- Meenasarani Linde Murugan – “ ‘M.I.A. coming back with power power’: Documentary Resurrections and Feminist Disarticulations”
This paper examines the music documentary MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. (2018) in relation to its efforts to resurrect M.I.A.’s career. M.I.A., born Maya Arulpragasam, is a Sri Lankan Tamil, who grew up mainly in London as a result of being a refugee of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Growing up as a refugee and immigrant she felt initially estranged from English, however it was this unease with the language - her inarticulateness - that later became key to her provocateur take on visual media and music. Defined by glitchy visual aesthetics, a globally promiscuous yet electronically based sound, and a refusal to answer a question “straight,” M.I.A. defied categories in her (always already) transnational emergence as a pop star and rapper in 2004. In the past 15 years she and her music have been the subject of several academic essays, album reviews, and celebrity profiles that puzzle through her mix of radical aesthetics, inarticulate politics, ascendance in wealth, and at this point pop culture ubiquity, only to be rivaled by perhaps now a pop culture datedness. Given this change in her life and celebrity - but less so in her music and beliefs - this paper seeks to take up M.I.A.’s sonic and visual aesthetics and politics in light of the different interviews and profiles that have emerged over the years where she has been characterized as merely “radical chic” or explicitly “anti-Black.” Rather than exculpate her for the problematic things she has said and done, this paper wants to take full account of them as they point to a failure of her feminist politics, especially at the intersections of Third World and Black Feminisms. Of course, this failure is largely erased from the music documentary that largely archives, pays homage, and revives her persona. As recent documentaries about women music artists - Amy (2015), What Happened, Miss Simone? ( 2015), Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (2017) - all deal with death and/or pastness, this paper locates in MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. a refusal of death even as the artist has been deemed ‘dead’ or ‘canceled’ by many popular music fans.
- Mina Tavakoli – “Metaphoric, Diasporic: The Mythical Legacy of Persian Pop Diva Googoosh”
The abortive power of the 1979 Iranian Revolution swiftly shuttled the country’s existing popular culture into a shallow grave. The authoritarian theocracy, led by Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ushered in – among other decrees – an era of hush, wherein pop music was formally banned, and women’s voices and bodies were forced to retreat from the public sphere.
In the decade leading up to ’79, a young woman named Faegheh Atashin, later and more famously monoynmmed ‘Googoosh,’ was arguably the most visible and vocal woman in the country. Pickling the sound and promise of a nation’s first experimentations with ‘global’-sounding pop music, Googoosh – a child actress turned pop phenom – represented a future-forward Iran of the pre-Revolution Pahlavi monarchy. Upon the turn of the Revolution, the Westernized, Tina Turner-loving, Azerbaijani-born it-girl was incarcerated, then forced into a twenty-year long exile from performance.
With a series of enduring singles that would later congeal into
Pol (“Bridge”) – an album formally pressed in 1995, now heralded as a keystone of Persian pop – Googoosh’s legacy as Iran’s orphaned diva marries not just the notion of diasporic rebirth, but endurance despite – or perhaps, in light of – a socio-politically mandated public ‘execution.’
This paper uses Googoosh’s body of work – as actress, singer, and sex symbol - as a framing device to investigate the role of nostalgia amid and after socio-political upheaval. What sort of weight has Googoosh, as metaphor, had to bear, and how has she interacted with this narrative? What relationship does Googoosh, as an artist, have toward country, and how has her legacy retroactively been interwoven with projections of the political? Perhaps more broadly, how do living pop stars transcend their own mortality and become figures of national myth?
