Mimesis stories: composing new nature music for the shakuhachi

Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. The article tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers’ varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around). Thus it hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world

Dancing with Knives: American Cold War Ideology in the Dances of West Side Story

In cultural studies today, there is emerging an interpretive revolution “from below” – that is, a radical reassessment of the politics of cultural forms, based on a recovery of the embodied and affective subject as the center of meaning-making. Making sense of dance performances is therefore methodologically important because of their particular ability to offer insight into these two aspects of subjectivity. As an artifact of Cold War American culture, Jerome Robbins’ choreography in the film West Side Story (1961) enforces an ideological distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, through its portrayals of “cool” affect as a necessary disposition, and organized violence as a necessary evil. Our close analysis of the dances “Rumble” and “Cool” offers new insights into the affective “map” that provided the ideological foundation for American political theorists and policy makers in formulating their Cold War attitudes

Anybodys “in and out of the shadows”: the threshold of visibility and queer orientation in West Side Story

            In this essay, we argue that Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein communicated a subversive queerness in their Cold-War-era musical, West Side Story. Despite a main plot line reiterating the heteronormative ideology of the period, West Side Story deploys the gender-ambiguous and seemingly peripheral character of Anybodys to embody the possibilities and pitfalls of a fluidly queer alternative – one that Bernstein and Robbins also pursued in their own personal lives. We pay close attention to Anybodys’ comportment, moves, and body placement in the film version of the musical, in order to map out their “deep choreography” of advance and retreat and abject stillness. Anybodys’ persistent but unstable presence, on the threshold of visibility in both the heteronormative and the homosocial spaces of the musical, is key to understanding its problematization of gender essentialism

Dancing with Knives: American Cold War Ideology in the Dances of West Side Story

In cultural studies today, there is emerging an interpretive revolution “from below” – that is, a radical reassessment of the politics of cultural forms, based on a recovery of the embodied and affective subject as the center of meaning-making. Making sense of dance performances is therefore methodologically important because of their particular ability to offer insight into these two aspects of subjectivity. As an artifact of Cold War American culture, Jerome Robbins’ choreography in the film West Side Story (1961) enforces an ideological distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, through its portrayals of “cool” affect as a necessary disposition, and organized violence as a necessary evil. Our close analysis of the dances “Rumble” and “Cool” offers new insights into the affective “map” that provided the ideological foundation for American political theorists and policy makers in formulating their Cold War attitudes

Anybodys “in and out of the shadows”: the threshold of visibility and queer orientation in West Side Story

            In this essay, we argue that Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein communicated a subversive queerness in their Cold-War-era musical, West Side Story. Despite a main plot line reiterating the heteronormative ideology of the period, West Side Story deploys the gender-ambiguous and seemingly peripheral character of Anybodys to embody the possibilities and pitfalls of a fluidly queer alternative – one that Bernstein and Robbins also pursued in their own personal lives. We pay close attention to Anybodys’ comportment, moves, and body placement in the film version of the musical, in order to map out their “deep choreography” of advance and retreat and abject stillness. Anybodys’ persistent but unstable presence, on the threshold of visibility in both the heteronormative and the homosocial spaces of the musical, is key to understanding its problematization of gender essentialism

Dancing with Knives: American Cold War Ideology in the Dances of West Side Story

In cultural studies today, there is emerging an interpretive revolution “from below” – that is, a radical reassessment of the politics of cultural forms, based on a recovery of the embodied and affective subject as the center of meaning-making. Making sense of dance performances is therefore methodologically important because of their particular ability to offer insight into these two aspects of subjectivity. As an artifact of Cold War American culture, Jerome Robbins’ choreography in the film West Side Story (1961) enforces an ideological distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, through its portrayals of “cool” affect as a necessary disposition, and organized violence as a necessary evil. Our close analysis of the dances “Rumble” and “Cool” offers new insights into the affective “map” that provided the ideological foundation for American political theorists and policy makers in formulating their Cold War attitudes

'Various kinds of madness': the French Nietzscheans inside America

Drawing comparisons with the introduction of deconstruction to America and its perceived discontinuity with North American intellectual traditions, this paper discusses the arrival of a different strain of poststructuralism in America, the French Nietzscheanism of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard. It isolates the presence and function of American oppositional discourses, such as the countercultural or anti-psychiatric, within French Nietzscheanism and asserts there exists a more intimate link between these French and American oppositional discourses than is customarily assumed. French Nietzscheanism entered America via the Schizo-culture conference, organized by Sylvère Lotringer in Columbia, 1975. The examination of this neglected, though intriguing event produces a valuable snapshot of the transition that oppositional discourses on both sides of the Atlantic underwent as the sixties gave way to the seventies