“The Mic Is My Piece”: Canadian Rap, the Gendered “Cool Pose,” and Music Industry        Racialization and Regulation

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Black Canadian Rap artists, many of whom are the children of Caribbean-born immigrants to Canada, employed the hyper-racialized and hyper-gendered “Cool Pose” as oppositional politics to intervene in a conversation about citizenship, space, and anti-blackness. Drawing from local and trans-local imaginings and practices, Black Canadian rappers created counter-narratives intended to confront their own sense of exclusion from a nation that has consistently imagined itself as White and rendered the Black presence hyper-(in)visible. Despite a nationwide policy of sameness (multiculturalism), Black Canadian musicians have used Rap as a discursive and dialogical space to disrupt the project of Black Canadian erasure from the national imagination. These efforts provided Black youth with the critically important platform to critique the limitations of multiculturalism, write Black Canadian stories into the larger framework of the nation state, and remind audiences of the deeply masculinized and racialized nature of Canadian iconography. And yet, even as they engaged in these oppositional politics, rappers have consistently encountered exclusionary practices at the hands of the state that have made it increasingly difficult to sustain a Black music infrastructure and spotlight Canadian Rap’s political and cultural intervention.

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Free as a Bird? Thinking with the Grain of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Butch Voice

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793525.013.63 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Tavia Nyong'o

Keyword(s):

Music Industry ◽

Black Music ◽

Female Masculinity ◽

History And Memory ◽

Cover Songs

Across a prolific, genre-spanning career, Meshell Ndegeocello has persistently avoided music industry labeling. This chapter considers the adequacy of conceptions of the butch voice and female masculinity as modalities for summing up her aesthetic strategy. More central than her transgression of customary modalities of history and memory, the chapter suggests, is the persistent quest for freedom in black music by any means musically necessary. Suggesting that the butch voice is both heard and silent, the chapter moves toward an aesthetics of redaction in her most recent music, especially in albums devoted to cover songs.

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Precariousness among young migrants in Europe: A consequence of exclusionary mechanisms within state-controlled neoliberal social work in Sweden

Critical and Radical Social Work ◽

10.1332/204986021x16215151035945 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Torun Elsrud ◽

Philip Lalander

Keyword(s):

Social Justice ◽

Social Work ◽

Young People ◽

Social Workers ◽

Active Role ◽

Social Rights ◽

Ethical Standards ◽

Nation State ◽

Central Concept ◽

Exclusionary Practices

This ethnographic article addresses social work’s participation in exclusionary practices performed by migration authorities in Sweden, leading to extreme precariousness among young people searching for protection. Through ethnographic descriptions of young people who fled from Sweden to other European countries, we argue that Swedish social workers played an active role in depriving young people of their social rights. A central concept in the article is administrative violence. Such institutionalised violence risks being excluded from a moral assessment. We argue that moral responsibility is not about following state rules, but may instead involve acting in a way that rules do not support. If social work accepts the boundaries of the nation-state, its border work and the logics of neoliberal ideologies, it cannot live up to the ethical standards of social work and its emphasis on social justice.

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Kipling’s Art of War

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2016.70.4.496 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 70 (4) ◽

pp. 496-519

Author(s):

Nasser Mufti

Keyword(s):

British Empire ◽

Short Story ◽

Turn Of The Century ◽

Nation State ◽

Rudyard Kipling ◽

Boer War ◽

Art Of War ◽

National Imagination ◽

Arthur Conan Doyle

Nasser Mufti, “Kipling’s Art of War” (pp. 496–519) This essay looks at the British empire’s most ambitious years, when it saw Britain and its settler colonies as belonging to a global nation-state, most commonly referred to as “Greater Britain.” The apex of this imperial-national imagination came with the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War, which jingoists like Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling celebrated as a civil war because it was seen to be a conflict between the “blood brotherhood” of empire: Britons and Boers. Hence the characterization of the Boer War as “the last of the gentleman’s wars” or “a sahibs’ war,” because it was said to be fought between the civilized fellow-citizens of the British empire. But Kipling also had to confront the fact that British and Boer tactics were decidedly “ungentlemanly” at the war front. I turn to his short story “A Sahibs’ War” (1901), which is especially concerned about the “gentleman’s war” in South Africa looking identical to anticolonial wars in Afghanistan and Burma, which in Kipling’s mind were barbaric frontier conflicts. Kipling registers this ambivalence between civil and colonial war in the language of his story, which strategically puns across English, Afrikaans and Urdu/Hindi. These translingual puns make legible and sensible the tensions between the intra-national and extra-national, domestic and foreign, civil and imperial that characterized Greater British discourse at the turn of the century.

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Museums of oblivion

Antiquity ◽

10.1017/s0003598x00068010 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 85 (328) ◽

pp. 625-629 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Yannis Hamilakis

Keyword(s):

Rich Source ◽

Nation State ◽

National Imagination ◽

Sacred Object ◽

Western Imagination ◽

Heritage Politics ◽

The Relationship

The relationship between antiquity, archaeology and national imagination in Greece, the sacralisation of the Classical past, and the recasting of the Western Hellenism into an indigenous Hellenism have been extensively studied in the last 15 years or so (see e.g. Hamilakis 2007, 2009). In fact, Greece has proved a rich source of insights for other cases of nation-state heritage politics. The new Acropolis Museum project was bound to be shaped by the poetics of nationhood right from the start, given that its prime referent is the most sacred object of the Hellenic national imagination, the Acropolis of Athens. This site is at the same time, however, an object of veneration within the Western imagination (you only have to look at the UNESCO logo), a pilgrimage destination for millions of global tourists, with all its revenue implications, and an endlessly reproduced and modified global icon (in both senses of the word).

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Immigration and national identity: constructing the nation

Review of International Studies ◽

10.1017/s0260210500118534 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 235-255 ◽

Cited By ~ 27

Author(s):

Roxanne Lynn Doty

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

International Relations ◽

British Empire ◽

Political Violence ◽

The Political ◽

Nation State ◽

World War ◽

Exclusionary Practices ◽

Freedom Of Movement ◽

The Relationship

Prompted by the integration of Europe, Derrida recently posed the following questions. ‘Indeed, to what concept, to what real individual, to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?’ While this question speaks of the political entity called Europe, it has much broader resonance. It echoes concerns about identity, boundaries, and the relationship between the inside and the outside of political entities, concerns that have not escaped the attention of critical International Relations scholars. Nor are these necessarily new concerns. The situation in post–World War II Britain prompted the same questions Derrida raises about Europe in 1992. To what real individuals, to what singular entity the terms ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ should be assigned was a question that prompted debate, political violence, and a series of increasingly restrictive and, some would suggest, racist immigration policies. The transformation of Britain from an empire to a nation–state was accompanied by a crisis of identity whereby early postwar proclamations that Britain ‘imposed no colour bar restrictions making it difficult for them when they come here’ and that ‘there must be freedom of movement within the British Empire and the Commonwealth’ were, rather quickly, to give way to exclusionary practices and a retreat to ‘little England’.

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Liminality and (Trans)Nationalism in the Rethinking of the African Canadian Subjectivity: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Canada and Beyond A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies ◽

10.33776/candb.v5i0.3025 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

Author(s):

Vicent Cucarella-Ramón

Keyword(s):

Second Life ◽

Nation State ◽

Transnational Politics ◽

Canadian Identity ◽

Canadian Experience ◽

Black Canadians ◽

Black Canadian ◽

Canadian Culture ◽

Definition Of ◽

African Canadian

Drawing on the concepts of liminality proposed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner and Althusser's three ideological tools that nationalism prescribe to be undertaken by individuals who try to become an integral part of a national community, this paper reads Esi Edugyan’s debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), as an exploration of the role of literature within the debate about the different positions of black Canadian subjectivity and national adherence. George Elliott Clarke and Rinaldo Walcott polarized the African Canadian criticism by proposing two different theories in an attempt to shape up and (re)define the subjectivity of black Canadians. Clarke advocates to include African Canadian subjectivity in the national desire to belong to a uniform Canadian culture and aims to establish the African Canadian identity in Canada’s national soil. Conversely, Walcott stands up for the defense of transnationality as the best way to explore and grapple with African Canadian subjectivi- ty aiming to contest racism while fostering self-definition. Declining Clarke’s theory, Walcott warns African Canadians to “think contrapuntally within and against the nation” (22) as a means to counteract a Canadian nationality that has historically exclud- ed its black citizens. It is my argument that The Second Life of Samuel Tyne fully participates in this debate and aligns partially with Walcott’s liminal status for black Canadians. The diasporic nature that defines Samuel Tyne together with his impossibility for succeeding and recognizing himself as truly Canadian place Edugyan’s novel within the scope of Walcott’s critical theory and helps to reconsider and to overtly challenge the image of Canada as a compassionate and egalitarian nation-state as well as to reconsider the negotiation of space. The concept of liminality stands as a valuable critical lens to highlight the retrieval of a transcultural African Canadian subjectivity that shows the complex and multiple faces of black Canadians. However, by setting forth a liminal subjectivity that aims to problematize black Canadian subjectivity, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne expands, to a certain extent, Walcott’s understanding of the diasporic approach by rejecting nostalgia as a melancholic hindrance. In this way, it bridges memory and present to cultivate a new reading of the diasporic approach that confirms an acute and more precise reading of the black Canadian experience. In so doing, the novel discusses the waning of the sovereignty of the Canadian nation-state and opts for uprootedness, transnational politics and deterritorialization as the way to extol a self-(re)definition of the coeval African Canadian subjectivity.

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The state of rock: a history of Finland’s cultural policy and music export

Popular Music ◽

10.1017/s0261143008004054 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 257-269 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Janne Mäkelä

Keyword(s):

Popular Music ◽

Cultural Policy ◽

Rock Music ◽

Music Industry ◽

State Intervention ◽

Nation State ◽

The Past ◽

History Of ◽

Historical Basis ◽

High Level

AbstractThe Finnish government has historically been active in regulating the practices of popular music. At the same time, the music industry, rock media and musicians have traditionally insisted on markets free from state intervention. This article focuses on the history of the interrelationship between cultural policy and popular music, especially rock exports, in Finland. It argues that the high level of organised forms of culture and the lure of internationalism form the historical basis for the nation-state–popular music relationship in Finland. Following the demands for ‘competitive society’ in the 1990s and the international breakthroughs of Finnish pop and rock music performers after 2000, this relationship has intensified. Contemporary policy is in many ways healthier than in the past, yet it also raises crucial questions about hierarchies and identity relationships in popular music and society.

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