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Authors: Andrea Scapolo, Zaya Rustamova, Arturo Matute Castro

Abstract:

The “Voices in Dissent” initiative aims at collecting and making available in a digital format, testimonies, letters, and other narratives produced by victims of political oppression from different geographical spaces across the Atlantic. By recovering silenced voices behind the official narratives, this open-access online database will provide indispensable tools for rewriting the history of authoritarian regimes from the margins as memory debates continue to provoke controversy among academic and popular transnational circles. In providing an extensive database of non-hegemonic discourses in a variety of political and social contexts, the project will complement the existing European and Latin-American studies, and invite further interdisciplinary and trans-national research. This digital resource will be available to academic communities and the general audience and will be organized geographically and chronologically. “Voices in Dissent” will offer a first comprehensive study of these personal accounts of persecution and repression against determined historical backgrounds and their impact on collective memory formation in contemporary societies. The digitalization of these texts will allow to run metadata analyses and adopt comparatist approaches for a broad range of research endeavors. Most of the testimonies included in our archive are testimonies of trauma: the trauma of exile, imprisonment, torture, humiliation, censorship. The research on trauma has now reached critical mass and offers a broad spectrum of critical perspectives. By putting together testimonies from different geographical and historical contexts, our project will provide readers and scholars with an extraordinary opportunity to investigate how culture shapes individual and collective memories and provides or denies resources to make sense and cope with the trauma. For scholars dealing with the epistemological and rhetorical analysis of testimonies, an online open-access archive will prove particularly beneficial to test theories on truth status and the formation of belief as well as to study the articulation of discourse. An important aspect of this project is also its pedagogical applications since it will contribute to the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER) to support students and educators worldwide. Through collaborations with our Library System, the archive will form part of the Digital Commons database. The texts collected in this online archive will be made available in the original languages as well as in English translation. They will be accompanied by a critical apparatus that will contextualize them historically by providing relevant background information and bibliographical references. All these materials can serve as a springboard for a broad variety of educational projects and classroom activities. They can also be used to design specific content courses or modules. In conclusion, the desirable outcomes of the “Voices in Dissent” project are: 1. the collections and digitalization of political dissent testimonies; 2. the building of a network of scholars, educators, and learners involved in the design, development, and sustainability of the digital archive; 3. the integration of the content of the archive in both research and teaching endeavors, such as publication of scholarly articles, design of new upper-level courses, and integration of the materials in existing courses.

Keywords: digital archive, dissent, open educational resources, testimonies, transatlantic studies

Procedia PDF Downloads 95

Authors: Beth Vale

Abstract:

Academic research has often neglected the city after dark. Surprisingly little consideration has been given to the every night life of cities: the spatial tactics and creative insurgencies of urban residents when night falls. The focus on ‘pleasure’ in the nocturnal city has often negated the subtle politics of night-time play, embedded in expressions of identity, attachment and resistance. This paper investigates Johannesburg nightclubs as sites of quotidian political labour, through which young people contest social space and their place in it, thereby contributing to the city’s effective and socio-political cartography. The tactical remodelling of the nocturnal city through nightclubbing traces lines of desire (material, emotional, sexual), affiliation, and fear. These in turn map onto young people’s expressions of their social and political identities, as well as their attempts at place-making in a ‘post-apartheid’ context. By examining the micro-politics of the cities' nightclubs, this paper speaks back to an earlier post-94 literature, which regularly characterised Johannesburg youth as superficial, individualist and idealistic. Similarly, some might position nightclubs as sites of frivolous consumption or liberatory permissiveness. Yet because nightclub spaces are racialised, classed and gendered, historically-signified and socially regulated, they are also profoundly political. Through ordinary encounters on the cities' dancefloors, young Jo’burgers are imagining, contesting and negotiating their socio-political identities and indeed their claims to the city. Meanwhile, the politics of this generation of youth, who are increasingly critical of the utopian post-apartheid city, are being increasingly inserted and coopted into night-time cultures. Data for this study was gathered through five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg nightclubs, including over 120 hours of participant observation and in-depth interviews with organisers and partygoers. Interviewees recognised that parties, rather than being simple frivolity, are a cacophony of celebration, mourning, worship, rage, rebellion and attachment. Countering standard associations between partying and escapism, party planners, venue owners and nightclub audiences were infusing night-time infrastructures with the aesthetics of politics and protest. Not unlike parties, local political assemblies so often rely on music, dance, the occupation of space, and a heaving crowd. References to social movements, militancy and anti-establishment emerged in nightclub themes, dress codes and décor. Metaphors of fire crossed over between party and protest, both of which could be described as having ‘been lit’ or having ‘brought flames’. More so, young people’s articulations of the city’s night-time geography, and their place in it, reflected articulations of race, class and ideological affiliation. The location, entrance fees and stylistic choices of one’s chosen club destination demarcated who was welcome, while also signalling membership to a particular politics (whether progressive or materialistic, inclusive or elitist, mainstream or counter-culture). Because of their ability to divide and unite, aggravate and titillate, mask and reveal, club cultures might offer a mirror to the complex socialities of a generation of Jo’burg youth, as they inhabit, and bring into being, a contemporary South African city.

Keywords: affect, Johannesburg, nightclub, nocturnal city, politics

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Authors: Enya Trenholm-Jensen

Abstract:

This paper employs various semiotic methodologies to examine the mechanism of soft power. Soft power refers to a country’s global reputation and their ability to leverage that reputation to achieve certain aims. South Korea has invested heavily in their soft power strategy for a multitude of predominantly historical and geopolitical reasons. On account of this investment and the global prominence of their strategy, South Korea was considered to be the optimal candidate for the aims of this investigation. Having isolated the entertainment industry as one of the most heavily funded segments of the South Korean soft power strategy, the analysis restricted itself to this sector. Within this industry, two entertainment products were selected as case studies. The case studies were chosen based on commercial success according to metrics such as streams, purchases, and subsequent revenue. This criterion was deemed to be the most objective and verifiable indicator of the products general appeal. The entertainment products which met the chosen criterion were Netflix’ “Squid Game” and BTS’ hit single “Butter”. The methodologies employed were chosen according to the medium of the entertainment products. For “Squid Game,” an aesthetic analysis was carried out to investigate how multi- layered meanings were mobilized in a show popularized by its visual grammar. To examine “Butter”, both music semiology and linguistic analysis were employed. The music section featured an analysis underpinned by denotative and connotative music semiotic theories borrowing from scholars Theo van Leeuwen and Martin Irvine. The linguistic analysis focused on stance and semantic fields according to scholarship by George Yule and John W. DuBois. The aesthetic analysis of the first case study revealed intertextual references to famous artworks, which served to augment the emotional provocation of the Squid Game narrative. For the second case study, the findings exposed a set of musical meaning units arranged in a patchwork of familiar and futuristic elements to achieve a song that existed on the boundary between old and new. The linguistic analysis of the song’s lyrics found a deceptively innocuous surface level meaning that bore implications for authority, intimacy, and commercial success. Whether through means of visual metaphor, embedded auditory associations, or linguistic subtext, the collective findings of the three analyses exhibited a desire to conjure a form of positive arousal in the spectator. In the synthesis section, this process is likened to that of branding. Through an exploration of branding, the entertainment products can be understood as cogs in a larger operation aiming to create positive associations to Korea as a country and a concept. Limitations in the form of a timeframe biased perspective are addressed, and directions for future research are suggested. This paper employs semiotic methodologies to examine two entertainment products as mechanisms of soft power. Through means of visual metaphor, embedded auditory associations, or linguistic subtext, the findings reveal a desire to conjure positive arousal in the spectator. The synthesis finds similarities to branding, thus positioning the entertainment products as cogs in a larger operation aiming to create positive associations to Korea as a country and a concept.

Keywords: BTS, cognitive semiotics, entertainment, soft power, south korea, squid game

Procedia PDF Downloads 134