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Picto‐verbal representation: Types and features of unreliable narration in comics The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) 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
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Welcome to fuckin' Letterkenny: Conceptualizing a modern Progymnasmata The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) 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
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Will the real faker please do a shoulder roll? Bodies, labor, and ideology in esports The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) 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
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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 0.275) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Muhammad Asad Latif
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Baiting whiteness: Ziwe Fumudoh's satirical repetition The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) 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
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For love and money: Navigating values at the antiques roadshow event The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) 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
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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 0.275) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Nicole D. Stevens
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Stephen King's evolution on race: Re-reading Duma Key The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) 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
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Cobra Kai Never Dies! Generational seriality and revived legacies of The Karate Kid The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Agata Frymus
This article investigates the hallmarks of generational seriality—the term coined by Matt Hills—using Cobra Kai, and its predecessor, The Karate Kid trilogy, as case studies. It combines textual analysis of overarching themes of these texts, such as the portrayal of white masculinity, and aligned conceptualizations of class, with the examination of televisual nostalgia. It draws on existing scholarship
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Prometheus by the Bay: Hollywood and tech capitalism in Silicon Valley The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Joe Street, Russ Hunter
A sequence of recent science-fiction films set in the San Francisco Bay Area suggests that Silicon Valley corporations have become a major concern for Hollywood. These films present Silicon Valley capitalism in thrall to a technological experimentation that prompts disastrous outcomes, which the films collectively argue emerges from the corporations' drive for profit and ignorance of the precautionary
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From femme fatale to love goddess: Nineteenth-century images of women in sixties San Francisco psychedelic rock posters The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Michael Parke-Taylor
This essay sheds new light on the adoption and adaptation by Sixties San Francisco psychedelic poster artists of images of women from nineteenth-century Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and Neoclassic sources. Nineteenth-century stereotypes of women found new relevance when transformed into the visual rhetoric of west coast psychedelic dance-concert posters from 1966 to 1970. The legacy of these nineteenth-century
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Shake my hand: Racial fantasies, white saviors, and Django Unchained's haunted screen The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Sarah Hagelin
This essay offers a critical re-assessment of the character King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), reading the film as a cautionary tale about the danger proximity to whiteness poses for Black subjects. For all of its hyperbolic violence and linguistic excess, Django Unchained asks important questions about the way American popular culture structures stories
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Raising a star: Black motherhood and the politics of whiteness in the Colombian telenovela, La mamá del 10 The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Marcelo Carosi
This study explores the representation of Blackness in the telenovela La mamá del 10, revealing it as ambiguous but largely depoliticized. Herein, soccer presents a “sanitized” way of being Black when hard work and high-performance sports are used to frame nonwhite populations within white values that manage to save a young man from repeating his Black father's mistakes. In addition, the mall is examined
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The “Bury your Gays” trope in contemporary television: Generational shifts in production responses to audience dissent The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Rob Cover, Cassandra Milne
“Bury Your Gays” is the popular name used to describe the common television trope in which characters who are ostensibly gender- or sexually-diverse are denied happy endings or “killed off”. Widespread online commentary among audiences reacting to incidents of “Bury Your Gays” are indicative of a public concern over the repetitiveness of this trope in contemporary popular culture. This paper investigates
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Transgressive women in punk: Politics, sexuality, and creative aggression in the 1970s The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 David A. Valone
Prior analyses have examined various elements of punk rock as an aggressive anti-establishment cultural and social movement that arose in post-WWII America and flourished in the 1970s. The unique gender dynamic of punk, however, has been less of a focus of historical investigation. This essay examines the lives and music of three women involved in the early years of the emergence of punk, an era overwhelmingly
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Toward a pulp criminology: The Vee Brown and Needle Mike series The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Zi-Ling Yan
