Abstract
Ever since Annie Leibovitz’s photos of coders playing computer games made it into the December 7, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, four years after Doug Engelbart staged “the mother of all demos” in San Francisco, digitality has been impressing itself on media, the fashion world, and other forms of popular culture, becoming ubiquitous in everyday life and a powerful source of imaginaries that reflect and reinforce lifestyle desires, aspirations, anxieties, and fears. In this paper we trace how the San Francisco Bay area came to be associated with computer culture, and we show how constitutive elements of its fashion and lifestyle paved the way for technology to become chic by bringing beatnik, dropout and countercultural rebellion to a space dominated by resource extraction, transport and higher education. Our focus is on Apple’s expertise in insinuating itself into personal lifeworlds. Its becoming synonymous with the increasingly personal use of computers took place at the level of technology as well as at the level of images of leadership, with Steve Jobs in his iconic Issey Miyake turtleneck a proto-influencer, paving the way for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s black leather jackets. We will also be examining some of Apple TV+’s offerings to establish how technology and lifestyle complement each other in the imaginaries of boutique streaming television shows.

Bio Blurbs
Susan Ingram is Professor of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where she coordinates the Graduate Diploma in Comparative Literature. She is the general editor of Intellect Book’s Urban Chic series and co-author of the volumes on Berlin, Vienna, and Los Angeles. A past president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and its current web systems administrator, her research interests revolve around the institutions of European cultural modernity and their legacies.

Markus Reisenleitner is also Professor of Humanities at York as well as the Director of the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture and the editor-in-chief of Imaginations: Revue d’études interculturelles de l’image / Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. Before joining York’s Division of Humanities in 2006, he taught at the University of Vienna, the Vienna campus of the University of Oregon’s International Program, the University of Alberta, and Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where he was Head of the Department of Cultural Studies from 2004–2006. His research focusses on the intersections and socio-political implications of popular culture, digital humanities, the urban, and fashion.

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Since they first appeared in the early nineteenth century, periodicals published by and for Black Americans have been essential building blocks of Black American culture. They played unique and powerful roles as community forums, political pedestals, artistic and intellectual cultivators, and tools for both the celebration and advancement of Black American life. This lecture dives into the archives for a discussion of the profound affects that these media had—and continue to have—on Black American culture.

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The mythology surrounding F. Scott Fitzgerald tends to eclipse his fierce devotion to his craft, a commitment animated by many sources, including music. The centennial of what many consider his greatest work, The Great Gatsby, provides ripe opportunity to reconsider our assumptions about it, along with Fitzgerald’s musical sources that are often obscured by the misleading designation of him as “America’s patron saint of the Jazz Age.” Fitzgerald knew very little about Jazz, but readers nevertheless want to read Gatsby as the author’s prose incarnation of it. This talk considers the connections, both viable and far-fetched, between the novel and the musical tropes that inspired it.

Nicole J. Camastra holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as Director of the Signature Scholars Research Program at The O’Neal School in North Carolina. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies and is the author of several essays on American literature. Her recent monograph, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Muse of Romantic Music, was published by McFarland Press in 2023.

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Ernest Hemingway avoided being a political writer. He wrote to the Russian critic Ivan Kashkin in 1935 that an author “owes no allegiance to any government” and that, if any good, “he will never like” the one “he lives under.” Limiting one’s artistic eye to class consciousness, for example, demonstrates a limited talent because “all classes are [the writer’s] province” (Selected Letters 419). Nevertheless, his 1933 story “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” is arguably one of his most implicitly political, for Hemingway was conscious of the difficulties faced by many Americans in the early 1930s, especially Mexican immigrants. In particular, this talk focuses on what Hemingway referred to as the “sugar beet racket” in Montana and the West and on the author’s oft-overlooked sympathy towards the immigrants who powered it.

Nicole J. Camastra holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as Director of the Signature Scholars Research Program at The O’Neal School in North Carolina. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies and is the author of several essays on American literature. Her recent monograph, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Muse of Romantic Music, was published by McFarland Press in 2023.

You can download the poster for the event here.