and the cult of entrepreneurship.

This article explores a panorama of relations between high culture and popular culture in Spanish poetry of the first third of the twentieth century. From populist proposals in the early years of t...

The study of Chinese nature tourism is a relatively independent research realm which adopts a cultural perspective to study the tourist experience. Chinese tourists are regarded as being accustomed to experiencing nature through associating it with high culture such as landscape poetry and paintings, calligraphy, and so on, and the impacts of traditional popular culture are seldom addressed. Yet, for the majority of Chinese, popular culture has significant influences on their behavior. From a cultural divergence approach, this paper chooses Huangshan Mountain as a case to investigate the way common Chinese people experience nature, and it is found that cultural impacts are differentiated, since neither cultures nor tourist groups are homogeneous. Specifically, tourists can be classified into classicists and folklorists according to whether they have professional knowledge about the traditional arts. As the majority of Chinese are folklorists and are largely neglected in the research, they are the main int...

Beginning in 1998, there has been an explosion in the flow of television programme formats worldwide witnessing to the advent of a global television system for programme production and distribution. In fact, this kind of programme adaptation and remaking had a long gestation that reaches back even before the beginnings of regular television broadcasting to the early 1940s. Media scholars were very slow over the subsequent half-century to register what was taking place, let alone inquire into its dynamics and critical significance. If programme remaking was noticed at all, it was understood in high culture terms as confirmation of crassness and materialism operating in commercial television. Critical research added a further charge of media imperialism to describe the supposed national and social outcomes of such a practice. However, since the 1990s, scholarly inquiry has affected a seachange in its engagement with the phenomenon of television programme remaking that was prompted not least by a realisation...

In the past decade, many sports historians made the ‘visual turn’ and embraced the diverse visual culture of athletic spectatorship and consumption; however, art historians have been somewhat reluctant to make the corresponding ‘sporting turn’. This paper assumes a unique position by investigating the central role mass sport, particularly football, plays in fine art, a field typically perceived as high culture. A closer examination of the African diaspora indicates soccer’s prominence within recent artistic practice. Many successful, professional artists utilize the game to contest politics and nationalism, social norms and human behaviour and codes of gender and class. By focusing on representations of the ball, star players, fan perspectives and stadium experiences, this essay explores artists’ use of soccer for critical reflections on contemporary life.

Gyorgy Markus’s post-Marxist writings on high culture are evaluated in terms of their possible contribution to a neo-Marxist theory of high culture. Because of the highly essayistic character of Markus’s presentation, this necessarily involves investigation of their dependence on his previous work. According to Markus, Marxism can be critically reconstructed and superseded on the basis of an independent theorization of the consequences of Marx’s most basic theoretical move: the identification of production as paradigmatic for social action in general. In section 3 this idea of the production paradigm is criticized. In section 4 I show how in Markus this idea is made the basis of an ostensibly historicist concept of critical theory, in which not only the theory’s object is historicized, but the theory is itself organized as an articulation of the needs of historically specific constituencies. I argue, however, that in reality the idea of the production paradigm stands in fundamental contradiction t...

Part of what made James Arnt Aune's scholarship so compelling was its style as well as content. Academic writing tends to be impersonal, only occasionally acknowledging the author, and creates its ethos through a formal, somewhat literary style. To be accepted and understood as academic writing, and to generate the ethos appropriate to such writing, the style needs to be serious and formal. And often pretty boring. However, there are a few--very few--academic writers who manage to flout these stylistic constraints, producing writing that is simultaneously formal and casual, closely argued, yet utilizing the callbacks of the standup comedian and the riffing of the rock guitarist. Jim Aune's prose did all of these things. He produced scholarship that was as rigorous and insightful as it was engaging and entertaining. In his work, the personal, pedagogical, and political came together as one, offering readers the chance to know him through his prose. One distinctive aspect of Aune's prose style was its movement between high and low cultural references. In the realm of high culture, for example, he pulled lessons on the democratic political style from musings on the period styles of classical music--baroque, romantic, and modern--nodding to Beethoven's and Schoenberg's use of dissonance along the way (Aune, 2008a). In the realm of low culture, he began a chapter in his 2001 book Selling the Free Market with an imaginary, Libertarian-themed episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Captain's Log: Stardate 13256.8. The Enterprise is on its way to Planet Libertas in the Hobbesian system. We have received a distress call from a Robert Nozick, who claims to be a professor at a Harvard University, and he is demanding that we rescue him. (p. 77) Of course, to appreciate the richness of this reference, one needs to have some knowledge of Star Trek, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Nozick. Indeed, this is where Aune's cultural references truly displayed their brilliance. He adeptly blended high and low culture into often-humorous, always-revealing scholarly insights. Consider the movement of his essay "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite" (Aune, 2006), which positioned the study of rhetoric as a form of mourning for the "failed quest to incorporate the lost desire signified by the Athenian polis" (p. 69). On the second page of the essay, Aune captured the Romantic longing for ancient Athens by quoting--first in the original German, then in English translation--Friedrich von Schiller's "The Gods of Greece." The presence of the German verses (not to mention the unusual word "piacular" in the title) mark the essay as a formal, refined, perhaps even elitist take on nostalgia. The quotation from Proust on the following page reinforces this appearance. But by the end of the essay, Aune had trodden from the snobbish to the familiar, as his insights on the status anxiety of rhetorical studies culminated with a personal reference and a set of song lyrics. "A few weeks ago, when I turned fifty," Aune recounted, "I ran across the following song from Bob Dylan's Love and Theft, entitled 'Mississippi.' In its mature acceptance of mourning and loss, Dylan's song captures something of a fitting mood for the piacular rites of the rhetorician facing the uncertainties of a new century and a radically changing university context." Aune then demonstrates how weaving works, by offering twenty lines from Dylan's song and changing the chorus slightly to make his point: "Well I got here following the southern star / I crossed that river just to be where you are / Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in rhetorical studies a day too long" (p. 75). To Aune, academic writing was supposed to be continuous with one's life--close to the rhythms, peculiarities, sorrows, and joys that one experienced on a daily basis. Humor was one of the many stylistic tools he used to tie his scholarship to the rhythms of life, and his humor was often dry and biting, in a typically Scandinavian way. …

The ‘aesthetics of the between’ includes a phenomenological aesthetics of the subject along with the aesthetic object. In addition to the aestheticised subject, phenomenological reflection on the between meets the object found as it is along with the experience of spatial context, the within-which of the museum, the gallery, the where of the plaza or boulevard, even the immediate mediation of the nonspace of the internet: the acting of in-action and interaction, the a-social sociality of ‘media’. Focusing on painting and sculpture as well as literature and philosophy, the aesthetics of the between is at work in the encounter with beauty in life as expressed in lived power and experienced dimensionality of the art world and it illuminates the erotic. This is the ‘beautiful’ in the work of Alexander Nehamas, ‘between’ the beautiful for Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann, but it can also be reflected in the staged-kitsch work of Jeff Koons, as in Hans-Georg Gadamer's high culture reflections on Plato and R...

Museum shops in America were created immediately after World War II (WWII) from what previously were termed museum sales or information desks. Museum retail occurred as a response to increased museum attendance and consumer spending by Americans in the post-war economy. Distinct changes such as mass consumption, the rise of individualism and cultural pluralism, and the modern consumer’s search for novelty, nostalgia, and later high culture, all affected museum responses to visitor needs and museum shop development. As a result, shops were popular and successful throughout the era even in times of general decline in the national economy. Museums, however, did not focus on shops as revenue generators until the 1980s when public support and governmental funding for museums retracted. The manner in which shops contributed to the total museum experience was an important component of museum development.

This article details former NBC president Sylvester ‘Pat’ Weaver, Jr.’s attempt to start a fourth American television network in 1957. The development of Weaver’s Program Service Network (PSN), and its ultimate failure, represent negotiations of several prominent discourses and practices within the television industry in the 1950s, including certain notions of the public interest, ‘high culture’ programming and quality audiences, and the changing economics of broadcasting. Drawing from archival evidence, I show that while PSN’s fourth-network status may hint initially at a lost opportunity for broader participation in the US broadcasting industries, and thus an alternate path that the medium may have taken, it nevertheless reflected the economics and ideologies of free-market capitalism as well as the tension between commercial imperatives and cultural legitimacy already familiar to the medium in the late 1950s. In spite of Weaver’s pronouncements about the oppressive three-network structure, the ‘service...

This article explores the reception of The Beatles in the West German press, from Beatlemania’s first rumblings in 1963 through 1966 when the band returned for its first concerts since playing Hamburg nightclubs. When West Germany “met” The Beatles, that encounter both resembled Beatlemania elsewhere and was inflected by specifically German contexts such as the Cold War division into East and West, the Nazi past, and the Economic Miracle. The Beatles became a screen onto which competing notions of the Federal Republic could be projected, from the relationship between high culture and commerce, ideas about tolerance and liberalism, to changing relations of gender, generation, nation, and class.

Jean-Francois Lyotard's 1973 essay ‘Acinema’ is explicitly concerned with the cinematic medium, but has received scant critical attention. Lyotard's acinema conceives of an experimental, excessive form of film-making that uses stillness and movement to shift away from the orderly process of meaning-making within mainstream cinema. What motivates this present paper is a striking link between Lyotard's writing and contemporary Hollywood production; both are concerned with a sense of excess, especially within moments of motion. Using Charlie's Angels (McG, 2000) as a case study – a film that has been critically dismissed as ‘eye candy for the blind’ – my methodology brings together two different discourses, high culture theory and mainstream film-making, to test out and propose the value of Lyotard's ideas for the study of contemporary film. Combining close textual analysis and engagement with key scholarship on film spectacle, I reflexively engage with the process of film analysis and re-direct attention to...

Plesch examines changing attitudes towards the gaucho as a musician in nineteenth-century Argentina through literary, musical and iconographic sources. She proposes the existence of a discursive formation gaucho, whose archive comprises travellers' writings, official reports, memoirs, visual arts, literature and music. Despised and persecuted throughout most of the nineteenth century, the gaucho was considered by Argentine elites as the epitome of ‘barbarism’, and his music was consistently described in derogatory terms. This attitude would be dramatically reversed towards the end of the century, when he was promoted to the role of national character and his cultural universe used as a source for the construction of a distinctive Argentine high culture that included the visual arts, literature and music. Plesch analyses the dominant discourse on the gaucho from colonial times to the publication of Martin Fierro (1872) and identifies four strategies of Othering at work: debasement, homogeneity, tim...

This article furthers the study of film comedy by examining how perceived distinctions of “high culture” give rise to a sociological “problem” in the reputation of comedians. This article explains how Woody Allen's acclaimed film Annie Hall (1977) was perceived by critics as a transitional comedy—moving from the immediate, visual jokes seen in Allen's previous films, to more cognitive, script-based humor. Whereas many critics perceived this shift as Allen's ascension to “high” culture, according to the same critical distinctions, some critics were disappointed by what was also perceived as his move away from expectations of the “comedy” genre.

This article examines the participation of art galleries at international contemporary art fairs (ICAFs) to evaluate what theories of cultural globalisation best describe this type of practice. For that purpose, it draws upon recent and original statistical data in order to examine the geographical distribution of major ICAFs worldwide, that is, their concentration in selected geographical locations, as well as the country of origin of the galleries participating in these events. This is intended to map out the workings of any territorial forms of dominance affecting the art market, seen both in the capability of a given country to organise one or more ICAFs and in that of art galleries to participate in such high profile events. The article firstly reviews relevant literature on cultural globalisation to outline, and also problematise, those interpretative models that can be applied to the particular case of ICAFs. Secondly, it provides and analyses new statistical data on ICAFs and gallery part...

Numerous studies of Viennese Jews of the fin de siecle period depict them as closely connected with ‘high culture’ and science. Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, and other Jewish artists as well as intellectuals are taken as proof of this perspective. A closer look at the emergence of popular/mass culture in Vienna reveals, however, that Jews were prominent among its organizers, producers, and consumers. They built and directed the largest and most important amusement park in Vienna (Venedig in Wien), organized exhibitions of indigineous people (‘Voelkerschauen’), were among so-called folk singers, and ran music halls and theatres.

The reluctance to introduce popular films in teacher education has often focused on the generic and stereotypical aspects of school movies. Stereotypes of education are said to misrepresent teaching and learning and are the basis for critical discussions in classes for preservice teachers. Rather than reject them, a narrative analysis will engage with these recurring patterns. School films can be described as equipment for living (Burke) and a company we keep (Booth) and provide narrative schemata. The British school film The History Boys is analyzed as a narrative that responds to a cultural tradition of representing teachers using stereotypes of different pedagogies, literature teaching, and popular culture.

In this digital age, declarations surface of the death of the expert and the democratization of information. Crowd wisdom is seen as the new guide in constructing and evaluating knowledge. In the context of the art world, this tension between the amateurs and the experts becomes particularly pronounced as popular meets high culture. Questions arise such as: what is the role of the expert in the evaluation of art in contemporary times? Do social media dismantle age-old hierarchies and established priesthoods in the art world? And can we assume that mass participation in valuation results in better judgments? This article addresses such popular notions of participation and expertise concerning social media in the art world through a historical lens by re-examining and positioning art experts from past to present. Particularly, characteristics of intermediaries in the art market are examined closely regarding their strategies in knowledge production and the establishment of expertise. This historical situate...

In his monumental collection Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity, Gyorgy Markus lays down the con - ceptual framework for the theorisation of modern high culture across the cultural spheres and articulates an account of cultural pragmatics or cultural relations - author, text and public - in the domains of sci - ence, arts and the humanities. He explores in great detail the conceptual keystones in the evolution of the cultural self-understanding of moder - nity from the enlightenment until today. Markus's work resonates with a deep understanding of the historico-cultural terrain being covered and the conceptual issues at play.

In 1997, an optional third-year undergraduate module, The Sporting Image, was developed for sports studies students in which they scrutinised the portrayal of sport in popular and high culture; including literature, film, TV, art and music. Fifteen years later, this module, now compulsory for sports journalism students, continues to examine the portrayal of sport and ways in which it has become an integral part of popular culture and resonates with values and standards specific in time and place. This paper describes the evolution of the module and its successes and failures in obliging both the lecturers and students to move outside of their comfort zones and engage with creative writing, poetry, music and the visual arts.

This paper identifies art festivals and heritage venues as central pillars in contemporary politics in the Republic of Macedonia. While focusing on the venues used during the Ohrid Summer Festival, my analysis expands on the wider performative aspect of politics shaped by the 2001 conflict with the Albanian insurgents and the conflict with Greece around the name Macedonia that has additionally added performative elements of pronounced emphasis on Christianity and antiquity. These political performative practices reveal the critical role that the country's pending accession to the EU has had on the ideological struggles within and outside the country, and the centrality of high culture in the conduct of ethno-national and international politics.

Aluba is a campus activity popular among adolescent males in Taiwan in which four boys lift up another boy by his arms and legs and make a show of pushing or rubbing his genitals against a pole-shaped object. The ‘alubaee’, nearly always a willing participant, is expected to put up a show of resistance for the satisfaction of all involved. It is a type of play for males that promotes closeness as well as competition. This study combines interviews, photographs and video materials with experiential descriptions to describe the aluba process, and analyses the fluidity of participant roles, the subtleties of the interaction among males, and the specific meaning of ‘high’ culture of adolescent males as reflected in the process of aluba.

Kanehara Hitomi won the 2004 Akutagawa Prize to a tremendous fanfare. The media spectacle served to commodify both the violence and the sex in Snakes and earrings (Hebi ni piasu, 2004), as well as the unconventional lifestyle of this 20-year-old middle-school dropout. Kanehara's work earned the distinction of high culture via this prestigious literary prize, but she is simultaneously seen as representative of a problematic youth subculture. UK/US cultural studies theory suggests a reading of text and author as an expression of subcultural resistance to the commodification process and to mainstream Japanese society. But questions remain as to how this resistance translates into political expression in an era of conservative politics and so-called apolitical youth. Ultimately, resistance is not found in the subcultural self-identification of the young protagonist Lui. Rather, working from within the media spectacle, Kanehara utilizes a literary legacy of the body in order to make her writing releva...

