New Books In Popular Culture

Nick Prior—Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh—discusses his new book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (SAGE Publications, 2018). The book explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts for the changes that have taken place in popular music since the widespread adoption of digital technology by creators, distributors, and listeners from the early 1980s onward. Joining insights from the sociology of culture with key analytic categories from science and technology studies (STS), Prior examines a variety of contexts in which these changes have been felt, including the novel spaces and structures of both music production and consumption afforded by digitalization, the co-construction of vocal subjects and vocal sound-processing technologies, the tactical use of portable media by young urbanites to mediate their relationship to the city, and the conjunction of music and play in the ever-growing video game sector. In addition to an acute sense for their embeddedness i

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Stacy Wolf of Princeton University about her book Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America (Oxford University Press, 2019), an exploration of the complexities of amateur and local theatre across the United States. From backstage moms to tiny divas to dinner theatres, Wolf demonstrates that this charming pastime of American culture that is anything but past. On the contrary, musical theatre continues to be an important culture touchstone for many and a pipeline to national phenomenon such as the High School Music franchise. Told in a stunning voice with a wealth of attention to its case studies and examples, Beyond Broadway feels like backstage pass combined with a cross-country road trip in early Fall. A must read for anyone interested in the untold story of musical theater, American culture, and truly embedded ethnography with a ground-up point of view. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Stacy ab

Fantasy sports have the opportunity to provide a sporting community in which gendered physical presence plays no role—a space where men and women can compete and interact on a level playing field. Whose Game?: Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports (Temple UP, 2020) shows, however, that while many turn to this space to socialize with friends or participate in a uniquely active and competitive fandom, men who play also depend on fantasy sports to perform a boyhood vision of masculinity otherwise inaccessible to them. Authors Rebecca Kissane and Sarah Winslow draw on a rich array of survey, interview, and observational data to examine how gender, race, and class frame the experiences of everyday fantasy sports players. This pioneering book examines gendered structures and processes, such as jock statsculinity—a nerdish form of masculine one-upmanship—and how women are often rendered as outsiders. Ultimately, Whose Game? demonstrates that fantasy sports are more than just an inconsequential leisure activity. This on

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Joe Packer of Central Michigan University about A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture (Penn State UP, 2019), an intriguing book attempting to rescue pessimism from the dustbin of public emotion and philosophical thought. From the work of H.P. Lovecraft to Rick and Morty to True Detective, Packer and Stoneman find the best of pessimistic philosophy reflected back in the weird affects of these cultural touchstones. A Feeling of Wrongness explores how these texts twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with Joe about this fascinating book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @r

In his new book, Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020), Tyler Bickford explores how the tween music market rose during the mid to late 2000s. Bickford addresses the ways in which the music industry seized only childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. Starting with how Kidz Bop and Disney’s High School Musical (2006), Bickford argues that tween music culture flourished due to the commodification of childhood and the rise of television and pop music stars. Focusing on the ways that femininity and whiteness are markers are innocence and childhood, Bickford examines Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana through a postfeminist discourse of work life balance, Taylor Swift’s longstanding relationship with girlhood and whiteness, and Justin Bieber’s label as child prodigy as a way to cement his position as a super star. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to

In Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Penguin, 2020) renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro turns his attention to the reception of Shakespeare in the US from the colonial period to the present. Shapiro brings us a John Quincy Adams morbidly obsessed with Othello, an Abraham Lincoln who preferred Edwin Booth’s acting over the bombastic performances of his younger brother John Wilkes, and a female Romeo who took America by storm in the during the period of Manifest Destiny. By turns funny, surprising, and profound, Shakespeare in a Divided America shows us the ways Shakespeare has been enlisted in the service both sides in every major conflict in American history. This is a book that will appeal equally to history buffs and Shakespeare fans, as well as the casual reader looking for a new lens with which to view the history of our fractured nation. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia Unive

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

How does music help us to understand the contemporary city? In It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City (Manchester UP, 2019), Caspar Melville, co-chair of the Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies at SOAS, University of London, explores three music scenes to tell the story of modern London. In doing so it rethinks the story of crucial cultural moments, such as the birth of acid house, and brings new depth and detail to research on cities and music. The book draws on extensive empirical material, foregrounding analysis of space, race, and music to deliver both a comprehensive history as well as a significant contribution to urban studies. The book is essential reading for music and social science scholars, as well as for anyone interested in London and its culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians, musicologists, and sociologists have long studied the relationship between politics and music. Peter La Chapelle’s new book, I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music (University of Chicago Press, 2019) traces interactions between country music and politics beginning with two late nineteenth-century politicians who fiddled to their supporters and ending with the 2016 election season. He establishes some long-standing associations between celebrity candidates, populist insurgents, outsider politics and country music. La Chapelle also does not shy away from exposing the ways that racist and anti-Semitic political figures have used country music to support their beliefs. While today many people think of country music as a politically conservative genre, La Chapelle brings to light a more complex story of politicians across the spectrum looking to country music to support their beliefs, publicize their campaigns, and establish their authenticity with their cons

“In the game of thrones you either win or you die”––with over 10 million viewers per episode of Game of Thrones, one of the most successful television shows of all time, George R.R. Martin definitely wins. The success of the show is even more amazing considering it’s genre television––fantasy, to be exact. Some assert that the power of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series upon which the crowning jewel of HBO is based, comes from the author’s willingness to ignore the conventions of the fantasy genre. Not so, argues Dr. Joseph Young in his new book, George R. R. Martin and the Fantasy Form (Routledge, 2019) Using the frameworks of literary theory relevant to modern fantasy, Dr. Young undertakes a compelling examination of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and his employment of the structural demands and thematic aptitudes of the genre. Examining Martin’s approaches to his obligations and licenses as a fantasist, Young persuasively argues that the power of A Song of Ice and Fi

