Readings in Law and Popular Culture is the first book to bring together high quality research, with an emphasis on context, from key researchers working at the cutting-edge of both law and cultural disciplines. Fascinating and varied, the volume crosses many boundaries, dealing with areas as diverse as football-based computer games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, digital sampling in the music industry, the films of Sidney Lumet, football hooliganism, and Enid Blyton. These topics are linked together through the key thread of the role of, or the absence of, law - therefore providing a snapshot of significant work in the burgeoning field of law and popular culture. Including important theoretical and truly innovative, relevant material, this contemporary text will enliven and inform a legal audience, and will also appeal to a much broader readership of people interested in this highly topical area.

"This is an extraordinarily rich collection full of informative detail and excellent interpretative analysis. There is not a single piece that fails to fascinate... " --Leeds African Studies Bulletin "... an impressive collection of inspiring and thought-provoking essays." --Media Development "This is a book that should find its way into many syllabuses and onto the bookshelves of Africanist scholars in many disciplines. Its publication marks a key turning point in scholarlship on the cultures of contemporary Africa." --Africa Today This book surveys the popular culture of contemporary Africa, including popular literature, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art, with special emphasis on the verbal arts. The essays cover six main areas: views of the field; oral tradition revisited; social history, social criticism and interpretation; women in popular culture; "little genres of everyday life"; the local and the global.

Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology is a current, compact, inexpensive collection that taps into students' passionate engagement with popular culture in order to help them to become better writers. Its focus on themes of consumption, advertising, identity, technology, television, movies, and new media prompts composition students to think and write about issues they care about. This volume in the popular Bedford/St. Martin's series of Portable Anthologies and Guides offers a trademark combination of high quality and great value. -- Provided by publisher.

This is the first book since Roland Barthes' Mythologies to take a comprehensive look at popular culture. The twenty-six essays in this volume, all written by specialists, cover a range of topics from t-shirts to computers. While each essay reflects some aspect of contemporary cultural theory, a number also develop original approaches to questions of whether popular culture is a condition or a representation of experience and how it manages to both resist and reproduce consumer capitalism. Together, these essays present an exciting reinterpretation of popular culture which will appeal to anyone interested in this important subject.

Readings in Law and Popular Culture is the first book to bring together high quality research, with an emphasis on context, from key researchers working at the cutting-edge of both law and cultural disciplines. Fascinating and varied, the volume crosses many boundaries, dealing with areas as diverse as football-based computer games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, digital sampling in the music industry, the films of Sidney Lumet, football hooliganism, and Enid Blyton. These topics are linked together through the key thread of the role of, or the absence of, law - therefore providing a snapshot of significant work in the burgeoning field of law and popular culture. Including important theoretical and truly innovative, relevant material, this contemporary text will enliven and inform a legal audience, and will also appeal to a much broader readership of people interested in this highly topical area.

'...well-written and accessible. Making the difficult seem easy is Fiske's great talent. No introductory reading list in the field would be complete without a Fiske' - Sociology In Reading the Popular, John Fiske analyzes popular "texts" to reveal both their explicit, implicit (and often opposite) meanings and uses, and the social and political dynamics they reflect. He examines the multitude of meanings lying beneath the cultural artifacts that surround us in shopping malls, popular music and television. Features: * highlights the conflicting responses that cultural phenomenon such as Madonna and the Chicago Sears Tower evoke. * locates popular culture as the point at which people take the goods offered them by industrial capitalism and turn them to their own creative, and even subversive, uses. * refutes the theory that a mass audience mindlessly consumes every product it is offered.

Table of contents

This collection attempts to incorporate cultural studies into the understanding of schooling, not simply addressing how students read themselves as "members" of a distinct culture, but how they, along with teachers and administrators, read popular texts in general. The purpose of this book is to suggest some alternative directions critical pedagogy can take in its critique of popular culture by inviting multiple reading of popular texts into its analysis of schooling and seeing many forms of popular culture as critical pedagogical texts.

This book is an attempt at deconstructive counter-reading or at what Jonathan Dollimore called “creative vandalism” (2018) of existing cultural or literary texts. Deconstruction is a much maligned or a much misunderstood word and for many, it usually bears a pejorative ring. While most would flaunt their familiarity with some of its philosophic jargons, for the majority, it is an area to be dismissed as intellectual obscurity or abstruse ‘high theory’. In fact there is a serious dearth of Derrida scholarship because of our collective aversion to Derrida that emanates from our lack of familiarity or engagement with deconstruction theory or with the philosophy of deconstruction. Norm-deviant reading strategies of deconstruction offer fresh insights and rebellious interpretative possibilities. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Readings in Gender in Africa collects the most important critical and theoretical writings on how gender issues have transformed contemporary views of Africa. Scholarship from North America, Europe, and Africa is represented in this comprehensive volume. A synthetic introduction by Andrea Cornwall discusses efforts to include women in research about Africa. The volume not only shows how gender relations have been constructed on the African continent but reflects the changes in approach and inquiry that have been brought about as scholars consider gender identities and difference in their work. Specific themes covered here include the contestation and representation of gender, femininity and masculinity, livelihoods and lifeways, gender and religion, gender and culture, and gender and governance. Readers from across the landscape of African studies will find this an essential sourcebook. Published in association with the International African Institute, London