Popular Cultural Products Research Articles

Alternate reality gaming and convergence culture

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a form of internet-based mystery game in which participants are immersed in a fictional world and engage in collective problem-solving. This article studies three ARGs connected to the TV series Alias (ABC, 2001—6), two of them launched by the network ABC as part of the marketing of the TV series, the third produced by fans. Previous research on ARGs has not sufficiently problematized the fact that many ARGs are marketing tools. While ARGs can be analysed as part of a wider context of convergence culture and fan culture, such an analysis must take into account the underlying commercial logic of popular culture production. Despite the differences found between industry-produced and fan-produced ARGs, they still share a framework of consumption that conforms to corporate goals of marketing and brand-building as well as fan audiences' goals of pleasurable interaction with fictional worlds. •

When the “Holy Land” Turns into Real Estate: National Identity, Globalization/Americanization, and Representation of the Land in Israeli Advertising

This article aims to broaden the discourse on national identity as a social and cultural construct by revealing the fluidity of its most fundamental symbol—the land. This discussion is extremely relevant in the cases of small countries living under the custody of globalization, primarily Americanization. While most noticeable scholars who write about national identity focus on “high” and “official” culture, we suggest looking at one of the most prominent products of popular culture—advertisement. This study utilizes qualitative analysis, based on a semiotic interpretation using 489 Israeli advertisements as the stage performing of “banal nationalism.” Looking at two broad categories, national symbols and spatial identity, we found a new real estate discourse in which Americanicity is an integral part of the neo-liberal discourse in Israeli society. In other words, the motherland turns into real estate.

A Response to Shelley Streeby

In her essay on labor, memory, and the boundaries of print culture, Shelley Streeby remarks provocatively on the possibilities and perils of print culture as a conduit for radicals aiming to remake in the future the labor struggles and revolutions that were repressed in the past. As the connections she draws from Haymarket back to the Civil War (and past that, the US-Mexico war) and forward to the Mexican Revolution insightfully suggest, these revolutionary reconstructions often reproduced the limits of the very battles their memory-makers evoked. This was especially true with respect to racial lines that fractured but also challenged labor radicalism domestically and transnationally in the late nineteenth century. When wage slavery was compared to chattel slavery or Mexican peonage by labor activists and radicals, the point was as often to lay claim to the upper rungs of a popular social Darwinian racial hierarchy as it was to level those categories in the name of an interracial, international solidarity of labor. Having plumbed with great nuance in her American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002) the complex class, racial, gendered, and urban dimensions making for such fractures in literary constructions of mid-century USMexican hostilities, Streeby shows us here how that colonial imaginary reverberated within the early twentieth-century revolutionary visions of even the most ardently internationalist labor radicals.

Remembering Walter Benjamin: Benjamin and His Biographers

Having long ago emerged from years of obscurity, Walter Benjamin functions today as an icon not only among an academic audience, but also in many products of popular culture. Through the examination of three key biographies, this study traces the different meanings given to Benjamin's life from the 1970s until today.

Contesting Space and Power through Digital Drama Research: Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Interrogations

Video is increasingly used in qualitative research. This paper addresses some of the pedagogical, aesthetic, social, and ethical implications of using digital video in research of high school drama classrooms. How does the video medium produce particular spaces of representation and representations of space, and what are the implications when this medium is used in ‘live’ drama contexts? Video is a complex medium; it has come to represent both a vehicle and product of popular culture. This paper examines particularly how the gaze of video has historically affected and continues to shape the study and expression of human subjects, and concludes with suggestions about how digital and live drama modes might interact in synergistic ways that challenge normative modes of video production, drama practices, and the research encounter. Throughout, we use human geography, post-colonial film, and feminist theoretical lenses to, as Trinh T. Minh-ha (1991) would put it, ‘evoke’ rather than ‘explain’ what a postcolonial digital drama might be.

Approaching the Mobile Culture of East Asia

Convergence is a term that has been gaining increasing attention across the globe. Conceptually situated between technological and socio-cultural domains – as has been intensely debated between the technological and social determinists since the birth of computer mediated communication (CMC) – mobile culture is no exception. It is powered by inter-operable and multi-functional mobile telecommunication technologies, which are also becoming increasingly high functional especially via fixed-mobile convergence, interconnecting fixed and wireless broadband networks. Wide diffusion and convergence of digital communication technologies – wired and wireless – in recent years have resulted in the emergence of two key paradigmatic convergences: between technology and sociality, and between productivity and play. I will first elucidate these convergences; I will then discuss cultural characteristics of specific East Asian cultures, focusing on South Korea, China, and Japan.

THE BLACK POPULAR PRESS

This paper explores what ‘black popular’ might mean within the context of cultural diversity and representation in contemporary Britain using African Voice, a specialist newspaper directed at the African diasporas as a case study. The African Voice was established to redress the limited representation and visual invisibility of the African diasporas in the mainstream press. The paper examines how the newspaper embraces the worldview of its readers; how it contributes to the process and product of popular culture; how it resists blurring the public and private divide; and how it manifests readers’ views. An extended interview with the editor of African Voice provided qualitative data and the content of the newspaper was analysed to yield quantitative data.

Flagging Finnishness: Reproducing National Identity in Reality Television

The worldwide success of reality television has received plenty of academic and public attention. All the debates seem both implicitly and explicitly to address reality TV as a global phenomenon, but little attention has been given to any national characteristics that may emerge in its localized variations. In this article, using a Finnish adventure show Extreme Escapades as a case, we argue that national television still plays an important role in constructing national identities; that reality television as a popular cultural product should be viewed in the context of “banal nationalism” and that the genre may indeed redefine the meaning of national television in the globalized media sphere.

Rationalisation, Race, and the Weimar Response to Jazz

ABSTRACTSurveying articles on jazz in the Weimar‐era popular press, one finds that commentators and critics commonly read the music as an expression of primitive blackness, a product of a rationally organised, industrial mode of composition, or a strange combination of both. The rationalised/industrialised and black elements perceived in jazz were generally understood as antithetical; the concept of blackness itself was rarely scrutinised. In exceptional cases, writers began to view blackness as a media‐generated construct and thereby re‐situate race itself as a product of modern popular culture. Siegfried Kracauer stands out in this regard. He recognised that the response to jazz was rarely about the music itself, and his critiques of jazz culture and the encompassing fascination with blackness contain an unusual degree of critical reflection on the public imagination of race in the Weimar Republic.

Dad Rudd, M.P. and the making of a national audience

This article contextualizes Ken G. Hall's 1940 film Dad Rudd, M.P. with the history of Dad Rudd, a fictional character who pervaded Australian popular culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that the fiction, theatre, film, cartoon and radio narratives in which he appeared have been instrumental in the creation of the idea of a popular Australian audience that can be defined in relation to a particular set of national symbols. Addressing Hall's film as well as the promotional material and public debate surrounding it, the article demonstrates that conceptualizations of an Australian national audience have been influenced by the genres and narratives of popular culture, historical circumstance and American cultural production.

Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture ed. by David W. Marshall (review)

DAVID W. MARSHALL, ed. Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 800-253-2187. Pp. x, 205. ISBN: 978-0-7864-2922-6. $35. Mass Market Medieval is a collection of thirteen original essays that investigate the role of the Middle Ages as an object of consumption in popular culture. The current popularity of the medieval in popular culture has been fueled, David Marshall notes in his introduction to the volume, by rapid technological innovation and experimentation in cable television, home video, and electronic games. Taking as its point of departure the 'hyper-consumerism' (6) of contemporary mass culture, this volume argues that technological progress has encouraged a commodification of the past that packages the European Middle Ages into 'easily consumable nuggets' in what Marshall calls 'shrink-wrapping time' (6), a process indicated iconically on the book's cover by the bar code, in the shape of an Alfred E. Neuman grin, peeking out through the visor of a medieval helmet. Marshall links the essays in the volume with recent work on medievalism in popular culture, beginning in 1976 with Leslie Workman's founding of the journal Studies in Medievalism. However, my own informal survey of the table of contents of that journal suggests that it is really more like 1994 before scholars of medievalism turn their attention away from the elite literature and art of the nineteenth and twentieth century toward genres of popular and even mass culture. Before that, I suspect, the study of popular culture was a bit more disreputable. William Morris, C.S. Lewis, and Walker Percy were more likely to be found in the pages of that journal before 1995 than Monty Python, Rick Wakeman, and Dungeons and Dragons. Even since 1995 most of the work on popular culture has been done in film. Marshall's introduction economically sketches this more recent scholarship. The editor has done an admirable job of selecting essays that cover different media. There is only one essay on film-the virtually unknown Swedish silent film Haxan. Other essays look at television, rock music, detective fiction, tourism, conspiracy theory, lesson plans, and gaming. Rather than divide the essays up into pre-established sound bites, the editor chose to allow them to affiliate loosely with one another around five 'functions' he argues the medieval serves within popular culture: essays explore the ways in which the medieval exposes contemporary social concerns, the way it engages with contemporary political issues, the question of how medieval history is rendered for popular consumption, the pedagogical uses of the medieval, and the ways in which the medieval structures the products of popular culture. …

