Unsere Kolumne nimmt sich diesmal eine kleine Auszeit von den Netzartikeln. Stattdessen gibt es einen Überblick zu Buchneuerscheinungen und -ankündigungen.

Ganz auf Web-Hinweise wollen wir aber nicht verzichten. Einen ausgezeichneten Überblick über Buchveröffentlichungen des letzten Jahres im Bereich Popmusik kann man sich auf der Internetseite des Arbeitskreises Studium Populärer Musik (ASPM)  »samples« [Link mittlerweile erloschen] verschaffen. Ein guter Anlaufpunkt für medienwissenschaftliche Rezensionen ist das »r-k-m-Journal«.

Eine größere Zahl an Rezensionen zu popkulturellen Büchern veröffentlicht das amerikanische »Journal of Popular Culture« und die deutsche »Testcard«. Beide stellen jedoch ihre Besprechungen nicht (»Testcard«) oder nur gegen Bezahlung (»Journal of Popular Culture«) online.

Unsere Zeitschrift »Pop. Kultur und Kritik« veröffentlicht alle Buchbesprechungen auf dieser Website in der Rubrik »Rezensionen«.

Bei unseren folgenden Hinweisen soll es um Neuerscheinungen und Ankündigungen des laufenden Jahres gehen, die sich auf Bücher mit größerem theoretischen oder inhaltlichen Anspruch beziehen (nicht auf die schier unendliche Zahl an lediglich informativen oder huldigenden Büchern zu Popmusikern oder anderen Künstlern). Vielversprechend klingen folgende Ankündigungen (zu Autor, Titel, Erscheinungsdatum, Verlag setzen wir noch den Klappentext hinzu, falls er nicht nur Marketingphrasen bietet):

Tanner Mirrless
Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization
March 13, 2013 (Routledge)
Mirrlees undertakes an analysis of the ownership, production, distribution, marketing, exhibition and consumption of global films and television shows, with an eye to political economy and cultural studies.

David Beer
Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation
July 19, 2013 (Palgrave Macmillan)
1. Introduction: The Intersections of Popular Culture and New Media
2. Objects and Infrastructures: Opening the Pathways of Cultural Circulation
3. Archiving: Organising the Circulations of Popular Culture
4. Algorithms: Shaping Tastes and Manipulating the Circulations of Popular Culture
5. Data Play: Circulating for Fun
6. Bodies and Interfaces: the Corporeal Circulations of Popular Culture
7. Conclusion: The Centrality of Circulations in Popular Culture

Pete Bennett/Julian McDougall (Hg.)
Barthes’ »Mythologies« Today: Readings of Contemporary Culture
Routledge (July 8, 2013)
This is Barthes’ seminal text reimagined in a contemporary context by contemporary academics. Through a revisiting of Mythologies, a key text in cultural and media studies, this volume explores the value these disciplines can add to an understanding of contemporary society and culture. Leading academics in media, English, education, and cultural studies here are tasked with identifying the »new mythologies« some fifty or so years on from Barthes’ original interventions. The contributions in this volume, then, are readings of contemporary culture, each engaging with a cultural event, practice, or text as mythological.

Dal Yong Jin
De-Convergence of Global Media Industries
26th February 2013 (Routledge)
Convergence has become a buzzword, referring on the one hand to the integration between computers, television, and mobile devices or between print, broadcast, and online media and on the other hand, the ownership of multiple content or distribution channels in media and communications. Yet while convergence among communications companies has been the major trend in the neoliberal era, the splintering of companies, de-convergence, is now gaining momentum in the communications market.

Lisa Dickson/Maryna Romanets (Hg.)
Beauty, Violence, Representation
25th July 2013 (Routledge)
Charting diversifying interests in the subject of violence and beauty, dealing with the multiple inflections of these questions and representing a spectrum of voices, the volume takes its place in a growing body of recent critical work that takes violence and representation as its object. This collection offers a unique opportunity, however, to address a significant gap in the critical field, for it seeks to interrogate specifically the nexus or interface between beauty and violence. While other texts on violence make use of regimes of representation as their subject matter and consider the effects of aestheticization, beauty as a critical category is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the book aims to »rehabilitate« beauty, implicitly conceptualized as politically or ethically regressive by postmodern anti-aesthetics cultural positions, and further facilitate its come-back into critical discourse.

