First published in 1989, Cultural Politics in Contemporary America is a radical attempt to lay out the complex ways in which the American media and American culture is powerfully interlocked. At the end of the 20th century, the media exerted an overwhelming influence on the formation of social identity through the production and consumption of images. The Hollywood Presidency of Ronald Reagan was founded on the skills of the ‘Great Communicator’; Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ was used by Chrysler Corporation to assure that ‘the pride is back’; feminists and right-wing militants converged to oppose pornography. The media, American culture, and political power were bound together in a gamble, the stakes of which increased daily.
‘Cultural Politics’ incorporates the struggles of race, gender and class; the economy of the commercial media system; the myths of hegemony and imperialism; the crises of privacy and of the intellectual; and such diverse issues as postmodernism, the American automobile, advertising as communication, and television. While political actors have changed and media technology has advanced rapidly, the outcome of this research still holds true for the 21st century and is of importance to students of media studies, cultural studies, postmodernism, postcolonial studies and political science.
Author(s): Ian Angus, Sut Jhally
Series: Routledge Revivals
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 402
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Empire and Consumption
1. Requiem for the American Empire
2. The Imperial Cannibal
3. American Empire and Global Communication
4. Power, Hegemony, and Communication Theory
5. The Political Economy of Culture
6. Advertising and the Development of Consumer Society
7. Circumscribing Postmodern Culture
Part II: Dimensions of Cultural Experience
8. In Living Color: Race and American Culture
9. Cultural Conundrums and Gender: America’s Present Past
10. Working Class Culture in the Electronic Age
11. Nature in Industrial Society
Part III: Themes in Popular Culture
12. Sexual Politics
13. Action-Adventure as Ideology
14. Vehicles for Myth: The Shifting Image of the Modern Car
15. Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic
16. The Importance of Shredding in Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture and Terrorism
17. Television and Democracy
18. MTV: Swinging on the (Postmodern) Star
Part IV: The Logic of Contemporary Culture
19. The Decline of American Intellectuals
20. The Myth of the Information Society
21. Limits to the Imagination: Marketing and Children’s Culture
22. The Privatization of Culture
23. Media Beyond Representation
24. Postmodernism: Roots and Politics
Notes
List of Contributors
