21st Century Retro: "Mad Men" and 1960s America in Film and Television

Numerous contemporary televisual productions revisit the past but direct their energies towards history's non-events and anti-heroic subjectivities. Debarchana Baruah offers a vocabulary to discuss these, using Mad Men as a primary case study and supplementing the analysis with other examples from the US and around the world. She takes a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to studying film and television, drawing from history, memory, and nostalgia discourses, and layering them with theories of intertextuality, paratexts, and actor-networks. The book's compositions style invites discussions from scholars of various fields, as well as those who are simply fans of history or of Mad Men.

Autorentext
Debarchana Baruah is a cultural theorist at the American Studies department, University of Tübingen. She completed her doctoral studies at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg University and received her B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in English Literature from the University of Delhi. She is interested in US popular cultures, film and television, memory cultures, food cultures, and immigration histories.

Zusammenfassung
»This book is undoubtedly a great achievement and presents a valuable resource for everyone interested in the retro mode, nostalgia, memory, and, of course, in Mad Men and its retroperspective on the United States in the 1960s.« Kathleen Loock, American Studies, 69/1 (2024) »A lush and exhaustive inspection of the ideas and tools of retro in film and TV, that will appeal to more than just a few readers, as nostalgia and audiovisual pleasures of the past seemingly attract all audiences sooner or later.« A. Ebert, www.popcultureshelf.com, 28.09.2022 Besprochen in: https://lpcm.hypotheses.org, 4 (2021)