New Books in Popular Culture

Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (Routledge, 2022) examines the multiplicity of books, films, TV shows, and merchandise that make up the transmedia Gidget universe from the late 1950s to the 1980s.The book examines the Gidget phenomenon as an early and unique teen girl franchise that expands understanding of both teen girlhood and transmedia storytelling. It locates the film as existing at the historical intersection of numerous discourses and events, including the emergence of surf culture and surf films; the rise of California as signifier of modernity and as the epicentre of white American middle-class teen culture; the annexation of Hawaii; the invention of Barbie; and Hollywood’s reluctant acceptance of teen culture and teen audiences. Each chapter places the Gidget text in context, looking at production and reception circumstances and intertexts such as the novels of Françoise Sagan, the Tammy series, La Dolce Vita, and The Patty Duke Show, to better understand Gidget’s meaning at different points in time.This book explores many aspects of Gidget, providing an invaluable insight into this iconic franchise for students and researchers in film studies, feminist media studies, and youth culture.Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality.Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced.Mentioned in the episode Yoshikazu Nango, "A new form of 'solitary space'...." (2021) Haruki Murakami's detailed fictional worlds of the 1980's onwards: real-feeling yet not actual history. Walter Scott's Waverley novels: can we also understand the novel as an immersive machine that leaves readers half in their actual world? Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its interplay between enclosure and expansion, and its shrinking/expanding motif) Ian Bogost on e-readers C S Lewis's wardrobe as portal in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Lukacs focuses on the dizzying and transformative scale in Naturalism in "Narrate or Describe?" (1936) Wearable heart monitors as feedback machines for watching scary movies. The pre-history of Pokemon Go is various games played by early users of VR headsets on trains. Sword Art Online is a breakout popular example of Japanese stories of players trapped inside a game-world Thomas Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life We Met in Virtual Reality Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined the concept of the metaverse. Recallable Books Madeline L'Engle The Wind in the Door (1973). Cervantes, Don Quixote (1606/1615) Futari Okajima Klein Bottle (1989) Collections such as Immersed in Technology, Future Visions, Virtual Realities and their Discontents; also, other early VR criticism of the 1990s including early feminist critique, scattered across journals in the early to mid 1990s . Paul feels someone should put together those germane articles into a new collection. Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In the late 1980s, Hollywood reflected the real world thaw in the Cold War by depicting the idea of two Russias: the cold bureaucratic state run by grey men intent on propping up a crumbling regime, and the beautiful, little known country of real, everyday Russians who live rich and full lives despite it all. Our three films this week show the two Russias in different ways and in different stages of the 1980s Cold War. White Nights, the story of a Russian ballet dancer who defected to America and is forced to return, came out in December 1985. The Hunt for Red October, based on a 1984 Tom Clancy novel, was released in March 1990, a few months after the world changed. The Russia House, based on John le Carre’s 1989 novel came out Christmas Day, 1990, exactly one year before the Soviet Union closed up shop for good.Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

It is often thought that the story of Tutankhamun ended when the thousands of items discovered by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were transported to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and put on display. But there is far more to Tutankhamun's story. Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the 100 years of research on Tutankhamun that has taken place since the tomb's discovery: we learn that several objects in the tomb were made of meteoritic iron that came from outer space; new evidence shows that Tutankhamun may have been a warrior who went into battle; and author Bob Brier takes readers behind the scenes of the recent CAT-scanning of his mummy to reveal secrets of the pharaoh.The book also illustrates the wide-ranging impact the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb had on fields beyond Egyptology. Included is an examination of how the discovery of the tomb influenced Egyptian politics and contributed to the downfall of colonialism in Egypt. Outside Egypt, the modern blockbuster exhibitions that raise great sums of monies for museums around the world all began with Tutankhamun, as did the idea of documenting every object discovered in place, before it was moved. And to a great extent, the modern fascination with ancient Egypt--Egyptomania--was also greatly promoted by the Tutmania that surrounded the discovery of the tomb. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford UP, 2020), an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms ― cinema and dance ― historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.Pratichi Priyambada is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is broadly interested in histories of performance, gender and sexuality, and colonial law. She can be reached at @rhymingrhythm on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.In this inaugural episode, our host Aswin Punathambekar speaks with Samhita Sunya, the author of the book Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (U California Press, 2022).In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Sunya’s intellectual trajectory in studying South Asian cinema from Houston to Bangalore, Bombay, and beyond; How the periodization of the “long” 1960s – bookended by the 1955 Bandung Afro-Asian Conference and the 1975 Indian Emergency – comes into view through the author’s interdisciplinary approach; How Dr. Sunya works her way through and out of a popular binary misunderstanding of Indian cinema - a familiar opposition between an auteurist world cinema and song-and-dance driven popular cinema; Why the author chooses what would be considered oddball or off-beat media artifacts, what kinds of sources she gathers in relation to these materials, and where she looks for them in creative ways; Reflection upon the pedagogy of world cinema in the classroom; A discussion of the notion of “excess” and how it is weaved into the three central themes – love, desire, and gender – that emerge throughout the book; How Dr. Sunya’s cross-industry and trans-regional perspective counter the spatial biases that are deeply ingrained into the disciplinary boundaries; A reflection on the nature of academic work through the lens of “love” on topics like world cinema and South Asia. About the BookBy the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War–era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases—flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions—this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.You can find the open access version of Dr. Sunya’s book through Luminosoa.org at the University of California Press website.Author Bio: Samhita Sunya is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia.Host Bio: Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.Editor & Producer Bio: Jing Wang. She is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.Original Background Music by Mengyang Zoe Zhao.Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

We could do a whole season on Vietnam war films, but in this episode we chose three films that highlight the Cold War’s omnipresence in daily life. You wouldn’t associate any of these films with how Vietnam figured into the Cold War dynamic because they are about the homefront. The Deer Hunter (1978), Coming Home (1978), and Da Five Bloods (2020) are reminders (or are they revelations?) that the Vietnam War deeply wounded American society from top to bottom. Whether it’s working class immigrants in rural Pennsylvania, severely wounded veterans and their caretakers, or Black and Brown soldiers contending with racism and shattered lives decades removed from the war, our three films depict the Cold War homefront in vivid detail. We often think of the Cold War as an impersonal contest between global powers that nearly ended the world, but the Vietnam War was incredibly personal for millions of Americans and Vietnamese.Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Manga historian Ryan Holmberg introduces the influential alternative manga artist Murasaki Yamada (1948-2009) to English readers through a scholarly translation of Talk to My Back (1981-1984), Yamada’s feminist examination of the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams. The manga is paired with an extensive essay by Dr. Holmberg, in which he positions Yamada’s oeuvre within the history of alternative manga and Yamada’s manga within her life. Alternative manga is primarily associated with male artists in the United States, but Holmberg illuminates why that came to be and how that image varies from reality through his examination of Yamada’s oeuvre.Talk to My Back (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022) portrays a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant. While engaging frankly with the compromises of marriage and motherhood, Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within the nuclear family.Ryan Holmberg is a comics historian and translator. He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (2010). He has edited and translated over two dozen manga, including the 2014 Eisner Award-winning edition of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men. His many essays and reviews can be found in such venues as The Comics Journal, Artforum International, and The New York Review. He has advised on exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art, and is currently Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He can be found on social media @mangaberg.Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University who researches Japanese culture and contemporary media. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, is forthcoming in 2023 from the University of Hawai’i Press. She consulted on the British Museum’s exhibition on manga, and her work has appeared in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, the Journal of Popular Culture, Film Criticism, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Together, bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert have written Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most-Read Woman (Seal Press, 2022), the first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you've never heard of. At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she'd lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was willing to sacrifice everything for this goal, even swinging a pickax in a gold mine to pay the bills. When the mine shut down, she moved to the Bay Area. Armed with moxie and samples of her work, she barged into the offices of the Oakland Tribune and was hired on the spot. She went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist and household name whose column ran for over thirty years and garnered fifty million readers. Told in cinematic detail Scheeres and Gilbert's, Listen, World! is the inspiring story of a timeless maverick, capturing what it means to take a gamble on self-fulfillment and find freedom along the way.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.1980: America's Pivotal Year (Rutgers UP, 2022) puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot JR, cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.Jim Cullen is the author of numerous books, including The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Those Were the Days: Why ‘All in the Family’ Still Matters, and From Memory to History: Television Versions of the Twentieth Century. He teaches history at the newly-founded upper division of Greenwich Country Day School.Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture