Government, E-Government and Modernity ‘The times they are a-changin’; and even the changes are a-changin

E-government is far too often taken to mean ‘government business as usual’ plus the internet. This paper puts forward the basis for an alternative orientation, locating e-government against a background of profound social changes

"Are My Songs Literature?": a Postmodern Appraisal of Bob Dylan\u27s American Popular Music Culture

The current study is a postmodern appraisal of Bob Dylan\u27s artistic career and vocal gestures to examine the way melody in popular music works in relation to speech and singing, the grand and the ordinary. It historicizes Bob Dylan\u27s protest music of the 1960s within the paradigm of folk music culture. Dylan\u27s music is full of riffs, blues sequences, and pentatonic melodies—all heavily part and parcel of blues, folk, gospel, and country music. It is the music that dwells on the pleasures of repetition, of circularity, and of the recurring familiar tune integrated within Dylanesque poetics of rhyme delivered with his idiosyncratic, deep and intense range of voices. Dylan is the official son of the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that mirrors contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodies of medieval troubadours, and the blessed rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. The study is an attempt to illustrate how musicology and ethnomusicology in particular can contribute to understanding Dylan as a ‘performing artist\u27 within the postmodern paradigm. Thus, the study seeks to establish Dylan as a phenomenal, prolific postmodernist artist, as well as an anarchist. The power and originality of Dylan\u27s music constitute a prima facie case that his performances should be considered postmodernist art

"Are My Songs Literature?": A Postmodern Appraisal of Bob Dylan's American Popular Music Culture

The current study is a postmodern appraisal of Bob Dylan’s artistic career and vocal gestures to examine the way melody in popular music works in relation to speech and singing, the grand and the ordinary. It historicizes Bob Dylan’s protest music of the 1960s within the paradigm of folk music culture. Dylan’s music is full of riffs, blues sequences, and pentatonic melodies—all heavily part and parcel of blues, folk, gospel, and country music. It is the music that dwells on the pleasures of repetition, of circularity, and of the recurring familiar tune integrated within Dylanesque poetics of rhyme delivered with his idiosyncratic, deep and intense range of voices. Dylan is the official son of the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that mirrors contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodies of medieval troubadours, and the blessed rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. The study is an attempt to illustrate how musicology and ethnomusicology in particular can contribute to understanding Dylan as a ‘performing artist’ within the postmodern paradigm. Thus, the study seeks to establish Dylan as a phenomenal, prolific postmodernist artist, as well as an anarchist. The power and originality of Dylan’s music constitute a prima facie case that his performances should be considered postmodernist art

The Times They Are A-Changin’

he article, whose central premise is to address the ellusive issue of the Zeitgeist of the "long 1968," revolves around the appeal of the singer-songwriter activism and the international, cross-cultural popularity of protest songs that defy political borders and linguistic divides. The argument opens with reference to Bob Dylan's famous song "The Times They Are A-Changing," whose evergreen topicality resulted not only in the emergence of its numerous official and unofficial covers and reinterpretations, but also generated translations into all major languages of the world, and which has provided inspiration to engaged artists, whose present-day remakes serve as a medium of criticism of the unjust mechanisms of power affecting contemporary societies. The "spirit of the 1968," which evades clear-cut definitions attempted by cultural historians and sociologists, seems to lend itself to capturing in terms of what Beate Kutschke dubs "mental" criteria, perhaps best comprehended in the analysis of the emotional reactions to simple messages of exhortative poetry or simple protest songs, which appeal to the shared frustrations of self-organized, grassroot movements and offer them both the sense of purpose and a glimpse of hope. In this sense, the Zeitgeist of '68 is similar to that of revolutionary Romanticism that united the young engaged intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, and whose messages reverberate in the activist songwriters' work until today. As such, the essay provides the keynote to the whole issue, which explores some of the transnational legacies of "1969.

Introduction: Scholarly engagement and decolonisation:Views from South Africa, The Netherlands and the United States

Considering that one of the core tasks of academia is to provide social critique and reflection, universities have an undeniable role to formulate the contours of a more inclusive academia in contrast to visible and normalised structures of exclusion. Translating such ambitions into transformative practices seems to be easier said than done. Academics need mutual inspiration and exchange of thoughts and practices to reflect on their actions and their own knowledge productions. The authors in this book mirror the challenges and achievements of academics and practitioners in three national contexts, which could serve as a foundation for academia to move towards dismantling elitist and privileged-based assumptions, and formulating new forms of knowledge production and institutional policies, inside and outside academia. The book aims to help create a more inclusive society in which academics, students and practitioners can engage, learn and transform structures of inequality, exclusion and disconnection where it seems to have the biggest impact

Deadly Contradictions

As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysis of twenty-four US global wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras

Modern Practices of Traditional Dance in Cameroon: The Influences of Colonization and Globalization

The study was originally one of the changing practices of traditional dance in Cameroon, and the causes behind the shift from purposeful dances with relevance to everyday life, to dances primarily meant for entertainment and exposition. What emerged was the somewhat ironic realization that the current manifestations of traditional dance cannot be separated from a discussion of modernity and Cameroon’s socio-cultural development. The changing practices of traditional dance in Cameroon compose a smaller piece of the larger puzzle of the ways in which Cameroonian culture is forced to adapt itself to the external influences of the times, while still attempting to hold onto its roots. Globalization has flooded Cameroon with cultural imports from neighboring nations, predominately from the West. This comes at the heels of colonization, during which period the ruling powers of Germany, then France and England demolished many of Cameroon’s cultural institutions, including dance. Colonization and globalization have left the general Cameroonian public less inclined to continue in purely traditional practices, favoring mélanges of cultures if not the wholehearted adoption of Western habits. Because of this, tradition has largely been relegated to the villages, while any outside manifestations of tradition have been mutated and pushed into the exhibitory sphere. This is something not unique to Cameroon; Alphonse Tiéru has noted this phenomenon in his work Dooplé: loi éternelle de la danse africaine, in regard to many African countries that have been impacted by globalization. Yet as Cameroon is “Africa in miniature”[1], due to its composition of over 250 ethnic groups, it is an ideal country to study the effects of the permeation and imposition of Western and foreign cultures on indigenous cultures. [1]Achanyang Atabong Jarvis. Interview 17 November, 2014

Choosing Futures: Alva Myrdal and the Construction of Swedish Futures Studies, 1967–1972

This article discusses the Swedish discourse on futures studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It focuses on the futures discourse of the group appointed by the Prime Minister, Olof Palme, in 1967 under the chairmanship of Alva Myrdal. The Swedish futures discourse focused on futures studies as a democratic means of reform in defence of the Swedish model and “Swedish” values of solidarity and equality, in opposition to an international futurology dominated by the Cold War and dystopic narratives of global disaster. The article suggests that the creation of Swedish futures studies, culminating in a Swedish institute for futures studies, can be seen as a highpoint of postwar planning and the Swedish belief in the possibility of constructing a particularly Swedish future from a particularly Swedish past

Deadly Contradictions

As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysis of twenty-four US global wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras