Title: Mass mediations: new approaches to popular culture in the Middle East and beyond 
Author: Armbrust, Walter
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Media Studies | Music | Cinema and Performance Arts
Publisher's Description: Offering a stimulating diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media are as ubiquitous in Cairo and Karachi as in Los Angeles and Detroit. From Persian popular music in Beverly Hills to Egyptians' reaction to a recent film on Gamal Abdel Nasser; from postmodern Turkish novels to the music of an Israeli transsexual singer, the essays illustrate the multiple contexts of modern cultural production. The unfolding of modernity in colonial and postcolonial societies has been little analyzed until now. In addressing transnational aspects of Middle Eastern societies, the contributors also challenge conventional assumptions about the region and its relation to the West. The volume will have wide appeal both to Middle Eastern scholars and to readers interested in global and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain
Author: Ginsburg, Faye D
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Media Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Electronic Media | Postcolonial Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Sociology | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media - film, television, video - are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.   [brief]
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Title: The politics of force: media and the construction of police brutality
Author: Lawrence, Regina G 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Politics | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: When police brutality becomes front-page news, it triggers a sudden, intense interaction between the media, the public, and the police. Regina Lawrence ably demonstrates how these news events provide the raw materials for looking at underlying problems in American society. Journalists, policy makers, and the public use such stories to define a problematic situation, and this process of problem definition gives the media a crucial role in our public policy debates. Lawrence extensively analyzes more than 500 incidents of police use-of-force covered by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to 1994, with additional analysis of more recent incidents such as as the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York. The incidents include but are not limited to those defined as "police brutality." Lawrence reveals the structural and cultural forces that both shape the news and allow police to define most use-of-force incidents, which occur in far greater numbers than are reported, she says. Lawrence explores the dilemma of obtaining critical media perspectives on policing policies. She examines the factors that made the coverage of the Rodney King beating so significant, particularly after the incident was captured on video. At the same time, she shows how an extraordinary news event involving the police can become a vehicle for marginalized social groups to gain entrance into the media arena. In contrasting "event-driven" problem definition with the more thoroughly studied "institutionally driven" news stories, Lawrence's book fills a major gap in media studies. It also offers a broader understanding of the interplay between the criminal justice system and the media in today's world.   [brief]
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Title: The state and the mass media in Japan, 1918-1945
Author: Kasza, Gregory James
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Gregory Kasza examines state-society relations in interwar Japan through a case study of public policy toward radio, film, newspapers, and magazines.
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Title: Epic encounters: culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000
Author: McAlister, Melani 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: American Studies | United States History | Middle Eastern History | Popular Culture | Middle Eastern Studies | Ethnic Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: In the last half of the twentieth century, cultural products--from films and news reports to museum exhibits and novels--profoundly shaped ideas about the relationship between Americans and the Middle East. In this innovative book, Melani McAlister explores the cultural history of political interests, arguing that U.S. encounters with the Middle East were influenced by both the presence of oil and the religious symbolism of the region. McAlister's richly textured study shows how culture functions as a social and historical force in shaping politics and identity. She skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of popular culture with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy and the domestic politics of race. McAlister begins by situating the postwar development of U.S.-Middle East relations, including the rise of anticolonialism and the establishment of the state of Israel. Subsequent chapters consider specific events and cultural texts such as the epic film The Ten Commandments, the King Tut museum exhibit, writings from the Black arts movement, the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis, and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In each of these cases, McAlister demonstrates how representations of the Middle East have been a site of struggle over both the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the construction of race, religion, and gender within the United States. Truly interdisciplinary, this work will appeal to a wide audience as it illuminates the significant intersection of culture and politics that is at the heart of both nationalism and globalization.   [brief]
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Title: Random violence: how we talk about new crimes and new victims
Author: Best, Joel
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | Law | Criminology
