This book examines the rise of cultural studies and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses. The author raises searching questions about the originality of cultural studies and its political motivation. Written with zest and a judicious sense of purpose it is a landmark work in cultural studies media and the sociology of culture.

David Harris examines the rise of cultural studies and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses. In doing so he raises searching questions about its originality and political motivation.

Drawing on an international range of examples, from Che Guevarra to "The Crying Game," Profit and Pleasure leads the discussion of sexuality to a consideration of material reality and the substance of men and women's everyday lives.

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

Ambalavaner Sivanandan was one of Britain's most influential radical thinkers. As Director of the Institute of Race Relations for forty years, his work changed the way that we think about race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Communities of Resistance collects together some of his most famous essays, including his excoriating polemic on Thatcherism and the left "The Hokum of New Times". This updated edition contains a new preface by Gary Younge and an introduction by Arun Kundnani.

In this new introduction to Antonio Gramsci's thought, James Martin reconstructs the central analytical themes of the Italian Marxist's famous Prison Notebooks : the 'organic' intellectuals, the relation between state and civil society, and the revolutionary party. The contemporary relevance of his concept 'hegemony' to the analysis of state legitimacy is critically considered and the limitations of Gramsci's historicist Marxism to understanding social complexity are outlined. The book will be of interest to undergraduates and teachers in the social sciences.

David James insists that popular resistance to domination by the culture industry must intervene at the point of production rather than consumption. In its most resolute instances, from the poetry of William Blake to the British Miners' Campaign Tape Project, alternative culture has fused with radical politics. Authoritatively mapping the terrain of cultural resistance under capitalism, James examines the material contradictions and the utopian potentials articulated in John Berger's fiction, Dada, rock music, the films of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, and the poetry of punk.

Unravelling Gramsci makes extensive use of Antonio Gramsci’s writings, including his much-overlooked pre-prison journalism, prison letters, as well as his prison notebooks, to provide a fresh approach to understanding his contemporary relevance in the current neoliberal world order. Adam Morton examines in detail the themes of hegemony, passive revolution and uneven development to provide a useful way of analysing the contemporary global political economy, the project of neoliberalism, processes of state formation, and practices of resistance. The book explores the theoretical and practical limitations of how Gramsci’s ideas can be used today, offering a broad insight into state formation and the international factors shaping hegemony within a capitalist framework.

A collection of key articles on the irrational in mass culture, relevant to the understanding of phenomena such as astrology and New Age cults, the power of neo-fascist propaganda and the psychological basis of popular culture, showing Theodor Adorno at his brilliant and maddening best.