New Books in Popular Culture

It’s the UConn Popcast, and Taylor Swift is by some measures the most popular person on the planet. Her periodic reinventions set the mass cultural terms of debate, and her political interventions – through exhorting her fans on social media – lead to huge spikes in voter registration. It is hoped by Democrats, and feared by Republicans, that a Taylor endorsement of Joe Biden in 2024 might meaning...

Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and continental Europe. Both countries were occupied after Wo...

Recent years have brought an upsurge in celebrity activism. Not a day goes by without an actor or musician taking to a stage, a podium or the internet to speak on a social issue, address an environmental problem, or adopt a political position. It’s easy to be cynical about the motivations of these privileged and sometimes uninformed people. Many of them come across as self-serving. But others appe...

Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source of the valuable drug spice, Arrakis has been colonized and its resources extracted by the Imperium. The Fremen fight to liberate themselves and their planet from Imperial control under the messianic leadership of Paul Atreides. In Frank Herbert’s ori...

How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (U California Press, 2023) examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. Wi...

With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — the trappings of “geekdom” have made their way into the global mainstream over the past few days. As part of this trend, Japanese-style anime has also gained immense transnational popularity, arguably becoming part of the “new cool”. It’s against this...

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male...

In Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work (FSG, 2023), Jesse David Fox—the country’s most definitive voice in comedy criticism and someone who, in his own words, enjoys comedy “maybe more than anyone on this planet”—tackles everything you need to know about comedy, an art form that has been under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a c...

In his debut essay collection, My Life of Crime (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2022), Tyler C. Gore brings readers on an awkward visit to a nude beach. A bike-pedaling angel careening through rush-hour traffic. The mystery of a sandwich found in a bathroom stall. A lyric, rainy-day ramble through the East Village. With the personal essays (and three other entertainments) Gore reveals the artistic secret...

Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economie...

Eve Benhamou's book Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (Edinburgh UP, 2022) is the first in-depth study of Disney’s latest animated output from the perspective of genre theory. Analysing a decade in Disney’s history (2008-2018), Benhamou examines the multifaceted interactions between animated films, Disney properties such as Pixar and Marvel, and popular genres including th...

Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietly seizing the imagination of millions, on the internet and off it. From catchy songs with acerbic lyrics to poetry recited in kavi sammelans to social media influencers shaping opinions with their bra...

Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music (U California Press, 2021) explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound t...

1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie market. Kartik Nair's book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (U California Press, 2024) is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "fail...

Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters? Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behin...

In A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (Duke UP, 2022), Richard T. Rodríguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodríguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ada...

As I may be the target audience for Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies (Edinburgh UP, 2023), I really enjoyed interviewing Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai. Their co-authored book explores the politics of American films about disease and zombies. We had a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and funny conversation about pandemics, capitalism, academic collabor...

The definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of the groundbreaking filmmaker. The enigmatic and elusive filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has not been treated to a full-length biography in over twenty years. Kubrick: An Odyssey (Pegasus Books, 2024) fills that gap. This definitive book is based on access to...

Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Brydie Kosmina investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture. The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination o...

The untold story of Chicago's pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country...

Sabina Andron's book Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City (Routledge, 2024) focuses on urban surfaces, on exploring their authorship and management, and on their role in struggles for the right to the city. Graffiti, pristine walls, advertising posters, and municipal signage all compete on city surfaces to establish and imprint their values on our environments. It is the first time...

Any tattoo is the outcome of an intimate, often hidden process. The people, bodies, and money that make tattooing what it is blend together and form a heady cocktail, something described by Matt, the owner of Oakland's Premium Tattoo, as "blood and lightning." Faced with the client's anticipation of pain and excitement, the tattooer must carefully perform calm authority to obscure a world of prepa...

An essential—and monumental—member of the Sonoran Desert ecosystem, the saguaro cactus has become the quintessential icon of the American West. In the Arms of Saguaros: Iconography of the Giant Cactus (U Arizona Press, 2023) shows how, from the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and...

Dr. Andy Jackson’s The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines an unexplored area of South Korean cinema history – the 1985-1997 growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia. This moment of heightened interest in art film altered how many Koreans conceptualised cinema and helped pave the way for the critical...

Monte Carlo and Las Vegas have become synonymous with casino gambling. Both destinations featured it as part of a broad variety of leisure and consumption opportunities that normalized games of chance and created emotional atmospheres that supported the hedonistic aspects of gambling. Urban spaces and architecture were carefully designed to enable a rapid growth of the casino industry and produce...