I like to revise the intro after I do the entire essay and read over it though, which is the same as doing the intro after body paragraphs. I'd also rather do the intro first, 'cause then you KNOW to stay in what the intro is on and not go outside that line, versus making the intro after, then going back over and re-doing things and taking things out in favor of it.
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I wonder which Pop Girls could actually complete a basic essay with a passing grade.
A complex entanglement of fear and fascination can be found in many accounts of Western appropriation of African music and dance styles, both historically and in the present day. This is implicit in Edward Said’s Orientalist paradigm, arguing that exploitation is centred around a self/other binary, in this case the moral, normative West and the dangerous yet appealing Africa (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000). Hall (1997) discusses the prolific references to Africans’ strange yet mesmerising rhythmic sense in antebellum travel reports and plantation diaries. The black body was a source of admiration, disgust and hatred, contributing to colonial power both materially and through the “ephemeral emotional release it provided to its captors” (Kopano, 2014: 6). Imbued in this is a sense of the aesthetics of African culture being desirable, rather than an engagement with the actual lived experience. As Mitchell (1996: 80) puts it, “much of the renewed interest in African music in the West reflects a desire for the exotic in a familiar context”.
Nearly twenty years after this statement, this fascination continues to pervade popular music, and to an even heightened extent. The term ‘twerking’ refers to a series of dances thought to originate from the Mapouka dance in Cote d’Ivoire (Koné, 2015), and was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2013 (Freeman, 2013). I turn here to the utilisation of the dance in American pop artist Taylor Swift’s music video for “Shake It Off”, which currently has over 650 million views on Youtube. The self/other binary is reproduced throughout the video, with Swift at the forefront in the video and marvelling at the physical capabilities of the faceless twerking background dancers. The video depicts Swift contorting her facial expression into one of mock scandalised horror as she finds herself attempting to take part in the dance. The representation of twerking as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘other’ is emphasised by one particular scene where she crawls underneath the twerking bodies and pauses to looks up in fascination at the buttocks of a black dancer – a scene which was used as the thumbnail to promote the video.
The exotic yet appealing ‘other’ is demonstrated here; Swift at once utilises the West African dance and distances herself from it. The video, whilst avoiding the dancers’ faces, also features camera shots zoomed in on one black dancer’s buttocks. For Schiebinger (1993), representations of black bodies as ‘hypersexual’ has circulated around the repeated fascination with this anatomical feature. The colonial ties in this racial discourse are well-documented; the sexual exploitation of female black slaves was justified by white plantation owners because the women’s apparently ‘strong robust constitution’ were argued as making them exceptionally sexual beings (Roberts, 1997). The exhibition of South African slave Saartjie Baartman, more popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, as a ‘freak’ in nineteenth-century Europe due to the ‘peculiar’ shape of her body – and buttocks in particular – is further evidence of this (Moudileno, 2009).
Swift’s appropriation of the dance, and particularly the fascination with the twerking bodies, positions her as an admiring ‘outsider’ but also reproduces the imagining of her own body’s purity in opposition to the objectification and sexualisation of the dancers. In the words of Hobson (2014): “her rhythm-less dance moves distance her from the hyper-sexualized racial body in a way that positions her as somehow morally ‘safe’”, reinforcing the self/other binary and its connotations of West/Africa, black/white and moral/immoral.
I included screencaps from the video and everything. So cute. The professor couldn't take.
A complex entanglement of fear and fascination can be found in many accounts of Western appropriation of African music and dance styles, both historically and in the present day. This is implicit in Edward Said’s Orientalist paradigm, arguing that exploitation is centred around a self/other binary, in this case the moral, normative West and the dangerous yet appealing Africa (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000). Hall (1997) discusses the prolific references to Africans’ strange yet mesmerising rhythmic sense in antebellum travel reports and plantation diaries. The black body was a source of admiration, disgust and hatred, contributing to colonial power both materially and through the “ephemeral emotional release it provided to its captors” (Kopano, 2014: 6). Imbued in this is a sense of the aesthetics of African culture being desirable, rather than an engagement with the actual lived experience. As Mitchell (1996: 80) puts it, “much of the renewed interest in African music in the West reflects a desire for the exotic in a familiar context”.
Nearly twenty years after this statement, this fascination continues to pervade popular music, and to an even heightened extent. The term ‘twerking’ refers to a series of dances thought to originate from the Mapouka dance in Cote d’Ivoire (Koné, 2015), and was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2013 (Freeman, 2013). I turn here to the utilisation of the dance in American pop artist Taylor Swift’s music video for “Shake It Off”, which currently has over 650 million views on Youtube. The self/other binary is reproduced throughout the video, with Swift at the forefront in the video and marvelling at the physical capabilities of the faceless twerking background dancers. The video depicts Swift contorting her facial expression into one of mock scandalised horror as she finds herself attempting to take part in the dance. The representation of twerking as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘other’ is emphasised by one particular scene where she crawls underneath the twerking bodies and pauses to looks up in fascination at the buttocks of a black dancer – a scene which was used as the thumbnail to promote the video.
The exotic yet appealing ‘other’ is demonstrated here; Swift at once utilises the West African dance and distances herself from it. The video, whilst avoiding the dancers’ faces, also features camera shots zoomed in on one black dancer’s buttocks. For Schiebinger (1993), representations of black bodies as ‘hypersexual’ has circulated around the repeated fascination with this anatomical feature. The colonial ties in this racial discourse are well-documented; the sexual exploitation of female black slaves was justified by white plantation owners because the women’s apparently ‘strong robust constitution’ were argued as making them exceptionally sexual beings (Roberts, 1997). The exhibition of South African slave Saartjie Baartman, more popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, as a ‘freak’ in nineteenth-century Europe due to the ‘peculiar’ shape of her body – and buttocks in particular – is further evidence of this (Moudileno, 2009).
Swift’s appropriation of the dance, and particularly the fascination with the twerking bodies, positions her as an admiring ‘outsider’ but also reproduces the imagining of her own body’s purity in opposition to the objectification and sexualisation of the dancers. In the words of Hobson (2014): “her rhythm-less dance moves distance her from the hyper-sexualized racial body in a way that positions her as somehow morally ‘safe’”, reinforcing the self/other binary and its connotations of West/Africa, black/white and moral/immoral.
I included screencaps from the video and everything. So cute. The professor couldn't take.
"It’s a Vegas war now that Céline is back, and Britney is losing in a major way," a source commented to Page Six. "Céline has sold out almost every show.
"Britney got off to a really good start, but her fans aren’t particularly Vegas people. It’s hard to keep people interested in an act like Britney Spears since she’s a 1990s, 2000s pop star."
she doesn't have twitter or anything, just Facebook. Poot ha widespread impacT 
I just love Her
"I love you." "I know."