Editor’s Introduction

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual n

THIS READER'S FORUM GOT ITS START because of an article written by Robert Fulford for the National Post on 13 October 2007 about SSHRC (The Social Science and Humanities Research Council) and the work of Dr Jes Battis. The article, Lex Luthor Hearts Superman: Your Tax Dollars at Work, takes SSHRC to task for not revealing much about its research proposals, then moves on to mock Dr Battis for doing research on popular culture and queer issues, and ends by criticizing Dr Battis's success at earning grants. Fulford even supplies the fact that Dr Battis wrote about soy milk and corn muffins on his blog as some kind of evidence that he is not a good scholar. It is easy to be annoyed by Fulford's predictable attack on SSHRC (what a waste of tax dollars!) and to be disturbed by his extended attack on Jes Battis as a person and as a scholar (cornbread! muffins! piercings! queer stuff!). It's more puzzling to see him get upset about research on popular culture--and in its parent discipline, cultural studies--if only because one of his recent books, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (1999) discusses popular culture at length, including the films of D. W. Griffiths, the culture of gossip, and Jack Nicholson, among other topics. Clearly, it's not the objects of popular culture which have attracted Fulford's ire since he writes about these himself, but popular culture research influenced by the politics of cultural studies, which aims to critique the conservative values Fulford holds dear. Fulford chooses to cloak that discussion of politics in contempt for the subject matter, and that's where things get really interesting. Fulford's strategy of expressing contempt for studies of popular culture on the one hand while writing about popular culture seriously on the other isn't so different from the position of popular culture in the humanities and social sciences today. Doing research and teaching on popular culture is seen in some academic quarters as a guilty pleasure, but it is not a pleasure which creates real research or substantial teaching, or which--until the recent creation of the cultural studies category for SSHRC Standard Research Grants--deserves funding. Fulford's hiding of ideology behind a contempt for everyday objects that he finds banal when he's not talking about them finds an uneasy parallel in the world of research and teaching, where emergence of popular culture as a field within cultural studies is accompanied by worries about its possible banality, its threat to serious fields, even the fact that popular culture is, well, popular with students and the general public too. And anything popular cant be all that educational, can it? It isn't only Fulford who gets exercised at the thought of articles about Buff, the Vampire Slayer: The general response to the Oprah Winfrey Show and Oprah's Book Club in the popular press is equally dismissive and hostile about Oprah Winfrey's choice of books (even when they are classically literary) and about the way readers in Oprah's Book Club choose to read and interpret. Recent scholarship on Oprah's Book Club is creating a more complex idea of what it is to be a participant on the show and what the selections themselves can mean. …

This paper introduces scholars of Greek political thought to the continued existence of the phenomenon of demagoguery, or ‘(mis-)leadership of the people’, in the Hellenistic period. After summarizing Classical elite discourse about demagoguery, I explore three areas in which political leaders continued to run afoul of elite norms in Hellenistic democratic poleis: 1) political persecution of the wealthier members of a political community; 2) ‘pandering to’ the people in a way considered infra dignitatem; and 3) stoking bellicosity among the common people. I show that considerable continuities link the Classical and Hellenistic periods and that demagoguery should be approached as a potential window onto ‘popular culture’ in Greek antiquity.

Letter from the Editors

This study describes a new approach to undergraduate science training that offers an alternate model to the national objective of scaling up scientific research interests and capabilities among undergraduate students. With this new focus, we seek to more effectively bring scientific research methods and experiences to larger numbers of students in non-elite educational circumstances. Our model has been designed and implemented, at the John Jay College and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, both of which are part of the City University of New York (CUNY), where we have a majority non-White and economically disadvantaged student body. We have successfully engaged large numbers of undergraduate students by linking multiple classes in the social and behavioral sciences to build collective cross-disciplinary research projects that give every enrolled student an opportunity to receive high-quality research training and create cumulative data sets over years that are cumulative, collaborative, and of professional value.

Neutrality: Axiological

This paper explores the responsibility of social sciences in making up a societal public sphere. More carefully, the article thinks about the construction of the Italian public space during the years included between the two World Wars, investigating the influence which racial and racist theories had in the public sphere. During the fascism, Italian social sciences developed a racial theory which proposed a causal connection between somatic and anatomical characteristics, and the cultural, moral and psychological qualities of a racially-defined population. The development of racial politics, which followed the conquest of the Empire, threw the intellectual world into turmoil. The principal conflict regarded the cause of national character, which some racist intellectuals attributed to an immutable racial element whilst others emphasised historical, ideal and cultural factors. In order to clarify the connections between race, people and nation an explanatory scheme was instituted, which allowed a variety of combinations of different disciplinary approaches. One of the major debates concerned the impact of environmental and genetic factors on a race's cultural, social and psychological characteristics. Environmentalists and geneticists disagree on numerous questions concerning racial theories and associated politics. The various doctrinal positions produced different racial typologies, which were used in a variety of ways by the fascist regime in its national and international politics.

This volume settles the debate between analytic and continental philosophy. It turns to art, more specifically popular culture, to demonstrate the validity of continental philosophy. Drawing on the philosophy of Georg Hegel (perhaps the most important of continental philosophers), James Kreines holds that reason in the world metaphysically exists. Reasons of the world are reasons of the Hegelian Absolute. Thus, similar to the fact that gravity is curves in the space-time continuum along which matter moves – reasons are the grooves in the Absolute along which human decision-making occurs. Art allows us to conceptualize, understand, speculate about the grooves (reasons) of the Absolute. Two key points can be drawn from Kreines’s position: first, normative values are embedded in reality. Thus, in complete contradistinction to analytic philosophy, there is no bifurcation between the empirical and the normative – to exist is to have normative value. Secondly, the role of social science is to cogitate, explore, identify the reasons of the world that shape social, political norms. Such an approach would decisively move the social sciences away from an emphasis on statistically significant patterns of human behavior (e.g., voting studies) and toward an approach that seeks to analyze the reasons of the world that motivate/shape social and political decisions. Art (particularly popular culture) becomes an important source in identifying the way that people reason about the world and how they perceive political elites reasoning in the world. To adjudicate between continental and analytic philosophy this book on relies on the broadcast iterations of Star Trek, as well as Nazi cinema. With regard to contemporary American politics, in addition to Star Trek, it draws on the television series Game of Thrones, Veep, House of Cards, and The Man in the High Castle. Popular culture is germane to philosophy and contemporary politics because television/movie creators frequently try to attract viewers by conveying authentic philosophical and political motifs. Conversely, viewers seek out authentic movies and television shows. This is in contrast to opinion surveys (for instance), as the formation of the data begins with the surveyor seeking to directly solicit an opinion – however impromptu or shallow.

This chapter explores what exactly are social sciences expected to give back to the societies that make their research possible. While the short answer to this is ‘knowledge’, this points to a much larger and overdue conversation: what kind of knowledge are social sciences expected to craft. Since this dialogue necessarily touches upon the thorny science-society relation, I propose to approach it through the concept of guidance (Valsiner, 2012). This notion makes clear that rather than a single direction of guidance, societies usually try to canalize social research towards many different—and even opposite—paths. It is in this context in which six different directions are described and organized into a single, three-axis framework. Through the analysis of the three opposite pairs of positions, it becomes clear that the classic distinction between applied and idealistic social research does not meet the actual diversity of social science. Moreover, by presenting a single pair of opposites this distinction has made more difficult to find common ground in which this diversity could coexist collaboratively rather than competitively. The chapter closes with remarks on how such common ground could look for contemporary social science.

