Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias 1st Edition Flora Pitrolo (Editor) full chapter instant download
Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias 1st Edition Flora Pitrolo (Editor) full chapter instant download
https://ebookmass.com/product/sexual-violence-in-
australia-1970s-1980s-rape-and-child-sexual-abuse-1st-edition-
lisa-featherstone/
https://ebookmass.com/product/world-dance-cultures-from-ritual-
to-spectacle-1st-edition-ebook-pdf-version/
https://ebookmass.com/product/global-cultures-of-contestation-
mobility-sustainability-aesthetics-connectivity-1st-edition-
esther-peeren/
https://ebookmass.com/product/banks-exchanges-and-regulators-
global-financial-markets-from-the-1970s-ranald-c-michie/
Different Global Journalisms. Cultures and Contexts
Saba Bebawi
https://ebookmass.com/product/different-global-journalisms-
cultures-and-contexts-saba-bebawi/
https://ebookmass.com/product/american-missionaries-in-iran-
during-the-1960s-and-1970s-1st-ed-edition-philip-o-hopkins/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-anatomy-of-dance-discourse-
literary-and-philosophical-approaches-to-dance-in-the-later-
graeco-roman-world-1st-edition-karin-schlapbach/
https://ebookmass.com/product/labor-and-aesthetics-in-european-
contemporary-dance-dancing-precarity-1st-ed-edition-annelies-van-
assche/
https://ebookmass.com/product/scribal-practice-and-the-global-
cultures-of-colophons-1400-1800-christopher-d-bahl/
Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures
and Popular Music
Series Editors
Keith Gildart
University of Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton, UK
Anna Gough-Yates
University of Roehampton
London, UK
Sian Lincoln
Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool, UK
Bill Osgerby
London Metropolitan University
London, UK
Lucy Robinson
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
John Street
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK
Peter Webb
University of the West of England
Bristol, UK
Matthew Worley
University of Reading
Reading, UK
From 1940s zoot-suiters and hepcats through 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers,
beatniks and Teddy boys; 1960s surfers, rude boys, mods, hippies and
bikers; 1970s skinheads, soul boys, rastas, glam rockers, funksters and
punks; on to the heavy metal, hip-hop, casual, goth, rave and clubber
styles of the 1980s, 90s, noughties and beyond, distinctive blends of fashion
and music have become a defining feature of the cultural landscape. The
Subcultures Network series is international in scope and designed to
explore the social and political implications of subcultural forms. Youth
and subcultures will be located in their historical, socio-economic and
cultural context; the motivations and meanings applied to the aesthetics,
actions and manifestations of youth and subculture will be assessed. The
objective is to facilitate a genuinely cross-disciplinary and transnational
outlet for a burgeoning area of academic study.
Global Dance
Cultures in the 1970s
and 1980s
Disco Heterotopias
Editors
Flora Pitrolo Marko Zubak
Department of English, Theatre and Department of Contemporary History
Creative Writing Croatian Institute of History
Birkbeck, University of London Zagreb, Croatia
London, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making and has acquired the
support of friends and allies through stratified conversations, debates,
listening sessions and parties with more people than we can thank here.
We would like to thank our colleagues from the disciplines and institu-
tions we work within, and Marko Zubak expressly wishes to thank the
Croatian Institute of History and Cost Action NEP4DISSENT for giving
him the freedom to research.
Some of the people who have helped us shape ideas related to this book
in its very early stages are Franco Fabbri, Rachel Haworth, Paul Long,
Ewa Mazierska, Goffredo Plastino and Gábor Vályi, aka DJ Shuriken. Our
gratitude goes to them for having given us both intellectual stimulus and
more public stages to begin to work on the ideas that eventually crystal-
lised in this volume.
We would like to thank Arabella Stanger, Mimi Haddon and Michael
Lawrence for giving this book a platform at the Brighton Disco! Conference
in June 2018 when we were still in the heat of working through this edito-
rial project, and to all the attendees of that conference for their generous
input, enlightened comments and enthusiasm for this book when it was
just beginning to take shape.
