“We Sing Our Home, We Dance Our Land”: Indigenous Self-Determination and Contemporary Geopolitics in Australian Popular Music

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Gibson

Strategies for indigenous self-determination have emerged at unique junctures in national and global geopolitical arenas, challenging the formal hegemony of the nation-state with claims to land rights, sovereignty and self-governance. These movements are reflected qualitatively, in a variety of social, political, and cultural forms, including popular music in Australia. An analysis of the ‘cultural apparatus’, recordings, and popular performance events of indigenous musicians reveals the construction of ‘arenas of empowerment’ at a variety of geographical scales, within which genuine spaces of Aboriginal self-determination and self-expression can exist. Although these spaces often remain contested, new indigenous musical networks continue to emerge, simultaneously inscribing Aboriginal music into the Australian soundscape, and beginning to challenge normative geopolitical doctrines. The emergence of a vibrant Aboriginal popular music scene therefore requires a rethinking of Australian music, and appeals for greater recognition of Aboriginal artists' sophisticated geopolitical strategies.

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Cloonan

Recent years have seen two noticeable trends in Popular Music Studies. These have been on the one hand a series of works which have tried to document the ‘local’ music scene and, on the other, accounts of processes of globalisation. While not uninterested in the intermediate Nation-State level, both trends have tended to regard it as an area of increasingly less importance. To state the matter more boldly, both trends have underplayed the continually important role of the Nation-State.


2021 ◽  
pp. 088541222110266
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-109
Author(s):  
Clara Bellamy

This article discusses how Zapatista women have built themselves as transformative political subjects that disrupt the racist, classist, and patriarchal nation-state. It underscores the importance of reflecting on Zapatista women, on their struggle for particular demands specified in the Revolutionary Women’s Law, especially the collective struggle for obtaining rights such as to land, to participate politically, and to organize themselves in the armed struggle. Instead of entering into debate over whether Zapatista women are feminists or not, this article recognizes how, besides transforming living conditions, the Zapatistas have organized politically and gone from a process of invisibility, silence, and obedience to one of recognition, speech, and command. In this sense, the struggle of Zapatista women is an example of theoretical and practical ruptures within the history of class, gender, and race struggled in Mexico and the world.


Author(s):  
Dmitry Shumsky

This introductory chapter discusses the unquestioned identification between “Zionism” as a national movement that sought to realize the Jewish nation's self-determination in Palestine, and “the Jewish nation-state,” which has no room for the national collective existence of any particular national group other than the Jews and which represents the ultimate and teleological realization of the Zionist project. The vast majority of those who support the two-state solution, who are known as the “Zionist left,” base their position on the need to avoid the formation of a binational state in which the Jewish demographic majority would be endangered. They argue that this is the way to rescue what they consider to be the political core of the Zionist idea: a mono-national state for the Jewish political collective.


Author(s):  
Martin Hébert

Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination and self-government are recognized by several international instances. Deliberation plays a key role in the exercise of these rights, and its forms are as diverse as the cultures and social structures of which it is part. However, efforts to understand commonalities and differences between contexts and experiences have led to discussions of what Rodolfo Stavenhagen has termed the “indigenous situation.” This chapter looks at some ways in which self-identified Indigenous peoples have maintained, repurposed, and developed practices of political deliberation within such contexts of colonialism, nation-state formation, and capitalist expansion. A particular emphasis is put on the various scales at which deliberation takes place, be it in community life, regional organizations, or national and international political movements.


Author(s):  
John Breuilly

This chapter examines the role of nationalism and national self-determination (NSD) in shaping the major institution of modern international relations: the nation-state. It considers different types of nationalism and how they vary from one another, whether the commonly accepted sequence of nation > nationalism > nation-state is actually the reverse of the normal historical sequence, and whether the principle of NSD is compatible with that of state sovereignty. The chapter also explores the contribution of nationalism to the globalization of world politics and the changing meanings of NSD since 1918. Four case studies of nationalism are presented: Kurdistan, Germany, India, and Yugoslavia. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether the principle of NSD threatens stable international relations.


Author(s):  
John Breuilly

This chapter examines the role of nationalism and national self-determination (NSD) in shaping the major institution of modern international relations: the nation-state. It considers different types of nationalism and how they vary from one another, whether the commonly accepted sequence of nation > nationalism > nation-state is actually the reverse of the normal historical sequence, and whether the principle of NSD is incompatible with that of state sovereignty. The chapter also explores the contribution of nationalism to the globalization of world politics and the changing meanings of NSD since 1918. Four case studies of nationalism are presented, in Kurdistan, Germany, India, and Yugoslavia. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether the principle of NSD threatens stable international relations.


Flaming? ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 115-148
Author(s):  
Alisha Lola Jones

Focusing on Washington, DC’s gospel go-go music scene in the early 2000s, chapter 4 highlights the role of an understudied popular music in performances of socioculturally preferred black male homosociality. This chapter examines men’s performances against the stereotype of the softer, woman-like, flamboyant male vocalist through research on a percussion-heavy music from Washington, DC called gospel go-go. In essence, the go-go music band is a symbolic composite of perspectives associated with the unmarked male-dominant categories of the musicians’ pit and absentee men, who are talking back, providing musical contestation of the duplicitous preacher and choir director stereotypes. Chapter 4 aims to shed light on the musical and performative properties of male homomusicoenrapture and homosonoenrapture, the same-gender musical and sonic textures and visual dynamics that stimulate intense enjoyment while enveloping and propelling gospel go-go participants.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-246
Author(s):  
Hui-Yi Katherine Tseng

Abstract Statehood and sovereignty have been mutually implicating in the Westphalian international order. The spatially characteristic tenet of sovereignty has not been questioned, which collaterally fortifies the one-nation/one-state formula prescribed in modern sovereignty. However, fissures inhered in this nation-state formula are discernible, particularly when the conventional statist sovereignty has remained indefinite and inchoate. Taiwan’s statist sovereignty has been overshadowed by its undetermined statehood and indefinite territorial domain. Intriguingly, once the rigidity of statist sovereignty is lifted, the development of national sovereignty becomes irrepressible. Reinvention of national sovereignty is informed by both universal values and case-specific particularity. For the former, individualism, multiculturalism, and self-determination serve exemplary cases. For the latter, the particularity is mostly presented in the wrestling between statist and national sovereignty. Taiwan’s constitutional jurisprudence serves to verify the universal, as well as the particular development of Taiwan’s national sovereignty. However, dangers loom large, in that identity reconfiguration has been cultivated collaterally, which brings about not only a sophisticated Taiwanese consciousness, but also a more uncertain outlook for cross-Strait relations.


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