Description
Contemporary popular culture is engaged in a rich and multi-levelled set of representational relations with austerity. This volume seeks to explore these relations, to ask: how does popular culture give expression to austerity; how are its effects conveyed; how do texts reproduce and expose its mythic qualities? It provides a reading of cultural texts in circulation in the present ‘age of austerity’. Through its central focus—popular culture—it considers the impact and influence of austerity across media and textual categories. The collection presents a theoretical deconstruction of popular culture’s reproduction of, and response to, mythical expressions of ‘austerity’ in Western culture, spanning the United Kingdom, North America, Europe and the Middle East and textual events from political media discourse, music, videogames, social media, film, television, journalism, folk art, food, protest movements, slow media and the practice of austerity in everyday life
Table of Contents
Part I: The Way We Live Now: Austerity Myths in Everyday Life
1. Trying to discern the impact of austerity in lived experience
Gargi Bhattachary
2. The allotment in the restaurant: the paradox of foody austerity and changing food values
Abigail Wincott
3. Snatches of Songs: Lyrical Reflections upon Alienation and Austerity, From Thatcher to Cameron’s Coalition
Allister Mactaggart
4. "Jolly Fucker": The Face of Farage
Julian McDougall
Part II: Popular Culture: Myths from the Front
5. "Actually we should be growing up": Neoliberalism & Austerity in NEON
Anne Graefer
6. Living in the Shadow of Manhattan: The White Knight Rises
Pete Bennett
7. (Negatively) Benefits Street: The Return of Naked Ideology
Julian McDougall
Part III: Out on the Streets: Myths and Acts of Resistance
8. From Hooverville to Bloomsbergville: Protest Camps and Cultural Imaginaries of Austerity in the United States
Anna Feigenbaum and Fabian Frenzel
9. On ready-made revolutions in the Arab world: how armchair journalism and citizen empowerment 2.0 fit into the rhetoric of contemporary neoliberal discourse
Donatella Della Ratta
10. Cinema America Occupato: Reclaiming the Cultural Commons With Slow Media
Antonio Lopez and Peter Sarram
Part IV: Popular Culture: Mythical Symmetries
11. Death and Dead End Jobs: Independent American Horror and the Great Recession
Craig Ian Mann
12. Poor Relations: Youth and Poverty in post-Millennial British Cinema
Dr Stella Hockenhull
13. Video games and representations of crime: the morality of criminality in an "age of austerity."
Wayne O’Brien
Afterword
Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan
