Popular Culture category: 4839 books

A broadly interdisciplinary study of the pervasive secrecy in America cultural, political, and religious discourse. The occult has traditionally been understood as the study of secrets of the practice of mysticism or magic. This book broadens our understanding of the occult by treating it as...

Bono is a passionate, articulate celebrity who has transcended his role as international rock star and become an effective political activist. This book provides insights into his life story and contributions to both popular culture and politics. • Contains many direct quotes from Bono's...

From viral videos on YouTube to mobile television on smartphones and beyond, TV has overflowed its boundaries. If Raymond Williams' concept of flow challenges the idea of a discrete television text, then convergence destabilizes the notion of television as a discrete object. Flow TV examines...

As we withdraw farther from American canonical literature and poetry and move closer to a re-appraisal of literature’s impact upon the arts through media, we may easily find a match for greater humanism and popular interaction in American rock culture through Paul Bowles. In this work, Bowles is...

This book studies the hitherto overlooked genre of horror cinema in India. It uncovers some unique and diverse themes that these films deal with, including the fear of the unknown, the supernatural, occult practices, communication with spirits of the deceased, ghosts, reincarnation, figures of vampires,...

A long-overdue paean to the predominant musical form of the 70s and a thoughtful exploration of the culture that spawned it Disco may be the most universally derided musical form to come about in the past forty years. Yet, like its pop cultural peers punk and hip hop, it was born of a period...

Dancehall: It's simultaneously a source of raucous energy in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica; a way of life for a group of professional artists and music professionals; and a force of stability and tension within the community. Electronically influenced, relevant to urban Jamaicans, and highly danceable,...

The Black Cultural Front describes how the social and political movements that grew out of the Depression facilitated the left turn of several African American artists and writers. The Communist-led John Reed Clubs brought together black and white writers in writing collectives. The Congress of Industrial...

The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America, Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields. The...

Evangelical Christianity—the faith professed by one in four Americans—exerts an enormous influence in American society. Believed by some to have originated as a reaction to the social revolution of the 1960s, evangelicalism as a distinct subculture in fact dates to the advent of radio. The evangelical...

Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through...

The story of "Revolution" by the Beatles, from its origin as a protest song of the 1960s, to it becoming the musical backdrop for one of the most famous, influential, and controversial adverts of all time. In 1987, Nike released their new sixty-second commercial for Air shoes—and...

In A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon makes a vital contributon to our understanding of the dynamics of sexuality and identity in modern American culture. He explores a wide array of literary, artistic, and theatrical performances ranging from the memoirs of Henry James and the dances of Vaslav...

Brazil has done much to shape football/soccer, but how has soccer shaped Brazil? Despite the political and social importance of the beautiful game to the country, the subject has hitherto received little attention. This book presents groundbreaking work by historians and researchers from Brazil, the...