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This book explores some of disco's other lives which thrived between the 1970s and the 1980s, from oil-boom Nigeria to socialist Czechoslovakia, from post-colonial India to war-torn Lebanon. It charts the translation of disco as a cultural form into musical, geo-political, ideological and sociological landscapes that fall outside of its original conditions of production and reception, capturing the variety of scenes, contexts and reasons for which disco took on diverse dimensions in its global journey. With its deep repercussions in visual culture, gender politics, and successive forms of popular music, art, fashion and style, disco as a musical genre and dance culture is exemplary of how a subversive, marginal scene - that of queer and Black New York undergrounds in the early 1970s - turned into a mainstream cultural industry. As it exploded, atomised and travelled, disco served a number of different agendas; its aesthetic rootedness in ideas of pleasure, transgressionand escapism and its formal malleability, constructed around a four-on-the-floor beat, allowed it to permeate a variety of local scenes for whom the meaning of disco shifted, sometimes in unexpected and radical ways.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction. Disco Heterotopias: Other Places, Other Spaces, Other Lives.- Chapter 2: Montreal, Funkytown: Two Decades of Disco History.- Chapter 3: Dancin' Days: Disco Flashes in 1970s Brazil.- Chapter 4: Gimmick! Italo Disco, Copy and Consumption.- Chapter 5: Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music.- Chapter 6: Disco, Dancing, Globalization and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema.- Chapter 7: Dancing Desire, Dancing Revolution: Sexuality and The Politics of Disco in China Since the 1980s.- Chapter 8: Non-stop, I Want to Live Non-stop: The Role of Disco is Late Socialist Czechoslovakia.- Chapter 9: Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism.- Chapter 10: Other Voices of the Orient: Lebanese Disco and Nightlife During the Civil War.- Chapter 11: Disco and Discontent in Nigeria: A Conversation.- Chapter 12: Outer Space, Futurism, and The Quest for Disco Utopia.- Chapter 13: Epilogue.Decolonising Disco: Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco.
About the author
Flora Pitrolo is a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and Syracuse University London. Her work investigates alternative European performance and music cultures of the 1980s, with a special focus on Italy. She publishes both as a scholar and as a journalist, and is active as a DJ and producer in various archival and experimental music scenes.
Marko Zubak is a Researcher at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb, specialising in popular culture in socialist Eastern Europe. His publications include The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968-1980), and he has curated the exhibitions 'Yugoslav Youth Press as Underground Press' and ''Stayin' Alive: Socialist Disco Culture'.
Report
"Promisingly, the anthology stands to serve as a jumping-off point for researchers of both historical and contemporary disco dance cultures. ... Dance scholars and practitioners ... will find the histories included in the anthology productive routes for future academic exploration. ... With selections drawn from each of the highlighted disco scenes, the authors' playlists offer a rich resource for DJs and dancers across the world eager to find new ways to embody disco's polyvalent pulse." (Elizabeth June Bergman, Dance Chronicle, Vol. 46 (2), 2023)
