scholarly journals Burned Out Myths and Vapour Trails: Vaporwave’s Affective Potentials

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 626-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Killeen

Abstract As a “born digital” audiovisual music genre and visual aesthetic, vaporwave channels remnants of popular culture, advertising, and consumer technology from the 1980s and early 1990s. retrieving the strange sense of affective potential that still echoes within the outmoded, depleted myths of that era. In doing so, it opens up a unique vantage-point on our present moment, and our contemporary attachments to digital media and a still unrelenting consumer culture. Just as Walter Benjamin believed “revolutionary energies” to resound in the outmoded objects of nineteenth century culture, vaporwave invites us to recognise the affective potentials still incipient in the sounds and images of the recent past and, in doing so, to acknowledge the affective potential available in our own cultural moment.

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-235
Author(s):  
Danielle Kinsey

This article analyzes George IV’s coronation as a multisensory festive experience in order to understand the meanings of diamonds within British material culture in 1821. Reframing the coronation as a festival allows historical scholars to bridge the premodern/modern divide in early nineteenth-century historiography and demonstrates the ongoing centrality of festivals in consumer culture in the modern era. It also offers a vantage point from which to study sensory paradigm shifts and clashes that occurred in this context and evaluate diamonds in relation to other pieces of material culture outside of the confines of a formal marketplace. The article argues that the coronation shifted how diamonds were thought about in Britain, though this shift was subtle and deeply embedded in the turmoil of the moment. On a widespread scale, the event normalized the association of diamonds with monarchy, imperial power, and light, in ways that made diamonds seem like quotidian items. The article is based on accounts of the event in newspapers, periodicals, and official histories.


Author(s):  
George E. Dutton

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.


Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

Nuns in popular media today are a staple of kitsch culture, evident in the common appearance of bobble-head nuns, nun costumes, and nun caricatures on TV, movies, and the stage. Nun stereotypes include the sexy vixen, the naïve innocent, and the scary nun. These types were forged in nineteenth-century convent narratives. While people today may not recognize the name “Maria Monk,” her legacy lives on in the public imagination. There may be no demands to search convents, but nuns and monastic life are nevertheless generally not taken seriously. This epilogue traces opposition to nuns from the Civil War to the present, analyzing the various images of nuns in popular culture as they relate to the antebellum campaign against convents. It argues that the source of the misunderstanding about nuns is rooted in the inability to categorize these women either as traditional wives and mothers or as secular, career-driven singles.


Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.


2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-212
Author(s):  
Cornelia Zumbusch

Abstract Benjamin’s approach to the history of the nineteenth century as a prehistory (Vorgeschichte) of modernity relies on his concept of the dialectical image. Starting from Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust’s narrative endeavor as the evocation of images that have not been seen before, this essay tries to situate Benjamin’s dialektisches Bild in new contexts. Examining Benjamin’s interest in Goethe’s Urphänomen as well as implicit references to Lessing’s concept of fruchtbarer Augenblick or Cassirer’s idea of symbolische Prägnanz, this essay stresses not so much the important but often considered aspects of discontinuity and destruction of chronological time, but tries to trace a hidden agenda: the affinity of Benjamin’s dialectical image to genetic processes.


With its five thematic sections covering genres from cantorial to classical to klezmer, this pioneering multi-disciplinary volume presents rich coverage of the work of musicians of Jewish origin in the Polish lands. It opens with the musical consequences of developments in Jewish religious practice: the spread of hasidism in the eighteenth century meant that popular melodies replaced traditional cantorial music, while the greater acculturation of Jews in the nineteenth century brought with it synagogue choirs. Jewish involvement in popular culture included performances for the wider public, Yiddish songs and the Yiddish theatre, and contributions of many different sorts in the interwar years. Chapters on the classical music scene cover Jewish musical institutions, organizations, and education; individual composers and musicians; and a consideration of music and Jewish national identity. One section is devoted to the Holocaust as reflected in Jewish music, and the final section deals with the afterlife of Jewish musical creativity in Poland, particularly the resurgence of interest in klezmer music. The chapters do not attempt to define what may well be undefinable—what “Jewish music” is. Rather, they provide an original and much-needed exploration of the activities and creativity of “musicians of the Jewish faith.“


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