The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, and Politics

by Sut Jhally

Sut Jhally’s influential work as an activist, writer, film producer, and educator has had a far-reaching impact on the course and concerns of media criticism. This volume offers an essential collection of his writings. Jhally’s work exhibits an engaged and ongoing concern with social justice, cultural politics, and public pedagogy. The Spectacle of Accumulation captures the full range of Jhally’s thought and covers a variety of issues including the role of advertising in contemporary life, the cultural politics of sport, race, and gender coding in the coverage of current events, and the power of media education to name just a few of the themes covered in this crucial, new work. In addition to his key writings, this book includes a foreword by Henry Giroux as well as three interviews offering a fresh perspective on Jhally’s work.

300 pages, Paperback

First published June 24, 2006

About the author

Sut Jhally is Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation (MEF). He is one of the world's leading scholars looking at the role played by advertising and popular culture in the processes of social control and identity construction. The author of numerous books and articles on media(including The Codes of Advertising and Enlightened Racism) he is also an award-winning teacher (a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Massachusetts, where the student newspaper has also voted him "Best professor"). In addition, he has been awarded the Distinguished Outreach Award, and was selected to deliver a Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 2007.

He is best known as the producer and director of a number of films and videos (including Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video; Tough Guise: Media, Violence and the Crisis of Masculinity; and Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire) that deal with issues ranging from gender, sexuality and race to commercialism, violence and politics. Born in Kenya, raised in England, educated in graduate studies in Canada, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Serenity · Rating 5 out of 5]

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