New Books in Popular Culture

View on AmazonWhen we consider the television, we think not only about how it's used, but also it's impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was seen as a form of entertainment and enjoyment for the family. Other "technology" that assists with leisure include things like rubber-soled shoes, books, and other digital devices. In their new book, Enjoying Machines (MIT 2015), Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, both scholars in the Stockholm University Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center, the success of a particular technology can be measured by how well it creates pleasure. The authors argue that pleasure "is fundamentally social in nature," and that to understand how technology supports leisure it is important to "produce a more sophisticated definition" of enjoyment. To do this Brown and Juhlin embark on an ethnographic investigation of technology and enjoyment that combines the sociological study of activity and the study of human-machine interaction. Over the course of their examination, the authors are careful to consider both the positives – enjoyment – and negatives – addiction- in relation to devices. Ultimately, Enjoying Machines offers a model of enjoyment useful for better understanding how to design useful machines.

View on AmazonJames Farrer and Andrew D. Field bring their respective areas of sociological and historical expertise to a new study of cosmopolitan nightlife in modern Shanghai. The fruit of two decades of collaborative work, the co-authored Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores continuity and change over a century of singing, dancing, drinking, playing, and otherwise cavorting in Shanghai's twentieth century and beyond. The book focuses on the ways that urban nightlife transformed alongside major historical, political, and social changes from the 1920s through the 1990s, but also traces its major threads through later developments in the twenty-first century. Its pages take readers into the cabarets and dance halls of Jazz Age Shanghai in the 1930s and 1930s, secret at-home dance parties, dancing and drinking clubs where revelers first experienced Hong Kong-style DJs or new forms of social drinking, jazz clubs, and nightlife transzones that were crucibles of social change. It's a fascinating study of modern China, and its urban cultures.

Stephen DysonView on AmazonStephen Dyson is the author of Otherworldly Politics: The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica (Johns Hopkins University Press 2015). Dyson is associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. Is Tyrian Lannister a realist or a liberal? What would Mr. Spock have to say about rational choice theory? And what did Stanley Kubrick read to create Dr. Strangelove? Dyson takes on these important questions with an enjoyable exploration for how the classic theories of International Relations have been played on our television and movie screens.

Nathan AlticeView on AmazonThe genre of "platform studies" offers both researchers and readers more than an examination of the technical machinations of a computing system. Instead, the family of methodologies presents a humanist exploration of digital media from the perspective of the platform itself. That is, this approach contemplates the social, economic and cultural influence and significance of the technology. Although more formally identified by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort in 2007 at the Digital Arts and Cultures Conference, the decades old platform studies discipline affords an understanding of the material manifestations of culture and creative work produced by computing systems. In his new book, I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer Entertainment System Platform (MIT Press, 2015), Nathan Altice, a digital media creator and scholar, studies the NES system and the Family Computer, it's precursor. More than considering the NES as a single entity, the author investigates the platform as a "network of objects and texts," that go beyond a "stable configuration of hardware and software." In this way, Altice dives deep to unearth the code and design decisions that shape the creative affordances of the NES, how users choose to play using the platform, and how the system was received outside of Japan. The NES's cultural reception is foundational for grasping a key theme throughout the book, that of "translation." For Altice, translation produces errors – "new meanings, new expressions, new bodies, and new objects." That is, the flaws in hardware and software, including the translation of language from Japanese to English, are not necessarily negative objects to be overcome. Instead, these bugs in the machine add to the performance of the games and the platform, and have very real social, economic, and cultural consequences. I Am Error is one book in the Platform Studies series from MIT Press.

Christopher ReaView on AmazonChristopher Rea's new book explores five kinds of laughter that emerged from the tumultuous first decades of China's twentieth century: jokes, play, mockery, farce, and humor. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (University of California Press, 2015) takes a playful approach to approaching play – it's not every book of Chinese history and literature that comes with a blurb by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, after all – and simultaneously offers readers a useful lens into modern Chinese history and a pleasurable introduction to some fascinating primary sources. Rea's book situates the history of laughter within broader stories of early Republican print history, the Shanghai popular press, cinema, early amusement parks, photography, hoaxes, and much more. The epilogue considers the resonance of these issues in the context of twentieth-century digital humor, and in light of controversies over and celebrations of the recent Nobel Prizes of Mo Yan and Liu Xiaobo. Enjoy!

In hew new book Real War vs. Reel War: Veterans, Hollywood, and WWII (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), Suzanne Broderick shares how she discussed a number of World War II films with veterans and others who experienced the conflict first hand.

Can sociology explain punk? In a new book, Networks of Sound, Style, and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, 1975-80 (Manchester University Press, 2015), Nick Crossley from the University of Manchester offers an important new perspective on the birth of punk and post-punk in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield in the mid to late 1970s. Crossley uses social network analysis (SNA) to show why punk developed in specific places in specific ways. This is in contrast to existing work that seeks to ground punk in the strains of adolescent life in the crisis ridden 1970s, or in the actions of specific individuals. The book seeks to account for punk and post-punk in the four cities as a series of musical worlds, all of which have similarities shown by the SNA. Indeed, by concentrating on the networks that facilitated the rise of punk, the book shows how punk can be explained through networks of connected and sometimes competing sets of enthusiasts, before it became a subject of national moral panic. Combining readable examples of SNA with the story of punk, the book will be of interest to a popular, as well as academic, audience. Prof Crossley will be discussing some of his work that has followed the publication of the book, along with a range of papers on music and networks in Manchester on June 16th-18th 2015.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Popular Music] What is Ska music? This is a deceptively complicated question. In this podcast Heather Augustyn, the author of Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation (Scarecrow Press, 2013) discusses ska’s journey from a local music in 1950s and 1960s Jamaica, its journey to Great Britain and its fusion with punk and other 1970s musical forms, and then its arrival and dissemination across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Even as the music developed in different locations and responded to local conditions, it retained its core sound and its central themes and imagery. Augustyn draws on her decades-long research as she tells the story of ska’s growth and development. Heather Augustyn is a journalist and writing teacher living in Chesterton, Ind. She author of Ska: An Oral History (with a foreword by Cedella Marley) which was nominated for the ARSC Award for Excellence, Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World's Greatest Trombonist (with a foreword by Delfeayo Marsalis). Her website is http://skabook.com and she blogs at Foundation Ska.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Film] Margaret Mitchell’s blockbuster novel was released in 1936 to great acclaim. It immediately drew interest from Hollywood hoping to turn it into an epic film. After its sale, Mitchell began a large series of letters related to the making of the film. GWTW expert John Wiley, Jr. reviewed the large collection of Mitchell’s correspondence and compiled a fascinating book of letters and telegrams from Mitchell to Hollywood moguls, reporters, fans, and friends related to the making of the film. The Scarlett Letters: The Making of the Film Gone With the Wind (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2014) presents a new way to look at the making of Gone With the Wind, as well as a different view of the importance of the book author to a movie.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Film] The United States and the world underwent a fundamental change because of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In addition to major wars, the event has brought up themes of security, torture, and the overall issue of terrorism in the 21st century. In Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2014), Guy Westwell, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London discusses a large number of feature films related to the attacks. From documentaries to narrative films, Westwell presents a great survey of a still-growing topic.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Cultural memory of World War II frequently draws on swing music and the USO dance floor as symbols of how the country came together in support of the war effort. Frequently, the term “the Greatest Generation” is used to exemplify patriotism and self-sacrifice. Digging beyond nostalgic remembrances, Sherrie Tucker’s Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke University Press, 2014) explores how race, gender, social class, and other social cleavages shaped the dance floor and produced a variety of responses to the war effort. Tucker questions the accuracy of common representations of World War II culture. In its place, she offers a more nuanced account of the social and cultural politics of the era. The podcast explores the war, the racial politics of swing music, integration and race relations, oral history and how to write cultural history. Dr. Sherrie Tucker is Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. She is also the author of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s and co-editor of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Film] War has been a constant topic for feature films since the invention of the motion picture camera. These events made for interesting stories and dynamic visual representations. In their book, War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America's Perception of History (Potomac Books, 2014),  Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen discussed a number of films that dealt with conflicts over the last 100 years. Beginning with World War I through the present War on Terror, the authors reviewed how selected films dealt with the issues of the particular war, the people who fought the war, and the society affected by the war. In this conversation with co-author David Luhrssen, he discusses how the book was conceived, how specific films were chosen, and the specific ways that the films represented the individual conflict.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Asian American Studies] Sean Metzger's Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Indiana University Press 2014), examines how, in the past 150 years, China was rendered legible to Americans through items of clothing and adornment. Professor Metzger offers a rich and detailed study of Chinese fashion, calling it the “Sino/American interface” that marks political and cultural investments in America’s views of China and Chinese Americans. Professor Metzger does this by providing a cinematic and performance-based cultural history of four iconic objects: the queue, or man's hair braid; the woman's suit or the qipao; the Mao suit; and the tuxedo. Rather than simply provide a consumptive or trading history of these garments, professor Metzger traces their emergence as consolidating discourses of gender, race, politics and aesthetics. In doing so, he asks larger questions about how garments can and have been used to express ethnicity, and to render new meanings onto racialized bodies.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Film] Many books on film discuss the artistic aspects of movies, often as they relate to social and political events that affected the filmmakers. In his book The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War (PublicAffairs, 2014), journalist/professor Dick Lehr uses a controversial film to tell a bigger story about one of the first civil rights leaders of the 20th century. Lehr presents a fascinating account of how African American journalist Monroe Trotter tried to get D. W. Griffith’s landmark film banned in Boston. He describes how the film’s release was an important aspect about how Trotter became a key participant in the nascent civil rights movement.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Critical Theory] To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) a new book by Steven Fielding, Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The book explores how British politics has been represented in fiction from the late Victorian era through to the present. The book identifies a fascinating set of core themes, including how the political class has been defended and attacked, how the idea of populism has developed over time, along with the changing role of women in British political fiction. A State of Play does not over-claim, stressing that although an understanding of fiction is essential to understanding politics, we still don't know the exact relationship between people's political participation and political fiction. However, it does make a convincing case that any understanding of the British political system will be insufficient without understanding how it has been imagined and depicted. Indeed, as later chapters show, the mode of depiction itself has become an important territory for explaining British political culture. The book contains a huge range of examples, from the more well known television series, such as Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, through to obscure and perhaps forgotten books such as The Mistress of Downing Street. Overall it will be of interest to academics and the public alike.