Ruth Mayer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3852522 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth Mayer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth |
| FAMILY NAME | Mayer |
| SIGNATURE | MAYER R |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7514-5886 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Lagging Behind
This article engages with the temporality of modernity and particularly modern mass culture, focusing on the 1910s revue theater scene in New York City. Following the lead of modernist theories of mass culture, it reads the dance revue as emblematic of modernity. Yet earlier theories of modernity (such as Siegfried Kracauer's seminal 1927 essay "The Mass Ornament") concentrated exclusively on the white revue, whereas this article takes a comparat…
Periodically Queer
This paper will be concerned with the special affordances of periodical writing, taking the modernist little magazine The Masses as its example. This magazine was instrumentally involved in promoting sexual liberation and ‘sex radicalism’ in the United States of the 1910s, and I argue that the – contracted, serial, and contingent – structure of periodical publishing had an incisive impact on the ways in which the magazine responded to and transfi…
Modernity management
This essay approaches the US cinema of the 1920s from the vantage point of the film serial, exploring the contexts of production, exhibition, distribution and reception that are specific to this format during the decade. As a consequence, it foregrounds how the film serial differs markedly in style and language from the contemporaneous feature films. Both film serials and feature films take up the decade’s discourses of efficiency, seriality and …
Die Geburt der Nation als Migrationspraxis. Benedict Anderson
Machinic Fu Manchu
This paper explores the processes of serial narration in view of the serial enactment of Fu Manchu. Its contention is that seriality is a principle rather than a technique and that this principle cannot be deduced to one author, author collective, or instigator. It gains a ‘machinic’ momentum of its own in the course of its unfolding. It is no mere circumstance that the most successful serial narratives—like the Fu Manchu narratives—were initiate…
Grenzgänger
Chinatowns in a Transnational World
Introduction: A Bit of Orient Set Down in the Heart of a Western Metropolis: Chinatown in the United States and Europe Ruth Mayer 1. York After Chinatown: Canal Street and the New World Order John Kuo Wei Tchen 2. Quarters: Maritime Labor, Chinese Migration, and Local Imagination in Rotterdam and Hamburg, 1900-1950 Lars Amenda 3. Cosmopolitan Lifestyles and Yellow Quarters: Traces of Chinese Life in Germany, 1921-1941 Dagmar Yu-Dembski 4. Rehabil…
Image power
This essay explores the workings of popular seriality with respect to the evolution of an ideologically fraught serial figure – Fu Manchu. It focuses on the function of iconicity in this context, taking its point of departure from the pre-Code film The Mask of Fu Manchu of 1932. The film features Boris Karloff in the title role and forges Fu Manchu's iconic image several decades after the figure's literary inception and ensuing crossmedial gestat…
Trans-Pacific Interactions
This book explores particular facets of the history and representation of the Pacific Rim region, focusing on the interactions between the United States and China at the beginning of the twentieth cen
The Things of Civilization, the Matters of Empire
This paper reflects upon the many representations of Jemmy Button, a Fuegian native who was abducted to England and returned to Tierra del Fuego in the first half of the 19th century. Travel and science writers like Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin, W. Parker Snow, and social Darwinist writers such as Max Nordau reflected upon Jemmy Button's life and fate - and their accounts reveal a deep, if changing, fascination with the material aspects of the …
Diaspora
Seit geraumer Zeit lässt sich eine Neuorientierung in den kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Debatten um Migration, Kulturkontakt, Imperialismus und Globalisierung feststellen, in denen der Begriff der Diaspora eine zentrale Rolle spielt. Die diasporische Situation - das (Über-)Leben als ethnische oder kulturelle Gemeinschaft in der Fremde - erweist sich als Paradigma der globalisierten Welt. Der Begriff der Diaspora gestattet, sich globalen Ph…
Virus!
AIDS, Ebola und abstürzende Computer; Fremdkörper, Parasiten und Sleeper; Bio- und Cyberterrorismus, Tierseuchen und zuletzt SARS: Viren zirkulieren derzeit in verschiedensten Bereichen. Dabei erweist sich die Metaphorik des Wortes als ebenso grenzgängerisch und mutierend wie die konkreten Objekte. Sie wird bemüht, um Bedrohungsszenarien und grenzsichernde Maßnahmen durchzusetzen und dient gleichzeitig als Modell für Widerstand und subversive Sel…
Deutsche Aussprache
Image power
This essay explores the workings of popular seriality with respect to the evolution of an ideologically fraught serial figure – Fu Manchu. It focuses on the function of iconicity in this context, taking its point of departure from the pre-Code film The Mask of Fu Manchu of 1932. The film features Boris Karloff in the title role and forges Fu Manchu's iconic image several decades after the figure's literary inception and ensuing crossmedial gestat…
The Things of Civilization, the Matters of Empire
This paper reflects upon the many representations of Jemmy Button, a Fuegian native who was abducted to England and returned to Tierra del Fuego in the first half of the 19th century. Travel and science writers like Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin, W. Parker Snow, and social Darwinist writers such as Max Nordau reflected upon Jemmy Button's life and fate - and their accounts reveal a deep, if changing, fascination with the material aspects of the …
Deutsche Aussprache
Virus!
