In the Sixth Edition of Media Analysis Techniques, author Arthur Asa Berger once again provides students with a clearly written, user-friendly, hands-on guide to media criticism. The book empowers students to make their own analyses of the media rather than just accept how others interpret the media.

In Racism and Cultural Studies E. San Juan Jr. offers a historical-materialist critique of practices in multiculturalism and cultural studies. Rejecting contemporary theories of inclusion as affirmations of the capitalist status quo, San Juan envisions a future of politically equal and economically empowered citizens through the democratization of power and the socialization of property. Calling U.S. nationalism the new “opium of the masses,” he argues that U.S. nationalism is where racist ideas and practices are formed, refined, and reproduced as common sense and consensus. Individual chapters engage the themes of ethnicity versus racism, gender inequality, sexuality, and the politics of identity configured with the discourse of postcoloniality and postmodernism. Questions of institutional racism, social justice, democratization, and international power relations between the center and the periphery are explored and analyzed. San Juan fashions a critique of dominant disciplinary approaches in the humanities and social sciences and contends that “the racism question” functions as a catalyst and point of departure for cultural critiques based on a radical democratic vision. He also asks urgent questions regarding globalization and the future of socialist transformation of “third world” peoples and others who face oppression. As one of the most notable cultural theorists in the United States today, San Juan presents a provocative challenge to the academy and other disciplinary institutions. His intervention will surely compel the attention of all engaged in intellectual exchanges where race/ethnicity serves as an urgent focus of concern.

The fifth edition of this approachable text draws on both academic and applied perspectives to offer a lively critique of contemporary advertising’s effects on American character and culture. Berger explains how advertising works by employing a psycho-cultural approach, encouraging readers to think about advertisements and commercials in more analytical and profound ways. Among the topics he addresses are the role of brands, the problem of self-alienation, and how both relate to consumption. Berger also considers the Values and Lifestyle (VALS) and Claritas typologies in marketing. Distinctive chapters examine specific advertisements and commercials from multiple perspectives, including semiotic, psychoanalytic, sociological, Marxist, mythic, and feminist analysis. Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture provides an accessible overview of advertising in the United States, spanning issues as diverse as sexuality, politics, market research, consumer culture, and more; helping readers understand the role that advertising has played, and continues to play, in all our lives.

The Dialectic of Taste examines the aesthetic economy in the context of economic crises. It explains how a new concern for aesthetics, seen in artisan markets, was born out of the ashes of McDonaldization to become a potent force today, capable of both regulating social identity and sparking social change.

While the ubiquity of the aesthetic in contemporary society can hardly be denied, the reasons for the staggering aestheticizing of private and social practices are manifold and have recently been subject to controversial debates within the humanities. Arguably, postmodern consumer culture, new hedonistic lifestyles, or the spectacularization of the political sphere are just another form of Americanization, yet the specific 'American' dimension of these phenomena often remains blurry. As the essays collected here show, to simply conflate the aestheticization of everyday life with an American consumerist ideology predicated on packaging and surfaces largely disregards the complex and tangled history of the aesthetic in Western cultures. In this volume, seven eminent literary and cultural historians from both Europe and the United States discuss the power and politics of the aesthetic in American culture (and elsewhere) with respect to multicultural diversity, fashion, the visual arts, aesthetic theory, the politics of race and sexuality, and, finally, America's response to the 9/11 attacks on New York.