Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: pop culture studies

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  Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart

  by Gavin Hopps

  Morrissey is arguably the greatest disturbance popular music has ever known. Even more than the choreographed carelessness of punk and the hyperbolic gestures of glam rock and the New Romantics, Morrissey's early bookish ineptitude, his celebration of the ordinary, and his subversive endorsement of celibacy, abstinence and rock `n' roll revolutionized the world of British pop. As an increasingly pugnacious solo... (more)
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  The Queer Art of Failure

  by Judith Halberstam

  The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that... (more)
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  Believer Essays

  More Baths, Less Talking

  by Nick Hornby

  “Read what you enjoy, not what bores you,” Nick Hornby tells us. That simple, liberating, and indispensable directive animates each installment of the celebrated critic and author’s monthly column in the Believer. In this delightful and never-musty tour of his reading life, Hornby tells us not just what to read, but how to read. Whether tackling a dismayingly bulky biography of Dickens while his children destroy... (more)
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  Gaga Feminism: Gender, Sex and the End of Normal

  by J. Jack Halberstam

  A roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminism   Judith “Jack” Halberstam, a well-known academic in queer theory, gender, and cultural studies, makes sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant... (more)
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  Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop

  by Yuval Taylor, Jake Austen

  An exploration and celebration of a controversial tradition that, contrary to popular opinion, is alive and active after more than 150 years. Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen investigate the complex history of black minstrelsy, adopted in the mid-nineteenth century by African American performers who played the grinning blackface fool to entertain black and white audiences. We now consider minstrelsy an... (more)
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  Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era

  by Francesca T. Royster

  Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The... (more)
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  Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

  by Justin Gifford

  "Lush sex and stark violence colored Black and served up raw by a great Negro writer," promised the cover of Run Man Run, Chester Himes' pioneering novel in the black crime fiction tradition. In Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive... (more)
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  Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies

  by David L. Robb

  This is the most important book ever written about Hollywood. It uncovers a secret collaboration between Hollywood and the military that has been going on for more than fifty years. Based on thousands of pages of Pentagon documents and interviews with filmmakers and military officials, OPERATION HOLLYWOOD reveals that many of your favorite movies and television shows have been shaped, sanitized, and censored by... (more)
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  Open Court Popular Culture and Philosophy Series

  Superheroes and Philosophy

  Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way

  by Tom Morris, Matt Morris, William Irwin

  The comic book superheroes — Superman, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and many others — have proved to be a powerful and enduring thread in popular culture, a rich source of ideas for moviemakers, novelists, and philosophers. Superheroes and Philosophy brings together 16 leading philosophers and some of the most creative people in the world of comics, from storywriters to editors to... (more)
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  Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women

  by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

  " Pimps Up, Ho's Down provides a vital critical assessment of the sexual exploitation of women and girls all too prevalent in hip hop culture and in our larger society. This intelligent and sensitively written study is mandatory reading for those of us who must stop the violence." --Darlene Clark Hine, co-author of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America "This compelling,... (more)
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  Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

  by Hiroshi Aoyagi

  Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the "idol," an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the... (more)
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  Open Court Popular Culture and Philosophy Series

  Manga and Philosophy

  by Adam Barkman, Josef Steiff

  Arguably the most important pop-culture import from the East to the West, manga is a phenomenon that can no longer be ignored. Yet just as much as it is a source of visual splendor and riveting storylines, manga — the herald of the exotic and über-hip — stimulates intense philosophical interest. Drawing from Japanese art traditions, influenced by the impact of World War II, and a significant player in... (more)
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  Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid

  by Ron Krabill

  During the worst years of apartheid, the most popular show on television in South Africa—among both Black and White South Africans—was The Cosby Show . Why did people living under a system built on the idea that Black people were inferior and threatening flock to a show that portrayed African Americans as comfortably mainstream? Starring Mandela and Cosby takes up this paradox, revealing the surprising impact... (more)
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  The Anthology of Rap

  by Adam Bradley

  From the school yards of the South Bronx to the tops of the Billboard charts, rap has emerged as one of the most influential cultural forces of our time. In The Anthology of Rap , editors Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois demonstrate that rap is also a wide-reaching and vital poetic tradition born of beats and rhymes. This pioneering anthology brings together more than three hundred lyrics written over thirty... (more)
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  Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!

  by Craig Schuftan

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  Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga

  by Jennifer S. Prough

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  Theories of International Politics and Zombies

  by Daniel W. Drezner

  What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner's groundbreaking book answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Addressing timely issues with analytical bite, Drezner looks at how well-known theories from international relations might be applied to a war with zombies. Exploring the plots of... (more)
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  Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans

  by Timothy Richard Aubry

  Why do Americans read contemporary fiction? This question seems simple, but is it? Do Americans read for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation? To satisfy their own insatiable intellectual curiosities? While other forms of media have come to monopolize consumers’ leisure time, in the past two decades book clubs have proliferated, Amazon has sponsored thriving online discussions, Oprah Winfrey has inspired millions... (more)
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  Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon

  by Kathryn Lofton

  "Today on Oprah ," intones the TV announcer, and all over America viewers tune in to learn, empathize, and celebrate. In this book, Kathryn Lofton investigates the Oprah phenomenon and finds in Winfrey's empire--Harpo Productions, O Magazine , and her new television network--an uncanny reflection of religion in modern society. Lofton shows that when Oprah likes, needs, or believes something, she offers her... (more)
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  Retromania

  Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

  by Simon Reynolds

  We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one... (more)