Download or read book Brimful of Asia written by Rehan Hyder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1990s, Asian pop artists began entering the mainstream of the British music industry for the first time. Bands such as Black Star Liner, Cornershop, Fun Da Mental and Voodoo Queens, led those within and without the industry to start asking questions such as what did it mean to be Asian? How did the bands' Asian background affect their music? What did their music say about Asians in Britain? In this book, Rehan Hyder draws on in-depth interviews with musicians from these bands and with critics and record producers, to examine the pressures associated with making music as a young Asian in today's multi-ethnic Britain. As the book reveals, these musicians wish to convey an authentic sense of creativity in their music, while at the same time wanting to assert a positive ethnic identity. Hyder explores these two impulses against the backdrop of a music industry and a society at large that hold a range of confining stereotypes about what it means to be Asian. The experiences of these bands add considerably to the wider debate about the nature of identity in the contemporary world.

Download or read book Impossible Desires written by Gayatri Gopinath and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-19 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By bringing queer theory to bear on ideas of diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath produces both a more compelling queer theory and a more nuanced understanding of diaspora. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her agile readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossible within diaspora: the impure, inauthentic, and nonreproductive. Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside not only mainstream narratives of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism but also most projects of liberal feminism and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. Among the fictional works she discusses are V. S. Naipaul’s classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chughtai’s short story “The Quilt,” Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta’s controversial Fire and Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood’s strategies of queer representation and to what is lost or gained in this process of translation. Gopinath’s readings are dazzling, and her theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.

Download or read book Women Filmmakers written by Jacqueline Levitin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging volume of new work brings together women filmmakers and critics who speak about what has changed over the past twenty years. Including such filmmakers as Margarethe von Trotta, Deepa Mehta, and Pratibha Parmar, and such critics as E. Ann Kaplan, this comprehensive volume addresses political, artistic, and economic questions vital

Download or read book Bhangra and Asian Underground written by Falu Bakrania and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian Underground music—a fusion of South Asian genres with western breakbeats created for the dance club scene by DJs and musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent—went mainstream in the U.K. in the late 1990s. Its success was unprecedented: British bhangra, a blend of Punjabi folk music with hip-hop musical elements, was enormously popular among South Asian communities but had yet to become mainstream. For many, the widespread attention to Asian Underground music signaled the emergence of a supposedly new, tolerant, and multicultural Britain that could finally accept South Asians. Interweaving ethnography and theory, Falu Bakrania examines the social life of British Asian musical culture to reveal a more complex and contradictory story of South Asian belonging in Britain. Analyzing the production of bhangra and Asian Underground music by male artists and its consumption by female club-goers, Bakrania shows that gender, sexuality, and class intersected in ways that profoundly shaped how young people interpreted “British” and “Asian” identity and negotiated, sometimes violently, contests about ethnic authenticity, sexual morality, individual expression, and political empowerment.

Download or read book Youth Media written by Bill Osgerby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the successful Routledge Introductions to Media and Communications series which provides concise introductions to key areas in contemporary communications, Bill Osgerby's innovative Youth Media traces the development of contemporary youth culture and its relationship with the media. From the days of diners, drive-ins and jukeboxes, to today's world of iPods and the Internet, Youth Media examines youth media in its economic, cultural and political contexts and explores: youth culture and the media the 'Fab Phenomenon': markets, money and media generation and degeneration in the media: representations, responses and 'effects' media, subculture and lifestyle global media, youth culture and identity youth and new media. Analyzing the nature of different forms of communication as well as reviewing their production and consumption, this is an essential introduction to this key area in communication and cultural studies.

Download or read book Transnational Spaces written by Philip Crang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social relations in our globalising world are increasingly stretched out across the borders of two or more nation-states. Yet, despite the growing academic interest in transnational economic networks, political movements and cultural forms, too little attention has been paid to the transformations of space that these processes both reflect and reproduce. Transnational Spaces takes a innovative perspective, looking at transnationalism as a social space that can be occupied by a wide range of actors, not all of whom are themselves directly connected to transnational migrant communities.

Download or read book Modern Migrations written by Maritsa Poros and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although globalization seems like a recent phenomenon linked to migration, some groups have used social networks to migrate great distances for centuries. To gain new insights into migration today, Modern Migrations takes a closer look at the historical presence of globalization and how it has organized migration and social networks. With a focus on the lives of Gujarati Indians in New York and London, this book explains migration patterns through different kinds of social networks and relations. Gujarati migration flows span four continents, across several centuries. Maritsa Poros reveals the inner workings of their social networks and how these networks relate to migration flows. Championing a relational view, she examines which kinds of ties result in dead-end jobs, and which, conversely, lead to economic mobility. In the process, she speaks to central debates in the field about the economic and cultural roots of migration's causes and its surprising consequences.

Download or read book Footsteps in the Dark written by George Lipsitz and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes. In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s. Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever. George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).

Download or read book Bhangra Moves written by AnjaliGera Roy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bhangra is commonly understood as the hybrid music produced in Britain by British Asian music producers through mixing Panjabi folk melodies with western pop and black dance rhythms. This is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. This book looks at Bhangra's global flows from one of its originary sites, the Indian subcontinent, to contribute to the understanding of emerging South Asian cultural practices such as Bhangra or Bollywood in multi-ethnic societies. It seeks to trace Bhangra's moves from Punjab and its 'return back' to look at the forces that initiate and regulate global flows of local texts and to ask how their producers and consumers redirect them to produce new definitions of culture, identity and nation. The critical importance of this book lies in understanding the difference between the present globalizing wave and previous trans-local movements. Gera Roy contrasts the frames of cultural imperialism with those of cultural invasion to show how Indian cultures have constantly reinvented themselves by cross-pollinating with 'invading' cultures such as Hellenic, Persian, Arabic and many others in the past. By looking at Bhangra's flows to and from India, the book revises the relation between culture, space and identity and challenges boundaries. It weighs both the uses and costs of visibility provided by global networks to marginalized groups in diverse localities and explores whether collaborations between Bhangra practitioners, largely of working class origin, give ordinary people any control over the circulation of culture in the global village. Finally, the book considers whether cultural practices can alter hierarchies and power structures in the real world.

Download or read book Culture Wars in British Literature written by Tracy J. Prince and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past century's culture wars that Britain has been consumed by, but that few North Americans seem aware of, have resulted in revised notions of Britishness and British literature. Yet literary anthologies remain anchored to an archaic Anglo-English interpretation of British literature. Conflicts have been played out over specific national vs. British identity (some residents prefer to describe themselves as being from Scotland, England, Wales, or Northern Ireland instead of Britain), in debates over immigration, race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and in arguments over British literature. These debates are strikingly detailed in such chapters as: "The Difficulty Defining 'Black British'," "British Jewish Writers" and "Xenophobia and the Booker Prize." Connections are also drawn between civil rights movements in the U.S. and UK. This generalist cultural study is a lively read and a fascinating glimpse into Britain's changing identity as reflected in 20th and 21st century British literature.

Download or read book Authenticating Ethnic Tourism written by Philip Feifan Xie and published by Channel View Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a shifting of emphasis away from the discourse of authenticity to the process of authenticating ethnic tourism. It focuses upon what authentication is, how it works, who is involved, and what the problems are in the process. By using the study of folk villages on Hainan Island, China, the book suggests that authenticity evolves from a static into a more dynamic concept, which can be formulated according to the different stages of development relating to all the stakeholders involved. Authentication is an interactive process in which a balance of forces defines a state of equilibrium. The book uncovers some interesting findings that will significantly contribute to the literature on ethnic tourism in developing areas. "Finally, here is a way to move beyond old debates about authenticity in tourism studies, with a pragmatic, useful approach for analyzing `authentification' processes. Xie's models of stakeholders' interactions and the paradoxes encountered in ethnic tourism development have worldwide application for academics and stakeholders themselves."Margaret Swain, University of California, USA

Download or read book Diana and Beyond written by Raka Shome and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of Princess Diana unleashed an international outpouring of grief, love, and press attention virtually unprecedented in history. Yet the exhaustive effort to link an upper class white British woman with "the people" raises questions. What narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? Why would a similar idealization not have appeared around a non-white, non-Western, or immigrant woman? Raka Shome investigates the factors that led to this defining cultural/political moment and unravels just what the Diana phenomenon represented for comprehending the relation between white femininity and the nation in postcolonial Britain and its connection to other white female celebrity figures in the millennium. Digging into the media and cultural artifacts that circulated in the wake of Diana's death, Shome investigates a range of theoretical issues surrounding motherhood and the production of national masculinities, global humanitarianism, transnational masculinities, the intersection of fashion and white femininity, and spirituality and national modernity. Her analysis explores how images of white femininity in popular culture intersect with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and transnationality in the performance of Anglo national modernities. Moving from ideas on the positioning of privileged white women in global neoliberalism to the emergence of new formations of white femininity in the millennium , Diana and Beyond fearlessly explains the late princess's never-ending renaissance and ongoing cultural relevance.

Download or read book Fear Cultural Anxiety and Transformation written by Scott A. Lukas and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection was inspired by the observation that film remakes offer us the opportunity to revisit important issues, stories, themes, and topics in a manner that is especially relevant and meaningful to contemporary audiences. Like mythic stories that are told again and again in differing ways, film remakes present us with updated perspectives on timeless ideas. While some remakes succeed and others fail aesthetically, they always say something about the culture in which_and for which_they are produced. Contributors explore the ways in which the fears of death, loss of self, and bodily violence have been expressed and then reinterpreted in such films and remakes as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead. Films such as Rollerball, The Ring, The Grudge, The Great Yokai Wars, and Insomnia are discussed as well because of their ability to give voice to collective anxieties concerning cultural change, nihilism, and globalization. While opening on a note that emphasizes the compulsion of filmmakers to revisit issues concerning fear and anxiety, this collection ends by using films like Solaris, King Kong, Star Trek, Doom, and Van Helsing to suggest that repeated confrontation with these issues allows the opportunity for creative and positive transformation.

Download or read book Britpop and the English Music Tradition written by Jon Stratton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view: that Britpop celebrated Englishness at a time when British culture, with its English hegemonic core, was being challenged and dismantled. It is now timely to look back on Britpop as a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s that can be set into the political context of its time, and into the cultural context of the last fifty years - a time of fundamental revision of what it means to be British and English. The book examines issues such as the historical antecedents of Britpop, the subjectivities governing the performative conventions of Britpop, the cultural context within which Britpop unfolded, and its influence on the post-Britpop music scene in the UK. While Britpop is central to the volume, discussion of this phenomenon is used as an opportunity to examine the particularities of English popular music since the turn of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Being Young and Muslim written by Asef Bayat and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2010 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the ways in which the young, both in Muslim majority societies and Muslim communities in the West, negotiate their Muslim identity in relation to their youthful desires - their individuality, the search for autonomy and security for the future.

Download or read book Staging British South Asian Culture written by Jerri Daboo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre looks afresh at the popularity of forms and aesthetics from Bollywood films and bhangra music and dance on the British stage. From Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams to the finals of Britain’s Got Talent, Jerri Daboo reconsiders the centrality of Bollywood and bhangra to theatre made for or about British South Asian communities. Addressing rarely discussed theatre companies such as Rifco, and phenomena such as the emergence of large- scale Bollywood revue performances, this volume goes some way towards remedying the lack of critical discourse around British South Asian theatre. A timely contribution to this growing field, Staging British South Asian Culture is essential reading for any scholar or student interested in exploring the highly contested questions of identity and representation for British South Asian communities.

Download or read book Multicultural Encounters written by S. Sharma and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-08-18 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book confronts the challenge of difference for rethinking everyday multiculture. It proposes both a theory and practice of a critical pedagogy of popular culture through an analysis of contemporary media and film. For students and scholars committed to a critical practice for transforming the politics of representation and otherness.