A superb new study of Japanese culture in the post-war period, focusing on a handful of filmmakers who created movies for a politically conscious audience.

A superb new study of Japanese culture in the post-war period, focusing on a handful of filmmakers who created movies for a politically conscious audience.

How does someone become a piece of meat? Carol J. Adams answers this question in this provocative book—her most controversial since The Sexual Politics of Meat—by finding insidious, hidden meanings in the culture around us. With 200 illustrations, this courageous book establishes why Adams's slide show, upon which The Pornography of Meat is based is so popular on campuses and is reviled by the groups she takes on with insight and passion.

This book explores different forms of mediated offence in the context of Trump's America, Brexit Britain, and the rise of far-right movements across the globe. In this political landscape, the so-called ‘right to offend’ is often seen as a legitimate weapon against a ‘political correctness gone mad’ that stifles ‘free speech’. Against the backdrop of these current developments, this book aims to generate a productive dialogue among scholars working in a variety of intellectual disciplines, geographical locations and methodological traditions. The contributors share a concern about the complex and ambiguous nature of offence as well as about the different ways in which this so-called ‘negative affect’ comes to matter in our everyday and socio-political lives. Through a series of instructive case studies of recent media provocations, the authors illustrate how being offended is more than an individual feeling and is, instead, closely tied to political structures and power relations.

This is an open access book. The start of the 21st century has seen the world shaken by protests, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, from the Occupy movement to the social uprisings in Latin America. There are periods in history when large numbers of people have rebelled against the way things are, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917, and 1968. Today we are living in another time of outrage and discontent, a time that has already produced some of the largest protests in world history. This book analyzes almost three thousand protests that occurred between 2006 and 2020 in 101 countries covering over 93 per cent of the world population. The study focuses on the major demands driving world protests, such as those for real democracy, jobs, public services, social protection, civil rights, global justice, and those against austerity and corruption. It also analyzes who was demonstrating in each protest; what protest methods they used; who the protestors opposed; what was achieved; whether protests were repressed; and trends such as inequality and the rise of women’s and radical right protests. The book concludes that the demands of protestors in most of the protests surveyed are in full accordance with human rights and internationally agreed-upon UN development goals. The book calls for policy-makers to listen and act on these demands.

From the birth of the Gay Liberation through the rise of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, the global justice movement in 1994, the largest day of antiwar protest in world history in February 2003, the Republican National Convention protests in August 2004, and the massive immigrant rights rallies in the spring of 2006, the streets of cities around the world have been filled with a new theatrical model of protest. Elements of fun, creativity, pleasure, and play are cornerstones of this new approach toward protest and community building. No movement has had a larger influence on the emergence of play in social movement activity than the gay liberation and queer activism of the past thirty years. This book examines the role of play in gay liberation and queer activism, and the ways in which queer notions of play have influenced a broad range of social movements.

The increased use of digital tools for political activism has triggered heated debates about the effectiveness of digital campaigns for political change and feminist causes. While technology’s immediacy and transnational reach have broadened the potential impact of activism, it has, at the same time, complicated the goals, materiality, and consumption of feminist actions. In Awkward Politics, Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle suggest that awkwardness offers a means of engaging with twenty-first century feminist activism by accounting for the uncertainty of popfeminist moments and movements, its sometimes illegible meanings, affects, and aesthetics. By investigating transnational media ranging from popfeminist performance art, music, street activism, blogs, and hashtags to literature, film, academic theory, and protests, the authors demonstrate that viewing activist art through the lens of awkwardness can yield a nuanced critique. By developing awkwardness into a theoretical tool for intervention, a key concept of feminist politics, and a moving target, this innovative study dramatically alters the ways in which we approach activism, its forms, movements, and effects. It also suggests a broad range of applicability, from social movements to the academy. Breaking new ground through the intersections of technology, consumerism, and the political in popfeminist work, Awkward Politics highlights the urgency of feminist politics and activism.

With the ubiquitous nature of modern technologies, they have been inevitably integrated into various facets of society. The connectivity presented by digital platforms has transformed such innovations into tools for political and social agendas. Politics, Protest, and Empowerment in Digital Spaces is a comprehensive reference source for emerging scholarly perspectives on the use of new media technology to engage people in socially- and politically-oriented conversations and examines communication trends in these virtual environments. Highlighting relevant coverage across topics such as online free expression, political campaigning, and online blogging, this book is ideally designed for government officials, researchers, academics, graduate students, and practitioners interested in how new media is revolutionizing political and social communications.

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 examines how political violence and resistance was represented in arthouse and cult films from 1960 to 1990. This historical period spans the Algerian war of independence and the early wave of post-colonial struggles that reshaped the Global South, through the collapse of Soviet Communism in the late ‘80s. It focuses on films related to the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups, as well as broader countercultural movements, Black Power, the rise of feminism, and so on. The book also includes films that explore the splinter groups that engaged in violent, urban guerilla struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the promise of widespread radical social transformation failed to materialize: the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy’s Red Brigades. Many of these movements were deeply connected with and expressed their values through art, literature, popular culture, and, of course, cinema. Twelve authors, including academics and well know film critics, deliver a diverse examination of how filmmakers around the world reacted to the political violence and resistance movements of the period and how this was expressed on screen. This includes looking at the financing, distribution, and screening of these films, audience and critical reaction, the attempted censorship or suppression of much of this work, and how directors and producers eluded these restrictions. Including over two hundred illustrations, the book examines filmmaking movements like the French, Japanese, German, and Yugoslavian New Waves; subgenres like spaghetti westerns, Italian poliziotteschi, Blaxploitation, and mondo movies; and films that reflect the values of specific movements like feminists, Vietnam War protesters, and Black militants. The work of influential and well-known political filmmakers such as Costa-Gavras, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Glauber Rocha is examined side by side with grindhouse cinema and lessor known titles by a host of all-but forgotten filmmakers, including many from the Global South, that are deserving of rediscovery.

In the late 1950s, Suzuki Seijun was an unknown, anxious low-ranking film director churning out so-called program pictures for Japan’s most successful movie studio, Nikkatsu. In the early 1960s, he met with modest success in directing popular movies about yakuza gangsters and mild exploitation films featuring prostitutes and teenage rebels. In this book, Peter A. Yacavone argues that Suzuki became an unlikely cinematic rebel and, with hindsight, one of the most important voices in the global cinema of the 1960s. Working from within the studio system, Suzuki almost single-handedly rejected the restrictive filmmaking norms of the postwar period and expanded the form and language of popular cinema. This artistic rebellion proved costly when Suzuki was fired in 1967 and virtually blacklisted by the studios, but Suzuki returned triumphantly to the scene of world cinema in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of critically celebrated, avant-garde tales of the supernatural and the uncanny. This book provides a well-informed, philosophically oriented analysis of Suzuki’s 49 feature films.