Mass Cultural Forms Research Articles

An Art of the Radio: Musique concrète and mass culture, 1941–1952

This article attends to the emergence of musique concrète as a theoretical object in Pierre Schaeffer’s writing between 1941 and 1952, seeing it as the logical endpoint of Schaeffer’s quest for an art proper to the radio. In this strong sense of the word, art is here positioned in opposition to entertainment, and as such Schaeffer seeks to separate the properly radiophonic from the impure, mercenary forms that radio had hitherto adopted. Schaeffer’s account of musique concrète follows this logic, seeking to cast off the vestiges of radio drama that remain audible in such works as Symphonie pour un homme seul. By way of conclusion, I suggest that grasping the entanglement of musique concrète with mass-cultural forms such as radio requires a mode of reading oriented not towards formalism or sonic ontology but towards the figure of the text.

Political Poetics of Arab Rap as a Form of Memorial Culture

The purpose of the article is to analyse modern Arab rap culture in the politics of memory. The author analyses the tactics and strategies of imagining and inventing the past, its ideologically and politically motivated reinterpretations in the discourse of Arabic rap. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of Arabic rap as a form of memory politics, since most academic studies of memorial culture are limited to the analysis of the visualization and actualization of the past in the nationalist and political imagination, which leads to ignoring the texts of modern mass culture and consumer society as forms and dimensions of the mnemonic space. The article analyses the contribution of Arabic rap to the formation and development of modern memorial culture in contexts of the historical memory of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The article also analyses a wide range of problems presented in the Arabic rap discourse. It is presumed that texts of the rap singers inspire the fragmentation of the Arab societies, actualising and visualising various versions of the memorial culture. It is assumed that rap as a form of mass culture can significantly influence the politics of memory as one of the spaces for the actualization and visualization of various memorial canons inspired by the generational differences in ideological and political preferences of Arab societies in contexts of the transformation of collective historical memory.

Cyberpunk as a Metacultural Movement: Philosophical-Cultural Analysis

The aim of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of modern mass culture and during this analysis find out its ontological status including scientism-technological imperatives of cyberculture and ideas of transhumanism. Results. Cyberpunk is an interesting, functional and new (in comparison with classical examples) form of mass culture, cultural-ideological movement, and sphere of translation and the intersection of protest ideas and meanings, due to its genre and sectoral pluralism (science fiction, film industry, music, design, video games, fashion, ideology, etc.), and also logics of technodeterminism, is still an important factor of transformation cultural-art space in the 21st century. Scientific novelty. In the article, for the first time, realised the philosophical-cultural analysis of cyberpunk including its peculiarities as a literary genre, phenomenon of mass culture and aesthetics. Conclusions. It is proved that cyberpunk appeared as a genre of science fiction literature in the 1960s-1970s and then later through conceptualisation of ideas in the 80s and agreeing of transcendental impulses counterculture of the 60s with computerisation and the specifics of technological evolution in the 90s, has evolved to the level of a metacultural movement. As the latter, it encompasses the literary genre, the film and fashion industry, architecture and graphic design (with a special aesthetic), technoanthropology, futurology and identity theory, and ideological discourse. It is confirmed that thanks to protest as a manifestation of freedom, the actualisation of the problem of corporeality, and dystopian high-tech projections, with the help of postmodern relativism and poststructuralist rhizomorphism, cyberpunk annihilates modern cultural narratives, thus creating many risks, including the potential formation of pathological forms of identification, declarative asociality, and cyber-prosthetics, which often develop into horrific manifestations of dehumanisation.

European models of festive communication: national and international

A holiday is an eternal and global category of human existence. All tribes and peoples had and have their own system of celebrations, and solemn events designed to unite people, protect and promote the values around which society organizes its life. The purpose of the article is to show the historically determined uniqueness of national holidays and to trace the trend towards the creation of a pan European fund of mass holiday culture using concrete examples. The methodology of the article is based on descriptive and comparative methodological approaches of ethnological studies. Scientific novelty. The article examines historically formed models of holiday traditions of the peoples of Europe, which reflect the specifics of the state system of each country, and those that have gained international distribution. Conclusions. Holidays change throughout historical development depending on economic, political and cultural transformations. The study made it possible to trace the processes of detraditionalization of European society and the associated transition to new modern forms of mass culture.

Мусульманский панк-дискурс в современной Индонезии

The purpose of the article is to analyze contemporary punk culture in Indonesia in its Muslim version. The author examines the activity of punk bands that have a reputation as pro-Muslim and pro-Islamist ones in modern Indonesia. The novelty of the research lies in the analysis of the Muslim punk discourse and its contribution to the development and transformation of modern ideological preferences of a part of the Muslim Ummah. A wide range of issues presented in the modern political discourse of the Muslim punk movement in Indonesia is also cosidered. The author demonstrates that the range of ideological preferences of Muslim believers integrated into punk culture is limited mainly by conservative Islam. Therefore, the contribution of representatives of the punk movement to the development of the concepts of Jihad is also shown. The author analyzes the ideological features of the Muslim punk discourse, presuming that Islamism, conservatism and anti-Zionism became its systemic features. It is assumed that punk discourse as a form of mass culture can significantly influence the development of the Ummah in a country where a significant part of the socially and culturally active population are young people who tend to use Islam as a factor in legitimizing their own forms of political activity.

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Aerobics on Tape

Set in the early 1980s in San Diego, California, Physical (Apple TV+, 2021−) dramatizes the emergence of aerobics on videotape, a prescient chapter of media history that promised to transform female viewers into the masters of their bodies, lives, and futures. Although not a feminist critique, the series is an exploration of the vicissitudes of a self-empowerment. As media technology has become more interactive, the message that women can achieve an Instagrammable body by following the self-help regimens of modern-day Sheilas has become even more pervasive—and insidious. At a time when empowerment is sold on T-shirts and technologies of the self are peddled by countless influencers, Physical offers a genealogy of these taken-for-granted realities. An overdue tribute to a form of mass culture that is usually not taken seriously, even in media circles, Physical offers the unsettling possibility that self-empowerment has become the cause of women’s problems, not their solution.

Illuminating the Antebellum Literary Marketplace: The Artfulness of Literary Labor in George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light

Abstract George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light (1850) has been understood as a characteristic text of urban sensationalism, a body of writing more often studied for its response to modernity than literary artfulness. Yet, while Foster seems eager to spectacularize the hidden corners of urban life, he also creates metaliterary moments around scenes of literary business and labor, especially the nighttime labor that the technology of gaslight enabled. Reading these self-referential moments in the context of dramatic changes in publishing facilitated by gaslight opens a theoretical intersection between materialist and aesthetic criticism concerning the relationship between work and art. I argue that Foster presents New York by Gas-Light as at once a product of his industrialized labor and an artifact of self-conscious literary crafting by cultivating attention to the material conditions of his aesthetic creation. As I show, Foster’s reflexive materialist aesthetics disrupts longstanding premises of literary history: it counters largely linguistic accounts of literary style by connecting literary artistry to the work of commercial publication, resists an autonomous ideal that abstracts literature from the material labor of authors, and reclaims the artistic possibilities of what might otherwise be regarded as mass cultural forms.

Formation and Development of Cultural Competence by Increasing Access to Material Forms of Historical and Art-History Heritage

The formation of the practical competence of the cultural cycle is determined, first of all, by the formation of access to the fund of material and non-material forms of art, which makes it possible to expand the possibilities of an individual to increase his cultural level. The relevance of the study is determined primarily by the fact that each individual must not only carry out his practical activities but also form an understanding of the meaning of cultural studies in his mind. In this regard, and in the context of overcoming crisis phenomena in the economy, turning to non-material forms becomes a priority task for bearers. The novelty of the research is determined by the possibilities of increasing access to cultural products, while the importance of access is determined not only by high culture. The authors show that the ability to access forms of mass culture also matters. It is shown that one of the possibilities of access to popular culture is to increase the level of distribution of library access. Using the example of countries that declare their commitment to raising the cultural level of the population, the necessity for the development of digital educational resources is shown. The practical significance of the study is determined by the possibilities of widely involving the population in the processes of digitalisation of information carriers about art and, on the basis of this, about the formation of general cultural competence in society as a whole.

Letter from the Editors

Letter from the Editors

Transnational sports soundscapes: Soccer announcers and radio in Argentina and Chile, 1920s–60s

The article contributes to the field of cultural studies and radio history by focusing on soccer (or fútbol), arguably the most significant mass spectacle in twentieth-century Latin America. By exploring the trajectories, iconic voices and styles of sportscasters, the article reconstructs the masculine soundscape of soccer in Argentina and Chile between the 1920s and 1960s. Play-by-play announcers, who ranged from second-rate actors and singers to professional journalists, crafted their own versions of masculinity and nationalism that were central to representing sports culture in an increasingly transnational context. The article pays special attention to the sporting press, audio records and sports films, since many commentators borrowed heavily from other forms of mass culture. Their oral representations of the game, loaded with moral evaluations and political statements, can be seen as cultural texts because they enabled new ways of imagining sports for much larger audiences than those sitting in the stadium.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America by Gorica Majstorovic

