Cultural Politics in Contemporary America

Description

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. 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