scholarly journals Parsing the Popular

Ethnologies ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Laba
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Knowledge Spaces ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Folklore Studies ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Expressive Strategies

This work argues for an engagement with, and analysis of folkloric expression through the concept and cultural practices of communicative action. The article is motivated by a critical need to situate folklore within dynamic and compelling currents of popular culture. It is suggested that the capacities of folklore as popular culture serve to renew and impel folklore studies for traction and relevance in analytic encounters with contemporary media, culture, and society. Foundational concepts and theoretical trajectories in folklore and communication are detailed, challenged and revised with a view to capturing the substance and significance of folklore in cultural terms. The analysis presented is premised on the notion that there is a decisive intersection of the concepts and practices of folklore and popular culture to the extent that definitional boundaries between them are imprecise and unsustainable. The analysis explores how folklore as popular culture socially articulates, negotiates and asserts meaning in codes, practices, knowledge, spaces and expressive strategies in contemporary cultural conditions and environments.

I Want My TKD

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-176
Author(s):  
Paul Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Contemporary Media

Chapter 7 picks up the idea of the fragmentariness of contemporary media culture in examining martial arts in music videos. Called ‘I want my TKD: Martial Arts in Music Videos’, this chapter is a wide-ranging survey of pop, hip-hop, and rock videos. The chapter begins with a discussion of the historical emergence of music videos as a powerful player in international popular culture with the appearance of MTV, before moving into an analysis of the earliest music videos to feature martial arts—several of which were, interestingly, parodic, comic, novelty, or eccentric rap songs, performed by white artists. Later texts demonstrate chaotic relationships with and (mis)understandings of Asian countries and cultures. The chapter argues that martial arts themes are particularly significant in progressive rap and hip-hop music videos, while in pop and rock videos martial arts are often treated as comic.

scholarly journals Symbolic Amateurs: On the Discourse of Amateurism in Contemporary Media Culture

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Work Role ◽  
Professional Work ◽  
Network Economy ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Industrial Network ◽  
Post Industrial

The amateur is the person who engages in activities that for another constitute a professional work role. Despite the global drive for professional development, amateurs are increasingly valued in the digitised economy. This leads to a series of interesting and increasingly pressing questions with regard to the nature of ‘the amateur’ in modern society and culture. Are amateurs necessarily good? Is amateurism necessarily located with amateur practitioners? Do divisions between professional producers and amateurs hold relevance to a post-industrial, network economy?

scholarly journals Idols of Promotion: The Triumph of Self-Branding in an Age of Precarity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy ◽  
Jefferson Pooley
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Precarious Employment ◽  
Talk Show ◽  
Popular Magazine ◽  
Contemporary Media

By analyzing the “mass idols” (Lowenthal, 1944) of contemporary media culture, this study contributes to our understanding of popular communication, branding, and social media self-presentation. Leo Lowenthal, in his well-known analysis of popular magazine biographies, identified a marked shift in mass-mediated exemplars of success: from self-made industrialists and politicians (idols of production) to screen stars and athletes (idols of consumption). Adapting his approach, we draw upon a qualitative analysis of magazine biographies (People and Time, n = 127) and social media bios (Instagram and Twitter, n = 200), supplemented by an inventory of television talk show guests (n = 462). Today's idols, we show, blend Lowenthal's predecessor types: they hail from the sphere of consumption, but get described –and describe themselves –in production terms. We term these new figures “idols of promotion,” and contend that their stories of self-made success –the celebrations of promotional pluck –are parables for making it in a precarious employment economy.

scholarly journals Grendizer Leaves for Sweden

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-71
Author(s):  
Omar Al-Ghazzi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Generational Identity ◽  
Media Globalization ◽  
Syrian Refugee Crisis ◽  
Media Practices

Abstract Exploring the post-March 2011 Syrian online sphere, in this article I focus on nostalgic videos and memes inspired by Arabic-dubbed Japanese anime series originally broadcast on Arab government TV stations in the 1980s. As part of a dissident social media culture, amateur videos that redubbed and edited childhood cartoons have appeared on YouTube since 2011—tackling themes of revolution, war and exile. These videos defied and mocked the Al-Assad regime, as well as the Islamic State. I argue that they are to be understood as empowering media practices for how they project political meaning onto childhood cartoons which are associated with a generational identity shared by now-adult Syrians. Highlighting an understudied aspect of media globalization—the influence of Japanese anime on Arab popular culture—in this article I examine a diverse body of social media clips and memes that recycle Japanese anime. I analyze their re-appropriation by Syrians, by offering a typology of nostalgic online practices in the contexts of war and the uprising. These can be summed up in three categories of nostalgic mediation: nostalgic defiance, as expressed in calls for political action; nostalgic mockery, as reflected in subversive nostalgic humor targeting authority; and nostalgic anguish, in reaction to the trauma of war and exile, for example, in relation to the Syrian refugee crisis.

Imagining the Mulatta

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasmine Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Political Events ◽  
And Gender

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media demonstrates how mixed-race women of African and European descent are harnessed in popular media as a tool to uphold white supremacy and discipline people of African descent to uphold state policies of antiblackness. Uncovering the racialized and gendered paradigms of U.S. and Brazilian media, the book uses case studies of texts from a broad range of popular culture media—film, telenovelas, television shows, music videos, magazines, newspapers, and Olympic ceremonies—to elucidate how the U.S. mulatta and Brazilian mulata figures operates within and across the United States and Brazil as a response to racial anxieties and notions of white superiority. These shared concepts of race, gender, and sexuality crystallize in the mulatta/mulata figure as representative of interlinked racial projects in Brazil and the United States. Focusing on popular culture and political events of the 2000s, the book demonstrates how the mulatta and mulata figures facilitated multicultural and postracial discourses. Exploring representations, definitions, and meanings of blackness in the context of the Americas, the book traverses the cultural conditions of racializations in the United States alongside Brazil to unveil the workings of pervasive racial and gender inequalities.

5. Inventing the samurai

2021 ◽  
pp. 86-112
Author(s):  
Michael Wert
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Military Science ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Tokugawa Period ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter argues that the samurai were “invented” in the Tokugawa period as a strictly defined group with a unique identity created through popular culture and codified social cultural practices. Commoners and samurai alike consumed, and participated in, warrior-related activities. People read warrior histories, military science manuals, were influenced by warrior theatre, like the 47 ronin story, and the value therein. It also describes how low-ranking warriors became more political, their education increasing connected to notions of warrior legitimacy and the relationship between warriors and the imperial institution. In so doing, the chapter, chronologically, leads readers to the collapse of the last warrior regime during the Meiji Restoration and the Boshin War.

scholarly journals “Talk to Each Other Like It’s 1995”: Mapping Nostalgia for the 1990s in Contemporary Media Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 574-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Ewen
Keyword(s):  
Media Culture ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Contemporary Media

Twenty years on from Television & New Media’s first issue, we find ourselves in an era defined by fracture, anger, anxiety, and nervousness. This short article considers one notable response to this crisis: nostalgia for the 1990s manifesting across a number of cultural fields, including television, music, and celebrity.

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