View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction.

"A perspicacious new book and one of the most intellectually exciting works of recent years, "Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the latinization of American Culture" gives new meaning to the idea of the >>pleasure of the text.QBR"

"Provocative and broad-ranging . . . This eclectic, always interesting work will be certain to elicit discussion among faculty and students of ethnic studies, US popular culture, and Puerto Rican and Latino studies."--"Choice"

"Mixing the down and dirty with high culture to come up with good look at the transculture effects of it all."
--"San Juan Star"

aa groundbreaking piece of work on the persistence of colonialism-irreverent, tragicomical, and bittersweet.a
--New West Indian Guide

"Important, timely, and innovative, "Boricua Pop" is a stellar addition to a body of work that grows in importance over time. Negron-Muntaner's book is eagerly anticipated."
--Jose Quiroga, author of "Tropics of Desire"

aSuch an analysis uncovers the transcultural origins of all U.S. cultural production, hopefully provoking additional work that reconsiders and articulates these genealogies.a--"FIlm Quarterly"

""Boricua Pop"" is a foundational text in American, Latino/a, Queer, Performance, and Cultural Studies."
--Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, Mount Holyoke College

Boricua Pop is the first book solely devoted to Puerto Rican visibility, cultural impact, and identity formation in the U.S. and at home. Frances Negron-Muntaner explores everything from the beloved American musical "West Side Story" to the phenomenon of singer/actress/ fashion designer Jennifer Lopez, from the faux historical chronicleSeva to the creation of Puerto Rican Barbie, from novelist Rosario Ferre to performer Holly Woodlawn, and from painter provocateur Andy Warhol to the seemingly overnight success story of Ricky Martin. Negron-Muntaner traces some of the many possible itineraries of exchange between American and Puerto Rican cultures, including the commodification of Puerto Rican cultural practices such as voguing, graffiti, and the Latinization of pop music. Drawing from literature, film, painting, and popular culture, and including both the normative and the odd, the canonized authors and the misfits, the island and its diaspora, Boricua Pop is a fascinating blend of low life and high culture: a highly original, challenging, and lucid new work by one of our most talented cultural critics.

"Ribbon Culture" explores the history, meaning, and sociological implications of the popular practice of 'showing awareness'. The book suggests that we see the rise of awareness campaigns in terms of a growing interest in personal displays of compassion in a cultural climate where empathy has become a by-word for authenticity. Not only this, but "Ribbon Culture" highlights charities' use of slick awareness campaigns to 'reach' their target-audience and explores the repercussions of the transformation of charity into a commercial enterprise.

Since Freud, psychoanalysis has always concerned itself with questions of art, creativity, politics, and war. This collection of essays from leading writers on psychoanalysis explores questions of culture through a close dialogue between psychoanalytic clinical and academic traditions. "Culture and the Unconscious" is a major contribution to these debates. With accessible introductions to its central themes, the book opens up conversations between the spheres of art, academia and psychoanalysis, revealing points of commonality and divergence.

With a discography of over 1000 songs, 20 musicals and three motion pictures, the Lebanese singer and performer, Fairouz, is an artist of pan-Arab appeal, who has connected with listeners from diverse backgrounds and geographies for over four often tumultuous decades. In this book, Dima Issa explores the role of Fairouz's music in creating a sense of Arab identity amidst changing political, economic context. Based on two years of research including 60 interviews, it takes an ethnographic approach, focussing on audience reception of Fairouz's music among the Arab diasporas of London and Doha. It shows that for discussants, talking about Fairouz meant discussing diasporic life, bringing to the surface notions of Arabness and authenticity, presence and absence, naturalization and citizenship, and the issue of gender. Conversations with the research respondents shed light on the idea of iltizam (commitment), or how members of the Arab diaspora hold on to attributes that they feel define and differentiate them from others.

