Music, mining and colonisation: Sámi contestations of Sweden’s self-narrative

Sweden’s dominant self-narrative has tended to marginalise its historical colonisation of Sápmi. This aspect of Swedish history sits uncomfortably with prevalent understandings of that self-identity. Indeed, there has been little emphasis on the historical subordination of Sámi people in political science scholarship on Swedish exceptionalism and internationalism. This article problematises this absence by centring the analysis on Sámi musician Sofia Jannok’s efforts to decolonise Sápmi through her music. The first part examines Sweden’s colonisation of Sápmi and the tensions between Sámi reindeer herding communities, mining interests and the Swedish state. This is followed by an exploration of the constitutive relationship between music, politics and celebrity, as sites of political communication. A two-step analysis follows, investigating the broad themes in Sofia Jannok’s personal narrative and the discursive markers defining her music and politics. The analysis shows how her narrative intersects with the discursive themes of her musical expression and other engagements.

”Danmark er danskernes land”: Højrepopulistisk diskurs i Danmark

This paper examines the phenomenon of right-wing populism in Denmark in the year of 2019 by applying qualitative discourse analysis to a sample of central public texts from the right-wing populist parties New Right and The Danish People’s Party. Both parties utilize populist discourse by constructing a popular bloc (“the people”) stabilized by its constitutive outside: The elite and the Muslim immigrants. However, the discourses of the two parties differ from each other insofar as New Right articulates the strongest antagonism between the people and the elite, while The Danish People’s Party downplays this antagonism, most likely because the party has a central power position in Danish politics.

‘Couture military’ and a queer aesthetic curiosity: music video aesthetics, militarised fashion, and the embodied politics of stardom in Rihanna’s ‘Hard’

Music video is an underappreciated type of audiovisual artefact in studies of the aesthetics of world politics, which typically privilege linear narrative storytelling and struggle to communicate how sonic and embodied practices also constitute world politics as sensory experiences through which individuals make sense of the world. Yet the ways in which music video invites spectators’ senses to work together, and to filter meaning through their knowledge of stars’ own ‘meta-narratives’, expose an intimate and affective continuum between the politics of stardom and attachments to collective projects such as militarism. This paper explores that continuum through a study of Rihanna’s video ‘Hard’ and the aesthetic strategies it used to visualise her performance of a ‘female military masculinity’ in a fantasised space employing signifiers of US desert war.

Music making politics: beyond lyrics

In this article I argue that considering how any sort of music is made more closely - as sonic material, performance cultures, for whom and on whose terms, is integral to projects exploring the music-politics nexus. The case in point is “My Way”, a seemingly apolitical song, as it becomes repurposed: transformed through modes of performance, unusual musical arrangements, and performance contexts. The analysis reveals a deeper, underlying politics of music-making that still needs unpacking: the race, gender, and class dichotomies permeating macro- and micro-level explorations into the links between music, society, and politics. Incorporating a socio-musicological analytical framework that pays attention to how this song works musically, alongside how it can be reshaped through radical performance and production practices, shows how artists in diverging contexts can ‘re-music’ even the most hackneyed song into a form of political engagement.

Of country and country: Twang and trauma in Australian Indigenous popular music

Over the last half century, as part of a wider struggle for recognition, respect, reconciliation and justice, Indigenous Australians and others supporting their claims have increasingly been heard in popular music. Indigenous musicians are increasingly insistent that white Australia must change.

Abstracts: The sound(s) of politics

Abstracts: The sound(s) of politics

Fairness og statsborgerskab

The Danish requirements for citizenship are often grounded on an ideal about rewarding personal effort and responsibility. A similar ideal is known from luck egalitarianism, a widely known and accepted theory of justice. This article unfolds a luck egalitarian argument in defence of the Danish requirements and investigates, in light of this argument, whether the requirements relevantly reflect effort and responsibility. The article concludes dismissively and offers a number of ways of improving Danish citizenship policy in terms of fairness.

Musical theatre and politics

The musical is in some ways the most significant contribution of the United States to theatre. Musicals have long been a space for considerable political expression, which is often overlooked in the tendency to view them as no more than light popular entertainments.

“We come from the land of the ice and snow”: De-colonising superhero cinema through music

In this short intervention we examine the relationship between Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor: Ragnarok. We do this to highlight the doubleness of both texts’ meaning, which gives each an aura of postcolonial subversion. This relation is important because in this case Immigrant Song was central to the production of Ragnarok, with director Taika Waititi allowing the song to suffuse the film from its inception. When we speak of music in film, we must also consider the deeper role of music in inspiring the tone of various filmic productions.

Introduction: the sound(s) of politics

Introduktion.