Pops In Pop Culture

The definitions of fatherhood have shifted in the twenty-first century as paternal subjectivities, conflicts, and desires have registered in new ways in the contemporary family. This collection investigates these sites of change through various lenses from popular culture - film, television, blogs, best-selling fiction and non-fiction, stand-up comedy routines, advertisements, newspaper articles, parenting guide-books, and video games. Treating constructions of the father at the nexus of patriarchy, gender, and (post)feminist philosophy, contributors analyze how fatherhood is defined in relation to masculinity and femininity, and the shifting structures of the heteronormative nuclear family. Perceptions of the father as the traditional breadwinner and authoritarian as compared to a more engaged and involved nurturer are considered via representations of fathers from the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and Sweden.

If you owe a couple cavities to Marathon candy bars, learned your adverbs from Schoolhouse Rock!, and can still imitate the slo-mo bionic running sound of The Six Million Dollar Man, this book is for you. Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? takes you back in time to the tastes, smells, and sounds of childhood in the '70s and '80s, when the Mystery Date board game didn't seem sexist, and exploding Pop Rocks was the epitome of candy science. But what happened to the toys, tastes, and trends of our youth? Some vanished totally, like Freakies cereal. Some stayed around, but faded from the spotlight, like Sea-Monkeys and Shrinky Dinks. Some were yanked from the market, revised, and reintroduced...but you'll have to read the book to find out which ones. So flip up the collar of that polo shirt and revisit with us the glory and the shame of those goofy decades only a native could love.

This book traces the evolution of the Hong Kong’s popular culture, namely film, television and popular music (also known as Cantopop), which is knotted with the city’s geo-political, economic and social transformations. Under various historical contingencies and due to the city’s special geo-politics, these three major popular cultural forms have experienced various worlding processes and have generated border-crossing impact culturally and socially. The worlding processes are greatly associated the city’s nature as a reception and departure port to Sinophone migrants and populations of multiethnic and multicultural. Reaching beyond the “golden age” (1980s) of Hong Kong popular culture and afar from a film-centric cultural narration, this book, delineating from the dawn of the 20th century and following a chronological order, untangles how the nowadays popular “Hong Kong film”, “Hong Kong TV” and “Cantopop” are derived from early-age Sinophone cultural heritage, re-shaped through cross-cultural hybridization and influenced by multiple political forces. Review of archives, existing literatures and corporation documents are supplemented with policy analysis and in-depth interviews to explore the centennial development of Hong Kong popular culture, which is by no means demise but at the juncture of critical transition.

"The selection of essays here is outstanding. The Reader is particularly strong in bridging between founding figures and cutting edge work by newer writers."- Henry Jenkins, MIT "An extraordinarily well considered selection of articles and essays, arranged with skill and style." - Charlie Blake, University College NorthamptonPopular Culture: A Reader helps students understand the pervasive role of popular culture and the processes that constitute it as a product of industry, an intellectual object of inquiry and an integral component of all our lives.The volume is divided into 7 thematic sections, and each section is preceded by an introduction which engages with, and critiques, the chapters that follow. The book contains: Classic writings from all the ′big names′ including Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Frederic Jameson, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy and many more. Contemporary cultural references throughout - this is not simply an historical account. Pieces drawing on diverse national, disciplinary and subdisciplinary contexts. Sensitivity to issues of gender, race and sexuality. This reader is a key resource for students of media and communication studies, cultural studies, and the sociology of the media.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering dynamic new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and art festivals, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, Goth/ic on TV and film, new trends like Steampunk, well-known icons Batman and Lady Gaga, and theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism.

The Dynamics of Interconnections in Popular Culture(s) is an eclectic and free-ranging collection of articles grounded in a combination of the social sciences with the populist humanities. The collection is further unified by an approach that considers changes and linkages within and between cultural systems as evidenced through their respective popular cultures. The key underlying assumption is that our collective popular expressions create an arena of global cultural exchange, further precipitating new cultural adaptations, expressions, and connections. The volume is divided into two sections. The first consists of articles investigating theoretical and methodological approaches to the dynamics of history and cultural changes. These include cultural anthropology, history, economics, and sociology. The second section is made up of explorations into a myriad of cultural practices and expressions that exemplify not only the wide diversity of popular cultures and their workings, but also the interconnections between and within those cultural systems. A wide variety of specific case studies are presented to evidence and support the more general points made in the previous section. The collection demonstrates that the everyday lives of ordinary people, while varying from culture to culture, are unified through their expressions of shared humanity. Foreword by Gary Hoppenstand.

"With mass migration changing the configuration of societies worldwide, we can look to the Caribbean to reflect on the long-standing, entangled relations between countries and areas as uneven in size and influence as the United States, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. More so than other world regions, the Caribbean has been characterized as an always already colonial region. It has long been a key area for empires warring over influence spheres in the new world, and where migration waves from Africa, Europe, and Asia accompanied every political transformation over the last five centuries. In Caribbean Migrations, an interdisciplinary group of humanities and social science scholars study migration from a long-term perspective, analyzing the Caribbean's "unincorporated subjects" from a legal, historical, and cultural standpoint, and exploring how despite often fractured public spheres, Caribbean intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and writers have been resourceful at showcasing migration as the hallmark of our modern age"--

Postmodernism and Popular Culture brings together eleven recent essays by Angela McRobbie in a collection which deals with the issues which have dominated cultural studies over the last ten years. A key theme is the notion of postmodernity as a space for social change and political potential. McRobbie explores everyday life as a site of immense social and psychic complexity to which she argues that cultural studies scholars must return through ethnic and empirical work; the sound of living voices and spoken language. She also argues for feminists working in the field to continue to question the place and meaning of feminist theory in a postmodern society. In addition, she examines the new youth cultures as images of social change and signs of profound social transformation. Bringing together complex ideas about cultural studies today in a lively and accessible format, Angela McRobbie's new collection will be of immense value to all teachers and students of the subject.