In one of his finest literary essays, i.e., “Tradition and Individual Talent”, T. S. Eliot opined that past works of art forms an order of tradition and this tradition is the foundation of long-lasting literature. Folklore is also a work of art, and it seems that no one knows better how to use folkloric elements in their novels than African writers. Folklore is an embodiment of individual dignity and social justice, explored in a traditional way. Most writers from the African continent including Chinua Achebe, Ngugiwa Thiong’o, Ben Okri etc. have made extensive use of African folklore and folk culture in their novels. In contrast, modern fiction writers across the globe have adopted a new fondness for popular culture in their writings. Popular culture generally refers to the set of contemporary practices, entertainment media including music, films, fashion, politics, use of technology etc. Some social science experts emphasise the importance of considering folk culture and folk beliefs as part of popular culture. However, popular culture commonly refers to modern cultural practices that have influenced a larger group of people. Chigozie Obioma is a writer from Nigeria—an African country with vibrant and rich cultural heritage. In his famous novel The Fishermen, he sets out to mix-up these two seemingly different areas i.e., folk culture and popular culture. This article examines how the novelist has blended popular culture with traditional and folkloric conventions, which represent two different poles of time and space.This article also examines the author’s unique narrative style which enables him to combine folk culture and popular culture with extraordinary ease of writing. This study aims to understand the multilayered dynamics of popular culture and oral folkloric traditions, with special reference to their use in this novel. Besides, it will look into how a traditionally orthodox Nigerian society is gradually transforming into a society of modern developments which are being reflected in this novel. The primary purpose of the study is to examine the intermingling of popular culture and traditional folkloric culture in the Nigerian society with special reference to the novel The Fishermen.In doing so, the primary approach of the researcher was speculative and analytical in nature. The study uses the method of closed reading of the primary text for detailed analysis of the topic concerned. The method of analyzing different situations and characters in connection to the concerned topic has been thoroughly used for this study. Apart from the study of the primary text, method of reading connected socio-cultural concepts and theories have also been used for this research article. It is believed that this article will pave a new path for the study of the intermingling of popular culture with folkloric conventions not only in the texts of the African continent but also encourage researchers to do the same in Oriental fictions which are equally rich in the blending of popular culture with folkloric conventions. This research will help readers and researchers engage in a new area of study where modern developments in the field of literature and folklore can be explored. This study will contribute to the study of Nigerian novels in connection to their very own folkloric conventions. In addition, this study will help create a new ecosystem of knowledge where folklore and popular culture within literature can be easily studied.

Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II. By Annegret Fauser. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xv, 366 p. ISBN 9780199948031 (hardcover), $39.95; (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France. By Leslie A. Sprout. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music, 16.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [xxiii, 280 p. ISBN 9780520275300 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520955271 (e-book), $65.] Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. While the Second World War once loomed as hard caesura in twentieth-century musical life, two recent books reveal the wartime years as anything but silent. Annegret Fauser's Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II and Leslie Sprout's The Musical legacy of Wartime France expose the often-surprising continuities between musical life before, during, and after one of the most disruptive periods in human history. Despite significant disparity between the wartime experience in the United States and France, much can be gained by reading Fauser's and Sprout's books with an eye toward overlapping concerns and productive tensions. In treating an era recent enough that numerous survivors remain to enrich the historical record with their testimony, both books necessarily contend with the issue of selective memory. For Fauser, the iconic sounds of the American experience during the Second World War mainly derive from popular sources: Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrews Sisters. Yet classical music also played significant role in the war effort, and the context of the war defined the sounds of classical music in crucial ways that we have forgotten (sometimes intentionally). Fauser advocates defamiliarizing the soundscape of this (p. 9) to get past sonic representations in popular culture that distort the historical record. Sprout, too, excavates what are often intentionally suppressed memories about the soundscape of the war. She focuses on the fraught and at times perilous wartime experiences of France's most prestigious composers, including several whose wartime music became iconic in the postwar era. In Sprout's account, aesthetic choices, historical narratives, and critical debates typically understood as exclusive to the postwar period are recontextualized as echoes of musical politics during the war. Taken together, the work of Fauser and Sprout corresponds to the second phase of postwar critical trajectory theorized by Maja Zehfuss (Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]). In the first phase, society memorializes the recent past in order to move on from (or remember) the finer details of pain and suffering experienced during the war. Constructing war monuments and consecrating battlefields, throwing ticker tape parades, and publicizing award ceremonies--these all involve what Zehfuss suggests is more about forgetting than remembering (p. 63). Eventually, however, the opposite is necessary: scholars like Fauser and Sprout find themselves in position of haring to forget or challenge layers of unreliable memory in order to remember the finer historical details of the war--including uncomfortable truths that contradict received narratives. For Fauser and Sprout, such truths include the politicized framework in which music was produced and consumed; the propaganda value that classical music held for the governments of the United States and France, just as it did in Nazi Germany; and the continuing influence of Depression-era institutions and policies on music making during the war. Fauser opens Sounds of War not in 1939 but in 2009, with the performances of Aaron Copland's wartime music that took place in Washington, D.C. around President Obama's first inauguration. The continued relevance of that music to listeners in 2009 (in the middle of another war) and its use as a political gesture rallying Americans . …

