A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY82 start with P start with P
The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, café culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture.
Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari
Panthers, Hulks, and Ironhearts offers the first comprehensive study of how Marvel has reimagined what a superhero might look like in the twenty-first century. It examines how they have revitalized older characters like Black Panther and Luke Cage, while creating new ones like Latina superhero Miss America. Furthermore, it considers the mixed fan responses to Marvel’s recasting of certain “legacy heroes,” including a Pakistani-American Ms. Marvel, a Korean-American Hulk, and a whole rainbow of multiverse Spidermen.
If the superhero comic is a quintessentially American creation, then how might the increasing diversification of Marvel’s superhero lineup reveal a fundamental shift in our understanding of American identity? This timely study answers those questions and considers what Marvel’s comics, TV series, and films might teach us about stereotyping, Orientalism, repatriation, whitewashing, and identification.
An examination of the American fascination with conspiracy and the distrust it sows
The recent popularity of The DaVinci Code and The Matrix trilogy exemplifies the fascination Americans have with conspiracy-driven subjects. Though scholars have suggested that in modern times the JFK assassination initiated an industry of conspiracy (i.e., Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Area 51, Iran-Contra Affair), Samuel Chase Coale reminds us in this book that conspiracy is foundational in American culture—from the apocalyptic Biblical narratives in early Calvinist households to the fear of Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant populations in the 19th century.
Coale argues that contemporary culture—a landscape characterized by doubt, ambiguity, fragmentation, information overload, and mistrust—has fostered a radical skepticism so pervasive that the tendency to envision or construct conspiracies often provides the best explanation for the chaos that surrounds us.
Conspiracy as embodied in narrative form provides a fertile field for explorations of the anxiety lying at the heart of the postmodern experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Paradise, Joan Didion's Democracy, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, and Paul Auster's New York City Trilogy are some of the texts Coale examines for their representations of isolated individuals at the center of massive, anonymous master plots that lay beyond their control. These narratives remind us that our historical sense of national identity has often been based on the demonizing of others and that American fiction arose and still flourishes with apocalyptic visions.
"A remarkable look at a remote society [and] an engaging memoir that testifies to a loving partnership . . . compelling."—James Idema, Chicago Tribune
Fans, fandoms, and fan practices are no longer the realm of media and popular culture; they have been adopted and co-opted across the contemporary political terrain. This volume offers specific examples and suggests approaches that can help make sense of the constantly shifting interaction between fandom and politics.
Contributors:
Alfred Archer, Renee Barnes, Simone Driessen, Xing Fan, Monica Flegel, Zoe Hurley, Bethan Jones, Sklaerenn Le Gallo, Judith Leggatt, Georgina Mills, Peng Qiao, James Rendell, Mel Stanfill, Michelle Stewart, Rebecca Williams, Christina Wurst
How did inexpensive posters influence nationalism in the decades leading up to and succeeding the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947? If mechanically reproduced images that occupy public spaces reflect the aesthetics of the “masses,” what can a critical interpretation of subcontinental popular visual culture in the mid-twentieth century reveal about the formation of communal identities?
In this essay, Yousuf Saeed studies the selective deification of leaders fighting for Indian independence. He highlights the biased representation within the domain of “patriotic” posters of the time and the evolving portrayal of religious minority communities in India’s popular print culture over subsequent decades. Also charts the turn popular print culture took in post-Partition Pakistan, Saeed focuses on the country’s thriving industry of Sufi-saint posters. Partitioning Bazaar Art is a timely exploration of how nationalism can be defined through popular imagery.
The actors, directors, producers, and agents examined here include Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and Adah Isaacs Menken, whose personal lives and careers traded on the same-sex erotics of "true love" in the antebellum period; Elisabeth Marbury, Elsie de Wolfe, Elsie Janis, Nance O'Neil, and Alla Nazimova, whose intimate female liaisons were variously interpreted around the turn of the century; the "lavender marriages" of Alfred Lunt to Lynne Fontanne and Guthrie McClintic to Katharine Cornell; the lesbian collaborations of Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford; the comic antics of Monty Woolley, which negotiated codified constructions of homosexual perversion in the post-Freudian interwar years; and the on- and offstage performances of Mary Martin and Joe Cino, which resisted the paranoid enforcements of heterosexual normality in the McCarthy era. Central to these investigations are the complex connections of performances of sexuality and gender and their different implications for men and women practitioners working under pervasive sexism and homophobia.
The volume also includes striking archival photographs of the performers and their performances, and an index to facilitate the cross-referencing of subjects' intersecting careers. Passing Performances will engage both general and academic readers interested in theater, gay and lesbian history, American studies, and biography.
Robert A. Schanke is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Division of Fine Arts, Central College, Iowa. Kim Marra is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Iowa.
Passionate Journeys explores the fascinating stories behind the Bhagwan Rajneesh phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on women who left families, careers, and identities to join the community of Rajneeshpuram. Rajneesh was a spiritual leader for thousands of young Americans, and in rural Oregon his devotees established a thriving community. Marion S. Goldman's extensive interviews with women who participated at Rajneeshpuram provide a fascinating picture of the cultural and social climate that motivated successful, established women to join such a movement.
Passionate Journeys will appeal to specialists in feminist theory and women's studies, sociology, religious studies, American studies, and the history of the Northwest.
Marion S. Goldman is Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon. She is also the author of Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode.
Combining historical research with the insights of social movement theory, Pathways to Prohibition shows how a locally based, moderate strategy allowed the early-twentieth-century prohibition crusade both to develop a potent grassroots component and to transcend the limited scope of local politics. Szymanski describes how the prohibition movement’s strategic shift toward moderate goals after 1900 reflected the devolution of state legislatures’ liquor licensing power to localities, the judiciary’s growing acceptance of these local licensing regimes, and a collective belief that local electorates, rather than state legislatures, were best situated to resolve controversial issues like the liquor question. "Local gradualism" is well suited to the porous, federal structure of the American state, Szymanski contends, and it has been effectively used by a number of social movements, including the civil rights movement and the Christian right.
Beneath the glitzy surface of the resorts and the seemingly cookie-cutter suburban sprawl of Las Vegas lies a vibrant and diverse ethnic life. People of varied origins make up the population of nearly two million and yet, until now, little mention of the city has been made in studies and discussion of ethnicity or immigration. The Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces fills this void by presenting the work of seventeen scholars of history, political science, sociology, anthropology, law, urban studies, cultural studies, literature, social work, and ethnic studies to provide profiles of thirteen of the city’s many ethnic groups. The book’s introduction and opening chapters explore the historical and demographic context of these groups, as well as analyze the economic and social conditions that make Las Vegas so attractive to recent immigrants. Each group is the subject of the subsequent chapters, outlining migration motivations and processes, economic pursuits, cultural institutions and means of transmitting culture, involvement in the broader community, ties to homelands, and recent demographic trends.
Klaver applies post-structuralist theories of subjectivity to drama while ranging through Beckett’s plays, National Hockey League games, “The Tonight Show,” gay and lesbian drama, minority drama, avant-garde performance, and the topics of theatrical paranoia, the mediatized Imaginary, and the spectatorial gaze.
As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.
Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons.
In Persons and Things, Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds.
The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us.
By tracing the publication history of The Phantom in magazines and comic books across international markets since the mid-1930s, author Kevin Patrick delves into the largely unexplored prehistory of modern media licensing industries. He also explores the interconnections between the cultural, political, economic, and historical factors that fueled the character’s international popularity. The Phantom Unmasked offers readers a nuanced study of the complex cultural flow of American comic books around the world. Equally important, to provide a rare glimpse of international comics fandom, Patrick surveyed the Phantom’s “phans”—as they call themselves—and lets them explain how and why they came to love the world’s first masked superhero.
The fifteen essays in this volume demonstrate the way in which phenomenological approaches can illuminate popular culture studies, and in so doing they take on the entire range of popular culture.
The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres—illustration and narrative painting—that blurred the line between the visual and textual.
Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.
Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.
In eight brilliant essays, Fox explores many of the major playas of the American West , examining locations as diverse as Nellis Air Force Base and Frenchman Flat, where the federal government has tested experimental aircraft and atomic weaponry; the Great Salt Lake Desert, where land-speed records have been broken; and the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada, site of the colorful Burning Man arts festival. He analyzes the geological and climatological conditions that created the playas and the historical role that playas played in the exploration and settlement of the West. And he offers lucid and keenly perceptive discussions of the ways that artists have responded to the playas, from the ancient makers of geoglyphs to the work of contemporary artists who have found inspiration in these enigmatic spaces, including earthworks builder Michael Heizer, photographer Richard Misrach, and painter Michael Moore. The ensemble is a compelling combination of natural history, philosophy, and art criticism, a thoughtful meditation on humankind's aversion to and fascination with the void.
From 1940 to 1989, nearly every hotel on the Las Vegas Strip employed a full-time band or orchestra. After the late 1980s, when control of the casinos changed hands from independent owners to corporations, almost all of these musicians found themselves unemployed. Played Out on the Strip traces this major shift in the music industry through extensive interviews with former musicians.
In 1989, these soon-to-be unemployed musicians went on strike. Janis McKay charts the factors behind this strike, which was precipitated by several corporate hotel owners moving to replace live musicians with synthesizers and taped music, a strategic decision made in order to save money. The results of this transitional period in Las Vegas history were both long-lasting and far-reaching for the entertainment industry. With its numerous oral history interviews and personal perspectives from the era, this book will appeal to readers interested in Las Vegas history, music history, and labor issues.
-William Coco
"At last---a book documenting the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway theater. Playing Underground is an insightful, illuminating, and honest appraisal of this important period in American theater."
-Rosalyn Drexler, author of Art Does (Not!) Exist and Occupational Hazard
"An epic movie of an epic movement, Playing Underground is a book the world has waited for without knowing it. How precisely it captures the evolution of our revolution! I am amazed by the book's scope and scale, and I bless its author especially for giving two greats, Paul Foster and H. M. Koutoukas, their proper, polar places, and for memorializing such unjustly forgotten masterpieces as Irene Fornes's Molly's Dream and Jeff Weiss's A Funny Walk Home. Stephen Bottoms's vivid evocation of the grand adventure of Off-Off Broadway has woken and broken my heart. It is difficult to believe that he was not there alongside me to breathe the caffeine-nicotine-alkaloid-steeped air."
-Robert Patrick, author of Kennedy's Children and Temple Slave
Few books address the legendary age of 1960s off-off Broadway theater. Fortunately, Stephen Bottoms fills that gap with Playing Underground---the first comprehensive history of the roots of off-off Broadway.
This is a theater whose legacy is still felt today: it was the launching pad for many leading contemporary theater artists, including Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and others, and it was a pivotal influence on improv comedy and shows like Saturday Night Live.
Off-off Broadway groups such as the Living Theatre, La Mama, and Caffe Cino captured the spirit of nontraditional theater with their edgy, unscripted, boundary-crossing subjects. Yet, as Bottoms discovers, there is no one set of truths about off-off Broadway to uncover; the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than a singular, concrete reality.
No other author has managed to illuminate this shifting tableau as Bottoms does. Through interviews with dozens of the era's leading playwrights, performers, directors, and critics, he unearths a countercultural theater movement that was both influential and transforming-yet ephemeral and quintessentially of its moment.
Playing Underground will be a definitive work on the subject, offering a complete picture of an important but little-studied period in American theater.
