Spaces Of Cultural Production Research Articles

Exploring the circulation of digital audiobooks: Australian library lending 2006–2017

Introduction. We investigated patterns in digital audiobook and e-book circulation through Australian libraries to identify and analyse trends in audiobook publishing and reading. Method. In partnership with four Australian library services we collated a dataset of 555,618 audiobook checkouts and 3,475,188 e-book checkouts, representing all OverDrive checkouts through these services from 2006 until July 2017. Analysis. We examined the availability and popularity of audiobook and e-book titles over time. We used bibliographic metadata and manual and automated coding to examine major publishers, sex and nationality of authors, and popular titles and genres. Results. Audiobooks and e-books have experienced substantial growth since 2006. Major publishers including the Big Five, Amazon, and Bolinda have historically been less important in audiobook publishing than in print or e-book markets, with numerous specialist audio publishers and producers prominent in the field. Audiobooks and e-books show disparities in the sex of authors. Crime, science fiction, and fantasy are the most popular audiobook genres. Conclusion. Library checkout data confirm audiobook publishing’s recent volatility. Libraries are the keepers of valuable information about new media forms like audiobooks, and collaboration between libraries, publishers, and researchers directly supports understanding of this important new space of cultural production and consumption.

Black Faces in White Spaces: Black Women's YouTube Channels in Brazil as Fortalecimento

A large and growing network of black women YouTubers in Brazil mobilize strategies of fortalecimento, a term used by some women to refer to how they prepare themselves to face the barriers created by the gendered racial hierarchy of Brazilian society. In this article, I examine these YouTube channels and the tactics black women use to increase their own visibility, to value black aesthetics, and to denounce racist and sexist acts or representations. Furthermore, I consider the importance of physical spaces, such as production studios, for YouTube success, and how black women negotiate material spaces as well as the video sharing platform to maximize their visibility and encroach on predominantly white spaces of cultural production. Using theories of intersectionality, representation, and subjecthood, I examine how these women use (virtual) communities to re-signify and pluralize black womanhood in Brazil.

O que o golpe quer calar: literatura e política no Brasil hoje

Para se consolidar, o golpe de 2016 tem de conter o movimento de democratização que, de algum modo, se fortalecia no país nos últimos anos, especialmente a partir do acesso à educação pública e com a valorização dos espaços periféricos de produção cultural. Esse golpe se estabelece, então, contra os direitos das mulheres, dos negros, dos indígenas, dos trabalhadores, dos moradores das periferias, da população LGBT, dos pobres; contra sua inserção social e contra suas formas de expressão. Mas se estabelece, também, contra o ensino público, contra a liberdade de expressão e de cátedra, contra o pensamento crítico. Mais do que nunca, precisamos estar atentos às vozes que eles querem calar, ao que elas têm a nos dizer, ao que elas acrescentam na compreensão de nossa realidade e na ampliação dos recursos estéticos disponíveis para reinterpretar o mundo. Este texto pretende fazer parte desse processo de resistência, discutindo algumas possibilidades de escrita em tempos de recrudescimento dos discursos fascistas.

The Environmental Roots of Urban Renewal in Boston

This essay argues that discourse related to residents of Boston’s South End as environmental agents justified the removal of minority and working-class residents from the neighborhood, and, in particular, the New York Streets section in the 1950s. It combines analytical approaches of urban ecology and traditional elements of social history to examine how the neighborhood orientated to the city in an economic sense, how residents created a mixed-use neighborhood, how social institutions functioned as contested spaces of cultural production, how settlement house workers created a framework of discourse about the South End, how negative perceptions of working-class and minority residents coalesced across American life, and how city officials activated the discourse to create the first steps of urban renewal in Boston. The conclusion examines how minority groups understood environmental factors to be central to urban renewal and how social justice groups took an environmental focus in their activism.

Rock of our salvation: ideological production at the Christian youth music festival

ABSTRACTChristian youth music festivals (CYMFs) are an important niche sector in the realm of large-scale leisure events. In line with the recent turn towards exploring festivals and events as spaces of cultural production and articulation, this compressed time ethnographic study analyses two very different Protestant CYMFs – one of which is affiliated with conservative Christianity and one of which is affiliated with counterculture Christianity – and investigates the way these leisure spaces function as sites where ideologies are produced and religious identities constructed. It concludes that, despite the festivals’ differences in ideological orientation, both events draw on the mechanisms of leveraged liminality, embodied performativity, and youthful impressionability to advance their respective ends. The paper thus seeks to highlight the ideological importance of leisure event management.

The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano

Reviewed by: The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano Michael Dylan Foster The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 295. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper, $25.00 e-book. There is always a complex and ambiguous relationship between state-imposed order and cultural practices that critique that order, between official hierarchies and popular behaviors that subvert such hierarchies. Nowhere is this relationship more evident than in Tokugawa-period Japan, known both for the rigidity of government authority and the simultaneous rise of a vibrant urban culture, with such creative, expressive forms as kabuki 歌舞伎 and puppet theater, spectacle shows (misemono 見世物), woodblock prints (ukiyo-e 浮世絵), and myriad inexpensive written and illustrated texts. In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination Katsuya Hirano explores this period, and the complex interactions of power and play that characterize it, through close readings and theoretical considerations of a number of popular culture products, along with some of the legal edicts and philosophical documents with which they were in conversation. The book opens with a long quotation from Louis Althusser, the influential twentieth-century Marxist thinker. Indeed, the words and work of Althusser—along with a panoply of other Marxist and post-Marxist philosophers, sociologists, historians, and literary critics—inform Hirano’s thought-provoking readings of cultural production under the Tokugawa bakufu 幕府. The “dialogic imagination” of the title is also, of course, an explicit reference to M.M. Bakhtin and his [End Page 476] focus on the “dialogical interaction of divergent voices and perspectives” (p. 3).1 Hirano’s own focus is the way in which conflicting voices within popular culture, particularly from the eighteenth century onward, critiqued the hegemonic order and “provoked the sustained concern and interference of the authorities” (p. 2). He also explores how these relationships changed with the onset of Meiji-period modernity. Hirano chooses to use the body and its regulation as a touchstone for exploring the complex interplay between popular cultural production and the hegemonic discourse of the Tokugawa government and Neo-Confucian elite. He explains in chapter 1 that, to the powers of the early Edo period, an idle body or a body at play was a problem: “The state made attempts consistently to delimit the meaning and function of the body to the moral imperative of productive work based on its deep concern that the failure to regulate the body, especially its excessive desire, would result in people’s awakening to the irrepressible presence of history” (p. 68). The formal structure of the state, with its official hierarchies and rice-based economy, was threatened during the eighteenth century by the emergence of “a new space of cultural production and consumption” (p. 56). Each of the next three chapters focuses on a different form of production within this new space. But rather than structure his argument around specific genres—for example, kabuki, woodblock prints, puppet theater, gesaku 戯作, and the like—Hirano explores particular rhetorical modes of expression: parody in chapter 2, comic realism in chapter 3, and grotesque realism in chapter 4. The concluding chapter of the book (chap. 5) focuses on the Meiji period and new discourses on subjectivity that emphasize “interiority” over bodily desires and excesses. A careful reading of Hirano’s text reveals a narrative arc that traces the meaning of the body in popular culture. In chapter 1, we see the rift between individual bodily desires and the imperatives of governmental power expressed through, for example, the love-suicide dramas of Chikamatsu Monzaemon 近松門左衛門 (1653-1724). This sort of dramatic and literary expression gives way in chapter 2 to the [End Page 477] visceral, defamiliarizing parodies by writers such as Santō Kyōden 山東京伝 (1761-1816), which are followed in chapter 3 by the laughter in response to a master farter in a spectacle show. And this bodily humor resonates in chapter 4 with the emergence of a critical role for the grotesque and ghostly body in late Edo-period kabuki such as, for example, The Ghost Story of Yotsuya (Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan 東海道四谷怪談) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV 鶴屋南北 (1755-1829). Throughout...

Mixed messages: The ambiguity of the MOD chip and pirate cultural production for the Nintendo DS

This essay1 examines the ambiguous character of videogame console modification chips (MOD chips) in the space of videogame piracy. While it is possible for these chips to be used to “pirate” versions of games for these devices, they also expand the utility of the devices by adding capabilities. Perhaps more significantly, MOD chips also enable users to create software and videogames that run on these consoles outside the typical rules and regulations of the videogame industry. Ethnographic work amongst Nintendo DS (“dual screen”) MOD communities is examined to illuminate this understudied space of cultural production.

The Globalist Dimensions of Silent Shakespeare Cinema

The Globalist Dimensions of Silent Shakespeare Cinema Greg Colón Semenza (bio) When I hear a director speaking glibly of serving the author, of letting a play speak for itself, my suspicions are aroused. . . . If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it. —Peter Brook1 In respectful disagreement with Samuel Crowl's description of the post World War II period as "the great international phase in Shakespeare's absorption into film,"2 and in response to recent studies of current Shakespeare cinema's globalist dimensions,3 I think it worth noting that Shakespeare film has been a thoroughly international phenomenon since its inception in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, recent debates regarding the ethical and political complexity of global Shakespeare cinema are similar to those engaged by early twentieth-century theorists focused on film as a new artistic medium, who openly questioned what they saw as film's vying fascistic and revolutionary potentialities. Especially in the 1920s and 30s, film commentators as varied as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Charles Chaplin, and Sergei Eisenstein sought to understand the ideological effects of film, whether we mean by "film" a movie's content, montage style, imagery, production, or the psychological [End Page 320] dimensions of the cinematic apparatus itself. Further, just as many of today's postcolonial and global studies scholars "generate," in Sonia Massai's terms, "either rash and under-theorized eulogies of—or skeptical responses to—interculturalism," early twentieth-century thinkers tended to fall into two camps as they struggled to negotiate film's complex hybridity (Massai 2005: 5): its uneasy and seemingly contradictory role as both a radical new art form and, in Frederic Jameson's words, the "product of the most sophisticated forms of industrial production" (Jameson 1992: xiii). How might a comparative awareness of this earlier period's fascination with Shakespeare cast light on the phenomenon of twenty-first-century global Shakespeare cinema? In this essay I contemplate ways in which our current conversation might be usefully informed by the "globalism" of silent Shakespeare cinema and the historical cinematic movement from intertitles to subtitles to spoken dialogue in multiple languages. In referencing the "globalism" of modern Shakespeare cinema, one might draw on the fact that Shakespeare films have recently been produced or shot in such vastly distant non-Anglophone locales as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Ghana, Greece, Holland, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Yugoslavia, just to mention a few. A growing body of scholarly work focuses on such films—particularly the ideological and political implications of their Shakespearean engagements.4 In the era of silent and early sound cinema, the term "global" has a less truly international reach, though I would wager that most readers will be surprised by how global silent cinema actually was. Nonetheless, because I am using "globalism" somewhat loosely, I should begin by briefly outlining my own understanding and employment of this notoriously vague term, which immediately and inevitably evokes a rather black and white divide described well by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake: "the space of cultural production and national representation . . . is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance) in everyday texture and composition" (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996: 1). Shakespeare and film scholar Mark Thornton Burnett has usefully streamlined the two opposed lines of thought captured here: "On the one hand," he argues, "globalization allows for bonding and interconnectivity; and, on the other, [End Page 321] policies of integration dislodge, divide and even eradicate the indigenous" (Burnett 2007: 2). This binary maps rather neatly onto countless other cultural studies debates: Benjamin's hope for art in the age of mechanical reproduction or Adorno's despair over the commodification of the art form; Foucault's deterministic power system or Bordieu's moldable habitus; colonialist erasures or the solidarity of Bhabha's "join"; containment or subversion? In Shakespeare studies specifically, historicist debates about Shakespeare's own radicalism or conservativism have gradually been overtaken by more reception-oriented studies...

Enclosures abound: Black cultural autonomy, prison regime and public education

Since slavery, attempted enclosures upon Black spaces of cultural production and autonomy (i.e. music, language, art) have manifested in various forms. In the context of the post‐industrial terrain of urban southern California, the formation of the prison is the dominant model of forced enclosure in the lives of Black people. Moving beyond the physical site of the prison, the conception of the prison regime is utilized to connect how racialized processes emanating from public education are informed by the formation/maintenance of the prison system. In particular, this article addresses the cultural assertions of Blackness made by Black students and how the corresponding attempted enclosure of Black cultural autonomy by the school is undergirded by a history of violence against Black spaces of cultural autonomy. Ethnographic research for this article was conducted at Southeast County High School (SCHS).

Contesting culture: a case study of commodification in Cuban music

After more than three decades of isolation from the West and a paralyzing economic crisis in the early 1990s, Cuba is increasingly globally active in both cultural and economic realms. In this paper I use Bourdieu’s (The fields of cultural production, 1993) fields of cultural production as a general frame through with to inspect the commercialization of Cuban music. Through a case study with Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, the creator of the Buena Vista Social Club, I explore the dialectical relationship of music as an expression of cultural and a cultural asset, and at the same time a commodity for the international market. I show that de Marcos uses his position between the international music industry and the local music scene in order to preserve cultural authenticity and survive economically. In doing so he challenges the all-to-typical place of the artist in the contested space of cultural production between the West and the Third World.

Collect Calls

Collect Calls

On the Utility of Art for Politics: Musil's "Armed Truce of Ideas"

A phantom haunts Germany today. It is ghost of intellectual invested with a critical mission. In course of last decade established notions concerning social and political role of intellectuals have increasingly come under scrutiny as space of cultural production has become more than ever politically contested. In a recent analysis of this historical transformation Peter Uwe Hohendahl observed that the critical function once attributed to intellectual seems to have evaporated. 1 Hohendahl is careful to emphasize specificity of German situation in which critical mandate of intellectual is understood as being rooted in sphere of aesthetic. In this context aesthetic sphere is conceived as locus of a distinctive knowledge which is qualitatively different from other cognitive practices, most notably science.2 Hohendahl's diagnosis is complemented by Andreas Huyssen's assessment of disorientation and historical shortsightedness displayed by German intellectuals after Wende.3 What drives Hohendahl's and Huyssen's analyses is recognition of a need to reformulate critical function of intellectuals in light of profound historical transformations. But, as Huyssen has noted, this step demands that assumptions underlying intellectual's claim to authority be reexamined today, particularly as they apply to relation between aesthetics and politics. This essay addresses this question by revisiting modernist origins of paradigms that have currency today and by seeking alternative models among competing discourses that once challenged these categories but have since been obscured. In particular Robert Musil's reflection on art and politics, which seemed so untimely in his own day, is examined as a vision whose time may have finally come. Much of today's vocabulary for conceptualizing relation between art and politics remains indebted, whether knowingly or not, to controversies that drove aesthetic debates of 1930s within German Marxism. In spite of important differences in emphasis and argumentation, opposing sides that emerged from these debates were aligned with respect to two mutually exclusive positions that construed aesthetic as intimately related to or, conversely, as incompatible with politics. While first model, paradigmatically articulated by Georg Lukacs, sought to place art's critical potential in service of a political narrative, opposing paradigm, embodied in its most radical form by Theodor W Adorno, embraced dialectical negativity of an autonomous aesthetic sphere as only critical space available in an administered world.4 Despite these differences both stances share a fundamental premise, namely, assumption that any critical activity presupposes a privileged vantage point for assessing real. In both models it is intersection of aesthetic and political discourses that provides critic with a superior standpoint from which to observe and account for history and society.5 It is this self-understanding of intellectual as endowed with a more encompassing view of whole that increasingly has been called into question by fundamental transformations in fabric of postindustrial societies. Given high degree of complexity of advances in industrial societies, Hohendahl writes, [...] there no longer seems to be an obvious mandate for writer to assume leadership. 116 Hohendahl's argument is indebted to Max Weber's characterization of modern societies as shaped by an unrelenting process of rationalization and proliferation of distinct domains of experience. The intellectual no longer enjoys a self-evident critical mandate because multiplication of perspectives and discourses-not just those underlying different realms of modern life, but within field of cultural production itself-makes any argument concerning intellectual's privileged viewpoint difficult to sustain. …

Introduction: Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production

Introduction: Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production