Contemporary South African Jazz and the Politics of Place

Abstract

Drawing on popular music scholarship on music and place, as well as interviews with jazz musicians, scholars, and journalists active on the jazz scenes in Durban and Johannesburg, this article considers how locales are perceived to uniquely influence music-making. Extending Bakhtin's notion of “utterance” to music, it argues that the musical character of recent South African jazz subtly registers demographic, political, economic, and environmental specificities peculiar to contemporary Durban and Johannesburg. It is argued that contemporary South African jazz, as it is experienced by its performers and listeners, may be profitably conceptualised as speaker and addressee of locale.     

“You Don't Get to Sing a Song When You Have Nothing to Say”: Oliver Mtukudzi's Music as a Vehicle for Socio-Political Commentary

Abstract

Oliver Mtukudzi's music is known for both its musicality and because it addresses social and political issues. Mtukudzi uses his music to tackle the political realities of Zimbabwe and issues related to AIDS, gender and street children. The use of riddles and innuendo is common within Shona music and it is these tools that Mtukudzi uses to deal with these issues that are not commonly addressed by many other musicians. This article analyses his lyrics and music to examine these particular issues. Particular attention is paid to music because the embedded subtexts of music help to illuminate the subtexts of the lyrics.     

Romancing the nation,effacing history: reading Kenya through patriotic choral music

This article looks at music as one of the channels used by oppressive regimes to persuade the public to pledge loyalty to the nation and government of the day while at the same time blinding citizens from acknowledging the social, economic and political realities on the ground. Music composed, performed and accompanied by dance and visual images, and subsequently broadcast through different media channels, can be effective in achieving this mission. This article examines the song Tuishangilie Kenya (1984, revised 2012) as an example of the way music and performance in the Kenyan context become tools to efface substantial historical realities in order to project an imagined vision of a united nation. This article draws on Stuart Hall’s argument that music channelled through mass media can instil a sense of patriotism and national consciousness, and Nicholas Cook’s analysis of music in television commercials, to argue that the 2012 remaking of Tuishangilie Kenya provides a potential avenue for constructing a kind of double meaning, one overtly intended and one subverted at the end. Through an analysis of the song’s lyrical, musical and visual parameters I demonstrate how the audience is “hoodwinked” but how propaganda can backfire.     

Occupational rhetoric and ideology: A comparison of copy and original music performers

This study focuses on similarities and differences between occupational rhetorics and ideologies of two groups of local level popular musicians, those who compose and perform their own music and those who perform music made commercially successful by other bands/performers. The analysis of in-depth interviews with twenty-five local level musicians demonstrates that the latter have developed an ideology which legitimates definitions of themselves as audience-oriented technicians who view the performance of music as an economic enterprise; musicians who perform original music share an ideology which stresses creativity over economic reward and legitimates a definition of themselves as primarily artists. Both types of musicians and their ideologies are discussed in relation to larger structural forces of the popular entertainment industry.Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association in the South, Knoxville, TN (October, 1988). The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions made on an earlier draft. The author also wishes to thank the Faculty Research Committee at Western Kentucky University for their support during the course of this project.     

The end of the world as we know it: Popular music's cultural mobility

Abstract

Popular music has moved to the centre of economic life, suggesting a shift in the political economy of advanced societies. The transition has been marked by a concomitant shift in the centrality of popular music in social life, assisted by new technologies. More importantly, the changes have been brought about by the reorganization of record company ownership and activity since the 1980s. This paper suggests that cultural studies could apply aspects of the research and analysis methods developed in institutional economics, to a study of the relationship between cultural and economic formations. Institutional economics, especially as proposed by Thorstein Veblen, provides a pragmatic critique for cultural industries in an era of globalization and rising corporate power. In this paper I have used institutional economics to illustrate how the shift in the organization of popular music has taken place within the corporate economy. The use of popular music as a feature of the corporate economy has involved the expansion of all forms of entertainment into the information economy. This convergence of activities and interests located in and around popular music is described by the term ‘cultural mobility’.     

Express yourself! A student's experience of running a movement improvisation workshop

This paper is an account of a social work student's experience running an improvisation workshop whilst on placement in a children's residential home. It describes the ways in which children were able to use movement and music in a spontaneous and unstructured manner to express their emotions, and how the improvised use of music can enable children to relate to, and understand, their experience.     

Consequences of the increasing rationality of music: A reassessment of Weberian rationalization

Max Weber's theory of the rationalization of music is used to demonstrate that there is a nexus between the tonal structure of music, which is formally “rational” in the Weberian sense, and the fundamental irrational properties on which it rests. It is posited that Weber, although failing to differentiate between types of irrationality, was primarily concerned with only two forms: harmonic‐structural and interpretational. Ironically, there is another more sociological type of irrationality that Weber failed to address. This type may be termed “interactional” irrationality. The importance of recognizing this element within the musical organization is critical, as the balance between rationality and irrationality becomes increasingly delicate. Case studies of professional, classically trained symphonic musicians and conductors illustrate the irrational consequences of growing rationality within the social organization of symphonic music.     

Invisible republics and secret histories: A politics of music

Abstract

How does music ‐ or any cultural artefact ‐ assume significance for those who encounter it? Why does one sound or image come to matter, while others are overlooked or forgotten? The answer is not to be found in the sounds alone, but in the context and conditions in which they are heard. This article explores this argument by considering the case of The Anthology of American Folk Music, a set of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, which has exercised an extraordinary power over popular music since its release in 1952. Using the arguments expounded by Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, and pointing to the uses of music in establishing national identities and mobilising social movements, the article argues for an understanding of music's significance that links social experience, aesthetic pleasure and political values.     

US Americans and 'Us' Americans: South American perspectives on Comparative American Studies

Abstract

This article discusses topics in Comparative American Studies from a South American perspective. If, on the one hand, we no longer restrict a people's history or literary and cultural production to spaces which were arbitrarily constructed for political and economically hegemonic purposes, but rather see these 'national' spaces as plural and movable loci, on the other hand, the very concept of 'America' will require an approach that seeks to deal with the geographic, linguistic, ethnographic, cultural, political and economic hemispheric differences – and the relations between space and power that necessarily come to mind when one thinks about America comparatively. The us/them paradigm, in an inter-American context, becomes highly problematized: in historical terms, America, the New World, is primarily a European construct; later the word America was appropriated to signify the US national space. Thus, America must be approached from a perspective that takes into consideration these very processes; which is to say that, whichever the adopted approach, it will necessarily be one that problematizes 'American' and that develops a form of US Studies that theorizes an interpretive framework for studying how the US exports its image to the rest of the world, the many ways in which the rest of the world has constructed the US and how US Americans have imagined 'us' Americans.     

Sounds From Nowhere: Musical Protagonists by Alejo Carpentier and Zora Neale Hurston

Abstract

Critics have missed the music of Seraph on the Suwanee. In response, this paper listens to the music of Zora Neale Hurston’s final novel through the ears of Alejo Carpentier. Although Carpentier published Concierto barroco (1974) twenty-six years after Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), the later novel offers a new reading of American music that changes how readers view the earlier work, in part because Concierto barroco creates an understanding of music in a Caribbean context that suffuses both novels. Although unknown to each other, musical and anthropological interests connect these coeval literary figures. Most compellingly, the trope of music in Hurston’s fictive work puts her musical rhetoric in conversation with Carpentier. In Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagi- nation, Robert discusses the rare ability to create music in one’s mind, a characteristic evident in the protagonists of both of the novels under discussion. Together, this paper ultimately argues, Hurston and Carpentier make beautiful music.     

