Jean-Luc Godard and the Shock of the New Wave

Jean-Luc Godard passed away on September 13, 2022. Eric Smoodin, author of Paris in the Dark, is an expert on French film culture and offers this guest post in remembrance. Smoodin is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, and also author of Regarding Frank Capra and coeditor of Looking Past the Screen.

“The camera is a living being…unstable…it’s a body trying to keep its balance……and this imbalance is the very sign of life.” That was how Pierre Marcabru, writing in Combat in March 1960, described À Bout de souffle in his perplexed, admiring, and not always positive review of Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature-length film. When Godard died last month, he left a body of work that had transformed the cinema, and he was acknowledged as one of the most important filmmakers of the last sixty years. But how was he understood at the very beginning of his career, a career so intertwined with the start of the New Wave, and so connected to a belief, among critics in France, filmmakers, and quite possibly the public, that French cinema had just been unalterably changed?

Despite the extensive bibliography about Godard and his work, the available evidence is hard to come by, at least for film historians working in the United States. Of the Bibliothèque nationale’s vast online holdings, the only daily from the period that readily can be accessed is Combat, which had been founded during the war as a Resistance newspaper, but that despite its interest in politics always gave a great deal of space to the cinema. It’s difficult to generalize from Combat, but the newspaper certainly paid attention to Godard, even before À Bout de souffle opened in Paris, perhaps a sign of the young filmmaker’s place in French film culture broadly.

“A sour, aggressive…razor-sharp film.” Pierre Marcabru’s review of À Bout de souffle in Combat, March 19, 1960.

In Combat at the time, Godard typically would be mentioned in relation to the New Wave and to other young filmmakers, often as one among many and then increasingly as the first among equals. In July 1959, for instance, the newspaper’s headline acknowledged a sort of aggressive attack by a group of new directors and screenwriters; “No Respite for the New Wave’s Assault on Cinema.”  In Combat’s telling, these cineastes—all of them men—“reflected the phenomenon of the New Wave in cinema.” Combat named many of them, the movies they had made, and also how old they were. The list is familiar to us now—Claude Chabrol, 28 years old, Le Beau Serge (1958), and François Truffaut, 27 years old, Les 400 Coups (1959), for example. But it also contains names and films mostly unknown so many years later—Jean-Pierre Mocky, 30 years old, Les Dragueurs (1959), and Claude Bernard-Aubert, 28 years old, Les Tripes au soleil (1959). In this narrative, Godard is very much in the second wave of the New Wave, “among the new names on the horizon” yet to make a first feature, along with Jacques Demy and Louis Malle.

Combat continued writing about these young, exciting filmmakers, including Godard, who by that time had only made some short films. In January 1960, still a few months before the premiere of À Bout de Souffle, Roger Tailleur lauded “a new generation of cineastes,” including Godard but also Marcel Hanoun, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Philippe de Broca, and many others.

By March, though, just a few days before À Bout de souffle opened, Godard and Truffaut had begun separating themselves, at least in Combat, from their contemporaries. The newspaper ran an interview with American producer Sam Spiegel, recently arrived in France, in order to frame the cinema as being in something of a generational conflict. The 58-year-old Spiegel, responsible for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and who was in preparation for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), came from a long line of hardened veterans who believed that, “after D.W. Griffith, the director had died,” replaced in importance by the movie producer. Combat then pointed out, though, that “nevertheless, he had come to Paris to see the films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, those “intellectuals from Cahiers du Cinéma whose theories of…film are…the opposite of his.”

“A New Generation of Filmmakers,” including Godard, in Combat, January 23, 1960.

Just a few days later, À Bout de souffle opened at four very fashionable Parisian cinémas d’exclusivité, the Vivienne in the second arrondissement, the Balzac in the eighth, the Helder in the ninth, and Scala in the tenth. Godard’s premiere stood out as a notable event in the city, even though other films beginning that week point to the astonishing film culture in Paris at the time: Fritz Lang’s Les Contrebandiers de Moonflet (Moonfleet [1955]), Blake Edwards’ Opérations jupons (Operation Petticoat [1959]), and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), among others. Marcabru’s extensive review in Combat seemed to mirror the film itself, a series of jump cuts between emotions and reactions; “À Bout de souffle is a sour, aggressive film…a dry film with a prodigious contempt for human weakness…a razor-sharp film.” Marcabru tried to describe the experience of seeing a film that “comes towards us in fits and starts…the eye and ear never attached to continuity in vision and hearing,” providing us with a “cinema of tensions.”

After the shock of À Bout de souffle, Godard became the great star of the New Wave. Two weeks after the opening, Combat reported that the film had finished second to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), by one vote, for the best French film since September 1959 among the editors of the literary journal La Nouvelle Critique. The next month, Combat told readers that the Ministry of Affairs had chosen À Bout de souffle to represent France at the Cannes film festival, and then, in July, that Godard had won the best director prize at the Berlin film festival. Marcabru himself kept writing about the film, explaining in April 1960, in an article headlined Ethnologie et cinéma, that Godard was actually a sociologist, telling us more about human behavior than any expert in the field.

Combat now treated Godard, not yet thirty, as something of a mentor to other New Wave directors, and as an important model for young, serious filmmakers around the world. The newspaper wrote admiringly of the 29-year-old Jacques Demy making his first feature, Lola (1961), with “the blessing” of his “production advisor,” Jean-Luc Godard. Then, in an enthusiastic review of the just-released Shadows, an anonymous critic confidently explained that the technique of the film “was very close to that which Jean-Luc Godard utilized in À Bout de souffle,” asserting influence even though the director, John Cassavetes, had finished his 1958 film well before Godard had begun his.

