bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Felman,Shoshana
Authors: Kilby Jane
Published: May 2017

Shoshana Felman (b. 1942) is Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University and her influence in the field of cultural and literary studies is accredited to the generative and interdisciplinary nature of her psychoanalytic reading. Like all critics of importance, Felman's contribution is methodological in origin, and for that reason more concerned with questions of pedagogy than knowledge production per se. She received her PhD from the University of Grenoble, France, before moving to Yale University, where she taught from 1970 until 2004, holding the post of Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature from 1986.
F
ish,
S
tanley
Authors: Eaglestone Robert
Published: May 2017

Stanley Fish (b. 1938) is one of the founders of reader‐response criticism, an approach to literature that emphasizes the reader's role in constructing literary meaning. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, where he took his PhD in 1962. He taught English for many years at Johns Hopkins University, served as Dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and ended his teaching career at Duke University. He has also written on contemporary political issues and law. He is an outspoken opponent of the move to make literary study more socially responsible and is a fervent advocate of a neo‐Humean skepticism regarding values.
F
oucault,
M
ichel
Authors: Downing Lisa
Published: May 2017

Michel Foucault was a French historian, philosopher, and literary critic whose analyses of the workings of power, language, and subjectivity have influenced contemporary debates on subjects as varied as sexuality, medicine, and social institutions. He is often associated, along with Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, with the poststructuralist current in French thought, partly a development of, partly a reaction against, linguistic and literary structuralism. However, it is difficult to ascribe any definitive disciplinary or philosophical label to Foucault's work. Foucault was born in 1926. He studied philosophy and psychology at university, undertook clinical work at the Parisian mental asylum Saint‐Anne, and contemplated training as a psychiatrist, before turning instead to critical historiography. He held academic positions in various disciplines (including literature, psychology, and philosophy) and institutions (including posts in Sweden and Tunisia), and was appointed to a Chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970. Foucault died in 1984 from an HIV‐related illness.
Gender Theory
Authors: Mitchell Kaye
Published: May 2017

Historically, the term “gender” has been used primarily as a grammatical term, referring to the classification of nouns (in languages including Latin, French, and German) as masculine, feminine, or neuter. It is derived from the Old French term for “genre” which, in turn, derives from the Latin
genus
, meaning “birth,” “family,” or “nation,” but also referring back to older and broader meanings such as “kind” or “type.” The other use of “gender,” to refer to the (human) state of being male or female, also dates back to the fourteenth century, but it's not until the twentieth century that the latter usage becomes common. In the late twentieth century, thanks largely to the influence of feminism, “gender” tends to be distinguished from “sex,” with the former seen as referring to the culturally attributed characteristics associated with being a woman or a man, and the latter viewed as a matter of nature or biology, although, as I'll go on to discuss, the sex/gender distinction continues to be a source of debate and contention both within and beyond feminism.
Genre
Authors: Belas Oliver
Published: May 2017

From the French for “kind” or “sort,” and etymologically derived from the Latin
genus
, the word “genre” has connotations of biological kind, and its use in relation to the arts begins in the late eighteenth century, not long after the establishment of Linnaean taxonomy. Theoretical and critical work on commercial or popular genres – notably detective and science fiction, but also pornography, the erotic thriller, the western, the romance – are relatively recent developments, emerging in number first in the late 1960s and early 1970s against the backdrop of New Left cultural politics. In literature, genre – for example, detective fiction in Auster (1987) – has been used as a metafictional cast within which questions of individual, collective, and authorial identity, as well as ideas of “textuality” and a textual or linguistic self, are interrogated. Notions of genre are implicated to varying degree in all literary study; the more refined and complex the study of literature becomes, the less stable are the ideas of genre and genres themselves. In literary studies today, scholarly focus has to some degree shifted away from definition: volumes in a series such as the Cambridge Companions to Literature dedicated to science fiction, crime fiction, the Gothic novel suggest, implicitly, that such genres should be thought of in the same terms as, say, modernism, Victorian, African American, or even single‐author studies – as broad fields of inquiry, rather than stably defined sets of texts.
Grosz,Elizabeth
Authors: Brahm Gabriel Noah
Published: May 2017

Elizabeth A. Grosz (b. 1952) is a renowned Australian materialist feminist philosopher of “difference” and “becoming,” working in the tradition of postmodern (late twentieth‐ century antinomian) French feminism and poststructuralism (post‐Marxist, Nietzschean‐inspired variations on Saussurean linguistics). Among male writers associated with the latter tendency, Gilles Deleuze increasingly occupied a privileged place in the texts of this otherwise woman‐centered thinker, as her thought developed under his influence in surprising ways throughout the 1990s and 2000s. She is a noted queer theorist who controversially critiques the value of the term “queer.”
Hybridity
Authors: Gyulay Nicole M.
Published: May 2017

An important term in postcolonial studies, hybridity is the intermixing of cultures that has occurred as a result of colonialism. Its full meaning in contemporary discourse is grounded in the theories of major postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, who conceives of hybridity as a “third space” in which cultural identity is negotiated in a way that subverts the power relations between colonizer and colonized.
J
ameson,
F
redric
Authors: Roberts Adam
Published: May 2017

Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) is an American literary and cultural critic, and is currently William A. Lane Professor in Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. His body of publications is notably, even prodigiously, diverse; however, his wider influence has mostly been felt in two areas. One is as one of America's most prominent Marxist thinkers; the other is as one of the defining voices in 1980s and 1990s debates about “postmodernism.”
L
aclau,
E
rnesto and
M
ouffe,
C
hantal
Authors: Clark Andrew
Published: May 2017

In 1985 the publication of
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
turned socialist theory into a new direction. Its authors, Ernesto Laclau (b. 1935 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Chantal Mouffe (b. 1943 in Charleroi, Belgium), open their book by referring to the “crossroads” of the contemporary Left: “Left‐wing thought today stands at a crossroads” (2001[1985]: 1). At stake in their work is thus a rethinking of the nature of leftist political theory – which in their eyes requires a deconstruction, rather than a dismissal, of the Marxist tradition.
Master Narrative
Authors: Russell Deirdre
Published: May 2017

Master narrative, metanarrative, metadis‐course, and grand narrative, as expounded by the French philosopher Jean‐François Lyotard (1924–98), are broadly synonymous terms which refer to totalizing social theories or philosophies of history which, appealing to notions of transcendental and universal truth, purport to offer a comprehensive account of knowledge and experience. “Meta” means beyond or about, and therefore here refers to all‐encompassing narratives which explain other, smaller narratives. Lyotard's account of metanarratives and their demise is a founding element of postmodernism. (Within narratology, “metanarrative” is also used in a distinct sense, as coined by the literary theorist Gérard Genette, to refer to stories within stories.)
M
itchell,
W. J. T.
Authors: Hensher Jonathan
Published: May 2017

W. J. T. Mitchell (b. 1942) is a scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature and is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also editor of
Critical Enquiry
. His extremely wide‐ranging output examines the relations between text and image across the frontiers of era and genre, from illuminated manuscripts to
Jurassic Park
. Firmly poststructuralist in his approach, Mitchell consistently seeks to question the definitions and boundaries of the verbal and the visual, rather than formulating any monolithic theory of textuality and visuality.
Moretti,Franco
Authors: Fothergill Anthony
Published: May 2017

Franco Moretti is a literary comparativist and theoretician whose roots in Marxist theory lend his work a sociological and historical orientation, while his innovatory methodology is increasingly global in its data‐based range of application and claims. “Global formalism” may best describe it.
New Historicism
Authors: Robson Mark
Published: May 2017

It is no exaggeration to say that new historicism has become the dominant mode of literary criticism in the Anglophone world since its emergence in the 1980s. Associated in particular with criticism of the early modern and romantic periods and the nineteenth century, some of the central tenets of the new historicist enterprise have seeped into criticism that would not necessarily identify itself directly with the movement. Inevitably, the force of its newness has dissipated into a retrenchment of older forms of historicism. While this mode of criticism in the forms in which it initially emerged does seem to be waning and there have been several announcements of its “death” its impact continues to be felt throughout Anglophone literary studies, and is also to be seen in disciplines such as art history and history.
Nomadism
Authors: Aldea Eva
Published: May 2017

Nomadism is a concept used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in a vast range of contexts, including mathematics, physics, cloths manufacture, metallurgy, music, and art, in their
A Thousand Plateaus
(1987 [1980]), with a contentious legacy in cultural and socioeconomic studies.
Orientalism
Authors: Bari Shahidha , Eaglestone Robert
Published: May 2017

“Orientalism,” a term which originally meant the depiction of Eastern or Middle Eastern culture by artists and writers in the West, or the academic discipline in the West that studied the East, was given a new burst of life and meaning by Edward Said's groundbreaking book
Orientalism
, published in 1978.
Postcolonial Studies and Diaspora Studies
Authors: Aguiar Marian , Greedharry Mrinalini , Tölölyan Khachig
Published: May 2017

Postcolonial studies takes an approach to the study of culture and society that pays particular attention to the practices, products, and consequences of European imperialism. In one sense, postcolonial studies begins with the period of decolonization of European empires that followed World War II. This is true not only in the sense that postcolonial studies would not be possible without the political reality of the drive to decolonize, but in the sense that the theory that we have now depends upon the body of critique, including speeches, novels, journalism, and pamphlets, that attended that political reality. In the British context, then, the era of decolonization begins roughly with the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, followed by the independence of Ghana in 1957, and it continues into the late 1960s and early ‘70s when most of the former British and French colonies in Africa became formally independent nations and European empires were finally dissolved. In the French context, decolonization begins during the gradual withdrawal from French Indo‐China in 1949–54 and from Tunisia in 1956 and is confirmed by Algeria winning its independence in 1962.
Queer Theory
Authors: Helmers Matthew
Published: May 2017

What is queer theory? This question is precisely one that queer theory itself continually asks. Queer theory, over the 20 years of its existence, has attempted to answer this question in numerous ways: historically, by discovering or writing the history of queerness; theoretically, by examining the possibilities for a text‐based methodological approach called “queering”; and even practically, by instantiating university departments and degree programs under the title “Queer Theory.” Yet for all this work, queer theory remains a nebulous and unwieldy category of critical practice which has continued to polarize critics in a fashion similar to the debates over the use of the term “queer” itself.
Religious Studies and the Return of the Religious
Authors: Bradley Arthur
Published: May 2017

In the context of contemporary literary and cultural theory, the return of the religious (which also goes under the name of the religious or theological turn) has manifested itself in a number of different ways. First, and most visibly, a significant number of leading contemporary philosophers commonly identified as atheist or, at least, secularist in orientation (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean‐François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean‐Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Charles Taylor) began to explore religious texts, themes or problems in their work over the course of the past 20 years. Second, the return of the religious has also taken the form of a revisionist reading of the religious dimensions of continental philosophy itself which both offers reinterpretations of canonical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas and reappraises hitherto marginalized or more secondary figures like Eric Petersen, Henri de Lubac, Jacob Taubes, and Michel de Certeau. Finally, the religious turn has also prompted a thoroughgoing re‐evaluation of a Judeo‐Christian tradition that had too easily been written off as metaphysical or ontotheological together with a contemporary reassessment of theological concepts such as messianic time, justice, givenness, confession, forgiveness, the universal, apophatic or negative theology, and, most recently, political theology. If the return of the religious in contemporary theory takes many different forms, though, a common theme running through all work in the field is a self‐conscious reflection on its own inherent assumptions. What exactly is “the religious”? How does its “return” manifest itself? Why has it come back now – if, indeed, it ever went away in the first place?
Specters
Authors: Moore Gerald
Published: May 2017

The specter is a concept given renewed currency by Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher best known for his critique of Western Metaphysics known as “deconstruction,” who used it to characterize the ways in which intellectual, historical, and political legacies come to haunt contemporary thinking. However, it also has an older and wider usage. European Enlightenment sought to banish the supernatural by throwing light over the forces of unreason, cultivating science to replace superstition. Yet the so‐called crisis of Western modernity has seen the spectral return as one of the names of the otherness and difference that reason allegedly doesn't so much explain away as deny. We see this in the way the specter comes to designate the point at which fantasy and reality become intertwined, rendered inseparable by the limitations of reason and experience. Earlier thinkers emphasized the possibility of using reason to exorcise or explain away ghostly apparitions. While still denying the existence of supernatural, metaphysical reality, more recent analyses suggest that exorcism is impossible and deploy motifs of spectrality to illustrate the haunting incompleteness of our reality and the constitutive role of the imagination in constructing it.
Stiegler,Bernard
Authors: Bradley Arthur
Published: May 2017

Bernard Stiegler (b. 1952) is a contemporary French philosopher of technology who is most famous for his ongoing book projectLa Technique et le temps [Technics and Time]. He is the founder of the group Ars Industrialis, and currently works as the director of the Institute for Cultural Development at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Subversion
Authors: Grindon Gavin
Published: May 2017

Subversion in literary and cultural theory is usually understood, broadly, as a matter of the reversal of established values, or the insertion of other values into them. The relationship between this mostly cultural or ideological subversion and the actual subversion of existing social relations is a hotly contested topic. Much literary and cultural theory which has developed from a critical standpoint, whether Marxist, feminist or otherwise, has become concerned with debating the extent of subversion's potential, presence or extent. As such, any debate on subversion normally takes place in close relation to a debate on its opposite: containment or recuperation.
Trauma and Memory Studies
Authors: Whitehead Anne
Published: May 2017

Trauma and memory studies together represent a field which has witnessed a dynamic growth in interest and popularity, particularly since the early 1990s. Trauma and memory studies represent complementary and interrelated fields of study, and trauma can usefully be considered in this context as a pathological form of remembering. For the purposes of this entry, then, trauma studies will be considered as a subset of the broader field of memory studies. Trauma and memory studies represent a field which is highly contested and subject to vigorous debate, in part because of the recent explosion of interest in this area which currently continues unabated.
V
irilio,
P
aul
Authors: James Ian
Published: May 2017

Best known as a thinker of speed and of the impact of technologies of speed on social and political development, Paul Virilio (b. 1932) engages with a very wide range of disciplines and critical issues: with questions of war and military strategy, with the history of cinema, the nature of modern media and telecommunications, and with the state of contemporary cultural and artistic production. His work touches on politics, international relations theory and war studies, on media and social theory, aesthetics, urbanism and environmental thinking. Within this broad range of concerns the question of technology has played a central and determining role. His work critically explores how and why technology has been, and will continue to be, fundamental to the shaping of human experience and historical development.
W
ittig,
M
onique
Authors: Rine Abigail
Published: May 2017

Monique Wittig was a novelist, theorist, and feminist activist, known primarily for her fictional works and theorization of feminism from a materialist, lesbian perspective. Wittig was a central figure in the feminist movement in France, and her writings on heterosexuality and the oppression of women have greatly influenced feminist thought and queer theory.
B
ordwell,
D
avid
Authors: Hoyle Brian
Published: May 2017

David Bordwell (b. 1947) is a leading figure in the field of film studies. His work, which frequently combines a rare gift for close analysis with polemical examinations of film studies as a discipline, has made him one of the most respected, influential, and controversial figures in the field. His numerous publications, although varied in subject, have shown a general interest in film style, history, and narratology. He has also championed empirical research and cognitive approaches to film studies, while criticizing more hermeneutic approaches, grand theory, and cultural studies.
C
homsky,
N
oam
Authors: Edgley Alison
Published: May 2017

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) is a groundbreaking linguist whose revolutionary theory of generative grammar, developed in the 1950s, successfully challenged dominant behaviorist accounts of language acquisition. However, since the 1960s he has also become well known as a political activist and outspoken critic of American foreign policy.
City, The
Authors: Morris Brian
Published: May 2017

Much recent work in cultural studies has focused on cultural life in specific cities, as well as on abstract considerations of how urban life as such has its own particular history; how the city sets up imagined social relations between individuals and communities; and how urban life produces distinct forms of selfhood, consciousness, and ways of being in the world. Cultural studies of “the city” (see Hubbard [2006] for a good overview) have focused on two key dimensions.
Commodity/ Commodification and Cultural Studies
Authors: Jenkins Eugenia Zuroski
Published: May 2017

In modern capitalist societies, cultural products function as commodities that are manufactured and distributed to meet the demands of a consuming public. In literary and cultural criticism, “commodification” and “consumer culture” are terms that direct us to the intimate relationship between large‐scale economic systems, particularly market capitalism, and hegemonic cultural ideologies. “Commodities” are objects designed or promoted for purchase; the people who purchase them are “consumers,” a term that indicates the level of desire cultivated in the purchasing public for commodified things. In a consumer culture, one's desire for commodities feels like a need and is never fully satisfied. The public's perpetual acquisition or “consumption” of goods drives an economic system based on the production and circulation of commodities.
Communication and Media Studies
Authors: Rosteck Thomas
Published: May 2017

Media studies is a broad academic discipline that seeks to understand the nature, content, history, and social impact of various media, including mass media such as film and television. As practiced in the field of communication, media studies is but one of the many disciplines in the humanities to be revolutionized by the “New” Critical theory and by recent new approaches to studying culture. However, critical/cultural media studies has a long history. Before its encounter with contemporary cultural studies, media studies (incorporating related fields such as television studies, film studies, cyberspace studies, and journalism studies) was shaped by rhetorical theory and criticism, influenced by German critical social theory and largely defined in opposition to a sociologically oriented behavioral research methodology.
Cultural Geography
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: May 2017

Cultural geography is a subdiscipline of human geography that explores the human organization of space and the impact of human activities and culture upon the natural environment. Human geography is one of the most active and interdisciplinary areas within the social sciences. There is a crossover in methodological and theoretical approaches with disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. But cultural geography in particular retains its focus on culture and its signifying practices of self, groups, the creation of “others” and of worlds of experience while maintaining an emphasis on environment, space, and place. According to one of its most politicized proponents, its focus “includes the investigation of material culture, social practices and symbolic meanings, approached from a number of different perspectives” (McDowell 1994: 146). Broadly, the development of cultural geography arises in dynamic opposition to positivist themes in geography. We must remember that the roots of academic geography lie in colonial exploration and “discovery” (see, e.g., Driver 1992), which explains its strong predilection for “the empirical,” with fieldwork across sites, of going “out there” into the “field,” developing mostly descriptive accounts and seemingly hostile to theoretical innovations from outside (see Anderson et al. 2003:8). Despite‐or perhaps because of – geography's colonial heritage, there is a critical edge to cultural geography that asserts its relevance, especially in the “new” cultural geography, by being radically interdisciplinary and by being influenced by, and in turn influencing, other disciplines and subdisciplines across the humanities and the social sciences.
Cultural Policy
Authors: Miller Toby
Published: May 2017

“Cultural policy” refers to institutional support for aesthetic creativity that provides a bridge between art and collective ways of life. Governments, trade unions, colleges, social movements, community groups, foundations, and businesses aid, fund, control, promote, teach, and evaluate culture. This maybe done through law courts that permit erotica on the grounds that they are works of art; curricula that require students to study texts because they are uplifting; film commissions that sponsor scripts to reflect national identity; or foundations that fund the community culture of minorities as a means of supplementing dominant culture. In turn, these criteria may themselves derive, respectively, from legal doctrine, citizenship education, tourism aims, or philanthropic desires.
Diaspora
Authors: Zuberi Nabeel
Published: May 2017

The word “diaspora,” rooted in the Greek verb
speirein
(to sow) and the preposition
dia
(over), refers to a scattered population resulting from the voluntary or involuntary movement of a social group from its homeland to settlement in at least two other locations. The word has a venerable history, but the accelerated displacement, migration, and resettlement of peoples in the late twentieth century invigorated diaspora as a multifaceted concept for intellectual and political debate. Diaspora discourse reveals the historically contingent, flexible, and contested meanings of the term. Globalization and multiculturalism have often framed recent uses of diaspora and inflected arguments about its value as an analytical category. It has been central to discussions about transnational politics and culture based on, or organized around, ethnic, racial, and religious lines. The experience of diaspora is often pitched in relation to ethnic or national identities, sometimes as sustaining and extending nationalisms, other times as lacking a sense of proper attachment to place and identity. For many theorists, diaspora offers critical distance from ethnic and national forms of belonging. In some instances, the word is even unmoored from people to refer to the dispersal of objects.
Disability Studies and Cultural Studies
Authors: Davis Lennard , Drazen Carlos Clarke
Published: May 2017

Disability studies, a branch of cultural studies, draws upon numerous disciplines in its attempt better to understand disability within its social, political, historical, and cultural context. Emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s, disability studies, deriving its impetus from feminist, race, and queer studies, employed the tools of the newly burgeoning cultural studies to attempt to place and understand the cultural, political, and social context of disability as an identity. However, while cultural studies tended to take a global or national view of “culture,” disability studies raised the issue of whether a single identity – disability – is sufficient to identify a culture, and, if so, what the parameters of that culture might be. Disability, unlike gender or race, is a very fluid category. One can be “normal” one moment and disabled the next, and one can return to “normalcy” by means of cure, remission, or prosthesis. Disability studies, then, had to evaluate how to think of culture and identity given the seemingly amorphous and shifting nature of its own identity, as well as the long‐term regard of disability by the humanities as being the province of scientific rather than artistic discourse. This study involved how disability is viewed within a larger ableist culture, how it is represented in mainstream and alternative media, how it may be theorized in relation to other identities, and how it intersects with issues of social class, postmodern and postcolonial analyses of knowledge, and power. Disability studies concerned itself with trying to understand and construct the way that dominant ableist definitions of “normality” can be imposed on people with physical and mental differences.
F
iske,
J
ohn
Authors: Shepard Iris
Published: May 2017

John Fiske has been a pioneering critic of popular culture (especially television) since the 1970s. The focus of his work includes popular culture, mass culture, and television studies. Fiske was born and educated in Britain. After graduation from Cambridge University, he traveled and taught widely in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. Because of his international experiences, Fiske is referred to as a “peripatetic student of popular culture” (Docker 1994: 158). While teaching in Australia, Fiske helped establish the
Australian Journal of Cultural Studies
. In 2000, after 12 years of teaching there, Fiske was awarded emeritus status as a Professor of Letters and Science/ Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin.
G
eertz,
C
lifford
Authors: Paterson Mark
Published: May 2017

