Three years after entering the pop music scene, Lady Gaga became the most well-known pop star in the world. These thirteen critical essays explore Lady Gaga's body of work through the interdisciplinary filter of performance identity and cover topics such as gender and sexuality, body commodification, visual body rhetoric, drag performance, homosexuality and heteronormativity, Surrealism and the theatre of cruelty, the carnivalesque, monstrosity, imitation and parody, human rights, and racial politics. Of particular interest is the way that Lady Gaga's uvre, however popular, strange, raw or controversial, enters into the larger sociopolitical discourse, challenging the status quo and altering our perceptions of reality.

Scholars have traditionally pushed Francophone literature to the margins of cultural and literary creation. When they do examine literature originating from the former French colonies, they often view it as an outgrowth of colonial literature. By suggesting new ways to understand the multiple voices present in this body of work, this book explores how Francophone African poetry and theatre in particular constitute both an organic cultural product, and a reflection of the diverse African cultures in which these genres originate. Themes explored in five chapters include the diversity of African identity formation, the resistance to former notions of literary composition as art, a remapping of social responsibility and diversity, and the impact of globalization on Francophone Africa's identity formation and participation in geoeconomics, geopolitics and geoculture. By looking at Francophone African literature from the arrival of independence in the 1960s until the present, this study highlights its inner workings and suggests a canonization of contemporary Francophone works from a world perspective.

Superhero films are one of the most enduring genres of cinema, and their popularity is only increasing in the 21st century. These ten critical essays explore the phenomenon of the superhero film through the lens of numerous academic disciplines, and cover topics such as the role of globalization in the formation of superhero narratives, the shifting nature of masculinity and femininity in the superhero world and the state of the genre today. Of particular interest is the way these narratives, however fantastic, abstract, futuristic or simplistic, resonate with specific events in the globalized world and function as starting points for discussion of contemporary sociopolitical conflicts.