-
-
California gothic: The dark side of the dream By Charles L.Crow, New York: Anthem Press. 2024. pp. 86. $23.95 (pbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-08 June Ann T. Greeley
-
Tiktok Broadway: Musical theater fandom in the digital age By TrevorBoffone, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024. pp. 232. $34.95 (hbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Jessica Hillman‐McCord
-
-
Making a scene in documentary film: Iconic filmmakers discuss what works and why By MaxineTrump, New York: Routledge. 2023. pp. 222. £100.00 (hbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Muhammad Asad Latif
-
Beyoncé's “break my soul”: An anthem of courage, resistance, peace, and community The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 Neal A. Lester
In 2023, Beyoncé became the artist with the most Grammys in music history. Her dance track, “Break My Soul,” from her Renaissance album,* is a radical statement about community and self‐affirmation grounded in Black and queer cultural specificity. This article explores “Break My Soul” as an anthem of uplift, advice, and unity that offers hope and reprieve to a world emerging from a global pandemic
-
Race, representation, and satire By Christopher P.Campbell (Ed.), Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024. pp. 262. $110.00 (hbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-23 James R. Cooke
-
-
-
-
The gothic and twenty‐first‐century American popular culture By Anna MartaMarini, MichaelFuchs (Eds.), Boston, MA: Brill. 2024. p. 248. £105.84 (hbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-15 Lin Wu, Ziwei Yan
-
-
Playing the percentages: How film distribution made the Hollywood studio system By DerekLong. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 2024. pp. 296. $55.00 (hbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-07 Wayne E. Arnold
-
Creating the viewer: Market research and the evolving media ecosystem By JustinWyatt. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 2024. pp. 288. $105.00 (hbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-04 Arya Priyadarshini
-
Will “you be found?”—Intratextual social media and going viral in the contemporary teen musical The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Emry Sottile
As musical theater has gained traction with younger audiences, producers have put out numerous new shows that focus on the modern high school experience in an attempt to capture this target audience. Social media has moved beyond being an off‐stage marketing tactic and has since warped into an on‐stage plot device to feel authentic to audiences. Through analyzing Dear Evan Hansen, The Prom, and Teenage
-
Zerox machine: Punk, post‐punk and fanzines in Britain, 1976–88 By MatthewWorley. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2024. pp. 360. $35.00 (pbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Anna McCully Stewart
-
Storytelling in Kabuki: An exploration of spatial poetics of comics By Steen LedetChristiansen, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2024. pp. 204. $30.00 (paperback) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Misha Grifka Wander
-
Screening social justice: Brave new films and documentary activism By Sherry B.Ortner. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2023. pp. 160. $23.95 (pbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Kathryn Burrell
-
You are what you watch: How movies and TV affect everything By WalterHickey, New York: Workman Publishing Company. 2023. pp. 240. $22.39 (hbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Zhimiao Yang
-
A cultural history of the Punisher. Marvel comics and the politics of vengeance By KentWorcester. Bristol: Intellect, 2023. pp. 274. £ 29.95 (pbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Ana Rita Martins
-
“All creatures great and small, welcome”: Animating accessible world design The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-08 Rebecca Rowe
Using four animated texts about anthropomorphic animals—Zootopia (2016), Sing (2016), Sing 2 (2021), and Zootopia+ (2022)—this article explores two related questions: How can animated films featuring cities for anthropomorphic animals rethink accessibility? How is accessibility sustained and/or adapted through continuations as seen in franchises and transmedia storytelling? I argue that the two series
-
-
Anime's knowledge cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai By JinyingLi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2024. pp. 344. $30.00 (paperback) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-04 Min Joo Lee
-
Star wars: The hidden empire The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-03 Azzan Yadin‐Israel
The remarkable cultural vitality of Star Wars and the subsequent franchise is due in part to the way in which it simultaneously builds on and bolsters the Gramscian “common sense” that America is not an empire. Like the Western, Star Wars uses apolitical individualism to portray political actions as the result of individuals' search for freedom, while representing the galaxy as home to a single, evil
