Expressive culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-117
Author(s):  
Mark Q. Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Anthony Macías

I am writing this analytical appreciation of cultura panamericana, or pan-American culture, to propose a wider recognition of how its historical linkages and contemporary manifestations confront colonialism, honor indigenous roots, and reflect multiple, mixed-race identities. Although often mediated by transnational pop-culture industries, expressive cultural forms such as art and music articulate resonant themes that connect US Latinos and Latinas to Latin Americans, pointing the way toward a hemispheric imaginary. In US murals, for example, whether in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen or the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, pan-American expressive culture offers alternative representations by embracing indigeneity, and it creates a sense of place by tropicalizing urban spaces.


Author(s):  
Jeff Todd Titon

This chapter is divided into four parts, addressed in turn to four questions: (1) How might phenomenological methods inform field research and ethnographic studies of people making music? (2) How do concepts from phenomenology, especially direct social perception, direct perception empathy, and embodiment, inform research on the expressive culture of same-species beings, both human and nonhuman, communicating with each other by means of sound? (3) How might phenomenology contribute to our understanding of cross-species sonic communication? (4) What might be gained (and lost) when ethnomusicologists reorient their research from the study of people making music to eco-ethnomusicology, the study of beings making sound?


1974 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fernandez ◽  
John Blacking ◽  
Alan Dundes ◽  
Munro S. Edmonson ◽  
K. Peter Etzkorn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
Michael Boyce Gillespie

Director Barry Jenkins’s body of work to date demonstrates an exquisite devotion to the art of blackness as an aesthetic and cultural practice. On the occasion of Jenkins’ latest work—the television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 book, The Underground Railroad—Film Quarterly contributor Michael Gillespie speaks with Jenkins about his craft, his process, and his acutely cinephilic attention to black visual and expressive culture. The series poses a stunningly exacting sense of the slave narrative coupled with an ambitious charting of antebellum nineteenth-century America, at once familiar and uncanny. As visual historiography, The Underground Railroad enacts an irreconcilable challenge to the writing of history and, furthermore, to the political and aesthetic capacities of televisual seriality. Jenkins’s conception of the series resonates as a fantastical and haunting restipulation of the idea of America—and a crucial reimagining of the rendering of blackness.


Author(s):  
Koritha Mitchell

This book argues for a new reading practice. Rather than approach art and literature from marginalized groups as examples of protest or as responses to “dominant” culture, it demonstrates the power of reading through the lens of achievement, using case studies from black expressive culture. Even while bombarded with racist and sexist violence, African Americans remain focused on defining, redefining, and pursuing success. By examining canonical examples of black women’s cultural production, this study reveals how African Americans keep each other oriented toward accomplishment through an ongoing, multivalent community conversation. Analyzing widely taught and discussed works from the 1860s to the present (via Michelle Obama’s public persona), the book traces “homemade citizenship”—the result of practices of making-oneself-at-home, practices of affirming oneself while knowing violence will answer one’s achievements and assertions of belonging. The texts examined include Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness (1969), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Michelle Obama’s first lady persona. [220 of 225 words]


2019 ◽  
pp. 55-84
Author(s):  
Todd Richardson

Using examples form the comics of Daniel Clowes, this chapter considers the roots, manifestations and expressive dimensions of disaffiliation. Focused as it is on the shared aspects of expressive culture, mainstream conceptualizations of folklore struggle to assess how individuals creatively convey the absence of belonging. Richardson uses Daniel Clowes’s comics in order to assess and analyze the performance of disaffiliation. In each instance, misanthropelore is not necessarily about a lack or loss of shared identity, which is how conventional folklore scholarship approaches it; misanthropelore, rather, is a refusal of shared identity through the creative expression of absence.


Author(s):  
Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote

This is an interdisciplinary study of how Kiowa men and women made, wore, displayed and discussed expressive culture. Kiowa men and women used the arts to represent new ways of understanding and representing Kiowa identity that resonated with their changed circumstances during the Progressive Era and twentieth century. Kiowas represented themselves individually and collectively through cultural production that emphasized the significance of change and cultural negotiation, gender, the ties and tensions over tribally specific and intertribal identities.


Author(s):  
Kristina M. Jacobsen

Chapter Two examines language and social authenticity as it relates to Navajo expressive culture. I argue that Diné language politics give us greater insight into the broader story of country music, belonging, and generational nostalgia, and I trace ethnographically how language—often portrayed as a key index of culture—is linked to a Navajo politics of difference through specific registers of speech and song. After an overview of Diné language politics, I turn to how a culturally intimate speech genre referred to as jaan or “jaan Navajo” is incorporated into Native band rehearsals and Navajo comedy, forming the bedrock onto which generational wordplay and humor are overlaid. I then interrogate the expectation that “full Navajos” should speak Navajo or need merely “activate” the Navajo language gene that resides within them. In these ways, perception of speaking the Navajo language shifts from being an index of Navajo identity to an icon of Navajoness itself.


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