Unsere Kolumne nimmt sich eine kleine Auszeit von den Netzartikeln. Stattdessen gibt es im Vorfeld der Buchmesse einen Überblick zu Buchneuerscheinungen und -ankündigungen des zweiten Halbjahrs 2013.

 

Die Bücher sind in der Reihenfolge ihrer Erscheinungstermine aufgeführt. Bei den Buchangaben setze ich jeweils den Ankündigungstext des Verlags hinzu.

 

Beatriz Preciado
Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY (September 17, 2013)

What constitutes a ›real‹ man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny. In this penetrating analysis of gender, Beatriz Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity are formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the business of creating desire. This riveting continuation of Michel Foucault’s »The History of Sexuality« also includes Preciado’s diaristic account of her own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on her body as well as her imagination

 

Irene Morra
Britishness, Popular Music, and National Identity: The Making of Modern Britain
Publisher: Routledge (September 24, 2013)

This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than a history of popular music, or an attempt to identify indigenous qualities in a popular music tradition, it exposes and interrogates the influential cultural and nationalist rhetoric around popular music — and the dissemination of that rhetoric in various forms. Since the 1960s, popular music has surpassed literature to become the dominant signifier of modern cultural British identity, a position enforced in popular culture, literature, news and music media, political rhetoric, and in popular music itself, which has become increasingly self-conscious about the expectation that music both articulate and manifest the inherent values and identity of the modern nation. This study examines the implications of such practices and the various social and cultural values they construct and enforce, identifying two dominant, conflicting constructions around popular music: music as the voice of an indigenous English ›folk‹, and music as the voice of a re-emergent British Empire. These constructions are not only contradictory but also exclusive, proscribing a social and musical identity for the nation that ignores its greater creative, national, and cultural diversity. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive interrogation of an extremely powerful discourse in England that today informs dominant formulations of English and British national identity, history, and culture.

 

Björn Weyand
Politik der Marke: Konsumkultur und literarische Verfahren 1900-2000
Verlag: De Gruyter (30. September 2013)

Die Studie zeigt, wie Werke von E. Edel, Th. Mann, I. Keun, W. Koeppen und Chr. Kracht materielle, semiologische und kulturtheoretische Aspekte der Konsumkultur reflektieren und in literarische Verfahren überführen: von Warenkatalogen und Fetischisierungen bis zu kapitalistischen Zirkulationsprozessen und der Faszination der Oberfläche.

 

Mark Duffett
Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (October 1, 2013)

This book explores popular music fandom from a cultural studies perspective that incorporates popular music studies, audience research, and media fandom. The essays draw together recent work on fandom in popular music studies and begin a dialogue with the wider field of media fan research, raising questions about how popular music fandom can be understood as a cultural phenomenon and how much it has changed in light of recent developments. Exploring the topic in this way broaches questions on how to define, theorize, and empirically research popular music fan culture, and how music fandom relates to other roles, practices, and forms of social identity. Fandom itself has been brought center stage by the rise of the internet and an industrial structure aiming to incorporate, systematize, and legitimate dimensions of it as an emotionally-engaged form of consumerism. Once perceived as the pariah practice of an overly attached audience, media fandom has become a standardized industrial subject-position called upon to sell box sets, concert tickets, new television series, and special editions. Meanwhile, recent scholarship has escaped the legacy of interpretations that framed fans as passive, pathological, or defiantly empowered, taking its object seriously as a complex formation of identities, roles, and practices. While popular music studies has examined some forms of identity and audience practice, such as the way that people use music in daily life and listener participation in subcultures, scenes and, tribes, this volume is the first to examine music fans as a specific object of study.

 

Limor Shifman
Memes in Digital Culture
Publisher: The MIT Press (October 4, 2013)

In December 2012, the exuberant video »Gangnam Style« became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video – »Mitt Romney Style«, »NASA Johnson Style«, »Egyptian Style«, and many others. »Gangnam Style« (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes — including »Leave Britney Alone«, the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street’s »We Are the 99 Percent«. She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

 

Adam Geczy/Vicki Karaminas
Queer Style
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic; 1 edition (October 10, 2013)

»Queer Style« offers an insight into queer fashionability by addressing the role that clothing has played in historical and contemporary lifestyles. From a fashion studies perspective, it examines the function of subcultural dress within queer communities and the mannerisms and messages that are used as signifiers of identity. Diverse dress is examined, including effeminate ›pansy‹, masculine macho ›clone‹, the ›lipstick‹ and ›butch‹ lesbian styles and the extreme styles of drag kings and drag queens. Divided into three main sections on history, subcultural identity and subcultural style, Queer Style will be of particular interest to students of dress and fashion as well as those coming to subculture from sociology and cultural studies.

 

Winifred Morgan
The Trickster Figure in American Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (October 24, 2013)

»The Trickster Figure in American Literature« provides a new framework to look at the richness that is American literature and culture. Trickster stories allow readers to experience vicariously another culture’s deepest discontent. They supply a laugh but more importantly, their stories reflect contemporary dilemmas being played out in fiction. Using the trickster figure as an entry-point into African American, American Indian, Euro-American, Asian American, and Latino/a stories, Winifred Morgan examines the oral roots of each racial/ethnic group to reveal how each group’s history, frustrations, and aspirations have molded the tradition. Ultimately, this compelling study shows that in a country such as the United States of America, tricksters remind listeners and readers that the ideals espoused by the law and traditions have not been achieved.

 

Rebecca Bramall
The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (October 30, 2013)

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the present ›age of austerity‹ has repeatedly been compared to the wartime and postwar austerity years. For many, the rise of austerity nostalgia suggests a compliant public in thrall to the command to ›keep calm and carry on‹ while the welfare state is dismantled around them. Yet, at the same time, the idea that the Second World War can serve as a compelling historical precedent for sustainable living has found favour in environmental and anti-consumerist debate. Challenging dominant approaches to ›austerity‹, Rebecca Bramall explores the presence and persuasiveness of the past in contemporary popular culture, focusing intensively on the contradictions, antagonisms, alternatives and possibilities that the current conjuncture presents. In doing so, she exemplifies a new approach to emergent uses of the past, questioning longstanding assumptions about the relationship between history, culture and politics.

 

Rebecca Munford u.a.
Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique
Publisher: I.B.Tauris (October 30, 2013)

»Feminism and Popular Culture« maps the fraught and often unpredictable relationship between popular culture, feminism and postfeminism. From the shadowy city spaces of »Mad Men« and »Homeland« to the dystopic suburbia of »The Stepford Wives« and »American Horror Story«, the authors trace the maniacal career women, hysterical housewives and amnesiac girls who roam the postfeminist landscape. Through recourse to these figures, they are able to illuminate postfeminism’s obsessive resuscitation of seemingly anachronistic models of femininity and ask why these should today be gilded with new appeal. Analysing postfeminism’s historical slippages and haunted temporalities, the book both takes account of the complex ways in which popular culture negotiates ongoing debates within and about feminism, and explores its implications for feminism’s future.

 

Kai-Uwe Hellmann
Der Konsum der Gesellschaft: Studien zur Soziologie des Konsums
Verlag: Springer VS (October 31, 2013)

Konsum scheint heutzutage allgegenwärtig zu sein. Nicht nur ist kaum vorstellbar, daß jemand überhaupt nie konsumiert. Auch kann nahezu alles, was man tut, als Konsum beobachtet werden. Zudem wird Konsum immer häufiger gesellschaftsweite Verbreitung und Geltung bescheinigt. Dieser Befund mag den Eindruck erwecken, Konsum sei zu einer eigenständigen gesellschaftlichen »Wertsphäre« (Weber) geworden, wie Erziehung, Kunst, Medizin, Politik, Recht, Sport, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft. Also nicht mehr bloß »Anhängsel« (Polanyi) der Wirtschaft, sondern eigenes Funktionssystem. Dieser Eindruck trügt. Denn bislang ist völlig ungeklärt, wie Konsum kommunikationstechnisch funktioniert. Die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit eines eigenständigen Funktionssystems erscheinen hochgradig prekär. Das ändert freilich nichts daran, daß Konsum zunehmend mehr Aufmerksamkeit erfährt, und genau diese Aufmerksamkeitszunahme fordert zur kritischen Reflexion auf. Feststellen lässt sich in jedem Fall, daß sich um das Thema ›Konsum‹ inzwischen ein hochkontroverses Diskursfeld entfaltet hat, auf das sich sämtliche Beiträge dieses Bandes beziehen. Der Band versammelt ausgewählte Aufsätze von Kai-Uwe Hellmann zur Konsumsoziologie und verweist auf die Aktualität und Relevanz dieses Forschungsfeldes.

 

Sara Doris
Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (October 31, 2013)

»Pop Art and the Contest Over American Culture« examines the socially and aesthetically subversive character of pop art. Providing a historically contextualized reading of American pop art, Sara Doris locates the movement within the larger framework of the social, cultural, and political transformations of the 1960s. She demonstrates how pop art’s use of discredited mass-cultural imagery worked to challenge established social and cultural hierarchies.

 

Erik Dussere
America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 1, 2013)

»America is Elsewhere« provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of ›authenticity effects‹ — representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films like »Double Indemnity«, »Ace in the Hole«, and »Kiss Me Deadly« alongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties — like »Klute« and »The Parallax View« — novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.

 

Maxine L. Craig
Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 11, 2013)

If you want to learn about masculinity, ask a man if he likes to dance. One man in this study answered, »Music is something that goes on inside my head, and is sort of divorced from, to a large extent, the rest of my body.« How did this man’s head become divorced from his body? To answer this question, Maxine Craig sought out men who love music but hate to dance. Combining interviews, participant observation and archival research, »Sorry I Don’t Dance« uncovers the recent origins of cultural assumptions regarding sex, race, and the capacity to dance. From the beginning of the twentieth century through the Swing Era young men of all races danced. But in the 1960s suburbanization, homophobia, and fragmentation of music cultures drove white men from the dance floor, and feminized, sexualized and racialized dance. »Sorry I Don’t Dance« reveals how changing beliefs concerning gender, race, class, and sexuality over the past half-century have redefined what it means to be a man in America.

