scholarly journals Musical Artists Capitalizing on Hybrid Identities

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Amara Pope

This study is an exploration of identity politics through an examination of the ways in which musical artists use the medium of music videos to create marketable, hybrid identities. With the rise of social media and the online consumption of information, music videos play a central role in global, cultural flows. I argue that hybrid identities are constructed by musical artists to gain popularity through the form of ethno-marketing. I include literature surrounding diaspora and hybridity to understand how hybrid identities become a production of heritage and human capital. By utilizing music videos specifically to construct their hybrid identities, musical artists are simultaneously enforcing and being subjected to economic, cultural, and political forms of exploitation. My methodology draws upon a multimodal discourse analysis (LeVine & Scollon, 2004) which assesses how meaning is made through the use of multiple modes of communication. I apply multimodality to the construction of music videos in which musical artists selectively chose particular sounds, images, and lyrics to claim specific identities. As articulated through the case study of Drake, I examine how the multimodal affordances of music videos allow artists to transcend borders within the digital age and reach a large audience. This study examines Drake’s bricolage of complex and intersectional identities and his unique privilege to choose to identify with different marginal communities. I assess how Drake capitalizes on shared experiences and struggles of different cultural, national, and class backgrounds though three of his music videos: “HYFR (Hell Yeah Fuckin’ Right)” (2011), “Started From The Bottom” (2011), and “Worst Behavior” (2013). Drake alludes to different cultures, locations, and social identities through these music videos to construct his place as a rapper in the music industry and articulates a hybrid identity as an “Authentic” Black/ Jewish, American/Canadian, working class member of society, and high-class rapper.  

Author(s):  
Joel Penney

This chapter focuses on the identity politics of social movements and uses the case study of gay and lesbian activism to examine how citizen media participation is mobilized in strategic projects of public visibility. It charts how citizens use mediated acts of self-labeling, such as changing profile pictures on social media, to announce the presence of their identities and attempt to influence perceptions of social and political reality. This model of “coming out” may have particular resonance for the LGBT community that has long sought to end its historical invisibility, yet it has also been adopted by a wide range of constituencies who seek to challenge notions of who “the people” truly are. Public visibility campaigns may also contribute to a flattening of differences as social identities become branded with a homogenized set of symbolic artifacts, suggesting the potential limits of visibility as a strategy for inducing social and political change.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174165902110243
Author(s):  
Orlando Woods

This paper explores how digital media can cause the representational value of rap artists to be transformed. Ubiquitous access to digital recording, production and distribution technologies grants rappers an unprecedented degree of representational autonomy, meaning they are able to integrate the street aesthetic into their lyrics and music videos, and thus create content that offers a more authentic representation of their (past) lives. Sidestepping the mainstream music industry, the digital enables these integrations and bolsters the hypercapitalist impulses of content creators. I illustrate these ideas through a case study of grime artist, Bugzy Malone, who uses his music to narrate his evolution from a life of criminality (selling drugs on the street; a ‘roadman’), to one in which his representational value is recognised by commercial brands who want to partner with him because of his street credibility (collecting ‘royalties’). Bugzy Malone’s commercial success is not predicated on a departure from his criminal past, but the deliberate foregrounding of it as a marker of authenticity. The representational autonomy provided by digital media can therefore enable artists to maximise the affective cachet of the once-criminal self.


Author(s):  
Hoang Van Nguyen

AbstractThe discourses of risk serve to organise the ways in which we understand and respond to potential harms and threats, which have become a major concern in our daily life. However, the discourses of risk have not been extensively investigated using linguistic text-based methods on the multimodal level, nor deeply examined beyond Western contexts. Grounded in the literature of risk and multimodal discourse, the aim of the study is to demonstrate Multimodal Discourse Analysis from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective as a potential methodology to investigate how risk discourses are constructed in and through semiotic resources in a non-Western setting. Through a case study of child helmet awareness advertisements in Vietnam, the multimodal analysis reveals a comprehensive picture of risk discourses constructed across various semiotic modes. In this analysis, the discourses of risk are constructed through a negotiation of expert knowledge and traditional values to encourage the audience to take actions and provide helmets for their children. Findings of the study demonstrate the use of Systemic Functional multimodal approach to media and communication to provide evidence for risk discourses in the Vietnamese setting, which are at odds with the current literature and can potentially be extended to other contexts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155545892110124
Author(s):  
Corinne Brion

