Examines extremity as a political and cultural phenomenon in the late 20th and early 21st century. It argues that we can discern a ‘continuum of extremes/extremity’ on which we may locate practices as diverse as Abu Ghraib, extreme sports, biomedical TV series and horror films.
Includes interviews with band members and fans, from countries ranging from the UK and US to Israel and Sweden, this book demonstrates the power and subtlety of an often surprising and misunderstood musical form. It draws on first-hand research to explore the global extreme metal scene.
"This book comes at a time that could hardly be more important. Miller-Idriss opens up a completely new approach to understanding the processes of violent radicalization through subcultural products...(and) will surely become a standard work in the study of right-wing extremism."--Daniel Koehler, founder and director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies.dies.
New Cultural Studies is both an introductory reference work and an original study which explores new directions and territories for cultural studies. A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School. It is a generation whose whole education has been shaped by theory, and who frequently turn to it as a means to think through some of the issues and current problems in contemporary culture and cultural studies. In a period when departments which were once hotbeds of "high theory" are returning to more sociological and social science oriented modes of research, and 9/11 and the war in Iraq especially have helped create a sense of "post-theoretical" political urgency which leaves little time for the "elitist," "Eurocentric," "textual" concerns of "Theory," theoretical approaches to the study of culture have, for many of this generation, never seemed so important or so vital. New Cultural Studies explores theory's past, present, and most especially future role in cultural studies. It does so by providing an authoritative and accessible guide, for students and teachers alike, to: the most innovative members of this "new generation" the thinkers and theories currently influencing new work in cultural studies: Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, Kittler, Laclau, Levinas, and iek the new territories currently being mapped out across the intersections of cultural studies and cultural theory: anti-capitalism, ethics, the posthumanities, post-Marxism, and the transnational
Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in contemporary literary-cultural texts. It studies the representation of 'invasion narratives' of the human body and the earth by alien life forms, the ecodystopian vision that informs much environmental thought in popular cultures, the states of ontological integrity and genetic belonging in the age of cloning, xenotransplantation and biotechnology's 'capitalisation' of life itself, and the construction of the 'wild' in these texts. It pays attention to the ecological uncanny and the monstrous that haunts ecodystopias and forms of natureculture that emerge in the bioeconomies since the late twentieth century.
Self reinvention has become a preoccupation of contemporary culture. In the last decade, Hollywood made a 500-million-dollar bet on this idea with movies such as Multiplicity, Fight Club, eXistenZ, and Catch Me If You Can. Self reinvention marks the careers of Madonna, Ani DiFranco, Martha Stewart, and Robin Williams. The Nike ads of LeBron James, the experiments of New Age spirituality, the mores of contemporary teen culture, and the obsession with "extreme makeovers" are all examples of our culture's fixation with change. In a time marked by plenitude, transformation is one of the few things these parties have in common. Although transformation is widely acknowledged as a defining characteristic of our culture, we have almost no studies on what it is or how it works. Transformations offers the first comprehensive and systematic view. It is an ethnography of the contemporary world.
Americans think of their country as a welcoming place where everyone has equal opportunity. Yet historical baggage and anxious times can restrain these possibilities. Newcomers often find that civic belonging comes with strings attached––riddled with limitations or legally punitive rites of passage. For those already here, new challenges to civic belonging emerge on the basis of belief, behavior, or heritage. This book uses the term "elsewhere" in describing conditions that exile so many citizens to "some other place" through prejudice, competition, or discordant belief. Yet, in another way, "elsewhere" evokes an undefined "not yet" ripe with potential. In the face of America’s daunting challenges, can "elsewhere" point to optimism, hope, and common purpose? Through 12 detailed chapters, the book applies critical theory in the humanities and social sciences to examine recurring crises of social inclusion in the U.S. After two centuries of incremental "progress" in securing human dignity, today the U.S. finds itself torn by new conflicts over reproductive rights, immigration, health care, religious extremism, sexual orientation, mental illness, and fear of terrorists. Is there a way of explaining this recurring tendency of Americans to turn against each other? Elsewhere in America engages these questions, charting the ever-changing faces of difference (manifest in contested landscapes of sex and race to such areas as disability and mental health), their spectral and intersectional character (recent discourses on performativity, normativity, and queer theory), and the grounds on which categories are manifest in ideation and movement politics (metapolitics, cosmopolitanism, dismodernism).
