In 1977 a single film called Star Wars exploded on the consciousness of the world. Since then the franchise, created by George Lucas, has become a global entertainment corporation. The merchandise of the original trilogy was largely confined to toys and games, but those games have since become computerized, the toys more sophisticated, and Star Wars has moved into the multi-media environment of the twenty-first century in ways unimaginable in the long-ago world of 1977. Computer games and web sites, novels, animated television shows, as well as a new trilogy of films, have all...

Sport Commerce Culture makes a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the critical analysis of today s highly mediated and commercialized sport spectacles. David L. Andrews explores sport s interdependent relation with the commercial structures and rhythms that define the experience of consumer capitalism within the contemporary United States. Through a series of highly original, interrelated essays, Andrews uncovers the complex connections between sport and contemporary processes of commercialization, commodification, and mass mediation. Focusing attention on a...

In the second edition of Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, Henry A. Giroux uses the metaphor of the zombie to highlight how America has embraced a machinery of social and civil death that chills any vestige of a robust democracy. He charts the various ways in which the political, corporate, and intellectual zombies that rule America embrace death-dealing institutions such as a bloated military, the punishing state, a form of predatory capitalism, and an authoritarian, death-driven set of policies that sanction torture, targeted assassinations, and a permanent...