|
THE
CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY BOOK CLUB QUEUE
No project is without an
influence and our influences include books.
Yes, we are outing ourselves as “readers.”
What better way to present our ideas than to share with you those
sources that helped shaped them. In
the next few minutes, we will share with our top ten “Cultural
Studies” reads. Editor
Stephen Duncombe divides the essays and excerpts in his Cultural
Resistance Reader into several sections. One of them is entitled
“A Politics That Doesn’t Look Like Politics.”
These books fit that description.
There are some differences among these books, but they have one
thing in common – they are concerned with combating the onslaught of
commercial interests that shape contemporary culture.
So grab your pencil and paper to write down titles and authors. Or
better yet, visit our website, http://culturalconstructioncompany.com
to find The Queue.
1. Introducing
Cultural Studies, written
by Ziauddin Sardar, illustrated by Borin Van Loon.
Published in the UK by Icon
Books, in the US by Totem Books, and by who-knows-whom in Canada, the
“Introducing . . .” series surveys a number of heady topics in a
lavishly-illustrated format. Readers
wanting light but not insubstantial overviews of such topics as
postfeminism, postmodernism, and semiotics will find them herein.
The book tends to be written from a British point-of-view, but
for North Americans that can be enlightening.
2. Sister
Outsider by Audre Lorde.
Lord is quoted often by cultural
critics and cultural activists. Her
articulate outline of how poetry, the personal and politics meld
together into subversion of dominant paradigms was most eloquent in this
collection of lectures and essays.
3. No
Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
by Naomi Klein.
Klein exposes the new face of
corporatism. There exists
an elite that seeks to control the ways and means of symbolic
communication itself. Their
modus operandi is introduction and promotion of commercial
symbols meant to supersede all other content and all other uses of media
and communications spaces. Familiar archetypes of anticorporate texts are present,
including consumers being trained to purchase whatever they are told and
sweatshops whose workers have no access to remedy when their employers
treat them arbitrarily, but Klein’s twist on the subject is the
pursuit by multinationals of strategies designed to impose their
trademarks and other proprietary snippets onto culture itself and indeed
to have overriding considerations attributed to such “intellectual
property.” Counterefforts
have already begun, and Klein notes many of them and their assessments
of the practical nuances of corporate branding strategy. The “resistance” is well aware of the implications of
paid speech taking precedence over free speech.
4. The
McDonaldization of Society
by George Ritzer.
Ritzer is arguably the most
accessible sociologist. Almost
every sociology student in North America has been assigned his
comprehensive theory survey and so it is no surprise that Rizter knows
social theory. What is surprising is that he can take that social theory and
make it readable by relating it to the problems of everyday life such as
the ways in which McDonald’s philosophy has invaded other cultures and
other realms of North American culture.
5. White
Trash: Race and Class in America
edited by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz of
Bad
Subjects on-line zine.
This collection of essays looks
at the concept of “whiteness” from a number of different angles
relating to class. Since
whiteness is often equated with wealth and non-white equated with
poverty, this reader breaks down both race and class, by marking both in
ways not usually done in sociological circles.
And well, it does so with humour as well as wit.
6. Commodify
Your Dissent: The Business
of Culture in the New Gilded Age
Edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland.
This collection of reprints from
The Baffler is an
irreverent look at business and culture.
Aptly describing their essays as “salvos,” they take shots at
much of the commodification of culture with hits designed to sink.
7. The
Onion Presents Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America’s
Finest News Source edited
by Scott Dikkers.
In a society that has tried very
hard to make a joke of the media, a joke media source can be valuable.
Dikkers and his staff have created a book of retroactive,
verisimilitudinous Page Ones for their famous parody periodical.
The work echoes the similar but serious New York Times
end-of-the-20th-century volume.
8. The
Bust Guide to the New Girl Order
edited by Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stroller.
What separates the women
from the girls? Boobs, no
doubt. Karp and Stoller
were an important part of the ‘zine revolution in the early 1990s and
this book has the best of breasts.
This project is a great example of what has been called “new
feminism.”
9. The
Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates
edited by Frauenfelder et. al.
So you’re one of those
creative people and you’re trapped on Earth with a bunch of
Organization Men and perpetually depressed artsy types.
Despair not: there is another lifestyle option at your disposal. The editors of bOING
bOING, a ‘zine of no fixed paradigm, provide tidbits on
“culture jamming” (crediting the band Negativland with coining the
term), advanced techniques in prank phone calling, the Reverend Ivan
Stang of the Church of the Subgenius (praise to Bob), using computers to
all sorts of aesthetically scary ends, and even the Happy Mutant Hall of
Fame, featuring, among others, William M. Gaines, the late publisher of Mad
magazine.
10. Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size
by Marilyn Wann.
The most fun to be had reading,
Wann takes on the diet and fitness industry, the fashion industry and
the medical establishment with excerpts from her ‘zine put together in
a cohesive book. Because
fat-hatred is so deeply entrenched in our culture, this book necessarily
culture jams, including fat trading cards and a beautiful Venus of
Willendorf paper doll complete with clothes that fit.
copyright
by Pattie Thomas and Carl Wilkerson 2002
|