The Role and Effects of Efficacy in Socioeconomic Development and Foreign Direct Investment: A Comparative Study of South Korea and Singapore

Abstract

There is a sizable amount of research and explanation concerning the rapid and sustainable development of newly industrialised countries (NIC) in Asia. This article seeks to create a deeper understanding of the relationships between the governmental sector, the economic sector, and the social sector in the Asian political arena. As such, it will explain how policies pursued in selected countries could have impacted the economies of the so-called ‘tiger’ or ‘dragon’ countries. In addition, the study will show how governmental efficacy is connected with socioeconomic development by means of comparing, as exemplars, South Korea and Singapore, in the period 1960–2007. The investigated period experienced heightened socioeconomic development in South Korea and Singapore. Stressing the historical evolution of socioeconomic development, the researcher accordingly focused on social, political, and economic outcomes in their relationship with the factor of macroeconomic stability and the varying amounts of foreign direct investment in the two nations. This study looks to create a deeper understanding of the role of government efficacy and socioeconomic development in an Asian context in which government efficacy and political development and institutions have played important roles in creating stable and continuous social and economic development. This idea of government efficacy and political development has helped to strengthen the capacity of governments to adapt and adjust their political agency’s capability to achieve political goals and sustainable socioeconomic development. South Korea has created institutions that are simpler than complex organisations and may lack autonomy and coherence. In contrast, Singapore has created complex and autonomous institutions with strong coherence. The findings in the outcomes section explain the different historical developments of South Korea and Singapore.     

Political Opportunity and Nested Institutions

Scholars use the concept of 'political opportunity structure' to explain how the political context affects the differential development and influence of ostensibly similar movements. Although the concept promises to become an important analytical tool for comparative studies, to date it is underspecified and undertheorized. It also faces new challenges in this era of increased transnational activism and more extensive scholarly recognition of activist ties across borders. In this paper I argue that assessing opportunity by looking exclusively at national political structures neglects the important role that international factors, such as alliances and transnational movements, play in constraining both states and their challengers. I begin by reviewing the literature on opportunity and drawing a synthesis between it and the literature on domestic influences of international politics. I argue that political institutions are nested in a larger international context, and that the tightness or looseness of that nesting affects the range of possible alliances and policy options available within states. I examine this framework by looking at New Zealand's decision in 1984 to prohibit port visits by nuclear-powered ships or ships that might be carrying nuclear weapons. I conclude by calling for more research that recognizes the interplay of national opportunities and international structures.     

Maze of Resistance: Crowd,Space and the Politics of Resisting Subjectivity

Abstract

In 1968 the streets around the world saw a rise of a mass political movements. Nowadays, 46 years later, a nostalgic revolutionary aura surrounds that time; as since, such is the impression, the street is yet to emerge as a strong political actor or an effective practice of resistance is yet to take form. It seems as if the old ways of resistance have met their end, and new ways have not quite come in place. However, the most recent protests, as this paper aims to show, might have started a new path of resistance at the centre of which is a particular political subjectivity gaining its power from a space of resistance and appearing in a form of a ‘crowd’. By looking at the power of the crowd as a particular embodiment or a cross between a political subject and a multitude this paper explores the constituent power of political gatherings by rejecting race, ethnicity, religion, class or gender as their mobilizing force and instead focusing on the power of coming-together (common) in a particular space. The political capacity of such ‘common’ mobilising force was fully exposed in the recent protests across Europe and the Arab world (the two examples on which this paper draws). The paper opens with a discussion of the distinct relationship between the sovereign (or state) and political subjectivity. The constitutive moment of subjectivity (the self-other relation) is placed in a political context and by drawing on the examples of sans papiers and Bouazizi's act of self-immolation the difficulties of the act of resistance and their inherent and unavoidable violence are highlighted. These two recent acts of resistance expose the need to think political subjectivity otherwise, and point to vistas (the crowd), which can facilitate such a different thinking. By drawing on the constitutive idea of the common as logic of subjectivation the intricate relationship between the body and the political space as manifested in the most recent against austerity and oppressive political regimes protests is interrogated. In the hope of placing the political subject closer to the driving seat of politics a case is made for a rather distinct relationship between political subjectivity of the crowd and the emerging space of resistance. This is a relationship that amounts to a new ‘resisting political subjectivity’ and that can bring about a new way of engaging with the politics of oppression and begins to think political contestations otherwise.     

