Культурология
Различные книги в жанре КультурологияPranksters
From BenjaminFranklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman’sattempt to levitate the Pentagon, pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have causedconfusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profilingthe most notorious mischief makers from the 1600s to the present day, Prankstersexplores how “pranks” are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to powerand social critique. Invoking such historical and contemporary figures as P.T. Barnum,Jonathan Swift, WITCH, The Yes Men, and Stephen Colbert, Kembrew McLeod showshow staged spectacles that balance the serious and humorous can spark importantpublic conversations. In some instances, tricksters have incited social change(and unfortunate prank blowback) by manipulating various forms of media, fromnewspapers to YouTube. For example, in the 1960s, self-proclaimed “professionalhoaxer” Alan Abel lampooned America’s hypocritical sexual mores by usingconservative rhetoric to fool the news media into covering a satirical organizationthat advocated clothing naked animals. In the 1990s, Sub Pop Recordsthen-receptionist Megan Jasper satirized the commodification of alternativemusic culture by pranking the New YorkTimes into reporting on her fake lexicon of “grunge speak.” Throughout thisbook, McLeod shows how pranks interrupt the daily flow of approved informationand news, using humor to underscore larger, pointed truths. Written in an accessible, story-driven style, Prankstersreveals how mischief makers have left their shocking, entertaining, andeducational mark on modern political and social life.
Perverse Spectators
Film and television have never been more prevalent or watched than they are now, yet we still have little understanding of how people process and make use of what they see. And though we acknowledge the enormous role the media plays in our culture, we have only a vague sense of how it actually influences our attitudes and desires. In Perverse Spectators , Janet Staiger argues that studying the interpretive methods of spectators within their historical contexts is both possible and necessary to understand the role media plays in culture and in our personal lives. This analytical approach is applied to topics such as depictions of violence, the role of ratings codes, the horror and suspense genre, historical accuracy in film, and sexual identities, and then demonstrated through works like JFK , The Silence of the Lambs , The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , Psycho , and A Clockwork Orange . Each chapter shows a different approach to reconstructing audience responses to films, consistently and ingeniously finding traces of what would otherwise appear to be unrecoverable information. Using vivid examples, charting key concepts, and offering useful syntheses of long-standing debates, Perverse Spectators constitutes a compelling case for a reconsideration of the assumptions about film reception which underlie contemporary scholarship in media studies. Taking on widely influential theories and scholars, Perverse Spectators is certain to spark controversy and help redefine the study of film as it enters the new millennium.
Our Biometric Future
Since the 1960s, a significant effort has been underway to program computers to “see” the human face—to develop automated systems for identifying faces and distinguishing them from one another—commonly known as Facial Recognition Technology. While computer scientists are developing FRT in order to design more intelligent and interactive machines, businesses and states agencies view the technology as uniquely suited for “smart” surveillance—systems that automate the labor of monitoring in order to increase their efficacy and spread their reach.Tracking this technological pursuit, Our Biometric Future identifies FRT as a prime example of the failed technocratic approach to governance, where new technologies are pursued as shortsighted solutions to complex social problems. Culling news stories, press releases, policy statements, PR kits and other materials, Kelly Gates provides evidence that, instead of providing more security for more people, the pursuit of FRT is being driven by the priorities of corporations, law enforcement and state security agencies, all convinced of the technology’s necessity and unhindered by its complicated and potentially destructive social consequences. By focusing on the politics of developing and deploying these technologies, Our Biometric Future argues not for the inevitability of a particular technological future, but for its profound contingency and contestability.
No University Is an Island
The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education’s independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach. No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education’s renewal. In an insider’s account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.The book calls on higher education’s advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education’s real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy.With broad and crucial implications for the future, No University Is an Island will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.
My Soul Is in Haiti
Offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally, by studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas. In the Haitian diaspora, as in Haiti itself, the majority ofHaitians have long practiced Catholicism or Vodou. However, Protestant forms ofChristianity now flourish both in Haiti and beyond. In the Bahamas, whereapproximately one in five people are now Haitian-born or Haitian-descended,Protestantism has become the majority religion for immigrant Haitians. In My Soul Is in Haiti, Bertin M. Louis, Jr. hascombined multi-sited ethnographic research in the United States, Haiti, and theBahamas with a transnational framework to analyze why Protestantism hasappealed to the Haitian diaspora community in the Bahamas. The volumeillustrates how devout Haitian Protestant migrants use their religiousidentities to ground themselves in a place that is hostile to them as migrants,and it also uncovers how their religious faith ties in to their belief in theneed to “save” their homeland, as they re-imagine Haiti politically and morallyas a Protestant Christian nation. This important look at transnational migration betweensecond and third world countries shows how notions of nationalism among Haitianmigrants in the Bahamas are filtered through their religious beliefs. Bystudying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas, Louisoffers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, bothregionally and globally.
Media Reception Studies
Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media.Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship. Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.
Love and Money
Love and Money argues that we can’t understand contemporary queer cultures without looking through the lens of social class. Resisting old divisions between culture and economy, identity and privilege, left and queer, recognition and redistribution, Love and Money offers supple approaches to capturing class experience and class form in and around queerness. Contrary to familiar dismissals, not every queer television or movie character is like Will Truman on Will and Grace—rich, white, healthy, professional, detached from politics, community, and sex. Through ethnographic encounters with readers and cultural producers and such texts as Boys Don’t Cry, Brokeback Mountain, By Hook or By Crook, and wedding announcements in the New York Times, Love and Money sees both queerness and class across a range of idioms and practices in everyday life. How, it asks, do readers of Dorothy Allison’s novels use her work to find a queer class voice? How do gender and race broker queer class fantasy? How do independent filmmakers cross back and forth between industry and queer sectors, changing both places as they go and challenging queer ideas about bad commerce and bad taste? With an eye to the nuances and harms of class difference in queerness and a wish to use culture to forge queer and class affinities, Love and Money returns class and its politics to the study of queer life.
Looking for Leroy
Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.
Lighting Up
While the past 40 years have seen significant declines in adult smoking, this is not the case among young adults, who have the highest prevalence of smoking of all other age groups. At a time when just about everyone knows that smoking is bad for you, why do so many college students smoke? Is it a short lived phase or do they continue throughout the college years? And what happens after college, when they enter the “real world”? Drawing on interviews and focus groups with hundreds of young adults, Lighting Up takes the reader into their everyday lives to explore social smoking. Mimi Nichter argues that we must understand more about the meaning of social and low level smoking to youth, the social contexts that cause them to take up (or not take up) the habit, and the way that smoking plays a large role in students’ social lives. Nichter examines how smoking facilitates social interaction, helps young people express and explore their identity, and serves as a means for communicating emotional states. Most college students who smoked socially were confident that “this was no big deal.” After all, they were “not really smokers” and they would only be smoking for a short time. But, as graduation neared, they expressed ambivalence or reluctance to quit. As many grads today step into an uncertain future, where the prospect of finding a good job in a timely manner is unlikely, their 20s may be a time of great stress and instability. For those who have come to depend on the comfort of cigarettes during college, this array of life stressors may make cutting back or quitting more difficult, despite one’s intentions and understandings of the harms of tobacco. And emerging products on the market, like e-cigarettes, offer an opportunity to move from smoking to vaping. Lighting Up considers how smoking fits into the lives of young adults and how uncertain times may lead to uncertain smoking trajectories that reach into adulthood.
Latino Spin
Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award in Latino Studies from the Latin American Studies Association Illegal immigrant, tax burden, job stealer. Patriot, family oriented, hard worker, model consumer. Ever since Latinos became the largest minority in the U.S. they have been caught between these wildly contrasting characterizations leaving us to wonder: Are Latinos friend or foe? Latino Spin cuts through the spin about Latinos’ supposed values, political attitudes, and impact on U.S. national identity to ask what these caricatures suggest about Latinos’ shifting place in the popular and political imaginary. Noted scholar Arlene Dávila illustrates the growing consensus among pundits, advocates, and scholars that Latinos are not a social liability, that they are moving up and contributing, and that, in fact, they are more American than “the Americans.” But what is at stake in such a sanitized and marketable representation of Latinidad? Dávila follows the spin through the realm of politics, think tanks, Latino museums, and urban planning to uncover whether they effectively challenge the growing fear over Latinos’ supposedly dreadful effect on the “integrity” of U.S. national identity. What may be some of the intended or unintended consequences of these more marketable representations in regard to current debates over immigration?With particular attention to what these representations reveal about the place and role of Latinos in the contemporary politics of race, Latino Spin highlights the realities they skew and the polarization they effect between Latinos and other minorities, and among Latinos themselves along the lines of citizenship and class. Finally, by considering Latinos in all their diversity, including their increasing financial and geographic disparities, Dávila can present alternative and more empowering representations of Latinidad to help attain true political equity and intraracial coalitions.