scholarly journals Whose riot? Collective memory of an iconic event in a local music scene

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Green

The application of memory studies to music scenes has so far had a material focus, favouring places and objects. This article critically examines the role of an iconic event in scene identity, through a case study of the ‘Cybernana’ music festival, hosted by Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZfm in 1996 and marked by what has been characterised, alternately, as an audience riot and a police riot. Based on ethnographic research and analysis of cultural texts it is shown that, against official findings and wider disinterest, there exists an intergenerational counter-memory of Cybernana as an iconic event, within a politicised narrative that defines both the radio station and the local music scene. The factors involved in constructing this iconicity are considered, including the role of media. This mediated, cultural memory provides a narrative frame for individual experiences, through which people locate themselves within the scene and reaffirm its collective identity.

Author(s):  
Olu Jenzen ◽  
Itir Erhart ◽  
Hande Eslen-Ziya ◽  
Umut Korkut ◽  
Aidan McGarry

This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. Extending the concept of media imaginaries to include analysis of protestors’ use of aesthetics, it aims to unpick how a particular ‘social media imaginary’ is constructed and informs their collective identity. Using the Gezi Park protest of 2013 as a case study, it illustrates how social media became a symbolic part of the protest movement by providing the visualised possibility of imagining the movement. In previous research, the main emphasis has been given to the functionality of social media as a means of information sharing and a tool for protest organisation. This article seeks to redress this by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in online protest expressions and thus also illustrates the role of visual analysis in social movement studies.


2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
UDITI SEN

AbstractWithin the popular memory of the partition of India, the division of Bengal continues to evoke themes of political rupture, social tragedy, and nostalgia. The refugees or, more broadly speaking, Hindu migrants from East Bengal, are often the central agents of such narratives. This paper explores how the scholarship on East Bengali refugees portrays them either as hapless and passive victims of the regime of rehabilitation, which was designed to integrate refugees into the socio-economic fabric of India, or eulogizes them as heroic protagonists who successfully battled overwhelming adversity to wrest resettlement from a reluctant state. This split image of the Bengali refugee as both victim and victor obscures the complex nature of refugee agency. Through a case-study of the foundation and development of Bijoygarh colony, an illegal settlement of refugee-squatters on the outskirts of Calcutta, this paper will argue that refugee agency in post-partition West Bengal was inevitably moulded by social status and cultural capital. However, the collective memory of the establishment of squatters’ colonies systematically ignores the role of caste and class affiliations in fracturing the refugee experience. Instead, it retells the refugees’ quest for rehabilitation along the mythic trope of heroic and masculine struggle. This paper interrogates refugee reminiscences to illuminate their erasures and silences, delineating the mythic structure common to both popular and academic refugee histories and exploring its significance in constructing a specific cultural identity for Bengali refugees.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Rahman ◽  
Adam Lynes

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the nature and extent of violent practice in the motorcycle underworld. It does this by considering the murder of Gerry Tobin, and then uses the biography of the founding member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club (HAMC) for a critical analysis. The authors are interested in understanding the role of masculine honour and collective identity, and its influences in relation to violence – namely, fatal violence in the motorcycle underworld. The authors argue that motorcycle gangs are extreme examples of what Hall (2012) considers “criminal undertakers” – individuals who take “special liberties” often as a last resort. Design/methodology/approach The methodological approach seeks to analyse the paradigm of “masculine honour”, and how the Outlaws MC (OMC) applied this notion when executing the seemingly senseless murder of Gerry Tobin. So too, the author triangulate these findings by critically analysing the biography of the founding member of the Californian chapter of the HAMC – Sonny Barger. Further to this, a case study inevitably offers “constraints and opportunities” (Easton, 2010, p. 119). Through the process of triangulation, which is a method that utilises “multiple sources of data”, the researcher can be confident that the truth is being “conveyed as truthfully as possible” (Merriam, 1995, p. 54). Findings What is clear within the OB worldview is that it can only be a male dominant ideology, with no allowance for female interference (Wolf, 2008). Thus, Messerschmidt’s (1993) notion of “hegemonic masculinity” fits the male dominated subcultures of the HAMC and OMC, which therefore provides the clubs with “exclusive” masculine identities (Wolf, 2008). For organisations like the HAMC, retaliation is perceived as an alternative form of criminal justice that is compulsory to undertake in order to defend their status of honour and masculinity. Originality/value Based on our understanding, this is the first critical think piece that explores a UK case of homicide within the context of the motorcycle underworld. It also provides a comprehensive understanding of violent practice with the motorcycle underworld from criminological and sociological perspectives. This paper will inform readers about an overlooked and under researched underworld culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-229
Author(s):  
Jadwiga Lelek ◽  
Konrad Sierzputowski

This article is the result of research on the condition of Polish musical comics. The basis of considerations are the comics of Marcin Podolec: Smoke and Fugazi Music Club, two works of Krzysztof Owedyk: Blix and Żorżet and You will be frying in hell, as well as the worst comic of the year by Maciej Pałka and Only calmly Bartek Glazy. The text aims to show the relationships between Polish popular music and comics. Draws attention to the ways of presenting musical subcultures and individual portraits in comic culture. It also introduces the role of memory and nostalgia in the construction of illustrated musical stories in which the real order mixes with the imaginary. The article points to the common points of these works and takes into account the most important shortcomings of all six comics. It highlights the marginalization of the role of women, both in the creative process and the discussed cultural texts. Using the theories of Jacques Ranciere and Robin, James raises the question of male dominance in the Polish music comic, while shedding light on the Polish music scene.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jordi Nofre

Abstract: During the last years of the Spanish fascist regime, two politically contrary music scenes emerged in Barcelona. While Catalanist folk music emerged for political freedom, Spanished rock’n’roll, punk, and heavy scenes emerged in the working-class suburbs of Barcelona, denouncing bad conditions of everyday urban life. The great success of this last music scene in Barcelona in the 1980s led to the then nationalist, conservative government of Catalonia to promote a new socially and politically sanitized music scene in response to such class-based contestation. This study aims to explore how a new Catalan(ist) pop-rock scene was created to socially and culturally sanitize the working-class suburbs of Barcelona along the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.


2021 ◽  
pp. 079160352110292
Author(s):  
John O’Brien

Pubs have served as a collective representation through which the collective identity of ‘Irish society’ has been articulated during the crisis of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As such they offer a case study of how meaning making occurs in contemporary periods of social crisis. While the neoliberal era is widely interpreted as period involving a process of desymbolisation in which meaning giving traditions are undermined, in this period of social crisis long-established and authoritative narratives drawn from collective memory circulated to articulate the meaning of the pandemic for the collective identity in the sense of its nature, character, boundaries, ‘others’, and moral duties and sacrifices that membership implied. Highly stereotyped images of the sacred moral core of the collective as represented by publicans who embodied qualities of age and maturity, rural, cultural-nationalist identity and a post Land War ideal of community-oriented owner-proprieters appeared. Similarly conventional representations of the immoral enemies within, who threaten to morally and literally infect the community, can be seen in representations of venues and drinkers who embody youth, the urban crowd and mixing. The ‘other’ through which identity is articulated against was represented through Britishness, which was shown as the source of the undesirable aspects of modernity.


2014 ◽  
pp. 66-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Jawor

Pride and prejudice. The significance of election of a transsexual person as a “representative of Nation”Ms. Anna Grodzka’s election to the Polish Parliament in 2011 was a crucial event because for the first time in Europe a transsexual person became a Member of Parliament, and thus was to represent all Poles at the national level. This event resulted in mixed reactions and comments: from euphoria to trauma, from great pride to deep prejudice. It is instrumental in self identification of Poles, nevertheless two different Polish “nations” make use of it, presenting two different languages and two absolutely separate pictures of Polish identity. The first approach is associated with such notions as freedom, equity, minority rights, multiculturalism. The other is connected with such phrases as original values, genuine Poles, God, and the regular family. Therefore contemporary war of cultures, that is a general conflict over values and collective identity, came to focus on the fact that Anna Grodzka became an MP. The author of the article, relying on Allan McKee’s interpretative analysis of cultural texts, in this case press articles, aims at an analysis of the role of Ms. Grodzka’s election for identity shaping processes among Poles. Duma i uprzedzenie. Znaczenie wyboru osoby transseksualnej na „przedstawiciela Narodu”Wybór Anny Grodzkiej na posłankę był przełomowym wydarzeniem, ponieważ po raz pierwszy w Europie osoba transseksualna została przedstawicielką wszystkich rodaków. Wydarzenie to wywołało jednak różne reakcje: od euforii do traumy, od wielkiej dumy do głębokich uprzedzeń. Służy ono bowiem samookreślaniu się Polaków, ale w taki sposób, że korzystają z niego w procesie samoidentyfikacji co najmniej dwa polskie „narody”, posługujące się językami uosabiającymi dwie zupełnie inne wizje polskości. Naród tych, którzy boją się o Polskę, utożsamianą z wiarą katolicką, tradycyjną rodziną i podziałem ról płciowych, dla których norma jest jedna, a wartości prawdziwe albo nieprawdziwe. I naród tych, którzy Polskę swą widzą barwną, różnorodną, wielokulturową, otwartą i zmienną. Fakt wyboru Anny Grodzkiej do Sejmu stał się więc jedną z soczewek, w której ogniskuje się współczesna wojna kultur, która jest w istocie symboliczną walką o to, kim jesteśmy jako Polacy i w jakim społeczeństwie chcemy żyć. Stosując, proponowaną przez Allana McKee, interpretatywną analizę tekstów kulturowych, w tym przypadku artykułów prasowych, staram się przybliżyć znaczenie tego wydarzenia dla procesów tożsamościowych Polaków.


Author(s):  
Aleksandra Đukić

Cultural heritage is recognized as an irreplaceable and non-renewable strategic resource for the sustainable development of the city. It could serve as important trigger for strengthening identity and competitiveness of the city at the regional and global level. Industrial heritage is seen as a cultural landscape that stems from the interaction of social groups and the space they belong and in relation to which they build collective identity and cultural meanings, through a layered and complex relationship. Social values of industrial heritage are an important part of citizens' identity, because they represent a part of the memory of people's lives, about industrial progress and pride of the local citizens. The case study is conducted in Smederevo, at the area of industrial heritage along the Danube river bank. Identification of the value and significance of the Indistrial heritage will be investigated by a survey of citizens. The survey is based on the five Lynch`s elements of the image of the city, as well as the identification of the emotional connection of citizens with the city, the understanding of its symbols and meanings.


Sociology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 850-864 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nettleingham

‘Generations’ have been invoked to describe a variety of social and cultural relationships, and to understand the development of self-conscious group identity. Equally, the term can be an applied label and politically useful construct; generations can be retrospectively produced. Drawing on the concept of ‘canonical generations’ – those whose experiences come to epitomise an event of historic and symbolic importance – this article examines the narrative creation and functions of ‘generations’ as collective memory shapes and re-shapes the desire for social change. Building a case study of the canonical role of the miners’ strike of 1984–85 in the narrative history of the British left, it examines the selective appropriation and transmission of the past in the development of political consciousness. It foregrounds the autobiographical narratives of activists who, in examining and legitimising their own actions and prospects, (re)produce a ‘generation’ in order to create a relatable and useful historical understanding.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document