Theory Of Cultural Production Research Articles

When kind of citizen? Temporally displaced citizenship education in a Chilean private school

ABSTRACTIn Chile, some elite private schools have developed a particular approach towards citizenship education, acknowledging the privileged social position their students occupy, while inviting them to disrupt the same social structure that has produced this privilege. However, the enduring salience of Chilean society's inequalities begs the question of how effective this approach truly is. This paper attempts to answer this, examining a Chilean private school and a particular service-learning activity. Through ethnographic methods and an analysis rooted in cultural production theory, the paper argues that, although many of its components are still quite problematic, service-learning activities like this one do provide opportunities for promoting participatory and social justice citizenship education, through the students' engagement in “collective deliberations.” However, these opportunities are neutralized when framed within a particular cultural fact – here called the Discourse of the Leaders – which displaces the enactment of students' citizenship into a future that still does not exist. The article provides a more nuanced understanding of the different ways inequitable social structures of privilege are dealt with in elite educational institutions that explicitly purport to challenge them. It also offers new avenues for educators to contribute to citizenship education practices that can more effectively promote social change.

‘If I had my way, I’d have been a killer’: songwriting and its motivations for leisure and work

ABSTRACTThis paper builds on our earlier work which looked at folk musicians exercising agency in careers that can develop from casual leisure through serious leisure to work. In looking specifically at songwriting, it synthesises theories on the underlying motivations reflecting the view of Born who suggests that the ‘theory of cultural production requires reinvention’ citing key themes of ’aesthetics and the cultural object; agency and subjectivity; the place of institutions; history, temporality and change; and problems of value and judgement’. It examines in a phenomenological way, through songwriter interviews, the cultural production of songs and the motivational factors within the songwriting process. Highlighting that this form of cultural production challenges, the hierarchical view of Maslow’s needs and suggests that the career arc proposed by Stebbins is not a case of work simply following sequentially from serious and casual leisure.

The memory practices of immigrant film-makers: Minor cinemas and the production of locality

This article presents a case study of independent immigrant film-making from the 1980s and the early 1990s in Sweden. The aim is twofold: to analyse the memory practices of exilic and diasporic subjects and to stress that what Zuzana M. Pick has coined as the subjective paradoxes and privileges of exile implies an agential understanding of memory. Hence, the study of memory and migration in relation to film practice before the digital turn calls for a theory of cultural production and an approach in which film is not primarily considered a means for representation but an act in itself.

Spaces of becoming: the Stockholm Film Workshop as a transnational site of film production

The aim of the essay was to present the Stockholm Film Workshop (Filmverkstan, 1973–2001) and its significance as a transnational site of film production. The films and the filmmaking at the workshop are considered as part of a minor cinema film practice in David E. James’s sense. James’s theory is complemented by returning to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s original concept of minor literature in order to stress an analysis that is based on film as a means of production and cultural intervention. This point is emphasized by a presentation and analysis of how various professional and non-professional filmmakers from Colombia, Egypt, Greece and Turkey made use of film at the Stockholm Film Workshop in order to intervene in their new cultural situations. Thus, the textual model of film analysis that is prevalent in Hamid Naficy’s seminal work on accented cinema is complemented with theories of cultural production in order to enable an analysis of a transnational film practice that is on a par with the immigrant experience.

The Perils of Global Cultural Promotion: (Re-)Presenting “European Culture” in Asia through Spanish Cultural Promotion in the Philippines

For the last few decades, European cultural organisations such as the Alliance Francaise de Manille, the British Council, the German Goethe-Institut, and the Spanish Instituto Cervantes have been working actively in the Philippines by establishing and promoting a whole range of cultural and educational activities, related to their particular languages and cultures. In the Philippines, the fact that arts funding is limited, has encouraged the development of a web of intercultural relationships and encounters. This article examines two problematic aspects of the global promotion of Spanish culture in the Philippines, namely the unidirectional approach to cultural promotion, and the politics of arts funding. Inspired by Anthony Giddens’ understanding of globalisation as a web of distant relationships, in which local events can be influenced by others occurring miles away, the concept of “rough cultural promotion” is proposed to discuss the unidirectional movement of cultural products. When European countries, such as Spain, select and promote specific cultural products as ‘universal’ referents of “Spanish (or national) culture” in the Philippines, “rough promotion” is achieved. This paper argues that this process establishes several disjunctures in both countries, such as the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes, and an imbalanced situation in which European cultural events are in direct competition with local arts. This imbalanced situation is further explained by exploring the politics of European arts funding in the Philippines. In this context, and following Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production, this paper argues that Spanish cultural producers in the Philippines are establishing an authority in the definition of what arts and culture should be in the Philippines.

The accidental avant-garde: Audiobook technologies and publishing strategies from cassette tapes to online streaming services

Abstract While the transformation of the traditionally print-based book industries to digital and multi-format publishing industries is the subject of much debate, the audiobook industry has largely escaped attention. In a sense, this is curious, given the fact that audiobook publishers have been at the forefront of the technological transformation of the book industry from reel-to-reel tapes and long-playing records all the way into the digital era. All the while, audiobook publishing has never been entirely integrated into the publishing world at large and has somewhat remained an outsider industry, often seen to cater for niche markets. In this article I argue that traditional book publishers venturing into digital publishing can learn from successes and failures in the history of audiobook innovations. Basing the discussion in theories of cultural production and innovation, the article explores the interplay between technology and publishing strategy by way of analysing audiobook technologies from 1980 to 2012 in light of industry and technology developments in the book industry in general, with specific attention to the Norwegian audiobook market, where four case studies of publishers and service providers are analysed. The central issue in the article is how and to what extent the development of audiobook publishing technologies is indicative of technology development in the book industries in general.

Extending methods: using Bourdieu’s field analysis to further investigate taste

In this commentary on Per Anderhag, Per-Olof Wickman and Karim Hamza’s article Signs of taste for science, I consider how their study is situated within the concern for the role of science education in the social and cultural production of inequality. Their article provides a finely detailed methodology for analyzing the constitution of taste within science education classrooms. Nevertheless, because the authors’ socially situated methodology draws upon Bourdieu’s theories, it seems equally important to extend these methods to consider how and why students make particular distinctions within a relational context—a key aspect of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production. By situating the constitution of taste within Bourdieu’s field analysis, researchers can explore the ways in which students’ tastes and social positionings are established and transformed through time, space, place, and their ability to navigate the field. I describe the process of field analysis in relation to the authors’ paper and suggest that combining the authors’ methods with a field analysis can provide a strong methodological and analytical framework in which theory and methods combine to create a detailed understanding of students’ interest in relation to their context.

Her-Storiography: Pierre Bourdieu, Cultural Capital, and Changing the Narrative Paradigm

Her-StoriographyPierre Bourdieu, Cultural Capital, and Changing the Narrative Paradigm Kimberly Francis (bio) Hildegard Jone (1891–1963) was a writer, poet, and artist who corresponded with Anton Webern, and he set her poetry to music on numerous occasions.1 Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938) was an Austrian painter, writer, and renowned feminist whose work influenced Arnold Schoenberg and Hugo Wolf.2 Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) was a French pedagogue, performer, and conductor who molded generations of artists. She maintained connections with numerous composers and performers throughout her career, among them Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky.3 All three of the women presented here—active, vibrant, influential artists during the modernist period—deserve [End Page 169] a place within and yet commonly stand outside of existing musicological narratives. The aforementioned trio is but a distilled sample of the many women or “other” actors essential to the mediation, transfer, and exchange of culture who as of yet occupy tangential roles in musicological work. It remains a complicated task to place these trivialized actors at the center of narratives, in large part because gendered devaluing—whether intentional or not—has predominantly overlooked or otherwise called into question the influence of their work. Indeed, Jeanice Brooks’s description of Boulanger as “seemingly central, yet stubbornly elusive” could easily apply to any of these women.4 For myriad reasons, women’s artistic work in less-conventional fields has been difficult to incorporate into the historical record, and I agree with Brooks—whose work argues persuasively for Boulanger’s musicological importance—that the blame lies, in large part, with musicologists’ seeming recourse to romantic narrative constructs centered on the “Great Composer.”5 Indeed, even the work of feminist musicologists—scholarship undeniably essential for the field—has tended to focus on women composers or feminist interpretations of male composers, marking the maker of the work as the center of the story, the essential protagonist, a critique made by Suzanne Cusick in 1999 that remains true today.6 This structural dependency entrenches composers and their works as the nucleus of any musicological narrative. Those who would fulfill ancillary roles must in some way be connected directly to the work as, for example, collaborators, patrons, or conductors, to name but three roles traditionally dominated by white men. To reposition those who filled unorthodox positions as powerful members of modernist activity, I turn to Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of the field of cultural production. Bourdieu’s model offers scholars an additional set of metaphors by which to organize narrative paradigms and thereby to displace the composer-nuclei of our discipline’s historiographical tendencies. Through Bourdieu, composers become situated within and amongst other cultural actors who play essential roles in the establishment of careers, reputations, and prestige. In adapting and extending Bourdieu, I advocate for the introduction of additional narrative paradigms within musicology that displace composers from their central location as isolated geniuses and instead portray them as interdependent upon those within their cultural mosaic. In so doing, I join with scholarship that seeks to reinterpret, in Suzanne Cusick’s words, “woman’s work and the culturally feminine so that they cease to be marginalized and devalued, but might be re-interpreted as important elements of musical culture.”7 Bourdieu was prolific, and his theories are expansive, teeming with potential [End Page 170] for feminist musicologists. Within the scope of this essay, I address only the usefulness of Bourdieu’s notions of cultural production, cultural capital, and the act of consecration. Though his theories could be applied to any of the previously mentioned individuals, for the purposes of this discussion I will focus exclusively on Nadia Boulanger. In so doing, my Bourdieudian intervention opens the interstices of the cultural process wherein “others” worked, and in eschewing a crippling dependence on the centrality of the composer-artist, I create room to celebrate the work of powerful historical women, to whom I refer as “cultural agents.” The Field of Cultural Production According to Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production, culture can only be defined within and amongst a group of individuals who engage in its discussion and definition. Bourdieu defines this system of social interaction as a “field” (champ) and the space...

Building between past and future

To balance radical changes in the built environment that accompany urban renewal, many cities deploy historical design elements to provoke a sense of physical and temporal continuity. By examining the theory and practice of nostalgia in renewal projects, I argue that this strategic deployment of historical signifiers is more complex and normatively problematic than it first appears. Analysing the design and construction of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards through Walter Benjamin’s theories of cultural production and historical succession, I show the problematic political effect of such image-led regeneration projects. The stadium exemplifies a system of urban and historical design and construction that uses material artifice to make totalizing political claims, deploying specific historical signifiers as a means to silence others. Drawing from Benjamin’s materialist historiography, I conclude with a survey of the resources that remain for the practice of an architecture of memory in light of my critique.

Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production

This article seeks to develop an approach to cultural production which takes racism seriously. We suggest that there has been a lack of attention to race and ethnicity in the booming research field of cultural production studies, and that the few good studies of race, ethnicity, and cultural production have been somewhat marginalized. Following a section that outlines our understandings of “race” and ethnicity, we outline the development of research on cultural production, differentiating various approaches according to the degree of attention that they afford to questions of power, inequality, and social justice. We then survey the main themes that have emerged from cultural production studies regarding race and ethnicity, and outline some of the problems associated with such research. We argue that a theory of cultural production that adequately integrates race and ethnicity needs to combine analysis of micro and macro factors, structure and agency, and change and continuity.

