Around the Mirror Ball: The Globalization and Glocalization of Disco

Abstract

The anthology Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias, co-edited by Flora Pitrolo and Marko Zubak, offers an interdisciplinary examination of the global spread and local interpretations of disco music and disco culture within a historical period shaped by social change, political conflict, and the globalization of mass media industries. With rigorously researched contributions by scholars, DJs, and musical experts representing different fields, scenes, and national locales, the anthology achieves its stated purpose of examining “how disco acquired different forms, meanings and functions as it was adopted and re-imagined” across distinct social, cultural, political, economic, and industrial contexts (p. 1). Most significantly, the anthology expands scholarship on disco’s routes and cultural meanings beyond extant studies of the rise and fall of disco in the U.S. context. Bringing together ideas from popular music, cultural studies, and media studies, the contributors, many of whom write from non-U.S. or U.K. positions, collectively offer generative theoretical frameworks and methods to envision and comprehend the globalizing and glocalizing of pop culture. While the focus on moving bodies is uneven across chapters, dance and performance scholars invested in embodied flows of popular, mediated culture stand to benefit from the wealth of perspectives and historical information included in the volume’s exploration of global dance music cultures. The introduction, co-written by Pitrolo and Zubak, provides two epistemological frames for considering diverse iterations of disco during the 1970s and ‘80s and configuring new disco historiographies. First is Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, “a term rooted in the spatial and able to account for a simultaneous participation in different geographical and imaginary regimes” which is invoked via disco’s most iconic symbol, the mirror ball (p. 5). The glittering mirror ball, with its ability to refract, scatter, and multiply a single light and transform an environment into a real yet unreal space, points to how each disco culture “draws into itself the disco paradigm as imaginary cipher