In spite of the existence of statistics and numerical data on various aspects of African American life, including housing, earnings, assets, unemployment, household violence, teen pregnancy and encounters with the criminal justice system, social science literature on how racism affects the everyday interactions of African American families is limited. How does racism come home to and affect African American families? If a father in an African American family is denied employment on the basis of his race or a wife is demeaned at work by racist slurs, how is their family life affected? Given the lack of social science literature responding to these questions, this volume turns to an alternative source in order to address them: literature. Engaging with novels written by African American authors, it explores their rich depictions of African American family life, showing how these can contribute to our sociological knowledge and making the case for the novel as an object and source of social research. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of the sociology of the family, race and ethnicity, cultural studies and literature.

Memory has long been a subject of fascination for poets, artists, philosophers and historians. This timely volume, edited by Siobhan Kattago, examines how past events are remembered, contested, forgotten, learned from and shared with others. Each author in The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies has been asked to reflect on his or her research companions as a scholar, who studies memory. The original studies presented in the volume are written by leading experts, who emphasize both the continuity of heritage and tradition, as well as the memory of hostilities, traumas and painful events. Comprised of four thematic sections, The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research within the discipline. The principal themes include: c Memory, History and Time c Social, Psychological and Cultural Frameworks of Memory c Acts and Places of Memory c Politics of Memory, Forgetting and Democracy Featuring contributions from key thinkers in the field, this comprehensive volume will be a valuable resource for all academics and students working within this area of study.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics offers a broad and comprehensive understanding of comparative or world rhetoric, from ancient times to the modern day. Bringing together an international team of established and emergent scholars, this Handbook looks beyond Greco-Roman traditions in the study of rhetoric to provide an international, cross-cultural study of communication practices around the globe. With dedicated sections covering theory and practice, history, pedagogy, hybrids and the modern context, this extensive collection will provide the reader with a solid understanding of: how comparative rhetoric evolved how it re-defines and expands the field of rhetorical studies what it contributes to our understanding of human communication its implications for the advancement of related fields, such as composition, technology, language studies, and literacy. In a world where understanding how people communicate, argue, and persuade is as important as understanding their languages, The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics is an essential resource for scholars and students of communication, composition, rhetoric, cultural studies, cultural rhetoric, cross-cultural studies, transnational studies, translingual studies, and languages.

This book explores the resurgence of rural horror following the events of 9/11, as a number of filmmakers, inspired by the films of the 1970s, moved away from the characteristic industrial and urban settings of apocalyptic horror, to return to American heartland horror. Examining the revival of rural horror in an era of city fear and urban terrorism, the author analyses the relationship of the genre with fears surrounding the Global War on Terror, exploring the films' engagement with the political repercussions of 9/11 and the ways in which traces of traumatic events leave their mark on cultures. Arranged around the themes of dissent, patriotism, myth, anger and memorial, and with attention to both text and socio-cultural context in its interpretation of the films' themes, Post-9/11 Heartland Horror offers a series of case studies covering a ten-year period to shed light on the manner in which the Post-9/11 Heartland Horror films scrutinize and unravel the events, aspirations, anxieties, discourses, dogmas, and socio-political conflicts of the post-9/11 era. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies and media studies, and those with interests in the relationship between popular culture and politics.

This book examines contemporary American animated humor, focusing on popular animated television shows in order to explore the ways in which they engage with American culture and history, employing a peculiarly American way of using humor to discuss important cultural issues. With attention to the work of American humorists, such as the Southwest humorists, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and Kurt Vonnegut, and the question of the extent to which modern animated satire shares the qualities of earlier humor, particularly the use of setting, the carnivalesque, collective memory, racial humor, and irony, Humor and Satire on Contemporary Television concentrates on a particular strand of American humor: the use of satire to expose the gap between the American ideal and the American experience. Taking up the notion of 'The Great American Joke', the author examines the discursive humor of programmes such as The Simpsons, South Park , Family Guy , King of the Hill, Daria, American Dad!, The Boondocks, The PJs and Futurama . A study of how animated television programmes offer a new discourse on a very traditional strain of American humor, this book will appeal to scholars and students of popular culture, television and media studies, American literature and visual studies, and contemporary humor and satire.

This ground-breaking book explores the moral dimensions of sexual imagery in contemporary, general-release Asian films. It examines debates that arise over aesthetic styles and the cultural and traditional influences that determine the content and impact of these films. The social and regulatory environments for filmmakers across Asia reflect distinct national and cultural differences. In just the past decade, for instance, Indian cinema has rapidly moved from representations of coy and submissive female protagonists to highly eroticized leading ladies unafraid of flaunting their sexuality. On the other hand, the cinema emerging from the Chinese mainland has been much more circumspect in its representations of overt sexuality, at times in conflict with other Chinese cinemas from Hong Kong and Taiwan. This use of sexual imagery or morally questionable film content raises on-going debates into censorship and the use of state or industry controls to protect certain sectors of society from exposure to particular narratives or images. Film, like all forms of art, fulfils a number of aesthetic functions for local, regional and international audiences. As distribution and technological advances make Asian films more readily available across the globe, an understanding of the different aesthetics at play will enable readers of this book to recognize key cultural motifs in representations of onscreen sexuality and the surrounding controversies found in cinematic texts from Asia.

Departing from the scholarly treatment of addiction as a form of rhetoric or discursive formation, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America focuses on the material, lived experience of addiction and the ways in which it is shaped by a 'metaphor of waste', from the manner in which people describe the addict, the experience of inebriation or his or her systematic exclusion from various aspects of American culture. With analyses of scientific and popular cultural texts such as novels and films, scholarly or medical models of addiction, reality television, TV drama, public health and anti-addiction campaigns, and the lives of celebrities who struggled with addiction, this book recovers the sense of materiality in which the experience of substance abuse is anchored, revealing addiction to be a set of socio-cultural practices, historically-contingent events and behaviours. Exploring the ways in which addiction as an identity construct, as a social problem, and as a lived experience is always and already circumscribed by the metaphor of waste, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America advances the idea that addiction constitutes a site of social control beyond the individual, through which American citizenship is regulated and the 'nation' itself is imagined, demarcated, and contained. As such, it will appeal to scholars of popular culture, cultural and media studies, performance studies, sociology and American culture.

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Paramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo's cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes' work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre's ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.

Outside Japan, the term 'manga' usually refers to comics originally published in Japan. Yet nowadays many publications labelled 'manga' are not translations of Japanese works but rather have been wholly conceived and created elsewhere. These comics, although often derided and dismissed as 'fake manga', represent an important but understudied global cultural phenomenon which, controversially, may even point to a future of 'Japanese' comics without Japan. This book takes seriously the political economy and cultural production of this so-called 'global manga' produced throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia and explores the conditions under which it arises and flourishes; what counts as 'manga' and who gets to decide; the implications of global manga for contemporary economies of cultural and creative labour; the ways in which it is shaped by or mixes with local cultural forms and contexts; and, ultimately, what it means for manga to be 'authentically' Japanese in the first place. Presenting new empirical research on the production of global manga culture from scholars across the humanities and social sciences, as well as first person pieces and historical overviews written by global manga artists and industry insiders, Global Manga will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, Japanese studies, and popular and visual culture.

This book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes. Developing the notion of surface ethnography as a methodological approach to examining the form of cultural experience produced by urban cultural spaces, the author sheds light on the manner in which they transform cultural spectatorship, express wider political and ecological concerns and offer differing views to the 'native' and the 'tourist' in the construction of local history. The book also examines the decline of the idea that iconic projects can drive regeneration, in the failures and delays that can beset such undertakings. Offering a rich examination of the legacy of urban change in its most recent formulation - that of cultural regeneration - this book reveals the fragile potential of the spaces produced by contemporary 'dream houses' and as such, will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and social theory, urban studies, cultural geography and architecture.

Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western examines the use and function of musical tropes and gestures traditionally associated with the American Western in new and different contexts ranging from Elizabethan theater, contemporary drama, space opera and science fiction, Cold War era European filmmaking, and advertising. Each chapter focuses on a notable use of Western musical tropes, textures, instrumentation, form, and harmonic language, delving into the resonance of the music of the Western to cite bravura, machismo, colonisation, violence, gender roles and essentialism, exploration, and other concepts.

In 2016, the Super Bowl, the climactic spectacle of American professional football, celebrated its 50th anniversary. The Super Bowl stands as the broadest 'shared experience' in American culture. As television ratings, cultural practices, and scholarly tomes reveal, more people participate in watching the Super Bowl than in any other common endeavour in the United States. The Super Bowl has become a new national holiday dedicated to the celebration of consumption-the driving force underneath modern culture. Beyond the borders of the United States, the Super Bowl does not rank as highly as a global phenomenon, though it increasingly draws larger audiences in a few nations around the globe. Some watch as curious students of American habits, others seem to be developing affinity for American-style football. The global dynamics of the consumption of football reveal much about the dynamics of American 'soft power' and cultural influence in the new globalized social networks that are emerging as consumption increasingly powers not only the United States but also the world economy. A Half Century of Super Bowls: National and Global Perspectives on America's Grandest Spectacle analyzes the Super Bowl in shaping American and global communities and identities. It was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

In 1936 the Mongolian socialist government decreed the establishment of a film industry with the principal aim of disseminating propaganda to the largely nomadic population. The government sent promising young rural Mongolian musicians to Soviet conservatoires to be trained formally as composers. On their return they utilised their traditional Mongolian musical backgrounds and the musical skills learned during their studies to compose scores to the 167 propaganda films produced by the state film studio between 1938 and 1990. Lucy M. Rees provides an overview of the rich mosaic of music genres that appeared in these film soundtracks, including symphonic music influenced by Western art music, modified forms of Mongolian traditional music, and a new genre known as 'professional music' that combined both symphonic and Mongolian traditional characteristics. Case studies of key composers and film scores are presented, demonstrating the influence of cultural policy on film music and showing how film scores complemented the ideological message of the films. There are discussions of films that celebrate the 1921 Revolution that led to Mongolia becoming a socialist nation, those that foreshadowed the 1990 Democratic Revolution that drew the socialist era to a close, and the diverse range of films and scores produced after 1990 in the aftermath of the socialist regime.

Published in 1999, the book invites readers to rethink about the contemporary form of politics in terms of the cultural and narrative logics of public discourse. The author proposes that the notions of 'public' and 'narrative' are central to understanding the discursive formation of public opinion. Incorporating a reformulated conception of the public into a theory of narrative progression, Dr. Ku explains (1) the interaction between narrative construction and political conflicts in politics of public credibility and (2) the progressive or narrative formation of the force of the 'public' out of the struggle as well as its power over the positioning and re-positioning of the actors. Using the method of textual interpretation of newspaper discourses, she analyzes the interplay between politics and the 'public' by delving into the continuously changing narrative contexts wherein the controversy over governor Patten's reform proposals unfolded in Hong Kong between 1992 and 1994.

"Writing With, Through, and Beyond the Text: An Ecology of Language" elaborates an understanding of writing, its influences on our interpretations of experience and identity, and its potential for enabling individuals to learn about and connect to the world beyond themselves. Rather than considering writing a process, the author describes it as a system, an ecology that engages the individual in a variety of socially constituted and interacting systems. The book examines the pedagogical and curricular implications of this approach to writing, considering what it means to write and teach writing in ways that understand and acknowledge the ecological character of writing. This is an illuminating text for a wide audience of faculty, professionals, and graduate students in English, writing, education, and women's studies/feminist theory.

"I can be a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a woman without having periods." This book explores two of the oldest and most important symbols of all time: menstruation and secondary amenorrhea. Women of menstruating age commonly experience secondary amenorrhea - a cessation of periods - but most people have never heard of the term, nor do they realise what it represents. Danielle Redland's curiosity as to why this is posits that menstrual conditions need to be decoded, not just simply treated. Surveying menstruation and Secondary Amenorrhea (SA) principally from a psychoanalytic perspective, with sociocultural, historical, political and religious angles also examined, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women, Menstruation and Secondary Amenorrhea draws secondary amenorrhea out of the shadows of its menstruating counterpart, and explores how narratives of womanhood and statehood dominate. Chapters on blood ideology and war amenorrhea, on Freud's treatment of Emma Eckstein and on the psycho-mythology of Pygmalion, present the reader with visions beyond patriarchy towards more thoughtful ideas on the feminine, challenging assumptions about gender, identity and what is deemed "good" for women. Rich in clinical examples, the book locates menses and their cessation at the heart of personal experience and examines psychosomatic phenomena, the link between psyche and body and the value of interpretation. From the author's own analysis to a variety of cases linked to hysteria, anorexia, stress, trauma, abuse, helplessness and hopelessness, individual stories and narratives are sensitively recovered and carefully revealed. This refreshing example of multi-layered research and psychoanalytic enquiry by a new, female writer will be of great interest to psychologists, psychotherapists, healthcare and social work professionals and readers of gender studies, history, politics and literature.