 Reviews Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America . By G M. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. . x+  pp. £. ISBN ––––. is highly innovative contribution to the field presents a timely re-evaluation of the Latin American modernist and avant-garde literature of the inter-war period through an anti-imperialist lens, drawing on a range of conceptual frameworks from both postcolonial and decolonial critical traditions. Building on the scholarship of Walter Mignolo, Beatriz Sarlo, Pheng Cheah, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Global Modernities examines the Latin American literary histories of the early twentieth century both as a nexus of decolonial thought and cultural production within the Global South and as a forerunner of the transnational South–South solidarities which would emerge during the s and s. Defining the Global South as both physical and geographical space, as well as ‘a discursive position from which theories of globalization are exposed and denounced’ (p. xiii), Gorica Majstorovic’s text maintains a focus which is firmly transnational. Considering avant-garde literary periodicals from across the continent , Mexican petrofiction, novels from Ecuador and Argentina, and travel writing from Nicaraguan and Dominican authors, this study sheds light on the multiple modernities at work in Latin America during this period. e corpus is impressive in its diversity of both geography and form, and successfully uncovers a network of connections between modernist cultural experimentation and emergent decolonial thought. e intermedial bent of the book is key here, as it facilitates a broader dialogue between the central literary texts of the corpus and other forms of contemporary mass culture, such as cinema, radio, and photography. Chapters  and  examine the output of a range of Latin American avant-garde magazines of the s, foregrounding the cultural and intellectual dialogue which these publications generated across the Global South as the engine of an alternative modernity which encompassed Andean indigenismo, the Harlem Renaissance, and the peripheral European modernism of the Balkans. Chapter  presents a new perspective on the novels Baldomera by Ecuadorian writer Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco and Los siete locos by the Argentine Roberto Arlt, using the aesthetics of Russian constructivist cinematic montage to elicit new meanings from both texts. Chapter  focuses on the mobility of Latin American modernities in the travel writing of, among others, Rubén Darío, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Ricardo Güiraldes. Finally , in Chapter  the author addresses the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Global South in the inter-war years through a study of Armando Discépolo’s  play Babilonia, foregrounding socio-economic factors such as mass immigration, precarity, and marginality to identify a dissident and radical ‘improbable cosmopolitanism ’ (p. ). Overall, Global Modernities convincingly advances a key thesis, namely that a more profound understanding of modernity generally, and in Latin America in particular, cannot be achieved without critical engagement with issues of empire, indigeneity, and decolonialization. By highlighting the threads of antiimperialism and transnational solidarity that run through the continent’s inter-war MLR, .,   literary production, this study destabilizes hegemonic anglophone subjectivities of the modern and posits the Global South as a key site in the articulation of a plural modernity in which aesthetics and the politics of social justice are inextricably intertwined. E B L Cortázar and Music. By N R. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Alongside literature and politics, music is an inescapable presence in the work of Julio Cortázar. In this thorough and wide-ranging study, Nicholas Roberts provides a detailed analysis of the myriad ways in which music appears in the novels, short stories, and critical work of the Argentine. In the process, he reveals that music was no mere leitmotiv, but rather provided the structural tools for key works. Cortázar loved music, wrote passionately about his preferences, and created memorable characters—Horacio Oliveira, the stuffy French critic Bruno, Johnny Carter—for whom music is more than just entertainment or pastime: it is the stuff of life itself. Roberts divides his subject’s musical interests into three broad genres: la música culta, or classical music; tango, Argentina’s (and Uruguay’s) beloved national sound; and jazz, from early New Orleans stylings through to...

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

НАРОДНЕ ХОРЕОГРАФІЧНЕ МИСТЕЦТВО ЯК ЗАСІБ ПІЗНАННЯ ТА ЗБЕРЕЖЕННЯ ТРАДИЦІЙ НАРОДУ, ПАТРІОТИЧНОГО ВИХОВАННЯ МОЛОДОГО ПОКОЛІННЯ

The article points out the urgency of implementing organizational measures to draw young people's attention to the cultural and folklore heritage of the Hutsul region and the formation and functioning of ethnic choreography today. The issues of preserving the folklore and ethnographic original of folk dance as a universal language of communication, an important aspect in the formation of ideals, values, internal and external appearance, a powerful pedagogical factor in shaping the moral principles of personality, culture of interpersonal relations and, of course, patriotism. The festival movement as a mass form of presentation and creative dialogue over the past 20 years has become much more active, representing various areas of art and creativity. However, there are other forms of mass culture with the involvement of a large audience of fans of different ages, including folk art and folklore – celebrations of calendar and customary holidays, folk festivals in the air on the occasion of religious holidays, folk art festivals, fairs and more. Preservation and reflection of colorful folklore and traditions, in eternal things like music, song and dance, its use and transfusion to future generations give faith that our future should be appropriate and original. Trends in the development of festivals in Ukraine are relevant and their popularity indicates the interest of people in them. Thanks to the conscious citizens of our country, the functioning of cultural festivals is a significant contribution to the prosperity of folk art, creating space for new creative performances. Also, cultural events influence the creation of new or already formed creative units, allow them to identify themselves as individuals or formed artists. Organizational arrangements it is necessary to put on an influential place, to determine their need not only for entertainment purposes, but formative and developing, why they actually need the participation of young people. The main idea of the modern cultural process is confirmed, it is to motivate the young generation to be active in learning about national culture, traditions, art, in particular Ukrainian dance.

Past Continuous: The Chronopolitics of Representation in Syrian Television Drama

Syria serves as a leading producer of the musalsal [dramatic miniseries], a key Arabic-language mass cultural form. With its dark realism and biting humor, Syrian drama has become a primary mode of sociopolitical commentary for both producers and audiences, given the restrictions on journalistic and academic expression and the absence of participatory politics in most Arab polities. Drama creators deploy a range of temporal strategies to comment on social and political conditions. A reflexive, intertextual chronopolitics runs through serials produced before and during the Syrian conflict that began in 2011. The question ‘what went wrong?’ preoccupies musalsal makers, and their works frequently foreground their belief that Syrian society is ‘going backwards.’ For example, in historical genres of television serials, idealized images harken back to perceived golden ages of cosmopolitanism, throwing the contemporary condition into bitter relief. Makers of dramas set in the present invert this technique, locating the sources of contemporary ills in past mistakes and historical injustices, revealed in flashback, dialogue, and voiceover. Through a technique of narrative allochrony, drama creators also highlight their understanding of modernity’s lapses, depicting select practices, mores, and attitudes as out of sync with what they see as contemporary values. These dramatic depictions of the past and present all point to a failed national project and a derailed modernity. Their creators seek to counter what they deem as a flawed political and social evolution, one that they believe has led to deterioration in the region and a devastating war in Syria.

They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen

Reviewed by: They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen James C. Nicholson (bio) They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic. By Kenneth Cohen. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pp. xi, 320. $55.00 cloth; $26.99 ebook) Like much of American culture, sports have often become overtly politicized terrain in recent years. But as Curator of Early American Culture at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Kenneth Cohen, shows, the American sporting realm was a site of cultural, social, and political tension long before the National Football League, or even the national anthem, existed. Interspersing the experiences of individual sportsmen into his examination of early American sporting venues (broadly defined to include taverns, billiard rooms, theatres, and racetracks), Cohen argues that these sites provided opportunities "for contesting and limiting elites' social authority while ultimately supporting their economic and political power" (p. 244). Building on and complicating the work of a generation of historians of early American sports culture, Cohen utilizes an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including newspapers, letters, and other archival material, in support of his facially paradoxical assertion that sporting culture "simultaneously promoted egalitarianism and hierarchy on the Anglo-American mainland between 1750 and 1860" in sporting venues where "white men's shared right to access and engage made elites seem more like other white men, and thus made differences in wealth and power seem less unnatural and more reflective of superior ability and character" (pp. 3, 10). In the decades before the American Revolution, wealthy colonists invested in sporting venues in part to "forge a more distinctive, exclusive, unified, and powerful colonial elite" (p. 23). These venues [End Page 591] gave prominent colonists an opportunity to strengthen business relationships, flaunt their status, and consolidate political power. However, as tensions with Great Britain heightened in the 1770s, American colonies began banning horse racing, cock fighting, and plays in an attempt to foster cultural solidarity and to "scale back a politicized sporting culture that, by 1774, had gotten away from the gentlemen in Congress and jeopardized their leadership of the patriot movement" (p. 87). In the aftermath of revolution, many Americans bristled against any whiff of aristocracy, including genteel sporting culture. However, investors in new sporting venues promoted their capacity to benefit all of society even as they pursued a broader goal of "the construction of economic and political systems that espoused competitive opportunism while rooting power among the few men with the assets and connections to control capital flows" (p. 127). In the Antebellum era, the sporting realm engendered what Cohen calls an early form of mass culture, and survived reformers' efforts to eradicate it. As wealth became more concentrated in the United States, white men across the class spectrum used sport to assert their masculine status and to challenge stereotypes associated with their social class. The antebellum sports culture that embraced an "implied democratic opportunity and meritocracy" ultimately helped to legitimize the notion that the accumulation and preservation of wealth in America was inherently moral (p. 234). Tracking continuity and change within American sporting culture over the course of nearly a century, They Will Have Their Game covers an impressive amount of ground and will be essential reading for scholars of early American society and culture and of American sports history more broadly. [End Page 592] James C. Nicholson james c. nicholson is the author of four books on American sports history, including The Notorious John Morrissey (2016). He taught history at the University of Kentucky. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

Riddle as a Structural Element of the Quest Genre

One of the most sought after forms of contemporary mass culture is the quest, represented in various formats from video games, to cinema, to city tours, to especially equipped game spaces. What is the secret the popularity of this format whose roots can be found in archaic myths and rituals? The article establishes the interconnection between the quest with literature, cinema, video games and reality shows. The phenomenon of the riddle in the context of real virtuality has never been explored in terms of cultural studies, modern artistic game forms are just beginning to be interpreted in the age of digitalization.

Telephonic Modernismo

Abstract This essay analyzes the Havana-based literary weekly La Habana Elegante to consider the hemispheric dimensions of late nineteenth-century media change and the role that writers of Latin American descent played in it. As new electric media and improved print technology powered an expanding and interconnected world of print, La Habana Elegante mediated a hemispheric, Spanish-speaking print culture, especially through its foreign correspondence from New York City. The periodical defined that print culture through a notion of latinidad that bridged Latin America and the United States—and by envisioning a two-way flow of ideas between writers and readers. As US-based English-language newspapers developed emerging mass cultural forms that starkly divided producers and consumers, La Habana Elegante tapped into notions of simultaneity inspired by the telegraph and, especially, the telephone to promote a more interactive modern media system meant to circulate Latin American culture throughout the hemisphere.

Darth Vader in Ukraine: On the boundary between reality and mythology

AbstractIn the autumn of 2015, Star Wars once again rattled the world with a new episode, The Force Awakens. The first movie of the series was released in 1977, and ever since the 1980s emerging new episodes have turned this epopoeia into a recognizable mass cultural text that is well-known all over the world nowadays and which has been transformed into a wide range of forms such as series, comic strips, video games, toys, stickers and other forms of mass culture. However, what happens when a mass cultural text gets fused into a new context of political discourse? What kinds of unpredictable clashes of meanings might be evoked on the threshold of mass culture and ideology, dominative hierarchy and democratic masquerade, or even communist and capitalist semiosphere? What mythological meanings appear when a fictional hero acquires a real body and becomes a politician? The present paper puts forward a semiotic analysis of the eccentric performance of Darth Vader the politician in the contemporary Ukrainian political life. The case employs the concepts of text and transmedial world, as well as notions of remediation and resemiotization, in order to make sense of how political masquerade appears in the semiosphere of the Ukrainian spectator. In addition, the paper introduces the examples of semiotic interaction between the contemporary fictional character Darth Vader, his namesake politician, and the collective memory of both: the traditional culture and the Soviet ideological past.

A regional romance of the storming of the art museum: Cultural contradictions of The Lionel Lindsay Art Gallery and Library

Abstract This article examines cultural contradictions of a regional Australiana collection, namely The Lionel Lindsay Art Gallery and Library (Lindsay Collection). This collection was established in Toowoomba by W. R. F. Bolton (1905–73), opened by Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1959 and rehoused at Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery in the mid-1990s. Sir Lionel Lindsay (1874–1961) was, among many other identities, an artist, critic and tastemaker who condemned ‘the mob invasion of Art’ and disseminated a catastrophist cultural politics. For Lindsay, the collection named in his honour was a microcosm of ‘old traditional Australia’, before the nation and the art museum were stormed by ‘mass’ culture. The vanguard of that storming was modernism, which he viewed as a manifestation of mass-cultural fashion and sensationalism. Lindsay himself, however, had been a sensationalist newspaper illustrator and fashionable commercial artist from the 1890s to the 1920s; examples of his work for mass cultural forms are held in the collection. Drawing on museological lemmas by Quiccheberg and Bataille, and on Frankfurt School theses, this article presents a critical overview of contradictory cultural drives and vectors integral to the Lindsay Collection’s formation in the 1950s. Cultural contradictions of the collection are analysed not as idiosyncrasies of Lindsay and Bolton’s collecting praxes, but as symptomatic of the condition of cultural heritage in commodity society.