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.     

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.     

Museums for the many? Rhetorical optimism and the failure of sustained political will at three London government-funded museums – then and now

ABSTRACT

This article contends that there are considerable similarities between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century aspirations for museums – not least, in respect to promises of “museums for the many”. Despite contemporary policy makers of different political allegiances embracing similar rhetorics, in general they appear to have had little interest in reflecting on previous realities. This article focuses on attendances at three national museums, in particular the British Museum, the National Gallery and, the Victoria & Albert Museum (formerly, the South Kensington Museum) over two periods: from the early 1850s to the late 1880s, and from the late 1970s to the present. It interrogates those and other institutions’ visit data for evidence of whether they did, indeed, deliver to “the many”. It questions the commitment of state-supported museums to those target audiences, both then and now.     

Celebrity

ABSTRACT

Recent debates about the meaning and role of cultural history have focused on the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘society’. Some have taken this opportunity to position cultural history as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ explanations of human behaviour. In contrast, this article argues that ‘biological’ methodologies – particularly the perspectives of evolutionary psychology – can usefully contribute to the historical understanding of culture and social development. To this end, it outlines the fundamentals of Darwinist psychology, suggests options for interdisciplinary cooperation and uses the topic of interpersonal violence to explore the potential for uniting cultural, social and evolutionary psychological methodologies.     

‘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.     

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.     

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.     

Beyond the Rule of Thumb: The Materiality of Marital Violence in England c. 1700–1857

This article examines how marital violence was articulated in and around particular places, spaces, and objects, to reveal the tensions embedded in the physical structure of the household and its control. It also demonstrates that space and objects shaped marital violence both as an idea and an act and did ‘emotional work’ in the sense that they operated upon people’s emotions and behaviour. Finally, it argues that an imagined material culture of marital violence contributed to the construction and maintenance of class stereotypes.     

A Visit to Remember: Stigmata and Celebrity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Focusing on a type of religious celebrity that attracted European crowds at the turn of the twentieth century, the stigmatized female mystic, in this article I examine the role of the audience in the generation of a celebrity culture from below, i.e., as opposed to the current type of pre-manufactured mass-media celebrity. To examine the audience’s role, I consider the thousands who visited two stigmatized laywomen: the Frenchwoman Marie-Julie Jahenny and the Spaniard Margalida Amengual. The article shows the importance of the personal experiences of the members of the audience, highlighting the role of word-of-mouth communication in the rise to fame of these two stigmatics. I argue that popular enthusiasm is key to achieving both celebrity and ‘living saint’ status. Drawing on the parallels between fans and religious devotees, I also provide evidence of the interplay between the cult of saints and celebrity worship.     

The Indonesian Killings and economic redistribution: a reply to Hilmar Farid

Abstract

In 2005 Hilmar Farid published “Indonesia's original sin: Mass killings and capitalist expansion, 1965-66,” the to date only scholarly attempt to interpret the destruction of the Communist Party of Indonesia, which led to the Killings of 500,000 people in the years 1965–1966, according to a classical Marxist framework. His argument is that the real story about the violence is one of massive transfers of agricultural land, which alienated millions of peasants from their means of subsistence and paved the way for a wide-ranging capitalist transformation of the country. Empirical analysis shows that it is unlikely that such a massive alienation has happened. Many other scholars who have studied the Killings conclude that the violence was not solely driven by capitalist expansion. However, Farid has uncovered an important connection between political violence and economic redistribution that should be detached from the Marxist framework he has used in order to unfold its full significance for our understanding of the Killings.     

Cruising Mat Motor: Malay biker masculinity and queer desire in/through KL Menjerit

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of working‐class Mat Motor (Malay biker) masculinity and queer desire in/through KL Menjerit, a commercial biker film that exudes the unmistakably aura of working‐class kejantanan (masculinity). Specifically, I focus on how the film – or more precisely the ‘queer moments’ it contains – resonates in ways that are not necessarily obvious to the disinterested heterosexual public eye. The discussion takes into account both filmic elements and the sexual geography of Kuala Lumpur (KL), where shifting biker spaces sometimes intersect with homosexual cruising sites. My argument is that the film’s representation of the Mat Motor protagonist as unbendingly straight and heterosexually jantan – while imaginably gratifying to the core audience of Mat Motors – actually belies the opposite reality of KL’s ‘forgotten’ underside, where gender and sexuality are much more fluid and malleable than is sanctioned by society and the state.     

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.     

Soft power: From ethnic attraction to national attraction in sociological globalism

This paper explores the influence of ethnic relations in sociological globalism on the formulation process of a country’s soft power (i.e., national attraction). People migrate into a country, become an ethnic group, and experience sociological contact/interaction with other ethnic groups, through which they form more concrete and experiential attitudes toward each other. In turn, these attitudes affect their perceptions of other ethnic groups’ homeland countries. With soft power being defined as favorability toward a foreign country, this paper investigates the influence of ethnic relations in a three-predictor regression model of soft power—ethnic relations, between country relationship quality, and normative performance (i.e., reputation) of a country. In testing the model, this study uses secondary data consisting of U.S. national surveys including polls of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations on perceptions of foreign countries and aggregate nation-level data. The findings show that ethnic relations has a sizable, significant influence on favorability, second to relationship quality, with normative performance having a weak, insignificant influence. This paper further discusses the findings’ implications for contemporary public diplomacy practice and theory and outlines directions for future study of ethnic relation’s influence on soft power in sociological globalism.