Sarah Baker/Andy Bennett/Jodie Taylor (Hg.)
Redefining Mainstream Popular Music
25th January 2013 (Routledge)
Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the »mainstream« in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures – what may have been considered alternative to one group may be perceived as mainstream to another. Incorporating a wide range of popular music texts, genres, scenes, practices and technologies from the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the authors theoretically challenge and augment our understanding of how the mainstream is understood and functions in the overlapping worlds of popular music production, consumption and scholarship. Spanning the local and the global, the historic and contemporary, the iconic and the everyday, the book covers a broad range of genres, from punk to grunge to hip-hop, while also considering popular music through other mediums, including mash-ups and the music of everyday work life. Redefining Mainstream Popular Music provides readers with an innovative and nuanced perspective of what it means to be mainstream.

Martin Clayton (Hg.)
The Cultural Study of Music. A Critical Introduction
11th January 2013 (Routledge)
The Cultural Study of Music is an anthology of new writings that serves as a basic textbook on music and culture. Increasingly, music is being studied as it relates to specific cultures – not only by ethnomusicologists, but by traditional musicologists as well. Drawing on writers from music, anthropology, sociology, and the related fields, the book both defines the field – i.e., »What is the relation between music and culture?« – and then presents case studies of particular issues in world musics.

Steven Peacock/Jason Jacobs (Hg.)
Television Aesthetics and Style
July 4, 2013 (Bloomsbury Academic)
Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted – until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the medium and particular types of output (specific programmes); and raising important questions about the way we judge television as both cultural artifact and art form.

Monika Bloss u.a. (Hg.)
ShePOP: Frauen. Macht. Musik!
5. März 2013 (Telos)
Es werden Schlaglichter geworfen auf charakteristische Geschichten von Frauen in den unterschiedlichen Phasen, Genres und Arbeits- bzw. Kunstbedingungen, von Sängerinnen und Tänzerinnen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts über Damenkapellen, Punk und Riot Grrrls, DJanes bis zu Auflösungsversuchen der kulturellen Kategorie Geschlecht wie bei Queer oder im Gaga-Feminism.

Marcus S. Kleiner/Thomas Wilke (Hg.)
Performativität und Medialität Populärer Kulturen: Theorien, Ästhetiken, Praktiken
24. Dezember 2012 (Springer VS)
Die Bedeutung von Populären Kulturen sowie von Popkulturen kann nicht ohne einen Bezug auf Performativität und Medialität begriffen werden. Vor diesem Hintergrund geht es um die Beantwortung der Frage, inwieweit sich in Populären Kulturen sowie Popkulturen Aspekte, Prozesse, Transformationen, Manifestationen von Medialität und/oder Performativität niederschlagen, beobachten und beschreiben lassen, sie Populäre Kulturen sowie Popkulturen mit formen bzw. allererst durch Erscheinungen Populärer Kulturen sowie Popkulturen eine spezifische Bedeutung erhalten.

Jens Schröter/Axel Volmar (Hg.)
Auditive Medienkulturen: Techniken des Hörens und Praktiken der Klanggestaltung
6. Februar 2013 (transcript)
Der Band »Auditive Medienkulturen« versammelt aktuelle Forschungen zu medial vermittelten Klang- und Hörkulturen und bietet einen fundierten und breit angelegten Überblick über aktuelle methodische Zugänge im Feld der Sound Studies. Die Fallstudien behandeln u.a. Recording Cultures von der Popmusik bis zur Bioakustik, Kulturen der Klanggestaltung vom Instrumentenbau über das Filmsounddesign bis zur auditiven Architektur sowie Rezeptionskulturen zwischen Ambient und Radio, Kopfhörer und Stereoanlage, Konzertsaal und Diskothek. Indem sich die Beiträge den Zusammenhängen zwischen Klang, Medientechnologien und kultureller Praxis widmen, verdeutlichen sie auf je unterschiedliche Weise, dass es sich bei Klang- und Hörphänomenen um kulturelle Objekte handelt, die nicht unabhängig vom Kontext ihrer historischen Entwicklung sowie vielfältiger Materialisierungen und Mediatisierungen betrachtet werden können.