First published in 1998. In a 1996 review article in College English, Elizabeth Rankin contrasted the method and epistemology of two recent books on writing pedagogy, describing one as "grounded in the experience of student writers and teachers" and the other as "academic." Rankin's labels highlight one of the leading sources of tension in composition research-the tension between practice and theory-a tension that echoes in writing center research and publications. This collection of chapters seeks to build on the inherent collaborativeness of writing centers, capturing the voices of the student writers and tutors who are at the core of writing center work.

Especially in the last several decades, Museum Studies has expanded enormously to become an internationally recognized and highly interdisciplinary academic field. It draws on subjects from across the humanities and social sciences, including Art History, Cultural Studies, Ethnography, Cultural Geography, History, Sociology, Economics, Business, Marketing, and Tourism Studies. (And, beyond the academy, it has also benefited from significant contributions made by cultural policy-makers.) While intellectual diversity is a great strength of Museum Studies, its complex heritage makes it extremely challenging for the uninitiated to navigate and comprehend the subject's major works. Indeed, even those who are very familiar with particular disciplinary domains may be unaware of other important parallel debates taking place elsewhere. This new five-volume collection from Routledge, edited by Rhiannon Mason of the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, Newcastle University, responds to that challenge by making readily available in one panoptical 'mini library' the foundational and the very best cutting-edge research from the entire range of disciplines and subjects that contribute towards Museum Studies. In five volumes, the collection addresses the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical concerns of museums-alongside the equally important practical, organizational, and operational issues-to understand how they operate today. The collection also reflects the fact that many of the issues faced by contemporary institutions can only be understood in the context of the philosophy and history of museums as they have developed since the earliest collections of the European Renaissance. The major works brought together in Volume I ('Museums: Histories and Theories') provide a historical and philosophical context for the development of museums. They furnish a comprehensive introduction to the ideas of 'the new museology', which are so crucial to current trends in anglophone Museum Studies, and provide a conceptual framework for a fuller understanding of the following volumes. The scholarship gathered in Volume II ('Museums: Economics and Management') situates museums in the everyday context within which they operate, and investigates the different purposes that museums are said to possess by their various stakeholders, for example, as engines of economic regeneration, tourism, or 'place branding'. Volume II also focuses on the financial costs and practicalities of making museums work, enabling readers to grasp the day-to-day realities of museum work alongside the more philosophical and ethical issues raised in Volume I. Volume III ('Museums: Materiality and Practice'), meanwhile, explores the specifics of museum practice to address questions such as: how are exhibitions and displays produced? How is interpretation understood? How are collections managed? And how are objects deployed and architectural spaces navigated? The pieces collected here also tackle other areas of museum practice, including institutional context and staffing. Issues around how institutions behave and develop an ethos, and how museum staff nurture their professional skills and careers, are vital to understanding the broader museum world. As are new trends in curation, such as community co-production, and the increasing range of ways in which museums are being reconceptualized beyond their physical walls, for example, as performance spaces or platforms for user-generated digital content. Volume IV ('Museums: Visitors, Audiences, Communities, and Publics') assembles vital research on our interactions with museums. The materials collected here introduce users to the many different ways in which a museum's public can be understood, imagined, and addressed across the whole gamut of a museum's activities, from its programming and interpretation to marketing. The volume also takes full cognizance of recent attempts to expand and diversify museum audiences. The final volume in the collection ('Museums: Identities, Controversies, and Difficult Histories') brings together landmark and contemporary studies to interrogate many of the concerns which have repeatedly drawn museums into controversy over recent years. Ways in which museums find themselves caught up in public outrage and censorship include dealing with thorny issues around identity politics and sensitive historical events, such as the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery. With a detailed and comprehensive introduction and commentary to each volume, Museum Studies is destined to be welcomed as an essential work of reference and a crucial research tool.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Race serves as a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, and media professionals who seek to understand the key debates about the impact of media messages on racial attitudes and understanding. Broad in scope and richly presented from a diversity of perspectives, the book is divided into three sections: first, it summarizes the theoretical approaches that scholars have adopted to analyze the complexities of media messages about race and ethnicity, from the notion of "representation" to more recent concepts like Critical Race Theory. Second, the book reviews studies related to a variety of media, including film, television, print media, social media, music, and video games. Finally, contributors present a broad summary of media issues related to specific races and ethnicities and describe the relationship of the study of race to the study of gender and sexuality.

