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

Numerous contemporary televisual productions revisit the 1960s 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 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 compositionist style invites discussion from scholars of various fields, as well as those who are simply fans of history or of Mad Men.

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, 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. She is currently working on her second book, which looks at food experiences on long distance journeys.