Redefines the contemporary interactions between media, culture, and the democratic process.

The media and popular culture are often identified as bearing primary responsibility for the decline of active citizenship and the decay of democratic institutions. Media culture is charged with eroding the capacity of citizens to trust in their public institutions and encouraging widespread civic apathy.

In Culture and Democracy, Clive Barnett critically evaluates the conceptual underpinnings of such widespread judgments. In doing so, he provides an innovative and theoretically informed exploration of the interface between culture, political economy, and public life. Through a triangulation of the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas, he argues that deconstruction, poststructuralism, and critical theory converge around shared concerns for the possibilities of democratic public life in a globalizing age. Focusing on the United States, Europe, and South Africa, Barnett demonstrates the indispensability of concepts of the public sphere, representation, and spatiality in a cultural democracy.

This book crosses disciplines and will therefore be valuable to a wide range of scholars and students, including political theorists, philosophers, geographers, communications experts, and political scientists.

Clive Barnett is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. His published research includes work on colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, culture, and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa.