When the Mahabharata and Ramayana are performed in South and Southeast Asia, audiences may witness a variety of styles. A single performer may deliver a two-hour recitation, women may meet in informal singing groups, shadow puppets may host an all-night play, or professional theaters may put on productions lasting thirty nights. Performances often celebrate ritual passages: births, deaths, marr…
"Films are integral to national imagination. Promotional publicity markets “domestic films” not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. Reviewers assess new films with reference to other films and cultural products as well as social and political issues. Through such interpretive framings by contemporaries and later generations, popular…
Turkish German comedy culture and the lived realities of Turkish Muslims in Germany Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Mu…
Cross-disciplinary analysis of contemporary images and representations of hysteria We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against…
The story of the (now restored) Regent Street Cinema is the fourth volume exploring the University of Westminster's long and diverse history. This multi-authored volume tells its history from architectural, educational, legal and cinematic perspectives and is richly illustrated throughout with images from the University of Westminster archive. A print paperback can be purchased direct from the …
Fujiwara Teika is known as the premier poet and literary scholar of the early 13th century. It is not so widely known that he also tried his hand at fiction: Mumyozoshi (Untitled Leaves; ca. 1201) refers to “several works” by Teika and then names Matsura no miya monogatari (The Tale of Matsura; ca. 1190) as the only one that can be considered successful. The work is here translated in full,…
From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with t…
Fujiwara Teika is known as the premier poet and literary scholar of the early 13th century. It is not so widely known that he also tried his hand at fiction: Mumyozoshi (Untitled Leaves; ca. 1201) refers to “several works” by Teika and then names Matsura no miya monogatari (The Tale of Matsura; ca. 1190) as the only one that can be considered successful. The work is here translated in full,…
Tactics of the Human returns to American fiction published during the 1990s, formative years for digital cultures, to reconsider these narratives’ comparative literary print methods of critically engaging with digital technologies and their now ubiquitous computation-based modes of circulation, scenes of writing, and social spaces. It finds that fiction by John Barth, Shelley Jackson, Leslie …
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea …