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Chapter 5 - Air Conditioning

Psychological Realism and the Circulation of “Cool”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2021

Julia A. Walker
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Summary

Noting that theatres were among the first public buildings to install air-cooling technology, Chapter 5 demonstrates how cold compressed air helped audiences engage with actors whose gestural restraint marked the “cool” style of psychological realism. Historicizing mid-twentieth-century models of self, it shows how air conditioning helped facilitate cross-racial identification by priming audiences to project themselves into the enigmatic interiority of characters that were rendered through psychological-realist techniques. With a focus on Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Orfeu Negro, it demonstrates how Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello’s psychological-realist acting helped white audiences identify with their Black characters and reject habituated (racist) ways of looking at Black bodies that were also encoded in the film. Paradoxically, it finds that, even as they were sealed within the contours of their own air-cooled skin, individual white audience members could imaginatively experience a sense of self not premised on the socially symbolic barrier of skin, and were thus conditioned to respond as an intersubjective “thou” to the “I” of Black liberationists in this moment of Civil Rights advocacy and postcolonial struggles throughout the American and Global South.

Type
Chapter
Information
Performance and Modernity
Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage
, pp. 203 - 248
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Air Conditioning
  • Julia A. Walker, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: Performance and Modernity
  • Online publication: 09 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108966870.006
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  • Air Conditioning
  • Julia A. Walker, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: Performance and Modernity
  • Online publication: 09 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108966870.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Air Conditioning
  • Julia A. Walker, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: Performance and Modernity
  • Online publication: 09 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108966870.006
Available formats
×