Locating the DJ: Black Popular Music, Location and Fields of Cultural Production

Extending Bourdieu’s work, this paper introduces the concept of location as a supplement to the concepts of position and disposition in understanding how strategies are enacted in cultural fields. To illustrate my argument, this paper is organized into four sections. First, the applicability and extension of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production is discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on illustrating how the concept of location adopts an intersubjective understanding of reflexivity in order to address some of the limitations of Bourdieu’s concepts of position, disposition and strategy. Second, two different strategies of legitimation (crowd pleasing and crowd commanding) adopted by DJs within the field are outlined. Third, the importance of location in the use of these strategies in the field of black popular music-making is illustrated. Finally, this paper concludes by summarizing the key dimensions of the concept of location and suggesting how the concept has broader applicability in other cultural fields.

The Cento, Romanticism, and Copyright

The Cento, Romanticism, and Copyright Mark A. McCutcheon (bio) Mature poets steal. T.S. Eliot The Sacred Wood A composition formed by joining scraps from other authors”: this is how Samuel Johnson defines the cento in his Dictionary, a definition that then joins scraps quoted from other authors like Pope, for particularly fitting illustrations of the word’s usage. This essay examines the genre of the cento in the period when new editions of Johnson’s Dictionary began to outlive him: the Romantic period, a period marked—like ours—by historic change in the regulation of copyright. I will proceed first by sketching the current status and outlining a brief history of copyright, which Jeffrey Galin glosses as a “limited monopoly of rights […] designed to balance the needs of creators to make a reasonable return on their works and inventions for a limited period of time, with the work then turning toward the public domain to serve as fodder for the development of future creative works” (10). This outline of copyright history will include a discussion of fair dealing, a copyright law exemption for users’ rights that seeks to counterbalance those of copyright holders; fair dealing has important bearing on my argument [End Page 71] as it concerns appropriation in cultural production. The essay then details the cento, in its supplementary relation to Romantic literature and ideology, and its complex relationship to creativity and criticism. In the process, salutary and symptomatic examples of the cento’s use by William Hazlitt and William Wordsworth will be considered, two authors well known as major proponents, in their time, of the Romantic ideology of cultural production as original creation (McGann 91), as opposed to Augustan and postmodern theories of cultural production as imitation and bricolage. Hazlitt’s and Wordsworth’s uses of the cento illustrate the constitutive contradiction between copyright’s rationale and the materialities of cultural production; their uses also suggest prototypical models of fair dealing, avant la lettre, as both a user’s right and a resource for authorship. The essay concludes by considering the implications of the cento under the copyright regime of English Romanticism for appropriative art and scholarship under today’s globalized regime. As a genre of poetry composed entirely of quotations from other poems, the cento makes an interesting study for Romanticism and copyright: it flies in the face of Romantic tradition, it shows how copyright conditions the possibilities of cultural production, and it points up the contradiction between the cultural-legal hegemony of originality and the material processes of appropriation-based production. The point is not that the cento is popular or pivotal to English literature but, instead, that it poses a Derridean supplement to this literature and its prevailing Romantic ideology, an ideology that, as Robert Macfarlane suggests, “continues to prosper in the literary-cultural consciousness. If anything, indeed, it is more unshiftably ensconced there than two hundred years ago, when it is generally taken to have been devised” (3). A study of the cento and Romanticism has timely implications for copyright and cultural production today, in the context of a digitized media ecology of content abundance and the ensuing global “copyfight” over regulating this new mediascape. As Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge has argued, and as the worldwide January 2012 protest over the U.S.’s Stop Online Piracy Act (sopa) made clear, this copyfight pits an increasingly draconian copyright regime not against commercial piracy but against civil liberties. Today’s copyfight is a techno-cultural front in the class war, being waged on the 99 percent by the predominantly corporate copyright holders among the 1 percent, who deploy both repressive instruments and ideological strategies drawn from Romanticism. Appealing to the Romantic figure of individual, expressive authorship is a rhetorical weapon of choice for copyright maximalist interests which [End Page 72] are—it is important to stress—not individual creators, for the most part, but corporations (Marshall 2–3). So this essay refers to ideas of Romanticism and authorship that may seem old-fashioned to scholars versed in theoretical and historicist interrogations of them; however, these ideas still hold formidable popular purchase thanks to the culture industry’s “adapted Romanticism” (Adorno para 7...

Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992 (review)

Reviewed by: Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992 Hillary Miller Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992. By Kamran Afary. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009; pp. 262. When all of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers charged in the brutal beating of Rodney King were exonerated with a "not guilty" verdict in April 1992, protests enveloped the city, leaving behind a toll of fifty dead, 2,000 injured, and damages nearing $1 billion (4). In Performance and Activism, Kamran Afary explores the performative aspects of these protests, emphasizing the voices of activists who struggled to transform unrest into social change. As a reporter for a local radio station in Los Angeles during the 1990s, Afary saw firsthand how their calls for justice and revolutionary, democratic social change dissipated behind the mainstream media's coverage of interethnic violence. Making extensive use of interviews and other archival materials, Afary recovers the "rhetorical arsenals" of these activists to illustrate the methods by which they developed new counter-public spaces and counter-narratives (161). In his introduction, Afary provides the rationale for his distinctly interdisciplinary methodology, which employs critical race theory, cultural studies, media studies, urban studies, and performance studies. This variety of theoretical lenses adds depth and texture to the frozen, still-life tableaux of the riots that have dominated the narratives of this period in Los Angeles's history. He reviews literature related to the uprising, as well as theories of postmodernism and the global city, acknowledging prominent sociologists who have taken this sprawling city as their subject (for example, Theodor Adorno, Mike Davis, and Saskia Sassen). Using the lens of performance to examine multiple public spheres, Afary argues that grassroots organizations, such as gang truce collectives and court-watch groups, developed new forms of cultural expression that created what political theorist Nancy Fraser refers to as "subaltern counterpublics," in contrast to the notion of a single public sphere. In these spaces, Afary explains, people from subaltern groups can "enact their identities and speak in their own voices relatively (but never totally) freely from forces of domination" (28). His second chapter, "Toward a Historical Political Economy of Los Angeles," tethers theories of cultural production to political economy, reading the rebellion in terms of both its ideological function in public discourse and its relation to the larger criminal-justice system. It also lends specificity to his profile of the city—particularly its shifting demographics, mass immigration, and economic growth—and lays the foundation for his later shift to the "local" (specifically, the Watts and Compton areas). After providing his theoretical grounding and sociological framework, Afary focuses on the gang truce movement in chapters 3 and 4. Although it was often misinterpreted by members of the LAPD as threatening, the gang truce movement offered what Afary, following anthropologist Victor Turner, refers to as "healing rituals." One example was the organization of "gang truce parties," a new form of urban festivity "comprised of a series of rich improvisatory rituals and ceremonies that symbolized a community's willingness to deal with rapidly changing political situations" (73). Gang truce negotiations "grew into a multifaceted movement throughout the 1990s, where performances and creative presentations of the self became even more pronounced" (89). These "creative presentations of the self" included the public telling of stories by former gang members, the emergence of new graffiti celebrating the truce, the wearing of clothing that symbolized friendship among gangs, and the playing of music once identified with rival gangs. In chapter 5, Afary focuses on organizations like the LA4+ Committee and Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (or Mothers ROC), composed of mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, and their supporters. These women monitored the judicial system in order to "build a movement that would offer their sons a chance for exoneration or a more equitable sentence" (122). Members educated themselves about the legal process, attended court sessions, and mentored friends and relatives of the men on trial. Afary claims that, in their seemingly simple acts of watching trials and collaborating with lawyers, they established a counter-public space, creating "one of the most successful grassroots responses to the injustices of the court system...

The Value of the Liberated Word: The Russian Satirical Press of 1905 and the Theory of Cultural Production

The Value of the Liberated Word: The Russian Satirical Press of 1905 and the Theory of Cultural Production

The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production

This article sets out new methodological principles for the sociology of art, a sub-discipline that it seeks to broaden conceptually by shifting the ground from art to cultural production. This shift suggests the utility of overcoming the boundaries that demarcate the sociology of art from adjacent fields, augmenting the sociological repertoire with reference to anthropology, cultural and media studies, art and cultural history, and the music disciplines. At the same time the article proposes that an explanatory theory of cultural production requires reinvention in relation to five key themes: aesthetics and the cultural object; agency and subjectivity; the place of institutions; history, temporality and change; and problems of value and judgement. The first half of the article approaches these issues through a sustained critique of Bourdieu. It proceeds through an exposition of generative research from contemporary anthropology, including the work of Alfred Gell, Christopher Pinney, Fred Myers and others, which highlights the analysis of mediation, ontology, materiality and genre. The second half develops fur ther an analytics of mediation and of temporalities, exemplifying this and expanding on the five themes through a discussion of two institutional ethnographies of cultural production (of the computer music institute IRCAM in Paris, and of the BBC). In pursuing this programme the paper advocates a novel conception of the relation between theoretical model and empirical research, one that might be termed post-positivist empiricism, while also suggesting that the framework outlined offers the basis for an enriched cultural criticism.

In Defence of Theoretical and Methodological Pluralism in the Sociology of Art: A Critique of Georgina Born’s Programmatic Essay

This article welcomes Born’s proposal that the sociology of art learn from ‘adjacent fields’ that can ‘augment the sociological repertoire’. It agrees especially that sociologists can learn much from the anthropology of art and material culture studies. However, it challenges Born’s claim that the sociology of art has ‘seen little progress in recent years’ and thus questions certain aspects of her proposal for a ‘post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production’. The central argument is: rather than an ‘analytics of mediation’ — which Born recommends — the sociology of art can benefit from studying material ‘mediators’ at work in concrete artistic networks, and the role of aesthetic agency and art in the constitution of social life more generally. The ar ticle concludes that the path forward for a sociology of art may lie precisely in not trying to force a reconciliation between macro and micro approaches, or between humanities and social science perspectives.

Cultural Differentiation or Self-Exclusion

Based upon Bourdieu’s ‘theory of capital’ and Willis’s ‘theory of cultural production’, the article scrutinizes the interrelation between perceived discrimination, self-exclusion and cultural differentiation. The empirical analysis is based on a longitudinal study by the German Youth Institute, which was set up to explore the transition of young Turks from school to vocational training and employment. The data point out that young immigrants who are dealing with experiences of devaluation of their (origin-)specific cultural capital and who are disadvantaged regarding the accessibility of dominant cultural capital bring about a production of a counterculture. They are less likely to exclude themselves in the sense of internalizing the rightness of the dominant culture.

Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (review)

Reviewed by: Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada J. A. Weingarten Candida Rifkind. Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 256 pages. $50.00. Candida Rifkind’s claim is difficult to refute: Canadian modernism “is unintelligible without some reference to socialism” (13). Studies of leftist politics in Canadian literature have generally emphasized the usual (and usually male) suspects: F. R. Scott, Irving Layton, Leo Kennedy, and the host of other male authors that fill Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski’s The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada. Dorothy Livesay is the only obvious exception to this androcentric historical approach. With such discourses in mind, Rifkind convincingly argues for the importance of female leftist authors during the 1930s and articulates the complex cultural, literary, and ideological struggles such writers faced. She situates many [End Page 141] of these ideas and contexts in her introductory chapter and subsequently outlines the general effects of modernism’s misogyny and the Depression on this decade’s female socialists. The sheer thoroughness of her study and its well-argued position overshadow a few concerns about Rifkind’s methodology; her elucidation of “documentary modernism” is sometimes slow-paced, and this issue might prompt minor criticisms from some readers. Rifkind’s introduction paints a vivid picture of the Depression and uses Ian McKay’s “map of the formations of Canadian socialism” (22) to frame this epoch politically. She also explicates the interdependence of modernism and socialism through a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural production and of “documentary modernism” (a key term in Rifkind’s study) in various mediums: poetry, theatre, and novels. For the most part, Rifkind’s chapters proceed according to this basic outline of genres. She begins with Dorothy Livesay and stresses her documentary interests as well as her affiliation with two socialist periodicals, Young Work and Masses. Rifkind identifies Livesay’s political poetry as part of a growing “counterpublic” in Canadian literature; here she borrows from Michael Warner’s popular discourse on “oppositional discursive exchanges” (45). This chapter oscillates between in-depth treatments of historical context and analyses of various poets (Livesay and Mona Weiss, for example) and of some short stories (such as Ruby Ronan’s “One-Day Service”). Most of Rifkind’s chapters follow such a structure: an extended historical context leads into her literary analysis. Her second chapter focuses on Anne Marriott’s The Wind Our Enemy as a paradigm of late 1930s socialist modernism. After thoroughly contextualizing the “Popular Front” in Canada’s 1930s, Rifkind argues for Marriott as an “experimental” poet and as a writer engaged in “political protest” (116); she praises the poem as “an entry into English-Canadian socialist modernism” (117). Her third chapter gives shape to socialist theatre groups, specifically the Toronto Workers’ Experimental Theatre, and concludes that these “theatres of innovation […] forged a space at once historical, social, and artistic in which experiences of the nation were reimagined” (160–61). Her final chapter turns to Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage and this novel’s achievement as documentary modernism: it “draws on satire and allegory,” but it is also “proletarian fiction” (175). She praises Baird’s novel as one that “opens up […] a point of entry into overlapping economic, social, and literary problems” (202). Rifkind’s historical and literary analyses are meticulous. Moreover, her inclusion of numerous anecdotes drawn from archival research makes Comrades and Critics engaging, to say the least. Her treatments of Livesay, the binding and strongest thread of this study (she appears in every [End Page 142] chapter), are most adept. This deftness partly stems from Rifkind’s useful new approaches to this poet, but the biographical asides also offer enjoyable context. Rifkind’s discussions about J. F. B. Livesay’s influence on the careers of both his daughter and his “protégé” (103), Anne Marriott, are most worthy of mention. The thorough exploration of such stories and of their historical circumstance demonstrates the scholar’s exceptional rendering of a particular moment and of particular relationships in Canadian socialist literary history. Some of these asides also mark Rifkind’s commendable anticipation of her reader’s questions...

How did Hou Hsiao‐Hsien change Taiwan cinema? A critical reassessment

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien has been one of the central members of Taiwan New Cinema (TNC) since the early 1980s and subsequently took on the rising trajectory of becoming an internationally famous film master. In contrast, during the same period, the Taiwan film industry diminished dramatically and nearly collapsed. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and the thesis of political economy of communication, this article regards Hou as a social agent and accordingly analyzes the dynamic interactions between him and the structural factors related to the broader transformations of Taiwan film industry. Hou seemed to choose his filming and production mode subjectively from the beginning, but actually the possibilities he got at the time were limited by the social structures. In addition, his rising trajectory also has been embedded in the dynamic processes of global cultural economy. Paradoxically, by the same local and global processes, Taiwan film industry has been seriously declining.

Self-made Motormen: The Material Construction of Working-class Masculine Identities through Car Modification

This paper explores how motorcars and car-based cultural practices operate in the construction of young working-class masculine identities. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the summer of 2002 with young male car modifiers from the Midlands and North Wales who associated with the British cruising scene. Although this study is broadly framed by the youth cultural world of cruising, it does not approach car modification as a collective cultural phenomenon or draw on subcultural theory, but instead examines young men's relationships with their cars in terms of general theories of consumption and identity and theories of cultural production. The car modifiers participating in this study frequently resisted calls to collectivity and repeatedly endorsed a heavily individualised discourse of consumption. As consumers of the motorcar, they constituted themselves as absolutely individual on the basis of their ownership of modified cars that they constituted as culturally unique. Car modification operated as a set of identity practices organised around the active consumption and symbolic manipulation of standard motorcars and the cultural production of idiosyncratic signifiers of masculine identity. Through car modification, young working-class men discursively distanced themselves from the mass of standard car-owning subjects and constituted themselves as ‘unique’ car-owning individuals who were culturally privileged. This claim to privilege was predicated on their capacity to produce highly conspicuous motorcars, which they viewed as a source of considerable cultural capital.