Showing papers in "European Journal of Cultural Studies in 2003"

What’s ‘home’ Got to do with it? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity

Abstract: This article focuses on how we can understand the contradictory dynamicsthrough which communications technologies have been domesticated at the same time that domesticity itself has been dislocated. The article addresses questions of historical periodization and the need for a more developed historical perspective on the futurological debates about the new technologies with which so much of media and cultural studies is concerned today.

Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats

Abstract: This article examines the shifts in young men's and women's racial and gendered identities in Manenberg, a predominantly coloured, Afrikaans-speaking township in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how male and female youth destabilizes, renovates and transforms local racial and gendered identities in relation to the local histories, repertoires and ideals of masculinity and femininity and in relation to global cultural forces such as soap operas, rap music and international brand name clothes. Youth obtains access to these global features through electronic media such as television, radio or visits to trendy city nightspots and cosmopolitan beachfront neighbourhoods. This study challenges the idea that cultural flows from the North necessarily lead to cultural hegemonization and homogenization in the South. Instead it suggests that the meanings that these cultural forms assume in this non-western context are shaped by specific local histories and cultural practices.

Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess Postfeminism and Cooking

Abstract: This article examines the significance of cookery writer and television cook Nigella Lawson in relation to debates about postfeminism, arguing that her work negotiates a form of feminine identity between the frequently polarized figures of `the feminist' and `the housewife'. It locates Nigella's work within feminist research into the meanings that women bring to their cooking practices within the sexual division of labour, arguing that her work offers an alternative way of imaging women's relationship to food based on the pleasures of cooking and eating rather than pleasing others. The article draws on Ang to explore how the figure of the domestic goddess constructed by Nigella offers a means of negotiating temporal constraints at the level of fantasy.

Peripheral Youth Relations of Identity and Power in Global/Local Context

Abstract: In this introduction, the editors construct a dialogue between a wideranging review of theories and research on global/local relations in youth cultures and the articles published in this Special I...

Retraditionalizing the Mobile Young People's Sociality and Mobile Phone Use in Seoul, South Korea

Abstract: This article, based on ethnographic research in Seoul, South Korea, proposes a `peripheral' and local perspective on teenage mobile phone users and sociality. The teenage users show that the mobile phone, which has often been represented as an example of global imagination technologies, is here appropriated in localized ways in which the traditional form of sociality, Cheong, is rearticulated. After reviewing the recent literature on young people's identity formation in relation to globalization, the article explores the way in which the mobile phone is appropriated as a means of extending traditional sociality between peers and family members. The study suggests that there is no clear-cut evidence that young people have become disembedded from local sociality; rather, they are reimagining the local through global imagination technology.

Being Gay, Being Straight and Being Yourself Local and Global Reflections on Identity, Authenticity and the Lesbian and Gay Scene

Abstract: Authenticity or `being true to the self' continues to be a culturally valued quality despite (or perhaps because of) the increasing fragmentation of identities in contemporary culture. Focusing on ...

`Ivory Lives' Economic Restructuring and the Making of Whiteness in a Post-Industrial Youth Community

Abstract: Weaving together historical, structural and cultural approaches to the study of youth, this article examines the impact of global change and economic restructuring in a Northeast English youth comm

Enterprising Femininity New Modes of Work and Subjectivity

Abstract: This article introduces a group of ‘enterprising women’ in occupations dealing with ‘impression management’ and ‘care of the self’. It argues that this brand of worker successfully transforms skills acquired through consumption and the making of the feminine into increasingly valuable marketable skills. As such she embodies a blurring of consumption and production and inhabits a particular form of enterprising femininity. Through a reflexive life story method, questions of the role of consumption and self-help literature in the construction of this subjectivity are explored

Young (Male) Irelanders Postcolonial Ethnicities - Expanding the Nation and Irishness

Abstract: This article explores the experiences of second generation Irish young men living in Britain. Drawing upon theories of globalization, diaspora and subjectivity, it considers how ethnic invisibility (in Britain) and national exclusion (in Ireland) are shaping young people's specific experience of cultural peripheries. At the same time, such a position provides an insight into the centrality of the black/white dualism on a lived-out level, while also highlighting the continuing salience of the racial dualism as a dominant explanatory framework. More specifically, it examines young people's reclamation and rearticulation of being and belonging, the cultural politics of Irishness and the visibility of Irish ethnicity. It concludes by bringing together some of the empirical, theoretical and methodological complexities involved in working in this area.