Publisher's Description: Random Violence is a deft and thought-provoking exploration of the ways we talk about - and why we worry about - new crimes and new forms of victimization. Focusing on so-called random crimes such as freeway shootings, gang violence, hate crimes, stalking, and wilding, Joel Best shows how new crime problems emerge and how some quickly fade from public attention while others spread and become enduring subjects of concern. Best's original and incisive argument illuminates the fact that while these crimes are in actuality neither new, nor epidemic, nor random, the language used to describe them nonetheless shapes both private fears and public policies.Best scrutinizes the melodramatic quality of the American public's attitudes toward crime, exposing the cultural context for the popularity of "random violence" as a catch-all phrase to describe contemporary crime, and the fallacious belief that violence is steadily rising. He points out that the age, race, and sex of homicide victims reveal that violence is highly patterned.Best also details the contemporary ideology of victimization, as well as the social arrangements that create and support a victim industry that can label large numbers of victims. He demonstrates why it has become commonplace to "declare war" on social problems, including drugs, crime, poverty, and cancer, and outlines the complementary influence of media, activists, officials, and experts in institutionalizing crime problems. Intrinsic to all these concerns is the way in which policy choices and outcomes are affected by the language used to describe social problems.   [brief]
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Title: The language war
Author: Lakoff, Robin Tolmach
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Language and Linguistics | Sociology | Literature | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space--political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O. J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal--Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights." Lakoff's introduction to linguistic theories and the philosophy of language lays the groundwork for an exploration of news stories that meet what she calls the UAT (Undue Attention Test). As the stories became the subject of talk-show debates, late-night comedy routines, Web sites, and magazine articles, they were embroidered with additional meanings, depending on who was telling the story. Race, gender, or both are at the heart of these stories, and each one is about the right to construct meanings from languagein short, to possess power. Because language tells us how we are connected to one another, who has power and who does not, the stories reflect the language war. We use language to analyze what we call "reality," the author argues, but we mistrust how language is used today--witness the "politics of personal destruction" following the Clinton impeachment. Yet Lakoff sees in the struggle over language a positive goal: equality in the creation of our national discourse. Her writing is accessible and witty, and her excerpts from the media are used to great effect.   [brief]
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Title: Building the fourth estate: democratization and the rise of a free press in Mexico
Author: Lawson, Chappell H 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Based on an in-depth examination of Mexico's print and broadcast media over the last twenty-five years, this book is the most richly detailed account available of the role of the media in democratization, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between changes in the press and changes in the political system. In addition to illuminating the nature of political change in Mexico, this accessibly written study also has broad implications for understanding the role of the mass media in democratization around the world.   [brief]
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Title: Pulp surrealism: insolent popular culture in early twentieth-century Paris
Author: Walz, Robin 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | French Studies | Comparative Literature
Publisher's Description: In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins, the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an interpretative history of the intersection between mass print culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary aims of the surrealist movement. Pulp Surrealism presents four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular series of Fantômes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the surrealist inquiry "Is Suicide a Solution?", which Walz juxtaposes with reprints of actual suicide faits divers (sensationalist newspaper blurbs). Although surrealist interest in sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.   [brief]
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Title: I, candidate for governor: and how I got licked
Author: Sinclair, Upton 1878-1968
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History | Autobiography | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Here, reprinted for the first time since its original publication, is muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair's lively, caustic account of the 1934 election campaign that turned California upside down and almost won him the governor's mansion.Using his "End Poverty in California" movement (more commonly called EPIC) as a springboard, Sinclair ran for governor as a Democrat, equipped with a bold plan to end the Depression in California by taking over idle land and factories and turning them into cooperative ventures for the unemployed. To his surprise, thousands rallied to the idea, converting what he had assumed would be another of his utopian schemes into a mass political movement of extraordinary dimensions. With a loosely knit organization of hundreds of local EPIC clubs, Sinclair overwhelmed the moderate Democratic opposition to capture the primary election. When it came to the general election, however, his opposition employed highly effective campaign tactics: overwhelming media hostility, vicious red-baiting and voter intimidation, high-priced dirty tricks. The result was a resounding defeat in November. I, Candidate tells the story of Sinclair's campaign while also capturing the turbulent political mood of the 1930s. Employing his trademark muckraking style, Sinclair exposes the conspiracies of power that ensured big-money control over the media and other powerful institutions.   [brief]
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Title: Picturing Casablanca: portraits of power in a modern city
Author: Ossman, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Electronic Media | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: In Picturing Casablanca , Susan Ossman probes the shape and texture of mass images in Casablanca, from posters, films, and videotapes to elections, staged political spectacles, and changing rituals. In a fluid style that blends ethnographic narrative, cultural reportage, and the author's firsthand experiences, Ossman sketches a radically new vision of Casablanca as a place where social practices, traditions, and structures of power are in flux.Ossman guides the reader through the labyrinthine byways of the city, where state bureaucracy and state power, the media and its portrayal of the outside world, and people's everyday lives are all on view. She demonstrates how images not only reflect but inform and alter daily experience. In the Arab League Park, teenagers use fashion and flirting to attract potential mates, defying traditional rules of conduct. Wedding ceremonies are transformed by the ubiquitous video camera, which becomes the event's most important spectator. Political leaders are molded by the state's adept manipulation of visual media.From Madonna videos and the TV's transformation of social time, to changing gender roles and new ways of producing and disseminating information, the Morocco that Ossman reveals is a telling commentary on the consequences of colonial planning, the influence of modern media, and the rituals of power and representation enacted by the state.   [brief]
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Title: China's new voices: popular music, ethnicity, gender, and politics, 1978-1997
Author: Baranovitch, Nimrod 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | China | Popular Music | Ethnomusicology | Politics | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This is the most comprehensive study to date of the rich popular music scene in contemporary China. Focusing on the city of Beijing and drawing upon extensive fieldwork, China's New Voices shows that during the 1980s and 1990s, rock and pop music, combined with new technologies and the new market economy, have enabled marginalized groups to achieve a new public voice that is often independent of the state. Nimrod Baranovitch analyzes this phenomenon by focusing on three important contexts: ethnicity, gender, and state politics. His study is a fascinating look at the relationship between popular music in China and broad cultural, social, and political changes that are taking place there. Baranovitch's sources include formal interviews and conversations conducted with some of China's most prominent rock and pop musicians and music critics, with ordinary people who provide lay perspectives on popular music culture, and with others involved in the music industry and in academia. Baranovitch also observed recording sessions, concerts, and dance parties, and draws upon TV broadcasts and many publications in Chinese about popular music. keywords: Ethnicity   [brief]
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Title: Crack in America: demon drugs and social justice
Author: Reinarman, Craig
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Crack in America is the definitive book on crack cocaine. In reinterpreting the crack story, it offers new understandings of both drug addiction and drug prohibition. It shows how crack use arose in the face of growing unemployment, poverty, racism, and shrinking social services. It places crack in its historical context - as the latest in a long line of demonized drugs - and it examines the crack scare as a phenomenon in its own right. Most important, it uses crack and the crack scare as windows onto America's larger drug and drug policy problems.Written by a team of veteran drug researchers in medicine, law, and the social sciences, this book provides the most comprehensive, penetrating, and original analysis of the crack problem to date. It reviews the social pharmacology of crack and offers rich ethnographic case studies of crack binging, addiction, and sales. It explores crack's different impacts on whites, blacks, the middle class, and the poor, and explains why crack was always much less of a problem in other countries such as Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands. Crack in America helps readers understand why the United States has the most repressive, expensive, and yet least effective drug policy in the Western world. It discusses the ways politicians and the media generated the crack scare as the centerpiece of the War on Drugs. It catalogues the costs of the War on Drugs for civil liberties, situates crack use and sales in the political economy of the inner cities in the 1980s, and shows how the drug war led to the most massive wave of imprisonment in U.S. history. Finally, it explains why the failures of drug prohibition have led to the emergence of the harm reduction movement and other opposition forces that are changing the face of U.S. drug policy.   [brief]
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Title: Lives together/worlds apart: mothers and daughters in popular culture 
Author: Walters, Suzanna Danuta
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Gender Studies | Popular Culture | American Studies | Gender Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In the 1940s film Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays a daughter struggling against her mother's stifling repression. Nearly fifty years later, in the Hollywood saga Postcards from the Edge , Shirley MacLaine, as a neglectful and bossy mother, inflicts untold psychological pain on her daughter, played by Meryl Streep. These dramas of conflict and the ambivalent struggle for separation have been central to popular images of mothers and daughters in the last half-century in the U.S. Walters boldly challenges these dichotomies and proposes an innovative and multilayered understanding of the cultural construction of the mother/daughter relationship.In a discussion of popular media ranging from themes of maternal martyrdom to maternal malevolence, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an "ideology of separation" as necessary to the daughter's emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years.Walters uses exceptions to mainstream imagery-films such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , television shows like "Maude," novels like The Joy Luck Club -to offer evidence of alternative traditions and paradigms. Timely and vividly argued, Lives Together/Worlds Apart makes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.   [brief]
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Title: Popular music and national culture in Israel
Author: Regev, Motti
