Modernity and Postmodern Culturecritically assesses claims made about the 'postmodernization' of culture and society and explores the complex interplay between the modern and the postmodern in an increasingly ‘globalized world’. The author argues that although culture may be 'postmodern' in terms of art, entertainment and everyday life, modernity still exists and is pervasive. The second edition is revised throughout, updating the literature and viewing international events through a modernist/postmodernist gaze. The theories of Baudrillard, Beck, Castells, Giddens, Jameson, Lyotard and others are discussed and specific issues concerning architecture, theme parks, screen culture, science, technology and the environment are examined. Topics include: Postmodern architecture and the hyperreality of Disney How poststructuralist theory questions modern rationality and reason The relations between postmodern culture, global capitalism and the technological changes brought about by electronics and computing The network society The book is key reading for students on courses in cultural politics, cultural theory, popular culture and sociology.

In the wake of proliferating discourses around globalisation and culture, some central questions around cultural politics have acquired a commonsensical and hegemonic character in contemporary intellectual discourse. The politics of difference, the possibilities of hybridity and the potential of multiple liminalities frame much discussion around the transnational dimensions of culture and post-identity politics. In this volume, the economic, political and social consequences of the focus on ‘culture’ in contemporary theories of globalization are analysed around the disparate fields of architecture, museum discourse, satellite television, dub poetry, carnival and sub-national theatre. The discourses of hybridity, diaspora, cultural difference minoritization are critically interrogated and engaged with through close analysis of cultural objects and practices. The essays thus intervene in the debate around modernity, globalization and cultural politics, and the volume as a whole provides a critical constellation through which the complexity of transnational culture can be framed. Thinking through the particular, the essays limn the absent universality of forms of capitalist globalization and the volume as a whole provides multiple perspectives from which to enter the singular modernity of our times in all its complexity.

Is popular culture merely a process of creating, marketing, and consuming a final product, or is it an expression of the artist's surroundings and an attempt to alter them? Noted Argentine/Mexican anthropologist Néstor García Canclini addresses these questions and more in Transforming Modernity, a translation of Las culturas populares en el capitalismo. Based on fieldwork among the Purépecha of Michoacán, Mexico, some of the most talented artisans of the New World, the book is not so much a work of ethnography as of philosophy—a cultural critique of modernism. García Canclini delineates three interpretations of popular culture: spontaneous creation, which posits that artistic expression is the realization of beauty and knowledge; "memory for sale," which holds that original products are created for sale in the imposed capitalist system; and the tourist outlook, whereby collectibles are created to justify development and to provide insight into what capitalism has achieved. Transforming Modernity argues strongly for popular culture as an instrument of understanding, reproducing, and transforming the social system in order to elaborate and construct class hegemony and to reflect the unequal appropriation and distribution of cultural capital. With its wide scope, this book should appeal to readers within and well beyond anthropology—those interested in cultural theory, social thought, and Mesoamerican culture.

This book provides a rich and wide-ranging analysis of Jewish history and culture, relating them to theories of modernity and postmodernity and to recent debates on ethnicity and postcolonialism. The sixteen essays are divided into four parts, addressing psychoanalysis and gender, literary antisemitism, modernity/postmodernity and the Jew, and the memory of the Holocaust. A Foreword and Afterword place these concerns in an extended multicultural and postcolonial context. What is at stake when Jewish history and culture are inserted into current feminist, gay and lesbian, postcolonial and postmodern revisions of modernity? Even the radical reconstruction of modernity has created a host of new orthodoxies which themselves need to be unsettled. Along with an amorphous political correctness, mainstream cultural studies has, routinely, written out the question of Jewishness, assuming it as part of a supposed Judeo-Christian tradition. On the other side of the barricades, however, those apologists for the efficacy of Western modernity have continued to banish Jewish difference from their brave new world in a desperate bid to signify the universality of the modern project. The essays in this collection are written in the margins of these reductive oppositions. They recognize that the Jewish other is both at the heart of Western metropolitan culture and is also what must be excluded in order for dominant racial and sexual identities to be formed and maintained. There is a virtue in this ambivalent positioning, this center of the road, which characterizes Jewish history and culture both then and now. "

V.1 Modernization -- V.2 Cultural modernity -- V.3 Odern system -- V.4 After modernity.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context. Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought. With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.

Are the arguments of the Frankfurt School still relevant? Modern Culture and Critical Theory investigates this question in the context of important issues in contemporary cultural politics: neoconservatism and new social movements, discontents with modernity and debates on postmodernism, the political hegemony of Ronald Reagan, and the cultural hegemony of structuralism and poststructuralism. Russell Berman thoughtfully explores the theories of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Foucault and their relevance to both historical and contemporary issues in literature, politics, and the arts.

Between the two world wars, Japanese society underwent a massive industrial transformation. The author explores the differences between the United States, England and France which safely modernised and Japan which moved unfortunately towards fascism.

This book explores the sense in which the uncanny may be a distinctively modern experience, the way these unnerving feelings and unsettling encounters disturb the rational presumptions of the modern world view and the security of modern self-identity, just as the latter may themselves be implicated in the production of these experiences as uncanny.

This book offers analysis of articulation of consumer culture and modernity in everyday lives of people in a transnational framework. It pursues three broad themes: lifestyle choices and construction of modern identities; fashion and advertising; and subaltern concerns and moral subjectivities. It juxtaposes empirical studies with theoretical traditions in addressing questions such as: How do people imagine modernity and identity in consumer culture? What does modernity or ‘being modern’ mean to people in different societies? Are modernity and tradition antithetical to or develop an interface with each other? The chapters in the book trace manifestations and trajectories of consumer culture and modernity as they connect to develop a sense of renewed identity.