"This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive treatment of how visual images, language and discourse work as 'systems of representation'." "Individual chapters explain a variety of approaches to representation, bringing to bear concepts from semiotic, discursive, psychoanalytic, anthropological, sociological, feminist, art-historical and Foucauldian models of representation. They explore representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites: the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; the poetics and politics of exhibiting other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of 'the racialized Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; the gendering of narratives in television soap operas." "The book discusses contested and critical questions of meaning, truth, knowledge and power in representation, and the relations between representation, pleasure and fantasy. Combining illustrative examples with activities and selected readings, accessible but not simplified, it offers a unique resource for teachers and students in cultural studies and related fields as an introduction to this complex and central theme."--Jacket.

“It is frightening to think the [Jon Wiener] teaches history at a university ... ”—Jacques Derrida “Wiener takes the modern university as his beat, and covers it like a police reporter ... Wiener’s mean streets are the think tank, the scholarly symposium, and the faculty lounge. And when he’s had enough of this academic low life, he listens to Elvis, Springsteen and the Beatles. He even listens to Frank Sinatra.”—John Leonard “In this book, Jon Wiener demonstrates his great skill as guerrilla sharpshooter in the forty-year war that the National Security State has been conducting against the American people. These reports from the field—the resistance—illuminate Nixon and Watergate as never before, reveal in fascinating detail the turbulence within Academe, invoke pity if not awe for that unexpected victim of state, Frank Sinatra.”—Gore Vidal “Wiener is good at spotting, and blasting, paranoid fantasy and incompetence in high (and low) places and his range of targets is impressively wide ... [his] surveys are lucid, trenchant and brief.”— Observer