Domesticating Otherness: The Snake Charmer in American Popular Culture
A.J. Racy
University of California, Los Angeles
Abstract. Metaphoric allusions to otherness are widely encountered and oftentimes taken for granted. Exploring the use of the snake-charming theme in American popular media, I discuss why and how such a supposedly foreign theme is borrowed, metaphorically adapted, and locally applied. The central premise is that such a process is integrally linked to the borrower’s own history and cultural outlooks. Besides reflecting my own first-hand experience, the narratives engage relevant discourses on representation, exoticism, imagination, metaphor, and power. Generally, the research illustrates how tropes of otherness acquire their forms and meanings as they become localized, or domesticated.
Sounding Against Nuclear Power in Post-3.11 Japan: Resonances of Silence and Chindon-ya
Marié Abe
Boston University
Abstract. In this paper, I explore the tension between the socially mandated silence of jishuku and the sounds of anti-nuclear power street protests to investigate how chindon-ya, an ostentatious musical advertisement practice on the street, has become politicized as a sonic emblem of the recent anti-nuclear movement in post-3.11 disaster Japan. By listening to both the sound of chindon-ya at demonstrations and the weighty silence of jishuku together, I suggest that chindon-ya sounds are foregrounding new political possibilities, enabling a broader-based movement towards, and beyond, what anthropologist Marc Abélès calls “the politics of survival” in contemporary Japan.
Black Like Me: Caribbean Tourism and the St. Kitts Music Festival
Jessica Baker
University of Pennsylvania
Abstract. In recent years the St. Kitts Music Festival has become a platform for popular American, Jamaican, and a relatively small number of local Kittitian-Nevisian artists–a shift that mirrors the changing demographic of audiences who attend the festival. These contemporary artists represent the black faces of Caribbean tourism that have previously been unacknowledged within discussions of mass tourism in the Caribbean. This article questions the stability of categories such as tourist, local, and visitor by examining the St. Kitts Music Festival as an occasion for local engagement with American blackness as one aspect of modern Kittitian identity and Caribbean tourism.
On Hybridity in African Popular Music: The Case of Senegalese Hip Hop
Catherine M. Appert
Cornell University
Abstract. This article critically considers the legacy of hybridity in African popular music studies and questions whether contemporary African engagements with diasporic popular musics like hip hop call for new interpretations of musical genre. Through ethnographic research with hip hoppers in Senegal, I explore how practices of musical intertextuality reinscribe global connections as diasporic ones and challenge the conditions for musical hybridity. I argue that the formal parameters of musical genre themselves constitute conscious and strategic social practice that situates human actors in local and global place.
Sound Matters: The SEM Blog 