zombie become a Janus-faced historical mirror, one that enables audi-ences to look backward at the past and forward to the future?

The depth and breadth of scope provided in this book make it avaluable resource for anyone interested in zombies, Gothic fiction,horror cinema, cultural studies, popular entertainment, posthuman-ism, and the representation of monsters in America. With a fewexceptions (notably Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead inModern Culture), most other cultural studies of the zombie focusalmost exclusively on a single medium, such as cinema or a majortheme, such as racial politics or labor relations. However, the inter-disciplinary approaches used by the authors of this collection providea broad spectrum of analyses, including discussions of common cine-matic fare (like the “zombie ghouls” of George A. Romero’s films) aswell as discussions of more unusual resources—1940s radio pro-grams, the “creature features” of 1950s cinema, contemporary digitalshorts, historical plague narratives, art exhibits, the Stepford wivesof suburban gothic narratives, depictions of modern soldiers, andeco-zombies. Although the comprehensive nature of this collectionmight seem unwieldy to a newly-initiated zombie scholar, the vastand varied theoretical sources, book-length studies, films, and fic-tional works listed in the bibliography are sure to create insightfulstarting places for new research.

Sharla HutchisonFort Hays State University

She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brook-lyn. Oneka LaBennett. New York: New York University Press,2011. 253 pp. $22.00 paperback.

In She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brook-lyn, Oneka LaBennett discusses how Afro-Caribbean first- andsecond-generation teenage girls living in Brooklyn relate to popularculture through leisure activities and consumer practices, negotiatingtheir subjective experiences and defining their racial, ethnic, andgender identities through consumption. This book is the result ofover a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, begun in 1997, “includingin-depth interviews, participant observation, focus groups, and

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analyses of youth representations in educational policies, local andnational newspapers and Internet blogs.”

The book challenges popular discourses and representations ofBlack teenage girls who posit them as a group “‘at risk’ for teenagepregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases” and “helplessvictims of inner-city poverty and violence.” While these same dis-courses frequently portray these teenagers’ consumer practices of pop-ular culture as “corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological,” LaBennettpresents a very different image. Many of her research subjects strug-gle with their high school obligations, engage in extracurricularactivities, and have one or more part-time jobs. Moreover, they oftenhave to attend to pressing family responsibilities, like taking care ofyounger siblings and contributing to their households’ expenses withpart of their wages.

LaBennett indicates, however, that she is not attempting to pres-ent her subjects as a “model minority” example. Instead, she claimsthat Afro-Caribbean adolescent girls in Brooklyn have agency andexercise it through multiple means in different settings. One of suchsettings is the Brooklyn Children’s Museum (or BCM), which pro-vides internship opportunities where these girls earn wages or credithours for their high-school programs, develop peer-mentoring skills,and receive assistance with college applications. The adolescents’roles at the BCM allow them to engage in “play-labor,” which theauthor posits as a manifestation of their agency. Through “play-labor” they negotiate compliance with and transgression of institu-tional norms. In addition, LaBennett discusses how the configurationof the BCM as a heteronormative space can jeopardize its status as a“safe space” that keeps many teenagers off the streets.

Regarding their popular culture consumer practices, LaBennettreveals that these girls are far from “incapable of deciphering themisogynous, materialistic, and unrealistic definitions of femininityoffered in today’s mass-mediated youth culture.” In fact, they aresavvy, strategic consumers. On one hand, they readily recognizesexism in popular culture representations of women. Although theyshow preference for female artists who present a strong model ofBlack femininity, they also consume hip-hop. In both cases, musicprovides for these teenagers venues to comment on sexism, constructdefinitions of respectable femininity, and evaluate racial authenticity.On the other hand, they are conscious of the objectification of the

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Black female body and the current impossible, unrealistic standardsof beauty, which this body always seems to fail. Precisely talkingabout the physical appearance and the perceived behaviors of theirfavorite female music stars allows Afro-Caribbean teenage girls toperform their own racial and gender identities and to construct anideal of a woman who “keeps it real.”

She’s Mad Real contributes to the ongoing conversation about trans-national black migration and diasporic identities. By focusing on teen-agers, however, LaBennett attempts to fill a gap in this field, whichhas usually neglected this group to focus on adult subjects. For thisreason, LaBennett’s is a commendable work, especially suited forundergraduate and graduate students interested in understanding whythe study of popular culture is an excellent opportunity to look atbroader social-political phenomena.

Andreea MicuTexas A&M University

The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, andScience Fiction in the Media. John C. Tibbetts. New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 416 pp. $27.00 paperback.

The Gothic Imagination is a prime instance of what Henry Jenkinsdescribes as “convergence culture,” uniting scholarly and fan-basedapproaches in an attempt to explain why the Gothic tradition hasappealed to the popular imagination over the past three centuries.

It is divided into nine sections, each dealing with a differentaspect of that tradition. It begins with “The Lovecraft Circle,” andcontinues through “The Heroic Age of Fantasy and Science Fic-tion,” “Destination Mars” (the early 1950s), “The Music of Terror”(examining the relationship between classical music and Gothic),and postmodern Gothic and speculative fiction. While the book’smain interest centers on Gothic in the twentieth and twenty-firstcenturies, it pays tribute to past specialists in the genre—LewisCarroll, Ann Radcliffe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As Tibbettsemphasizes in his introduction, Gothic remains perennially popularin the way it blurs the distinctions “between the terror sublimeand the uncanny, the rational and the irrational, science and art.”

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