Popular Politicians: The Interaction Between Politics and Popular Culture in the Netherlands, 1950s–1980s

ABSTRACT

From the late 1950s onwards, the Netherlands witnessed a transformation of the emotional codes of politics. A culture of political leadership marked by notions of duty and restraint, made way for self-expression and authenticity. This article argues that the interaction between the spheres of politics and popular culture played a vital role in this transformation. The practices and discourses of popular culture became a significant part of the repertoire through which politicians articulated representative claims. The article traces how politicians negotiated their interaction with popular culture, started to cultivate a private persona and eventually turned into political celebrities.     

Religion and Popular Rebellion,From the Capuciati to Niklashausen

ABSTRACT

The historiography of pre-modern popular uprisings tends to ascribe a religiose ‘naïveté’ to earlier revolts, placing religion as innately antithetical to popular politics. This article challenges that opposition, and argues that whilst (as Sam Cohn has recently demonstrated) medieval revolts were not by any means all ‘religious' in outlook, leadership or inspiration, those which did involve religious elements can be read more sympathetically and with greater nuance. Focusing particularly on structural similarities between the Drummer of Niklashausen (1476) and the Capuciati (1183), the article argues that longue durée forms of revolt persist, driven by a plebeian reappropriation of certain elements in orthodox religion.     

San Fancón and the Goddess of Mercy

ABSTRACT

This article examines two cases of religious syncretism among migrant and ethnic Chinese in Cuba. It shows that Chinese communities outside China, often described in popular and even in some academic discourse as inassimilable (a prejudice unfortunately assisted by the roots discourse now popular in China and elsewhere), were in fact authors of and participants in the same processes of transculturation and religious mixing as other migrants.     

The emerging (national) popular music culture in China

ABSTRACT

Before the emergence of the modern sense of popular music in China, the uses of music in that country have been instrumental in serving political purposes for the state. The modern form of popular music began to enter China through Hong Kong and Taiwan – the two very political locales in which we could observe China’s political economy through the reception of their music in mainland China. How the Chinese authorities coped with the production, distribution and consumption of this ‘foreign’ popular music, is reflective of the swing of the pendulum between relaxation and control, and hence the changing ideologies of the state. Based on the cultural and institutional analysis on a few classical Chinese popular singers since the mid‐1980s, this paper illustrates such a transformation. The paper argues that the Chinese authorities have evolved from a dictatorial authority, which chose to control popular music by means of direct bans and censorship, to an active agent, through various strategies, managing and producing a kind of popular music that can be conducive to, and be resonant with, the national ideologies.     

The lyrics of laborious life: popular music and the reassertion of migrant manhood in Northeastern Thailand

Abstract

The focal subject under investigation in this paper is the gendered identities of overseas male migrant workers as presented in the contemporary popular song lyrics from Northeastern Thailand. My reading of such lyrics is informed by my ethnographic fieldwork of Thai migrant workers in Singapore. I intend to uncover some complex, cultural junctures of transnational labor migration, in which men, mobility, and music have come across and formed a social force to reshape cultural imagination of migrant manhood. I argue that popular music celebrates male heroism of overseas migrant workers. Instead of challenging existing structures of hegemonic masculinity in the region, popular song texts poetically reaffirm and reassert the traditional dominant gender ideology and cultural practice. Overseas workmen are usually depicted as hard‐working, self‐sacrificial heroes in their attempts to rescue their families as well as romantic, caring lovers and morally responsible fathers.     

Gender and everyday evasions: moving with Cantopop 1

Abstract

In this paper, gender negotiations in the production, musical forms, and consumption of Cantopop are taken as a cultural exemplar for a social and political imagination of ambivalence, which seems to be shaping popular life in Hong Kong. It has three focal points – musical forms and expressions of Cantopop (style, lyrics, iconography, affect), gender politics, and ‘everyday‐ness’ – which converge to mark a notable cultural logic performing an enlarging sense of ambivalence about a city that has seen a shift from high moments of economic prosperity to the current postcolonial uncertainties. In other words, Cantopop signals a shift in our sensibilities, a redrawing of our affective map of everyday life after an important historical and politico‐administrative shift. In a sense then, this paper explores Hong Kong's changing identity within the sight and sound of popular culture, by specifically tracing some of the ways in which gender politics is inscribed, coded, negotiated, performed, or simply flirtingly posed on the surface of popular culture.     

A regional gateway: Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong, 1990–2005

Abstract

In popular culture, Hong Kong is probably the most “Japanese city” outside Japan. It is home to a wide variety of Japanese popular cultural products and a regional base to many of the Japanese music and television companies who expanded their operations in the city in the early 1990s. Hong Kong's emerging middle class, especially the younger generation, has enthusiastically accepted Japanese contemporary culture and lifestyle, making the city one of the biggest destinations for Japan's cultural exports. Based on fieldwork surveys and interviews, this paper looks at the organizational aspect of popular culture during the heydays of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s and early 2000s. The investigation focuses on the marketing strategies and promotional efforts used by agents of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong and the role of popular culture piracy in this process. Beyond analyzing the Japanese case, the paper introduces a new framework to examine the transnational expansion of popular cultures across markets in East and Southeast Asia, highlighting the role of companies and promoters in this process.     

