A Loose Affiliation of Alleluias

This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject. We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.

Kanduras ‘Khaleeji style’: Investigating Gulf masculinities and dress

Far more research is dedicated to assessing women’s fashioned bodies than for men’s in the Middle East and particularly in Gulf countries. Across the Gulf, male national citizens typically wear a long ‘dress-like’ garment, with regionally designated names of kandura , dish-dasha or thobe, and in colours delineated depending on the particular GCC state. Particularly focusing on the United Arab Emirates, I investigate how the kandura, when combined with the ghutra (white headscarf) and agal (black rope with tassels), becomes representational of national hegemonic masculinity and performatively styled to underline cultural authority and authenticity. These garments are deemed traditional attire, but on a closer inspection, they act as sites to investigate coded signs of cultural fashion capital and ‘local’ tastes. This article critically unpacks these constructs and their meanings for Khaleeji masculinity by examining three main ‘spaces’ – work, leisure and military national service – to scrutinize how the gender politics of space operates on men’s dressed body practices and underpins an emblematic presentation of privilege and patriotic manhood.

KNOW YOUR MEME AND THE HOMOGENIZATION OF WEB HISTORY

Know Your Meme (KYM) is a website devoted to compiling histories, definitions, and examples of internet memes. In the last decade, KYM has become popular among researchers, educators, and day-to-day Web users to understand memes and their meanings. As a result, it has become instrumental in establishing dominant histories of memes on the Web. This paper uses a discursive interface analysis of the KYM website along with the examples of Pepe the Frog, OK Boomer, and niche Facebook meme groups to demonstrate how the website constructs itself as a cultural authority to define and classify memes, and that an overreliance on KYM can have significant stakes. It may overlook entire uses of the meme, potentially downplay harmful ideologies, and generally imply the possibility for a meme to have a single primary meaning. I argue that an overreliance on KYM without acknowledging its limitations tends to overlook the essential plurality of the Web and instead implies a singular history of memes as an element of internet culture. However, KYM can still be a useful resource and to that end, ultimately, I conclude that we should move toward defining KYM as, “a curated collection of user-submitted meme instances and partially crowdsourced definitions.” While KYM is undeniably a useful resource, it is important that those of us who study the histories of the Web are mindful about how we lean upon this particular website and situate it within our work.

From Medicine to Health: The Proliferation and Diversification of Cultural Authority

In his account of the medical profession’s ascent, Paul Starr drew a distinction between the social authority of physicians and the cultural authority of medicine—between doctors’ capacity to direct others’ behavior and the ability of medical institutions and discourses to shape meanings of illness, health, wellness, and treatment. Subsequently, scholars have reflected on the social-structural transformations challenging physicians’ social authority but neglected shifts in cultural authority. Focusing on the United States, we find a proliferation and diversification of cultural authority, reflecting a partial movement from the domain of medicine into new terrains of health. This shift is apparent in the resurgence of alternative healing, the advent of new forms of self-care and self-monitoring, the rise of health social movements, and the spread of health information online. We advance a research agenda to understand how the mechanisms and dynamics of cultural authority shape contests to speak in the name of health.

Whitman and Stevenson: Singing the Nation from Scotland to Sāmoa via Ohio and Hawai‘i

This chapter explores the role of song in the intermingled reception of Whitman’s and Robert Louis Stevenson’s work. The first section introduces Stevenson’s part in disseminating Whitman’s work in Polynesia, discussing Stevenson’s writings on Polynesian song and his friendships with Hawai’ian musicians King David Kalākaua and Queen Liliʻuokalani with whom he shared an interest in Whitman. It suggests the importance of song to their understandings of cultural authority and challenges to colonial influence. The second section considers several composers – including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ernst Bacon – who set work by both Whitman and Stevenson, focusing particularly on James H. Rogers’ song cycle In Memoriam (1919). It considers the ways in which relationship between the two writers was constructed by these composers and their critics and explores the role of anthologising – whether in poetry anthologies or song cycles – in constructions of national identity and exoticism.

“This Isn’t Some TV Show, Okay?”

Chapter 4 seems like an ostensible contradiction of all that has come before it, as it zooms in on parody. In common parlance, parody is regarded narrowly as a sendup or a spoof. But this chapter repurposes the concept as a displacement paradigm, rethinking parody as a deceptive double that furtively displaces the authority of the original. Playing on eminent existing terrain and interrogating cinematic tradition make parody particularly effective for an analysis of Dear White People (Netflix, 2017–present), a web series that demonstrates how parody works to undermine the cultural authority and assumed whiteness of mainstream American as well as European art cinema.

Empowered by Ancestors

By focusing on the Imperial Temple, this book explores the making of ancestral ritual norms by looking into the ritual debates in the imperial courts of Song China (960–1279). It argues that court ritual debates empowered the Song scholar-officials (shidafu士大夫‎) with the cultural authority to confront the state and reshape society. In particular, the two discourses of filial piety and political merits played crucial role in Song court ritual debates over the Imperial Temple. Both discourses had a tremendous influence on the ancestral practices of later societies. In addition, this book offers a new perspective to examine the intellectual dimension of Song factionalism, in which the ritual interests of Song scholar-officials were more associated with their scholarly backgrounds than their political stances or affiliations. In the Song ritual discourses of the Imperial Temple, scholar-officials rendered a separate intellectual identity that transcended the boundaries of not only factional politics but also the strictly defined “schools” (xuepai學派‎) of Song scholarship. In terms of intellectual identity, Song scholar-officials are more eclectic than historians have previously thought, if ritual interest is taken into consideration. From this perspective, the book examines Song scholars’ ritual discussions on the Imperial Temple, especially those scholars who have been conventionally categorized with the New Learning (xinxue新學‎) school and the Learning of the Way (Daoxue 道學‎) fellowship.

Thomas Carlyle and the Australasian Labour Movement

The influence of the great Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) on the British labour movement is well known. Drawing largely on the Australasian labour press, this article explores the influence of Carlyle on the intellectual culture of the Australasian labour movement, demonstrating that Australasian labour activists (including many Scots) derived considerable inspiration from Carlyle, with regard to idealist ethics and the nobility of work, social criticism, and constructive political thought. In all these regards, Carlyle provided not only ideas, but also language, rhetoric, and cultural authority. In this sense, Carlyle was just as crucial an influence on the Australasian labour movement as he was on the British labour movement.