Unsere Kolumne nimmt sich eine kleine Auszeit von den Netzartikeln. Stattdessen eine Auswahl interessanter Buchneuerscheinungen und -ankündigungen der ersten sechs Monate 2014.

 

Die Bücher sind in der Reihenfolge ihrer Erscheinungstermine aufgeführt. Bei den Buchangaben setze ich jeweils den Ankündigungstext des Verlags hinzu.

 

Uwe Breitenborn / Thomas Düllo / Sören Birke
Gravitationsfeld Pop: Was kann Pop? Was will Popkulturwirtschaft? Konstellationen in Berlin und anderswo
Transcript (15. Januar 2014)

Was bleibt oben, was fällt runter? Welche Kräfte wirken im Feld der Popkultur? Es gilt Konstellationen zu identifizieren, um Flugbahnen des Popgeschehens durchschauen und analysieren zu können. Dieser Band bietet verschiedene Perspektiven auf diese Konstellationen: Produzenten aus der Kulturwirtschaft kommen mit ihren Bestandsaufnahmen zu Wort. Nutzer sehen und behandeln die Dinge wieder anders als die Macher. Reflektoren hingegen sortieren, debattieren und kartografieren das Geschehen. Besonders im Fokus: der Kosmos Berlin. Hart treffen hier die Kräfte aufeinander. Was passiert in der Kulturwirtschaft dieser Stadt? Ist das komplexe Spiel der Kräfte steuerbar? Ob Musik, Lifestyle oder Clubszene – den sozialen, politischen und kulturellen Gravitationsfeldern ist auch im Pop nicht zu entkommen.

 

 

Frédéric Döhl / Renate Wöhrer (Hg.)
Zitieren, appropriieren, sampeln: Referenzielle Verfahren in den Gegenwartskünsten
Transcript (20. Januar 2014)

Sampeln, Zitieren, Appropriieren etc. – in diesem Band werden verschiedene künstlerische Verfahren der Bezugnahme auf bestehende Kunstwerke vorgestellt. Die Beiträger setzen diese künsteübergreifend ins Verhältnis zueinander und präsentieren Ansätze ihrer theoretischen Bestimmung. Aus der Perspektive unterschiedlicher Disziplinen werden die verschiedenen Formen von Referenzialität in der bildenden Kunst, der Musik, der Literatur, dem Theater, dem Tanz sowie dem Film anhand exemplarischer Analysen untersucht und es wird nach ihren gattungsspezifischen sowie medialen und technischen Bedingungen gefragt. Dabei ergeben sich fruchtbare Querverweise zwischen den einzelnen Disziplinen ebenso wie fachspezifische Problemstellungen.

 

 

Angela McCracken
The Beauty Trade: Youth, Gender, and Fashion Globalization
Oxford University Press, USA (February 3, 2014)

While it is frequently trivialized, the business of beauty is one of the most important global industries, generating millions of dollars and implicating many more the world over, from consumers to corporate elites. As trends spread so do ideas about standards of appearance and what is necessary to look good and fit in — standards that are often influenced by ideas about race, class and gender norms. In looking at beauty products, practices, and ideas of youth in Guadalajara, Mexico, The Beauty Trade takes seriously the question of whether and how beauty norms are changing in relation to the globalizing beauty economy. Angela B. V. McCracken considers who benefits and who loses from beauty globalization and what this means for gender norms among youth. Weaving together fascinating ethnographic research on beauty practices and insights from political economy theory, the book presents a feminist analysis of the global economy of beauty. Rather than a sign of frivolity, the beauty economy is intimately connected to youth’s social and economic development. Cosmetic makeovers have become a modern rite of passage for girls, enabling social connections and differentiations, as well as entrepreneurial activities. The global beauty economy is a phenomenon generated by young people, mostly women, laboring in, teaching, and consuming beauty — and eager for belonging and originality, using every mechanism at their disposal to enhance their appearance. As McCracken shows, globalization is not homogenizing beauty standards to a Western ideal; rather, it is diversifying beauty standards. The Beauty Trade explains how globalization, combined with youth’s desires for uniqueness, is enabling the spread of a diversity of beauty cultures, including alternative visions of gender appropriate looks and behavior.

 

 

Peter Gibian (Hg.)
Mass Culture and Everyday Life
Routledge (February 4, 2014)

A collection of lively work from the small but seminal journal Tabloid. The book offers a clarification of the study of mass culture as it transforms daily life, providing a detailed survey of a wide range of the mass culture phenomena that have defined our everyday lives in recent years: from Hillary’s hairdo to tampons, exercise fads and fashion trends; from soaps to opera to rythmn and blues; from horror movies to the interrelation of cats, pigs and mothers in Babe. This volume includes ground-breaking essays on: the boom of talk radio and talk TV; shopping as cinematic spectacle; and how „everyday life“ in the university community has become a key battleground in America’s „culture wars.“ The direct, accessible, and refreshingly personal work speak not only to an academic audience but to a wide general readership.

 

 

Sarah Projansky
Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture
NYU Press (February 7, 2014)

As an omnipresent figure of the media landscape, girls are spectacles. They are ubiquitous visual objects on display at which we are incessantly invited to look. Investigating our cultural obsession with both everyday and high-profile celebrity girls, Sarah Projanskyuses a queer, anti-racist feminist approach to explore the diversity of girlhoods in contemporary popular culture.The book addresses two key themes: simultaneous adoration and disdain for girls and the pervasiveness of whiteness and heteronormativity. While acknowledging this context, Projansky pushes past the dichotomy of the “can-do” girl who has the world at her feet and the troubled girl who needs protection and regulation to focus on the variety of alternative figures who appear in media culture, including queer girls, girls of color, feminist girls, active girls, and sexual girls, all of whom are present if we choose to look for them. Drawing on examples across film, television, mass-market magazines and newspapers, live sports TV, and the Internet, Projansky combines empirical analysis with careful, creative, feminist analysis intent on centering alternative girls. She undermines the pervasive “moral panic” argument that blames media itself for putting girls at risk by engaging multiple methodologies, including, for example, an ethnographic study of young girls who themselves critique media. Arguing that feminist media studies needs to understand the spectacularization of girlhood more fully, she places active, alternative girlhoods right in the heart of popular media culture.

Alex Houen (Hg.)-
States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty and the War on Terror
Routledge (February 12, 2014)

This multidisciplinary edited volume explores how the spread of the ‚War on Terror‘ has entwined matters of state sovereignty and states of war into mutually affecting relations. Pre-emptive attacks on terrorist groups in ‘rogue’ states, ‘outsourcing’ of state militancy and the mutable state of armed conflict required to wage a ‘hybrid war’ have increasingly been issues for the War on Terror. Moreover, such measures have seen the spread of this war to countries such as Israel, Russia, Ethiopia, and Uganda, all of whom have justified their own attacks in other nation-states as a war of ‘self-defence’ against terrorism. States of War since 9/11 offers a timely, innovative analysis of how the War on Terror has taken on different modes of militancy and militarisation in spreading to different nation-states and regions. Featuring a multidisciplinary line-up of eminent contributors, the book ranges in reference from the early stages of the war up to France’s 2013 intervention in Mali. Part One examines the various modes of war and militarisation that have been employed in particular nation-states, including Afghanistan, Russia and Chechnya, and Israel and Palestine. Part Two examines how the war’s innovations have more generally involved ‘just war theory’, biopolitics and sovereignty, networked battlespace, new military urbanism, citizenship, homeland security and surveillance. Overall, this book offers a fresh insight into how states have attempted to secure their own bounds by extending the boundaries of war itself.

 

Jean Burgess and Joshua Green
Youtube: Online Video and Participatory Culture
Polity Pr; 2 edition (February 14, 2014)

YouTube is now firmly established as the dominant platform for online video, and it continues to be a site of both experimentation and conflict among media industries, creators and audiences. First published in 2009, this was the first book to take YouTube seriously as a media and cultural phenomenon. This revised and updated second edition explains how the platform is being used, how it is changing, and why it matters. The new edition reflects YouTube’s maturity as a platform and includes more detailed coverage of its institutional and economic contexts, while retaining the discussions of YouTube’s relation to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy that made the first edition so valuable. The book critically examines the public debates surrounding the site, demonstrating how it is central to struggles for authority and control in the new media environment. Drawing on a range of theoretical sources and empirical research, the authors discuss how YouTube is being used by the media industries, by audiences and amateur producers, and by particular communities of interest, and the ways in which these uses challenge existing ideas about cultural ‚production‘ and ‚consumption‘. Rich with concrete examples, the second edition will continue to be essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of online media.

 

 

Karen Hellekson / Kristina Busse (Hg.)
The Fan Fiction Studies Reader
University Of Iowa Press (February 15, 2014)

An essential introduction to a rapidly growing field of study, The Fan Fiction Studies Reader gathers in one place the key foundational texts of the fan studies corpus, with a focus on fan fiction. Collected here are important texts by scholars whose groundbreaking work established the field and outlined some of its enduring questions. Editors Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse provide cogent introductions that place each piece in its historical and intellectual context, mapping the historical development of fan studies and suggesting its future trajectories.

 

 

Gilad Padva / Nurit Buchweitz (Hg.)
Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye
Palgrave Macmillan (February 19, 2014)

This international collection focuses on the phallic character of classic and contemporary literary and visual cultures and their invasive nature. The phallic eye is analyzed as a spectacle of the obscene, the scene and the sin, a visualization of guilty pleasures and outrageous lusts that evoke anxiety, guilt, satisfaction, intimacy and intimidation. The phallic eye is a powerful and useful metaphor for a radical investigation of the interrelations between spectatorship, authorship, dominance, Mulvey’s theorization of voyeurism/exhibitionism/Looked-at-ness, and surveillance of human desires and visual pleasures. This volume suggests a broad perspective on the phallus as passionate, dynamic and energetic force, which is more than the consuming, predatory eye of the beholder who yearns for sensational spectacles. The chapters focus on thrillers, horror cinema, pornography, sexual art and photography, erotic literature, female and male body politics, queer pleasures, gender/cross-gender/transgenderism, CCTV and phallic ethnicities.

 

 

Gregor Jansen u.a. (Hg.)
Leben mit Pop. Eine Reproduktion des kapitalistischen Realismus
Verlag der Buchhandlung König (28. Februar 2014)

Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke und Manfred Kuttner prägten den Begriff Kapitalistischer Realismus anlässlich ihrer selbst organisierten Ausstellungen in Düsseldorf im Jahr 1963. Obwohl sie selbst ihn nur kurze Zeit verwendeten und sich von der Wahrnehmung als Künstlergruppe schnell distanzierten, repräsentiert der Kapitalistische Realismus eine spezifische Kunstauffassung der westdeutschen Nachkriegszeit, die bis heute kontrovers diskutiert wird. Die Publikation zur Ausstellung widmet sich erstmals umfassend diesem wichtigen Phänomen. Die zentralen Ausstellungen und Aktionen werden in Bild und Text dokumentiert und der internationale, kunsthistorische und gesellschaftliche Kontext aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven beleuchtet. Ausstellung und Katalog belegen die Aktualität einer der intensivsten und wirkungsmächtigsten Tendenzen der Nachkriegszeit.

 

 

Diedrich Diederichsen
Über Pop-Musik
Kiepenheuer&Witsch (8. März 2014)

Diedrich Diederichsen über Pop-Musik: das Opus magnum Ganze Generationskohorten von Pop-Fans hat er angeregt und aufgestört: Diedrich Diederichsen. Nun erscheint mit »Über Pop-Musik« das Ergebnis seines lebenslangen Nachdenkens über Pop. »Über Pop-Musik« ist ein kluges, ein kontroverses Buch, dessen Thesen ganze Gebäude eilig zusammengezimmerter Übereinkünfte zum Einsturz bringen werden. Pop-Musik, sagt Diederichsen, ist gar keine Musik. Musik ist bloß der Hintergrund für die viel tiefer liegenden, viel weiter ausstrahlenden Signale des Pop. Pop ist ein Hybrid aus Vorstellungen, Wünschen, Versprechungen. Er ist ein Feld für Posen und Pakte, für Totems und Tabubrüche. Der Autor bezieht seine Argumente aus Semiotik und Soziologie ebenso wie aus der Geschichte und Gegenwart der Pop-Kultur und aus den angrenzenden Gebieten Jazz, Kino, Oper. Es dürfte das erste Buch sein, das der ganzen Vielgestaltigkeit des Phänomens Rechnung trägt, und das einzige, in dem gleichzeitig Theodor W. Adorno und Congo Ashanti Roy auftreten. Und es ist ein sehr persönliches Buch. Diederichsen greift immer wieder auf die eigenen Erfahrungen zurück, sein Initiationserlebnis war ausgerechnet ein Konzert des bleichen Bluesrockers Johnny Winter. Was er über dessen Auftritt schreibt, gilt für viele, die nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg aufgewachsen sind: Pop hat »eingelöst, was wir alle immer schon geahnt hatten, aber als Kinder nie ganz genau wussten: dass es etwas gibt. Nicht, wovon Winter heulte, war wichtig, sondern dass in komischen Geräuschen ein Weg zur Welt war.«

[Hier muss ich doch mal etwas zu sagen, weil der Verlagstext neben Buchankündigung und Inhaltsinformationen nicht nur einige der üblichen Anpreisungen bringt, die in vielen Promotexten, die wir hier versammeln, stehen – ‚zum ersten Mal‘, ‚komplex‘, ‚umfassend‘ etc. –, sondern darüber hinausgeht: ein Buch, „dessen Thesen ganze Gebäude eilig zusammengezimmerter Übereinkünfte zum Einsturz bringen werden. Pop-Musik, sagt Diederichsen, ist gar keine Musik.“ Das haben nun seit der Independent Group der 1950er Jahre schon derart viele Autoren gesagt, dass die Einsturzrhetorik reichlich übertrieben herüberkommt. Da mir das Buch aber schon vorliegt, kann ich, ohne ausführlicheren Einschätzungen, die wir auf dieser Seite oder in unserer Printausgabe noch bringen werden, vorzugreifen, anmerken, dass Diederichsen selbst zum Glück auf solche Rhetorik verzichtet, mit dem Preis, dass bis auf einige anzitierte Größen (etwa Hegel, Butler, Jack Smith, von Foerster) auf beinahe jede Kenntnisnahme der reichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur zu den jeweiligen Themen verzichtet wird (Theorien und Gedankengebäude, die man dann zum Einsturz hätte bringen können oder eben auch nicht). Diederichsen entfaltet im Buch seine ihrerseits bereits aus jüngeren Aufsätzen bekannten Topoi – Pop als indexikalische Kunst, Pop als Sound, drei Phasen der Kulturindustrie – an vielen historischen Beispielen, die vor allem den Jahren bis Mitte der 1980er entnommen sind.]

 

 

Barry J. Faulk
Music Hall & Modernity: Late Victorian Discovery Of Popular Culture
Ohio University Press (March 15, 2014)

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of “the people.” In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated. Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism.

 

 

Rob Allen / Thijs van den Berg
Serialization in Popular Culture
Routledge (March 31, 2014)

From prime-time television shows and graphic novels to the development of computer game expansion packs, the recent explosion of popular serials has provoked renewed interest in the history and economics of serialization, as well as the impact of this cultural form on readers, viewers, and gamers. In this volume, contributors—literary scholars, media theorists, and specialists in comics, graphic novels, and digital culture—examine the economic, narratological, and social effects of serials from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century and offer some predictions of where the form will go from here.

 

 

Robert James
Popular Culture and Working-class Taste in Britain, 1930-39: A round of cheap diversions?
Manchester University Press (March 31, 2014)

This book examines the relationship between class and culture in 1930s Britain. Focusing on the reading and cinema-going tastes of the working classes, Robert James‘ landmark study combines rigorous historical analysis with a close textual reading of visual and written sources to appraise the role of popular leisure in this fascinating decade. Drawing on a wealth of original research, this lively and accessible book adds immeasurably to our knowledge of working-class leisure pursuits in this contentious period. It is a key intervention in the field, providing both an imaginative approach to the subject and an abundance of new material to analyse, thus making it an undergraduate and postgraduate ‚must-have‘. It will be a particularly welcome addition for anyone interested in the fields of cultural and social history, as well as film, cultural and literary studies.

 

 

Paul Sullivan
Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora
Reaktion Books (April 15, 2014)

Dub is the avant-garde verso of reggae, created by manipulating and reshaping recordings using studio strategies and techniques. While dub was one of the first forms of popular music to turn the idea of song inside out, it is far from being fully explored. Tracing the evolution of dub, Remixology travels from Kingston, Jamaica, across the globe, following dub’s influence on the development of the MC, the birth of sound system culture, and the postwar Jamaican diaspora. Starting in 1970s Kingston, Paul Sullivan examines the origins of dub as a genre, approach, and attitude. He stops off in London, Berlin, Toronto, Bristol, and New York, exploring those places where dub had the most impact and investigates its effect on postpunk, dub-techno, jungle, and the dubstep. Along the way, Sullivan speaks with a host of international musicians, DJs, and luminaries of the dub world, from DJ Spooky, Adrian Sherwood, Channel, and Roy to Shut Up and Dance and Roots Manuva. Wide-ranging and lucid, Remixology sheds new light on the dub-born notions of remix and reinterpretation that set the stage for the music of the twenty-first century.

