Cultural Studies and Marxism – serie

Red Aesthetics offers a new way to think about art and politics, focusing on the revolutionary work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein between the wars. Todd Cronan shows how these three artists’ photographs, dramas, films, and writings—centered on class conflict—differ from current left orthodoxies rooted in empathy. Writing against liberal pieties, Cronan contends, following Brecht, that empathy is not the solution to our problems, but more like the source of them.

Red Aesthetics offers a new way to think about art and politics, focusing on the revolutionary work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein between the wars. Todd Cronan shows how these three artists’ photographs, dramas, films, and writings—centered on class conflict—differ from current left orthodoxies rooted in empathy. Writing against liberal pieties, Cronan contends, following Brecht, that empathy is not the solution to our problems, but more like the source of them.

In the early part of the 20th century, state and corporate propagandists used the mass media to promote the valor and rightness of ascending U.S. hegemony on the global stage. Critics who challenged these practices of mass persuasion were quickly discredited by the emergent field of communication research - a field explicitly attempting to measure and thereby improve the efficacy of media messages. Three strains of critical cultural and media theory were especially engaged with the continued critique of the role of commodified, industrially produced, mass distributed culture- the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, the Cultural Materialism and active audiences of Cultural Studies, and Critical Political Economy of Communication. This book examines these three paradigms, illustrating the major tensions and points of agreement between them, particularly in relation to the dominant paradigms of administrative social science research and media ecology within communication and media studies more broadly.From the perspective of the emergent cultural environment, Hegemony, American Mass Media and Cultural Studies argues that the original points of disagreement between these paradigms appear less contradictory than before. In doing so it offers a new theoretical toolkit for those seeking to understand the current struggles for a more just, more democratic media, culture, and society.

In the early part of the 20th century, state and corporate propagandists used the mass media to promote the valor and rightness of ascending U.S. hegemony on the global stage. Critics who challenged these practices of mass persuasion were quickly discredited by the emergent field of communication research - a field explicitly attempting to measure and thereby improve the efficacy of media messages. Three strains of critical cultural and media theory were especially engaged with the continued critique of the role of commodified, industrially produced, mass distributed culture- the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, the Cultural Materialism and active audiences of Cultural Studies, and Critical Political Economy of Communication. This book examines these three paradigms, illustrating the major tensions and points of agreement between them, particularly in relation to the dominant paradigms of administrative social science research and media ecology within communication and media studies more broadly.From the perspective of the emergent cultural environment, Hegemony, American Mass Media and Cultural Studies argues that the original points of disagreement between these paradigms appear less contradictory than before. In doing so it offers a new theoretical toolkit for those seeking to understand the current struggles for a more just, more democratic media, culture, and society.

How has capitalism created or enhanced racism? In what ways do the violent histories of slavery and empire continue to influence the allocation of global resources? Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival proposes a return to analyses of racial capitalism – the capitalism that is inextricably linked with histories of racist expropriation – and argues that it is only by tracking the interconnections between changing modes of capitalism and racism that we can hope to address the most urgent challenges of social injustice. It considers the continuing impact of global histories of racist expropriation on more recent articulations of capitalism, with a particular focus on the practices of racial capitalism, the continuing impact of uneven development, territory and border-marking, the place of reproductive labour in sustaining racial capitalism, the marketing of diversity as a consumer pleasure and the creation of supposedly 'surplus' populations.