Alabamians have always been a singing people. The settlers who moved into the various sections of the state brought with them songs which reflected their national origins and geographical backgrounds, and as they spread into the hills and over the lowlands they created new songs out of the conditions under which they lived. Also, they absorbed songs from outside sources whenever these pieces could be adapted to their sentiments and ways of life. Thus, by a process of memory, composition and recreation they developed a rich body of folk songs. The following collection a part of the effort to discover and preserve these songs.

African Americans have made a unique contribution to the richness and diversity of US popular culture. Rooted in African society and traditions, black slaves in America created a dynamic culture which continues to evolve. Present day Hip Hop and Rap music are still shaped by the historical experience of slavery and the ongoing will to oppose oppression and racism.
This volume is an authoritative introduction to the history of African Americans in US popular culture, examining its development from the early nineteenth century to the present. Kevern Verney examines the role and significance of race in all major forms of popular culture, including sport, film, television, radio and music. He also looks at how Hollywood and the entertainment industry have encouraged racism through misrepresentations and caricatured images of African Americans.

This book explores the depiction of suicide in American youth films from 1900 to 2019. Anchored in Sociology, this multidisciplinary study investigates the causes and consequences of suicide and uncovers the socio-cultural context for the development of youth, film, and suicide. While such cinematic portrayals seem to privilege external explanations of suicide versus internal or psychological ones, overall they are neither rich nor sensitive. Most are simplistic, limited or at the very least unbalanced. At times, they are flatly controversial. In light of this overall problematic depiction of suicide, this book offers a proactive approach to empower young audiences-a media literacy strategy to embrace while watching these films.

This book examines trauma in late twentieth- and twenty-first century American popular culture. Trauma has become a central paradigm for reading contemporary American culture. Since the early 1980s, an extensive range of genres increasingly feature traumatised protagonists and traumatic events. From traumatised superheroes in Hollywood blockbusters to apocalyptic-themed television series, trauma narratives abound. Although trauma is predominantly associated with high culture, this project shows how popular culture has become the most productive and innovative area of trauma representation in America. Examining film, television, animation, video games and cult texts, this book develops a series of original paradigms through which to understand trauma in popular culture. These include: popular trauma texts' engagement with postmodern perspectives, formal techniques termed 'competitive narration', 'polynarration' and 'sceptical scriptotherapy', and perpetrator trauma in metafictional games.

Interrogating the intersections of food, journalism, and politics, this book offers a critical examination of food media and journalism, and its political potential against the backdrop of contemporary social challenges Contributors analyse current and historic examples such as Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, the environment, Brexit, and gender politics, highlighting how food media and journalism reach beyond the commercial imperatives of lifestyle journalism to negotiate nationalism, globalization, and social inequalities The volume challenges the idea that food media/journalism are trivial and apolitical by drawing attention to the complex ways through which storytelling about food has engaged public discourse in the past, and the innovative ways it is doing so today Bringing together international scholars from a variety of disciplines, the book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Journalism, Communication, Media Studies, Food Studies, Sociology and Anthropology

This book addresses the current resurgence of interest in feminism-notably within popular culture and media-that has led some to announce the arrival of the fourth wave. Research explores where fourth-wave feminism sits in relation to those that preceded it, and in particular, how fourth-wave feminism intersects with differing understandings of postfeminism(s). Through accessible and highly topical examples such as; the controversial actions of activist group, Femen; the rising phenomenon of 'celebrity feminism;' or the assumed outdated views of feminists' associated with previous waves, the relationship between differing concepts of postfeminism(s) is illustrated. By pressing the need for an intergenerational approach to fourth-wave feminism, this book encourages engaging past debates and theorists allowing readers with an interest in the relationship between feminism and popular culture a fuller understanding of feminist theory and providing the opportunity to take stock before diving headfirst into another wave.

The relationship between popular music and fashion has been culturally significant since the 1950s, and this book explores the ways in which music and musicians play a key role in the shaping of identity, taste and consumption. Using a range of historical and contemporary examples, this book uncovers the way in which fashion and music have worked to shape contemporary attitudes to bodies and identities.
Focusing on performers as much as fans, on the mainstream as much as the underground, "Fashion and Music" provides a lens through which to examine themes of gender, sexuality, ageing and youth, ethnicity, body image, consumer culture, fandom and postmodernity.

