Celebrity In Popular Culture Research Articles

It Depends

While Comic-Con is a celebration of popular culture, it is also a launching pad for new properties in film and television. In recent years, the conventional thought about how to approach this has changed from handing out free memorabilia such as tee shirts and posters to providing an actual experience in the properties world. This type of advertising is the immersive activation. The goal of the activation is an analogous relationship between the live experience and the mediated, neither serving as the precedent to the other. In embracing this analogous relationship, mediatized and live performances move forward, establishing new entanglements with their audience. The clearest example of this analogous relationship exists in activations. An immersive activation is a live-action event where the spectator is tasked with the moniker of both audience and participant. The shift from “viewer” to “collaborator” is, as Clair Bishop (2012) and so many others have noted, manifested in fascinating and new creations. I take an approach following neuroscientific discoveries, which support this shift through different means joining the brain’s function with philosophy, as I explore the immersive activation.

Dominant Anthropocentrism in the Representations of Nature in Jakarta Post “Destinations” Travel Articles

Travel, travel writing, and tourism industry are today inseparable although travelers are noted to try to distance themselves from tourists. Seen in the critical context of the potential harms caused by tourism, travel article (a sub-genre of travel writing commonly published in mass media) might contribute in one way or another. Therefore, a study on this sub-genre is important to gain a better insight of the degree of its participation in the potentially harmful impact of tourism.
 This essay covers a study on travel articles from the “Destinations” section of The Jakarta Post between September to December 2017. The articles are analyzed for words, sentences, or passages that in one way or another represent to nature. The purpose of this study is to explore and explain how tourism articles represent nature. By extension, I hope to demonstrate how today’s travel articles might contribute to the potentially damaging impact of tourism on nature.
 Throughout the research, I discovered that there are seven ways in which writers represent nature in the studied texts. These ways include representations that focus on 1) spirituality, 2) visual beauty, 3) celebration of popular culture, 4) social media presence, 5) mental rejuvenation, 6) prudent treatment of nature, and 7) concern for preservation. Further analysis on these seven ways of representation led to three tendencies in the representation of nature in the twenty articles, i.e. full anthropocentrism (which covers the first five ways of representation), thoughtful anthropocentrism (the sixth way of representation), and relative ecocentrism (the last type of representation). The unbalanced percentage of representations of nature in the first category appears to support the critical opinion of tourism. Therefore, I argue through the analysis that tourism writing contributes despite relatively small to the imminent threat of tourism industry on natural preservation.

A carnivalistic reading of The Wedding of Zein by Taib Salih

ABSTRACT Reading The Wedding of Zein (1962) by Tayeb Salih from a Bakhtinian perspective can be helpful to trace the revolutionary touch that marks the novel. As the world of Rabelais celebrates the unofficial discourse of the festive life standing against the strictures of the feudal culture, the same celebration of the festive time in terms of merry moments of unbridled indulgence of feasting, joking and folk festivities in the carnival type could be mapped out in the narrative of The Wedding of Zein. The latter presents a reconciliatory vision to syncretise the social and spiritual worlds so as to materialise the delighted and optimistic world that Salih is panting for. The vision of the dream world of Salih collides with a harsh world involving an identity crisis. A facet of the ideal world that Salih heads to undertake lies in cancelling out the identity privileges that are determining in the social, economic and political life. In theory, the carnivalesque implications including the dismantling of hierarchies and the celebration of popular culture are the same principles postmodernism feeds upon. To this end, in view of postmodernism, Salih makes out of the narrative of The Wedding of Zein a carnival to suspend all the hierarchical prerogatives. Similar to Bakhtin as he disrupts the hierarchical social stratification privileging the bourgeois group through the gay time of the wedding, Salih interrogates the official discourse at the time of state building predicated upon the legacy of colonialism, excluding different groups from the Sudanese identity.

GAGA: NOTES ON THE MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC IDENTITY

Lady Gaga distinctively exemplifies the contemporary celebrity in popular culture because of the extent of her fame as well as because of the peculiar persona she presents to her audience of both fans and onlookers. In this paper, I discuss how the persona of the person born as Stefani Germanotta was created and subsequently maintained in a variety of ways related to her naming as Lady Gaga. Invoking the work of Erving Goffman, my discussion extends beyond an analysis of the effectiveness and fame of Lady Gaga’s presentation of self to the ensuing essence of her persona itself, that is, of Lady Gaga as Gaga rather than gaga. Not merely a brand, Lady Gaga is in more ways than only economic also what Lady Gaga has become to herself and to others. As the performer slips in and out of the many public personae she has created in her name, I argue, she has become Gaga to the public at large and, with only minimal qualification, among her once personal friends as well as in the privacy of her socially constituted self. The truth that has to be acknowledged today is that Lady Gaga has indeed become Lady Gaga.

“A Mission of Enormous Transcendence”: The Cultural Politics of Music During Colombia’s Liberal Republic, 1930-1946

AbstractThis article examines the cultural programs developed by reformist intellectuals and artists working for the Colombian government during the period known as the Liberal Republic (1930-1946). It explores the implementation of two music programs in particular, the orfeones obreros and the murgas populares, with attention to both the political discourses from above and the everyday music practices from below. I show that, far from being inspired by common interest or nationalist sentiment alone, the ruling elites turned to cultural politics as an arena through which to define the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in a way that naturalized the former’s place in power. I argue that while music programs asserted the unity, horizontality, and inclusiveness of the nation by glorifying popular music, they also deepened the terms of exclusion they professed to level by essentializing the pueblo. However, this official celebration of popular culture, which rendered its practitioners archaic and passive repositories of the nation’s soul, was challenged by a very dynamic, effervescent, and transnationally open music landscape driven by the activities of creative grassroots musicians. Using data from the National Folkloric Survey of 1942, I explore the everyday music practices of popular sectors in different areas of the country and the challenge that these practices posed to elite definitions of popular music.

The People's Show: A Critical Analysis

1990s heralded a new form of museum exhibition: The People's Show. A light-hearted celebration of popular culture, the concept has had phenomenal success throughout the United Kingdom. Beneath the humour, however, are more complex and radical agendas relating to cultural rights. paper explores the issues associated with the rise and possible wane of this museum-based popular cultural phenomenon.

Humor and Comedy in Puppetry: A Celebration of Popular Culture

This volume is about puppetry, an expression of popular and folk culture which is extremely widespread around the world and yet has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Puppetry, which is intended for audiences of adults as well as children, is a form of communication and entertainment and an esthetic and artistic creation. Of the many aspects of puppetry worthy of scholarly study, this book's focus is on a central and dominant feature--humor and comedy.

Modernization and Dancing in Rural France: From la Bourrée to le Fox-Trot

Social history picks up the drumbeat of dancing in both the condemnation and the celebration of popular culture. Listen to the curé of Savigny (Rhône) in 1821, worrying about the peasants' overindulgence: “since they are full of passions, and dancing only enflames these passions, since these meetings never finish without crime, since a single debauched person can infect those who watch him, and since things are said [at dances] which should not be heard, and things are done which should not be seen, it is prudent for priests to oppose dances altogether.” A century later this was the mot d'ordre of his eminence the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, who proscribed modern dancing, and also that of the moral pundit of Le Peuple, who called the tango, the fox trot and the shimmy “une sorte de précoce et dangereuse défloration virginale.”