This teaching case study takes place in an American middle school and tells the story of Dorah, a refugee student from the Republic of Congo who experienced severe trauma. At Lincoln Middle School, the principal and her teachers encounter difficulties serving their refugee students adequately because of their lack of cultural proficiency. This case aims to help leaders in diverse contexts understand how to embrace and advocate for different cultures, beliefs, and norms to increase the cultural wealth of their communities. To achieve this goal, I provide a cultural proficiency model and a trauma-invested framework.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147035722097406
Author(s):  
Nashwa Elyamany

Musical numbers, as viral modes of entertainment, influential forms of visual culture and catalysts of popular discourse are dense with multivariate aesthetic performers, and are interlaced to punctuate the melodramatic narrative texture in advancement of the plot and characterization in musical films. Performing identity through dancing bodies has been the subject of several film, music, culture, performance and communication research endeavours yet has rarely been explored from multimodal discourse analysis perspectives. To examine the ‘resilient identities’ underlying performances, the article adopts an eclectic approach informed by the Bakhtinian chronotope with regard to two numbers drawn from a recent American musical film in order to pinpoint: (a) the full repertoire of multimodal resources of narrative agency and identity performance; (b) the emotional experiences evoked by the musical numbers; and (c) the social practices that constitute, maintain and resist social realities and identities. The unconventional approach to the analysis of the musical numbers is what makes the current research project stand out among interdisciplinary studies of musical discourse.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Andrey Damaledo

Abstract This article assesses the implementation of Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees and how it relates to different kinds of bureaucratic labelling of refugees as it unfolds in Indonesia’s region of Kupang. From a politico-historical perspective, Kupang is a useful case-study for elucidating the policy implications of the labelling of refugees, as the region has been hosting different kinds of refugees due to its strategic geographical location that borders Australia and Timor-Leste. Drawing on my fieldwork in Kupang between October 2012 and October 2013, and my intermittent return to the region between January 2017 and February 2019, this article argues that labels for refugees evolve over time in response to the larger sociopolitical situation, but they are formed mostly to serve the interest of the host country rather than those of displaced people. Furthermore, while labelling displaced people as “refugees” has been effective in justifying funding and support, it can also lead to a manipulation of refugee status, and the marginalization and exclusion of refugees.


Author(s):  
Jens Jorgensen ◽  
David Havens ◽  
Paul Salvatore ◽  
Alvaro J. Rojas Arciniegas ◽  
Marcos Esterman

Product development teams are facing continued pressure to develop more products in less time and with fewer resources. Platform-based developed is commonly seen as a solution to increase capacity of the product development pipeline. This research identified enablers and barriers to successful platform-based product development. This was achieved through a comprehensive literature review of the current state of the art and an exploratory case study of product development practices within a business-to-business environment from companies with significantly different cultures and experiences with platform-based product development. Key enablers identified in this research include institutionalizing systems engineering, development and communication of product development roadmaps, augmentation of phase gate review process and critical parameter characterization. Operational recommendations from this research are considered to be possible to implement without significant changes to existing processes and organizational structures.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Salcedo ◽  
Alejandra Rasse

This paper addresses the scholarly debate on cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity of urban poor families. While authors such as Lewis (1959) or Wacquant (2000 ; 2001) claim that structural disadvantages are linked to a particular type of identity or culture, others such as Hannerz (1969) , Anderson (1999 ; 2002) , or Portes ( Portes and Manning, 1986 ; Portes and Jensen, 1989 ) believe that it is possible to find different behaviors, expectations, decision–making processes, and outcomes among people living in seemingly identical structural conditions ( Small et al., 2010 ). Using Santiago, Chile, as a case study, we differentiate five different cultures or identities among the poor. Those identities seem to be the product of different historical and political circumstances, as well as of different types of public policies. The paper ends with a discussion of the need for poverty reduction policies to consider these differences among the poor.


Author(s):  
Remi Chukwudi Okeke

This study examines the linkages between relative deprivation and identity politics in a postcolonial state. It further investigates the relationship among these variables and nation-building challenges in the postcolony. It is a case study of the Nigerian state in West Africa, which typically harbours the attributes of postcoloniality and indeed, large measures of relative deprivation in her sociopolitical and economic affairs. The study is also an interrogation of the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. It has been attempted in the study to offer distinctive explanations over the problematique of nation-building in the postcolonial African state of Nigeria, using relative deprivation, identity politics and the neo-Biafran movement as variables. In framing the study’s theoretical trajectories and in historicizing the background of the research, ample resort has been made to a significant range of qualitative secondary sources. A particularly salient position of the study is that it will actually be difficult to locate on the planet, any group of people whose subsequent generations (in perpetuity) would wear defeat on the war front, as part of their essential identity. Hence, relative deprivation was found to be more fundamental than identity politics in the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. However, the compelling issues were found to squarely border on nation-building complications in the postcolony.


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