From Combat, April 4, 1960, Godard (in sunglasses) filming Le Petit Soldat in Geneva.

Godard consistently would be used to signify the ongoing health and vibrancy of the French cinema, and the terms here were those of continuity rather than the earlier “assault.” In August 1960, Jean-Louis Caussou reflected in Combat on “The New Film Season,” and viewed it as marked both by a welcome return of “the old guard,” with the opening of Abel Gance’s Austerlitz (1960), and by the spectacular new films by Godard, as well as Truffaut, Malle, and Claude Autant-Lara.

Combat began reporting on Godard’s second feature, Le Petit Soldat, in February 1960, even before his first, À Bout de souffle, had opened. By the time Godard had finished Le Petit Soldat, the film and the controversy around it had become a major news story. The Minister of Information, Louis Terrenoire, who oversaw the French film censorship commission, had banned this film about the Algerian war, largely because of the movie’s depiction of the French army’s use of torture against Algerian liberation fighters. Combat took up the commission’s decision in order to argue against censorship in general, and also saw Terrenoire’s action as the death knell of the New Wave, “putting an end to the ambitions of young directors who wish to bring to the screen something other” than the expected and the conventional.

Even more than Terrenoire, the man Combat named as most responsible for banning the film was Jean-Marie Le Pen. At the time a young member of the national assembly, Le Pen would become the leader of the anti-immigrant, antisemitic French ultra-right, a position now held by his daughter, Marine le Pen.  In 1960, Le Pen père demanded that Le Petit Soldat not be shown anywhere in France or elsewhere, and argued unsuccessfully that Godard himself should be expelled from the country.

Godard included his caricature of Minister of Information Louis Terrenoire in his article about censorship. Combat, September 22, 1960

Referring to the scenes that Terrenoire found objectionable, Combat quoted Godard as saying that “the instances of torture last three-and-a-half minutes in a 90-minute film, and therefore do not exceed that which is tolerated in detective, horror, science fiction, or spy films.” Then Combat enlisted Godard to provide a response to the controversy, and the director wrote both dismissively and humorously about the actions taken against his film. Godard insisted, first, that “I don’t think anything about censorship,” but then added that “we must say what we have to say, express what we feel without worrying about…censorship.” He went on that “if we really are of this century, we necessarily pose the problems of this century through stories,” while “censorship…aims to preserve principles fixed in the past.” Godard concluded that censorship is “like someone telling you, ‘I don’t like your belt, it’s shocking, take it off.’” Then, when you comply, “your pants fall down and that’s even more shocking…so you get put in jail.”

In just one year, at least in Combat, Godard had gone from one of many very promising young French filmmakers to a leading spokesperson for freedom of speech and expression. Reading through the newspaper’s reporting on Godard from that period, we can get a sense of the impact of his films, of the intense shock of the new. This is the recurring motif of Marcabru’s review of À Bout de Souffle, and, in fact, of so much of the writing about Godard in the decades that followed. “It is a new beginning of cinema,” Marcabru wrote. “It is crucial.”

A Beginner’s Guide to Queer African Cinema

Today we’re excited to present a guest post by Lindsey Green-Simms, author of the new book Queer African Cinemas. The book examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, showing how these films record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience while at the same time imagining new hopes and possibilities. Lindsey B. Green-Simms is Associate Professor of Literature at American University and author of Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa.

In my new book, Queer African Cinemas, I look at all the different ways queer African films have registered various forms of resistance and have shown the multiple ways that queer African subjects love, dream, negotiate, flee, and craft new worlds. The following 10 fiction films capture the difficulty of queer existence but also highlight the potentials for queer life-building and joy.  Some of them are difficult to find, but some can be streamed on platforms that many readers will be able to access.  All of the films ask us to listen carefully to subtle and quiet modes of resistance and to think about queer Africans in all of their complexity, not simply as objects of homophobia.

Dakan, dir. Mohamed Camara (Guinea, 1997)

Dakan, the first Black African feature film to depict homosexuality, was a film that was, in many ways, ahead of its time. It opens with two high school boys, Manga and Sory, making out in Sory’s red convertible. But neither Manga nor Sory’s parents approve of their relationship. Manga is sent off to a traditional healer and then eventually married off to Oumou, a white woman. Sory, who is expected to take over his father’s lucrative business, is also married off to a woman. Dakan premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and screened primarily abroad where audiences in the diaspora were often elated to see representation of queer love on the continent. But when Dakan screened at FESPACO —the famous pan-African film festival held every other year in Burkina Faso—Camara had to change hotels every day and leave screenings early to avoid being beaten up. Likewise, when the film screened in Guinea, where local imams issued a fatwa against him, Camara narrowly escaped an angry crowd. But, despite the challenges Camara faced funding, casting, and screening the film, Dakan ends defiantly and holds out hope for the possibility that queer African love can exist, and perhaps even flourish, on the continent. It is available for streaming on Amazon, Vimeo, and Kanopy.

