“You Don’t Belong in Nashville!”: Politics, Country Music, and the Reception of Robert Altman’s \u3ci\u3eNashville\u3c/i\u3e

Robert Altman’s film Nashville (1975) generated a prodigious amount of press commentary following its release. Early on, critics praised the film, but a disappointing box office led many to assume a split between big-city liberal audiences and small-town conservative audiences. Subsequent press coverage connected this divide to both the film’s politics and its use and portrayal of country music, as political pundits, music critics, country music stars, and general audiences weighed in. This essay situates the reception of the film within a shifting country music industry, which was growing increasingly aligned with the Republican Party and increasingly suspicious of new artists. Altman’s overtly liberal political opinions, and his unusual decision to have the cast, along with music supervisor Richard Baskin—novices to country music—compose the songs, alienated him from the Nashville country music industry. Janet Staiger’s theorization of “talk” provides a compelling framework, as the film served as a flashpoint to argue political truths about the nation post-Watergate and to define country music’s evolving authenticity in a commercializing marketplace

Recovering the sense of sight: Berardino Palumbo’s vision for Italian anthropology’s possible redemption

Comment on Berardino Palumbo, Lo strabismo della DEA: Antropologia, accademia e società in Italia, Palermo, Edizioni Museo Pasqualino, 2018, pp. 289.Commento a Berardino Palumbo, Lo strabismo della DEA: Antropologia, accademia e società in Italia, Palermo, Edizioni Museo Pasqualino, 2018, pp. 289

The development of modern French music

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kansas, Music, 1920. ; Includes bibliographical references

A study of distributive occupations in Stockton, California : for puposes of secondary school counseling

The purpose of this study is to assemble occupational information of a statistical antire and present it in a form that will make it immediately usable to Stockton’s secondary school counselors as a basis for apprising their students of the opportunities in distributive occupations in the Stockton Unified School District

Platinum City and the New South African Dream

Much has been written about the persistence of economic apartheid inscribed on the geography of South Africa’s cities. This has intensified fragmentation, producing spatial configurations that are at once reminiscent of the old order of segregation, and simultaneously embody the particular inequities and divisions of the new neoliberal order (Turok 2001, Harrison 2006). Through an ethnographic study of Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa’s platinum belt, (once labelled the ‘fastest growing city in Africa’ after Cairo) I explore how the failure of urban integration maps onto the failure of the promise of market inclusion. What is particular about mid-range towns such as Rustenburg, is that the opportunities of ‘empowerment through enterprise’ are seen, or believed to be, all the more attainable than in large cities. Here the extended supply chains of the mining industry and the expanding secondary economy appear to offer limitless possibilities to share in the boons of the platinum boom. Yet as the account below shows, the disjuncture (and friction) between corporate authority and local government, has given rise to increasing fragmentation and exclusion, as only a very few are able to grasp the long-anticipated rewards of the new South African dream

Patchwork Nation: Collage, Music, and American Identity.

Collage has emerged as the quintessential art form of the twentieth century through its sustained impact across the arts and through its embodiment of cross-cultural social movements. Drawing on interdisciplinary models that engage with collage’s formal, semiotic, and cultural properties, this dissertation proposes a theory of musical collage, and applies this theory specifically to the construction and iteration of American musical nationalism across the twentieth century. Collage captures this dynamic and contentious process by exposing the seams, thus preserving a tension between the whole and its diverse constituent parts. Furthermore, because collage is polysemic, it can resist narrative/ counternarrative and other binary approaches and better attend to the complex power structures that shape American music’s diversities. Balancing a top-down theoretical approach with a bottom-up study of collage as cultural practice, the dissertation comprises five case studies that showcase a diverse array of methodologies, musical genres, and cultural debates. Chapter One illuminates how collage underpins theories of nationalism, and how these theories shaped the reception of Edward MacDowell’s, George Antheil’s, and Charles Ives’s divergent strategies for creating a nascent American art music. Turning to the Broadway stage, Chapter Two examines how Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Balanchine collaboratively staked their own claim of musical nationalism by combining ballet, classical music, jazz, and musical theater in On Your Toes (1936). Chapter Three uses Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) to trace the shifting values of folk music in American identity, from the original 1920s commercial recordings Smith used through the Smithsonian’s 1997 reissue of the Anthology. Addressing how collage continues to operate today, Chapter Four examines how collage negotiates between individual, subcultural, and national experiences of AIDS and 9/11 in two musical memorials: John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 (1991) and John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls (2002). Finally, Chapter Five demonstrates how multiple collages, including YouTube mashups, hip hop songs, official playlists, and a star-studded Inaugural concert continually reconstructed Barack Obama’s image to navigate crucial social and political issues. To conclude, I reflect on the analytical benefits and challenges posed by the malleable nature of collage.PHDMusic: MusicologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100005/1/danblim_1.pd

Remaking Africa's informal economies: youth, entrepreneurship and the promise of inclusion at the bottom of the pyramid

In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents vast 'under-served' informal economies, harnessing the entrepreneurial mettle of youth to create new markets for a range of products, from solar lanterns and shampoo to cook stoves and sanitary pads. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth entrepreneurs, we trace the prcesses of individual and collective 'transformation' that the mission of (self-) empowerment through entrepreneurship seeks to bring about. We argue that, while such systems are meant to bring those below the poverty line above it, the 'line' is reified and reinforced through a range of discursive and strategic practices that actively construct and embed distinctions between the past and the future, valuable and valueless, and the idle and productive in Africa's informal economies