The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Hamera
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Human Motor ◽  
Modernist Project ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson, arguably the most notable popular-culture virtuoso of the late twentieth century, cannot be understood outside the economic moment that produced him. This essay examines relations between his virtuosity as a dancer and the trajectory of American deindustrialization in the period 1983–88. Through the trope of the human motor, Jackson's virtuosity produces nostalgia for a vanishing industrial past, while barely containing the contradictions and exclusions endemic to the industrial modernist project, especially those involving race. This trope is activated by the intersection of his movement vocabulary and his recurring invocations of hard work. Jackson's dancing in this period reveals a neglected aspect of virtuosity in dance more generally. As an allegorical presentation of idealized relations between the body and work abandoned by the relentless motility of capital, Jackson's virtuosity allows audiences to view these disappearing modes with a romantic backward glance.

Secretions

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-158
Author(s):  
Rex Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Genetic Research ◽  
Forensic Analysis ◽  
Dna Profiling ◽  
The Body ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

DNA profiling, in which individual being is identified by its cellular structures, was first developed by the geneticist Alec Jeffreys in the 1980s. That this source of identity also forms the instructions through which living organisms are generated has complicated profiling’s place in the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century. So, while profiling actually deals only in non-coding regions of the genome—matter often referred to as ‘junk DNA’—the significance of DNA as a substance of forensic analysis, in the late twentieth century imaginary, is its resonance as the apparent blueprint of existence. The notable features that this blurring of concepts brings about include a conceptualization of identity as a mass of information; notions to do with codes and coding; the presence of the body in the fluids which spill beyond its bounds; and a sense of the body as an archive of heredity and primitivism. In writing specifically about genetic research, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) serves a dual function in this chapter, as both an explicatory document and thematic example. But the more substantive analysis is reserved for the work of J. G. Ballard which, from its science fiction origins in novels such as The Drowned World (1962), through the controversial era of Crash (1973), to its trilogy of autobiographical texts (Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991), and Miracles of Life (2008)) articulates a form of identity that has close, though often oblique, affinities with all the most prominent features of DNA profiling.

Samba

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika Lior
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Afro Brazilian

Modern samba music and dance began in Rio de Janeiro’s Afro-Brazilian communities in the early 1900s and spread rapidly to international audiences through twentieth-century technologies of mass media, recording, and cinema. Rio’s samba developed from Bahian samba de roda, which has been danced and played by enslaved Africans and their descendants from the sixteenth century to the present. Modern samba differed from the circular samba de roda through its harmonic elements, the linear use of space, increased speed and footwork, and stylized upper body positions. First brought to the US by Brazilian sensation Carmen Miranda through Hollywood films of the 1940s, samba’s numerous rhythmic variations have achieved broad global recognition in the twenty-first century. The fast-paced samba no pé singularizes Rio’s world-famous carnaval, which expanded through modern industrial fabrication of floats and costumes and through increasingly cross-national commerce while continuing to capitalize on influences from traditional Afro-Brazilian dance and percussion. The partner dance samba de gafieira has spread from its origins in Rio’s neighborhoods to nightclubs in urban locations across Brazil, North America, and Europe. Meanwhile samba reggae, a late twentieth-century reappropriation of samba within northeastern Brazil that integrates African aesthetic elements with reggae beats and steps has become emblematic of Bahian popular culture.

“Wir leben, indem wir leiben”

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Joel Michael Reynolds ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Life Worth Living ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Bodily Difference ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.

The “Somatic/Linguistic Turn” and Histories of Exercise and Sport

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gruneau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Sport History ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines the turn to the body that occurred in sport history in the late twentieth century, tracing its connections to the emergence of structuralism in postwar French social theory. Focusing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, the chapter argues that the “somatic turn” in sport history drew inspiration from an accompanying linguistic turn in French social theory and philosophy. As part of this discussion, the chapter discusses studies of the body in sport history influenced by Bourdieu and Foucault and concludes with some issues, problems, and implications of the somatic/linguistic turn in current historical research.

Stage visions and strategies of contemporary performing practices – a broadly conceived analysis of the phenomena at the intersection of theory and practice: Valentina Valentini, Worlds, Bodies, Matters: Theatre of the Late Twentieth Century

Maska ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (175) ◽  
pp. 146-149
Author(s):  
Nika Arhar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Complex Field ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The first book in the new series Thinking Through Performance offers a mental feat of a concise survey of numerous performances by various artists and theatrical and philosophical concepts, which the author, Valentina Valentini, also observes within the fields of other disciplines. Three basic lines of investigation bring forth the visions of contemporary theatre worlds, their images and the strategies of their establishment, the expansion of the field while blurring the boundaries between visual art, the performative and new media, as well as the transformation of the actor into the autonomous body of the performer and the body that becomes plural, open, hybrid, space itself. With its in-depth and wide-ranging probing of the key phenomena in contemporary performing arts, its taking into account diverse perspectives, and its fragmentary approach within a complex field, the author has created a productive foundation for new starting-points and understandings in the dialogue between theory and practice.

Gurdjieff in the Theater

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 209-235
Author(s):  
Catharine Christof
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Fourth Way ◽  
Jerzy Grotowski ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article focuses on the links between revolutionary and iconoclastic Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), and G. I. Gurdjieff. Grotowski is widely honored in the theater world, and understood to have been involved in creating what have been called spiritual experiences within theater movements of the late twentieth century. His work articulated experiences of the spiritual within the body; achieving a removal of spirituality from ecclesial authorities and a relocation of it within the body of the performer. This article explores the manifold resonances between concepts used in Grotowski’s work and that of Gurdjieff, demonstrating how Grotowski’s transformative theater work shows strong elements of Gurdjieff’s influence. Because of the striking and numerous similarities explored herein, a place can be affirmed for Grotowski as an independent Western Fourth Way spiritual teacher, working in theater.

Friend and foe: Wei Te-Sheng on Taiwanese emotions towards Japanese colonization and the Japanese perspectives of Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Tets Kimura ◽  
Shih-Ying Lin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Taiwanese Identity ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In Warriors of the Rainbow, Wei Te-Sheng sharply distinguished between heroes and villains in the 1930 Musha incident – the Taiwanese heroes fight against the Japanese villains. This contrasts with Kano, where Wei presents the romantic Orient of Japanese colonization through baseball games. Although his films are not always historically accurate in details, they realistically represent Taiwanese collective emotions towards Japanese colonization. Preferencing Japanese colonization over Chinese administration is not unusual in today’s Taiwan and thus not original to Wei. Taiwan’s Japanese colonial past was previously acknowledged by two well-known Japanese writers, Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi, in the late twentieth century when Taiwan newly asserted its freedom of expression. This article will analyse the role played by Japan in establishing the creation and projection of a unique Taiwanese identity in the field of popular culture by employing a ‘point of view’ framework from narratology.

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