Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film - Fantasy - Fighting - Philosophy

Published by Rodopi, 2010

Deconstructing Popular Culture

Bowman, Paul (2008) Deconstructing Popular Culture, London: Palgrave

(The publisher has put a sample chapter of the book here: http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0230545351.Pdf - which I have also added under "Papers", here)

From the back cover:

“Deconstructing Popular Culture is an accessible, funny and stimulating introduction to popular culture. This is a book with both a passionate argument and a rare skill in making the ‘fine print’ of complex theoretical arguments accessible.”

- Richard Stamp, Senior Lecturer of Media and Cultural Studies, Bath Spa University


“Bowman writes very much as though he is speaking directly to a group of undergraduates: it engages them where they live. This book is an extraordinarily significant achievement.” –

-John Mowitt, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Minnesota


Popular culture permeates every aspect of our lives: from the music we listen to, the films and television shows we watch and the books we read.  But who decides what counts as popular culture? Why is it so important? And how do we go about studying it?

This book provides a unique introduction to popular culture. Unpicking and analysing recognisable examples from contemporary music, Hollywood film and the self-help movement, Paul Bowman uses techniques of deconstruction that encourage readers to form their own interpretations of the culture they experience every day. Introducing complex ideas effortlessly, the book shows how to avoid common pitfalls in studying theory, questions claims behind the importance of popular culture and looks at the problems and possibilities of studying this fast-changing field. With an innovative user guide and glossary to explain essential terms and ideas, this book makes difficult concepts relevant, accessible and interesting.

This witty, thought-provoking and insightful book provides a unique approach and a clear introduction to popular culture for all students of cultural studies, media studies and sociology.

(The publisher has put a sample chapter of the book here: http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0230545351.Pdf )

Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Politics, Theory and Intervention

Bowman, Paul (2007), Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh

“[Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies is] the first sustained scholarly assessment of the scandal of post-Marxism [which] traces the struggle – both intellectual and political – of academic Marxism to keep its footing on the long march through the institution. As the “versus” that hinges his title suggests, neither post-Marxism nor cultural studies remain unscathed by Bowman’s staging of this face off. Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies rewards the serious reader concerned to come to terms with the discursive politics of the contemporary university”. John Mowitt (Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota).


“This is an ambitious book which will make a significant impact in […] an exciting field which is beginning to open up a sustained ‘thinking about’ politics from a post-structuralist perspective”. Martin McQuillan (Professor of Cultural Theory and Analysis, University of Leeds)



Contents



  Acknowledgements
  Preface

1 Cultural Studies and post-Marxism
1.1 Introduction: Of Deconstruction into Politics
1.2 The Discourse of post-Marxism
1.3 The Text of Cultural Studies
1.4 The Problem with the Text
1.5 The Institutional Articulation and Dissemination of Texts and Discourses

2 Cultural Studies versus post-Marxism
  2.1 Two Texts of Cultural Studies
  2.2 Stuart Hall’s Closure versus post-Marxist Discourse
  2.3 The Political Disciplinary Object
  2.4 Textual versus Discourse Analysis
  2.5 Cultural Studies versus Political Analysis
  2.6 The Object of the Subject
  2.7 Deconstruction versus Marxism

3. Theory versus Practice
  3.1 Practice versus Theory
  3.2 Theory versus Practice
  3.3 Post-Marxist Theory and Practice
  3.4 Banal Pragmatism versus High Theory
  3.5 The (dis)articulation of Theory and Practice
  3.6 Knaves versus Fools
  3.7 Investments and Institutions

4. Post-Marxist Cultural Studies’ Theory, Politics and Intervention
  4.1 Relations and Effects
  4.2 The Necessity of Articulation
  4.3 The Necessity of Institution
  4.4 The (Dis)Articulation of post-Marxism and Politics
  4.5 For a New Intervention
  4.6 The Necessity of Deconstruction

Bibliography
Index

The Truth of Zizek

Edited with Richard Stamp. Continuum 2007

“Over the years that Slavoj Žižek has risen to become the colossus of cultural theory and political dispute there has been little criticism that has set out to outface him on the grounds of his word. The Truth of Zizek sets out on this arduous task with intelligence, integrity and wit. Facing Zizek from the substance of his own protean preoccupations, weaving between the direct assault and a more elliptical displacement, the truth-values of his claims on psychoanalysis, political theory and critique, notions of justice, equality and difference, cultural studies and the figure of mass culture as their core material, are put under micro- and macroscopic attention. The result is a riveting collection of essays which pulls off an immense and contradictory effect. It both enables Žižek’s countless readers at last to navigate a pathway through a possible and viable fundamental critique of his work, and it provokes from him a response that might rank among the very best of his many polemical interventions. A fascinating new creature comes into being: Žižek and his critics – a single glorious symptom of the work we try to do in so many disciplines in these strange and difficult times.”

– Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture, Middlesex University.

Table of Contents

1.          Notes on Contributors.

2.          Simon Critchley: Foreword: Why Žižek Must Be Defended.

3.          Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp: Editors’ Introduction: Is this not precisely … The Truth of Žižek.

4.          Leigh Claire La Berge: The Writing Cure: Slavoj Žižek, Analysand of Modernity.

5.          Paul Bowman: The Tao of Žižek.

6.          Mark Devenney: Žižek’s Passion for the Real: The Real of Terror, The Terror of the Real.

7.          Jeremy Gilbert: All the Right Questions, All the Wrong Answers.

8.          Iain Hamilton Grant: The Insufficiency of Ground: On Žižek’s Schellingianism.

9.          Oliver Marchart: Acting and the Act: On Slavoj Žižek’s Political Ontology.

10.      John Mowitt: Trauma Envy.

11.      Ian Parker: The Truth about Overidentification.

12.      Richard Stamp: ‘Another exemplary case’: Žižek’s logic of examples.

13.      Jeremy Valentine: Denial, Anger and Resentment.

14.      Slavoj Žižek: Afterword: With Defenders Like These, Who Needs Attackers?

15.      Bibliography, Index

Interrogating Cultural Studies

2003. Pluto Press. Edited.

"Paul Bowman has done cultural studies a great theoretical service... This book is a powerful resource for engaging cultural studies as both a language of critique and a discourse of possibility. What Bowman has done brilliantly is make dialogue and critical exchange fundamental to the very meaning of cultural studies and in doing so has given it both a new life and a more secure future to expand and deepen the meaning of democratic identities, values, and struggles. Anyone interested in cultural studies should read this book."

      Henry A. Giroux, Warterbury Chair Professor of Education, Penn State University.


Table of Contents 


'Interrogating Cultural Studies', Paul Bowman.

"From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism", An Interview with Catherine Belsey.
 
"From Cultural Studies to Cultural Analysis", An Interview with Mieke Bal.

"The Projection of Cultural Studies", An Interview with Martin McQuillan.

"Why I Love Cultural Studies", An Interview with Simon Critchley.

"Two Cheers For Cultural Studies", An Interview with Chris Norris.

"Inventing Recollection", An Interview with Adrian Rifkin.

"Becoming Cultural Studies", An Interview with Griselda Pollock.

"Friends and Enemies: Which Side Is Cultural Studies On?", An Interview with Jeremy Gilbert.

"...as if such a thing existed...", An Interview with Julian Wolfreys.

"Cultural Studies, In Theory", An Interview with John Mowitt.

"The Subject Position of Cultural Studies: Is There A Problem? ", An Interview with Jeremy Valentine.

"What Can Cultural Studies Do?", An Interview with Steven Connor.

"Responses", An Interview with Thomas Docherty.

"Unruly Fugues", An Interview with Lynette Hunter.

The Rey Chow Reader

Columbia University Press, forthcoming

The Rey Chow Reader:
Modernity, Postcolonial Ethnicity, Filmic Visuality,
& Transcultural Politics

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
PREFACE:
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Paul Bowman


Part 1
MODERNITY & POSTCOLONIAL ETHNICITY

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Paul Bowman

1. The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies
• Seeing Is Destroying
• The World Becomes Virtual
• The Orbit of Self and Other
• From Atomic Bombs to Area Studies

2. The postcolonial difference: lessons in cultural legitimation

3. Leading Questions, Writing Diaspora
• Orientalism and East Asia: The Persistence of a Scholarly Tradition
• Sanctifying the “Subaltern”: The Productivity of White Guilt
• Tactics of Intervention
• The Chinese Lesson

4. Brushes with Other as Face: Stereotyping and Cross-Ethnic Representation
• The Inevitability of Stereotypes

5. The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon
• Race and the Problem of Admittance
• Community Formation and Sexual Difference: A Double Theoretical Discourse
• What Does the Woman of Color Want?
• The Force of Miscegenation
• Community Building among Theorists of Postcoloniality

