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Palgrave Macmillan

Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s

Disco Heterotopias

  • Book
  • © 2022

Overview

Editors:
  1. Flora Pitrolo

    1. Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

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  2. Marko Zubak

    1. Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • 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

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
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  2. Introduction: Disco Heterotopias—Other Places, Other Spaces, Other Lives

    • Flora Pitrolo, Marko Zubak
    Pages 1-28

  3. Montreal, Funkytown: Two Decades of Disco History

    • Will Straw
    Pages 29-49

  4. Dancin’ Days: Disco Flashes in 1970s Brazil

    • Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari
    Pages 51-74

  5. Gimmick! Italo Disco, Copy and Consumption

    • Flora Pitrolo
    Pages 75-99

  6. Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music

    • Yusuke Wajima
    Pages 101-126

  7. Disco, Dancing, Globalization and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema

    • Gregory D. Booth
    Pages 127-150

  8. Dancing Desire, Dancing Revolution: Sexuality and the Politics of Disco in China Since the 1980s

    • Qian Wang
    Pages 151-171

  9. Non-stop, I Want to Live Non-stop: The Role of Disco in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia

    • Jakub Machek
    Pages 173-193

  10. Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism

    • Marko Zubak
    Pages 195-221

  11. The Lebanese Music Experiment: Disco and Nightlife During the Civil War

    • Natalie Shooter, Ernesto Chahoud
    Pages 223-249

  12. Disco and Discontent in Nigeria: A Conversation

    • Uchenna C. Ikonne, Flora Pitrolo, Marko Zubak
    Pages 251-280

  13. Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia

    • Ken McLeod
    Pages 281-301

  14. Epilogue: Decolonising Disco—Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco

    • Tim Lawrence
    Pages 303-338

  15. Back Matter

    Pages 339-345
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Keywords

About this book

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, transgressionand 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.

Reviews

“Promisingly, the anthology stands to serve as a jumping-off point for researchers of both historical and contemporary disco dance cultures. … Dance scholars and practitioners … will find the histories included in the anthology productive routes for future academic exploration. … With selections drawn from each of the highlighted disco scenes, the authors’ playlists offer a rich resource for DJs and dancers across the world eager to find new ways to embody disco’s polyvalent pulse.” (Elizabeth June Bergman, Dance Chronicle, Vol. 46 (2), 2023) 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

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Flora Pitrolo

  • Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia

    Marko Zubak

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’.


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