Borderland Pop: Arab Jewish Musicians and the Politics of Performance

Saada-Ophir, Galit

doi:10.1525/can.2006.21.2.205

Cited by 39 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…24 Cultural Anthropology has also published many essays on performance. See Galit Saada‐Ophir's“Borderland Pop: Arab Jewish Musicians and the Politics of Performance” (2006), Jonathan Shannon's“Emotion, Performance, and Temporality in Arab Music: Reflections on Tarab ” (2003), and James Boon's“Showbiz as a Cross‐Cultural System: Circus and Song, Garland and Geertz, Rushdie, Mordden, … and More” (2000). For a full list of Cultural Anthropology essays focused on performance, see http://culanth.org/?q=node/124.…”

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confidence: 99%

Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana

Shipley

2009

Cultural Anthropology

101

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This essay traces Charismatic preaching and the moral importance of the fake pastor across public spaces and genres in Accra, Ghana. I argue that fear of the fake pastor creates a local theory of moral performance that sets the conditions of possibility for the legitimacy of the pastor as a public figure. Although rapid circulation generates anxiety about spiritual sincerity, it also produces continual hope for the miraculous and the potential for morally legitimate agency. The specter of the fake pastor provides a symbolic nexus for the transformation of spiritual into economic value in privatizing Ghana. This transformation occurs in the language of public moral belonging. A pastor's moral authority relies on public style and performance to connect spiritual power, moral sincerity, and economic potency. Fakery appears as the margin, the horizon against which a moral center is clarified. The fake's centrality to public moral discourse is rooted in the possibilities and dangers of individuated agencies associated with Ghana's liberalization.

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confidence: 99%

Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana

Shipley

2009

Cultural Anthropology

101

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“…A scene at dusk outside Sderot, a small, largely Mizraḥi desert town about five kilometers from the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip. The town is a stronghold of Mizraḥi culture (Saada‐Ophir ). It has been a constant target for Hamas rockets for the past fifteen years.…”

Section: The War On Gaza – Protective Edgementioning

confidence: 99%

Gaza 2014 and Mizraḥi Feminism

Lavie

2019

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What is the relationship between Mizraḥi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to Operation Protective Edge (the 2014 Gaza War) and Israel's foreign policy? Mizraḥi protests dissipate and disappear when the Israel‐Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. This essay connects intra‐Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel's political right wing. In between came bloodletting between the Israeli Defense Forces, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel's neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed not only for the Israel‐Palestine conflict; under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reforms. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizraḥi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel's Mizraḥi‐Ashkenazi rift.

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“…Yet the point is that as terrorist attacks became so frequent, many programmers felt that the public had become saturated by the stark fluctuations between musical genres and that they should not foster such a strict atmosphere of crisis. Instead they adopted a more diffuse practice referred to as “moderating the music,” where they simply softened the ongoing pop rock programming or incorporated “light” versions of mizrachi music with a flavor of Shirei Eretz Yisrael (Saada‐Ophir 2006:224), rather than switch entirely to the old genre. The emergency repertoire has changed to a more current sound, incorporating quiet, downbeat songs but with little thematic relevance to themes of tension or mourning.…”

Section: Mood Shifting In Times Of Emergencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years some mizrachi artists broke through the mainstream playlists by transforming into “light mizrachi” music based on pop‐style arrangements. Galit Saada‐Ophir (2006) analyzes the subversive position of mizrachi music in the national culture given its Jewish–Arab border crossing characteristics.…”

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THE SONGS OF THE SIREN: Engineering National Time on Israeli Radio

Kaplan

2009

Cultural Anthropology

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One of my early childhood recollections in Jerusalem during the 1973 YomKippur War is how my close playmate from the apartment next door froze in her place when the alarm siren sounded instead of rushing down to the shelter. 1 It turned out that she confused the rising and falling sound of the siren activated during times of emergency with the steady siren sounded on memorial days, when the whole country is brought to a standstill for a moment of silent communion with the dead. In what follows I suggest that underlying my friend's naive mistake is more than simply a matter of inexperience, but rather a deep-rooted association between modes of national emergency and modes of collective commemoration in Israeli-Zionist culture. I shall do so by analyzing a site of music production, which, on the face of it, is far removed from the sounds of sirens, that of radio broadcasting. Informed by an ethnographic study of national and regional radio stations in Israel (Kaplan 2008b), I examine how the growing use of music programming presents new ways for engineering national identification. 2 The structure of Israel's radio scene and its music broadcasting policies regulate collective time in a uniform manner, attempting to abruptly alter the public mood in response to national events, in a sense extending the function of the siren. Alternating between ordinary life and times of commemoration or emergency this occasioning of collective time follows Jewish-Zionist temporal regimes perceived as sacred. Consequently, it produces a parallel between times of emergency and sacred time. I shall argue that times of emergency are represented through and subordinated to sacred, mythic

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Borderland Pop: Arab Jewish Musicians and the Politics of Performance

Cited by 39 publications

References 40 publications

Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana

Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana

Gaza 2014 and Mizraḥi Feminism

THE SONGS OF THE SIREN: Engineering National Time on Israeli Radio

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