Forms Of Popular Culture Research Articles

Monument Valley, Instagram, and the Closed Circle of Representation

Monument Valley, Instagram, and the Closed Circle of Representation

Trends in Cultural Journalism

Various studies report that cultural journalism increasingly focuses on service and entertainment instead of serious arts coverage. The press prioritizes popular culture over traditional high arts to a growing extent. However, this shift in journalistic attention does not necessarily signify a straightforward decline in aesthetic standards, as popular cultural forms like film have developed along the lines of high art principles in the past decades. This article charts trends in American, Dutch, French, and German film journalism between 1955 and 2005. It demonstrates that coverage is typified by a serious aesthetic approach from the 1970s onwards. The principles of art are seen to steer journalists’ attention to an important degree: the review remains the predominant journalistic genre, and newspapers devote more attention to films by prestigious directors than strictly commercial moviemakers. As such, film’s prominence in the press does not seem to indicate a decline in serious cultural journalism but rather a revaluation of a popular cultural form.

Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific: Popular Culture in Singapore and Sydney

Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific: Popular Culture in Singapore and Sydney

The eye of Persepolis’ tiger: How melancholy and nostalgia resonate through Satrapi’s animated film

Abstract Will Eisner coined the term sequential art to refer to comic strips/books and graphic novels, while arguing that this distinct discipline not only has much in common with film-making but it is in fact a forerunner to film-making. Sequential art is a powerful form of popular culture. However, the scholarly community has generally ignored this popular form of art. This article discusses the animated film Persepolis (Paronnaud and Satrapi, 2007) and explores the ways in which animation is used. We analyse this film in terms of the cultural memory discourse and suggest that this film not only creates a melancholic cultural memory of the past it negotiates, but also, paradoxically, it generates a nostalgic one. As we shall argue, the film’s inherent melancholy and nostalgia allegorically communicate a quest for identity in our present-day societies.

The Importance and Power of Networks in Health Research, Practice and Policy

Jennifer Zelmer showcases in Healthcare Policy 11(3) how with complex care patterns comes a need for strong coordination of care. Movies and other forms of popular culture have propagated the notion that we are all joined by six degrees of separation. Formal research has proven this theory to be valid in some cases and has refined it in others. More importantly, studies have explored why people in networks sometimes do – and other times do not – invest time, energy, and effort to connect and share knowledge with others.

Oral history, collective memory and socio-political criticism: A study of popular culture in Cameroon

The growing popularity of contemporary Cameroonian popular cultural production is a significant indication of the value attached to the medium as well as the appreciation of the opportunity offered by the Biya regime. As opposed to the Ahidjo era, Cameroonian popular cultural products today are preoccupied with the daily concerns of the society at large and the masses in particular who have appropriated the art, with its evolving thematic and stylistic focus, thereby making it suitable as a veritable avenue for the representation of voices. Also considered as new forms of oral literature, pop culture owes invaluable contribution to public social discourse. There is no denying therefore that the present form of popular culture is a hybrid of folk or traditional art customized in step with the exigencies of contemporary Cameroonian society. This paper articulates the relationship between historico-social reality and popular culture showing how Cameroonian popular cultural musicians use history and social realities as raw material for the configuration of creative ideology. It further demonstrates that without forfeiting artistic grandeur, popular culture acts as a reservoir of memory, collective experience and sociopolitical criticism.

The anthropology of film in Serbia

The term ‘film’ refers to feature length commercial movies both of foreign and domestic production. The phenomenon of film is approached as a form of popular culture which means that the emphasis is on its cultural-communicative traits. The paper aims to make visible the dynamic field of anthropology of film present in Serbian academia, as well as introduce readers to this subdiscipline and point them towards the relevant literature – both foreign and domestic – in the field. The paper has been envisioned as an introduction to the edited volume Anthropology of film – the first book in the new series of editions titled New Serbian anthropology. Six anthropological and two sociological papers which together make up the edited volume are presented here. The aim is to highlight the thematic breadth and wealth of research in this area of anthropology.