 

 

Walid El Hamamsy / Mounira Soliman
Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook
Routledge (April 19, 2014)

This book explores the body and the production process of popular culture in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, and Iran in the first decade of the 21st century, and up to the current historical moment. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and cultural issues in film, cartoons, music, dance, photo-tattoos, graphic novels, fiction, and advertisements. Contributors to the volume span an array of specializations ranging across literary, postcolonial, gender, media, and Middle Eastern studies and contextualize their views within a larger historical and political moment, analyzing the emergence of a popular expression in the Middle East and North Africa region in recent years, and drawing conclusions pertaining to the direction of popular culture within a geopolitical context. The importance of this book lies in presenting a fresh perspective on popular culture, combining media that are not often combined and offering a topical examination of recent popular production, aiming to counter stereotypical representations of Islamophobia and otherness by bringing together the perspectives of scholars from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines. The collection shows that popular culture can effect changes and alter perceptions and stereotypes, constituting an area where people of different ethnicities, genders, and orientations can find common grounds for expression and connection.

 

 

Hank Johnston
What is a Social Movement
Polity (April 21, 2014)

Social movements play a central role in the scope and direction of social change. They were instrumental in the creation of the modern state and, today, are major forces in politics and culture. Environmentalism, gay rights, alterglobalization, and Islamic fundamentalism are all movements with far-reaching impacts on contemporary society. What is a Social Movement? traces how the study of movements such as these – of their structures, their ideas, and their repertoires of protest – have grown in recent years to become a major focus in the social sciences. It deftly navigates the organizational, ideational, and cultural complexity of political and social movements, and offers a succinct but comprehensive overview of the hows, whys, and wheretofores of studying them. The book analyzes how politics and culture frequently intersect as people participate in movements that call for change and pursue group interests. By focusing on movement organizations and networks, on what they do, and how they articulate their ideas of justice and collective interests, What is a Social Movement? lays the essential groundwork for understanding this significant and exciting field of research, where it came from, and where it is headed.

 

 

Sumanth Gopinath / Jason Stanyek
The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies
Oxford University Press, USA (April 22, 2014)

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. At once a marketing term, a common mode of everyday-life performance, and an instigator of experimental aesthetics, „mobile music“ opens up a space for studying the momentous transformations in the production, distribution, consumption, and experience of music and sound that took place between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. Taken together, the two volumes cover a large swath of the world-the US, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, France, China, Jamaica, Iraq, the Philippines, India, Sweden-and a similarly broad array of the musical and nonmusical sounds suffusing the soundscapes of mobility.

 

 

Prem Kumari Srivastava
Leslie Fiedler: Critic, Provocateur, Pop Culture Guru
McFarland (April 30, 2014)

Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003), a controversial literary critic, was one of the first critics of popular culture as well as an early proponent of queer theory. This book traces the evolution of this larger-than-life figure through an extensive examination of his works. Beginning with his homoerotic reading of the relationship between Jim and Huck Finn in the Mark Twain novel, this book covers how his many contributions have been provocative, outrageous, novel, and enduring.

 

 

Ellen Willis
The Essential Ellen Willis
Univ Of Minnesota Press (May 1, 2014)

Out of the Vinyl Deeps, published in 2011, introduced a new generation to the incisive, witty, and merciless voice of Ellen Willis through her pioneering rock music criticism. In the years that followed, Willis’s daring insights went beyond popular music, taking on such issues as pornography, religion, feminism, war, and drugs. The Essential Ellen Willis gathers writings that span forty years and are both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today’s seemingly intractable political and cultural battles. Whether addressing the women’s movement, sex and abortion, race and class, or war and terrorism, Willis brought to each a distinctive attitude—passionate yet ironic, clear-sighted yet hopeful. Offering a compelling and cohesive narrative of Willis’s liberationist “transcendence politics,” the essays—among them previously unpublished and uncollected pieces—are organized by decade from the 1960s to the 2000s, with each section introduced by young writers who share Willis’s intellectual bravery, curiosity, and lucidity: Irin Carmon, Spencer Ackerman, Cord Jefferson, Ann Friedman, and Sara Marcus. The Essential Ellen Willis concludes with excerpts from Willis’s unfinished book about politics and the cultural unconscious, introduced by her longtime partner, Stanley Aronowitz. An invaluable reckoning of American society since the 1960s, this volume is a testament to an iconoclastic and fiercely original voice.

 

 

Andy Fry
Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960
University Of Chicago Press (May 6, 2014)

The Jazz Age. The phrase conjures images of Louis Armstrong holding court at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Duke Ellington dazzling crowds at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and star singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. But the Jazz Age was every bit as much of a Paris phenomenon as it was a Chicago and New York scene. In Paris Blues, Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France’s complicated jazz history from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons—such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, among others—what he asks is how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re-creation—reinvention—in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and contributes greatly to a growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France.

 

 

Rina Arya
Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature
Palgrave Macmillan (May 14, 2014)

Abjection and Representation is a theoretical investigation of the concept of abjection as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980) and its application in various fields including the visual arts, film and literature. Rina Arya provides an accessible, systematic and interdisciplinary exposition of abjection in the development of the subject in psychoanalysis, the role that it occupies in society, and its resonance in different cultural fields. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, Mary Douglas and other theorists, the book explores the significance and ongoing relevance of abjection as a cultural code that is of interest to contemporary artists, writers and film theorists. It promotes rigour, intelligibility and cross-disciplinary understanding.

 

 

Larissa Hjorth / Ingrid Richardson
Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media
Palgrave Macmillan (May 14, 2014)

The convergence of online social media, location-based services, mobile apps and games is transforming the way we communicate with each other and participate in media spaces. Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media explores this complex dynamic of platforms and interfaces, reflecting on some of the social, personal and political dimensions of the ‚playful turn‘ in contemporary culture. Drawing on ethnographic case studies across the Asia-Pacific region, Hjorth and Richardson consider how mobile social media are changing our experience of place, mobility, intimacy and sociality, both in the context of quotidian life and across geographic regions. Through the lens of everyday practices, and adapting a range of concepts and theoretical perspectives from media, communication and game studies, the authors think critically about how locative, mobile, social and ‚playful‘ media are reshaping our experience of the world and ourselves as cultural beings.

 

 

Barry Spunt
Heroin and Music in New York City
Palgrave Macmillan (May 14, 2014)

Heroin abuse amongst musicians has never been limited to one genre, but the nature of the connection between heroin and music is not well understood at all. Narrative accounts from a sample of 69 New York City-based musicians and self-acknowledged heroin abusers will address the beginnings of their heroin addictions, it’s prevalence amongst artists in certain music genres, and the impact -detrimental or otherwise- heroin has on musicians‘ playing, creativity, and careers.

 

 

Doyle Greene
The Rock Cover Song: Culture, History, Politics
McFarland (May 15, 2014)

Cover songs operate as a form of cultural discourse across various musical genres and different societal, historical and political conditions. Employing both textual and contextual analysis, cases studies include a comparative analysis of Jimi Hendrix’s and Whitney Houston’s versions of „The Star-Spangled Banner“ as well as mapping the trajectory of „(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction“ from the original version by the Rolling Stones through cover versions by Otis Redding, Devo, and Britney Spears. The radical deconstruction of pop and rock songs by the Residents and Laibach is also examined, with additional case studies of cover songs ranging from Van Halen, Kim Wilde, Rufus Harley, the Four Tops, Pat Boone and Johnny Cash. Rather than questions of quality and how a given cover song measures up as „better or worse“ than other versions, this book focuses on the ideological implications and social stakes of the „same old songs“ as they are reconfigured in numerous ways to consider, comment on, and confront political issues of gender, sexuality, race, the nation-state and the generation gap.

 

 

Alexa Geisthövel / Bodo Mrozek (Hg.)
Popgeschichte
Transcript (Juni 2014)

Dieser Band will eine akademische Debatte über das bisher stark vernachlässigte Thema Popgeschichte anregen. Er fächert erstmalig verschiedene Ansätze und Methoden auf, mit denen sich Historiker/-innen dem Thema Pop nähern können. Von den Cultural Studies über Körper-, Gender- und Konsumgeschichte bis zur Sound History stellt er verschiedene Zugänge vor und diskutiert ihre Relevanz für die zeitgeschichtliche Forschung. Zugleich führt das Buch Studierende der Geschichtwissenschaften an einen historisch informierten Umgang mit Popkultur heran und bietet benachbarten Wissenschaften eine historische Kontextualisierung ihres Theorieinventars.