Pioneers in Popular Culture Studies


Book Description

Contains informal interviews with 13 significant figures in the development of the field of popular culture studies. The interviews explore the academic revolution inaugurated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the fields of the humanities and social sciences with the founding and subsequent influence of the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association and the interviewees' thoughts about the changes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




African Americans and Popular Culture


Book Description

The African American influence on popular culture is among the most sweeping and lasting this country has seen. Despite a history of institutionalized racism, black artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs have had enormous impact on American popular culture. Pioneers such as Oscar Michaeux, Paul Robeson, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Langston Hughes, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Bessie Smith paved the way for Jackie Robinson, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Sidney Poitier, and Bill Cosby, who in turn opened the door for Spike Lee, Dave Chappelle, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. Today, hip hop is the most powerful element of youth culture; white teenagers outnumber blacks as purchasers of rap music; black-themed movies are regularly successful at the box office, and black writers have been anthologized and canonized right alongside white ones. Though there are still many more miles to travel and much to overcome, this three-volume set considers the multifaceted influence of African Americans on popular culture, and sheds new light on the ways in which African American culture has come to be a fundamental and lasting part of America itself. To articulate the momentous impact African American popular culture has had upon the fabric of American society, these three volumes provide analyses from academics and experts across the country. They provide the most reliable, accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive treatment of key topics, works, and themes in African American popular culture for a new generation of readers. The scope of the project is vast, including: popular historical movements like the Harlem Renaissance; the legacy of African American comedy; African Americans and the Olympics; African Americans and rock 'n roll; more contemporary articulations such as hip hop culture and black urban cinema; and much more. One goal of the project is to recuperate histories that have been perhaps forgotten or obscured to mainstream audiences and to demonstrate how African Americans are not only integral to American culture, but how they have always been purveyors of popular culture.




Popular Culture Studies Across the Curriculum


Book Description

Academic curricula are being strengthened and enriched through the enlightened realization that no discipline is complete unto itself. In the interdisciplinary studies that result, the one theme that remains universal is popular culture. Academia throughout the disciplines is rapidly coming to understand that it should be used in courses campus-wide and on all levels. All in the world of education benefit from the use of the cultures around them. This work emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary mingling and explores the ways in which instructors can utilize popular culture studies in order to deepen both their own areas of specialization and their students' appreciation of education. The collection of 18 essays spans campus curricula, including the humanities (English literature, American studies, folklore and popular culture), the social sciences (anthropology, history, sociology and communications), religion and philosophy, geography, women's studies, economics and sports. Also addressed is the importance of popular culture courses in both community colleges and high school settings.




A Companion to Popular Culture


Book Description

A Companion to Popular Culture is a landmark survey of contemporary research in popular culture studies that offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the field. Includes over two dozen essays covering the spectrum of popular culture studies from food to folklore and from TV to technology Features contributions from established and up-and-coming scholars from a range of disciplines Offers a detailed history of the study of popular culture Balances new perspectives on the politics of culture with in-depth analysis of topics at the forefront of popular culture studies




Wanted Dead Or Alive


Book Description

Following Richard Aquila's introduction, which examines the birth and growth of the pop culture West in the context of American history, noted expects explore developments in popular western fiction, major forms of live western entertainment, trends in western movies and television shows, images of the West in popular music, and visual images of the West in popular art and advertising.




British Cultural Studies


Book Description

is a comprehensive introduction to the British tradition of cultural studies. Turner offers an accessible overview of the central themes that have informed British cultural studies: language, semiotics, Marxism and ideology, individualism, subjectivity and discourse. Beginning with a history of cultural studies, Turner discusses the work of such pioneers as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, E. P.Thompson, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He then explores the central theorists and categories of British cultural studies: texts and contexts; audience; everyday life; ideology; politics, gender and race. The third edition of this successful text has been fully revised and updated to include: * How to apply the principles of cultural studies and how to read a text * An overview of recent ethnographic studies * Discussion of anthropological theories of consumption * Questions of identity and new ethnicities * How to do cultural studies, and an evaluation of recent research methodologies * A fully updated and comprehensive bibliography




A Companion to American Women's History


Book Description

This collection of twenty-four original essays by leading scholars in American women's history highlights the most recent important scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field. Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including the colonial family, marriage, health, sexuality, education, immigration, work, consumer culture, and feminism. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Includes expanded bibliography of titles to guide further research.




Popular Culture Theory and Methodology


Book Description

Since its birth in the 1960s, the study of popular culture has come a long way in defining its object, its purpose, and its place in academe. Emerging along the margins of a scholarly establishment that initially dismissed anything popular as unworthy of serious study-trivial, formulaic, easily digestible, escapist-early practitioners of the discipline stubbornly set about creating the theoretical and methodological framework upon which a deeper understanding could be founded. Through seminal essays that document the maturation of the field as it gradually made headway toward legitimacy, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology provides students of popular culture with both the historical context and the critical apparatus required for further growth. For all its progress, the study of popular culture remains a site of healthy questioning. What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? Is it always conformist, or has it the power to subvert, refashion, resist, and destabilize the status quo? How does it differ from folk culture, mass culture, commercial culture? Is the line between "high" and "low" merely arbitrary? Do the popular arts have a distinctive aesthetics? This collection offers a wide range of responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology charts some of the key turning points in the "culture wars" and leads us through the central debates in this fast developing discipline. Authors of the more than two dozen studies, several of which are newly published here include John Cawelti, Russel B. Nye, Ray B. Browne, Fred E. H. Schroeder, John Fiske, Lawrence Mintz, David Feldman, Roger Rollin, Harold Schechter, S. Elizabeth Bird, and Harold E. Hinds, Jr. A valuable bibliography completes the volume.




Collecting and the Internet


Book Description

The Internet has had a profound effect on collecting—because of the Web, collectibles are now more readily available, collections more easily displayed for a wider audience, and collectors’ online communities are larger and often quite intimate. In addition, the Web has added new items to the pantheon of collectibles, including digital bits that, whether considered virtual or material, are nevertheless collectible. In this work, essays discuss the age-old habit of collecting and its modern relationship with the Internet. Topics include individually authored websites, online auctions, watches, eyewear, Kelly dolls, the gambler’s rush of online acquisition, mp3s, collecting friends via online social networking sites, and online museums, among others.




Popular Culture


Book Description

A comprehensive, informal overview of world history and popular culture. Popular Culture: From Cavespace to Cyberspace traces the history of people's cultures from primitive to postmodern times. Educational, informative, and absorbing, this book contains interesting facts on such figures as King Tut, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Madonna, linking you to the world, past and present. Popular Culture highlights important historical events such as the American, French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions while examining world-changing social movements. You will go on a journey through time, exploring the cultures of the world, venturing from cavespace to tomb space, to temple space, then medieval space, to modern space and post-modern epochs, and finally to cyberspace. While moving through cultural history, you will explore such stories and discoveries as: the 1991 discovery of Oetzi the Ice Man, who is 5,300 years old the legends of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Americans who or what turned on the light to the Dark Ages the impact of René Descartes: “I think, therefore I am,” and the inspiration of the Enlightenment modernism and the determination to be up to date the incredible 20th century that McDonaldized the world postmodernism and its technology cyburbia and globalism Popular Culture contains a wide collection of stories covering cultural phenomena such as Tutmania, the Crusades, the Ninja Turtles, Hamburger University, elitism, Shakespeare, America's Frontier Thesis, The Global Village, and the coming millennium. You will be intrigued by the plethora of fascinating links that Professor Fishwick makes in this comprehensive guide to ever-changing popular culture.