Series:

Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society

3 total works

Cover of Undoing Culture

Undoing Culture

by Mike Featherstone

Published 21 September 1995
Written with the clarity and insight that readers have come to expect of Mike Featherstone Undoing Culture is a notable contribution to our understanding of modernism and postmodernism. It explores the formation and deformation of the cultural sphere and the effects on culture of globalization. Against many orthodox postmodernist accounts,the author argues that it is wrong to regard our present state of fragmentation and dislocation as an epochal break. Existing interdependencies and power balances are not so easily broken down.

Nonetheless some important cultural changes have occurred since World War II. In particular, the book examines some of the processes which have uncoupled culture from the social; the erosion of the ideal of the heroic life in the face of the onslaught from consumerism and the deformation of culture; and the rise of new forms of identity development. It explains why culture has gained a more significant role in everyday life and also why it has come to preoccupy the Academy in recent years.

Mike Featherstone looks at the effects of the multiplication of cultural goods and images on our ability to read culture and develop fixed meanings and relationships. He highlights the importance of the global in attempting to cope with the objective difficulties of cultural overproduction. The book concludes that the rise of non-Western nation-states with different cultural frames produces different reactions of modernity, making it more appropriate to refer to global modernities.

Cover of Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
The first edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ′consumer culture′ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. This expanded new edition includes:
  • a fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the first edition
  • a major new chapter on ′Modernity and the Cultural Question′
  • an update on postmodernism and the development of contemporary theory after postmodernism
  • an account of multiple and alternative modernities
  • the challenges of consumer culture in Japan and China.

The result is a book that shakes the boundaries of debate, from one of the foremost writers on culture and postmodernism of the present day.

Cover of The Mask of Ageing