Cultural studies Books

First published in 1990, Border Dialogues explores some of the territories of contemporary culture, philosophy and criticism. It touches on arguments surrounding Nietzsche and Italian 'weak thought', the mysteries of being 'British', and with more...

The terrorist attacks in the United States on 9/11 and the U.S.-led military campaign against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan have intensified scrutiny of radical Islamic groups across Central Asia. This books offers one of the first comprehensive...

First Published in 1989, this work is based around a monthly TV column which Raymond Williams wrote for The Listener between 1968 and 1972. Those were the years of the Prague Spring, of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, of fighting in Cambodia and...

How did we get from Hollywood to YouTube? What makes Wikipedia so different from a traditional encyclopedia? Has blogging dismantled journalism as we know it? Our media landscape has undergone a seismic shift as digital technology has...

First published in 1982, The Sociology of Art considers all forms of the arts, whether visual arts, literature, film, theatre or music from Bach to the Beatles. The last book to be completed by Arnold Hauser before his death in 1978, it is a total...

Emmy-Award winning writer and comedian Gondelman's collection of personal stories of best intentions and mixed results is full of the warm and relatable humor that's made him a favorite on the comedy club circuit.

Between work, play, family, and friends, most of us feel like we're speeding along at 100 miles an hour. Our lives are full, yet we don't feel fulfilled. One solution is to slam on the brakes and adopt a radically simpler lifestyle. But, as psychologist...

In Clublife, Rob takes readers on a harrowing tour of the seedy, dangerous, and often deranged world of New York's hottest nightclubs. In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and The Tender Bar, Clublife is a remarkable memoir of the nightclub business...

Originally published in 1970, this book represents a unique study of beliefs and ritual practices in a pagan religion, and of the processes by which a transformation to Christianity took place.Christianity came to the major islands of Polynesia nearly...

The collection provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and...

Food is an important cultural marker of identity in contemporary Asian societies, and can provide a medium for the understanding of social relations, family and kinship, class and consumption, gender ideology, and cultural symbolism. However, a truly...

Weber's claim that Buddhism is an otherworldly religion is only partially true. Early sources indicate that the Buddha was sometimes diverted from supramundane interests to dwell on a variety of politically-related matters. The significance of Asoka...

The quest for gentility has shaped Chinese civilization and the formation of culture in China until the present day. This book analyzes social aspirations and cultural practices in China from 1550 to 1999, showing how the notion of gentility has evolved...

Sexing the Groove discusses these issues and many more, bringing together leading music and cultural theorists to explore the relationships between popular music, gender and sexuality. The contributors, who include Mavis Beayton, Stella Bruzzi, Sara...

This book offers a comprehensive overview of Canadian cultural policy and research, at a time of transition and redefinition, to establish a dialogue between conventional and emerging foundations. Taking a historical view, the book informs insights on...

This second book in the Routledge Docalogue series continues to model a new form for the discussion of documentary film, focusing on a new film and a different set of critical questions.Kedi (2016) is the first feature documentary by Turkish-American...

Between the 1930s and 1970s, a handful of writers mentioned old, mysterious, roof-like grave covers in cemeteries in Sussex and Wicomico counties on the Delmarva Peninsula. Their origins were unknown, but they were believed to be one to two hundred years...

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

These essays critically rethink Marxism in the light of the disintegration of communist regimes Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Containing essays from a group of internationally distinguished writers and intellectuals, this collection addresses...

The growing field of popular culture studies in Taiwan can be divided into two distinct academic trends; a different analytical framework is used to examine either locally oriented popular culture or transnational pop culture. This volume combine these...

This book examines American popular culture to demonstrate that celebrities have superseded religious figures as moral authorities. As trust in religious institutions has waned over recent decades, the once frivolous entertainment fringe has become the...

Written by nationally recognized anthropologists Conrad Kottak and Lara Descartes, this ethnography of largely white, middle class families in a town in the midwest explores the role that the media play in influencing how those families cope with...

Militainment, Inc. offers provocative, sometimes disturbing insight into the ways that war is presented and viewed as entertainment-or "militainment"-in contemporary American popular culture. War has been the subject of entertainment for centuries, but...

Racing Cyberculture explores new media art that challenges the 'race-blind' myth of cyberspace. The particular cultural workers whose productions are addressed are the performance and installation artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, the UK...

Everyday eBay is the first scholarly analysis of the internet marketplace that has become a global social, cultural and economic phenomenon. The eighteen new and classic essays gathered here examine eBay from a wide variety of perspectives as a...

In Intoxicated Identities, Tim Mitchell provides a novel and well-grounded framework for understanding subjective drinking experiences from the Aztecs to the present day in areas as diverse as Chiapas, Chihuahua, Oaxaca, Mexico City, Texas and...

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City, Hae explores how nightlife in New York City, long associated with various subcultures of social dancing, has been recently transformed as the city has undergone the gentrification of its space...

This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than providing a history of popular music or an itemization of indigenous musical qualities, it exposes the...

Young people in London have contributed to the production of a distinctively British rap culture. This book moves beyond accounts of Hip-Hop's marginality and shows, with an examination of the production, dissemination and use of rap in London, how this...

In this book, Nathanson examines how contemporary American television and associated digital media depict women's everyday lives as homemakers, career women, and mothers. Her focus on American popular culture from the 1990s through the present reveals...

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...

The Ma' Betisek are a group of aborigines who live on the mangrove coastal area of Selangor in peninsular Malaysia. Dr Karim's study is mainly focused on the Ma' Betisek communities on Carey Island, off the west coast of Selangor and in particular...

Focusing on Disney's production of Shanghai Disneyland, this book examines how the Chinese state and the local market influence Disney's ownership and production of the identities and the representations of Shanghai Disneyland. Qualitative methods are...

In this lively and witty history of the study of political culture, Michael Brint examines the differences between the French sociological tradition from Montesquieu to Tocqueville; the German tradition of cultural philosophy from Kant to Weber; and the...

Bolivia, like most developing countries around the world, strove for decades to imitate Western and particularly U.S. methods of development, importing the latest technologies, institutions, crops, and livestock. Finally, beginning in the 1970s, faced...

In the West, Islam and Muslim life have been imagined as existing in an opposing state to popular culture-a frozen faith unable to engage with the dynamic way popular culture shifts over time, its followers reduced to tropes of terrorism and enemies of...

The idea of diversity dominates cultural policy in the twenty-first century. Against the perceived elitism of the past, policy-makers seek to use culture to address social exclusion. Drawing on original research, this book exposes problems with this...

This volume brings together twenty original essays on the changes and continuities in gender relations and intersecting politics of sexuality, race, class and location. The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid...

Why do individuals and groups hold distinctive theological views? Why do these beliefs change? In what ways do theological interpretations influence concepts of spiritual and political justice? How and why do these concepts of justice affect policy...

Know what academic freedom is? Or what it's come to mean? What's affirmative about affirmative action these days? Think you're up on the problem of sexual harassment on campus? Or know how much the university depends on part-time faculty? Academic...

Since nearly the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, activists have signaled the inadequacy of prevention strategies and drug protocols that have been developed from research done primarily on men. The latest C.D.C. figures prove they were right; for the...

PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy addresses the very issue of political correctness and the current skirmishes in the culture wars. It includes statements from many of our leading contemporary public intellectuals, including Joan Wallach...

Shopping Around investigates the issues of contemporary popular narrative, feminine pleasure, and consumer culture, viewing the permutations of the feminine subject as a textual construction evolved through everyday life. A wide spectrum of texts are...