Academic literature on the topic 'Xhosa (African people) – Music – Social aspects'

This paper explores the construction of cultural identities through contemporary music from Madagascar, in particular the songs by Dama — singer-song-writer of the eponymous group of musicians- the Mahaleo. Specific focus is on the role that the discourses of and about popular Malagasy music play for the identity constructions of Malagasy people in Madagascar and abroad. Discussions about contemporary African music on the media and in the cultural studies literature, and the record industry’s own appropriation and commercialization of such music as generic ‘world music — tend to neglect the lyrics — and thus the often radical social critique — contained in these songs. Since much of African music is sung in languages not normally known to ‘Western’ audiences, their appreciation hinges on the vibrancy of rhythm and sound, to the exclusion of content. Yet to ‘home’ and ‘diapsoric’ audiences, the texts are of huge significance. Our paper discusses the significance of language choice for popular music in Madagascar in the political movement of 1972 and its aftermath. We will also analyse in detail the lyrics of some typical songs from Mahaleo’s repertoire written by Dama. These will exemplify some of the ways in which the group attempts to encapsulate aspects of Malagasy every-day life, thus providing a cohesive link not only between several generations of Malagasies in Madagascar itself, but even more pronouncedly for those Malagasies who have left Madagascar and settled overseas. Finally, we will show the ways in which audiences create and perform ‘being Malagasy’ through the medium of their popular music, demonstrating the extent to which the project of ‘Mahaleo’ is being reflexively and consciously understood and taken up by their listeners.

This paper directs attention to Abigbo, an outstanding traditional music of Mbaise people of Igbo south, east of the Niger. It gears to interrupt and challenge willful observations by western-oriented music lovers’ derogatory opinion, contrary to music in traditional setting such as ‘Abigbo’. To realize this objective and prove wrong the ill-informed critics, ‘Abigbo’s uniqueness in song rendition and peculiarity in music making is conspicuously examined here as a case study. The origin and development of Abigbo, its uses, and relationship with other aspects of Mbaise culture are discussed in this work. The musical challenges are highlighted with the dance formation, movements/steps and the ensembles costumed critically analyzed. All these are essentially adumbrated in association with music making trends in contemporary Mbaise. Equally reviewed where applicable are Abigbo’s relevance and inevitable roles in achieving the goal of societal well being. Song communication supported with body language and phonic emission via vocals are equally matters of great interest here. Methods employed in the data collection are library source of information obtained from associated printed materials documented in the library shelves. The researcher consulted relevant ones, read through them during desk work, and use their extracts as backup information to the subject of discourse which he initiated. Few of the procured print media materials are equally paraphrased as and when due. Datum is also secured through participant observation. At this juncture, the researcher’s sense of sight and aural perceptions are actively utilized along with retentive memory with the view to capturing the salient points needed for the paper. A few literature reviews that border round music making in rural culture are altogether, examined to guide and back up the thrust of this discourse. Abigbo has proved its worth beyond all reasonable doubt during its performance presentation in Mbaise social culture. The musicians’ close attention to the masses, particularly the zealous ones who are inclined to get at African tribes’ traditional music to subject them to western notation is a spring board to its fame. At this juncture, we resolve that for music making through song communication to logically reign supreme in Abigbo, its practice by interested artistes should be enhanced and encouraged even beyond the ensemble’s environmental origin. This done helps to secure indigenous interest akin to norms and values within the fabric of Mbaise society.

This study aimed to explore the perceived barriers to physical activity among college students Study Design: Qualitative research design Eight focus group discussions on 67 college students aged 18-24 years (48 females, 19 males) was conducted on College premises. Data were analysed using inductive approach. Participants identified a number of obstacles to physical activity. Perceived barriers emerged from the analysis of the data addressed the different dimensions of the socio-ecological framework. The result indicated that the young adults perceived substantial amount of personal, social and environmental factors as barriers such as time constraint, tiredness, stress, family control, safety issues and much more. Understanding the barriers and overcoming the barriers at this stage will be valuable. Health professionals and researchers can use this information to design and implement interventions, strategies and policies to promote the participation in physical activity. This further can help the students to deal with those barriers and can help to instil the habit of regular physical activity in the later adult years.

This paper explores South African hip-hop activist Emile YX?'s work to suggest that he presents an alternative take on mainstream US and South African hip-hop. While it is arguable that a great deal of mainstream hip-hop is commercially co-opted, it is clear that a significant amount of US hip-hop (by Angel Haze or Talib Kweli, for example) and hip-hop beyond the US (by Positive Black Soul, Godessa, Black Noise or Prophets of da City, for example) present alternatives to its co-option. Emile YX? pushes for an alternative to mainstream hip-hop's aesthetics and politics. Foregoing what Prophets of da City call “mindless topics” (Prophets of da City “Cape Crusader”), he employs hip-hop to engage audiences critically about social and political issues, including language and racial identity politics. Significantly, he embraces AfriKaaps, which is a challenge to the hegemonic speech variety of Afrikaans. From Emile's perspective, AfriKaaps preceded Afrikaans because it was spoken by slaves during the Cape colonial era and was later culturally appropriated by Afrikaner Nationalists in the apartheid era to construct white, Afrikaner identity as pure and bounded. AfriKaaps in hip-hop therefore presents an alternative to mainstream US-centric hip-hop in South Africa (via AKA or Cassper Nyovest, for example) as well as Afrikaner Nationalist representations of Afrikaans and race by promoting multilingual hip-hop aesthetics, which was initially advanced by Prophets of da City in the early '90s.Pursuing Alternative TrajectoriesEmile YX?, a former school teacher, started out with the Black Consciousness-aligned hip-hop crew, Black Noise, as a b-boy in the late 1980s before becoming an MC. Black Noise went through a number of iterations, eventually being led by YX? (aka Emile Jansen) after he persuaded the crew not to pursue a mainstream record deal in favour of plotting a career path as independent artists. The crew’s strategy has been to fund the production and distribution of their albums independently and to combine their work as recording and performing artists with their activism. They therefore arranged community workshops at schools and, initially, their local library in the township, Grassy Park, before touring nationally and internationally. By the late 1990s, Jansen established an NGO, Heal the Hood, in order to facilitate collaborative projects with European and South African partners. These partnerships, not only allowed Black Noise crew members to continue working as hip-hip activists, but also created a network through which they could distribute their music and secure further bookings for performances locally and internationally.Jansen’s solo work continued along this trajectory and he has gone on to work on collaborative projects, such as the hip-hop theatre show Afrikaaps, which looks critically at the history of Afrikaans and identity politics, and Mixed Mense, a b-boy show that celebrates African dance traditions and performed at One Mic Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2014 (48 Hours). This artist’s decision not to pursue a mainstream record deal in the early 1990s probably saved Black Noise from being a short-lived pop sensation in favour of pursuing a route that ensured that Cape hip-hop retained its alternative, Black Consciousness-inspired subcultural edge.The activism of Black Noise and Heal the Hood is an example of activists’ efforts to employ hip-hop as a means of engaging youth critically about social and political issues (Haupt, Stealing Empire 158-165). Hence, despite arguments that the seeds for subcultures’ commercial co-option lie in the fact that they speak through commodities (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45), there is evidence of agency despite the global reach of US cultural imperialism. H. Samy Alim’s concept of translocal style communities is useful in this regard. The concept focuses on the “transportability of mobile matrices – sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities” (Alim 104-105). Alim makes the case for agency when he contends, “Although global style communities may indeed grow out of particular sociohistoric originating moments, or moments in which cultural agents take on the project of creating ‘an origin’ (in this case, Afrodiasporic youth in the United States in the 1970s), it is important to note that a global style community is far from a threatening, homogenizing force” (Alim 107).Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of ethnoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, Alim argues that the “persistent dialectical interplay between the local and the global gives rise to the creative linguistic styles that are central to the formation of translocal style communities, and leads into theorizing about glocal stylizations and style as glocal distinctiveness” (Appadurai; Alim 107). His view of globalisation thus accommodates considerations of the extent to which subjects on both the local and global levels are able to exercise agency to produce new or alternative meanings and stylistic practices.Hip-Hop's Translanguaging Challenge to HegemonyJansen’s “Mix en Meng It Op” [“Mix and Blend It / Mix It Up”] offers an example of translocal style by employing translanguaging, code mixing and codeswitching practices. The song’s first verse speaks to the politics of race and language by challenging apartheid-era thinking about purity and mixing:In South Africa is ek coloured and African means black raceFace it, all mense kom van Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionEk’s siek en sat van all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s om te expose onse behoort aan een rasHou vas, ras is las, watch hoe ons die bubble barsPlus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir daai potjie want ons wietie wattie mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSoe hulle moet gemix het om daai clicks to employ(Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; my emphasis)[In South Africa I am coloured and African means black raceFace it, all people come from Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionI’m sick and tired of all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s to expose the fact that we belong top one raceHold on, race is a burden, watch as we burst the bubble Plus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir that pot because we don’t know what the mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSo they must have mixed to employ those clicks]The MC does more than codeswitch or code mix in this verse. The syntax switches from that of English to Afrikaans interchangeably and he is doing more than merely borrowing words and phrases from one language and incorporating it into the other language. In certain instances, he opts to pronounce certain English words and phrases as if they were Afrikaans (for example, “My” and “land’s”). Suresh Canagarajah explains that codeswitching was traditionally “distinguished from code mixing” because it was assumed that codeswitching required “bilingual competence” in order to “switch between [the languages] in fairly contextually appropriate ways with rhetorical and social significance”, while code mixing merely involved “borrowings which are appropriated into one’s language so that using them doesn't require bilingual competence” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, he argues that both of these translingual practices do not require “full or perfect competence” in the languages being mixed and that “these models of hybridity can be socially and rhetorically significant” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, the artist is clearly competent in both English and Afrikaans; in fact, he is also departing from the hegemonic speech varieties of English and Afrikaans in attempts to affirm black modes of speech, which have been negated during apartheid (cf. Haupt “Black Thing”).What the artist seems to be doing is closer to translanguaging, which Canagarajah defines as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). The mix or blend of English and Afrikaans syntax become integrated, thereby performing the very point that Jansen makes about what he calls “the lie of purity” by asserting that the “mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sir” (Emile XY? “Mix en Meng It Op”). This approach is significant because Canagarajah points out that while research shows that translanguaging is “a naturally occurring phenomenon”, it “occurs surreptitiously behind the backs of the teachers in classes that proscribe language mixing” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). Jansen’s performance of translanguaging and challenge to notions of linguistic and racial purity should be read in relation to South Africa’s history of racial segregation during apartheid. Remixing Race/ism and Notions of PurityLegislated apartheid relied on biologically essentialist understandings of race as bounded and fixed and, hence, the categories black and white were treated as polar opposites with those classified as coloured being seen as racially mixed and, therefore, defiled – marked with the shame of miscegenation (Erasmus 16; Haupt, “Black Thing” 176-178). Apart from the negative political and economic consequences of being classified as either black or coloured by the apartheid state (Salo 363; McDonald 11), the internalisation of processes of racial interpellation was arguably damaging to the psyche of black subjects (in the broad inclusive sense) (cf. Fanon; Du Bois). The work of early hip-hop artists like Black Noise and Prophets of da City (POC) was therefore crucial to pointing to alternative modes of speech and self-conception for young people of colour – regardless of whether they self-identified as black or coloured. In the early 1990s, POC lead the way by embracing black modes of speech that employed codeswitching, code mixing and translanguaging as a precursor to the emergence of music genres, such as kwaito, which mixed urban black speech varieties with elements of house music and hip-hop. POC called their performances of Cape Flats speech varieties of English and Afrikaans gamtaal [gam language], which is an appropriation of the term gam, a reference to the curse of Ham and justifications for slavery (Adhikari 95; Haupt Stealing Empire 237). POC’s appropriation of the term gam in celebration of Cape Flats speech varieties challenge the shame attached to coloured identity and the linguistic practices of subjects classified as coloured. On a track called “Gamtaal” off Phunk Phlow, the crew samples an assortment of recordings from Cape Flats speech communities and capture ordinary people speaking in public and domestic spaces (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”). In one audio snippet we hear an older woman saying apologetically, “Onse praatie suiwer Afrikaan nie. Onse praat kombius Afrikaans” (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”).It is this shame for black modes of speech that POC challenges on this celebratory track and Jansen takes this further by both making an argument against notions of racial and linguistic purity and performing an example of translanguaging. This is important in light of research that suggests that dominant research on the creole history of Afrikaans – specifically, the Cape Muslim contribution to Afrikaans – has been overlooked (Davids 15). This oversight effectively amounted to cultural appropriation as the construction of Afrikaans as a ‘pure’ language with Dutch origins served the Afrikaner Nationalist project when the National Party came into power in 1948 and began to justify its plans to implement legislated apartheid. POC’s act of appropriating the denigrated term gamtaal in service of a Black Consciousness-inspired affirmation of colouredness, which they position as part of the black experience, thus points to alternative ways in which people of colour cand both express and define themselves in defiance of apartheid.Jansen’s work with the hip-hop theater project Afrikaaps reconceptualised gamtaal as Afrikaaps, a combination of the term Afrikaans and Kaaps. Kaaps means from the Cape – as in Cape Town (the city) or the Cape Flats, which is where many people classified as coloured were forcibly relocated under the Group Areas Act under apartheid (cf. McDonald; Salo; Alim and Haupt). Taking its cue from POC and Brasse vannie Kaap’s Mr FAT, who asserted that “gamtaal is legal” (Haupt, “Black Thing” 176), the Afrikaaps cast sang, “Afrikaaps is legal” (Afrikaaps). Conclusion: Agency and the Transportability of Mobile MatricesJansen pursues this line of thought by contending that the construction of Shaka Zulu’s kingdom involved mixing many tribes (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”), thereby alluding to arguments that narratives about Shaka Zulu were developed in service of Zulu nationalism to construct Zulu identity as bounded and fixed (Harries 105). Such constructions were essential to the apartheid state's justifications for establishing Bantustans, separate homelands established along the lines of clearly defined and differentiated ethnic identities (Harries 105). Writing about the use of myths and symbols during apartheid, Patrick Harries argues that in Kwazulu, “the governing Inkatha Freedom Party ... created a vivid and sophisticated vision of the Zulu past” (Harries 105). Likewise, Emile YX? contends that isiXhosa’s clicks come from the Khoi (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; Afrikaaps). Hence, the idea of the Khoi San’s lineage and history as being separate from that of other African communities in Southern Africa is challenged. He thus challenges the idea of pure Zulu or Xhosa identities and drives the point home by sampling traditional Zulu music, as opposed to conventional hip-hop beats.Effectively, colonial strategies of tribalisation as a divide and rule strategy through the reification of linguistic and cultural practices are challenged, thereby reminding us of the “transportability of mobile matrices” and “fluidity of identities” (Alim 104, 105). In short, identities as well as cultural and linguistic practices were never bounded and static, but always-already hybrid, being constantly made and remade in a series of negotiations. This perspective is in line with research that demonstrates that race is socially and politically constructed and discredits biologically essentialist understandings of race (Yudell 13-14; Tattersall and De Salle 3). This is not to ignore the asymmetrical relations of power that enable cultural appropriation and racism (Hart 138), be it in the context of legislated apartheid, colonialism or in the age of corporate globalisation or Empire (cf. Haupt, Static; Hardt & Negri). But, even here, as Alim suggests, one should not underestimate the agency of subjects on the local level to produce alternative forms of expression and self-representation.ReferencesAdhikari, Mohamed. "The Sons of Ham: Slavery and the Making of Coloured Identity." South African Historical Journal 27.1 (1992): 95-112.Alim, H. Samy “Translocal Style Communities: Hip Hop Youth as Cultural Theorists of Style, Language and Globalization”. Pragmatics 19.1 (2009):103-127. Alim, H. Samy, and Adam Haupt. “Reviving Soul(s): Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. & South Africa”. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice. Ed. Django Paris and H. Samy Alim. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2017 (forthcoming). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Modernity. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Canagarajah, Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London & New York: Routledge, 2013.Canagarajah, Suresh. “Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging”. The Modern Language Journal 95.3 (2011): 401-417.Creese, Angela, and Adrian Blackledge. “Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching?” The Modern Language Journal 94.1 (2010): 103-115. Davids, Achmat. The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims. Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2011.Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Journal of Pan African Studies, 1963, 2009 (eBook).Erasmus, Zimitri. “Introduction.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001.Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness”. Black Skins, White Masks. London: Pluto Press: London, 1986. 48 Hours. “Black Noise to Perform at Kennedy Center in the USA”. 11 Mar. 2014. <http://48hours.co.za/2014/03/11/black-noise-to-perform-at-kennedy-center-in-the-usa/>. Haupt, Adam. Static: Race & Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media & Film. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012.———. Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. ———. “Black Thing: Hip-Hop Nationalism, ‘Race’ and Gender in Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001.Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. London & Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000.Hart, J. “Translating and Resisting Empire: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Studies”. Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. Eds. B. Ziff and P.V. Roa. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.Harries, Patrick. “Imagery, Symbolism and Tradition in a South African Bantustan: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha, and Zulu History”. History and Theory 32.4, Beiheft 32: History Making in Africa (1993): 105-125. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.MacDonald, Michael. Why Race Matters in South Africa. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press: Scottsville, 2006.Salo, Elaine. “Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats.” Journal of European Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 345–65.Tattersall, Ian, and Rob De Salle. Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011.TheatreAfrikaaps. Afrikaaps. The Glasshouse, 2011.FilmsValley, Dylan, dir. Afrikaaps. Plexus Films, 2010. MusicProphets of da City. “Gamtaal.” Phunk Phlow. South Africa: Ku Shu Shu, 1995.Prophets of da City. “Cape Crusader.” Ghetto Code. South Africa: Ku Shu Shu & Ghetto Ruff, 1997.YX?, Emile. “Mix En Meng It Op.” Take Our Power Back. Cape Town: Cape Flats Uprising Records, 2015.

“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies Popular music is firmly rooted within realist practice, or what has been called the "culture of authenticity" associated with modernism. As Lawrence Grossberg notes, the accelleration of the rate of change in modern life caused, in post-war youth culture, an identity crisis or "lived contradiction" that gave rock (particularly) and popular music (generally) a peculiar position in regard to notions of authenticity. Grossberg places rock's authenticity within the "difference" it maintains from other cultural forms, and notes that its difference "can be justified aesthetically or ideologically, or in terms of the social position of the audiences, or by the economics of its production, or through the measure of its popularity or the statement of its politics" (205-6). Popular music scholars have not adequately addressed issues of authenticity and individuality. Two of the most important questions to be asked are: How is authenticity communicated in popular music? What is the site of the interpretation of authenticity? It is important to ask about sound, technology, about the attempt to understand the ideal and the image, the natural and artificial. It is these that make clear the strongest connections between popular music and contemporary culture. Popular music is a particularly appropriate site for the study of authenticity as a cultural category, for several reasons. For one thing, other media do not follow us, as aural media do, into malls, elevators, cars, planes. Nor do they wait for us, as a tape player paused and ready to play. What is important is not that music is "everywhere" but, to borrow from Vivian Sobchack, that it creates a "here" that can be transported anywhere. In fact, we are able to walk around enveloped by a personal aural environment, thanks to a Sony Walkman.1 Also, it is more difficult to shut out the aural than the visual. Closing one's ears does not entirely shut out sound. There is, additionally, the sense that sound and music are interpreted from within, that is, that they resonate through and within the body, and as such engage with one's self in a fashion that coincides with Charles Taylor's claim that the "ideal of authenticity" is an inner-directed one. It must be noted that authenticity is not, however, communicated only via music, but via text and image. Grossberg noted the "primacy of sound" in rock music, and the important link between music, visual image, and authenticity: Visual style as conceived in rock culture is usually the stage for an outrageous and self-conscious inauthenticity... . It was here -- in its visual presentation -- that rock often most explicitly manifested both an ironic resistance to the dominant culture and its sympathies with the business of entertainment ... . The demand for live performance has always expressed the desire for the visual mark (and proof) of authenticity. (208) But that relationship can also be reversed: Music and sound serve in some instances to provide the aural mark and proof of authenticity. Consider, for instance, the "tear" in the voice that Jensen identifies in Hank Williams's singing, and in that of Patsy Cline. For the latter, voicing, in this sense, was particularly important, as it meant more than a singing style, it also involved matters of self-identity, as Jensen appropriately associates with the move of country music from "hometown" to "uptown" (101). Cline's move toward a more "uptown" style involved her visual image, too. At a significant turning point in her career, Faron Young noted, Cline "left that country girl look in those western outfits behind and opted for a slicker appearance in dresses and high fashion gowns" (Jensen 101). Popular music has forged a link with visual media, and in some sense music itself has become more visual (though not necessarily less aural) the more it has engaged with industrial processes in the entertainment industry. For example, engagement with music videos and film soundtracks has made music a part of the larger convergence of mass media forms. Alongside that convergence, the use of music in visual media has come to serve as adjunct to visual symbolisation. One only need observe the increasingly commercial uses to which music is put (as in advertising, film soundtracks and music videos) to note ways in which music serves image. In the literature from a variety of disciplines, including communication, art and music, it has been argued that music videos are the visualisation of music. But in many respects the opposite is true. Music videos are the auralisation of the visual. Music serves many of the same purposes as sound does generally in visual media. One can find a strong argument for the use of sound as supplement to visual media in Silverman's and Altman's work. For Silverman, sound in cinema has largely been overlooked (pun intended) in favor of the visual image, but sound is a more effective (and perhaps necessary) element for willful suspension of disbelief. One may see this as well in the development of Dolby Surround Sound, and in increased emphasis on sound engineering among video and computer game makers, as well as the development of sub-woofers and high-fidelity speakers as computer peripherals. Another way that sound has become more closely associated with the visual is through the ongoing evolution of marketing demands within the popular music industry that increasingly rely on visual media and force image to the front. Internet technologies, particularly the WorldWideWeb (WWW), are also evidence of a merging of the visual and aural (see Hayward). The development of low-cost desktop video equipment and WWW publishing, CD-i, CD-ROM, DVD, and other technologies, has meant that visual images continue to form part of the industrial routine of the music business. The decrease in cost of many of these technologies has also led to the adoption of such routines among individual musicians, small/independent labels, and producers seeking to mimic the resources of major labels (a practice that has become considerably easier via the Internet, as it is difficult to determine capital resources solely from a WWW site). Yet there is another facet to the evolution of the link between the aural and visual. Sound has become more visual by way of its representation during its production (a representation, and process, that has largely been ignored in popular music studies). That representation has to do with the digitisation of sound, and the subsequent transformation sound and music can undergo after being digitised and portrayed on a computer screen. Once digitised, sound can be made visual in any number of ways, through traditional methods like music notation, through representation as audio waveform, by way of MIDI notation, bit streams, or through representation as shapes and colors (as in recent software applications particularly for children, like Making Music by Morton Subotnick). The impetus for these representations comes from the desire for increased control over sound (see Jones, Rock Formation) and such control seems most easily accomplished by way of computers and their concomitant visual technologies (monitors, printers). To make computers useful tools for sound recording it is necessary to employ some form of visual representation for the aural, and the flexibility of modern computers allows for new modes of predominately visual representation. Each of these connections between the aural and visual is in turn related to technology, for as audio technology develops within the entertainment industry it makes sense for synergistic development to occur with visual media technologies. Yet popular music scholars routinely analyse aural and visual media in isolation from one another. The challenge for popular music studies and music philosophy posed by visual media technologies, that they must attend to spatiality and context (both visual and aural), has not been taken up. Until such time as it is, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to engage issues of authenticity, because they will remain rootless instead of situated within the experience of music as fully sensual (in some cases even synaesthetic). Most of the traditional judgments of authenticity among music critics and many popular music scholars involve space and time, the former in terms of the movement of music across cultures and the latter in terms of history. None rely on notions of the "situatedness" of the listener or musicmaker in a particular aural, visual and historical space. Part of the reason for the lack of such an understanding arises from the very means by which popular music is created. We have become accustomed to understanding music as manipulation of sound, and so far as most modern music production is concerned such manipulation occurs as much visually as aurally, by cutting, pasting and otherwise altering audio waveforms on a computer screen. Musicians no more record music than they record fingering; they engage in sound recording. And recording engineers and producers rely less and less on sound and more on sight to determine whether a recording conforms to the demands of digital reproduction.2 Sound, particularly when joined with the visual, becomes a means to build and manipulate the environment, virtual and non-virtual (see Jones, "Sound"). Sound & Music As we construct space through sound, both in terms of audio production (e.g., the use of reverberation devices in recording studios) and in terms of everyday life (e.g., perception of aural stimuli, whether by ear or vibration in the body, from points surrounding us), we centre it within experience. Sound combines the psychological and physiological. Audio engineer George Massenburg noted that in film theaters: You couldn't utilise the full 360-degree sound space for music because there was an "exit sign" phenomena [sic]. If you had a lot of audio going on in the back, people would have a natural inclination to turn around and stare at the back of the room. (Massenburg 79-80) However, he went on to say, beyond observations of such reactions to multichannel sound technology, "we don't know very much". Research in psychoacoustics being used to develop virtual audio systems relies on such reactions and on a notion of human hardwiring for stimulus response (see Jones, "Sense"). But a major stumbling block toward the development of those systems is that none are able to account for individual listeners' perceptions. It is therefore important to consider the individual along with the social dimension in discussions of sound and music. For instance, the term "sound" is deployed in popular music to signify several things, all of which have to do with music or musical performance, but none of which is music. So, for instance, musical groups or performers can have a "sound", but it is distinguishable from what notes they play. Entire music scenes can have "sounds", but the music within such scenes is clearly distinct and differentiated. For the study of popular music this is a significant but often overlooked dimension. As Grossberg argues, "the authenticity of rock was measured by its sound" (207). Visually, he says, popular music is suspect and often inauthentic (sometimes purposefully so), and it is grounded in the aural. Similarly in country music Jensen notes that the "Nashville Sound" continually evoked conflicting definitions among fans and musicians, but that: The music itself was the arena in and through which claims about the Nashville Sound's authenticity were played out. A certain sound (steel guitar, with fiddle) was deemed "hard" or "pure" country, in spite of its own commercial history. (84) One should, therefore, attend to the interpretive acts associated with sound and its meaning. But why has not popular music studies engaged in systematic analysis of sound at the level of the individual as well as the social? As John Shepherd put it, "little cultural theoretical work in music is concerned with music's sounds" ("Value" 174). Why should this be a cause for concern? First, because Shepherd claims that sound is not "meaningful" in the traditional sense. Second, because it leads us to re-examine the question long set to the side in popular music studies: What is music? The structural homology, the connection between meaning and social formation, is a foundation upon which the concept of authenticity in popular music stands. Yet the ability to label a particular piece of music "good" shifts from moment to moment, and place to place. Frith understates the problem when he writes that "it is difficult ... to say how musical texts mean or represent something, and it is difficult to isolate structures of musical creation or control" (56). Shepherd attempts to overcome this difficulty by emphasising that: Music is a social medium in sound. What [this] means ... is that the sounds of music provide constantly moving and complex matrices of sounds in which individuals may invest their own meanings ... [however] while the matrices of sounds which seemingly constitute an individual "piece" of music can accommodate a range of meanings, and thereby allow for negotiability of meaning, they cannot accommodate all possible meanings. (Shepherd, "Art") It must be acknowledged that authenticity is constructed, and that in itself is an argument against the most common way to think of authenticity. If authenticity implies something about the "pure" state of an object or symbol then surely such a state is connected to some "objective" rendering, one not possible according to Shepherd's claims. In some sense, then, authenticity is autonomous, its materialisation springs not from any necessary connection to sound, image, text, but from individual acts of interpretation, typically within what in literary criticism has come to be known as "interpretive communities". It is not hard to illustrate the point by generalising and observing that rock's notion of authenticity is captured in terms of songwriting, but that songwriters are typically identified with places (e.g. Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Liverpool, etc.). In this way there is an obvious connection between authenticity and authorship (see Jones, "Popular Music Studies") and geography (as well in terms of musical "scenes", e.g. the "Philly Sound", the "Sun Sound", etc.). The important thing to note is the resultant connection between the symbolic and the physical worlds rooted (pun intended) in geography. As Redhead & Street put it: The idea of "roots" refers to a number of aspects of the musical process. There is the audience in which the musician's career is rooted ... . Another notion of roots refers to music. Here the idea is that the sounds and the style of the music should continue to resemble the source from which it sprang ... . The issue ... can be detected in the argument of those who raise doubts about the use of musical high-technology by African artists. A final version of roots applies to the artist's sociological origins. (180) It is important, consequently, to note that new technologies, particularly ones associated with the distribution of music, are of increasing importance in regulating the tension between alienation and progress mentioned earlier, as they are technologies not simply of musical production and consumption, but of geography. That the tension they mediate is most readily apparent in legal skirmishes during an unsettled era for copyright law (see Brown) should not distract scholars from understanding their cultural significance. These technologies are, on the one hand, "liberating" (see Hayward, Young, and Marsh) insofar as they permit greater geographical "reach" and thus greater marketing opportunities (see Fromartz), but on the other hand they permit less commercial control, insofar as they permit digitised music to freely circulate without restriction or compensation, to the chagrin of copyright enthusiasts. They also create opportunities for musical collaboration (see Hayward) between performers in different zones of time and space, on a scale unmatched since the development of multitracking enabled the layering of sound. Most importantly, these technologies open spaces for the construction of authenticity that have hitherto been unavailable, particularly across distances that have largely separated cultures and fan communities (see Paul). The technologies of Internetworking provide yet another way to make connections between authenticity, music and sound. Community and locality (as Redhead & Street, as well as others like Sara Cohen and Ruth Finnegan, note) are the elements used by audience and artist alike to understand the authenticity of a performer or performance. The lived experience of an artist, in a particular nexus of time and space, is to be somehow communicated via music and interpreted "properly" by an audience. But technologies of Internetworking permit the construction of alternative spaces, times and identities. In no small way that has also been the situation with the mediation of music via most recordings. They are constructed with a sense of space, consumed within particular spaces, at particular times, in individual, most often private, settings. What the network technologies have wrought is a networked audience for music that is linked globally but rooted in the local. To put it another way, the range of possibilities when it comes to interpretive communities has widened, but the experience of music has not significantly shifted, that is, the listener experiences music individually, and locally. Musical activity, whether it is defined as cultural or commercial practice, is neither flat nor autonomous. It is marked by ever-changing tastes (hence not flat) but within an interpretive structure (via "interpretive communities"). Musical activity must be understood within the nexus of the complex relations between technical, commercial and cultural processes. As Jensen put it in her analysis of Patsy Cline's career: Those who write about culture production can treat it as a mechanical process, a strategic construction of material within technical or institutional systems, logical, rational, and calculated. But Patsy Cline's recording career shows, among other things, how this commodity production view must be linked to an understanding of culture as meaning something -- as defining, connecting, expressing, mattering to those who participate with it. (101) To achieve that type of understanding will require that popular music scholars understand authenticity and music in a symbolic realm. Rather than conceiving of authenticity as a limited resource (that is, there is only so much that is "pure" that can go around), it is important to foreground its symbolic and ever-changing character. Put another way, authenticity is not used by musician or audience simply to label something as such, but rather to mean something about music that matters at that moment. Authenticity therefore does not somehow "slip away", nor does a "pure" authentic exist. Authenticity in this regard is, as Baudrillard explains concerning mechanical reproduction, "conceived according to (its) very reproducibility ... there are models from which all forms proceed according to modulated differences" (56). Popular music scholars must carefully assess the affective dimensions of fans, musicians, and also record company executives, recording producers, and so on, to be sensitive to the deeply rooted construction of authenticity and authentic experience throughout musical processes. Only then will there emerge an understanding of the structures of feeling that are central to the experience of music. Footnotes For analyses of the Walkman's role in social settings and popular music consumption see du Gay; Hosokawa; and Chen. It has been thus since the advent of disc recording, when engineers would watch a record's grooves through a microscope lens as it was being cut to ensure grooves would not cross over one into another. References Altman, Rick. "Television/Sound." Studies in Entertainment. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 39-54. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Death and Exchange. London: Sage, 1993. Brown, Ronald. Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995. Chen, Shing-Ling. "Electronic Narcissism: College Students' Experiences of Walkman Listening." Annual meeting of the International Communication Association. Washington, D.C. 1993. Du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 1997. Frith, Simon. Sound Effects. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Fromartz, Steven. "Starts-ups Sell Garage Bands, Bowie on Web." Reuters newswire, 4 Dec. 1996. Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. London: Routledge, 1992. Hayward, Philip. "Enterprise on the New Frontier." Convergence 1.2 (Winter 1995): 29-44. Hosokawa, Shuhei. "The Walkman Effect." Popular Music 4 (1984). Jensen, Joli. The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialisation and Country Music. Nashville, Vanderbilt UP, 1998. Jones, Steve. Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. ---. "Popular Music Studies and Critical Legal Studies" Stanford Humanities Review 3.2 (Fall 1993): 77-90. ---. "A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity and the Aural." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10.3 (Sep. 1993), 238-52. ---. "Sound, Space & Digitisation." Media Information Australia 67 (Feb. 1993): 83-91. Marrsh, Brian. "Musicians Adopt Technology to Market Their Skills." Wall Street Journal 14 Oct. 1994: C2. Massenburg, George. "Recording the Future." EQ (Apr. 1997): 79-80. Paul, Frank. "R&B: Soul Music Fans Make Cyberspace Their Meeting Place." Reuters newswire, 11 July 1996. Redhead, Steve, and John Street. "Have I the Right? Legitimacy, Authenticity and Community in Folk's Politics." Popular Music 8.2 (1989). Shepherd, John. "Art, Culture and Interdisciplinarity." Davidson Dunston Research Lecture. Carleton University, Canada. 3 May 1992. ---. "Value and Power in Music." The Sound of Music: Meaning and Power in Culture. Eds. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space. New York: Ungar, 1982. Young, Charles. "Aussie Artists Use Internet and Bootleg CDs to Protect Rights." Pro Sound News July 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steve Jones. "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php>. Chicago style: Steve Jones, "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steve Jones. (1999) Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: "Remixing" Authenticity in Popular Music Studies. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php> ([your date of access]).

All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. 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Music from Another Time – One Perth Night in 2009The following extract is taken from fieldwork notes from research into the enduring Northern Soul dance scene in Perth, Western Australia.It’s 9.30 and I’m walking towards the Hyde Park Hotel on a warm May night. I stop to talk to Jenny, from London, who tells me about her 1970s trip to India and teenage visits to soul clubs in Soho. I enter a cavernous low-ceilinged hall, which used to be a jazz venue and will be a Dan Murphy’s bottle shop before the year ends. South West Soul organiser Tommy, wearing 34-inch baggy trousers, gives me a Northern Soul handshake, involving upturned thumbs. ‘Spread the Faith’, he says. Drinkers are lined up along the long bar to the right and I grab a glass of iced water. A few dancers are out on the wooden floor and a mirror ball rotates overhead. Pat Fisher, the main Perth scene organiser, is away working in Monaco, but the usual suspects are there: Carlisle Derek, Ivan from Cheltenham, Ron and Gracie from Derby. Danny is back from DJing in Tuscany, after a few days in Widnes with old friends. We chat briefly mouth to ear, as the swirling strings and echo-drenched vocals of the Seven Souls’ 45 record, ‘I still love you’ boom through the sound system. The drinkers at the bar hit the floor for Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move on up’ and the crowd swells to about 80. When I move onto the floor, Barbara Acklin’s ‘Am I the Same Girl?’ plays, prompting reflection on being the same, older person dancing to a record from my teenage years. On the bridge of the piano and conga driven ‘’Cause you’re mine’, by the Vibrations, everybody claps in unison, some above their heads, some behind their backs, some with an expansive, open-armed gesture. The sound is like the crack of pistol. We are all living in the moment, lost in the music, moving forward and backward, gliding sideways, and some of us spinning, dervish-like, for a few seconds, if we can still maintain our balance.Having relocated their scene from England south to the Antipodes, most of the participants described on this night are now in their sixties. Part of the original scene myself, I was a participant observer, dancing and interviewing, and documenting and exploring scene practices over five years.The local Perth scene, which started in 1996, is still going strong, part of a wider Australian and New Zealand scene. The global scene goes back nearly 50 years to the late 1960s. Northern Soul has now also become southern. It has also become significantly present in the USA, its place of inspiration, and in such disparate places as Medellin, in Colombia, and Kobe, in Japan.The feeling of ‘living in the moment’ described is a common feature of dance-oriented subcultures. It enables escape from routines, stretches the present opportunity for leisure and postpones the return to other responsibilities. The music and familiar dance steps of a long-standing scene like Northern Soul also stimulate a nostalgic reverie, in which you can persuade yourself you are 18 again.Dance steps are forward, backward and sideways and on crowded dancefloors self-expression is necessarily attenuated. These movements are repeated and varied as each bar returns to the first beat and in subcultures like Northern Soul are sufficiently stylised as to show solidarity. This solidarity is enhanced by a unison handclap, triggered by cues in some records. Northern Soul is not line-dancing. Dancers develop their own moves.Place of Origin: Soul from the North?For those new to Northern Soul, the northern connection may seem a little puzzling. The North of England is often still imagined as a cold, rainy wasteland of desolate moors and smoky, industrial, mostly working-class cities, but such stereotyping obscures real understanding. Social histories have also tended to focus on such phenomena as the early twentieth century Salford gang members, the “Northern Scuttlers”, with “bell-bottomed trousers … and the thick iron-shod clogs” (Roberts 123).The 1977 Granada television documentary about the key Northern Soul club, Wigan Casino, This England, captured rare footage; but this was framed by hackneyed backdrops of mills and collieries. Yet, some elements of the northern stereotype are grounded in reality.Engels’s portrayal of the horrors of early nineteenth century Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was an influential exploration of the birth pains of this first industrial city, and many northern towns and cities have experienced similar traumas. Levels of social disadvantage in contemporary Britain, whilst palpable everywhere, are still particularly significant in the North, as researched by Buchan, Kontopantelis, Sperrin, Chandola and Doran in North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study.By the end of the 1960s, the relative affluence of Harold Wilson’s England began to recede and there was increased political and counter-cultural activity. Into this social climate emerged both skinheads, as described by Fowler in Skins Rule and the Northern Soul scene.Northern Soul scene essentially developed as an extension of the 1960s ‘mod’ lifestyle, built around soul music and fashion. A mostly working-class response to urban life and routine, it also evidenced the ability of the more socially mobile young to get out and stay up late.Although more London mods moved into psychedelia and underground music, many soul fans sought out obscure, but still prototypical Motown-like records, often from the northern American cities Detroit and Chicago. In Manchester, surplus American records were transported up the Ship Canal to Trafford Park, the port zone (Ritson and Russell 1) and became cult club hits, as described in Rylatt and Scott’s Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel.In the early 1970s, the rare soul fans found a name for their scene. “The Dave Godin Column” in the fanzine Blues and Soul, published in London, referred for the first time to ‘Northern Soul’ in 1971, really defining ‘Northern’ directionally, as a relative location anywhere ‘north of Watford’, not a specific place.The scene gradually developed specific sites, clothes, dances and cultural practices, and was also popular in southern England, and actually less visible in cities such as Liverpool and Newcastle. As Nowell (199) argues, the idea that Northern Soul was regionally based is unfounded, a wider movement emerging as a result of the increased mobility made possible by railways and motorways (Ritson and Russell 14).Clubs like the Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino were very close to motorway slip roads and accessible to visitors from further south. The initial scene was not self-consciously northern and many early clubs, like the ‘Golden Torch’, in Tunstall were based in the Midlands, as recounted by Wall (441).The Time and Space of the DancefloorThe Northern Soul scene’s growth was initially covered in fanzines like Blues and Soul, and then by Frith and Cummings (23-32). Following Cosgrove (38-41) and Chambers (142), a number of insider accounts (Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell; Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul by Nowell; The In-Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene by Ritson & Russell) were followed by academic studies (Milestone 134-149; Hollows and Milestone 83-103; Wall 431-445). The scene was first explored by an American academic in Browne’s Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene.Many clubs in earlier days were alcohol-free, though many club-goers substituted amphetamines (Wilson 1-5) as a result, but across the modern scene, drug-taking is not significant. On Northern Soul nights, dancing is the main activity and drinking is incidental. However, dance has received less subtle attention than it deserves as a key nexus between the culture of the scene and black America.Pruter (187) referred to the earlier, pre-disco “myopia” of many music writers on the subject of dance, though its connection to leisure, pleasure, the body and “serious self-realization” (Chambers 7) has been noted. Clearly Northern Soul dancers find “evasive” pleasure (Fiske 127) and “jouissance” (Barthes v) in the merging of self into record.Wall (440) has been more nuanced in his perceptions of the particular “physical geography” of the Northern Soul dance floor, seeing it as both responsive to the music, and a vehicle for navigating social and individual space. Dancers respond to each other, give others room to move and are also connected to those who stand and watch. Although friends often dance close, they are careful not to exclude others and dancing between couples is rare. At the end of popular records, there is often applause. Some dance all night, with a few breaks; others ‘pace’ themselves (Mercieca et al. 78).The gymnastics of Northern Soul have attracted attention, but the forward dives, back drops and spins are now less common. Two less noticed markers of the Northern Soul dancing style, the glide and the soul clap, were highlighted by Wall (432). Cosgrove (38) also noted the sideways glide characteristic of long-time insiders and particularly well deployed by female dancers.Significantly, friction-reducing talcum powder is almost sacramentally sprinkled on the floor, assisting dancers to glide more effectively. This fluid feature of the dancing makes the scene more attractive to those whose forms of expression are less overtly masculine.Sprung wooden floors are preferred and drink on the floor is frowned upon, as spillage compromises gliding. The soul clap is a communal clap, usually executed at key points in a record. Sometimes very loud, this perfectly timed unison clap is a remarkable, though mostly unselfconscious, display of group co-ordination, solidarity and resonance.Billy from Manchester, one of the Perth regulars, and notable for his downward clapping motion, explained simply that the claps go “where the breaks are” (Mercieca et al. 71). The Northern Soul clap demonstrates key attributes of what Wunderlich (384) described as “place-temporality in urban space”, emerging from the flow of music and movement in a heightened form of synchronisation and marked by the “vivid sense of time” (385) produced by emotional and social involvement.Crucially, as Morris noted, A Sense of Space is needed to have a sense of time and dancers may spin and return via the beat of the music to the same spot. For Northern Soul dancers, the movements forwards, backwards, sideways through objective, “geometric space” are paralleled by a traversing of existential, “conceived space”. The steps in microcosm symbolise the relentless wider movements we make through life. For Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, these “trialectics” create “lived space”.A Sense of Place and Evolving IdentitySpaces are plastic environments, charged with emerging meanings. For Augé, they can also remain spaces or be manipulated into “Non-Places”. When the sense of space is heightened there is the potential for lived spaces to become places. The space/place distinction is a matter of contention, but, broadly, space is universal and non-relational, and place is particular and relational.For Augé, a space can be social, but if it lacks implicit, shared cultural understandings and requires explicit signs and rules, as with an airport or supermarket, it is a non-place. It is not relational. It lacks history. Time cannot be stretched or temporarily suspended. As non-places proliferate, urban people spend more time alone in crowds, ”always, and never, at home” (109), though this anonymity can still provide the possibility of changing identity and widening experience.Northern Soul as a culture in the abstract, is a space, but one with distinct practices which tend towards the creation of places and identities. Perth’s Hyde Park Hotel is a place with a function space at the back. This empty hall, on the night described in the opening, temporarily became a Northern Soul Club. The dance floor was empty as the night began, but gradually became not just a space, but a place. To step onto a mostly empty dance floor early in the night, is to cross liminal space, and to take a risk that you will be conspicuous or lonely for a while, or both.This negotiation of space is what Northern Soul, like many other club cultures has always offered, the promise and risk of excitement outside the home. Even when the floor is busy, it is still possible to feel alone in a crowd, but at some stage in the night, there is also the possibility, via some moment of resonance, that a feeling of connection with others will develop. This is a familiar teenage theme, a need to escape bonds and make new ones, to be both mobile and stable. Northern Soul is one of the many third spaces/places (Soja 137) which can create opportunities to navigate time, space and place, and to find a new sense of direction and identity. Nicky from Cornwall, who arrived in Perth in the early 1970s, felt like “a fish out of water”, until involvement in the Northern Soul scene helped him to achieve a successful migration (Mercieca et al. 34-38). Figure 1: A Perth Northern Soul night in 2007. Note the talcum powder on the DJ table, for sprinkling on the dancefloor. The record playing is ‘Helpless’, by Kim Weston.McRobbie has argued in Dance and Social Fantasy that Northern Soul provides places for women to define and express themselves, and it has appealed to more to female and LGBTQIA participants than the more masculine dominated rock, funk and hip-hop scenes. The shared appreciation of records and the possibilities for expression and sociality in dance unite participants and blur gender lines.While the more athletic dancers have tended to be male, dancing is essentially non-contact, as in many other post-1960s ‘discotheque’ styles, yet there is little overt sexual display or flirtation involved. Male and female styles, based on foot rather than arm movements, are similar, almost ungendered, and the Soul scene has differed from more mainstream nightlife cultures focussed on finding partners, as noted in Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story by Winstanley and Nowell. Whilst males, who are also involved in record buying, predominated in the early scene, women now often dominate the dance floor (Wall 441).The Perth scene is little different, yet the changed gender balance has not produced more partner-seeking for either the older participants, who are mostly in long-term relationships and the newer, younger members, who enjoy the relative gender-blindness, and focus on communality and cultural affinity. Figure 2: A younger scene member, ‘Nash’, DJing in Perth in 2016. He has since headed north to Denmark and is now part of the Nordic Northern Soul scene.In Perth, for Stan from Derby, Northern Soul linked the experiences of “poor white working class kids” with young black Americans (Mercieca et al. 97). Hollows and Milestone (87-94) mapped a cultural geographic relationship between Northern Soul and the Northern cities of the USA where the music originated. However, Wall (442) suggested that Northern Soul is drawn from the more bi-racial soul of the mid-1960s than the funky, Afro-centric 1970s and essentially deploys the content of the music to create an alternative British identity, rather than to align more closely with the American movement for self-determination. Essentially, Northern Soul shows how “the meanings of one culture can be transformed in the cultural practices of another time and place” (Wall 444).Many contemporary Australian youth cultures are more socially and ethnically mixed than the Northern Soul scene. However, over the years, the greater participation of women, and of younger and newer members, has made its practices less exclusive, and the notion of an “in-crowd” more relaxed (Wall 439). The ‘Northern’ connection is less meaningful, as members have a more adaptable sense of cultural identity, linked to a global scene made possible by the internet and migration. In Australia, attachment seems stronger to locality rather than nation or region, to place of birth in Britain and place of residence in Perth, two places which represent ‘home’. Northern Soul appears to work well for all members because it provides both continuity and change. As Mercieca et al. suggested of the scene (71) “there is potential for new meanings to continue to emerge”.ConclusionThe elements of expression and directional manoeuvres of Northern Soul dancing, symbolise the individual and social negotiation of direction, place, space, identity and time. The sense of time and space travelled can create a feeling of being pushed forward without control. It can also produce an emotional pull backwards, like an elastic band being stretched. For those growing older and moving far from places of birth, these dynamics can be particularly challenging. Membership of global subcultures can clearly help to create successful migrations, providing third spaces/places (Soja 137) between home and host culture identities, as evidenced by the ‘Southern’ Northern Soul scene in Australia. For these once teenagers, now grandparents in Australia, connections to time and space have been both transformed and transcended. They remain grounded in their youth, but have reduced the gravitational force of home connections, projecting themselves forward into the future by balancing aspects of both stability and mobility. Physical places and places and their connections with culture have been replaced by multiple and overlapping mappings, but it is important not to romanticise notions of agency, hybridity, third spaces and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). In a globalised world, most people are still located geographically and labelled ideologically. The Northern Soul repurposing of the culture indicates a transilience (Richmond 328) “differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power” (Gupta and Ferguson 20). However, the way in which Northern Soul has moved south over the decade via migration, has arguably now provided a stronger possible sense of resonance with the lives of black Americans whose lives in places like Chicago and Detroit in the 1960s, and their wonderful music, are grounded in the experience of family migrations in the opposite direction from the South to the North (Mercieca et al. 11). In such a celebration of “memory, loss, and nostalgia” (Gupta and Ferguson 13), it may still be possible to move beyond the exclusion that characterises defensive identities.ReferencesAugé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975Browne, Kimasi L. "Identity Scene and Material Culture: The Place of African American Rare Soul Music on the British Northern Soul Scene." Proceedings of Manchester Music & Place Conference. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Vol. 8. 2006.Buchan, Iain E., Evangelos Kontopantelis, Matthew Sperrin, Tarani Chandola, and Tim Doran. "North-South Disparities in English Mortality 1965–2015: Longitudinal Population Study." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 71 (2017): 928-936.Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985.Cosgrove, Stuart. "Long after Tonight Is All Over." Collusion 2 (1982): 38-41.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.Fiske, John. 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London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. 130-161.Mercieca, Paul, Anne Chapman, and Marnie O'Neill. To the Ends of the Earth: Northern Soul and Southern Nights in Western Australia. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013.Milestone, Katie. "Love Factory: The Sites, Practices and Media Relationships of Northern Soul." The Clubcultures Reader. Eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne, and Justin O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 134-149.Morris, David. The Sense of Space. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.Nowell, David. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson, 1999.Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.Richmond, Anthony H. "Sociology of Migration in Industrial and Post-Industrial Societies." Migration (1969): 238-281.Ritson, Mike, and Stuart Russell. The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene. London: Robson, 1999.Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum. London: Penguin, 1971.Rylatt, Keith, and Phil Scott. 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Introduction In any list of dictators and antagonists of the West the name of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi will always rank highly as one of the most memorable, colourful and mercurial. The roles he played to his fellow Libyans, to regional groupings, to revolutionaries and to the West were complex and nuanced. These various roles developed over time but were all grounded in his self-belief as a messianic revolutionary figure. More importantly, these roles and behaviours that stemmed from them were instrumental in preserving Qaddafi’s rule and thwarting challenges to it. These facets of Qaddafi’s public self accord with the model of “persona” described by Marshall. Whilst the nature of political persona and celebrity in the Western world has been explored by several scholars (for example Street; Wilson), little work has been conducted on the use of persona by non-democratic leaders. This paper examines the aspects of persona exhibited by Colonel Qaddafi and applied during his tenure. In constructing his role as a revolutionary leader, Qaddafi was engaging in a form of public performance aimed at delivering himself to a wider audience. Whether at home or abroad, this persona served the purpose of helping the Libyan leader consolidate his power, stymie political opposition and export his revolutionary ideals. The trajectory of his persona begins in the early days of his coming to power as a charismatic leader during a “time of distress” (Weber) and culminates in his bloody end next to a roadside drainage culvert. In between these points Qaddafi’s persona underwent refinement and reinvention. Coupled with the legacy he left on the Libyan political system, the journey of Muammar Qaddafi’s personas demonstrate how political personality can be the salvation or damnation of an entire state.Qaddafi: The Brotherly RevolutionaryCaptain Muammar Qaddafi came to power in Libya in 1969 at the age of just 27. He was the leader of a group of military officers who overthrew King Idris in a popular and relatively bloodless coup founded on an ideology of post-colonial Arab nationalism and a doing away with the endemic corruption and nepotism that were the hallmarks of the monarchy. With this revolutionary cause in mind and in an early indication that he recognised the power of political image, Qaddafi showed restraint in adopting the trappings of office. His modest promotion to the rank of Colonel was an obvious example of this, and despite the fact that in practical terms he was the supreme commander of Libya’s armed forces, he resisted the temptation to formally aggrandize himself with military titles for the ensuing 42 years of his rule.High military rank was in a way irrelevant to a man moving to change his persona from army officer to messianic national leader. Switching away from a reliance on military hierarchy as a basis for his authority allowed Qaddafi to re-cast himself as a leader with a broader mission. He began to utilise titles such as “Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council” (RCC) and “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.” The persona on display here was one of detached impartiality and almost reluctant leadership. There was the suggestion that Qaddafi was not really acting as a head of state, but merely an ordinary Libyan who, through popular acclaim, was being begged to lead his people. The attraction of this persona remained until the bitter end for Qaddafi, with his professed inability to step aside from a leadership role he insisted he did not formally occupy. This accords with the contention of Weber, who describes how an individual favoured with charisma can step forward at a time of crisis to complete a “mission.” Once in a position of authority, perpetuating that role of leadership and acclamation can become the mission itself:The holder, of charisma seizes the task that is adequate for him and demands obedience and a following by virtue of his mission. His success determines whether he finds them. His charismatic claim breaks down if his mission is not recognized by those to whom he feels he has been sent. If they recognize him, he is their master—so long as he knows how to maintain recognition through ‘proving’ himself. But he does not derive his ‘right’ from their will, in the manner of an election. Rather, the reverse holds: it is the duty of those to whom he addresses his mission to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader. (Weber 266-7)As his rule extended across the decades, Qaddafi fostered his revolutionary credentials via a typical cult of personality approach. His image appeared on everything from postage stamps to watches, bags, posters and billboards. Quotations from the Brother Leader were set to music and broadcast as pop songs. “Spontaneous” rallies of support would occur when crowds of loyalists would congregate to hear the Brotherly Leader speak. Although Qaddafi publicly claimed he did not like this level of public adoration he accepted it because the people wanted to adore him. It was widely known however that many of these crowds were paid to attend these rallies (Blundy and Lycett 16).Qaddafi: The Philosopher In developing his persona as a guide and a man who was sharing his natural gifts with the people, Qaddafi developed a post-colonial philosophy he called “Third Universal Theory.” This was published in volumes collectively known as The Green Book. This was mandatory reading for every Libyan and contained a distillation of Qaddafi’s thoughts and opinions on everything from sports to politics to religion to the differences between men and women. Whilst it may be tempting for outsiders to dismiss these writings as the scribbling of a dictator, the legacy of Qaddafi’s persona as political philosopher is worthy of some examination. For in offering his revelations to the Libyan people, Qaddafi extended his mandate beyond leader of a revolution and into the territory of “messianic reformer of a nation.”The Green Book was a three-part series. The first instalment was written in 1975 and focuses on the “problem of democracy” where Qaddafi proposes direct democracy as the best option for a progressive nation. The second instalment, published in 1977, focuses on economics and expounds socialism as the solution to all fiscal woes. (Direct popular action here was evidenced in the RCC making rental of real estate illegal, meaning that all tenants in the country suddenly found themselves granted ownership of the property they were occupying!) The final chapter, published in 1981, proposes the Third Universal Theory where Qaddafi outlines his unique solution for implementing direct democracy and socialism. Qaddafi coined a new term for his Islamically-inspired socialist utopia: Jamahiriya. This was defined as being a “state of the masses” and formed the blueprint for Libyan society which Qaddafi subsequently imposed.This model of direct democracy was part of the charismatic conceit Qaddafi cultivated: that the Libyan people were their own leaders and his role was merely as a benevolent agent acceding to their wishes. However the implementation of the Jamahiriya was anything but benevolent and its legacy has crippled post-Qaddafi Libya. Under this system, Libyans did have some control over their affairs at a very local level. Beyond this, an increasingly complex series of committees and regional groupings, over which the RCC had the right of veto, diluted the participation of ordinary citizens and their ability to coalesce around any individual leader. The banning of standard avenues of political organisation, such as parties and unions, coupled with a ruthless police state that detained and executed anyone offering even a hint of political dissent served to snuff out any opposition before it had a chance to gather pace. The result was that there were no Libyans with enough leadership experience or public profile to take over when Qaddafi was ousted in 2011.Qaddafi: The Liberator In a further plank of his revolutionary persona Qaddafi turned to the world beyond Libya to offer his brotherly guidance. This saw him champion any cause that claimed to be a liberation or resistance movement struggling against the shackles of colonialism. He tended to favour groups that had ideologies aligned with his own, namely Arab unity and the elimination of Israel, but ultimately was not consistent in this regard. Aside from Palestinian nationalists, financial support was offered to groups such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Moro National Liberation Front (Philippines), Umkhonto we Sizwe (South Africa), ETA (Spain), the Polisario Front (Western Sahara), and even separatist indigenous Australians. This policy of backing revolutionary groups was certainly a projection of his persona as a charismatic enabler of the revolutionary mission. However, the reception of this mission in the wider world formed the basis for the image that Qaddafi most commonly occupied in Western eyes.In 1979 the ongoing Libyan support for groups pursuing violent action against Israel and the West saw the country designated a State-Sponsor of Terror by the US Department of State. Diplomatic relations between the two nations were severed and did not resume until 2004. At this point Qaddafi seemed to adopt a persona of “opponent of the West,” ostensibly on behalf of the world’s downtrodden colonial peoples. The support for revolutionary groups was changing to a more active use of them to strike at Western interests. At the same time Qaddafi stepped up his rhetoric against America and Britain, positioning himself as a champion of the Arab world, as the one leader who had the courage of his convictions and the only one who was squarely on the side of the ordinary citizenry (in contrast to other, more compliant Arab rulers). Here again there is evidence of the charismatic revolutionary persona, reluctantly taking up the burden of leadership on behalf of his brothers.Whatever his ideals, the result was that Qaddafi and his state became the focus of increasing Western ire. A series of incidents between the US and Libya in international waters added to the friction, as did Libyan orchestrated terror attacks in Berlin, Rome and Vienna. At the height of this tension in 1986, American aircraft bombed targets in Libya, narrowly missing Qaddafi himself. This role as public enemy of America led to Qaddafi being characterised by President Ronald Reagan (no stranger to the use of persona himself) as the “mad dog of the Middle East” and a “squalid criminal.” The enmity of the West made life difficult for ordinary Libyans dealing with crippling sanctions, but for Qaddafi, it helped bolster his persona as a committed revolutionary.Qaddafi: Leader of the Arab and African Worlds Related to his early revolutionary ideologies were Qaddafi’s aspirations as a pan-national leader. Inspired by Egypt’s Gamel Abdul Nasser from a young age, the ideals of pan-Arab unity were always a cornerstone of Qaddafi’s beliefs. It is not therefore surprising that he developed ambitions of being the person to bring about and “guide” that unity. Once again the Weberian description of the charismatic leader is relevant, particularly the notion that such leadership does not respect conventional boundaries of functional jurisdictions or local bailiwicks; in this case, state boundaries.During the 1970s Qaddafi was involved in numerous attempts to broker Arab unions between Libya and states such as Egypt, Syria and Tunisia. All of these failed to materialise once the exact details of the mergers began to be discussed, in particular who would assume the mantle of leadership in these super-states. In line with his persona as the rightly-guided revolutionary, Qaddafi consistently blamed the failure of these unions on the other parties, souring his relationship with his fellow Arab leaders. His hardline stance on Israel also put him at odds with those peers more determined to find a compromise. Following the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in 1981 Qaddafi praised the act as justified because of Sadat’s signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel.Having given up on the hope of achieving pan-Arab Unity, Qaddafi sought to position himself as a leader of the African bloc. In 2009 he became Chairperson of the African Union and took to having himself introduced as “The King of Kings of Africa.” The level of dysfunction of the African Union was no less than that of the Arab League and Qaddafi’s grandiose plans for becoming the President of the United States of Africa failed to materialise.In both his pan-Arab and pan-Africa ambitions, we see a persona of Qaddafi that aims at leadership beyond his own state. Whilst there may be delusions of grandeur apparent in the practicalities of these goals, this image was nevertheless something that Qaddafi used to leverage the next phase of his political transformation.Qaddafi: The Post-9/11 Statesman However much he might be seen as erratic, Qaddafi’s innate intelligence could result in a political astuteness lacking in many of his Arab peers. Following the events of 11 September 2001, Qaddafi was the first international leader to condemn the attacks on America and pledge support in the War on Terror and the extermination of al-Qaeda. Despite his history as a supporter of terrorism overseas, Qaddafi had a long history of repressing it at home, just as with any other form of political opposition. The pan-Islamism of al-Qaeda was anathema to his key ideologies of direct democracy (guided by himself). This meant the United States and Libya were now finally on the same team. As part of this post-9/11 sniffing of the wind, Qaddafi abandoned his fledgling Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program and finally agreed to pay reparations to the families of the victims of the Pan Am 107 flight downed over Lockerbie in 1987.This shift in Qaddafi’s policy did not altogether dispel his persona of brotherly leadership amongst African nations. As a bloc leader and an example of the possibility of ‘coming in from the cold’, Qaddafi and Libya were reintegrated into the world community. This included giving a speech at the United Nations in 2009. This event did little to add to his reputation as a statesman in the West. Given a 15-minute slot, the Libyan leader delivered a rambling address over 90 minutes long, which included him tearing up a copy of the UN Charter and turning his back to the audience whilst continuing to speak.Qaddafi: The Clown From the Western point of view, performances like this painted Qaddafi’s behaviour as increasingly bizarre. Particularly after Libya’s rapprochement with the West, the label of threatening terrorist supporter faded and was replaced with something along the lines of a harmless clown prince. Tales of the Libyan leader’s coterie of virgin female bodyguards were the subject of ridicule, as was his ardour for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Perhaps this behaviour was indicative of a leader increasingly divorced from reality. Surrounded by sycophants dependent on his regard for their tenure or physical survival, as well as Western leaders eager to contrast his amiability with that of Saddam Hussein, nobody was prepared to draw attention to the emperor’s new clothes.Indeed, elaborate and outlandish clothing played an increasing role in Qaddafi’s persona as the decades went on. His simple revolutionary fatigues of the early years were superseded by a vast array of military uniforms heavily decorated with medals and emblems; traditional African, Arab or Bedouin robes depending on the occasion; and in later years a penchant for outfits that included images of the African continent or pictures of dead martyrs. (In 2009 Vanity Fair did a tongue-in-cheek article on the fashion of Colonel Qaddafi entitled Dictator Chic: Colonel Qaddafi—A Life in Fashion. This spawned a number of similar features including one in TIME Magazine entitled Gaddafi Fashion: The Emperor Had Some Crazy Clothes.)The Bedouin theme was an aspect of persona that Qaddafi cultivated as an ascetic “man of the people” throughout his leadership. Despite having many palaces available he habitually slept in an elaborate tent, according once again with Weber’s description of the charismatic leader as one who eschews methodical material gain. This predisposition served him well in the 1986 United States bombing, when his residence in a military barracks was demolished, but Qaddafi escaped unscathed as he was in his tent at the time. He regularly entertained foreign dignitaries in tents when they visited Libya and he took one when travelling abroad, including pitching it in the gardens of a Parisian hotel during a state visit in 2007. (A request to camp in New York’s Central Park for his UN visit in 2009 was denied; “Inside the Tents of Muammar Gaddafi”).The role of such a clown was unlikely to have been an aim for Qaddafi, but was instead the product of his own increasing isolation. It will likely be his most enduring character in the Western memory of his rule. It should be noted though that clowns and fools do not maintain an iron grip on power for over 40 years.The Legacy of Qaddafi’s Many Personas Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was a clever and complex leader who exhibited many variations of persona during his four decades of rule. These personas were generally facets of the same core self-belief of a charismatic leader, but could be conflicting, and often confusing, to observers. His eccentricities often hid a layer of deeper cunning and ambition, but ultimately led to his marginalisation and an impression by world leaders that he was untrustworthy.His erratic performance at the UN in 2009 perhaps typifies the end stages of Qaddafi’s leadership: a man increasingly disconnected from his people and the realities of what was going on around him. His insistence that the 2011 Libyan revolution was variously a colonial or terrorist inspired piece of theatre belied the deep resentment of his rule. His role as opponent of the Western and Arab worlds alike meant that he was unsupported in his attempts to deal with the uprising. Indeed, the West’s rapid willingness to use their airpower was instrumental in speeding on the rebel forces.What cannot be disputed is the chaotic legacy this charismatic figure left for his country. Since the uprising climaxed in his on-camera lynching in October 2011, Libya has been plunged in to turmoil and shows no signs of this abating. One of the central reasons for this chaos is that Qaddafi’s supremacy, his political philosophies, and his use of messianic persona left Libya completely unprepared for rule by any other party.This ensuing chaos has been a cruel, if ironic, proof of Qaddafi’s own conceit: Libya could not survive without him.References Al-Gathafi, Muammar. The Green Book: The Solution to the Problem of Democracy; The Solution to the Economic Problem; The Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory. UK: Ithaca Press, 2005.Blundy, David, and Andrew Lycett. Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution. Boston and Toronto: Little Brown & Co, 1987.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self”. Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170.Qaddafi, Muammar. Speech at the United Nations 2009. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKMyY2V0J0Y›. Street, John. “Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Representation.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6 (2004): 435-52.Street, John. “Do Celebrity Politics and Celebrity Politicians Matter?” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 14.3 (2012): 346-356.TIME Magazine. “Gaddafi Fashion: The Emperor Had Some Crazy Clothes.” ‹http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2055860,00.html›.TIME Magazine. “Inside the Tents of Muammar Gaddafi.” ‹http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2058074,00.html›.Totman, Sally, and Mat Hardy. “In the Green Zone: 40 years with Colonel Qaddafi.” Ed. Geoffrey Hawker. APSA 2009: Proceedings of the APSA Annual Conference 2009. Sydney: Macquarie University, 2009. 1-19.Totman, Sally, and Mat Hardy. “The Rise and Decline of Libya as a Rogue State.” OCIS 2008: Oceanic Conference on International Studies. Brisbane: University of Queensland, 2008. 1-25.Vanity Fair. “Dictator Chic: Colonel Qaddafi—A Life in Fashion.” ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/qaddafi-slideshow200908›.Weber, Max, Hans Heinrich Gerth, and C. Wright Mills. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge, 2009.Wilson, J. “Kevin Rudd, Celebrity and Audience Democracy in Australia.” Journalism 15.2 (2013): 202-217.

“Communicating deep feeling in linear solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me” — Audre Lorde in an interview with Adrienne Rich (Lorde 87) How do you disclose? In writing, in spoken words, in movements, in sounds, in the quiet energetic vibration and its trace in discourse? Is disclosure a narrative account of a self, or a poetic fragment, sent into the world outside the sanction of a story or another recognisable form (see fig. 1)?These are the questions that guide my exploration in this essay. I meditate on them from the vantage point of my own self-narrative, as a community performance practitioner and writer, a poet whose artistry, in many ways, relies on the willingness of others to disclose, to open themselves, and yet who feels ambivalent about narrative disclosures. What I share with you, reader, are my thoughts on what some may call compassion fatigue, on boredom, on burn-out, on the inability to be moved by someone’s hard-won right to story her life, to tell his narrative, to disclose her pain. I find it ironic that for as long as I can remember, my attention has often wandered when someone tells me their story—how this cancer was diagnosed, what the doctors did, how she coped, how she garnered support, how she survived, how that person died, how she lived. The story of how addiction took over her life, how she craved, how she hated, how someone sponsored her, listened to her, how she is making amends, how she copes, how she gets on with her life. The story of being born this way, being prodded this way, being paraded in front of doctors just like this, being operated on, being photographed, being inappropriately touched, being neglected, being forgotten, being unloved, being lonely. Listening to these accounts, my attention does wander, even though this is the heart blood of my chosen life—these are the people whose company I seek, with whom I feel comfortable, with whom I make art, with whom I make a life, to whom I disclose my own stories. But somehow, when we rehearse these stories in each others’s company (for rehearsal, polishing, is how I think of storytelling), I drift. In this performance-as-research essay about disclosure, I want to draw attention to what does draw my attention in community art situations, what halts my drift, and allows me to find connection beyond a story that is unique and so special to this individual, but which I feel I have heard so many times. What grabs me, again and again, lies beyond the words, beyond the “I did this… and that… and they did this… and that,” beyond the story of hardship and injury, recovery and overcoming. My moment of connection tends to happen in the warmth of this hand in mine. It occurs in the material connection that seems to well up between these gray eyes and my own deep gaze. I can feel the skin change its electric tonus as I am listening to the uncoiling account. There’s a timbre in the voice that I follow, even as I lose the words. In the moment of verbal disclosure, physical intimacy changes the time and space of encounter. And I know that the people I sit with are well aware of this—it is not lost on them that my attention isn’t wholly focused on the story they are telling, that I will have forgotten core details when next we work together. But they are also aware, I believe, of those moments of energetic connect that happen through, beyond and underneath the narrative disclosure. There is a physical opening occurring here, right now, when I tell this account to you, when you sit by my side and I confess that I can’t always keep the stories of my current community participants straight, that I forget names all the time, that I do not really wish to put together a show with lots of testimony, that I’d rather have single power words floating in space.Figure 1. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performer: Neil Marcus.”water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. Orientation towards the Frame: A Poetics of VibrationThis essay speaks about how I witness the uncapturable in performance, how the limits of sharing fuel my performance practice. I also look at the artistic processes of community performance projects, and point out traces of this other attention, this poetics of vibration. One of the frames through which I construct this essay is a focus on the formal in practice: on an attention to the shapes of narratives, and on the ways that formal experimentation can open up spaces beyond and beneath the narratives that can sound so familiar. An attention to the formal in community practice is often confused with an elitist drive towards quality, towards a modern or post-modern play with forms that stands somehow in opposition to how “ordinary people” construct their lives. But there are other ways to think about “the formal,” ways to question the naturalness with which stories are told, poems are written, the ease of an “I”, the separation between self and those others (who hurt, or love, or persecute, or free), the embedment of the experience of thought in institutions of thinking. Elizabeth St. Pierre frames her own struggle with burn-out, falling silent, and the need to just keep going even if the ethical issues involved in continuing her research overwhelm her. She charts out her thinking in reference to Michel Foucault’s comments on how to transgress into a realm of knowing that stretches a self, allows it “get free of oneself.”Getting free of oneself involves an attempt to understand the ‘structures of intelligibility’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 156) that limit thought. Foucault (1984/1985) explaining the urgency of such labor, says, ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all’ (p. 8). (St. Pierre 204)Can we think outside the structure of story, outside the habits of thought that make us sense and position ourselves in time and space, in power and knowledge? Is there a way to change the frame, into a different format, to “change our mind”? And even if there is not, if the structures of legibility always contain what we can think, there might be riches in that borderland, the bordercountry towards the intelligible, the places where difference presses close in an uncontained, unstoried way. To think differently, to get free of oneself: all these concerns resonate deeply with me, and with the ways that I wish to engage in community art practice. Like St. Pierre, I try to embrace Deleuzian, post-structuralist approaches to story and self:The collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. […] To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call myself (moi). I is an order word. (Deleuze and Guattari 84).“I” wish to perform and to write at the moment when the chorus of the voices that make up my “I” press against my skin, from the inside and the outside, query the notion of ‘skin’ as barrier. But can “I” stay in that vibrational moment? This essay will not be an exercise in quotation marks, but it is an essay of many I’s, and—imagine you see this essay performed—I invite the vibration of the hand gestures that mark small breaches in the air next to my head as I speak.Like St. Pierre, I get thrown off those particular theory horses again and again. But curiosity drives me on, and it is a curiosity nourished not by the absence of (language) connection, by isolation, but by the fullness of those movements of touch and density I described above. That materiality of the tearful eye gaze, the electricity of those fine skin hairs, the voice shivering me: these are not essentialist connections that somehow reveal or disclose a person to me, but these matters make the boundaries of “me” and “person” vibrate. Disclose here becomes the density of living itself, the flowing, non-essential process of shaping lives together. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have called this bordering “deterritorialization,” always already bound to the reterritorialisation that allows the naming of the experience. Breath-touch on the limits of territories.This is not a shift from verbal to a privileging of non-verbal communication, finding richness and truth in one and less in the other. Non-verbal communication can be just as conventional as spoken language. When someone’s hand reaches out to touch someone who is upset, that gesture can feel ingrained and predictable, and the chain of caretaking that is initiated by the gesture can even hinder the flow of disclosure the crying or upset person might be engaged in. Likewise, I believe the common form of the circle, one I use in nearly every community session I lead, does not really create more community than another format would engender. The repetition of the circle just has something very comforting, it can allow all participants to drop into a certain kind of ease that is different from the everyday, but the rules of that ease are not open—circles territorialise as much as they de-territorialise: here is an inside, here an outside. There is nothing inherently radical in them. But circles might create a radical shift in communication situations when they break open other encrusted forms—an orientation to a leader, a group versus individual arrangement, or the singularity of islands out in space. Circles brings lots of multiples into contact, they “gather the tribes.” What provisional I’s we extract from them in each instance is our ethical challenge.Bodily Fantasies on the Limit: BurningEven deeply felt inner experiences do not escape the generic, and there is lift available in the vibration between the shared fantasy and the personal fantasy. I lead an artists’ collective, The Olimpias, and in 2008/2009, we created Burning, a workshop and performance series that investigated cell imagery, cancer imagery, environmental sensitivity and healing journeys through ritual-based happenings infused with poetry, dramatic scenes, Butoh and Contact Improvisation dances, and live drawing (see: http://www.olimpias.org/).Performance sites included the Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, July and October 2009, the Earth Matters on Stage Festival, Eugene, Oregon, May 2009, and Fort Worden, Port Townsend, Washington State, August 2009. Participants for each installation varied, but always included a good percentage of disabled artists.(see fig. 2).Figure 2. Image: Linda Townsend. Performers: Participants in the Burning project. “Burning Action on the Beach”. Burning. 2009. In the last part of these evening-long performance happenings, we use meditation techniques to shift the space and time of participants. We invite people to lie down or otherwise become comfortable (or to observe in quiet). I then begin to lead the part of the evening that most closely dovetails with my personal research exploration. With a slow and reaching voice, I ask people to breathe, to become aware of the movement of breath through their bodies, and of the hollows filled by the luxuriating breath. Once participants are deeply relaxed, I take them on journeys which activate bodily fantasies. I ask them to breathe in colored lights (and leave the specific nature of the colors to them). I invite participants to become cell bodies—heart cells, liver cells, skin cells—and to explore the properties and sensations of these cell environments, through both internal and external movement. “What is the surface, what is deep inside, what does the granular space of the cell feel like? How does the cell membrane move?” When deeply involved in these explorations, I move through the room and give people individual encounters by whispering to them, one by one—letting them respond bodily to the idea that their cell encounters alchemical elements like gold and silver, lead or mercury, or other deeply culturally laden substances like oil or blood. When I am finished with my individual instruction to each participant, all around me, people are moving gently, undulating, contracting and expanding, their eyes closed and their face full of concentration and openness. Some have dropped out of the meditation and are sitting quietly against a wall, observing what is going on around them. Some move more than others, some whisper quietly to themselves.When people are back in spoken-language-time, in sitting-upright-time, we all talk about the experiences, and about the cultural body knowledges, half-forgotten healing practices, that seem to emerge like Jungian archetypes in these movement journeys. During the meditative/slow movement sequence, some long-standing Olimpias performers in the room had imagined themselves as cancer cells, and gently moved with the physical imagery this brought to them. In my meditation invitations during the participatory performance, I do not invite community participants to move as cancer cells—it seems to me to require a more careful approach, a longer developmental period, to enter this darkly signified state, even though Olimpias performers do by no means all move tragically, darkly, or despairing when entering “cancer movement.” In workshops in the weeks leading up to the participatory performances, Olimpias collaborators entered these experiences of cell movement, different organ parts, and cancerous movement many times, and had time to debrief and reflect on their experiences.After the immersion exercise of cell movement, we ask people how it felt like to lie and move in a space that also held cancer cells, and if they noticed different movement patterns, different imaginaries of cell movement, around them, and how that felt. This leads to rich discussions, testimonies of poetic embodiment, snippets of disclosures, glimpses of personal stories, but the echo of embodiment seems to keep the full, long stories at bay, and outside of the immediacy of our sharing. As I look around myself while listening, I see some hands intertwined, some gentle touches, as people rock in the memory of their meditations.nowyour light shines very brightlybut I want youto knowyour darkness alsorichand beyond fear (Lorde 87)My research aim with these movement meditation sequences is not to find essential truths about human bodily imagination, but to explore the limits of somatic experience and cultural expression, to make artful life experiential and to hence create new tools for living in the chemically saturated world we all inhabit.I need to add here that these are my personal aims for Burning—all associated artists have their own journey, their own reasons for being involved, and there is no necessary consensus—just a shared interest in transformation, the cultural images of disease, disability and addiction, the effects of invasion and touch in our lives, and how embodied poetry can help us live. (see fig. 3). For example, a number of collaborators worked together in the participatory Burning performances at the Subterranean Arthouse, a small Butoh performance space in Berkeley, located in an old shop, complete with an open membrane into the urban space—a shop-window and glass door. Lots of things happen with and through us during these evenings, not just my movement meditations.One of my colleagues, Sadie Wilcox, sets up live drawing scenarios, sketching the space between people. Another artist, Harold Burns, engages participants in contact dance, and invites a crossing of boundaries in and through presence. Neil Marcus invites people to move with him, gently, and blindfolded, and to feel his spastic embodiment and his facility with tender touch. Amber diPietra’s poem about cell movement and the journeys from one to another sounds out in the space, set to music by Mindy Dillard. What I am writing about here is my personal account of the actions I engage in, one facet of these evenings—choreographing participants’ inner experiences.Figure 3. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performers: Artists in the Burning project. “water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. My desires echo Lorde’s poem: “I want you”—there’s a sensual desire in me when I set up these movement meditation scenes, a delight in an erotic language and voice touch that is not predicated on sexual contact, but on intimacy, and on the borderlines, the membranes of the ear and the skin; ‘to know’—I continue to be intrigued and obsessed, as an artist and as a critic, by the way people envision what goes on inside them, and find agency, poetic lift, in mobilising these knowledges, in reaching from the images of bodies to the life of bodies in the world. ‘your darkness also’—not just the bright light, no, but also the fears and the strengths that hide in the blood and muscle, in the living pulsing shadow of the heart muscle pumping away, in the dark purple lobe of the liver wrapping itself around my middle and purifying, detoxifying, sifting, whatever sweeps through this body.These meditative slow practices can destabilise people. Some report that they experience something quite real, quite deep, and that there is transformation to be gained in these dream journeys. But the framing within which the Burning workshops take place question immediately the “authentic” of this experiential disclosure. The shared, the cultural, the heritage and hidden knowledge of being encultured quickly complicate any essence. This is where the element of formal enframing enters into the immediacy of experience, and into the narration of a stable, autonomous “I.” Our deepest cellular experience, the sounds and movements we listen to when we are deeply relaxed, are still cultured, are still shared, come to us in genres and stable image complexes.This form of presentation also questions practices of self-disclosure that participate in trauma narratives through what Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman has called “impression management” (208). Goffman researched the ways we play ourselves as roles in specific contexts, how we manage acts of disclosure and knowledge, how we deal with stigma and stereotype. Impression management refers to the ways people present themselves to others, using conscious or unconscious techniques to shape their image. In Goffman’s framing of these acts of self-presentation, performance and dramaturgical choices are foregrounded: impression management is an interactive, dynamic process. Disclosure becomes a semiotic act, not a “natural,” unfiltered display of an “authentic” self, but a complex engagement with choices. The naming and claiming of bodily trauma can be part of the repertoire of self-representation, a (stock-)narrative that enables recognition and hence communication. The full traumatic narrative arc (injury, reaction, overcoming) can here be a way to manage the discomfort of others, to navigate potential stigma.In Burning, by-passing verbal self-disclosure and the recitation of experience, by encountering ourselves in dialogue with our insides and with foreign elements in this experiential way, there is less space for people to speak managed, filtered personal truths. I find that these truths tend to either close down communication if raw and direct, or become told as a story in its complete, polished arc. Either form leaves little space for dialogue. After each journey through bodies, cells, through liver and heart, breath and membrane, audience members need to unfold for themselves what they felt, and how that felt, and how that relates to the stories of cancer, environmental toxins and invasion that they know.It is not fair. We should be able to have dialogues about “I am poisoned, I live with environmental sensitivities, and they constrict my life,” “I survived cancer,” “I have multiple sclerosis,” “I am autistic,” “I am addicted to certain substances,” “I am injured by certain substances.” But tragedy tugs at these stories, puts their narrators into the realm of the inviolate, as a community quickly feel sorry for these persons, or else feels attacked by them, in particular if one does not know how to help. Yes, we know this story: we can manage her identity for her, and his social role can click into fixity. The cultural weight of these narratives hinders flow, become heavily stigmatised. Many contemporary writers on the subjects of cancer and personhood recognise the (not always negative) aspects of this stigma, and mobilise them in their narratives. As Marisa Acocella Marchetto in the Cancer-Vixen: A True Story puts it: ‘Play the cancer card!’ (107). The cancer card appears in this graphic novel memoir in the form of a full-page spoof advertisement, and the card is presented as a way to get out of unwanted social obligations. The cancer card is perfectly designed to create the communal cringe and the hasty retreat. If you have cancer, you are beyond the pale, and ordinary rules of behavior do no longer apply. People who experience these life-changing transformational diagnoses often know very well how isolating it can be to name one’s personal story, and many are very careful about how they manage disclosure, and know that if they choose to disclose, they have to manage other people’s discomfort. In Burning, stories of injury and hurt swing in the room with us, all of these stories are mentioned in our performance program, but none of them are specifically given individual voice in our performance (although some participants chose to come out in the sharing circle at the end of the event). No one owns the diagnoses, the identity of “survivor,” and the presence of these disease complexes are instead dispersed, performatively enacted and brought in experiential contact with all members of our temporary group. When you leave our round, you most likely still do not know who has multiple sclerosis, who has substance addiction issues, who is sensitive to environmental toxins.Communication demands territorialisation, and formal experimentation alone, unanchored in lived experience, easily alienates. So how can disclosure and the storytelling self find some lift, and yet some connection, too? How can the Burning cell imaginary become both deep, emotionally rich and formal, pointing to its constructed nature? That’s the question that each of the Olimpias’ community performance experiments begins with.How to Host a Past Collective: Setting Up a CirclePreceding Burning, one of our recent performance investigations was the Anarcha Project. In this multi-year, multi-site project, we revisited gynecological experiments performed on slave women in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1840s, by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology.” We did so not to revictimise historical women as suffering ciphers, or stand helpless at the site of historical injury. Instead, we used art-based methods to investigate the heritage of slavery medicine in contemporary health care inequalities and women’s health care. As part of the project, thousands of participants in multiple residencies across the U.S. shared their stories with the project leaders—myself, Aimee Meredith Cox, Carrie Sandahl, Anita Gonzalez and Tiye Giraud. We collected about two hundred of these fragments in the Anarcha Anti-Archive, a website that tries, frustratingly, to undo the logic of the ordered archive (Cox et al. n.p).The project closed in 2008, but I still give presentations with the material we generated. But what formal methods can I select, ethically and responsibly, to present the multivocal nature of the Anarcha Project, given that it is now just me in the conference room, given that the point of the project was the intersection of multiple stories, not the fetishisation of individual ones? In a number of recent presentations, I used a circle exercise to engage in fragmented, shrouded disclosure, to keep privacies safe, and to find material contact with one another. In these Anarcha rounds, we all take words into our mouths, and try to stay conscious to the nature of this act—taking something into our mouth, rather than acting out words, normalising them into spoken language. Take this into your mouth—transgression, sacrament, ritual, entrainment, from one body to another.So before an Anarcha presentation, I print out random pages from our Anarcha Anti-Archive. A number of the links in the website pull up material through chance procedures (a process implemented by Olimpias collaborator Jay Steichmann, who is interested in digital literacies). So whenever you click that particular link, you get to a different page in the anti-archive, and you can not retrace your step, or mark you place in an unfolding narrative. What comes up are poems, story fragments, images, all sent in in response to cyber Anarcha prompts. We sent these prompts during residencies to long-distance participants who could not physically be with us, and many people, from Wales to Malaysia, sent in responses. I pull up a good number of these pages, combined with some of the pages written by the core collaborators of our project. In the sharing that follows, I do not speak about the heart of the project, but I mark that I leave things unsaid. Here is what I do not say in the moment of the presentation—those medical experiments were gynecological operations without anesthesia, executed to close vaginal fistula that were leaking piss and shit, executed without anesthesia not because it was not available, but because the doctor did not believe that black women felt pain. I can write this down, here, in this essay, as you can now stop for a minute if you need to collect yourself, as you listen to what this narrative does to your inside. You might feel a clench deep down in your torso, like many of us did, a kinesthetic empathy that translates itself across text, time and space, and which became a core choreographic element in our Anarcha poetics.I do not speak about the medical facts directly in a face-to-face presentation where there is no place to hide, no place to turn away. Instead, I point to a secret at the heart of the Anarcha Project, and explain where all the medical and historical data can be found (in the Anarcha Project essay, “Remembering Anarcha,” in the on-line performance studies journal Liminalities site, free and accessible to all without subscription, now frequently used in bioethics education (see: http://www.liminalities.net/4-2). The people in the round, then, have only a vague sense of what the project is about, and I explain why this formal frame appears instead of open disclosure. I ask their permission to proceed. They either give it to me, or else our circle becomes something else, and we speak about performance practices and formal means of speaking about trauma instead.Having marked the space as one in which we agree on a specific framework or rule, having set up a space apart, we begin. One by one, raw and without preamble, people in the circle read what they have been given. The meaning of what they are reading only comes to them as they are reading—they have had little time to familiarise themselves with the words beforehand. Someone reads a poem about being held as a baby by one’s mother, being accepted, even through the writer’s body is so different. Someone reads about the persistence of shame. Someone reads about how incontinence is so often the borderline for independent living in contemporary cultures—up to here, freedom; past this point, at the point of leakage, the nursing home. Someone reads about her mother’s upset about digging up that awful past again. Someone reads about fibroid tumors in African-American women. Someone reads about the Venus Hottentott. Someone begins to cry (most recently at a Feminisms and Rhetorics conference), crying softly, and there is no knowing about why, but there is companionship, and quiet contemplation, and it is ok. These presentations start with low-key chatting, setting up the circle, and end the same way—once we have made our way around, once our fragments are read out, we just sit and talk, no “presentation-mode” emerges, and no one gets up into high drama. We’ve all taken strange things into our mouths, talked of piss and shit and blood and race and oppression and love and survival. Did we get free of ourselves, of the inevitability of narrative, in the attention to articulation, elocution, the performance of words, even if just for a moment? Did we taste the words on our tongues, material physical traces of a different form of embodiment? Container/ConclusionThe poet Anne Carson attended one of our Anarcha presentations, and her comments to us that evening helped to frame our subsequent work for me—she called our work creating a container, a vessel for experience, without sharing the specifics of that experience. I have since explored this image further, thought about amphorae as commemorative vases, thought of earth and clay as materials, thought of the illustrations on ancient vessels, on pattern and form, flow and movement. The vessel as matter: deterritorialising and reterritorialising, familiar and strange, shaping into form, and shaped out of formlessness, fired in the light and baked in the earth’s darkness, hardened only to crumble and crack again with the ages, returning to dust. These disclosures are in time and space—they are not narratives that create an archive or a body of knowledge. They breathe, and vibrate, and press against skin. What can be contained, what leaks, what finds its way through the membrane?These disclosures are traces of life, and I can touch them. I never get bored by them. Come and sit by my side, and we share in this river flow border vessel cell life.ReferencesBritzman, Deborah P. "Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight." Educational Theory 45:2 (1995): 151–165. Burning. The Olimpias Project. Berkley; Eugene; Fort Worden. May-October, 2009Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Vol. 2. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1985.Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1969Kuppers, Petra. “Remembering Anarcha: Objection in the Medical Archive.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4.2 (2006): n.p. 24 July 2009 < http://liminalities.net/4-2 >.Cox, Aimee Meredith, Tiye Giraud, Anita Gonzales, Petra Kuppers, and Carrie Sandahl. “The Anarcha-Anti-Archive.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4.2 (2006): n.p. 24 July 2009 < http://liminalities.net/4-2 >.Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984.Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen: A True Story. New York: Knopf, 2006.St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. “Circling the Text: Nomadic Writing Practices.” Qualitative Inquiry 3.4 (1997): 403–18.

The Walt Disney Company has been creating magical fairy tales since the early 1900s and is a trusted brand synonymous with wholesome, family entertainment (Wasko). Over time, this reputation has resulted in the Disney brand’s huge financial growth and influence on audiences worldwide. (Wohlwend). As the largest global media powerhouse in the Western world (Beattie), Disney uses its power and influence to shape the perceptions and ideologies of its audience. In the twenty-first century there has been a proliferation of retellings of Disney fairy tales, and Kilmer suggests that although the mainstream perception is that these new iterations promote gender equity, new cultural awareness around gender stereotypes, and cultural insensitivity, this is illusory. Tangled, for example, was a popular film selling over 10 million DVD copies and positioned as a bold new female fairy tale character; however, academics took issue with this position, writing articles entitled “Race, Gender and the Politics of Hair: Disney’s Tangled Feminist Messages”, “Tangled: A Celebration of White Femininity”, and “Disney’s Tangled: Fun, But Not Feminist”, berating the film for its lack of any true feminist examples or progressiveness (Kilmer). One way to assess the impact of Disney is to look at the use of shape shifting and transformation in the narratives – particularly those that include women and young girls. Research shows that girls and women are often stereotyped and sexualised in the mass media (Smith et al.; Collins), and Disney regularly utilises body modification and metamorphosis within its narratives to emphasise what good and evil ‘look’ like. These magical transformations evoke what Marina Warner refers to as part of the necessary surprise element of the fairy tale, while creating suspense and identity with storylines and characters. In early Disney films such as the 1937 version of Snow White, the queen becomes the witch who brings a poison apple to the princess; and in the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty the ‘bad’ fairy Maleficent shapeshifts into a malevolent dragon. Whilst these ‘good to evil’ (and vice versa) tropes are easily recognised, there are additional transformations that are arguably more problematic than those of the increasingly terrifying monsters or villains. Disney has created what we have coined the ‘princess bubble’, where the physique and behaviour of the leading women in the tales has become a predictor of success and good fortune, and the impression is created of a link between their possession of beauty and the ‘happily-ever-after’ outcome received by the female character. The value, or worth, of a princess is shown within these stories to often increase according to her ability to attract men. For example, in Brave, Queen Elinor showcases the extreme measures taken to ‘present’ her daughter Merida to male suitors. Merida is preened, dressed, and shown how to behave to increase her value to her family, and whilst she manages to persuade them to set aside their patriarchal ideologies in the end, it is clear what is expected from Merida in order to gain male attention. Similarly, Cinderella, Aurora, and Snow White are found to be of high ‘worth’ by the princes on account of their beauty and form. We contend, therefore, that the impression often cast on audiences by Disney princesses emphasises that beauty = worth, no matter how transgressive Disney appears to be on the surface. These princesses are flawlessly beautiful, capable of winning the heart of the prince by triumphing over their less attractive rivals – who are often sisters or other family members. This creates the illusion among young audiences that physical attractiveness is enough to achieve success, and emphasises beauty as the priority above all else. Therefore, the Disney ‘princess bubble’ is highly problematic. It presents a narrow range of acceptability for female characters, offers a distorted view of gender, and serves to further engrain into popular culture a flawed stereotype on how to look and behave that negates a fuller representation of female characters. In addition, Armando Maggi argues that since fairy tales have been passed down through generations, they have become an intrinsic part of many people’s upbringing and are part of a kind of universal imaginary and repository of cultural values. This means that these iconic cultural stories are “unlikely to ever be discarded because they possess both a sentimental value and a moral ‘soundness’” (Rutherford 33), albeit that the lessons to be learnt are at times antiquated and exclusionary in contemporary society. The marketing and promotion of the Disney princess line has resulted in these characters becoming an extremely popular form of media and merchandise for young girls (Coyne et al. 2), and Disney has received great financial benefit from the success of its long history of popular films and merchandise. As a global corporation with influence across multiple entertainment platforms, from its streaming channel to merchandise and theme parks, the gender portrayals therefore impact on culture and, in particular, on how young audiences view gender representation. Therefore, it could be argued that Disney has a social responsibility to ensure that its messages and characters do not skew or become damaging to the psyche of its young audiences who are highly impressionable. When the representation of gender is examined, however, Disney tends to create highly gendered performances in both the early and modern iterations of fairy tales, and the princess characters remain within a narrow range of physical portrayals and agency. The Princess Bubble Although there are twelve official characters within the Disney princess umbrella, plus Elsa and Anna from the Disney Frozen franchise, this article examines the eleven characters who are either born or become royalty through marriage, and exhibit characteristics that could be argued to be the epitome of feminine representation in fairy tales. The characters within this ‘princess bubble’ are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, Elsa, and Anna. The physical appearance of those in the princess bubble also connects to displays around the physical aspects of ethnicity. Nine out of eleven are white skinned, with Jasmine having lightened in skin tone over time, and Tiana now having a tanned look rather than the original dark African American complexion seen in 2009 (Brucculieri). This reinforces an ideology that being white is superior. Every princess in our sample has thick and healthy long hair, the predominant colour being blonde. Their eyes are mostly blue, with only three possessing a dark colour, a factor which reinforces the characteristics and representation of white ethnic groups. Their eyes are also big and bulbous in shape, with large irises and pupils, and extraordinarily long eyelashes that create an almost child-like look of innocence that matches their young age. These princesses have an average age of sixteen years and are always naïve, most without formal education or worldly experience, and they have additional distinctive traits which include poise, elegance and other desired feminine characteristics – like kindness and purity. Ehrenreich and Orenstein note that the physical attributes of the Disney princesses are so evident that the creators have drawn criticism for over-glamorising them, and for their general passiveness and reliance on men for their happiness. Essentially, these women are created in the image of the ultimate male fantasy, where an increased value is placed on the virginal look, followed by a perfect tiny body and an ability to follow basic instructions. The slim bodies of these princesses are disproportionate, and include long necks, demure shoulders, medium- to large-sized perky breasts, with tiny waists, wrists, ankles and feet. Thus, it can be argued that the main theme for those within the princess bubble is their physical body and beauty, and the importance of being attractive to achieve success. The importance of the physical form is so valued that the first blessing given by the fairies to Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is the gift of physical beauty (Rutherford). Furthermore, Tanner et al. argue that the "images of love at first sight in the films encourage the belief that physical appearance is the most important thing", and these fairy tales often reflect a pattern that the prince cannot help but to instantly fall in love with these women because they are so striking. In some instances, like the stories of Cinderella and Snow White, these princesses have not uttered a single word to their prince before these men fall unconditionally and hopelessly in love. Cinderella need only to turn up at the ball as the best dressed (Parks), while Snow White must merely “wait prettily, because someday her prince will come" (Inge) to reestablish her as royalty. Disney emphasises that these princesses win their man solely on the basis that they are the most beautiful girls in the land. In Sleeping Beauty, the prince overhears Aurora’s singing and that sets his heart aflame to the point of refusing to wed the woman chosen for him at birth by the king. Fortunately, she is one and the same person, so the patriarchy survives, but this idea of beauty, and of 'love at first sight', continues to be a central part of Disney movies today, and shows that “Disney Films are vehicles of powerful gender ideologies” (Hairianto). These princesses within the bubble of perfection have priority placed on their physical and sexual beauty (Dietz), formulating a kind of ‘beauty contest motif’. Examples include Gaston, who does not love Belle in Beauty and the Beast, but simply wants her as his trophy wife because he deems her to be the most beautiful girl in the town. Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, looks as if she "was modeled after a slightly anorexic Barbie doll with thin waist and prominent bust. This representation portrays a dangerous model for young women" (Zarranz). The sexualisation of the characters continues as Jasmine has “a delicate nose and small mouth" (Lacroix), with a dress that can be considered as highly sexualised and unsuitable for a girl of sixteen (Lacroix). In Tangled, Rapunzel is held hostage in the tower by Mother Gothel because she is ‘as fragile as a flower’ and needs to be ‘kept safe’ from the harms in the world. But it is her beauty that scares the witch the most, because losing Rapunzel would leave the old woman without her magical anti-aging hair. She uses scare tactics to ensure that Rapunzel remains unseen to the world. These examples are all variations of the beauty theme, as the princesses all fall within narrow and predictable tropes of love at first sight where the woman is rescued and initiated into womanhood by being chosen by a man. Disney’s Progressive Representation? At times Disney’s portrayal of princesses appears illusively progressive, by introducing new and different variations of princesses into the fold – such as Merida in the 2012 film Brave. Unfortunately, this is merely an illusion as the ‘body-perfect’ image remains an all-important ideal to snare a prince. Merida, the young and spirited teenage princess, begins her tale determined not to conform to the desired standards set for a woman of her standing; however, when the time comes for her to be married, there is no negotiating with her mother, the queen, on dress compliance. Merida is clothed against her will to re-identify her in the manner which her parents deem appropriate. Her ability to express her identity and individuality removed, now replaced by a masked version, and thus with the true Merida lost in this transformation, her parents consider Merida to be of renewed merit and benefit to the family. This shows that Disney remains unchanged in its depiction of who may ‘fit’ within the princess bubble, because the rubric is unchanged on how to win the heart of the man. In fact, this film is possibly more troublesome than the rest because it clearly depicts her parents to deem her to be of more value only after her mother has altered her physical appearance. It is only after the total collapse of the royal family that King Fergus has a change of patriarchal heart, and in fact Disney does not portray this rumpled, ripped-sleeved version of the princess in its merchandising campaign. While the fantasy of fairy tales provides enthralling adventures that always end in happiness for the pretty princesses that encounter them, consideration must be given to all those women who have not met the standard and are left in their wake. If women do not conform to the standards of representation, they are presented as outcasts, and happiness eludes them. Cinderella, for example, has two ugly stepsisters, who, no matter how hard they might try, are unable to match her in attractiveness, kindness, or grace. Disney has embraced and not shunned Perrault’s original retelling of the tale, by ensuring that these stepsisters are ugly. They have not been blessed with any attributes whatsoever, and cannot sing, dance, or play music; nor can they sew, cook, clean, or behave respectably. These girls will never find a suitor, let alone a prince, no matter how eager they are to do so. On the physical comparison, Anastasia and Drizella have bodies that are far more rounded and voluptuous, with feet, for example, that are more than double the size of Cinderella’s magical slipper. These women clearly miss the parameters of our princess bubble, emphasising that Disney is continuing to promote dangerous narratives that could potentially harm young audience conceptions of femininity at an important period in their development. Therefore, despite the ‘progressive’ strides made by Disney in response to the vast criticism of their earlier films, the agency afforded to their new generation of princesses does not alter the fact that success comes to those who are beautiful. These beautiful people continue to win every time. Furthermore, Hairianto has found that it is not uncommon for the media to directly or indirectly promote “mental models of how a woman should look, speak and interact with others”, and that Disney uses its pervasive princess influence “to shape perceptions of female identity and desirability. Females are made to measure themselves against the set of values that are meted out by the films” (Hairianto). In the 2017 film Beauty and the Beast, those outside of the princess bubble are seen in the characters of the three maidens from the village who are always trying to look their very best in the hope of attracting Gaston (Rutherford). Gaston is not only disinterested but shows borderline contempt at their glances by permitting his horse to spray mud and dirt all over their fine clothing. They do not meet the beauty standard set, and instead of questioning his cruelty, the audience is left laughing at the horse’s antics. Interestingly, the earlier version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast portrays these maidens as blonde, slim, and sexy, closely fitting the model of beauty displayed in our princess bubble; however, none match the beauty of Belle, and are therefore deemed inferior. In this manner, Disney is being irresponsible, placing little interest in the psychological ‘safety’ or affect the messages have upon young girls who will never meet these expectations (Ehrenreich; Best and Lowney; Orenstein). Furthermore, bodies are shaped and created by culture. They are central to self-identity, becoming a projection of how we see ourselves. Grosz (xii) argues that our notions of our bodies begin in physicality but are forever shaped by our interactions with social realities and cultural norms. The media are constantly filled with images that “glorify and highlight some kinds of bodies (for example, the young, able-bodied and beautiful) while ignoring or condemning others” (Jones 193), and these influences on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, and religion within popular culture therefore play a huge part in identity creation. In Disney films, the princess bubble constantly sings the same song, and “children view these stereotypical roles as the right and only way to behave” (Ewert). In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana’s friend Charlotte is so desperate to ‘catch’ a prince that "she humorously over-applies her makeup and adjusts her ball gown to emphasize her cleavage" (Breaux), but the point is not lost. Additionally, “making sure that girls become worthy of love seems central to Disney’s fairy tale films” (Rutherford 76), and because their fairy tales are so pervasive and popular, young viewers receive a consistent message that being beautiful and having a tiny doll-like body type is paramount. “This can be destructive for developing girls’ views and images of their own bodies, which are not proportioned the way that they see on screen” (Cordwell 21). “The strongly gendered messages present in the resolutions of the movies help to reinforce the desirability of traditional gender conformity” (England et al. 565). Conclusion The princess bubble is a phenomenon that has been seen in Disney’s representation of female characters for decades. Within this bubble there is a narrow range of representation permitted, and attempts to make the characters more progressive have instead resulted in narrow and restrictive constraints, reinforcing dangerous female stereotypes. Kilmer suggests that ultimately these representations fail to break away from “hegemonic assumptions about gender norms, class boundaries, and Caucasian privileging”. Ultimately this presents audiences with strong and persuasive messages about gender performance. Audiences conform their bodies to societal ‘rules’: “as to how we ‘wear’ and ‘use’ our bodies” (Richardson and Locks x), including for example how we should dress, what we should weigh, and how to become popular. In our global hypermediated society, viewers are constantly exposed to princesses and other appropriate bodies. These become internalised ideals and aid in positive and negative thoughts and self-identity, which in turn creates additional pressure on the female body in particular. The seemingly innocent stories with happy outcomes are therefore unrealistic and ultimately excluding of those who cannot or will not ‘fit into the princess bubble’. The princess bubble, we argue, is therefore predictable and restrictive, promoting female passiveness and a reliance of physical traits over intelligence. The dominance of beauty over all else remains the road to female success in the Disney fairy tale film. References Beauty and the Beast. Dirs. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Walt Disney Productions, 1991. Film. Beauty and the Beast. Dir. Bill Condon. Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Film. Best, Joel, and Kathleen S. Lowney. “The Disadvantage of a Good Reputation: Disney as a Target for Social Problems Claims.” The Sociological Quarterly 50 (2009): 431–449. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01147.x. Brave. Dirs. Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman. Walt Disney Pictures, 2012. Film. Breaux, Richard, M. “After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes in on Its Racist Past.” Journal of African American Studies 14 (2010): 398-416. Cinderella. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. Walt Disney Productions, 1950. Film. Collins, Rebecca L. “Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Go?” Sex Roles 64 (2011): 290–298. doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9929-5. Cordwell, Caila Leigh. The Shattered Slipper Project: The Impact of the Disney Princess Franchise on Girls Ages 6-12. Honours thesis, Southeastern University, 2016. Coyne, Sarah M., Jennifer Ruh Linder, Eric E. Rasmussen, David A. Nelson, and Victoria Birkbeck. “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem, and Prosocial Behavior in Children.” Child Development 87.6 (2016): 1–17. Dietz, Tracey, L. “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior.” Sex Roles 38 (1998): 425–442. doi:10.1023/a:1018709905920. England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. "Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses." Sex Roles 64 (2011): 555-567. Ewert, Jolene. “A Tale as Old as Time – an Analysis of Negative Stereotypes in Disney Princess Movies.” Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences 13 (2014). Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. London, Routledge, 1994. Inge, M. Thomas. “Art, Adaptation, and Ideology: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32.3 (2004): 132-142. Jones, Meredith. “The Body in Popular Culture.” Being Cultural. Ed. Bruce M.Z. Cohen. Auckland University, 2012. 193-210. Kilmer, Alyson. Moving Forward? Problematic Ideology in Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films. Central Washington University, 2015. Lacroix, Celeste. “Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Popular Communications 2.4 (2004): 213-229. Little Mermaid, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Film. Maggi, Armando. Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Parks, Kari. Mirror, Mirror: A Look at Self-Esteem & Disney Princesses. Honours thesis. Ball State University, 2012. Pinocchio. Dirs. Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Norm Ferguson, Bill Roberts, and T. Lee. Walt Disney Productions, 1940. Film. Princess and the Frog, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 2009. Film. Richardson, Niall, and Adam Locks. Body Studies: The Basics. Routledge, 2014. Rutherford, Amanda M. Happily Ever After? A Critical Examination of the Gothic in Disney Fairy Tale Films. Auckland University of Technology, 2020. Sleeping Beauty. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Les Clark. Walt Disney Productions, 1959. Film. Smith, Stacey L., Katherine M. Pieper, Amy Granados, and Mark Choueite. “Assessing Gender-Related Portrayals in Topgrossing G-Rated Films.” Sex Roles 62 (2010): 774–786. Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Dirs. David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, William Cottrell, Perce Pearce, and Larry Morey. Walt Disney Productions, 1937. Film. Tangled. Dirs. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Walt Disney Pictures, 2010. Film. Tanner, Litsa RenÉe, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund. “Images of Couples and Families in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31 (2003): 355-373. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds. London: Oxford UP, 2002. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Polity Press, 2001. Wohlwend, Karen E. “Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts through Disney Princess Play.” Reading Research Quarterly 44.1 (2009): 57-83. Zarranaz, L. Garcia. “Diswomen Strike Back? The Evolution of Disney's Femmes in the 1990s.” Atenea 27.2 (2007) 55-65.

This thesis investigates the presentation of AmaXhosa traditional dancing and music on the stages of the National Arts Festival (NAF), Main Programme, of South Africa in 2009. Four productions featuring AmaXhosa traditional dancing and music, as well as a fine art exhibition, are analysed to determine how the AmaXhosa culture is being portrayed, what is considered authentic and how these productions may affect the memory of the AmaXhosa nation. In an attempt to understand the position of these productions within the NAF the South African cultural context as well as the NAF is examined. The post-apartheid, post-rainbow nation, South African cultural context is discussed and how the NAF could contribute towards creating a more unified South African identity. Incorporated and inscribed memory categories are related to how one could determine authenticity in traditional indigenous productions. A cautionary note on incorporated memory is linked to efficacy, while a loss of incorporated memory within the AmaXhosa society may result in ritual acts being orientated towards entertainment. If the private culture is consistently displayed in the public realm then it is inevitable that the ways in which the AmaXhosa recollect their history will be altered. The contribution of the transitional spaces of theatres and proscenium arch stages to the choreography and incorporated memory of the performers relates to the collective recollection of the AmaXhosa. Bearing this in mind, this thesis suggests that the NAF is playing a dual role in the evolution of the AmaXhosa. It is both positively contributing to the economic upliftment of a sector of the population and exposing people to this rich and multilayered culture. However, it is also impacting the efficacy of the private culture and fracturing the traditional knowledge of the AmaXhosa by assisting in the inscription of their performance forms.<br>This thesis consists of three parts (1 pdf document and two video mp4 files)

