New Books in Popular Culture

In her book, American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Jennifer Helgren traces the creation of a new internationalist girl citizenship in the first two decades following World War II by uncovering the activism of girls organizations including Camp Fire Girls, YWCA Y-Teens, and the Girl Scouts. Helgren shows how anxieties about nuclear warfare led educators, psychologists, and government groups to encourage girls to develop their “natural” skills as nurturers and caretakers and become homemakers to the world. These organizations taught girls to understand their responsibility to their family, nation, and globe as united, and girls between 10 and 17 years old promoted democratic education, global citizenship, and intercultural tolerance. Using girls’ essays in magazines like Seventeen alongside their personal letters, pen pal exchanges, and oral histories, Helgren demonstrates that girls internalized an internationalist ethos that fostered seemingly contradictory ideas--they reinforced traditional gender roles while offering a political model of girlhood and challenged American racism while simultaneously promoting a benign image of America’s new global power. During the Second Red Scare, this internationalist identity came under attack as conservatives claimed that the YWCA and Girl Scouts had been infiltrated by communists, and in response these organizations were forced to limit their defense of multilateral cooperation. By the late 1950s, however, the groups learned how effectively balance their American and international aims by integrating their activism with state-sponsored programs like the People-to-People Program established under President Eisenhower. By analyzing this moment of international experimentation and hope about a new, peaceful world system, Helgren demonstrates the ways that gender and age combined to form a new category of citizenship for America’s girls.Chelsea Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. Her research explores the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States before 1917.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Dr. John Etty explains how Krokodil magazine provided a venue in which the state, the the magazine’s editors, and readers all participated in defining what it was permissible to laugh at in the USSR. A standard view of Krokodil as propaganda would suggest that the magazine largely functioned as an arm of state ideology. In some cases, Krokodil did serve this function, but more often than not, its contents were the product of a process of co-creation, with all three groups playing a creative role in producing the magazine’s contents. With an engaging mix of visual analysis and theoretical sophistication, the author provides a window into everyday reading materials consumed by Soviet citizens.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Mark D. White's new book Batman and Ethics (Wiley Blackwell, 2019) focuses on the comic book character Batman, particularly from the early 1970s through 2011, exploring Batman’s motivations, his mission, aspects of the mission that do not always work together, and how Batman implements and executes his mission. This book aims at two goals, one goal is situating Batman, and how he operates, within the utilitarian and deontological schools of philosophical thought, the other goal is to encourage the reader to consider the contradictions that we all face in our decision making by taking us through so many of the conflicts that arise within the Batman oeuvre. While the book focuses specifically on the comic book version of Batman, the many other forms of Batman are lurking in the background, since the cinematic and televisual Batman comes from the original comic book source material. The moral conflicts that Batman repeatedly faces remain part of the enduring understandings of the character, and Batman and Ethics dives deep into these complexities, with substantial textual references, to flesh out the moral inconsistencies and assess Batman’s reasoning and choices. This book may be appealing for use in courses that examine ethics, moral reasoning, or political theory, but the book may be equally of interest to those who are fascinated by Batman in general and want to think and learn more about this dark and often-isolated superhero.Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor, with Linda Beail, of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloombury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political histories treat Hawaii’s statehood as a kind of historical inevitability, an event that was bound to pass the moment the kingdom was annexed. As I would frequently pontificate, “nobody has unpacked the imperial history of the islands in sufficient detail, nor the fact that their political fate diverged sharply from a number of other possessions.”For better and for worse, Sarah Miller-Davenport has robbed me of this particular talking point by writing a new book on the process of Hawaiian statehood, American imperialism and its relationship to mainland politics and society shortly after statehood. Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire (Princeton University Press, 2019) takes a close look at some of the narratives that have grown up around the islands and unpacks them. She notes that the process of becoming a state was not a foregone conclusion and was in many ways predicated on Hawaii acting as a gatekeeper to Asia. She also notes that while the island’s racism was less fixed in certain ways than mainland racial norms, racism persisted in more subtle forms on the island. What emerges is a close look at how multiculturalism in service of egalitarianism can nevertheless be adapted to imperial norms.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

