Experiencing Armenian Music in Turkey: An Ethnography of Musicultural Memory

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Yildiz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Musical Identity ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
Armenian Music ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Cultural Recovery

Experiencing Armenian Music in Turkey: An Ethnography of Musicultural Memory is structured to explore different domains of cultural memory encoded in and conveyed through Armenian musicking practices. Burcu Yildiz discusses the sounds, performance practices and discourses in terms of her personal journey and multi-sited ethnographic experiences rather than as an attempt to describe Armenian music in Turkey. The author offers a critical look at various issues including historical framework on the possibilities of expression concerning Armenian music in Turkey; yerki bari khump (Song and Dance Ensemble) performances and choir singing as a cultural recovery of Istanbul Armenians; Gomidas Vartabed's legacy and the notion of 'the authenticity of Armenian music'; the performance of 'homeland' in diaspora via the musical identity and life story of Onnik Dinkjian; and the process of 'constructing self' by means of musical representation of Arto Tunçboyaciyan. Through in-depth ethnographic analysis, Yildiz sheds light on the musical plurality and thereby endeavor to understand the influence of hybridity and transnational circulation on Armenian music. The issue of Armenian musicking, which the author has discussed as carrier of cultural memory and a performative compound of identity, is simultaneously an expression of the loss experienced in 1915, and a means of dealing with that loss. The book will be of interest to the students and academics not only in ethnomusicology but also anthropology and cultural studies.

scholarly journals “Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation!”: Music Videos and the Construction of Cultural Memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. F. Bertens
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Limited Length ◽  
Diverse Audience

Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.

scholarly journals Ned Kelly’s legend through the series of paintings of Sidney Nolan

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (X1) ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Huong Thu Trinh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Life Time ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
National Myth

The paper approaches cultural studies in a way which tells us about a life-time story of Ned Kelly, who is a legend, an Australian hero and beloved by many Australians, through the series of 27 paintings of Sidney Nolan. Ned Kelly is an Australian icon man. Both the painter and the main character of the novel are famous and express Australianness well. In this paper, the writer bases on figurative language, the colour of paintings and the life story of the main character to show the Australian nationalism, national myth and Australianness.

Remembering Armenian music in Bolis: Komitas Vardapet in transcultural perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 547-564
Author(s):  
Jacob Olley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Armenian Music ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Rural Music ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Musical Memory

This article explores the relationship between music, memory and transcultural processes in late Ottoman Istanbul by studying the writings of the Armenian composer and musicologist Komitas Vardapet (1869–1935). It describes the changing political and intellectual landscape in which Komitas and his contemporaries redefined the collective musical memory of the Armenian people through a process of secularisation and internationalisation. I argue that there was a shift from local transculturalism, in which musical memories were to some extent shared between different ethnic and confessional groups in the Ottoman Empire, to a more global and modern transculturalism, in which consciously differentiated and often antagonistic national musical memories were constructed and disseminated across non-local spaces through new media and discursive strategies. In the process, rural music practices were appropriated from their local and unofficial contexts by urban, cosmopolitan elites and purposefully inscribed as monuments of Armenian cultural memory which have endured to the present.

Forgetful Remembering: A Colonial Life in the Congo

Africa ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Fabian
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Places Of Memory ◽  
The Town ◽  
Made In

AbstractSocial memory, cultural memory, culture as memory, and memory as culture, landscape and memory, places of memory, regimes of memory—all these have been prominent topics in cultural studies, also in anthropology; in this work, attention is usually paid to remembering. Based on several prior inquiries into popular historiography and local regimes of memory, this paper is an attempt to include forgetting in a model of ‘memory work'. What this entails is shown with ethnographic evidence, the recording of a conversation made in Lubumbashi in 1986 with one of the African pioneers of the town. The text in French and Swahili, accompanied by an English translation, is accessible at www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca.

scholarly journals Modern apocrypha as an example of cultural memory “in action”

2016 ◽  
pp. 10-31
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Jankowska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Basic Tool ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Collective Remembering

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role modern apocrypha play in the processes of collective remembering. From the perspective of cultural studies the modern apocrypha can be seen not only as literary or religious texts but also as an important element of cultural autocommunication. And if we understand autocommunication as a crucial mechanism of cultural memory, we can describe intertextuality (which is a form of cultural autocommunication) as an autoimmune technique of preventing the basic cultural meanings from the oblivion. The canon is a basic tool of collective memory in the so called ‘literate cultures’ or ‘Cultures of the Book’. That is the reason why the apocrypha, which deal with canonical contents, build the unique set of texts playing an essential role in protecting the source myth and tradition from the ‘semiotic death’.

Translation studies at a cross-roads

Target ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Bassnet
Keyword(s):  
Present State ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Gradual Rise ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Important Field

This article is an account of the personal journey of one writer, from her first encounters in the 1970s with fellow scholars sharing an interest in translation and a sense of frustration at the anti-translation prejudices of many colleagues working in literature or linguistics at that time. The article traces the gradual rise of translation studies as an important field in its own right, but raises questions about the present state of the discipline, arguing that as translation studies has become more established, so it is failing to challenge orthodoxies and risks being left behind by the more innovative and exciting research now emerging from within world literature, postcolonialism, and cultural memory studies. I suggest that translation studies has reached a cross-roads and needs to reach out to other disciplines, taking advantage of what is being hailed by some as a translational turn within the humanities in general.

Remaking Winnetou, reconfiguring German fantasies of Indianer and the Wild West in the Post-Reunification Era

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Loock
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
German Nation ◽  
Wild West

AbstractThis article argues that the 2016 television remake of Winnetou reconfigures German fantasies of Native Americans (Indianer) and the Wild West in the post-reunification era. The remake raises questions about the historically constructed meanings and the appropriateness of Winnetou in Germany today, presenting an occasion to probe processes of German nation building and their continued – and increasingly controversial – reliance on metaphorical meanings of “Indianness”. Taking a cultural studies approach, the article develops a theoretical framework around remaking, generationing, and cultural memory, and examines the remake against the background of Germany’s still ongoing inner reunification and Native American claims to self-representation.

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