This book is about war and popular culture, and war in popular culture. Tara Brabazon summons, probes, questions and reclaims popular culture, challenging the assumptions of war, whiteness, Christianity, modernity and progress that have dominated our lives since September 11. Addressing modes of thinking, design, music and visual media, Thinking Popular Culture offers a journey through courageous, interventionist and thoughtful ideas, performers and cultures. It welcomes those who ask difficult questions of those in power. Addressing the lack of imagination and dissent that characterizes this new century, it is essential reading for any scholar of cultural studies and popular culture, media and journalism, creative writing and terrorism studies.
Biography
Tara Brabazon is Professor of Education and Head of the School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia
The Times Higher Education's Book of the Week 'Tara Brabazon has ushered cultural studies out of the drawing room and prodded it back onto the streets, where it matters more than ever.' Justin O'Connor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia 'Brabazon is a "war writer", grappling not with the culture wars but with war itself, including the wars within. She offers a cultural studies approach to the period between 9/11 and the present. Her elegiac essays range widely. Brilliant Brabazon is an antidote to the Bush "war presidency" and its dispiriting denouement. She makes cultural studies matter again.' Ben Agger, University of Texas at Arlington, USA 'Tara Brabazon has written a beautiful, passionate, and political book about popular culture in which the learning of pleasure is matched by the pleasure of learning, critique, and civic engagement. One cannot think about politics without engaging popular culture as a powerful educational force, and Thinking Popular Culture is one of the best books available to confront this crucial question with great insight, enormous courage, and sense of social responsibility.' Henry Giroux, McMaster University, Canada 'There is no one else with Brabazon's combination of raucousness and subtlety, offensive pugnacity and dazzling charm, terrific garrulity and razor incisiveness...Indeed, this packed and fizzing book is in many of its sections a celebration sung over the great achievements and works of art wrung from this epoch by both television and the great frescoes of popular culture, especially rock music, which provides its staple...Thinking Popular Culture reads like a pasted-together but perfectly coherent series of shortish newspaper articles. I don't know whether or not this is the case, but the point is really that this swift, darting movement of the author's mind from topic to subject permits her to spin a long, ravelling and gossamer thread of continuity and connectedness along the multitudinous quiddity of
