Angora Matta

Angora Matta PDF Author: Marta Elena Savigliano
Publisher: Wesleyan
ISBN: 9780819565990
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Angora Matta is a bilingual (Spanish/English) and interdisciplinary work that adopts performative writing to reflect on the transnational politics of culture. Part I is an introduction co-authored by a tango-opera librettist and a central character in her libretto, offering two contending versions of how this book came into being. Part II is the libretto for the tango-opera Angora Matta, a critical view of Argentina’s contemporary history conceived as a surreal and tragic thriller. Part III contains feminist scholarly essays written by three other characters who appear in the libretto: Elvira Diaz is a dance ethnographer disenchanted with her profession; Manuela Malva is a biting foreign-film critic invested in de-mystifying exotic renderings of the Argentine tango world; Angora Matta, the assassin for hire, closes the book with philosophico-poetic preoccupations about her profession. An innovative blend of scholarship and art, Angora Matta is both critique of and antidote to the representational practices of ethnography that have fetishized “other” cultures by isolating them from contemporary history and the global flow of international politics.

Angora Matta

Angora Matta PDF Author: Marta Elena Savigliano
Publisher: Wesleyan
ISBN: 9780819565990
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Angora Matta is a bilingual (Spanish/English) and interdisciplinary work that adopts performative writing to reflect on the transnational politics of culture. Part I is an introduction co-authored by a tango-opera librettist and a central character in her libretto, offering two contending versions of how this book came into being. Part II is the libretto for the tango-opera Angora Matta, a critical view of Argentina’s contemporary history conceived as a surreal and tragic thriller. Part III contains feminist scholarly essays written by three other characters who appear in the libretto: Elvira Diaz is a dance ethnographer disenchanted with her profession; Manuela Malva is a biting foreign-film critic invested in de-mystifying exotic renderings of the Argentine tango world; Angora Matta, the assassin for hire, closes the book with philosophico-poetic preoccupations about her profession. An innovative blend of scholarship and art, Angora Matta is both critique of and antidote to the representational practices of ethnography that have fetishized “other” cultures by isolating them from contemporary history and the global flow of international politics.

My Life with Things

My Life with Things PDF Author: Elizabeth Chin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374269
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Unconventional and provocative, My Life with Things is Elizabeth Chin's meditation on her relationship with consumer goods and a critical statement on the politics and method of anthropology. Chin centers the book on diary entries that focus on everyday items—kitchen cabinet knobs, shoes, a piano—and uses them to intimately examine the ways consumption resonates with personal and social meaning: from writing love haikus about her favorite nail polish and discussing the racial implications of her tooth cap, to revealing how she used shopping to cope with a miscarriage and contemplating how her young daughter came to think that she needed Lunesta. Throughout, Chin keeps Karl Marx and his family's relationship to their possessions in mind, drawing parallels between Marx's napkins, the production of late nineteenth-century table linens, and Chin's own vintage linen collection. Unflinchingly and refreshingly honest, Chin unlocks the complexities of her attachments to, reliance on, and complicated relationships with her things. In so doing, she prompts readers to reconsider their own consumption, as well as their assumptions about the possibilities for creative scholarship.

Love and Rage

Love and Rage PDF Author: Kelley Tatro
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819580953
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Love and Rage is a deeply ethnographic account of punk in Mexico City as it is lived and practiced, connecting the sounds of punk music to different styles of political action. Through compelling first-person accounts, ethnographer Kelley Tatro shows that punk is more than music. It is a lifestyle choice that commits scene participants to experimentation with anarchist politics. Key to that process is the concept of autogestión ("self-management"), a term with deep history in local leftist politics. In detailed vignettes, grounded in historical, social, and political frames, the book shows how punk-scene sounds and practices foster autogestión through intensely affective experiences, understood as manifestations of love and rage. Drawing on the history of anarchism in Mexico City, as well as social movement scholarship, Love and Rage details the pleasures and problems of using music as a tool for creating an autonomous politics. Includes 25 photographs from photographer Yaz "Punk" Núñez.

Making Beats

Making Beats PDF Author: Joseph G. Schloss
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819574821
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats was the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods, and values of a surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects—from hip-hop artists’ pedagogical methods to the Afrodiasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of “digging” for rare records—Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values, and cultural realities. This second edition of the book includes a new foreword by Jeff Chang and a new afterword by the author.

The Cultural Work

The Cultural Work PDF Author: Corinna Campbell
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819579564
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of The Cultural Work, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname and French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain their communities within Paramaribo, the capital. Focusing on three collectives known locally as "cultural groups," which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons, it marks a vital contribution to knowledge about the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Traveling Spirit Masters

Traveling Spirit Masters PDF Author: Deborah Kapchan
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819501360
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance—and indeed all sacred music—is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

Planet Beethoven

Planet Beethoven PDF Author: Mina Yang
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819574872
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In Planet Beethoven, Mina Yang makes the compelling case that classical music in the twenty-first century is just as vibrant and relevant as ever—but with significant changes that give us insight into the major cultural shifts of our day. Perusing events, projects, programs, writings, musicians, and compositions, Yang shines a spotlight on the Western art music tradition. The book covers an array of topics, from the use of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” in YouTube clips and hip-hop, to the marketing claims of Baby Einstein products, and the new forms of music education introduced by Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. While the book is global in its outlook, each chapter investigates the unique attributes of a specific performer, performance, or event. One chapter reflects on Chinese pianist Yuja Wang’s controversial performance at the Hollywood Bowl, another explores the highly symbolic Passion 2000 Project in Stuttgart, Germany. Sure to be of interest to students, professionals, and aficionados, Planet Beethoven traces the tensions that arise from the “classical” nature of this tradition and our rapidly changing world. Ebook Edition Note: One image has been redacted.

The Kind of Man I Am

The Kind of Man I Am PDF Author: Nichole Rustin-Paschal
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 081957757X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Nearly four decades after his death, Charles Mingus Jr. remains one of the least understood and most recognized jazz composers and musicians of our time. Mingus's ideas about music, racial identity, and masculinity—as well as those of other individuals in his circle, like Celia Mingus, Hazel Scott, and Joni Mitchell—challenged jazz itself as a model of freedom, inclusion, creativity, and emotional expressivity. Drawing on archival records, published memoirs, and previously conducted interviews, The Kind of Man I Am uses Mingus as a lens through which to craft a gendered cultural history of postwar jazz culture. This book challenges the persisting narrative of Mingus as jazz's "Angry Man" by examining the ways the language of emotion has been used in jazz as shorthand for competing ideas about masculinity, authenticity, performance, and authority.

Ishtyle

Ishtyle PDF Author: Kareem Khubchandani
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047205421X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of “ishtyle” to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors’ performances stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.

Antiphonal Histories

Antiphonal Histories PDF Author: Julia Byl
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819574805
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Positioned on a major trade route, the Toba Batak people of Sumatra have long witnessed the ebb and flow of cultural influence from India, the Middle East, and the West. Living as ethnic and religious minorities within modern Indonesia, Tobas have recast this history of difference through interpretations meant to strengthen or efface the identities it has shaped. Antiphonal Histories examines Toba musical performance as a legacy of global history, and a vital expression of local experience. This intriguingly constructed ethnography searches the palm liquor stand and the sanctuary to show how Toba performance manifests its many histories through its “local music”—Lutheran brass band hymns, gong-chime music sacred to Shiva, and Jimmie Rodgers yodeling. Combining vivid narrative, wide-ranging historical research, and personal reflections, Antiphonal Histories traces the musical trajectories of the past to show us how the global is manifest in the performative moment.