Ranging from the humorous to the ironic, from the personal to the theoretical, and from sports as dissimilar as baseball and rugby, gambling and karate, this issue explains fandom itself and explores the intersections of sport and politics, sport and class, and sport and identity. One timely essay addresses the use of Native American imagery and nicknames and the recent NCAA ban on these references. Another classifies gambling as a popular American sport, one that in 2003 attracted three times as many attendees as all Major League Baseball franchises combined. Another essay delves into the history of the golfing mecca of Pinehurst, North Carolina, discussing the resort’s roots in the age of Jim Crow. Among the other topics addressed in this issue are how soccer fandom and commodity culture can be one and the same; why Liverpool’s 2005 victory in the European Champion’s League proves that God is red; and why the Olympic Games can represent performative nationalism.
Contributors. David L. Andrews, Amy Bass, Norman K. Denzin, Grant Farred, Keya Ganguly, John Hartley, Jane Juffer, Liz Moor, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Annie Paul, George Ritzer, Jim Shepard, Orin Starn, Kenneth Surin
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant defines his "poetics of relation"--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.S. multiculturalism. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses--telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings--is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies.
This translation of Glissant's work preserves the resonating quality of his prose and makes the richness and ambiguities of his voice accessible to readers in English.
"The most important theoretician from the Caribbean writing today. . . . He is central not only to the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies, but also to the newly flourishing literary scene in the French West Indies." --Judith Graves Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center. Betsy Wing's recent translations include Lucie Aubrac's Outwitting the Gestapo (with Konrad Bieber), Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault and Hélêne Cixous's The Book of Promethea.
Engaging the works of critics such as Chandra Mohanty, Barbara Harlow, Claribel Alegria, Albie Sachs, and Audre Lorde, among others, Mary DeShazer reconceptualizes traditional notions of resistance and literature and the relationship between them. She argues that women’s voices have been underrepresented in previous analyses of Third World resistance poetry, and that when examined collectively, their work reveals overtly gendered concerns that distinguish it from that of their male counterparts.
DeShazer defines resistance as an active quest for justice and a means of collective empowerment. She looks at the diasporic consciousness of exiled and dislocated women, examines the tensions between claims of identity and claims of difference, and explores the ways in which gender and struggle connect women across nationalities and historical imperatives. Her analysis of Salvadoran and South African women’s poetry reveal the ways in which poetic conventions can be seen as “political declarations of privilege,” casting a new light on women’s resistance poetry in the United States.
Although critics have attested to the importance of the visual arts to literary modernists and have begun to explore the relationships between literary production and social institutions, before now no one has examined the particular institutions in which modernist poets found the artworks, specimens, and other artifacts that inspired their literary innovations. Catherine Paul's book offers the reader a fresh encounter with modernism that will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies and museum studies.
Catherine Paul is Associate Professor of English, Clemson University.
The poets of the era voiced their opinions on virtually every subject. They wrote about New Deal agencies, they praised and condemned Hoover and Roosevelt. They expressed their views about the Supreme Court, the third term, and the approaching war in Europe. The resulting study, arranged topically rather than chronologically, provides a unique perspective on American popular culture and American politics.
The collection covers a broad range of subjects and concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and the arts, including fetal alcohol syndrome, education, and identity; representations of disability in the visual arts and the complicated position of the disabled spectator; the impact of cancer on the patient and the caregiver; the similarities between beauty pageants and freak shows; Alzheimer's disease; prosthetic devices; the mechanized disabled body; disability and performance; and profiles of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, Christopher Reeve, Franklin Roosevelt, and sado-masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan.
Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture was originally published as a special double issue of the well regarded literary magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review. Now available in a single, convenient paperback volume, its broad range of perspectives on disability and its entertaining and engaging selections will appeal to general readers, scholars, and students alike.
Susan Crutchfield is lecturer in English, University of Michigan. Marcy Epstein teaches literature at The Roeper School and women's studies at Henry Ford Community College.
Poker is an extraordinary worldwide phenomenon with major social, cultural, and political implications, and Poker: The Parody of Capitalism investigates the game of poker as a cultural expression of significance not unlike art, literature, film, or music. Tracing the history of poker and comparing the evolution of the game to the development of capitalism, Ole Bjerg complicates prevalent notions of “casino capitalism” and correspondingly facile and simplistic comparisons of late capitalism and poker. By employing Slavoj Žižek’s threefold distinction between imaginary-symbolic-real as a philosophical framework to analyze poker and to understand the basic strategies of the game, Bjerg explores the structural characteristics of poker in relation to other games, making a clear distinction between poker and other gambling games of pure chance such as roulette and craps. With its combination of social theory and empirical research, Poker offers an engaging exploration of a cultural trend.
"Poker is a theoretically sophisticated, highly original and innovative treatment of a contemporary social phenomenon, and contributes greatly to our understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalism."
—Charles Livingstone, Monash University Australia
A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced--and resisted--politics and power.
This volume, edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor, presents a diverse and stimulating group of interconnected essays that respond to these questions by infusing biopolitical material and theory into ecocentric studies of medieval life. The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain pursues the political power of sovereign law as it disciplines and manages various forms of natural life, and discloses the literary biopolitics played out in texts that work out the fraught interactions of life and law, in all its forms. Contributors to this volume explore such issues as legal networks and death, Arthurian bare life, Chaucerian medical biopolitics, the biopolitics of fur, ecologies of sainthood, arboreal political theology, conservation and political ecology, and geographical melancholy.
Bringing together both established and rising critical voices, The Politics of Ecology creates a place for cutting-edge medievalist ecocriticism focused on the intersections of land, life, and law in medieval English, French, and Latin literature.
With crisp, engaging prose, Borenstein leaps from Harry Potter into an exploration of the culture wars and moral panics sparked by the development of Western-inspired children’s culture, extending back into the Soviet period and through the invasion of Ukraine, guiding us along a path as treacherous and intriguing, with as many surprising characters, dark corners, and historical side streets, as the wizarding world’s Diagon Alley. As cultural products pitched ostensibly to children, the Harry Potter books and films became the perfect objects for criticism, translation, adaptation, parody, attack, mimicry, and meme-making, allowing Russians to carve out their own space in the worldwide market of magical multiverses.
"Polka Heartland" captures the beat that pulses in the heart of Midwestern culture--the polka--and offers up the fascinating history of how "oompah-pah" came to be the sound of middle America. From the crowded dance tent at Pulaski Polka Days to an off-the-grid Mexican polka dance in small-town Wisconsin, "Polka Heartland" explores the people, places, and history behind the Midwest's favorite music.
From polka's surprising origin story as a cutting-edge European fad to an exploration of the modern-day polka scene, author Rick March and photographer Dick Blau take readers on a joyful romp through this beloved, unique, and richly storied genre. "Polka Heartland" describes the artists, venues, instruments, and music-makers who have been pivotal to polka's popularity across the Midwest and offers six full-color photo galleries to immerse readers in today's vibrant polka scene.
This book takes another look at politics and popular culture. The author has tried to explain the politics of popular culture as part of historical and cultural processes, helping the reader understand not only how popular culture has affected our politics, but also where it is taking us.
Popular Abstracts is a reference tool providing access to information appearing in past issues of three journals published by the Bowling Green Popular Press. Abstracts are included for each article appearing in the first ten volumes of The Journal of Popular Culture (1967–1977), the first five volumes of The Journal of Popular Film (1972–1977), and the first four volumes of Popular Music and Society (1971–1975).
Popular Culture in America was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This book collects some of the best work from the journal Cultural Correspondence (1975–83), which editor Paul Buhle calls "the first political journal of culture to assume its readers (and writers) watched television." The twenty-four contributors are part of a new generation of cultural critics and historians who are self-conscious products of the mass culture of the fifties and sixties. Their work attempts to update an elementary democratic principle - that people seek understanding and solutions, real or fanciful, through the mechanisms available to them. Although these writers condemn the manipulative qualities of commercial culture, they just as vehemently reject most of what has passed for Marxist (or liberal or conservative) orthodoxy on popular culture. Americans, they argue, have had a unique opportunity as well as a unique need to make the most of popular culture; the collective cultural experience is our only shared past. The richness and vitality of that culture is the focus of this book.
