This book explores the meaning of leisure in the context of the key social formations of our time: capitalism, modernity and postmodernity. Rojek brings together the insights of Marxism, feminism, Weber, Elias, Simmel, Nietzsche and Baudrillard to produce a comprehensive survey - and rethinking - of leisure theory. At the same time he presents a radical critique of the traditional 'centring' of the concept of leisure on 'escape', 'freedom', 'choice'. In the first part, he describes the relations between capitalism and leisure, the meaning of free time for workers in a capitalist system, and the gendered nature of leisure. He then discusses the social construction of leisure under modernity and the main competing arguments - that it imprisons the individual and reinforces conformity or that it liberates people and releases their creativity. Finally, he examines postmodernity, the cultural condition which has radically changed the idea of leisure. Revealing how leisure practices have responded to living in a risk society, he shows that 'free' time becomes something very different when simulation and nostalgia lie at the heart of everyday life. Decentring Leisure will be essential reading for students and lecturers in leisure studies, cultural studies and social theory.
Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture
The first book solely devoted to Puerto Rican visability and cultural impact. The author looks as such pop icons as JLo and Ricky Martin as well as West Side Story.
The Disneyization of Society is an agenda-setting new work in the sociology of culture and modern society. It argues that the contemporary world is increasingly converging towards the characteristics of the Disney theme parks. This process of convergence is revealed in: the growing influence of themed environments in settings like restaurants, ......
What influence does the cinema have on visual culture and social understanding? In what ways are we products of the cinematic gaze? This timely book, written by one of the leading commentators in the sociology of culture, highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society. The cinema not only turns its audience into voyeurs, eagerly following the lives of its screen characters, but repeatedly casts its key players as onlookers, spying on other people's lives. The nature of the cinematic voyeur - the obsessive outsider, the ethnic or sexual Other - is examined in depth, as are its implications for contemporary society. Denzin analyses Hollywood's manipulations of gender, race and class, and, drawing on the work of Foucault argues that the cinematic gaze must be understood as part of the machinery of surveillance and power which regulates social behaviour in the late twentieth century. The effect of the cinema in the social construction of everyday life has rarely been explored with such penetration and clarity. Ranging over a rich and varied array of material from film and film literature, and encompassing a critical interrogation of traditional realist ethnographic and cinematic texts, The Cinematic Society will be essential reading for students of social theory, sociology of culture and film studies. 'Adopting as a central premise the notion that the constitution of subjectivity occurs through the gaze of the Other, and locating the voyeur as the anti-hero of cinematic society, Denzin enters into a brilliant analysis of multiple forms of the voyeur's gaze' Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles
This book examines the complex and dynamic relationship between the popular press and popular culture. Martin Conboy rejects approaches to popular culture which restrict themselves to the contemporary, arguing for the importance of an historical perspective in understanding the contemporary relationship between the popular and the press. ......
This beautifully illustrated overview of the folk arts of New Mexico from the sixteenth century to the present covers both religious and secular arts including festivals, music, dance, and the visual arts.
By using a series of studies of contemporary mainstream Hollywood movies - Blue Velvet, Wall Street, Crimes and Misdemeanors, When Harry Met Sally, Sex Lies and Videotape, Do the Right Thing - Norman Denzin explores the tension between ideas of the postmodern, and traditional ways of analyzing society. The discussion moves between two forms of text: social theory and cinematic representations of contemporary life. Denzin analyzes the ideas of society embedded in poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies and Marxism through the ideas of key theorists like Baudrillard, Barthes, Habermas, Jameson, Bourdieu and Derrida. He relates these to the problematic of the postmodern self as exposed in cinema centering on the decisive performance of race, gender and class.
This work considers the visual languages, politics and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with the 19th-century style of men such as Oscar Wilde. This book examines the wider influence of dandyism and considers its destablizing aesthetic effect.
