She's skinny, white, and blond. She's Barbie--an icon of femininity to generations of American girls. She's also multiethnic and straight--or so says Mattel, Barbie's manufacturer. But, as "Barbie's Queer Accessories "demonstrates, many girls do things with Barbie never seen in any commercial. Erica Rand looks at the corporate marketing strategies used to create Barbie's versatile (She's a rapper She's an astronaut She's a bride ) but nonetheless premolded and still predominantly white image. Rand weighs the values Mattel seeks to embody in Barbie--evident, for example, in her improbably...

Imagine Fredric Jameson--the world's foremost Marxist critic--kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In "The""Jamesonian Unconscious," a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson's work and career that refines and extends his most important themes.
In an unusual biographical move, Burnham...

This entertaining and playful book views Disney World as much more than the site of an ideal family vacation. Blending personal meditations, interviews, photographs, and cultural analysis, "Inside the Mouse" looks at Disney World s architecture and design, its consumer practices, and its use of Disney characters and themes. This book takes the reader on an alternative ride through "the happiest place on earth" while asking "What makes this forty-three-square-mile theme park the quintessential embodiment of American leisure?"
Turning away from the programmed entertainment that Disney...

Moving across academic disciplines, geographical boundaries, and literary genres, "Home and Harem" examines how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in nineteenth-century imperialist England and colonial India. Inderpal Grewal's study of the narratives and discourses of travel reveals the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. Reworking colonial discourse studies to include both sides of the colonial divide, this work is also the first to...

Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the validity of Marxism and Marxist theory has undergone intense scrutiny both within and outside the academy. In "Lukacs After Communism," Eva L. Corredor conducts ten lively and engaging interviews with a diverse group of international scholars to address the continued relevance of Gyorgy Lukacs's theories to the post-communist era. Corredor challenges these theoreticians, who each have been influenced by the man once considered the foremost theoretician of Marxist aesthetics, to reconsider the Lukacsean legacy and to speculate on Marxist...

Presents an overview of the power of written discourse in the historical formation of Latin American societies, and highlights the central role of cities in deploying and reproducing that power. This title explores the place of writing and urbanisation in the imperial designs of the Iberian colonialists.

Units, rules, codes, systems: this is how most linguists study language. Integrationalists such as Michael Toolan, however, focus instead on how language functions in seamless tandem with the rest of human activity. In "Total Speech," Toolan provides a clear and comprehensive account of integrationalism, a major new theory of language that declines to accept that text and context, language and world, are distinct and stable categories. At the same time, Toolan extends the integrationalist argument and calls for a radical change in contemporary theorizing about language and...

Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. Variously termed France s leading philosopher of postmodernism and a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left, he might also be called our leading philosopher of seduction or of mass culture. Following his acclaimed America and Cool Memories, this book is the third in a series of personal records in hyperreality. Idiosyncratic, outrageous, and brilliantly original, Baudrillard here casts his net widely and combines autobiographical memories with further reflections...

Units, rules, codes, systems: this is how most linguists study language. Integrationalists such as Michael Toolan, however, focus instead on how language functions in seamless tandem with the rest of human activity. In "Total Speech," Toolan provides a clear and comprehensive account of integrationalism, a major new theory of language that declines to accept that text and context, language and world, are distinct and stable categories. At the same time, Toolan extends the integrationalist argument and calls for a radical change in contemporary theorizing about language and...

Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. Variously termed France s leading philosopher of postmodernism and a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left, he might also be called our leading philosopher of seduction or of mass culture. Following his acclaimed America and Cool Memories, this book is the third in a series of personal records in hyperreality. Idiosyncratic, outrageous, and brilliantly original, Baudrillard here casts his net widely and combines autobiographical memories with further reflections...