Global Popular Culture Research Articles

Filmske lokacije kao mesta sećanja - Tolkinova Srednja zemlja između mentalnih, virtuelnih i stvarnih topografija

This paper examines film locations as places of memory (les lieux de mémoire) and their role in individual imagination. Film-induced tourism creates specific sites of memory typical of global popular culture; the places of confrontation, negotiation, and interplay between fiction and reality which affect our mental as well as the real topographies. The aim is to analyse how memorised film images determine visitors ' experience of real places and their imagining of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional world, and vice versa. The film adaptations of Tolkien's "the Lord of the Rings" and "the Hobbit", directed by Peter Jackson, were shot in New Zealand, causing it to become touristically promoted and visited as "the home of Middle-earth" and "Middle-earth on Earth". This case is analysed as an illustrative example of the aforementioned processes.

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers

Masculinities and the Construction of Boyhood in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction for Young Readers Lisa Chu Shen (bio) The marriage between masculinity studies and children's literature is a fairly recent phenomenon. Compared with the attention received by femininity and female bodies in children's fiction, masculinity as an object of inquiry arrives rather late on the scene, not least because it was only toward the end of the twentieth century that masculinity studies emerged as an academic discipline. The problem with the continued focus on women and girls in children's literature could "run the risk of further naturalizing masculinity" (Wannamaker 122). Since manhood is a continuation of, rather than a flight from, boyhood, examining how boyhood is represented and constructed offers us insight into the kinds of masculine identities being propagated in children's books and the extent to which such identities conform to normative standards. Academic studies of gender in Chinese fiction, both modern and contemporary, have been largely confined to the study of women (Chow; Liu; Sang; Zhu). As Evans and Strauss note: "narratives on masculinity . . . are notably absent, in part reflecting how gender in academic studies of China is still largely associated with the study of women" (825). This imbalance is being redressed by an emerging body of studies on masculinity in modern and contemporary China, especially in the recent decade (Hird; Louie; Song; Xiao; Yang; Zhong). Nevertheless, in the field of Chinese children's fiction, studies of gender have been largely confined to the representation of femininity, with narratives on masculinities being almost nonexistent. As this essay will show, however, examining how masculinity is constructed in contemporary Chinese fiction for young readers reveals the continuing struggle between tradition and modernity, a topic of paramount importance in studies of Chinese literature and culture. On the one hand, [End Page 221] contemporary Chinese conceptions of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity in particular, have been largely Westernized in the process of modernization and globalization. On the other hand, there are alternative models that hinge upon the prospect of modernity but which reflect the persistent influence of the Chinese tradition. The Chinese case illuminates the intersections between masculinity studies, children's literature and modernity studies, intersections that have not yet been explored, due largely to the marginalized positions, in Chinese studies, of both masculinity studies and children's literature. As such, the Chinese case brings light to the role of children's literature in global studies of masculinities in patriarchal societies caught between tradition and modernity where gender categories are being constantly shaped and defined in relation to the tensions inherent in this ever-evolving dyad. Masculinity Studies and Chinese Masculinities Masculinity studies has emerged as a serious academic discipline in the past decades, as gender scholars in sociology, literature, and culture alike are regarding masculinity as a subject worthy of scholarly investigation. As with femininity, masculinity is now being recognized as a constructed concept, rather than innate or inherent (Gilmore; Connell; Kimmel). Manhood, rather than static or timeless, is historical, constructed in relation to "a set of 'others'" (Kimmel 182). Although masculinity is not the exclusive domain of men or manhood (for discussions of female masculinity, refer to Halberstam), it is usually in the context of men's/manhood studies that masculinity is taken as a serious object of inquiry. Since children's literature serves to prepare children for their future roles as gendered adults, it is understandable that authors tend to project their ideas of manhood onto their construction of boyhood. According to sociologist R. W. Connell, hegemonic masculinity is "the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women" (Masculinities 77). Rolf Romøren and John Stephens point out, with reference to Connell, that hegemonic masculinity is taken to be "the version of masculinity which is considered normative within a particular society's expressions of masculinity" (233). They argue that currently, within media images of global popular culture, forms of masculinity grounded in "domination, physical assertiveness, and egocentric individualism" dominate (217). What needs to be made clear is that these forms...

Hip-hop and Decolonized Practices of Language Digitization among the Contemporary !Xun and Khwe Indigenous Youth of South Africa

ABSTRACT The paper is based on a long-term study using ethnographic methods among the Indigenous youth of Platfontein, Northern Cape, South Africa between 2013 and 2018. It explores how the children of two migrant groups (the !Xun and Khwe), now settled in the peri-urban township of Platfontein, South Africa, deal with sociolinguistic issues using the contemporary music genre of hip-hop. Platfontein youth produce hip-hop music that, as a by-product, allows for them to digitize, preserve and strengthen their endangered indigenous languages, culture, history and authentic experiences. Such production and digitization can be seen as decolonized practices which enable the youngsters to directly disseminate Indigenous issues, as well as challenge and rewrite colonial and colonizing narratives from the bottom-up. The process of language digitization through popular culture also allows the community to bypass the complex process of inscribing language into a semiotic modality that potentially sheds their fundamental oral qualities. The study explores how the practice enables the youngsters to participate in a global popular culture, develop networks and influence and negotiate the restrictive urban spaces in contemporary South Africa.

Music Geographies and Iconic Music Legends: Mapping Céline Dion’s Outstanding Contribution to Music and Global Popular Music Culture

Music Geographies and Iconic Music Legends: Mapping Céline Dion’s Outstanding Contribution to Music and Global Popular Music Culture

Looking into the “Anime Global Popular” and the “Manga Media”: Reflections on the Scholarship of a Transnational and Transmedia Industry

This article introduces the special issue dedicated to global industries around anime, its theoretical commentary and its cross-cultural consumption. The concepts “anime” and “anime studies” are evaluated critically, involving current debates such as those presented in this volume. This discussion will employ the concepts of “manga media” as well as the “popular global”, giving an account of the transmedia and transcultural character of these creative industries. The conclusion critiques the irregular presence of Cultural Studies in the study of Japanese visual culture and advocates for constructing an updated dialogue with this tradition in order to readdress the study of these media as a form of global popular culture.

Close Encounter of the 3D Kind: Examining Constructions of the Foreign ‘Other’ in Japanese Videogames

AbstractAs a relatively young medium, videogames have become an important part of global popular culture that cannot be underestimated. Due to rapid technological advances, the contents of today’s videogames are becoming increasingly complex. While games are publicly often denounced for causing aggression, violence, or even mental illness, game studies oppose such stereotypical views and seek possibilities to conduct research on digital games in a systematic and thorough manner. This paper draws on approaches from game studies to examine videogames from the perspective of Japanese studies. Assuming that videogames, like other mass media, take part in and shape socially relevant discourses, it will be analysed how the relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is constructed in Fire Emblem: Sōen no kiseki and Akatsuki no megami, Tales of Symphonia, and Zeruda no densetsu: Mujura no kamen. For this purpose, the games’ content and character design will be taken into account. Special emphasis will be placed on the question how the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ becomes manifest in the relation between the player and the characters that is constructed during gameplay.

Internet rumours with Chinese characteristics

Abstract Internet rumours are a global popular culture phenomenon. For instance, the claims that Barack Obama was not born in America persisted throughout his presidency. Despite the technological means used to control the Internet and the legislation against the spread of rumours there are many false stories on the Internet in China and removing them is a full-time task. Although the quote, ‘When you open the window, some flies may come in’ 打开窗户，苍蝇可能会飞进 (Deng Xiaoping on the Open Door Policy), refers to the opening up of China in 1978, it is still relevant as a response to the consequences of the Internet and the way it is managed. This article investigates the discourses surrounding the regulations about the spreading of rumours and argues that the regulations are used to maintain control over the narrative of events so as to preserve and reaffirm the government’s legitimacy to rule. The legislation is used as a justification to censor information that the government deems sensitive and this has been used as a reason to imprison activists and to shape popular culture. The regulations are also used to prevent widespread public panic or unrest, as was the case in 2011, when there was panic buying of salt thought to give protection from nuclear fallout that was rumoured to be heading to China from Fukushima. The application of the law can at times be arbitrary and planted rumours are used during factional fighting that is played out in the media and online. Xi Jinping has also used the tightening of rumour regulations as a part of factional fighting and in his consolidation of power. The following case studies act as empirical data to further illustrate the ways in which rumour and the legislative attempts to control it are used to shape Chinese cyberspace and online popular culture.

Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture ed. by Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell

Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture ed. by Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell

Youth fans of global popular culture: Between prosumer and free digital labourer

The subculture of urban global popular-culture youth fans is believed to be a resistance-subculture against the hegemony of dominant power. This study, however, found that the subculture given rise to by the urban, global popular-culture youth fans of ‘the Mortal Instruments’ in Indonesia is in opposition to the Neo-Gramscian thought which has become the foundation of popular-culture studies. In constructing their identity, some of the digital fandoms of global popular culture have been critical of the content of cultural texts as a form of resistance against texts produced by cultural industries. However, they have only been developing artificial forms of resistance within the system, that is, in fan sites. This study found that the urban youths joining digital fandoms are not free from the hegemony of capitalism because they have become playlabourers, engaging in free digital labour for the powers of the global culture industry. This critical attitude of urban youths, in building their digital fandom-subculture identity, is incapable of standing against the system. They even position themselves within the network of cultural-industry capitalism – identified by the Frankfurt School as the domination and superiorization of the industry power of global entertainment that is continually self-restoring.

Lessons from the Zombie Apocalypse in Global Popular Culture: An Environmental Discourse Approach to the Walking Dead

ABSTRACTIn the last few decades, the zombie apocalypse has become the subject of films, television programmes, video games and other entertainment fare all over the world. This has not only made the zombie an important allegorical figure in global popular culture, but tales of resource scarcity, ecological collapse and post-“event” life on Earth are now universally recognized by audiences all around the world. But as texts that present a world defined by conflict and competition, what are the environmental prescriptions and lessons presented in zombie popular communication? This essay engages these questions by examining the underlying environmental discourses in zombie media and the metaphors, tropes and narratives that are used to produce them. It concludes by offering an assessment of what environmental prescriptions and survival strategies are suggested by zombie film and television, as well a critical interpretation of what zombie popular culture tells us about our environmental fears, particularly those of the West.

A queerly normalized Western lesbian imaginary: online Chinese fans’ gossip about the Danish fashion model Freja Beha Erichsen

ABSTRACTOnline gossip is an important site of negotiation and contestation for today’s global popular culture in the post-audience age. This article presents a discourse analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip about the Danish female model, Freja Beha Erichsen, in one of the most sizable and influential cyber Chinese fandoms, The Garden of Eden Communication Site for Foreign Series (GE). Erichsen has been famous worldwide for her queer persona and homosocial/homoerotic relationships. The gossip discussed in the research was mainly produced in GE between September 2007 and December 2012. My examination highlights the ambivalent strategy—namely, queer normalization—employed by GE fans. I show that the fans queerly contested yet also renormalized the commercialized images of Erichsen. Furthermore, I illustrate how GE fans both debated and contradictorily reimagined Erichsen’s personal lesbian relationships based on Chinese-specific social-familial and marital ideals pertaining to women’s genders and sexualities. Ultimately, I argue that this tendency of GE fans to craft “desirable,” “normalized” queer fantasies about Erichsen can be seen as an interesting set of queer strategies that allow the fans to creatively reconfigure these local Chinese normative cultural conventions and traditions as viable models for queer women’s survival and expression.

Claiming Bruce Lee's Sex: Memoirs of the Wholesome Wife, Memories of the Salubrious Mistress

Claiming Bruce Lee's SexMemoirs of the Wholesome Wife, Memories of the Salubrious Mistress Celine Parreñas Shimizu (bio) The book cover of Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew (1975) features him bare-chested on the right with big, black, bushy hair topping a dark handsome face, lips pursed together and eyes intent with confident purpose. Bruce Lee, a man known for his small, slight stature and perilous strength, appears large as he leans into the frame, extending his fist toward us. We can clearly see the rippling texture of his torso and chiseled, muscled arms. The flexing of his body reveals adherence to a disciplined physical regimen and affirms his reputation of brute strength made famous by his one-inch punch. Below his medium-shot image and to the left, a very large close-up of the book's author Linda Lee's dewy and blushing face appears. She has a short, blonde, no-nonsense hairdo, coral lipstick on full half-smiling lips, and blue eye-shadowed lids; her long lashes emphasize the wideness of her eyes as she looks up at her husband's figure with adoration. The foregrounding of her image as a wholesome white woman is juxtaposed against his iconic visage as the most celebrated Asian male in global popular culture. His smaller image renders the book's premise in visual terms: we will hear about him through her intimate perspective from inside a celebrated interracial marriage. From the title of the book and its byline, "By his wife Linda Lee," the marital connection between writer and subject appears as its central conceit. The dedication to their children, "that they might know the rich legacy which is theirs alone," shows how the book's author takes specific ownership of Bruce Lee. This possession further extends with the subtitle: "the man only I knew." Published two years after his death at the age of thirty-two, Linda Lee's book promises to reveal the man behind the star as a husband and father devoted to domesticity. To envelop Bruce Lee in the domesticity of family counters the descriptions of him as hypermasculine but asexual. That is, Bruce Lee's sexuality is understood as macho in narcissistic, nationalist, and ascetic terms by scholars and critics.1 So Linda Lee's claiming for her husband the role of American hero, in [End Page 92] terms of an upright and proper heteronormative and hegemonic manhood, certainly contrasts with the legacy of the Oriental coolie and Fu Manchu as outlined well in the work of Robert G. Lee. Rendering Bruce Lee as the ideal husband provides a different sexuality for Asian men, whose subjectivities are usually anxious, insecure, and disprized in US representations of marital and romantic capital. In terms of Asian North American men lacking masculine virility and sexual power in representation, scholars Jachinson W. Chan, David Eng, Richard Fung, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Viet Nguyen, and Eng Beng Lim have called for feminist and queer readings of Asian manhoods so as not to fall into the trap of romanticizing Asian masculinity.2 Indeed, what is so striking in Bruce Lee's appeal and what is so understudied in his image is his sexuality, which Linda Lee definitively binds within the normative bounds of heterosexuality, marriage and fatherhood. This wifely and motherly claim is significant because of Bruce Lee's purported mistress, the Hong Kong B-movie star Betty Ting Pei, who stars as herself in a controversial film about his life. Released just three years after his death, the film Bruce Lee and I (1976) is a fictionalized account of its subtitle: "His Last Days, His Last Nights."3 The film, directed by Mar Lo, famously includes explicit sex scenes and bacchanalian drug consumption of both pills and pot, in the narrative context of an all-consuming, frenzied, and torrid love affair. The Chinese theatrical poster for the film, released in the United States in 1979 as I Love You, Bruce Lee, features a full-figured Bruce Lee kicking his leg high as his upper body bends down almost horizontally. In contradistinction, to the right of this powerful pose, another image shows him relaxed. Bare...

Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture ed. by Hilary McD. Beckles, Heather D. Russell

Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell, eds. Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture. Kingston: U of Indies P, 2015. Pp. v, 211. US$32. Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell cite uncompromising articulations of national belonging coupled with her unprecedented transnational success (she is arguably most commercially successful Caribbean musical artist in history) as impetus for their edited volume focused on performer (2). The volume's eight chapters approach artistry and persona from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including history, literature, political science, and cultural, feminist, and gender studies in order to redress ways in which black diaspora subjects and their art have historically been (mis)appropriated and (mis)represented by others (Beckles and Russell 2). Keenly aware that defiant sexuality is subject to critiques from local and global audiences, volume aims to decentre and destabilize primacy, and thus potency, of Euro-American gaze, positing instead considerations of Caribbean artist and her oeuvre from a Caribbean postcolonial critical/theoretical corpus (4). This decentering of Euro-American gaze is one of volume's greatest strengths, and challenges of navigating such a destabilizing mission are finessed by contributors' commitments to positioning as at once 100% Barbadian and a borderless daughter of Caribbean (her mother is Guyanese) whose genre-defying dance/pop/reggae/R&B/hip-hop music has topped global charts. Beckles and Russell's introduction positions fame as carving out artistic cultural space for Caribbean and for Barbados in particular, yet volume's theoretical thrust is also in critical dialogue with important work of scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies who have explored multivalent ways in which rhythmic, aesthetic, corporal, and migratory dimensions of Caribbean diasporic spaces expand conceptualizations of Caribbean beyond its geographical confines. This notion of reading region as a historically integrated space within modernity is a central thread in Beckles' highly original chapter, Writes Back, which puts upbringing in conversation with childhood of Everton Weekes, a top-ranked cricket player who grew up on same ghetto street, Westbury Avenue. Beckles historicizes two Barbadians' backgrounds to purposely conflate global and local, thus pitting economic placement of Barbados in global South against his argument that the West began, in financial terms, in Barbados because it was here that Africa, Europe and Americas met in unholy slavery (28). Beckles makes a compelling case for expanding path of inquiry into postcolonial Caribbean by mounting a community-centered reading of how Westbury shaped in order to break conceptual traps of big island/small island and island/continent dichotomies that inhibit effective postmodern readings of archipelago (15-16). His approach reveals good gone bad image as forged in Bajan from start. Questions about badness reappear in Don D. Marshall's richly argued chapter, Rihanna as Global Icon and Caribbean Threshold Figure, which deconstructs local debates about sexually explicit lyrics and rude girl posture in order to intervene in broader discourses about culture, nationalist sentiment, and social construction of gender in Caribbean. Marshall argues that Rihanna's ethical drive and her erotic drive may pull in contrary directions, but daring to point up an unbidden dimension in her psychic life as a Caribbean female subject allows for an upping of 'anti' in anti-colonialism, leading to a more complex level of analysis (55). For Marshall, that more sophisticated reading involves applying example as a window into the resistance vernaculars of [Caribbean] youth (67), whose use of technology, he argues, represents a refusal to be objects of global culture. …

Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene

This essay shows how digital publishing practices are changing the field of contemporary literature. It identifies an overlooked intersection between strategies of amateur creativity and professional literary production across print and digital mediums. Strategies of amateur creativity (a category coined by Lawrence Lessig) include self-publishing stories, novels, and poetry, participating in online writing communities, and using social media platforms to share work. Such online behavior fosters a global popular culture that is, I argue, reshaping traditional literary categories like authorship and canonicity as well as institutions like the publishing house. The essay brings scholarship on fandom, digital sharing economies, and media studies into conversation with literary studies to explain how internet cultures of amateurism alter definitional accounts of artistic works as both commodities and gifts. It further shows how changing conceptions of literary ownership and distribution inform a range of contemporary writers’ experiments with the formal composition of their works, anonymous publishing, and promotion. Writers addressed include Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante, Wu Ming, Cory Doctorow, and Lauren Beukes.

Racial Capitalism and the Crisis of Black Masculinity

In this article, I theorize “complicit masculinity” to examine how access to capital, in other words, making or spending money, mediates masculine identity for un- and underemployed black men. Arguing that hegemony operates around producer-provider norms of masculinity and through tropes of blackness within a system of racial capitalism, I show how complicity underscores the reality of differential aspirational models in the context of severe un- and underemployment and the failure of the classic breadwinner model for black men globally. I draw on participant observation fieldwork and interviews with men from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s informal sector from 2008 to 2009. I investigate two groups of men: political propagandists (orators) for former President Laurent Gbagbo and mobile street vendors. Rejecting racialized colonial narratives that positioned salaried workers as “evolved,” orators used anti-French rhetoric and ties to the political regime to pursue entrepreneurial identities. Vendors, positioned as illegitimate workers and non-citizens, asserted consumerist models of masculinity from global black popular culture. I show how entrepreneurialism and consumerism, the two paradigmatic neoliberal identities, have become ways for black men to assert economic participation as alternatives to the producer-provider ideal.

New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon ed. by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González

Reviewed by: New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon ed. by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González Vinodh Venkatesh Robbins, Timothy R., and José Eduardo González, eds. New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 252 pp. New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon is a well-conceived examination of recent Latin American narrative that furthers two parallel yet connected lines of inquiry: first, the collection of essays establishes the groundwork for discussing several contemporary movements or “generations,” working through their poetics and roughly tracing their aesthetics; second, it situates these works in relation to the greater body of Latin American narrative, more specifically the Boom and its immediate aftermath. Make no mistake about it—this is an ambitious project, and one that Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González hone and craft to produce a finished product that is useful not only as a reference guide to non-specialist readers, but to researchers interested in locating authors and texts within the wide spectrum that New Trends outlines. The volume is not, however, an encyclopedic reference—like the recent The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolaño and After—but an orientative text that includes a few essays that will be essential reading for the topic at hand. [End Page 782] New Trends opens with a quote by Ángel Rama on the enduring presence of modernismo. This citation sets the tone for not only the introduction but several of the chapters in the anthology, as there is a genuine attempt to seek a balance between thinkers from different geo-academic circles. There is, thus, a balance between Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and theories forwarded by the likes of Beatriz Sarlo, Donald Shaw, and Néstor García Canclini on the genesis of a literature after the Boom. Robbins and González mobilize Rama’s musings on Darío to further a concise but illuminative discussion of the rough swaths or trajectories that have been planted in recent Latin American narrative, discussing albeit overtly the very designator of “Latin American” to these at times disparate works and authors. The editors outline the work and manifestos of McOndo and Crack writers, to then segue into a discussion of what they term posnacionalista fiction (6), echoing works by others such as Aníbal González who have discussed writers “after the nation.” For the editors of New Trends, these new works are characterized by “the erosion of the nation-state and the fragile production of locality” (6). There is no effort to clearly define this periodization of Latin American literature (something that will later be argued to be intrinsic to the reception of the Boom)—instead, the editors focus on “four aspects of contemporary life in Latin America that . . . are strongly shaping the way cultural producers relate to their social formation and their national spaces” (6). Namely, they examine “the emergence of a global popular culture,” “the rise of the internet,” “a disinterest in politics,” and “the effects of the dissolution of the nation-state discourse” (12). Several of these factors have been mulled over, reconfigured, and deconstructed in other places, but Robbins and González adhere to them as founding principles to contemporary Latin American narrative. The introduction, then, proves useful for critics attempting to situate many new(er) writers who clearly conform to these rough characteristics that the editors trace. The individual essays of New Trends covers work from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico, focusing at times on wider movements such as the Crack (as is the case of Regalado López’s excellent piece) or on individual authors, and, at times, a specific work. The breadth of the texts and writers analyzed is not exhaustive—and the editors make it clear early on that it is not their intention to be so—but well-represented and useful for both generalists and specialists. The lack, however, of any mention of Central American fiction is almost criminal, given the importance of writers such as Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey...

Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture

Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture

Open Mind, Open Heart: An Anthropological Study of the Therapeutics of Meditation Practice in the US.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews collected with meditation teachers and students in the United States, this article will argue that active training in meditation-based practices occasions the opportunity for people with traumatic stress to develop a stronger mind-body connection through heightened somatic awareness and a focus on the present moment that they find to be therapeutic. Three important themes related to healing through meditation for trauma emerged from the data and centered around the ways our interlocutors attempted to realign their sense of self, mind and body, after a traumatic experience. The themes helped explain why US women perceive meditation as therapeutic for trauma, namely that the practice of meditation enables one to focus on the lived present rather than traumatic memories, to accept pain and "open" one's heart, and to make use of silence instead of speech as a healing modality. As meditation practices increasingly enter global popular culture, promoted for postulated health benefits, the driving question of this research--how meditation may perpetuate human resilience for women who have experienced trauma based on their own perspectives of meditation practices--is a critical addition to the literature.

A South African Zombie Apocalypse: Lily Herne's Mall Rats Series

In 2011, Lily Herne published Deadlands, the first in her series of Mall Rats zombie novels for young adults. Deadlands was followed by Death of a Saint (2012) and Army of the Left (2013). The novels are set ten years after the zombie apocalypse, referred to as the ‘War’ by the characters, which took place during the 2010 FIFA World Cup Tournament in South Africa. The novels should be read within the context of a resurgence of zombie fiction in the USA and Europe after 2000. Described by Lauren Beukes as ‘teen-fighting-zombie-fun’, Herne's novels have all the makings of zombie fiction in global popular culture. In Herne's depiction of a South African zombie apocalypse, though, the zombies – except for the threat of contagion – are not the real enemy. They are pawns in a power struggle between the human survivors of the apocalypse and the Guardians, mysterious figures who seem to have appeared out of nowhere after the apocalypse. The way in which politics, power and witchcraft are intertwined in Herne's novels can therefore also be linked to the zombie discourse in postcolonial South Africa. Here, I explore whether Herne expresses a specific view in her novels on the role of authority in contemporary society.

Mujeres, violencia y posfeminismo en los vídeos de Madonna

Several authors identify the 1990s as a turning point in gender representation in the media. Women have been depicted more diversely since then. In recent years, this has had a bearing on the idea of empowerment, which has been redefined as far as women's representations are concerned. This renewed capability women are currently ascribed appears to be linked to their equally revived sexual agency —but also to an aggressive kind of behavior and to violence— within an overall individualistic framework. By way of illustration of how this transformation has manifested itself, we think Madonna's music videos to be much to the point as to how significant these traits have become in shaping today's new femininities and, more specifically, as to how empowerment is being increasingly linked to violent attitudes and demeanors. We have chosen Madonna in view of her being a truly global popular culture icon, but also because of her long career in pop music and how much interest she has drawn from scholars in gender studies. In an analysis of four of her music videos —two from the early 1990s and two from the 2000s— we have found how, over the years, Madonna has changed the way she characterizes herself vis-a-vis violence, from a position of violence's victim to one of executioner/avenger. As a victim, in spite of the power of her seductiveness, she could not escape her subordinated condition. However, in her later vindication as a tough woman, she (her on-screen persona, that is) overindulges in a personal, individual (and suicidal) revenge on men, while (resorting to seduction) reaffirming herself in her (quintessentially post-feministic) role as a triumphant female.