Transnational Studies
SOC 783
B. Nadya Jaworsky
Room 3.59
Mondays 16.00 – 17.00
Tuesdays 15.00 – 16.00
Abrahamic Karma: Can
three fractious religions
descended from the same
patriarch be joined in harmony
by Israeli metal music?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZUcWngEtcM
Martiniello & Lafleur’s Questions
• Can music itself be political?
• How can one explain the choice of culture and
arts as a means to express political concerns
and hence, to participate politically?
• What is the political function of cultural and
ethnic practices for ethnic groups?
Music, Identity & Place
• Fills the silence left by the working day
• Use by the state; nation-building
• Identity formation for nations in diaspora
– Koreans in Russia; difference in generations
– Mexican Folklorico; reinterpretation by Chicanos
This last example illustrates the transnational cultural
dialogue taking place between the country of origin and
the country of settlement and by which culture at home
is redefined by practices abroad (p. 1201).
Potentially Political Elements of Music
• Lyrics – content, hidden meanings, language
choice, ‘lyrical drift’
• Rhythm/Sound – salsa as Cuban heritage,
rap’s re-appropriation of lyrics, tone, mixing
messages – e.g., alternative country
• Public Performance – venue – e.g., rap in
large metropolitan areas, clothing by
performers, symbols used on stage, items for
sale, distribution mode
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tseT9oOd4pY
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-dvAOaDO5k
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMeF9BX0og8
“Folklorico” Post-migration
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKIkBbZ3Ll4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-ZTQuWgUlg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp6j5HJ-Cok
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGnp44aNqLk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CBTXuS
M.I.A. “Sunshowers”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cA3b-PbPE0&ob=av2e
Pressures of Commercialization
Raï music
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVGuqW_k0pA
• RAI n B FEVER arab-african hiphop
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhcAqeCLwKY
ALSO:
• Pressures of Stigmatization
• Pressures of Censorship (even by immigrants
themselves – Cuba Ordinance)
Why do migrants and ethnic minorities choose
culture and the arts as forms of political
expression when and where they do?
Immigrants political participation largely and
primary depends on the structure of political
opportunities present at a given time and in a
given society and which is the result of inclusionexclusion mechanisms developed by states (or
residence and origin) and their political systems.
Typology of Political Action in Popular Music
(Mattern):
1. Confrontational political action; music as a
practice of resistance, opposition, and struggle
2. Deliberative political action; rests upon the
recognition both of intra-groups differences
and disagreements and of border zones in
which different groups share the same
interests;
3. Pragmatic political action – the assumption of
the existence of shared political interests.
LiveAid, FarmAid, SOS racism in France, etc.
Czechs in Texas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixcNIgLzdw4
1. Author states that migrants and ethnic minorities choose culture
and arts as forms of political representation, but is it really
conscious pick?
2. Music serves as a very important tool in the sphere of right-wing
neo-Nazi extremism. Spreading extreme right-wing ideas (even in
the form of visual signs for ex. on clothing) is deemed illegal, but
should the state be eligible to punish those individuals who „just
come to enjoy the concert“ (on the basis that listening to that
kind of music represents an expression of extremist ideas
dangerous to democracy)? The questions “What role should the
state adopt in dealing with cultural/musical expressions of
political attitude? Should it be a pure observer? Regulator?
Protector (of whom/what)?” are pressing.
3. Politics can influence music and music influences politics. The
disadvantage of music is that the politics can ban a band.
Musicians cannot ban a politician. Can artists change politics?
Gort, Ireland
Gort, Ireland
Gort, Ireland
Gort, Ireland
Main Goal of the article: a new
framework within TS
•
•
•
•
Re-examination of the ideas of home
Existence of multiple homes
Fluid understandings of places
New attachment to places
– Transnational ties and local attachments
can be complementary
Sheringham’s Thesis:
• ‘Far from hindering their local attachment
and integration, the ‘Brazilianization’ and
creation of certain transnational spaces by
Brazilians in Gort enables a positive
engagement with both Irish and Brazilian
identities and places (p. 61)’.
• Pp. 62-65 provide a great review of
transnationalism as a concept!
• Also her Conclusions – pp. 77-78.
We must ask ourselves whether the studied community is
indeed a transnational environment. Not only do the
Brazilians socialize mostly with other Brazilians… but they
also (for the most part) attend mass in Portuguese, shop in
Brazilian food stores, buy clothes and shoes of Brazilian
design (again sold in specialized Brazilian shops) and are
served by other Brazilians at restaurants. Some of them are
not even encouraged or motivated at all to learn decent
English. Is this true transnationalism in the sense of
vanishing borders between cultures and communities, or is
this only a matter of exporting Brazil into Gort and mere
shifting and re-establishing of old borders? We might also
ask if there exists such a thing as transnationalism at all –
sure, borders indeed disappear in bigger communities than
Gort, but New York, Shanghai or London are global cities
not transnational.
• Levitt's proposal is to set up museums as places in which collective
memories with different cultural nuances can be recollected and
known by new generations, to ensure that the contribution of
minorities becomes an integral part of the history of a nation. It's a
very interesting and challenging proposal, but is this enough? Or
soon the multicultural societies will require a new kind of
government, able to represent and give voice to the various souls of
the society and to settle any possible conflict between them?
Something like the Swiss Directory model, in which much more
democracy has to be guaranteed to the different parts involved?
• Do you think that museums have more or less influence on shaping
pictures about different cultures and groups nowadays than in preinternet era?
• What kind of groups are difficult to search online? (I mean that
there are no information about them on the Internet and so
museums and such institutions have the „monopoly“ on
information about them)
Martin Heidegger,
'Building, dwelling, thinking'
• A boundary is not that at which
something stops but, as the Greeks
recognized, the boundary is that from
which something begins its presencing.
Homi Bhabha
Locations of Culture (1994)
“It is in the emergence of the interstices-the overlap and
displacement of domains of difference-that the
intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness,
community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. . . .
Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or
affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation
of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of
pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of
tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the
minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation
that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in
moments of historical transformation.”
Homi Bhabha
Locations of Culture (1994)
• How are subjects formed in-between, or in excess,
of, the sum of the parts of difference? Race, class
gender, etc.
• How do strategies of representation or
empowerment come to be formulated in the
competing claims of communities where, the
exchange of values, meanings, and priorities maybe
not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may
be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even
incommensurable?
Alan Sekula – Fish Story
Nestor Garcia Canclini (1992)
• Cultural reconversions are hybrid
transformations generated by the horizontal
co-existence of a number of symbolic systems
(from high culture to “folk” or “traditional”
culture) (p. 342).
• Mass media do not homogenize
audiences; in fact, they encourage new
techniques of segmentation by broadcasting
diversified information and programs that
appeal to varied consumers’ (p. 343).
Themes to take away
• The realm of the urban as a space of
transnationalism, hybridity, and/or cultural
reconversion.
• Tension between westernization /
homogenization and localized empowerment.
• Three basic streams of theorizing – arts and
identity, citizenship and identity, place and
identity
• Theory of interstitial spaces of culture – levels
of agency and empowerment
READINGS – Week 4
• Section 8 (Chapters 33-34 and 36-37), pp. 359-410 in
TS Reader (World society, global diffusion of cricket
and McDonald’s in Asia)
• Dekel, Tal. 2009. "Body, Gender and
Transnationalism: Art and Cultural Criticism in a
Changing Europe." Studies in Ethnicity and
Nationalism 9:175-197.
• Shavisinsky, Neil. J. 1994. "Transnational Popular
Culture and the Global Spread of the Jamaican
Rastafarian Movement." New West Indian
Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 68:259-281.