The Antebellum Era was a complex time in American culture. Young ladies had suitors call upon them, while men often settled quarrels by dueling, and mill girls worked 16-hour days to help their families make ends meet. Yet at the same time, a new America was emerging. The rapid growth of cities inspired Frederick Law Olmstead to lead the movement for public parks. Stephen Foster helped forge a catalog of American popular music; writers such as Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson raised the level of American literature; artists such as Thomas Cole and Thomas Doughty defined a new style of painting called the Hudson River School. All the while, schisms between northern and southern culture threatened to divide the nation. This volume in Greenwood's "American Popular Culture Through History" recounts the ways in which things old and new intersected in the decades before the Civil War.

James and Dorothy Volo are one of the more prolific author teams in reference publishing today, and with this volume they make important contributions to Greenwood's successful series on America's other history.

This volume examines Mary Poppins as a 1960s film reflecting and invested in its radically changing times, a largely but not unmitigatedly antiestablishment musical resonant with conditions and issues powerfully affecting baby boomers. Among the explosion of baby boomer films that rocked the 1960s, the most stirring early work was likely Mary Poppins. This 1964 film captivated young audiences, earning top-grossing ticket sales, multiple Oscars, and landmark status as a cultural phenomenon. The book illuminates Mary Poppins as a musical teeming with preoccupations of American youth in the early-to-mid-1960s, including antiestablishment desires, anxieties, and pleasures. Reading against the dominant grain, this book deciphers Mary Poppins as a mid-century reflection that spans the generation gap, dysfunctional nuclear family, youth unrest, activism including feminist advocacy, counterculturalism, capitalist imperialism, race relations, socially conscious music, and hallucinogenic consciousness expansion. Conjunctively, the book explores tensions inherent in this studio production as a mainstream Disney release evoking imperatives of 1960s American youth while sanitizing figures and values representing radical change. Further, examining the film's collective authorship, this volume traces Mary Poppins' origins in the writings and life of nonconformist author P.L. Travers as well as in Disney cinema and the studio's adaptation processes. Analysis extends to diverse facets of Mary Poppins' reception, including the shifting image of its star, Julie Andrews, the film's influence on popular culture and controversy among some as an adaptation, its appropriation by drug culture, association with the teenpic, and status as cinema of social consciousness. This book is ideal for students, researchers, and scholars of cinema studies and youth culture.

In contrast to the main body of current Victorian detective criticism, which tends to concentrate on Conan Doyle's creation and only uses other detectives as a backdrop, the texts gathered in this volume examine various contemporary ways of (re)presenting real and fictional detectives that originated in or are otherwise associated with that era: Inspector Bucket, Sergeant Cuff, Inspector Reid, Tobias Gregson, Flaxman Low, and psychiatrists as detectives. Such a collection allows for a critical re-assessment of both the detectives' importance to the Victorian literature and culture and provides a better basis for understanding the reasons behind their contemporary returns, re-imaginings and re-creations, contributing to the creation of a base for further cultural and critical works dealing with reworkings of the Victorian era.

When A Return to Modestywas first published in 1999, it began an important and much-needed national conversation. Wendy Shalit persuasively argued that modesty is not some hang-up we should set out to cure, but rather a wonderful instinct that, if rediscovered and given the right social support, has the power to transform society. Now, in this newly revised edition, Shalit backs up her claim with the latest trends and research to prove that the issue is just as pressing today as ever. Unfortunately, many problems Shalit originally explored, such as date rape, harassment, and most alarmingly, the sexualisation of young girls, have only become more prevalent. Where once a young woman was ashamed of her sexual experience, today she is ashamed of her sexual inexperience. And as we continue to push the limits of what is accepted behaviour, the pressure to overcome embarrassment and discard all sense of modesty is greater than ever. A Return to Modestyis a deeply personal account as well as a fascinating intellectual exploration into everything from seventeenth-century manners to the 1948 tune "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Beholden neither to social conservatives nor to feminists, Shalit reminds us that modesty is not prudery, but a natural instinct-and one that may be able to save us from ourselves.