The thirty-four essays work toward an understanding of American mass culture not through abstraction but by exploring the real pleasures of ordinary people's lives. Pulp literature (utopian and horror themes, sports and nurse novels, and contemporary science fiction); radio thrillers; TV horror movies: television evangelists; sitcoms; music (polka, country-western, blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll); comic strips (Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Zippy); women's humor—these and other topics are given sensitive, detailed—sometimes humorous—attention. Paul Buhle's essay, "The 1960s Meet the 1980s," discusses popular culture scholarship, drawing on a wide range of theory—the Frankfort School, art history, literary criticism, and social science approaches. Buhle argues for the importance of this scholarship as a way of understanding "that missed connection between the cultural promise of a richly diverse, democratic society and the reality at hand."
The culture of the Middle Ages was as complex, if not as various, as our own, as the essays in this volume ably demonstrate. The essays cover a wide range of tipics, from church sculpture as "advertisement" to tricks and illusions as "homeeconomics."
This edited collection offers evocative ways into an international selection of popular music, from the Ecuadorian indie scene to Chinese rock. In exploring the experiences of musicians, fans, industry professionals, and academics, the rich complexity of popular music is brought to life through ethnography as an immersive approach to both undertaking and communicating research.
Experimenting with ethnography through the joys and tribulations of musical production, fandom, and scholarship, the contributors critically consider what it means to be a popular music ethnographer and what it means to take an ethnographic approach to studying popular music.
In addition to the critical essays, shorter vignettes are provided by musicians, venue owners, music writers, live music photographers, and fans. Altogether, the book explores the practices, places, and identities behind the music.
Jack Fritscher sifts through legends of sorcery and the twisted history of witchcraft, including the casting of spells and incantations, with a focus on the growing role of witchcraft in popular culture and its mainstream commercialization through popular music, Broadway, Hollywood, and politics. As seriously historical as it is fun to read, there is no other book like it.
The Middle English romance has elicited throughout the centuries a curious mixture of indifference,hostile apprehension, and contempt that perhaps no other literature—except its most likely offspring, modern best-sellers—has provoked.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.
What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.
Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.
Sarah E. Van De Vort Emery, a Michigan woman transplanted from the Finger Lakes region of New York, was for many years a voice for Populism in the late 19th century. Emery was a woman who believed and acted on her beliefs that freedom and the flowering of the human potential should not five way to the demands of the "money power."
A study of Cuban culture and media in the twenty-first century as both a global phenomenon and a local reality, at a time when the declared death of socialism coexists in tension with emerging anticapitalist movements worldwide.
Why does Cuban socialism endure as an object of international political desire, while images of capitalist markets consume Cuba’s national imagination? This bold new study argues that Cuba’s changing media cultures are key to our understanding of the global postsocialist condition and its competing political imaginaries.
Portable Postsocialisms calls on a vast multimedia archive to offer a groundbreaking cultural interpretation of Cuban postsocialism. Paloma Duong examines songs, artworks, advertisements, memes, literature, jokes, and networks that refuse exceptionalist and exoticizing visions of Cuba. Expanding postsocialist critical theory to read this complex mediascape, Duong argues that a materialist critique of Cuba’s revolutionary legacy must account for Cubans’ everyday demands for agency and self-representation. This long overdue reassessment of Cuba’s place in Latin American and post-Marxist studies shows Cuban postsocialism to be an urgent and indispensable referent for core debates on the politics of participatory cultures in new media studies. Portable Postsocialisms performs the crucial task of redefining how we envision imaginaries of social change in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Pretty in Punk combines autobiography, interviews, and sophisticated analysis to create the first insider’s examination of the ways punk girls resist gender roles and create strong identities.
Why would an articulate, intelligent, thoughtful young women shave off most of her hair, dye the remainder green, shape it into a mohawk, and glue it onto her head? What attracts girls to male-dominated youth subcultures like the punk movement? What role does the subculture play in their perceptions of themselves, and in their self-esteem? How do girls reconcile a subcultural identity that is deliberately coded “masculine” with the demands of femininity?
Research has focused on the ways media and cultural messages victimize young women, but little attention has been paid to the ways they resist these messages. In Pretty in Punk, Lauraine Leblanc examines what happens when girls ignore these cultural messages, parody ideas of beauty, and refuse to play the games of teenage femininity. She explores the origins and development of the punk subculture, the processes by which girls decide to “go punk,” patterns of resistance to gender norms, and tactics girls use to deal with violence and harassment.
Pretty in Punk takes readers into the lives of girls living on the margins of contemporary culture. Drawing on interviews with 40 girls and women between the ages of 14-37, Leblanc examines the lives of her subjects, illuminating their forms of rebellion and survival. Pretty in Punk lets readers hear the voices of these women as they describe the ways their constructions of femininity—from black lipstick to slamdancing—allow them to reject damaging cultural messages and build strong identities. The price they pay for resisting femininity can be steep—girls tell of parental rejection, school expulsion, institutionalization, and harassment. Leblanc illuminates punk girls’ resistance to adversity, their triumphs over tough challenges, and their work to create individual identities in a masculine world.
Private Eyes is the complete map to what Raymond Bhandler called "the mean streets," the exciting world of the fictional private eye. It is intended to entertain current PI fans and to make new ones.
American crime fiction has developed into writing that has a commitment to democracy and the democratic way of life, a compassion and empathy and a style which has created a significant branch of American literature.
Chapter by chapter, the book analyzes the stars' best-known and best-loved roles, including Martin as Nellie in South Pacific, Merman as Momma Rose in GypsyAndrews as Eliza in My Fair Lady and Guinevere in Camelot, and Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. The final chapter scrutinizes the Broadway and film versions of The Sound of Music, illuminating its place in the hearts of lesbian spectators and the "delicious queerness" of Andrews's troublesome nun. As the first feminist and lesbian study of the American Broadway musical, A Problem Like Maria is a groundbreaking contribution to feminist studies, queer studies, and American studies and a delight for fans of musical theater.
Stacy Wolf is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas, Austin.
"Profession of Medicine is a challenging monograph; the ideas presented are stimulating and thought provoking. . . . Given the expanding domain of what illness is and the contentions of physicians about their rights as professionals, Freidson wonders aloud whether expertise is becoming a mask for privilege and power. . . . Profession of Medicine is a landmark in the sociological analysis of the professions in modern society."—Ron Miller, Sociological Quarterly
"This is the first book that I know of to go to the root of the matter by laying open to view the fundamental nature of the professional claim, and the structure of professional institutions."—Everett C. Hughes, Science
In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature.
McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison.
Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university.
An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
Winner, Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association, 2014
During the early 1970s, the nation’s turbulence was keenly reflected in Austin’s kaleidoscopic cultural movements, particularly in the city’s progressive country music scene. Capturing a pivotal chapter in American social history, Progressive Country maps the conflicted iconography of “the Texan” during the ’70s and its impact on the cultural politics of subsequent decades.
This richly textured tour spans the notion of the “cosmic cowboy,” the intellectual history of University of Texas folklore and historiography programs, and the complicated political history of late-twentieth-century Texas. Jason Mellard analyzes the complex relationship between Anglo-Texan masculinity and regional and national identities, drawing on cultural studies, American studies, and political science to trace the implications and representations of the multi-faceted personas that shaped the face of powerful social justice movements. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson’s picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of longstanding American myths and symbols at a historic moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested.
Delivering a fresh take on the meaning and power of “the Texan” and its repercussions for American history, this detail-rich exploration reframes the implications of a populist moment that continues to inspire progressive change.
Between 1967 and 2000, film production in Germany underwent a number of significant transformations, including the birth and death of New German Cinema as well as the emergence of a new transnational cinematic practice. In Projecting History, Nora M. Alter explores the relationship between German cinematic practice and the student protests in both East and West Germany against the backdrop of the U.S. war in Vietnam in the sixties, the outbreak of terrorism in West Germany in the seventies, West Germany's rise as a significant global power in the eighties, and German reunification in the nineties.
