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oapen-20.500.12657-438202021-01-25T13:51:07Z The Un-Americans Litvak, Joseph Performing Arts Film History & Criticism bic Book Industry Communication::A The arts::AP Film, TV & radio::APF Films, cinema::APFA Film theory & criticism In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names”. 2020-12-15T14:01:10Z 2020-12-15T14:01:10Z 2009 book 9780822390848 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/43820 eng application/pdf n/a external_content.pdf Duke University Press Duke University Press https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390848 103920 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390848 f0d6aaef-4159-4e01-b1ea-a7145b2ab14b b818ba9d-2dd9-4fd7-a364-7f305aef7ee9 9780822390848 Knowledge Unlatched (KU) Duke University Press Knowledge Unlatched open access
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In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names”.
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