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) was a groundbreaking cultural anthropologist whose techniques for the interpretation of cultural practices have been widely influential, not only in anthropology, but in fields such as literary criticism, where they exercised considerable influence on the development of the New Historicism. Part of the wave of veterans suddenly inducted into college life after World War II, Geertz originally aspired to be a famous novelist in the vein of John Steinbeck or Jack London. Having grown up in Depression‐era California, he applied to Antioch College, a small liberal arts college in southern Ohio where the atmosphere was conducive to both countercultural expression and intellectual exploration. As an aspiring writer, he originally enrolled in English, but soon switched to philosophy. Unable to find work after graduation, he was advised by a philosophy professor to pursue further study in the area of anthropology. Swept up in the spirit of postwar adventure, he joined the social relations program at Harvard, a then unusual blend of anthropology, sociology, and psychology at a time when anthropology was mostly physical anthropology and aligned with the more scientific techniques of archaeology. The Social Relations Department was a gathering of academic fugitives from many disciplines, together aiming for a “common language” in the social sciences. He was aided in this endeavor by being brought up to speed in areas such as anthropology but also in the fields of social psychology, sociology (Talcott Parsons was a contemporary in social relations), and much else besides. Having become an accidental anthropologist, Geertz and his first wife Hildred then found themselves doing their first stint of fieldwork in Indonesia, a place to which he would return to perform innovative fieldwork. After a year at Berkeley Geertz spent 10 years at the University of Chicago (1960–70), whence he also conducted fieldwork in Morocco; he then spent 30 years in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, where he was Emeritus Professor before he died in 2006 at the age of 80.
G
ilroy,
P
aul
Authors: Dworkin Dennis
Published: May 2017

A cultural theorist, critic, and scholar of black popular culture (who is also a musician and has been a DJ), Paul Gilroy has been in the forefront of articulating a cultural understanding of race and racism in the contemporary world. He was born in London in 1956 and is from an English and Guyanese background (his mother being the novelist, children's writer, critic, and teacher Beryl Gilroy). He attended the University of Sussex as an undergraduate and received his PhD from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. He has held academic positions in both Britain and the United States, including Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Yale University. At Yale he was the Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of Sociology and African American Studies and chair of the Department of African American Studies. He is currently the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics.
H
araway,
D
onna
Authors: Schneider Joseph
Published: May 2017

Donna Jeanne Haraway (b. 1944) is a scholar whose writings, teachings, and politics have helped to create and shape, across the last decades of the twentieth century, the interdisciplinary fields of feminist science studies and the cultural studies of science. Through several original books, scores of articles and essays, and hundreds of presentations – a body of work recognized by several prestigious awards – Haraway, in a complex, densely cited, and collegial style rich with both figural and empirical detail, has developed and pursued a series of critical questions about the practices and products of techno‐scientific knowing and being that are at the center of Western human studies scholarship. She is currently Professor in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Hegemony
Authors: Ives Peter
Published: May 2017

The term “hegemony” (derived from the Greek
hegemon
: leader, ruler, or guide) is generally used in literary and cultural studies to denote how power is used to construct and maintain the consent of those governed. In this sense, it has recently been associated with questions of identity politics and the politics of culture. However, “hegemony” is also used in a number of different and even inconsistent ways. For example, it is commonly used as a synonym of “superpower,” as in the global hegemony of the US. The emphasis is often on the pervasiveness of power, or its “total social authority” (Hebdige 1979: 15–16). Thus when writers such as Noam Chomsky use it in describing the US it is almost synonymous with “cultural imperialism” without significant emphasis on the choices of those who consent, as with other usages.
h
ooks,
b
ell
Authors: Florence Namulundah
Published: May 2017

Born Gloria Watkins in 1952, the African American cultural critic bell hooks is a prominent public intellectual. In her prolific writing, teaching, film appearances, and public lectures, hooks passionately critiques what she sees as a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The work of hooks reflects the influence of critiques of social hierarchies by Sojourner Truth, Paulo Freire, Gustavo Gutierrez, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Toni Morrison, among others.
Identity Politics
Authors: Mohanty Satya P.
Published: May 2017

Identity politics involves joint political action by individuals who feel themselves united by membership in a marginalized social category (ethnicity, gender, class, religion) that gives them common political interests. However, more than almost any other popular term in contemporary culture, “identity politics” poses a problem of definition. Many academic scholars equate the term with the tendency to treat social identities as both predetermined and unchanging as well as with a simple‐minded view of politics shaped by such “essentialist” views of social agents. For many practitioners, however, as well as a growing number of theorists, both academic and otherwise, identity politics and the notions of identity that accompany it are more complex. They point out that identity politics has been the basis of some of the most progressive social movements in history, especially in modern times. Defenders of this more complex view of identity politics thus see it as neither simply good nor simply bad; they focus on identities as multivalent social phenomena, and consider our views about them to be both fallible and corrigible. Students of culture and society would do well, then, to begin by being clear about their own working definition of identity politics as well as the view of (social) identity it presupposes.
K
racauer,
S
iegfried
Authors: Solomon Jeff
Published: May 2017

Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) rose to fame as one of the best‐known cultural critics of Weimar Germany before fleeing the Nazi occupation of Europe to re‐establish his career in the US. Born to a middle‐class German Jewish family in Frankfurt‐am‐Main, Kracauer was originally trained as an architect, though he also studied sociology and philosophy with Georg Simmel and Max Scheler, informally instructed Theodor Adorno on Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
, and earned his doctorate in engineering in 1914. In 1921, after a disappointing career as an architect, Kracauer turned to journalism full time, first as a freelance writer in the arts and culture section of the trendsetting liberal newspaper,
Frankfurter Zeitung
, and then as the paper's editor from 1924 to 1933. Kracauer fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for Paris, where he struggled to earn his living publishing essays, fiction, and longer works of cultural criticism. When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Kracauer was again forced to flee. In 1941, with assistance from Adorno and Max Horkheimer, he relocated to the US, taking a position with the Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Vowing never again to write in his native German, Kracauer taught himself to write in English and then resumed his career, emerging as one of the most celebrated mid‐century voices on film criticism and the philosophy of history. Kracauer was appointed research director of the Empirical Social Research Department at Columbia University in 1951. He died in New York in 1966.
L
efebvre,
H
enri
Authors: Highmore Ben
Published: May 2017

Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), a French philosopher and sociologist, established the critical analysis of everyday life as the central component for understanding culture and society. While he spent most of his life in Paris he was also engaged in the study of rural society and never severed his ties with his birthplace in the French Pyrenees. He was a communist but was expelled from the party in 1958 for his general recalcitrance to the party line. Throughout his life he was connected to various avant‐garde cultural and social movements: Dada and surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Situationist International in the 1960s – and his love of art and literature comes through in everything he writes. During World War II he fought on behalf of the French Resistance.
Lifestyles
Authors: Lewis Tania
Published: May 2017

In cultural studies and sociology, the term “lifestyle” refers to a distinctive style or mode of living adopted by individuals and groups. Associated in particular with contemporary consumer culture, the concept of lifestyle encompasses a wide range of practices, habits, and values, from people's diets and fashion choices to their interpersonal relationships and hobbies. It has also become a key term in public health where issues like obesity are often framed today in terms of people's lifestyle “choices” and behaviors. Another way in which lifestyle is a pivotal concept is in marketing and advertising circles. Since the 1960s marketers have looked for broad lifestyle patterns through which they can categorize consumers into different groups based on their spending power, habits, attitudes, and tastes. In the 1960s and ‘70s the term “lifestyles” also took on another set of connotations with the emergence of various hippie or counter‐cultural modes of living. Often associated with a degree of freedom from social constraints, today such alternative lifestyles include everything from ecopolitics and communal living to new ageism, with many of these lifestyles having been absorbed into contemporary “mainstream” consumer culture.
Marcuse,Herbert
Authors: Libretti Tim
Published: May 2017

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), a German philosopher and social theorist, was one of the leading figures in Marxist intellectual circles in the twentieth century. His intellectual and political odyssey constitutes an important chapter in the tradition and development of Marxist thought and in intellectual history generally, resulting in a body of work characterized by strikingly original multidisciplinary research that engages philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. This remarkable odyssey featured an early philosophical apprenticeship to Martin Heidegger, later membership in the Institute for Social Research where he studied and theorized alongside other Frankfurt School theorists such as T. W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1933, Marcuse left Germany to escape Nazi persecution, eventually settling in the United States, where he pursued a career that included positions in the Office of Secret Services and the State Department (motivated by his desire, as a Jew who fled Europe, to fight fascism) as well as academic stints at Columbia University, Brandeis University, and the University of California at La Jolla, where in the 1960s and 1970s he became a major influence on and defender of the New Left in both the United States and Europe, achieving a world renown that has since waned. His rise to intellectual and political eminence was due in part to his incisive ability to rethink Marxism and to synthetically engage Marx and Freud in the post‐World War II socioeconomic environment, characterized by both abundance and the rise of a technocratic structure that ushered in the viability of imagining an end to poverty at the same as it posed the threat of a repressive society of total control.
M
odleski,
T
ania
Authors: Hurley Megan
Published: May 2017

