The United States is no longer modernity’s driving force and primary symbol. American cultural imperialism is coming to an end. What better time to recall that American culture, which is as reviled as it is adulated, is itself the result of countless mestizajes - as is the rest of the continent.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be back at the end of August. In the meantime, here is a selection of interviews, reviews and essays on popular music published over the past year.
The way nightlife has been affected by the recent Covid-19 restrictions invites us to think back on the value and features of the night as we have known it for most of our lives. A pioneer in the burgeoning field of night studies, Will Straw sheds light on the history of the night and the issues related to its loss.
How did Hip-Hop Studies emerge as a legitimate field of study? This interview with Murray Forman, who has contributed to the development of this field in the United States, shows the links between the recognition of rap and related art forms and the rise of academic analyses.
From crooning to auto-tune, the voice is at the heart of popular songs. However, it has proved difficult to study: how can something as personal be analysed? Catherine Rudent provides an overview of current approaches of the voice in popular music studies.
Our interest in celebrities is a major structuring element of contemporary societies. According to Sharon Marcus “stars” appeared in the 19th century in theatre, and the case of Sarah Bernhardt allows us to characterise the type of interaction that arises between the media, publics and celebrities.
Over the past twenty years, a new field of study has developed: metal studies. The scholars in this field are often also music enthusiasts, investigating their own passion. How can fandom be articulated with academia?
The presidential election campaign and the unexpected election of Donald Trump was cause for immediate reaction from the music world in the United States and beyond. Ron Eyerman gives us an overview of that reaction.
A coauthored volume offers a panoramic overview of working classes in contemporary France. These sociologists offer a theoretical clarification of the concept and show its relevance for describing this social group and its historical transformations.
Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), whose works became classics in the humanities and social sciences due to his relentless effort to decompartmentalize knowledge, produced a unique oeuvre, in which his Christian faith inspired without limiting his historical and anthropological insights into contemporary culture.
Relying on recent studies on the working-class, Dominique Memmi shows that building a talent is not just a matter of class relations, but is also related to gender-relations. While men are believed to have gifts that distinguish them, women give of themselves for others.
What turns a literary work into a classic? Something critical is “lived experience,” that is, people read the literary work to make sense of current events. The fact that Orwell’s 1984 is selling hundreds of copies after Trump’s inauguration is telling as Alvaro Santana-Acuña explained in his analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude and current affairs such as the BP oil spill in 2010. [updated introduction following Donald Trump’s election to the White House]
Against a backdrop of economic growth and growing spate of collective actions, rural migrant workers have developed narratives of migrant labour. This essay studies articles, diaries, poems and online songs asserting their collective subaltern identity and specific norms and values.
Youth gangs are often discussed but rarely investigated. In an ethnographic study that examines families, schools, and the street, sociologist Marwan Mohammed reconstructs the principles according to which these groups are formed in the Paris region.
A special issue of the journal Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science edited by the American sociologists David J. Harding, Michèle Lamont, and Mario L. Small examines the relations between culture and poverty. The authors return to “the culture of poverty,” a concept that became taboo in the 1970s because of its conservative and racist recuperation. Their pluralist and supple view of culture allows them to untie the knot between culture and race that feeds conservative rhetoric.