As the title suggests, Jerry T. Watkins III’s Queering the Redneck Riviera: Sexuality and the Rise of Florida Tourism (University Press of Florida, 2018) re-queers this North Florida tourist destination showing how people who defied gender and sexual normalcy found their space in the “Sunshine State” after the Second World War. Despite concerted efforts to police and control what was perceived as sexual deviance in the region, the tourism economy also created opportunities for queer socialization, while queer people played a crucial role in making the Redneck Riviera (now the Emerald Coast) a major tourist destination. Watkins re-creates queer life during this period, drawing from a variety of sources including newspaper articles, advertising, oral history narrations, government documents, and interrogation transcripts from The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (The Johns Committee), uncovering stories of queer beach parties, bars, and friendship networks. The book clearly places this story in broader national, regional, and local contexts while telling touching personal stories with fascinating characters, making it accessible for a broader audience. It also includes rare photos from the Emma Jones Society, a Pensacola-based group that boldly hosted gatherings and conventions in public places which would eventually lead to one of the most important events in the country’s LGBTQ calendar. By showing how the Redneck Riviera become the Gay Riviera and the role of pink money (or the “flaunting of gay capital”) played in that process, Queering the Redneck Riviera offers new insights about the relationships between sexuality and capitalism.Isabel Machado is a Brazilian historian, living and teaching in Mexico, while writing about U.S. Carnival. She is currently working on Now You Do Whatcha Wanna: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile’s Mardi Gras, which uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in that U.S. southern city. Her new project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León Mexico. She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the Star Wars franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to the release of a new movie trilogy, two stand-alone films, and two animated series. In Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy(University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Dan Golding examines the current status of Star Wars, as well as the similarities and differences between the old and the new. His book is a great mix of both academic and popular that will give readers a useful sense of Lucas’ creation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Edited by Nicholas Baer of the University of Chicago, Maggie Hennefeld of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen, both of Carelton University, Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019) is interesting on both an academic and popular level. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Music has always been integral to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with songs such as Kendrick Lamar’s "Alright," J. Cole’s "Be Free," D’Angelo and the Vanguard's "The Charade," The Game’s "Don’t Shoot," Janelle Monae’s "Hell You Talmbout," Usher’s "Chains," and many others serving as unofficial anthems and soundtracks for members and allies of the movement. In Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan's collection of essays, Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection (Indiana University Press, 2018), contributors draw from ethnographic research and personal encounters to illustrate how scholarly research of, approaches to, and teaching about the role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement can contribute to public awareness of the social, economic, political, scientific, and other forms of injustices in our society. Each chapter in Black Lives Matter and Music focuses on a particular case study, with the goal to inspire and facilitate productive dialogues among scholars, students, and the communities we study. From nuanced snapshots of how African American musical genres have flourished in different cities and the role of these genres in local activism, to explorations of musical pedagogy on the American college campus, readers will be challenged to think of how activism and social justice work might appear in American higher education and in academic research. Black Lives Matter and Music provokes us to examine how we teach, how we conduct research, and ultimately, how we should think about the ways that black struggle, liberation, and identity have evolved in the United States and around the world.Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What does it mean to be famous on the Internet? How do people become Internet celebrities, and what can that celebrity be used to do? Dr. Crystal Abidin offers anthropological insight into these questions in her book Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018). Drawing on case studies from around the world, Dr. Abidin identifies the qualities that contribute to the making of internet celebrity. She explains how some internet celebrities become professional influencers and explores the global implications of the influencer industry. This accessibly written book is aimed at popular audiences and will be indispensable for undergraduate courses about digital culture, for academics who want a clear and cogent introduction to internet celebrity, and for anyone who wants to understand the online worlds in which we increasingly live.Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London, 1884-1914 (Wayne State University Press, 2018), Vivi Lachs, social and cultural historian, Yiddishist, performer, and associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, looks at London's Yiddish popular culture. She positions it in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture. This book breaks lots of new ground, and is an exciting, entertaining and revealing peek into this vibrant and noisy world.Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture