Teaching Cultural Theory and Popular Culture in Postsocialist Country: Fighting Against (Perceived) High Culture

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 694–709 Reading the Popular in American Jewish Studies LAURENCE ROTH MICHAEL IMMERSO. Coney Island: The People’s Playground. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. viii Ⳮ 199. LAWRENCE J. EPSTEIN. The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001. Pp. xxii Ⳮ 356. Heeb: The New Jew Review. Spring 2003. The Plotz Retrospective. The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia. April 25–August 17, 2003. Michael Immerso’s and Lawrence J. Epstein’s wide-ranging histories help crystallize a number of trends, and problems, in contemporary scholarship on the popular arts in American and American Jewish life. Both books attempt to convey to a broad readership a compelling story about the rise and fall of a popular phenomenon. Both are ‘‘celebrations’’ of those phenomena, and examples of how such popular scholarship— scholarship aimed primarily at lay readers—is informed and legitimated by the recent boom in the theory and criticism of mass culture, popular culture, the vernacular, and the everyday. Such upbeat interpretations appeal to America’s current fascination with its commodities and with the mundane bric-a-brac of its modern life, as well as with its entertainments and entertainment-delivery systems. Call these stories cultural solipsism in the face of global turbulence and instability, or call them a critical rereading and unpacking of American identities and cultural hegemony, in either case they now have a market value as high as any Britney Spears collectible on eBay. Much fun can be had in lampooning this publishing trend—witness the humor column in the October 6, 2003, issue of the New Yorker that The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. READING THE POPULAR—ROTH 695 offered mock book reviews of historical studies of vanilla (The Flavor That Changed the World), pet cats (The House Cat That Changed the World), and wallets (The Pocket Lint That Changed the World). But for those of us interested in how questions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, politics, and religion intersect with our readings of the everyday and our consumption of the popular arts, satires such as this are instructive. They remind us that, in light of the current obsession with everything popular, we must pay careful and close attention to the culturally specific ways in which representations of individual and collective identities are being shaped and reshaped, told and retold, in the popular arts. This is especially true when that process is examined in books like Immerso’s and Epstein’s histories. For the importance of those histories is that they illustrate to readers why popular and mass culture are the dominant social-construction engines in modern America. In both these books we are invited to contemplate how the boundaries and bridges between individuals and collectives—and between past, present, and future—are conjured and reinterpreted in the popular and mass-culture realms. Andreas Huyssen persuasively argues that it is through the media and information technologies embedded in these realms that ‘‘the sense of lived time is being renegotiated in our contemporary cultures of memory.’’1 This transformation of the human perception of time, space, and identity erupts into the popular imaginary in movies like Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, and spills over into a cultural need for the sorts of reassurances and solutions provided by the popular arts. For scholars of American Jewish popular culture and literature, books such as Epstein’s and Immerso’s, and ‘‘alternative’’ publications such as Heeb and Plotz: The Zine for the Vaclempt, offer an opportunity to consider how American Jewish studies is an important site of struggle over two questions: How best to unravel the scope and power of American popular and mass culture, and who constitutes the audience for that project. Jeffrey Melnick takes up these questions in a recent review essay, when he outlines what scholarship in American Jewish studies ought to look like if it aspires to be a relevant mode of contemporary inquiry...

