The 1960s in the United States saw the peak of the Tiki craze, the fascination with physical products of Polynesia and, more important than that, the easy and happy way of life, as it was glorified by the American public. There actually was a very strong influence of Tiki culture on American everyday life then, […]
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Tag: American Studies
Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946-1962… by Chris and Rafiel York (eds.) (2012)
The comic books of the post WWII years differ in many respects from their predecessors. For one reason, they (generally) invented new dangers, new villains and new challenges for the keepers of the peace, fighters for freedom and justice, aka the Superheroes and the Federal Agents, the T-Men, a moniker for government agents of the […]
Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream by Mark Osteen (2013)
By choosing the rather bleak Edmund Goulding noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947) as the namesake for his new book, author Mark Osteen surprises with his fresh approach to films noir. He concentrates on the major antagonists, so to speak, of the American dream, and the American pursuit of happiness, a constitutional right in a way. […]
Ragged But Right. Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and … by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff (2012)
For several decades, a very distinctive form of African American minstrel show was the most popular form of entertainment for black audiences in the South, its fame covering almost the entire country by and by. The beginning of this art form (that was in parts of the country available until the late 1940s) and its […]
In Lonely Places. Film Noir Beyond the City by Imogen Sara Smith (2011)
There seem to be specific instances that make a particular type of movie clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain group. For example, we like to have deserts, gunfights and horses if we watch a western movie, and we may look out for earrings, battleships, sabers and the Jolly Roger when we watch a pirates […]
The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman (2012)
Let us put aside for a moment the rather usual and thus “uncritical” approach to the USA in the 1940s and 1950s as a cultural, political and national whole; and now let us try to experience that world through the eyes of a fictional character in a Film Noir. Then we would sense the many […]