Erika G. Abad has been teaching for University of Nevada Las Vegas’s Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies Department since the fall of 2016. Since then, her students have introduced her to the worlds of fandom, resurrecting her interest in the lack of diversity on screen and in print. In the summer of 2019, she was featured on Latinos Who Lunch to discuss Latinx queer representation … Continue reading Contributors
Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection. Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan. Indiana University Press, 2018. 144 pp. ISBN: 978-0253038418. Over the past couple years, the Black Lives Matter movement has emerged. Gaining lots of media attention, the movement is led by African Americans who are tired of the murder of innocent blacks and the general racial inequality that still occurs in the United … Continue reading Review of Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection
In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization. Gilbert, Helen H., JD Phillipson, Michelle H. Raheja, Editors. Liverpool University Press, 2020. 304 pp. ISBN: 978-1786940346 The world of Indigenous cultures is an untapped trove of unique insights into the human experience. Although native societies all across the globe have already conceded vast amounts of land and other natural resources to more powerful colonizers, relatively little is known about … Continue reading Review of In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization
Nick Yablon, Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule. University of Chicago Press, 2019. 407 pp. ISBN: 978-0226574134. Historians usually trace the origins of the time capsule to the one that Westinghouse Electric promoted at the 1938 World’s Fair in New York. This sleek metal cannister stuffed with human ephemera, weighing eight hundred pounds and resembling a ballistic missile, was lowered into … Continue reading Review of Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule
Reel Latinxs Representation in US Film and TV. Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González. University of Arizona Press, 2019. 192 pp. ISBN: 9780816539581. With reboots like Party of Five and Charmed casting Latinx characters as leads and the growth of Latinx representation on Netflix among other streaming sites, a text like Reel Latinx Representation in US Film & TV written by Frederick Luis Aldama and … Continue reading Review of Reel Latinxs Representation in US Film and TV
By Seth Vannatta Abstract What are the necessary conditions for middle class life? This is the central question of Jordan Peele’s horror movie, Us. I argue here that Peele’s answer is both Freudian and Marxian, that these are interrelated, and that the tethered doubles of the Wilson family in Us represent their dynamic unconscious drive structures, the return of the repressed, and the revolutionary return … Continue reading The Return of the Repressed (and Oppressed): A Freudo-Marxian Analysis of Jordan Peele’s Us
Redime me et miserere mei Carl Rollyson ABSTRACT William Faulkner’s 1951 adaptation of William Barrett’s inspirational novel, The Left Hand of God (1950), never made it to production, but it is superior to the 1955 film. Faulkner’s screenplay reflects a spiritual journey that he explored in Requiem for a Nun (1951) and A Fable (1954), works revealing a hierological intensity that is absent from his … Continue reading William Faulker’s Film of Redemption: The Left Hand of God
By Isa Rehana Flores Keywords: Aronofsky, Mother!, psychological horror, ecofeminism Mother! is a psychological horror film directed by Darren Aronofsky released in 2017. While on the surface, it is about a young woman whose peaceful home with her husband is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a problematic couple and their family, Mother! is a Biblical allegory for the abuse and mistreatment of Mother Earth. … Continue reading Mother Earth: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Aronofsky’s Mother!
by Todd Giles 2020 marks the twentieth anniversary of Mary Harron’s film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 much-maligned novel of 1980s excess and greed, American Psycho. Patrick Bateman, brilliantly portrayed by Christian Bale, is still a modern day American corporate Jekyll & Hyde figure for the ages, a coked-up Gordon Gekko from the era of no-holds-barred corporate raidering. Mergers & acquisitions Master of the … Continue reading “‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in’: American Psycho and the Pictures Generation”
By Kenneth Payne ABSTRACT Algernon Blackwood [1869-1951] was a prolific and popular author of tales of the weird and the supernatural, although he resented having become best known as “the ghost man.” He was at pains to clarify that his main interest was not so much in ghosts but rather in what he termed “the Extension of Human Faculty,” in other words (as he put … Continue reading Hearing Things, Seeing Things: The Extension of Human Faculty in Algernon Blackwood’s The Damned (1914)
