In "Plastic Culture", British comics artist and illustrator Woodrow Phoenixxplores our relationship to toys in the twenty-first century, witharticular emphasis on Japan - an exporter of both merchandise and ideas.lastic Toys based on comics, movies and TV shows from "Astro Boy", "Godzilla"nd "Gatchaman", to "Power Rangers", "Sailor Moon" and "Pokemon" have had aowerful effect on the West, and have kick-started trends in design and populture that have crossed from Japan to the West and back East again. Withts blend of incisive analysis and stylish photography, this is a book thatill appeal to a wide range of readers: from those interested in the latestrends in contemporary art, to toy collectors young and old, and to anyoneith an interest in Japan's influence on contemporary pop culture.

Fantastic Plastic provides a fascinating look at how designs using plastics can be considered works of art, as well as objects of our everyday lives. Within Fantastic Plastic the material is explored, from the high end of furniture and product design, to the throwaway, disposable world of condoms and plastic bags. Fantastic Plastic shows how product design has developed and considers plastics' usability, technology and appearance. From the trademarked names of Spandex, Teflon, Nylon, Rayon, Formica and Tupperware, this book follows plastic through its iconic incarnations and reflects on how their function and reputation have changed over their lifetime.

"(Meikle) traces the course of plastics from 19th-century celluloid and the first wholly synthetic bakelite, in 1907, through the proliferation of compounds (vinyls, acrylics, nylon, etc.) and recent ecological concerns".--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. Winner of the 1996 Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology and a 1996 CHOICE Oustanding Academic Book. 70 illustrations.

The Plastic Turn offers a novel way of looking at plastic as the defining material of our age and at the plasticity of plastic as an innovative means of understanding the arts and literature. Ranjan Ghosh terms this approach the material-aesthetic and, through this concept, traces the emergence and development of plastic polymers along the same historical trajectory as literary modernism. Plastic's growth as a product in the culture industry, its formation through multiple application and chemical syntheses, and its circulation via oceanic movements, Ghosh argues, correspond with, and offers novel insights into, developments in modernist literature and critical theory. Through innovative readings of canonical modernist texts, analyses of art works, and accounts of plastic's devastating environmental impact, The Plastic Turn proposes plastic's unique properties and destructive ubiquity as a "theory machine" to explain literature and life in the Anthropocene. Introducing several new concepts (like plastic literature, plastic literary, etc.) into critical-humanist discourse, Ghosh enmeshes literature and theory, materiality and philosophy, history and ecology, to explore why plastic as a substance and as an idea intrigues, disturbs, and haunts us.

An argument for the centrality of the visual culture of waste—as seen in works by international contemporary artists—to the study of our ecological condition. Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. Boetzkes examines a series of works by an international roster of celebrated artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, Tara Donovan, Agnès Varda, Gabriel Orozco, and Mel Chin, among others, mapping waste art from its modernist origins to the development of a new waste imaginary generated by contemporary artists. Boetzkes argues that these artists do not offer a predictable or facile critique of consumer culture. Bearing this in mind, she explores the ambivalent relationship between waste (both aestheticized and reviled) and a global economic regime that curbs energy expenditure while promoting profitable forms of resource consumption.

Worlds of Dissent analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences--diverse, uncertain, nameless--have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Václav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West--including Ludvík Vaculík, whose 1980 diary The Czech Dream Book is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. Worlds of Dissent offers a rare opportunity tounderstand the texture of dissent in a closed society.

Garbage in Popular Culture is the first book to explicitly link media discourse, consumer culture and the cultural politics of garbage in contemporary global society. It makes an original contribution to the areas of consumer culture studies, visual culture, media and communications, and cultural theory through a critical analysis of the ways in which waste and garbage are visually communicated in the public realm. Mehita Iqani examines three key themes evident in the global representation of garbage: questions of agency and activism, cultures of hedonism and luxury, and anxieties about devastation and its affect. Each theme is explored through a number of case studies, including zero-waste recycling campaigns communicated on Instagram, to fine art made with waste, popular entertainment festivals, tropical beach tourism, and films about oil spills and plastic waste in oceans. Iqani argues that we need a new vocabulary to think about what it means to be human in this new age of consumption-produced waste, and reflects on what rubbish allows us to learn about our relationship with the natural world.