popular culture

From Edward Lear’s owl-and-pussycat elopement, the Queen’s laughable rage in Wonderland, to the visual wit found in illustrations by Phiz and the Punch artists, the Victorian era was no stranger to delight and merry-making. In one sense, the Victorian era was a bastion of prudish puritanical “no nonsense,” of earnest rationalism in its documenting positivism and nascent naturalist sciences. In another sense, this historic moment also saw the flowering of imaginative merriment through the emergence of leisure time for working and bourgeois classes, which inspired a myriad of humorous and nonsense artistic forms to proliferate.

Since the discovery of oil in the 1970s, Gulf Cooperation Countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman) have employed a large expatriate labor force, primarily from neighboring South Asian Countries of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Philippines. Recent studies claim that nearly 50.4% of the total population of the Gulf Cooperation Countries are expatriates. Such mass emigration has not only allowed for the rapid economic expansion of these Gulf countries, but at the same time they have produced a number of cultural and socio-economic consequences for the countries from where Gulf’s primary work forces originate.

Serial Tourists: Leisure, Tourisms  and Tourists

University of Lille, France

Nov. 2-3, 2018

Defined by the MIT[1] group as a displacement whose purpose is recreational, tourism articulates spaces and practices and in that regard it constitutes an object of investigation (and fictionalization) that is particularly intriguing.

Call for Papers: Black Popular Culture-Special Topics

PCA/ACA (April 17-20, 2019)

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association

Washington Marriott Wardman Park/ Washington, D.C.

The Literature and Madness section of the Popular Culture Association is soliciting 15-20 minute papers for the upcoming year’s annual PCA/ACA conference in Washington, D.C, scheduled for 17-20 April 2019.  The deadline for abstract submission is 1 October 2018.