New Books in Popular Culture

Professor Cairns Craig’s new book, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), which has been shortlisted for the Saltire History Book of the Year Award, is a wide-ranging study of the ways in which Scottish culture was defined, exported, transformed, and smuggled through its assimilation in the British State and the British Empire, their rise, their fall, and the more recent fallout. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), and the Chicago School and Thatcher’s distortions of its lessons, is a central theme: A considered analyses of the structure of Smith’s thought, its uses and abuses open and close the argument. Craig develops and applies very original critical concepts to Scotland’s cultural history. These include: ‘Xeniteian migration’ (as opposed to diasporic migration: these are institution-builders, recasting the world in Scotland’s image); ‘Nostophobia’ (revulsion toward the culture of one’s own country, especially where it is seen to be ‘past-oriented’); and ‘Theoxenia’ (hospitality to strangers on the basis that they might be Gods in disguise; this notion is close to the idea of a vast horizon of possible Scotlands that was ignited during the 2014 Independence Referendum). Beginning among the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Craig’s argument casts its net wide, incorporating, for example: the history Scottish Free Masonry; the reception of Walter Scott’s historical novels; the development of so-called ‘race science’; the history of theoretical physics; the intent and impact of pastoral literatures; Associationist aesthetics; film history; modern and contemporary sculpture; contemporary Scottish politics; and a vast array of Scottish literary authors, from Scott to Liz Lochhead. The Wealth of the Nation is vital reading for those interested in the deeper currents of contemporary debates around Scotland’s cultural politics, and for anyone interested in the foundational relationships between what Craig calls ‘Cultural Wealth’ and a more materialist, or dryly economic notion of historical processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University Press, 2018), edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, is a collection of essays about Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit musical, Hamilton. The show has taken Broadway and much of the United States by storm and is currently running on the West End in London as well. The popular interest in Alexander Hamilton prompted by the show’s success has generated new museum exhibits, numerous hot takes in the media, and even a successful effort to preserve Hamilton’s likeness on the ten dollar bill. The essays in this collection take on some of the questions and issues raised by the musical and its popularity. Some of the authors comment on the ways that Miranda’s interpretation of American history diverges from many historians’ understandings, while others take him to task for his portrayals of women and slavery. Miranda’s decision to cast non-white actors in most of the roles also comes under scrutiny in several essays. Aimed at a wide audience, including teachers, scholars, and fans the essays provide a diverse, sometimes contradictory, set of views on Hamilton, as well as suggestions for teaching the musical. It is not often that we see a new collective memory of the past form in real time, but that is what is happening because of the success Hamilton. This collection is one of the first attempts at analyzing the musical as a piece of art, an interpretation of America’s founders, and a phenomenal commercial success in the online age. Renee C. Romano is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History at Oberlin College in Ohio. She is the author or coeditor of many books and articles on racial politics of the post-WWII United States, African American history, civil rights, and historical memory. Her most recent book is Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders from Harvard University Press. Claire Bond Potter is a professor history at the New School in New York and the executive editor of Public Seminar. In addition to her monograph, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture, and scholarly articles, she is a prolific public historian whose writing has been published by many news outlets including The Guardian, the Washington Post. She is also the Director of the Digital Humanities Initiatives at the New School. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

When talking about the American South in the second half of the twentieth century, popular discourse tended to fall into one of three camps (on occasion, two might coexist simultaneously): the “Vicious South” which was violent and regressive, the “Down Home South” which was traditional and family oriented, and the “Changing South” which was moving past its earlier racial strife. While the Vicious South archetype predominated and fit into a narrative that showed the South as un-American, unrepresentative of the larger country, and repressive, by the end of the 1960s perceptions of the South were changing. Americans in different parts of the country began to consider the different ways that the real or perceived culture of the South might offer solutions to racism, masculinity, modern ennui, and crime. Zachary Lechner’s The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980 (University of Georgia Press, 2018) looks at this cultural transformation in the United States in the period from 1960 to 1980. Lechner examines different forms of cultural production to see how the South was being understood at different moments. That understanding was in turn shaped by a desire to use elements of southern culture to overcome social and cultural problems in the United States. Shows like Andy Griffith showed a traditional southern way of life that was able to work past the problems of consumerist modernity, movies like Walking Tall showed men using violence to restore order and to end crime, and the musical counterculture found both musical technique and personal style to mine in country music and the South. This culminated in the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, whose persona was built in part on having insight into overcoming the racial and social strife that had plagued the rest of the country. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

One of the major aspects of the popular film industry are the fans who want to collect material related to their favorite films, actors, and actresses. While this has become generally easier in the age of the Internet, there is a long history of people who literally spent their entire lives gathering things. In his new book Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), Anthony Slide presents an overview of these collectors, as well as how the hobby began. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park, which opened in July 2016. Entertainment has long been understood as important aspect of Christianity in the US, but the theme park, which includes a re-creation of Noah’s ark, provides a striking setting through which to ask questions such as how creationists present their beliefs to the broader public. Ark Encounter is, in part, a workplace ethnography, which describes the entwined conceptual and aesthetic work through which the park’s design team imagine how to most effectively and playfully communicate a controversial religious perspective. Bielo’s findings are situated in discussion with other groundbreaking anthropological work on how categories such as ‘fundamentalist’ have been constructed over time, perhaps most notably Susan Harding’s scholarship. While the whole book is ethnographically rich and reflexive, an appendix describes in useful detail (for both readers and for those planning or currently engaged in their own research projects) the processes through which Bielo entered – and left – his fieldsite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of the professor in children’s books since 1850. The book details the history of highly problematic depictions of academics, usually as kindly old men, baffled buffoons, or evil madmen, depictions that exclude those who are not white, often middle class origin, men. Terras’ work is a great example for digital humanities scholarship, offering a powerful case for new methods to answer crucial questions of equality and diversity for humanities scholars and across universities more generally. Alongside the analysis, Terras has published an anthology, The Professor in Children’s Literature, including some of the works discussed in the book. Both Picture-Book Professors and the accompanying anthology are open access and free to read, and will be of interest to every academic as well as the wider public too! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Kathryn Fuller-Seely, a Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the acclaimed book on Jack Benny, delves into the groundbreaking career of this comedy legend. She discusses Benny’s transition from vaudeville to radio and his unique character-driven approach to sitcoms. Fuller-Seely reveals Benny's playful gender dynamics, the crucial role of Mary Livingstone, and how Benny's innovative integration of commercials brought new life to branded comedy. They also explore Benny's lasting impact on modern comedic forms.

What do Shakespeare and superheroes have in common? A penchant for lycra and capes? A flair for the dramatic? Well, according to Shakespeare scholar, English Professor and comic-book fan Jeffrey Kahan, the connection between Batman and the Bard runs much deeper. In his new book, Shakespeare and Superheroes (ARC Humanities Press, 2018), Kahan argues that Shakespeare’s work and the popular superhero comics of the past century are actually engaged in a meaningful dialogue with each other. Rather than simply exploring the influence of Shakespearean drama on the superhero genre or analysing the many comic-book adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, Kahan instead tackles the much more profound question of how these diverse canons engage with broader philosophical and cultural issues. In doing so, he draws highly original parallels between their respective ethical and epistemological stances. Over the course of three chapters, Kahan dissects the shared approach to issues of morality and free will evidenced in Hamlet and CW’s Arrow, analyses the figure of Wonder Woman through the lens of Shakespearean crossdressing, and explores the existential meta-humour of Othello’s Iago and Marvel’s Deadpool. Refusing to adhere to conventional academic hierarchies, Shakespeare and Superheroes provides new insights and fresh perspectives that will appeal equally to scholars of Early Modern literature and twentieth-century popular culture. In a truly fascinating interview, Kahan discusses the thematic parallels between popular comic books and Shakespeare’s plays, the benefits of reading distinct literary works intertextually, and the role of academia in the current political climate. Kahan encourages acts of heroism in daily life on his FB page BE SUPER! Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. She blogs about literature and popular culture HERE and can also be found on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), editors Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark curate a wide-ranging collection of essays about the function of tone and timbre in popular music. Comprised of four sections focused on genre, voice, instrument, and production, The Relentless Pursuit of Tone engages diverse popular music genres and employs varied theoretical and methodological approaches. The book begins with an ethnographic study about timbre in the 1990s Bay Area rave scene by Cornelia Fales. It concludes with a discussion about timbre in contemporary recording production and electronic dance music by Simon Zagorski-Thomas, along with an afterword by Simon Frith. In between are essays that engage tone in multiple musical genres such as death metal and country, in recording techniques like Auto-Tune and reverb, and through considerations of voice and assorted instruments, including the electric guitar and synthesizer. A companion website with music examples, videos, and images can be accessed here. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. She is also a music journalist who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Village Voice, Relix, PopMatters, and Hot Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture