Cultural Studies

This book brings together multiple strands of debate around the cultural creative industries and contemporary capitalism, China’s position in global capitalism, the future of modernity and new ways of thinking about culture and cultural policy.  Clearly written and engaging, it is the first study to provide a critical lens on creative industries discourse and to bring it together with detailed historical and social analysis.

It analyses the ongoing development of China’s cultural industries, examining the institutions, regulations, interests and markets that underpin the Chinese cultural economy and the strategic position of Shanghai within that economy. Explores cultural policy reforms in post-colonial China and articulates Shanghai’s significance in paving China’s path to modernity and entry to global capitalism. In-depth and illuminating, this book situates China’s contemporary cultural economy in its larger global and historical context, revealing the limits of Western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture and society.

This book is aimed at a broad, educated audience who seek to engage more with what is happening in China, especially in the cultural field. It tries to take such an audience outside the standard frame of Western modernity, suggesting the possibility of different historical trajectories and possibilities. Because the book is theoretical and empirical in its approach, it will be of strong interest to both those interested in Chinese cultural policy and the creative industries approach generally. 

Cultural and creative industries is an increasingly important subject area in Higher Education, with undergraduate and postgraduate programs representing some of the fastest growing areas in arts, humanities and social science faculties. This audience is increasingly global, as this policy debate has now moved outside the Western countries whose economic competitiveness it was meant to promote. It is an agenda promoted by agencies such as UNESCO, UNCTAD, the World Bank, British Council and the Goethe Institute.

Primary readership will be academics with a particular interest in Chinese culture, cultural studies, media studies, public policy and management studies, cultural policy, East Asian studies and cultural policy researchers. It will also be relevant to all those interested in China and Chinese’s culture; and those interested in the history of Shanghai and the role it plays in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.  Given the current interest in China, it may also be of wider appeal too.

Raymond Williams was a complex figure with various different facets to his activity. Raymond Williams: Cultural Analyst concentrates on the formation and application of his cultural-materialist methodology and its relation to his politics. Surveying Williams’s extensive writings across the fields of cultural studies, sociology and Marxist theory, the overall objective is to rescue Williams from his routine treatment as a literary scholar, and restore him to his rightful place as a leading scholar of the social sciences, not least for his theoretically sophisticated contribution to the field in the form of cultural materialism. Ultimately, this book argues that Williams should be regarded as a cultural analyst in the sociological rather than narrowly literary sense.

The book is replete with examples of Williams’s ideas and concepts that are of direct and illuminating relevance to twenty-first century problems. Throughout, Jim McGuigan displays a remarkable capacity to explain Williams’s sometimes complex ideas in an inviting and intuitively appealing way, making interesting connections across key concepts. For those familiar with Williams’s work, this new book will come as a breath of fresh air, and for readers coming across Williams for the first time, this offers an inspiring and vivid introduction to his work.

Zombies, vampires and mummies are frequent stars of American horror films. But what does their cinematic omnipresence and audiences’ hunger for such films tell us about American views of death? Here, Outi Hakola investigates the ways in which American living-dead films have addressed death through different narrative and rhetorical solutions during the twentieth century. She focuses on films from the 1930s, including Dracula, The Mummy and White Zombie, films of the 1950s and 1960s such as Night of the Living Dead and The Return of Dracula, as well as more recent fare like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Mummy and Resident Evil.

Red Sun and Merlin Unchained are the most recent original stage works by one of the most acknowledged yet neglected dramatists of our time. Red Sun is a two-hander, tightly tethered within the classical unities of theme and space and the span of a single day. Merlin Unchained is an explosive, multitudinous epic, crossing continents and centuries and passing between worlds. Yet though technically so contrasting, both works speak with the same distinctive voice, offering an exhilarating and sometimes disturbing challenge to the cultural and political perceptions of a contemporary audience, and exploring alien worlds that, alarmingly, begin to become recognizable as our own. 

Red Sun and Merlin Unchained are the most recent original stage works by one of the most accomplished yet neglected dramatists of our time. Red Sun is a two-hander, tightly tethered within the classical unities of theme and space and the span of a single day. Merlin Unchained is an explosive, multitudinous epic, crossing continents and centuries and passing between worlds. Yet though technically so different, both works speak with the same distinctive voice, offering an exhilarating—and sometimes disturbing— challenge to the cultural and political perceptions of the contemporary audience, and exploring alien worlds that, alarmingly, begin to become recognizable as our own.

 

In the twentieth century, the media gave whistleblowers a voice, spearheaded the downfall of powerful politicians, and exposed widespread corporate corruption.  How will the twenty-first-century media cope with its storied legacy as the watchdog of democratic society?  Reclaiming the Media examines the sometimes tenuous, often fraught relationship between media organizations and civil rights in Europe.  In sections devoted to citizenship, participation, contemporary journalism, and activist communication strategies, a panel of European media experts makes the case for deepening the media’s role in democracy.

This second volume of the series Advances in Art & Urban Futures brings together contributions from artists, sociologists, architects and cultural theorists in addressing the recoveries and reclamations being made within urban and rural landscapes as a result of the fallout of redevelopment in the twenty-first century.

Recoveries and Reclamations addresses pertinent issues facing all those interested in a multi-disciplinary approach to developing critical interventions in public space.



The book includes the examination of the work of Doris Salcedo to the unseen spaces in Birmingham; the implications of gender in the creation of The Wapping Project in East London; the self-representation of asylum seekers from Bosnia-Herzegovina; the issue of the 'imagined' community in relation to the Irish in Britain; the significance of assemblage in the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the global importance of local actions in collaborations between ecologists and artists.