The detective/crime pulp series Vee Brown (Carroll John Daly) and Needle Mike (William E. Barrett) incorporate elements of contemporaneous criminological theory into their narratives as explanatory devices for social deviance. Initially, they align themselves along the dominant etiological divide of the 1920s and 1930s: intrinsic tendencies versus environmental factors, respectively. Over the course
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From Shark Bait to final girl in filmic horror: Young women, killer sharks, and the Monstrous-Masculine The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-02 Susan Hopkins
This study examines filmic (mis)use of monstrous sharks as metaphors for exploring prey and predation, and how these films have incorporated postfeminist discourses around a symbolic overcoming of gendered violence. Research methods deployed include framing analysis of film narratives, dialogue and visual elements, including the key phrases and images used in the theatrical release posters and other
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Fracturing walls, not identities: The power of John Green's fully human representations of disability in The Fault in Our Stars The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-02 Amy Pearson
In my paper, I argue that young-adult author John Green recognizes the problematic ways conventional literary representations of people with disabilities contribute to the dehumanization of people with impairments. Furthermore, I suggest that Green's vibrant characters in The Fault in Our Stars and the connection readers have formed with them illuminate the power that realistic and, therefore, necessarily
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Fans on the silver screen: Portrayals of fandom in the Marvel Cinematic Universe The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-11-02 Jana Radošinská, Zdenko Mago
Fan culture has changed the whole entertainment industry, becoming “mainstream.” Thus, its expressions necessarily shape franchise cinema, including Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The study reacts to this shift, aiming to explore how MCU movies incorporate images of fan culture and turn some of their support characters into “fans.” The offered critical reflection on related theoretical outlines is
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The decline of Dr. Frasier Crane The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-29 Arby Ted Siraki
Frasier (1993–2004) remains one of television's most successful and memorable sitcoms. Its protagonist, Dr. Frasier Crane, shares many qualities with other comic protagonists. However, he is in fact unique in the pantheon of comic characters. As the show moves forward, Frasier Crane regresses in several ways, and which is often effected through the show's use of ironic parallels. Furthermore, Frasier
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Counter-hegemonic sport: Constructing alternative sports narratives in Indian cinema The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Sonal Jha
This paper explores the Indian sports film as a category that gains popularity after the economic reforms of the 1990s. Influenced by the Hollywood sports film and global neoliberal ideals, these films incorporate local ideological influences and contribute to the prevailing discourse about sport in India. While mainstream films convey dominant values associated with sport, there are films which challenge
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The notorious RBG: The discursive power of celebrity in defense of the supreme court The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Sara Polak, Sabine Stroband
When speaking publicly outside the Court, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who garnered celebrity status due to her fiery dissents in the 2010s, did so to explain and defend the institution. Whereas celebrity is usually associated with personality cults, we argue that she used her podium to emphasize the importance of collegiality and process in the Supreme Court as an institution. By analyzing
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Coin-Op conspiracies: Nostalgia and moral panic in the video arcade The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Eric Hahn
The Polybius conspiracy theory has been featured in numerous contemporary pop cultural works from The Simpsons to Loki. The conspiracy theory suggests that a government created arcade cabinet was installed in numerous video arcades in the early 1980s as a means of experimenting on unsuspecting children. While the theory itself remains an outlandish and nostalgic remnant of 1980s culture, this paper
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They also served: Nurses, the great war, and children's picture books The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Allison Millward, Martin Kerby, Catherine Dewhirst, Margaret Baguley
British and Australian children's books about the Great War remain a steadfastly conservative example of popular culture, particularly when exploring war time nursing. The marginalized place of females in children's literature, the failure of the official histories to adequately acknowledge the unique experience of the nurses, and the popular focus on the battlefield have discouraged any sustained
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The size of the fight in the girl: Violent girlhood in Ms. Marvel The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Charlotte Johanne Fabricius
The rise of girl protagonists in superhero comics creates a dilemma, since violent girlhood is surrounded by cultural anxieties, yet super-girls are expected to engage in violence. One of the most popular super-girls of this century, Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan, embodies this ambivalence in the fraught intersection of girlhood, racialization, and physical violence. This article investigates the affective
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“Fourth-wall breakiness or whatevs”: Presumed self-awareness in American superhero comics The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Lucía Bausela Buccianti
