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Concert Life

Halina Goldberg

in Music in Chopin's Warsaw

This chapter places Chopin within Warsaw's lively concert scene. The concert life in Warsaw was dominated by virtuoso concerts, featuring local and foreign artists, Niccolò Paganini and Johann ... More

This chapter places Chopin within Warsaw's lively concert scene. The concert life in Warsaw was dominated by virtuoso concerts, featuring local and foreign artists, Niccolò Paganini and Johann Nepomuk Hummel among them. The conventions and repertories associated with the virtuoso concerts, piano concertos in particular, as well as Chopin's earliest public concerts are discussed in detail. At the same time, music societies provided opportunities for performances on symphonic and chamber repertories that included the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. There were ambitious performances of sacred music in Warsaw churches, especially the Piarists' Church which hosted the Society for Church Music, and the Lutheran Church, which during the 1820s attracted Warsaw's best musicians, including the young Chopin. Musical performances also took place in many cafés. In some cafés, artistic projects were discussed and artistic events received the most candid reviews; others fostered an atmosphere of intense patriotism.Less

Internet Cafés

Jack Linchuan Qiu

in Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China

This chapter describes China’s cybercafé, or “Net bar (wangba),” business. It specifically provides an analytical overview of Internet cafés, their historical trajectory, internal differentiation, ... More

This chapter describes China’s cybercafé, or “Net bar (wangba),” business. It specifically provides an analytical overview of Internet cafés, their historical trajectory, internal differentiation, and implications for working-class network society. The chapter shows that the growth of the Internet café as a working-class information and communication technology (ICT) is more remarkable when compared with other modes of access. It also draws four basic types of collective Internet access venues in China: (1) promotional cafés, (2) elite cafés, (3) mass-service Net bars, and (4) illegal or semilegal black Net bars. The chapter reveals that the dispute with the online gaming industry illustrates the political awareness of working-class providers, and addresses how Internet cafés can be a better sphere of the commons.Less

Tung Lo Wan: A Lesbian Haven or Everyday Life?

Denise Tse Shang Tang

in As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong

This chapter shows how lesbian commercial spaces in Hong Kong — including karaoke bars, upstairs cafés, and lesbian specialty stores in a high-density shopping hub known as Causeway Bay or Tung Lo ... More

This chapter shows how lesbian commercial spaces in Hong Kong — including karaoke bars, upstairs cafés, and lesbian specialty stores in a high-density shopping hub known as Causeway Bay or Tung Lo Wan — function as sites of community formation for lesbians to escape from heteronormative society, validate their self-images, build and maintain social networks, and/or perform political subjectivity. It also argues that these physical spaces are in a continuously mobile process of transforming themselves through customers who take part in the reproduction of social and sexual relations within them. In general, it reviews how lesbians have been marginalized in the field of gender and space and how notions of resistance can offer a theoretical framework to understand the spatial decisions made by Hong Kong lesbians. It attempts to position everyday resistance in the city of Hong Kong as lesbians negotiate with capitalist ideologies as entrepreneurs or as customers to lesbian spaces such as bars, café or specialty stores.Less

Eating Out

Anna Cottrell

in London Writing of the 1930s

In Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Eleanor Pargiter observes a lower-middle-class couple in a restaurant, enjoying their time off after work. Variations of this scene appear in many novels of the ... More

In Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Eleanor Pargiter observes a lower-middle-class couple in a restaurant, enjoying their time off after work. Variations of this scene appear in many novels of the 1930s; the restaurants and teashops where London’s lower middle class spent their lunch breaks and evening outings became the settings in which their behaviour, their cultural preferences and even their dreams could be scrutinised. Eleanor concludes after watching the self-conscious couple that their performance is borrowed from the movies and illustrated magazines. This performance consisted of glamour and ‘nonchalance’ – modes incompatible with their working lives, but perfectly fitting in establishments that offered ordinary people atmospheres far removed from their mundane routines. Although Woolf does not identify it as such, the scene probably takes place in a Lyons Corner House – one of the four grand central London teashops that provided their patrons not only with affordable food, but also with a visual spectacle that could rival the glitter of the West End and the glamour of cinemas.Less

Popular Entertainment

Nancy Duvall Hargrove

in T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year

Although Eliot was principally drawn to Parisian high culture offerings, he also took advantage of being away from home and was also able to immerse himself in the more liberal environment of popular ... More

Although Eliot was principally drawn to Parisian high culture offerings, he also took advantage of being away from home and was also able to immerse himself in the more liberal environment of popular culture. Beginning in about 1905, this type of entertainment grew significantly in popularity because of the reduced working hours of those in the lower classes as well as greater access and improved transportation. The diversity of popular entertainment reflected the new modern urban life as it included several new sights, sounds, and patterns. This chapter reconstructs the complexity of light entertainment through drawing attention to melodramas, music halls, fairs and exhibits, circuses, dance halls, cinema, cabarets-artistiques, and cafés-concerts. Also, focus is given to specific shows and performers and the chapter looks at how these influenced Eliot's critical and literary works.Less

A Room of Their Own: Friendship, Fellowship, and Fraternity

Sarah Wobick-Segev

in Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg

The first chapter explores how Jews integrated into European society while at the same time used leisure and consumer places to maintain senses of group cohesion and collective identity. In aiming to ... More

The first chapter explores how Jews integrated into European society while at the same time used leisure and consumer places to maintain senses of group cohesion and collective identity. In aiming to preserve but also in effect to recreate a sense of collectivity, an increasing number of Jewish individuals turned to new social spaces to make and nurture friendships and solidify networks and solidarity. The chapter is thus about boundaries: the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews and the boundaries between different Jewish groups as they were expressed in social spaces. In particular, the chapter explores how writers, intellectuals, artists, immigrants, and the working classes used cafés to create friendship and fraternity, and how they used hotels and restaurants for new forms of conviviality and community building.Less

Clothing

Teresa Platz Robinson

in Café Culture in Pune: Being Young and Middle Class in Urban India

Chapter 2 explores how the young Puneites of the café culture understood and positioned themselves in their world through their dressed bodies. By wearing jeans they not only clearly distinguished ... More

Chapter 2 explores how the young Puneites of the café culture understood and positioned themselves in their world through their dressed bodies. By wearing jeans they not only clearly distinguished themselves from their elders and the rest of society but also communicated ‘normality’ before an imagined global audience.Less

Aesthetic Community

Lily Chumley

in Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China

This chapter first contrasts two professional sites in which practice communities and aesthetic communities emerge: a giant art fair called Art Beijing, and a private meeting between a small group of ... More

This chapter first contrasts two professional sites in which practice communities and aesthetic communities emerge: a giant art fair called Art Beijing, and a private meeting between a small group of young artists and a curator. It next examines the studios and cafés (kafeiguan or jiuba) in which artists and designers socialize, before showing how communities expand spatiotemporally through objects and media. Throughout, the chapter considers fantasies of sociality provoked by anxieties about anomie: memories of the community around Yuanmingyuan that was torn down during the reconstruction of the city; attempts to build a community of artists and designers turned kung fu (gong fu) practitioners; and a fantasy of a public art library, imagined by a young photographer, which never came to be.Less

Vienna: “This Mocking and Innocent City”

in Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe

This chapter discusses Vienna as an important intellectual center for Hebrew modernism. Within a few years around World War I, Hebrew and Yiddish literature blossomed in Vienna. The diaries and ... More

This chapter discusses Vienna as an important intellectual center for Hebrew modernism. Within a few years around World War I, Hebrew and Yiddish literature blossomed in Vienna. The diaries and memoirs of this period reveal a close and fertile collaboration between the Hebrew and the Yiddish writers. Literary cafés such as Café Griensteidl and Café Central were also indispensable for the creation of Viennese modernism. These coffeehouses had a very high Jewish presence, bringing immigrant Hebrew and Yiddish writers together and opening new paths for them.Less

A Traditional Industry Switches Gears, ca. 1850–1914

Kenneth Bertrams, Julien Del Marmol, Sander Geerts, and Eline Poelmans

in Becoming the World's Biggest Brewer: Artois, Piedboeuf, and Interbrew (1880-2000)

Several inventions completely transformed and revolutionized the ancient craft of brewing in the nineteenth century. Among the most important ones: the introduction of steam in the brewing process, a ... More

Several inventions completely transformed and revolutionized the ancient craft of brewing in the nineteenth century. Among the most important ones: the introduction of steam in the brewing process, a better understanding of yeast and its working, the invention of artificial refrigeration, the breakthrough of glass production, and the scientification and academization of brewing. Lager, a beer style hitherto confined to central Europe, started to spread and supersede traditional ales, creating opportunities which were grasped by several companies, old and new. One was the Artois brewery from Leuven, an already well-established brewery, with a brewing lineage going back to the 1700s. The Piedboeuf brewery from Jupille, on the other hand, was a newcomer in a brewing business in full transformation. This chapter discusses the roots of the two families and their companies that would come to dominate the Belgian and global beer market.Less

The Rise of Flamenquismo in Madrid, 1888–1898

Samuel Llano

in Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850-1930

This chapter analyzes the impact on the population of the expansion of nightlife in Madrid from the 1880s on. More particularly, it studies public fears raised by alcoholism and flamenco that led to ... More

This chapter analyzes the impact on the population of the expansion of nightlife in Madrid from the 1880s on. More particularly, it studies public fears raised by alcoholism and flamenco that led to this music being identified with social disorder and immorality. The Fuencarral Street murder (1888), in which a flamenco aficionado was involved, shocked the public and triggered a campaign against flamenco and the culture associated with it, known as flamenquismo. Behind this campaign, however, was fear and hatred of rural immigrants from Andalusia, who transformed Madrid’s culture and elicited the opposition of the population most affected by the rise of hunger and deprivation in Madrid. At the turn of the twentieth century, this situation led to flamenquismo being used as a catchword to designate any social problems affecting Spain in the wake of the 1898 desastre.Less

Flamenco, Flamenquismo, and Social Control

Samuel Llano

in Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850-1930

This chapter describes how, toward the end of the nineteenth century, journalists and social scientists concerned about social degeneration and the moral effects of Madrid’s nightlife gradually ... More

This chapter describes how, toward the end of the nineteenth century, journalists and social scientists concerned about social degeneration and the moral effects of Madrid’s nightlife gradually turned their attention away from the Gypsy and the señorito, that is, the rich Andalusian immigrant who organized flamenco juergas or gatherings in Madrid. Instead, these writers focused on the environment in which flamenco was performed. They used their publications to present Madrid as a den of vice and degeneration and to call the authorities to take measures to prevent the rise of scandals and crime in Madrid’s drinking establishments. Madrid’s authorities responded by passing legislation aimed at restricting the operating times of cafés and protecting the peace of residents from the “noise” of taverns. The lobbying by representatives of the powerful alcohol industry, however, rendered those measures fruitless in the long term.Less

Jaleo de Jerez and Tumulte Noir: Juana Vargas “La Macarrona” at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889

K. Meira Goldberg

in Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco

Juana Vargas “La Macarrona,” a Gitana, was one of the greatest flamenco dancers of all time. Yet complex responses to her international debut in 1889 Paris set “authentic” performances against French ... More

Juana Vargas “La Macarrona,” a Gitana, was one of the greatest flamenco dancers of all time. Yet complex responses to her international debut in 1889 Paris set “authentic” performances against French “recreations” of Spanish dance. Developing new, tango (that is, Afro-Cuban)-inflected forms to attract international audiences, Macarrona’s “audacity,” “mad fury,” and suggestive hip déhanchements drew on long-standing tropes of Blackness, born “illegitimate” in diaspora, nativized as tokens of Spain’s colonial reach. Macarrona’s Paris reception reveals the conundrums of race being negotiated with the Gitana playing intermediary, casting her audacious glance backward to Spain and forward into the international arena, simultaneously representing Spain’s Blackness and its Whiteness. Long seen as outlaws, emblematic of “wildness” and “freedom,” French fascination with Macarrona reveals the racial politics of modernist desire to become, the ability and the privilege to dream of a life—in the words of Walt Whitman, “immense in passion, pulse, and power.”Less

Epilogue: Ponzi Logics in Postsocialist Albania

Smoki Musaraj

in Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania

This chapter summarizes the ethnographic study of pyramid schemes in Albania. It reviews the collapse of the firms and how the economic reforms in Albania have maintained a distinct neoliberal ... More

This chapter summarizes the ethnographic study of pyramid schemes in Albania. It reviews the collapse of the firms and how the economic reforms in Albania have maintained a distinct neoliberal flavor. This postsocialist neoliberal economic order has focused on liberalization and privatization reforms. The chapter looks at Albania's economy that is now rated as an upper-middle-income economy with a few large industries and foreign investments but with the majority of the working force employed in small-and medium-sized enterprises in services, agriculture, and tourism. It analyzes how pyramid schemes, speculative financing in construction, betting cafés, and Ponzi logics of accumulation and investment have become enduring economic forms in postsocialist Albania.Less