Youth culture as practical innovation: Turkish German youth, 'time out' and the actionisms of breakdance

Abstract: This article uses extensive qualitative research to address questions about the identifiable peculiarities of adolescence as a phase in the life course. It suggests that the perspective of action theory allows one to see how adolescence is defined through a series of search processes that follow a rationality of their own that is difficult to grasp via utilitarianism. We have called these processes 'actionisms'. They evolve within a moratorium (a 'time out' that is often initiated by the young people themselves) and are particularly important when young people find themselves deprived of (or liberated from) ties to the local milieu. We suggest that three typical forms of actionist search processes are evident empirically, including forced solidarity within an episodic community of fate, as well as two kinds of alternative milieu formation rooted in either collective or individual identities. This article illustrates the latter process - milieu formation - drawing on our research with young breakdancers of Turkish German origin.

Television and Nationalism: Historical Change in the National Domestic TV Formation of Postwar Japan

Abstract: This article attempts to throw some light on the linkage between television and nationalism in contemporary Japan, focusing on: 1) the historical development of TV as a symbolic object in everyday life; 2) TV as a technology of time–space articulation; and 3) the textual formation of TV programs. By the late 1950s, TV sets were placed not in homes, but on street corners, where large numbers of people gathered. The symbolic meaning of the ‘collective’ nature of TV changed after the 1960s. From the early 1960s onwards, when TV entered households, it became an overarching medium linking the family with the state, defining the national consciousness and dominating people’s imaginative views of both the past and the present. This article analyzes the ideological relationship between gender, technology and nationalism in TV images through the postwar period. But TV also provides a flow of information and discursive structures for the horizons of the social imagination. Thus, the article also shows how TV broadc...

Youth Identities in the Global Cultural Economy: Central and Peripheral Consumer Culture in Denmark and Greenland

Abstract: Based on a qualitative study among high school students from metropolitan and rural areas in Denmark and Greenland, the article discusses the identity discourses of young people in the global cultural economy and how young people's position in structures of centre and periphery is generative of certain discourses of identity. The discourses are to a large extent generated in relation to consumption and consumer culture, in particular among those who live on the periphery of the global cultural economy. Here, consumer culture is generative of a discourse of 'peripheral consciousness', the logic of which is the lack of consumption opportunities - opportunities that are imagined to be available in the centre. Introduction: the mythology of the 'global youth segment' In the marketing literature, youth has been held up as the prototypical example of a global segment (see, for example, Hassan and Katsanis, 1991; Tully, 1994). The basis for the excitement about the youth segment (labelled with various names such as the 'teen segment', 'Gen X culture', 'baby busters', 'the MTV generation') largely stems from the allegedly uniform consumption habits of young people all over the world - their clothing, music tastes and media habits. This leads to the conclusion that young people have 'shared habitats of meaning' (Hannerz, 1996) and that we are therefore able to speak of a global consumer segment. However, in the discursive construction of the 'global youth segment', the role of the local spaces in which young people conduct their everyday life is largely ignored; the role of the local, in relation to identity and consumption, is in one sense hidden.

The social life of opera

Abstract: This article explores the changing status of opera and seeks to challenge the idea that opera is `essentially' an elite cultural practice. I begin by considering the increasing social visibility of opera in contemporary UK and US society. I then examine the history of opera in terms of its invention in the late 16th century and its development as popular commercial entertainment in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Next, I explore how opera was turned into `high culture' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Returning to the contemporary, I again discuss the increasing social visibility of opera, posing the question: is opera once again what it was for most of its history — an inclusive rather than an exclusive cultural practice?

Informational Revolution, the Net and Cultural Identity: A Conceptual Critique of Manuel Castells's the Information Age

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Loyalties in flux: The changing politics of citizenship

Abstract: Institutional politics have become increasingly market oriented, consensual and therapeutic. The emerging form of political governance relies on consensual expertise and paternal care rather than on political differences and ideologies. These changes have an impact on the ways in which citizenship is defined and articulated. The classical ideals of an active polis citizenship (i.e. the ideas of dialogue, joint political action and political process) seem to be losing momentum. In particular, state-bound citizenship is losing its ability to provide the means for meaningful political action and identities. Instead, citizenship is to an increasing extent defined by market-oriented discourses and institutions, which are constructing identities and governance overlapped by traditional political citizenship. It is suggested that cultural studies could consider the cultural changes at the heart of political and economic power in order to understand the changing discourses of citizenship.