Karmen Geï, dir. Joseph Gaï Ramaka (Senegal, 2001)

Karmen Geï is another pioneering queer West African film, though its queerness is not necessarily central to the plot. Karmen Geï is a Senegalese adaptation of Georges Bizet’s famous 1875 opera Carmen. In Ramaka’s film, the first ever African adaptation, the music is not opera but Afro-jazz with a host of famous African-American and Senegalese musicians creating a pulsing, improvisational jazz and drumming score. Moreover, in Karmen Geï Carmen is not an outlaw from Southern Spain caught in a love triangle between two men. Instead, Karmen is a Senegalese woman, recently released from prison after seducing the female warden, who loves both men and women but who, like all Carmens, insists on her own freedom even though it costs her. And though this artful and somewhat opaque film does not necessarily say anything directly about what it’s like to live as a queer person in Senegal, it is a beautiful portrait of refusal, love, waywardness, and eccentricity. It can be streamed on Kanopy, Vimeo and YouTube.

Stories of Our Lives, dir. Jim Chuchu (Kenya, 2014)

The Nest Collective and Jim Chuchu did not set out to make Kenya’s first queer film but that’s precisely what happened. In 2013 members of the Nest Collective, a multidisciplinary art collective, had been traveling around Kenya collecting stories from queer-identified people for a book project called Stories of Our Lives.  They decided to turn a few of the stories into short films to show to the community of people they had interviewed. One of these shorts was shown to a curator of the Toronto International Film Festival who then asked if the Nest Collective could make more vignettes for a feature-length film. The collective agreed, and Stories was slated to show in Toronto before the film was even finished. The Stories of Our Lives film anthology consists of five emotionally charged black and white vignettes that show the different ways queer Kenyans live and love. Unfortunately, though the film was met with well-deserved critical praise internationally, it was banned in Kenya and has not been screened there. It can be rented on Vimeo.

Rafiki, dir. Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya, 2018)

Rafiki is another film that was banned in Kenya, though a judge did lift the ban for seven days so that the film could be eligible for an Oscar. Theaters in the country were so packed that Rafiki became the second highest grossing Kenyan film. Based on Monica Arac de Nyeko’s prize-winning short story “Jambula Tree,” Rafiki tells the story of two girls from opposing politicians’ families who fall in love in Nairobi. The film is a gorgeous homage to the colors, sounds, and street life in Nairobi as Kahiu fills the screen with pinks, purples, and bright green and introduces us to Kenyan musicians, fashion labels, and artists. The film stands out for its vibrancy as well as for its belief in the possibility of young queer love. And though it’s difficult to see in Kenya, outside of its country of origin, it can be found on Amazon, Hulu, ShowTime, and Apple TV to name just a few.

Inxeba, dir. John Trengove (South Africa, 2017)

Inxeba, or The Wound in translation, takes place on a mountain in the Eastern Cape during the Xhosa male circumcision and initiation rites known as ulwaluko. Two of the protagonists are Xolani and Vija, old friends and lovers who resume their secret queer affair every year when they journey to the mountain and act as caregivers to the young boys who come for their initiation. But when Xolani becomes the caregiver to Kwanda, a brazen, out gay boy from Johannesburg, Xolani and Vija’s desire to remain quiet is challenged. This film breaks away from the tradition of situating African queerness primarily in urban settings and asks pressing questions about the role of tradition, the premium placed on being out, and ways of disrupting the violence of heteronormative masculinity. It is currently available to stream (under the title The Wound) on Vudu, Google Play, Apple TV, and Amazon.

Kanarie, dir. Christaan Olwagen (South Africa, 2018)

Kanarie is, like Karmen Geï, a film infused with musical numbers and dance sequences, but its setting and content could not be further from that of Karmen Geï. Kanarie takes place during the South African Border Wars when the apartheid regime fought insurgents in Namibia and Angola.  The war, which began in the 1960s, lasted for decades but Kanarie is set during 1984-1985 when a state of emergency was declared that led to draconian law enforcement and military operation against non-white South Africans. At the beginning of the film Johan Niemand, the small-town Boy George-obsessed protagonist is conscripted into the army and joins the Defense Force Choir, the Kanaries. Despite its heavy topic, the film is a quirky coming out story, full of 1980s pop music, set in the most unlikely of spaces, and it takes the audience on a complicated journey with Johan as he tries to understand both his own sexuality and what it means to be a white, gay South African serving in the apartheid government’s Defense Force. It is currently available to stream on the Roku Channel, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, Apple TV, and Tubi.

Moffie, dir Oliver Hermanus (South Africa, 2019)

(Screenshot: YouTube/ Portobello Productions)

Moffie is set slightly earlier than Kanarie but is also about a white gay South African boy who discovers his queer identity after being conscripted into the army. However, Moffie, an adaptation of André Carl van der Merwe’s semiautobiographical novel, has none of the lightness of Kanarie and follows the protagonist, Nicholas Van der Swart, through his grueling training and active duty in a particularly violent counterinsurgency unit. Even Hermanus himself admits that the film is triggering and brutal as it’s intended to depict the multiple ways the military dehumanized non-white and non-straight bodies. Thematically, the film also serves as a prequel to Hermanus’s 2011 film Skoonheid about a closeted Afrikaner man (formerly in the Defense Force) who becomes violent with another man. It is currently available to stream on Hulu, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon, and Apple TV.

We Don’t Live Here Anymore, dir Tope Oshin (Nigeria, 2018)

We Don’t Live Here Anymore is the first feature-length film produced by The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs), a Nigeria-based human rights non-profit that focuses on sexual minorities. We Don’t Live Here Anymore is the second film TIERs produced – the first was the short film Hell or High Water, which is available for free on YouTube. With both films, TIERs worked with stars and directors from Nollywood, the popular Nigerian film industry, to combat homophobia and elicit compassion both for gay characters and their family members. We Don’t Live Here Anymore centers on the fallout after two teenage boys are caught together on school grounds. Rather than supporting their sons, the parents flounder. One mother decides to use her wealth and connections to paint her son as a victim. The other fails to get her son to safety soon enough. In many ways, the film is less about the two boys and more about the mothers, and it serves as a cautionary tale, as many Nollywood films do, about the failure to stand up to both internal and external homophobia. It can be streamed on Amazon and Google Play.