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger about their edited collection, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the US South from Louisiana State University Press’s Southern Literary Studies Series. This collection of seventeen essays focuses on the mythologies and representations of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption (or rejection) in the literature and culture of the US South. Picken and Dischinger argue in the introduction that the relationship between the US South and alcohol has been overdetermined in popular imagination. The region is simultaneously known for its “dry” counties, temperance laws, and religious teetotalers as well as “hard­drinking authors, bootleggers, moonshiners, and distillers, to name but a few.” Picken and Dischinger interrogate the assumption that alcohol consumption is a community-building activity, arguing that drinking together, like eating together, often obscures underlying and persistent inequalities of race, class, and gende

The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark chapters of country’s recent history. Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020) sheds unique light on the operation of what she calls China’s culture of ‘public secrecy’. Focusing on the storied afterlives and artistic re-purposings of photographic images from key junctures of China’s twentieth-century – the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests – Hillenbrand shows how they expose the subtle contours of what it is permissible and what impermissible to know. The book’s highly original and at times haunting

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its diffe

Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool. They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents (MIT Press, 2019), Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class. Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movemen

A beloved Japanese anime move released in 1988, My Neighbor Totoro tells the story of two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, as they deal with the separation from their mother who is in the hospital, and their adventures with the forest creatures they meet called the Totoro. In Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro Soundtrack (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Kunio Hara analyzes the film’s score and image song collection composed by Joe Hisaishi. The movie’s catchy theme song, along with the rest of the music, contribute to the film’s nostalgic exploration of children’s inner lives and the power of imagination to combat the very real traumas of childhood. Part of the 33 1/3 Japan Series, this short book explores the collaboration between Hisaishi and Miyazaki Hayao, the film’s creator and director. Hara considers his subject from a variety of perspectives, from a musical analysis of key sections of the score and image album to an investigation of the film’s importance as an icon of Japanese pop culture. Kunio Ha

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Kristen Hoerl (she/hers) on her impressive new book The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements (University Press of Mississippi, 2018). The Bad Sixties explores the construction of “the sixties” in Hollywood media, from Family Ties and The Wonder Years to Law and Order, arguing that these texts have proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change. These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy. Hoerl describes our contemporary relationship to the sixties, shaped by these media

What does music tell us about society? In Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nick Crossley, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, introduces a relational sociology of music. The book thinks through the social and individual practices of music, the music industry, and the music ‘worlds’ of mainstreams, alternatives, and subcultures. The book also considers music’s relation to inequalities, including of patterns of taste, politics, and the public sphere. As well as the sociological perspective, Connecting Sounds discusses the role of individuals, as they use music for meaning and sense of identity, and as practitioners and consumers. Packed with examples, as well as a rich range of theoretical discussions, the book is essential reading for social science and music scholars, as well as for anyone interested in the role of music in our social world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium

For a year, B. J. Hollars traveled the Midwest, or Flyover country as he refers to it, in search of monsters, aliens, and oddities. Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) documents his encounters with the weird and wonderful. Hollars examines aliens who share pancakes with a plumber, Mothman, Hodag, and other strange creatures and experiences in small town America. In Midwestern Strange, Hollars shares his visits with the people who have experienced and study these creatures. His goal is not to debunk the mysteries but instead to seek them out as a way to show the importance of these stories and experiences to small towns and the people who are part of the lore. Hollars deftly combines memoir and journalism offering informative and often humorous stories of the monsters, Martians, and weird that may encourage you to take a road trip through flyover country and visit some unusual Midwest landmarks. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate P

 Art Spiegelman's Maus is the story of an American cartoonist's efforts to uncover and record his father's story of survival of the Holocaust. It is also a cartoon, where the Jews are mice, the Nazis cats, the Poles dogs, and the French, well, you'll have to read it. It's a story of survival and also a story of silences, and how the next generation can find and make sense of stories that seem to defy representation in their sheer horror. It's also a triumph in story-telling and a serious meditation on good and evil; on the nature of Romantic; familiar and filial love; on America's legacy of absorbing immigrants who arrive with often unspeakable traumas in a past that finds little resonance in a culture obsessed with entertainment and fast news. Maus upended the conventions of representing the Holocaust and historical trauma for a far greater audience than the American Jewish communities. It broke several rules: it spoke about past suffering to outsiders, it used low-culture to represent catastrophes, and it r

What can online social spaces like Reddit’s r/gaming reveal about gender attitudes, masculinized spaces, and turning points in gamer communities? In their new book Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community (Palgrave Pivot, 2019), Marcus Maloney, Steven Roberts, and Timothy Graham utilize computational and qualitative methods to explore conversations happing on the social media platform Reddit’s gaming subreddit. They explore masculine and feminine gendered comments and discourse using the online platform’s functions like upvoting and downvoting, in addition to textual analysis of comments. Maloney, Roberts, and Graham reveal a continuum of discourses from marginalization to inclusion and contribute to our greater understanding of gendered discourse online. This book would be a great addition to any gender course, both undergraduate and graduate, as it provides clear theoretical analysis of a popular social media platform. This book will be of interest to Sociologists of gende