Western Popular Culture Research Articles

Islamic Underground Movement: Islamist Music in the Indonesian Popular Music Scene

Since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, music has become a site of religio-political resistance among the new Islamist generation in Indonesia. This research examines the emergence of Islamist music on the Indonesian underground music scene to show the deepening influence of the Islamist movement among urban Muslim youth and the shifting strategy of the new Islamist generation from structural politics to cultural politics. The emergence of Islamist music indicates how a new generation of Islamists negotiates an Islamist worldview with contemporary popular culture. By maintaining the aggressive character of underground music, they adopt the Western popular culture as a code of resistance against the secular cultural hegemony. They also use popular music as a cultural approach or a strategy to promote the Islamist ideology to all urban Muslim youth.

From DIY Avant-gardism to Icons of German New Wave: Einstürzende Neubauten and the Legacy of “Ingenious Dilletants”

ABSTRACT Originating from the avant-gardist part of Berlin’s “ingenious dilletants” of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Einstürzende Neubauten have been playing a significant role in Western popular culture for more than 40 years. This article investigates Einstürzende Neubauten’s reception and legacy-building process by using ethnographic field research and documentary analysis. The analysis focuses the dimensions of musical traditions and innovations within the Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) movement, the artistic and philosophic approach of the “dilletants” as well as the social and local context of Berlin during the times of Cold War.

Чайна-таун в России: судьба символа «китайской экспансии»

The massive Chinese labor migration to post-Soviet Russia has posed a difficult task in understanding this new phenomenon and assessing its consequences. A popular response to this request was the idea that the immediate and obligatory consequence is the formation of Chinatowns - places of cohabitation, concentration of economic activity and social life of migrants. Chinatown was seen as an immanent characteristic of Chinese migration, its way of life, a mechanism of social organization and control. In many geopolitical constructions and in the mass media, Chinatowns were considered as already existing numerous and uncontrolled enclaves in cities - the main tool of “Chinese expansion”. The empirical basis for the formation of such constructions was provided by vague fragments of historical memory of pre-revolutionary Chinatowns and images of American Chinatowns drawn from Western popular culture. However, this syndrome, which was powerful at the beginning of the process, began to quickly lose energy and influence. Nobody could find Chinatowns in Russian cities due to their absence. The horror of “Chinese expansion” gradually changed to the already familiar migrant phobia. People became used to decreasing quantitative Chinese migration and became accustomed to benefiting from it. As a result, Chinatown gradually transformed from a very concrete, material phenomenon into a metaphor, a designation of Chineseness as such. Therefore, this syndrome loses its mobilizing power. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Translingual Englishes, participatory hip‐hop and social media in Nepal

AbstractThis article discusses some key functions and features of English in participatory popular culture and social media in Nepal. Analytical attention is paid to how English use in rap battles is entangled with other local languages and semiotic modes to create translingual practices and how online metapragmatic comments about the rap battles give rise to diverse language ideologies. The study shows that by creating their social life offline and online, Nepali young adults project themselves as individuals who have access to niche Englishes via popular culture. English use by Nepali youth functions not only as an instrument to understand Western popular culture but also as a symbolic resource to index a range of such social identities as ‘educated’, ‘civilized’ and ‘competent’. The article concludes by arguing that Nepali young adults create new subjectivities that are often suggestive of social transformation.

“Fearing your own queer self”: Depictions of Diasporic Queer Experience in Grace Lau’s Poetry

The intersection of migrant and queer experiences constitutes one of the core motifs of The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak (2021), the debut poetry collec- tion by Grace Lau, a Chinese Canadian poet. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, Lau provides an insight into her experiences as both a Canadian and a Chinese immigrant, a lesbian and a failed model child, an aficionado of traditional Chinese culture and an en- thusiast of contemporary Western popular culture. The mosaic of experiences illustrates the complexity and intricacy of the author’s identity/ies. Through the analysis of three poems (“The Levity,” “The Lies That Bind,” and “My Grief Is a Winter”), supported with references to the theoretical works on Asian North American writing and queer Asian mi- grant experience, the article discusses Lau’s depictions of queerness and her experiences as a Chinese immigrant in relation to the Canadian LGBTQ+ community, white queer liberalism, and internal politics of the Chinese diaspora. It proposes to see Lau’s poetry as an example of biomythography, a form of autobiographical writing showcasing how encounters with different communities shape the subject. In the process of disentangling her complex ties with the Chinese diaspora, the white Canadian LGBTQ+ community and her own family, Lau reveals the impact of her interactions with those different groups as she can finally express her identity as a queer Chinese Canadian.

"Jewish" Genocidal Villains for Children? Emergent Holocaust Consciousness and Postwar Antisemitism in One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

ABSTRACT: This article studies how two popular 1960s Anglophone children's films projected antisemitic ideas onto genocidal villains. Focusing on Cruella de Vil of Walt Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and the Child Catcher of Ken Hughes's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), it analyzes the appearance of ethnically stereotyped, Jewish-suggestive figures presented as enactors of genocidal violence, rather than as victims or survivors of it. Subliminally reversing the resonance of the Holocaust's Jewish victimization by non-Jewish Europeans, these films both touch upon themes of genocidal atrocity that were belatedly emerging in broader Western popular culture of the 1960s, as well as maintain an antisemitic ethnic hierarchy in which implicitly "Jewish," non-white, and queer bodies appear unworthy or dangerous. In these films, villains marked by Jewish, racialized, and queer stereotypes, as well as by antisemitic paradigms, categorically oppose the existence of an entire demographic or seek to confine and/or annihilate that demographic for their own perceived wellbeing. Contextualizing and analyzing this phenomenon, I consider its potential meanings for 1960s American audiences in relation to their shifting social and political realities, including the waning of public antisemitism, as well as the emergence of Second-Wave Feminism and the Gay Liberation movement.

State Spectacles of Yoga: Invisible India and India Everywhere

This essay investigates competing visibilities within a cultural practice that India has promoted as a privileged image of national identity: yoga. These competing perceptions, in which yoga can be seen as at once iconically and yet not uniquely Indian, pose a challenge for the Indian state in its management of yoga’s symbolic value. Analysing rhetoric from India’s nation-branding pursuits in the context of Western popular culture, I argue that the state manipulates visual regimes of yoga in ways that turn this spectre of Indian invisibility into a testament to Indian ubiquity. Invisibility as a problem is thus transformed into invisibility as a privilege, revealing how the potential fluidity across two different regimes of identity and power can render state fantasies more resilient.

Translation as Representation: Western Imagination of China from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

This article explores how China has been imagined in Western literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, using a series of emblematic figures to examine practices of appropriation and troping. It seeks to reveal how the historical construction and representation of China is refashioned in our time, against the background of China’s rise to global power and a concomitant growing sense of doubt, fear and hostility in Europe and North America surrounding its ascendency. Two case studies are employed to elaborate on what this article considers to be exemplifications of Orientalism in Sino-Western cultural history: Daniel Defoe and Voltaire in Enlightenment Europe, and Western popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In doing so this article addresses how China has incrementally come to be translated and represented as a principal Other for Euro-America, and how their perceptions of, and writings about, China today echo and reinforce its translations and representations produced by the Defoe-Voltaire axis: the binary schema of demonization and romanticization. It concludes that this mechanics at work in framing China for reception and consumption by the Anglophone readership provide effective means of translating and representing China as an ideologically menacing Other, thereby begetting self-perpetuating representations.

The role of eastern philosophy in building immunity against the attack of western popular culture

In this study, the role of oriental education in increasing the importance of traditional culture, the role of oriental education in increasing the importance of traditional culture against pop culture, which is now becoming a part of the culture of all countries, the way of man and his life path in oriental philosophy, and the path leading to perfection are discussed in this research. views. It is about the role of establishing a view of Eastern philosophy as a part of the youth education system in forming a stronger and more durable worldview than foreign ideas and ideologies.

The new ‘new liberal Indian woman’: The glocalization of chick lit

ABSTRACT Since the process of economic liberalization began in India in the 1990s, globalization opened channels for the circulation of Western popular literature and culture in India, which led to their localized adaptation. An illustrative example of this phenomenon is Indian chick lit, which features plots that have a lot in common with Western chick lit but are adapted to reflect urban Indian popular culture, complete with popular Indian stereotypes like the arranged marriage to make it more relatable to the target Indian audience. Through an analysis of Swati Kaushal’s Piece of Cake (2004) and Advaita Kala’s Almost Single (2009), this essay will illustrate how Indian chick lit represents a newer version of Rupal Oza’s post-liberalization ‘new liberal Indian woman’ and glocalizes the influences of Western culture. I also suggest that Indian chick lit requires a broadening of the understanding of agency to include the choices that privileged subjects make even if they do not dismantle hegemonic power structures.

