New Books in Popular Culture

Mike McCartney's Early Liverpool (Genesis Publications, 2021), brings together all of his finest work including a wealth of previously unseen photographs and treasured drawings. McCartney takes us from his very first photograph, taken with the family Kodak Brownie box camera, to experimenting with his Rollei Magic camera and finding a love in surrealism, through to capturing the Merseybeat scene in Liverpool. The venues that were at the heart of the city are all featured, including the Casbah Club, the Jacaranda Club, Hope Hall, the Tower Ballroom and the legendary Cavern Club. This signed, limited edition book reveals the secrets of the Sixties and Seventies Liverpool through McCartney's photography, illustrations, and commentary. In a commentary that is honest, revealing and often humorous, McCartney describes growing up in a post-war Liverpool and the cultural sensation that followed. McCartney shares his love of satire, poetry and music, and his experience of being there to photograph the talent that came out of Liverpool, including his own group, the Scaffold. From the Beatles to the Fourmost, and from the Roadrunners to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, McCartney captured the local bands as well as Liverpool's poets and artists, including Adrian Henri, Sam Walsh and Maurice Cockrill, RA. In Mike McCartney's Early Liverpool the incredible visiting acts that Liverpool welcomed are also celebrated, including Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Long John Baldry. With each photograph, McCartney gives a fascinating insight into the history of the vibrant city.Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition (Rutgers University Press, 2021) focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only.With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews. Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes: The Cold War in American and British Popular Music (Indiana University Press, 2021), Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions. Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.Joanna Smolko holds a PhD in Musicology and is Adjunct Professor of Music at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the University of Georgia. Tim Smolko holds master's degrees in Musicology and Library Science and is Monographs Original Cataloger at the University of Georgia.Learn more about the Smolkos' work on their website, which you can access here.Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Uwe Schütte's Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany (Penguin, 2021) is not your typical rock star biography. Eschewing gossipy interpersonal details, Schütte instead contextualizes Kraftwerk within contemporaneous debates about German cultural identity in the wake of Nazi atrocities. Kraftwerk's intellectual and artistic debts to Weimar era movements like Bauhaus and early Soviet experimentation in constructivism and futurism are fully elucidated, showing how Kraftwerk's futuristic electro-pop was actually deeply rooted in pan-European avant-garde movements. Schütte also provides in-depth analysis of each of Kraftwerk's albums, including now-disowned early recordings and the most recent Kraftwerk studio release, 2003's Tour de France. With this book, Schütte makes a compelling case for Kraftwerk as a major artist in 20th century pop music, as influential in its own way as The Beatles or Elvis Presley.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In her new book, Haunted Homes (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dahlia Schweitzer explores the ways in which the trope of the haunted house in horror signifies the anxieties, traumas, and terrors of suburban American life. Comprehensive and readable, this slim volume establishes beyond a doubt that in movies and television series from The Conjuring to The Haunting of Hill House, "home is where the horror is." Haunted Homes is unique in its focus on what Schweitzer calls the "suburban gothic." Scholarly studies of the supernatural in horror cinema tend to be decidedly ahistorical, suggesting that contemporary films about haunted houses tap into the same fear of the uncanny evoked by eighteenth and nineteenth-century works of European gothic literature. Schweitzer, however, argues that these films are distinctly modern and American, framing them as a dark reflection of suburban life since the 1950s and particularly in the decade following the economic collapse of 2008. Schweitzer undertakes an in-depth examination of the history of suburbia in the United States as well, offering a detailed and informed account of its origins and development. This is a fresh and original approach. It opens up a new way of seeing haunted homes in recent horror cinema and television, setting her book apart from others on the topic. This is consequently a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers, from film scholars and students to fans of the horror genre.Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

“Not a whisper. / Never laughter. / Buster, thank you / for disaster.” So wrote graduate student Dana Stevens, who would go on to become Slate’s resident film critic and podcaster. Her love affair with Buster Keaton – strictly platonic, as their “first sustained encounter” was decades after the actor’s passing in 1966 – began at a cinematheque in Alsace. But Stevens’ book about actor-director-gag man-stunt virtuoso Buster Keaton, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (Simon & Schuster, 2022), is more than the story of one man. Through Keaton, Stevens tells the story of modernity, one that includes the myths and scandals of the Hollywood Dream Factory but that goes far beyond the usual contours of the celebrity biography.In this conversation, Dana Stevens discusses the origins of this, her first full-length book project, weighs in on her favorite Keaton films, and reveals the particular challenges of working as a critic of contemporary franchise filmmaking.Dana Stevens has been Slate's film critic since 2006. She is also a cohost of the magazine's long-running weekly culture podcast, the Slate Culture Gabfest, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Bookforum. Stevens lives with her family in New York. You can follow her on Twitter @thehighsign.Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura. You can follow her on Twitter @sayanniething. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Today we are joined by Dr. Samir Chopra, Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: My Shapeshifting Journey (Temple University Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed how Chopra became an Indian cricket fan, the unique role that cricket plays in immigrant South Asian communities in Australia and the United States, the scholarly legacy of CLR James Beyond a Boundary, and the future of global cricket since the 1980s.In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra mixes autobiography, ethnography, memoir, exile literature, and philosophy to better understand and explain how cricket helped him recognize and reshape his own post-colonial and immigrant identity. In the process, he also shows how cricket speaks to larger global patterns such as the tension between colonialism and post-coloniality in and outside of India, the interplay of the local and the national in the subcontinent, and transcendent and ephemeral qualities of live sporting events for fans of all stripes.Chopra’s compelling work proceeds roughly chronologically recounting the experiences of a young, Indian self-avowed cricket tragic and his relationship with his own sense of identity from the 1970s until the present. In his first chapter, he tells us about his “perverse” attraction to English, Australian, and even Pakistani cricket, and his rejection of the Indian cricket team.Over the next several chapters, Chopra exhumes and examines the moments that helped bring him back to Indian cricket fandom as well as those that helped to moderate his ultimate cricket nationalism. The pathway is winding and defies easy explanation: English biases against Pakistani cricketeers lead him to a more critical view of those same English authors’ attacks on Indian players. He learns to appreciate his own national identity through the local even as his Punjabi background complicates the easy adoption of any Hindu nationalism. India’s victory in the 1983 World Cup helps him reclaim the Indian team but he struggles with the space between the genteel image of cricket he idolizes and its aggressive expression in Indian, Pakistani, Australian, and English players and fans.The latter chapters detail his life after he leaves India – living first in New Jersey, afterward Sydney, Australia, and finally back in New York City. These sections are animated by cricket’s absence and presence. In the US, Chopra despairs cricket’s invisibility and to see it, he goes to great lengths (and sometimes great distances) to watch matches. This brings him face-to-face with many Pakistani cricket fans doing the same thing and he discovers comity and confrontation, if not in equal parts. He also becomes a devotee of the early internet, discovering cricket conversations and participating avidly in them. They reflect a new and more democratic (and even at times particularly South Asian) expression of the game.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone 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

In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press, 2019), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-American writer who changed the face of Western politics and culture. As a lifelong anti-imperialist, black queer advocate, and feminist, Baldwin (1924-1987) was a passionate chronicler of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. war against Vietnam, Palestinian liberation struggle, and the rise of LGBTQ rights. Mullen explores how Baldwin's life and work channel the long history of African-American freedom struggles, and explains how Baldwin both predicted and has become a symbol of the global Black Lives Matter movement.Bill V. Mullen is Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University. His specializations are American Literature and Studies, African American Studies, Cultural Studies, Working-Class Studies, Critical Race Theory and Marxist Theory.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Poet and jazz band musician Sun Ra, born in 1914, is one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his band “Arkestra” appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, this keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology and that the planet Saturn was his true home. In his book, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. William Sites contextualizes this visionary musician in his home on earth—specifically in Chicago’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 Sun Ra lived and relaunched his career.The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then still known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—all this to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.Dr. William Sites is Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban and community studies, political economy, social movements, immigration, race, culture, social theory, and historical methods.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca 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 world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design (Princeton UP, 2021) offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers.Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others.A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture. Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture