The rhythm of life: Subhajyoti and Alokparna Guha

Like in Le café d’Yllka and L’atelier des Strésor, Cécile Oumhani goes back in time to evoke lives made of exiles and hasty departures. Her words echo the crash of History on human destinies. They pay stirring homage to the men and women who had to rebuild their lives in another country, in the exile colonization forced upon them, or in times of war. What is identity but a multiplicity of facets forever unforming and forming themselves anew throughout life? Who is this wounded soldier on one of the Oise roads in 1918, after he landed with American troops? A Tunisian, thirsting for freedom, Dawood left his country to break free from colonial rule and patriarchal authority. He arrives in New York, in bustling Little Syria, where Kahlil Gibran is about to found the Pen League, the first association of Arab-American writers. But World War I soon changes the course of his dreams. (Elyzad)

Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin J. PowerThe Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions series will publish internationally informed edited collections, monographs and textbooks which engage in the critical study of popular music performances (live and recorded), historical and contemporary popular music practitioners and artists, and participants and audiences for whom such musics embody aesthetic, cultural and particularly socio-political values. The series sees music not only as a manifestation of global popular culture, but also as a form that profoundly shapes and continually seeks to redefine our understandings of how society operates in a given location and era. This series is edited by an eponymous interdisciplinary research cluster located at the University of Limerick, Ireland, which provides a platform for researchers working within a range of disciplines to come together to advance their shared interest in the critical analysis of popular music(s) and the elucidation of their social meaning, significance and material impacts. The publication records of the series editors – Professor Eoin Devereux and Drs Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power – reflects the interdisciplinarity of the endeavour. The editors have previously published books on David Bowie and Morrissey for example. Theoretically, books in this series are envisaged as: • Interrogating the potential of popular music to both foreclose and promote alternative / hegemonic frameworks of understanding within the public consciousness. • Analysing the creative processes and outputs in terms of the social, political and historical moment in which popular music is produced. • Extending discussion of live and recorded performances of popular music within critical reception theory frameworks and fandom studies as a means of appreciating consumption as a form of secondary production (prosumption) and creation. • Honouring, but also moving beyond the Anglo-American hegemony evident in the majority of Popular Music Studies.Empirically, the series editors are particularly interested in publishing work which: • Engages with the politics of performance, production, consumption and circulation that is informed by fieldwork and ethnography. • Seeks to synthesise critically engaged musicological analysis with deeply textured and nuanced readings of the broader socio-cultural context from which popular music(s) emerge. • Includes popular music genres from different geographic locations and epochs in order to broaden discussions of the role that popular music plays in shaping and (re)defining our understandings of how society operates.Methodologically, the series will welcome texts which: • Address key ontological and epistemological debates within the broad field of popular musics analysis of societal issues. • Provide new and creative ways of interrogating popular musics that blends close textual and textural analysis of performances with approaches informed by fieldwork and ethnography. • Map different approaches to the analysis of popular music ‘texts’ by modelling interdisciplinary approaches that also view music/songs as ‘process’ in the elucidations of social meaning.This interdisciplinary series will include texts located in sociology, (ethno)musicology, cultural studies, political science, socio-linguistics, media and communication studies, musicology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies, and queer studies and more. A range of theoretical perspectives are anticipated, including but not limited to critical theory and cultural theory, music and ethnography, performance theory, sociology of music, musical semiotics, queer theory, transnational theory, music and hybridity and migration theory. Please send proposals to the series editors at pmpc@ul.ie Professor Eoin Devereux, Assistant Dean, Research,  Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Limerick.  Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Limerick, IRELAND.  Course Director MA in Sociology: Youth, Community and Social Regeneration Co-director, Popular Music and Popular Research Cluster, UL. Co-director, Power, Discourse and Society Research Cluster, UL. Adjunct Professor, Contemporary Culture (Discourse & Fan Studies) University of Jyvasklya, FINLAND.  Contact Details:  Room C1085,  Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Limerick, Ireland. Tel: 00 353 (61) 202341 Paperback edition of DAVID BOWIE: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power and featuring a new and extended preface is now available from Routledge.  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *