Research seminar information
When: Friday, 5th of April, 1:00pm-2:00pm (UTC+2).
Where: Room 247, Unioninkatu 33, you can also join in by Zoom
Join Zoom Meeting
https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/65062881927?pwd=VThZNVNscmlzM3dlZldyUGhtUWta…
Meeting ID: 650 6288 1927
Passcode: 486775
'Thinking politically with popular music from the Balkans'
What does it mean to think politically with popular music? Scholars of popular music in south-east Europe are accustomed to observing the contested boundaries of ethnic and national identity, socioeconomic dislocations since the advent of neoliberal capitalism, and the region’s status as a semi-periphery of Europe through the tens of the music that suffuses everyday life. In the post-Yugoslav region, the politics of popular music additionally draw in the legacies of Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the clashing memory politics in the aftermath of the 1990s wars. Popular music is where the complex racialisation of the Roma as part of defining national, Balkan and European identities is most perceptible, where anxieties over Islamic heritage as part of Euromodernity are widespread, and where the region’s encounters with cultures of the global Black diaspora might be most clearly seen. Based on the development of a forthcoming Routledge handbook on popular music and politics of the Balkans, this seminar argues that taking the politics of popular music seriously and centring a semi-peripheralised space like south-east Europe as we do so produces richer understandings of the everyday, the intimate and the embodied in politics itself.
This seminar is part of the EuroStorie Research Seminar Series "Time and Identity". In our spring series, we want to concentrate on different notions of time and identity and illuminate the fundamental narratives and principles of contemporary societies that guide public discourse and decision making. Time is an essential dimension of our foundational stories and shared understandings of who we are, but the intertwinements between time and identity are characterized by diverse and sometimes inconsistent representations. How and by whom are the representations constructed, and what is required for a particular representation of time and identity to become hegemonic? In what ways does the focus on time and identity help us to analyze narratives on Europe?