scholarly journals Shakespeare for Revolution: From Canon to Activism in V for Vendetta and Sons of Anarchy

2020 ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Maria Consuelo Forés Rossell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
V For Vendetta

Shakespeare’s works have long been a place of cultural and political struggles, and continues to be so. Twenty-first century non-canonical fiction is appropriating Shakespeare for activist purposes. The present article will analyze this phenomenon, applying the concept of cultural capital, the theories of cultural materialism, intertextuality, and appropriation in relation to popular culture, in order to study how Shakespeare’s plays are being appropriated from more radically progressive positions, and resituated in alternative contexts. Among the plethora of Shakespearean adaptations of the last decades, non-canonical appropriations in particular offer brand new interpretations of previously assumed ideas about Shakespeare’s works, popularizing the playwright in unprecedented ambits and culturally diverse social spaces, while giving voice to the marginalized. Thus, through entertainment, non-canonical fiction products such as V for Vendetta and Sons of Anarchy recycle the Shakespearean legacy from a critical point of view, while using it as a political weapon for cultural activism, helping to make people aware of social inequalities and to inspire them to adopt a critical stance towards them, as free and equal citizens.

Geopolitics of Energy

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Blerina Muskaj
Keyword(s):  
Natural Gas ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Energy Market ◽  
Energy Potential ◽  
Environmental Consequences ◽  
Regional Energy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Weapon

At the beginning of my paper I will explain the concept of "Geopolitics of Energy", this will be done for a quite simple reason, because I want everyone who can sit to read this article to understand more clearly what is at stake, therefore allow them the comprehension of what is being elaborated bellow at first sight. Geopolitics of energy is a concept that relates to policies choosing exporters to implement on importers, is the policy that has an impact on energy consumption, which includes consumer’s choice in the geopolitical context, taking into account the economy, foreign policy, the safety of energy, environmental consequences and priorities that carries the energy exporter. This concept permits the understanding of how works the politics that undertakes this initiative taking into account natural resources such as: natural gas and oil. Natural gas and oil are two main resources that produce energy but also two main elements on which arises all the topic in the energetics game. For this paper is used qualitative methodology, through which we were able to accomplish this work. I focused on scientific literature, official publications and reports on energy geopolitics. The main aim has been to show how in this decade, energy security is at the center of geopolitical agenda and has become the focus of numerous political debates. Regarding this point of view, Europe is taking the initiative to create a common energy market within the continent by creating projects, in which Albania appears as a new regional energy potential. Russia, which is aiming to play a role in the international arena, is seeking to position itself geopolitically in "its political weapon", hydrocarbon resources, in particular natural gas resources.

History Has Its Eyes on You

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Maslon
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Technological Advance ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Personal Preference ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Consumer Habits

A generational change at the beginning of the twenty-first century intersected with the technological advance of the Internet to provide a renaissance of Broadway music in popular culture. Downloading playlists allowed the home listener to become, in essence, his/her own record producer; length, narrative, performer were now all in the hands of the consumer’s personal preference. Following in the footsteps of Rent (as a favorite of a younger demographic), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton emerged as the greatest pop culture/Broadway musical phenomenon of the twenty-first century; its cast album and cover recording shot up near the top of music’s pop charts. A rediscovery of the power of Broadway’s music to transform listening and consumer habits seems imminent with the addition of Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to a devoted fan base—and beyond.

Cultural Imperialism and the Assessment of Creative Work

2019 ◽  
pp. 275-297
Author(s):  
Juniper Hill
Keyword(s):  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Creative Development ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
Diverse Learning ◽  
Work Strategies

Assessing creative work is often challenging, even more so in culturally diverse learning environments, in which students and educators may not hold the same musical values. An instructor aiming to teach proficiency within a specific style may unintentionally give feedback that devalues a student’s personal creative expressions, which in many cases reflect diverse musical heritages. Such devaluing feedback can inhibit individual creative development, stifle innovation, and perpetuate sociocultural power imbalances. In this chapter examples from jazz, classical, and traditional musicians in Cape Town and Helsinki illustrate how and why idiomatic boundaries are enforced, how musical value judgments can perpetuate social inequalities, and how negative feedback can inhibit individual creative development. The chapter emphasizes the personal, social, and cultural importance of embracing musical diversity and the value of permitting and supporting developing musicians to go beyond idiomatic conventions in their creative work. Strategies are discussed for how music educators might better support individual creative development and social justice.

scholarly journals After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World Order

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitav Acharya
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
World Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The West ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
China And India ◽  
International Stability

While the West woke up to the threat to the liberal international order when Donald Trump was elected U.S. president, its decline was apparent even at the height of the Obama-Clinton era. What follows the end of the U.S.-dominated world order is not a return to multipolarity as many pundits assume. The twenty-first-century world—politically and culturally diverse but economically and institutionally interlinked—is vastly different from the multipolar world that existed prior to World War II. China and India are major powers now; and globalization will not end, but will take on a new form, driven more by the East than the West and more by South-South linkages than North-North ones. The system of global governance will fragment, with new actors and institutions chipping away at the old UN-based system. Liberal values and institutions will not disappear, but will have to coexist and enmesh with the ideas and institutions of others, especially those initiated by China. This “multiplex world” carries both risks and opportunities for managing international stability. Instead of bemoaning the passing of the old liberal order, the West should accept the new realities and search for new ways to ensure peace and stability in partnership with the rising powers.

scholarly journals Fifty Shades of Bluebeard? Dukas'sAriane et Barbe-Bleuein the Twenty-First Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-438
Author(s):  
LAURA WATSON
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Fifty Shades Of Grey

AbstractWith the appearance of opera videos in 2013 (DVD) and 2015 (YouTube), Paul Dukas'sAriane et Barbe-Bleue(1907) has been revived for twenty-first-century audiences. Not only has this formerly obscure work migrated to a mass-media landscape of personalized digital consumption, but its cultural recontextualization has also been extended to the interpretations staged in those opera videos. Both challenge historical, feminist readings ofAriane. Updating the action to modern scenes of abduction and captivity, these productions recast Ariane as victim and reframe the opera as part of the present discourse on sexual violence. As these recent productions ofArianeresonate with broader aesthetic tendencies in current popular culture, I trace parallels between the opera and three such examples from 2015. Selecting works that exemplify the trend of repackaging the Bluebeard tale as contemporary drama, I cite the filmsFifty Shades of GreyandRoom, and the Netflix seriesThe Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Conclusion: Sincerity Dreams

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Rutten
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Cultural Paradigms ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Inclusive Analysis

This conclusion reflects on today's dreams of renewing or revitalizing sincerity and rejects the notion that they are outdated or do not deserve any of our attention. It cites the work of several scholars to show that sincerity is anything but obsolete in twenty-first-century popular culture. Indeed, today's strivings to renew sincerity have not been neglected by scholars such as R. Jay Magill Jr., Epstein, and Yurchak. The rhetoric on new sincerity has been addressed in thoughtful analyses of contemporary culture that have helped the author in crafting a comprehensive and geographically inclusive analysis of present-day sincerity rhetoric. In post-Communist Russia, debates on a shift to late or post-postmodern cultural paradigms are thriving with at least as much fervor as—and possibly more than—in Western Europe or the United States. This conclusion discusses the newly gained insights which the author's sincerity study offers.

Gaining a Past, Losing a Future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

2012 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Allen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Web 3.0 ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
The Web

This article explore how, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the internet became historicised, meaning that its public existence is now explicitly framed through a narrative that locates the current internet in relation to a past internet. Up until this time, in popular culture, the internet had been understood mainly as the future-in-the-present, as if it had no past. The internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O'Reilly's creative marketing of that label. Web 2.0, in this sense not a technology or practice but the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, created for us a second version of the web, different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. This historicising moment aligned the past and future in ways suitable to those who might control or manage the present. And while Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality.

Drawn to Life

2018 ◽  
pp. 122-142
Author(s):  
Kylie Cardell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Teenage Girl

As forms of auto biography, diaries are of ten framed as secret, private, and confessional genres–they are presumed to be (desired as) an unfiltered and uncensored mode. In popular culture, diaries are frequently used to connote the image or experience of a teenage girl and are connected to expectations for emotionally heightened and subjective or unfiltered narration. This chapter explore show the contemporary comics artists Gabrielle Bell and Julie Doucet use diary as a both a methodology (a structural device) and a symbolic mode: in a body of diary comics, these artists respectively narrate autobiographical stories that center on the mundane, banal, and ephemeral, in away that both heightens and contests the voyeuristic frame of diary point of view.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Le Zotte
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Heroin User ◽  
Average Consumer ◽  
Cultural Currency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Used Goods

The epilogue discusses the contining role of secondhand commerce and style in the twenty-first century United States. Throughout the twentieth century, used goods economies codified and expanded, branching out into million-dollar industries. Vintage exhibitionism and elective poverty merged even more decisively at the end of the millennium. After habitual heroin user Kurt Cobain took his own life with a shotgun in 1994, styles straight-facedly called shabby chic, heroin chic, or poor chic enjoyed greater cultural currency than ever before. Voluntary secondhand dress persists precisely because it suggests both cultural and economic distinction, and shoppers continued to view secondhand venues as exceptions to the social and economic critiques of dominant capitalisms. Secondhand styles satisfy a desire to be seen as different than the average consumer dupe, as willing to invest time in the cultivation of originality without utilizing class and wealth privilege. The success of the 2013 song, “Thrift Shop,” by independent rappers Macklemore and Lewis—born and raised in the hometown of grunge, Seattle— attests to the continuing relevance of secondhand to popular culture.

Reflecting the Nation: Costa Rican Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-180
Author(s):  
Liz Harvey-Kattou
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
San Jose ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The City

This chapter argues that cinema has been the primary creative vehicle to reflect on national – tico – identity in Costa Rica in the twenty-first century, and it begins with an overview of the industry. Considering the ways in which film is uniquely positioned to challenge social norms through the creation of affective narratives and through the visibility it can offer to otherwise marginalised groups, this chapter analyses four films by key directors. Beginning with an exploration of Esteban Ramírez’s Gestación, it considers youth culture, gender, and class as non-normative spaces in the city of San José. Similarly, Jurgen Ureña’s Abrázame como antes is then discussed from the point of view of its ground-breaking portrayal of trans women in the capital. Two films shot at the geographic margins of the nation are then discussed, with the uncanny coastline the focus of Paz Fábrega’s Agua fría de mar and the marginalized Afro-Costa Rican province of Limón the focus of Patricia Velásquez’s Dos aguas.

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