Saffron-robed monks and long-haired gurus have become familiar characters on the American popular culture scene. This book examines the contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and provides ...a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in American mass media. Initial engagements with Asian spiritual heritages were mediated by monks, gurus, bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions. Virtual Orientalism shows the evolution of these interactions, from direct engagements with specific individuals, to mediated relations with a conventionalized icon. Visually and psychically compelling, the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a “figure of translation” - a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities and modes of being. Through the figure of the solitary Monk, who generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West, Asian religiosity is made manageable — psychologically, socially, and politically — for popular culture consumption. On an historical level, the books argues that American mass awareness of Asian religions coincides with the advent of visually-oriented media (magazines, television, and film) and examines how technological transformations ushered in a new form of Orientalism — virtual Orientalism — prevalent since the late 1950s. Although popular engagement with Asian religions in the U.S. has increased, the fact that much of this has taken virtual form makes stereotypical constructions of “the spiritual East” obdurate and especially difficult to challenge. Representational moments in Virtual Orientalism’s development that are examined include: D.T. Suzuki and the 1950s Zen Boom; the Maharishi Mahesh and his celebrity followers in the 1960s and; Kwai Chang Caine in the popular 1970 television series, Kung Fu.
This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations.Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the ...contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional conflict and reconciliations between Japan and Korea. Its contributors link several key areas of interest in East Asian Studies, including conflicts over historical memories and cultural production, grassroots challenges to state ideology, and the consequences of digital technology in Japan and South Korea.Taking recent discourse on Japan and South Korea as popular cultural superpowers further, this book expands its focus from mainstream entertainment media to the lived experience of daily life, in which sentiments and perceptions of the "popular" are formed. It will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese and Korean studies, as well as film studies, media studies and cultural studies more widely.
From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by ...such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous planter, white-columned mansions, and even bolls of cotton.InDreaming of Dixie, Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of this constructed nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, especially advertising agencies, musicians, publishers, radio personalities, writers, and filmmakers playing to consumers' anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America's pastoral traditions. Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region's past, particularly in the tourist trade as southern states and cities sought to capitalize on popular perceptions by showcasing their Old South heritage. Only when television emerged as the most influential medium of popular culture did views of the South begin to change, as news coverage of the civil rights movement brought images of violence, protest, and conflict in the South into people's living rooms. Until then, Cox argues, most Americans remained content with their romantic vision of Dixie.
The First Edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ′consumer culture′ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. Updated throughout, this expanded new edition includes a ...fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the First Edition. Among the most noteworthy areas discussed are the effect of global warming on consumption, the rise of the new rich, changes in the North/South divide and the new diversity of consumer culture. The result is a book that shakes the boundaries of debate, from one of the foremost writers on culture and postmodernism of the present day.
In Supernatural Entertainments , Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media ...entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.
Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.
Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
This book is about the process of Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the sixties. After having fallen out of the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to American backing. In political ...spheres distance was carefully guarded, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be rewarding. It stabilised the regime internally and gave it an image of openness in foreign policy. The book addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. The main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and how life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people, living in a country with communist ideology wrapped in capitalist form. The book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream. The analysis raises doubts toward both the uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and the exaggerated picture of its authoritarianism.
In revolutionary France the life of things could not be assured. War, shortage of materials, and frequent changes in political authority meant that few large-scale artworks or permanent monuments to ...the Revolution’s memory were completed. On the contrary, visual practice in revolutionary France was characterized by the production and circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects, from printed paper money, passports, and almanacs to temporary festival installations and relics of the demolished Bastille. Addressing this mass of images conventionally ignored in art history, The Politics of the Provisional contends that they were at the heart of debates on the nature of political authenticity and historical memory during the French Revolution. Thinking about material durability, this book suggests, was one of the key ways in which revolutionaries conceptualized duration, and it was crucial to how they imagined the Revolution’s transformative role in history.
The Politics of the Provisional is the first book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in the following e-book editions: Kindle, Nook Study, Google Editions, ebrary, EBSCO, Project MUSE, and JSTOR.
Fandom Gray, Jonathan; Sandvoss, Cornel; Harrington, C
2007, 20070101
eBook
We are all fans. Whether we log on to Web sites to scrutinize the latest plot turns in Lost , “stalk” our favorite celebrities on Gawker , attend gaming conventions, or simply wait with ...bated breath for the newest Harry Potter novel—each of us is a fan. Fandom extends beyond television and film to literature, opera, sports, and pop music, and encompasses both high and low culture.
Fandom brings together leading scholars to examine fans, their practices, and their favorite texts. This unparalleled selection of original essays examines instances across the spectrum of modern cultural consumption from Karl Marx to Paris Hilton, Buffy the Vampire Slayer to backyard wrestling, Bach fugues to Bollywood cinema¸ and nineteenth-century concert halls to computer gaming. Contributors examine fans of high cultural texts and genres, the spaces of fandom, fandom around the globe, the impact of new technologies on fandom, and the legal and historical contexts of fan activity. Fandom is key to understanding modern life in our increasingly mediated and globalized world.
Fandom Gray, Jonathan; Sandvoss, Cornel; Harrington, C
2007, 20070101
eBook
We are all fans. Whether we log on to Web sites to scrutinize the latest plot turns in Lost , “stalk” our favorite celebrities on Gawker , attend gaming conventions, or simply wait with ...bated breath for the newest Harry Potter novel—each of us is a fan. Fandom extends beyond television and film to literature, opera, sports, and pop music, and encompasses both high and low culture.
Fandom brings together leading scholars to examine fans, their practices, and their favorite texts. This unparalleled selection of original essays examines instances across the spectrum of modern cultural consumption from Karl Marx to Paris Hilton, Buffy the Vampire Slayer to backyard wrestling, Bach fugues to Bollywood cinema¸ and nineteenth-century concert halls to computer gaming. Contributors examine fans of high cultural texts and genres, the spaces of fandom, fandom around the globe, the impact of new technologies on fandom, and the legal and historical contexts of fan activity. Fandom is key to understanding modern life in our increasingly mediated and globalized world.
Kosher pork -- an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces
the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism.
The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews ...between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most
ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period,
Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new
Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity.
This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted
to create a new Jewish culture, national in form and socialist in
content. Soviet and Kosher is the first study of key Yiddish documents that
brought these Soviet messages to Jews, notably the Red Haggadah, a
Soviet parody of the traditional Passover manual; songs about Lenin and Stalin;
scripts from regional theaters; Socialist Realist fiction; and magazines for
children and adults. More than 200 interviews conducted by the author in Russia,
Germany, and the United States testify to the reception of these cultural products
and provide a unique portrait of the cultural life of the average Soviet
Jew.
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