Life is an adventure to embark upon. Having traveled around the world, my life has been full of separations, and new beginnings. Time flows incessantly, no matter what happens around us. The last six years of my life describe a unique journey from high school in Sudan to a university in Canada. The experience enabled me to learn the importance of family, friends, and love- along with the need to live life without regrets. My story begins with my struggles as an eleventh grader at Khartoum American School in Sudan, revealing the raw emotions of my first infatuation with a girl, her rejection, and my subsequent efforts to move on without her. Nothing could have prepared me then for the sequence of events that were to unfold in my life that summer, and the few years that followed. It all began when I found a friend in Tina. Our Last Summer offers a poignant glimpse into a young man's coming-of-age journey through laughter, tears, betrayal, infatuation, and love as he cherishes the memories of his past, learns to live in the present, and happily anticipates his future.

An expert explains and analyzes the beloved art form An iconic symbol of Spain, flamenco has become a global phenomenon. Peter Manuel offers English-language readers a rare portrait of the music’s history, styles, and cultural impact. Beginning with flamenco’s Moorish and Roma influences, Manuel follows the music’s evolution through its consolidation in the mid-1800s and on to the vibrant contemporary scene. An investigation of flamenco’s major song-types looks at rhythm and compás, guitar technique, and many other aspects of the music while Manuel’s description and analysis of the repertoire range from soleares and bulerías to tangos. His overview of contemporary flamenco culture provides insight into issues that surround the music, including globalization, gender dynamics, notions of ownership, and the ongoing debates on purity versus innovation and the relative roles played by Gitanos and non-Gitanos. Multifaceted and entertaining, Flamenco Music is an in-depth study of the indelible art form that inspires enthusiasts and practitioners around the world.

An expert explains and analyzes the beloved art form An iconic symbol of Spain, flamenco has become a global phenomenon. Peter Manuel offers English-language readers a rare portrait of the music’s history, styles, and cultural impact. Beginning with flamenco’s Moorish and Roma influences, Manuel follows the music’s evolution through its consolidation in the mid-1800s and on to the vibrant contemporary scene. An investigation of flamenco’s major song-types looks at rhythm and compás, guitar technique, and many other aspects of the music while Manuel’s description and analysis of the repertoire range from soleares and bulerías to tangos. His overview of contemporary flamenco culture provides insight into issues that surround the music, including globalization, gender dynamics, notions of ownership, and the ongoing debates on purity versus innovation and the relative roles played by Gitanos and non-Gitanos. Multifaceted and entertaining, Flamenco Music is an in-depth study of the indelible art form that inspires enthusiasts and practitioners around the world.

The first book-length study on Cuban music in the English language. This volume consists of thirteen articles written by nine authors, including four Cuban scholars and five North American ethnomusicologists. The articles by Cuban scholars, translated from largely out-of-print publications, constitute a selection of some of the best Cuban research on their island's music, and present a set of perspectives which complement those of the North American authors. The articles cover such areas as descriptions of the Afro-Haitian derived tumba francesa, the traditional Afro-Cuban rumba, and the rural punto, as cultivated by peasants of Hispanic descent; aspects of the music bureaucracy in contemporary Cuba; the American music industry's dissemination of Cuban-derived salsa in New York City; Afro-Cuban cult music; the history and current status of charanga dance bands; and more.

In "Cassette Culture," Peter Manuel tells how a new mass medium--the portable cassette player--caused a major upheaval in popular culture in the world's second-largest country. The advent of cassette technology in the 1980s transformed India's popular music industry from the virtual monopoly of a single multinational LP manufacturer to a free-for-all among hundreds of local cassette producers. The result was a revolution in the quantity, quality, and variety of Indian popular music and its patterns of dissemination and consumption.
Manuel shows that the cassette revolution, however, has brought new contradictions and problems to Indian culture. While inexpensive cassettes revitalized local subcultures and community values throughout the subcontinent, they were also a vehicle for regional and political factionalism, new forms of commercial vulgarity, and, disturbingly, the most provocative sorts of hate-mongering and religious chauvinism.
"Cassette Culture" is the first scholarly account of Indian popular music and the first case study of a technological revolution now occurring throughout the world. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in modern India, communications theory, world popular music, or contemporary global culture.

First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage. The authors succinctly and perceptively situate the musical styles and developments in the context of themes of gender and racial dynamics, sociopolitical background, and diasporic dimensions. Caribbean Currents showcases the rich and diverse musics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities in the United States and elsewhere to provide an engaging panorama of this most dynamic aspect of Caribbean culture.

This is an exploration of the region's music - its forms and innovations, musicians, festivals, and dance halls, its fans - and traces its African, Asian and European roots.

Kunst und Propaganda wurden unter der gleichen Perspektive gesehen: Menschen zu formen. Es blieb jedoch eine entscheidende Differenz: Das Politische nutzte die Propaganda als Funktion bzw. Mittel, die Kunst aber war u. a. ihr Ziel. Propaganda und Kunst gerieten in Wechselverhaltnisse: Kunst konnte Mittel der Propaganda werden, die selbst eine Kunst sein sollte. Die hohe Kunst blieb jedoch Leitbild, selbst wenn dadurch eine Modernisierung des Films nach internationalen Massstaben verhindert wurde. Was dabei jedoch entstand, war ein sehr eigener, eben als spezifisch kunsthaft deutsch verstandener Stil der Dramatisierung von Historie und Zeitgenoessischem. Die Kunst der Propaganda erschien so als modern und ruckwartsgewandt zugleich; sie entwickelte raffinierte Muster und verfiel plattester Rhetorik; sie kalkulierte Freiraume der Affekte ein, die sie doch zugleich kontrollieren wollte. Dieser Kunst der Propaganda, mit ihren Eindeutigkeiten, Widerspruchen und Ambivalenzen sind die Aufsatze dieses Bandes auf der Spur. Die Beitrage, die sich aus einem gemeinsamen Seminar zum "Film im Dritten Reich" an der Humboldt-Universitat entwickelt haben, zentrieren sich um Themen wie: Filmkunst als Gesetz, Inversion der Feindbilder, Kunstler als Genies, Flieger und Trummerlandschaften, Bilder der Grossstadt, das Melodram, den Jugendfilm oder die Imaginationen von Fremde und Heimat.

Reflecting the growing interest in popular music from the developing world, this unique book is the first to examine all major non-Western urban music styles, from increasingly familiar genres like reggae and salsa, to the lesser-known regional styles of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, non-Western Europe (Greece, Yugoslavia, Portugal), Asia, and the Near East. Manuel establishes parameters that distinguish popular music from both folk and classical music, defining popular music as music created with the mass media in mind and reproduced on a large scale basis as a salable commodity for wide public consumption. While emphasizing stylistic analysis and historical development, he also treats the diverse popular musics as sites for the negotiation and mediation of the dialectics of nationalism and acculturation, tradition and modernity, urban and rural aesthetics, and grassroots spontaneity and corporate or bureaucratic manipulation. With its encyclopedic syntheses of earlier studies and extensive original research, Manuel's book will be an invaluable source for general readers and students of ethnology, popular music, and contemporary culture.

Life is an adventure to embark upon. Having traveled around the world, my life has been full of separations, and new beginnings. Time flows incessantly, no matter what happens around us. The last six years of my life describe a unique journey from high school in Sudan to a university in Canada. The experience enabled me to learn the importance of family, friends, and love- along with the need to live life without regrets. My story begins with my struggles as an eleventh grader at Khartoum American School in Sudan, revealing the raw emotions of my first infatuation with a girl, her rejection, and my subsequent efforts to move on without her. Nothing could have prepared me then for the sequence of events that were to unfold in my life that summer, and the few years that followed. It all began when I found a friend in Tina. Our Last Summer offers a poignant glimpse into a young man's coming-of-age journey through laughter, tears, betrayal, infatuation, and love as he cherishes the memories of his past, learns to live in the present, and happily anticipates his future.

First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage. The authors succinctly and perceptively situate the musical styles and developments in the context of themes of gender and racial dynamics, sociopolitical background, and diasporic dimensions. Caribbean Currents showcases the rich and diverse musics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities in the United States and elsewhere to provide an engaging panorama of this most dynamic aspect of Caribbean culture.

Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture.
Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.

Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority Mangal Patasar once remarked and tan-singing, \u0022You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get.\u0022 Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as \u0022tan-singing\u0022 or \u0022local-classical music\u0022 and in Suriname as \u0022baithak gana\u0022 (\u0022sitting music\u0022), tan-singing has evolved in to a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tan-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people \u0022without history,\u0022 a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming \u0022truly\u0022 Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tan-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture.