Singing-in-between spaces: Bhooter Bhabisyat and the music transcending class conflict

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Dhrubaa Mukherjee

This article analyses Bhooter Bhabisyat, a Bengali political horror satire, as a counter-narrative to Bengali cinema’s monocultural bhodrolok branding. The article argues that Bhooter Bhabisyat is radical in its refusal to follow hegemonic homogenizing musical styles classified into genres such as folk, popular, traditional and modern, which tend to be ethnocentric and class based with serious value judgments about the superiority of certain musical forms over others. Instead, Bhooter Bhabisyat uses a variety of distinct Bengali musical traditions to problematize the historic role of capitalist media that work to homogenize and popularize the dominant culture of the ruling classes. The hybrid songs of the film disrupt a sense of homogeneous bhodrolok class position that Bengali cinema has historically sustained. Through the strategies of musical pastiche, Bhooter Bhabisyat offers a meta-historic narrative about Bengali cinema, which makes possible a critical investigation of the cultural discourses and historical narratives that are discursively embedded within the history of filmic production, circulation and consumption. If film histories are produced by repressing differences between social groups and constructing universal identification, then foregrounding film songs as decolonial storytelling methods that reemphasize local voices and subject matters can lead to an effort to read history from below. The vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogeneous continuum has […] diluted the Marxist concept of history. (Giorgio Agamben) The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (Karl Marx)

Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen

Biographical scholarship provides a means by which to understand the past. Disability biography writes disabled people into historical narratives and cultural discourses, acknowledging power, action, and consequence. Disability biography also analyzes the role of ableism in shaping relationships, systems of power, and societal ideals. When written with skilled storytelling, rigorous study, nuance, and insight, disability biography enriches analyses of people living in the past. Disability biography makes clear the multiple ways by which individuals and communities labor, make kinship, persevere, and both resist and create social change. When using a disability analysis, biographies of disabled people (particularly people famous for their disability, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Helen Keller) reveal the relationality and historically embedded nature of disability. In an ableist world, such acts can be revolutionary.


Babel ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pilar Ordóñez-López

Abstract In recent years, attempts have been made to unveil the role of women in the history of translation and have brought to light women’s contributions to translation, which had generally been overlooked in mainstream discourse on the history of translation. This study focuses on Zenobia Camprubí’s (1887–1956) contribution to translation. Camprubí, the wife of the Spanish poet and Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958), translated literary and non-literary texts extensively from English into Spanish. In order to critically evaluate her impact as a translator, a thorough analysis is carried out, based on a mixed range of sources, such as newspapers, private correspondence, previous studies on Camprubí’s work as a translator, and contemporary research on translation history. The results provide new insights regarding into the reception of Camprubí’s translations at the time of publication (characterized by frequent comments with value judgments typically for women as well as unfounded questioning of her role as a translator), her unusual and distinctive (co-)translation method, and her presence in contemporary translation literature. Ultimately, this study reveals how, despite her undoubted commitment to translation, Camprubí never really stepped out of her husband’s shadow, which is, regrettably, the case of many other women translators.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Mikael Strömberg

The article’s primary aim is to discuss the function of turning points and continuity within historiography. That a historical narrative, produced at a certain time and place, influence the way the historian shapes and develops the argument is problematized by an emphasis on the complex relationship between turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts within an argumentative framework. Aided by a number of examples from three historical narratives on operetta, the article stresses the importance of creating new narratives about the past. Two specific examples from the history of operetta, the birth of the genre and the role of music, are used to illustrate the need to revise not only the use of source material and the narrative strategy used, but also how the argument proposed by the historian gathers strength. The interpretation of turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts illustrate the need to revise earlier historical narratives when trying to counteract the repetitiveness of history.


The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates the role of music in Christian practice and history across contemporary world Christianities (including chapters focused on communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia). Using ethnography, history, and musical analysis, it explores Christian groups as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book traces five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias, music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume approaches Christian musical practices as powerful windows into the ways music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) among places. It also pays attention to the ways Christian musical practices encompass and negotiate deeply rooted values. The volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural practices, narratives, and values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
G. Dalla Bontà ◽  

In the context of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov’s audacious “lifelong” project, an encyclopedic perspective can be traced quite clearly through various approaches, languages and methodologies throughout the artist’s creative career. Prigov’s Bestiaries not only deviate from the traditional path of encyclopedic genealogy; they are the prototype of later, more pronounced taxonomic projects, and even act as a reference to what he called his “lifelong project”. Our task is to show how the Bestiaries series is not only a study of the Russian cultural space, but is also the very concept of Prigov’s anthropology from the beginning of the history of culture to the present day in a post-Soviet and even post-human perspective, thus asserting itself as a proto-encyclopedia of his New Anthropology. In the process of researching, methods such as theoretical, general philosophical analyses (systemic method, analysis, analogy, synthesis) were used, including the analysis of texts, interviews and artistic production of Prigov. The sociological methods are also taken as the basis for drawing conclusions and the main approach moves from a semiotic and poststructuralist point of view, especially the theory of culture of Yuri Lotman, the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and George Bataille. Thus, we have outlined the importance of the Bestaries in presenting the theory of cultural evolution of Dmitry Prigov and his “new anthropology”, referring to this series on the role of the visual conclusion of his new anthropological system


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (03) ◽  
pp. 2050006
Author(s):  
S. D. PRADO ◽  
S. R. DAHMEN ◽  
A. L. C. BAZZAN ◽  
M. MACCARRON ◽  
J. HILLNER

Since the 1970s, scholars have begun to pay attention to the presentation of women in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the main source for the early history of Britain (from the first century BC to the eighth century AD). Vastly different conclusions have been drawn, ranging from positivist approaches which saw the period as a golden age for women to rather more negative assessments, which argue that Bede suppressed the role of women. By analyzing the concept of communicability and relevance of certain nodes in complex networks, we show how Bede’s Ecclesiastical History affords women complex and nuanced social roles. In particular, we can show the independent importance of certain abbesses, which is a significant result and challenges much of the existing scholarship on Bede’s attitude to female power.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-225
Author(s):  
Stephen Chaikind

AbstractThis paper introduces the role wine has played as a central factor in the history of economic thought. The focus is on an examination of documented sources that connect wine and its viticulture and enology with the evolution of economic concepts. Works by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, and others are examined, as well as wine economic ideas postulated by Greek and Roman thinkers. (JEL Classification: A1, B1, B3, N00)


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Mikael Strömberg

The article’s primary aim is to discuss the function of turning points and continuity within historiography. That a historical narrative, produced at a certain time and place, influence the way the historian shapes and develops the argument is problematized by an emphasis on the complex relationship between turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts within an argumentative framework. Aided by a number of examples from three historical narratives on operetta, the article stresses the importance of creating new narratives about the past. Two specific examples from the history of operetta, the birth of the genre and the role of music, are used to illustrate the need to revise not only the use of source material and the narrative strategy used, but also how the argument proposed by the historian gathers strength. The interpretation of turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts illustrate the need to revise earlier historical narratives when trying to counteract the repetitiveness of history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Caroline Spry ◽  
Jillian Garvey ◽  
Emmy Frost

Warning Aboriginal and Torres Strait readers of this article are warned that it may contain images of ancestral remains. Compiling a history of archaeology is critical for evaluating, understanding and contextualising the current state of the discipline. While oral histories provide vivid accounts of people, events and decisions from sources with direct relationships to these moments in time, they have played a limited role in building historical narratives of archaeology as a discipline. A moderated conversation between Emeritus Professors David Frankel and Jim Allen and Professor Susan Lawrence on the early and more recent history of archaeology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, held during the university’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2017, provides a glimpse of the discipline’s past, present and future in Australia. This paper presents the key themes and topics from this conversation with accompanying excerpts, providing an important case study of how oral history can assist with archiving this discipline.


Paragraph ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
William Watkin

This article presents a critical theory of the medium of ‘normative’ prose. Relying on the work of critics of poet's prose and the philosophy of Badiou and Nancy, it commences by defining prose ostensibly as the immaterial and thus invisible dianoia or discursive other to the radically material poeisis. The essay then attempts to trace a brief history of critical attention paid to prose to uphold and further develop this thesis. Using the poeticized prose of Ron Silliman's Tjanting as an exemplary, contemporary text the remainder of the article delineates the three elements of prosaic immateriality. The first is the predominance of the role of deixis in prose as the very act of referring to reference itself devoid of actual referents in the world, the moment of the predominance of prose as normative according to Godzich and Kittay. The second is the attempt by automatized prose discourse to occlude its alterity and the role of poetic alienation in revealing this automatization as a political/ideological construct. This is traced back to the formalism of Shklovsky and then reconsidered in the Language poetics of Ron Silliman's own theorization of the New Sentence as that which resists automatized syllogistic cohesion. Thirdly, the paper looks at the significant incursions in the field by one of the key contemporary thinkers, Giorgio Agamben. Analysing Agamben's theory of prose as the collapse of poetic semiotic singularity into semantic generality, I finish with a consideration of how Silliman's work resists this very gesture in an attempt to create a permanently materialized prose that resists being relegated to dianoia or the prose of generalized connections.


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