Monstrous Belonging

Author(s):  
Harmony Bench

This chapter begins by reviewing the importance of Michael Jackson’s early forays in music video, paying particular attention to the short film, “Michael Jackson’s Thriller” from 1983. Jackson’s monstrosity and Ola Ray’s victimization in this film are addressed. This chapter then turns to recent adaptations and performances of “Thriller,” arguing that as a choreography, “Thriller” became a privileged site for articulating a collective sense of belonging in the early twenty-first century. In an era that amplified American insecurity and paranoia, performances of “Thriller” circulating through social media show how performers used the choreography to embody monstrosity, domesticate fear, dissipate threat, form an American public outside nationalist discourses, and resignify public spaces rendered threatening by the “War on Terror.”

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-48
Author(s):  
Nicholas Ray

The nature of architectural design in the early twenty-first century is considered through a comparison between the author's recent design for a university hostel and earlier examples of the genre.This project was designed by a Lecturer in Architecture at Cambridge for one of its Colleges. It is occupied by undergraduates, some of them architecture students, and during its construction it was used as a teaching case study. The design is somewhat ‘didactic’ in nature, attempting to be quite explicit in its thematic and formal procedures; stylistically, it can be seen as an examination of the possibilities inherent in a late modernist tradition. For this reason, and because of its privileged site and budget, it offers an opportunity for some reflections on architectural composition at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in relation to earlier traditions of formal manipulation.


Author(s):  
Paula Clare Harper

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. A photo of a dress, and videos set to “Harlem Shake.”  The above are recognizable as “viral” phenomena—artifacts of the early twenty-first century whose production and dissemination were facilitated by the internet, proliferating social media platforms, and ubiquitous digital devices. In this paper, I argue that participation in such phenomena (producing, consuming, circulating, or “sharing” them) constitutes a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice: viral musicking, to borrow and adapt Christopher Small’s foundational 1998 coinage. In this paper I analyze instances of viral musicking from the 2000s through the 2010s, tracking viral circulation as heterogeneous, capacious, and contradictory—a dynamic, relational assemblage of both “new” and “old” media and practices. The notion of virus as a metaphor for cultural spread is often credited to computer science and science fiction, with subsequent co-option into marketing and media; such formulations run adjacent to the popularization of "virus" in philosophical models for globalization and pervasive capitalism across the late twentieth century, from Derrida to Baudrillard and Deleuze. In this paper, I seek to braid these lineages with the work of scholars reading cultural contagion through lenses of alterity and difference, situating music as a particularly felicitous vector for viral contagion, exceeding and preceding Internet circulation. Ultimately, I argue that viral musicking activates utopian promises of digital advocates, through the cooperative social operation of “sharing,” even as it resonates through histories and presents of racialization, miscegenation, appropriation, and the realities of porous, breachable borders, cultures, and bodies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 189-198
Author(s):  
David Thackeray ◽  
Richard Toye

We explore the ongoing importance of election promises since 1997. Even if the way that promises are disseminated has changed with the growing importance of the internet and social media in campaigning, expectations surrounding manifestos remain roughly those that were set during the twentieth century. And yet the Brexit controversy has arguably created an acute crisis in trust in politicians’ promises and uncertainty about the authority of election manifestos. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, manifestos enjoyed a more central role in the 2017 and 2019 elections than they had achieved at other elections during the early twenty-first century, not least because of the ambiguities of the mandate provided by the referendum.


Author(s):  
Linda Freedman

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.


Nature ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 488 (7412) ◽  
pp. 495-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kääb ◽  
Etienne Berthier ◽  
Christopher Nuth ◽  
Julie Gardelle ◽  
Yves Arnaud

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