Buyers Beware Saunders, Patricia Joan
2022, 2022-05-13
eBook
Buyers Beware offers a new perspective for critical inquiries about the practices of consumption in (and of) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations ...of the Caribbean from “less respectable” segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and 'sistah lit' that proudly jettison any aspirations toward middle-class respectability. Treating these pop cultural texts and phenomena with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region allows Patricia Joan Saunders to read them against the grain and consider whether and how their “pulp” preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality and national politics are constructed, performed, interpreted, disseminated and consumed from within the Caribbean.
Bullet chats have grown in popularity in East Asia since 2006, when the Japanese animation website Niconico originated overlaying flying texts on video displays and synchronizing them to the video ...timeline. This bullet chat function has now gained popularity on Bilibili, a popular Chinese video-sharing social media site with a focus on East Asian pop culture. Bilibili users mix Chinese with foreign languages to create a cyberpidgin vocabulary, adding visual language to express their feelings in a mode that reflects the social norms learned from other East Asian fandoms. Analysis of Bilibili bullet chats provides insight into how social media and online platforms influence user interactions from both linguistic and visual perspectives.
Susan Westhafer Furukawa’s The Afterlife ofToyotomi Hideyoshi: Historical Fiction and Popular Culture in Japan(Harvard University Press, 2022) is an engagingly written study of twentieth-and ...twenty-first-century representations of a crucial figure in Japanesehistory. The research is thorough; the critical underpinnings of the study areaccessibly presented; the illustrations, which grace nearly every chapter,serve to enhance what is already a valuable addition to any library that isstaying abreast of significant developments in Japanese literary and historicalscholarship.@font-face{font-family:Arial;panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073711037 9 0 511 0;}@font-face{font-family:Arial;panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073711037 9 0 511 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-520092929 1073786111 9 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:游明朝;panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;mso-font-charset:128;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-format:other;mso-font-pitch:auto;mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;}@font-face{font-family:"\@游明朝";panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;mso-font-charset:128;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-format:other;mso-font-pitch:auto;mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:8.0pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:107%;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:游明朝;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-size:11.0pt;mso-ansi-font-size:11.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:游明朝;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoPapDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;margin-bottom:8.0pt;line-height:107%;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}
In March 1972, the pop idol David Cassidy played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden dressed in a white lace-up jumpsuit. Although this outfit has been widely documented by fans, photographers ...and journalists, it has not been as widely discussed as signature costumes worn by his equally famous contemporaries — David Bowie and his man’s dress, for example, which helped make the musician the androgynous style icon he is known as today, or Elvis Presley in his iconic white jumpsuit, which redefined ideas of masculinity in American culture. Yet when discussed through Joanne Entwistle’s framework of dress as an embodied practice — David Cassidy wearing this particular jumpsuit, at this particular event — the individual garment regains a deeper meaning. Through an analysis of the jumpsuit and dress as an embodied practice, the stage is set to show Cassidy as a powerful conduit of social change who subverted gender norms in mainstream American culture in the late 1960s and early 70s — an unlikely but worthy nonbinary fashion icon.
Swearing fulfils a range of interpersonal pragmatic functions and also acts as a distinguishing feature of speakers and contexts. In broadcast media, swearing has traditionally been censored or at ...least limited in its deployment; although when used, it serves characterization, interactional, and narrative functions. In this article, we consider the Disney+ television series Only Murders in the Building (OMITB, 2021–), in which swearing is not subject to standard media constraints, due to its provision on a streaming service. Freed from such constraints, OMITB is distinctive in its unusually high frequency and dispersion of swearing across characters and contexts. Compared with both real-life and media-based analyses of language use, the swearing in OMITB reflects neither real-life nor standard broadcast patterns. In this paper, we investigate how swearing is used by the characters, and what it is ‘doing’ in the series. In particular, we highlight the role of swearing in affiliation and relationship-building, both between characters in the story world, and between the series and its viewers. Our analysis contributes to understanding the pragmatic functions of media swearing.
While it has been more than 15 years since the Korean pop culture phenomenon known as the Korean wave or hallyu emerged, academic analyses have not sufficiently addressed its dimension as a media ...environment from a global perspective. In this regard, drawing on qualitative interviews with North American fans of the recent Korean wave, this study explores how the hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a social media-driven cultural landscape, which will be referred to as the social mediascape. The social mediascape of hallyu reveals that the technological affordances of social media platforms and fans’ sociality interplay with each other, resulting in the rapid spread of hallyu as a set of impure cultural forms.
The article focuses on the phenomenon of political fandom and its potential impact on citizens’ political engagement. In particular, our research intends to offer a contribution to the discussion of ...possible types of online fan-like attachment to a political leader. Our case study is the Instagram account @lebimbedigiuseppeconte, a fanpage celebrating the former Italian Prime minister Giuseppe Conte. We analyzed posts between 2018 and 2022 with the aim of investigating the evolution of the account following the change of Conte’s role from the office of Prime Minister—that he held as an outsider—to the more politicized role of leader of the Five-Star Movement. Our results suggest that, although in the first phase @lebimbedigiuseppeconte could not be regarded as a standard type of political fandom, its evolution shows that also a fanpage born with no apparent political goal and a vocation for entertaining may become a platform for the diffusion of political contents.
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