"They had no medium of expression, so they had to make it up; they had no look, so they created it with gallons of hair gel and hours of toiling meticulously over their escapularios. They don't imitate anyone because they never hand [i.e., had] anyone to imitate and they created their fascinating code from scratch. All from a güiro they heard on the radio that was so catchy that it was impossible not to follow its rhythm and let yourself go wherever it took you. And it took them underneath bridges, to the dance halls, and into the streets of Monterrey's roughest neighborhoods, where they stand out from everyone else thanks to their unmistakable way of dressing and dancing"--P. [4] of cover.
Over the past two decades, increased criminal and state violence has profoundly transformed everyday life in Mexico. In The Two Faces of Fear, Ana Villarreal draws on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a major turf war in Monterrey, Mexico to trace the far-reaching impact of fear and violence on social ties, daily practices, and everyday spaces. Villarreal brings two seemingly contradictory faces of fear into focus--its ability to both isolate and concentrate people and resources, deepening inequality. While all residents of one of Mexico's largest metropolises confronted new threats, the most privileged leveraged vastly unequal resources to spatially concentrate and defend one municipality more fiercely than the rest. Within this defended city, business, nightlife, and public space thrived at the expense of the greater metropolis. The book puts forth a new approach to the study of emotion and provides tangible evidence of how quickly fear worsens inequality beyond Mexico and the "war on drugs."
This innovative collection of studies by international youth researchers, critically addresses questions of ‘global’ youth, incorporating material from regions as diverse as Sydney, Tehran, Dakar and Manila, and advancing our knowledge about young people around the globe. Exploring specific local youth cultures whilst mediating global mass media and consumption trends, this book traces subaltern ‘youth landscapes’ and tells subaltern ‘youth stories’ previously invisible in predominantly western youth cultural studies and theorizing. The chapters here serve as a refutation of the colonialist discourse of cultural globalization. Showcasing previously unpublished youth research from outside the English-speaking world alongside the work of well-known researchers such as Huq and Holden, these accounts of youth cultural practices highlight much that is predictably different, but also a great deal of common ground. This book goes inside creative cultural formation of youth identities to critically examine the global in the local. Bringing together an internationally diverse group of researchers, who describe and analyze youth cultures throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania, this volume presents the first comprehensive review of global youth cultures, practices and identities, and as such is a valuable read for students and researchers of youth studies, cultural studies and sociology.
Contributions by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Benjamin Burkhart, Ivy Chevers, Martha I. Chew Sánchez, Athena Elafros, William García-Medina, Sara Goek, David Henderson, Eyvind Kang, Junko Oba, Juan David Rubio Restrepo, and Gareth Dylan Smith In Scattered Musics, editors Martha I. Chew Sánchez and David Henderson, along with a range of authors from a variety of scholarly backgrounds, consider the musics that diaspora and migrant populations are inspired to create, how musics and musicians travel, and how they change in transit. The authors cover a lot of ground: cumbia in Mexico, música sertaneja in Japan, hip-hop in Canada, Irish music in the US and the UK, reggae and dancehall in Germany, and more. Diasporic groups transform the musical expressions of their home countries as well as those in their host communities. The studies collected here show how these transformations are ways of grappling with ever-changing patterns of movement. Different diasporas hold their homelands in different regards. Some communities try to re-create home away from home in musical performances, while others use music to critique and redefine their senses of home. Through music, people seek to reconstruct and refine collective memory and a collective sense of place. The essays in this volume—by sociologists, historians, ethnomusicologists, and others—explore these questions in ways that are theoretically sophisticated yet readable, making evident the complexities of musical and social phenomena in diaspora and migrant populations. As the opening paragraph of the introduction to the volume observes, “What remains when people have been scattered apart is a strong urge to gather together, to collect.” At few times in our lives has that ever been more apparent than right now.
In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety--from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America--are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at the margins of urban societies. The inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs to, is manufactured and manipulated by, others--others who are prone to view violence at the urban margins as evidence of a cultural, or racial, defect, rather than question violence's relationship to economic and political marginalization. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied. This edited volume seeks to counteract this pernicious tendency by putting under the ethnographic microscope--and making public--the way in which violence is lived and acted upon in the urban peripheries. It features cutting-edge ethnographic research on the role of violence in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America, and sheds light on the suffering that violence produces and perpetuates, as well as the individual and collective responses that violence generates, among those living at the urban margins of the Americas.
This ebook is an inter-disciplinary collection of topics representing conventional and unconventional approaches to fashion studies, exposing a wide variety of methodological perspectives from fields including anthropology, history, art history, sociology, and material culture.
Public, Private, Secret explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves. This collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behavior and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional separations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression. The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. They anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self-representation.
Cool is a compendium of global youth subcultures and street styles—from Flappers to Swing Kids, to Goths to today’s Normcore—that have shaped the fashion zeitgeist. It’s no secret that the youth of the world buck conventional mainstream culture every chance they get, blazing countercultural trails in the process. Driven by their thirst for art and music, and their environment, young people combine their inspirations with the innate desire to rebel, resulting in a defiant subculture; and mainstream society runs to catch up, to co-opt it, and drag it to the mainstream. Lindy Hoppers of the 1930s, greasers of the 1950s, Rude Boys of the 1960s, glam rockers of the 1970s, club kids of the 1980s: there are countless subculture styles that were born from resisting authority. COOL: Style, Sound, and Subversion is equal parts historical chronicle and handbook of the myriad subcultures—most unknown to mainstream culture—that have influenced style. Authors Greg Foley and Andrew Luecke have compiled a comprehensive list of subcultures that have evolved over more than one hundred years, taking a look at the fashion, the art, the films, the books, the music, and historical context of these style movements, many of which came to influence conventional culture and eventually became a norm. Lavish with original illustrations, COOL references a wealth of ephemera—including a timeline, zeitgeist films, ’zines, secret music scenes, art collectives, and over one hundred music playlists tied to specific subcultures through the years—to give the reader a thoroughly vibrant picture of each movement and their sub-movements. COOL: Style, Sound, and Subversion is sure to appeal to fashionistas, culture mavens, and pop culture fans alike.
This is the first book to gather leading designers, creators and industry insiders to reflect on sneaker design and its ground-breaking impact on popular culture. Contributors provide insights into the evolution of sneakers from sport-wear to style icons, the processes and people involved in sneaker design and its global future.Through conversations with the people directly involved in the creation of sneakers, it speaks to the the next generation of sneaker designers and wearers by asking: who are the people involved in the design of a sneaker? How do their roles and approaches differ? How does their individual work contribute to the collective effort of making a sneaker? What will the future of sneaker design be?Richly illustrated, it includes iconic sneakers, drawings and sketches, prototypes as well as glimpses in the manufacturing process. Across three chapters - Style and Culture, People and Processes, The Future - the approaches and experience of industry leaders unfold the past, present, and future of sneakers as style icons and cultural facilitators. Contributors turn to the next generation of designers with an open challenge to move the industry towards a more positive direction for both the people and the planet.