We wish to acknowledge generous help and input from Lucia
Udvardyova and Marysia Lewandowska; Colin Cumming’s eagle-eyed
work was invaluable in helping us move through the final throes of preparing
these texts and we want to thank him for his professionalism and interest
in our work.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Introduction: Disco Heterotopias—Other Places, Other
Spaces, Other Lives 1
Flora Pitrolo and Marko Zubak
Montreal, Funkytown: Two Decades of Disco History 29
Will Straw
Dancin’ Days: Disco Flashes in 1970s Brazil 51
Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari
Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music101
Yusuke Wajima
Disco, Dancing, Globalization and Class in 1980s Hindi
Cinema127
Gregory D. Booth
Dancing Desire, Dancing Revolution: Sexuality and the
Politics of Disco in China Since the 1980s151
Qian Wang
vii
viii Contents
Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism195
Marko Zubak
The Lebanese Music Experiment: Disco and Nightlife During
the Civil War223
Natalie Shooter and Ernesto Chahoud
Disco and Discontent in Nigeria: A Conversation251
Uchenna C. Ikonne, Flora Pitrolo, and Marko Zubak
Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia281
Ken McLeod
Epilogue: Decolonising Disco—Counterculture, Postindustrial
Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco303
Tim Lawrence
Index339
Notes on Contributors
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
a book chapter, titled ‘The Birth of Enka’, for Made in Japan: Studies in
Popular Music (2014). His recent book, Odoru Showa Kayou (Dance
Music in the Showa Period (1926–1989), 2015), focuses on dance music in
modern Japan.
Qian Wang is Professor of Sociology at Yibin University. His research is
mainly focused on music sociology, cultural studies and gender studies in
the context of Chinese popular music. He examines the sophisticated
interaction between popular music and social transformation since the
economic reform and writes on issues such as gender and queer. He is the
author of Rock Crises: Research on Chinese Rock Music in the 1990s and the
co-author of Research on New Media and Urban Children (forthcoming).
Marko Zubak is a researcher at the Croatian Institute of History in
Zagreb, specialising in popular culture in socialist Eastern Europe. Recent
publications include the monograph The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968–1980)
(2018). He has curated the exhibitions ‘Yugoslav Youth Press as
Underground Press’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive: Socialist Disco Culture’, which
travelled across the region.holds a PhD in History from the Central
European University in Budapest. He is a research associate at the Croatian
Institute of History in Zagreb, focusing on popular, alternative and youth
cultures and media in the second half of the twentieth century in Eastern
Europe, on which he taught at several universities (Zagreb, Budapest,
Klagenfurt). He published on these topics, including a monograph The
Yugoslav Youth Press (1968–1980): Student Movements, Youth Subcultures
and Alternative Communist Media (2018). His recent interest focuses on
popular music and club cultures. He has curated two exhibitions (‘Yugoslav
Youth Press as Underground Press: 1968–1972’, ‘Stayin’ Alive: Socialist
Disco Culture’) that have travelled around the region and collaborated on
many others, most recently on ‘Restless Youth: 70 Years of Growing up in
Europe, 1945 to Now’ at the House of European History in Brussels.
Introduction: Disco Heterotopias—Other
Places, Other Spaces, Other Lives
F. Pitrolo (*)
Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of
London, London, UK
M. Zubak
Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History,
Zagreb, Croatia
taken disco seriously over the past two decades, examining both its under-
ground roots and its more conventional aspects (Lawrence 2003; Flatley
and Kronengold 2008; Echols 2011; Lawrence 2016), the genre’s capac-
ity to be absorbed and remodelled across a wider geographical range has
not thus far been chartered, and disco’s other lives in local, marginal and
peripheral scenes remain mostly under-appreciated. But as it exploded,
atomised and travelled, disco served a number of different agendas: its
aesthetic rootedness in ideas of pleasure, transgression and escapism and
its formal malleability, constructed around a four-on-the-floor beat,
allowed it to permeate a number of local scenes for whom the meaning of
disco shifted, sometimes in unexpected and radical ways.
This volume seeks to go some of the way in opening up a terrain for the
global study of disco as a musical genre, as a dance culture and as a wider
cultural phenomenon. Across these chapters, our authors capture the vari-
ety of scenes, contexts and reasons for which disco took on diverse dimen-
sions in its global journey, acting as generous interpreters between
English-language scholarship and geo-political, ideological and sociologi-
cal landscapes that fall outside of its more well-trodden narratives. From
oil boom Nigeria to post-Invasion Czechoslovakia, from post-colonial
India to war-torn Lebanon, our aim here is to increase the visibility of
scenes that have hitherto been under-represented and to make some criti-
cal interventions in how to tackle the ideology of derivative musics and
‘glocal’ and ‘non-local’ music- and nightlife-related cultures. How can we
balance representation and appropriation in a globalised world? How can
we complicate the discourse between centre and periphery? How do dif-
ference and sameness play out in the complex travelling of global cultural
phenomena?