Social theory can sometimes seem as though it's speaking of a world that existed long ago, so why should we continue to study and discuss the theories of these dead white men? Can their work still inform us about the way we live today? Are they still relevant to our consumer-focused, celebrity-crazy, tattoo-friendly world? This book explains how the ideas of classical sociological theory can be understood, and applied to, everyday activities like listening to hip-hop, reading fashion magazines or watching reality TV. Taking the reader through central sociological texts, Social Theory In Popular Culture explains why key theorists – from Marx to Saussure – are still considered to be the bedrock of sociology and sociological enquiry. Each chapter examines a different key thinker and applies their work to a recognisable aspect of popular cultural, showing how the central issues underpinning classic social thought - class, conflict, gender, power, ethnicity, and social status - can still be readily observed within the modern global world. Encouraging the reader to critique and reflect upon the ways in which classic social theory applies to their own worlds, this is the perfect antidote to dry social theory explanations. It is an eye-opening read for all students and scholars across the social sciences.

In an era of global polycrisis, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and geopolitical disruption, how the ocean is depicted and imagined in popular culture plays a crucial role in shaping the public understanding of ocean‐related challenges and societal responses to them. We introduce the concept of ocean pop—the portrayal of oceanic spaces, issues, and both human and non‐human actors in popular media—as a framework for critically examining these imaginaries. We contextualise the concept by showing how popular culture both reflects and shapes dominant (political) discourses about the ocean, spanning topics from environmental protection to piracy and warfare. The articles of this thematic issue underline their contributions to interdisciplinary, multimedia scholarship within the blue humanities and social sciences. Beyond showcasing insights into popular culture artefacts, we highlight the value of ocean pop in addressing empirical challenges and normative questions alike. In doing so, we invite scholars to refine and extend the concept as a framework for understanding and reconfiguring contemporary engagements with the ocean.

“Indeed the very shape of Africa, a question mark, is sphinx-like in its challenge to all scholars to find the proper key to an understanding of its rich diversity and complexity.” This view expressed by Elliot P. Skinner in 1973 remains as valid today as when it was first proposed. The search for the proper key to understanding and making sense of such a huge and diverse continent as Africa has taken many twists and turns. From generalized monographs, often with Africa in their titles, the content of which, however, betrays a fleeting and shallow observation of a singular practitioner, to disciplinary-based studies, and now interdisciplinary approaches, it has become obvious that a continent that boasts no less than two thousand different languages, and hence at least two thousand peoples—in other words, nations of varying sizes, customs, environments, and experiences—cannot be explicated on the basis of one theoretical prism. According to an Igbo proverb, one cannot stand at a spot to watch roving masquerades dance. Just as the dance of the masquerades is dynamic, reflecting the varying tempo of the drums, the mood of the moment, and the demands of the occasion, the popular traverses studies on Africa and African cultures spanning a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, subsuming history, politics, linguistics, religion, economics, science, health, transportation, literature, arts, ecology, sports, and films. These studies have national, regional, and continental foci. They include specialized journals and scholarly associations, and they have evolved into academic subjects such as Africana studies or disciplines qualified by the adjective African (e.g., African linguistics, African literature, Lusophone Africa, Afro-Latin studies, African and African American studies, African and African diaspora studies). The number of Africans whose research focuses on Africa, its peoples, and cultures has grown steadily since the 1970s. In the spirit of Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How to Write about Africa” (Granta 92 [2005]), this article foregrounds the extant works on Popular Culture and the study of Africa. In focusing on contemporary scholarship, specifically works that date from the 1970s on, it may be possible to avoid, even if slightly, the unsavory descriptions, images, and representations of Africa, its peoples, and practices that are sometimes found in the so-called seminal, classical, and foundational works on Africa.

Humanities and Clinical Medicine