The Maternal in Creative Work examines the interrelation between art, creativity and maternal experience, inviting international artists, theorists and cultural workers to discuss their approaches to the central feminist question of the relation between maternity, generation and creativity. This edited collection explores various modes and forms of art practice which look at mothers as subjects and as artists of the maternal experience, and how the creative practice is used to accept, negotiate, resist or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering. The book brings together some of the major projects of maternal art from the last two decades and opens up new ways of conceptualizing motherhood as a creative and communicative practice. Chapters include intergenerational discussion of art practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, representations of breastfeeding and infertility in creative projects, the notion of the 'unfit mother' and childlessness, together with the experiences of women and men that take on maternal identities through many forms of kinship and social mothering. The Maternal in Creative Work will be essential reading for interdisciplinary students and scholars in cultural studies, gender studies and art theory and will have wider appeal to audiences interested in maternity, childcare, creativity and psychoanalysis.

From the emergence of digital protest as part of the Zapatista rebellion, to the use of disturbance tactics against governments and commercial institutions, there is no doubt that digital technology and networks have become the standard features of 21st century social mobilisation. Yet, little is known about the historical and socio-cultural developments that have transformed the virtual sphere into a key site of political confrontation. This book provides a critical analysis of the developments of digital direct action since the 1990s. It examines the praxis of electronic protest by focussing on the discourses and narratives provided by the activists and artists involved. The study covers the work of activist groups, including Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater and the electrohippies, as well as Anonymous, and proposes a new analytical framework centred on the performative and aesthetic features of contemporary digital activism.

The intersection of virtual and physical spaces at the heart of contemporary political protests is a pivotal element in new practices of activism. In this new and global ecology of dissent and activism, different forces, stakeholders, and spaces, once defiantly discordant, come together to define the increasingly malleable nature and terms of participatory politics and the performance of democracy. This book explores the emerging sites, aesthetics and politics of contemporary dissent as a critical attempt to foreground their mediation and negotiation in an era of neoliberal globalization. Contemporary forms of media activism occupy deeply ambivalent spaces, which Ardizzoni analyzes using the lens of what she calls "matrix activism." Rather than confining the analysis to a single platform, a single technology, or a single social actor, matrix activism allows us to explain the hybrid nature of new forms of dissent and resistance, as they are located at the intersection of alternative and mainstream, non-profit and corporate, individual and social, production and consumption, online and offline.

This book offers a critical reflection on interpersonal positioning across both large- and small-scale contexts and highlights the multi-faceted nature of intercultural communication in today's global world. The volume establishes positioning primarily as the negotiation of interpersonal relationships, and draws on concepts from across disciplines by way of reappraisal before applying them to two specific domains: MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) and private ELF couple interaction. While acknowledging and showcasing the unique features of positioning in these two contexts, Kloetzl and Swoboda point to their commonalities by looking at how language and specifically English is used as a communicative resource in lingua franca situations. The book also identifies new directions for future methodological innovations in that it demonstrates how the same interaction can be looked at in methodologically-different ways and how the authors' own positions projected on to such interaction create an integrated tri-partite perspective on the two domains. Shedding light on interpersonal positioning in different contexts and in turn on global communication more generally, this book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in discourse analysis, pragmatics, computer-mediated communication, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.

Made in Poland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Polish popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Polish music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Poland and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Poland, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Popular Music in the People's Republic of Poland; Documenting Change and Continuity in Music Scenes and Institutions; and Music, Identity, and Critique.

This book focuses on the uses of scientific evidence within three types of environmental discourses: popular nonfiction books about the environment; traditional and social media texts created by a grassroots environmental group; and a set of data displays that make arguments about global warming in a variety of media and contexts. It traces the operations of eight commonplaces about science and shows how they recur throughout these contexts, starting with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and ending with contemporary blogs and social media. The commonplaces are shown to embed ideological assumptions and simultaneously challenge those assumptions. In addition, the book addresses the potential dangers involved in relying too heavily on aspects of these commonplaces, and how they can undermine the goals of some of the writers who use them.