This is a study of 'beer drinks' among Xhosa people living in the Shixini administrative area of Willowvale district, Transkei. Beer drinks are defined as a 'polythetic' class of events distinguishable from other kinds of ceremonies and rituals at which beer may be consumed, and an attempt is made to outline their major characteristics. A detailed description of the way in which beer drinks are conducted is provided in Chapter 3, with emphasis on the symbolism involved in the allocation of beer, space and time, and on the speech events (including formal oratory) that occur. The main theoretical argument is that beer drinks may be regarded as 'cultural performances' in which social reality or 'practice' is dramatised and reflected upon, enabling people to infuse their experience with meaning and to establish guidelines for future action. This is achieved by relating social practice to cultural norms and values, in a dynamic rather than a static manner. It is demonstrated that the symbolism involved in beer drinking is highly sensitive to the real world and adjusts accordingly, which means that 'culture' is continually being reinterpreted. Despite poverty, a degree of landlessness and heavy reliance on migrant labour, Shixini people maintain an ideal of rural selfsufficiency and are able to partly fulfill this ideal, thereby maintaining a degree of independence and resistance to full incorporation into the wider political economy of southern Africa. They achieve this largely by maintaining a strong sense of community and of household interdependence, linked to a sense of Xhosa tradition. It is this aspect of social practice, manifested in a variety of forms - work parties, ploughing companies, rites of passage, and so on - that is dramatised, reflected upon and reinforced at beer drinks. In a definite sense then, beer drinks may be regarded as a response and a way of adapting to apartheid, and this study one of a community under threat.

