Popular Cultural Products Research Articles

Economic Impact of Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia

The term “popular culture” has not yet been clearly defined; however, there are already efforts to quantify its impact on the economy. Cusic and Faulk (2009) computed the gross domestic product of popular culture, which is divided into several economic activities in the information sector and in the arts, entertainment, and recreation sector. This article follows Cusic and Faulk’s definition to make explicit the contribution of each activity to Cali’s economy. Our results imply that the main components of popular culture in Cali are gambling and sporting activities; however, recreation also plays an important role. The gambling activities are mainly constituted by the sales of a small-bets game played on a daily basis by more than half of adults in Cali. A limitation of our approach to calculating the gross domestic product of popular culture is that we do not adopt an explicit social sciences definition. This article presents a detailed description of the industries included in the calculation of the gross domestic product of popular culture. The data presented here can be organized to present the economic impact of popular culture.

The Angel of Geography

Contemporary capitalism is in the throes of crises precipitated by over-accumulation and the effects of decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other. The angel of geography is conjured to mark these crises on the grounds of everyday life. Their profound and uneven consequences for the present and future, seen in the shifting discourses and material social practices around children and childhood, call for redress. This piece builds upon my ongoing project, ‘childhood as spectacle’, to examine what is at stake in the accomplishment of social reproduction – and its failures – in turbulent times and heterogeneous spaces. Looking closely at the ways aspirations for the future are defined, managed, reached, and deferred in and through the family and schools, I take stock of contemporary social reproduction and its anxieties. Drawing on three popular and contradictory cultural productions, the films Race to Nowhere and Waiting for Superman, and the best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, I will address some of the ways the lives and wellbeing of some children – middle-class and wealthier children – have been fetishized while others – the vast majority of children – suffer the consequences of a disinvested public sphere and a radically reduced social wage. As the sense of precariousness stemming from the financial crises of the past decade widens and infiltrates everyday life more deeply, this situation becomes more acute. In this context, aspiration and its management can be framed as a cultural politics ripe for unpacking; a structure of feeling whose drives and effects may illuminate the present as a political moment.

The Cultural Diamond as an English Teacher’s Best Friend

The author describes how the production and reception of popular culture can be studied in secondary classrooms using Wendy Griswold’s cultural diamond to better understand the homogenizing of content and the limiting of alternative viewpoints.

The Humanity of the Zombie: A Case Study of a Korean Zombie Comic

Originally defined as an undead human body by Haitian and Northern African voodoo culture, the zombie has become a popular cultural product. However, in most entertainment media, the zombie has been standardized as a frightful enemy to humans. The dominance of zombie-related Western media content has led to a number of variations in other cultures. In Korea, the concept of the zombie has evolved into the “ghost” concept of han (한, 恨), a unique emotional concept in Korean culture that stems from the country’s historical and geopolitical situation. Analyzing the narrative of the Korean online comic (“webtoon”) series Every Moment of Your Life (당신의 모든 순간), this paper discusses how the Western conception of the zombie has evolved in han, motivating audiences to reflect on the meaningfulness of human life.

MUSICAL PIETY: REPRESENTATION OF ISLAM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA’S NASYID BOY-BAND MUSIC

In recent decades, the movement of Islamisation in Malaysia and Indonesia have significantly developed. Islam in both Malaysia and Indonesia is known by its moderate character, more syncretised and politically diverse. These characteristics may have led the mass popular culture that globally spread, significantly influenced the rapid movement of Islamic popular culture in both countries. This paper analysed the rise of Islam in Malaysian and Indonesian society and politics, with a focus on Islamic popular culture. It then compared the characteristics of Malaysian Islam and Indonesian Islam movement and examine the rise of nasyid as one of Islamic popular culture products in Southeast Asia. The trends indicated that the success of popular culture adaptation such as nasyid boy-band music in Malaysia and Indonesia vary in terms of the issues that they represent. It may influenced by the economic, political and cultural agenda which involve in it.Keywords: popular culture, islamisation, islamic music, nasyid

Cultural entrepreneurship: from making culture to cultural making

We summarize three perspectives on cultural entrepreneurship (CE). Originating in sociology, CE 1.0 focuses on making culture, or the processes by which high culture organizations and popular culture products are created. With roots in strategic management and organization theory, CE 2.0 focuses on deploying culture, or the processes by which culture constitutes a toolkit for legitimating new ventures. We interpret recent scholarship as suggesting the emergence of a third wave, CE 3.0, which emphasizes cultural making, the distributed and intertemporal processes whereby value is created across multiple and fluid repertoires and registers of meaning. We close by speculating on two issues: the performativity of cultural entrepreneurship, and the cult of entrepreneurship.

Regulating Romance: Youth Love Letters, Moral Anxiety, and Intervention in Uganda's Time of AIDS by Shanti Parikh

Shanti Parikh, Regulating Romance: Youth Love Letters, Moral Anxiety, and Intervention in Uganda’s Time of AIDS. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. 336 pp.Shanti Parikh's Regulating Romance offers compassionate, cleareyed, and scrupulously researched examination of youth romance in Uganda. With great ethnographic richness, Parikh analyzes the fraught dynamics of morality, desire, and aspiration in a time of AIDS, moment when HIV/AIDS has become profoundly intimate and social fact for most Ugandans. With considerable care, Parikh historically contextualizes her ethnographic investigations; her book situates contemporary anxieties about youth romance within longer-term transformations that have reshaped the ways that Ugandans experience kinship, love, bodies, and well-being.Regulating Romance is notable for being grounded in research that is both extensive, relying on nearly decade of fieldwork (1996-2015), and intensive, drawing on formidable range of data on life in rural and urban east-central Uganda in the kingdom of Busoga. Aided by team of four research assistants, Parikh is able to robustly substantiate her claims on the basis of household surveys; gossip and oral traditions; hundreds of interviews with youth and adults; 25 case studies following young people over several years; numerous coming-of-age and sexual histories; focus-group discussions; and many interviews with community leaders, activists, and sexperts positioned to speak about youth romance.But the most distinctive kind of data in Parikh's book consists of over 300 love letters written by Ugandan youth. Parikh's use of this material arose serendipitously in the course of her research, when she happened upon young man's letter. This chance revelation led Parikh to discover that lively practice of letter-writing was central to young Ugandans' romantic exploits. Moreover, she found youth quite willing to share and discuss these letters, which she collected in exchange for small fee. This collection of love letters allows Parikh to circumvent major obstacle that confronted her research-garrulous elders and reserved, evasive youth. Yet if Ugandan youth proved reluctant to answer direct inquiries about their romantic lives, they were by no means restrained in their often charmingly florid letters (e.g., Your shining face attracts and affects my feelings and make [sic] me mix up my chemical wrongly) or in discussing them. Parikh offers thorough reading of the form and content of these letters, as well as the ways they are crafted, circulated, and received. In so doing, she conceptualizes the letters with the notion of the counterpublic, arguing that they serve as central textual media in the making of alternative romantic world that is constantly surveilled by concerned adults and thwarted by the economic and social precarities that surround them (171).Parikh unfurls this analysis over the book's three parts. Part I, 'Things Keep Changing': Histories of Dispersal and Anxiety in Iganga, offers rich data on people's historical consciousness with chapters taking up the historical and political-economic transformations that, over century, have shaped the lives of people where Parikh worked. Part II, entitled Publics, tracks broadly circulating discourses and target and attempt to regulate youth sexuality. Finally, Part III, Counterpublic, turns directly to youth discourses on romance.At theoretical level, Parikh offers Regulating Romance as critical anthropology of interventions (30). The book undertakes an analysis of how variety of around youth sexuality-including HIV and public health messages, popular and local cultural productions, and other regulatory regimes-are absorbed into local imaginations about romance and structures of affect (220). Along these lines, Parikh argues that Uganda's internationally vaunted HIV/AIDS campaigns have fostered general going public of sexuality (30), while also facilitating the particular emergence of youth romantic counterpublic. …

The Yummy Side of Hallyu: A Critical Autoethnography

The spread of the increasingly popular Korean cultural products worldwide at the turn of the millennium is commonly referred to as Hallyu, or the Korean Wave. Literature on Hallyu is often written from the Korean perspective, focusing on its success in neighboring Asian countries, and the USA. The experiences and perspectives of cultural outsiders are largely absent from this corpus. Inspired by this perceived gap, my paper begins with my chosen methodology, autoethnography: the study of the self in the context of culture, with a focus on individual experiences and personal accounts. After a brief introduction to Hallyu and what made it resonate with me on a personal level, I discuss how I first became aware of the problematic issue of Korean halal food and how this problem was expounded when I came to study in Korea. Finally, I refer to a few efforts on the side of Korea, discussing their effectivity in the face of this problem, and outline the implications of the food problematic.

Drinking pito: conviviality, popular culture and changing agricultural production at the rural–urban interface in Brong Ahafo, Ghana

This paper examines the spread of consumption and commercial brewing of pito (sorghum beer) from its production base in the northern savanna region of Ghana to the southern transition zone in Brong Ahafo and the resulting drinking culture. It draws on fieldwork conducted in Brong Ahafo and northern Ghana to discuss the connections among rural migration, ecological and economic changes and how these affect consumption patterns in the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana. Focusing on the vibrant drinking activities of two pito bars, it shows that when viewed through the lens of political economy and contemporary Ghanaian history, the spread of consumption of pito can provide a window into social transformation and the construction of inter-ethnic relations and identities while speaking simultaneously to an emerging northern Ghanaian middle class

Zwischen Abgrenzung und Faszination. Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland in populärkulturellen dänischen Darstellungen des Zweiten Weltkriegs

The paper discusses the presentation of Nazi Germany in products of current Danish popular culture. It analyzes and compares two different, but closely connected types of media: movies and popular history magazines. It is informed by a social identity approach and demonstrates that stereotypes with respect to Nazi Germany – such as technology and masculinity – are characterized by a specific tension between otherness and fascination. It argues that memory studies have to cope with the entanglement between national framing and transnational connections. This entanglement shapes specific dynamics in memory culture.

Representing ‘otherness’ in African popular media: Chinese characters in Ethiopian video-films

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the recent phenomenon of Ethiopian films that prominently feature Chinese characters. As the success of these films relies on representing a stereotypical Chinese ‘Other’, and in reference to China’s ever-growing presence in African countries, we pose broader questions relating to the place of ethnicity, race and national identity in popular cultural productions emerging from the continent. Through an analysis which caters for multiple and at times oppositional interpretations, we argue that the representation of the ‘Chinese Other’ constructed by these films at times criticizes and at times reasserts existing stereotypes and prejudices. The overriding view and intent of the filmmakers to use Chinese characters mainly as narrative devices is often functional in the development of specific, inward-looking social and political criticisms. But this attitude inevitably forces the films to overlook the key issue underlying discourses about otherness in Ethiopian popular media – namely the issue of how to deal with racial multiplicity in a society that defines belonging along rigid and exclusionary terms.

Thinking About the Role of Popular Culture in International Conflicts

The goal of this paper is to present a broad yet systematic framework for thinking about the role of popular culture (PC) in international conflict management and resolution, from an International Relations perspective. Protracted conflicts often involve a non-material dimension, as they become central elements in the rival states’ sense of identity, and as societies develop over time strong beliefs about the conflict, which help sustain it over time. Popular culture can play an important role in shaping and changing this non-material dimension of international conflicts. This is largely due to the unique characteristics of PC products that can reach a large number of people, and can convey both information and emotions. Despite this potential, the role of PC in international conflicts has not been systematically analyzed, due to internal divides within the field of IR between positivist and critical understandings of what PC is and how it should be studied, and due to the very interdisciplinary nature of PC and its operation, which leads to many discussions of PC within different disciplines that do not engage each other. The paper examines the multiple roles that PC can play in the context of protracted conflicts. It examines its role domestically within states–societies that live under conflict; the role of PC as a foreign policy tool used by governments vis-a-vis the publics of their rival; the role and limits of PC in challenging conflicts and facilitating transitions to peace; and finally the impact of the joint consumption of global PC by citizens of states in conflict. These different roles of PC are illustrated throughout with examples from different protracted conflict around the world. The goal of this framework is to serve as a focal point for research that transcends the disciplinary divides and allows for fruitful engagement.

Crossroads Poetics

Crossroads Poetics

Gender and Popular Culture

Part of listening to popular music is complaining about it: Why is mainstream music so dreadful? . . . so repetitive? . . . and so the argument goes. Popular culture producers argue that they do not force-feed the public or “dupe” listeners into liking awful music. They are simply giving consumers what they want, or they are trying to figure out what consumers want. This paper explores the issue while focusing on gender and popular culture, by asking whether popular music producers and listeners agree or disagree regarding the types of artistic representations that are valuable. I find they do not, especially when it comes to female music listeners and female artist types. According to the production of culture perspective, demands of production and pursuit of market share usurp accommodating listeners, which includes overemphasis on gender stereotypes that are less popular with female consumers. Discussion includes suggestions as to why certain gendered patterns emerge in popular culture production and consumption.

Challenging prime time television

Television (TV) has always been the focus of continuous debate around its shifting social practices, involving and challenging all established main agents, from content producers to brands, corporations, regulators and audiences (Boddy, 2002; Uricchio, 2002). At the same time, the remediations of TV are at the core of broader discussions on media change, particularly since the popularization of media consumption through the Internet. TV retains a position of centrality for understanding what it means to live in a connected environment. This article contributes to this debate through the analysis of the co-viewing practices within the specific context of Brazil’s most popular cultural product, the telenovela. After an overview of the key themes and scope of the research, we will situate the practices of co-viewing in the context of some of the key issues regarding connected viewing. We will deal with the particularities of the Brazilian telenovela as a cultural product and finally we will outline our empirical research on co-viewing practices in unofficial Facebook groups surrounding the controversial prime time telenovela ‘Babilônia’.

The new technologies and the schism between popular music and elitist/obscure drama in Nigeria: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Wole Soyinka on YouTube

ABSTRACTThe study examines the concepts of popular culture and elitist art productions. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is studied as a paradigm for popular music and Wole Soyinka is examined as a paradigm for elitist drama. The study investigates the impacts of the new technologies, particularly YouTube, in making the works of popular and elitist artists (Fela and Soyinka, in this case) available and accessible to online audiences. The paper examines the theme of schism between popular and elitist art works (popular music and elitist drama). It reveals that, unlike Fela, Soyinka, with his canonical drama, on many occasions, does not attract a wide range of audiences due to, among other factors, the language and styles/techniques of the canonical plays. The paper argues, therefore, that whether or not schism would be mandatory between popular and elitist/“obscure” art works is a matter that would be determined by, among other factors, the factors of production and consumption of the works.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF CONSUMER CULTURE THROUGH CAR COMMERCIALS

Bu calismanin amaci reklamlarin tuketim olgusu uzerindeki kulturel incelenmesidir. Bu amacla, cesitli televizyon kanallarinda gosterilen on iki otomobil reklami ornegi uzerinden nitel bir icerik analizi yurutulmustur. secilmesinin nedeni, teknolojinin vazgecilmez bir parcasi olan bu sektorun son derece hizli bir sekilde degisim gostererek tuketim aliskanliklarini farkli sekillerde bicimlendirmesidir. Bu baglamda, soz konusu reklamlarin toplumsal manipulasyonlari acisindan bir reklam okumasi yapilmistir. Soz konusu reklamlarin analizi Baudrillard, Veblen, teorisyenlerin tuketime yonelik gorusleri baglaminda ele alinmistir. Reklamdaki tuketim unsurunun guclendirilip asil tuketim nesnesi olan arabalarin davranisinin kilmistir. Bu calismanin sonucunda ozellikle populer kulturun olusmasinda ve dagitiminda onemli bir faktor olan kitle iletisim araclarinin davranisinin analizi yapilmis olacaktir

Americanization of Non-American Storiesin Disney Films

The study is intended to know the Disney’s animation films characteristics which are adapted from non American stories that contain Americanization in order to be American popular culture products. This qualitative and library research is carried out within the field of American Studies. Disney’s animated films which are regarded as artifacts in order to identify American society and culture is used as her primary data. She then compares those Disney films with the original stories to discover the changes in making those stories become American popular products. She furthermore uses the sources such as books, magazines, journals, articles, and also internet data for her secondary data. The result of this study shows that most of folk narratives which were used in Disney films were adapted from other countries’ stories. However, Disney intentionally adapts foreign countries’ stories in its animated films by using Disney formula to blow up the sale of its products. Since Disney is one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world, it works endlessly to set out world entertainment. Disney formula in its animated films which has dominated those adapted films are only intended to obtain as much profit as possible without paying attention to the values in children entertainment.

Americanization of Non-American Storiesin Disney Films

The study is intended to know the Disney’s animation films characteristics which are adapted from non American stories that contain Americanization in order to be American popular culture products. This qualitative and library research is carried out within the field of American Studies. Disney’s animated films which are regarded as artifacts in order to identify American society and culture is used as her primary data. She then compares those Disney films with the original stories to discover the changes in making those stories become American popular products. She furthermore uses the sources such as books, magazines, journals, articles, and also internet data for her secondary data. The result of this study shows that most of folk narratives which were used in Disney films were adapted from other countries’ stories. However, Disney intentionally adapts foreign countries’ stories in its animated films by using Disney formula to blow up the sale of its products. Since Disney is one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world, it works endlessly to set out world entertainment. Disney formula in its animated films which has dominated those adapted films are only intended to obtain as much profit as possible without paying attention to the values in children entertainment.Keywords: Americanization; Non American Stories; Animation; Popular culture; Formula

<i>The Book of Touch</i> edited by Constance Classen

Acclaimed author Constance Classen’s edited collection of sensual studies, The Book of Touch, is an intriguing contribution to the already excellent Sensory Formations series published by Berg. Other books in the series which I have seen include The Auditory Culture Reader (superb for anyone teaching the regulation, production and consumption of popular music culture) and The Visual Culture Reader (perfect for film and television studies). Other titles which I have yet to investigate from the series include The Smell Culture Reader, The Taste Culture Reader and The Sixth Sense Reader.