The nineteenth century saw a complete transformation of the practice and reputation of surgery. Crucial Interventions follows its increasingly optimistic evolution, drawing from the very best examples of rare surgical textbooks with a focus on the extraordinary visual materials of the mid-nineteenth century. Unnerving and graphic, yet beautifully rendered, these fascinating illustrations include step-by-step surgical techniques paired with medical instruments and painted depictions of operations in progress. Arranged for the layman from head to toe, and accompanied by an authoritative, eloquent and inspiring narrative from medical historian Richard Barnett, author of 2014 bestseller The Sick Rose, Crucial Interventions is a unique and captivating book on one of the world's most mysterious and macabre professions, and promises to be another success.

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction explores how much technology has reshaped feminist conversations in the decades since Donna Haraway's influential "Cyborg Manifesto" was published. With sections exploring reproductive technologies, new ways of imagining femininity and motherhood via artificial means, queer readings of gender as a social technology, and posthuman visions of a world beyond gender, this book demonstrates how feminist speculative fiction offers an urgently needed response to the intersections of women's bodies and technology. This collection brings together authors from Europe, Japan, the US and the UK to consider speculative films and texts, reproductive technologies and food futures, and opportunities to rethink family, aging, gender and sexuality, and community through feminist speculative fiction, a social technology for building better futures.

"Genre in Asian Film and Television takes a dynamic approach to the study of Asian screen media previously under-represented in academic writing. It combines historical overviews of developments within national contexts with detailed case studies on the use of generic conventions and genre hybridity in contemporary films and television programmes"--

Considering both retrospective memories and the prospective employment of memories, Memory in a Mediated World examines troubled times that demand resolution, recovery and restoration. Its contributions provide empirically grounded analyses of how media are employed by individuals and social groups to connect the past, the present and the future.

This book examines the psychological aspects of pop culture preferences, personality, and behavior from across sixteen research studies. The authors analyze such phenomena as superhero and antihero fandoms, internet trolls, women in popular culture, generational preferences, and romance and sexuality. Analyzing pop culture in the context of the #MeToo movement, LGBTQIA+ representation, and contemporary politics, Keith Beard, April Fugett, and Britani Black pay close attention to contemporary issues of inclusion and marginalization.

Made in Nusantara serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, ethnography, and musicology of historical and contemporary popular music in maritime Southeast Asia. Each essay covers major figures, styles, and social contexts of genres of a popular nature in the Nusantara region including Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, and the Philippines. Through a critical investigation of specific genres and their spaces of performance, production, and consumption, the volume is organised into four thematic areas: 1) issues in Nusantara popular music; 2) history; 3) artists and genres; and 4) national vs. local industries. Written by scholars working in the region, Made in Nusantara brings local perspectives to the history and analysis of popular music and critically considers conceptualisations developed in the West, rendering it an intriguing read for students and scholars of popular and global music.

This book is the first comprehensive account of classical music on all British radio stations, BBC and commercial, between 1945 and 1995. It narrates the shifting development of those services, from before the launch of the Third Programme until after the start of Classic FM, examining the output from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, as well as recounting some of the stories and anecdotes which enliven the tale. During these fifty years, British classical music radio featured spells of broad, multi-channel classical music radio, with aspirational and mainstream culture enjoying positive interactions, followed by periods of more restricted and exclusive output, in a paradigm of the place of high culture in UK society as a whole. The history was characterised by the recurring tensions between elite and popular provision, and the interplay of demands for highbrow and middlebrow output, and also sheds new light on the continuing relevance of class in Britain. It is an important and unique resource for those studying British history in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as being a compelling and diverting account for enthusiasts for classical music radio.

A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media. Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints-such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce-have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of "Asian" and "Asian American" are counterbalanced within global popular culture. Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering new and critical analyses of popular cultures that account for emerging textual fields, global producers, technologies of distribution, and trans-medial circulation, this ground-breaking collectionexplores the mainstream and the margins of popular culture.

This book studies the Afro-European and Euro-African past and present from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. It addresses Africa as a whole, eschewing historical divisions between North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Its content exemplifies the extent to which the histories of Europe and Africa are intertwined, and the way European sources are usually privileged in the writing of historical accounts of cross-cultural encounters. Using post/decolonial studies, the authors' point of view is based on anthropology, history, ethnomusicology, and film and literary studies. The authors argue that mutual experiences and imaginations have affected how cultural heritage and legacy are conceived and thought of, as well as memories and sociopolitical experiences. The aim is to establish and encourage a broader knowledge of Africa-Europe and Europe-Africa encounters, incorporating case studies of Euro-African and Afro-European legacies. The final goal is to favour a more relational point of view by comparing Euro-African and Afro-European realities.

