Policing Space and Defying the Mainstream: Gender and the Creation of a Traditional Music Public Sphere in Twentieth-Century Ireland

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 247-268
Author(s):  
TES SLOMINSKI

Whether in Ireland or elsewhere, most people first encounter Irish traditional music in public spaces such as pub sessions or concerts, or through the recorded traces of music-making produced for a listening public.1 For those who become more involved in the scene as players, dancers, or avid listeners, festivals, schools, non-profit organisations, archives, and other instruments of the public sphere of Irish traditional music shape perceptions of the genre’s style, history, and participants. But while public and semi-public music-making has been a vital part of the transnational Irish traditional music scene for at least a century, the genre’s self-understanding still relies on its associations with a domestic, private past. In this article, I locate the roots of this contradiction in the historiographical problems presented by the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act—a piece of legislation that has had profound effects on musical practice and discourse in Ireland.2 I examine the ways this law and the frequent retrospective overemphasis of its effects have contributed to the idealisation of Irish traditional music as rooted in a domestic, rural, and lower-class past. Combined with social and governmental restrictions on the activities of women during most of the twentieth century, this alignment of domesticity with imagined “authenticity” has shaped the reception of women’s public Irish traditional musical performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 410
Author(s):  
Ian A. Morrison

Towards the end of the twentieth century, religion re-emerged as a topic of pressing concern in a number of the most self-consciously secularized states of the global north. From disputes over the wearing of headscarves in schools to debates over accommodations for religious practices in the public sphere, religion, particularly the ‘foreign’ religiosity of migrants and other minority religious subjects, appeared on the scene as a phenomenon whose proper place and role in society required both urgent and careful deliberation. This article argues that in order to account for the affective potency produced by the immanence of the figure of the ‘foreign’ religious subject, it is necessary to understand secularization as fantasy. It is within the fantasy of secularization that the secular emerges as an object of desire—as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘foreign’ religiosity—and figures of inassimilable religiosity assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. In this sense, within this fantasy scene, the secular promises to provide ‘us’ with something that we are lacking. However, this promise has been undermined by the apparent persistence of religious difference. As such, as a result of their continued religiosity, ‘they’ appear to be taking something from ‘us’.


Çédille ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 103-128
Author(s):  
Isabel Clúa Gines ◽  

"The aim of this work is to reflect on the construction of the woman writer as a public figure based on the case of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and her projection in Spain, placing her in the framework of the tensions that surround the female condition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although her work is translated and reviewed, it is her public figure the element that focuses the attention of the critics, as confirmed by the various references by prominent chroniclers (Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Isabel Oyarzábal, María Luz Morales or Teresa de Escoriaza). This phenomenon allows us to see the key elements of the feminine authorial construction, as the incorporation of strategies of the emerging idea of celebrity and its use as an essential mechanism to deal with the difficulty of being a woman in the public sphere"


Author(s):  
Halyna Chumak

Inspired by the interdisciplinary studies undertaken by Michael North and Rochelle Rives, this article examines conspicuous representations of the modern female face in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918), ‘Pictures’ (1920), and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922). If writers and artists of the early twentieth century dispelled facile assumptions about a mimetic relationship between face and character, why are two modernist women writers so invested in highlighting the female face? I approach this query and the lexical visages Mansfield and Woolf craft by situating their work within a cultural-historical framework that constellates nineteenth-century physiognomy, a growing female presence in the public sphere, and the rise of modern visual technologies. Physiognomy had lost its cultural traction by the fin de siècle, but it left an indelible influence on cultural assumptions about women who crossed domestic thresholds. I demonstrate that Woolf and Mansfield convey a salient interest in the inscrutable female visage that resists being read as what Rives calls a ‘text for analysis and interpretation’. Both writers reveal concerns about the modern woman’s visual identification, but of the two, it is Mansfield who fashions corrective images and extricates the modern woman from her physiognomic past.


Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-379
Author(s):  
JAMES P. WOODARD

AbstractAn examination of the Brazilian newspaper O Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documents O Combate's place, alongside other ‘yellow press’ outlets, in the making of a ‘public sphere’ in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests that O Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the ‘public sphere’ idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas’ original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Gaynor ◽  
Anne O’Brien

Community radio is unique when compared to its commercial and public service counterparts in that, as a non-profit activity, it is owned, managed and controlled by local communities, In theory therefore, community radio offers the potential for more broad-based participation in deliberation and debate within the public sphere engaging multiple voices and perspectives and contributing towards progressive social change. Drawing on a study of four community radio stations in Ireland within a framework drawn from the evolving work of Habermas and associated deliberative, social and media theorists, in this article we examine the extent to which this is the case in practice. We find that democratic participation is still not optimised within the four stations studied. We argue that the reasons for this lie in four main areas: a somewhat limited policy framework; a focus within training programmes on technical competencies over content; the weakness of linkages between stations and their local community groups; and the failure of the latter to understand the unique remit of community radio. The article draws lessons of specific interest to researchers and activists in these domains, as well as offering a framework to those interested in examining community media’s contribution to the re-animation of the public sphere more broadly.


Author(s):  
Georgios E. Trantas

Migration does not take place in a vacuum, nor is the formation of communities thereof a mere collection of individuals; particularly when taking into account one of the main transferrable cultural determinants of identity and self-perception, i.e. group religiosity. The latter makes its aesthetic manifestation in the public sphere and hence, migration gives rise to religioscapes, which are identifiable by their visible markers in the form of architecture and religious art. The same applies to the Greek-Orthodox migrant communities of Germany and Great Britain. Both were established in the mid-twentieth century when the main bulk of their demographic presence in the corresponding countries took place. The formation of their communities occurred clearly before globality ushered in the contemporary, parallel, glocal, translocal and cultural relativisation that is facilitated by increased mobility and advanced means of communication. Yet, this paper argues that both the glocal and translocal conceptual frameworks apply to the case studies of interest. Evidence of this is particularly traceable in their corresponding religioscapes’ markers, which are permeated by aesthetic priorities and main influences, emergent patterns of predominant featured themes and tendencies that attest to glocality and translocality. Notably, not only are their places of worship containers of their immortalized narratives, they also contribute to the perpetuation of their distinct mutability. This phenomenon of aesthetic adaptation in accordance with the accumulated social experience, highlights the emergent patterns of a glocal and translocal sense of being and belonging that gave rise to the distinct hybrid identity amalgams thereof.


2008 ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
K.I. Shvalagina

Secularization theory is one of those intellectual products that determine the understanding of religion, its status in society, and the changes that take place between faith and unbelief, between church and state, for quite some time. Constituted in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, this theory has found many followers both in America and in Europe, even in the USSR. Its validity and integrity, evidentiality and obviousness did not cause any doubt either to scholars or to religious and statesmen. It was clear that society is liberated from the influence of religion and the church, is rapidly secularized, which will inevitably lead to the transformation of religion into a marginal phenomenon, and eventually - to its extinction. But the predictions that were made with unqualified certainty did not come true, as the development of the religious environment at the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI century showed. Not only has religion not lost its significance for the modern man, but he is also actively returning to the public sphere. In line with such objective changes, secularization theory undergoes significant transformations, evolving from a monopoly that it has had for almost half a century, to a crisis, and eventually to its antipode, a theory of desecularization.


2019 ◽  
pp. 215-220
Author(s):  
Teresa Pepe

The chapter sumps up the main themes and findings presented in the book. It concludes that blogging has led to emergence of a new literary genre, as well as has allowed young Egyptians to reshape their identity, connect to each other and rebel against the authorities. Placing blogs in the larger history of Arabic autobiographical genre, it argues that the autofictional blog, in some ways, continues the role played by the autobiographical novel or novelised autobiography in the twentieth century. In addition, the interactivity afforded by blogging has helped intellectuals to re-establish connections with the public sphere and to communicate with their readers, a connection that was lost in recent decades, particularly the 1990s. Finally, the chapter advocates for further studies on Arabic digital expression, as well for trans-historical studies on the impact of media on Arabic culture.


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