Poker is a centuries-old American game. Why has it become so popular in the twenty-first century? What does current interest in the game tell us about ourselves and some of our most pressing social issues? In this timely and thought-provoking book, Andrew Manno offers important insights into the intersection of gaming, gender, and capitalism that illuminate how the shift to a casino capitalist economy-combined with a culture of toxic masculinity-impacts workers and how it has led to the rise of populism in the United States that manifested in the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Interdisciplinary and engaging, Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Popular Cinema is the first scholarly work to link visual representations of heterosexual masculinities to the neo-liberal transformations in Argentina. Rocha critically examines contemporary cinematic representations of Argentine masculinities produced after the crucial changes of the 1990s affected both the social construction of gender and the financing of domestic film productions. Theoretically innovative, this study provides detailed analysis of six Argentine blockbusters.

In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends that the titular movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as her tenure as the most beautiful woman in the world coincides with the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress in a cycle of Hollywood plantation, via her extra-cinematic image as a jet-setting wanton seductress and oriental in whiteface in the early 1960, through her repatriation to the U.S. in the 1970s via her marriage to and the election of her pro-military husband John Warner to the U.S. Senate, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.

A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth.

In "Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures," Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles.

Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.

The relationship between media and sport has become of particular interest to media scholars over the last decade. As the significance of sport itself has grown in a variety of other disciplines, the study of the ways in which media and sport interact across boundaries can be found in literature on the sociology of sport, history of sport, gender studies, cultural studies, journalism, leisure studies and beyond. For scholars interested in the media in particular, sport can shed light on a range of issues central to media studies. This book focuses on the sport-media phenomenon and analyses such issues as new media technology, gender, ethnicity, collective identity and globalization, as well as aspects of the political economy of the media.

Reacting against the accelerating pace of modern life and too-much-information technology, young urban dwellers are carving out a new space, one brilliantly surveyed in "United States of Americana". Here we find barbers who instruct men to unplug the Norelco and try their (shaky) hand at shaving with a straight razor; manufacturers of high-end leather goods that outsource to the Amish rather than to India; DJs who rely on wax cylinders instead of digital files; restaurants where wild boar appears on the bill of fare (and the walls); and, work wear that once saved the lives of turn-of-the-century Alaskan miners, now reinterpreted for the runways of Paris and Milan. This isn't mere nostalgia, but a conscious celebration of community and sustainability. "United States of Americana" is the first comprehensive guide to the sounds, sights, tastes, and colorful characters that populate this new old-fashioned world, with topics including: the rise and evolution of alt-country music and the Americana genre (Fleet Foxes, Wilco, the Decemberists, and T-Bone Burnett) and the legends of country, blues, gospel and folk (Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams, Leadbelly); American work wear and heritage clothing and footwear like Red Wing Boots, Pendleton, Filson, and Carhartt; prohibition and pre-prohibition era cocktails (Old Fashioned, Gin Fizz, Sidecar) and the speakeasy renaissance; nose-to-tail butchering and raising backyard chickens; straight razor shaving and old-fashioned barber shops; burlesque and circuses; the resurgence of the vinyl LP; home canning, pickling and preserving; and, the D.I.Y. handmade crafts movement (knitting, needlepoint, soap making).

Gender Issues in Scandinavian Music Education: From Stereotypes to Multiple Possibilities introduces much-needed updates to research and teaching philosophies that envision new ways of considering gender diversity in music education. This volume of essays by Scandinavian contributors looks beyond the dominant Anglo-American lens while confronting a universal need to resist and rethink the gender stereotypes that limit a young person's musical development. Addressing issues at all levels of music education-from primary and secondary schools to conservatories and universities- topics discussed include: the intersection of social class, sexual orientation, and teachers' beliefs; gender performance in the music classroom and its effects on genre and instrument choice; hierarchical inequalities reinforced by power and prestige structures; strategies to fulfill curricular aims for equality and justice that meet the diversity of the classroom; and much more! Representing a commitment to developing new practices in music education that subvert gender norms and challenge heteronormativity, Gender Issues in Scandinavian Music Education fills a growing need to broaden the scope of how gender and equality are situated in music education-in Scandinavia and beyond.

This book addresses print-based modes of adaptation that have not conventionally been theorized as adaptations-such as novelization, illustration, literary maps, pop-up books, and ekphrasis. It discusses a broad range of image and word-based adaptations of popular literary works, among them The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Daisy Miller, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Moby Dick, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The study reveals that commercial and franchise works and ephemera play a key role in establishing a work's iconography. Newell argues that the cultural knowledge and memory of a work is constructed through reiterative processes and proposes a network-based model of adaptation to explain this. Whereas most adaptation studies prioritize film and television, this book's focus on print invites new entry points for the study of adaptation.

This book offers a thorough examination of digital work by women comedians in the US, exploring their use of digital media to perform jokes, engage with fans, remake their reputations, and become political activists This book argues that despite its many adverse effects, digital work is changing comedy, empowering women to create new comic forms and negotiate the contentious political climate incited by former President Donald. J. Trump Chapters are focused on video-podcasting, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and the streaming platform Netflix - each containing informative case studies on significant women comedians who use them, including Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Mindy Kaling, Colleen Ballinger, Lilly Singh, Ms. Pat, Whitney Cummings, Issa Rae, and others To understand their strategies, this book examines the popularity of their digital content, their career-outcomes in television and film, as well as the ups and downs of their critical reputations in magazines, newspapers, the trade press, and with their participatory audiences online This insightful and timely work will appeal to scholars researching and teaching in the areas of media studies, digital communication, gender studies and performance

Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, A Concise Dictionary of Comics guides students, researchers, readers, and educators of all ages and at all levels of comics expertise. It provides them with a dictionary that doubles as a compendium of comics scholarship. A Concise Dictionary of Comics provides clear and informative definitions for each term. It includes twenty-five witty illustrations, and pairs most defined terms with references to books, articles, book chapters, and other relevant critical sources. All references are dated and listed in an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of comics scholarship. Each term is also categorized according to type in an index of thematic groupings. This organization serves as a pedagogical aid for teachers and students learning about a specific facet of comics studies and as a research tool for scholars who are unfamiliar with a particular term but know what category it falls into. These features make A Concise Dictionary of Comics especially useful for critics, students, teachers, and researchers, and a vital reference to anyone else who wants to learn more about comics.

This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine the conscious and unconscious forces underlying race as a social formation, conceptualizing race, racial identity, and racism in ways that go beyond traditional modes of psychoanalytic thought. Featuring contributions by Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics, including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; analyses of racism in apartheid and American slavery; clinical reflections on Latinx and other racialized patients; and applications of Lacan's concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection both reorients readers' understandings of race through its deployment of Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of subjectivity in relation to race, racism and racial identification. Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and contemporary scholars of race, appealing to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology.

Examining the ways in which feminist and queer activists confront privilege through the use of intersectionality, this edited collection presents empirical case studies from around the world to consider how intersectionality has been taken up (or indeed contested) by activists in order to expose and resist privilege. The volume sets out three key ways in which intersectionality operates within feminist and queer movements: it is used as a collective identity, as a strategy for forming coalitions, and as a repertoire for inclusivity. The case studies presented in this book then evaluate the extent to which some, or all, of these types of intersectional activism are used to confront manifestations of privilege. Drawing upon a wide range of cases from across time and space, this volume explores the difficulties with which activists often grapple when it comes to translating the desire for intersectionality into a praxis which confronts privilege. Addressing inter-related and politically relevant questions concerning how we apply and theorise intersectionality in our studies of feminist and queer movements, this timely edited collection will be of interest to students and scholars from across the social sciences and humanities with an interest in gender and feminism, LGBT+ and queer studies, and social movement studies.

One particular American sport arguably surpasses all others in reflecting U.S. society: the national pastime -- baseball. Roger Angell has suggested, "Baseball seems to have been invented solely for the purpose of explaining all other things in life". It has uniquely mirrored the trends within our culture and has been associated with "The American Dream" in all of its permutations. Baseball has been an arena in which the mightiest struggles of our society -- equal rights regardless of race, nationality, or gender -- have been played out.

Editor Robert Elias has woven together a collection of essays of exceptional diversity to look at how baseball and the American Dream have connected through history to the present day, as well as providing a signpost to the future of baseball in American popular culture. Featuring articles by former players such as Orlando Cepeda and Dusty Baker (currently the manager for the San Francisco Giants), legendary journalists such as Leonard Koppett, Andrei Codrescu, and Roger Kahn, and contemporary scholars such as Jules Tygiel, Gai Berlage, and Samuel Regalado, this volume provides a unique and valuable perspective on baseball and its distinctive place in American culture.