The Commodification of Ritual: Women Performers and Media Events 1

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-193
Author(s):  
Sarah Pink

Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marwan M. Kraidy

Considering the group that calls itself Islamic State (IS) as a “war machine,” an ever-shifting combination of humans and technology, this article articulates, from a Deleuzian perspective, terror, territoriality, and temporality as constitutive of events. It explores terrorism as a hypermedia event that resists conceptual containment in Dayan and Katz’s three categories of “contest,” “conquest,” or “coronation.” It builds on work that recognizes the globality of media events. The article uses the rise of IS to explore events as a peculiar articulation of space and time, and draws on the global “network-archive” that IS created (its digital footprint), the referentiality of which means that we experience IS depredations as one continuous “global event chain.” In this analysis, media events are a productive force that articulates territoriality and temporality through affect.


Matatu ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 444-455
Author(s):  
Hugh Ellis

Abstract The practice of performance or ‘spoken word’ poetry has gained a significant foothold among the youth in urban Namibia in the last two decades. While this poetry has been put to many socio-political uses, one of the main ones has been a protest against patriarchal elements in Namibian society and culture, and an outcry against Namibia’s high rates of gender-based violence. Patriarchal aspects of Namibia’s national culture are often explicitly linked to violence and to the intersectional nature of oppression. Spoken word poetry has also often given LGBT+ women a space to speak out against their oppression and to normalise their existence. This article shows how women performers have used and modified the conventions of poetry and song to get this challenging—in the Namibian context often radical—message across. The paper argues that poetry in this context has the potential to approximate a localised ‘public sphere’ where inclusive discourse can be held around social issues—bearing mind that people are not excluded from this discourse because of arbitrary reasons such as gender or sexuality.


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