The Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-302
Author(s):  
Hamid Naficy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
The World ◽  
Fredric Jameson

In this article, I will focus on the poetics and practice of nostalgia in exilic popular culture, drawing primarily on examples from some 10 years of Iranian television programs and music videos produced in Los Angeles. Nostalgia, a feature of exile, has in recent years become a “cultural practice” and a “mode of representation” (K. Stewart 227, 238) as postmodernity, neocolonialism, communism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and transnational capital have displaced peoples and cultures the world over. Fredric Jameson tells us that this fragmentation and deterritorialization forces us to experience time differently; that is, we experience the present as a loss or, as Baudrillard would have it, as a phenomenon that has no origin or reality, a “hyperreality” (2). For the exiles who have emigrated from Third World countries, life in the United States, especially in the quintessentially postmodern city of Los Angeles, is doubly unreal, and it is because of this double loss—of origin and of reality—that nostalgia becomes a major cultural and representational practice among the exiles. In addition, nostalgia for one’s homeland has a fundamentally interpsychic source expressed in the trope of an eternal desire for return—a return that is structurally unrealizable.

Prison uniforms on the outside: Intersections with US popular culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Akou
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The World ◽  
The Look

With the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world ‐ peaking in 2008 at 755 prisoners for every 100,000 residents ‐ it is not surprising that American popular culture is saturated with images of prison. Although the experience of being in prison is associated with humiliation, punishment and a lack of choice (which is antithetical to the existence of fashion), numerous films, television shows, music videos, designers and retailers have demystified and even glamorized the ‘look’ of prison. This article explores how Americans outside of prison are able to engage with this imagery ‐ not just as passive consumers of media, but through buying and wearing prison uniform costumes, fashions inspired by prison uniforms, clothing made by prisoners and clothing formerly worn by prisoners.

Morrissey as Latina/o Literary and Cultural Icon

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa M. Hidalgo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Fourth Decade ◽  
The World ◽  
United States Mexico ◽  
North And South America

Morrissey is a singer and songwriter from Manchester, England. He rose to prominence as a popular-music icon as the lead singer for the Manchester band The Smiths (1982–1987). After the breakup of The Smiths, Morrissey launched his solo career in 1988. In his fourth decade as a popular singer, Morrissey continues to tour the world and sell out shows in venues throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, Asia and Australia, and across North and South America. Although Morrissey enjoys a fiercely loyal global fan base and inspires fans all over the world, his largest and most creatively expressive fans, arguably, are Latinas/os in the United States and Latin America. He is especially popular in Mexico and with Chicanas/os from Los Angeles, California, to San Antonio, Texas. How does a white singer and pop icon from England become an important cultural figure for Latinas/os? This entry provides an overview of Morrissey’s musical and cultural importance to fans in the United States–Mexico borderlands. It introduces Morrissey, examines the rise of Latina/o Morrissey and Smiths fandom starting in the 1980s and 1990s, and offers a survey of the fan-produced literature and other cultural production that pay tribute to the indie-music star. The body of fiction, films, plays, poetry, and fans’ cultural production at the center of this entry collectively represent of Morrissey’s significance as a dynamic and iconic cultural figure for Latinas/os.

Popular Culture and US Foreign Relations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Falk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Information Campaigns ◽  
The World ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Third World

Americans in and out of government have relied on media and popular culture to construct the national identity, frame debates on military interventions, communicate core values abroad, and motivate citizens around the world to act in prescribed ways. During the late 19th century, as the United States emerged as a world power and expanded overseas, Americans adopted an ethos of worldliness in their everyday lives, even as some expressed worry about the nation’s position on war and peace. During the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, though America failed to join the League of Nations and retreated from foreign engagements, the nation also increased cultural interactions with the rest of the world through the export of motion pictures, music, consumer products, food, fashion, and sports. The policies and character of the Second World War were in part shaped by propaganda that evolved from earlier information campaigns. As the United States confronted communism during the Cold War, the government sanitized its cultural weapons to win the hearts and minds of Americans, allies, enemies, and nonaligned nations. But some cultural producers dissented from America’s “containment policy,” refashioned popular media for global audiences, and sparked a change in Washington’s cultural-diplomacy programs. An examination of popular culture also shows how people in the “Third World” deftly used the media to encourage superpower action. In the 21st century, activists and revolutionaries can be considered the inheritors of this tradition because they use social media to promote their political agendas. In short, understanding the roles popular culture played as America engaged the world greatly expands our understanding of modern American foreign relations.