-
Video game characters and transmedia storytelling: The dynamic game character By JoleenBlom, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2023. pp. 208. €104.00 (hardcover) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-02 Stephanie O' Dell Daugherity
-
-
-
Happy eating and food addiction in American advertising By DebbieDanowski. New York: Lexington Books. 2024. pp. 232. $100.00 (Hardcover) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-25 Edith Ritt‐Coulter
-
-
Middle Eastern television drama: Politics, aesthetics, practices By ChristaSalamandra, NourHalabi (Ed.), New York: Routledge. 2023. pp. 190. $160.00. (hardcover) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-31 Muhammad Asad Latif
-
-
-
-
Mapping the posthuman: Perspectives on the non‐human in literature and culture By GrantHamilton and CarolynLau (Eds.), Routledge: New York. 2024. p. 346. £155.00 (hardcover) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-08 Yuwei Huang, Xiaohui Liang
-
-
Women's American football: Breaking barriers on and off the gridiron By RussCrawford, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2022. pp. 379. $34.95 (hardcover) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Nichole Bogarosh
-
Sitcom as refuge, sitcom as prison: Nostalgia, anti‐nostalgia, and the embedded multi‐camera sitcom in WandaVision and Kevin Can F**k Himself The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-27 Reto Winckler
This article claims that the recent trend in television and web streaming drama series to feature segments shot in the style of a multi‐camera sitcom, a phenomenon which is termed “embedded sitcom,” reflects the current popularity of nostalgia in popular culture. Situating the sitcom in the context of television history and theories of nostalgia, the article argues that embedded sitcom reveals the
-
Predator's Prey: Reframing indigenous representation and Hollywood franchise cinema in the age of SVOD The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-25 César Albarrán‐Torres, Andrew Lynch
Hulu's Prey (2022), the fifth installment of the Predator franchise, is set in 1719 and features a Comanche female protagonist. The setting is unlike the 1987 Predator and its sequels, with their hardbody machismo and conservative politics. We argue that Prey is a small but significant step in Hollywood, but its inclusivity comes at a price. Though praised as progressive, it perpetuates a worldview
-
-
Baseball: The turbulent midcentury years By Steven PhilipGietschier. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2023. pp. 568. $44.95 (cloth). The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-23 Andrew Kettler
-
The intersecting aesthetics: Literary adaptations and cinematic representations of blackness By CharleneRegester, CynthiaBaron, Ellen C.Scott, Terri SimoneFrancis, and Robin G.Vander (Eds.), Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press. 2023. pp. 278. $30.00 (paperback). The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-21 Xinyu Chen
-
54th Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association PCA‐ACA The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-18
-
Polish theatre revisited: Theatre fans in the nineteenth century By AgataŁuksza, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2024. 367 pages. $100.00 (pbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Orel Beilinson
-
The experimental book object: Materiality, media, design By SamiSjöberg, MikkoKeskinen, ArjaKarhumaa (Eds.), New York: Routledge. 2023. pp. 336. $170.00 (hardcover) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Yuanyuan Zhang, Haifeng Hui
-
How documentaries went mainstream: A history, 1960–2022 By NoraStone, New York: Oxford university press. 2023. pp. 234. $125.00 (cloth) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Muhammad Asad Latif
-
Culture‐bound syndromes in popular culture By Cringuta IrinaPelea (Ed.), New York: Routledge. 2024. pp. 338. $170 (hardcover) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Yuanyuan Wang, Xiaohui Liang
-
Afrocentricity in Afrofuturism: Toward Afrocentric futurism By Aaron X.Smith (Ed.), Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 2023. pp. 242. $30.00 (paperback) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Jonathan S. Lower
-
Is Jim Halpert looking at me?: The Jim Halpert Gaze, The Office, and the Fascist Look The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Cooper Casale
It's entirely possible to watch all nine seasons of The Office without asking the obvious: Is Jim Halpert Looking at Me? The six‐hundred‐fifty times Jim looks at us and the six‐hundred‐fifty sins to which his famous glare responds result in a training that confers viewers with the ability to mime the mime; to recover Jim's stupid, vampiric face by matching it's subtle permutations, to dismiss the naïve
-
-
That's the joint: The Hip‐Hop studies reader, 3rd edition By MurrayForman, Mark AnthonyNeal, and Regina N.Bradley (Eds.), New York: Routledge. 2024. pp. 780. £59.99 (pbk) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 John David Vandevert
-
Moving beyond the magic Indian Trope in Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-22 Rachel Schaffer
In films, the Magic Negro is a stock character whose supernatural gifts promote the success of a White protagonist. A character with parallel traits found in a number of mystery series is the Magic Indian, who has supernatural connections and abilities unavailable to others. In his Walt Longmire mysteries, Craig Johnson develops a strong supernatural thread with the agency of Native American characters
-
Normporn: Queer viewers and the TV that soothes us By KarenTongson, New York: New York University Press. 2023. 203 pp. $19.95 (paperback) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Kamil Zapasnik
-
Picto‐verbal representation: Types and features of unreliable narration in comics The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Lian Xu
Scholars have underestimated comics as an art form. This article uses an analysis of unreliable narration to show the complexity of this narrative mechanism in comics and, in turn, the sophistication of comics. Groensteen divides comic narrators into reciters and monstrators, and this distinction provides the basis to discuss unreliable narration in comics. This article categorizes comics with unreliable
-
Welcome to fuckin' Letterkenny: Conceptualizing a modern Progymnasmata The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Kimberly Rachal
Crave TV's niche hit Letterkenny is packed with exercises in wordplay and examinations of semantics that serve various functions in its presentation of life in small‐town Canada. This article examines how the progymnasmata of classical rhetorical education and the linguistic comedy bits in Letterkenny serve a similar role in preparing their users (and viewers) to both engage in a specific type of dialogue
-
Will the real faker please do a shoulder roll? Bodies, labor, and ideology in esports The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 George Pate
Esports and the broader professionalization of playing video games demonstrates the neoliberal project's continuing expansion across new horizons. By transforming leisure into labor and extracting value from play, major gaming and digital media companies extend the commodity life of video games beyond the sale of the games themselves and into the actual play and even spectatorship of the games. As
-
Cinema in the Arab world: New histories, new approaches By IfdalElsaket, PhilippeMeers, DanielBiltereyst, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2023. pp. 304. $76.00 (paperback) The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Muhammad Asad Latif
-
Baiting whiteness: Ziwe Fumudoh's satirical repetition The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Katelyn Hale Wood
Analyzing the comedy of Ziwe Fumudoh, this paper examines how repeated comedic bits can challenge white audiences' disingenuous anti-racism, satirize toxic white womanhood in the U.S., and script what is possible when white feminists demonstrate sincere attempts at cross-racial connection. Each artifact from Ziwe's comedy—an interview with chef Alison Roman, a musical sketch titled “Lisa Called the
-
For love and money: Navigating values at the antiques roadshow event The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Helen Cornish, Gavin Weston, Natalie Djohari, Alexandra Urdea, Elena Liber, Lowri Evans
Antiques Roadshow Events are held in historic locations across the United Kingdom. On site, experts evaluate objects brought in by attendees, who are often cast as passive recipients, while edited highlights make up the long-running BBC TV program. Through Collaborative Event Ethnography at one Roadshow Event we show how object stories are navigated through “value talk” between attendees and experts
-
Contemporary cowboys: Reimagining an American archetype in popular culture By Clint WesleyJones (Ed.), Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2023. 288 pp. $45.00 hardback The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Nicole D. Stevens
-
Stephen King's evolution on race: Re-reading Duma Key The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Michael J. Blouin, Carl H. Sederholm
Stephen King is at times more self-reflective about his depictions of blackness than it might seem at first glance. He ruminates upon his own complicated role as a white writer who, on occasion, speaks through the mouths of black characters. King has demonstrated a willingness, especially in his twenty-first century fiction, to interrogate his biases. Put simply, we should not be too hasty in dismissing