The manufacture of fiction at the Belle Epoque was a veritable industry, employing a large, privatized workforce that included many aspiring writers from social groups with limited access both to 'respectable' employment and to high culture — notably women. Among these 'ouvrieres de lettres' (Ellen Constans) was Daniel Lesueur (pen-name of Jeanne Loiseau, 1860– 1921), studied here as a particularly interesting practitioner and theorist of the roman-feuilleton. Through analysis of Lesueur's theory of the popular novel, expressed in prefaces, articles, and interviews, and of the narrative techniques that enabled her to captivate a huge (arguably female) readership, this article argues that complex, skilful work is needed to produce the space of play provided by good popular fiction. It contends, too, that the ideological work performed by such fictions, contrary to the view of their many detractors, can be both constructive and instructive. The successful 'roman romanesque', as Lesueur argues and de...

The development of South Asian arts in the UK has gone from using typical colonial and ‘high culture’ showcases to using particular but still far more ‘mainstream’ formats, and has been publicly subsidised in a number of ways, including through community projects. In many respects, South Asian arts is not a ‘niche product’ any more due to the (mainly political) tension towards creating a distinctively ‘British Asian’ (or BrAsian) rather than a strictly ‘South Asian’ product. This paper draws upon two case studies of South Asian ‘cultural producers’ (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 223) in Northern England to argue that showcasing South Asian art in Britain is a peculiar endeavour, the existence of which must account for multiple functions, multiple audiences and even international politics. The paper argues that recognising this fact has profound implications for the future of British Asian identities and for the negotiation between popular culture and politics.

The word museum today carries a strong whiff of cultural legitimacy, but historians know that nineteenth-century museums were commercial leisure as much as consecrated high culture. A dime museum i...

This study aims to examine the cases of crossover phenomena between fashion design and other design genres in Korea, from a comprehensive viewpoint, with a focus on fashion design. Crossover culture and design attain popularity through various crossovers between popular culture and high culture, and have extensive creative and commercial properties gained by crossing genres. Crossovers can be categorised into three types for analysis: (1) crossover phenomena between high fashion and mass fashion, or between fashion and art; (2) crossover phenomena between fashion design and product design; and (3) crossover phenomena between fashion design and environmental design. Now, in an era dominated by fashion design, fashion design needs to communicate with new industries more actively and attempt crossovers, while fashion designers should keep their eye on the crossover trend and make efforts to apply their own identities to other genres of design.

This paper examines a production of Calderon's El alcalde de Zalamea, performed in Zalamea by residents of Zalamea, as a specific exercise in presentism that connects the cultural situation of the peasantry in sixteenth-century Spain with that of its rural areas today. In this analysis I bring to bear the notion of 'coloniality of power' upon rural cultural practices. While the Counter-Reformation's quasi-mythical image of the peasant as Cristiano viejo was exploited and imposed at the cost of eliminating local rural culture, the historic image of the Zalamea is exploited today for the sake of picturesque exoticism and nostalgia. Yet, I examine how, even from a subaltern position, these local productions redefine Zalamea as a historic De Certeaunian 'space' scripted by local quotidian practices rather than as a fixed place invented by Calderon. In addition to the geographic position of Zalamea as a marginal topos, away from the national and the urban centres, another aspect designates its productions as subculture: their situation in the borderlands between high culture and everyday life. The people of Zalamea have reappropriated the Calderonian text and turned it into a site of empowerment and subaltern knowledge. Besides valuing their productions as specific cultural expressions, I also propose them as a model for community productions of historical plays and as a contribution to the construction of a geographic politics of identity.

From the late 1930s until the early 1970s, foreign language films were commonly categorised by Australian film exhibitors and distributors as ‘Continental’. Continental films were earmarked for exhibition to audiences described as ‘discerning’ and ‘sophisticated’, epithets which distinguished their more ‘discriminating’ taste from the popular preferences of mainstream cinema audiences. But ‘Continental’ had ambiguous connotations. Foreign language cinemas exploited the association of ‘Continental’ with high culture, for example, by appropriating French icons, but ‘Continental’ could also mean scurrilous and sordid. It was the Continental cinema audience's apparent transcendence of these moral ambiguities, its seemingly effortless appreciation of ‘art’, and its cosmopolitan approval of select aspects of foreign ‘culture’ that demonstrated its sophistication and cultural distinction. In its attitudes towards sex, art and ethnic diversity, the Continental cinema audience anticipated the more widespr...

This paper discusses the construction of the body in the American makeover programme The Swan (2004). Using the digital terms morph and morphing and the idea of the sculptural as metaphors, the paper focuses on two body fantasies at work in the programme, the one related to the surgical procedures and the transformation process and the other to the final beauty pageant. Furthermore, the paper discusses how the makeover programme negotiates ideas of female beauty, bodily change, and agency within a narrative development from before to after and, thus, makes an argument for cosmetic surgery. The paper traces the cultural layers upon which the programme's construction of the beautiful female body is written, rewritten, and retrieved in both high culture and popular culture, and assembled and mediated by a contemporary reality TV format.

In the 1980s, The Cosby Show broke all molds for the negative representation of Black people in media by supplanting them with an upper middle-class family whose forays into high culture and familial values served to dignify Blackness on television. Two decades later, at least two Black families have emerged on reality television shows, both of which provide a platform from which to examine the televisual construction of Black fatherhood years after Cosby's debut. Run's House and Snoop Dogg's Father Hood (Father Hood), both shows based on “real” Black families, can be interpreted in comparison and contrast to Cosby's version of upper-middle class Black fatherhood to (a) investigate themes of Black fatherhood in a variety of positive forms while challenging limited images of Black fathers on television; and (b) revive debates from Jhally and Lewis’ book Enlightened Racism as the families in the reality shows simultaneously corroborate, shift away from and flaunt issues of race and class while still fosteri...

This article outlines how, from the Victorian era through the postmodern style in architecture, consumer culture has depended on a dual process in which (1) forces of capitalism generated a broad spectrum of representational experimentation that transformed common modes of thinking and perceiving and (2) verbal discourses provided comfort to people unsettled by the speed and magnitude of these changes. Such narratives seemingly sustained traditional value systems and an illusion that high culture and good intentions are immune to commercial interests. Architectural discourses contributed to and adopted this process, discouraging critical insight into the design and understanding of built environments.

This recent collection of essays pays tribute to Edward Said, but is no hagiography. It explores the salience of concepts such as the public intellectual, exile and worldliness in his life and work. It considers the strengths and the limits of his vision, his passion for European high culture and classical music and his relative disinterest in popular culture and visual and electronic communication. It connects settler colonialism in Palestine and the US with Australia (where most of the contributors are located), while unsettling notions of ‘exile’ and ‘home’.

This essay argues that silent Shakespeare films of the transitional era are marked de facto by inner conflict as they attempt to honour a set of divergent allegiances: to stage and screen, word and image, textual fidelity and filmic autonomy, inherited iconographies and vital performance, plot and spectacle, high culture and popular culture, heritage and topicality, “author” and market, acts of memorializing, and acts of making new. The 1908 one-reel film of The Tempest released by the English film production company Clarendon and directed by Percy Stow provides a particularly clear example of these divided allegiances. The film was not directly derived from a stage production but clearly trades upon some of the detail, and the driving political premises, of the Herbert Beerbohm Tree production of The Tempest that had been mounted at His Majesty's Theatre four years previously. In the process of tracing the specific links between the film and the earlier stage production, this essay describes the oscillat...