'A Good Body' The case of/for feminist media studies

Abstract: The figure of the embodied speaker has been central within feminist media and cultural studies and has been central theoretically to questions of how, when and where women can speak with authority. It has also been central to the feminist study of film and television representations in which women have been seen as simultaneously absent as subjects of discourse and overpresent as bodies/images. This article traces the connections between these issues and asks how we should view the recent emergence of the female professor investigator as a hero of popular film and television. It argues that these lecturer detectives are both figures of anxiety ? embodying concerns about a perceived feminization of the public sphere ? and transgressive figures. In their troubling and embarrassing tendency to evade containment and to speak from a position of embodied difference, they also offer an alter ego for the feminist academic.

‘Mohammed Atta and I&rsquo Identification, Discrimination and the Formation of Sleepers

Abstract: This article uses the popular thought figure of the sleeper as a methodological tool to get a new angle on the cultural analysis of majority–minority relations in Europe I do so on the basis of an autobiographical essay written by Nazneen Khan, who considers the theoretical possibility that she too might have become a terrorist The analysis focuses on descent and religion, as specific sources of identification and belonging, and on how and where, in present-day identification, sleeper identities might be identified The analysis reveals that the definition of the sleeper in the mass media is not the only one possible This figure can be reconfigured more dynamically and processually as someone who has experienced repeated rejection within structured relations of power influenced by ideologies focusing on blood and religion In addition, I argue that populist ideas in Europe can themselves be regarded as (racist) sleepers

Reimagining Birmingham Public History, Selective Memory and the Narration of Urban Change

Abstract: This article was sparked by the relative lack of attention the city of Birmingham has received in the global reception of `Birmingham cultural studies' This oversight may reflect a more general tr

It Almost Needn’t Have Been the Germans: The State, Colonial Violence, and the Holocaust

Abstract: The starting point for this chapter is one that many people will find highly contentious, that in order to understand the Holocaust as a practice we need to set it into the context of the history of colonial violence.1 I am, though, not the first person to make this connection. Sven Lindqvist makes a similar connection in Exterminate All the Brutes, first published in Swedish in 1992.2 In order to contextualize the role of colonial violence we need to understand how violence—and I will want to talk about the discourse of violence to enable us to confront the understanding of violence as a culturally constituted practice—in modernity was conjoined with terror as a way of constituting the order which is the achievement of the modern state as a political form. Articulated with this practice of the state has been the emphasis on the social homogeneity of the population which has been constructed in terms of a binary of inclusion or exclusion. Following down this path we find a history of those the state punishes, either locked up in prisons or deported to a prison colony elsewhere, though European states began to discontinue this latter practice in the second half of the nineteenth century. This history needs to be distinguished from the history of those that the state excludes, casts out or does not allow in, a practise which is the other side of the coin from the emphasis in the modern state on internal homogeneity.

Textual Spaces, Social Identities and Race in Singapore Advertising

Abstract: Advertising in Singapore contests certain notions that prevail in much of the current advertising theory -- notions of the advertisement as 'commodity sign', removed from the real particularities of social contexts, in order to interpellate consumer readers into a uniform set of 'symbolic exchange values'. The influence of Marxist thought in such theory is clear. However, this method of analysis is not remunerative in the Singapore context, chiefly because of its small size, highly multiracial and multicultural society and strong degree of governance. These are manifested in a number of ways: indirectly, for example, in the creation of so-called 'Asian values' which are meant to resist 'western influence'; and directly in the form of media and advertising regulations and government advertising campaigns that create signs quite different from the commodity signs touted by neo-Marxist theory. In addition, racial and cultural sensitivities are registered in textual dialogics which interrogate both this theory as well as the constructed identities (whether commodified or governanced) in advertising texts

The Predicament of Cultural Studies A Reply to Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin

Abstract: The article examines the critiques against cultural studies that have been voiced by Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin and others. The article offers a response to these authors by suggesting that John Rawls and Michael Walzer's theories of justice can help us address some of these critiques.

`For Venus smiles not in a house of tears' Interethnic relations in European cinema

Abstract: In the 1990s, several European filmmakers addressed the Romeo and Juliet motif of `impossible love' in the context of multiculturalism. A heterosexual love affair between people of different ethnic backgrounds allows filmmakers to address issues of racism and deconstruct racial stereotypes. In the films discussed in this article, the tragic love affairs point to the unwillingness of European countries to become pluralistic and multiethnic societies. Some films have attempted to represent interethnic love relations more hopefully, celebrating happy endings of mixed race couples. The success of such films may indicate that the genre of comedy has won over the tragedy of the Romeo and Juliet topos in cinematic representations of interethnic love relations. Perhaps European cinema is ready to embrace constructions of European identity as hybrid, diverse and multiple.

Native birth Identity and territory in postcolonial Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

Abstract: Focusing on examples from Guinea-Bissau, this article examines recent attention to birthplace as constitutive of national identity in West African postcolonial politics. The author explores the log...