Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and Nationhood: (Re)sounding Whiteness

ISBN-13: 9783030676216 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 260 str.

Catherine Hoad

Opis

This book addresses how whiteness is represented in heavy metal scenes and practices, both as a site of academic inquiry and force of cultural significance. The author argues that whiteness, and more specifically white masculinity, has been given normative value which obscures the contributions of women and people of colour, and affirms the exclusory understandings of ‘belonging’ which have featured in the metal scenes of Norway, South Africa, and Australia. Utilizing critical discourse analysis and critical textual analysis of musical texts, promotional material, and participant-based observation ethnographies, it explores how the texts, discourses, and practices produced and articulated by metal scene members and scholars alike have presented heavy metal as a white, masculine pastime, yet also considers the vital work done by scene members to confront expressions of exclusory misogyny and racism when they emerge in metal scenes. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of metal music studies, leisure studies, sociology of culture and sociology of racism.

Spis treści

1.Introduction.- 2. Sound of White Noise.- 3.Norwegian black and Viking metal scenes.- 4.Territories of Whiteness in Afrikaans metal.- 5. Normophilic Whiteness and Banal Nationalism in Australian extreme metal.- 6.(Re)sounding, (re)sealing: Translocal Terrains of Whiteness across Norway, South Africa and Australia.- 7.Conclusion: Beyond the Pale.

O autorze

Catherine Hoad is Senior Lecturer in Critical Popular Music Studies, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

Blurb

This book addresses how whiteness is represented in heavy metal scenes and practices, both as a site of academic inquiry and force of cultural significance. The author argues that whiteness, and more specifically white masculinity, has been given normative value which obscures the contributions of women and people of colour, and affirms the exclusory understandings of ‘belonging’ which have featured in the metal scenes of Norway, South Africa, and Australia. 

Utilizing critical discourse analysis and critical textual analysis of musical texts, promotional material, and participant-based observation ethnographies, it explores how the texts, discourses, and practices produced and articulated by metal scene members and scholars alike have presented heavy metal as a white, masculine pastime, yet also considers the vital work done by scene members to confront expressions of exclusory misogyny and racism when they emerge in metal scenes.

The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of metal music studies, leisure studies, sociology of culture and sociology of racism.

Catherine Hoad is Senior Lecturer in Critical Popular Music Studies, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.