Recycling Culture(s)

Book excerpt: Culture survives today by means of a constant recycling, optimistically trying to overcome its own decadence in the 21st century. Recycling Culture(s) addresses from a variety of perspectives this strategy, analyzing not only a wide range of texts but also of cultural practices. As the volume shows, culture thrives on a permanent state of flux, borrowing materials for its own survival wherever they are found and always favouring hybridity. This refers not only to how texts cross genre and medium boundaries but also to how identities and the very idea of culture grow out of recycling what is at hand both synchronically and diachronically. Divided in two sections, ‘Part I: Recycling the Book and the Screen’ and ‘Part II: Recycling Identity, Consumption and History,’ the twenty essays offered here are the work of an international group of scholars dealing with different linguistic and geographical environments. A primary aim of the volume is breaking away with the compartmentalisation of Cultural Studies into non-communicating linguistic domains to offer an eclectic, engaging mixture of approaches. This is the twelfth monographic volume of the series Culture & Power edited by members of the permanent seminar on Cultural Studies ‘Culture & Power,’ which has organised an international yearly conference since 1995. "Recycling Culture(s)/ is the latest in the series of Culture and Power books to come out of Spain. It features essays not only from many of the most distinguished cultural studies scholars on the Iberian Peninsular but many from beyond its borders. What makes this volume so stimulating, relevant and exiting is that the contributors range across an impressive assortment of contexts of (and for) recycling. The book’s thematic base is impressive taking in, as it does, the relevance of recycling history, identity and a multitude of popular texts (written and audio-visual). All contributions are theoretically informed and the authors consider subjects from comic-book heroes, James Bond and /Clockwork Orange/ to African-Carribbean women, Australian national myth and mobile phones. The contributors and editor should be congratulated on producing a theoretically coherent, challenging and important intervention into contemporary cultural studies. " Dr David Walton, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the Univerisity of Murcia, Spain, author Introducing Cultural Studies: Learning Through Practice /(Sage, 2008)