• A photograph of a drawing of a crowd watching a theatrical performance inside a nineteenth-century style theatre hall

Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity

By Chris Coffman The Parisian salon hosted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas was unique among queer modernist spaces. Unlike Natalie Barney’s salon emphasizing women, femininity, and Sapphic identity or the cosmopolitan Paris of queer outcasts surveyed in ‘John’…

Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke

Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke

In 2008, I saw Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life, and it changed my life. I had never seen a film that had affected me so intensely and knew that, after that moment, I needed to research this director and his films further. What impacted me the most about Jia’s films were their emotional and affective qualities, and how they evoked feelings that lingered long after the films had ended.
COUNT 4.2

CounterText Special Issue: Afterward/Afterword

CounterText guest editor Norbert Bugeja shares some interesting thoughts about the special issue, Afterward/Afterword, and the important, complex questions it approaches. It is mid-May, a sunny afternoon in Bethlehem. I have arrived here from Ramallah, driving in the midday heat…

Christianity in North Africa and West Asia

Mapping Christianity in North Africa and West Asia

This region, North Africa and West Asia, is where Christianity began, nearly 2,000 years ago. Many Christian communities today trace their histories back over the entire period. At the same time, there is no region in the world where Christians are more at risk of extinction, as civil wars, persecution and economic distress have resulted in a massive exodus of the Christian population. This volume documents that exodus while it is underway.

British Youth Cultures and the Wider World

Pop music and youth culture are known to be among the great British exports of the late twentieth century. Be it teddy boys/girls or The Beatles, mods or the Sex Pistols, football hooligans or the Spice Girls, the seemingly rapid…

Emotion, History and the Arts

Erin Sullivan and Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild are guest editors of a special issue of Cultural History about ‘Emotion, History and the Arts’, published October 2018. Their introduction draws on a wide range of emotionally charged art works from different times and places—including…