Following its pivotal contribution to the Allied cause in World War I, Japan became a central architect of an expansive new global infrastructure for peace after 1918. Given America’s failure to join the League of Nations, Japanese fidelity to every pillar of the new infrastructure for peace—the League, the Washington Conference, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the London Conference—became an essential prerequisite for a viable new postwar world. Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and defiance of the new postwar infrastructure for peace was momentous precisely because it was perpetrated by a power so central to its original construction.

This chapter examines the central role of radio and music within the mass media cultures of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, arguing that entertainment broadcasting functioned as a crucial, if often understated, instrument of political legitimation and social cohesion under fascism. The chapter traces the institutional development of German and Italian radio networks, emphasizing their hybrid political and commercial imperatives, and situating radio within a broader media ecology that blurred distinctions between propaganda and entertainment. Through analyses of request concerts, talent competitions, and touring variety programmes, it shows that the regimes cultivated participatory listening practices that integrated audiences into imagined national communities. At the same time, it demonstrates that these projects were inherently unstable due to listener agency and the persistence of distracted listening. The chapter argues for a more nuanced understanding of radio as a political medium whose power under fascism resided less in explicit messaging than in its capacity to produce shared sonic experience.

Comparisons of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism reveal that the two movements bore more similarities than differences and often emulated each other. In their cultural policies, both embraced corporatism in organizing their cultural workforce, both invested heavily in cultural institutions and high-profile events, and, despite their authoritarian and racist practices, both exercised considerable caution in implementing censorship, contrary to postwar assumptions. Following a comparative overview of Nazi and Fascist approaches to architecture, visual art, film and theater, this chapter explores the challenges both systems faced in censoring music. Practiced in a wide range of amateur and professional performance experiences, music was by its very nature extremely difficult to control. Strong rhetoric denouncing ‘alien’ musical forces was far more pronounced in Germany than in Italy, but both countries needed to hold back on aggressive censorship practices that might risk alienating the public. The only arena in which censorship could be effectively imposed was upon Germany’s oppressed Jewish community.

Rather than offering definitive insights into what “Modernist Aesthetics in Pahlavi Iran” constitutes, this chapter argues that the movement away from the dominant ways of reading modernist aesthetics requires a departure from the question of “existence” and “discovery” toward critical processes of “invention,” where acts of close reading and paradigms of comparison tease out, invent, and imagine alternatives to modernity by attending to the tensions between a text and its many contexts. Rather than sentencing texts to follow the interpretive fate of their modernist Euro-American counterparts, we can think of the critiques of the modern situation, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s formulation, that call into question the imagined identity of this present with itself and interrogate the metaphysics of continuity and rupture. The implications of such readings far extend the imaginary borders of aesthetics and gesture toward new forms of political relationality. Informed by the famed modernist poet Nīmā Yūshīj’s “anxious aesthetics,” the chapter explores these ideas through a reading of Férydoun Rahnéma’s short documentary film, Takht-e Jamshid (Persepolis, 1960).

The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

The chapter addresses: What Is a Motion Picture?; What Is an Instructional Video?; What Is the Role of Instructional Video in Education and Training?; Are Instructional Videos Effective? And How Can We Design Effective Instructional Videos?

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen’s relationship to audiovisual art forms. Given Bowen’s own relative lack of interest in film, one may wonder why adaptation should be included in an overall analysis of her work and its impact. One argument is largely commercial: be it through television, film, or radio, dramatisations of Bowen’s works contribute to increased public scrutiny of her fiction. For those already familiar with Bowen’s fiction, adaptations revitalise readings of her fiction. How her texts correspond to traditions and tropes of other media tells us much about the interplay of genres – from novel of manners and social satire to spy story or historical fiction – as they manifest themselves in the traditions of those media. Ultimately, an adaptation is also an interpretation and analysis of its source text. This examination of adaptations focuses on The Last September and The Heat of the Day, two of Bowen’s most-read works. These adaptations are the best known and most accessible audiovisual adaptations of her fiction.

Chapter 4 considers how race and racism were presented in post-war television and film. Much of this chapter focuses on blacking-up practices on television, the success of The Black and White Minstrel Show with white audiences, and its defence by white producers, audiences and the press, when Black audiences in Britain protested against it in 1967 through the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD). It also traces the post-war life of the empire film content discussed in Chapter 2, when these films were consistently broadcast on both the BBC and ITV before the watershed and at ‘family viewing times’. The chapter also examines the broader enduring popularity of blacking-up practices on screen in the post-war period.

Chapter 2 outlines what ultimately made it to the screen when presenting racialised people, places and themes to British audiences from 1900 to the end of World War II. It concentrates on the thinking behind the production of the popular empire feature films, documentaries about empire and home movies of blacked-up Britons in the early twentieth century by white Britons such as John Grierson at the Empire Marketing Board and GPO Film Units, and William Sellers, director of the Colonial Film Unit during World War II. The chapter further outlines the ‘counter-storytelling’ that audiences of colour offered when encountering this material in film screenings in both Europe and the colonies and their varied responses to the racism on screen, including laughter.

In 1969, Franco Zeffirelli invited Cohen to Italy to discuss scoring his film Brother Sun, Sister Moon. The collaboration did not advance, but in 1971 German director Rainer Fassbinder used Cohen’s songs for Beware the Holy Whore. A few years later, Robert Altman chose to use four songs from Cohen’s first album for the soundtrack of McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), for which Cohen also wrote some new material that Altman did not use. Since then, Cohen’s songs have been used in over 300 films and TV episodes. Roger Young’s Kiss the Sky (1998) includes eight Cohen songs on the soundtrack, and the film echoes themes that run throughout Cohen’s work. Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) was inspired by Cohen’s song. “Hallelujah” has been used prominently in numerous films and television episodes, including Shrek, The West Wing, and Saturday Night Live. Cohen was also directly involved in the production of several films, including I Am a Hotel (1983), which features the surreal interactions of several sets of lovers at a hotel. This chapter explores the relationship of Cohen’s music and lyrics to these films and assess their role in his career.

Cultural exchange was another critically important mechanism for influencing popular emotions. This chapter looks at Sino-North Korean exchanges in theater, film, and the arts. It argues that these exchanges reached large audiences in both countries while inculcating official emotions.

A survey of drama and performance in the period 1975-1980, with emphasis on the innovative plays and experimental productions that appeared in New York in 1976, along with consideration of surrounding developments in visual art, literature, film, and music, and attention to the politics of these transitional years.

A comprehensive examination of the plays and prose of Adrienne Kennedy, with particular focus on two works she premiered in 1976: A Rat’ s Mass / Procession in Shout, an operatic adaptation of her early play A Rat’ s Mass, composed and directed by the jazz composer and pianist Cecil Taylor; and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, a play derived from Kennedy’s fascination with Hollywood film and her memory of her brother’s devastating car accident. The chapter also explores Kennedy’s experiments in visual art, with particular attention to her own and her mother’s scrapbooks, her assemblage of photographed objects ("Cherished Objects from the Past"), her use of quotation, and the mixed-media nature of her manuscripts.