A social tragedy is a collective representation of injustice. Baker demonstrates how social tragedies facilitate moral action and discusses a series of contemporary case studies - the death of Princess Diana, Zinedine Zidane's 2006 World Cup scandal, KONY 2012 - to examine their social and political effects.

In the 1970s, Northern Soul held a pivotal position in British youth culture. Originating in the English North and Midlands in the late-1960s, by the mid-1970s it was attracting thousands of enthusiasts across the country. This book is a social history of Northern Soul, examining the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices. Northern Soul emerged in a period when working class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. Locating Northern Soul in these shifting economic and social contexts of the English North and Midlands in the 1970s, the authors argue that people kept the faith not just with music, but with a culture that was connected to wider aspects of work, home, relationships and social identities. Drawing on an expansive range of sources, including oral histories, magazines and fanzines, diaries and letters, this book offers a detailed and empathetic reading of a working class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young people in the 1970s. The authors highlight the complex ways in which class, race and gender identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dancefloors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Blackpool Mecca, the Torch in Stoke-on-Trent, the Catacombs in Wolverhampton and the Casino in Wigan. Marking a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, this book is essential reading for those interested in popular music and everyday life in postwar Britain. -- .

This interdisciplinary examination of present-day identities and histories of the former Yugoslavia explores relationships with the social, political, cultural and historical 'facts and fictions' that have marked the different parts of the region. It shows that while nationalism remains important other social dynamics also exert a strong influence.

The Gothic tradition continues to excite the popular imagination. John C. Tibbetts presents interviews and conversations with prominent novelists, filmmakers, artists, and film and television directors and actors as they trace the Gothic mode across three centuries, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through H.P. Lovecraft, to today's science fiction, goth, and steampunk culture. H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Robert (Psycho) Bloch, Chris (The Polar Express) Van Allsburg, Maurice Sendak, Gahan Wilson, Ray Harryhausen, Christopher Reeve, Greg Bear, William Shatner, and many more share their worlds of imagination and terror.

This book is about poison and poisonings; it explores the facts, fears and fictions that surround this fascinating topic. Poisons attract attention because they are both dangerous and hard to discover. Secretive and invisible, they are a challenging object of representation. How do science studies, literature, and especially film-the medium of the visible-explain and show what is hidden? How can we deal with uncertainties emerging from the ambivalence of dangerous substances? These considerations lead the editors of this volume to the notion of "precarious identities" as a key discursive marker of poisons and related substances. This book is unique in facilitating a multi-faceted conversation between disciplines. It draws on examples from historical cases of poisoning; figurations of uncertainty and blurred boundaries in literature; and cinematic examples, from early cinema and arthouse to documentary and blockbuster. The contributions work with concepts from gender studies, new materialism, post-colonialism, deconstructivism, motif studies, and discourse analysis.

Closer Together, Further Apart offers current unique insight into the cultural shifts brought about by digital technology and the Internet. It considers how these new connections are impacting not only society as a whole, but more specifically communication in relationships and across generations.
Digital technology has in less than a single generation, dramatically and permanently altered the ways in which humans connect and communicate with each other. Conversations and information transfers that once either weren't possible or took days to complete now occur in an instant. Technological advances are profoundly affecting humankind, forcing us to change on multiple levels.
As with all forms of human/social/technological change, these advances will be good for some and bad for others. Those who learn to effectively absorb information and use new technologies in healthy ways will flourish, and those who don't may feel increasingly disconnected from our technology driven world.

Robert Weiss, MSW, is a therapist, international speaker, author, and a blogger on PsychCentral.com, where he writes regularly on the topic of sex and intimacy in the digital age. He was featured in LA Weekly 2013 People issue as one of LA's most fascinating people. He currently serves as Senior Vice-President of Clinical Development for Elements Behavioral Health.

Jennifer P. Schneider, MD, PhD, is a physician, international speaker, and the author of nine books and numerous journal articles.