Daniel H. Bays, , and Grant, Wacker,  eds. The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History. Religion and American Culture Series. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. x+332 pp. $60.00 (cloth).

When discussed as a genre, Telefantasy may be regarded as a hybrid category because it subsumes existing labels. Although Telefantasy is a composite genre, the characteristics of its constituent elements - namely Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror - are often in conflict, requiring an appraisal of the tensions between them. This article explores the prospects of using Telefantasy as a generic classification by showing the collective presence of these different genres within The X-Files (1993-2002). It traces the historical interaction between the three genres that make up Telefantasy through a series of examples from Edgar Allan Poe to H.P. Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), thus providing a historical grounding for generic interaction. The present article forms part of a larger project concerning the interaction of generic motifs in North American cultural history. Here, the focus of that project is directed at examining Telefantasy and the utility of the composite genre to the study of television programs.

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Street Dance and the Dream of Freedom

Dancing Revolution ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252042393.003.0010 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 140-154

Author(s):

Christopher J. Smith

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

North American ◽

New World ◽

Political Power ◽

First Century ◽

Dominant Culture ◽

Expressive Culture ◽

Analytical Methodology ◽

Contested Spaces ◽

American Cultural History

This chapter provides the capstone of the book’s overall argument, suggesting that participatory dance occurring in contested spaces, especially that which originates in disenfranchised subaltern communities, has been a tool, deployed with previously unremarked consistency, across four centuries of North American cultural history. It reiterates the complex disciplinary resources that provide effective analytical methodology and interpretive frames. The chapter also emphasizes contemporaneity, and the “ongoing” nature of street dance as a political tool, in a comparison of two twenty-first-century examples of movement politics: 2012’s “Occupy” and 2013’s Taksim Gezi Park protests (Istanbul) and finds in these two contemporary examples further evidence of the resiliency and revolutionary political power of bodies moving in space and sound. The chapter and the manuscript conclude with an articulation of the essentiality of multidisciplinary social historiography, as a means of recovering and “voicing” subaltern communities that have been omitted from dominant-culture narratives, but whose contributions--especially in the participatory idioms of music and dance--have been essential in the ongoing story of New World expressive culture.

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American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction

10.1093/actrade/9780190200589.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Eric Avila

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

Cultural History ◽

National Culture ◽

American Culture ◽

The Internet ◽

Way Of Life ◽

Short Introduction ◽

The World ◽

American Cultural History ◽

Global Reach

American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction provides a chronological look at American culture—the values, attitudes, beliefs, and myths of a particular society and the objects through which they are organized—addressing literature, music, art, architecture, theater, film, television, and the Internet. In doing so, it emphasizes culture’s role in the shaping of national identity and how previous generations of Americans have imagined themselves, their nation, and their relationship to rest of the world. Across the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, generation, and geography, diverse Americans have forged a national culture with a global reach, inventing stories to underscore the problems and possibilities of an American way of life.

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