Books in the Radical Cultural Studies series

From Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead, imaginary worlds in fantastic genres offer us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. This book examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer valuable tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negri's concept of Empire as a way of understanding globalization, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics shows how popular fantastic fiction has the potential of offering more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media convergence and participatory culture. The book approaches fantastic world-building as an ideologically ambiguous way of imagining alternatives to global capitalism. By approaching transmedia world-building both as a narrative form and as a growing industry derived from fan culture, it shows on the one hand the limitations inherent in the political economy of popular genre fiction. But at the same time, it also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics, popular culture, and anticapitalism.

Explores the rapidly changing relationship between the Balkans and the EU in a time of crisis

Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities is a ground-breaking work that revaluates the cultural and political understandings of the world today from the perspective of the south.

A multidisciplinary collection which brings together cutting edge research about the cultural politics of space.

A multidisciplinary collection which brings together cutting edge research about the cultural politics of space.

Explores how UK politicians and the press mobilise support for 'austerity' through appealing to socially conservative conceptions of work and community. It examines the techniques of anti-austerity social movements in challenging the prevailing mood of guilt, nostalgia and resentment and how these may offer radical alternatives for social change.

Paris, along with New York, was one of the main centres of the fashion industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But although New York based garment workers were mobilized early in the twentieth century, Paris was the stage of vibrant revolutions and uprisings throughout the nineteenth century. As a consequence, French women workers were radicalized much earlier, creating a unique and unprecedented moment in both labour and feminist history.Seamstresses were central figures in the socio-political and cultural events of nineteenth and early twentieth century France but their stories and political writings have remained marginalized and obscured. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished documents from the industrial revolution, ';Sewing, Fighting and Writing' is a foucauldian genealogy of the Parisian seamstress. Looking at the assemblage of radical practices in work, politics and culture, it explores the constitution of the self of the seamstress in the era of early industrialization and revolutionary events and considers her contribution to the socio-political and cultural formations in modernity.

Brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture.

Brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture.

Explores the rapidly changing relationship between the Balkans and the EU in a time of crisis

This book offers a radical and timely cross-subject intervention into critical social media studies, comprised of four distinct but related sections which are interspersed with artistic illustrations, depicting the affectivities that flow through social media.

This book explores how traditional ideologies of gender and sexuality have influenced the culture of the space and the extra-terrestrial.

This book explores different ways that the male body has been represented by, constructed in, and experienced through digital media during the age of austerity. It uses three case studies to do this: the celebrity male nude leak; the rise of young men sharing images of their muscular bodies on social networking sites; and the rise of chemsex.