Walking with Shadows, dir. Aoife O’Kelly (Nigeria, 2020)

Walking with Shadows is a co-production between TIERs and Oya Media, the production company of the former Nigerian talk show host Funmi Iyanda. Walking with Shadows is the adaptation of Jude Dibia’s novel of the same name, the first Nigerian novel to focus on a gay protagonist. Both Iyanda and former TIERs executive director Olumide Makanjuola had long dreamed of making Dibia’s groundbreaking book into a film and when they teamed up to do so they made a beautiful rendition of this classic coming out story. The plot is straight-forward: when the successful businessman Adrian Ebele Njoko is outed by a co-worker seeking revenge, Adrian must re-evaluate his life and his relationship with his wife, family, and friends. Like Dibia’s book, the film asks audiences who might otherwise reject queer people to think about them as fully human and also provides the type of gay protagonist that is rarely represented in Nigerian film and literature. The film screened to packed theaters at the Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF) in Lagos and toured globally but has not yet been made available on streaming platforms.

Ifé, dir. Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim (Nigeria, 2020) 

(Screenshot from PM News)

Ifé is a 35-minute short film, produced in partnership with Pamela Adie’s The Equality Hub, a Lagos-based organization focusing on the rights of female sexual minorities. (Adie also made a coming out documentary, Under the Rainbow, about her own life). Ifé begins with the titular character preparing for a date with Adaora, a woman she has not yet met in person. Adaora and Ifé immediately connect and their one-night date stretches into three intimate days. Unlike other queer Nigerian films, Ifé is not about how these women’s love might affect their larger community, nor is it a film in which anyone is trying to save anyone from the supposed sins of homosexuality. Rather, Ifé, the first Nigerian film written, produced, and directed by queer women, focuses on queer women’s intimacy when it gets to exist, for just a moment, in a protected space, safely inside the walls of Ifé’s home. Ifé, along with Adie’s first film, can be rented on the Equality Hub’s own streaming platform.

Use coupon code E22GRNSM to save 30% on Queer African Cinemas by Lindsey Green-Simms.

Q&A with Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, author of Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines, and coeditor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i. Her latest book is Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, which follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper, who was the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur, to explore the contours of empire as experienced on the scale of personal relationships.

If most people know anything about Isabel Rosario Cooper, it’s that she was General Douglas MacArthur’s mistress. In footnotes to most histories, she is portrayed as a tragic figure, “a beautiful woman who died of heartbreak.” What made you want to tell her story more fully?

This kind of feminine figuration has always served as camouflage for complexity, a shorthand that feeds into and is fed by a colonial fantasy of brown women longing for white men, as well as narrative desire for familiar tropes. This version of Isabel Cooper’s story is not in the footnotes: it is front and center because it’s the comfortable and typical characterization of “women like her.” When I started to dig into the footnotes of MacArthur biographies, I discovered a kind of recursive pattern that boiled down to a reliance on repeated citations of sources that had somehow become authoritative evidence for her story. What became clear was that these sources that were more hearsay or even outright inaccurate had circulated enough times that they had hardened into truth—in particular the version that revolved around the General as her object of yearning and heartbreak had become the standard. The work of postcolonial feminist scholars has taught us that of course there’s something more operating beneath the flattened image of dead, beautiful, heartbroken women, something more than “MacArthur’s mistress.” The short interludes that bothered to portray Isabel Cooper in MacArthur biographies and their suspect footnotes that were cited as evidence didn’t match up to this work.

There’s also a way in which stories like hers are dismissed as unworthy in the sense that her biggest known “accomplishment” is sleeping with MacArthur—often read as betrayal at worst, or venal at most—another way to marginalize women’s stories. At the same time, I did not want to dismiss her sexual agency, because to some degree, that was crucial to the kind of power and identity she wielded. From the great work that has been done on the early colonial period in the Philippines, particularly on the “woman question,” we know that the lives of Filipinas were complex, cosmopolitan, and often grappled with the contradictions engendered by the shifts in colonial society. I wanted to tell her story more fully because it deserved to be told with the same kind of effort in terms of research and writing as stories of men like MacArthur, and I felt that it would be a good vehicle to also interweave a parallel account about archives and genres, and the ways in which both open and up and foreclose how we learn to narrate ourselves.

You choose not to structure your book chronologically like a traditional biography. Instead you begin with her relationship with MacArthur and then jump around in time. You also feature documents, pictures and imagined letters and conversations in between your chapters. Why did you choose this structure? How does it help tell Cooper’s story more fully?

It took me a while to figure out how to tell her story. I knew I needed to include elements of biography—because so little of her life is actually known, and the broader historical context of her story is unfamiliar to most readers—so some part of this had to be fleshed out. But I also knew that I didn’t want to present an account that was somehow whole or authoritative or forthright, like an exhumation or an explanation, because I didn’t want to repeat the pattern of how she has been narrated in such an overdetermined way. I did begin with a chronological draft, but this structure felt like it didn’t make room for the ways in which patterns repeated themselves in her life, or how a particular part of her story (the MacArthur interlude) pre-empts others. It felt inert—and so I began with her death, because so much of what is written about her pivots on the suicide of this beautiful woman, and the half-truths or outright lies that adhered to it. I also foregrounded her time with MacArthur in the narrative, a bit perversely, because I wanted to arrest the desire to center MacArthur and frame him as the “reveal” of the story later on in the book. I felt like that the strange enticement of that infamous scandal was not something I wanted the reader to be invested in. The few years of her life during which she associated with MacArthur has come to define her and how she’s narrated: it’s the hook that draws most people to her story, but I didn’t want it operate as the climax of the narrative. It is certainly not the main driving force of her life, even as it is often characterized this way. I try to make the case that this moment is more an effect, rather than a cause.

