Unmasking Class Gender And Sexuality In Nicaraguan Festival

Masaya, a provincial capital of Nicaragua, cultivates an aggressively traditional identity that contrasts with ManaguaÕs urban modernity. In 2001 the city was officially designated Capital of Nicaraguan Folklore, yet residents have engaged in a vibrant folk revival since at least the 1960s. This book documents the creative innovations of MasayaÕs performing artists. The first extended study in English of Nicaraguan festival arts, Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival is an ethnographically and historically grounded inquiry into three festival enactments during the Somoza, Sandinista, and Neoliberal periods: the carnivalesque torovenado masquerades, the transvestite Negras marimba dances, and the wagon pilgrimage to Popoyuapa. Through a series of interlinked essays, Katherine Borland shows that these enactments constitute a peopleÕs theater, articulating a range of perspectives on the homegrown and the global; on class, race, and ethnicity; on gender and sexuality; and on religious sensibilities. BorlandÕs book is a case study of how the oppositional power of popular culture resides in the process of cultural negotiation itself as communities deploy cherished traditions to assert their difference from the nation and the world. It addresses both the gendered dimensions of a particular festival masquerade and the ways in which sexuality is managed in traditional festival transvestism. It demonstrates how performativity and theatricality interact to negotiate certain crucial realities in a festival complex. By showing how one locale negotiates, incorporates, and resists globally circulating ideas, identities, and material objects, it makes a major contribution to studies of ritual and festival in Latin America.

Masaya, a provincial capital of Nicaragua, cultivates an aggressively traditional identity that contrasts with Managua’s urban modernity. In 2001 the city was officially designated Capital of Nicaraguan Folklore, yet residents have engaged in a vibrant folk revival since at least the 1960s. This book documents the creative innovations of Masaya’s performing artists. The first extended study in English of Nicaraguan festival arts, Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival is an ethnographically and historically grounded inquiry into three festival enactments during the Somoza, Sandinista, and Neoliberal periods: the carnivalesque torovenado masquerades, the transvestite Negras marimba dances, and the wagon pilgrimage to Popoyuapa. Through a series of interlinked essays, Katherine Borland shows that these enactments constitute a people’s theater, articulating a range of perspectives on the homegrown and the global; on class, race, and ethnicity; on gender and sexuality; and on religious sensibilities. Borland’s book is a case study of how the oppositional power of popular culture resides in the process of cultural negotiation itself as communities deploy cherished traditions to assert their difference from the nation and the world. It addresses both the gendered dimensions of a particular festival masquerade and the ways in which sexuality is managed in traditional festival transvestism. It demonstrates how performativity and theatricality interact to negotiate certain crucial realities in a festival complex. By showing how one locale negotiates, incorporates, and resists globally circulating ideas, identities, and material objects, it makes a major contribution to studies of ritual and festival in Latin America.

Oral History is part of the Understanding Qualitative Research series, which is designed to provide researchers with authoritative guides to understanding, presenting, and critiquing analyses and associated inferences. There are three subareas in this series: Quantitative Research, Measurement, and Qualitative Research. This volume fits in the Qualitative Research group and addresses issues surrounding oral history - how to both fully and succinctly report and present this material, as well as the challenges of evaluating it.

This book examines the critical connection between revolts and revolutions to larger notions of social and cultural performances in Nicaraguan social, cultural and political life. To understand social relations in Nicaragua today, it is crucial to look at those highly theatricalized and rhetorical performances of power and resistance that have spanned specific national spaces for centuries. The book looks, therefore, at the history of Nicaragua from the colonial period to the Sandinista Revolution to frame contingent and temporal social and cultural processes that have become heightened and revealing of the social relations in revolution. The contemporary staging of the ancient El Gueguense play, for instance, illustrates a social space that reveals contemporary issues of oppression and power. Tapping into the spirit of self-consciousness, reflexivity, and narrational disruptions, the book uses the conventions of theatre such as audience and actor relations to make available to readers the theatrical intimacy of interlocutors and researcher.

This is an original book, covering all the past areas of research anyone would need to know about festivals and ‘event-based culture’. It is based on academic research but written in a way relevant for cultural professionals – uniquely explaining the cultural power of festivals, and with original empirical research, the realities of organisation and management, and social and economic value. Dr Jonathan Vickery, Reader in Cultural Policy Studies and Director: Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Univeristy of Warwick. This book discusses music festivals in the context of the specific values they convey. Today, music festivals are a permanent feature of national, regional and local cultural policies, a valuable asset in the tourism industry and a significant source of income for an industry that has been adversely affected by the steady decline in physical sales of music. For the audience, on the other hand, it is an opportunity to escape from everyday life, multi-sensory contact with art, an activity that stands for “full-body participation”– a cultural phenomenon that drags people out of their homes like no other. There is one common denominator linking the above-mentioned features of contemporary music festivals – namely the world of values. This is evident from the non-accidental locations, festivals spaces’ design, planning and the line-ups created consciously, with great care. The organisers’ “missions”, logos, and other symbolic organisational artefacts communicate specific values. These values are explicitly mentioned by artists and audiences: they can be easily identified in online forums and media reports; participant behaviour, festival “rituals” and additional festival programs are shaped on the basis of values, and cooperation is built between the festival and the local community. As the reader will quickly realize, numbers and statistics sit alongside descriptions and quotations in this book, and the organisers’ statements are accompanied by the opinions of academics, but above all the festival audience is given a voice – both through quotations and their drawings. This voice is by no means uniform, as it turned out that research into values was often transformed into a pretext for spinning tales about one’s life situation, one’s political preferences, and one’s understanding of freedom and responsibility. Memories were mixed with declarations, joy with regret, curses with dreams, prose with poetry. Thomas Pettitt was not wrong in noting that “Social history has learnt to appreciate festival as a valuable window on society and its structures”. The authors have tried to open all the windows available. Students and researchers in the fields of cultural anthropology, social psychology, folklore studies, comparative religion, sociology of culture, cultural policy, cultural history, and cultural management will find this book highly interesting.

An unprecedented number of folklorists are addressing issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality in academic and public spaces in the US, raising the question: How can folklorists contribute to these contemporary political affairs? Since the nature of folkloristics transcends binaries, can it help others develop critical personal narratives? Advancing Folkloristics covers topics such as queer, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship in folkloristics. Contributors investigate how to apply folkloristic approaches in nonfolklore classrooms, how to maintain a folklorist identity without a "folklorist" job title, and how to use folkloristic knowledge to interact with others outside of the discipline. The chapters, which range from theoretical reorientations to personal experiences of folklore work, all demonstrate the kinds of work folklorists are well-suited to and promote the areas in which folkloristics is poised to expand and excel. Advancing Folkloristics presents a clear picture of folklore studies today and articulates how it must adapt in the future.

This unique reader offers an engaging collection of essays that highlight the diversity of Latin America's cultural expressions from independence to the present. Exploring such themes and events as funerals, dance and music, letters and literature, spectacles and monuments, and world's fairs and food, a group of leading historians examines the ways that a wide range of individuals with copious, at times contradictory, motives attempted to forge identity, turn the world upside down, mock their betters, forget their troubles through dance, express love in letters, and altogether enjoy life. The authors analyze case studies from Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Trinidad-Tobago, tracing as well how their examples resonate in the rest of the region. They show how people could and did find opportunities to escape, if only occasionally, their daily drudgery, making lives for themselves of greater variety than the constant quest for dominance, drive for profits, orknee-jerk resistance to the social or economic order so often described in cultural studies. Instead, this rich text introduces the complexity of motives behind and the diversity of expressions of popular culture in Latin America.

Beyond Women’s Words unites feminist scholars, artists, and community activists working with the stories of women and other historically marginalized subjects to address the contributions and challenges of doing feminist oral history. Feminists who work with oral history methods want to tell stories that matter. They know, too, that the telling of those stories—the processes by which they are generated and recorded, and the different contexts in which they are shared and interpreted—also matters—a lot. Using Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai’s classic text, Women’s Words, as a platform to reflect on how feminisms, broadly defined, have influenced, and continue to influence, the wider field of oral history, this remarkable collection brings together an international, multi-generational, and multidisciplinary line-up of authors whose work highlights the great variety in understandings of, and approaches to, feminist oral histories. Through five thematic sections, the volume considers Indigenous modes of storytelling, feminism in diverse locales around the globe, different theoretical approaches, oral history as performance, digital oral history, and oral history as community-engagement. Beyond Women’s Words is ideal for students of oral history, anthropology, public history, women’s and gender history, and Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as activists, artists, and community-engaged practitioners.