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?
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