Embodied Nostalgia

Embodied Nostalgia is a collection of interlocking case studies that focus on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, and asks what social dance is doing performatively, dramaturgically, and critically in musical theatre. The case studies in this volume are all Broadway musicals set during the Jazz Age (1910-1950), however, performed and produced after that time, creating a spectrum of nostalgic impulses that are interrogated for social and political resonance and meaning. All reflect the fractures or changes in the social dance when brought to the stage and expose the complexities of the embodied nostalgia – broadly interpreted as the physicalizing of community memories, longings, and historical meaning – the dances carry with them. Particular attention is focused on the Black ownership of the social dances and the subsequent appropriation, cultural theft, and forgotten legacies. By approaching musical theatre through this lens of social dance––always already deeply connected to notions of class and race––and the politics of choreography therein, a unique and necessary method to describing, discussing, and critically evaluating the body in motion in musical theatre is put forth.

Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from the skillful manipulation of both physical and verbal forms of politeness. This account of dance's significance in performance and in everyday life draws on extensive research, including dance training in Java, and builds on how practitioners interpret and explain the repertoire. The Javanese case is contextualized in relation to social values, religion, philosophy, and commoditization arising from tourism. It also raises fundamental questions about the theorization of culture, society and the body during a period of radical change.

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This interdisciplinary volume explores the girl’s voice and the construction of girlhood in contemporary popular music, visiting girls as musicians, activists, and performers through topics that range from female vocal development during adolescence to girls’ online media culture. While girls’ voices are more prominent than ever in popular music culture, the specific sonic character of the young female voice is routinely denied authority. Decades old clichés of girls as frivolous, silly, and deserving of contempt prevail in mainstream popular image and sound. Nevertheless, girls find ways to raise their voices and make themselves heard. This volume explores the contemporary girl’s voice to illuminate the way ideals of girlhood are historically specific, and the way adults frame and construct girlhood to both valorize and vilify girls and women. Interrogating popular music, childhood, and gender, it analyzes the history of the all-girl band from the Runaways to the present; the changing anatomy of a girl’s voice throughout adolescence; girl’s participatory culture via youtube and rock camps, and representations of the girl’s voice in other media like audiobooks, film, and television. Essays consider girl performers like Jackie Evancho and Lorde, and all-girl bands like Sleater Kinney, The Slits and Warpaint, as well as performative 'girlishness' in the voices of female vocalists like Joni Mitchell, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Kathleen Hanna, and Rebecca Black. Participating in girl studies within and beyond the field of music, this book unites scholarly perspectives from disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, comparative literature, women’s and gender studies, media studies, and education to investigate the importance of girls’ voices in popular music, and to help unravel the complexities bound up in music and girlhood in the contemporary contexts of North America and the United Kingdom.

The world is witnessing a media revolution similar to the birth of the film industry from the early 20th Century. New forms of media are expanding the human experience from passive viewership to active participants, surrounding and enveloping us in ways film or television never could. New immersive media forms include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (XR), fulldome, CAVEs, holographic characters, projection mapping, and mixed experimental combinations of old and new, live, and generated media. With the continued expansion beyond the traditional frame, practitioners are crafting these new media to see how they can influence and shape the world. The Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media is a collection of innovative research that provides insights on the latest in existing and emerging immersive technologies through descriptions of case studies, new business models, philosophical viewpoints, and scientific findings. While highlighting topics including augmented reality, interactive media, and spatial computing, this book is ideally designed for media technologists, storytellers, artists, journalists, designers, programmers, developers, manufacturers, entertainment executives, content creators, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and media students.

This critical and inclusive edited collection offers an overview of the musical in relation to issues of race, culture and identity. Bringing together contributions from cultural, American and theatre studies for the first time, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on musical theatre history, calling for a radical and inclusive new approach. By questioning ideas about what the musical is about and who it for, this groundbreaking book retells the story of the musical, prioritising previously neglected voices to reshape our understanding of the form. Timely and engaging, this is required reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of musical theatre. It offers an intersectional approach which will also be invaluable for theatre practitioners.

The book focuses on the distinctive contribution that Joseph Maguire has made to process sociology and the study of sport. Maguire’s work over the past three decades highlights how process sociology has a unique perspective on the relationship between sport, culture and society, and to the body, globalisation and civilisational analysis. Reflecting on this body of work and the use of process sociology, Maguire captures the research dynamic of ‘walking the line' between involvement and detachment, theory and observation, and engagement and critique. The book is structured around four broad sections: Theory, Sport and Society; The Meaning of Sport, Body and Society; Case Studies in Sport and Process Sociology; Globalisation, Sport and Civilisational Analysis. Providing an introduction to, and key examples of, a process sociology approach to the study of sport, the body, civilising processes and globalisation, this book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in sport studies / sports science degrees, sociology, cultural studies and to those studying migration, globalisation and cross cultural civilisation relations. This book was previously published as a Special Issue of Sport in Society.

Intercultural Screen Adaptation offers a wide-ranging examination of how film and television adaptations (and non-adaptations) interact with the cultural, social and political environments of their national, transnational and post-national contexts. With screen adaptations examined from across Britain, Europe, South America and Asia, this book tests how examining the processes of adaptation across and within national frameworks challenges traditional debates around the concept of nation in film, media and cultural studies. With case studies of films such as Under the Skin (2013) and T2: Trainspotting (2017), as well as TV adaptations like War and Peace (2016) and Narcos (2015 - 2017), Intercultural Screen Adaptation offers readers an invigorating look at adaptations from a variety of critical perspectives, incorporating the uses of landscape, nostalgia and translation.