Problematizing the popular: the dynamics of Pinoy pop(ular) music and popular protest music

ABSTRACT

In 1973, the pop music industry in the Philippines, long dominated by the American Top 40, was jolted by the emergence of a new kind of sound that delivered soulful Filipino lyrics in the medium of Western rock. At about the same time the protest movement found, in the popular forms of Western rock and folk, powerful vehicles for cultural resistance. This experimentation within and outside the industry generated great interest across social classes and opened many possibilities for new kinds of popular music, later to be called Pinoy (slang for Filipino) rock or Pinoy pop music. This article looks into the dynamics of Pinoy pop/rock and protest music during the period of authoritarian rule and after, marking their points of intersection and divergence and analyzing the factors that account for the rich popular music production in the 1970s and the 1980s.     

My Wild Lily: a self‐criticism from a participant in the March 1990 student movement 1

Abstract

The ‘Wild Lily’ student sit‐in in March 1990 was often praised in the later political transformation process as a crucial moment when the ‘pure and innocent’ students facilitated democratization in Taiwan. From the perspective of a participant in the protest, the author argues that the sit‐in was actually a failure of the ‘popular democratic’ wing of Taiwan's student movement in the 1980s, which championed a more radical vision of democracy. The idea of ‘popular democracy’ was an anti‐elitist ideology arising from critiques on the elite‐led political reform movement. However, due to its historical constraint, practices along this line were unable to alter the bourgeois democratic character of 1980s' democratization process in Taiwan.     

‘The Most Respectable Looking of Revolutionaries’

Abstract

New political histories of late nineteenth-century British political culture have closely analysed the role of language and rhetoric in popular politics. The focus on the content of political messages has meant that the ways such messages were communicated has often been overlooked, as have the varied forms of political communication in the period. This article follows on from recent work that has sought to examine the place of material and visual culture in popular politics in the period. In particular, it focuses on the links between dress, class and politics. It suggests that visual, along with material, forms of political communication remained important and that they illuminate the political culture of the period.     

Witchcraft in the Early Modern Isle of Man

ABSTRACT

This article examines evidence relating to witchcraft beliefs and official attitudes to witchcraft in the Isle of Man during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is based mainly on court records, and above all those of the Manx ecclesiastical courts. It demonstrates that there was a rich popular culture relating to witchcraft on the island, with a number of individualistic features. It places Manx witchcraft beliefs in relation to two other phenomena that were central to the island's popular culture: fairy beliefs and the belief in the efficacy of the curse. It also demonstrates that the island's authorities maintained a relatively low-keyed approach to witchcraft (only two people are known to have been executed as witches in the island), treating it as a sign of popular ignorance and a regrettable source of neighbourly disputes rather than as a satanic heresy.     

Screaming and crying androids: voice and presence in Chinese popular music

Abstract

The voice is, next to the face, a defining aspect of the persona of popular music stars. This article seeks to understand the voice prior to lyrical content and genre convention. How does the voice relate to a singer and his or her body? Is the singing voice a sign of an individual? Does it rather embody a tradition, a nation or a generation? Or are the voices of Chinese popular music radically disembodied and phony?     

From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896. By Stuart Hanson/The British Musical Film. By John Mundy.

ABSTRACT

This article explores the political, economic, media and social reactions to the Sex Pistols' Anarchy Tour of December 1976. A critical reading of the sociological concept of ‘moral panic’ is used to examine the ways in which responses to the Sex Pistols were related to the notion of post-war decline, immorality, delinquent youth and the changing nature of the British working class. The responses to the Anarchy Tour constitute a further episode in the cycle of ‘moral panics' that emerged in British society in connection with the development of youth culture, juvenile delinquency and popular music. The exploration that follows posits the view that although ‘moral panic’ is useful for understanding particular aspects of popular music, it also conceals the complexity of the differing responses of political/social groups to the appearance of such phenomena. The article also forms a critique of recent revisionist characterizations of Britain in the 1970s. The ‘moral panic’ surrounding the Sex Pistols was in part ‘socially constructed’ by the media, yet reactions by trade unionists, students, feminists and socialists show that concerns about British society in 1976 were not confined to religious pressure groups, conservative media commentators and political elites.     

Chains of Gold: Portuguese Migration to Argentina in Transatlantic Perspective. By Marcelo J. Borges

ABSTRACT

The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 and its subsequent publishing success sparked intense debate at the time and have come to exemplify a clash of worlds, one Victorian, repressed, deferential, restricted by class assumptions and hopelessly out of touch, the other progressive, open, liberated and, above all, permissive, that most value-laden and controversial of terms. Yet examining popular responses to Lady Chatterley's Lover reveals complex attitudes and raises questions about the permissiveness of the 1960s.     

Looking for other stories: women's writing,Self-Respect movement and the politics of feminist translations

ABSTRACT

The primary purpose of this essay is to survey the recent zombie craze in Northeast Asian films from Japan and South Korea. While the concept of the zombie may have originated in colonial Haiti, with its ghoulish images and supernatural lore, zombies were later imported to North America and reformulated as popular cultural entertainment by Hollywood. They are now flourishing in an East Asian cinematic context preserved in a globalized form. The films under investigation – I Am a Hero and Train to Busan – share similar cultural subtexts despite their incommensurable experiences of global capitalism in Asia and its latest ideological phase, neoliberalism. Both films critique the current neoliberal order and were nurtured by historical traumas experienced by both countries as well as the pandemic spread of viruses, both real and imaginary, that have ravaged the region. Nevertheless, the most prominent issue explored by Japanese and Korean zombie films is the continuity of society and its reproduction: as cultural artifacts of the neoliberal world, these films offer dystopian visions in which exploitation accelerates to such an extent that states cannot protect themselves against the viral and capitalist onslaught.     

‘Now You See a Great Many Men Pushing their Pram Proudly’

ABSTRACT

The image of a man pushing a pram could provoke much controversy in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Many contemporary commentators argued men should be and were pushing their child in a pram with pride, yet others felt this compromised manliness. The article explores this image to analyse the relationship between fatherhood and masculinity, and between cultural norms and social practice in this period. It argues that this image was used to symbolize a new emotionally close relationship between father and child and suggests that a ‘family-orientated’ masculinity came to prominence in this period, partly instigated by certain popular cultural norms.     

Geolocating popular memory: Recorded images of Hashima Island after Skyfall

ABSTRACT

This article examines efforts to document Japan’s Hashima Island following its appearance in the popular film Skyfall. It describes how the film’s commercial success led to an effort by Google to produce images of the island’s built environment using digital navigation technologies. It further describes how this effort led the Japanese government to include Hashima Island in a bid to gain Unesco heritage status for Meiji-era sites of industrialization. Drawing from visual studies, critical media studies, and from interdisciplinary approaches to collective memory, this article analyzes how the circulation of images depicting Hashima Island in popular culture affects continuing efforts to hold Japan accountable for injustices committed there in the past. By narrowing on the moment “after” Skyfall, the article concludes with an assessment of the island’s Google Street View archive in terms of its broader impact on the uses of navigation, spatial presence, and digital heritage.     

From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd

ABSTRACT

This article traces the changes and continuities in fictional stories of serial murder in London from the late-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, it shows how changes in the primary audience for metropolitan popular culture necessitated dramatic shifts in the tale of serial killing and narratives of violence. Thus, by the nineteenth century, as the lower classes had become the main supporters of both traditional and new genres of entertainment in popular culture, their experience of and fears and anxieties about urban change became intertwined with myths about serial killing and reflected in a new character of the public nightmare, Sweeney Todd, the barber of Fleet Street, who set out to effectively depopulate the capital with his ghastly murder machine.     

Life Narratives and Personal Identity: The End of Linear Social Mobility?

ABSTRACT

This paper uses visualisations of life trajectories drawn from the 1958 National Child Development Survey to show how this generation refused linear narratives of mobility in favour of jags and turning points. We argue that these visualisations demonstrate the limitations of conventional class-based interpretations of social mobility. . We show how these jags represent moments of switching between public and private lives, demonstrating the interruptions which this generation display. We argue that these visualisations are consistent with the distinctive historical conditions ofthis generation, especially its female members, We conclude that more studiesof popular identities of social mobility are needed.     

‘Let the People Sing’: J.B. Priestley and the Significance of Music

Abstract

In a writing life that spanned the 1910 to 1970s, J.B. Priestley engaged with a variety of subjects, across various literary forms, ranging from politics, popular culture and Englishness through to theories of time. However it has rarely been noted that he also wrote passionately and knowledgeably about music, with the latter playing an important role in key novels, plays and nonfiction. Priestley also promoted chamber festivals, wrote the libretto for an opera ‘The Olympians’, and even occasionally performed himself. Priestley’s writings on music fitted into his concerns about the rise of an Americanized mass order, and his mistrust of commericalized musical forms was shared by other critics of the time. However, Priestley’s work is more significant than a binary high/low low cultural validation of classical music/dismissal of more popular musical forms. He was often critical of jazz and ragtime, but more positive about popular music that was produced in, reflected, and empowered the individual and community. Priestley’s writings on music marked a genuine attempt at understanding the role of music in culture, and contributed to his democratic critique of the mass society.