 

Martin Iddon/Melanie L. Marshall (Hg.)
Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture
Publisher: Routledge (November 12, 2013)

This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, dance, fashion, and music. It represents one of the first scholarly volumes devoted to Lady Gaga, who has become, over a few short years, central to both popular (and, indeed, populist) as well as more scholarly thought in these areas and who, the contributors argue, is helping to shape—directly and indirectly—thought and culture both in the fields of the ›scholarly‹ and the ›everyday.‹ Lady Gaga’s output is firmly embedded in a self-consciously intellectual pop culture tradition, and her music videos are intertextually linked to icons of pop culture intelligentsia like Alfred Hitchcock and open to multiple interpretations. In examining her music and figure, this volume contributes both to debates on the status of intertextuality, held in tension with originality, and to debates on the figuring of the sexualized female body, and representations of disability. There is interest in these issues from a wide range of disciplines: popular musicology, film studies, queer studies, women’s studies, gender studies, disability studies, popular culture studies, and the burgeoning sub-discipline of aesthetics and philosophy of fashion.

 

Anne Massey
Out of the Ivory Tower: The Independent Group and Popular Culture
Publisher: Manchester University Press (November 12, 2013)

The Independent Group is now the subject of global scholarly interest, and this book, a sequel to The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945–59, explores the Anglo-American phenomenon from a new perspective. The Group included fine artists Magda Cordell, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull; architects Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St John Wilson; graphic designer Edward Wright; music producer Frank Cordell; and writers Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, John McHale and Toni del Renzio. This radical collective met at the ICA in London during the early 1950s, and worked with and within the new world of both the avant garde and popular culture.  This sequel includes an in-depth discussion of the recent historiography of the Independent Group, and examines its history from an alternative perspective – that of popular culture. The themes of domestic space, Hollywood film, fashion, mass-circulation magazines, science-fiction and popular music are explored, broadening our general understand

 

Ariel Leve/Robin Morgan
1963: The Year of the Revolution: How Youth Changed the World with Music, Art, and Fashion
Publisher: It Books (November 19, 2013)

Ariel Leve and Robin Morgan’s oral history »1963: The Year of the Revolution« is the first book to recount the kinetic story of the twelve months that witnessed a demographic power shift—the rise of the Youth Quake movement, a cultural transformation through music, fashion, politics, and the arts. Leve and Morgan detail how, for the first time in history, youth became a commercial and cultural force with the power to command the attention of government and religion and shape society. While the Cold War began to thaw, the race into space heated up, feminism and civil rights percolated in politics, and JFK’s assassination shocked the world, the Beatles and Bob Dylan would emerge as poster boys and the prophet of a revolution that changed the world. »1963: The Year of the Revolution« records, documentary-style, the incredible roller-coaster ride of those twelve months, told through the recollections of some of the period’s most influential figures—from Keith Richards to Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon to Graham Nash, Alan Parker to Peter Frampton, Eric Clapton to Gay Talese, Stevie Nicks to Norma Kamali, and many more.

 

Innokentij Kreknin
Poetiken des Selbst: Ídentität, Autorschaft und Autofiktion
Verlag: De Gruyter (20. November 2013)

Wie ist literarische Autorschaft daran beteiligt, Poetiken des Selbst herzustellen? Anhand der Werke von Goetz, Lottmann und Herbst werden die Ansätze der Autofiktionsforschung erprobt und ein methodisches Instrumentarium entwickelt, das die Bedingungen des heutigen Mediensystems berücksichtigt. Als Ergebnis kommen grenzaufhebende Selbstpoetiken zum Vorschein, in denen die Differenz von Leben und Werk getilgt wird.

 

Dietrich Helms/Thomas Phleps (Hg.)
Geschichte wird gemacht: Zur Historiographie populärer Musik
Verlag: Transcript (Dezember 2013)

»Keine Atempause, Geschichte wird gemacht.« Die populäre Musik – vor Jahren noch ein Modeartikel mit begrenzter Haltbarkeit – werkelt an ihrer Vergangenheit. Alte Alben werden wieder aufgelegt und zu Klassikern erhoben. Popjournalisten schreiben an Listen des Besten und Wichtigsten ›aller Zeiten‹. Das Fernsehen strahlt längst verdrängt gehoffte Musiksendungen der Schlaghosenzeit wieder aus: »Spot an!« auf die Geschichte. Die wissenschaftliche Forschung hat sich bisher wenig um eine Geschichte der Pop- und Rockmusik gekümmert. Die Beiträge des Bandes fragen: Was oder wer ist überhaupt geschichtswürdig und was darf/soll man vergessen? Wie schreibt man überhaupt eine Geschichte der populären Musik? Und: Gibt es nur eine oder nicht eigentlich viele Geschichten?