Not Your Average Zombie: Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks, by Chera Kee

In her ambitious study, Chera Kee seeks to revise one of the most prominent monstrous figures in Western popular culture since the early 2000s—the zombie. Building on Sarah Juliet Lauro’s important work in the field, Kee proposes a rather broad definition of zombihood “as a state existing somewhere between the human and the not quite human, as a state of liminality associated with—but not entirely dictated by—a loss of free will” (15). Yet, Kee distances herself from some of the more dominant readings of the zombie as primarily an empty container onto which all kinds of social, cultural, and political anxieties can be projected to express concerns about an equally broad range of dehumanising tendencies in various contexts. In contrast, by distinguishing between “ordinary” and “extra-ordinary” zombies (3), the book provides a productive new lens through which we can study this influential figure.

The influence of local and national press on the comic publishing industry in the Polish People’s Republic between 1956 and 1989

ABSTRACT This article analyses the influence of the local and national press on the shape of the Polish comic publishing industry in the Polish People’s Republic (1947–1989). It discusses how the negative attitude of the authorities towards comics gradually changed, leading in the 1970s to the use of this medium both as propaganda and a didactic tool as well as an equivalent of Western popular culture, anchored in the policy of economic stabilisation in Edward Gierek’s era. We describe the main newspaper and magazine series of comics and their authors, examine the national and transnational patterns of visual narration, and show the links between ideology and entertainment. The essential part of our analyses is the political and economic factors that shaped the Polish publishing industry, especially between 1956 and 1989. The article also explores the first political and academic commentaries on comics in communist Poland and indicates the evolution of views on them – from an evil, capitalist medium to a useful (or even fashionable) mode of artistic expression. Finally, our research examines how comic books, their characters and authors from the 1970s and 1980s survived in free and democratic Polish culture. We also investigate some international careers of Polish authors.

Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones

Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones

Exploring the Irony in Japanese Popular Culture. A Cross-Cultural and Linguistic Analysis.

The present study addresses the status and use of irony in Japanese popular culture by closely examining its’ cultural variations on a corpus consisting of ironic utterances and situations from three popular culture media: Japanese drama, anime, and manga. While it is likely that Western popular culture abounds in ironic aesthetics and standpoints, the concept of “irony” faces cultural reconstruction within Japanese culture and society, a fact easily reflected in national media and cinematographic productions. In such cases, the cultural and linguistic distance between Japanese and English, and the striking difference, which exists between these two geographical and cultural contexts, increase the challenge interposed by the understanding and interpreting of irony. Moreover, on a conversational level, ironizing one’s communication partner is considered socially unacceptable and penalised accordingly. It stands against the much-expected politeness and traditional Japanese concepts such as “honne” and “tatemae,” which, if preserved, can create harmony in communication. In conclusion, the ambiguous definition of irony, together with the negative perception and reluctance of Japanese people towards its usage, has contributed to frequently branding irony strictly as a Western phenomenon. However, as the present research attempts to demonstrate, the usage of irony in Japanese popular culture embraces multifarious approaches, and it extends to reach the borders of semantics.

Disco Culture and the Ritual Journey in the Soviet 1980s

This article traces a largely forgotten history of the 1980s Soviet disco craze by following the work of one of its pioneering figures, the Latvian DJ, musician, and performance artist Hardijs Lediņš (1955–2004). It documents how the movement coalesced amidst creative responses to the gradual opening of the USSR to Western popular culture on the one hand, and to the unique affordances of local political, social, and technological structures on the other. In Lediņš’s case, the response was also shaped by commitments to an ideal of Soviet socialism that persisted despite the grim realities of Brezhnev-era society. Drawing on archival research and oral history, I begin in the loosely monitored space of the Student Club at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, where Lediņš’s talents and ties to elites enabled him to found a wildly popular discotheque in the 1974–75 academic year, one of the first of its kind in the USSR. I follow his increasing investment in a distinctly Soviet form of experimentalist performance art in the early 1980s, in which—inspired in part by local readings of John Cage—the ritualized trek into the countryside became a vehicle for attaining spiritual enlightenment in communion with others. Finally, I consider ways in which his ritual journeys inflected his disco operation in subsequent years, when he reframed his events as experiments in communality—specifically, as means of experiencing, at least for an evening, the enlightening promise of Soviet socialism undelivered by the state itself.

