Global media and advances in technology have profoundly affected the way people experience events. The essays in this volume explore the dimensions of contemporary spectacles from the Arab Spring to spectatorship in Hollywood. Questioning the effects that spectacles have on their observers, the authors ask: Are viewers robbed of their autonomy, transformed into depoliticized and passive consumers, or rather are they drawn in to cohesive communities? Does their participation in an...
Over many decades, «contagion» has been a metaphor of choice for everything from global terrorism, suicide bombings, poverty, immigration, global financial crises, human rights, fast food, obesity, divorce, and homosexuality. Essays examine the language of epidemiology used in the war on terror, the repressive effects of global disease surveillance, and films and novels that enact the perplexities of contagion in a global context. Fear of microbial disaster becomes a framework for larger...