From Bahianas to the King of Pop …

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Line ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Brazilian Music ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the history of Brazilian music in Los Angeles, covering the journey of the collation of rhythms known as samba into the rest of the Americas, to the emergence of bossa nova as a major cultural force, to the post-bossa Brazilian sound in the United States. It argues that as music moves, it operates according to its own logic. Influences are fluid: a bossa nova rhythm can morph easily into a second line, a two step can slide into a samba, and writing music is, thankfully, a far more interesting way to write history than history writing. But it is undeniable that, since the late 1930s, the language, swing, and palette of Brazilian music have influenced the world and changed music in the city of Los Angeles profoundly, while very few of us noticed.

The Case against the C.I.A.

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-23
Author(s):  
John Stockwell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Intelligence Service

Following several years of shocking revelations about the United States intelligence service, we now have a unique opportunity to rethink our objectives in the Third World, especially in Africa, and to modify our intelligence activities to complement rather than contradict sound, long term policies. The revelations, and their related publicity, have been a healthy exercise, making the American public aware of what enlightened people throughout the world already knew, that CIA operations had plumbed the depths of assassination, meddlesome covert wars, and the compulsive recruitment of foreign officials to commit treason on our behalf; activities which, if they did not border on international terrorism, certainly impressed their victims as harsh and cruel, whatever their bureaucratic authentication and national security justification in Washington.

Blackness, Jazz, and Globalization

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Music ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Pan African ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Over Time

The globalization of jazz was also the globalization of black US popular culture. This essay discloses, and provides a model for, the ambiguous dynamics of popular music migrations and the race politics that frame them. In diasporic destinations, those politics are generated by cultural histories very different from that of the United States, and which also exhibit their own synchronic and diachronic heterogeneities, thus introducing distinctive local complexities. In the context of the black-centered jazz canon, these circumstances have produced regional jazz narratives that are derived from the US model, but with often radically different inflections from place to place, and over time. Apart from documenting the perennial ubiquity of the blackness/jazz nexus, the study identifies a broad historical trajectory, in which the focus shifted from African American blackness to a pan-African model that anticipated the World Music phenomenon.

A People's Theater on Skid Row

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (9) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Walda Katz-Fishman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Skid Row ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World

In Acting Like It Matters, James McEnteer gives a compassionate account of John Malpede—actor, activist, and co-creator of the political theatre troupe the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)—and of the Skid Row community that is the organization's heart and soul. The story of Malpede and the LAPD is one of life as art and art as life, and its protagonists are the dehumanized homeless citizens of Los Angeles and their compatriots in cities across the United States and the world, who represent a growing part of today's global working class pushed out of the formal economy.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Anticipating the Postwar World

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-179
Author(s):  
Robert L. McLaughlin ◽  
Sally E. Parry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
The United States ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Special Interests ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Return Home

Social anxieties about the war and about what it was doing to the country permeated America. What would happen when the war was over? The plays at the end of the war ask what kind of country the United States will be after the war is won, what form postwar democracy will take, and what the county's relationship with the rest of the world what will be. Taken together, the plays produced near and just after the end of the war spend little time celebrating the Allies' victory. Rather, they look at the challenges that returning servicemen will face in trying to reestablish family relationships and trying to heal from psychological wounds. They look at the difficulties families will face when their serviceman doesn't return home. They look at how those on the home front have had to remake their lives in ways that the returning serviceman will have trouble recognizing. They look at how old prejudices will create new social divisions as black and Jewish servicemen return home. They look at how selfish special interests, political naivete, and sheer love of power may undermine the democratic cause for which the nation had fought the war. While much of the country's popular culture was ringing victory bells, along Broadway, many playwrights were sounding alarms.

The Asian American Movement

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daryl Joji Maeda
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Services ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Asian American Movement ◽  
1960S And 1970S

The Asian American Movement was a social movement for racial justice, most active during the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, which brought together people of various Asian ancestries in the United States who protested against racism and U.S. neo-imperialism, demanded changes in institutions such as colleges and universities, organized workers, and sought to provide social services such as housing, food, and healthcare to poor people. As one of its signal achievements, the Movement created the category “Asian American,” (coined by historian and activist Yuji Ichioka), which encompasses the multiple Asian ethnic groups who have migrated to the United States. Its founding principle of coalitional politics emphasizes solidarity among Asians of all ethnicities, multiracial solidarity among Asian Americans as well as with African, Latino, and Native Americans in the United States, and transnational solidarity with peoples around the globe impacted by U.S. militarism. The movement participated in solidarity work with other Third World peoples in the United States, including the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State College and University of California, Berkeley. The Movement fought for housing rights for poor people in the urban cores of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and Philadelphia; it created arts collectives, published newspapers and magazines, and protested vigorously against the Vietnam War. It also extended to Honolulu, where activists sought to preserve land rights in rural Hawai’i. It contributed to the larger radical movement for power and justice that critiqued capitalism and neo-imperialism, which flourished during the 1960s and 1970s.

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