{"title":"Negotiating body, sex, and self-fashioning in Fújì music","authors":"Stephen Olabanji Boluwaduro","doi":"10.1558/sols.24125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.24125","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of literature interrogating the voluptuous rendering of human sexuality in popular culture has focused on sex scripting in Western films and the commodification of women and their representations in popular media. However, exploration of how linguistic metaphors and innuendoes are deployed to affirm or contest expressions of desires that are sacred, sensitive, or taboo in Fuji music has received little scholarly attention. Of what significance is contesting social structure on sexuality to Fuji as a Nigerian popular musical genre? This empirical study explores this question while drawing on an ethnographic and interpretive literary analysis. Drawing from Hakim’s notion of ‘erotic capital’, the analyses and discussion operationalize the sexual scripting framework, Black feminist thought, and African/Black revolutionary art. I argue that sexual narratives and connotations in Fuji performance are often generated as powerful resources to contest sexual sensitivity and push back on silence on sexuality, negotiate and solicit artistic identity, and exact influence on public conversations on sexuality. By and large, this article affirms the engagement of sensual lyrical content as constitutive of revolutionary art and a social transformative site in which the body is negotiated as a catalyst for sexonomics in the contemporary ‘ear-tearing pant-and-bra’ musical evocations.","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78382196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Branding a pandemic response","authors":"R. Carlson, Hiroto Hatano","doi":"10.1558/sols.23524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.23524","url":null,"abstract":"Although there is little consensus on the precise reasons Japan managed to maintain a relatively low number of Covid cases overall in 2020, the Japanese government was quick to publicize their approach as a success, calling it the ‘Japan Model’. Drawing on interviews with physicians working in Tokyo area hospitals during the pandemic as well as Japanese and English language media, we argue that this promotion is an example of the way nation branding is a form of biopower. Although physicians ultimately critiqued the government for its failure to implement clear public health policies, they simultaneously relied on its promotion of Japan’s superior culture to rationalize publicized epidemiological successes. This paper argues that as branding works to metapragmatically frame, and then activate, messages already in public circulation, it coopts individuals to independently take up branding practices, symbolically displacing those messages from government programs.","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89096872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"taming of the shrewd","authors":"Raymund Vitorio, Paolo Niño M. Valdez","doi":"10.1558/sols.23527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.23527","url":null,"abstract":"The travel restrictions, health and safety protocols, and the stigmatization of traveling for leisure brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic have significantly affected the tourism industry. In this article, we investigate the current discursive efforts of the Department of Tourism (DOT) of the Philippines to revitalize the country’s tourism industry. We examine seven official DOT video advertisements to determine how the government construes pandemic-safe tourism and rebrands the country as a safe tourist destination. We argue that these videos capitalize on technologies of the self: the onus to negotiate the risks of traveling during the pandemic with the benefits of the tourism experience is premised on the tourist’s willingness to unilaterally take care of oneself. We also contend that the videos’ cautious deployment of emotions enables the government to portray their efforts to combat the pandemic as effective and downplay their heavily criticized draconian measures. This article demonstrates how tourism, an activity that is typically characterized as hedonistic and shrewd, is being tamed as an attempt to remain relevant in the context of the pandemic.","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85071362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"role of language in place branding during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-lockdowns","authors":"Johanna Tovar","doi":"10.1558/sols.23528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.23528","url":null,"abstract":"The articles in this issue examine the transformations and adaptations of place branding during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-lockdowns. Using five case studies, they examine how Covid-19 has changed place branding in Italy, Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, and France during different stages of the pandemic. The articles explore questions concerning how to (re)brand a global viral hotspot; the interplay of Covid-19, place branding and tourism; populism, nation (re)building and Covid-19 management; as well as the political nature and impact of place branding such as nation-building and nationalism during the Covid-19 pandemic and in a post-lockdown world. The articles examine place branding as semiotics with respect to how campaigns are entextualized and re-contextualized. They focus on tropes such as morality, fun, (lack of) mobility, and the future/time. Overall, this issue argues that Covid-19 is an event for place branding and that new tropes are likely to continue to emerge and endure.","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"145 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81032270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kinetic intensities and moral registers of pandemic place branding","authors":"Aurora Donzelli","doi":"10.1558/sols.23523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.23523","url":null,"abstract":"Emblematic of late capitalist modes of value creation, place branding draws on semiotic processes as well as on affective mobilization both to structure the representation and fruition of specific locales and to produce publics. Such governmental projects of people and places, however, are always open to possible acts of recontextualization. This article discusses the complex forms of social and semiotic regimentation (and subversion) underlying place-branding projects by exploring two social media campaigns that involved the city of Milan during two key moments of the Covid-19 outbreak. Revolving around different moral discourses of speed, both campaigns resulted in a partial or failed uptake. The initial (February 2020) celebration of fast-paced metropolitan work ethics evoked by #MilanoNonSiFerma (‘Milan doesn’t stop’) – a marketing and political faux pas – was followed (in May 2020) by a reparatory campaign #UnPassoAllaVolta (‘One step at a time’), aimed at endorsing the meditative quality of slow temporality. These morally inflected shifts in kinetic intensity materialized alternative forms of ethical sociality and disciplinary practices, showing how the semiotic regimentation of affects through moral registers and chronotopic formulations plays a key role within the fusion of media and capital characteristic of our post-Fordist present.","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77856152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"different kind of branding","authors":"Daniel N. Silva","doi":"10.1558/sols.23525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.23525","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his ‘different kind of branding.’ Contrary to the expectations of marketing experts and place branding scholars, Bolsonaro’s branding tactics were predicated not on portraying Brazil positively to commoditize it to (trans)national audiences but on producing the image of Brazil as a white conservative Christian country through maintaining epistemic and informational crises, delegitimizing expert systems, and engaging in necropolitical calculation. Methodologically, to describe the ‘brand-new’ Brazil projected in Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019–2022), I build three case studies centering on the boycott of Covid-19 vaccines, his strategy of letting the virus spread freely in favor of a supposed herd immunity, and the ‘shadow board’ that helped him build a necropolitical strategy. I suggest that Bolsonaro’s ‘chaotic’ branding project harnessed features of currently existing neoliberalism, including informational entropy, the digital production of ‘alternative facts’, entrepreneurial ethos, the delegitimization of expert systems, and the association between free market and political conservatism.","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87898610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language Rosemary Salomone (2022)","authors":"G. Pullum","doi":"10.1558/sols.22899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.22899","url":null,"abstract":"The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language Rosemary Salomone (2022) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 485ISBN: 9780190625610 (hbk) ISBN: 0190625619 (eBook)","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76724538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes (eds) (2022)","authors":"S. McNulty","doi":"10.1558/sols.22998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.22998","url":null,"abstract":"Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes (eds) (2022)London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Pp. 196 ISBN: 9780367363475 (hbk) ISBN: 9780429351075 (eBook)","PeriodicalId":43912,"journal":{"name":"Sociolinguistic Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75892292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}