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Charous and Ravans: A Story of Mutual Nonrecognition

Thomas Blom Hansen

in Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa

This chapter studies the theme of racism and fear of Africans among people of Indian origin. The relationship between indentured Indians and Zulu speakers in the province of Natal was tense and ... More

This chapter studies the theme of racism and fear of Africans among people of Indian origin. The relationship between indentured Indians and Zulu speakers in the province of Natal was tense and contentious throughout the twentieth century. The large riots in 1949 in Durban when Indian homes were attacked by African workers, as well as subsequent conflicts in 1985 and after apartheid, left a legacy of apprehension between the two communities that periodically erupt in racist allegations from both sides. The chapter also explores the tension between the so-called “racism's two bodies”—notions of surface and substance—in racial practices among Indians. It argues that the influx of large numbers of Africans in Chatsworth has transformed the idea of the area as a knowable site of cultural intimacy.Less

Text and the City: Dublin, Cultural Intimacy, and Modernity

Luke Gibbons

in Joyce'S Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory

Dublin in James Joyce's spectral imagination is akin to a phantom limb. His literary modernism turns on what is absent or off the page, an apophatic style in which text is intimately bound up with ... More

Dublin in James Joyce's spectral imagination is akin to a phantom limb. His literary modernism turns on what is absent or off the page, an apophatic style in which text is intimately bound up with context, and language re-enacts the material texture of the city. In keeping with Wittgenstein's argument that language is embedded in a form of life, Joyce's language operates as if a physical acquaintance with the city and its social practices are required to complete sentences, with the fiction in turn giving the impression, as Joyce remarked, that the city could be rebuilt from his prose. Joyce's narrative techniques chart cultural intimacy in a new way, allowing the stranger access to the inner life of a city and the native Dubliner to become part of a wider cosmopolitan world. By this means, Joyce pioneered a vernacular modernism in which the local is universal, and national literature becomes world literature. Joyce's revolution of the word draws on the “open secrets” of a colonial public sphere, a coded cultural space shared with the republican political underground in the decades leading up to the 1916 Irish rebellion.Less

Pak Duri

Joshua D Pilzer

in Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese "Comfort Women"

The author investigates the life and songs of Pak Duri, a survivor of the “comfort woman” system living at the House of Sharing. Pak Duri composed, pastiched and sang ribald songs drawn from across ... More

The author investigates the life and songs of Pak Duri, a survivor of the “comfort woman” system living at the House of Sharing. Pak Duri composed, pastiched and sang ribald songs drawn from across Korean folk culture. In so doing she retrieved her own identity and sexuality from a life-long experience of sexual domination and suffering at the hands of men, and she contemplated the nature of female-relations, love, the body, and mortality. She brought the eloquence and the understandings that she cultivated in song and storytelling to bear as a keen participant in the political movement, while from publicizing the songs themselves and certain aspects of the self they sustained.Less

Mun Pilgi

Joshua D Pilzer

in Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese "Comfort Women"

The author investigates the life and songs of Mun Pilgi, a survivor of the “comfort woman” system who lives in Seoul and later in the House of Sharing. Mun Pilgi sang canonical pop songs, which she ... More

The author investigates the life and songs of Mun Pilgi, a survivor of the “comfort woman” system who lives in Seoul and later in the House of Sharing. Mun Pilgi sang canonical pop songs, which she learned from records and radio as she reached out to participate in a society and a public culture that had ostracized her. She set these songs and their society against her traumatic memories and nightmares. And as she adopted and modified songs, she modified those memories. In her treasured pop ballads, she discovered and sustained an ideal love and the innocence to sustain it; this character which she developed in song exerted a marked influence on the political movement, in which she was an ardent participant.Less

Clan and Cultural Intimacy

Stephanie R. Bjork

in Somalis Abroad: Clan and Everyday Life in Finland

This chapter provides an overview of Somali kinship studies and discusses why such studies have become marginalized within Somali studies. It is argued that cultural intimacy explains the intricacies ... More

This chapter provides an overview of Somali kinship studies and discusses why such studies have become marginalized within Somali studies. It is argued that cultural intimacy explains the intricacies that shape Somalis’ contestation of clan and the cultural intimacy of clan inhibits scholarship. A practice theory approach to clan is outlined and Bourdieu’s formulation of social capital serves as a foundation for understanding how clan is experienced and employed. The chapter discusses Somalis’ initial movement to Finland as accidental and later movement as a strategy to access benefits of the Finnish welfare state. The Finnish context is discussed, including xenophobia and racism, as well as strategies and challenges of conducting research including views of researchers.Less

Economies of Devotion: Affective Engagement and the Subject(s) of Labor

Nitin Govil

in Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay

This chapter examines the routes and routines of working bodies in transnational screen culture, with particular emphasis on how subjectivity and labor—marked by racial, religious, class, and ... More

This chapter examines the routes and routines of working bodies in transnational screen culture, with particular emphasis on how subjectivity and labor—marked by racial, religious, class, and national difference—become implicated in various itineraries of contact between Hollywood and Bombay cinema. It considers how the production of cross-cultural intimacy creates forms of affinity tied to the circulation of laboring bodies between Hollywood and Bombay. It also explores the cultural politics of “traveling” bodies, and especially how categories of difference are inscribed within an “affect economy” of transnational media industries. It shows how the distribution of emotional engagement across media worlds is influenced by the connections made by film stars, fans, and industry representatives between Hollywood and Bombay cinema. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the “geographies of intimacy” across three case studies in the history of Bombay and Hollywood encounter.Less

The Intimate Nostalgia of Diné Country Music

Kristina M. Jacobsen

in Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

The introduction examines how Navajos strategically use sound, and speech and song in particular, in their social spaces and provides a history of country music performance on the Navajo Nation. ... More

The introduction examines how Navajos strategically use sound, and speech and song in particular, in their social spaces and provides a history of country music performance on the Navajo Nation. Through a dual ethnographic focus on music and language, I consider how some expressions of Navajo identity are flexible and negotiated, while others—for example, an affective attachment to place and the lived experience of being from what Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall called a “domestic dependent nation”—are private, nonnegotiable, and often not shared in public contexts such as bars and chapter houses at all. Thus, musical and linguistic performances of Navajoness—also sometimes locally parsed in the broader frames of being Native, Indian and, less often, as “indigenous”—are publicly celebrated. Other expressions of identity—for example the culturally intimate use of the Navajo term for a working-class rube from the “sticks” known as a “jaan”—are elided or hidden from an outsider’s gaze.Less

Keeping up with the Yazzies: The Authenticity of Class and Geographic Boundaries

Kristina M. Jacobsen

in Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

Chapter 1 examines Navajo country music through the lens of geography (in particular through discussions of difference between the Arizona and New Mexico portions of “the rez”), focusing on the use ... More

Chapter 1 examines Navajo country music through the lens of geography (in particular through discussions of difference between the Arizona and New Mexico portions of “the rez”), focusing on the use of the culturally intimate term jaan, or “john,” to describe rural, “hick,” or hillbilly reservation identities. I then turn to country vocalist, drummer, and bandleader Candice Craig (of the Kinyaa’áanii, or Towering House Clan), analyzing how class, place-based and jaan identities are reflected and parodied in her own performances of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” Here, I analyze Craig’s embracing of a working-class, “rezneck” sociophonetic identity as a refusal to adhere to race- and place-based definitions of Diné identity, stretching the boundaries of what it means for a Navajo female performer to “sound” and be Diné.Less

Zeki Müren: Sun of Art, Ideal Citizen

in The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music

When queer nightclub star Zeki Müren died in 1996, the nation mourned and commentators and fans contemplated a complex legacy. In the years immediately following his death, old recordings and films ... More

When queer nightclub star Zeki Müren died in 1996, the nation mourned and commentators and fans contemplated a complex legacy. In the years immediately following his death, old recordings and films slowly materialized and broader stretches came into view of a remarkable career, until then largely remembered in terms of the kitsch and camp of his later years. A consistent theme emerged: Zeki Müren as “model citizen.” This chapter explores that characterization and its entanglement with issues of cultural intimacy. Three elements are at play in the nostalgic popular identification of Müren as a kind of model citizen. First, Müren drew on the regional (and Egypt-dominated) circulation of sentimental films and musical styles identified with revolutionary politics. Second, arguments about Müren's queerness—or denials of it—constituted a way of talking about other kinds of identities and the relationship between identities and citizenship in the 1990s. Finally, Zeki Müren nostalgia also functions as a palliative to the broad condition of cynicism that prevailed after the Susurluk car crash of 4 November 1996.Less

Tending the Flower Garden: Legacies of Panchayat Musical Nationalism

Anna Marie Stirr

in Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal

Focusing on dohori’s place in state constructions of nationalism, this chapter traces the genealogies of musical tropes in dohori and the umbrella genre of lok gīt, or folk song, through a history of ... More

Focusing on dohori’s place in state constructions of nationalism, this chapter traces the genealogies of musical tropes in dohori and the umbrella genre of lok gīt, or folk song, through a history of musical nationalism and associated musical and language ideologies. It looks at song genres chosen to represent the nation after the founding of Radio Nepal in 1951, and tells how men in charge of the folk song department at the radio shaped Nepali national folk music. It also tells the story of national dohori competitions and how they, along with the radio and national cultural policy, helped consolidate dohori into its current generic parameters. It examines the power dynamics of region, caste, and ethnicity, showing how the attempt to unite Nepal’s musical diversity into an all-inclusive national genre ended in the overrepresentation of particular regional styles, and, most important, how the music chosen became symbolic of cultural intimacy.Less