The Body Electric: GE, TV, and the Reagan Brand

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Raphael
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
The Body ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
General Electric ◽  
Corporate Capitalism ◽  
American Nation ◽  
Instrumental Role

As host of NBC's General Electric Theater from 1954 to 1962, Ronald Reagan enacted a new relationship between popular culture, corporate capitalism, and electronic media. Through his affiliation with General Electric and the celebrity he achieved through television, Reagan played an instrumental role in promoting the re-branding of the imagined community of the American nation as a republic of consumption. This phase of Reagan's career was a crucible for the formation of his political persona and political base.

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.

scholarly journals Looking Like People; Feeling Like People: The Black Body, Dress and Aesthetic Therapy in the Caribbean

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 857-872
Author(s):  
Marsha Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Therapeutic Discourse ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Bodily Practice ◽  
Instrumental Role

In the Caribbean, the practice of getting dressed matters because it is a practice of attending to the body. Under a colonial regime, black bodies were ill-treated and selves were negated. Clothing played an instrumental role in the abuse of bodies and the stripping of a sense of wellbeing. Attire was one key way of demarcating master and slave and rendering some members of society null and void. Enslaved Africans, who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic to the New World, were considered chattel or commodities rather than people and clothes functioned in a way that reinforced that notion. Yet, dress became a strategy of subversion – of making chattel, property or ‘non-people’ look like people. The enslaved recognised that, through clothes, it was possible to look and feel free. Today that legacy remains. Clothing is seen not only as that which can make a people ‘look like people’ but also feel like people – clothing sets up a specific structure of feeling. This paper pivots on notions of looking and feeling like people while deploying Joanne Entwistle’s conceptual framework of dress as situated bodily practice. The article locates its investigation in the Caribbean, examining the philosophy and practice of Trinidadian clothing designer Robert Young. The article establishes him as a source of aesthetic therapeutic solutions in the Caribbean. It argues that his clothing designs produce a therapeutic discourse on the Black Caribbean body – a discourse, which facilitates a practice of getting dressed that gives a sense of agency, self-empowerment and psychic security even if that sense is embodied temporarily; lasting perhaps only as long as the garment is worn.

The “tedious yammering of selves”: The End of Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her

2019 ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Richard Smith
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Career Trajectory ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Body Experiences ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World

Spike Jonze’s unusual career trajectory, from the outer edges of popular culture to the center of indiewood, has resulted in a distinctive body of work that spans several genres and forms. This chapter traces Jonze’s career to ground a stylistic reading of his fourth feature film, Her (2013). Presented in three parts—Jonze’s short works, Gilles Deleuze’s “implied dream” and the “sound-image,” the lonely social world of Her—the chapter argues that Jonze’s cinematic style is an elaboration of a very simple image of a body in motion. As his style develops the relation of body and world becomes more central and more uncertain. In Her, the world is replaced by media affect and the body experiences itself as an aesthetic form. Smith explores a terrain of loneliness that sits at the center of much of Jonze’s work.

The Body Politic and the Politics of Two Bodies: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Death

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
The Body ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
American Nation

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.

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.

Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media

1992 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Flo Leibowitz ◽  
Quentin Schultze ◽  
Roy Anker ◽  
James Bratt ◽  
William Romanowski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Electronic Media

scholarly journals MF Husain’s Hindi Autobiography Em. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Consolaro
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
The World ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Subject

Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the body as a socio-cultural artefact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed, and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic identities, in this article I introduce world-renowned Indian painter MF Husain’s verbal and visual autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī as a series of sketches of a performative self, surfing the world in space and time. Bodies and spaces are envisioned as “assemblages or collections of parts” in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art – MF Husain being foremost a painter – and eventually also in literature. I look for strategies that MF Husain uses in order to construct or deconstruct the self through crossings and linkages. I try to investigate how the self is performed inside and outside private and public spaces, how the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community is portrayed, and how this autobiography does articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia.

scholarly journals MEDIA SOSIAL, BUDAYA PENGGEMAR SEPAK BOLA DAN (RE) ARTIKULASI DISKURSUS DOMINAN MENGENAI KEISLAMAN

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 568
Author(s):  
Danang Salahuddin Aditya Lukmana ◽  
Shuri Mariasih Gietty Tambunan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Textual Study ◽  
Islamic Values

Media sosial dan kreatifitas budaya penggemar dapat dianalisis dengan pendekatan multidisiplin untuk membongkar ideologi dominan yang melatarbelakangi praktik budaya tersebut. Selain itu, kajian terhadap media sosial juga dapat menunjukkan bagaimana ranah budaya populer seperti akun penggemar sepak bola ternyata tidak terlepas dari usaha afirmasi diskursus Keislaman dominan yang berkembang di Indonesia sejak beberapa tahun belakangan ini. Akan tetapi, apabila diskursus Keislaman terutama yang erat kaitannya dengan tubuh (atau yang berkaitan dengan aurat di media sosial) biasanya dikaitkan dengan perempuan, dalam penelitian ini justru dibicarakan dalam konteks budaya penggemar sepak bola yang didominasi penggemar laki-laki. Pergeseran atau pembalikan diskursus ini dilakukan akun @plesbol dengan cara menarik jumlah penggemar melalui representasi diri sebagai akun yang sarkastik ketika membahas persepakbolaan. Oleh karena itu, analisis dilakukan dengan metode kajian tekstual dan “observation ethnography” untuk melihat bagaimana akun ini melakukan ‘dakwah’ dengan strategi menggabungkan budaya populer fandom dengan ranah keseharian, yaitu diskursus agama, dalam ruang digital. Pertanyaan utama penelitian ini adalah bagaimana akun tersebut mengemas dan mengartikulasikan nilai-nilai Islami dalam kaitan dengan representasi akun tersebut sebagai akun sepak bola yang kerap menampilkan sarkasme. Berdasarkan hasil analisis ditemukan bahwa setelah mendapatkan pengikut (follower) cukup banyak, @plesbol juga mengunggah postingan yang mengartikulasikan Keislaman atau mengenai rekonseptualisasi aurat laki-laki dan ajakan ketaatan dalam praktik keIslaman. Social media and fanfare cultural creativity can be analyzed with a multidisciplinary approach to dismantle the dominant ideology that lies behind these cultural practices. In addition, studies on social media can also show how the realm of popular culture such as soccer fan accounts is apparently inseparable from the effort to affirm dominant Islamic discourses that have developed in Indonesia in recent years. However, if Islamic discourse, especially those closely related to the body (or relating to genitals on social media) is usually associated with women, in this study it is discussed in the context of the culture of football fans dominated by male fans. This shift or reversal of discourse is done by @plesbol account by attracting a number of fans through self-representation as a sarcastic account when discussing football. Therefore, the analysis was conducted using textual study method and observation ethnography to see how this account performs 'da'wah' by combining fandom popular culture with everyday realms, namely religious discourse, in the digital space. The main question of this research is how this account packs and articulates Islamic values in relation to the account's representation as a sarcastic football account. Based on the result of the analysis it was found that after getting quite a number of followers, @plesbol also uploaded posts that articulated Islam or regarding the reconceptualization of male genitalia and invitations to obedience in Islamic practices.

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