Resist!: Protest Media and Popular Culture in the Brexit-Trump Era

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Resist! pays close attention to popular culture; it examines the political ramifications of Kanye Wests support of Donald Trump, the significance of Aaron Sorkins language to American political discourse, and the casting of female emotion as a political force in House of Cards and The Handmaids Tale. In doing so, the collection traverses the formal world of the political as it relates to presidential elections and referenda, while emphasising the sociocultural and political significance of popular texts which have played a critical role in exploring, critiquing and shaping culture in the twenty first century.

Popular culture is often considered trivial or irrelevant to more pressing political concerns, and celebrities are often reprimanded for their forays into the political sphere. Resist! pays close attention to texts that are too often excluded when we think about politics, and explores the cultural and political fall-out of a reality TV president and a divisive public vote on increasingly connected global audiences. In examining the cultural politics of popular media, this collection is inherently interdisciplinary, and the chapters utilise methods and analysis from a range of social science and humanities disciplines. Resist! is both creative and timely, and offers a crucial examination of a fascinating and frightening political and cultural moment.

Reviews

A fantastic, urgent and lively collection that importantly thinks about what it means to resist in the here and now. Monteverde and McCollum are two of the most significant young scholars in Anglo-American cultural and media studies and this carefully curated edited collection reflects brilliantly their intelligence, craft and ethico-political commitment. A truly wonderful book.

Monteverde and McCollum have brought together a timely collection that examines a range of forms of and opportunities for presenting resistance within culture. They demonstrate how this work and the issues it deals with are urgently present within our everyday lives and how these examples can provide hope when that can appear in short supply.

With 16 other contributing authors, [Monteverde and McCollum] cover different aspects of popular culture as it has unfolded during the Brexit-Trump era, with some emphasis on cinema. Together the authors make an important claim that popular culture has become, in a time of right-wing populism, more a channel for political expression and socially responsible activism than ever before. This theme is examined in 12 chapters, adopting at points the perspective of social protest and resistance, or paying homage to earlier scholars and social scientists, e.g., Tedd Gurr and Charles Tilly.... Fairly easy to read, the chapters eschew technical language and employ ethnographic narrative including quoted examples. From a theoretical point of view, the volume is informed by discourse analysis, uniting social trends and popular expressions of cultural resistance. Recommended.

Author Bio

Giuliana Monteverde is a Lecturer in Broadcast Production at Queens University, Belfast.

Victoria McCollum is a Lecturer in Cinematic Arts at Ulster University.