Global Culture Exam 2

"divided city"

The city of Rio de Janeiro is divided between the North and South zones, and there is a strong sense of regionalism among this population of people. The South zone is the location of all of the famous beaches and the touristy-friendly wealthy areas. The North is less wealthy and this idea of a divided city flips on notion on the roles between North and South. The North and South is mainly divided in terms of wealth, due to a small minority of the population owning land.

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

The debate about cultural imperialism centers on the fear that American popular culture has become a vehicle for transforming cultures everywhere. American consumer culture, in its pervasiveness, is proof of the strength of US nationalism, the US as a mega-brand is the inspirational model for many developing postcolonial nations. What this charge also brings to the forefront is the continuing tension between the local 'imagined community' of the geo-political nation and the multiplicity of 'imagined worlds' created by globalization, as well as by competing nationalisms within the framework of internationalization. Within such a cultural climate, it is important to analyze media commodities such as Worlds Apart, as topical programming based on audi- ence research that addresses social fears and desires, and where the re-branding of the 'imagined community' validates the political relevance of popular culture.

Roots and Routes

Wesolowski and her companions trip to Angola was to create a stronger connection to the imagined roots of the expressive practice to which they had dedicated their lives.the story of an encounter between Brazilian and Angolan capoeiristas and the complicated convergence of the "roots" and "routes" of an embodied diasporic expressive practice. A process of reciprocal imaginings occurred: while the Brazilian capoeiristas imagined Angola as holding the generative roots of their art form, the young Angolan capoeiristas who grew up in a war that devastated many local expressive practices, imagined Brazil as the preserver and promoter of their cultural roots. Along with this twinned desire to recuperate lost roots and reconnect with an African history, however, was also a joint project that looks to the future rather than the past. This future is spatially located neither in Africa or Brazil but in the transnational movement of a commodified expressive culture and embodied practice: both parties from opposite sides of the Atlantic imagine capoeira as a route to a new kind of global cosmopolitanism.

Ritual: separation, liminality, reintegration

What one seeks is a transformative experience that goes to the root of each person's being. Obviously moved by moments of deep encounter with "remembered" pasts, many people on the McDonald's tour expressed a sense of belonging.The tour itself appeared as carefully crafted as a Turnerian "ritual process" in which stages of separation, liminality, and reintegration produced social transformation (Turner 1969). In the case of this tour, participants were pressed to rearticulate their identities within particular narratives of family and homeland—narratives that allowed the participants to reaffirm their sense of being successful American consumers, but with a culturally privileged difference.Furthermore, the wealth of familiar and powerful public imagery concerning slavery as well as African culture employed during the tour came together with the materiality of the tourist visit to produce a sense of personal involvement. The tourist as pilgrim, produced as a frame of experience, in turn enabled the trope of collective memory—the central trope of African American identity discourse—as both oppositional creed and American affirmation

Cyborg

A cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. It applies to an organism that has restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on some sort of feedback

Capoeira

A fight/dance/game that incorporates martial arts, acrobatics, dance, percussive music and call-and-response singing. Emerging in Brazil several hundred years ago, capoeira probably developed out of an amalgamation of various dance and martial practices that journeyed with captured Africans from the Portuguese slaving ports of Luanda and Benguela, Angola to the ports of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The paucity of historical documentation of capoeira prior to the 19th century and the complicated relationship the practice has had with national and racial politics in Brazil since has led to much debate and competing theories on the exact place of origin.

Favela chic

A term to describe the gritty glamour that surrounds favelas, and specifically Rocinha's narco-world. Larkins uses the term to describe Ja Rule's ability to build material and symbolic capital through performing in a favela. Ja Rule had armed traffickers ensuring his security in a so-called war zone, allowing the production of this favela staged narrative to confirm his gangsta status.

African Diaspora

African Diaspora is the term commonly used to describe the mass dispersion of peoples from Africa during the Transatlantic Slave Trades, from the 1500s to the 1800s. This Diaspora took millions of people from Western and Central Africa to different regions throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. The diasporic expressive practice of "going home" challenges the spatial and temporal conceptualization of the diaspora as "homeland and peripheries" and "past and present" in which Africa figures as a static, traditional place of origins, and the "new world" as dynamic, innovative and future-oriented.

Utopia

An imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities. Utopian ideals often place emphasis on egalitarian principles of equality in economics, government and justice, though by no means exclusively, with the method and structure of proposed implementation varying based on ideology.

Angola - Luanda/Benguela

Angola, along with other African locales, has become the newest node in the robust transnational circuitry of capoeira that has become, in the last quarter century, a highly visible global practice and youth culture

Pocket Capitalism and Virtual Intimacy

Anne Allison

Arrastao/Rolezinho

Arrastoes is the resurgence of widespread beach hold-ups where the poorer citizens came by bus to wealthy beach locations and stole the wealth from Brazilians and tourists, a resurgence of gang robberies. Similarly, rolezinho is a new movement in which favela residents conduct organized strolls through the elite spaces of the city's luxury shopping malls.

BOPE

BOPE is a special police unit of the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro State in Brazil. Due to the nature of crime in favelas, BOPE units have extensive experience in urban warfare as well as progression in confined and restricted environments. It also utilizes equipment deemed more powerful than traditional civilian law enforcement. The punishing face of the state is embodied by them.

Orfeu Negro

Black Orpheus is a Brazilian film that is set in the modern context of a favela during Carnaval. We only watched the introduction however samba music was extremely present in the background as well as black women carrying water and a boy flying a kite.

Racial democracy

Brazil brands itself as a racial democracy which serves as an ideology for its people where there apparently no sense of racism, however there is a strong sense of classism that is not really acknowledged. . Brazilians do not view each other through the lens of race and do not harbor racial prejudice towards one another. Because of that, while social mobility of Brazilians may be constrained by many factors, gender and class included, racial discrimination is considered irrelevant.

"Humming This Song Trying To Remember The Way Another One Goes": Intermedia Conversations in a Southern Vernacular

Brendan Greeves

Cidade de Deus

City of God depicts the growth of organized crime in the Cidade de Deus suburb of Rio de Janeiro, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, with the closure of the film depicting the war between the drug dealer Li'l Zé and vigilante-turned-criminal Knockout Ned. While watching the film liveliness with samba music, unnecessary and spectacular use of violence, scenes of the beach, as well as the black funk movement in Rio are present. The film shows the hyper realized violences and aesthetics violence but I question the purpose of these motives.

Cidade de Homens

City of Men is a 2007 Brazilian TV series and later turned film that takes place in a favela. in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian big city jungle. The story is told in short, fast alternating scenes from the viewpoints of two sets of characters, all youngsters, but from both sides of unequal life: generally dark-skinned street-kids, which rarely come to anything better then begging and street crime, and generally white boys from the middle and upper classes, who have a shot at a better future thanks to an actual education. Yet each group simultaneously hates, fears and envies the other at some level when their worlds physically touch but socially remain unbridgeable.

UPP

Community policing, the police are establishing and working with the community. There are new young recruit but also career police that have been working for a while and are corrupt because they are paid off. The system of policing is not paid well and the use of fresh blood will help because they will not have connections and are inexperienced.

"cram schools"

Cram schools are specialized schools that train their students to meet particular goals such as achieving good marks or passing the entrance examinations of high schools or universities. Many Japanese students feel relentless pressure to get ahead so many kids attend a full day at school and then a few additional hours of cram school in the evening. Kumon is an example of a cram school in the United States.

Bass 101: Miami, Rio and the Global Music South

David Font-Navarrete

Olympic Exception

Demonstrates how states of exception can be tied to global image making as Brazil prepare to enter the world stage. The favela is the target and there is a new spectacle of favela integration and social progress masking the fact that poor communities are being torn down and residents pushed to the outskirts. Larkin's term of pacification applies to the Olympic state of exception, as bare life (no identity or citizenship, vulnerability, afloat, favelas are zones that don't acknowledge citizens) does not result in torture or death but can authorize all sorts of other activities as well. The ongoing threat of the favela is used to justify exceptional action that meets certain government development goals. Moreover, traffickers cite government failures to improves the lives of residents through security measures.

"soft power"

Describes the ability to attract and co-opt rather than by coercion (hard power), using force or giving money as a means of persuasion. Soft power is the ability to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. A defining feature of soft power is that it is noncoercive; the currency of soft power is culture, political values, and foreign policies

Hybridity and K-pop

Doobo Shim

The Spectacular Favela

Erika Larkins

everyday violence

Everyday violence functions as a normalized type of violence in which people become desensitized to and people accept their social positions within this ranking. People are accepting to be subject to violence such as through poverty and militarized policing.

Favela

Favela is the term used to describe the slums or shanty terms located within Brazil. The dynamics of the community within favelas are particularly interesting as social, economical, political and cultural issues often arise. The relationships between the residents of the favela, the traffickers and the police expose a complex web that further perpetuates the workings and systematic issues embedded within this community. The violence present in favelas is often capitalized, not only consuming the bodies of traffickers and cops while keeping the poor marginalized but also being a commercially viable by-prodcut of an ongoing capitalist enterprise. Tours of favelas are common and often allow tourists and the media to see a performance of spectacular violence at hand.

Paul Gilroy: "Black Atlantic"

From my vantage point, Bass represents an instructive break in what Paul Gilroy describes as the relational network of the Black Atlantic, a web in which culture materials seem especially susceptible to radical reductions. Aesthetic abstractions and neologisms seem capable of displacing and detaching cultural materials, reducing them to "timeless" cultural data that can be exchanged without the direct human relationships or embodied senses of history. Bass also represents an intersection of two closely-related discourses regarding authenticity in music (and, by extension, culture): one grounded in Hip Hop, the other grounded in World Music. And while questions about authenticity in either vein may indeed "seem quaint" (Neal 69), they also seem persistent. Bass exemplifies the difficulty in providing a single answer to Gilroy's challenge: "Can there be a blackness that connects, articulates, synchronizes experiences and histories across the diaspora space?" ("It's a Family Affair" 308). Through the prism of Bass, answers to this question—plural, layered, and varied—insist that we recognize complex, intimate relationships between blackness, the US South, and the Global South.

Cultural imperialism

Globalization is viewed as an outgrowth of cultural imperialism. In Shim's reading, she discusses that the forces of globalization are usually American, and they subjugate weaker, national/cultural identities.

Glocal

Local cultural agents and actors interact and negotiate with global forms

"Roots tours"

In 1994 McDonald's provided the financial backing for a "homeland" tour for African Americans to travel to Africa in search of their roots. The tour was inspired by Alex Haley, author of Roofs (1976). For McDonald's to base a tour on Roots was not just an incidental choice; it was a reaffirmation of the American identity of African Americans even as it brought them to Africa. Roots tourism is basically tourism searching for ones roots, in particular specification with African Americans back to Africa or Jewish people back to Israel. In the case of Ebron's article, the African Americans travel to Senegal, visiting Goree Island and then Gambia.

Worlds Apart

Ishita Roy

Alex Haley: Roots

It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and later follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley.

The American South in the Global World

James Peacock

New Utopia

Jerome K Jerome

Imagining Brazil in Africa

Katya Wesolowski

The Perfect Match

Ken Liu

embodied consumption

Larkins describes the new market for favela tourism as "the embodied consumption of the violent favela brand." The principal objection to the tourism industry in Rocinha is the limited economic and representational benefit that residents receive. This, Larkins argues, is yet another form of violence that ultimately marginalizes residents and benefits only a small number of outside individuals who profit from the industry. The mobility of the wealthier classes in the global context are able to experience embodied consumption through participation in favela tours.

spectacular violence

Larkins writes that armed violence, at the hands of traffickers and police alike, is "not quiet or silent but performative." It is subsequently consumed by both Brazilian and international audiences, through news coverage, music videos, films and video games. Understanding how these processes of production and commodification interact is therefore critical when considering the role of Rocinha both in the city of Rio and in the context of the newer global imagining of favelas. Many of the police invasions Larkins observed were similarly staged for public consumption. Though these operations usually led to minimal direct confrontation, as traffickers were often warned beforehand, the representation of these events "as a clash between heroic forces of the state and enemy gang members is fundamental to understanding how the favela is policed." The theatricality of policing in Rocinha is conducive both to the circulation of news coverage and for subsequent depictions of the favela as a de facto war zone in popular culture

world fairs

NGC's cross-cultural programming also utilizes fetishized codes of primi- tiveness to situate developing postcolonial nations in the chrono-political space of a pre-industrial past, which American participants/viewers can safely visit and consume, like the artificially resurrected anthropological space of the World Fairs and museums. American viewers of/participants in Worlds Apart are encouraged to feel part of a global human 'race', even as the storyline pro- motes the superiority of the American 'race' within an epidermal ranking of nations. Within this schema, race and socio-economic class become conflated, so that people of color are equated with 'culture', and whiteness becomes syn- onymous with modern 'civilization'. There is, consequently, no perceived need on the part of the program's producers to throw the participants into the urban spaces of the Third World. Instead, the rural backdrop of the Other's space confirms that modernity and urbanity only belong to developed nations.

nation-branding

Nation Branding is a concept through which marketing techniques are used to fix the tarnished image of a nation in order to attract investment, visitors or skilled labor. Nations looking to market themselves favorably seek a unique identity 'that can be articulated as a clear point of difference' from other countries. The influence of globalization has caused certain countries to develop their national identity by bolstering their brand image. Nation- branding is a strategic act to secure ideological terrain in the global/national cultural imaginary, and symbolically reinforce the notion of a 'natural' hierarchy of nations within the world order.

Tourists as Pilgrims

Paulla Ebron

adventure tourism

Reference how foreign involvement in developing countries attempt to manipulate the daily experiences of lower class residents in favelas. Adventure tourism allows travelers to be able to feel the exhilaration and excitement from the media sensationalized perspective of the alternative lifestyle without having to take part in it. The residents felt as if they were being misrepresented as a hyper-violent group of people. Furthermore, neither of the populations in these environments was given the opportunity to say anything to change that representation of themselves in media. These tours are often structured to dramatize the violence and suffering favelas face, and tend to only give a limited view of what the region is like. While some companies are changing these tours by giving residents a chance to conduct tours to make the experience more authentic, many residents take offense to these tours. They feel as though they are being placed on display in manner resembling safari tours for the sake of making tourists feel better about themselves. Although some people have been able to make a profit from tourists, donations are typically limited when present, and usually do not occur.

Rocinha

Rocinha is the largest favela in Brazil and located in the South zone. Most of the favela is on a very steep hill and is located near the beach.

Hybridity

Shim approach states that discourses identify cultural hybridity and investigate power relations between periphery and center from the perspective of postcolonial criticism. Hybridity reveals itself as new practices of cultural and perforative e expression. For example, locals appropriate global goods, conventions and styles. Shim views hybridity as a communicative practices that consists of sociopolitical and economic arrangements.

"The Empire Strikes Back"

Shim refers to Korea as a "sub Empire" enjoying the historical juncture of media liberalization in Asia. Cultural hybridization has occurred as local cultural agents and actors interact and negotiate with global forms, using them as resources through which Koreans construct their own cultural spaces.

Koeran Wave/kim chic

Specifically, more and more heads are turning towards South Korea, where the youth are quickly creating a new world in which their creativity and passion can be fully expressed through popular culture. K-pop describes contemporary popular music of South Korea. The genre originated in the 1990s and gained wide popularity across Asia, also known as "Hallyu." Korean pop culture is sung in Korean; however, the visual aspects of K-pop are just as important as the audio. Out of pure observation, Korean pop evokes a brighter and flashier essence when compared to Western pop culture. , K-pop can be seen as a product of globalization and liberalization of Korea's political and cultural environments. Doobo Shim states "the Korean Wave is indebted to the media liberalization that swept across Asia in the 1990s" (28). The liberalization could be the cause of cultural development. The Korean Wave is a vision of modernity in which the youth play the most important role. Clearly, South Korea is flourishing in cultural mediums with far reaching economic and creative impact.

structural violence

Structural violence relates to the systematic forms of racism, poverty, lack of opportunity, discrimination and oppression that exists both within the favelas and on a global scale. Structural violence is represented in the Spectacular Violence in various forms such as the mere fact that global structural inequalities exist and where certain populations have the means to travel and allow the misery of others to be a form of commodification.

regionalism

The expression of a common sense of identity and purpose combined with the creation and implementation of institutions that express a particular identity and shape collective action within a geographical region.