The role of the arts in general and the dramatic arts in particular in post-colonialism elevates Jamaica and the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean to the status of "best case scenario". For the experience of this country and region over the past half a century endorses the notion of the centrality of the exercise of the creative imagination, of which artistic products are an iconic result, in both nation building and the quest for identity and cultural certitude. The claim to such centrality becomes even more marked when in a globalised world the efforts at cultural homogenization drives would-be victims tenanting the Two Thirds World to zones of comfort in search of particularity, specificity of life-experiences and existence and that sense of self and society which the struggle against colonial subjugation promised in any case. It is no surprise, then, that we in this part of the world arguably have more artists per square inch than is probably good for us. From the ancestral Festival Arts of masquerade or jonkonnu (strong in Jamaica, Belize on the Central American mainland, the Bahamas and Bermuda) through pre-Lenten Carnival whose locale remains Trinidad reaching out to the rest of the Eastern Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora in Toronto, Brooklyn, Miami, and London, to Hosay the East Indian Hindu observance of a Muslim commemoration morphed into a major Caribbean festival art extant in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana - all of these speak to the heritage (tangible and intangible) that has been bequeathed to the region by forebears who found solace, resilience and renewal in masking, metaphor and myth. They all provided a route to redemption and certitude in coping with the obscenities of slavery, indentureship and the humiliation and dehumanization which those socio-economic systems imposed on hundreds of thousands severed from ancestral hearths - most of them involuntarily - to plough the fields and scatter what others were to regard as "good seeds" on the land. The intensification of such transgressions informing relations between masters and servants came, albeit unintentionally, with colonialism presided over by gubernatorial viceroys who embodied stubborn and lasting notions of high culture versus low culture, superior versus inferior, Caucasian versus Others and Europe over Africa in particular, with the second category in each binary equation relegated to inferior status. So our art, as in painting, had to be "primitive"; our music (as Derek Walcott once said) had to be without depth because it was created for us to enjoy; our drama to be minstrel farces; our languages creole aberrations to the norm of Standard English; our dance lascivious and groin centred; and our skin colour indicative of what was described as being the result of having groin centred; and our skin colour indicative of what was described as being the result of having been Overcooked in the womb.' On this last there were, of course, medium rare and even rare depending on the amount of melanin in the epidermis. Such were the burdens that colonials like us had to bear. Small wonder that those who were fighting for self-determination in the years preceding actual Independence tackled with resolute vigour such misconceptions of human existence. If individuals led the way in taking the arts on the road in quest of certitude, the collective consciousness had to be sensitized to the task. Norman Washington Manley, Jamaica's founding father and self-government advocate was the first political leader in the English-speaking Caribbean to give to arts-and-culture a portfolio realizing the systemic denigration of things African and the force of the Eurocentrism which frustrated native expressions and threatened the quest for that cultural certitude among the majority. As far back as 1939 he is recorded as saying: "The immediate past has attempted to destroy the influence of the glory that is Africa; it has attempted to make us condemn and mistrust the vitality, vigour, the rhythmic emotionalism that we get from our African ancestors. …

This visual essay examines the garden gnome as a product of both low and high culture. Its essence of ambiguity and unreliability has through the ages made it a favored object for ironic comments, social and political statements, popular aesthetics and religious folklore. The gnome's more or less hidden nature of rude male (homo)sexuality saw him banished from the bourgeois sphere and transformed into childish triviality often conceived as kitsch. However, in the period of post-modernity, when many artists and cultural producers are inspired by “kitsch,” it seems pointless, if not impossible to maintain the concept of kitsch.

Alexandria is familiar in the West it is largely as the fictional city of Durrell and others, a city with a glorious ancient past which had been subsumed into a more recent cosmopolitan decadence. Yet it lacks the visual signifiers of either its Hellenistic splendour or its early 20th century allure, and exists in contemporary guide books as a place without touristic sights where the well read traveller is exhorted to ‘use the mind’s eye' to bring it alive. Its associations, however, are those of high rather than popular culture, and its literary construction is as a bastion of Western colonialism and nostalgia, one which hegemonically defines an oriental Other as a liminal place of transgressive erotic possibility and schadenfreude. This Alexandrian myth exists uneasily within postcolonial Egypt, and equally uneasily with contemporary touristic practices that are both democratised and posited as much on material as on cultural consumption. This paper draws on MacCannell's semiotic of the tourist attraction to suggest that whatever the significance of past literary productions of high culture to contemporary tourists, they continue to be cited generically to validate and authenticate touristic responses to, and encounters with, a city lacking familiar and regularly reproduced sights.