[ecrea] Monster Culture Book Announcement

Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader
Marina Levina, PhD and Diem-my Bui, PhD (Editors)

Bloomsbury Academic/Continuum Press (May, 2013)

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/monster-culture-in-the-21st-century-9781441178398/

http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Culture-21st-Century-ebook/dp/B00CPOS4X4/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1369848814&sr=1-1
About Monster Culture in the 21st Century

In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global 
epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, 
immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions 
reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased 
mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great 
social, political, and economical uncertainty.
The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to 
manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and 
televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, 
District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous 
narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically 
because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and 
embracing change in the 21st century.
The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a 
metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which 
change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach 
introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in 
culture.
Table Of Contents

Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century 
by Marina Levina and Diem My Bui
1. Ontology and Monstrosity by Amit S. Rai

Part I: Monstrous Identities
2. Heading Towards the Past: The Twilight Vampire Figure as Surveillance 
Metaphor by Florian Grandena
3. Playing Alien in Post-Racial Times by Susana Loza
4. Battling Monsters and Becoming Monstrous: Human Devolution in The 
Walking Deadby Kyle W. Bishop
5. The Monster in the Mirror: Reflecting and Deflecting the Mobility of 
Gendered Violence Onscreen by Megan Foley
6. Intersectionality Bites: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in HBO’s 
True Blood by Peter Campbell
7. Gendering the Monster Within: Biological Essentialism, Sexual 
Difference, and Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular 
Werewolf Texts by Rosalind Sibielski

Part II: Monstrous Technologies
8. Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics and Zombies by 
Sherryl Vint
9. Monstrous Technologies and the Telepathology of Everyday Life by 
Jeremy Biles
10. Monstrous Citizenships: Coercion, Submission, and the Possibilities 
of Resistance inNever Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas by Roy Osamu Kamada
11. On the Frontlines of the Zombie War in the Congo: Digital 
Technology, the Trade in Conflict Minerals, and Zombification by Jeffrey 
W. Mantz
12. Monsters by the Numbers: Controlling Monstrosity in Video Games by 
Jaroslav Švelch
13. Killing Whiteness:The Critical Positioning of Zombie Walk Brides in 
Internet Settings by Michele White

Part III: Monstrous Territories
14. Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national 
imaginary by Michael S. Drake
15. The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. 
Shifting Terrain of Terror by Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. 
Lugo-Lugo
16. The Heartland Under Siege: Undead in the West by Cynthia J. Miller 
and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
17. When Matter Becomes an Active Agent: The Incorporeal Monstrosity of 
Threat in Lostby Enrica Picarelli
18. Monstrous Capital: Frankenstein Derivatives, Financial Wizards, and 
the Spectral Economy by Ryan Gillespie
19. Domesticating the Monstrous in the Globalizing World by Carolyn Harford
About the Contributors
Index
Reviews

“Preoccupied with zombies, vampires, and ever more unholy configurations 
of human body parts and consciousnesses, the 21st century is proving to 
be a monstrous time.Monster Culture in the 21st Century offers readers 
an international and interdisciplinary theoretical toolkit that can help 
us better understand the monstrous’ magical ability to reflect and 
refract immense political, technoscientific, and ecological changes and 
anxieties.” – Carol A. Stabile, Professor, School of Journalism and 
Communication and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University 
of Oregon, US,

“Monster Culture in the 21st Century brings together various theoretical 
and methodological approaches to look critically at the trope of the 
monstrous as an increasingly ubiquitous mode for managing contemporary 
crises of identity, technology and globalization through popular media 
culture. As such it provides refreshing new directions for understanding 
‘monster culture’ beyond metaphor and as a necessary condition of our 
lives in the 21st century.” – Dr. Jane Chi Hyun Park, Senior Lecturer, 
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the United States Studies 
Centre, University of Sydney, Australia
Marina Levina, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of Memphis
212 Art and Communication Bldg
Memphis, TN 38152
Office: 901-678-2577
Fax: 901-678-4331
(mlevina /at/ memphis.edu)
http://www.marinalevina.com/

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