La Música Ranchera in the Reconfiguration of Hispanismo and Mexicanidad in Musical Exchanges between Spain and Mexico

2021 ◽  
pp. 189-217
Author(s):  
Martha I. Chew Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Mexican Cinema

This chapter analyses the continuous negotiations and dialogues that are happening on both sides of the Atlantic regarding the construction of Mexicanidad and Hispanismo through música ranchera. The author emphasizes the role of Hispanismo during La época de oro del cine mexicano (The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema) from 1936 to 1959: for example, in the construction of Mexicanidad through Chavela Vargas, and through the appropriation of the estilo bravío performed originally by Lucha Reyes. This chapter explores especially the legacy of Cuco Sanchez and Chavela Vargas and concludes with a consideration of the new cultural dialogues that are currently taking place regarding música ranchera.

Pre-Rehearsal Questions of Performance Tradition and Play-Selection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Jeffs
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
The Public ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
Public Consciousness

This chapter asks the questions: ‘what is the Spanish Golden Age and why should we stage its plays now?’ The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Spanish season of 2004–5 came at a particularly ripe time for Golden Age plays to enter the public consciousness. This chapter introduces the Golden Age period and authors whose works were chosen for the season, and the performance traditions from the corrales of Spain to festivals in the United States. The chapter then treats the decision taken by the RSC to initiate a Golden Age season, delves into the play-selection process, and discusses the role of the literal translator in this first step towards a season. Then the chapter looks at ‘the ones that got away’, the plays that almost made the cut for production, and other worthy scripts from this period that deserve consideration for future productions.

scholarly journals The Role of Lucha Libre in the Construction of Mexican Male Identity

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Pereda ◽  
Patricia Murrieta-Flores
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Fast Growing ◽  
Mexican Cinema ◽  
Mexican Culture ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Ordinary Person ◽  
Lucha Libre

Lucha Libre has played an important role in Mexican culture since the late 1950s. The sport became famous mainly due to its masked wrestlers, who incorporated their own family traditions, beliefs and fears into the design of their masks, transforming an ordinary person into a fearless character. After the introduction of the Monsters Cinema in the 1930s, Mexican audiences welcomed and adopted characters like Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein and The Werewolf. The success of Monster Cinema in Mexican culture was based on the integration of national legends and beliefs, placing them in local and identifiable concepts in the Mexican popular imagination. Later, Lucha Libre Cinema mixed with Monster Cinema resulting in the birth of new heroes and myths. These emergent paladins of the Mexican metropolis set the cultural and moral standards of that time and how Mexicans wanted to be perceived. Through an anthropological and historical analysis of Mexican Cinema and Lucha Libre, this paper investigates the main social interaction of male wrestlers who perform as heroes inside the celluloid world and outside of it. We explore how masculinity and the male figure evolves in Lucha Libre Cinema, and the processes that wrestlers have to undergo in order to be able to portray themselves as superheroes of an evolving and fast growing Mexico.

scholarly journals Hegemony and mediations in melodrama of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dave Evans
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Contentious Issue ◽  
Mexican Cinema ◽  
The Family ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Revolutionary Period

<p>The influence of the mass media is a contentious issue, especially in regards to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the mid-twentieth century. These melodramatic films have often been viewed by critics as instruments of hegemony. However, melodrama contains an inherent ambivalence, as it not only has a potential for imparting dominant messages but also offers a platform from which to defy and exceed the restraining boundaries imposed by dominant ideologies. An examination of a number of important Golden Age films, especially focussing on their contradictory tensions and their portrayals of modernity, illustrates this. The Nosotros los pobres series serves as an example of how melodramatic elements are incorporated into popular Mexican films and how melodrama could be used as an ideological tool to encourage the state’s goals. Similarly, the maternal melodrama Cuando los hijos se van uses the family to represent the processes of conflict and negotiation that Mexicans experienced as a result of modernization. Consistent with the reactionary nature of melodrama and its simultaneous suggestive potential, the film combines a Catholic worldview with an underlying allegory of moving forward. The issue of progress is also at the centre of a number of films starring iconic actor Pedro Infante, which offer an avenue for exploring what modernisation might mean for male identity in Mexico. His films show a masculinity in transition and how lower-class men could cope with this change. Likewise, the depiction of women in Golden Age film overall supports the stabilising goals of the 1940s Revolutionary government, while also providing some transgressive figures. Therefore, these films helped the Mexican audience process the sudden modernization of the post-Revolutionary period, which was in the state’s best interest; however, the masses were also able to reconfigure the messages of these films and find their own sense of meaning in them.</p>

On Women, Power, and Politics During the Last Phase of the Ilkhanate

Arabica ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 59 (6) ◽  
pp. 709-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hend Gilli-Elewy
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Study ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
The One

Abstract As a social and cultural study, this article is an attempt to contribute to the discussion around the end of the Ilkhanate by looking at the question of assimilation of Muslim and Mongol traditions during Abū Saʿīd’s rule (reg. 716-736/1316-1335). By studying this period through the main focus of women’s roles, it hopes to draw connections between the traditional Turco-Mongol status of elite women, the process of Islamization of the Ilkhanate, and the Ilkhanate’s inability to ensure continuity of government after the death of Abū Saʿīd. It will highlight the role of women of the ruling house during this period that on the one hand was seen as a Golden Age of the Ilkhanate, but on the other hand was marked by political fragmentation, confusing alliances, marriages, and numerous rebellions which ultimately led to its dissolution. The tension between choosing to remain loyal to traditional Turco-Mongol values and the processes of cultural exchanges, integration, and especially conversion to Islam becomes particularly interesting when studying the role of women in the late Ilkhanid court.

A Leonidas for the Golden Age of Superhero Films: The Thermopylae Tradition in 300 (2006)

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Eric Ross
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Western Historiography

In the second of two chapters investigating the role of Homeric epic in fabricating golden ages, Ross proposes the current golden age of superhero movies as an effective lens for viewing the modern idealization of the Spartan king Leonidas as portrayed in 300 (2006). He cites several criteria: the superhero’s origin story; the threats posed by a tyrannical enemy and by civic bureaucracy; and the superhero’s tragic alienation from loved ones and society he protects. Leonidas’ superhero status resonates with Herodotus’ fifth-century BCE account of the Battle of Thermopylae, a “golden” moment in Western historiography, when Leonidas led his 300 Spartan warriors into Homeric “doomed combat” by standing their ground against the massive invasion of the Greek mainland by the army of Xerxes, Great King of Persia. Herodotus’ account has long been recognized as assimilating the Spartan warriors, especially Leonidas, to Homer’s depiction of mythical heroes, who were themselves the bases for twentieth-century superheroes. Ross demonstrates the political ramifications of the film’s use of storytelling to mobilize nostalgia for this golden age into contemporary re-enactment – despite director Zack Snyder’s (in)famous denials of political engagement.

Gilding American History through Song Culture in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Ryan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
American History ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
American South ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
Depression Era

In the first of two chapters investigating the role of Homeric epic in fabricating golden ages, Platte reveals how Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which proclaims its debt to Homer’s Odyssey in the opening credits, also re-enacts Homeric epic’s creation of a golden age. Platte focuses on the role of song in generating ancient and modern societies’ gilded memories of the past, including the nostalgia-laden misremembering of the Depression-era American South in which the film is set. Platte emphasizes how technological change affected the American folk-song tradition through recording – a phenomenon similar to that which changed Greek song culture into “Homeric” epic. By focusing on a moment of epochal change, the filmmakers undercut the notion that folk music is a simple and genuine artefact of the past. Instead, invoking nostalgia through song exposes the artificiality of the traffic in nostalgia, which has shaped attitudes toward the ancient Greek and modern American pasts. Through the protagonist’s encounter with two Homer avatars, the Coens dramatize both the process of nostalgia-creation for such a golden age and the rejection of attempts to politically weaponize it: in this case, by obscuring racism in romantic depictions of the “Old South.”

John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Day
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Civic Identity ◽  
John Ford ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Self Knowledge

Standing at the end of a long line of John Ford Westerns and at the twilight of the genre’s Golden Age, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a self-reflective work, as much about the Western genre as a product of it. Thus, while this film, like other Westerns examined in this book, demonstrates important connections to Homer’s epics, it finds its most pervasive parallels with the post-Homeric tradition. As in Virgil’s Aeneid, John Wayne’s Tom Doniphan sacrifices his personal desires in the interest of national progress, exhibiting a Western version of Aeneas’ pietas, while Liberty Valance fills the role of Turnus, demonstrating Achillean traits, but in a negative light. Yet the film also has a close kinship with Greek tragedy: in particular, through its preoccupation with generational tensions along with issues of knowledge and identity intertwined with themes of murder, marriage, and reputation, it recalls Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, with James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard functioning as a decidedly un-epic Oedipus figure forced to confront his own failures. Like both Virgil and Sophocles before him, Ford offers a complex commentary on nation-building, simultaneously sentimental and critical, holding America’s glorious civic identity up for scrutiny and encouraging self-knowledge over blind mythologizing.

Locality, Distance, and Troubadour Song in the Second Crusade

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-224
Author(s):  
Rachel May Golden
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
Musical Object ◽  
The Voice

Troubadour song has been explored as an expression of courtly love and early vernacular song creation, even mythologized as a brief flowering of a romanticized Occitanian golden age. However, troubadour songs also importantly act as expressions of place and provide indices of contemporaneous regional communities and identities. Contemporary with the Second Crusade, the troubadour songs Pax in nomine Domini by Marcabru and Lanqan li jorn by Jaufre Rudel employ circularity, dialectic, and movement as ways of expressing place and creating a sense of near versus far. These songs should not be understood as only fixed texts; rather in sounding, transmission, and the enacting of motion they move through new environments and assume new agency as they travel. Troubadour songs of the Second Crusade thus transcend the role of fixed musical object to mediate between the position of composer-poet, the voice of the performer, and the reception of distant listeners.

Detective Fiction, Nostalgia and Rian Johnson's Knives Out: Making the Golden Age Great Again

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-253
Author(s):  
Eric Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Centre Of Gravity ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Agatha Christie

The Golden Age is back with a vengeance: reprints, re-boots, and adaptations of interwar detective fiction and its off-shoots have proliferated in the twenty-first century, as have works more loosely, but nonetheless substantially, inspired by the clue-puzzle format developed and perfected by authors like Agatha Christie. This resurgence of the ‘whodunnit’ mystery is something of mystery itself, as the centre of gravity of crime writing has long shifted away from this ostensibly dated and aesthetically limited form. This paper explores this unexpected development, looking in particular at the role of nostalgia in relation to new Golden Age mysteries. While nostalgia is frequently, and quite justly, viewed in negative terms as a personally and politically regressive phenomenon, in some cases, as in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Knives Out (2019), examined here, it can be used not simply as a dubious marketing or aesthetic strategy, but as part of a broader social critique in which one form of nostalgia is used to critique another.

To the Iron Age of Progress (The Image of Economic Life of the Country in Russian Poetry of the XVIII – XIX Centuries)

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-2) ◽  
pp. 231-259
Author(s):  
Oleg Donskikh ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Social Orientation ◽  
External Observer ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Common Opinion ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Xix Century

The author presents the attitude of Russian poets of the XVIII–XIX centuries to different aspects of economic life based on their works. The poetry of the XVIII century was rigidly differentiated by genre, and it was not supposed to reflect the specifics of economic relations in general. The only exceptions were satirical works whose authors criticized, primarily from the moral side, certain aspects of everyday life, and in particular, the practice of tax collectors. Nevertheless, poets did not do without comments about the socio-economic division of society into separate groups, the significance of certain power decisions for the development of the country’s economy, and, of course, the role of money and trade in the development of society as a whole and in human lives. Some poems contain curious references to international trade, the development of which, especially in the reign of Catherine II, led some poets to hail progress and even characterize this time as a ‘Golden Age’. It is shown how the assessment of the epoch changes during the first half of the XIX century, and how the ‘Golden Age’ is transformed in common opinion into the ‘Iron Age’. The role of economic and socialist theories in the life of society is increasing. A poet of the XIX century descends from the position of an external observer watching the sinful earth and he is horrified to find himself at the mercy of money and related interests, which produce a highly negative effect on morality, subordinating all human aspirations to monetary relations and, therefore, coarsening the soul. We consider the disputes about the progress between the lyric poets and our quite straightforward Westerners. Alexander Blok sums up a certain result of the social orientation towards purely economic relations and the technological progress associated with it in the poem “Retribution”.

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