Wang Ming-hui and Blacklist Production: the Third World/Asia turn of Taiwan’s new music production

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the music group ‘Blacklist Production’ (also known as Blacklist Studio) that was established in the late 1980s when the Martial Law was lifted in Taiwan, and the group’s original works of music. It investigates the music composition and thinking process of Wang Ming-hui, the founder of Blacklist Production, and analyses two albums produced by the music studio, Songs of Madness (1989) and Lullaby (1996), as a way of reconsidering and reflecting the feeling process and limitations of the nativist ideology from 1989 to 1996 that took shape in Taiwan’s society. In addition, the paper also explores Wang’s musical practices through which he has tried to answer the question of ‘how to express thoughts with music’. Through the historical analysis of musical works and interviews with Wang Ming-hui, the paper suggests that ‘Taiwan’s New Music Production’ brought up and practiced by Wang and Blacklist Production is embedded with the possibility for Taiwan’s culture and imagination of modernity to ‘turn’ the referent point to the Third World/Asia.     

Persistent militants and quiescent comrades: intra-industry strike activity on the docks, 1947-89⊃

Although dockers have figured prominently as a critical case in many standard theories of industrial conflict, they have often behaved in ways which these theories cannot grasp. This is perhaps most clearly evident when strike action at the port rather than the industry level is the subject of attention. Most notably, industry level theories cannot explain the persistent militancy of dockers employed in the major ports and the relative quiescence of their comrades employed at the smaller ports. To be sure, industry level variables can be used to understand the general character of workplace relations and the processes involved in strike action, but to fully explain the actual incidence and intensity of strike action over both time and place also requires analysis of the particular patterns of labour regulation at different ports and the consequent patterns of conflict and accommodation at the workplace level.     

Multiculturalism’s categories and transnational ties: the Bangladeshi campaign for independence in Britain, 1971

Accounts of the changing categories operative within British multiculturalism have commonly focused upon the gradual division of identities. Analysing the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War’s effects in Britain, this article suggests that a narrative of categorisations in British multiculturalism must be more complex, sensitive to shifts in time and both bottom-up and top-down factors. Whilst the mobilisation of second-generation British Bangladeshi community organisations in the 1980s firmly established Bangladeshis as a distinct constituency of multiculturalism, the 1971 campaign, conducted in a context less sensitive to the internal diversity of ethnic minorities, contributed to a more partial recognition of Bengalis as distinct. Such categorical shifts, the article suggests, are therefore the result of both domestic and transnational politics. In the British Bangladeshi community, ‘homeland’ political issues, particularly those centred on the relationship between Bangladeshi culture and Islam, have mapped heavily onto British struggles about how the community is framed. The transnational mobilisations, by bringing British Bangladeshis into increased contact with mainstream institutions, have often assisted rather than frustrated integration. Nevertheless, the importation of Bangladeshi political conflict to Britain has at times been resisted by British elites, reflecting again the importance of the dialect between bottom-up and top-down action in producing multiculturalism’s structure.     

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt,Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face‐to‐face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexander's performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexander's concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.     

Electronics technicians in an industrialising economy: some glimpses on the ‘New Middle Class’

The ‘New Working Class’ theory, popularised in French sociology during the 1960s and 1970s, envisages the advent of a politically inspired class movement that rekindles the vision of a new social order as the technicians rise to become its vanguard. According to writers like Mallet and Touraine, these technical ‘white-collars’ tend to take over from the traditional manual groups in posing as the ‘standard-bearers’ of class-based industrial radicalism and solidarity. This paper proposes to trace the recent vein of discussions on the class implications of occupational and technological transformation from such a neo-Marxian perspective. It also attempts to apply these arguments to interpret the characteristics of a new occupation in Hong Kong – the technicians working in the electronics and related industries, with reference to an empirical study carried out in the early 1980s. ¹ 1 Empirical data for the study were derived chiefly from a survey using a questionnaire schedule to interview a sample of 342 technicians and their managements in thirty-five establishments selected from the related industries of electronics manufacture, tele-communications, television, electronics product trading, computer servicing and data-processing, power plant, the mass-transit underground railway and the civil service. Field work was conducted in the summer of 1980. This research project provided the backbone of the empirical data for the writer's Ph.D. Thesis for the University of London, 1983, entitled ‘Technicians in the Hong Kong electronics and related industries: an emerging occupation?
     

