..". acute look at the state of contemporary culture... A humorous... book, it yields rewarding advice for our perception of reality and fiction." --Back Stage / Shoot

"Mellencamp's ease of movement between the conceptual and the commonplace is the great strength of this work.... High Anxiety is an invaluable contribution to the cultural studies debate... " --Art + Text

Written with wit and flair, High Anxiety is a critique of the temporality of U.S. television, a narrative journey between Freud's texts on obsession and the cult of anxiety pervading contemporary culture....

..". this is no doctrinaire tract but rather a concerted attempt to look at important cultural problems from a fresh perspective.... Chow's book is an excellent example of its type."--Discourse & Society

"I believe that Rey Chow has written a powerful set of essays which offer a critical strategy for approaching questions of otherness and other societies by forcing us to constantly reassess our position." --Harry Harootunian

Writing Diaspora questions aspects of cultural politics, including the legacies of European imperialism and colonialism, the media, pedagogy, literature,...

Amateur film has been seen as the junkheap of private culture. Yet music videos recycle home movies as authenticity; commercials copy its style to sell intimacy; documentaries use it to recount history "from below."

Reel Families is the first historical study of amateur film, the most pervasive of media. Patricia Zimmerman charts the history of this medium from 1897 to the present, examining how ideological, technical, and social constraints have stunted amateur film's potential for extending media production beyond corporate monopolies and into the hands of everyday people. She...

Barbara Browning combines a lyrical, personal narrative with incisive theoretical accounts of Brazilian dance cultures. While she brings ethnographic, historiographic, and musicological scholarship to bear on her subject, Browning writes as a dancer, fully engaged in the dance cultures of Brazil and of Brazilian exile communities in the U.S.

Toward Cinema and Its Double brings together Laleen Jayamanne s discussions of Australian films, Sri Lankan films, European art films, silent film comedy, contemporary American films, and her own films. While some of her essays are based on formal film analysis, others include more theoretically based ways of considering films. In her studies, Jayamanne employs Walter Benjamin s and Theodor Adorno s concept of mimesis, and Gilles Deleuze s theses on cinematic time and movement as tools for thinking about the cinematic experience in new ways.

Toward Cinema and Its Double addresses a...