Dear LEARNING-FROM-FILM-TV-NEWMEDIA Subscribers,
I hope the following titles will be of interest to you:
Global
Television
Co-Producing Culture
Barbara
J. Selznick, University of Arizona
"Global
Television is well focused, disciplined, imaginative, and original; the
global outlook and free ranging expertise across borders are signature virtues.
It looms to be a blueprint for the emergent field of globally-centric media
studies."
—Thomas Doherty , American Studies Department, Brandeis University
The face of U.S. television broadcasting is
changing in ways that are both profound and subtle. Global Television
uncovers the particular processes by which the international circulation of
culture takes place, while addressing larger cultural issues such as identity
formation.
Focusing on how the process of
internationally made programming such as Highlander: The Series and The
Odyssey—amusingly dubbed “Europudding” and
“commercial white bread”—are changing television into a
transnational commodity, Barbara Selznick considers how this mode of
production—as a means by which transnational television is
created—has both economic rewards and cultural benefits as well as
drawbacks.
Global Television explores the ways
these international co-productions create a “global” culture as
well as help form a national identity. From British “brand”
programming (e.g, Cracker) that airs on A&E in the U.S. to
children’s television programs such as Plaza Sesamo, and
documentaries, Selznick indicates that while the style, narrative, themes and
ideologies may be interesting, corporate capitalism ultimately affects and
impacts these programs in significant ways.
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1855_reg.html
Temple University Press
June 2008 224 pp 5.5 x 8.25 inches 8 B & W
illustrations £17.99 PB 978-1-59213-504-2
SPECIAL
DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £12.50 to LEARNING-FROM-FILM-TV-NEWMEDIA
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and Packing £2.75
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QUOTE REF NUMBER: LN211108GT for discount)
To order a copy please
contact Marston on 44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask] or visit our website www.combinedacademic.co.uk
Signal
and Noise
Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria
Brian
Larkin, Columbia University
“This
thoughtful, scholarly, and original book links the transnational traffic of
media forms to the logics of the colonial state and to the vulnerabilities of
large cities in Africa. It will provoke new thinking among Africanists,
urbanists, anthropologists, and all students of globalizing media processes.
Brian Larkin is a major new voice in the study of media as lived infrastructure
in a world of uneven connectivity.”—Arjun Appadurai,
author of Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger
“This
eagerly anticipated book is a wonderful contribution to several fields: media
studies, cultural studies, African studies, anthropology, and analyses of
globalization. Brian Larkin writes with eloquence and passion, and he compels
us to rethink our assumptions about the work of transnational media and the
formation of identity.”—Purnima Mankekar, author of Screening
Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation
in Postcolonial India
Mainstream
media and film theory are based on the ways that media technologies operate in
Europe and the United States. In this groundbreaking work, Brian Larkin
provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media
theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United
States is taken as the starting point. Concentrating on the Muslim city of Kano
in the north of Nigeria, Larkin charts how the material qualities of
technologies and the cultural ambitions they represent feed into the everyday
experiences of urban Nigeria.
Media technologies were introduced to Nigeria by colonial regimes as part of an
attempt to shape political subjects and create modern, urban Africans. Larkin
considers the introduction of media along with electric plants and railroads as
part of the wider infrastructural project of colonial and postcolonial
urbanism. Focusing on radio networks, mobile cinema units, and the building of
cinema theaters, he argues that what media come to be in Kano is the outcome of
technology’s encounter with the social formations of northern Nigeria and
with norms shaped by colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and Islam. Larkin
examines how media technologies produce the modes of leisure and cultural forms
of urban Africa by analyzing the circulation of Hindi films to Muslim Nigeria,
the leisure practices of Hausa cinemagoers in Kano, and the dynamic emergence
of Nigerian video films. His analysis highlights the diverse, unexpected media
forms and practices that thrive in urban Africa. Signal and Noise brings
anthropology and media together in an original analysis of media’s place
in urban life.
Duke University Press
April 2008 352pp 56 Illustrations
£16.99 PB 978-0-8223-4108-6
SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £12.00 to LEARNING-FROM-FILM-TV-NEWMEDIA
Subscribers
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£2.75
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NUMBER: LN211108SN for discount)
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465500 or email [log in to unmask] or
visit our website www.combinedacademic.co.uk
Clare Cottrell
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Combined Academic Publishers
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