scholarly journals Pawns in Their Game: Bob Dylan’s Celebrity Persona in Dont Look Back

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Victor Viser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Concerns ◽  
Look Back

Documentary film craft in the mid-twentieth century, like many other arts at the time, evolved aesthetically around the notions of “truthfulness” and “honesty” in the depiction of their subjects. Simultaneous with these artistic innovations was the ascendency of a commercial popular culture industry that often appropriated aesthetic ideals of authenticity to construct celebrity narratives. This article examines the constructed celebrity persona of Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker’s American cinéma vérité production Dont Look Back. Utilizing a critical theory approach based on the philosophy and political economy of celebrity aura, it addresses questions of directorial subjectivity, celebrity self-consciousness and the contemporaneous subject/audience interface within a larger discussion of the intentionality of celebrity construction as part and parcel of films and other media dedicated to documenting the rise of pop superstars. While Dont Look Back attempts to reify Dylan as a rebellious voice speaking the social concerns of his audience, the film also testifies to the commodification of such stars by a 1960s corporate media machinery whose ultimate intentions were not necessarily so public-spirited.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Le Zotte
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Heroin User ◽  
Average Consumer ◽  
Cultural Currency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Used Goods

The epilogue discusses the contining role of secondhand commerce and style in the twenty-first century United States. Throughout the twentieth century, used goods economies codified and expanded, branching out into million-dollar industries. Vintage exhibitionism and elective poverty merged even more decisively at the end of the millennium. After habitual heroin user Kurt Cobain took his own life with a shotgun in 1994, styles straight-facedly called shabby chic, heroin chic, or poor chic enjoyed greater cultural currency than ever before. Voluntary secondhand dress persists precisely because it suggests both cultural and economic distinction, and shoppers continued to view secondhand venues as exceptions to the social and economic critiques of dominant capitalisms. Secondhand styles satisfy a desire to be seen as different than the average consumer dupe, as willing to invest time in the cultivation of originality without utilizing class and wealth privilege. The success of the 2013 song, “Thrift Shop,” by independent rappers Macklemore and Lewis—born and raised in the hometown of grunge, Seattle— attests to the continuing relevance of secondhand to popular culture.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Marinopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Epistemology

Critical Theory and Epistemology is a comparison of the major epistemological concerns in the twentieth century with critical theory of the Frankfurt School. I focus on modern epistemology as a theory of and about science that also addresses the social and political aims of scientific enquiry.The critique that the book deploys on the epistemological tendencies of late modernity suggests that the main distinction between Kant and the critical theorists lies in their understanding of rationality. Such a critique can be characterized as the ‘battle’ of modern epistemology for or against the scientifically, socially and politically rational. Thus, arguments of modern epistemology, as articulated by phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, modernists and postmodernists, systems’ theory and critical realism, can certainly be considered ‘modern’ in historical terms, but in essence their concerns are of a pre-modern and pre-scientific nature. In such a manner, we come closer to understanding what constitutes the scientific, philosophy, truth, and whether modern epistemology paves the way for a political epistemology in the twenty-first century.

Self-Subversion

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
Albert O. Hirschman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social

In a survey spanning over half a century of his own work, Hirschman, among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century on political economy, celebrates the ability to undermine one’s own claims and theories. Whereas skepticism toward other people’s work is not noteworthy, Hirschman argues, self-critque is crucial in relation “to one’s own generalizations or constructs.” But self-criticism and interpretive changes do “not in the end cancel out or refute the earlier findings”; rather, they help to define domains of the social world where originally postulated relations do not hold. Exercises in “self-subversion,” while often experienced at first as traumatic, are eventually, as Hirschman’s own career attests, “rewarding and enriching.”

scholarly journals The Lower Clergy and Popular Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dániel Bárth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Written Form

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of the Christian lower priesthood in local communities in eighteenth–twentieth century Hungary and Transylvania in cultural transmission. The author intends to map out the complex and changing conditions of the social function, everyday life, and mentality of the priests on the bottom rung of the clerical hierarchy. Particular emphasis is placed on the activity of priests active at the focus points of interaction between elite and popular culture who, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, often reflected both directly and in a written form on the cultural practices of the population of villages and market towns. The theoretical questions and possible approaches are centered around the complex relations of the priest and the community, their harmonious or conflict-ridden co-existence, questions of sacral economy, stereotypes of the “good priest” and the “bad priest” as shaped from above and from below, the subtleties of “priest-keeping”, the intentions related to preserving traditions and creating new customs, and the different temperaments of priests in relation to these issues.

From political economy to sociology: Francis Galton and the social-scientific origins of eugenics

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS RENWICK
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Biological Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Francis Galton ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractHaving coined the word ‘eugenics’ and inspired leading biologists and statisticians of the early twentieth century, Francis Galton is often studied for his contributions to modern statistical biology. However, whilst documenting this part of his work, historians have frequently neglected crucial aspects of what motivated Galton to establish his eugenics research programme. Arguing that his work was shaped more by social than by biological science, this paper addresses these oversights by tracing the development of Galton's programme, from its roots in a debate about political economy to his appeals for it to be taken up by sociologists. In so doing, the paper not only returns Galton's ideas to their original context but also provides a reason to reflect on the place of the social sciences in history-of-science scholarship.

Monstrous Grace

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kélina Gotman
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Burning Man ◽  
Medical Opinion ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rock N Roll

The first decades of the twentieth century saw a flurry of dance ‘crazes’, from the tango and the Charleston to the jitterbug, increasingly mapped onto the language of blackness. Jazz, cakewalk, and animal dances infused the social and popular culture of American and European cabarets; yet in the literature on dance and public health, twisting, contortions, hopping, and contagious enthusiasm represented the spectre of sexually taboo and ungainly blackness, against which ‘modern’ (white) dancing set itself. The choreographic discourse on modernity after Sigmund Freud conjugated primitive, infantile gestures with the lowest classes, in contrast to the lithe, ‘graceful’ dancing body exemplified by white socialite teachers Irene and Vernon Castle. They, reprising medical opinion, argued that upright dancing exercised in moderation stimulated youthful health. But the fantasy of convulsive primitivism held strong: from the advent of rock ’n’ roll to raves and Burning Man, figures of Dionysian frenzy persist.

Chicago Heights and Organized Crime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Corsino
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Look Back ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The City

Chicago Heights was a twentieth-century city. The defining movements of the century—urbanization, industrialization, and immigration—tell much of the city's history and provide an understanding of the social conditions leading to the emergence of organized crime. This chapter takes a brief look back at these historical developments as they played themselves out in the Chicago Heights context. Following this, it traces the history of the vice operations in Chicago Heights from their beginning in the early 1900s, to their union with the Chicago Outfit in the 1920s, to their ascendance and decline throughout the remainder of the century. The chapter suggests that the rise development and decline of the Chicago Heights Outfit run parallel in many ways to the fortunes of the city.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-182
Author(s):  
Reva Marin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Positive Elements ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Rich Material

Accounts of interracialism in white jazz autobiography may best be viewed as works in progress toward a more just society, comparable to the growing movement for gender justice in the contemporary jazz world. Unlike the more unsparing critiques of white appropriation and theft that leave little space for the positive elements of interracialism in popular culture, this book resists the cynicism and despair that come from the belief that individuals are powerless in the face of systemic racism; rather, it proposes a reading of jazz autobiography that stresses the importance of individuals in breaking down the social structures upon which racist laws and institutions depend. Finally, it proposes that the accounts of these autobiographers—from the most embracing to the most virulent—provide rich material for teaching and studying twentieth-century US race history and offer paths for resisting the intolerance of our present time.

What was ‘Indian’ Political Economy? On the separation of the ‘social’, the ‘economic’, and the ‘ethical’ in Indian nationalist thought, 1892–1948

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANIRBAN KARAK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social History ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
State Planning ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Social Mediation ◽  
The Social

AbstractThis article argues that to gauge the significance of state planning in mid-twentieth century India, it is necessary to study the trajectory of what was called ‘Indian political economy’ during the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. Through a close reading of selected texts, I demonstrate that the transmutation of Indian political economy into an abstract science of economics was a function of Indian nationalists’ inability to hold together the ‘social’, ‘economic’, and ‘ethical’ spheres within a single conceptual framework. The separation of these three spheres was the enabling factor behind the conceptualization of planning as a purely technical process of economic management. Further, the article contends that these conceptual developments cannot be adequately explained with reference to either ‘elite’ interests or the insidious effects of ‘colonial’ discourses. Rather, the narrative demonstrates that economic abstractions can—and must—be grounded in the historical development of capitalist social forms that transformed the internal fabric of Indian society. Drawing on a theory of capitalism as a historically specific form of social mediation, I argue that a Marxian social history of Indian state planning can overcome certain limitations inherent in extant approaches. Finally, the interpretation proposed here opens up the possibility of putting Indian history in conversation with a broader development during the first half of the twentieth century, namely the separation of political economy into economics and sociology.

Administering wealth: the concept of “economy” and the epistemic foundations of nationalism in late-imperial China (late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Pablo A. Blitstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One

Abstract In this paper, I will focus on the emergence and uses of political economy in late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century China. I will discuss how the concept of “economy” came to be conceived as an autonomous sphere of human life, with its own rules and its own order, and how the production of “wealth” was conceptually divorced from ethics, politics, and administration. For this purpose, I will focus on a group which played a key role in reshaping the social and political discourse of the empire: a group of nationalist reformers who wanted to transform the Qing empire into a constitutional monarchy. I will explore how these reformers brought together two different sets of traditions – the Chinese imperial traditions of literati statecraft on the one hand, and mostly British, French, and German traditions of political economy on the other – and how they used them to naturalize a particular idea of what the “Chinese nation” was and should be.

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