scholarly journals The Political Force of Musical Actants: Grooves, Pleasures, and Politics in Havana D'Primera's ‘Pasaporte’ Live in Havana

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
KJETIL KLETTE BØHLER
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Musical Analyses

Abstract Drawing upon Rancière's argument that aesthetics instigates politics, Latour's rethinking of agency as relational, and Ortiz's work on Afro-Cuban music aesthetics, this article explores how the experience of aesthetic pleasure in Cuban timba grooves makes politics audible and affective in novel ways. Through a combination of ethnographic and musical analyses of Havana D'Primera's performance of ‘Pasaporte’ live at Casa de la Música in 2010, it unpacks the political affordances of call-and-response singing and polyrhythmic timba grooves among participating listeners in Havana. In contrast to the recurrent tendency to exclude musical details from research into the politics of music, this article suggests that engaging grooves and catchy melodies do important political work as musical actants by creating affective communities and new expressions of political critique. The concept of musical actants serves as a lens through which to view these pregnant interactions between rhythmic, melodic, social, and political meanings in time.

Turkey’s failed coup as an ‘ongoing media event’ and the formation of public affect

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ergin Bulut ◽  
Başak Can
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
National Unity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The Media ◽  
Pedagogical Relationship ◽  
Media Event ◽  
Coup Attempt

Following the coup attempt in Turkey, former Gulenists made appearances on various television channels and disclosed intimate and spectacular information regarding their past activities. We ask: what is the political work of these televised disclosures? In answering this question, we situate the coup within the media event literature and examine the intimate work of these televised disclosures performed as part of a media event. The disclosures we examine were extremely spectacular statements that worked to reconstruct a highly divided and polarized society through an intimate language. Consequently, these television performances had two functions: ideological and affective. First, these disclosures and television shows chose to foreground sensation and therefore mystified the illegal networks that historically prepared the coup. Second, using a language of regret and apology, these disclosures aimed to teach the audience how to be purified and good citizens through a mediated, pedagogical relationship. Within the vulnerable context of a hegemonic crisis, these disclosures intended to form their own publics where citizens were invited to sympathize with those who made mistakes in the past, ultimately aiming to create national unity and reconciliation.

scholarly journals Critique. Division. An Archaeology of Separation and a Salvaging Etymology

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 123-151
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Trzeciak ◽  
Jakob Ziguras
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Widespread Interest

The goal of this essay is twofold: firstly, it is a description a post-critical tendency within the contemporary, Anglo-American humanities; secondly, it presents propositions which broaden the boundaries current in the post-critical current, which lead to the replacement of critical sci-entificity with an affirmation of everyday readerly affects. The claims regarding the rejection of a criticism based on suspicion, formulated by, among others, Rita Felski, accentuate the elite character of reading, the goal of which is the unveiling of the economico- political entan-glement of the text as a product of historical reality. The distrust towards the surface of the text and the illusion of aesthetic autonomy, central for cultural studies, raised the critical atti-tude to the rank of an activity that is revelatory and privileged. The opponents of an unmask-ing criticism underline its limitations—unmasking reveals the ultimate source of every cultural production, the logic of capitalism, the total character of which leaves no chance for change. In defense of change, and in the hope of restoring to literature a widespread interest, there appear tendencies which bring back the individual experience of reading, the basis of which is to be aesthetic pleasure, freed from the historical context and its determinants. In the article, examples of such tendencies will be pointed out, as also will be their consequences caused by the elevation and universalisation of non-professional reading. The rejection of the political task of criticism leads to the questioning of its anti-systemic potential; in turn, the apotheosis of suspicion paralyses the postulative dimension of criticism. For this reason, in the last part of the essay, I propose going beyond oppositional con ceptualisations in the direction of a criti-cism that is situated and material, and whose model, in my rendering, is subordi nated knowledge.

