CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Popular Culture and Cultural Production

Organiser: Michael Kaplan

Yarar, Betul (Abant Izzet Baysal University, Turkey) WHAT IS NEW IN THE STRUGGLE FOR HEGEMONY? POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE IN THE 1980S IN TURKEY
This paper studies the relationship between new right politics and popular culture in the 1980s in Turkey. The analysis aims to point at a new element of the struggle for hegemony that brought victory to the new right at the time. The paper begins with an examination of the new right's contradictory approach to the popular, and proceeds with an analysis of new techniques of regulating popular culture (exemplified with football and arabesk music). Inspired by Bob Jessop, the new right's project is considered a "two nations project" that constructs an ideological frontier splitting the nation into two opposing camps. In contrast to older techniques of constructing hegemony, the new ones are seen to have blurred the line between the two sections of society by controlling and pacifying the popular masses less through ideological means, than through a structuring of their everyday life practices into enclosed and detached social spaces.

Santos, Helena (University of Porto, Portugal) NEITHER HIGH NOR LOW: SOME ARTS "IN BETWEEN"
Animation cinema, comics and bande dessinée and puppet theatre are some examples of very hybrid fields of art production. They seem particularly interesting to analyse the relationships between "levels" of culture and art, as those fields reveal characteristics from both mass and media culture and avant-garde art. Our focus will be the art segments of those fields, which are usually classified as "minor arts". There, we find strong efforts to define art boundaries against the hegemonic industrial and popular culture and against the high arts. We have studied some cases within these fields, in Portugal. Their roots can be founded within the cultural and political movements of the seventies. Nowadays they present a high international artistic palmarès, based on peripherical networks of creation and diffusion.

Kaplan, Michael (Northwestern University, USA) THE REBEL CITIZEN AND THE INVAGINATION OF GENRE: 'THELMA & LOUISE'
This essay reads "Thelma & Louise" against the grain of its critical reception to argue that the film thematizes an unsurpassable limit in liberalism's conception of citizenship as rebellion. The film invokes genres organized around efforts to imagine spaces and relations beyond politics, reflecting liberalism's constitutive ambivalence concerning the status and value of the political. It then juxtaposes liberalism's contradictory drive beyond politics with its requirement of self-abstraction, which produces the eviction of particular subjects from the polity. This second "beyond" returns the exteriority of rebel citizenship to liberalism's interior-an invagination figured by "woman." It is not the women (their gender is insistently problematized) who drive into the inverted protuberance of the canyon; it is liberalism's limit-drive that is driven into the abyss. Floating in extra-narrational space, the Thunderbird figures the radical suspension of the logic which would introduce a boundary within democratic politics that democracy necessarily abhors.

Valaskivi, Katja (The Finnish Institute in Japan, Japan) THE UNION OF INFORMATION AND ENTERTAINMENT CROSSING THE GENRE BOUNDARIES IN FINNISH TELEVISION SINCE THE 1960S
The juxtaposition between information and entertainment has been the undercurrent of television debates throughout the history of the Finnish television. At times information has been analogous to serious, good and necessary for the construction of the national identity and participation in the society while entertainment has been seen as something threatening and “Americanizing”. Recently the issue has been less topical as entertainment has become the selfevident mode of television. The paper explores the developments of how the relationship between information and entertainment have been perceived and talked about in the press and public dialogues on television. The focus is on especially the public service strategies in relatioship to television entertainment. Analyses of television programs conciously attempting to combine information with entertainment since the 1960s are also included.

Trotter, Stephen (Tennessee State University, USA) COMPUTER USAGE APTTERNS OF BLACK COLLEGE STUDENTS AS A FUNCTION OF GENDER
Computer usage may be the instrument of equality or it may serve to further separate the races and genders. Recent surveys and studies in the United States have suggested differing patterns of computer technology usage as a function of racial group membership. This disparity may well impact current educational status and future economic status. The current study tracked the information processing patterns of Black undergraduate university students and compared behavior as a function of gender. The students were interviewed using a structured protocol and kept detailed journals of their computer activities.

Gilmore, Abigail (De Montfort University, United Kingdom) BANGING THE DRUM FOR CULTURE?
The place of popular music in the European capital ofculture (UK) competition Culture is now seen as a central aspect of the regeneration, well-being and prosperity of localities. This paper considers this claim in relation to the case of local popular music activity, by examining the bidding process for European Capital of Culture 2008. It will focus on three of the 14 UK cities and towns currently bidding for the title, and consider how their local musical scenes, industries and histories are reflected and framed within competition campaigns. The production of bids involves a review of existing cultural assets in these cities and their hopes for future investment. How do bids include or exclude the music sector? What part is popular music perceived to play in these cities' cultural lives? What ways is it utilised to place-market a city on the European stage? And how are the cultural politics of place played out in relation to popular culture's position in local governance frameworks?