Irrational amusements,theatre law,and moral reformers in nineteenth-century America: implications for later popular music study

This paper considers several case studies of conflicts between moral reformers active in US cities and venues catering to working-class audiences from the 1860s to 1880s. For moral reformers, theatrical entertainments, particularly forms with no educational or moral purpose, were deeply corrupting and threatened not only the well-being of the individual, but also that of the nation. These case studies show that tensions emerged when popular styles sought to expand their audience beyond their traditional patrons or to move into respectable areas of the city – in other words, when they did not stay in their traditional place. This is also true of the many hybrid musical forms that combined European-based folk or religious styles with African-American music. Forms such as jazz and rock ‘n’ roll did not elicit significant protest until they began to find an audience in northern cities among middle- and lower-middle-class youth. Exploring how laws were changed in response to earlier conflicts adds a crucial historical perspective to popular music studies, which tends to remain firmly focused on music from the mid-twentieth century onwards.     

The Politics and Poetics of Space in Les Passagers du Roissy-Express

Les Passagers du Roissy-Express is habitually situated in relation to writing on the city and/or postcolonial writing. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to explore the extent to which, in its rewriting of the spaces of the banlieue as historical and contemporary authentic spaces of the French nation, it can be aligned to some post-war sociological writing on rural France. Second, through a close reading of the language of the text, to show the landscape of the banlieue is also an emotional landscape, a landscape of filth and of freshness, of departure and disappearance. The public discourse of rediscovery and difference is inflected by a much more private one rooted in the oppression and suffering of the Occupation, and the text problematises the notions of otherness and elsewhere at both levels.     

Apollo and the Virgin: The Changing Meanings of a Sacred Site on Anafi

The ruins of an ancient Greek temple on a Cycladic island form part of an Orthodox Christian shrine. To local people and returning migrants, the site is that of their patron saint; its pre‐Christian past is irrelevant except in so far as it establishes their specific link with the ancient world, and thus with national claims of unbroken continuity between modern and ancient Greece. To early travellers and antiquarians, and to today’s archaeologists, it has been primarily the ancient site which is of interest, while tourists are more concerned in finding “an unspoilt island”. A historical survey of information about the ancient and the Christian site reveals ambiguities and confusions about both. These multiple meanings for locals and scholars are discussed.