Othering within the Islamist Spectrum: Ennahda and the Political Salafists in Tunisia

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-221
Author(s):  
Jasmin Lorch ◽  
Hatem Chakroun
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Fine Grained

Abstract While research on Islamist moderation has paid considerable attention to cross-ideological cooperation, it has barely explored whether and how the moderation of Islamist parties is related to interactions inside the Islamist spectrum. We attempt to bridge this gap by using othering as a theoretical-analytical lens with which to analyze the interplay between Ennahda’s moderation and the party’s relations to the political Salafists in Tunisia. We argue that the discursive act of othering the political Salafists has helped Ennahda construct itself both as a moderate, democratic actor representing the ‘true’ version of Tunisian Islam and as an effective and reliable political force. Moreover, while the concept of othering has barely been systematically applied to intra-Islamist relations, we show that it constitutes a fine-grained tool with which to study Islamist moderation in the context of intra-Islamist competition.

Sweden is Increasingly Loosing its Peculiarity (On Elections of 2010)

2011 ◽  
pp. 46-56
Author(s):  
I. Grishin
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Development Model ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Development Model ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Left And Right

The article analyses results of Swedish parliamentary elections in September 2010. The author regards them as another manifestation of the fact that Sweden is losing peculiarity of its social development model. This is a result of the end of an era of two-block party structure of the Riksdag (left and right centers) and of the domination of Social Democrats in the political life of the country. The new third political force – the party of Swedish Democrats which strongly opposes the other culture immigration – is detail regarded.

The Fiction of Formalization

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-160
Author(s):  
Michael B. Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Sugar Plantation ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Global Land ◽  
Per Se

This chapter explores the regulatory fictions of presumably fixed administrative categories in the vastly different context of rural Cambodia. It examines the work of property formalization in the country, through processes of titling and concession making associated with the global land rush of the late 2000s. Through an impressive cartographic deconstruction of Cambodia's uneven geography of formalization as well as the land allocations for a private sugar plantation, the chapter illustrates that this formalization fix operates more as a promise than a reality. It shifts to discuss the discursive work that renders formalization logical, legal, and hegemonic. The chapter then explores the bureaucratic work that gives it a subnational geography, and ends with the political work of enforcing it at the margins where hegemony breaks down and conflicts erupt with those who openly question its fictions. The chapter argues that the goal is not to argue against formalization per se, but to denaturalize it so that its powers can be put to work in better ways.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 215-229
Author(s):  
Frédéric Mérand
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Political Controversy ◽  
Collective Reading ◽  
Collective Experience

This book’s ethnographic narrative ends with a description of the last months of the Moscovici cabinet, which dissolves as he and his collaborators look for new opportunities, while the incoming Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen is engulfed in political controversy and Brexit negotiations. Exiting fieldwork through a collective reading of the book manuscript, I discuss the methodological challenges of embedded observation, while the Moscos take stock of their collective experience. What did the political commissioner and his staff achieve? What were the limits of political work? The conclusion is an opportunity to reflect on Juncker’s “Political Commission” experiment and on what it means to do politics in the European Union.

‘I am tired from all of these feelings’: Narrating suffering in the film Sick

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Senka Božić-Vrbančić ◽  
Renata Kokanović ◽  
Jelena Kupsjak
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
The Political ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Lesbian Woman ◽  
Institutional Violence ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Emotional Relationships ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Political Question

This article explores ‘the politics of sentimentality’ with specific reference to the documentary film Sick, which represents the narrative of a young lesbian woman, Ana, who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Croatia and ‘treated’ for her homosexuality. We consider the ways our most intimate emotional relationships and states, such as pain and suffering, articulate with a wider context of familial citizenship and critically examine the political limits of compassion within the sentimentalised public sphere. In this analysis, we problematise the film’s emotional logic, which presents an individualised narrative resolution at the expense of dwelling on the political question of institutional violence. We examine the role that politics of sentimentality plays in neutralising the film’s political critique of the state apparatuses (psychiatry and family) that enforce heterosexual norms.

Feminist Art and the Political Imagination

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 189-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Mullin
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Art ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Political Works ◽  
The Aesthetic

Activist and political art works, particularly feminist ones, are frequently either dis-missed for their illegitimate combination of the aesthetic and the political, or embraced as chiefly political works. Flawed conceptions of politics and the imagination are responsible for that dismissal. An understanding of the imagination is developed that allows us to see how political work and political explorations may inform the artistic imagination.

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