Popular culture 1978: history,theory, politics

The history of US universities is both an expansion of governmentality, in the sense of research undertaken for the public weal and teaching undertaken to train the populace in self-regulation; and an expansion of commodification, as research becomes more driven by corporate needs, students are increasingly addressed as consumers of education, and paymasters and administrators accrete authority over academics.     

Housing,memory and everyday life in contemporary Britain

With specific reference to public policy and the housing market in post-Second World War Britain, this article explores the relationship between housing, memory and everyday life. It argues that the house owes its cultural and emotional power to its capacity to separate itself ideologically from what Marc Augé calls the ‘non-places’ of everyday life. The extent to which houses have come to be seen as refuges from the non-place requires a great deal of symbolic work to conceal their sameness and everydayness. The association of the house with nostalgia, in particular, represents a denial of what Henri Lefebvre sees as the ‘residuality’ of the everyday, its capacity to lag behind the more dramatic transformations of modernity. In order to explore these questions, the article focuses on different types of housing in contemporary Britain, which are all based on a serial repetition and collectivity that are often denied. It examines: how the demolished terraced house and the surviving slum reveal the broader structures of everyday life in a way that the refurbished middle-class town house, alternating between a commodified past and a self-promoting futurism, specifically conceals; how the high-rise estates represent the most visible manifestation of the residuality of the everyday; and how new suburban houses are built in ‘timeless’ vernacular styles and sold as well-equipped interiors for exclusively privatized use, in a way that obscures their links to systems of mass production and consumption. The article concludes that the cultural economy of houses denies the reality of uneven development, and the ways in which our carefully refurbished homes are achieved at the expense of other everyday spaces.     

Afrikaans,Inc.: the Afrikaans culture industry after apartheid

Following apartheid’s demise, the Afrikaans language was forced to part with the privileged position it once held under the National Party’s guardianship and has, subsequently, contracted in a number of its functions. Despite growing concerns about the language’s “endangered” status, Afrikaans has proven its vitality in multiple market-driven domains. In this paper, I trace the expansion of the Afrikaans culture industry after apartheid. I argue that this process was fomented, at least in part, by paranoia about Afrikaans’s “fading position.” Because Afrikaners still command a vast material and cultural capital, they have been the prime producers, sellers and buyers of Afrikaans language media and cultural commodities. Thus, together with the growth of the Afrikaans culture industry, an array of physical, digital and psychological spaces has opened up where white Afrikaans speakers can be a majority. I argue that the expansion of these spaces has laid the foundation for the formation of new Afrikaner subjectivities and enclaved identities, and contributed to the production and strengthening of separatist tendencies amongst certain Afrikaners. Instead of being an emancipatory force, facilitating Afrikaans speakers’ forceful integration into a new South Africa and “rainbow nation,” it has succeeded in reaffirming and naturalising the imagined boundaries of Afrikanerdom.     

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.     

Speaking out loud: Muslim women,Indian Delights and culinary practices in eThekwini/Durban

I asked, ‘Did your mother teach you to cook?’ Almost an hour later, time consumed by mutual reminiscences of Indian Delights, stories of the tastes and textures and colours of food and life in Durban, at last when I thought it would never be answered my question swam back up to the surface of our conversation: ‘You know, then I lived with my oldest sister, not my mother. Her mother-in-law taught me.’ Too heavy a shift of register, the answer dropped into the bubble of conversation we had made around ourselves, imposing another reluctant silence. I could not ask more, not then. Deliverance came through other stories. We talked about the subtly different combinations of spices that women even from the same family choose to use, and the embodied pleasures of walking into a kitchen steamed up with the smells of several dishes all cooking at once. And for the moment we avoided returning to a family narrative of separation, loss and melancholy.     

Grudge spending: the interplay between markets and culture in the purchase of security

In the paper, we use data from an English study of security consumption, and recent work in the cultural sociology of markets, to illustrate the way in which moral and social commitments shape and often constrain decisions about how, or indeed whether, individuals and organizations enter markets for protection. Three main claims are proffered. We suggest, firstly, that the purchase of security commodities is a mundane, non‐conspicuous mode of consumption that typically exists outside of the paraphernalia of consumer culture – a form of grudge spending. Secondly, we demonstrate that security consumption is weighed against other commitments that individuals and organizations have and is often kept in check by these competing considerations. We find, thirdly, that the prospect of consuming security prompts people to consider the relations that obtain between security objects and other things that they morally or aesthetically value, and to reflect on what the buying and selling of security signals about the condition and likely futures of their society. These points are illustrated using the examples of organizational consumption and gated communities. In respect of each case, we tease out the evaluative judgements that condition and constrain the purchase of security among organizations and individuals and argue that they open up some important but neglected questions to do with the moral economy of security.     

Consuming the car: anticipation, use and meaning in contemporary youth culture

Drawing on evidence from a recently conducted study of the everyday lives of young people in Manchester, UK, this article considers the place of cars in contemporary youth culture. The article acknowledges the recent beginnings of sociological and social science discussion of cars but concurs with the view that this topic has been much neglected. More specifically the study of young people and personal mobility has been constrained by approaches that emphasise the problematic nature of this phenomena or locate it within a theory of subculture. Taking its cue from recent studies of consumption, this paper offers an alternative theorisation. Refinement of the work on television consumption by Roger Silverstone leads to a discussion of more affluent young people's relationships to cars under three heads: anticipation, use and meaning. It is suggested that car use must be seen in the framework of sociability and networks and that it also critically and suggestively mediates ordinary consumption with imaginative possibilities.     

Olfactive frames of remembering: theorizing self,senses and society

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta‐narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial‐bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis‐à‐vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self‐identity and social relations.     

Literary Narratives of the Past: Generations of Memory and Everyday Life Under the Romanian Communist Regime

ABSTRACT

In Romania, the literary approach to the recent communist past centred on everyday life under the communist regime is usually associated with a nostalgic communist perspective. By reading communist nostalgia in the context of the communist politics that pervaded every aspect of everyday life, this paper traces the connections between narratives and moral responsibility at the level of Romanian literary productions. Many of the topics included in the collective volumes that bring together personal narratives of the past resonate with and influence the fictional creations of the past; in many cases, combining personal testimonies with fictional characters offered an improved mechanism for dealing with the past. The paper argues that the topic of daily life experiences under the communist regime can be further developed, raising awareness of the lack of discussions about moral responsibility at the societal level in post-totalitarian Romania. Even if the younger generations can use the literary narratives of the past to re-appropriate their predecessors’ life stories, the reduction of the past to visual or linguistic stereotypes deepens the separation between public and private memory.     

Problematizing contemporary Men/Masculinities theorizing: the contribution of Raewyn Connell and conceptual‐terminological tensions today

Critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM) have burgeoned in recent times. For this reason, it seems to me a useful moment to reflect on what I see as some tensions, even contradictions, in these studies. In keeping with Chantal Mouffe's espousal of the advantages of agonism rather than consensus, I suggest that heterogeneous theoretical directions in scholarship attending to men/masculinities are by no means to be discouraged. However, the various theoretical tools employed in this scholarship may be incommensurable and thus produce a certain inconsistency or even incoherence. In this context, I suggest that in order to more clearly articulate current theoretical/terminological debates it is important to undertake analysis of key conceptual distinctions and widely used terms, such as notions of structure and patriarchy, gender identities/masculinities/men, hegemony and hegemonic masculinity, and relations between gender and sexuality, amongst others. The aim here is not to produce or require homogeneity in studies of men/masculinities but rather to provide an opportunity to consider the epistemological frameworks which inform the political intentions and goals of this sphere of scholarship.     

Public space,collective memory and intercultural dialogue in a (UK) city of culture

Using the case study of Derry~Londonderry and its designation as ‘UK City of Culture 2013’, the primary objective of this research paper is to critically analyse the challenges associated with the production of a year-long cultural programme in a culturally and politically divided place. Given that Northern Ireland’s second largest city has been understood in terms of a conflict between ‘two traditions’, Irish/Catholic and British/Protestant, we critically assess the dialogue and policy negotiations with reference to public places as well as representations of collective memory and traditional music during the year. Fieldwork over two years has enabled us to investigate how culture and identity politics are played out in the context of a city undergoing a process of reconciliation. Placing our case study in a strongly comparative context, we argue that cultural concerns are pivotal points of (re-)negotiation in any society transitioning from conflict to ‘peace’ and that this issue, therefore, is of vital concern to academics and policymakers alike internationally.     

Translating culture: missionaries and linguists in contemporary Yunnan Province

In an attempt to emulate early modern missionaries to Yunnan who engaged in the invention of writing systems for various ethnic groups, contemporary evangelical missionaries in Yunnan have become heavily involved in the realm of linguistics, focused on the preservation of endangered languages. While such activity may potentially be perceived as a challenge to the state-Chinese linguistic hegemony, I argue that the presence of missionary linguists is acceptable to the Chinese authorities as it does not threaten the paramount position of Putonghua but rather serves to integrate minority people into the state system. In addition, based on interviews conducted with a missionary working to produce texts for Kunming’s Buoyi population in their language, I aim to demonstrate how missionary linguists attempt to remold local culture by attempting to reconstruct ethnic identity around a language core. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in Yunnan in 2009–2010 and 2012.     

Rub Out the Past: Nostalgia and the Cut-Up Works of William S. Burroughs

Abstract

William S. Burroughs’ cut-up texts of the 1960s have been read as a representation of the author’s attempt to escape the repressive hold of nostalgic memory. I show that this reading is flawed and argue that the treatment of memory in Burroughs’ cut-up works can be more successfully read in terms of Svetlana Boym’s concept of ‘reflective nostalgia’. Through examining Burroughs’ 1965 text ‘St. Louis Return’ alongside a page from his contemporaneous ‘Black Scrapbook’, I provide a reading that counters earlier critical responses to the cut-ups: firstly, by belying the assumption that Burroughs’ use of the cut-up technique enabled the author to overcome the allure of nostalgic memory; secondly, by demonstrating the importance of the nostalgic theme across Burroughs’ body of work; and thirdly, by challenging prevailing conceptions of nostalgia as an inherently sterile and reactionary impulse.     

Extension and the disposal of the world: Double‐crossing systems,culture, self and language

Long indexed by sociological ideas of structure, the notion of extension is yet disparate and poorly disseminated – as evidenced by popular motifs such as ‘the world is at our disposal’ eschewing notions of emplacement and embeddedness and instead championing choice and individualised agency. On the assumption that this lacunae relates in part to paradigm debates over incommensurability, the proposal in this inaugural lecture is to explore double‐crossing as a methodological device by which to draw insights on extension from major ‘gatherings’ of Euro‐American thought, while respecting the orderings, institutional arrangements, situations and networks each approach imposes. In retracing the ‘disposal’ of the world through four theoretical perspectives germane to sociology – namely systems, culture, self and language – the objective is to illustrate the methodology of double crossing. Drawing on both my work on social and cultural theory and my field studies in market leaders, I first show how moving back and forth between the older and newer ground within each perspective helps to elicit what gets unsighted from either view. Secondly, inasmuch as the usual way of ‘making a clearing’ is argued as caught ‘in reaction’ from extant theory (ending up say talking of parts instead of wholes or consumption in place of production), I advance the methodology of double‐crossing by excavating the recessive arrangements and ordering implicit in each perspective and so illuminate the different ways extension is affected by how world is imagined and experienced.     

Musical Ties That Bind: Nostalgia,Affect, and Heritage in Festival Narratives

Affective heritage embracement, a collective narrative of nostalgia, is identified at two popular music festivals. “MusicFest” embraces a tradition of “Red Dirt” country music through performance (music festival), whereas the “Walnut Valley Festival” embraces a bluegrass/folk musical heritage through performance and participation (musicians' festival). The symbolic importance of musical interaction is explored to highlight the experienced emotionality that leads to the affective ties that bind these otherwise temporary communities. This collective narrative reveals the various functions of nostalgia wherein collective sentiment both reflects and creates the perceived authentic experiences of festival attendees.     

Mind the gap: selling revolution,marginality and spectacle in post-revolutionary Nicaragua

A group of elderly women set up prayer camps in public roundabouts throughout Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, to pray for ‘peace and reconciliation.’ A few miles away, in a humble barrio, escaping sexual discrimination and violence, a 24-year-old transvestite performs a sexually charged act in a circus. Meanwhile, across from the national parliament, hundreds of ex-agricultural workers exposed to the pesticide nemagon exhibit their dying flesh to the nation and the world in order to expose corporate greed and government inaction. These cases, happening under the new Sandinista regime, reflect a plurality of social spaces where theatricality, as the rhetorical manipulation of spaces and bodies aiming to affect publics, has become a mechanism for revealing the interstices of power relations in present day Nicaragua. This work explores various instances of linked and entwined government-sponsored and -sanctioned social performances of power and visibility, as well as other social performances that draw attention to the gap between the rhetoric of the government and social reality.     

“Such Hatred Has Never Flourished on Our Soil”: The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Turkey and Spain

In this article, we analyze local Holocaust Remembrance Day (HRD) ceremonies promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Spain and Turkey. We investigate whether these memory practices have the potential to lead to a cosmopolitan engagement with the host countries’ own pasts. Focused on the same memorial events in highly contrasting and diverse national contexts, this article examines how supranational memory discourses are adopted and reinterpreted within the nation‐state framework. Our ethnographic observation of the commemorations and analysis of the speeches between 2011 and 2018 in Turkey and 2005 and 2018 in Spain show that the Spanish ceremony can be defined as porous and to a certain degree open to multivocality—given the participation of different mnemonic communities—while the Turkish one is sealed and does not allow for the possibility of disrupting its self‐congratulatory national memory narrative. Paradoxically, in both cases, especially in Turkey, the national legitimation profiles are bolstered by the universal frameworks that Holocaust memory provides. Even though memory travels transnationally, the nation‐state still is the most powerful translator of this past. This results in the rendition of pre‐Holocaust nostalgic pasts as a multicultural heaven where different groups, including the Jewish community, lived in harmony.     

Delicious Delhi: nostalgia,consumption and the old city

This article examines how Old Delhi is represented and recreated in contemporary India. Delhi’s old city was once the locus of pre-colonial Mughal sovereignty. It is now often encountered via nationalist spectacles, mass-media images and consumption practices. Paralleling neo-liberalism’s onset in the 1990s, its street food, bazaar spaces and historical monuments have been avidly appropriated by reigning institutions and classes. Old Delhi suggests that which the new India has left behind; yet this displacement also elicits longing for what has been lost.

This medieval remnant can therefore be considered the site of nostalgia consumed by a globalised middle class. This article presents an ethnography of Old Delhi’s invocation in New Delhi’s cultural landscape, including malls, newspapers, heritage sites, hotels, and food courts. In triangulating among the realms of nationalist nostalgia, middle-class identity and mediated consumption, it emphasises how India’s neoliberal emergence is bound up with the co-opting of the past.