Africa in the American Imagination by In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. Africa in the American Imagination: Popular Culture, Racialized Identities, and African Visual Culture explores this presence, examining Mattel's world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. Because these cultural icons permeate American life, they represent the broader U.S. culture and its relationship to African culture. This study integrates approaches from art history and visual culture studies with those from culture, race, and popular culture studies to analyze this interchange. Two major threads weave throughout. One analyzes how the presentation of African visual culture in these popular culture forms conceptualizes Africa for the American public. The other investigates the way the uses of African visual culture focuses America's own self-awareness, particularly around black and white racialized identities.
Black Women and Popular Culture by With the emergence of popular culture phenomena such as reality television, blogging, and social networking sites, it is important to examine the representation of Black women and the potential implications of those images, messages, and roles. Black Women and Popular Culture: The Conversation Continues provides such a comprehensive analysis. Using an array of theoretical frameworks and methodologies, this collection features cutting edge research from scholars interested in the relationship among media, society, perceptions, and Black women.
Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn by Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century. Elana Levine brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine.
Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, And Popular Culture by Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture addresses the conflicted meanings associated with the figure of the action heroine as she has evolved in various media forms since the late 1980s. Jeffrey A. Brown discusses this immensely popular character type, the action heroine, as an example of, and challenge to, existing theories about gender as a performance identity.
Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture by There is no teasing apart what interracial couples think of themselves from what society shows them about themselves. Following on her earlier ground-breaking study of the social worlds of interracial couples, Erica Chito Childs considers the larger context of social messages, conveyed by the media, that inform how we think about love across the color line. Examining a range of media_from movies to music to the web_Fade to Black and White offers an informative and provocative account of how the perception of interracial sexuality as 'deviant' has been transformed in the course of the 20th century and how race relations are understood today.
In Search of the Black Fantastic by Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change.
Making Camp by Making Camp examines the rhetoric and conventions of “camp” in contemporary popular culture and the ways it both subverts and is co-opted by mainstream ideology and discourse, especially as it pertains to issues of gender and sexuality.
The Myth of Popular Culture by The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan is a fascinating examination of the cultural traditions of the American novel, Hollywood, and British and American rock music which leads us to redefine our concept of the division between "high" and "low" culture.
Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity by This innovative and engaging textbook is the first to survey the field of popular geopolitics, exploring the relationship between popular culture and international relations from a geographical perspective. Each chapter focuses on a specific concept—defining it, considering key debates, and offering a concrete case study such as first-person-shooter video games, blogging, and comic books.
Popular Culture in a New Age by This book redefines popular culture in the light of the revolutionary changes brought about by the information revolution and the digital divide. It explores the phenomenal growth and extension of popular culture in the last decade and ties in the vast changes brought about by technology and the Internet. In an era when American television and the Internet reach virtually every corner of the globe, Popular Culture in a New Age shows how the poorly understood and often underestimated area known as popular culture affects all of our lives.
Not sure where to start your research? The interdisciplinary databases are good places to search for information on any topic, and have lots of full-text material available.
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture by 
Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion by 
Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture by 
Encyclopedia of Latino Culture by 
African Americans and US Popular Culture by To peruse other image collections online, check out the link below.
The Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture by While fairy tales are constantly migrating into new cultures and new media, reinventing themselves along the way, recent years in particular have seen a wave of highly innovative but also highly disputable fairy-tale retellings in popular culture.
Unpopular Culture by This collection includes eighteen essays that introduce the concept of unpopular culture and explore its critical possibilities and ramifications from a large variety of perspectives. Proposing a third term that operates beyond the dichotomy of high culture and mass culture and yet offers a fresh approach to both, these essays address a multitude of different topics that can all be classified as unpopular culture.
Imagining the Global by Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century.
Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture by We all know what suburbia is, indeed the majority of us live in it. Yet, despite this ubituity, with no formal definition of the contept, the suburbs have developed in our collective imagination through representations in popular culture, from Terry and June to Desparate Housewives.