Martin Seeliger
Deutscher Gangstarap: Zwischen Affirmation und Empowerment
14. Dezember 2012 (Posth)
Teenie-Stars, Skandalrapper oder Integrationsbotschafter – wieso genießt Gangstarap auf dem so umkämpften Terrain der Popkultur überhaupt so eine große Popularität? Aus kultursoziologischer Perspektive zeigt der Text, wie Images des Gangstaraps im Spannungsfeld von Klasse, Ethnizität und Geschlecht als popkulturell vermittelte Momente sowohl der Affirmation als auch des Empowerment interpretiert werden können.

Philipp Meinert/Martin Seeliger (Hg.)
Punk in Deutschland: Sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven
Juli 2013 (transcript)
Über Punk wurde in den letzten 35 Jahren eine Menge geschrieben. Das inhaltliche Spektrum dieses Diskurses reicht von bürgerlich-kulturpessimistischer Bestürzung über zahlreiche Kondolenzbekundungen bis hin zu harschen Sellout-Kritiken. Vor diesem Hintergrund versammelt der Band eine Reihe von »Beobachtungen zweiter Ordnung«, die neben der substanzialistischen Beschreibung von Punk in Deutschland auch eine Kontextualisierung des Phänomens Punk in der bundesdeutschen Gesellschaft vornehmen.

Susanne Eichner/Lothar Mikos/Rainer Winter (Hg.)
Transnationale Serienkultur. Theorie, Ästhetik, Narration und Rezeption neuer Fernsehserien
2013 (Springer VS)
Gerade die letzte Dekade brachte eine Vielzahl an Formaten hervor, die unter dem Label »Quality TV« sowohl ein breites Publikum als auch Kritiker und eingeschworene Fangemeinden begeisterten. Dabei basiert der Erfolg nicht nur auf der Fernsehausstrahlung: Als paradigmatisches Kennzeichen einer »convergence culture« entfalten sich die narrativen und ökonomischen Räume der neuen Serien über die Grenzen einzelner Medien hinweg und erfordern eine Neudefinition des Untersuchungsgegenstands. Der Band versammelt Beiträge, die sich der Ästhetik und Narration dieser neuen Serien ebenso widmen wie den veränderten Rezeptionsweisen und die neue theoretische Aspekte der Serienkultur diskutieren.

S. Alexander Reed
Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music
June 5, 2013 (Oxford University Press)
Noisy, confrontational, and controversial, industrial music first emerged in the mid-1970s around bands and performance groups that combined avant-garde electronic music with the provocative attitude and abrasive style of punk rock. In Assimilate, S. Alexander Reed provides the first ever critical history of this fascinating and enigmatic genre, charting its trajectory from Throbbing Gristle’s founding of the record label Industrial Music in 1976, to its peak in popularity with the success of Nine Inch Nails in the mid-1990s, through its decline to the present day. Exploring twenty exemplary works and drawing on extensive interviews with musicians, record label owners, DJs, and concert promoters, Reed offers a vivid history that encompasses not only the bands but the structures that supported them and the scenes they created.

Rick Poynor
No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism
May 21, 2013 (Laurence King Publishers)
The last thirty-five years have seen profound upheavals in the field of graphic communication. One by one, the old certainties about the techniques and purposes of graphic design have been questioned and torn apart. Jettisoning rules that no longer seemed relevant in the postmodern era, designers and typographers have reassessed their roles and forged experimental new approaches.

Tony Blackshaw (Hg.)
Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies
May 28, 2013 (Routledge)
This landmark publication brings together some of the most perceptive commentators of the present moment to explore core ideas and cutting edge developments in the field of Leisure Studies. It offers important new insights into the dynamics of the transformation of leisure in contemporary societies, tracing the emergent issues at stake in the discipline and examining Leisure Studies’ fundamental connections with cognate disciplines such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, History, Sport Studies and Tourism.

Helen Powell
Promotional Culture and Convergence: Markets, Methods, Media
May 22, 2013 (Routledge)
The rapid growth of promotional material through the internet, social media, and entertainment culture has created consumers who are seeking out their own information to guide their purchasing decisions. Ten contributions from theorists on contemporary promotional culture presents an indispensable guide to this creative and dynamic field and include detailed historical analysis, in-depth case studies and global examples of promotion through TV, magazines, newspapers and cinema.

Andrea Most
Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America
May 20, 2013 (NYU Press)
For centuries, Jews lived in diverse countries with vibrant theatrical cultures, yet they were one of the few peoples without a sanctioned theatrical tradition of their own. In the modern era, however, Jews came to be among the most important creators of popular theatre and film in America. Why? In Theatrical Liberalism, Andrea Most illustrates how American Jews used theatre to navigate encounters with modern culture, negotiating a position for themselves within and alongside Protestant liberalism by reimagining key aspects of traditional Judaism as theatrical. Discussing works from the Hebrew Bible to The Jazz Singer and Death of a Salesman. Most situates American popular culture in the religious traditions that informed the worldviews of its practitioners. Offering a comprehensive history of the role of Judaism in the creation of American entertainment, Theatrical Liberalism re-examines the distinction between the secular and the religious, providing a new way of understanding both modern Jewish culture and liberalism, as well as their crucial contributions to a pluralist society.

Joel Gwynne/Nadine Kuller (Hg.)
Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
July 20, 2013 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Much ground has been covered in terms of (post)feminist analyses of popular film and television, and box office successes such as Bridget Jones’s Diary and television phenomena such as Sex and the City have become established parts of the now canonical critical texts on postfeminism, media and popular culture. By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, by charting trends in film production and media reception, and by focusing on the largely neglected intersections between postfeminism and queer theory, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema. The chapters in this collection position contemporary commercial production as a space where female empowerment is both celebrated and undermined, and signal the necessity of further debate surrounding the formation of gender identity in postmillennial Hollywood cinema.

Stuart Hall/Jessica Evans/Sean Nixon (Hg.)
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices
June 30, 2013 (SAGE Publications Ltd)
Second Edition
…addresses the emergence of new technologies and formats of representation, from the internet and the digital revolution to reality TV

Folker Hanusch (Hg.)
Lifestyle Journalism
June 10, 2013 (Routledge)
Lifestyle journalism has experienced enormous growth in the media over the past two decades, but scholars in the fields of journalism and communication studies have so far paid relatively little attention to a field that is still sometimes seen as »not real journalism«. There is now an urgent need for in-depth exploration and contextualisation of this field, with its increasing relevance for 21st century consumer cultures.

Derek Johnson
Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries
March 22, 2013 (NYU Press)
While immediately recognizable throughout the U.S. and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. In each case, the initial success of a single product led to a long-term embrace of media franchising – a dynamic process in which media workers from different industrial positions shared in and reproduced familiar culture across television, film, comics, games, and merchandising. In Media Franchising, Derek Johnson examines the corporate culture behind these production practices, as well as the collaborative and creative efforts involved in conceiving, sustaining, and sharing intellectual properties in media work worlds. Challenging the connotations of homogeneity, Johnson shows how the cultural and industrial logic of franchising has encouraged media industries to reimagine creativity as an opportunity for exchange among producers, licensees, and even consumers. Drawing on case studies and interviews with media producers, he reveals the meaningful identities, cultural hierarchies, and struggles for distinction that accompany collaboration within these production networks.