Research and Innovation

A milestone in the cinematic representation of neoliberalism, Maren Ade’s 2016 breakout hit Toni Erdmann offers a wide-ranging depiction of the contemporary global economy and its reshaping of our psychic and social lives. Emerging from the German art cinema movement known as the Berlin School, Toni Erdmann achieved unexpected success with audiences worldwide, attaining theatrical release in at least 37 countries and winning more than 50 international awards. Yet the film’s viral popularity and critical acclaim proved perplexing to some commentators, especially given its oxymoronic status as a German comedy; its sprawling, nearly three-hour duration; and its formally unremarkable, even nondescript style.

The Celluloid Atlantic changes the way we look at American and Italian cinema in the postwar period. In the thirty years following World War II, American and Italian film industries came to be an integrated, transnational unit rather than two separate, nation-based entities. Written in jargon-free prose and based on previously unexplored archival sources, this book revisits the history of Neorealism, World War II combat cinema, the "Western all'Italiana," and the career of John Kitzmiller, the African American star who made Italy his home and was the first person of color to win the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival.  Giovacchini argues that the waning of the Celluloid Atlantic in the early 1970s was due to the economic policies of the first Nixon administration, specifically its important, but largely neglected, Revenue Act of 1971, as well as to the ideological debates between Europeans and Americans that intensified during the American intervention in Vietnam. 

The fifth and final section of this book, “Cinematic Echoes,” contains three contributions whose common feature is a shift from words on the page to images on the big screen, from Greece to the United States. To this end, Caroline Eades (University of Maryland) and Françoise Létoublon (Université Grenoble Alpes) develop the work of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord on Homer and the Serbo-Croatian oral tradition to situate the oeuvre of filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos within the lineage of Greek and Balkan oral poetry. Such an approach—diachronic (from Homer to the present), geographic (from Greece to the Balkans), and interdisciplinary (at the intersection of literature, cinema, and anthropology)—aims to demonstrate that this tradition is not disappearing, since it finds in Angelopoulos’s films an updating and reactivation that make it a deliberate means for expressing and disseminating myths today.

This is the first edited collection to critically address in its entirety questions related to the displaying of Chinese contemporary art. It includes chapters by scholars and cultural workers from diverse backgrounds involved in the interpretation of artistic as well as curatorial discourses and practices. Each of those chapters gives a detailed account of a particular, socio-culturally informed, approach to the making and showing of Chinese art - including in relation to queer identities, transculturality, the use of social media, artivism, social engagement, institutional critique, and neo-Confucian aesthetics. Together they present a vital intervention with established curatorship amidst the intensely interconnected and increasingly multi-polar cultural conditionalities of early 21st-century contemporaneity.

In terms of plot, The Ascent  is unusual in how it humanizes collaboration with the enemy, an act usually befitting only villainous characters in Soviet cinema. The film as a whole, and the first half in particular, emphasizes what Lucía Nagib calls the “realist mode of production”—in particular, through on-location shooting in which the actors endured conditions similar to those experienced by their onscreen characters. The “documentary” approach to the production of a historical film serves to recuperate a sense of contingency, in opposition to the teleological developmental narrative of Soviet History, a gesture that fits into the post-war, post-Stalin-era Soviet “counter-cinema” attempt to break with the entrenched norms of socialist realism. The chapter argues that in rejecting the psychological development of the two main characters and in focusing, particularly in the first half of the film, on the materiality of experience under the extreme conditions of the war, the film exceeds the boundaries of its ostensible central ideological conflict and its engagement with the Soviet mythology of the Second World War. Rather, the film poses broader, universal questions of moral life under extreme circumstances, and provides the audience with the conditions for engaging those questions through their own experiences—and their experience of the film. 

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them.

In Nile Nightshade, Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians' embrace of the tomato and the emergence of Egypt's modern national identity were both driven by the modernization of the country's food system. Drawing from cookbooks, archival materials, oral histories, and vernacular culture, Gaul follows this commonplace food into the realms of domestic policy and labor through the hands of Egypt's overwhelmingly female home cooks. As they wrote recipes and cooked meals, these women forged key aspects of public culture that defined how Egyptians recognized themselves and one another as Egyptian.

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community.

In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.

This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States.
 

Since the summer of 2002, the Diasporas and Borders seminars have been held under the academic banner of Aula de las Diásporas (Diasporas Classroom), coordinated by José María Naharro Calderón at the House of Culture of the Llanes City Council (Asturias). These seminars have examined key issues and records stemming from the 1936 coup d'état and its totalitarian and exile-driven consequences in Spain, which, among others, definitively affected Asturians from October 1937 onwards. These courses, and the selection of papers presented here, have also addressed past exiles and present-day migrations.

Jyana S. Browne has been awarded the Nancy Staub Publication Award for her book chapter “Realisms in Japan’s Eighteenth-Century Puppet Theatre” in Realisms in East Asian Performing Arts (University of Michigan Press, 2023).

The award, given annually by UNIMA-USA (the North American Center of Union Internationale de la Marionnette), recognizes outstanding scholarship in puppetry arts. Named in honor of Nancy Lohman Staub—an original member of UNIMA-USA known for her leadership, writing, and contributions to the Center for Puppetry Arts Museum in Atlanta—the award celebrates scholarship that deepens understanding of puppetry worldwide.

Jyana S. Browne has been awarded the Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Prize for Japanese Theatre Scholarship for her article “Puppetry Networks of the Island of Naoshima” in Theatre Research International 49, no. 2 (2024).

Presented annually by the Association for Asian Performance (AAP), this prize recognizes an early career scholar for an outstanding article, chapter, or essay on Japanese theatre or performance published in English during the calendar year. The award is designed to promote and encourage the study of Japanese theatre and performance, honoring emerging voices who advance the field.