"How can sound be utilized as a tool for political conscientization? COVID-19 has disrupted face-to-face organizing tactics for progressive movements globally, making it necessary to branch out to more mediated forms of grassroots political organizing. In this article, we explore how sound might be ...employed to invoke an imagined working-class community across ethnic, gender and generational divides against a backdrop of crisis and corruption on the structural level. Through a close listening of a South African radio drama, 'Plague in the Time of King Kapital and Queen Corona' (KKQC), we find that the use of sound enables a worldmaking that is both attuned to structural inequities and imagines a utopian, solidaristic working-class community. KKQC offers a case of worldbuilding and political conscientization through radio drama that is relevant to understanding the possibilities of the genre in the contemporary South African context." (Abstract)
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"Welcome to the world of melodrama—and to the melodramas of the world. This book introduces nearly one hundred cinematic masterpieces from various periods and different cultural contexts—ranging from early Hollywood to emergent and popular Bollywood, from Latin American and New German Cinema to ...contemporary Nollywood, from classic melodrama and commercial blockbusters to arthouse film and meta-melodrama, while also encompassing a number of other local forms and styles in their hybrid or revisionist varieties. Our collection features discussions of seemingly timeless stories of love and loss, demonstrating the possibility and power of melodramatic plots to portray the overcoming of differences and antagonisms. Yet it also reveals how the melodramatic code is time and again used for asserting political claims and articulating critique—and hence for (re)producing powerful dichotomies of good vs. evil, innocence vs. corruption, virtue vs. vice. Melodrama performs and rehearses moral conflict and emotional crisis management on a broad scale, involving intimate relationships and familial relations, on the one hand, and global constellations of oppression, violence, war, and regime changes, on the other. Thus, like no other genre, melodrama indeed makes the political personal and the personal political." (Introduction, p.13)
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