Suzanne K. Kaufman's Books

Consuming Visions

Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine

By: Suzanne K. Kaufman

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Consuming Visions

Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine

By: Suzanne K. Kaufman

Plastic Madonnas, packaged holy tours, and biblical theme parks can arouse discomfort, laughter, and even revulsion in religious believers and nonbelievers alike. Scholars, too, often see the intermingling of religion and commerce as a corruption of true spirituality. Suzanne K. Kaufman challenges these assumptions in her examination of the Lourdes pilgrimage in late nineteenth-century France.Consuming Visions offers new ways to interpret material forms of worship, female piety, and modern commercial culture. Kaufman argues that the melding of traditional pilgrimage activities with a newly developing mass culture produced fresh expressions of popular faith. For the devout women of humble origins who flocked to the shrine, this intensely exciting commercialized worship offered unprecedented opportunities to connect with the sacred and express their faith in God.New devotional activities at Lourdes transformed the act of pilgrimage: the train became a moving chapel, and popular entertainments such as wax museums offered vivid recreations of visionary events. Using the press and the strategies of a new advertising industry to bring a mass audience to Lourdes, Church authorities remade centuries-old practices of miraculous healing into a modern public spectacle. These innovations made Lourdes one of the most visited holy sites in Catholic Europe.Yet mass pilgrimage also created problems. The development of Lourdes, while making religious practice more democratically accessible, touched off fierce conflicts over the rituals and entertainments provided by the shrine. These conflicts between believers and secularists played out in press scandals across the European continent. By taking the shrine seriously as a site of mass culture, Kaufman not only breaks down the opposition between sacred and profane but also deepens our understanding of commercialized religion as a fundamental feature of modernity itself.

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Page Count

264

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501727354

ISBN 13

9781501727351

Dancing in the Street

Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit

By: Suzanne E. Smith

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Dancing in the Street

Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit

By: Suzanne E. Smith

Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign. Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.

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Page Count

336

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674043839

ISBN 13

9780674043831

Consuming Visions

Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine

By: Suzanne K. Kaufman

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Consuming Visions

Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine

By: Suzanne K. Kaufman

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

264

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501727354

ISBN 13

9781501727351

Book's by Suzanne K. Kaufman

Consuming Visions

Consuming Visions

Dancing in the Street

Dancing in the Street

Consuming Visions

Consuming Visions

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