| blaxplotation film | A crime film genre that features a swaggering black hero, catering to black audiences.
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| commedia dell'arte | [kuh-MAY-de-uh del-AR-the] Italian, "comedy of art"; an Italian theatrical genre from the sixteenth century, using puppets and stock characters, with a strong streak of improvisation. Highly influential later on live theater in Italy and elsewhere.
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| conceptual art | A Late Modern art movement in which the concept or idea of the proposed art is more important than the means for its execution.
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| Deconstruction | In Post-Modern literary analysis, a set of practices for analyizing and critiquing a text to "deconstruct" its actual meaning and language.
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| electronic music | Music produced using electronic means, usually with a synthesizer and/or a computer.
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| environmental art | A Post-Modern art form that uses the environment, including stone, earth, and water, so as to create a natural-looking artwork. Environmental art is ephemeral, as it tends to revert to its primary elements over time—thus echoing the ever-changing world of nature.
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| high tech | In architecture, a style that uses obvious industrial design elements with exposed parts serving as decorations.
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| hip-hop | In Post-Modern popular culture, after 1970, an eclectic trend among African Americans and Hispanic Americans, drawing on break dancing, graffiti art, rap rhyming, and disc jockeys playing with turntables and "scratch" effects; highly influential on today's youth culture, popular music, film, and dance styles.
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| installation art | A boundary-challenging type of art born in the 1960s that creates architectural tableaux, using objects drawn from and making references to artistic sources (such as music, painting, sculpture, and theater) and the workaday world (such as everyday tasks, media images, and foodstuffs) and that may include a human presence. Associated with the work of Ann Hamilton.
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| liberation theology | A reform movement, which began in the late 1960s among Roman Catholic priests and nuns in Latin America, blending Christian teachings on social and economic justice with Marist theory. After this movement went global, the Vatican withdrew its support in the 1980s, though liberation theology remains an underground force in some parts of the world today.
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| magic realism | A literary and artistic style identified with Latin American Post-Modernism that mixes realistic and supernatural elements to create imaginary or fantastic scenes.
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| Neoclassicism | In the late third century b.c., an artistic movement in the disintegrating Hellenistic world that sought inspiration in the Athenian Golden Age of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.; and, since 1970, Neoclassicism has been a highly visible submovement in Post-Modernism, particularly prominent in painting and architecture, that restates the principles of Classical art-balance, harmony, idealism.
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| Neoexpressionis | A submovement in Post-Modernism, associated primarily with painting, that offers social criticism and is concerned with the expression of the artist's feelings.
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| Neorealism | A submovement in Post-Modernism that is based on a photographic sense of detail and harks back to many of the qualities of nineteenth-century Realism.
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| Neoromanticism | A Post-Modern movement in music, starting after 1970, which rejects atonality and draws inspiration from the music of the Romantic period.
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| nihilism | The denial of any objective ground of truth, and, in particular, moral truths.
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| paradigm shift | The exchange of one worldview or perspective for another, as, for example, the shift from earth-centered astronomy to sun-centered astronomy between 1550 and 1700; a paradigm is an unconsciously agreed-on pattern of thought in a scientific discipline and, by extension, any shared set of beliefs and habits of thought; a term coined by Thomas Kuhn.
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| Post-Modernism | An artistic, cultural, and intellectual movement, originating in about 1970, that is more optimistic than Modernism, embraces an open-ended and democratic global civilization, freely adapts elements of high culture and mass culture, and manifests itself chiefly through revivals of earlier styles, giving rise to Neoclassicism, Neoexpressionism, and Neorealism.
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| Post-Structuralism | In analytical theory, a set of techniques, growing out of structuralism, which were used to show that meaning is shifting and unstable.
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| synthesizer | [SIN-thuh-size-uhr] An electronic apparatus with a keyboard capable of duplicating the sounds of many musical instruments, popular among Post-Modernist composers and musicians.
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| video art | A type of art made with a video monitor, or monitors; produced using either computerized programs or handheld cameras; can be ephemeral or permanent.
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