scholarly journals Bossa Nova: the reinvention and reinvigoration of samba in the 1950s

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Martinus Helmiawan

<p>In a society where music becomes the core of its people’s life, many discourses emerge and root in music. In Brazil, for instance, samba as the national music represents the chronicle of the Brazilians, which starts from the slavery in eighteenth century. However, at the start of the era of Brazil’s modernism in 1950s, samba was deemed stagnant. It was unable to cope with the fast developments of Brazil’s politics, societies, and cultures. This essay observes the history of samba, investigates the reasons why samba becomes stagnant and reviews the efforts made to revitalize it through the invention of Bossa Nova. In the process of redefining samba, American jazz plays an important role as the agent which brings modernity and revolution to the original samba. The ideology of the Brazilian urban middle class is also important, as well as Brazilian 1950s musicians’ efforts such as Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, or Vinicius de Moraes. This paper aims to analyze Bossa Nova’s contributions in revitalizing and redefining samba, with its jazz influence which could be traced from the ideology of the Brazilian urban middle class. The paper also highlights the contradiction between foreign influences and traditional heritages in the music.</p>

Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 499-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES MARK

This article explores the middle-class response to life under the early Communist state in Hungary. It is based on an oral history of the Budapest bourgeoisie, and challenges some of the dominant indigenous representations of the central European middle class as persecuted victims who were forced into ‘internal exile’ by the Stalinist state. Despite being officially discriminated against as ‘former exploiters’, large numbers achieved educational and professional success. Their skills were increasingly needed in the rapid modernization of the 1950s, and the state provided them with semi-official opportunities to remake themselves into acceptable Communist citizens. Middle-class testimony revealed how individuals constructed politically appropriate public personas to ensure their own upward mobility; they hid aspects of their pasts, created ‘class conscious’ autobiographies, and learnt how to demonstrate sufficient political loyalty. The ways in which individuals dealt with integrating into a system which officially sought to exclude them and which many disliked ideologically is then examined. In order to ‘cope with success’, respondents in this project invented new stories about themselves to justify the compromises they had made to ensure their achievements. These narratives are analysed as evidence of specifically Communist middle-class identities.


1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Mabry

The record industry in the United States was controlled until the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small, regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains the shifts in demography and technology that made possible the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the changes that such companies, by recording and promoting rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, introduced to the cultural mainstream.


Author(s):  
Sarah Maza

The concept of a group called “the bourgeoisie” is unusual in being both central to early modern and modern European history, and at the same time highly controversial. In old regime France, people frequently used the words “bourgeois” or “bourgeoisie” but what they meant by them was very different from the meaning historians later assigned to those terms. In the nineteenth century the idea of a “bourgeoisie” became closely associated with Marxian historical narratives of capitalist ascendancy. Does it still make sense to speak of a “bourgeoisie”? This article attempts to lay out and clarify the terms of the problem by posing a series of questions about this aspect of the social history of Ancien Régime France, with a brief look across the Channel for comparison. It considers first the problem of definition: what was and is meant by “the bourgeoisie” in the context of early modern French history? Second, what is the link between eighteenth-century economic change and the existence and nature of such a group, and can we still connect the origins of the French Revolution to the “rise” of a bourgeoisie? And finally, can the history of perceptions and representations of a bourgeoisie or middle class help us to understand why the concept has been so problematic in the longer run of French history?


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas H. Jucker

AbstractFictional texts constitute complex communicative acts between an author and an audience, and they regularly depict interactions between characters. Both levels are susceptible to an analysis of politeness. This is particularly true for early eighteenth-century drama, which – in the context of the age of politeness – established new dramatic genres to educate and edify their audiences. Characters were used to demonstrate good or bad behaviour as examples to be followed or avoided. Early eighteenth-century drama was a reaction against what was considered to be the immorality and profanity of Restoration drama of the seventeenth century. Two plays serve as illustrations and a testing ground for an analysis of fictional politeness that considers both communicative levels; the play itself and the interactions within the play. Richard Steele’s sentimental comedy “The Conscious Lovers” (1722) gives an example of good behaviour by being exceedingly polite to the audience in the theatre through characters that are exceedingly polite to each other; and George Lillo’s domestic tragedy “The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell” (1731) shows the “private woe” of everyday characters in order to warn the younger generation against wrongdoing and to propagate middle-class virtues and moral values.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Hossein Nazari ◽  
Maryam Khorasani

Eighteenth-century children's authors implicitly exploited the fantastic and the improbable aspects of fairy tales to complement the persuasiveness of their moralistic teachings. Whereas the coexistence of chapbook residue with middle-class pedagogy in eighteenth-century children's books has already been underlined in scholarly studies, little critical attention has been paid to the rhetorical effects exercised by the incorporation of the fantastic and the improbable in eighteenth-century children's stories. Through appealing to the audience's collective imagination, eighteenth-century children's authors both derived from and built upon a set of common aspirations shared by a middle-class audience, thus cultivating a sense of what Kenneth Burke termed consubstantiality among the readers. Focussing on John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), The History of Goody Two-Shoes (1765), and Maria Edgeworth's ‘The Orphans’ (1796), this study explores the modus operandi through which late-eighteenth-century children's authors sought to communicate serious messages by employing improbable plotlines.


Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines how Michel Foucault reformulated the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment by moving from a deliberate rereading of the Hegelian Centaur to an advocacy of the “death of man”—the extinction of a rational platform of knowledge along the lines developed by Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. It considers Foucault's genealogical historiography, a new and original tool for the analysis of history, and his arguments against the idea of a necessary and defining connection between knowledge and virtue, which had been the core identity of the Enlightenment, the link between power and knowledge, and the rise of disciplinary violence in the history of the Western world. Finally, it explores Foucault's view that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its exercise of power, and to question power on its discourses of truth.”


Author(s):  
Marcus Gräser

This chapter shows that in America the middle class has historically been more than just a diverse group of middling sorts. In self-awareness as well as in the descriptions made by foreign observers, the middle classes after the eighteenth century appeared as embodiments of the new society that had developed in the colonies of settlers on North American soil. This resulted not least from the fact that typical elements of European societies—above all the aristocracy but also the clergy as a separate estate—were absent. Since the state was relatively weak, the core tasks of civil society, such as poor relief or the establishing of institutions—museums, libraries, symphony orchestras—relied on the private initiatives of the American bourgeoisie and middle class, respectively. In reality, however, the “great American middle class” was much more fragmented than the emphasis placed on it in political discourse might suggest. One important reason for this was racial exclusion. Although the emergence of an Afro-American middle class succeeded in the last third of the nineteenth century, its rise was restricted by a variety of racially motivated discriminations. Overcoming such racial segregation was hardly possible until the second half of the twentieth century.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document