Turn on the television or radio, browse the internet, pick up a newspaper or a magazine, connect to social media or even just walk down the street. The chances are if you do any of these things, you will be exposed to popular culture in some form or other, and, at times, it can seem to permeate every aspect of our everyday lives. In its broadest terms, popular culture denotes a widely accepted set of customs and beliefs. As a concept, popular culture is nothing new, but, with the proliferation of the internet and over more recent years’ social media, the channels to which we are exposed to popular culture have rapidly increased, and its influence is far-reaching.
From a scholarly perspective, popular culture is interdisciplinary, cutting across a range of other disciplines, including media and communication studies, sociology, literature, journalism, anthropology and gender studies. It is hardly surprising then that popular culture captures the attention of academia. A quick search on Google shows that it is now possible to study for an MA in Popular Culture at a number of UK universities, and the subject is also taught as a significant element in a wide range of other related degrees and qualifications. It is within this context, that Routledge has published The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture, a collection of popular culture research essays edited by Toby Miller, the Sir Waltor Murdoch Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at Murdoch University and Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University.
In his introductory chapter, Miller provides an anecdote of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose careers began as twin babies on a US network TV comedy show Full House (ABC, 1987-1995) and who have gone on to capitalize on their prominence through a range of music, books, videos and clothing (p. 1). Their entire lives have been played out under the scrutiny of the public eye, and they embody precisely that popular-cultural phenomenon this companion attempts to examine. It is following this anecdote about the Olsen twins that the book continues, exploring the phenomenon of global popular culture over three themed sections as a way of analysing the popular: theories (theorization, from everyday understandings to academic norms), genres (generic distinctions based on themes and qualities) and places (the places in which theories and genres occur and are modified) (p. 2). The three divisions are heuristic as opposed to substantive, designed to stimulate the reader’s interest and encourage an exploratory approach to the study of global popular culture. The result of this is a work that explores popular culture from a wide range of angles and perspectives. Flicking through the volume will take you through a whole spectrum of well-known films, television programmes, fashion designers, movie stars, reality TV stars, bands, politicians, writers and newspapers – many of which have become synonymous with popular culture in the twenty-first century.
Miller has enlisted almost 60 academics, researchers and other relevant voices from across the globe to contribute to the volume, presenting perspectives from Europe, Asia, Australasia, North America and Latin America. Although the influence that the US and the UK have had on popular culture can't be understated, Miller has worked hard to create a volume that presents a globally informed set of case studies and successfully acknowledges the contribution that other countries and cultures have made to this area of scholarship. In its preface, the companion promises to provide “an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, internationally-aware, and conceptually agile guide to the most important aspects of popular culture scholarship”, and I think it would be fair to say that it succeeds in this aim. Although it does add to an already large body of existing literature on popular culture, this volume would nonetheless be a rich addition to a library that supports the field of academic study and research in media, cultural studies and other related programmes in the field of the arts and humanities. The e-book version is available via the VitalSource platform or for purchase on Amazon Kindle.