Troubled Engagement in Ethnicized Conflict

Feminist cross-community initiatives, which emerged in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine in the 1980s, are frequently lauded in the gender and conflict literature as evidence of the ways in which women can work across ethnonational boundaries. In particular, the theory of ‘transversal dialogue’, developed by Nira Yuval-Davis and adopted by other feminist scholars and activists, suggests that participants have developed a mode of dialogue that enables them to acknowledge differences while developing common goals. In ethicized conflict, transversal politics is understood as an alternative to the essentializing of ‘identity politics’ as well as their undemocratic character. The empirical research, however, suggests that identity politics remains relevant for participants, particularly when cross-community dialogue is limited by external political realities and internal community divisions. In my view, understanding the ways in which identity politics contributes to the development of feminist goals related to women's inclusion in peace processes and post-conflict peace-building is not at odds with transversal politics; rather, women use both modes of politics to build feminist networks and tackle women's marginalization in hyper-masculinized and militarized zones of ethnicized conflict.     

Young precariat and a new work order? A case for historical sociology

This article assesses Guy Standing's (2011) account of ‘the precariat’ as a ‘new class' to the many exercises undertaken in youth studies since the 1980s to make sense of the changing patterns of youth employment. While Standing's focus on the experience of fragmented and casualized work in many economies which now implicates young people has value, there are significant problems with his account that highlights the some difficulties in thinking in somewhat abstracted ways about ‘structural’ change processes that do not sufficiently consider the question of time. The case of Australia's of labour market regulation since the 1890s is used to test the validity of Standing's focus on the novelty of neoliberalism after the early 1980 to explain the emergence of precarious employment. Standing's claim that insecurity is central to the ‘new precariat’ because they lack the different kinds of security enjoyed by the ‘working-class’ after 1945, highlights the need for an interpretative framework attentive to the longer term role of state policy and the interplay of historical and local processes. The case is then made for developing a historical sociology that engages with what is now happening in respect to young people and their employment security.     

The Engaged Academic: Academic Intellectuals and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement

This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci. More specifically, it considers that role in relation to one political ‘field’ and one type of movement: a field which we refer to, following the work of Peter Sedgwick, as ‘psychopolitics’, and a movement which, since the mid- to late-1980s, has been known as the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement—psychiatric patients and their allies who campaign for the democratisation of the mental health system. In particular, through a comparison of two texts, Nick Crossley's Contesting Psychiatry and Kathryn Church's Forbidden Narratives, the paper contrasts different depths of engagement between academic intellectuals and the social movements which they research.     

Occupational Cultures and the Embodiment of Masculinity: Hairdressing,Estate Agency and Firefighting

Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project, this article explores the implications of different occupational cultures for men's masculine identity. With a focus on embodiment and individual agency, it explores the argument that it is within ‘scenes of constraint’ that gendered identities are both ‘done’ and ‘undone’. In this article we examine embodied experience in occupational cultures commonly stereotyped as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (hairdressing, estate agency and firefighting), showing how men conform to, draw upon and resist the gendered stereotypes associated with these occupations. What we argue is that gendered conceptions of ‘the body’ need to be differentiated from individual men's embodiment. Instead, processes of identification can be shown to emerge via embodied experiences of particular kinds of gendered body, and in the ways in which men negotiate the perception of these bodies in different occupational contexts.     

