Paper short abstract:

In Newark, the Ironbound neighborhood is ideologically marked racially white. My ethnography points to a narrative of relational creativity among queer black, brown, and white nightlife goers through karaoke that transcends the city's racial divides and has engendered a worldmaking of "one Newark."

Paper long abstract:

In Newark, New Jersey, an African American and Latinx majority city, the Ironbound neighborhood has been marked both racially and ideologically as racially white. From the late 1960s into the late 1990s, the Ironbound gained notable influxes of Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants who sustained a predominant and marketable Lusophone culture in the neighborhood along with a growing presence of Hispanophone (largely Ecuadorian and Mexican) immigrants and African Americans. Since the late 1990s, city government officials, journalists, and historians have distinguished the Ironbound and its residents as a model of individual hard work and enterprise in its black and brown majority city, recognizing the neighborhood's highly desired ethnic market and heteronormative service labor force, which contributes to Newark's neoliberal economic redevelopment and revitalization. This dominant local narrative has sustained sharp racial boundaries of whiteness and blackness such that even the city's LGBTQ community is centered in black Newark. My critical and embodied ethnography of queer nightlife in the Ironbound, conducted in 2004-2009 and 2019-2020, points to an alternative narrative of informal relational creativity among Brazilians, Portuguese, African Americans and Latinx nightlife goers through karaoke. In particular, through song selection and performance, this nightlife karaoke facilitates a dialogue of relationality in which nightlife goers cross racialized and sexualized boundaries in ways that contrast with static state narratives about Newark's steep racial divides. I argue that this social engagement has engendered a worldmaking of "one Newark" that alerts queer Newark residents and their allies to shared interests, values, and needs.

Paper short abstract:

A drift away from music practices associated with industry affiliation and contracts in Japan mirrors broader changes in the work/life balance. Sustainable musicianship is instead achieved within collaborative relationships in neighbourhoods, and through the creative use of public spaces.

Paper long abstract:

The production of music in cities across Japan has increasingly become a labour of love, without profit or financial reward (Martin 2016). The "gap society" (kakusa shakai), separating secure from insecure, is replicated across a music industry where unestablished and lesser-known musicians are losing access to even basic support and limited contracts. How are musicians reacting to the limitations placed upon them by changes in society and the disappearance of music "professionalism" as performance for pay?

To address these issues I present fieldwork conducted with street-based amateur musicians in the Koenji neighbourhood of Tokyo. In particular, I focus on the use of urban and micro spaces in the neighbourhood as alternative sites of performance, sociality and belonging. As their hopes of a professional career faded after arriving in the metropolis, many were forced to rethink the process of creating and playing their music. Practical solutions emerged that rescaled their music to fit informal economies of sharing and exchange, with neighbourhood-based connections laying a foundation for longevity and pathways out of isolation.

The panel's concern with revealing the collaborative scaffolding behind the creative individual is particularly pertinent in the case of Koenji street musicians, who appear alone before the passing crowds of the train station they use as a temporary stage. Their negotiations of both people and place demonstrates the importance of not only new creative collaborations, but of new relationships with the urban environment within music practices in the city.

Paper short abstract:

Artists are not necessarily paid to create work, especially when what they produce is graffiti. What prompts them to create, and how does the urban environment affect such productions? This paper explores why and how the female artist Shamsia Hassani from Afghanistan produces graffiti in Kabul.

Paper long abstract:

Many artists, including professional artists are not necessarily paid to engage in artistic or creative production, especially when what they produce is graffiti. What prompts them to create, and how does the urban environment affect such productions? Known as the first female graffiti artist from Afghanistan, Shamsia Hassani has created graffiti and murals on the walls in Kabul and beyond. Originally trained in traditional arts, Hassani took up graffiti after attending a workshop with a British graffiti artist in Kabul in 2010. Since then, graffiti has been a powerful tool for her to seek changes in society despite the stigma often attached to graffiti in other parts of the world. Many of her graffiti, portraying women in burqa, sometimes with calligraphic writings, have been produced on the damaged walls in Kabul. These works attempt not only to colour over the sad memories of her bombarded city, but also to change the common perception of her country, which has been characterized by its recent wars. Any passerby on the streets of Kabul will encounter her work, and so her work requires collaboration with her urban environment and its residents. The urban spaces of Kabul―streets, walls, and buildings etc.― are integral to the production of her graffiti and these spaces also need her work. This paper explores why and how the artist Shamsia Hassani produces graffiti in Kabul. It considers the significance of such informal creative production in a city like Kabul, and asks how such works affect our environments.

Paper short abstract:

Exploring the creative practices of two film 'circles' (sākuru) in the district of Nishijin, Kyoto, this paper queries the demarcation between consumers of the creative arts, and creative practitioners, as in each case a love of cinema inspires the group to pursue collaborative creative practices.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contrasts the group creative activities of two film 'circles' (sākuru) in the crafts and manufacturing district of Nishijin, Kyoto, in order to trouble the demarcation between consumers of the creative arts, and creative practitioners. The Kyoto kiroku eiga o miru kai, or the Meeting to Watch Documentary Films ran from April 1955 to March 1962, and collaboratively produced Nishijin, which won the short-documentary award at the Venice Film Festival in 1961. Following the producers' bankruptcy and a fire at the offices, the film circle folded, and was reborn again as Shi dokyumentari shinema (Shidofu) in in June 1964. The core members of Shidofu would go on to create the Kinugasa jōeikai, a film circle operated by elderly residents in Kyoto which collaboratively creates film events, written materials, and participated in my own documentary filmmaking.

As Janet Staiger observes, "historical circumstances sometimes create 'interpretative communities' or cultural groups such as fans who produce their own conventionalized modes of reception" (2000, 23). In this case, the historical circumstances of the urban area of Nishijin gave rise to an active and politically engaged mode of reception that culminated in an attempt at production. Jackie Stacey has argued that group exchanges "condense and make more tangible the collaborative, and yet always enigmatic, production of a sense of self" (2013, 51). This paper aims to draw out how group-based amateur arts practice informs the building of our life-worlds, and problematize any easy demarcation between consumers of creative arts and creative practitioners.