Taming rock music in communist states: Politicisation of Western popular culture in East Europe and mainland China

A comparison of the former Eastern Bloc and China’s ways of dealing with the social implications of rock music as an alien cultural import from the West reveals significant analogies. The paper traces the process of politicisation of rock music and compares the two different cultural spaces by mapping each space’s state ideology, aesthetic traditions and identities, and discriminative political and economic tools used to marginalise rock. Here the term politicisation refers mainly to the polarisation between the communist regimes’ restrictive policies, and the attempts of the rock scenes to sustain their discriminating characteristics and relationship to protest. While in European communist states rock played a relevant subversive role, conversely, in China any ‘rocking’ of the state has largely been averted. The Chinese rock scene as an off-mainstream urban subculture has received less popular support than its counterpart in Europe and has also proved less politically significant. This comparative case study discusses the relationship between popular music and politics by tracing analogies and differences between the former Czechoslovakia, where the ideologisation and politicisation of rock reached the highest point in the Eastern Bloc, and contemporary China.

Social justice in the courtroom: youth culture and multiple narrative voices in Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging Is Announced

African writers who have been concerned with governmental authority have sought to uncover the sources of injustice in the larger societal context, to redefine criminality beyond the focus on individual culpability. Using multiple narrative voices and the courtroom as literary space, Eustace Palmer’s A Hanging Is Announced exemplifies the search for social justice through representations of youth culture. Multiple narrative voices can be understood through musical analogies, such as counterpoint, developed in such theoretical ideas as those of Edward Said. The stories of the five varied narrative voices in A Hanging Is Announced are “intertwined” and are of a contrapuntal or polyphonic nature, akin as well to patterns of jazz improvisation. Palmer reveals through retrospection and a contrapuntal grounding the relationship between the larger Sierra Leonean pre-civil war social order and the justice system influenced by powerful elites. The courtroom scenario reflecting the “whodunit” motif, often portrayed in Western popular culture, is given symbolic rendering. Furthermore, the novel explores complex familial relationships and child labor as well as sexual exploitation of youth who become victims of foreign tourism.

Alternativne umetničke prakse između moći države i granica slobode

Starting from Theodore Adorno's point of view that the sociability of art is shown through its anti-social character, the paper deals with a sociological analysis of alternative artistic practices and their social reach and boundaries. Associated with a very specific social context, with a clearly established deviation not only from the mainstream of the official, elite art (artistic formalism) but also from the dominant culture and prevailing social values, alternative artistic practices are considered in the context of critical cultural counter-public, which is positioned between the formal and the symbolic powers of the state, on the one hand, and the personal / creative and social freedom of the artist and recipients, on the other hand. In the first part of the paper, we are presented with a general review of the transformations as regards the spheres of artistic creation, reception, and evaluation, which started establishing themselves within Western societies as of the beginning of 20th century, as well as with questioning their most important social functions. Following the existing research and using secondary data sources, the paper continues with an analysis of the underground music scene and lifestyles of young people in Western societies, as well as of those that emerged under the influence of the spread of Western popular culture and art in authoritarian regimes of some Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Although still sporadic, rather marginalized and regime-controlled, these alternative artistic practices contribute to trans-cultural communication and creative and value synergy, gradually undermining rigid social frameworks and belief systems within different societies (Western and Arab-Islamic) but also between them.

#Hashtag: How Selected Texts of Popular Culture Engaged With Sexual Assault In the Context of the Me Too Movement in 2019

The paper seeks to explore recent shifts within the popular culture with regard to oppression involving gender, class, race, and ethnicity that can be traced back to the #MeToo movement which was revived as a social media hashtag in October 2017 and has since spread all over the world. The paper starts with a brief overview of Western popular culture that “has recently been seen as a champion for feminism . . . with many high-profile female musicians and actresses visibly promoting the movement in their work” (Woodacre 2018, 21). Next, the paper discusses the origins of the Me Too Movement and the way it approaches the meaning of gendered oppressions as well as individualized and collective experiences of survivors of sexual abuse. This is later explored in the examination of the impact of the hashtag-led movement on three works of popular culture: Amazon’s TV series Lorena (2019), Nancy Schwartzman’s documentary Roll Red Roll (2019), and We Believe: the Best Men Can Be (2019) advertisement by Gillette. The entire case study is informed primarily by feminist theory understood as inseparable from feminist activism, following bell hooks’ Feminist theory from margin to center (1984).

About the Contributors

About the Contributors