Off Beat: Pluralizing Rhythm draws attention to rhythm as a tool for analyzing various cultural objects. In fields as diverse as music, culture, nature, and economy, rhythm can be seen as a phenomenon that both connects and divides. It suggests a certain measure with which people, practices, and cultures may comply. Yet, for this very reason rhythm can also function as a field of exclusion, contestation, and debate. In that respect, rhythm possesses an underestimated meaning-creating potential. Whereas its connecting force is often accentuated in the aesthetic, political, and commercial usage of the term, the divisive aspect of rhythm is at least as important. This volume wants to rid rhythm of its harmless, nearly esoteric, reputation as a cosmic unifier by understanding it in the light of the contemporary medial turn. In the present collection of essays, we have encouraged approaches that combine political, aesthetic, musical, and theoretical dimensions of rhythm.
Contents
Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen: Introduction
Timothy Yaczo: ¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island
Tilman Baumgärtel: Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love”
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen: Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture: Rhythmic Conventions, Skills, and Everyday Life
Dietmar Elflein: Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music
Marie Gelang: Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing
Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja: Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry
Peter Groves: Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry
Shintaro Miyazaki: AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies
Jodi Brooks: Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field
Jan Hein Hoogstad: The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions
Contributors
Index
Jan Hein Hoogstad is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is Associate Professor in the Section for Aesthetics and Culture, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark.
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