'Hollywood' as a concept applies variously to a particular film style, a factory-based mode of film production, a cartel of powerful media institutions and a national (and increasingly global) 'way of seeing'. It is a complex social, cultural and industrial phenomenon and is arguably the single most important site of cultural production over the past century. This collection brings together journal articles, published essays, book chapters and excerpts which explore Hollywood as a social, economic, industrial, aesthetic and political force, and as a complex historical entity.

This seminal book explores the complex relationship between popular geopolitics and nation branding among the Newly Independent States of Eurasia, and their combined role in shaping contemporary national image and statecraft within and beyond the region. It provides critical perspectives on international relations, nationalism, and national identity through the use of innovative approaches focusing on popular culture, new media, public diplomacy, and alternative "narrators" of the nation. By positing popular geopolitics and nation branding as contentious forces and complementary flows, the study explores the tensions and elisions between national self-image and external perceptions of the nation, and how this complex interplay has become integral to contemporary global affairs.

A Companion to Popular Culture is a landmark survey of contemporary research in popular culture studies that offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the field. Includes over two dozen essays covering the spectrum of popular culture studies from food to folklore and from TV to technology Features contributions from established and up-and-coming scholars from a range of disciplines Offers a detailed history of the study of popular culture Balances new perspectives on the politics of culture with in-depth analysis of topics at the forefront of popular culture studies

Polyglot Cinema brings together a diverse group of scholars from Europe, Canada and the US, resulting in a dynamic account of plurilingual migrant narratives in contemporary films from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. In addition to the close analysis of key films, the essays cover theories of translation and language use as well as central paradigms of cultural studies, especially those of locality, globality and post-colonialism. The volume marks a transdisciplinary contribution to the question of cultural representation within film studies.

Women and men in cinema are imaginary constructs created by filmmakers and their audiences. The film-psychoanalytic approach reveals how movies subliminally influence unconscious reception. On the other hand, the movie is embedded in a cultural tradition: Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et la Bete (1946) takes up the classic motif of the animal groom from the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' The Golden Ass (originally a tale about the stunning momentum of genuine female desire), liberates it from its baroque educational moral (a girl's virtue and prudence will help her to overcome her sexual fears), and turns it into a boyhood story: inside the ugly rascal there is a good, but relatively boring prince - at least in comparison to the monsters of film history. In the seventy years since it was made, La Belle et la Bete has inspired numerous interpretations and has been employed by theorists of all genres and interests.

The key question asked in this book is, how did Stalinist war cinema present Soviet women's resistance against the Nazi forces during World War II? This book challenges those scholarly works which support the idea of the compatibility of femininity and combat under Stalinism. Despite the Soviet regime’s claim of being opposed to any religious heritage, this book reveals how Stalinist cinema drew on Russian religious tradition and culture in the creation of cinematic representations of Soviet women during WWII. Further, the book shows how the adoption of Russian cultural and religious heritage in Soviet war cinema served Stalinist collective identity-construction policies and state-citizen relations. In so doing, this study contributes to a range of fields within Russian and Soviet studies, including gender studies, cinema studies, Soviet modernity, and the study of identity-construction and state-nation relations. Whilst this book is aimed at researchers and academics, it provides a supplementary source for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Soviet/Russian studies.

This volume examines the consequences, implications, and opportunities associated with issues of diversity in the electronic media. With a focus on race and gender, the chapters represent diverse approaches, including social scientific, humanistic, critical, and rhetorical. The contributors consider race and gender issues in both historical and contemporary electronic media, and their work is presented in three sections: content, context (audiences, effects, and reception), and culture (media industries, policy, and production). In this book, the authors investigate, problematize, and theorize a variety of concerns which at their core relate to issues of difference. How do we use media to construct and understand different social groups? How do the media represent and affect our engagement with and responses to different social groups? How can we understand these processes and the environment within which they occur? Although this book focuses on the differences associated with race and gender, the questions raised by and the theoretical perspectives presented in the chapters are applicable to other forms of socially-constructed difference. Chapters 5, 10, 12, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

In the aftermath of liberalization of Indian economy in 1991, the study of star-fan studies has experienced exponential expansion. Hero and Hero-Worship: Fandom in Modern India explores the areas of political, religious, film and cricket star fandoms; analyzing the rise of star formations and their consequent fandoms, star-fan bonds, as well as the physical and virtual space that both stars and fans inhabit. As perhaps one of the first book-length studies on Indian fandom, this volume not only draws on the works of Jenkins and other fandom scholars, but also explores the economic and cultural specificities of Indian fandom. This book will be of particular interest to scholars working in the field, as well as general readers interested in understanding star-fan interactions and intersections.

Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world. Simidele Dosekun's interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist idea that their unapologetically immaculate beauty signals—but also constitutes—feminine power. As empowered global consumers and media citizens, the women deny any need to critique their culture or to take part in feminism's collective political struggle. Throughout, Dosekun unearths evocative details around the practical challenges to attaining their style, examines the gap between how others view these women and how they view themselves, and engages with ideas about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity across cultures and class. Intellectually provocative and rich with theory, Fashioning Postfeminism reveals why women choose to live, embody, and even suffer for a fascinating performative culture.