The essay considers the relationship of the US empire to torture as a practice and an aspect of entertainment. Focusing on depictions of torture in film and television after 9/11, the article also looks back to the nineteenth century to show how torture functioned as a type of entertainment in an earlier historical context. Lazo argues that the use of torture in popular culture amounts to a type of “torturetainment” meant to entice the audience with its spectacle of violence. Through these forms of torturetainment, US cultural producers recognize, critique and flaunt the US willingness to use torture as a tactic to support its imperial ambitions while also masking the operations of empire through a focus on alternate narratives related to the goals of protagonists. These cultural representations thus reveal torture as part of the arsenal of empire and a discursive framing related to social conditions within a national polis. The chapter examines the film Zero, Dark Thirty (2012) and a dime novel from 1851 to emphasize the longue durée of torture as entertainment within the context of the US empire.

The chapter provides an overview of the multifaceted cultural significance of Allen Ginsberg. While Ginsberg appeared in numerous works, performances, and actions from the late 1950s until his death in 1997 (and continues to enjoy an afterlife in popular and literary culture), in every case these appearances mean something. Hypersensitive Beatnik misfit, spokesman for the Summer of Love, conduit for Eastern mysticism, drug advocate, punk rocker, itinerant scholar, and gay-rights champion (to name only the most prominent of Ginsberg’s manifestations), Ginsberg’s lasting representation – that of the gifted and innovative poet – is the one that will linger.

Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

Early-twentieth-century empire soaked into European culture. That occurred via new visual media and other imaginative means: cinema, photography, and popular press; zoos, trade fairs, and colonial exhibitions; postcards and advertisements; colonial commodity consumption; memoirs, travelogues, and exploration; quality literature and popular fiction. Europe’s relations with exotically faraway, excitingly wealth-producing, aesthetically enticing, but threatening overseas worlds saturated identity and national character. Europeans knew themselves via their racially “othered” colonized populations, who enabled a vivid topography of the imagination. Resulting languages of difference and belonging delivered many resources for individual and collective self-understanding. Cultural media were legion: mass-circulation fictions and recognized novels; children’s comic books; polar expeditions and Central Asian exploration; new Black sporting celebrity; Negrophilia surrounding Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. “Race” acquired many sinister applications, from social Darwinism and eugenics to the hardening of the “color line.” The most aggressively elaborate version was the Nazis’ racial state.

This chapter argues that the relationship between the online world and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Popular culture, and the increasing use of social media by young people and children has seen many traditionalists lament how our culture has declined, and worry about how educationally corrupted our schools have become. Its absence has been used to suggest that our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency – children and young people. The keen-eyed among you might note that this chapter is full of false binaries... perhaps this tells us something about the nature of the topic. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement. This is not even a simple chapter to write; the references will likely be outdated by the time I finish writing this sentence. So read on with a little grace, and a little humor.

This chapter traces the growth of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King from his earliest ideas for an Arthurian epic in his notebooks from the 1830s to the completion of his twelve-book epic in 1886. It examines his treatment of his Arthurian sources, most importantly Malory, and attempts to capture the reactions of nineteenth-century readers to the Idylls by drawing on a range of contemporary reviews. It is difficult to overestimate Tennyson’s role in recentring the Arthurian legend in popular consciousness, and the final section briefly explores the influence of the Idylls on aspects of Victorian popular culture.

This chapter, which introduces the collection, maps a distinctively British utopian impulse in literature and culture from the end of World War II to the present. Drawing on philosophical works by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch, the chapter explores the utopian impulse in literary works, films, zines, poetry, art, and music. It situates these works in their materialist contexts, from the swinging 1960s and more apocalyptic 1970s to the political riots of 1980s British cities and blistering critiques of Thatcherite neoliberalism that persisted into the 1990s and early 2000s, concluding with the utopian turn in the 2010s and 2020s as financial, ecological, and political crises gripped the British state. Taking its inspiration from the Welsh cultural materialist Raymond Williams and British postcolonial scholars Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, the chapter argues that British countercultures and subcultures have yielded a powerful utopian surplus that persists into the present. Like an explosive, the image Bloch privileges for utopian rupture, the texts, novelists, filmmakers, poets, zine-makers, and playwrights explored in this collection rip through the prevailing discourse to reveal a utopian surplus; ‘that which is not yet fulfilled’.

This chapter explores the significant impact of the digital age on the realm of literature, focusing specifically on Hebrew poetry as a distinctive case study. This focus is driven by the declining status of literature within Israeli culture and the dynamic state of its reviving literary landscape. The study is structured in two phases: the first delves into practices and phenomena, while the second aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the field’s logic and values by examining different participants and levels. The chapter claims that the necessity of the second phase arises from the current state of the field, where the adaptation of media has become so ingrained that it conceals its influence on literary themes, forms, and language. The chapter addresses this gap using the theoretical framework of mediatization, which explores long-term changes associated with media evolution.

In stark contrast to the Mao era, today’s party propaganda has adapted to consumer culture. This chapter argues that ideology and patriotism under Xi have been transformed into commodity and fashion. The chapter examines the mechanism of commodifying ideology from three angles. The first are the more traditional media and popular cultural products such as movies and CCTV New Year’s Gala. The second is through the enterprise of “telling China’s story” exemplified by venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs such as Eric Xun Li and Rao Jin, whose enterprises support party-endorsed popular intellectuals such as Jin Canrong, Zhang Weiwei, and Hu Xijin. The third is through the we-media, or self-media, flatform, where millions around the globe profit by posting repetitive sensationalized “loving China” videos. The trident principle manifests itself in the Chinese celebration of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s return to China. The party has masterminded a grand-scale ambitious propaganda movement that reaches far beyond the Great Wall of China.

This chapter traces the roots of racial capitalism in early modern England. It shows how ideologies of class and race were grounded in the logic of both nationalism and overseas trade and colonialism. It does so by tracing the evolution of the story of Dick Whittington, a fantasy about a poor boy that acquired the status of a fairy tale in English culture. This evolution illustrates how dreams of class mobility at home were shaped by the promises of international wealth; how these promises in turn molded the ideology of nationalism whereby the nobility and the mercantile classes came together despite the tensions between them; how existing geographic differences were rewritten to present European superiority; and finally, how peoples from different parts of the world were represented as both necessary and dangerous to the advancement of the European self.