Intersecting Aesthetics

Contributions by Cynthia Baron, Elizabeth Binggeli, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Priscilla Layne, Eric Pierson, Charlene Regester, Ellen C. Scott, Tanya L. Shields, and Judith E. Smith Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness illuminates cultural and material trends that shaped Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors to this collection reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives. Their work ultimately explores the effects racial perspectives have on film adaptations and how race-inflected cultural norms have influenced studio and independent film depictions. Several chapters analyze how self-censorship and industry censorship affect Black writing and the adaptations of Black stories in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Using archival material, contributors demonstrate the ways commercial obstacles have led Black writers and white-dominated studios to mask Black experiences. Other chapters document instances in which Black writers and directors navigate cultural norms and material realities to realize their visions in literary works, independent films, and studio productions. Through uncovering patterns in Black film adaptations, Intersecting Aesthetics reveals themes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural dynamics that rightfully belong to accounts of film adaptation. The volume considers travelogue and autobiography sources along with the fiction of Black authors H. G. de Lisser, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Frank Yerby, and Walter Mosley. Contributors examine independent films The Love Wanga (1936) and The Devil’s Daughter (1939); Melvin Van Peebles's first feature, The Story of a Three Day Pass (1967); and the Senegalese film Karmen Geï (2001). They also explore studio-era films In This Our Life (1942), The Foxes of Harrow (1947), Lydia Bailey (1952), The Golden Hawk (1952), and The Saracen Blade (1954) and post-studio films The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995).

This volume looks forward and re-examines present day education and pedagogical practices in music and dance in the diverse cultural environments found in Oceania. The book also identifies a key issue of how teachers face the prospect of taking a reflexive view of their own cultural legacy in music and dance education as they work from and alongside different cultural worldviews. This key issue, amongst other debates that arise, positions Intersecting Cultures as an innovative text that fills a gap in the current market with highly appropriate and fresh ideas from primary sources. The book offers commentaries that underpin and inform current pedagogy and bigger picture policy for the performing arts in education in Oceania, and in parallel ways in other countries.

Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice.

‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is a celebration and a critical study of F. W. Murnau’s seminal vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens on the 100th anniversary of its release in 1922.The movie remains a dark mirror to the troubled world we live in seeing it as striking and important in the 2020s as it was a century ago. The unmistakable image of Count Orlok has traveled from his dilapidated castle in old world Transylvania into the futuristic depths of outerspace in Star Trek and beyondas the all-consuming shadow of the vampire spreads ever wider throughout contemporary popular culture. This innovative collection of essays, with a foreword by renowned Dracula expert Gary D. Rhodes, brings together experts in the field alongside creative artists to explore the ongoing impact of Murnau’s groundbreaking movie as it has been adapted, reinterpreted, and recreated across multiple mediums from theatre, performance and film, to gaming, music and even drag. As such, ‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is not only a timely and essential book about Murnau’s film but also illuminates the times that produced it and the world it continues to influence.

The Reformation was one of the defining cultural turning points in Western history, even if there is a longstanding stereotype that Protestants did away with art and material culture. Rather than reject art and aestheticism, Protestants developed their own aesthetic values, which Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts addresses as it identifies and explains the link between theological aesthetics and the arts within a Protestant framework across five-hundred years of history. Featuring essays from an international gathering of leading experts working across a diverse set of disciplines, Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination. Contributors challenge accepted preconceptions relating to the boundaries of theological aesthetics and religiously determined art; disrupt traditional understandings of periodization and disciplinarity; and seek to open rich avenues for new fields of research. Building on renewed interest in Protestantism in the study of religion and modernity and the return to aesthetics in Christian theological inquiry, this volume will be of significant interest to scholars of Theology, Aesthetics, Art and Architectural History, Literary Criticism, and Religious History.

The inclusion of this volume in Brill's Transcultural Aesthetics, a book series devoted primarily to multidisciplinary Western and non-Western aesthetics, is indispensable to enrich the nature and scope of contemporary aesthetics. Time and again, many aesthetic controversies have not been adequately addressed, and this has become a common concern among scholars in contemporary aesthetics. This volume therefore seeks to contribute new perspectives to these controversies by shedding light on some of the fresh views among the leading theorists working in the field today.

This book focuses on the artistic process, creativity and collaboration, and personal approaches to creation and ideation, in making digital and electronic technology-based art. Less interested in the outcome itself – the artefact, artwork or performance – contributors instead highlight the emotional, intellectual, intuitive, instinctive and step-by-step creation dimensions. They aim to shine a light on digital and electronic art practice, involving coding, electronic gadgetry and technology mixed with other forms of more established media, to uncover the practice-as-research processes required, as well as the collaborative aspects of art and technology practice.

The promotion of sustainable urban development and livable cities in the past three decades has effectively merged the themes of urban health, urban sustainability, and urban livability into an integrated research field. As more people are predicted to live in a relatively confined space, the balance between the physical/built environment, social environment, and urban dwellers becomes more delicate. Urban systems have evolved to be more complex than ever during this process. While complex systems often offer relative stability, delicate balance requires carefully designed plans and management to avoid collapse. It is, hence, of great interest and importance to know what future sustainable and livable cities look like. Intersecting Health, Livability, and Human Behavior in Urban Environments considers how to improve the quality of the environment and healthy living in contemporary and future urban environments. Covering key topics such as environmental health, smart cities, and urban health, this premier reference source is ideal for policymakers, government officials, scholars, researchers, academicians, instructors, and students.