The Cultural Front

Download or read book The Cultural Front written by Michael Denning and published by Verso. This book was released on 1998 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As garment workers, longshoremen, autoworkers, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the Depression, artists, writers and filmmakers joined the insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand 'Strange Fruit' at the left-wing cabaret, Café Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane. A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.

Download or read book The Cultural Front written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on "the cultural front" from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays—two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here—which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor. The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.

Download or read book Soldiers on the Cultural Front written by Tatiana Gabroussenko and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An understanding of contemporary North Korea’s literature is virtually impossible without an investigation of its formative period, 1945–1960, which saw a gradual transformation from the initial "Soviet era" to a Korean version of "national Stalinism." This turbulent epoch established a long-lasting framework for North Korean literature and set up an elaborate system of political control over literary matters, as well as over the people who served in this field. In 1946 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leader Kim Il Sung described the country’s writers as "soldiers on the cultural front," thus clearly defining what the nascent Communist regime expected from its intellectuals. As a result, many literary nonentities were rewarded with fame and success (often only to be relegated once again to obscurity within a few years) while many outstanding luminaries of the past were erased from the pages of official publications or even lost their lives. The Soviet cultural impact brought new tropes, artistic images, and rhetoric, which were quickly absorbed into the North Korean discourse. However, the cultural politics of the DPRK and the USSR revealed profound and irreconcilable disparities that were rooted in the different political conditions and traditions of each country. Soldiers on the Cultural Front presents the first consistent research on the early history of North Korea’s literature and literary policy in Western scholarship. It traces the introduction and development of Soviet-organized conventions in North Korean literary propaganda and investigates why the "romance with Moscow" was destined to be short lived. It reconstructs the biographies and worldviews of major personalities who shaped North Korean literature and teases these historical figures out of popular scholarly myth and misconception. The book also investigates the specific forms of control over intellectuals and literary matters in North Korea. Considering the unique phenomenon of North Korean literary critique, the author analyzes the political campaigns and purges of 1947–1960 and investigates the role of North Korean critics as "political executioners" in these events. She draws on an impressive variety and number of sources—ranging from interviews with Korean and Soviet participants, public and family archives, and memoirs to original literary and critical texts—to present a balanced and eye-opening work that will benefit those interested in not only understanding North Korean literature and society, but also rethinking forms of socialist modernity elsewhere in the world.

Download or read book The Black Cultural Front written by Brian Dolinar and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the formation of a black cultural front by looking at the works of poet Langston Hughes, novelist Chester Himes, and cartoonist Ollie Harrington. While none of these writers were card-carrying members of the Communist Party, they all participated in the Left during their careers. Interestingly, they all turned to creating popular culture in order to reach the black masses who were captivated by movies, radio, newspapers, and detective novels. There are chapters on Hughes's "Simple" stories, Himes's detective fiction, and Harrington's "Bootsie" cartoons. Collectively, the experience of these three figures contributes to the story of a "long" movement for African American freedom that flourished during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Yet this book also stresses the impact that McCarthyism had on dismantling the Black Left and how it affected each individual involved. Each was radicalized at a different moment and for different reasons.

Download or read book Culture in the Age of Three Worlds written by Michael Denning and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last half of the twentieth century, culture moved to the foreground of political and intellectual life. Suddenly everyone discovered that culture had been mass produced like Ford's cars; the masses had culture and culture had a mass. Culture was everywhere, no longer the property of the cultured or the cultivated. Radical social movements around the globe invented a politics of culture. Culture In the Age of Three Worlds is a reflection on this cultural turn which was a fundamental aspect of the age of three worlds, that short half century between 1945 and 1989 when it was imagined that the world was divided into three-the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world. Recasting the legacies of British cultural studies and the radical traditions of the American studies movement in a global context, Michael Denning explores the political and intellectual battles over the meanings of culture, addresses the rise of a distinctive 'American ideology,' and charts the lineaments of the global cultures that emerged as three worlds gave way to one.

Download or read book The Ends of Performance written by Peggy Phelan and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring work by leading theorists, excursions into performative writing and texts by performance artists, The Ends of Performance illuminates the provocative intellectual ends which motivate these varied approaches to performing writing, and to writing performance.

Download or read book Culture Warrior written by Bill O'Reilly and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With three straight #1 bestsellers and more than 4 million copies of his books in print, the most powerful traditional force in the American media now takes off his gloves in the ongoing struggle for America’s heart and soul. Bill O’Reilly is the very embodiment of the idea of a Culture Warrior—and in this book he lives up to the title brilliantly, with all the brashness and forthrightness at his command. He sees that America is in the midst of a fierce culture war between those who embrace traditional values and those who want to change America into a “secular-progressive” country. This is a conflict that differs in many ways from the usual liberal/conservative divide, but it is no less heated, and the stakes are even higher. In Culture Warrior, Bill O’Reilly defines this war and analyzes the competing philosophies of the traditionalist and secular-progressive camps. He examines why the nation’s motto “E Pluribus Unum” (“From Many, One”) might change to “What About Me?”; dissects the forces driving the secular-progressive agenda in the media and behind the scenes, including George Soros, George Lakoff, and the ACLU; and dives into matters of race, education, and the war on terror. He also shows how the culture war has played out in such high-profile instances as The Passion of the Christ, Fahrenheit 9/11, the abuse epidemic (child and otherwise), and the embattled place of religion in public life—with special emphasis on the war against Christmas. Whatever controversies are roiling the nation, he fearlessly confronts them—and no one will be in the dark about which side he’s on. Culture Warrior showcases Bill O’Reilly at his most eloquent and impassioned. He is an unrelenting fighter for the soul of America, and in this book he fights the good fight for the traditional values that have served this country so well for so long.