Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Dotun Ayobade
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Music

AbstractPopular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

Four Elvises

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Comentale
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Body ◽  
Commodity Form ◽  
Consumer Desire

This chapter shows how the very deadliness of the commodity form—its radical detachment from any traditional context—ultimately extends the affective range and reach of popular music. It argues that the rock counterculture was founded not against, but through technological manipulation, commercial standardization, and consumer desire, and thus provided fans with new, more thrilling ways of inhabiting a national scene defined by market identities and taste cultures. Somewhere between Marcel Duchamp's arty toss-off and Elvis Presley's tossed-off art, a certain indifference comes to infect popular culture at large. In the end, this chapter focuses on the experiences and emergent sites of fandom, arguing that, with each cut, the King presented his body as an affectively charged and fully mediated public body and that, with records, radio, television, and film, his revolt extended—from one savvy fan to the next—across the body politic at large.

scholarly journals Media, ideological hegemony and popular music: Golden microphone song contestMedya, ideolojik hegemonya ve popüler müzik: Altın mikrofon şarkı yarışması

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1446
Author(s):  
Levent Ergun
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Daily News ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theoretical Status ◽  
The Media ◽  
Popular Music History

<p>This article focuses on "Golden Microphone Award" song contest which has been organized under the sponsorship of Hürriyet Daily News between the years of 1965-68. Between the different forms of popular culture/music and mass media, there is a characteristically symbiotic relationship in which one almost can not survive in the absence of the other. Golden Microphone song contest, organized under the sponsorship of the mass media institution, Hürriyet Daily News, requires an evaluation in a scope that exceeds this symbiotic relationship. Because the role that Hürriyet plays in the circulation and the support of the dominant ideological definitions and representations is more important here. If we consider Golden Microphone contest as a moment,we can say that: there is a dynamic arena for the media, official ideology, musicians and audience in which both the elements of resistance and consent, the issues of the past and the future; hence overlapping and conflicting elements are available. In this framework, this research tries to analyse the dynamics of this specific moment of Turkish popular music history by using the theoretical status of media, sponsorship, ideology and hegemony concepts.  </p><p> </p><p><strong>Özet</strong></p><p>Bu makale, Hürriyet Gazetesi’nin sponsorluğunda 1965-68 yılları arasında düzenlenen “Altın Mikrofon Armağanı” adlı şarkı yarışması üzerine odaklanır. Popüler kültürün/müziğin farklı formları ile kitle iletişim araçları arasında, diğeri olmadan birisinin hayatını neredeyse sürdüremez olduğu karakteristik bir simbiyotik ilişki vardır. Bir kitle medyası olarak Hürriyet Gazetesinin sponsorluğunda düzenlenen “Altın Mikrofon” şarkı yarışması, bu simbiyotik ilişkiyi aşan bir çerçeve içinde değerlendirmeyi de gerektirmektedir. Çünkü Hürriyet’in egemen ideolojik tanımlar ve temsillerin dolaşımı ve pekiştirilmesinde oynadığı rol, burada çok daha önemlidir. Altın Mikrofon yarışmasını bir uğrak (moment) olarak ele alırsak şunu söyleyebiliriz: bu uğrakta gerek medya, gerek resmi ideoloji, gerekse müzisyenler ve izlerkitle için; hem direniş hem kabullenme ögeleri, hem geçmişin ve geleceğin unsurları, dolayısıyla hem birbiriyle örtüşen hem de çatışan ögelerin olduğu dinamik bir mücadele alanı bulunmaktadır. Bu çerçevede çalışma; medya, sponsorluk, ideoloji ve hegemonya kavramlarının teorik statüsünden yararlanarak, Türk popüler müzik tarihinin bu özgül uğrağını biçimlendiren dinamikleri analiz etme girişimidir.</p>

Studio Documentary in the Kennedy Era

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Glick
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Function ◽  
The Body ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
The Cold War

The Sputnik launch, the network quiz-show scandals, and the election of President John F. Kennedy inspired the desire to strengthen the body politic through educational forms of mass media. This chapter argues that Wolper Productions occupied an essential position on the cultural front of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Documentaries about citizens, politicians, and the Cold War functioned as narratives of assurance. With the assassination of Kennedy, Wolper Productions became the preeminent custodian of the fallen president’s memory. The studio’s films documenting Kennedy’s rise to the highest office (The Making of the President: 1960 [1963]) and his death (Four Days in November [1964]) performed an important social function during the period of transition to the Johnson administration.

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic in My Brother Tom

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Louise Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Rape Narratives

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

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