Making claims on echoes: Dranem, Cole Porter and the biguine between the Antilles, France and the US

Popular Music ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 492-508
Author(s):  
Edwin Hill

AbstractThis paper considers the ways in which the biguine (or ‘beguine’) circulated as a French West Indian musical genre and as a signifier for colonial and island exoticism in non-biguine musical genres during the early to mid-20th century. I begin by suggesting the ways in which the colonial and transnational conditions of its performance have left a history of ideological tensions within popular and academic discussions about the biguine. I then suggest some of the specific ways in which the biguine's circulation functioned in the context of the interwar years and resonated with the discourse and dynamics of ‘Jazz Age Paris’, negrophilia and le tumulte noir. Finally, I offer a close reading of the ways in which French comedian-singer Dranem's ‘La Biguine’ and Cole Porter's ‘Begin the Beguine’ playfully represent the genre in French chanson coloniale and popular song. Rather than viewing the biguine's conditions of performance, or the re-appropriation of the biguine in name only, as the equivalent of the complete musical colonisation and erasure of the genre, I propose that we extend biguine discussion beyond its empirical musicological elements, and lay claim on the echoes of biguine discourse as they resonate through other genres.

Author(s):  
Paula De la Cruz-Fernandez

A multinational corporation is a multiple unit business enterprise, vertically managed, that operates in various countries, called host economies. Operations beyond national borders are controlled and managed from one location or headquarters, called the home economy. The units or business activities such as manufacturing, distribution, and marketing are, in the modern multinational as opposed to other forms of international business, all structured under a single organization. The location of the headquarters of the multinational corporation, where the business is registered, defines the “nationality” of the company. While United Kingdom held ownership of over half of the world’s foreign direct investment (FDI), defined not as acquisition but as a managed, controlled investment that an organization does beyond its national border, at the beginning of the 20th century, the United States grew to first place throughout the 20th century—in 2002, 22 percent of the world’s FDI came from the United States, which was also home to ten of the fifty largest corporations in the world. The US-based, large, modern corporation, operated by salaried managers with branches and operations in many nations, emerged in the mid-19th century and has since been a key player and driver in both economic and cultural globalization. The development of corporate capitalism in the United States is closely related with the growth of US-driven business abroad and has unique features that place the US multinational model apart from other business organizations operating internationally such as family multinational businesses which are more common in Europe and Latin America. The range and diversity of US-headquartered multinationals changed over time as well, and different countries and cultures made the nature of managing business overseas more complex. Asia came strong into the picture in the last third of the 20th century as regulations and deindustrialization grew in Europe. Global expansion also meant that societies around the world were connecting transnationally through new channels. Consumers and producers globally are also part of the history of multinational corporations—cultural values, socially constructed perceptions of gender and race, different understandings of work, and the everyday lives and experiences of peoples worldwide are integral to the operations and forms of multinationals.


2004 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 568-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiarash Shahlaie ◽  
Joseph C. Watson ◽  
Daniel R. Benson

✓ Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and Harvey William Cushing were two of the most prominent neuroscientists of the early 20th century. Their contributions helped advance the understanding of the brain and its disorders, and propelled neuroscience into a new era of research and treatment. Although separated geographically and culturally, Pavlov and Cushing exchanged letters and followed one another's careers from afar. They met only a few times, during international scientific gatherings in the US and abroad. These encounters were captured in journal entries, letters, and photographs, and provide a glimpse into the lives of these two great men and the history of neuroscience at the turn of the last century.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McNally

This article presents a cultural history of Brazilian popular song (canção popular) and the many musical genres that fall under its umbrella. From the early days of samba to contemporary popular styles, popular song in Brazil has long represented a site for negotiating complex questions of race, nation, and politics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 238-283
Author(s):  
Olga Demidova

This article is an attempt at close reading an extensive ego text (Georgy Adamovich’s letters to Alexander Bacherac of the 1940s – 1972) as a thirty-year-long literary conversation of two Russian émigré writers. Regarding the letters as a single cultural text, and relying on the hermeneutic and semiotic approaches, the article singles out three major layers of the text in question, and analyzes the textual body “inwardly,” i.e. starting from the purely existential-informational upper layer, proceeding to the layer of literary criticism, and finally reaching the layer of literary quotations and cultural allusions used as one of the basic devices forming Adamovich’s epistolary style. Comparing the letters with Adamovich’s famous Literary Conversations (Literaturnye besedy) of the 1920s, the author argues that in his correspondence with Bacherach Adamovich followed the tradition of the Russian friendly literary-philosophical discourse borrowed from the West in the 1800s and developed in the 1820s – 1830s by Alexander Pushkin and his circle. KEYWORDS: 20th-Century Russian Literature, Georgy Adamovich (1892—1972), Alexander Bacherac (1902—1985), Correspondence, History of Literature.


Author(s):  
Альберт Новацький

Role of memory in forming national identity. “The land of bitter tenderness” by Volodymyr Lys The paper offers an attempt to look at the “The Land of Bitter Tenderness” by contemporary Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Lys in the context of the search for individual and national identity, national memory, as well as the history of the 20th century Ukraine. In the analyzed work, the writer uses the image of a child, which, in the researcher’s opinion, is a quite rare phenomenon in Ukrainian literature. The is technique was used by the writer in order to capture the reader’s attention and make him penetrate the text of the novel deeper. The us, the author informs the reader that the main idea of the work is extremely important because the average person is accustomed to paying more attention to children. On occasion, the writer points out that manipulating a child’s memory was the easiest way for the Bolsheviks in their criminal social experiment. The writer emphasizes that the effects of ‘brainwashing’ may be prevented, but it is impossible to cure the trauma left by this process in the soul of a person. Analyzing the mentioned novel, the author of the paper refers to the works in the fields of literary studies, pedagogy, sociology, and psychology, written by Philip Aries, Rudolf Schaffer, Ellen Kay, Pierre Nora, Katarzyna Segiet, and others.  The Ukrainian writer, describing the fate of three women (grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter), presented against the backdrop of the tumultuous Ukrainian history of the last century, is trying to restore the lost memory, both individual and collective, in order to secure the process of building Ukrainian national identity. The writer draws attention to the fact that during almost all the 20th century not only the Ukrainian nation but also Ukrainian history has been the subject of constant Bolshevik manipulation and fraud. He emphasizes that the prerequisite for building a unified Ukrainian identity is the attempt to restore individual and collective memory in Ukrainians, including the memory of history.


Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Carsten Card-Hyatt

AbstractThe beatific vision plays a prominent role in the history of Christian ethics. Reformed ethics has an ambiguous relationship to this history, on two counts. First, it offers some qualified critiques of the role of vision in ordering ethical understanding, and second, on some accounts, Reformed ethics shares some responsibility for the loss of transcendence in the modern world, and the narrowing of the ethical field that has resulted from this loss. This essay argues that the vision of God in John Calvin’s understanding of the Christian life offers resources to defend a Reformed ethics from some recent detractors. Further, it provides a constructive contrast with the role of eschatology in a prominent strand of 20th century ethics. This argument is sustained through a close reading of Calvin’s biblical commentaries on the role of theophanies and the promise of the vision of God, and of Book III, chapters 6-10 of the Institutes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Angelika Zirker

Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in England in 1884 and a year later in the US, is paradoxical in that it is one of most frequently censored books of world literature – and, concurrently, one of the most frequently read and praised. The following article will try to explain this paradox and, in a first step, address the history of the novel’s censorship and the (various) reasons given for it. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has undergone censorship since its first publication, and even today it is included in the list of »Banned and Challenged Books« of ALA (American Library Association). What are, in fact, reasons for banning the book? And how are these reasons questioned by defenders of the book? Which strategies are used? Since the novel’s publication, those who have completely dismissed the book and those who have appreciated it as a »masterpiece« have opposed each other. An overview of these controversies will result in a close reading of one of the most debated chapters in the novel, with a focus on the autodiegetic narrator Huck, who has been characterized as a naïve child that simply does not know any better, as a »fallible narrator«, or as a liar. But it remains doubtful whether the narrator’s weakness is the answer to the question of Huck’s alleged racism. The paper will offer alternative roads into the novel that consider both the text and the context of its origin.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-269
Author(s):  
Golbarg Rekabtalaei

AbstractMuch of the scholarship on the history of Iranian cinema considers film spectatorship in the first three decades of the 20th century as a leisure practice with origins in royalist and elitist entertainment forms. However, a close reading of archival material from this era reveals that cinema's significance extended well beyond its role as a pastime, as it became engaged in the governance of the self and disciplinary strategies of the state in Iran's experience of modernity in the early 20th century. In this article, I reperiodize the history of cinema in Iran by demonstrating the entanglement of cinema in popular nationalist discourses on education prior to cinema's institutionalization in the 1930s. Drawing on newspaper articles, film announcements, official documents, and poems, I show how, despite the absence of a centralized cinema institution in the 1910s and early 1920s, cosmopolitan citizens in dialogue with global trends promoted cinema as a means for the governance of selfhood and moral edification in the service of national progress. With the appropriation of cinema by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s, cinema was used as a technique of governmentality that aimed to conduct the conduct of individuals and shape an Iranian civic society.


2004 ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
M. Voeikov ◽  
S. Dzarasov

The paper written in the light of 125th birth anniversary of L. Trotsky analyzes the life and ideas of one of the most prominent figures in the Russian history of the 20th century. He was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution in its Bolshevik period, worked with V. Lenin and played a significant role in the Civil War. Rejected by the party bureaucracy L. Trotsky led uncompromising struggle against Stalinism, defending his own understanding of the revolutionary ideals. The authors try to explain these events in historical perspective, avoiding biases of both Stalinism and anticommunism.


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