Diva Misora Hibari as Spectacle of Postwar Japan’s Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine R. Yano
Keyword(s):  
Popular Song ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Star Text

This chapter examines Japan’s premiere diva of popular song, Misora Hibari (1937-1989) as a child star who grows up in postwar Japan.  It asks, what kinds of gendered negotiations between childhood and adulthood does the child star have to make, in what kinds of historical contexts, and to what effects?  And finally, how does the shoujo – here, the child star diva – help define the period?  This chapter covers not only the period of the late 1940s and 1950s when Misora Hibari was credited with boosting the Japanese public morale as the spunky singing orphan, but also the period that followed – the Jet Age of the 1960s and 1970s – as a site of national negotiations of modernity through the images of Hibari the diva. This essay contends that Misora Hibari’s star text enacted postwar Japan’s supra-text, particularly during the years when she occupied media and stage as the shoujo orphan, “Tokyo Kid.” Both nation and child star alike performed themselves as spunky orphans – even nascent cosmopolitans – while masking the hard-hitting realities of the period.  It is the intensity of the diva and her life – both on- and off-stage, transmitted aurally and figuratively – that makes of her a parable of modernity.

The Life of Galileo and Brechtian Television Drama

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Smart
Keyword(s):  
Television Drama ◽  
Theatrical Space ◽  
British Drama ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Television Audience ◽  
Dennis Potter ◽  
Ken Loach ◽  
Television Studio

Bertolt Brecht's dramaturgy was as influential upon the development of British drama on television between the 1950s and the 1970s as it was in the theatre. His influence was made manifest through the work of writers, directors and producers such as Tony Garnett, Ken Loach, John McGrath and Dennis Potter, whose attempts to create original Brechtian forms of television drama were reflected in the frequent reference to Brecht in contemporary debate concerning the political and aesthetic direction and value of television drama. While this discussion has been framed thus far around how Brechtian techniques and theory were applied to the newer media of television, this article examines these arguments from another perspective. Through detailed analysis of a 1964 BBC production of The Life of Galileo, I assess how the primary, canonical sources of Brecht's stage plays were realised on television during this period, locating Brecht's drama in the wider context of British television drama in general during the 1960s and 1970s. I pay particular attention to the use of the television studio as a site that could replicate or reinvent the theatrical space of the stage, and the responsiveness of the television audience towards Brechtian dramaturgy.

Literature, Theory and Politics of the Long ’68: The Last Season of Modernism and Peripherality

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Literature ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Structuralist Theory ◽  
Hybrid Texts ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
A Site ◽  
Modes Of Interaction

As part of the Yugoslav in-between periphery, Ljubljana became a site of interaction between an antisystemic movement, literature and theory, the fields that in Paris were arguably only co-present during the long 1968. Following Franco Moretti and Perry Anderson’s notion of modernism as a cultural field of force experiencing the imaginative proximity of social revolution, the experimental literature of the 1960s may be viewed as the last season of modernism. This is when modernism in Slovenia synchronized with Paris, the metropole that Pascale Casanova has described as the Greenwich meridian of literary modernity. Peripheries in the literary world-system are, for Moretti, forced into a belated compromise between local perspectives and globalized forms emanating from metropoles. In this case, however, it is due to its peripherality that Slovenian literature was able to produce an innovative political interlacement of theory and literature (for example, the internationally acclaimed neo-avant-garde group OHO and the Ljubljana Lacanian circle). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ljubljana student journal Tribuna published experimental literature, (post)structuralist theory and antisystemic political writings. The mere contiguity of these discourses evoked their interaction. Even stronger modes of interaction characterized their production and mediation, such as writer-theorists translating French theory or various hybrids of theory and literature. Slavoj Žižek’s early hybrid texts show the emergence of theory as a parasite of literature and philosophy. They deconstruct the (nationalist) author function. A scandal provoked by Žižek in 1967 foretells the split of the ‘68 avant-garde between the theoretical and literary faction in the 1970s.

From Child Star to Diva

Diva Nation ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Christine R. Yano
Keyword(s):  
Female Child ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
Star Text

This chapter problematizes Japan’s premiere diva of popular song, Misora Hibari (1937–1989), as a child star who grows up in postwar Japan to become a transgressive diva. I ask what defines this female child star, this singing shōjo (young female) on stage? What kinds of gendered negotiations between childhood and adulthood does the child star have to make, in what kinds of historical contexts, and to what effects? And finally, how does the shōjo—here, the child star–turned–diva—help define the period? The remnants of the child star give poignancy to her adult divahood as the Japanese public stood witness to her continual transformations. And in witnessing these transformations, I contend that Misora Hibari’s star-text enacted postwar Japan’s supra-text, with the complexities of an era and a nation.

The Plantation’s Colonial Modernity in Comparative Perspective

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
Dar Es Salaam ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
The University ◽  
Plantation Society

By reconstructing the pioneering work of political economists and social theorists associated with the New World Group at the University of the West Indies and the Dar es Salaam School at the University of Dar es Salaam, this chapter recovers the theorization of the plantation as a modernizing institution that produced a distinctive colonial modernity. Between the 1960s and 1970s, George Beckford and Lloyd Best theorized the Caribbean as a pure plantation society in which the forms of economic exploitation and idioms of sociality that emerged in the context of plantation slavery continued to structure islands states like Jamaica. While primarily associated with slavery in the Americas, Walter Rodney conceptualized the colonial plantation as a form of economic and social organization that traveled to contexts like Tanzania and continued to structure postcolonial legacies. Through south/south comparison, the use of conceptual innovation and lateral extension, this cohort of social theorists offered a distinctive mode of thinking through modernity as a site of convergence and divergence. Their comparative historical, sociological, and economic studies of the plantation highlight the uneven and differentiated ways in which societies in the global south had been radically transformed by imperial imposition. In the jettisoning of north/south, West/non-West axes of comparison and in the effort to attend to the specificity of postcolonial political and economic forms, this episode of comparative theorizing can inform contemporary projects of globalizing political theory.

The 'Catastrophic Consciousness of Backwardness': Culture and Dependency Theory in Latin America and the Caribbean

2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (103) ◽  
pp. 113-133
Author(s):  
Michael Niblett
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Dependency Theory ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Economic Analyses ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Political Economic

This article examines the relationship between economic and cultural dependency. Its analysis is framed by Enrique Dussel's methodological insistence on the international transfer of surplus value as the essence of dependency. Beginning with an examination of the heyday of classical dependency theory in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s, the article moves on to consider the increasing importance accorded culture as a site of power and struggle, focusing on the work of Sylvia Wynter. The second half of the article turns to the literary registration of dependency. Arguing that literary works can provide a barometric reading of the pressures of underdevelopment in advance of political-economic analyses, I consider Patrícia Galvão's Parque Industrial (1933) and Olive Senior's 'Boxed-In' (2015). Published, respectively, some forty years either side of the heyday of dependency theory, these paradigmatic fictions are examples of both the diagnostic and active role of literature in responding to the depredations of dependency.

Ken Russell's Wartime Imagery

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Flanagan
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Personal Style ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World ◽  
Wartime Experience ◽  
National Experience

This article traces Ken Russell's explorations of war and wartime experience over the course of his career. In particular, it argues that Russell's scattered attempts at coming to terms with war, the rise of fascism and memorialisation are best understood in terms of a combination of Russell's own tastes and personal style, wider stylistic and thematic trends in Euro-American cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, and discourses of collective national experience. In addition to identifying Russell's recurrent techniques, this article focuses on how the residual impacts of the First and Second World Wars appear in his favoured genres: literary adaptations and composer biopics. Although the article looks for patterns and similarities in Russell's war output, it differentiates between his First and Second World War films by indicating how he engages with, and temporarily inhabits, the stylistic regime of the enemy within the latter group.

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

The ‘Modernisation’ of Scotland and its Impact on Glasgow, 1955–1979: ‘Unwanted Side Effects’ and Vulnerabilities

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chik Collins ◽  
Ian Levitt
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Regional Policy ◽  
Excess Mortality ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This article reports findings of research into the far-reaching plan to ‘modernise’ the Scottish economy, which emerged from the mid-late 1950s and was formally adopted by government in the early 1960s. It shows the growing awareness amongst policy-makers from the mid-1960s as to the profoundly deleterious effects the implementation of the plan was having on Glasgow. By 1971 these effects were understood to be substantial with likely severe consequences for the future. Nonetheless, there was no proportionate adjustment to the regional policy which was creating these understood ‘unwanted’ outcomes, even when such was proposed by the Secretary of State for Scotland. After presenting these findings, the paper offers some consideration as to their relevance to the task of accounting for Glasgow's ‘excess mortality’. It is suggested that regional policy can be seen to have contributed to the accumulation of ‘vulnerabilities’, particularly in Glasgow but also more widely in Scotland, during the 1960s and 1970s, and that the impact of the post-1979 UK government policy agenda on these vulnerabilities is likely to have been salient in the increase in ‘excess mortality’ evident in subsequent years.

The Fragmentation of the Palestinian Political Field

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
National Representation ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Palestinian National Movement ◽  
The Relationship

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.

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