Afro-Cuban Bata Drum Aesthetics: Developing Individual and Group Technique, Sound and Identity

The Lucumi religion (also Santeria and Regla de Ocha) developed in 19th-century colonial Cuba, by syncretizing elements of Catholicism with the Yoruba worship of orisha. When fully initiated, santeros (priests) actively participate in religious ceremonies by periodically being possessed or "mounted" by a patron saint or orisha, usually within the context of a drumming ritual, known as a toque de santo, bembe, or tambor. Within these rituals, there is a clearly defined goal of trance possession, though its manifestation is not the sole measure of success or failure. Rather than focusing on the fleeting, exciting moments that immediately precede the arrival of an orisha in the form of a possession trance, this thesis investigates the entire four- to six-hour musical performance that is central to the ceremony. It examines the brief pauses, the moments of reduced intensity, the slow but deliberate build-ups of energy and excitement, and even the periods when novices are invited to perform the sacred bata drums, and places these moments on an equal footing with the more dynamic periods where possession is imminent or in progress. This document approaches Lucumi ritual from the viewpoint of bata drummers, ritual specialists who, during the course of a toque de santo, exercise wide latitude in determining the shape of the event. Known as omo Ana (children of the orisha Ana who is manifest in drums and rhythms), bata drummers comprise a fraternity that is accessible only through ritual initiation. Though they are sensitive to the desires of the many participants during a toque de santo, and indeed make their living by satisfying the expectations of their hosts, many of the drummers' activities are inwardly focused on the cultivation and preservation of this fraternity. Occasionally interfering with spirit possession, and other expectations of the participants, these aberrant activities include teaching and learning, developing group identity or signature sound, and achieving a state of intimacy among the musicians known as "communitas."

The Aesthetics of Motion in Musics for the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Rumi

This dissertation investigates the concept of motion as a fundamental aesthetic element in the devotional music, dance, and rituals performed in honor of the celebrated thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet and saint, the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Muhammad Rumi. The main focus of the study is threefold. First, it investigates the prevalence of the notion of movement in Islamic music and culture, specifically within the Sufi communities of Turkey, in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the relationship between music, aesthetics, and worldview. Secondly, it explores how musical performance functions as a form of devotion or religious worship by focusing on the musical repertories performed in honor of a single holy figure, the Mevlana Rumi. Finally, it provides an ethnographic account of contemporary developments in Sufi musical culture in Turkey and across the world by describing the recent activities of the Mevlana's devotees, which includes members of the Mevlevi Order of Islamic mystics as well as adherents of other Sufi brotherhoods and followers of so-called New Religions or New Age. The primary research for this study involved two short one-month field trips to Turkey and India in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and a longer one year expedition to Turkey in 2004 and 2005, which also included shorter stays in Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt. Additionally, the dissertation draws directly from critical theories advanced in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and ethnochoreology and focuses on the kinesthetic parameters of music, dance, trance, and ritual as well as on broader forms of socio-cultural movement including pilgrimage, cultural tourism, and globalization. These forms of movement are analyzed in four broad categories of music used in worship, including classical Mevlevi music, music of the zikr ceremony, popular musics, and non-Turkish musics.

Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

Funding, ideology and the aesthetics of the development film in postcolonial Zimbabwe

This article considers the relationships between aesthetics and ideology in donor-funded ‘development’ film-making from Zimbabwe, examining in particular how the films’ producers have attempted to popularize a genre of film-making that has its roots in colonial cinema. Making close reference to two productions from the Harare-based Media for Development Trust (MFD) – Neria (Godwin Mawaru, 1992), and Everyone’s Child (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1996) (both of which may be regarded as archetypal examples of their genre) – the article demonstrates how the films deploy a range of aesthetic strategies to imbue a set of narratives drawn from colonial development films with greater impact and cultural resonance for contemporary local audiences. The article also suggests that close analysis of these strategies may provide insights into the relationships between the films’ aesthetic dimensions and wider ideological issues in the region.

Transformative Aesthetics: Between Remembrance and Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Irish Theatre

This article explores the ways in which two recent plays by the Tinderbox Theatre Company in Belfast – Jimmy McAleavey's The Sign of the Whale and David Ireland's Everything Between Us – engage with current political debates in Northern Ireland about how to deal with the ‘legacy of the past’. Both plays dramatise the uneasy tension between the demands for remembrance and reconciliation. I suggest that they give rise to a ‘transformative aesthetics’ that proposes an un-remembering of the past to make way for a transformative re-remembering for the future. This process, however, does not imply an easy resolution or transcendence of the antagonisms, debates, and traumatic memories. Instead, it suggests an intense and complicated engagement that sits in vexed opposition to the restorative conception of reconciliation and both a politics and a political context of ameliorative forgetting that dominates the Northern Irish Peace Process.

Yeats's Eugenical and Psychical Aesthetics

It should never be forgotten that Yeats is perfectly capable of contradicting himself even about some of his most cherished speculations. Nevertheless, the theoretical aspect of his later work exhibits a marked internal coherence: it is not possible to separate his ideas about society, his theories about the spirit world, his doctrine of the image, his cyclical theory of history. It is for this reason that I have referred, in brief, to “Eugenical and Psychical Aesthetics.”

Aesthetics and emotion in an organisational ethnography

In this paper, I argue that an aesthetic approach can help us to better understand workplace ethnography. Ethnography is sensory by nature; it can incorporate a feeling of rightness and beauty in the experience of 'being-with' the organisation being studied. The process is inherently aesthetic. I explore this argument with an in-depth account of a researcher's experiences at a non-profit organisation. I identify the aesthetic of belonging that developed over time. This study shows how an aesthetic perspective helps us to understand the day to day experience of ethnography, and how the it can be emotionally ambivalent and somewhat dark. © 2008, Inderscience Publishers.