Upcoming Book Projects
Cruel Modernism: Celebrity, Identification, and Antipathy in U.S. Cinema, 1920-1940
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a number of unusual stars appeared: a man most known for being unrecognizable; an interracial gang of child actors who moved in and out of roles as they aged; misinterpreted suicides; a little girl who played at sex games even as her studio sued those who noticed this play; and a number of publicly unhappy women. Drawing from fan magazines, film performances, and production materials, Cruel Modernism argues that celebrity served a pedagogical function, as odd stars appeared alongside the rise of more traditional Hollywood celebrity culture and provided Americans test cases for empathy’s limits. For, in addition to being the moment at which the studio system was codifying star promotion, this period also saw a number of groups making increasingly public claims for rights as well as governmental care: children, the poor, women, and African Americans, to take a few of the examples considered in this book. I argue that marginal cases of celebrity (and non-celebrity) are crucial for understanding both how stardom is constructed and also how certain identity groups are able to make only partial claims on the privileges that come with such spectacular subjectivity.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a number of unusual stars appeared: a man most known for being unrecognizable; an interracial gang of child actors who moved in and out of roles as they aged; misinterpreted suicides; a little girl who played at sex games even as her studio sued those who noticed this play; and a number of publicly unhappy women. Drawing from fan magazines, film performances, and production materials, Cruel Modernism argues that celebrity served a pedagogical function, as odd stars appeared alongside the rise of more traditional Hollywood celebrity culture and provided Americans test cases for empathy’s limits. For, in addition to being the moment at which the studio system was codifying star promotion, this period also saw a number of groups making increasingly public claims for rights as well as governmental care: children, the poor, women, and African Americans, to take a few of the examples considered in this book. I argue that marginal cases of celebrity (and non-celebrity) are crucial for understanding both how stardom is constructed and also how certain identity groups are able to make only partial claims on the privileges that come with such spectacular subjectivity.