Of postfeminist girls and fireflies: Consuming Rome in Un giorno speciale

For Pasolini the extinction of the firefly symbolized the disappearance of any popular resistance into the homogeneity of consumer culture. However, Francesca Comencini revitalizes the symbolic potential of the firefly for Rome through an engagement with the Italian postfeminist girl in her 2012 film Un giorno speciale. Made in the wake of the Berlusconi scandals, the film mobilizes a familiar set of dichotomies to express nostalgia for the clarity of a second-wave feminist vision: margins and center, authenticity and artifice, rebellion and conformity, agency and coercion. However, in blending more popular cultural forms with familiar apocalyptical readings of the cityscape, the film also marks significant shifts in interpretations of the cityscape and its association with the body politic through the degraded female figure. Recognition of the ambiguities of postfeminist culture, expressed through the motif of ‘girl power,’ reframes spatial dichotomies of artifice and authenticity. The film puts questions of branding and performance at the center of the debate about Italy’s future. Rome emerges as a postmodern cityscape (Trentin, 2013), in which the girl can nonetheless embody intermittently the symbolic potential of the elusive ‘firefly.’

Soccer Versus Jihad

Stadia have reemerged as a preferred jihadist target. The Islamic State (IS) targeted a friendly soccer match between France and Germany in its November 2015 attacks in Paris. (Martinez, 2015) German police said days later that they had foiled a plot against a stadium in the German city of Hannover barely an hour before the German national team was scheduled to play. Similarly, Belgium cancelled a friendly soccer match against Spain (Ryan, 2015). The list of targeted stadia is long. It dates back to an Al-Qaeda plan to strike against the 1998 World Cup and includes sporting grounds in among others Iraq and Nigeria. The targeting of stadia spotlights jihadists’ often convoluted relationship to soccer. Many jihadists see soccer as an infidel invention designed to distract the faithful from fulfilling their religious obligations. Yet others are soccer fans or former, failed or disaffected players who see the sport as an effective recruitment and bonding tool. Men like Osama Bin Laden, Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah base their advocacy of the utility of soccer on those Salafi and mainstream Islamic scholars who argue that the Prophet Mohammed advocated physical exercise to maintain a healthy body as opposed to more militant students of Islam who at best seek to rewrite the rules of the game to Islamicize it, if not outright ban the sport. Self-declared IS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi embodies the jihadists’ double-edged attitude toward soccer. A passionate player in his pre-IS days (McCant, 2015) Al-Baghdadi’s IS and its affiliates take credit for scores of attacks on stadia. A successful attack on a major soccer match in Europe would go a long way to achieve IS’s goals of polarizing communities, exacerbating social tensions, and driving the marginalized further into the margins. In targeting the sport and stadia, jihadists focus on the world’s most popular form of popular culture and the one fixture that evokes the kind of deep-seated emotion capable of rivalling passions associated with religion and sectarianism. Yet the relationship between militant Islam and soccer is one that has barely been researched by scholars in multiple disciplines, including Islamic, Middle Eastern, and sports studies. This article constitutes a first stab at trying to fill the gap.

Emigration, return migration and surprise homecomings in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

This article explores the cultural and ideological management of mass migration in twenty-first-century Ireland, arguing that narratives of return have come to dominate representations of emigration. The almost universal focus on the moment or experience of return distinguishes the current era from other periods of high emigration in Ireland. The phenomenon of the surprise homecoming video is scrutinised alongside recent cinematic releases, newspaper articles, blogs and cultural events including The Gathering (2013) and the Marriage Equality Referendum (2015). By drawing these sources together, the article exposes how cultural representations of emigration have been shaped to fit with official narratives of a business-friendly nation in recovery. By repeatedly showcasing the emotional pleasures of return these popular culture forms support a fantasy of easy return and mask the real economic and social problems driving the latest wave of emigration.

Orality and Refractions of Early Literary Textualizations in Gurdjieff’s <i>Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson</i>

In this article I present and discuss some of the literary aspects of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (published in 1949) and analyze, in broader strokes, the reflection and residue in his work of oral and early literary cultures. Written in the 1920s, and revised into the 1930s, Gurdjieff’s 1,200+ page magnum opus draws significantly from pre-existing literary and religious traditions and stands in the liminal space between orality and writing in a number of notable ways. Not only is Beelzebub’s Tales told in the mode of a dialogue, between Beelzebub and his grandson, Hassein, but the text of the Tales themselves reflect an influence both direct and indirect from oral storytelling, popular culture, and early literary forms that were prevalent in wellknown, as well as lesser known, literary texts particularly from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. I first address briefly Gurdjieff’s own attitude toward oral culture and language as expressed in the preface to his work. I then focus on Beelzebub’s Tales and several points of correspondence with early textualizations of oral culture such as The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s The Decameron, and a notable example from the second century, The Golden Ass. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales stands in its own time and context between oral and literate cultures and employs and parallels many of the formal and cultural elements of these early textualizations in the same way that they did in their own time.

Social commentary, subaltern voices and the alternative medium of Zimdancehall music: Unpacking the music of Winky D and Sniper Storm

ABSTRACTThe article explores the subject of Zimbabwean dancehall (Zimdancehall) music, a contemporary genre whose local popularity is on the rise, particularly among urban youths. Zimdancehall is infamous for its sometimes ‘dirty’ lyrics and the stereotyped ‘ghetto’/dancehall culture of drug and alcohol abuse, sex and rebelliousness that pervade its creation and consumption. This article critically analyses selected songs by two of the most popular and established Zimdancehall musicians, Winky D and Sniper Storm. Their music shows that beyond the party themes and colloquial language employed in Zimdancehall, the genre embodies deep commentary and consciousness on topical issues affecting society. It is also shown in this article that Zimdancehall, as a form of popular culture, has positioned itself as an alternative medium through which youths, as a subaltern group, speak back to power, pointing out their daily tribulations, while at the same time deconstructing the hegemony of the elites who wield political and economic authority.

‘Savage times come again’: Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885–1920

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885–1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates.

Tarp populizmo ir poparcheologijos: populiarioji kultūra šiuolaikinio Lietuvos teatro scenoje

There has been a proliferation of studies on popular culture (or vacillating terms such as mass culture, culture for the masses, culture industry, media culture ) that interpret/investigate the popular as cultural construction – something ‘staged’ rather than ‘natural’ or ‘given’. According to Nestor Garcia Canclini, three currents play the major role in this ‘theatricalization’ of the popular: folklore (as invented traditions), the culture industry, and political populism. Performance can play an important part in all three spheres; however, the main question is how it deals with the popular – by reconstructing and multiplying its images, narratives and identities, by appropriating or by challenging and deconstructing them. If we understand various forms of popular culture as “imaginary stagings of the social,” theatre which forms a tense, interrogative relationship with the popular can become the platform for investigation of the means by which our perception of reality is constructed and new models of identification are produced. Furthermore, there are quite a number of examples in contemporary Lithuanian theatre where combining and contrasting the elements of popular culture / dramatic discourse / personal narratives produce a multiple network of representations that accurately reveal the hidden power struggles of contemporary society as well as various mechanisms of manipulation. On the other hand, contemporary theatre can very easily become part of the popular culture by choosing to mirror its language and to comply with the rules of popularity. In this paper, the author examines the ways in which the popular culture has been represented (re-contextualization, ironic interpretation, critical deconstruction, or mimetic mirroring) on the stage of post-Soviet Lithuanian theatre, at the same time addressing the larger issues about the political and social implications of these particular stagings of the popular

Nordic noir in the UK: the allure of accessible difference

This article takes a closer look at the recent success of Nordic noir in the United Kingdom considering especially the ways in which this particular aesthetic or popular cultural form has come to function as a medium for intercultural communication wherein the perceived Nordicness of the genre plays a central role in negotiating social and cultural desires and challenges pertaining mostly to the receiving culture. Nordic noir, I argue, is not merely a fleeting fashion but a publishing and media phenomenon that tells us something about particular patterns of cultural consumption in the first decades of the twenty-first century United Kingdom.

BVI Barbie: Materializing Subjectivity on the Beauty Pageant Stage

The British Virgin Islands (BVI) is a small Eastern Caribbean country whose economy is based on elite tourism and financial services and where questions of local affiliation intersect with global prerogatives and competing national loyalties. These intersections were highlighted in the talent performance of the winning contestant of a 2009 pageant selecting a queen to represent the BVI in the Miss Universe pageant. In her performance, the contestant took on the persona of a collectible Virgin Islands Barbie Doll to address concerns about her racial and ethnic authenticity. Drawing from Inger Sjørslev’s work on public performance, I argue that, in performance, the contestant materialized a conceptualization of belonging that resists racial or ethnic embodiment and flows beyond the borders of the nation. The article illuminates how popular cultural forms represent and respond to local impacts of globalization, transnational migration, and neoliberal policies and practices, and adds to recent studies noting the emergence of new conceptualizations of citizenship, identity, and subjectivity in the English-speaking Caribbean.

“We Stick Out Like a Sore Thumb . . .”

Employing the concept of racial evasion—a derivation of Bonilla-Silva’s colorblind ideology theory—the author analyzes 237 songs of underground white and nonwhite rappers from 2006 to 2010. Performing a content analysis on their lyrics, the author finds that white artists make fewer references to racially political and social themes (e.g., racial profiling, police brutality, racist policies) than nonwhite artists—what the author terms racial evasion. The author speculates that white rappers, understanding that they operate in a specifically racialized black and brown cultural art form, deemphasize or mask their racial identity in their lyrics. This tactic is achieved through lyrically referencing hypermasculine tropes such as violence, misogyny, and homophobia to a greater degree than nonwhite artists. This work demonstrates the strategic use of hypermasculine discourse as a rhetorical strategy to achieve “hip hop authenticity” by minimizing or evading racial discourse within this popular cultural form. Furthermore, the author illustrates how the maintenance and manifestation of white male privilege operates via the process of deracialization as a form of meaning making. Ultimately, this work elaborates on the debate of “authenticity” within hip hop studies, providing a window into white racial identity construction within popular culture.

Postfeminist Fiction in Chick Lit Novels

Abstract The intersection of postfeminist arguments with popular culture and popular cultural forms is of great significance for investigating representational politics and issues of identity. These elements are central for capturing the concept of feminist heterogeneity in its engagement with cultural theory, particularly postmodernism. This study considers postfeminism’s redefinition and reevaluation of popular culture, as an area of political and emblematic contestation.

Contested territory: American film spectatorship, colonial mimicry and British Empire

This essay examines an account of cinema spectatorship in 1920s Jamaica as relayed by a British librarian's treatise advocating for the extended use of film in education. He details how African Jamaican women attended mission churches dressed in the flapper style, mimicking the American movie stars they had seen at the local cinema. Like similar stories of ‘primitive’ spectatorship, this account of movie mimicry is meant to function as evidence of the relatively new medium's unprecedented powers of persuasion over colonial subjects, children, women, and other individuals characterized as feeble-minded. As such, it seems to confirm the imperial fantasy of the superiority of the colonizing culture. But as I demonstrate, this instance of colonial mimicry also triggered anxieties about American cultural hegemony in the British Empire because the Jamaican women chose to mimic the American movie stars they saw on screen rather than the other, competing models of white femininity they were exposed to at the mission. I therefore argue these Jamaican women's mimicry may be read as an appropriation of an American popular cultural form as resistance against British colonial hegemony and suggest how further study of similar stories will open up new avenues for thinking about what constitutes resistant spectatorship.

The “killer of the cane fields”: The social construction of the Australian coastal taipan

ABSTRACTThis paper makes an original contribution to human–animal studies through the application of social construction theory to an iconic species of Australian snake, the coastal taipan. Little research attention using this approach has been focused on reptiles, and this study addresses this gap in the literature. The taipan has achieved a high level of notoriety in Australia. This paper seeks to understand why and how this has occurred. Drawing on a range of data derived from analysis of newspaper articles, popular magazines and books, and the scientific literature, four dominant narratives are identified: the taipan as an object of science and natural history, as social problem, as object quest and as celebrity. The insights gained from this study support the contention that the meanings made of Australia's fauna are fluid, historically contextualised and socially constructed. In the specific case of the taipan, key individuals, including scientists, popular natural historians and snake men contributed greatly to the species’ construction, as did popular cultural forms such as newspapers and natural history books.