Beyond ‘Gender Differences’: A Canadian Study of Women's and Men's Careers in Engineering

This article explores the relationship between gender and career paths for a group of women and men who graduated as engineers during a period of labour market turbulence in western Canada during the 1980s. Using a model adapted from Brown (1982 ), the article uses ‘career path’ as a device to organize data drawn primarily from telephone and face‐to‐face interviews with 317 graduates. Three career paths provide the focus for the study: the ‘organizational’, characterized by stable employment with one employer; the ‘occupational’, characterized by mobility between employers; and the entrepreneurial, characterized by self‐employment. The use of the career path framework moves the study beyond global comparisons (of the dichotomized ‘gender differences’ kind) between ‘the women’ and ‘the men’. As well as allowing for comparison between the paths, it allows more refined and contextualized comparisons within each path. Such comparisons produce patterns of similarity and difference that sometimes transcend gender.     

Professionals on the Sidelines: the Working Lives of Bedside Nurses and Elementary Core French Teachers

Oppression exists at many levels and in varying degrees. To demonstrate how marginality affects differently situated professionals, two occupational groups considered to be marginalized were studied: bedside nurses and elementary core French teachers. The findings confirm that women (and men) in ‘feminized’ fields experience, as well as exercise, oppression. Devaluation of their worth is internalized and taken for granted by most who inhabit these work spaces, including the members concerned. While those groups ‘on top’ bully those ‘below,’ dominance is also reinforced laterally amongst the members. Thus marginality between groups, as well as within them is thereby produced, with the centre of oppression constantly shifting. The authors conclude that professionals are not unified categories, readily distinguishable from outside oppressors. Their members, too, are caught up in power relationships amongst themselves. Recognition of the shifting centre of oppression is an essential first step to improve conditions for the marginalized.     

Calling for accounts: numbers, monsters and membership1

This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts ‘pass muster’ and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co‐presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like ‘action at a distance’. Taking numbers to act as ‘bearers of culture’, the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to ‘occasions’ in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets. The article begins by exploring how ‘calls to account’ are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such ‘gaps’ affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of ‘co‐presence’.     

RECLAIMING HERITAGE: COLOURIZATION,CULTURE WARS AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA

This article considers the discursive continuities between a specifically liberal defence of cultural patrimony, evident in the debate over film colourization, and the culture war critique associated with neo-conservatism. It examines how a rhetoric of nostalgia, linked to particular ideas of authenticity, canonicity and tradition, has been mobilized by the right and the left in attempts to stabilize the configuration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity. While different in scale, colourization and multiculturalism were seen to create respective (postmodern) barbarisms against which defenders of culture, heritage and good taste could unite. I argue that in its defence of the ‘classic’ work of art, together with principles of aesthetic distinction and the value of cultural inheritance, the anti-colourization lobby helped enrich and legitimize a discourse of tradition that, at the end of the 1980s, was beginning to reverberate powerfully in the conservative challenge to a ‘crisis’ within higher education and the humanities. This article attempts to complicate the contemporary politics of nostalgia, showing how a defence of cultural patrimony has distinguished major and minor culture wars, engaging left and right quite differently but with similar presuppositions.     

A Cross-Cultural Examination of Family Communication Patterns,Parent-Child Closeness,and Conflict Styles in the United States,China, and Saudi Arabia

The current study was designed to examine the impacts of family communication patterns (FCP), relational closeness, and culture on adult children’s conflict styles with their parents. Participants (N = 594) from the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia completed self-report questionnaires that included questions about their family’s conversation and conformity orientations, relational closeness, and their conflict styles with their parents. The results show that conversation orientation is a positive predictor of collaboration and compromise, conformity orientation is a positive predictor of accommodation and avoidance, and relational closeness is a negative predictor of dominance across cultures. Relational closeness also interacts with conversation orientation to influence dominance. The cross-cultural invariance provides empirical evidence of the universal application of FCP in family conflict communication. More importantly, significant interactions between culture and conformity orientation and closeness show that culture’s influence on family communication is better understood through indirect rather than direct roles.     

Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.     

