European Journal of Cultural Studies

The international development of booktowns during the late 20th and early 21st centuries has facilitated the accumulation of cultural capital for small towns by mobilizing the prestige of books as cultural objects. This article investigates the booktown phenomenon through a case study of Clunes, a village in regional Australia that has been designated as a booktown since 2007. The Bourdieusian approach of the article investigates cultural intermediaries and audiences at booktown, drawing on interviews and analysis of annual reports. These suggest two key findings. First, while Clunes Booktown participates in a range of regional, national and international networks, these work to focus attention strongly at the local level of the village. Second, the booktown designation relies upon and sometimes shores up the association of books with cultural distinction. Findings also suggest that the peripheral setting of Clunes may offset some of the exclusivity of book culture, as the attractions of the village and its non-book-related activities enable different forms of participation and potentially open up literary culture to a broader public.

This article tells the story of how the journalistic practices of David Hamilton Jackson (1884–1946), a local of St. Croix, in the newspaper The Herald (1915–1925) produced cultural and cosmopolitan bridges in (post)colonial times and how these connections were built on cultural and journalistic practices rather than on technological advancements. Based on a critical, discursive reading of The Herald, the article argues that despite the dominant narrative of the telegraph’s cosmopolitan qualities, which is supported by its perceived neutral transmission of news between peoples and cultures, the telegraph’s neutrality, like journalism’s own ambition of objectivity, is contestable. Rather, when looking for cosmopolitan connections – understood as worldwide, cultural citizenship – and citizen journalism, the reader is urged to consider the embodied, political acts and engagements of subjects struggling to gain rights and political voice through the medium of journalism.

This article analyses new waves of cultural production in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. It focuses on contemporary artists’ self-perception and self-positioning in the new realities of the postsocialist cultural realm and national awakening discourses. Independent contemporary artists of the post-Soviet period form new artistic movements, such as Punk Shamanism in Kazakhstan, to produce alternative truth and authentic discourses on nation and its history. This production is juxtaposed to the production of state-sponsored artists and writers. The article focuses on this struggle for defining the nation and claiming power in the discursive realm. It contributes to further conceptualization of the power of contemporary artists and non-state-sponsored cultural elites to participate in the processes of alternative and powerful discourses on nation and national imagination that become successful domestically and abroad. Through the discussion and production of Punk Shamanism – a new wave of cultural production identified with the search for lost memory and cultural codes, the article demonstrates how this cultural struggle developed in post-1991 Kazakhstan.

Notions of authenticity and resistance are often addressed concomitantly in the context of popular culture and in the discourse that surrounds blackness in particular. Avoiding such a perspective, this article draws on Israeli mainstream rappers for whom rap is a way to converge popular style with the ability to speak their mind in the most sincere way. Based on ethnographic description, I therefore call to acknowledge rappers’ position as ‘authors’: aware and critical subjects whose sense of personhood depends not on strict avoidance from mainstream routes but rather on a sober participation in it. Contemporary hip-hop in this case offers a possible escape from a rigid power-oriented analysis and from the irresolvable cycle of resistance and cooptation so often found in Cultural and Popular Music Studies.

This article discusses the concept of fandom structures centring on Japanese popular culture fan conventions by highlighting potential factors underlying young Malaysians’ involvement in such conventions. Data were collected from participatory observations at four conventions and interviews with nine Malaysians involved in conventions for at least 5 years. These participants felt marginalized in their school lives because of their fondness for anime, yet they expressed a sense of togetherness while at conventions. For those continuously involved, the conventions were not limited to only a temporal ritual space, as may be explained with the term ‘communitas’. While experiencing a feeling of ‘communitas’ with other convention attendees as of members of their discursive fandom, they acquired a hierarchical system within other activity-based fandom. In this way, young Malaysians have not merely been subsumed into an existing system as the respective structural fandom communities enable the inclusion of democratic aspects by being open to the public through local conventions.

This article analyses discourses about migration within three documentaries that were broadcast on terrestrial British television in January 2014: The Truth about Immigration in the UK and The Hidden World of Britain’s Immigrants, both broadcast on BBC Two, and Episode 2 of Benefits Street, broadcast on Channel 4. The methodology involved a detailed analysis of the documentaries, situated within a Marxist analysis of British capitalism, the capitalist crisis, and the economic and political position of migrants. Amidst the contradictions and complexities that were identified within these documentaries, representations of ‘migrants’ can be grouped into three categories: disposable labour, passive victim, and active threat. We argue these discursive roles reflect and reinforce capitalist exploitation, by constructing ‘migrants’ as a mutable ‘other’ to divide the working class.

Crime-detective fiction tours are increasingly popular in cities around the world, providing both international and domestic tourists alike the possibility to visit and experience urban space through its associations with their favorite novels and adaptations. Engaging in a comparison between guided literary tours through Sherlock Holmes’ London, Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles and Lisbeth Salander’s Stockholm, this research aims to answer the question of how and in what way(s) these crime-detective fiction tours create a sense of place in the postmodern metropolis. Based on participant observation, as well as interviews with the guides and/or organizers of these tours, results show that each of these literary tours is particularly corresponding to the act of reading crime-detective fiction in general: the tours perform a re-enactment of the text, as the guide-as-detective takes the participants to unknown urban locations, in pursuit of unraveling hidden histories of the city. The locations addressed on the tours are all, to varying extents, made sense of through a combination of multiple narratives, derived from both historical fact and fiction. In gradually exposing, analyzing and unraveling these narrative layers of significance on location, the tours convey a distinctively modernistic myth of a presumed core identity of the city.