The use of political motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and aftermath

ABSTRACT

Political motherhood, which uses traditional motherhood to mobilize and sustain women’s political participation, is understudied in political science. Women played a significant role in Egypt’s Arab Spring and its aftermath by “bargaining with patriarchy” and strategically using traditional motherhood to access the political sphere. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument based on the work of Gentry, Carreon and Moghadam and Amar. We illustrate it with examples drawn from news articles on women’s political activism and social media posts by Egyptian activists. Our argument explores how women’s agency and the larger political context in which women operate reveals how political motherhood takes the particular shape that it does. In the context of Egypt, we examine how the state’s choice to highlight women as “hypervisible” citizens, worthy of protection, backfired. Through a bottom-up political motherhood, women used their respectability as mothers in need of state protection against the state, thereby legitimizing anti-Mubarak and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and challenging these governments.     

Two Assemblages of Cultural Transmission: Musicians,Political Actors and Educational Techniques in the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe

In this study I aim to develop a sociological understanding of why certain techniques of cultural transmission are more easily accepted in some societies than in others. With this aim in mind, I present a comparative analysis of the contrasting approaches to music education in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While, as a major technique of cultural transmission music notation found relatively widespread acceptance in Western Europe at least since the eleventh century onwards, most musicians in the Ottoman Empire resisted its adoption until the end of the nineteenth century. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the choices of Ottoman and West European musicians interacted with broader social and political processes in the two societies. In the light of this analysis, it is suggested that technologies used in cultural transmission can be seen as parts of a broader assemblage and their rejection or acceptance can be conditioned by a series of socio‐political concerns.     

Musicians' social representations of health and illness: a qualitative case study about focal dystonia

Musicians are artists who use the entire body when playing their instruments. Since over-practicing may lead to physical problems, musicians might encounter focal dystonia, a hand's motor disorder. The cause seems to be the brain's confusion between afferent and efferent information transfer provoking a disharmony with the instrument. Although focal dystonia may have serious consequences for a musician's career, it is unclear how musicians perceive this trouble. This case study describes two musicians with focal dystonia. Qualitative research was used to study their social representations of health and illness. The results show the central role of the hand during music playing, the passion for music and the understanding for focal dystonia as "brain panic". Therapists should account for those specific features inherent to this population in order to better help them in their quest for art through music. Giving a voice to musicians may improve their quality of care.     

Social work for critical peace: a comparative approach to understanding social work and political conflict

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a case study approach to explore issues of social work policy and practice in three sites of political conflict in Europe: Northern Ireland; Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Cyprus. It begins with a review of the international literature on social work and political conflict and then discusses the strengths and limitations in engaging with comparative case study approaches. The authors explain how they view the writing of the paper as an intellectual encounter that helped establish the beginning stages of their comparative analysis. This starts with an analysis of the existing knowledge base about the three case studies that each share similar patterns of colonial histories, political and community conflict and the social work response. The second part of the paper extends this analysis to a critique of the impact of neo-liberal social and economic policies that often adversely impact upon the role of social workers in resolving conflict and building peace. The paper concludes with an appeal for social work to rediscover its rights-based role in working with victims and survivors of political conflict, what the authors describe as: ‘social work for critical peace’.     

Political transition and sexual and gender-based violence in South Africa,Kenya, and Zimbabwe: a comparative analysis

This article draws on research conducted in Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe that focused on violence in the context of political transition. The paper examines the relation between political transition and sexual and gender-based violence in the three countries. The paper argues that it is critical to recognise sexual and gender-based violence as bound to systemic gendered inequality if such forms of violence are to be addressed and mitigated when periods of violent conflict end.     

Gender and Performance Capital among Local Musicians

This article extends Bourdieu’s field theory to explain how learning spaces in the Toronto folk and metal scenes create gendered access to a field-specific form of cultural capital: performance capital, or the instrumental and interpersonal skills required to perform music. Folk musicians develop performance capital in open-access spaces, such as workshops and open stages at local folk clubs, while metal musicians learn in private spaces such as garages, basements, and rented rehearsal rooms. Folk’s learning spaces are open to all aspiring musicians, while access to heavy metal’s learning spaces relies on social networks from which women are often excluded. These different processes of capital development can lead to greater or lesser opportunities for women to become cultural producers: In Toronto, women make up approximately five percent of heavy metal musicians, but almost half of practicing folk musicians.