The overall structure of the book also pulls from the protracted, piecemeal, and interrupted process of my research into her life, and from the sometimes-unexpected and last-minute way that new sources would shift a whole arc I had neatly mapped out. The sparseness and inaccuracy of the existing writing and archival materials on Isabel Cooper resists that neat and orderly biographical narrative: there are so many moments that are lost to history because of lack of documentation, and in her case, contradiction, inconsistency, absence, or outright error in whatever records can be pieced together. So that’s another story in itself: the colonial archive’s promises and secrets. I was struck by how so much of the narrative about her is fictional (in the sense of repeated inaccuracies), and as I dug deeper, how much of this fiction she also perpetrated. It gave me permission to speculate about moments that might not have documentation, or to invent, as she did, stories about herself.

Cooper goes by many different names in her life, from Dimples as a child performer, to Chabing Cooper, Elizabeth Cooper, and Belle Cooper, to a married name of Isabel Kennamer. Why does Cooper constantly rename herself and shift her identity?

To me, this was a strategy that was tied to moments in her life where she was reinventing herself, or starting over. She was someone who had, at a very young age, entered the world of the stage and screen, so taking on roles was a habit she never dropped. It was something she also learned from her mother, to some extent. But she also had really distinct periods in her life: she crossed the Pacific several times, experienced very diverse living conditions, married twice, had affairs, and made big choices about her career. I think renaming herself gave her some modicum of control over conditions that were far beyond her power to manage, and later on, allowed for her to have a clean slate when so much of her past tended to creep up on her unexpectedly due the lingering effects of US imperialism. As a researcher, this made tracking her occasionally tricky: it felt sometimes that these past decisions on her part were also about refusing an easy narration on mine. It forced me to pause and think about what went into her decisions to go by a particular name at different points in her life.

You say that “sex, and lots of it, defined the colonial encounter.” How does focusing on intimate relationships like that of Cooper and MacArthur change the way we view colonial history?

I owe so much of this work to postcolonial feminists who understand the intimate as a site of colonial power, and to work by Philippine Studies and Filipinx diaspora studies scholars in particular who have explored how sex and sexuality operated in the US-Philippine colonial world. My ability to tell Isabel Cooper’s story is built on that foundational research, and my claim is not new. What I try to shed a bit of light on is how the contradictions of American claims to benevolence and discourses of superiority break down when you look at how empire played out through relationships between people. So many of the colonial encounters turned on sex—the archives are filled with both overt confessions, allusions, or outright mentions of sexually transmitted diseases or decisions about the management of sex work. It’s dirty reading at times. I was interested in the messiness of transactions that revolved around sex or were defined through sexual exchange, as well as how the racial carnal desires at the heart of empire shaped relations well after the actual arrangement or encounter occurred. Who had the upper hand in these kinds of arrangements or coercions was not always clear, and that made for a fascinating dynamic to explore. Isabel Cooper operated within this colonial milieu and the ways she understood, navigated, and leveraged it gives us a sense of the push and pull, and the possibilities and limits of human agency and creativity at a more intimate scale of empire.

What can we learn about Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s from Cooper’s story? How does centering the experiences of non-white actors change the way we think about this era and its films?

I don’t know that we learn much more than we already know about how the Hollywood gambit was a story about deep disappointment for non-white actors in the 1940s and 1950s. For all the Anna May Wongs and Philip Ahns who carved out some kind of a career against and alongside the deep racism and sexism that defined Hollywood culture, there were hundreds of aspirants like Isabel Cooper whose willing and strategic self-exoticizations fell far short of any kind of living. It is probably safer to say that Cooper supplemented her income with her film acting roles but supported herself mainly from nightclub work. The casual mention of casting couch culture, or the matter-of-fact ways she tried to position herself for “Oriental” roles or parts for which she could make a racial stretch was evident in the letters that she wrote during that time, as well as in the industry literature itself. In some ways, her experience was more the rule, rather than the exception that gets written about.

How have artists and people of Filipino descent remembered and reimagined Isabel Rosario Cooper? What does her legacy mean to people today?

For most Filipinos, Isabel Cooper first registers as MacArthur’s mistress, with all the titillation and scandal that entails. This is why interest around her endures. In so many ways, this bit of her story feeds into the melodramatic habits that characterizes some of Hollywood/Manila cinema of her time, as well the theater of everyday politics in the Filipino diaspora. She is also known to some extent as a performer on stage and screen. Filipino cinema is just a bit over a century old, so there has been renewed interest in its pioneers—and as a crossover vaudeville star who made a big early impression in the first “modern” Filipino silent films, Isabel Cooper (she went by Elizabeth Cooper in film) is noteworthy.

Over the course of my research and writing, I also encountered visual artists (one of whom I write about), and writers (both fiction and non-fiction) who grapple with the kinds of narratives that adhere to Isabel Cooper. I think she continues to attract this kind of interest because when you dig deep enough, there’s a lot more to her story beyond the superficiality of MacArthur’s mistress that is typically the first draw. I look to these interpretations as retellings that reveal the inadequacy of the “mistress” framework. My purpose in the book is not to supplant or supersede any of these creative encounters with her, but rather to shake up the assumptions that produce a particular narrative account that is a habit of imperial culture, and one that clearly is not enough to contain her.

Read the introduction to Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E21GNZLZ.

 

New Books in February

Winter is a great time to curl up with a good book. In February we have notable titles in media studies, critical race studies, and more!

Jazz critic and historian Cisco Bradley tells the story of the life and music of bassist and composer William Parker in Universal Tonality, which documents fifty years of the monumental figure’s life in free jazz. Be sure to join us for a live online event featuring Bradley, Parker, Anthony Reed, and Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker on February 19.

Drawing on interviews with industry workers from MTV programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Amanda Ann Klein in Millennials Killed the Video Star examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV’s shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s.

Lauren Steimer’s Experts in Action examines how Hong Kong-influenced action movie aesthetics and stunt techniques have been taken up, imitated, and reinvented in other locations and production contexts around the globe.

Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise at Los Angeles International Airport since the 1960s, in Atmospheric Noise, showing how noise is central to how we know, feel, and think atmospherically.

Theodore D. Segal’s Point of Reckoning narrates the fraught and contested fight for racial justice at Duke University—which accepted its first black undergraduates in 1963—to tell both a local and national story about the challenges that historically white colleges and universities throughout the country continue to face. Catch Segal at two online events this month: on February 10, sponsored by the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, and on February 24, sponsored by the Duke Alumni Association.

Kevin Quashie in Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being analyzes texts by of Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Evie Shockley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others to argue for a black aliveness that is disarticulated from antiblackness and which provides the basis for the imagination and creation of a black world.

Throughout The Powers of Dignity Nick Bromell examines how Frederick Douglass forged a distinctively black political philosophy out of his experiences as an enslaved and later nominally free man in ways that challenge Anglo-Continental traditions of political thought.

Engaging with the work of Black musicians, writers, and women mystics, Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias takes up the concept of utopia as an occasion to explore new states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. You can catch Brown’s first online event this Thursday, February 4.

Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other hegemonic regimes through tropicalist representation in Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism.

Candace Fujikane draws upon Hawaiian legends about the land and water and their impact upon Native Hawai‘ian struggles in Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future to argue that Native economies of abundance provide a foundation for collective work against climate change.

A Time of Youth brings together 89 of the more than 2000 photographs William Gedney took in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood between October, 1966 and January, 1967, documenting the restless and intertwined lives of the disenchanted youth who flocked to what became the epicenter of 1960s counterculture.

In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder examines the campus-based New Left in Japan by exploring the significance of women’s participation in the protest movements of the 1960s.

Ma Vang examines the experiences of Hmong refugees who migrated to the United States following the secret war in Laos (1961–1975) to theorize “History on the Run” as a framework for understanding refugee histories, in particular those of the Hmong.

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper to explore the contours of empire as experienced on the scale of personal relationships in Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, taking us much deeper into her life story than merely her role as the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur.

Jonathan Beller traces the history of the commodification of information and the financialization of everyday life in The World Computer, showing how contemporary capitalism is based in algorithms and the quantification of value that intensify social inequality.

In The Charismatic Gymnasium, Maria José A. de Abreu examines the conservative Charismatic Catholic movement in contemporary urban Brazil to rethink the relationship between theology, the body, and neoliberal governance, showing how it works to produce subjects who are complicit with Brazilian neoliberalism.

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Virtual Events in January

Start your new year off right with some great virtual events featuring our authors.

January 9-February 26: Fans of Jane Bennett’s work may want to check out a new art exhibit inspired by her most recent book Influx and Efflux. Artist Taney Roniger’s drawings will be on display at the SVA Flatiron Project Space in New York City, where they can be viewed from outside while social distancing.

January 10, 10:15 am EST: Attendees at the virtual MLA conference won’t want to miss the panel on the thirtieth anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s classic book Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Many of our other authors are also appearing on panels at the virtual MLA, including Fred Moten, Lisa Lowe, Katina Rogers, and Kandace Chuh. There’s also a panel centered on Ronak Kapadia’s recent book Insurgent Aesthetics.

January 20, 12:00 pm CST: Kaiama L. Glover, author of A Regarded Self, joins five other authors for a conversation about global race studies, Black diaspora studies, and transnational feminism, sponsored by Transnational Feminist Scholars.

January 21, 12:00 pm EST: Daisuke Miyao talks about his book Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema in an event sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan.

January 21, 5:30pm EST: The Phillips Collection hosts a book club discussion about Latinx Art by Arlene Dávila. The discussion will be led by Fabiola R. Delgado.

January 29, 6:00 pm GMT: Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan celebrates the launch of his book The Globally Familiar with commentary and discussion by eleven scholars.

In Conversation: Anna Watkins Fisher and Elizabeth Ault

Check out our newest “In Conversation” video, in which Editor Elizabeth Ault talks with Anna Watkins Fisher about her new book, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Fisher talks about what “parasitical resistance” is, about the ways in which the Trump Era has built on the Obama administration, and about thinking with Bong Joon-Ho’s film Parasite.

New Books in May

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve extended our Spring Sale through  May 25, which will allow you to pick up some new titles at 50% off this month. Use coupon SPRING50 to save.

In the beautifully illustrated, full-color book  AFRICOBRA, painter, photographer, and cofounder of Chicago arts collective AFRICOBRA Wadsworth A. Jarrell tells the definitive history of the group’s creation, history, and artistic and political principles and the ways it captured the rhythmic dynamism of black culture and social life to create uplifting art for all black people.

Eric Zolov presents a revisionist account of Mexican domestic politics and international relations during the long 1960s in The Last Good Neighbor, tracing how Mexico emerged from the shadow of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy to become a geopolitical player in its own right during the Cold War. Look for a Q&A with Zolov on our blog later this month.

Through innovative readings of gay and lesbian films, Lee Wallace offers a provocative argument in Reattachment Theory that queer experiments in domesticity have profoundly reshaped heterosexual marriage to such an extent that now all marriage is gay marriage.

François Ewald’s The Birth of Solidarity—first published in French in 1986 and appearing here in English for the first time—is one of the most important historical and philosophical studies of the rise of the welfare state. This edition is edited by Melinda Cooper.

Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society in Cloud Ethics, proposing what she calls cloud ethics as a way to hold algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.

In Re-enchanting Modernity, Mayfair Yang examines the reemergence of religious life and ritual after decades of enforced secularized life in the coastal city of Wenzhou, showing how local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism influence economic development and the structure of civil society.

In Writing Anthropology, fifty-two anthropologists reflect on scholarly writing as both craft and commitment, offering insights into the myriad roles of anthropological writing, the beauty and the function of language, the joys and pains of writing, and encouragement to stay at it. This collection is edited by Carole McGranahan.

In Beijing from Below, Harriet Evans tells the history of the residents in Dashalar—now redeveloped and gentrified but once one of the Beijing’s poorest neighborhoods—to show how their experiences complicate official state narratives of Chinese economic development and progress. 

Alex Blanchette explores how the daily lives of a Midwestern town that is home to a massive pork complex were reorganized around the life and death cycles of pigs while using the factory farm as a way to detail the state of contemporary American industrial capitalism in Porkopolis. As the coronavirus tears through meatpacking plants around the U.S., Blanchette’s analysis is highly relevant. We’ll feature a Q&A with him on our blog later in the month.

Drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience, as well as critical phenomenology, genealogy, and feminist theory, Cressida J. Heyes shows how and why experience has edges, and analyzes phenomena that press against them in Anaesthetics of Existence.

In The Government of Beans, Kregg Hetherington uses Paraguay’s turn of the twenty-first century adoption of massive soybean production and the regulatory attempts to mitigate the resulting environmental degradation as a way to show how the tools used to drive economic growth exacerbate the very environmental challenges they were designed to solve.

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New Titles in Asian American Studies

We regret to announce that in the ongoing efforts to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we will be unable to meet with you during the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) conference, which has been cancelled.

We know that many of you look forward to stocking up on new books at special discounts at our conferences, so we are pleased to extend a 50% discount on all in-stock books and journal issues through May 1. Use coupon code SPRING50 to save 50% when ordering online. In addition, if you spend $100 or more, we are offering free shipping to U.S. addresses. Journal subscriptions and society memberships don’t qualify for the 50% discount, but they do count toward the $100 threshold.

Big congratulations to Renisa Mawani, whose book Across Oceans of Law is the winner of the AAAS Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History. The prize committee wrote, “Grappling with the interconnectedness of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans—and the ways in which Asian Indians navigated the reach of the British empire—Mawani shifts our perspectives not only from U.S.-centric histories, but also from terrestrially-bound histories. . . . Mawani is able to ground her conceptual insights, transforming what could have remained an abstract, legal history of maritime law into a richly materialized narrative of mobility, empire, and race.” 

Check out some of the other great titles we would have featured in our booth at AAAS. 

Nandita Sharma traces the development of the categories of migrants and natives from the nineteenth century to the present in Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants to theorize how the idea of people’s rights being tied to geographical notions of belonging came to be.

In a brilliant reinvention of the travel guide, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i, artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai‘i’s culture, complex history, and the effects of colonialism. This volume is edited by Hokulani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez.

Rick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students at the University of Washington as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence into a space based on meaningfulness, respect, and multiple notions of student success in The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University.

In Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania, Maile Arvin analyzes the history of racialization of Polynesians within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i, arguing that a logic of possession through whiteness animates European and Hawaiian settler colonialism.

Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics and film from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present, Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal postsocialist China in Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility.

In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system that is entrenched in and reinforces racial capitalism and patriarchy.

Weaving U.S. history into the larger fabric of world history, the contributors to Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain de-exceptionalize the American empire, placing it in a global transimperial context as a way to grasp the power relations that shape imperial formations. This collection is edited by Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton.

Examining the work of writers and artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Allan deSouza, Kandice Chuh advocates for what she calls “illiberal humanism” as a way to counter the Eurocentric liberal humanism that perpetuates structures of social inequality in The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.”

If you were hoping to connect with one of our editors about your book project at AAAS, please reach out to them by email. See our editors’ specialties and contact information here and our submissions guidelines here. We are now accepting submissions online!

Once again, we’re sorry to miss you in person but hope the 50% discount with free U.S. shipping on orders over $100 will make it possible for you to pick up some new books and journal issues. Use coupon SPRING50 at checkout and see the fine print on the sale here.

Courtney Berger on the Canceled SCMS Conference

Our editors look forward to meeting their authors at conferences every year and are sad to be missing out on that this spring. The annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies would have taken place April 1-5 in Denver this year. We know that many of you look forward to stocking up on new books at special discounts at our conferences, so we are pleased to extend a 50% discount on all in-stock books and journal issues through May 1. In addition, if you spend $100 or more, we are offering free shipping to U.S. addresses. Journal subscriptions and society memberships don’t qualify for the 50% discount, but they do count toward the $100 threshold.

Instead of greeting Executive Editor Courtney Berger in person this year, check out her recommendations for new titles in the discipline and a great round up of other ways to learn about all the new scholarship that was to be presented at the conference.

Hello, SCMSers. I’m sorry that I won’t see you all in person this year. In the past couple of months, we have published an amazing range of new books in film & media studies. I was looking forward to showing them off at the conference.  I hope you’ll go to our website to see the new and forthcoming titles and take advantage of the 50% off sale. (I know, I know. It’s not the same as being able to browse books at the exhibit hall, but it’s the best we’ve got right now.) You can learn about the centrality of the soap opera to the history of American tv production in Elana Levine’s Her Stories, experience the film culture of mid-20^th century Paris with Eric Smoodin in Paris in the Dark, or find out about the environmental publics that emerge in India around radiant technologies like cell-phone towers in Rahul Mukherjee’s Radiant Infrastructures.

There were some exciting panels this year that I was hoping to attend that highlight some emerging areas on Duke’s media studies list. Several panels on environment and media feature work related to the new Elements series, edited by Nicole Starosielski and Stacy Alaimo. Some of these panels will be happening in virtual form during the week, so check them out if you can. Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media is the latest book in the series. Jue submerges key concepts of media—such as storage and transmission—under water, asking us to reconsider conventional notions of media environment. It’s a must read for folks in media studies, in my opinion.

Also, here’s a heads up about an upcoming book series on gaming and game culture called “Power Play” that will be edited by Jen Malkowski and TreaAndrea Russworm. It’s brand new, so no books yet; but keep your eyes open for new books in this area. And if you are into queer gaming culture, check out Bonnie Ruberg’s volume The Queer Games Avant-Garde, which features interviews with 22 queer video game developers and designers.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to Eliza Steinbock, whose book Shimmering Images won this year’s SCMS Best First Book Award. Congratulations, Eliza!

Take care, everyone, and I look forward to seeing you next year.

If you were hoping to connect with Courtney or another of our editors about your book project at SCMS, please reach out to them by email. See our editors’ specialties and contact information here and our new online submissions guidelines here.

We’re also excited to welcome liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies to our publishing program next spring. And don’t forget to check out our great new journal issues in film and media studies, including “On Chantal Akerman” from Camera Obscura, “Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema” from New German Critique, “Scenes of Suffering” from Theater, and “Multimodal Media” from Poetics Today.

Once again, we’re sorry to miss you in person but hope the 50% discount with free U.S. shipping on orders over $100 will make it possible for you to pick up some new books and journal issues. Use coupon SPRING50 at checkout and see the fine print on the sale here.

New Books in April

Curling up on the couch with a great book is an excellent way to practice social distancing this month. All these titles will deliver before our sale ends on May 1, so check our website regularly. You can save 50% on all in-stock titles with coupon SPRING50. 

Tyler Bickford traces the dramatic rise of the “tween” pop music industry in Tween Pop, showing how it marshaled childishness as a key element in legitimizing children’s participation in public culture.

The contributors to Playing for Keeps examine the ways in which musical improvisation can serve as a way to negotiate violence, trauma, systemic inequality, and the aftermaths of war and colonialism. This volume is edited by Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter.

John F. Szwed’s Space is the Place is the definitive biography of Sun Ra—composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn, and a founder of Afrofuturism. We are pleased to be bringing this classic back into print with a new preface.

Micha Rahder explores how multiple ways of knowing the forest of Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve shape conservation practice, local livelihoods, and landscapes in An Ecology of Knowledges.

In Relations, Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of anthropology’s key concept of relation and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world, showing how its evolving use over the last three centuries reflects changing thinking about knowledge-making and kin-making.

In Virtual Pedophilia, Gillian Harkins traces the genealogy of the transformation of cultural construction of the pedophile as a social outcast into the image of normative white masculinity from the 1980s to the present, showing how his “normalcy” makes him hard to identify and stop.

In A People’s History of Detroit, Mark Jay and Philip Conklin use a Marxist framework to tell a sweeping story of Detroit from 1913 to the present, outlining the complex socio-political dynamics underlying major events in Detroit’s past, from the rise of Fordism and the formation of labor unions to deindustrialization and the city’s recent bankruptcy.

In Revolution and Disenchantment, Fadi A. Bardawil explores the hopes for and disenchantments with Marxism-Leninism in the writings and actions of revolutionary intellectuals within the 1960s Arab New Left.

In Tehrangeles Dreaming, Farzaneh Hemmasi draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and musical and textual analysis to examine how the pop music, music videos, and television made by Iranian expatriates express modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran.

The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the black church, theology, mysticism, and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life.

Drawing on Whitman and Adorno, Morton Schoolman proposes aesthetic education through film as a way to redress the political violence inflicted on difference society constructs as its racialized, gendered, Semitic, and sexualized other in A Democratic Enlightenment.

In Kwaito Bodies, Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of Kwaito—a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid.

Reflecting on the experience, philosophy, and practice of Latin American indigenous and Afro-descendant activist-intellectuals who mobilize to defend their territories from large-scale extraction, Arturo Escobar shows in Pluriversal Politics how the key to addressing planetary crises is the creation of the pluriverse—a world of many epistemological and ontological worlds.

The contributors to AIDS and the Distribution of Crises outline the myriad ways that the AIDS pandemic exists within a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises borne of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, and gendered violence. This collection is edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani. It is currently available to read free online as part of our Navigating the Threat of Pandemic syllabus.

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