Calypso, Identity and Social Influence, The Trinidadian Experience seeks to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre... Show more Calypso, Identity and Social Influence, The Trinidadian Experience seeks to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre as a mechanism or as part of a mechanism that has exerted on-going social influence within Trinidadian society. It chronicles the evolution of calypso music from its emergence in Trinidad, and highlights contingent institutions, peculiar traditions, and salient events that have shaped the socio-political and cultural landscape there during the Colonial and Post-Colonial periods. The study is descriptive and explorative, and follows an interdisciplinary route that integrates historical fact, socio-anthropological philosophy, psychological, musicological, and ethnomusicological thought, and notes from my own ethnographic research. It analyses a large corpus of written material, and audio/visual recordings of music performance and participation in calypso and carnival-related events by practitioners and audiences alike. Show less
Prior to the abolishing of Apartheid rule in 1994 several major South African white writers wrote a novel set on a South African farm. Likewise, in the decades that preceded the institutionalising... Show morePrior to the abolishing of Apartheid rule in 1994 several major South African white writers wrote a novel set on a South African farm. Likewise, in the decades that preceded the institutionalising of Apartheid, several farm novels were published, but with an entirely different message. In Unheimlich moederland insights from several disciplines are used to show how major changes in social-economic relations, land rights and the construction of cultural identity in and between these two periods were reflected on farms and in farm novels. Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny) – those things within ones own realm that are strange and therefore frightening – , a concept coming from Freud, but also used by structuralists and cultural critics, proofs to be capable to explain certain effects of (post-)colonalism and interculturality. Uncanny for instance, were the rising dead or venging powers of nature that in late 20th century farm novels undermined white hegemony. Death is a plural metaphor: in a literary as well as in a social context, it refers to transgressing boundaries, change and chaos but also to land rights and patrimonie and from there to the establishing of spatial and identifying boundaries. In text as in real life, the structure of a rite de passage (separation, liminality, reintegration) is being used to link death to life, and thus to control it. Show less
