Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias. Edited by Flora Pitrolo and Marko Zubak
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, transgression and 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.
– Develops research which decolonises disco to shedd light on scenes unexplored in Anglophone scholarship
– Establishes a crucial link between the ‘field’ of popular music studies and the ’scenes’ of its production
– Offers a range of interdisciplinary and international perspectives suited to academic and non-specialised audiences
Reviews
This book is a critical and necessary contribution to disco studies and to popular music studies more broadly. The volume will find an avid readership among researchers and students in popular music studies and among practitioners and aficionados of disco itself.
— Arabella Stanger, University of Sussex, UK
Table of contents
Introduction: Disco Heterotopias—Other Places, Other Spaces, Other Lives
Flora Pitrolo, Marko Zubak
Montreal, Funkytown: Two Decades of Disco History
Will Straw
Dancin’ Days: Disco Flashes in 1970s Brazil
Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari
Gimmick! Italo Disco, Copy and Consumption
Flora Pitrolo
Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music
Yusuke Wajima
Disco, Dancing, Globalization and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema
Gregory D. Booth
Dancing Desire, Dancing Revolution: Sexuality and the Politics of Disco in China Since the 1980s
Qian Wang
Non-stop, I Want to Live Non-stop: The Role of Disco in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
Jakub Machek
Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism
Marko Zubak
The Lebanese Music Experiment: Disco and Nightlife During the Civil War
Natalie Shooter, Ernesto Chahoud
Disco and Discontent in Nigeria: A Conversation
Uchenna C. Ikonne, Flora Pitrolo, Marko Zubak
Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia
Ken McLeod
Epilogue: Decolonising Disco—Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco
Tim Lawrence
About the editors
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’.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s
Book Subtitle: Disco Heterotopias
Editors: Flora Pitrolo, Marko Zubak
Series: Title Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
Published: 29 March 2022
Number of Pages: XII, 345
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5