BLURB FOR TOTAL PROP MAILER Total Propaganda moves the study of propaganda out of the exclusive realm of world politics into the more inclusive study of popular culture, media, and politics. All the participatory functioning elements of the society are aspects of membership in the popular culture. Thus, the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and even international trade become everyday propaganda to which everyone may relate. To emphasize the necessity for new thinking about propaganda, Edelstein creates the concepts of the new propaganda and the old, and he devises a language of uninyms to convey their meanings more quickly. Oldprop is characteristic of mass cultures and utilizes totalitarian methods of conflict, hegemony, minimization, demonization, and exclusiveness to achieve its goals. By contrast, newprop is created by members of the popular culture to allow them to engage in accomodation, enhance the individual, and promote inclusiveness. Shifts in the old and the new propaganda are tracked across social issues such as race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, and the environment, as well as in fashion, politics, advertising, sports, media, and politics. Central to the concept of total propaganda is that it is not simply additive; it is the product of new energies that are produced by the fusing of propaganda in such related forums as music, art, advertising, sports and politics. It is these synergies, and their production of new energies, that make total propaganda greater than the sum of its parts. Edelstein concludes that the most important distinction that should be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text; i.e., its propaganda. In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda; in a mass culture almost everyone consumes it but only a few create it. This formulation offers new ways to discuss power and ideology in media texts. As an example, where once the least informed and the least educated were the most subject to propaganda, now the most informed and most educated often are the first to create propaganda and the first to consume it. FORMER BLURB COPY.......It is widely recognized that the mass media provide us with ample information which we use to construct some sense of the world around us. It is not as widely recognized that consumers of media messages are active in this constructive process, making meanings that are sensible to them in particular life circumstances. The media target a younger, more media savvy generation who are more likely to be participants in the messages than members of any previous generation. This participatory aspect of new media is central to what the author defines as the new propaganda. Although critical and cultural theories are often prohibitive for undergraduate students, the author's formulation offers an accessible way to discuss power and ideology in media texts. Without using the critical discourse, he provides compelling arguments that power and ideology are created and maintained through the active participation of audience members. The conceptualization of the old and new propagandas helps move the study of propaganda out of the realm of world politics into the study of popular culture. The author views all of the participatory functioning of the society as aspects of membership in a more embracing popular culture. This point of view recognizes that the mass media are extremely important forces in the consumer's construction of reality and that they are no longer exclusive channels for disseminating the messages of the powerful elites. Instead, the media -- particularly the new media -- are accessible to and used frequently by less powerful members of society -- children, ethnic minorities, and marginal members of society -- to create realities that more satisfactorily fulfill their needs. NEW BLURB COPY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... Total Propaganda is a fresh answer to the question of the inclusiveness of the popular culture. It demonstrates how the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and international trade have become everyday propaganda to which everyone relates in some way. Edelstein demonstrates that the most important distinction that can be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text (i.e., its propaganda). In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda, whereas in a mass culture, almost everyone consumes but only a few create it. This book presents a new language of propaganda that makes it possible to draw comparisons between mass and popular cultures. The language is used to observe shifts in propaganda across various social issues -- race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, the environment, print and broadcast media, new technologies, and politics. It also examines fashion, advertising, sports, and lobbying. Total Propaganda is not defined only quantitatively; it mirrors the synergies that have come about in every social and political realm and the energies that these synergies produce. As such, the sum of total propaganda is greater than the sum of its parts.

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual n

Total Propaganda

This paper lifts the curtain on the cross-fertilization of political resistance and theatre performance in three post-socialist countries – Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary – by focusing on how theatre can function as sites of resistance to right-wing populism from a cross-cultural perspective. The argument is that theatre performance can function as a critical platform that engages strategies from popular culture to reveal the voices of those who are silenced by populist institutions and actors. Although resistance to populism through critical cultural production is very seldom addressed in academic studies dedicated to Central and Eastern Europe, we claim that theatre can illuminate fresh modes of political action and critical knowledge about world politics. The impetus for this study is Angela Marino’s claim that ‘populism is inseparable from the embodied, relational, and material aesthetics of performance.’ Thus, this paper focuses on contemporary theatrical performances that are put to the opposite end, namely to resist the cultural essentialism put forth by the right-wing populist entrepreneurs in Central and Eastern Europe.

Letter from the Editors

Images of law and lawyers abound in popular culture. Legal scholarship in popular culture has begun to document and reflect upon the significance of these images. Its agendas and objectives are diverse, ranging a desire for a legal theory of popular culture to a popular cultural theory of law. This chapter seeks to examine law from the outside, by way of an engagement with the representations of law in popular culture. Through an analysis of the terms of the gendered and sexualized corporeality of law in popular culture produced in the characterization of the male homosexual lawyer. The chapter also seeks to open up a new domain within the law and popular culture scholarship and to challenge the limits of lesbian, gay, and queer legal scholarship. In Victim, it is important to note that the litigator as hero occupies a distinctive position with respect to the traditional site of legal heroics, the courtroom.

Contributors’ Notes

Reviewed by: Tales of Southeast Asia's Jazz Age: Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920–1936 by Peter Keppy Raul Casantusan Navarro Peter Keppy Tales of Southeast Asia's Jazz Age: Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920–1936 Singapore: NUS Press, 2019. 269 pages. Peter Keppy has written extensively on Indonesia since the 1990s. His Politics of Redress: War Damage and Restitution in Indonesia and the Philippines, 1940–1957 (KITLV Press, 2010) was his first major work, in which he tackled postwar issues in both countries. The present work is the author's second, in which he fuses together the intersections of politico-historical events and popular music in the two Southeast Asian nations. Viewed against the political backdrop of colonization characterized by two contrasting modes of subjugation—Indonesia under the repressive Dutch government and the Philippines under the "benevolent assimilation" of the American insular government—both countries were gifted with artists who touched their respective nation's popular imagination. Keppy chose Luis Borromeo, aka Borromeo Lou, who was among the first proponents of jazz music in the Philippines, to initiate his discussion on popular culture in the Philippines, and he picked the multitalented Ms. Riboet, actress, dancer, singer, and recording artist, as an appropriate representative of both low- and high-brow Indonesian culture. [End Page 123] The author uses three key concepts to weave his data to produce the present work. Two of the concepts, "pop cosmopolitanism" and "participatory culture," are derived from media scholar Henry Jenkins, and the last one, "popular modernism," is a take on anthropologist Joel Kahn's cultural theory. To make a small twist to Jenkins's theory, Keppy uses the term "participatory pop" instead of "participatory culture." The inclusive term "participatory culture" could have sufficed to navigate seamlessly through both mass and elite cultures discussed in the book because, after all, the author does not offer any new meaning for the phrase "participatory pop." Besides, the words "participatory" and "popular" basically connote the same thing. Any cultural artifact could not have been created or formed without the participation or popular support of its audience as both consumer and producer. On the one hand, Keppy highlights specific groups of Filipinos (as the following chapter titles attest: "Cabaret Girls and Legislators" and "Jassistas, Balagtansistas [sic], Zarzuelistas") to suggest a varied cultural scenario that Borromeo negotiated as a musician. On the other hand, aside from being a singer, Ms. Riboet was introduced by the author as a cultural broker, a bridge between arts and artists and the masses. These interconnections among artists, producers, and consumers suggest a broad participation of people in the creation of popular culture. The book has ten chapters, the first of which introduces both Borromeo and Riboet as leitmotif in discussing popular culture in their respective countries. The next five chapters narrate stories of Borromeo's work relationships with other Filipino artists, his active theater life, and the groups he founded or performed with. The last four chapters are devoted to a close reading of Riboet's career and the development of politics and popular theater in Indonesia; the genres "popular theater" and political theater were fortes of the theater groups Komedie Stamboel and Dardanella at the height of their popularity. Although Keppy utilizes them as handles for discussion, Borromeo and Riboet are not given equal treatment. The obvious wealth of data on Indonesia and Riboet (or perhaps the number of years devoted by the author to the study of Indonesia) has yielded a richly woven story about popular theater in Batavia and other centers of cultural activity in the Dutch East Indies. There is also the impression that the author is much more knowledgeable about this colony than the Philippines, as inaccuracies about the latter are found in the text. A few examples of these slips are as [End Page 124] follows: "as a consequence of impending Philippine Independence in 1935" (132) (the Philippines was granted its independence by the US in 1946); and "In the early 1930s, Bocobo would lead a research project aimed at documenting native music and dances" (46) (Bocobo was president of the University of the Philippines [UP] when he created the "UP Committee on Folk Songs and...

Applying the theories of Popular Culture, Visual Culture, Performance Studies, (Post) Feminism, and Film Studies, this new monograph proposes to explore the recent important and significant cases of the literature works adapted, represented and transformed into interesting artistic medium in films, (musical) theater, and TV drama. Theoretical ideas include Angela McRobbie’s book Postmodernism and Popular Culture, Christine Geraghty’s book chapter “Soap Opera and Utopia,” etc., Utopia imagination from the rural to urban, from the past to the present, is similar yet changing. Jean Baudrillard’s article “The Precession of Simulacra,” Michel de Certeau’s book chapter “The Practice of Everyday Life,” and Ien Ang’s “Feminism Desire and Female Pleasure” all offer the insights in the politics of popular culture, manifested in the related films, theater performances, and TV drama interpreted in this monograph.

"I’m a Modern Bride": On the Relationship between Marital Hegemony, Bridal Fictions, and Postfeminism

In this entirely sophisticated and scholarly account of political culture, Arthur Asa Berger shows how the variety of cultural preferences creates the foundations of communication theory. Using the work of Aaron Wildavsky, the author shows how individualism, egalitarianism, collectivism, and fatalism form the basis of culture in complex societies. But more importantly, Berger breaks down the mechanical distinction between mass culture and elite culture, showing how they interpenetrate and crossover at the level of competitive and hierarchical frames. Agitpop, now in paperback, suggests that there is an ideological content to our popular culture, even though the creators no less than the consumers of that culture are either unaware or dimly aware that they are creating works with an ideological bent. The work takes up in quick order two examples from different areas of the hierarchical, individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist cultures. From football games to the Iran-Contra Hearings, from MTV to the Human Potential Movement, from Max Headroom to humor on the Jews, and from wrestling to The Terminator, Berger takes up his master themes with a deft touch of his own. Weaving in the work of scholars from Emile Durkheim to Aaron Wildavsky he manages to make each of the chapters very much his own. For those who know the earlier work of this author, the reader will be very much at home; for those new to Berger, the volume will be a joyous revelation. The final three chapters reveal a deeper aspect of Berger's work. His interpretation of the earlier materials in terms of the semiotics of power, of textual analysis, or deconstruction of the media, and finally, an analysis and self-analysis of the larger research agenda of which this work is pivotal, should make this book central to the theoretical construction of popular and political culture. For people working in communications theory, political culture, and the sociology of knowledge, this book is a must; for everyone else, it is a joy.

There are many ways to construct, shape and frame a history of popular music. From a focus on performers to a stress on cities, from theories of modernity to reveling in ‘the post,’ innovative music has been matched by evocative writing about it. One arc of analysis in popular music studies focuses on the record label. Much has been written about Sun, Motown, Factory and Apple, but there are many labels that have not reached this level of notoriety and fame but offer much to our contemporary understanding of music, identity and capitalism. The aim of this article is to capture an underwritten history of 21st century music, capturing and tracking moments of collaboration, movement and contact. Through investigating a specific record label, we explore the interconnectiveness of electronica and city-based creative industries’ initiatives. While urban dance culture is still pathologised through drug scares and law and order concerns, clubbing studies and emerging theories of sonic media and auditory cultures offer a significant trigger and frame for this current research. The focus on Off World Sounds (OWS) traces a meta-independent label that summons, critiques, reinscribes and provokes the conventional narratives of capitalism in music. We show how OWS has remade and remixed the collaborations of punk to forge innovative ways of thinking about creativity, policy and popular culture. While commencing with a review of the origin, ideology and intent of OWS, the final part of the paper shows where the experiment went wrong and what can be learnt from this sonic label laboratory. Moving Off World Popular cultural studies evoke and explore discursive formations and texts that activate dissent, conflict and struggle. This strategy is particularly potent when exploring how immigration narratives fray the borders of the nation state. At its most direct, this analysis provides a case study to assess and answer some of Nabeel Zuberi’s questions about sonic topography that he raises in Sounds English. I’m concerned less with music as a reflection of national history and geography than how the practices of popular music culture themselves construct the spaces of the local, national, and transnational. How does the music imagine the past and place? How does it function as a memory-machine, a technology for the production of subjective and collective versions of location and identity? How do the techniques of sounds, images, and activities centered on popular music create landscapes with figures? (3) Dance music is mashed between creativity, consumerism and capitalism. Picking up on Zuberi’s challenge, the story of OWS is also a history of what happens to English migrants who travel to Australia, and how they negotiate the boundaries of the Australian nation. Immigration is important to any understanding of contemporary music. The two proprietors of OWS are Pete Carroll and, one of the two writers of this current article, Stephen Mallinder. Both English proprietors immigrated to Perth in Australia. They used their contacts to sign electronica performers from beyond this single city. They encouraged the tracks to move freely through lymphatic digital networks for remixing—‘lymphatic’ signalling a secondary pathway for commerce and creativity where new musical relationships were being formed outside the influence of major record companies. Performers signed to OWS form independent networks with other performers. This mobility of sound has operated in parallel with the immigration policies of the Howard government that have encouraged insularity and xenophobia. In other eras of racial inequality and discrimination, the independent record label has been not only an integral part of the music industry, but a springboard for political dissent. The histories of jazz and rhythm and blues capture a pivotal moment of independent entrepreneurialism that transformed new and strange sounds/noises into popular music. In monitoring and researching this complex process of musical movement and translation, the independent label has remained the home of the peripheral, the misunderstood, and the uncompromising. Soul music in the United States of America is an example of a sonic form that sustained independence while corporate labels made a profit. Labels like Atlantic Records became synonymous with the success of black vocal music in the 1960s and 1970s, while the smaller independent labels like Chess and Invicta constructed a brand identity. While the division between the majors and the independents increasingly dissolves, particularly at the level of distribution, the independent label remains significant as innovator and instigator. It retains its status and pedagogic function in teaching an audience about new sounds and developing aural literacies. OWS inked its well from an idealistic and collaborative period of label evolution. The punk aesthetic of the late 1970s not only triggered wide-ranging implications for youth culture, but also opened spaces for alternative record labels and label identity. Rough Trade was instrumental in imbuing a spirit of cooperation and a benign mode of competition. A shift in the distribution of records and associated merchandizing to strengthen product association—such as magazines, fanzines and T-Shirts—enabled Rough Trade to deal directly with pivotal stores and outlets and then later establish cartels with stores to provide market security and a workable infrastructure. Links were built with ancillary agents such as concert promoters, press, booking agents, record producers and sleeve designers, to create a national, then European and international, network to produce an (under the counter) culture. Such methods can also be traced in the history of Postcard Records from Edinburgh, Zoo Records from Liverpool, Warp in Sheffield, Pork Recordings in Hull, Hospital Records in London, and both Grand Central and Factory in Manchester. From the ashes of the post-1976 punk blitzkrieg, independent labels bloomed with varying impact, effect and success, but they held an economic and political agenda. The desire was to create a strong brand identity by forming a tight collaboration between artists and distributors. Perceptions of a label’s size and significance was enhanced and enlarged through this collaborative relationship. OWS acknowledged and rewrote this history of the independent label. There was a desire to fuse the branding of the label with the artists signed, released and distributed. No long term obligations on behalf of the artists were required. A 50/50 split after costs was shared. While such an ‘agreement’ appeared anachronistic, it was also a respectful nod to the initial label/artist split offered by Rough Trade. Collaboration with artists throughout the process offered clear statements of intent, with idealism undercut by pragmatism. From track selection, sleeve design, promotion strategy and interview schedule, the level of communication created a sense of joint ownership and dialogue between label and artist. This reinscription of independent record history is complex because OWS’ stable of performers and producers is an amalgamation of dub, trance, hip hop, soul and house genres. Much of trans-localism of OWS was encouraged by its base in Perth. Metaphorically ‘off world’, Perth is a pad for international music to land, be remixed, recut and re-released. Just as Wellington is the capital of Tolkien’s Middle Earth as well as New Zealand, Perth is a remix capital for Paris or New York-based performers. The brand name ‘Off World Sounds’ was designed to emphasise isolation: to capture the negativity of isolation but rewrite separation and distinctiveness with a positive inflection. The title was poached from Ridley Scott’s 1980s film Bladerunner, which was in turn based on Philip K. Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Affirming this isolation summoned an ironic commentary on Perth’s geographical location, while also mocking the 1980s discourses of modernity and the near future. The key was to align punk’s history of collaboration with this narrative of isolation and independence, to explore mobility, collaboration, and immigration. Spaces in the Music Discussions of place dictate a particular methodology to researching music. Dreams of escape and, concurrently, intense desires for home pepper the history of popular music. What makes OWS important to theories of musical collaboration is that not only was there a global spread of musicians, producers and designers, but they worked together in a series of strategic trans-localisms. There were precedents for disconnecting place and label, although not of the scale instigated by OWS. Fast Products, although based in Glasgow, signed The Human League from Sheffield and Gang of Four from Leeds. OWS was unique in signing artists disconnected on a global scale, with the goal of building collaborations in remixing and design. Gripper, from the north east of England, Little Egypt from New York, The Bone Idle from Vienna, Hull and Los Angeles, Looped for Pleasure from Sheffield, Barney Mullhouse from Australia and the United Kingdom, Ooblo from Manchester, Attache from Adelaide, Crackpot from Melbourne and DB Chills from Sydney are also joined by artists resident in Perth, such as Soundlab, the Ku-Ling Bros and Blue Jay. Compact Disc mastering is completed in Sydney, London, and Perth. The artwork for vinyl and CD sleeves, alongside flyers, press advertising and posters, is derived from Manchester, England. These movements in the music flattened geographical hierarchies, where European and American tracks were implicitly valued over Australian-derived material. Through pop music history, the primary music markets of the United Kingdom and United States made success for Australian artists difficult. Off World emphasised that the product was not licensed. It was previously unreleased mate

Cultural Theory, Popular Culture, and the Biblical Studies Classroom Beatrice Lawrence (bio) As universities across the country witness an epidemic of sexual violence on campus, it becomes clear that faculty have an obligation to address this reality, to raise awareness about the crisis, and to work to address its causes. Rape culture, the insidious and ubiquitous set of constructs that shapes gendered self-concepts and expectations about sexual assault, must be analyzed as part of this task. We face the challenge of using the classroom as a locus to examine and try to deconstruct rape culture. Pedagogical strategies are an important component of this, but so is theoretical grounding. Although it is important to notice both the overt and subtle manifestations of rape culture, noticing is not enough: in order to understand the formation and transmission of this culture, we must discuss what lies behind it. Cultural theory provides language and a hermeneutical framework for the critical analysis of rape culture. In large part, it is due to the work of feminist cultural theorists that cultural criticism has been applied to TV, popular music and literature, advertisements, films, and even social media. Multiple hierarchies are present within these media: economic, racial, gendered, and class differentials play out in materials that are often treated as “entertainment,” which subtly and consistently shape concepts of reality for contemporary audiences, especially our students. A connection exists between the Bible and popular culture. Not only does the reader of the Bible encounter cultural material that invites analysis in the text itself, but the afterlife of the Bible in multiple forms of cultural “output” has also made it an integrated part of media encountered even today. One need only watch the opening sequence of Desperate Housewives or take note of the archetype of the “female assassin” to see valences of Eve (specifically in Gen 3) and Yael (Judg 4–5). Models of masculinity that demand physical strength, power, and aggressiveness (for example, famous wrestlers) reflect the valorization of figures like Samson. Biblical characters and themes appear in famous works of art and even popular TV shows, and biblical passages are familiar to those who listen to music, ranging from classical to hip-hop. What this means is that the Bible exists not only as a text that students encounter in biblical studies classrooms but also as a source of models, constructs, and meanings that pervade today’s world. Applying a critical lens to both the text and its modern expressions creates the opportunity for deconstruction of both models and processes [End Page 167] of creation: Who benefits from these images? How does one population receive power when others are denied it? Who creates these pieces? How does the identity of the creator affect the output? What does that reveal about cultural production and its impact? Sexual violence is a topic that is too prominent in not only the Bible but also contemporary popular culture. Biblical stories about sexual violence serve multiple purposes: some focus on the protagonist/perpetrator and his experience (David and Bathsheba, 2 Sam 11–12); some reflect political and national realities (the Levite and his concubine, Judg 19); some serve as theology (Hos 2; Ezek 16 and 23; Amnon and Tamar, 2 Sam 13); and some discrete cases might serve multiple purposes, including cultural critique (Shechem and Dinah, Gen 34). These stories and their accompanying models appear today. For example, the BBC show Luther depends on violence against women for its narrative tension in virtually every episode; the only woman who is not victimized is a violent psychopath. Rape is a plot development device in the critically acclaimed film Gran Torino. Sexual violence in the form of acquaintance rape has been used to advertise Mitchum deodorant, alcoholic beverages, sales at Macy’s, and more—the examples are too numerous to list. As in the Bible, sexual violence is a “fact of life” that serves a function rather than a construct that needs to be addressed directly. Students are familiar with these images and stories. When they read the biblical text, stories about sexual violence resonate in the media that comes at them from every direction, and they can begin to ask the questions...