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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
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Becoming Honey Ryder – the visual politics informing the first Bond Girl
More LessAbstractThis comparative study focuses especially on the prior visual representation of the first Bond Girl, Honeychile Rider, in comic strip form in the Daily Express in 1960, and aims to negotiate how the visual politics of her screen character was mediated through and influenced by this and other earlier iterations of James Bond’s female companions in popular printed media. I also problematize the claims that the pornographic influences on the visual politics imbuing these images result from Fleming’s graphic writing. In this way, I have accomplished three things: to locate graphical reiterations (texts) of James Bond’s female companions that can act as a possible matrix to future studies of them; to introduce a more nuanced and complex view of the development of the Bond Girl prior to the first Bond film; and to critically investigate the random and often simplified use of the notion of pornography in relation to studies of the Bond Girl.
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‘Artful communicators’ at the Tobar an Cheoil: Traditional Irish music and the transmission of Irish cultural identity
Authors: Debra Reddin Van Tuyll and Carl PurdyAbstractCulture and cultural identity are formed, transmitted, and maintained when meaning is created and shared. Music is as capable of creating shared meaning as are verbal and visual communications. This study sought to use participant/observation and interviewing methodologies to explore the role of the session in creating an environment where traditional Irish music is free to transmit cultural values, beliefs and attitudes through their music as well as through fellowship and conversation. They found that both musicians and audience members believe music is a powerful cultural force in Ireland and that it will continue to be.
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Mauerpark: Berlin’s gentrifying scene park
By Katrina SarkAbstractMauerpark (Karsten, 2011) is a documentary film shot in Berlin’s most notorious park in Prenzlauer Berg in the summer of 2009. It portrays diverse protagonists – artists, musicians, activists, performers and visitors – who frequent the park and participate in its array of activities, such as mass karaoke, flea market, outdoor basketball and other recreational sports, performances, arts, music, etc. Through their narratives, the park is presented as the last public space in Prenzlauer Berg that has not yet been completely gentrified and allows for sub- and countercultural, unregulated creativity and leisure. This article examines Karsten’s film and the gentrifying landscape of the New Berlin.
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A ‘horizon of important questions’: Choice, action and identity in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
By Kevin BrownAbstractThough David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas was only published in 2004, critics are already beginning to write articles and book chapters about his novel. Thus far, though, no one has examined the novel’s portrayal of identity or authenticity as defined by individual choice and action, though this idea undergirds the entire novel. When most people talk about choice and identity, they refer to Jean-Paul’s Sartre’s view of Existentialism. Sartre’s philosophy works well when examining Mitchell’s novel, but using other ideas from Charles Taylor, a more contemporary philosopher, deepens how one reads the ideas about choice, action and identity that Mitchell’s novel examines. These six seemingly separate stories explore these ideas of choice, responsibility and identity, as each of the major characters struggles to discover who he or she is and how he or she should live in the various worlds they find themselves in. Looking at the novel through Sartrean Existentialism, along with Charles Taylor’s ideas about identity, we can see the major characters in Cloud Atlas all finally make choices that define who they are, choices that provide an identity that carries on beyond their own lives and stories.
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Imelda rocks the boom boom: Retro nostalgia, Imelda May and the culture of Irish austerity
Authors: Carlton Brick and Kelly DavidsonAbstractThis article focuses upon the recent emergence of the Dublin born musician, Imelda May, as a cultural icon in post-Tiger Ireland. May has become a significant figure in the recent socio-political remaking of ‘Irishness’, both globally and domestically, performing at the Year of the Gathering in 2012 and the Glaoch: The President’s Call in 2013. Following Bramall the article argues that Mays’s celebrity embodies a form of ‘disruptive performativity’ embodied in the aesthetic appropriation of austerity as an expression of feminine subjectivity. May’s self-consciously retro feminine aesthetic simultaneously problematizes and legitimates the structural inequalities and ideological constructions of Irelands recent economic past. The article concludes that May embodies a popular nostalgia for a radical, collectivist ‘Irishness’, while also manifesting the passive normalization of austerity within contemporary Irish cultural and political discourse. The postmodern historicity of May’s particular ‘retro femininity’ simultaneously locates her within contemporary discourse as a revivalist of conservative gendered identities and (post-)feminist revisionist.
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Book Review
More LessAbstractTHE EURO-WESTERN: REFRAMING GENDER RACE AND THE ‘OTHER’ IN FILM, LEE BROUGHTON (2016) London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 304 pp., ISBN: 9781784533892, h/bk, 62/$99; eISBN: 978 0857729408
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