6. When Whiteness Feminizes...: Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic
• Is “Woman” a Woman, a Man, or What? The Unstable Status of Woman in Contemporary Cultural Criticism


Part 2
FILMIC VISUALITY & TRANSCULTURAL POLITICS

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Paul Bowman

7. Film and Cultural Identity

8. Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship

9. The Dream of a Butterfly
• “East Is East and West Is West, and Ne’er the Twain Shall Meet”
• “The Beauty. . . of Her Death. It’s a . . . Pure Sacrifice.”
• The Force of Butterfly; or, the “Oriental Woman” as Phallus
• “Under the Robes, beneath Everything, It Was Always Me”
• “It’s Not the Story; It’s the Music”
• Madame Butterfly, C’est Moi
• Coda: New Questions for Cultural Difference and Identity

10. Film as Ethnography
• The Primacy of To-Be-Looked-At-ness
• Translation and the Problem of Origins
• Translation as “Cultural Resistance”
• The “Third Term”
• Weakness, Fluidity, and the Fabling of the World
• The Light of the Arcade

11. A Filmic Staging of Postwar Geotemporal Politics: Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth, Sixty Years Later

12. Sentimental Fabulations: Contemporary Chinese Films
• Where is the movie about me?
• Highlights of a Western Discipline
• Image, Time, Identity: Trajectories of Becoming Visible
• Defining the Sentimental in Relation to Contemporary Chinese Cinema

13. ‘Woman,’ Fetish, Particularism: Articulating Chinese Cinema with a Cross-Cultural Problematic
• ‘Woman’ as commodity and fetish: some observations about Chinese cinema
• Anglophone feminist film theory and the moral high ground of particularism
• Fetish power unbound

NOTES
INDEX

Jacques Ranciere: In Disagreement

Edited issue of Parallax

Editorial:
Jacques Rancière: in disagreement


Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp


There are many ways of being in disagreement. Over the past forty years, Jacques Rancière’s work has defined itself through disagreement. There have been significant disagreements: with Althusser, Bourdieu, Habermas, Lyotard, Derrida, Agamben, Badiou…; with the influence of Heideggerian categories for thinking politics and the political; with neoliberalism and thinkers of ‘consensus’; and indeed with the possibility of the concept of ‘political philosophy’ per se.

More recently, Rancière has explicitly elevated ‘disagreement’ to the status of the primary political category. His sense of the political character of disagreement has several dimensions. For firstly, there is the problem of recognition and of mutual intelligibility. This is not only the problem of ‘speaking the same language’, but the reciprocal problem of one group acknowledging that another group might be equals, equally able to command logos, sense and reason, and hence worthy of being listened to and perhaps responded to. At the same time, Rancière’s work insists on the importance of the always difficult task of establishing a shared, or common, ethos and topos for disagreement: ‘Those who say on gen¬eral grounds that the other cannot understand them, that there is no common language, lose any basis for rights of their own to be recognized’, he proposes, while ‘those who act as though the other can always understand their arguments increase their own strength ¬and not merely at the level of argument’. Hence, Rancière is communitarian precisely insofar as he is not a ‘Communitarian’: for what we share is disagreement, not consensus: it is dissensus between us that needs to be verified.

So this issue of parallax, Jacques Rancière: in Disagreement, seeks to establish a space for the verification of the disagreements within which Rancière intervenes, in a ‘sphere of shared meaning’. The issue was conceived as a way to clarify the nature of Rancière’s interventions into putatively distinct disciplinary and indeed geographical realms – politics, philosophy, history, film, aesthetics, literature, pedagogy, in francophone and – increasingly – anglophone realms; to illuminate the contours and the significance of his disagreements with others and, reciprocally, the nature of the disagreements that others have with him; and thereby to simultaneously demonstrate and verify the importance of Rancière.

The aim of this issue was to make explicit these lines of engagement and dissensus by inviting provocative thinkers and theorists to respond to the challenge of Rancière’s interventions – and to invite Rancière to respond directly to these contributions.

For responding so generously, even though up against so many other pressing commitments, we sincerely thank Professor Rancière. We thank all of our contributors, and we thank the editorial team of parallax, in particular Martin McQuillan, for affording us this opportunity to present some important disagreements.

Reading Ranciere

To be published by Continuum, forthcoming

Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon Through Film, Philosophy and Popular Culture

Wallflower, 2010