American Visual Cultures

by Holloway, David; Beck, John

• ISBN13: 9780826464859
• ISBN10: 0826464858
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-05
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

American Visual Cultures analyzes the role of painting, photography, film, television, advertising, journalism and other visual media in the historical development of the United States from the Civil War to the present day. It offers a chronology of major debates and developments in modern US history and traces the social, political and economic factors that have shaped the development of visual forms and practices across time. Illustrated throughout, the book combines a wide range of critical approaches and is made up of new essays by internationally renowned scholars. There is a general introduction, in which the editors discuss the theoretical and pedagogical approaches shaping the contemporary study of visual culture, with particular reference to the United States. This is followed by four sections, each covering a defined chronological period: 1861-1929; 1929-1963; 1963-1980; 1980 to the present. Each section opens with an introduction by the editors, giving historical and cultural context and highlighting thematic and pedagogical links between essays. An annotated bibliography of suggested further reading completes this invaluable and unique resource for the student and teacher of modern American art, media and culture.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
Notes on Contributors	xii
Acknowledgements	xvi
General Introduction	1	(305)
Towards a Social Theory of American Visual Cultures	1	(12)
David Holloway
John Beck
PART 1: 1861--1929
Introduction to Part 1	13	(8)
David Holloway
John Beck
Manifest Destiny and Visual Culture
Photographing American Indians: Repression and Revision	21	(10)
Mick Gidley
Visualizing Women in the Civil War
Unsexed Amazons and Desperadoes: Imaging Public War Women and Imagining Female Warriors in the American Civil War	31	(8)
Cynthia Wiedemann Empen
Renegotiating Masculinity after the Civil War
Absent Fathers and Women with Beards: Religion and Gender in Popular Imagery of the Nineteenth Century	39	(9)
David Morgan
Visualizing `America' as `Progress' at the end of the Western Frontier
Painting the Nation: American Art at the White City	48	(8)
Christopher Gair
Alternative Racial Gazes in American Silent Cinema
Visualizing Racial Politics in the Films of D. W. Griffith and Oscar Micheaux	56	(7)
Charlene Regester
Visualizing Dissent in World War 1
Modernism, and the End of `Liberal' Progressivism, in Art from The Masses (1911--1917)	63	(10)
David Holloway
The Avant-Garde and the Market
Debating Modernism: Art and American Advertising in the 1920s	73	(10)
Don McComb
PART 2: 1929--1963
Introduction to Part 2	83	(6)
David Holloway
John Beck
The New Deal and Film
Debating the New Deal: Gold Diggers of 1933 and My Man Godfrey	89	(9)
Michael Ryan
Painting and the New Deal
Art and Work on the WPA	98	(9)
Joan Saab
The New Deal and Photography
Liberal Documentary Goes to School: Farm Security Administration Photographs of Students, Teachers and Schools	107	(9)
Eric Margolis
Supporting Dictatorship in World War 2 News
`Flash From Brazil' -- 1940s' Newsreels Present Latin America	116	(9)
Pennee Bender
The Emergence of TV as a New Mass Medium
The Birth of American Televisual Spectatorship	125	(8)
Cat Celebrezze
Negotiating the Cold War in Film
The Other Side of Hollywood's Cold War: Images of Dissent in the 1950s	133	(9)
Tony Shaw
Cold War `Containment Culture' and Photography
Robert Frank's The Americans and the 1950s	142	(8)
Neil Campbell
Reading Abstract Expressionist Art
Aesthetics, Politics and `Cultural Theory': Barnet Newman's Utopian Painting	150	(11)
David A. Wragg
PART 3: 1963--1980
Introduction to Part 3	161	(5)
David Holloway
John Beck
Visualizing Political Struggle
Civil Rights-era Photography	166	(8)
Deborah Willis
Towards Postmodernism
Post-World War 2 Photography in America: From Committed to Solipsistic Art	174	(9)
Jean Kempf
Bruno Chalifour
Visual Violence in History and Art
Zapruder, Warhol, and the Accident of Images	183	(7)
John Beck
New Modes of Dissent in Art of the 1960s and 1970s
Visual Culture and Strategies of Resistance: from Semina to Heresies	190	(9)
Francis Frascina
Photographing the Vietnam War
Democratic Accountability and Liberal Representation in American Iconic Photography: the Image of `Accidental Napalm'	199	(10)
Robert Hariman
John Louis Lucaites
`Commodity Feminism' in 1960s' Visual Culture
Sex, Style and Single Girls	209	(7)
Bill Osgerby
New Genre Forms in `New Hollywood' Film
Partly Truth and Partly Fiction: The Western, the City Movie and the American 1970s	216	(11)
Linnie Blake
PART 4: 1980--2001
Introduction to Part 4	227	(5)
David Holloway
John Beck
Marketing `Post-Fordism'
Advertising the Global Economy	232	(9)
Katherine Johnson
Commodifying Latin America in NAFTA-era Film
The World According to Miramax: Chocolate, Poetry and Neoliberal Aesthetics	241	(8)
Sophia A. McClennen
Visualizing `Memory' in the Age of Global Capital
A Taste for Black and White: Visuality, Digital Culture and the Anxieties of the Global	249	(8)
Paul Grainge
Remembering Vietnam in the 1980s
White Skin, White Masks: Vietnam War Films and the Racialized Gaze	257	(8)
LeiLani Nishime
`Queer' Photography and the `Culture Wars'
Robert Mapplethorpe's Queer Aesthetic of the Pair	265	(9)
Denis Flannery
Transnationalism in Contemporary African American Photography
Memory, History and `Universal' Narrative in the Work of Carrie Mae Weems	274	(10)
Maren Stange
Anthropology at the Movies
Jerry Maguire as `Expeditionary Discourse'	284	(7)
Jonathan Gayles
S. Elizabeth Bird
Negotiating Feminism in Contemporary TV
`What's Sex Got To Do With It?': Signifying Post-Feminism in Sex and the City	291	(8)
Anna Gough-Yates
Constructing History in TV News from Clinton to 9/11
Flashframes of History -- American Visual Memories	299	(7)
Andrew Hoskins
Bibliography	306	(32)
Index	338