Chapter Two. Problems Of Communication, Identity, And Gendered Social Construction In Contemporary Japanese Cinema: The Look And The Voice

Author(s):  
Dalya Yafa Markovich

The voice of the subaltern is barely ever heard in the traditional historical-ethnological museum. Aiming to break the constraints and limitations of the traditional museum sphere, Alemu Eshetie, an Israeli based artist of Ethiopian origin, has created a museum dedicated to the Ethiopian Jewish community that functions as a traveling “public sphere”. Through these strategies the Museum wishes to establish a “dialogical methodology” that will voice the ‘Ethiopian' subaltern and thus foster his empowerment. By using ethnographic fieldwork that followed the activities held by the Museum in the 4th grade at a multiethnic and disadvantaged school in Israel, this chapter examined the ways in which students of Ethiopian origin chose to voice themselves in the public sphere created by the Museum, and the social and educational meanings attached to their voice. Hence findings suggest that the social construction of the subalterns' personal voice within the public sphere can expose racial and social inferior position and thus work against the aims it means to achieve.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fausto Cruchinho

Usually associated with the practice of cinema, offscreen is understood as everything and what is not contained in the field of cinema, in the plane of image and sound. This conference addresses the issue, placing the field and the field out of the image creation and its relation to what the plan entails and obliterates, in the same way as theatre space, the existence of another space that is filmic. In the same way, the sound field installs itself as the offscreen, to where it is sent what is not in the field. The sound construction, far from replicating the field of the image, establishes the possibility of the film being composed, in fact, by two films. The absence of sound in silent films would have its adherents in the totalizing idea of the art of moving images. However, offscreen was a real need to occupy this field. With the advent of sound, the transformations of silent cinema into sound cinema, established the possibility of a new cinematographic art, in fact two arts: silent cinema and sound cinema. The characteristics of both are not complementary, but rather simultaneous. That means a true relationship between the need of to show everything in field and to reinforce the idea that the field doesn’t exclude the offscreen. Cinema is a sound art, like music and theatre. Like them, cinema founds its nature in the replica of the human: the voice, the sound production, the silence. Like the theatre, cinema makes use of two organs for its reception and for its creation: the eye and the ear. In this way, the cinema works the look more than the see and works more listening than hear.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
Hazmah Ali AI-Harshan

Postmodern fiction demonstrates a suspicion about the narrative status of history. Arguably, its project is to reveal the illusion of truth in history because of history's reliance on texts. There is no doubt that historical events occur, but their transmutation into “fact” and their transmission to posterity are limited by their narrativization and textualization. In the Afterword to her novel, Alias Grace (1996) – a fictionalized narrative centering on a real-life person embroiled in a double murder in 1843 – Margaret Atwood reveals her interest in this problem with “history”. She tells the reader, “I have of course fictionalized historical events … as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history”. The purpose of this paper is thus to consider Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace as a postmodern fiction that seeks to reveal the illusion of truth in history through her use of innovatory narrative techniques. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “double-voiced” is used to examine the permitted, surface-level utterances – and the necessarily conflicting actual narratives – of the two narrators in Atwood’s novel. However, the term is also applied in the broader feminist/theoretical context of the silencing of the female subject more generally. Atwood establishes a fragmented, multiplicity narrative. This arises from the reported and somewhat self-aware observations of the eponymous Grace and a doctor named Simon Jordan. Seemingly, the author’s own authority does not exist. Atwood thus exploits the slippery nature of language that does not have some kind of “truth” imposed upon it. The historical “truth” about Grace Marks is never revealed, not because Atwood is “leaving it to the reader's imagination” but because Atwood plays with the problem of personality as a social construction. Almost invisible as “author”, Atwood nevertheless reveals just how language can be manipulated and made to conform to a certain version of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. However, in Alias Grace, Atwood also recuperates the voice of a supposedly murderous woman by revising the myth of woman’s silence and subjugation. Because her speaking voices are required to practice “double-voicing” to be heard, through presenting the reader with both voices, Atwood recuperates the moments of existential liberation to be heard from emergent voices.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ieuan Franklin

Having ceased publication in 2015, Bucketfull of Brains (aka BoB), founded in 1979 by Nigel Cross, is prime candidate for the United Kingdom’s longest-running music fanzine. When Cross relinquished control of the zine in 1985 its identity changed, but it retained the ‘voice’ of a zine despite increasingly assuming the ‘look’ of a magazine. This liminal identity also extended to its transatlantic focus and its straddling of punk and psychedelic music scenes. This article demonstrates how BoB also ‘bridged the gap’, especially in terms of taste communities, between the countercultural/underground publications of the 1970s and the punk and post-punk fanzines which came later. In doing so BoB was ideally situated to document the long-running garage rock revival of the 1980s and indeed was regarded as ‘the Bible’ of this scene by its readers. Drawing on interviews with BoB editors Nigel Cross and Jon Storey, the article is primarily concerned with the motivations and work of fanzine editors/writers in documenting the histories and development of interlinked popular musical sub-genres and micro-genres. In providing various layers of context to elucidate the place of both BoB and the publications that had a significant influence upon it (e.g. ZigZag) in the history of rock fanzine scholarship and the reasons for the persistent neglect of such scholarship, the article is also influenced by concepts of literary form and genre.


2020 ◽  
pp. 102986492092668
Author(s):  
Kristine Anne Healy ◽  
Graham R. Gibbs

To play a musical instrument in the way that one would sing is a goal that has been shared and documented by performers of Western classical music for several centuries. It is still common to hear performers in the 21st century encouraging each other to aspire to performance ideals that are linked to aspects of vocality. Taking voicelikeness not as an identifiable property of sound but rather as a social construction, this study investigates what an instrumental musician can do when they invoke the notion of voicelikeness, using discourse analysis to probe data from a single case study of a flute masterclass. We contend that, while the “truth” about any one instrumentalist’s claim to vocality may be impossible to verify, observing the ways in which such a claim is built up, shared, and defended can reveal the musical values that are being shaped and disseminated by musicians in a given set of circumstances. Applying a discourse approach to the analysis of an actual social encounter exposes how an instrumental musician can draw upon existing ideas about the voice to construct ideal musical practice. We conclude that stories of voicelikeness in discourse amongst instrumental musicians are not only about making a sound that is in some way vocal, they can also be used to transmit the norms of classical music performance from expert performer to developing performer.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Stanley Tucker

Abstract This article explores the perceptions of a group of working class white boys living in the West Midlands area of the United Kingdom. Using original data generated from a series of in-depth personal interviews matters of educational underachievement, future job prospects and ambitions are explored. In capturing the ‘voice’ of the young people concerned specific attention is given to how a variety of social, economic and class-based factors shape their personal and collective perceptions. It is argued that the dominant social construction of the period of youth, commonly represented through the young people’s views, is underpinned by notions of marginalisation, problematisation, social exclusion and discrimination. The case is made for re-orientating the nature of school relationships and adjusting the curriculum to reflect the needs and experiences of the young people involved.


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