Browsing by Subject "Cultural politics"
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Item Cosmic cowboys, armadillos and outlaws: the cultural politics of Texan identity in the 1970s(2009-05) Mellard, Jason Dean; Davis, Janet M.This dissertation investigates the figure of “the Texan” during the 1970s across local, regional, and national contexts to unpack how the “national” discourse of Texanness by turns furthered and foreclosed visions of a more inclusive American polity in the late twentieth century. The project began in oral history work surrounding the cultural politics of Austin’s progressive country music scene in the decade, but quickly expanded to encompass the larger transformations roiling the state and the nation in the 1970s. As civil rights and feminist movements redefined hegemonic notions of the representative Texan, icons of Anglo-Texan masculinity—the cowboy, the oilman, the wheeler-dealer—came in for a dizzying round of celebration and critique, satire and ritual performance. Such Seventies performances of “the Texan” as took place in Austin’s “cosmic cowboy” subculture provided an imaginative space to refigure Anglo-Texan identity in ways that responded to and internalized the decade’s identity politics. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson’s picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of longstanding American myths and symbols at a historical moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested. This dissertation maps the messy ground of the 1970s in Texas along several paths. It begins some years prior with the Centennial Exposition of 1936 and the regionalism of J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek before proceeding to the challenges to their vision of “the Texan” on the part of the African American civil rights, Chicano, and women’s movements. The dissertation’s central chapters then address the melding of countercultural forms and the state’s traditional Anglo-Texan iconography and music in spaces like Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters. Popular music, art, film, journalism, and literature evoke this attempted revisioning of Anglo-Texan masculinity in dialogue with the decade’s identity politics.Item Culture in the crucible : Pussy Riot and the politics of art in contemporary Russia(2013-08) Johnston, Rebecca Adeline; Garza, Thomas J.There is a consistent thread throughout Russian history of governmental management of culture. Tsars and Communist bureaucrats alike have sought to variously promote, censor, or exploit writers, filmmakers, and musicians to control and define the country's cultural content. Often, these measures were intended not necessarily to cultivate Russia's aesthetic spirit, but to accomplish specific policy goals. The promotion of a State ideology and other efforts to stave of social unrest were chief among them. With the fall of Soviet power and the loss of an official ideology promoted by the state, the concept of cultural politics fell to the wayside. It has remained largely ignored ever since. Despite numerous high-profile incidents of persecution of the creative class, analysts have not linked them together as part of an overarching cultural policy. However, the Russian government under Vladimir Putin has faced consistent policy challenges since the beginning of the 2000s that could be mitigated through the implementation of such a policy. In some ways, the breadth and character of State involvement in the cultural sphere follows the pattern of the country’s autocratic past. In others, it demonstrates that it has adapted these policies to function in the hybrid regime that Putin has created, as opposed to the totalitarian ones that preceded it. A recent case that exemplifies this new breed of cultural policy is the persecution of the radical feminist punk band Pussy Riot. While largely unknown to many Russian citizens, the group’s overt opposition to the patriarchal model of rule established by Putin with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church was met by the most comprehensive crackdown within the cultural sphere since perestroika. Examining this case in detail can reveal the extent to which the Russian government is concerned about its ability to maintain popular legitimacy. The fact that it has continued to try to manage the cultural sphere may indicate the level of democracy that has or has not been established in Russia so far today.