Tania Modleski (b. 1949) is a prominent feminist critic of popular culture whose work focuses on popular texts by and about women or produced for female audiences. She is particularly concerned with examinations of the ways in which these narratives address women's needs in ways that perpetuate patriarchal hegemony and how artists and critics might address women's needs in more radical, liberating ways. Educated at the State University of New York at Albany and Stanford University, Modleski has spent the majority of her career as a Professor of English at the University of Southern California. She has served on numerous panels and editorial boards. She is also the editor of
Studies in Entertainment
(1986).
M
ohanty,
C
handra
T
alpade
Authors: Libretti Tim
Published: May 2017

Chandra Talpade Mohanty (b. 1955) is an important feminist theorist who associates herself most assertively in her writing with feminist struggles and the theory and politics informing those struggles. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the vital contributions of Mohanty's feminist political thinking result from her writings' engagement with and emergence from the crossroads of many theoretical, political, and activist traditions, where, for example, Western feminist scholarship meets the historical realities of Third World women's lives and Third World anticolonial critiques; where feminist scholarship and the academy more broadly meet feminist political practice and struggles for eco‐nomic and social justice more generally; and where a feminist politics must of necessity meet, inform, and transform into anticapitalist and antiglobalization struggles to realize its vision. While her work engages issues of economic and social justice on a global scale from what is arguably a profoundly historicized and deeply layered Third World Marxist feminist perspective, she is always clear that a feminist perspective centers her vision and that her work “is based on a deep belief in the power and significance of feminist thinking in struggles for economic and social justice” (2003: 1).
O
hmann,
R
ichard
Authors: Harkin Patricia
Published: May 2017

Richard M. Ohmann (b. 1931) was a pioneer in exploring the political implications of the study of literary texts, and in particular in analyzing the institutions that construct and sustain conditions of labor in part as a response to the Cold War, the military conflict in Vietnam, and the social conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. He was educated at Harvard (MA 1954; PhD 1960), studied at Oxford with the speech act theorist J. L. Austin, and taught at Wesleyan University from 1962 until his retirement in 1997. The salient analytic gesture in Ohmann's work is denaturalizing; his characteristic tactic is the juxtaposition of events and discourses that cultural institutions usually keep separate. His purposes are to reveal the contradictions to which capitalism gives rise and ponder “how consciousness and culture interact with material life” (1987: 116). His first book,
Shaw: The Style and the Man,
invoked speech act theory and transformational grammar to define the patterns of that playwright's “epistemic stances” (1962: xii).
Performativity and Cultural Studies
Authors: Wagner Matthew
Published: May 2017

Construed most broadly, performativity refers to the theory that speech or action is constitutive, rather than merely representative, of reality. This is especially germane to questions of identity and identity politics. In other words, statements (speech) or behavior (action) cannot be limited to describing or outwardly manifesting what is real; they should be understood as actually making up what is real. This notion has its most direct roots in the work of speech theorist J. L. Austin, whose key lectures were published posthumously in the 1960s and 1970s; it is perhaps more commonly associated, however, with the writings of Judith Butler, who from the 1980s onward has applied the theory specifically to the discourse of gender identity.
Postmodernism in Popular Culture
Authors: Shepard Iris
Published: May 2017

Though first used in the 1930s to describe a specific conservative counter‐trend within Latin American modernism, the term “postmodernism” as we now generally use it refers to a specific style of art and thought that rose to prominence in the United States and Europe after World War II, reaching its full definition as a movement by the early 1970s. As the name implies, postmodernism is generally defined in relation to Western modernism, though the exact nature of this relationship is still contested. One thing almost all theorists of postmodernism agree on, however, is that, while it draws in significant ways upon the modernist tradition of “high” art, postmodernism also maintains a close connection with popular culture, bridging the gap between “high” and “low” art that many see as central to the ethos of modernism.
Radio Studies
Authors: Chignell Hugh
Published: May 2017

Radio studies is a subfield of media studies that emerged in the 1990s to provide the same sort of analysis of radio as a medium that was already being applied to other media, such as film and television. Encouraged by the comparative neglect of radio in the larger subject, it was initiated by a decisive turn away from the study of visual media (mainly television and film) toward the nonvisual and older medium of radio. Because of these origins, radio studies, a diffuse and hybrid amalgam, is united simply by the attention paid to radio at the expense of television and film, rather than any coherent underpinning theory. Most published work that shares this focus can be classified as part of radio studies, and by this sleight of hand works of cultural history or on the wider auditory culture can be seen as part of the new subject, irrespective of the intentions of the author.