Studies on reflexivity in the field of comics studies have been scarce and, more often than not, disconnected from each other, which has resulted in overlapping, and sometimes even contradicting, classifications of reflexive devices. Therefore, this article analyzes different instances of self-awareness in American superhero comics, as it has become quite a popular feature in recent years. In order
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“Human or machine?” performing androids, “Elektro-Homos,” and the “Phroso” and “Moto Phoso” manias on the popular stage around 1900 The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Anna-Sophie Jürgens
“Human or Puppet?” A once popular, now forgotten performance routine explored this question on the popular stage. Concentrating on rare historical materials, this paper uncovers how “Human or Puppet?” performances looked like and how they built on and added to the early twentieth-century cultural discourse, and trope, of the human machine. Extending the notion of “popular modernity” this paper provides
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Zombies and India: The neoMONSTERS Epidemiology The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Sami Ahmad Khan
This paper hunts for zombies – both “real” and “unreal”– in contemporary Indian Science Fiction. It investigates how India's undead appropriate semantic markers of the global zombie industry via metaphors of monstrosity and how they simultaneously propagate a monstrosity of metaphors that disrupts social cohesion and communal harmony. Adopting the filters of genre, form, monster, and location, it advances
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The “Cthulhu network”: The process by which the popular myth was made The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-10-01 Jose Luis Arroyo-Barrigüete
In the context of popular culture, the work of Lovecraft deserves a prominent role, not only for its influence on many later authors, but for its profound impact on 20th century popular culture, from music and video games to films, comics, and merchandising. This paper analyzes the way in which Lovecraft developed his Cthulhu Mythos, creating a dense network of relationships between his different tales
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Despondent superheroes and cosmic horror: Posthumanism and antihumanism in Jack Kirby's cosmic mythos The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Matthew J. Costello
The breakdown of cultural categories in the 1960s was perceived as liberating, but by the 1970s Americans increasingly felt uneasy and directionless. The liminality of social categories was evident in popular culture, such as superhero comics. Examining how Jack Kirby melded superhero and cosmic horror tropes in the Fantastic Four, Fourth World, and Eternals series reveals how Kirby's work initially
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Sadist, Land Shark, and Reptile: Autumn de Wilde's EMMA. The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Rita J. Dashwood, Andrew McInnes
Nobody likes someone who is handsome, clever, and rich. Jane Austen knew this, reportedly saying of her 1815 novel Emma, that it would include “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like” (Austen-Leigh 204). Autumn de Wilde knows this, opening her 2020 film adaptation of Austen's novel, EMMA.,1 with an early morning scene in which Emma instructs her trailing servants exactly which flower to cut:
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Concrete Expressionism: Harley Earl, William France, and NASCAR Aesthetics The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Timothy J. Lukes
It is not a secret that stock car racing attracts white southern males (Hurt), an element of which continues to flaunt antiquated sentiments of race, gender, and regional superiority (Loewen).1 In fact, NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) resists the inclusiveness initiatives prevalent in other sports, clinging to what scholars refer to as “paleo-conservative whiteness” (Newman
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Evil Voices in Popular Fictions: The Case of The Exorcist The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Michaela Hejná, Mathias Clasen, Mark Eaton
In William Friedkin's iconic horror film The Exorcist (1973), an adolescent girl, Regan MacNeil, is possessed by an evil demon that makes her act in increasingly erratic and immoral ways. She starts to swear and urinates on the floor at a house party. Later, she violates herself with a cross, violently attacks her mother, and goes on to murder two people: a friend of the house and a Catholic priest
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Out of Step with the World: Minor Threat and “Normal as Abnormal” Dress in Representation of Alterity and Authenticity The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 John Davis, Monica Sklar
Photo by Glen E. Friedman
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Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Johnny Walker
In Britain in the 1980s, the books of horror novelist, Shaun Hutson, were outsold only by those of Stephen King and James Herbert (Gilbert 76). Yet, despite his success, Hutson's work has never received extensive scholarly appraisal. When Hutson's work is mentioned in academic writing, it is usually in passing, often to indicate a scholar's awareness of broader goings-on in British horror fiction,
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The Big Short's Incoherence, Documentary Aesthetics, and Use of Direct Address The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Wickham Clayton
“How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation” (Lewis 222-3)? This question, asked by author Michael Lewis through the eyes of one of his subjects – Ben Hockett – appears to have an answer: with great difficulty. Lewis's book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, lays
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Toys, Comics and Transmedia Play: Tracing the connections between multidimensional storytelling and playability The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-12-04 Katriina Heljakka
Introduction: Toys, comics and their shared strategies of storytelling An industrially produced toy may not come to existence without a two-dimensional image: Often, a three-dimensional toy character first exists as a two-dimensional sketch or as part of a story-world from other media. On the contrary, a two-dimensional comic come to fruition without any three-dimensional, or ‘toyish’ manifestations
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The Cruel Optimism of Anthropocene Technologies: Suspicion and Fascination of Technology in Okja, What Happened to Monday, and Geostorm The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Esben Bjerggaard Nielsen, Gregers Andersen
Human history is marked by turning points that have radically altered humanity’s relationship with technology. The detonations of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 constituted one such point, leaving the human species with a new sense of common frailty.1 Since then, the evolution of technology has initiated many other turning points that have shaped the multiple ways in which humans
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“If You Can’t Love Yourself, How in the Hell You Gonna Love Somebody Else?”: Care and Neoliberalism on Queer Eye, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Pose The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Landon Sadler
With over one million Americans dead from COVID-19—many of whom are disproportionately people of color—the United States is experiencing a crisis of care. Paradoxically, the country is also in a care renaissance. Partly because former President Trump abdicated his duties as consoler-in-chief, many Americans have turned to popular culture to fill care vacuums. Lists like “The 10 Most Comforting, Feel-Good
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Things Can Only Get Stranger: Theoretical and Clinical Reflections on Netflix's Stranger Things The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-06-30 Kevin Lu, Greta Kaluzeviciute, William Sharp
With the eagerly anticipated release of season four of Stranger Things, it is timely to reflect on the series up to its present point, considering possible reasons for its widespread popularity. We begin from the position that its ability to grip audiences lies in its representation of psychological themes that resonate with the show's audience. Some authors, such as Brenda Boudreau, note the tension
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K‐Pop Culture in the United States: Protest Contexts and Practices The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Judy Suh
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Stephen King and American Politics. Michael J.Blouin. U of Wales P, 2021. 256 pp. $57.00 paper. The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Marharyta Fabrykant
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White Skin and the Black Mask™ The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Matthew X. Vernon
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Cutting the Biker’s Coif: Hair as the Visual Rhetoric of the Son of Anarchy The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Rachel Lanier Bragg
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Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited. PhilippaGates and KatherineSpring, editors. Wayne State UP, 2021. 356 pp. $36.99 paper. The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Eric Deutsch
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Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America. Benjamin M.Han. Rutgers UP, 2020. 206 pp. $27.96 paper. The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Jaymen Canice Neff‐Strickland
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I Can Read It All by Myself: The Beginner Books Story. Paul V.Allen. U of Mississippi P, 2021. 356 pp. $21.00 paper. The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Morgan E. Foster
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What’s the Matter with Jerry? Superiority Humor and the Shifting Norms of Whiteness in Parks and Recreation The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Tison Pugh
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Spectacular Selves: Fashion and Identity in Lee Tulloch’s Fabulous Nobodies The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Srijani Ghosh
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Nihilism, Violence, and Popular Culture: The Postmodern Psychopath in Toby Fox’s Undertale The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Sean Travers
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Midnight Cinderella : Amoral Shōjo (Girl) and Japanese Girl Culture The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Masafumi Monden
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Year of the Cat: Abuse, Healing, and Intergenerational Trauma in Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Erika Arivett
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Duets and the Demands of Country Music: Contradictory Feminisms in Nashville The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Phoebe Macrossan,Jessica Ford
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This Is How I Win: Uncut Gems , Colonial Violence, and the Victorian Adventure Story The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Clayton Carlyle Tarr
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Renovating Value: HGTV and the Spectacle of Gentrification. RobertGoldman. Temple UP, 2021. 233 pp. $34.95 paper. The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Nancy L. Murray
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Asian Americans in the Cipher: Underground Hip Hop Aesthetics and Polycultural Coherence The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Daniel Woo
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K‐Pop Fandom in Laos: Social Participation and Global Citizenship The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Sueun Kim
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The Hallucinatory Landscape in Twentieth‐Century American Poetry The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Eric Rawson
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Of Superheroes and SJWs: Media and Fans Framing the Impact of Diversity in 2010s Comic Books The Journal of Popular Culture (IF 0.275) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Matt Griffin,Hilde Van den Bulck