The book you hold in your hands is intended as a set of guided tours—
which may be a starting point for your own historical research and musical
discoveries, or an ulterior step of the way in debates you are already
embedded within—which can serve as tools of comparison and differen-
tiation. It contains rich historical and geo-political backgrounds, expert
analysis and much discographic detail. It is the result of deep reading, deep
listening, oral histories and personal discoveries; it is made by writers and
scholars who are also diggers, collectors, DJs, label bosses, cultural agita-
tors and people of the night, and targets the music lover as much as the
academic reader. Indeed, our curation of writers, contributions and inves-
tigative angles here seeks to establish a crucial connection between ‘scene’
and ‘field’, because there are important differences in the kinds of
INTRODUCTION: DISCO HETEROTOPIAS—OTHER PLACES, OTHER SPACES… 3
knowledge the two produce and in the ways in which that knowledge
circulates. Allowing these to overlap and cross-pollinate is crucial to enrich
our work from both sides, taking disco seriously as an object of analysis
without sacrificing its effects on lived experience.
[m]usic travels practically as long as it exists, but some routes are more fre-
quented than others. (…) In the twentieth century, music is used less in
open acts of colonisation and missionisation (not least because they were
replaced by subtler forms of dominance), yet its production and consump-
tion reflects well on the imbalances of power between different regions and
countries. (Mazierska in Gregory and Mazierska 2015, 8)
We are conscious that the terms ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘glocal’ have to be
productively redefined at each turn, and indeed these and other terms
appear in this volume in multifarious ways which not only speak back to
ongoing debates in Anglophone scholarship but also reflect the cultural
and discursive positionalities of each author. This collection seeks to join a
protean move towards analytical differentiation in an interdisciplinary field
already marked by work such as that performed by Gregory and Mazierska
and many others (see, e.g., Mitchell 1996; Fairley 2001; Connell and
Gibson 2003; White 2012; Guerra and Quintela 2020), as well as single-
regional focus work (such as the volumes making up the Routledge
Popular Music Studies Made In series, as well as texts in the same series as
this book such as Marsh 2016, Lohman 2017, and Tosoni and Zuccalà
2020), work invested in both demolishing and rebuilding the critical and
racial palimpsests that still bury our understanding of many popular musics
4 F. PITROLO AND M. ZUBAK
(beyond the volumes mentioned across these chapters see, e.g., recent
volumes such as diverse as Brooks 2021 and Haddon 2020) and work on
how the digital reconfigures our perception of the ‘global’ (as an example
see Clayton 2016). As such, it inscribes itself as part of a process that seeks
to nuance understandings of local and global in the face of the hybrid, the
hyperlocal and the decentralised.
This process has been underway for at least two or three decades in
academic circles, but it is now being accelerated by progressively moving
up the mainstream agenda. The world this volume comes into is not sim-
ply a world in which one might hear the same single being played in clubs
and on radios everywhere, as was the case in the time this book explores,
the 1970s and 1980s; it is a world in which tapes from a market vendor in
Azerbaijan will end up on a famous DJs SoundCloud account and be dis-
tributed to millions of followers, a world in which Dutch and Syrian stu-
dents of economics might argue expertly over the best Russian trance
singles on a beach in Goa. Situated beyond Jameson’s problems with post-
modernist ‘random cannibalisation’ (Jameson 1991, 18) and beyond the
notions of ‘mutual misunderstanding/an imagined quality of elsewhere/a
projection from the unconscious’ that sit at the centre of David Toop’s pyra-
mid diagram at the beginning of his Exotica (1999), the world this volume
comes into is a world in which students openly protest curricula that don’t
adequately account for the global South and in which statues are toppled.
The notion of ‘world music’ has been problematised for at least two
decades in popular music scholarship (Connell and Gibson 2003; Guilbault
2001; Stokes 2003), but the mere fact that it has become quite hard to
find a ‘world music’ section in independent record stores demonstrates on
a day-to-day level how there is a widespread dissatisfaction with the tax-
onomies we have hitherto used to order experience. Equally, in academic
fields, the notion of intersectionality has found many applications as ‘buzz-
word’ since Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in 1989 (Davis 2008), and
intersectional views of cultural phenomena proliferate in contemporary
scholarship; at the same time, the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism
(Papastergiadis 2012; Regev 2013), which works on a quasi-Derridaen
always already globalised and thus interactive formation of taste and artis-
tic practices in late modernity, has provided much food for thought and
has been both utilised and criticised. Meanwhile, in the scene, three decades
of DIY internet radio experimentation have brought us now to a place in
which NTS, still one of the most successful internet radios, carries the
slogan ‘don’t assume’; the radios Threads and Threads* broadcast at the
INTRODUCTION: DISCO HETEROTOPIAS—OTHER PLACES, OTHER SPACES… 5
and living while keeping our eye on ‘the investment in imaginary unities’
that keeps these experiences in common (Straw 1991, 369).
The mirror makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at
myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that
surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to
pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Foucault 1984, 4)
In our work on this volume we are using this concept on two levels: on the
one hand, the level on which as Garcia has rightly picked up before us,
‘given their layered spatialities, interstitial sites, and fleeting materializa-
tions, disco’s dancefloors could be perhaps described as heterotopias instead
of utopias’ (Garcia 2014); and on the other, we are using it to speak of the
position of disco scenes that are geographically, socially, economically,
politically, linguistically other to disco’s original conditions of production
and consumption. Reinvented at each turn—in each linguistic, political,
socio-cultural landscape—the scenes taken into analysis in this volume
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
peace have expressed at Shakspeare. The veriest churl and Jacobin
cannot resist the influence of the style and manners of these haughty
lords. We are affected, as boys and barbarians are, by the
appearance of a few rich and wilful gentlemen who take their honor
into their own keeping, defy the world, so confident are they of their
courage and strength, and whose appearance is the arrival of so
much life and virtue. In dangerous times they are presently tried, and
therefore their name is a flourish of trumpets. They, at least, affect us
as a reality. They are not shams, but the substance of which that age
and world is made. They are true heroes for their time. They make
what is in their minds the greatest sacrifice. They will, for an injurious
word, peril all their state and wealth, and go to the field. Take away
that principle of responsibleness, and they become pirates and
ruffians.[127]
This self-subsistency is the charm of war; for this self-subsistency
is essential to our idea of man. But another age comes, a truer
religion and ethics open, and a man puts himself under the dominion
of principles. I see him to be the servant of truth, of love and of
freedom, and immovable in the waves of the crowd. The man of
principle, that is, the man who, without any flourish of trumpets, titles
of lordship or train of guards, without any notice of his action abroad,
expecting none, takes in solitude the right step uniformly, on his
private choice and disdaining consequences,—does not yield, in my
imagination, to any man. He is willing to be hanged at his own gate,
rather than consent to any compromise of his freedom or the
suppression of his conviction. I regard no longer those names that so
tingled in my ear. This is a baron of a better nobility and a stouter
stomach.
The cause of peace is not the cause of cowardice. If peace is
sought to be defended or preserved for the safety of the luxurious
and the timid, it is a sham, and the peace will be base. War is better,
and the peace will be broken. If peace is to be maintained, it must be
by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero,
namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any
instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the
hero, and will not seek another man’s life;—men who have, by their
intellectual insight or else by their moral elevation, attained such a
perception of their own intrinsic worth that they do not think property
or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of
principle as treating a man like a sheep.
If the universal cry for reform of so many inveterate abuses, with
which society rings,—if the desire of a large class of young men for a
faith and hope, intellectual and religious, such as they have not yet
found, be an omen to be trusted; if the disposition to rely more, in
study and in action, on the unexplored riches of the human
constitution,—if the search of the sublime laws of morals and the
sources of hope and trust, in man, and not in books, in the present,
and not in the past, proceed; if the rising generation can be provoked
to think it unworthy to nestle into every abomination of the past, and
shall feel the generous darings of austerity and virtue, then war has
a short day, and human blood will cease to flow.
It is of little consequence in what manner, through what organs,
this purpose of mercy and holiness is effected. The proposition of the
Congress of Nations is undoubtedly that at which the present fabric
of our society and the present course of events do point. But the
mind, once prepared for the reign of principles, will easily find modes
of expressing its will. There is the highest fitness in the place and
time in which this enterprise is begun. Not in an obscure corner, not
in a feudal Europe, not in an antiquated appanage where no onward
step can be taken without rebellion, is this seed of benevolence laid
in the furrow, with tears of hope; but in this broad America of God
and man, where the forest is only now falling, or yet to fall, and the
green earth opened to the inundation of emigrant men from all
quarters of oppression and guilt; here, where not a family, not a few
men, but mankind, shall say what shall be; here, we ask, Shall it be
War, or shall it be Peace?
VI
THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW