 |
|
|
Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass
Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. |
| |
Incisive look at how advertising and related consumer-oriented
messages have shaped US culture and consumer consciousness.
|
|
|
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s
House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1998. |
| |
Brilliant interpretation of a major Chicano art retrospective
that raises key questions about the construction of high art vs.
popular art among marginalized ethno-racialized groups. |
|
|
Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle
for "Blackness." Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. |
| |
Brilliant interpretation of the evolution of representations
of African Americans in television news and fiction programming,
from the 1980s to the present. |
|
|
Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the
Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. |
| |
Strong study of how advertising texts shape racial, gender,
and class beliefs and create a “consumer” consciousness.
|
|
|
Jhally, Sut and Justin Lewis. Enlightened Racism: The
Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream.
Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. |
| |
Combines audience surveys and textual analysis to look at how
confusions of race and class in the US are reflected in and
reinforced by Cosby’s mid-80s show. |
|
|
Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American
Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. |
| |
Innovative study of relations between mass-produced pop culture
and the realities of communal memory dimly present in those
commodified productions. |
|
| ———.
Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism
and the Poetics of Place. London; New York: Verso, 1994. |
| |
Incisive study of various musical ethnic subcultures and their
complex negotiations with the dominant culture and their co-resisters
in a global/local struggle over meaning. |
|
|
|
Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements.
New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993.
|
| |
Wide-ranging study of the culture industries of the early 20th
century, with particular emphasis on the role they played for
immigrant workers. |
|
|
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure
in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia, PN: Temple University Press, 1986. |
| |
Classic American Studies text, looking at the various forms
of early 20th century pop culture aimed at women from the working
class. |
|
| ———.
A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary
Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997. |
| |
One of the few books that looks carefully at the construction
of “middle-brow” taste as exemplified in the book
of the month club’s efforts to provide enlightening reading.
|
|
|
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in
Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Published by University Press
of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1994. |
| |
Arguably the best book yet on rap, this study analyses both
the political economic cultural roots of rap, and its textual
meanings. |
|
|
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.
New York: Routledge, 1989.
|
| |
Important collection of essays tracing the various kinds of
analysis US intellectuals have made of popular culture over
the course of the 20th century. |
|
|
Ross, Andrew, Tricia Rose, and Andrew Rose, eds. Microphone
Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. |
| |
Excellent collection of essays on rock, rap, heavy metal, dance
scenes, and the youth cultures that surround them. |
|
