Visual Culture and Hip Hop/VCDM408 with Professor Tewodross Melchishua Williams: E-books

Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the "mainstream" in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures – what may have been considered alternative to one group may be perceived as mainstream to another.

Therapeutic Uses of Rap Hip-Hop introduces a more complex understanding of the ways in which rap and hip-hop is attentive to the live experiences (both positive and negative) of many therapy clients

From youth violence, to the impact of high stakes educational testing, to editorial hand wringing over the moral failures of hip-hop culture, young people of colour are often portrayed as gang affiliated, "troubled", and ultimately, dangerous. The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back examines how youth activism has emerged to address the persistent inequalities that affect urban youth of colour. Based on two years of fieldwork with youth affiliated with two non-profit organizations in Oakland, California.

While the term "culture wars" often designates the heated arguments in the English-speaking world spiralling around race, the canon, and affirmative action, in fact these discussions have raged in multiple sites and languages. Charting the multidirectional traffic of the debates, Stam/Shohat trace their literal and figurative translation, seen in French Postcolonial Studies and Brazilian Whiteness Studies, and in such cultural phenomena as Tropicalia and Hip-Hop.

In his familiar and accessible style, Lull brings to life a diverse range of examples and mini case studies which will prove invaluable to the reader. These range from the hip-hop hybrids of New Zealand's Maori youth and the vastly divergent meaning of race and culture in Brazil and the United States to the global impact of McDonalds and Microsoft. Complex theoretical ideas such as globalization,symbolic power, popular culture, ideology, consciousness, hegemony,social rules, media audience, cultural territory, and super culture are explained in a clear and engaging way that challenges traditional understandings.

Colour permeates contemporary visual and material culture and affects our senses beyond the superficial encounter by infiltrating our perceptions and memories and becoming deeply rooted in thought processes that categorize and divide along culturally constructed lines. Colour exists as a cultural as well as psycho-physical phenomenon and acquires a multitude of meanings within differing historical and cultural contexts. The contributors examine how colour becomes imbued with specific symbolic and material meanings that tint ourconstructions of race, gender, ideal bodies, the relationship of the self to others and of the self to technology and the built environment. By highlighting the relationship of colour across media and material culture, this volume reveals the complex interplay of cultural connotations, discursive practices and socio-psychological dynamics of colour in an international context.

All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler's view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences.

Art Is Not What You Think It Is utilizes original research to present a series of critical incursions into the current state of debate on the idea of art, making manifest what has been largely missing or unsaid in those discussions: Links museology, history, theory, and criticism to the realities of contemporary social conditions and shows how they have structurally functioned in a variety of contexts; Deals with divisive and controversial problems such as blasphemy and idolatry, and the problem of artistic truth; Addresses relations between European notions about art and artifice and those developed in other and especially indigenous cultural traditions