Favela, Inc/Ethnicity Inc

The favela has become an internationally recognized element of Rio de Janeiro's landscape, serving as a backdrop for countless music videos, films and video games. The representation of favelas in these mediums has led foreign audiences to view them as places of violence, organized crime and poverty. Larkins argues that the increased demand for a favela aesthetic has contributed to the production of what she identifies as "Favela, Inc." In her analyses of favela representations in various mediums, Larkins points out that producers of this "brand" almost never come from the favelas they depict, and base their curated favela on stereotypes and mass market appeal. She explains, "The aesthetics and discourses of Favela, Inc. obscure the larger historical, economic, and political factors that contribute to the reality they purport to represent." In this sense, "media discourses surrounding the favela are not only about the violence imagined to take place there, but are forms of violence in and of themselves."

solidarity tourism

The idea of solidarity tourism surrounds around individuals from privileged backgrounds having the ability to go into these communities and feel the personal pride of making a difference for a selective period of time. Most of the time these acts of benevolence, or rather paternalism, are unsustainable due to the lack of continuity that is an inherent part of these trips. This reality keeps the tensions between the two cultures very present and also develops an unwelcome dependency on these incoming foreigners.

neocolonialism

The practice of using capitalism, globalization and cultural imperialism to influence a developing country or the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries. Neocolonialism fuels binaries to exist in society and is represented in Roy's reading though the televised portrayal of cross cultural exchange in "Worlds Apart." This show portrays the subaltern in an expected light, and the privileged American grateful for modern society and technology.

Millenial capitalism

The world of endless consumption and accumulation. Allison uses the term to say that in an economy that has shifted according the central role and value around consumption, a speculative and presentist logic has replaced modernist belief in progress organized by hard work and savings.

morro/asfalto

These terms represent the community of Brazil and capture the idea of a divided city. The term morro means hillside or informal city, representing the favelas. The term asfalto means asphalt, and stands not only for the paved streets but also for the full suite of developed urbanism including housing, utilities, security, employment, political inclusion and social and cultural status.

Giorgio Agamben: State of exception

This is the idea that there are moments or states in which allow for all rules of behavior to turn off. Behaviors that are not usually accepted are, and behaviors that wouldn't occur elsewhere occur in these states.

Victor Turner

This structure was deliberately designed by the organizers. As I recount aspects of the tour in an effort to suggest the multilayered dimensions of the "return" journey, as in a Tumerian ritual process, I also analyze the ways temporal and spatial disjunctures experienced by participants (including myself) throughout the journey were resolved at the end of the trip to create a sense of transformation and reintegration. The Turnerian structure of ritual as well as commercialism help establish the course for a discussion of diasporic dreams and desires.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Ursula Le Guin

cariocas

a term used to refer to anything related to Rio de Janeiro, the capital and the homonymous state of Rio de Janeiro. For example, Larkins uses this term to argue that trafficker state appears like an inversion of the larger cariocas state however are deeply intertwined with mainstream Brazilian and global cultures and that favela tourism is driven by tourist's desires to see and consume impoverished carioca slums.

otaku

a young person who is obsessed with computers or particular aspects of popular culture to the detriment of their social skills.

Addictive capitalism (Fredric Jameson)

addiction to the rush of acquisition particularly as it relates to Pokemon. The desire to consume, enforced by the game, appeals to people who are inept at human relationship and are compulsive consumers and taxonomies of brand-name goods in which they invest value and affection.

Dystopia

an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.

Anime/mange

animation and comic books that are central to Japan's culture as they also display a business of cuteness

disembodied consumption

consume images and ideas and notions and Larkins contributes to disembodied consumption through writing her ethnography, however she doesn't want it to contribute to the image and preconceived notions of favelas

Berimbau

fundamental characteristics that mark capoeira as a distinctly African-inspired embodied practice have disappeared. These characteristics include the percussive music that employs an atabaque (drum), agogô (two-toned clapper) and the berimbau, (a musical bow), as well as the call-and-response singing.

syncretic

the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion.

Vernacular

the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region

Global South

the term Global South should be understood as a euphemism for the underprivileged majority of the world's population outside of North America and Western Europe. Global South is often synonymous with Third World, if only semantically. The notion of a Global South becomes an even more coarse distinction as a worldwide North-South divide that figures prominently in theories of globalization. More subtly, it is also important to discern an "internal South" among socioeconomically disadvantaged areas and groups within the borders of the industrialized Global North; likewise, cities in the Global South contain elites whose wealth and lifestyles typify the Global North.

Hikkimori

they are reclusive adolescents or adults who withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement. Hikikomori refers to both the phenomenon in general and the recluses themselves. Hikikomori have been described as loners or "modern-day hermits.

Outsider art

what constitutes as southern art and how vernacular art can appear like outsider art because it is not traditional in an artistic sense