Stephen Harper: Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, communism, democracy, fascism, journalism, left, marxism, mass media, migration, neoliberalism, politics, television, wikileaks
Attacking the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.
The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.
Publisher Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2012
ISBN 1846949769, 9781846949760
114 pages
review (Laura Cooke, Socialist Review)
Comment (0)Jake Kinzey: The Sacred and the Profane: An Investigation of Hipsters (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, counterculture, hip hop, hipster, music, neoliberalism
The Sacred and the Profane examines the hipster and the current cultural impasse by going beyond “going-against-the-grain.”
The Sacred and the Profane is a work that combines local and global analysis to examine our age’s often-talked about, but mostly misunderstood, mainstream subculture: the hipster. This book seeks to answer questions like, Why don’t hipsters want to be called hipsters? and Why do they act like they are different when they are just like all the other hipsters? If you can’t stand hipsters, are a hipster, or don’t know what a hipster is, this book is for you.
Publisher Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2012
ISBN 1780990340, 9781780990347
68 pages
PDF (EPUB)
Comment (0)Ian Buchanan (ed.): Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, capitalism, cinema, cognition, ideology, literary theory, literature, marxism, modernism, philosophy, politics, postmodern, postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, urbanism, utopia
Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.
Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.
The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.
Interviewers: Mona Abousenna, Abbas Al-Tonsi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Culler, Sara Danius, Leonard Green, Sabry Hafez, Stuart Hall, Stefan Jonsson, Ranjana Khanna, Richard Klein, Horacio Machin, Paik Nak-chung, Michael Speaks, Anders Stephanson, Xudong Zhang
Publisher Duke University Press, 2007
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822340879, 9780822340874
296 pages