PANEL 1: ECHOES OF IMPERIALISM

This is pop! The soundtrack of Portuguese colonialism in Joo Maria Tudelas

songbook
Marcos Cardo (CEHC Universitary Institute of Lisbon)
Luso-tropicalism was a way to imagine the Portuguese community, which tended to
highlight the natural disposition of the Portuguese for a settlement without prejudice of
colour or race. This particular way of retelling the history of Portuguese colonization
won consistency in the last decades of authoritarian rule, when a series of rituals
fostered the idea that Portugal was a multiracial country, geographically diverse and a
politically homogeneous unit.
I believe that Portuguese singer Joo Maria Tudela, better known as the voice of
Mozambique, played an important role on the generalization of luso-tropicalism in the
sixties. His songbook, with songs such as Mozambique, Kanimambo, Macala,
Xicuembo, Cano de Angola, etc., offered a constant reminder of Portuguese
nationality, presenting a sort of ego ideal of the country, who pretended to be one,
indivisible and have a vast sub-tropical area, where Tudelas narratives would fit.
Joo Maria Tudela brought the exotic imaginaries into the Portuguese popular music,
making an aesthetic and sensual valorisation of colonial Mozambique. By combining
familiar and unfamiliar sounds, and ascribing familiar meanings to unfamiliar things,
Tudela formally introduced a sub-set of exotica style named afro-tropicalism. Some of his
songs used exotic rhythm patterns, complemented with percussion instruments, vocal
chanting, and imitation of jungle noises. An example of this aesthetic was the song
Kanimambo, a word in macua dialect, which means thank you in English.
My aim in this presentation is to shed a new light on a peripheral story of Portuguese
colonialism, showing how Tudelas songbook functioned as a mechanism of cultural
translation by which luso-tropicalism was converted into a spectacle.
BIO
Marcos Cardo is a researcher at Centro de Estudos de Histria Contempornea (CEHC -
IUL). He is finishing his Ph.D. thesis, entitled Fado tropical. Lusotropicalismo na cultura
de massas (1960-1974), which investigates the dissemination of luso-tropicalism in
popular culture. Marcos Cardo is a FCT (Fundao para a Cincia e a Tecnologia)

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scholarship holder. Marcos Cardo has two forthcoming articles and recently presented
a paper at the Conference Crossroads in Cultural Studies (Paris, July 2012).

Por Este Rio Acima and Portuguese Popular Music

Rui Afonso (CECC Catholic University of Portugal)
This paper aims to reflect on the album Por Este Rio Acima (1982), by Fausto Bordalo
Dias, and on how it relates to the concept of Portuguese Popular Music. Fausto Bordalo
Dias, emblematic author with over forty years of artistic production from 1970 to the
present day uses the expression Portuguese Popular Music to define his work. This
concept refers to a 'new' genre which is based on traditional genres, merging and
adapting them to the technological and cultural evolution, as well as to the creative
approach of each new author, without distorting its essential matrix and therefore the
cultural identity that those genres represent. Despite being the sixth album in Faustos
discography, Por Este Rio Acima is the first work in which the experience of Portuguese
Popular Music is revealed in its entirety, both in an aesthetic and thematic way. Prior to
1982, Faustos work was strongly influenced by the plots of the Portuguese Colonial
War, the decline of Estado Novo, the Carnation Revolution of 1974, and the entire post-
revolutionary and postcolonial period. Only after Por Este Rio Acima did the cultural and
identity reflection overlap the political reflection in Faustos songs.
Por Este Rio Acima is a conceptual album deliberately inspired in one of the most widely
known Portuguese travel literature works of the Modern Era: Peregrinao (1614) by
Ferno Mendes Pinto. In the antihero of Peregrinao, Fausto finds an atypical, flawed
protagonist with incoherent feelings, closer to the people than to the elite, more
accurately representing what would be the common Portuguese man in the exoticism of
faraway lands. He uses the protagonist and a fusion of traditional musical styles
recognized by the Portuguese people, which allows him to better envision the national
culture and identity.

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 PANEL 2: SCREENING POPULAR CULTURE

Popping (it) up: Popular Culture in Supernatural

Diana Gonalves (CECC Catholic University of Portugal)
Supernatural is a TV series created by Eric Kripke in 2005 about two brothers, Dean and
Sam Winchester, who hunt creatures from the supernatural realm (e.g. monsters, ghosts
or even angels and demons). Despite the strong horror-related thematic, derived from
the exploration of urban legends and folklore or the evolution of the narrative arc
toward apocalypse, the show is characterized for mixing various genres such as fantasy,
drama, thriller and comedy. Above all, it showcases a continuous playful game with
genre conventions, intertextuality and meta-fiction, which blurs fiction and reality and
momentarily transports the viewer to the world outside the screen.
The use of popular culture references has been appointed as one of the main reasons for
Supernaturals success and longevity. These references, which pop up regularly
throughout the show, range from music (especially classic rock), TV shows, movies,
celebrities, and so on. They are usually used by the authors as inspiration for the title of
an episode or integrated directly in the story, either as sound, background image or
characters lines.
In this paper, I will investigate how popular culture impacts on the economy of the
series. In order to do that, I will analyze specific episodes that are representative of the
recourse to the popular as a tool to complement or develop the plot, identify characters,
set the mood and pace of the scenes as well as, on an extradiegetic level, appeal to a
broader audience.
BIO
Diana Gonalves is a PhD Candidate in Culture Studies at the Catholic University of
Portugal. She holds a scholarship from the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) to
develop her research and she is a member of the international program PhD-net in
Literary and Cultural Studies. She is also a Junior Researcher of the Research Center for
Communication and Culture (CECC).

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In and Out of the Popular: Framing TV Serials Studies
Franois-Ronan Dubois (University Stendhal-Grenoble 3)
Having historically risen from the field of sociology, TV serials studies have often
displayed ambiguous discourses while approaching concepts such as the popular,
popular culture and pop culture. Never completely absorbed by the academic
perspectives of cultural studies, TV serials studies have been contrived to produce a
specific rhetoric of justification.
If three decades ago scholars like Dominique Pasquier felt no urge to assert any intrinsic
value of the object studied, some fifteen years later, the founders of Slayage, an academic
journal mainly devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, published many papers solely
concerned with this kind of justification.
I would like to offer here a close reading of these papers and others similar and confront
this reading with my own experience among the French academy as interpret and
theorist of TV serials. I feel there exists a discrepancy between the way TV serials
scholars think of their work and the way it is perceived by other scholars.
Nevertheless, I dont mean to hint that unfortunate TV serials scholars have to endure
the scorn of other members of the scientific community and bravely fight for the right of
popular culture to be accounted for. Rather, I hope to underline a difference in the
conceptual and disciplinary framing of this object.
On the one hand, analysing composition of panels in multidisciplinary conferences in
which I lectured myself, I will argue that, to the scientific community, TV serials are
worthy of interest as items of popular culture. On the other hand, commenting the
papers here above mentioned, I will try to show how TV serials scholars aim to inscribe
their work within long-settled disciplinary fields such as philosophy or literary studies,
hence effectively if not willingly turning away from popular culture.
This leads to wonder whether popular culture remains at all a valid concept to
describe TV serials not only as they are produced by professional agencies but also as
they are construed by scholars.
BIO
Franois-Ronan Dubois is a Doctoral student at Universit Stendhal Grenoble 3
(France). Interpret and theorist of North-American and British TV Serials (Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, The X-Files, 30 Rock, 24, Doctor Who). Several papers
regarding interpretation, theorisation and methodology of TV serials studies published

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in academic journals and/or presented in national and international conferences. Most
recent works include (titles translated from French): The myth of Heracles in three
American TV serials : Buffy, Supernatural, The X-Files (in e-lla), Ghosts and ghost
towns in the TV serials Supernatural (conference Potiques et politiques du spectre:
figures de la rmanence dans les Amriques); Time and narrative in TV serials : a case-
study with Doctor Who (Lignes de fuite).

PANEL 3: THE PORTUGUESE LIFE OF POPULAR

Fairground Theatre: a popular entertainment for an erudite audience

Paula Magalhes (Faculty of Letters University of Lisbon)
During the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century,
funfairs and their entertainments were one of the most sought-after manifestations of
popular culture in Lisbon. Created to amuse the underprivileged classes, these fairs
were also attended by the uprising bourgeoisie who sought to flaunt there its wealth and
status. Among several attractions, theatre was one of the most appreciated. However,
this preference was being brushed off from the writings of the elite of that time, mostly
fascinated by progress, speed and erudite entertainments. Many of those writings, highly
depreciative, nicknamed it popular (in those days meaning lower entertainment),
fleering its conditions and performances, while others praised its uniqueness. Pinheiro
Chagas, for example, was a faithful supporter of the mountebanks tradition which
prevailed at the fairs.
Although it was a national passion which moved audiences all over the country, from the
aristocracy to the people, the different groups did not blend together in most of the
theatre rooms. Seen as a lower entertainment, the fairground theatre (aimed at the
people) moved away many scholars, except those who, although attending the S. Carlos
Theatre and moving amongst the most distinct society, advocated maintaining a kind of
popular authenticity, a theatre which was not influenced by progress and kept the
traditions of ancient times.
Using as a reference some forgotten chronicles and feuilletons, this communication
intends to reanalyze the audience who attended these theatres and to show that,

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although the clear division between popular culture and erudite culture, this division
was not always real. The people would hardly have access to the S. Carlos Theatre
performances. Nevertheless, it was common to see the most elegant society of that time
attending the fairground theatre performances.
BIO
Paula Magalhes (born in 1971) is a researcher at the Centro de Estudos de Teatro da
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, in areas such as Theatre History in
Portugal and Iconography. She teaches Performance and dramatic text analysis,
Dramaturgy and Theatre Production Research at the ESTAL - Escola Superior de
Tecnologia e Artes de Lisboa. She is graduated by the Faculdade de Cincias Sociais e
Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Communication Sciences and she got her
Master degree in Theatre Studies at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.
She is currently a PhD student in Theatre Studies and her research is focused on the
history of the fairground theatres in Portugal.

Recognizing Popular Arts in Portugal an ethnic / aesthetics approach

Sofia da Costa Pessoa (CECC Catholic University of Portugal)
This paper will explore an essential aspect of the history of European anthropology: the
distinction between Volkerkunde the anthropological study of primitive cultures or
the anthropologies for the building of the Empire and Volkskunde the
anthropological study of popular traditions and customs, or the anthropologies for
the construction of the nation. The development of these different lines of
anthropological study implies the political and ideological contexts that prevailed in
Europe in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Between 1870 and 1970,
Portuguese anthropology emerged and developed as an intellectual project committed
to the study of popular traditions, aiming for the search of Portuguese national identity.
Portuguese anthropology built itself as a disciplinary field oriented towards the study of
Portuguese popular culture of rural characteristics, an aim reinforced by the will to
analyze the central problematic of the Portuguese national identity. Despite its apparent
indifference towards the colonial amplitude of the country, Portuguese anthropology
was, however, marked by the shadow of the Empire, which, although hidden, was still a
determinant factor for the interrogation about national identity. As several Portuguese

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authors pointed out, it is paradoxical the way Portuguese anthropology defines itself as
an anthropology for the building of the nation, giving great importance to the
development of the notion of nationality in the context of bourgeois hegemony, in the
search for national identity by turning to ethnography. Local ethnography, oriented
towards the study of popular culture, and cosmopolitan anthropology, oriented
towards the primitives, will be central concepts for the approach on this topic.
BIO
Sofia da Costa Pessoa is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Human
Sciences, Catholic University of Portugal, and a junior researcher at the Research Centre
for Communication and Culture. She holds a Degree in Public Relations and Advertising
(INP), and a Graduation in Arts and Management from the Administration National
Institute INA. She holds a Masters Degree in Museology and Museography from the
Faculty of Fine Arts of the Lisbon University, with a dissertation on the work of the
Portuguese contemporary designer Antnio Garcia (2006). She was the scientific curator
of the exhibition and catalogue untitled Zoom in / zoom out - Antonio Garcia, Designer
hold on MUDE Fashion and Design Museum (2010). Her main areas of interest are
Culture and Aesthetics Studies, Museology and Museography and Graphic Design. Her
doctoral dissertation topic in Cultural Studies is subordinated to the topic
Musealization of Popular Art in the 21st Century. She holds a PhD Grant from the
Science and Technology Foundation FCT.

A Popular Affair: Cultural Programmes and the Contemporary City

Joana Mayer (CECC Catholic University of Portugal)
.....

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 PANEL 4: FANDOM: THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF CELEBRITIES

Fan Culture, Fan Fiction on the Social Media Best-Seller in Denmark

Anne Petersen (VIA University College)
This paper discusses the challenges that professionals can meet when taking interest in
a fan culture targeted for children and young people. It is based on a research among
Danish fans. The research brings along Danish fan fiction writers and places them in a
literary context. Neither fan fiction, the Twilight saga, The Hunger Games, nor fan culture,
have been documented in Danish educating literature before. The fan culture in a way
renews the tradition and thereby in some way maintains it. Fan cultures are much more
aesthetically facetted and nuanced than many adults imagine a popular culture being.
Fan culture brings out new literary competencies, text linguistics, and genres. Fan fiction
is a part of the new media literacies. Aspects that can be used both pedagogically and
educationally. On the other hand, fan culture has its own value; founded on a sub-
cultural capital that might profit from being part of the more private and personal
niches, affinity spaces and groups from which they emerge. In Denmark, the fan cultures
modes of expression can be seen parallel to those described in both English and
American research. A varied creativity is displayed through playing games, writing,
drawing and painting, interior decoration, and to some extent crafting. For many young
people, the fan culture springs from the Potterverse and J. K. Rowlings well-known
Harry Potter stories. Since then, the fan culture continued to evolve as a culture among
children and young adults, especially through Stephanie Meyers Twilight Saga.
BIO
Anne Petersen, M.A., Senior Lecturer. Has been editing and writing non-fictional books
since 2007. Doing critics in Children and Youth (Brn og Unge) monthly. 1998: Senior
Lecturer VIAUC. 19971998: Teaching IVA, Aalborg. 19961998: Amanuensis University
of Southern Denmark. 1990: Graduated from the Department in Scandinavian Studies,
Aarhus University. Writes mostly in Danish on Twitter
(http://twitter.com/#!/hverdagsfan) and Facebook
(http://www.facebook.com/fankultur). Living in a small town near Aarhus with my
husband, one of 3 children, our dog and 6 computers.

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A ready-made model or an invitation to re-invent yourself? The trivialization of
public life in a celebrity confessional text
Joaquim Negreiros (CIES University Institute of Lisbon)
Large scale consumption of popular culture in contemporary societies is often
associated with the blurring of boundaries between the public and the private realms.
Among the vast array of popular culture manifestations which enable the public
circulation of private issues, lifestyle magazines provide a discursive environment
where such blurring is particularly visible, in so far as the so called trivialization of the
public sphere constitutes the very raison dtre of most verbal and visual texts they
display. The consequences of this phenomenon are controversial and the discussion on
how the blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private affects social
dynamics is a decisive aspect of the wider debate on the role of popular culture in our
lives. The negative deterministic view that traditionally characterized academic
approaches to popular culture has been challenged by notions which regard popular
culture as a resource for individual re-invention. With such overall concepts in the
background, this paper scrutinizes a particular popular culture text My parents
divorce made me scare to date, a confessional celebrity based text published in Cosmo
Girl! so as to identify the actual discursive mechanisms through which the trivialization
of the public sphere is achieved. Close textual analysis reveals a complex and frequently
ambiguous process of representation, marked by an oscillation between the offer of
ready-made identity models and the emphasis upon the be yourself paradigm that
stands out as an important feature of lifestyle magazines discursive economy. Discursive
instability is a main feature of this particular text. The aim of this paper is to identify and
interpret traces of such instability in both the ideational and interactive meanings
conveyed by the text, thus contributing to demonstrate that the role of popular culture
in the trivialization of the public sphere is far from a simple and clear cut phenomenon.
BIO
After having completed a graduation in Journalism (Pontifcia Universidade Catlica do
Rio de Janeiro, 1988) and a short period of work as a reporter in Brazil, I moved to
Lisbon, where I joined the team who created the daily newspaper PBLICO. In 1999 I
left the newsroom and started a MA in Coimbra (Instituto de Estudos Jornalsticos). Four
years later I moved to the United Kingdom, having completed a PhD at Kings College
London in 2009. Back in Portugal, I began a post-doctoral research (CIES-IUL) on the

9
articulations between representations of intimacy and the disposition to act in the
public sphere.

From Minor Star to Major Star: Problems of Popularity

Egret Lulu Zhou (The Chinese University of Hong-Kong)
Celebrity and Stardom Studies always focus on the most popular stars that I termed as
the Major Stars. However, I call for attention to the Minor Stars, the relatively less
pervasive ones who attract fragmented but active fans. I argue that the concepts of
Major or Minor Stars are temporal articulations under changing power relations in
particular social and historical contexts; they should be understood as the contingent
moments rather than the essential attributes.
Hong Kong television star Kevin Cheng provides a good case to explore the changing
nature of stardom and reexamine the problems of (un) popularity. Thanks to two
popular TV dramas aired in 2011, Cheng had suddenly risen from a Minor Star to a
Major Star after 18 years working in the showbiz, which strongly refashioned his
stardom and restructured his fan base. The methodology consists of textual analysis of
his changing stardom, interviews of 20 long-time fans, as well as my firsthand star-
chasing experiences as the auto-ethnography. Negotiating with the theories of popular
culture as mass culture (Storey, 2003), I find these fans are tempted and tortured by the
ideology of mass culture (Ang, 1985). Used to be anxious about his unpopular status,
now they hate to share him with the mass when he achieved popularity. How does the
television industry (un)successfully make his stardom? How do these fans cope with his
(un) popularity? What kinds of power relations (re)make such historical contingent
articulations of stardom? How can we reconsider the problems of the mass and the
popular when the Minor Stars are included? This paper does not mean to challenge the
Major Star Studies, but do mean to challenge the static way of thinking, the distinctions
and hierarchies made by scholars of Stardom and Fandom Studies.
BIO
Egret Lulu Zhou is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Arts, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong. She is one of the first-batch awardees of the Hong Kong PhD
Fellowship Scheme launched by the Hong Kong government in 2010. Stardom and
fandom studies, TV and cinema studies as well as contemporary Chinese literature

10
studies are her research interests. Her works have been published in many influential
Chinese journals, such as Film Literature, Masterpieces Review, Drama Literature and
Hong Kong Films. Her recent paper has been published as one chapter in the book
Cultural Studies the 12th edition (in Chinese) on June, 2012.

PANEL 5: VISUAL PO(P)LITICS

Paintings of Disquiet: the Pop-Political Art Movement in Post-1989 China

Tnia Ganito (CECC Catholic University of Portugal)

(Re)creating the Western Other in the Maoist Propaganda Posters: fuming images
to popularize friends and foes
Beatriz Hernndez (CECC Catholic University of Portugal)
When Mao Zedong established the PRCh in 1949, he had under his control over 800
million people - mostly illiterate - scattered over 9 million square kilometres. How to
spread his ideology? How to reach them so that he could craft and control their ideals
and attitudes? Propaganda posters played an important role in the construction of the
new social order designed by Mao. This visual promoter also helped in the creation of
the image of non-Chinese Other, reviving feelings of humiliation caused by lost wars, and
inheriting from the past the vision of the foreigner as a barbarian and invader, so that he
would be seen as the current imperialistic enemy.
Within the framework of Chinese Occidentalism that alludes to the Occident as a
contrasting figure to define what one believes to be distinctively Chinese, this
illustrated paper discusses the image of the western foreigners promoted between 1949
and 1976, using the mechanism that Mao put massively into circulation: the propaganda
poster. These popular printings included a great amount of visual information, intended
to serve as a way to identify friends and enemies, depicted whether as caricatures or
portraits depending on their status. At the same time, they were conceived to prove that
the Maoist ideology that underpinned the Chinese Nation was the supreme principle and

11
living gospel, whose application had indisputably great beneficial effects to help the
young nation to demarcate its proper place in the world.
Finally, we will examine the great (re)emergence of Maoist imagery experienced during
the 90s, known as Mao-craze. Removed from their original context, propaganda
posters were reproduced as new cultural products and exploited as new commodities,
showing the exceptional potential of creativity that these popular images had on their
afterlife.
BIO
Graduate in Journalism at San Pablo CEU University (Madrid) in 1999, and Post-
Graduate in Translation at Autnoma University (Lisbon) in 2004, got a Master degree in
Asian Studies at Catholic University (Lisbon) in 2010. Her dissertation examined the
representation of westerners on propaganda posters during the Maoism. She is
currently following a PhD in Cultural Studies, focusing her research interest in calendar
posters from 20s and 30s, Maoist propaganda poster, body representation on art and
theater, cultural and political relations between China and the 'West' and Cultural
Memory.

Transculturality and Comics: The Case of the Marguerite Abouets Aya de

Youpogon
Gyula Maksa (University of Debrecen)
The concepts of transculturality and transcultural communication can provide a frame
of reference for media studies when these investigate the cultural flows of globalization.
This dynamic perception of cultures appears as opposite to the traditional concept of
single cultures and interculturality. It seems to be able to understand the processes of
cultural globalization. These processes do not only work in terms of homogenization,
universalisation, cultural imperialism, but also in terms of particularization, divergence,
negotiation, hybridization.
It seems that comic media exists in different versions. We can see that the media text
production, dissemination and the social use and practices of these texts are often
varying in different cultures. Comic studies distinguishes between different versions of
comics in different cultural geographical areas. The main types are the Japanese manga
(or oriental style comics), the French-Belgian bande dessine and the North American

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comics. Currently, these great versions overlap and interpenetrate each other. The
transnational and transcultural flows create and form comic cultures as media cultures.
This paper aims to examine and understand some of these processes.
Marguerite Abouets Aya de Youpogon combines tools and processes from various media
genres and codes: soap opera, telenovela, French author comics, graphic novel,
dissemination of knowledge etc., in order to obtain a change of the European
stereotypes of Africa. Thanks to the success of her serial fiction, she could mobilize
European enterprises and institutions to found a library in Abidjan.
BIO
Gyula Maksa is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Media
Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. After his graduate studies in Hungarian
literature and linguistics in Hungary, he was a student in communication and media
studies at the Catholic University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) and obtained
a diploma in this field in 2003. He accomplished his PhD research project at the
University of Debrecen. His book (Variations for Comic books, published in Hungarian)
focused on media theory, comics as a media and comics based mediatic hybridization in
different cultural contexts. He has publications on comic studies, television studies,
media theory, cultural studies of tourism.

PANEL 6: POPULAR MUSIC AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Matt Bellamy: an intellectual for the masses?

Nelson Nunes (CECC Catholic University of Portugal)
Many authors have questioned the real existence of an intellectual in the contemporary
public sphere, saying that he is extinct or disregarded, due to the media mainstream of
information and, on the other hand, to the constant loss of audiences. There are,
however, certain authors who still consider the intellectual as an active agent in the
public sphere. The media keep offering a stage to new personas associated to a new kind
of intellectual. At the same time, in the contemporary rock music context, some of the
sang, said and broadcasted messages can assume a prominent and relevant role. In this
paper, we try to state that certain musicians can be integrated in this new intellectual

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category, through the analysis of the body of work of Matthew Bellamy, composer,
guitarist and lead singer of the rock band Muse. This musician tries to objectify political
and social relevant issues on his songs, taking literary work as reference. This behaviour
can locate him as a new intellectual, if we take the characteristics of the concept itself:
public policy influent agent, cultural standards gate-keeper, independence towards the
powers-that-be, citizenship defendant, among others. Through this analysis we will be
able to identify the possibility of Bellamy being a real public intellectual.
BIO
Nelson Nunes doutorando em Cincias da Comunicao pela Universidade Catlica
Portuguesa, tendo vindo a desenvolver trabalhos de investigao sobre a possibilidade
de msicos-intelectuais na esfera pblica contempornea. Alm disso, investigador do
Centro de Estudos de Comunicao e Cultura da Faculdade de Cincias Humanas,
estando integrado na linha de Media, Tecnologia e Contextos. Neslon Nunes tambm
jornalista, tendo j colaborado com rgos de comunicao social como a Rdio
Renascena e a Focus. Actualmente, chefe de redaco da revista Forum Estudante.

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity: the influence of pop music in the shaping of identity
Telmo Rodrigues (FCSH New University of Lisbon)
The attention that the Humanities have given in the last decades to the study of popular
culture has been, in part, a reply to the attacks on the usefulness of the field itself. While
many consider this move a concession that diminishes the importance of the
Humanities, others have argued that this special attention to popular culture has
resulted in a new post-cultural setting in which the differences between high culture and
low culture have been somewhat eradicated. Although these differences seem to be
fading, the norms for discussing popular culture seem highly inadequate to convey the
major role that it plays in our lives; although some consider this to be a symptom of the
feeble weight that popular art has when compared to the higher arts, one could also look
at it as a result of a series of bad academic practices that continually undermine popular
art. Taking Nick Hornbys novel High Fidelity as an example of a popular culture object
that deals with characters that have a close relationship to pop music, it will be
proposed an analysis on how human beings deal with popular culture and how an
everyday relationship with popular culture objects affects those human beings. It will be

14
stressed that popular culture plays an important role in the 21st century and that in
order to fully understand how it affects our lives one must call for a reconfiguration of
the discussions that are kept about it and for the redefinition of many concepts that are
still held as relevant within these discussions.
BIO
Telmo Rodrigues is since 2010 a researcher and PhD-fellow at the IFL/FCSH-UNL, with a
Foundation of Science and Technology grant. He has a BA in "Lnguas e Literaturas
Modernas - Estudos Ingleses" (English), U Lisboa (2007), and a MA in Literary Theory, U
Lisboa (2009). He is a PhD candidate in Literary Theory, U Lisboa. After completing his
MA in Literary Theory with the thesis Bob Dylan: Poetry with Music, he is currently
working on a PhD thesis on the relationship between music and poetry and its
consequence on the critical practices for both arts.

The evolution of merchandising and the changing dynamics of popularity

Marianne Damoiseau (Goldsmiths College University of London)
The decline in music sales that has occurred during the last decade means that artists
are now trying to maximise other sources of revenue, such as concerts and merchandise.
The later is particularly important for two reasons: first, while an artist can only give a
certain amount of concerts in a year, for a limited amount of people, merchandise sales
do not suffer from these boundaries. Secondly, merchandise is not only a source of
revenue for the artist, but also influences his or her popularity. Sell lots of t-shirts, have
thousands of fans wearing your logo, and more people will be familiar with your name.
Moreover, band t-shirts are now sold not only at shows or online, but also in high street
chains such as Topshop or H&M.
This has led to the appearance of a new kind of person wearing band t-shirts: the one
that does not know the band or the music and sometimes does not even realise there is
a band behind the logo and buys the merchandise purely because of the design. This in
turns leads to some questions about how to define what a popular band is. Does
popularity depend on the music being familiar to most people, or is your logo enough?
How do artists react when their image dominates their art? What is the reaction of a
band's fans when they see non-fans wearing a similar t-shirt as them?

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This talk will use the example of the band the Ramones to discuss the issues of the
dynamics of popularity, its relationship with merchandising, and how fans and artists
have reacted to this evolution.
BIO
Marianne Damoiseau is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths,
working under the direction of Pr John Hutnyk and Mark Fisher. Her thesis is titled "5
for the record, and 7 for the t-shirt: on music merchandising and value". She did her
Master at the Universit Montpellier III in France, and wrote a dissertation on the
importance of authenticity in the Manchester post-punk scene. She previously took part
in a symposium organized by the University of Rennes and presented a paper entitled
"Maladjusted: les chansons engages et l'arrive au pouvoir du New Labour".

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