scholarly journals Performing poetry slam and listening closely to slam poetry

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
Jakob Schweppenhäuser ◽  
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Contemporary Poetry ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Slam Poetry ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
The One ◽  
World Champion

The article addresses poetry slam as an example of an oral turn captured in contemporary poetry practices that seems to extend the landscape of literary arts (Gioia, 2003). We investigate poetry slam as a phenomenon that mediates between at least two quite different (audio) language cultures – namely the contemporary Western literary poetry reading and a literary network, on the one side, and, on the other side, the rap battle connected to hip hop culture (other genres, such as e.g. stand-up comedy, could also have been drawn into the discussion, but in order to clarify our argument we have chosen to keep focus on the two mentioned). The article builds on a generalised perspective negotiating poetry slam as an aesthetic and cul- tural phenomenon in between hip hop culture and literary culture, but it also includes a close reading/listening aspect deriving from a speci c example, namely a performance by the 2012 poetry slam world champion Harry Baker. Positioning poetry slam in between literary culture and more popular cultural forms has previously been addressed by for instance Jeremy Kaye (2006) discussing the relationship between academic and popular aspects of poetry slam, Helen Gregory (2009) studying poetry slam in terms of interactions between avant-garde and established art worlds and Kathleen Crown (2001) pointing to poetry slams as subscribing to both popular and literary/poetry-based cultural influences.

Politics and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 64-82
Author(s):  
Josephine M. Guy
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The One

During the Victorian period it was widely held that the literary and the political were separate and distinct spheres, a view which did not, however, prevent many writers from using works of literature to address explicitly political issues. This chapter explores the reasons behind this apparent paradox, one which helps explain why modern accounts of the politics of Victorian literary works, notably the realist novel, are often quite different from the claims made for them by the Victorians themselves. The chapter focuses on describing Victorian literary taste, and the ways it was shaped by concerns about a growing commercialization and democratization of literary culture. More precisely, it shows how anxieties about the development of popular literary forms on the one hand and, later in the century, of avant-garde movements on the other, led to an increased politicization of the literary, as various elites competed with each other to control definitions of literariness.

scholarly journals Too Dark to Support the Lions, But Light Enough for the Frontlines”: Negotiating Race, Place, and Nation in Afro-Finnish Hip Hop

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 386-401
Author(s):  
Jasmine Linnea Kelekay
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Black African ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Imaginary

Abstract In this article, I examine cultural production as an avenue for mapping African diasporic identities and racialised experiences in Finland. Hip hop culture has long acted as a lingua franca for the African diaspora and has been central in the development of collective identities among second-generation European youth of colour. Prior to the 2010s, the landscape of Finnish hip hop was largely white with little engagement with race or hip hop’s roots as a Black American cultural form. This status quo was disrupted by the rise of Afro-Finnish rappers. Since gaining mainstream visibility, they have catapulted into the national consciousness with music that reclaims the language of racial and ethnic identities, interrogates assumptions about national belonging, and represents the lived experiences of first-generation Black/Afro-Finnish men. Approaching hip hop as a resource for resisting normative Whiteness and carving out space for Black/African diasporic collectivities in the Finnish cultural and political imaginary, I show how Afro-Finnish rappers articulate and navigate Blackness in relation to identity, racism, and national belonging in Finland. In doing so, I emphasise the tensions between racial, ethnic, and cultural hybridity, on the one hand, and the rigidity of Finnish Whiteness and national exclusion, on the other.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Christopher Driscoll
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Academy ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Hip Hop Culture

At the 2010 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta, GA, a group of young scholars organized a wildcard session titled “What’s This ‘Religious’ in Hip Hop Culture?” The central questions under investigation by the panel were 1) what about hip hop culture is religious? and 2) how are issues of theory and method within African American religious studies challenged and/or rethought because of the recent turn to hip hop as both subject of study and cultural hermeneutic. Though some panelists challenged this “religious” in hip hop, all agreed that hip hop is of theoretical and methodological import for African American religious studies and religious studies in general. This collection of essays brings together in print many findings from that session and points out the implications of hip hop's influence on religious scholars' theoretical and methodological concerns.

ALTRUISTIC AND EGOISTIC AGON IN THE EMOTIONAL CRISIS OF SUŠIĆ'S DRAMATIC PERSONS

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 2361-2365
Author(s):  
Almedina Čengić
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Modern Process ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
Dramatic Characters ◽  
The One

The second half of the 20th century in Bosnian literature is marked by the new tendencies of avant-garde writers, who will create their work through a different form of artistic creation, compared to the one that was presented at the beginning of this period. It is important to clarify the specificity of the various procedures that have positively directed dramatic creativity towards the modern lines of European literary circles. Derviš Sušić (1925-1990.), the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tradition and the reality of images, presented in a completely new artistic vision, make oscillation, in the writer's creation, between the determinants of historical facts and the legacy of oral tradition. Derviš Sušić Within the avant-garde tendencies of contemporary writers of the regional region, which appear in the mid-20th century, Sušić dominates in his virtuous creations of dramatic situations and dilemmas, in which his protagonists act. In a specific presentation of crucial culmination points, within the framework of the process of "drama of the flow of consciousness," a modern process in the conduct of drama, this writer analytically approaches the individual's dialectical duplication. Through artistically shaped fragments taken from historical records, this literary virtuoso presents in his texts a culmination point of Bosnian survival, very picturesque dramatic shaped historical characters and crucial events. It is symptomatic that Susić's characters become prototypes of stage characters, without temporal or location restrictions, transmitting a universal message of a unique attitude about the value of human activity and existence, outperform stereotypical models recognizable in the additional drama literature. Through the colorful of seeing and a range of specific dramatic characters, without the diversity of their differentiation in national status or sociopolitical affiliation, this writer creates a special ambient effect in the construction of his poetic fabrics based on historical background. The task of this paper is to prove the causality and conditionality of altruistic (social) and egoistic (individual) agonies in the actions and actions of Sušić's characters, in the examples of dramatic texts "Veliki vezir" (1969) and "Posljednja ljubav Hasana Kaimija "(1973), as well as the influence of emotional indicators on the concrete initiation of the dramatic conflict. It is therefore very interesting to explore and verify the models that will dominantly dominate the regional scene for almost half a century and be accepted as models in the way of writing its contemporaries, among the readers' population, but also at the same time with very successful placement in the theater audience.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

SEEING AND HEARING DISABILITY IN MAURICIO KAGEL'S REPERTOIRE FROM STAATSTHEATER

Tempo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (296) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Bethany Younge
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hearing Disability ◽  
Physical Action ◽  
The One ◽  
Traditional Roles

AbstractThis article adopts a disability studies perspective to evaluate the ways in which Mauricio Kagel's Repertoire from Staatstheater reimagines human bodies. Objects and bodies interact in myriad ways within the one hundred vignettes of Repertoire: some objects hinder or aid the bodies on stage, while others become incorporated within the body, acting as a single expressive unit. My analysis demonstrates the ways in which both objects and bodies transform their traditional roles as ascribed by society, rejecting procrustean physiques. Using disability studies concepts such as embodiment and experientialism I evaluate sound and physical action as inextricable expressions of imaginative corporealities. Reflecting upon Kagel's identity as an outsider of the European avant-garde, as well as his irreverence for oppressive social institutions, I evince that other forms of hierarchical disruptions are at play, namely that abled bodies do not preside over disabled ones and notions of beauty hold no clout.

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