This is the first book to look at how lesbians and gays use history to define themselves as social, cultural, and political subjects. Bravmann shows how historical representations are dynamic conversations between past and present, creating individual and collective meanings. Exploring the theoretical and political ramifications of this project, he considers how historiography, ancient Greece, the Stonewall riots, and postmodern historical texts inform and reflect race, gender, class, and political differences in queer subjectivity.

Drawing on historical, sociological and literary theory, Krishan Kumar examines the rise of English nationalism and issues of race and ethnicity from the Norman Conquest to the present. This study encourages reconsideration of pre-conceptions about nationalism and identity.

Drawing on historical, sociological and literary theory, Krishan Kumar examines the rise of English nationalism and issues of race and ethnicity from the Norman Conquest to the present. This study encourages reconsideration of pre-conceptions about nationalism and identity.

This original and engaging book investigates American television viewing habits as a distinct cultural form. Based on an empirical study of the day-to-day use of television by working people, it develops a unique theoretical approach integrating cultural sociology, postmodernism and the literature of media effects to explore the way in which people give meaning to their viewing practices. Accessibly written and at the cutting edge of cultural studies and television research, this book is essential reading for students and academics in cultural studies, television research, media and...

This exciting new volume brings together seminal work by leading figures in what is emerging as a new and important intellectual tradition, relating them to other work in sociology and different disciplines. The book is divided into sections on Culture as Text and Code, The Production and Reception of Culture, and Culture in Action, each containing edited theoretical and empirical contributions that address the key debates in cultural sociology: the autonomy of culture, power and culture, structure and agency, and the concept of meaning.

The Unfinished Revolution compares the post-Second World War histories of the American and British gay and lesbian movements with an eye toward understanding how distinct political institutional environments affect the development, strategies, goals, and outcomes of a social movement. The two case study chapters function as brief historical sketches that provide an introduction to British and American gay and lesbian history. An appendix provides a useful evaluative summary of common social movement theories. The book will be of value to academics and students of sociology, political science,...

In this groundbreaking book, influential cultural sociologist Alberto Melucci delves deeper into questions about the self as both a psychological and sociocultural entity, particularly in the context of a global society for which information has become a basic resource. He accounts for the self as a site of highly subjective and intimate experiences, such as crying, laughing and loving, and in relation to social structural dynamics, through more impersonal experiences, such as the experience of time, and links of the self to politics.

This analysis of two hundred American and Canadian novels offers a new theory of national literatures, demonstrating that national canon formation occurs in tandem with nation-building. It accounts for cross-national differences and illuminates the historically constructed and symbolic nature of the relationship between literature and the nation-state. High-culture national literatures are selected as different from other novels; popular-culture bestsellers are mass market commodities for the largest, least differentiated audience.

In Louis XIV's France, land took on new importance in politics and court life. A sequestered aristocracy promenaded in formal gardens while the military moved across the landscape, marking state boundaries with fortresses and refiguring the interior with canals and forests. Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design, showing how the gardens at Versailles showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality.

The authors argue that American patriotism is a civil religion organized around a sacred flag, whose followers engage in periodic blood sacrifice of their own children to unify the group. Using an anthropological theory, this groundbreaking book presents and explains the ritual sacrifices and regeneration that constitute American nationalism, the factors making particular elections or wars successful or unsuccessful rituals, the role of the mass media in the process, and the sense of malaise that has pervaded American society during the post-World War II period.