AIDS, Ebola und abstürzende Computer; Fremdkörper, Parasiten und Sleeper; Bio- und Cyberterrorismus, Tierseuchen und zuletzt SARS: Viren zirkulieren derzeit in verschiedensten Bereichen. Dabei erweist sich die Metaphorik des Wortes als ebenso grenzgängerisch und mutierend wie die konkreten Objekte. Sie wird bemüht, um Bedrohungsszenarien und grenzsichernde Maßnahmen durchzusetzen und dient gleichzeitig als Modell für Widerstand und subversive Sel…
Diaspora
Seit geraumer Zeit lässt sich eine Neuorientierung in den kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Debatten um Migration, Kulturkontakt, Imperialismus und Globalisierung feststellen, in denen der Begriff der Diaspora eine zentrale Rolle spielt. Die diasporische Situation - das (Über-)Leben als ethnische oder kulturelle Gemeinschaft in der Fremde - erweist sich als Paradigma der globalisierten Welt. Der Begriff der Diaspora gestattet, sich globalen Ph…
The Things of Civilization, the Matters of Empire
This paper reflects upon the many representations of Jemmy Button, a Fuegian native who was abducted to England and returned to Tierra del Fuego in the first half of the 19th century. Travel and science writers like Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin, W. Parker Snow, and social Darwinist writers such as Max Nordau reflected upon Jemmy Button's life and fate - and their accounts reveal a deep, if changing, fascination with the material aspects of the …
Trans-Pacific Interactions
This book explores particular facets of the history and representation of the Pacific Rim region, focusing on the interactions between the United States and China at the beginning of the twentieth cen
Grenzgänger
Chinatowns in a Transnational World
Introduction: A Bit of Orient Set Down in the Heart of a Western Metropolis: Chinatown in the United States and Europe Ruth Mayer 1. York After Chinatown: Canal Street and the New World Order John Kuo Wei Tchen 2. Quarters: Maritime Labor, Chinese Migration, and Local Imagination in Rotterdam and Hamburg, 1900-1950 Lars Amenda 3. Cosmopolitan Lifestyles and Yellow Quarters: Traces of Chinese Life in Germany, 1921-1941 Dagmar Yu-Dembski 4. Rehabil…
Image power
This essay explores the workings of popular seriality with respect to the evolution of an ideologically fraught serial figure – Fu Manchu. It focuses on the function of iconicity in this context, taking its point of departure from the pre-Code film The Mask of Fu Manchu of 1932. The film features Boris Karloff in the title role and forges Fu Manchu's iconic image several decades after the figure's literary inception and ensuing crossmedial gestat…
Machinic Fu Manchu
This paper explores the processes of serial narration in view of the serial enactment of Fu Manchu. Its contention is that seriality is a principle rather than a technique and that this principle cannot be deduced to one author, author collective, or instigator. It gains a ‘machinic’ momentum of its own in the course of its unfolding. It is no mere circumstance that the most successful serial narratives—like the Fu Manchu narratives—were initiate…
Die Geburt der Nation als Migrationspraxis. Benedict Anderson
Modernity management
This essay approaches the US cinema of the 1920s from the vantage point of the film serial, exploring the contexts of production, exhibition, distribution and reception that are specific to this format during the decade. As a consequence, it foregrounds how the film serial differs markedly in style and language from the contemporaneous feature films. Both film serials and feature films take up the decade’s discourses of efficiency, seriality and …
Periodically Queer
This paper will be concerned with the special affordances of periodical writing, taking the modernist little magazine The Masses as its example. This magazine was instrumentally involved in promoting sexual liberation and ‘sex radicalism’ in the United States of the 1910s, and I argue that the – contracted, serial, and contingent – structure of periodical publishing had an incisive impact on the ways in which the magazine responded to and transfi…
Lagging Behind
This article engages with the temporality of modernity and particularly modern mass culture, focusing on the 1910s revue theater scene in New York City. Following the lead of modernist theories of mass culture, it reads the dance revue as emblematic of modernity. Yet earlier theories of modernity (such as Siegfried Kracauer's seminal 1927 essay "The Mass Ornament") concentrated exclusively on the white revue, whereas this article takes a comparat…
Philosophy (9 works) · Art (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · History (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · Humanities (3 works)