The Branding Potential And Japanese Popular Culture Overseas

There has been a surge in the interest in Japanese popular culture worldwide. The objective of this paper was to explore the extent to which products, images, and activities associated with Japanese popular culture are achieving the status of recognizable and sustainable consumer brands overseas. A specially designed survey was used to examine the levels of awareness, interest, and participation in Japanese popular cultural activities of individuals from different national backgrounds. Regression analysis and other statistical techniques were used to evaluate the empirical findings. The results strongly supported the view that Japanese popular culture products and services have tremendous branding potential overseas. By breaking down popular culture into recognizable components, it was possible to explore the underlying branding potential trends and gain insights into areas for further market development. This approach can be generally applied to the study of the development and marketing of popular culture products & services.

The Idiom of Age in a Popular Kenyan Newspaper Serial

AbstractThis article examines the narratives constructed around age in Kenya. Noting the ‘spatial crossings’ of the Kenyan subject, who is as much attuned to the village ethos as he is to the globalized world, the article problematizes our approach to the study of age in Africa. It discusses the multiple narratives now constructed around age within the context of a society in rapid flux, especially underscoring its relationship to authority. The article proposes that there are multiple ways – some new, others merely reinvented – in which social and political relationships are now (re)constructed around age in Africa. The article is based on a critical reading of popular fiction, an important site of popular cultural production where the performance of political power is manifest and narratives around power are created and enacted. The work is based on a popular Kenyan newspaper serial ‘Whispers’, an important site of cultural production in the 1980s–1990s. This period witnessed ruthless political repression in Kenya when spaces of popular expression were all but monopolized by the government. It is in such sites as ‘Whispers’ that ‘spaces of freedom’ emerged, narrating the travails of the period and challenging the ‘bounds of the expressible’. Through ‘Whispers’, the article explores how age and gender are used as ‘instrumentalities of political survival’ but also how African maledom reacts to the challenges of globalization that threaten to disrupt the status quo, especially regarding the normative grammar of patriarchy. Further, the article explores how the twin elements of gender and age are manipulated by the Kenyan polity but also simultaneously reproduced and contested by society, resulting in a largely contradictory discourse that challenges but at the same time reaffirms the (il)legitimacy of gerontocracy and the sanctity of the male order.

Popular media for HIV/AIDS prevention? Comparing two comics: Kingo and the Sara Communication Initiative

This paper draws attention to some assumptions implicit in HIV/AIDS communication or prevention campaigns which use popular culture media, in this instance comics. Theoretically the analysis is placed in a framework of popular culture as the arena of negotiations about claims over hegemonic discourses. Methodologically the internal logics of a local Swahili comic from the magazine Kingo and of a comic from the Sara Initiative in Swahili (UNICEF-ESARO) are explored through a comparative textual analysis, focusing on differences and convergences in the use of dramaturgy and characterisation of the protagonists. The transformations of locally known comic characters and the differences in dramaturgical strategies are made visible in the comparison, exposing the communicative, historical and social underpinnings of both comics. It is argued that as long as these preconditions of the international campaigns, as well as of local popular culture production are not thoroughly explored, hegemonic Western claims of knowledge of HIV/AIDS will be rejected by African people (and why not?). The paper recommends that prevention design allow for ‘moments of freedom’ understood ‘as the potential to transform one's thoughts, emotions and experience into creations that can be communicated and shared’ (Fabian 1998).

Culture and Stigma: Popular Culture and the Case of Comic Books

This paper argues that a better articulated conception of stigma can enhance the analysis of popular culture. Beginning with the work on stigma by Erving Goffman and other scholars, the article contends that the stigma sometimes attached to the production and consumption of popular culture is distinct from the low status associated with certain forms of popular culture. Unlike low status, stigma discredits cultural forms and practitioners often rendering them problematic. This reassessment of stigma is applied and developed further through a study of comic books, showing the various ways stigma can operate in popular culture. The analysis suggests that stigma significantly impeded the evolution of the comic book as an art form, illustrating the potential negative effects of stigma in popular culture.

‘Years ago some lived here’: Aboriginal Australians and the production of popular culture, history and identity in 1930s Victoria

This article examines two phenomena of 1930s Victoria: the desire for Aboriginal culture to appear in popular exhibits and centennial celebrations, and visits by members of the public to Lake Tyers Aboriginal Station to view Aboriginal performers and purchase Aboriginal material culture. While different, they are nonetheless connected by a desire to witness the Aborigine as primitive spectacle. They demonstrate that popular interest in Indigenous culture was far more prevalent than has been previously acknowledged. The modernist preoccupation with primitivism, far from being an elitist, intellectual pursuit, was occurring at a very popular level. However, these ideas, while often more sympathetic to Indigenous culture and heritage, still viewed Aboriginal Australians as Other.

(Un)popular Culture and Citizenship — mapping illicit drugusing in Trainspotting

ABSTRACTThe principal aim of this article is to explore how the cultural politics of illicit drug-using are embedded in the citizenship idea. Given that many young people in contemporary Britain are identified with this particularly (un)popular culture, it is suggested that geography educators move beyond the traditional core of disciplinary concerns to engage with the everyday lifeworlds of the young. The article narrates the geographies of citizenship by utilising Irvine Welsh's iconic drugs text Trainspotting to deconstruct Scotland's vernacular geographies, geographies of ill-health and the nationalising geographies of the countryside. It elucidates the axes along which those involved in illicit drug-using are displaced by the imagined geographies of the nation state. If citizenship is to be reimagined in ways that are more inclusive, it is suggested that a futuring model of geography education might develop pedagogic practices which make use of popular cultural productions as a basis for critical thinking.

Film beyond boundaries: film, migrant narratives and other media

Film beyond boundaries: film, migrant narratives and other media

“Mrs. Chatelaine” vs. “Mrs. Slob”: Contestants, Correspondents and the Chatelaine Community in Action, 1961-1969

Scholars and critics alike have presumed that readers of popular women's magazines were merely passive consumers. That was not the case with Chatelaine magazine. Reader commentary was regularly featured in the magazine and often influenced editorial decisions. This analysis of the Mrs. Chatelaine contest provides a demographic profile of the reading community, an overview of the text and the producers, an examination of the national community of readers created at Chatelaine, it also explores the reaction of “average readers” to products of popular culture. In summary, readers' responded in a host of ways to the periodical. Some enjoyed the preferred meanings offered by the magazine, particularly of traditional fare (like the contest) which celebrated paragons of feminine virtue. Other readers were resistant to this material - they criticised, challenged, or parodied the contest - clearly demonstrating that “average” readers did not passively accept material which was at odds with their lives.

The Idiom of Age in a Popular Kenyan Newspaper Serial

This article examines the narratives constructed around age in Kenya. Noting the ‘spatial crossings’ of the Kenyan subject, who is as much attuned to the village ethos as he is to the globalized world, the article problematizes our approach to the study of age in Africa. It discusses the multiple narratives now constructed around age within the context of a society in rapid flux, especially underscoring its relationship to authority. The article proposes that there are multiple ways – some new, others merely reinvented – in which social and political relationships are now (re)constructed around age in Africa. The article is based on a critical reading of popular fiction, an important site of popular cultural production where the performance of political power is manifest and narratives around power are created and enacted. The work is based on a popular Kenyan newspaper serial ‘Whispers’, an important site of cultural production in the 1980s–1990s. This period witnessed ruthless political repression in Kenya when spaces of popular expression were all but monopolized by the government. It is in such sites as ‘Whispers’ that ‘spaces of freedom’ emerged, narrating the travails of the period and challenging the ‘bounds of the expressible’. Through ‘Whispers’, the article explores how age and gender are used as ‘instrumentalities of political survival’ but also how African maledom reacts to the challenges of globalization that threaten to disrupt the status quo, especially regarding the normative grammar of patriarchy. Further, the article explores how the twin elements of gender and age are manipulated by the Kenyan polity but also simultaneously reproduced and contested by society, resulting in a largely contradictory discourse that challenges but at the same time reaffirms the (il)legitimacy of gerontocracy and the sanctity of the male order.