Arbeitsmarktsegregation und Einkommen

What mechanisms link horizontal labour market segregation and the gender gap in wages? One explanation is based on the cultural devaluation of typically ‘female’ skills and work contents which are held responsible for lower earnings in these occupations. In the present study the idea of devaluation of ‘female’ work is contrasted with other possible explanations such as occupational differences in specialized human capital requirements or unpleasant work conditions. Based on a large sample of employed persons in Germany (IAB-Beschaeftigtenstichprobe 1975–1995) and on a survey on work conditions (BIBB/IAB-Erhebung 1991/92), the influence of ‘female’ work contents and other occupational variables on individual earnings is modeled for East and West Germany separately. The results of multilevel analyses accounting for the embeddedness of individuals in occupations and industries show that some ‘female’ work contents — typing, cleaning and selling — decrease income, and thus are culturally devalued. In contrast, occupational differences in specialized human capital requirements and work conditions do seemingly not affect individual wages. In East Germany the results in regard of devaluation are less pronounced. In both parts of the country there is an unabatedly strong effect of individual sex on earnings which cannot be explained by the introduced occupational characteristics.     

The More Things Change,the More They Remain the Same?

Since the publication of Arlie Hochschild’s groundbreaking work, The Second Shift (1989), scholars have delineated and deliberated the predictors and implications of American men’s participation in unpaid labor. Still, there’s little consensus about the current or future state of gender inequality in US households. In the course of reviewing scholarship published on this topic over the last two decades, this piece outlines and critically reflects upon two paradoxical conclusions one might reach when examining trends in men’s housework and care work time. In comparing and contrasting what I call ‘the mop bucket is half full’ and ‘the mop bucket is half empty’ conclusions, I also highlight the major theoretical frameworks, empirical findings, and diverging opinions on whether Hochschild’s ‘household revolution’ is permanently stalled, slowly reigniting, or ready to take off. I then conclude with a call for consensus among scholars and suggestions for future research on men’s participation in unpaid labor.     

Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photography

Group Material’s Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America (1984) at P.S.1’s Center for Contemporary Art explored the framing devices of installation art and photography in tandem, as a means of reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible at the height of the Cold War. In response to escalating crisis (including continuous Central Intelligence Agency operations being carried out in Nicaragua and El Salvador), this activist project employed postmodern strategies such as appropriation, pastiche and a resistance to conclusiveness in order to suggest provocative and unexpected dialogues between disparate artworks and artefacts across time and geopolitical difference. Artists ranging from Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger to John Heartfield, Tina Modotti and Arellano Bolivar, among others, come together as signs of political and aesthetic conflict, as networks of visual culture that complicate dominant narratives of spatial and temporal reality during the Cold War era. Closer analysis of such works reveals historical ruptures alongside continuities, relayed by official government policy, mass media and the art world more broadly. By excavating a long-standing history of conflict, Timeline addresses the stakes of the ownership of meaning itself in the mid-1980s, with implications regarding art production and politics for generations to come.     

Performing “in the red”: transformations and tensions in repertoires of contention during the 2012 Quebec student strike

The longest and largest student strike in Canadian history began in Quebec in the spring of 2012 in resistance to proposed tuition hikes and the increasing privatization of education and public services that this signaled. The symbol of the student movement, the red square (denoting ‘squarely in the red’ or ‘squarely in debt’) quickly went ‘viral’. At its height, an estimated 300,000 students were striking – nearly 75% of Quebec’s post-secondary student population; on May 22nd some 500,000 people marched in support. The strike continued for six months, ending only after the government was overturned and a new government cancelled the tuition increase. The redeployment of local protest repertoires, including traditional tactics such as picket lines combined with inclusive and creative tactics popularized in alter-globalization movements. Formal student associations combined with various ad hoc coalitions and organizations, as well as communitarian groups, in an uneasy alliance to create a mass mobilization that some commentators dubbed Québec’s ‘Maple Spring’. This article documents the transformation of what Tilly has called ‘repertoires of contention’ within the context of the Quebec student movement. In so doing, it highlights some of the principle debates concerning social values and distributions of agency that resurfaced in connection with the diverse tactics that formed the ‘new’ combinational repertoire.