Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge (Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture) [Hardcover]

Van Liesbet Zoonen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 23, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0742529061 | ISBN-13: 978-0742529069

Can politics be combined with entertainment? Can political involvement and participation be fun? Politics and popular culture are converging all the time, whether itOs in Arnold SchwarzeneggerOs election as governor of California or in political television dramas and movies like The West Wing and Dave. This book encourages readers to think about how links between entertainment and politics have the potential to rejuvenate citizenship, endorse civic values, and sustain civic commitment. Instead of discarding the popular as irrelevant or dangerous to the democratic process, Liesbet van Zoonen shows us the possibilities for increasing political knowledge and participation through the arenas of politics and popular music, political Osoaps,O political television dramas, and politicians as celebrities. A first-rate starting point for debate, Entertaining the Citizen will stimulate and entertain students and general readers alike.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book not only brings a welcome international perspective to a U.S.-dominated discussion, but also theorizes the relationship between popular culture and governing as a form of political praxis. The result is an intriguing proposal to remedy the crisis of citizen participation in liberal democracies. (Argumentation And Advocacy )

This is a well-written and long-overdue book that focuses on the debated relationship between politics and popular culture. Specifically, the author sets out to find ways in which readers, viewers, and listeners can be entertained whilst being citizens, refuting previous modernist media-malaise accounts that regard politics and entertainment as separate spheres that need to be kept apart for their own protection. (Political Studies Review )

Current scholarship on the relationships between media, popular culture, and politics tends to focus on the problematic if not downright negative aspects of their interaction. The of Liesbet van Zoonen stands out because of the very different approach the author adopts and the refreshing analyses she produces as a consequence. ...van Zoonen delivers here a fundamental book with necessary and perhaps challenging arguments on popular culture, which should be put forth in any classroom where teachings on politics and the public are high on the agenda. (European Journal Of Communication )

Entertaining the Citizen is...vigorously argues and it offers some fascinating insights into the ways that popular culture and politics come together. It will undoubtedly and deservedly serve as an important catalyst to serious consideration of how politics can connect to the everyday culture of citizens and thereby connect citizens to politics. (Acta Politics )

Liesbet van Zoonen's important new book is unusual in the way it treats politics and entertainment with equal seriousness. The result is a study that makes us rethink our understanding of political and cultural life—and of the ways they engage with each other. (John Street )

About the Author

Liesbet van Zoonen is professor of media studies in the Amsterdam School of Communications Research at the University of Amsterdam.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (November 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742529061
• ISBN-13: 978-0742529069
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,536,945 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Politics and Entertainment, February 15, 2005

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P. Nagy "revreader" (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge (Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture) (Hardcover)

Entertaining The Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge by Liesbet Van Zoonen (Critical Media Studies: Rowman & Littlefield) (Paperback) One day, while researching for this book, I came across an excited text from an American student who had to watch The West Wing, an American television series about life and politics at the White House, for her political science class. Did I envy her! I remember reading All the President's Men and watching the movie in the Netherlands in the mid-seventies, when I was in my teens. I found it electrifying; what an amaz¬ing arrogance of the Nixon administration, what a daring investigation by the Washington Post journalists, what a right and proper outcome of the democratic process. How exhilarating politics could be! I don't re-ally remember whether the book and the movie made me go to univer¬sity to study political science, but I do recall my surprise and frustration in my first year that politics could be made so tiresome. We did not get movies at my Dutch university, but there were lots of readings, endless theorizing, enigmatic statistical logics, and discussion-always more discussion. On only a few occasions did a teacher manage to convey some of the passion and vitality that motivates people to become involved in politics or to study political science. More often I found my-self struggling with the abstract concepts of "the state," "ideology," and "the public sphere." I found out only later that my bewilderment as an eighteen-year-old (Where is this public sphere exactly?) was a running gag among scholars working with the concept. Had they told me then, I may not have ended up with such a love-hate relationship with politics and political science; much of which also had to do, as I understood again much later, with being one of the few women to study this pecu¬liar discipline.
After my first disappointing year, I turned away and focused on re-search methodology and media studies. These proved to be much more concrete and fun; apparently I was not cut out for the intense and solemn business of politics and political science. Some two decades later I have managed to shrug off my inevitable sense of failure and turn the issue around. I started to wonder if there was a deficiency in politics and polit¬ical science itself. Perhaps my difficulties with the discipline were not the result of my frivolity but a consequence of how politics and the belonging discipline framed itself. It seemed likely that I was not the only one who was terribly bored; after all, political interest and student numbers seemed to be declining, at least in the late nineties in the Netherlands.
Obviously, age, experience, and position enabled me to ask the ques¬tions that I thought were trivial when I was eighteen. This book is the re¬sult. It is meant as an agenda to think about entertaining politics, instead of simply discarding it as irrelevant and dangerous to citizenship and the democratic project. It is meant as a starting point for debate, and it is meant to stimulate and entertain students and all others reading it.
Excerpt: Can politics be combined with entertainment? Can political involvement and participation be fun? Can citizenship be pleasurable? These and similar questions have forced themselves upon us again and again in the past years: they were, for instance, raised by Arnold Schwarzeneg¬ger's election as governor of California. They were implicit in the meet¬ings between U2 lead singer Bono and world leaders, which concerned Third World debts. They were behind the outcry that greeted the pro¬posal, by American cable network FX, to run a televised political popu¬larity contest in the vein of American Idol, with the purpose of selecting presidential candidates. They were inherent in the acclaim for the award-winning television series The West Wing, a fictional portrayal of day-to-day political processes in the White House. They were heightened in the dispute about the portrayal of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the 2003 tel¬evision series The Reagans, which made CBS decide not to air the show on network television.