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Music | Ethnomusicology | Middle Eastern Studies | Popular Culture | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: A unique Israeli national culture - indeed, the very nature of "Israeliness" - remains a matter of debate, a struggle to blend vying memories and backgrounds, ideologies and wills. Identifying popular music as an important site in this wider cultural endeavor, this book focuses on the three major popular music cultures that are proving instrumental in attempts to invent Israeliness: the invented folk song repertoire known as Shirei Eretz Israel; the contemporary, global-cosmopolitan Israeli rock; and the ethnic-oriental musica mizrahit. The result is the first ever comprehensive study of popular music in Israel. Motti Regev, a sociologist, and Edwin Seroussi, an ethnomusicologist, approach their subject from alternative perspectives, producing a truly interdisciplinary, sociocultural account of music as a feature and a force in the shaping of Israeliness. A major ethnographic undertaking, describing and analyzing the particular history, characteristics, and practices of each music culture, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel maps not only the complex field of Israeli popular music but also Israeli culture in general.   [brief]
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Title: Material girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory
Author: Walters, Suzanna Danuta
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Women's Studies | American Studies | Politics | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Madonna, Murphy Brown, Thelma and Louise: These much-discussed media icons are the starting points of Suzanna Walter's brilliant, much-needed introduction to feminist cultural theory. Accessible yet theoretically sophisticated, up-to-date and entertaining, Material Girls acquaints readers with the major theories, debates, and concepts in this new and exciting field.With numerous case studies and illustrations, Walters situates feminist cultural theory against the background of the women's movement and media studies. Using examples from film, television, advertising, and popular discourse, she looks at topics such as the "male gaze," narrative theory, and new work on female "ways of seeing" and spectatorship. Throughout, Walters provides a historically grounded account of representations of women in popular culture while critiquing the dominance of psychoanalytic and postmodern analyses.The first comprehensive guide to the approaches and debates that make up this growing field, Material Girls belongs on the shelf of every cultural critic and savvy student today.   [brief]
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Title: American sensations: class, empire, and the production of popular culture 
Author: Streeby, Shelley 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | American Literature | Californian and Western History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.   [brief]
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Title: Spectacular realities: early mass culture in fin-de-siècle Paris
Author: Schwartz, Vanessa R
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | French Studies | European History | European Literature | Women's Studies | Film
Publisher's Description: During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle.Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.   [brief]
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Title: Religion and popular culture in America
Author: Forbes, Bruce David
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Popular Culture | United States History
Publisher's Description: The connections between American popular culture and religion is the subject of this multifaceted and innovative collection. Ranging from religious themes in cowboy fiction to Madonna's "Like a Prayer," from televangelism to the world of sports, the book's contributors offer fascinating insights into what popular culture reveals about the nature of American religion today. Bruce David Forbes provides an introductory essay that states the book's organizing principles. The first group of essays examines the appearance of explicit religious content or implicit religious themes in popular culture, focusing on such particulars as Christmas television specials and the fiction of Louis L'Amour and Cormac McCarthy. The second group of essays considers ways that popular culture influences traditional religions, especially evangelical Christianity. A third group illustrates how aspects of popular culture develop their own myths, symbol systems, and ritual patterns; included are discussions of Star Trek fandom, women's weight loss rituals, and sports. The fourth group offers examples of ways that religion and popular culture might critique each another: the disguise of vengeance in Pale Rider , rap music's take on African-American Christian theology, and a Christian feminist perspective on the role of gender in cyberspace. Jeffrey H. Mahan's concluding essay looks at the academic and general audiences engaged in discussions of social and cultural reform.   [brief]
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Title: Cold War orientalism: Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961
Author: Klein, Christina 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | United States History | American Literature | Asian American Studies | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: In the years following World War II, American writers and artists produced a steady stream of popular stories about Americans living, working, and traveling in Asia and the Pacific. Meanwhile the U.S., competing with the Soviet Union for global power, extended its reach into Asia to an unprecedented degree. This book reveals that these trends - the proliferation of Orientalist culture and the expansion of U.S. power - were linked in complex and surprising ways. While most cultural historians of the Cold War have focused on the culture of containment, Christina Klein reads the postwar period as one of international economic and political integration - a distinct chapter in the process of U.S.-led globalization. Through her analysis of a wide range of texts and cultural phenomena - including Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and The King and I, James Michener's travel essays and novel Hawaii, and Eisenhower's People-to-People Program - Klein shows how U.S. policy makers, together with middlebrow artists, writers, and intellectuals, created a culture of global integration that represented the growth of U.S. power in Asia as the forging of emotionally satisfying bonds between Americans and Asians. Her book enlarges Edward Said's notion of Orientalism in order to bring to light a cultural narrative about both domestic and international integration that still resonates today.   [brief]
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