Search results for ""Author Martin Stokes""

Critical citizenship practices and the language of today's populism have never been more sharply opposed. Today's insistent efforts to anchor citizenship narratives in national belonging now confront a variety of 'flexible' or 'differentiated' citizenships - plural, performative, and decentered practices of rights claiming mutually defining 'the political', its subjects, and its others on a variety of scales. They confront, too, critiques of citizenship in totalitarian or neoliberal governmentality that derive from Foucault, Agamben, and Arendt and have become pressing today in proliferating states of emergency and exception and the growing ranks of non-citizens. How should these debates be configured now? And what place does music have in them? In Music and Citizenship, author Martin Stokes argues that music has for a long time been entangled with debates about citizenship and citizenly identities, though for various reasons this entanglement has been insufficiently recognized. Citizenship and citizenly identity debates, for their part, have important implications for the way we think about music in relation to politics, identity, and scholarly practice. Stokes's particular claim is that ethnomusicology has for too long configured relationships between music, society, and reflective and critical practice in terms of identity paradigms. The rejection of these identity paradigms in recent years has taken the form of a post- or anti-humanism that is equally problematic. This book challenges the conventional understanding of citizenship in terms of nationalism and national identity though the examination of case studies from across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. In this way, this volume departs from an earlier ethnomusicology preoccupied with belonging and cultural participation in the nation-state. Citizenship-the fantasy, according to some definitions, of political community without outsiders-suggests, in this book, a different space in which one might configure such relations, one more satisfactorily, and energetically, oriented to questions about musical ecology, sustainability, democracy, and inclusivity.

Read more less

At the heart of "The Republic of Love" are the voices of three musicians - queer nightclub star Zeki Muren, arabesk originator Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu - who collectively have dominated mass media in Turkey since the early 1950s. Their fame and ubiquity have made them national icons - but, Martin Stokes here contends, they do not represent the official version of Turkish identity propagated by anthems or flags; instead, they evoke a much more intimate and ambivalent conception of Turkishness. Using these three singers as a lens, Stokes examines Turkey's repressive politics and civil violence as well as its uncommonly vibrant public life, in which music, art, literature, sports, and journalism have flourished. However, Stokes' primary concern is how the music and careers of Muren, Gencebay, and Aksu can be understood in light of theories of cultural intimacy. In particular, he considers their contributions to the development of a Turkish concept of love, analyzing the ways these singers explore the private matters of intimacy, affection, and sentiment on the public stage.

Read more less

At the heart of "The Republic of Love" are the voices of three musicians - queer nightclub star Zeki Muren, arabesk originator Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu - who collectively have dominated mass media in Turkey since the early 1950s. Their fame and ubiquity have made them national icons - but, Martin Stokes here contends, they do not represent the official version of Turkish identity propagated by anthems or flags; instead, they evoke a much more intimate and ambivalent conception of Turkishness. Using these three singers as a lens, Stokes examines Turkey's repressive politics and civil violence as well as its uncommonly vibrant public life, in which music, art, literature, sports, and journalism have flourished. However, Stokes's primary concern is how the music and careers of Muren, Gencebay, and Aksu can be understood in light of theories of cultural intimacy. In particular, he considers their contributions to the development of a Turkish concept of love, analyzing the ways these singers explore the private matters of intimacy, affection, and sentiment on the public stage.

Read more less

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim.With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.

Read more less