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We immerse ourselves daily in expressions of popular culture—YouTube videos, hip hop music, movies, adverts, greeting cards, videogames, and comics, to name just a few possibilities—and far too often we pay only scant critical attention to them. The essays in this collection redress this situation by probing a wide range of topics within the field of popular culture studies. Written in engaging and jargon-free prose, contributions critically examine various offerings in film, television, social media, music, literature, sports, and related areas. Moreover, they often pay special attention to the ways in which these pop culture artefacts intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ability. Providing a rich mixture of broad perspectives and intriguing case studies, the essays form a compelling mosaic of findings and viewpoints on popular culture. Exploring everything from toxic masculinity in twenty-first century television programmes to gendered greeting cards and adult colouring books, this provocative volume is essential reading for anyone interested in that fabricated and all-pervasive environment we call popular culture.
Introduction -- The cultural commons -- Culture as moral beliefs -- Culture as instrument -- The rise of flourishing societies -- The free market democracy dilemma -- The fall of flourishing societies -- Family, religion, government, and civilization -- Conclusion
Prominent scholars and journalists ponder the question of why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is more divided than ever between the rich and the poor, between those living in freedom and those under oppression.
Avoiding the easy definitions and caricatures that tend to celebrate or condemn the "hip hop generation," Hip Hop Matters focuses on fierce and far-reaching battles being waged in politics, pop culture, and academe to assert control over the movement. At stake, Watkins argues, is the impact hip hop has on the lives of the young people who live and breathe the culture. He presents incisive analysis of the corporate takeover of hip hop and the rampant misogyny that undermines the movement's progressive claims. Ultimately, we see how hip hop struggles reverberate in the larger world: global media consolidation; racial and demographic flux; generational cleavages; the reinvention of the pop music industry; and the ongoing struggle to enrich the lives of ordinary youth.
Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.
Culture Matters explores the role of political culture studies as one of the major investigative fields in contemporary political science. Cultural theory was the focal point of the late Aaron Wildavsky’s teaching and research for the last decade of his life, a life that profoundly affected many fields of political science, from the study of the presidency to public budgeting. In this volume, original essays prepared in Wildavsky’s honor examine the areas of rational choice, institutions, theories of change, political risk, the environment, and practical politics.
WINNER OF THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2021 WINNER OF THE POLARI PRIZE 2022 'Visionary and powerful. I loved it.' Hollie McNish The female body is a political space. C+nto enters the private lives of women from the butch counterculture, telling the inside story of the protests they led in the '90s to reclaim their bodies as their own – their difficult balance between survival and self-expression. History, magic, rebellion, party and sermon vibrate through Joelle Taylor's cantos to uncover these underground communities forged by women. Part-memoir and part-conjecture, Taylor explores sexuality and gender in poetry that is lyrical, expansive, imagistic, epic and intimate. C+nto is a love poem, a riot, a late night, and an honouring. minds. Here is poetry that defends our right to walk without fear, wear what we choose, be who we uniquely are." - - Diana Souhami
From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.
Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will bring communities together. Culture will improve your education. This is the message from governments and arts organisations across the country; however, this book explains why we need to be cautious about culture. Offering a powerful call to transform the cultural and creative industries, Culture is bad for you examines the intersections between race, class, and gender in the mechanisms of exclusion in cultural occupations. Exclusion from culture begins at an early age, the authors argue, and despite claims by cultural institutions and businesses to hire talented and hardworking individuals, women, people of colour, and those from working class backgrounds are systematically disbarred. While the inequalities that characterise both workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised.
Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. But these cardboard cutouts and examples of lazy storytelling could never embody the rich traditions and histories of Latinx peoples. Not seeing real Latinxs on TV and film reels as kids inspired the authors to dive deep into the world of mainstream television and film to uncover examples of representation, good and bad. The result: a riveting ride through televisual and celluloid reels that make up mainstream culture. As pop culture experts Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González show, the way Latinx peoples have appeared and are still represented in mainstream TV and film narratives is as frustrating as it is illuminating. Stereotypes such as drug lords, petty criminals, buffoons, and sexed-up lovers have filled both small and silver screens—and the minds of the public. Aldama and González blaze new paths through Latinx cultural phenomena that disrupt stereotypes, breathing complexity into real Latinx subjectivities and experiences. In this grand sleuthing sweep of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film that continues to shape the imagination of U.S. society, these two Latinx pop culture authorities call us all to scholarly action.