Bibliography: leaves 166-172.<br>Isihlonipho Sabafazi (the Xhosa women's language of respect) is a language in which syllables occurring in the names of menfolk are avoided by women. Thie thesis attempts to place the practice in it social context by applying both descriptive and analytical methodologies. The thesis include a literature survey and a critique on the dynamics of gender and language. The results of interviews conducted in three areas, one urban and two rural, are analysed and tabulated. A glossary of substitute words is included.

Among the Xhosas, the healing sickness called intwaso is interptreted as a call by the ancestors to become a healer. Transpersonalists also see these initiatory illnesses as spiritual crises, while according to the widely accepted Western psychiatric view, illness is purely perceived in physical and psychological terms. A case study was conducted where a single participant who has undergone the process of ukuthwasa and is functioning as a traditional healer was interviewed. A series of interviews were done where information was gathered about significant experiences related to ukuthwasa process. Tapes were transcribed and a case narrative was written and interpreted using the traditional Xhosa beliefs, the western psychiatric and the transpersonal psychology perspectives. Strengths and weaknesses of each perspective were then examined.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2002.<br>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis employs the theoretical framework of text construction advanced by Grabe and Kaplan (1996) for the analysis of human rights magazine texts in isiXhosa. The theory employed in this study includes linguistic elements, which can be included in teaching methodology for developing the learners' analytic skills in analyzing the discourse structure of written texts. These kinds of analytic skills are strongly reflected in Curriculum 2005 for the learning area languages. The thesis employs a range of textlinguistic strategies for analyzing written genre texts on human and civil rights issues. It is argued that the incorporation of these strategies by teachers in the process of language teaching in Curriculum 2005 will enable the learners to analyse texts successfully and to gain an awareness about how language is used in texts. For the purpose of analysis in this thesis, texts from the Bona magazine with contents ranging on human and community or civil rights were collected. The thesis demonstrates that text analysis involves to a large extent, an investigation of generic factors such as the communicative purpose, the culture and the community in which the text is produced. Following the discussion of the generic features of texts, a broad definition of the term text is explored, and the textlinguistic construction and certain levels of analysis are identified. In addition to this, the study demonstrates that analysis of the linguistic structure of texts needs to incorporate the discussion of the parameters of the ethnography of writing advanced by Grabe and Kaplan (1996). The ethnography of writing entails that a detailed analysis of texts should address the following questions: 'Who writes what to whom, for what purpose, why, when and how?' The study explores the implications and rationale for incorporating text analysis in language teaching and learning. Lastly, the relationship between the theoretical underpinnings assumed in this study, and the learning outcomes of Curriculum 2005 are explored. This study demonstrates that the theoretical framework of Grabe and Kaplan (1996) which underlies in the construction of written texts, will not only introduce the language learner to an inclusive language pedagogy, but can be employed for effective text analysis of isiXhosagenre texts on human rights in popular magazineslike Bona.<br>AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis maak gebruik van die teoretiese model van Grabe en Kaplan (1996) vir die analise van menseregte tydskrifartikels in isiXhosa. Die teorie wat aangewend word in die studie sluit linguistiese elemente in wat ingesluit kan word in taalonderrigmetodologie vir die ontwikkeling van leerders se analitiese vaardighede in die analise van diskoersstrukture van skriftelike tekste. Hierdie soort analitiese vaardighede word sterk gereflekteer in Kurrikulum 2005 vir die leerarea van tale. Die tesis wend 'n verskeidenheid tekslinguistiese strategieë aan vir die analise van geskrewe genre tekste oor menseregte en burgerlike regte vraagstukke. Daar word betoog in die studie dat die insluiting van hierdie strategieë deur onderwysers in die proses van taalonderrig in Kurrikulum 2005 leerders in staat sal stelom tekste suksesvol te ontleed en 'n bewussyn te kry van hoe taal in tekste gebruik word. Vir die doeleindes van analise is hierdie tesis is tekste gebruik uit die BONA tydskrif met 'n inhoud oor menseregte en gemeenskaps- en burgerlike regte. Die tesis demonstreer dat teksanalise in 'n groot mate 'n ondersoek behels van generiese faktore soos kommunikatiewe doelstelling, die kultuur en die gemeenskap waarin die teks geproduseer word. Na 'n bespreking van die generiese faktore van tekste word 'n breë definisie van die term "teks" ondersoek, en die tekslinguistiese konstruksie en bepaalde vlakke van analise word geïdentifiseer. Hierbenewens demonstreer die studie dat die linguistiese analise van tekste die bespreking moet insluit van die parameters van die etnografie van geskrewe tekste soos voorgestaan deur Grabe en Kaplan (1996). Die etnografie van geskrewe tekste behels dat die analise van tekste die volgende vrae ondersoek: Wie skryf wat vir wie vir watter doel, waarom, wanneer en hoe? Die studie ondersoek die implikasies en motivering vir die insluiting van teksanalise in taalonderrig. Laastens word die verhouding tussen die teoretiese grondslae, wat aanvaar word in hierdie studie, en die leeruitkomste van Kurrikulum 2005 ondersoek. Die studie toon aan dat die teoretiese raamwerk van Grabe en Kaplan (1996), wat onderliggend is aan die konstruksie van geskrewe tekste, kan aanvaar word om leerders in te lei in 'n meer inklusiewe taalonderrig en kan aangewend word vir effektiewe teksanalise van isiXhosa genre tekste gebaseer op die menseregte in populêre tydskrifte soos Bona.

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2007.<br>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Purpose. This study investigates how foreign-born Chinese managers in the Cape Town area perceive their own leadership in a cross-cultural business situation, and compares these perceptions with how the local South African Xhosa-speaking employees perceive the styles of their foreign managers. The study is important because of the growing private investment in Africa by people from China. Approach. Ten small businesses owned and managed by Chinese nationals were studied: five retail, two wholesale, one restaurant and two Chinese supermarkets. A Likert-type questiormaire was created by operationalising 10 of the 19 aspects of cross-cultural leadership identified by Suutari and Riusala (2001). These ten aspects are: decision participation, autonomy-delegation, consideration, rewarding, informing, conflict management, production emphasis, criticizing, goal setting, and inspiration. Each aspect had four questions associated with it. The questiormaire was given individually to the ten managers and to 20 of their Xhosa-speaking employees, two per business. It was followed by an open interview based mainly on the questiormaire content. The questionnaire responses were analysed statistically, first to test for the sameness of responses of the employees as well as the sameness of responses of the managers, using the Sign Test. Responses of the two groups were compared for each aspect. Interview responses were used to help interpret the numbers and formulate findings. Findings. There are clear, statistically significant differences between the perceptions of the managers' leadership style by the two groups on all ten of the aspects. The Chinese managers show a similar leadership approach when interacting with their employees. The Xhosa-speaking employees have perceptions similar to one another about their managers' leadership style. Thus a disjunction is shown between the two culturally different groups. The responses of the Chinese managers were analysed in light of the literature on Chinese culture, and in most ways they were seen to be managing using a traditional Chinese-based style. In general, they make the decisions and do the planning, do not delegate much, withhold infonnation, do not reward good performance, and are not inspirational. However, they do tend to be kind. Research limitations. The study compared only those two ethnic groups in a small geographic area, with small sample sizes. It also studied reported perceptions. Further research could tty to isolate just cultural differences, and focus more on leadership behaviours. Practical implications. Acknowledgement of the local culture and perhaps use of a more inclusive, less authoritarian management-leadership style seem important for existing and future Chinese managers. Culturally-based management training can be offered for them and for potential investors, to support future small business investors in South Africa and beyond.<br>AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Doel. Hierdie studie behels 'n ondersoek na hoe buitelands-gebore Sjinese bestuurders in Kaapstad hulle eie leierskap beoordeel in 'n kruis-kulturele sake omgewing. Hierdie sienings word dan vergelyk met die persepsies van hoe plaaslike Suid-Afrikaanse Xhosa-sprekende werknemers die bestuurstyl van hulle buitelandse werkgewers beoordeel. Hierdie studie is belangrik vanweë die toenemende private belegging in Afrika deur Sjinese burgers. Benadering. Tien klein sake-ondememings wat deur Sjinese burgers besit en bestuur word, is ondersoek: vyf in die kleinhandel, twee in die groothandel, een restaurant en twee Sjinese supermarkte. 'n Likert-tipe vraelys is saamgestel deur die operasionalisering van 10 van die 19 aspekte van kruis-kulturele leierskap s00s deur Suutari en Riusala (2001) geïdentifiseer. Hierdie tien aspekte is: besluit-deelneming, outonomie-delegasie, konsiderasie, beloning, inkennisstelling, konflik-bestuur, produksie-beklemtoning, kritisering, doelsteIling-bepaling, en inspirasie. Elke aspek is aan vier vrae gekoppel. Die vraelys is aan elkeen van die tien Sjinese bestuurders gegee, en aan 20 van hulle Xhosa-sprekende werknemers, twee per sake-ondememing. Dit is opgevolg deur 'n oop onderhoud wat hoofsaaklik op die inhoud van die vraelys gebaseer was. Die antwoorde op die vraelys is statisties ontIeed, eerstens vir die ooreenstemming van die antwoorde van die werknemers, sowel as die ooreenstemming van die antwoorde van die bestuurders deur middle van die "Sign" toets. Die antwoorde van die twee groepe is met mekaar vergelyk vir elke aspek. Die terugvoering vanaf die onderhoude is gebruik om die getalle te interpreter en om resultate te help formuleer. Bevindings. Daar is helder, statistiese beduidende verskille tussen die beoordeling van die bestuurders se leierskapstyl deur beide groepe wat betref al tien die aspekte. Die Sjinese bestuurders toon 'n soortgelyke leierskap benadering wanneer hulle met hul werknemers omgaan. Die Xhosa-sprekende wer1cnemers het onderling soortgelyke persepsies betreffende hul bestuurders se leierskapstyl. Dus bestaan daar 'n uiteenlopende siening tussen die twee kulturele groepe. Die beoordeling van die Sjinese bestuurders is ontleed in die lig van literatuur oor Sjinese kultuur, en dit het geblyk dat hulle 'n tradisionele Sjinese bestuurstyl navolg. In die algemeen is daar bevind dat hulle die besluite neem en die beplanning doen, dat hulle nie veel delegeer nie, dat hulle inligting weerhou, dat hulle nie goeie werkverrigting beloon nie, en dat hulle nie werkers aanmoedig nie. Desniteenstaande is hulle goedhartig. Navorsingsbeperkings. In hierdie studie is slegs twee etniese groepe in 'n klein geografiese gebied, met klein steekproewe, ondersoek. Persepsies waaroor verslag gedoen is, is ondersoek. In verdere navorsing kan daar probeer word om kulturele verskille te isoleer, en om op leierskapsgedrag te fokus. Praktiese implikasies. Erkenning van die plaaslike kultuur en miskien 'n meer insluitende, minder outoritêre bestuurstyl blyk belangrik te wees vir bestaande en toekomstige Sjinese bestuurders. Kultuur-gebaseerde bestuursopleiding kan vir hulle en voornemende beleggers aangebied word om toekomstige klein sake-beleggers in Suid-Afrika en elders te ondersteun.

This thesis focuses on the articulation in music of human worldviews, and the social contexts in which they emerge. It suggests that people project various forms of social reality through symbolic systems which operate dynamically to maintain and recreate cultural patterns. The symbolic system investigated in support of this suggestion is that constituted by Venda guitar songs. In the performance of these songs, social reality emerges in a combination of symbolic forms: verbal, musical and somatic. The combination of these symbolic forms serves as a medium for individual self-awareness basic to the establishment of social reality and identity, and the drive for social power and legitimacy. A study of these symbolic forms and their performance indicates that musicians invoke the potential of communal music to increase social support for certain principles on which survival strategies in a turbulently changing society might be based. The discourse of Venda guitar songs incorporates modes of popular expression and consciousness, and thus attempts to invoke states of intensified emotion to promote these survival strategies. Performance occasions emerge as a focus for community orientation and the exploration of social networks. They promote stabilizing social and economic interaction, and serve as a basis for moral and cooperative action. Social reality also emerges in musical style, which is treated as the audible articulation of human thought and emotion. Stylistic choices are treated as integral to the conceptualization of contemporary existence. A study of these choices reveals varying degrees of cultural resistance and assimilation, ranging from musical styles which are essentially rooted in traditional social patterns, to styles which integrate traditional and adopted musical elements as articulations of changing self-perceptions, social aspirations, and quests for new social identity.

The dominant emphasis in Western models of bereavement is on the breaking of bonds with the deceased in order for healing to occur. Failure to let go often leads to a diagnosis of 'pathological grief'. This paper challenges the assumption that death invariably means that the bonds with the deceased have to be severed. Situating Western models of bereavement in a modernist context not only challenges the 'truth' claims of these models, but also facilitates a deconstruction of the elements that contribute to the emphasis on letting go. In contrast to these theories, two Xhosa rituals (umkhapho and umbuyiso) that seek to sustain the bond with the deceased person will be examined. Such rituals demonstrate that it is possible to both maintain the bond and for the bereaved person to move on with their lives. Despite different contexts, it will be argued that these Xhosa bereavement rituals have a contribution to make to Western models of bereavement and some implications for therapy will be explored.

Thesis (MA. (African Languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2013<br>Mushumo uno wo sumbedza ṱhalutshedzo dza nyimbo dza sialala dza Tshivenḓa, kukhethekanyele kwa nyimbo dza sialala, zwifhinga zwa u imba nyimbo dza sialala, tshakha dza nyimbo dza sialala dza Vhavenḓa na tsumbo dzadzo, vhathu vhane vha imba nyimbo dza sialala, zwilidzo na mutengo wa zwilidzo zwa nyimbo dza sialala, mishumo ya nyimbo dza sialala dza Tshivenḓa, nḓila dza u tsireledza nyimbo dza sialala dza Vhavenḓa uri dzi songo ngalangala.