Registration is now open for the Radical Aesthetics & Politics Conference

Registration is free and open to the public
Space is limited - reserve your seat now

Email Portia Seddon to register: portiaseddon@gmail.com 

View conference information:
About
Program
Abstracts
Presenters
Discussants
Location

Project Description

Critical Studies in Expressive Culture is a collective of scholars, activists, artists, and musicians working to rethink intersections between aesthetic practices and social theory. Our work considers aesthetic practices and political action in terms of their radical contours, interrogating the boundaries of the political in music and art, and vice versa, getting at the root of knowledge systems and changing the concepts of contemporary political, ethical, and aesthetic debates. As an online discussion network, CSEC acts as a dialectical space for research on expressive culture and social theory, while fundamentally working to analyze, critique, and build upon this scholarship.

CSEC is an anti-disciplinary research collective; we welcome all modes of critical inquiry, and actively work in the margins of traditional academic disciplines, in our online discussion list and study groups. Please contact Portia Seddon (portiaseddon [at] gmail [dot] com) or join the discussion list in order to participate.

Defending Public Higher Education

Conference: Friday October 7th, 8:30 – 3pm
CUNY Graduate Center (Proshansky Auditorium)

Over the course of the past three decades investment in public higher education has declined dramatically. Most American public university systems, such as California, Wisconsin, and Illinois, have experienced serious reductions in their state funding requiring dramatic cutbacks in academic programs and services they provide to their students.

Here at the City University of New York (CUNY), we have gone from a tuition-free system as late as 1976 to one that receives over 45% of its operating budget from student fees and tuition. During this same time, the faculty workforce has been completely transformed. In the past almost all of the courses were taught by full time faculty. Today over 50% of all courses are taught by adjunct faculty. Academic and student support services such as library, financial aid, and counseling have had serious staff reductions. Simultaneously, CUNY enrollments are at an all-time high. In the past ten years, the number of CUNY students has risen from 210,000 to 267,000, the equivalent of three new colleges, but with no commensurate increase in full time faculty or support staff. In the midst of these greater demands and a reduced full time work force, CUNY has lost 330 million dollars, or 15%, of its state funding over the past three years. Finally, present plans are to further privatize or shift the cost of financing CUNY from the state to students. Tuition has increased dramatically over the past decade and an additional $300/year for CUNY students in each of the next five years has just been included in the NY State budget. This regimen of tuition increases is an invisible tax on a student body that is disproportionately poor, 38% of our students’ family income is less than $20,000.

What can we do to reverse these trends? This question has caused a number of faculty and staff at the CUNY Graduate Center to organize this conference around the following questions:
1. What is happening to public higher education across the country and what explains these trends?
2. What is the situation at CUNY presently and what can we expect in the immediate future from state and local policy makers?
3. How can faculty, staff and students begin to turn around these policies of disinvestment in order to provide quality education for all?

Please join us for a day of collective thinking about the challenges facing public higher education. Turn this time of disinvestment into an opportunity to think strategically about mounting a defense of this precious resource, the City University of New York.

For more information, contact us at defendpubhied@gmail.com

View the website here

Call for Papers: Radical Aesthetics and Politics Conference at Hunter College

“Radical Aesthetics and Politics: Intersections in Music, Art and Critical Social Theory”
9 December 2011
Hunter College, CUNY

In the past few decades, the study of sonic, visual, textual, and other media practices have emerged as productive areas of cultural analysis and critique. Often constitutive of paradoxes and tensions within society, these aesthetic practices have prompted critical engagements with structures of power and knowledge. Researchers and artists have sought to deconstruct particular relationships between aesthetics and power, creating renewed and emergent questions with which current social theory must engage. For instance, how might we think about the “public sphere” in terms of nodes of encounters with the sonic, the visual, and the textual? What forms of political action and sociality emerge from civic engagements with visual, sonic, and textual culture? How are sonic and material landscapes engaged with as embodied practices? What might this imply about the corporeality of the political, the ethical, and the technological? What are the disjunctures and syntheses between artists’ and scholars’ concept-driven productions and the ways in which audiences interpret and construct life-worlds with these productions?

This multidisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions centering on the intersections between aesthetic practices and radical political action. We invite papers that engage with any practices within sonic, visual, and textual culture, and that understand these not merely in terms of the symbolic or the ideal, but also in terms of the material relations embedded within these practices. This conference will thus be concerned with the ideological lives of aesthetic practices. Rather than focusing solely on overtly politicized artistic expression, however, this conference interrogates the boundaries of the political in music and art (and vice versa). We aim to take a radical approach to aesthetics and politics by getting at the root of knowledge systems and changing the concepts of contemporary political, ethical, and aesthetic debates. This conference thus asks how we may think through and act on political commitments in art and music, and how social theory may displace and elaborate on the concepts of cultural and ethical debates.

We invite proposal submissions from scholars, students, musicians, and artists that address the following and related themes:

Visual/Sonic Publics
Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Ownership and Property
Feminism and Queer Theory
Governmentality
Performance
Consumption and Material Culture
Critical Race Studies
Affect, Sensation, and Embodiment
New Economies
Labor
Language, Speech, and the Voice
Technologies and Media
Space and the Environment

Please submit a 200-300 word proposal, including a title and full contact details to Portia Seddon (portiaseddon [at] gmail [dot] com) by August 15, 2011.

This conference is organized by Critical Studies in Expressive Culture and by the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, CUNY.

Discussion: Underground vs. Popular Culture

CSEC's next discussion will explore underground/popular culture dynamics, as well as the discursive modes surrounding this in social theory. Some basic theoretical starting points for discussion follow: are the categories "underground" and "popular" necessarily opposed? Are they dialectical or complementary? Music genres such as heavy metal, punk, rap, and techno/house can trace their formations to underground, grassroots movements - do they encounter an ontological crisis when they become mainstream, or popular? Is the popular necessarily mainstream? Can popular culture resist the mainstream and its hegemonic cultural products? And how do we think through hegemonic distinctions between "underground" and "popular"? That is, dothese categories imply social exclusion and marginalization? While it would be useful to think of cultural movements that upset the binary (e.g., rai in Algeria and Morocco, or hip hop in the U.S.), our purpose should not be to simply catalogue instances of this, but to place a renewed focus on the idea of the "subcultural," and to illuminate patterns in the organization of cultural production using this conceptual framework.

Please see the discussion reading list below:

Adorno, Theodor
1976. Popular Music. In Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Pp. 21-38. New York: Seabury.

Fikentscher, Kai
2000. "You Better Work!": Underground Dance Music in New York City. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Hall, Stuart
1981. Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular.' In People's History and Socialist Theory. Raphael Samuel, ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Joseph, Gilbert M. and Daniel Nugent
1994. Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico. In Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds. Pp. 3-23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marshall, Wayne
2010. Post Postopolis Unpacking, Part 1: Hip Hop en DF. http://wayneandwax.com/?p=3552

Marshall, Wayne
2010. Post Postopolis Unpacking, Part 2: Graffiti en DF. http://wayneandwax.com/?p=3569

Mitchell, Tony
2001. Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Rose, Tricia
1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Solomon, Thomas
2005. " 'Living Underground is Tough': Authenticity and Locality in the Hip Hop Community in Istanbul, Turkey." Popular Music 24(1):1-20.

Swedenburg, Ted
2000. Sa'ida Sultan/Danna International: Transgender Pop and the Polysemiotics of Sex, Nation, and Ethnicity on the Israeli-Egyptian Border. In Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Walter Armbrust, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thornton, Sarah
1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.


To participate in CSEC discussions, please see our Participation Guidelines, and send a statement of interest to chreculture [at] gmail [dot] com.

Popularizing 'Culture': Discussion Summary

Below are some notes and queries from CSEC's discussion, "Popularizing 'Culture': The Marketing of Indigeneity and Cultural Expression."

Cynthia Enloe
1) In “Carmen Miranda On My Mind: International Politics of the Banana,” Cynthia Enloe (1990) exposes the international political system’s reliance on artificial notions of masculinity (e.g. the “manliness” of guns and money), as well as those of femininity (e.g., the feminized worker, the sex object, the consumer, and the supportive wife). How do you think these factor into cultural imaginaries, especially those contrived by popular marketing schemes?

2) Elsewhere in her book (see Ch. 2, “On the Beach: Sexism and Tourism”), Enloe stresses the implications of tourism, and seemingly innocent activities, such as postcard-selecting. The tourist usually strives to find picturesque scenes of Third World people (often women) in the midst of weaving, making pottery, or cooking, instead of the no less real images of factory workers, sex workers and chambermaids at work. What does this suggest about the First World tourist, and about international gendered power relations?

3) The image of Carmen Miranda and United Fruit's portrait of the feminized, Latinized banana has been a useful insignia of popular culture for the Hollywood film industry of the 1930s and 40s, for the exotic fruit-import industry, and for the North American impression of Latin American women. But how exactly did the United Fruit marketing strategy of “Chiquita Banana” borrow from and build upon Hollywood’s marketing strategy of the feisty Latin woman that was embodied in Carmen Miranda? In other words, how was the expressive domain of Latin cultures (e.g., song, dance, visual culture, etc.) exploited in the caricaturing of Carmen Miranda first in Hollywood films, and then in the banana industry? And how did this exoticized image come to fit so comfortably in American popular culture? Did it operate alongside a precedent of sexualization and racialization in American culture?

Rachel Moore
1) Rachel Moore (1992) speaks of the “cooption of indigenous media” in her critique of Ethnographic Film and the Kayapó film project, and the debate between “authenticity” and the “representational characteristics” of film-making (18). She also notes that ideally, an ethnography explores not the “other” culture through the eyes of the dominant observer, but rather explores the relationship between the interacting cultures. Thus, how much of “us” (i.e. the First World) is revealed through the marketing of Third World cultures in commercial products? Note the emphases on “tribes”, “indigenous culture”, and “tradition” that frequently appear in exoticized commercial goods (see Creative Women, Inc.), and most recently in the "fair trade" movement.

2) Does popularizing a “culture” - through marketing, commercialization, media saturation, etc. – effectively galvanize it to navigate in a globalized and exploitative capitalist society?

3) The political successes of the Kayapó were attributed to Indigenous Video, and were the ultimate result of a longstanding relationship between the First World (anthropologists) and indigenous society (Kayapó). This leads us to Bamberger’s “voice” option for the Kayapó, especially with regard to the Brazilian state and the international media. But Moore disagrees with Bamberger and points out that “the emergence of voice is thus part of the project of containment” (20). A western-defined “voice” reduces opportunities for the Kayapó and fits only into the dominant logic of state power and western academic theory. “Voice itself here is thus a construction, predicated on that which it is believed will be listened to, or in some cases quite bluntly, who the Brazilians say they want to talk to” (20).

4) Interestingly, effective political rhetoric of indigenous societies – that which constitutes “voice” – must resemble and reflect modern capitalism. The “authentic” voice also has an economic value, which, although it may support Kayapó interests, also affirms First World authority and informs the nature of Kayapó “voice.”

5) What I found most interesting about Moore’s essay was her mention of the creation of a cultural self-consciousness for indigenous groups that did not previously exist (21-22). She points out that in a globalized, capitalist society, where a premium is placed on indigeneity, and where it literally is given capital value, “culture” is the very grounds for “survival”, and not just the means. Furthermore, “culture” must be reified in visual form, such as in postcards, sales brochures, tourist pamphlets, government websites, etc. The “culture” thus owes its survival to media exposure and First World capitalist marketing techniques. Yet, “a crude hierarchy emerges separating visible people and practices from those that defy visual representation” (23). Focusing on the “other,” just at the point when our own methods appear to be exhausted, not only defers their critique (and thus assures their recycling), but far more importantly, preempts the creativity…required to change them” (24).

6) With the backdrop of commercial marketing and international media in mind, how then does a “culture” become a “culture”? What does it develop towards, especially with the idea of economic capital in mind?

In response to the question of tourism and the "traditional" image of the Third World, one discussant wrote:

Such traditional portaits superimpose a fantasy of authenticity on the realities of exploitation. Enloe discusses the term "the farmer and his wife" and how this disguises the real work of women. Similarly, the indigenous image simultaneously encourages a sense of complacency in the viewer and puts forth a hierarchical divide, placing the First World viewer in a position of power and making the subjugation of others seem natural.

Portia's third question raises some interesting ideas about how expressive culture evolves. It seems like the Latin culture that Americans embraced had nothing to do with the real intricacies of culture and more to do with the invention of an exotic image that would serve as a lucrative marketing ploy. There is an excellent aricle by Kaori O'Connor (2008) called "The Hawaiian Luau: Food as Tradition, Transgression, Transformation and Travel" in
Food, Culture, & Society. She explores how American travel companies invented an image of Hawaii to attract tourists. Sadly, that image effectively came to replace indigenous Hawaiian culture.

Enloe's review of the banana industry reminds me of how similarly structured these private, usually foreign owned agribusiness companies, located in "developing" countries, are to colonial governments. In both cases, the strategy is to group workers according to skill (or as Enloe points out, amenability) and thereby segregating wokers by race, gender, and class. This often exploits fissiparous relationships already evident in a society. Control and authority are thus maintained by dividing a country's people.

The current trend in marketing indigeneity may be seen as another form of colonization as well. The coffee, tea, and other companies that tout fair trade practices are not as regulated as a truly fair system would demand. Consequently, while an image of the people producing a product is circulated, it is without consideration for the realities of those people, or those who are not pictured. The idea of the efficacious image also relates to Rachel Moore's discussion of the constructed visual image of culture. The visual role in commodification defines people without a factual basis. The viewer is left to assume the identity of the pictured individual or construct an identity from small details chosen by the company's marketing department. The idea of culture is thus proffered through the image of indigeneity.

This raises some questions about progressive workers' movements in large-scale industrial settings. How can we think through corporate involvement in workers' emancipation? Is it realistic if it is in the corporation's best interests? Or are enforced government regulations likely to have more of an effect?

CSEC also noted that both Equator Coffee and Creative Women make a point of identifying themselves as "woman-owned" companies. What is the effect of this conflation of "causes"? (i.e. the assumption that American women's rights struggles fit comfortably alongside the struggles of Third World or indigenous peoples, especially indigenous women.) What is wrong with this assumption? This notion, by the way, is addressed thoroughly by Cynthia Enloe in her first chapter of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, titled "Gender Makes the World Go Round."

In the course of our discussion, we were especially interested in how the construction of a visual representation of culture - through marketing the indigenous in commercial products, or through making visual the expressive elements of an indigenous culture (as in the Kayapó film project, or in Carmen Miranda's film career) is a crucial element in the construction of First World power. For the First World consumer, this both 1) affirms your position of power in relation to the "indigenous" craftsperson or performer, and puts you in the privileged position of being able to "help" the craftsperson and her/his local economy and society through your much-needed foreign money, and 2) assuages post-industrial consumer guilt. Since the mass-produced good now has a matching face - a comfortable, non-threatening, and powerless face - it feels more acceptable than the more realistic probability of a craft that is anonymously produced for an alienated Western market.

Ultimately, the comfort we derive from buying a product with which we can attach a familiar face or story (such as Chido with Equator Coffee) is no different than the comfort that 1940s housewives probably felt from seeing the familiar image of Carmen Miranda on a banana sticker. Many of the issues that we are bringing up are ones that could also fit into a discussion of Orientalism in the 21st century. What is most disappointing about the fervor to help indigenous cultures, though, is the anti-academic turn that has developed. More consideration for post-colonial trends and disjunctures - in an atmosphere that integrates popular movements and academic knowledge - is necessary in order to analyze social movements and establish equitable relationships.

Changes in Discussion Format

Below are some updates regarding the format of the group and our discussions:

1) While we are maintaining the discussion forum on Google Groups, a network that allows us greater flexibility and organizational freedom than many listserv support systems, we will modify the group's participation format so as to encourage the type of dynamic and dialogical flow of research and ideas enabled by the format of academic listservs. Thus, instead of organizing periodic discussions constituting a subgroup of consortium members, our internet discussions will be ongoing and flexible, with no time limits.

2) All members of the consortium will be included in the discussions, and will no longer need to sign up to participate in a scheduled discussion. You will receive all messages that your colleagues send to the group, and you in turn can post freely to the entire group. (Incidentally, if you no longer wish to receive messages from the consortium, this would be a good time to withdraw from the list - just email me to let me know you would like to be removed.) Thus, the scope of participation has been widened, as you will now be able (and are encouraged) to initiate discussions, propose topics, share research materials, academic and news articles, links, and other resources with your fellow members, outside of the boundaries of a scheduled discussion. In this way, we have loosened the formality of previous discussions, allowing for more spontaneous and informal participation. Yet in doing so, we have also called for more rigorous participation from all members, who are expected to regularly contribute to our online discussion network. The group will thus thrive on each individual's thoughtful and informed contributions to the consortium's direction. Thus, the task of "directing" the consortium will now be diffused throughout the group, and rather than acting as the "director," I will be more of a moderator, respondent, and editor.

3) As a reflection of this organizational and methodological change, we will be changing the name of the group to Critical Studies in Expressive Culture, in order to better express our purpose and methods. Thus, we emphasize that it is a study group, in which we critically engage with relevant themes and problems in scholarship on human rights and expressive culture. Please not that the URL for the blog, www.chreculture.blogspot.com, will not change for the time being.

4) We are currently in the early stages of planning a conference to be held at CUNY Hunter College in New York - the proceedings of which we hope to publish for a wider audience. If you would like to be involved in planning the focus of the conference, please contact me to discuss this further.

I hope you are all enjoying the summer, and I look forward to hearing from you via our Google Groups discussion page.

Portia Seddon
Editor

Participation Guidelines

Participation in the Critical Studies in Expressive Culture discussion network is open to students and scholars of any discipline. Members of the consortium contribute to themed online discussions through the Google Groups discussion page on a monthly basis, and are encouraged to submit editorials, reviews, announcements, and to initiate discussions via the Google Groups discussion page and the consortium blog. We emphasize that this is a research group and discussion network, requiring its members to perform textual and ethnographic analyses, and to submit writings to the discussion page and blog on a regular basis.

Students and scholars who wish to participate in the consortium should send an email to chreculture [at] gmail [dot] com, with a description of your research interests, as well as a statement that explains your interest in the consortium.

Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa

Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) will be hosting the Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa from April 15th to the 17th. Please see the description below:

The discipline that was once called “Oriental Studies” has been divided up in various ways in today’s university. Post-colonial literature has a foothold in the English department, history departments have by and large stopped confusing “European history” with “world history,” and of course the area studies departments with venerable names like Near Eastern Studies or South Asian Languages and Civilizations have taken up an array of new methodologies from other departments. Several universities have begun expanding their African and South Asian studies offerings under the umbrella of “Global Studies.” This conference is concerned not with “the death of the discipline” as so many others have been, but rather with the diversity of the disciplines when it comes to studying the non-Western World.

Please note that the consortium director will be presenting a paper in the South Asia(s) panel titled, "Bollymizwid and Bollyraï: Digital Mashups of Hindi, Tunisian, and Algerian Popular Music." Consortium members are encouraged to attend and engage in discussion.

Ownership and Cultural Property

The Consortium on Human Rights and Expressive Culture will begin its next discussion on Monday, 15 February, 2010 with the theme of Ownership and Cultural Property. Discussants should be prepared to address ideas of "public culture" and the performance of cultural ownership, as well as national property rights conflicts, and how these figure into human rights discourses that emphasize global norms.

Please review the guidelines for participation and confirm your participation as soon as possible to chreculture [at] gmail [dot] com. Participants should use the time prior to the discussion to read all materials and prepare at least three questions and comments for discussion. These should be posted within 24 hours of the start of the discussion. Please find the reading list below:


Reading List: February 2010

Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin.

Manuel, Peter, and Wayne Marshall. 2006. The Riddim Method: Aesthetics, Practice, and Ownership in Jamaican Dancehall. Popular Music 25(3): 447-470.

Marshall, Wayne. 2007. Brave You World. http://wayneandwax.com/?p=90

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction in the Archive of the Nation. In The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Raviv, Yael. 2002. National Identity on a Plate. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 8(4).

Taylor, Mary N. 2009. Intangible Heritage Governance, Cultural Diversity, Ethno-nationalism. Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology 55: 41-58.

Taylor, Timothy D. 2003. A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery: Transnational Music Sampling and Enigma's 'Return to Innocence.' In Music and Technoculture. Lysloff, Rene T.A. and Leslie C. Gay, eds. Pp. 64-92. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.