Although a central tendency of New German Cinema in the 1970s was to reduce the nation's history to the product of individuals, the films addressed in Projecting History focus not on individual protagonists, but on complex socioeconomic structures. The films, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Harun Farocki, Alexander Kluge, Ulrike Ottinger, Wim Wenders and others, address basic problems of German history, including its overall "peculiarity" within the European context, and, in particular, the specific ways in which the National Socialist legacy continues to haunt Germans.
Nora M. Alter is Associate Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Florida. A specialist in twentieth-century film, comparative literature, and cultural studies, Alter has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. She is also the author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage.
The author has conducted an impressive amount of research in nine countries, including conversations with male and female sex tourists, adult and child prostitutes, procurers, and clients. Through her research, O'Connell Davidson demonstrates the complexity of prostitution, arguing that it is not simply an effect of male oppression and violence or insatiable sexual needs, nor is it an unproblematic economic encounter. The book provides a sophisticated explanation of the economic and political inequalities underlying prostitution, but also shows that while prostitution necessarily implies certain freedoms for the clients, the amount of freedom experienced by individual prostititutes varies greatly.
This highly accessible book will be of great interest to those in gender and women's studies, sexuality and cultural studies, the sociology of work and organizations, and social policy. General readers will also appreciate having new ways of thinking about this age-old social phenomenon.
Julia O'Connell Davidson is Lecturer in Sociology, University of Leicester.
“I got 1-2-3-4 psychobilly DNA”—Norm and the Nightmarez
Call it punk rockabilly with science-fiction horror lyrics. The outsider musical genre known as psychobilly, which began in 1980s Britain, fuses punk, heavy metal, new wave, and shock rock with carnivalesque elements. The participants in this underground scene sport coffin tattoos and 1950s fashions. Bands such as The Meteors, Nekromantix, and Demented Are Go play with a wild energy and a fast tempo. Sometimes fake blood runs down a performer’s mouth.
Psychobilly is ethnomusicologist Kimberly Kattari’s fascinating, decade-long study of this little-known anti-mainstream genre. She provides a history and introduces readers to the core aspects of the music as she interviews passionate performers and fans. Kattari seeks to understand how psychobilly so strongly affects—and reflects—its participants’ lives and identities so strongly. She observes that it provides not only a sense of belonging but a response to feelings and experiences of socio-economic marginalization and stigmatization.
Psychobilly shows how this subculture organized around music furnishes an outlet for members to resist normative expectations and survive; they adhere to their own rules by having a good time while going through a hard time.
An exposé of the realities facing poor black children in our consumer society.
What does it mean to be young, poor, and black in our consumer culture? Are black children “brand-crazed consumer addicts” willing to kill each other over a pair of the latest Nike Air Jordans or Barbie backpack? In this first in-depth account of the consumer lives of poor and working-class black children, Elizabeth Chin enters the world of children living in hardship in order to understand the ways they learn to manage living poor in a wealthy society.
To move beyond the stereotypical images of black children obsessed with status symbols, Chin spent two years interviewing poor children in New Haven, Connecticut, about where and how they spend their money. An alternate image of the children emerges, one that puts practicality ahead of status in their purchasing decisions. On a twenty-dollar shopping spree with Chin, one boy has to choose between a walkie-talkie set and an X-Men figure. In one of the most painful moments of her research, Chin watches as Davy struggles with his decision. He finally takes the walkie-talkie set, a toy that might be shared with his younger brother.Through personal anecdotes and compelling stories ranging from topics such as Christmas and birthday gifts, shopping malls, Toys-R-Us, neighborhood convenience shops, school lunches, ethnically correct toys, and school supplies, Chin critically examines consumption as a medium through which social inequalities-most notably of race, class, and gender-are formed, experienced, imposed, and resisted. Along the way she acknowledges the profound constraints under which the poor and working class must struggle in their daily lives.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2025
The University of Chicago Press