Cultural studies scholarship on the television talk show, especially the 'audience discussion' genre, was guardedly hopeful about its democratic or feminist potential. In this exciting new volume, Kathleen Dixon investigates the relationship between the talk genre and democracy, but through a new emphasis on art, broadly defined. The Global Village Revisited: Art, Politics, and Television Talk Shows explores three case studies from Belgium, Bulgaria, and the United States, and reveals how these cases interanimate to produces a new view of the talk show as a global phenomenon, and as a negotiation among the forces of late capitalism, the unnamed but still palpable audience, and the individual rhetors, artists, and technicians who make the shows. Dixon treats the globalization of media and culture as a dynamic process that yields different results according to time and place. While the way in which television talk shows serve democracy may be hard to define precisely, The Global Village Revisited demonstrates the importance and necessity of this question in cultural studies.

The personal stories of the Gao villagers demonstrate and are related to changes in China. This is a close study of Gao Village twenty years after the author, an anthropologist and native of Gao village, wrote his original ethnography Gao Village. It combines ethnographic analysis, personal vignettes, and a number of fascinating stories, which presents a convincing yet complex picture of how Gao villagers interact with the outside world. With his sympathetic and insider's approach, the author argues that rural Chinese display great entrepreneurship and inner strength of selfimprovement; they are active contributors to China's economic boom.

This book is about Gao Village, in Jiangxi province, where the author was born and brought up, leaving when he was twenty-one to study English at Xiamen University. Since emigrating to Australia in 1990, he has returned every year to Gao Village, where his brother still lives. Several accounts of village life in China have been published, but all have been by Western or urban Chinese scholars. Mobo Gao's account is in every sense one from the inside. Though written as an academic work, it does not eschew personal stories and experiences relevant to the themes addressed. These cover a forty-year period and fall into four distinct themes; the village before and after land reform; the commune system; the dismantling of the communes; and the unfolding impact of the market economy, including increased migration to urban areas, from the late 1980s onwards.

This interdisciplinary collection of articles by scholars who have returned to previously investigated villages relates village studies to the global rural-urban transformation. Drawing on anthropological, sociological, historical, and economic perspectives, these essays are based on grass-roots level research analyzed in the context of national and global policies and their local level impact._

Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.

In 1991 Clinton Heylin published what was considered the most definitive biography of Bob Dylan available. In 2001 he completely revised and reworked this hugely acclaimed book, adding new sections, substantially reworking text, and bringing the story up-to-date with Dylan's explosive career in 2000. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited follows the story of Dylan from his humble beginnings in Minnesota to his arrival in New York in 1961, his subsequent rise in the folk pantheon of Greenwich Village in the early '60s, and his cataclysmic folk-rock metamorphosis at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In the succeeding eighteen months, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and embarked on the legendary 1966 World Tour that culminated with an unforgettable concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Heylin details it all, along with the true story of Dylan's motorcycle accident, his remarkable reemergence in the mid-'70s, the only exacting account of his controversial conversion to born-again Christianity, the Neverending Tour, and yet another incredible Dylan resurgence with his 1997 Grammy Album of the Year Award-winning Time Out of Mind. Deemed by The New Yorker as "the most readable and reliable" of all Dylan biographies, this book will give fans what they have always wanted -- a chance to get to know the man behind the shades.