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The influx of European émigré filmmakers into the US film industry during the mid-1930s led to an exilic critique in Hollywood films. This study analyzes Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) to explore the relationships between exile and trauma, engaging with issues of displacement, memory, the victim/perpetrator duality, and the loss of "home." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now in the midst of a racial crisis, the United States continues to face challenges from COVID-19. Herein, scholars explain the influence of the virus on health, education, and social interactions within families. Special attention will be placed on the pandemic's effect upon African American/Black communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rumor is customarily considered a taboo element in contemporary journalism; its use is roundly condemned in many official quarters. And yet, its actual persistence in everyday journalistic practice also suggests a need to reexamine its various functions. This essay considers the manifold uses of rumor in the journalism of The New Yorker author Calvin Trillin – specifically, his Noir essays on accidental death and murder in mid-size American towns and cities collected in Killings (1984) and American Stories (1991). Originally published as part of his ‘US Journal’ and ‘American Chronicles’ series for The New Yorker, these essays use rumor to reconstruct the private doubts and public opinions of its profiled towns – and as such, reveal Trillin’s debts to a Noir critique of the public sphere. Moreover, both as fieldwork and rhetorical tool, the marshaling of rumor plays a role both in Trillin’s own self-fashioning as a mid-American everyman and in The New Yorker’s larger claim to speak not only about such towns but also for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pixar films expand the limitations typically binding G-rated films by employing a postmodern adaptation of the “principle of deniability,” a producer-designed multivalence. This deniability allows adult spectators to identify with the object, to distance themselves from “grown-up” cinema, and to contemplate adult fears through the guise of animation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]