New Books in Popular Culture

A life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we...

In Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press), Laura Westengard examines the intersection of queerness and the gothic. Westengard’s scope is broad enough to encompass Lady Gaga’s meat dress, lesbian pulp fiction, Dracula, queer literature, and sadomasochistic performance art. What brings these diverse cultural objects together i...

Isabella Cosse’s Mafalda: A Social And Political History of a Global Comic (Duke University Press) is the definitive account of the most famous comic from Latin America, the Argentine strip Mafalda (1964-1973). Mafalda, a four-year-old girl living in a Buenos Aires apartment with her middle-class family, became an international symbol of dissent through her humorous, yet pointed critiques of autho...

The Routledge Handbook of Festivals (Routledge, 2018) offers a comprehensive evaluation of the most current research, debates, and controversies surrounding festivals. It covers a wide range of theories, concepts and contexts, such as sustainability, festival marketing and management, the strategic use of festivals, and their futures. The handbook features a variety of disciplinary, cultural, and...

Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it’s as much a personal account of the Stooges’...

How should we understand the role of cultural industries in contemporary society? In Global Cultural Economy (Routledge) Christiaan De Beukelaer, a senior lecturer in cultural policy at the University of Melbourne, and Kim-Marie Spence, a postdoctoral researcher at Solent University, explore and explain the interrelationship between culture and economy across the world. The book covers a range of...

In Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Dana Renga offers the first comprehensive study of recent, popular Italian television. Building on work in American television studies, audience and reception theory, and masculinity studies, her book examines how and why viewers are positioned to engage emotionally with—and root for—Italian...

From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In Work! A Queer History of Modelling (Duke University Press, 2019), Elspeth H. Brown traces the history of modeling from the advent of photographic modeling in the...

In White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Beacon, 2019), Lauren Michele Jackson analyzes Christina Aguilera, high fashion, the conceptual poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith, digital blackface, and the dearly departed video platform Vine. She demonstrates that cultural appropriation (especially of Black culture by white artists) is prevalent and deeply...

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge...

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness...

In New Orleans Carnival Balls: The Secret Side of Mardi Gras, 1870-1920 (LSU Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Atkins draws back the curtain on the origin of the exclusive Mardi Gras balls, bringing to light unique traditions unseen by outsiders. The oldest Carnival organizations emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and ruled Mardi Gras from the Civil War until World War I. For these organizations, Carn...

From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke University Press, 2020) move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a p...

Under dictatorship in Argentina, sex and sexuality were regulated to the point where sex education, explicit images, and even suggestive material were prohibited. With the return to democracy in 1983, Argentines experienced new freedoms, including sexual freedoms. The explosion of the availability and ubiquity of sexual material became known as the destape, and it uncovered sexuality in provocativ...

Mitchell and Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Routledge, 2019) is Caridad Svich’s love letter to the 1998 musical that introduced the world to its favorite East German ex-pat genderqueer rock star, Hedwig. A tribute both to the New York that spawned the musical and the glam rock that inspired it, this book contextualizes the show in a way that allows the reader to appreciate both its “ahead of i...

The reissue and revision of Martin James’ State of Bass: The Origins of Jungle/Drum & Bass (Velocity Press, 2020) examines the origins and progression of British Junglism in the 1990s. Rave culture’s clashes with UK government and police drove the scene into a dark space, but jungle/drum & bass emerged to capture a new audience of youth, creating what James labels as the first truly Black British...

In American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and The Battles of Lev Gleason (Chapterhouse Publishing, 2020), Brett Dakin, Gleason’s great-nephew delves into the life of his famous relative. Gleason rose to the top of the comic publishing world during its Golden Age, publishing Daredevil and Crime Does Not Pay among other titles. Dakin explores the family archives and FBI files to give readers a compr...

From the time of his introduction in the Detective Comics in 1940s, the Joker is a character that has both fascinated and repelled the collective psyche of the fans of the comic subculture and beyond. In a new book titled “The Sign of the Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime as a Sign” published in the Brill Research Perspectives series, Joel West of the University of Toronto, Canada, analyzes the his...

The Blackface minstrel show is typically thought of a form tied to the 19th century. While the style was indeed developed during the Antebellum period, its history stretches well into 20th- and even 21st-century America. Far from being the endpoint posited by much of the existing literature on the topic, the Jazz age of the 1920s actually saw a flourishing of Minstrel activity, as new forms of med...

Junior Tomlin: Flyer & Cover Art (Velocity Press, 2020) showcases the artwork of Junior Tomlin. Featuring flyers and record covers Tomlin has created for the rave scene starting in the late 1980s, this is the first book which comprehensively and cohesively documents his work in this important UK subculture. Raised in Ladbroke Grove, west London, Tomlin’s Afrofuturism work is influenced by surreali...

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Emily Wallace, author and illustrator of the new book Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South (University of Texas Press, 2019). Road Sides pays homage to popular travel guides with its short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet containing a brief contextualizing essay followed by a feature of a spec...

Justin Gomer is the author of White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. White Balance explores the connection between politics and film from the 1970s to the 1990s. Gomer illustrates the myriad of ways that Hollywood relied on and helped solidify an emerging ideology of colorblindness in the wak...

In Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Thomas Bishop details the remarkable cultural history and personal stories behind an iconic figure of Cold War masculinity—the fallout shelter father, who, with spade in hand and the canned goods he has amassed, sought to save his family from atomic warfare. Putting policy docume...

In Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Manuel Betancourt explores what makes Judy Garland’s landmark album great, and why it holds such a central place in queer culture. A hit when released in 1961 (it was the first album by a woman ever to win the Grammy award for Best Album), Judy at Carnegie Hall quickly came to occupy a central place in the gay imaginary. And yet...

If Jay Gatsby is the embodiment of patriotism, what does that mean for America? Join NBN host Lee Pierce and author Greil Marcus as they take a deep dive into how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive. In Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment, and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby" (Yale Universi...