Tag Archives: resistance

Amy Garey takes the page 99 test

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 Page 99 of my dissertation ends with a quote from a 2019 comedy festival, “KVN is, KVN lives, KVN will continue to live!” It sums up one of the strands of this research, which examines how a popular student game came to be both banned and supported by the Soviet state, both politically subversive and ideologically conservative, both grassroots phenomenon and media spectacle. KVN, an acronym for Klub Veselykh i Nakhodchivykh, or “Club of the Cheerful and Clever,” is a Soviet-bloc team comedy competition. It began in 1961 as a televised improv show, but students across the USSR soon adopted the game in their universities, organizing interdepartmental competitions and city-wide leagues. Students grew to love KVN because comedy helped them, as octogenarian Ukrainian Eduard Chechelnitsky put it, ”get round” the censors: young people could critique the state nonreferentially, voicing sentiments no one would allow in direct speech. Most, though, simply wanted to laugh and make others laugh. While competitors made (and make) political jokes, and while many found value in a forum that let them speak truth to power, it is humor that attracted participants.

Jokes worried Soviet ideologues, though, and in 1972 officials banned KVN—at least on television. But by that time KVN had spread to schools, universities, and summer camps from Kiev to Bishkek, and people openly played throughout the fourteen-year period of the “ban.” In interviews, KVNshiki (as participants are called) stressed triumph and autonomy as they described the game: KVN is ours, they seemed to say, not the state’s.

KVN’s extra-state nature has been highlighted by the war between Russia and Ukraine. Although Ukrainians and Russians no longer compete against each other, as they had before 2014, KVN remains as popular as it ever has been in domestic Ukrainian competitions. KVN lives. That millions of young people still play a game that began as a hokey 1960s Soviet game show, despite prohibitions, despite border closures, means something, socially. A lot of KVNshiki, beyond liking to laugh, believe in the personally and politically transformative potential of comedy. Page 99 illustrates some of the ways they renew those principles in everyday practice.

Amy Garey. 2020. The People’s Laughter: War, Comedy, and the Soviet Legacy. University of California, Los Angeles, Phd.

Laura Bunting-Hudson’s The Art of the Hustle

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While traditionally the neoliberal economic system has been characterized as one which militates against poor people and those that are oppressed, my research analyzes how ordinary people are using the political economy combined with resistance politics for their own advantages. This dissertation explores the political economy of rap music in Bogota, Colombia and how groups use diverse transnational business strategies in order to develop a new entertainment industry there. My work explores the social organizational strategies of multi-national rap polities, based in Bogota, as they utilize new forms of digital technology, and their street smart entrepreneurial skills to distribute popular music as well as to start horizontal business firms, in order to challenge the status quo within their communities.

On page 99, my dissertation is describing the ideology of many of the most successful rap groups in Bogota, Colombia. It illustrates the rappers counter-cultural system of values that comes from street codes one often finds in international street gangs. The rappers use these ideas in order to form a group of resistance artistic poets (rap) who believe in using the capitalistic system, forming a strong transnational network of Spanish rap elites and establishing businesses based on the groups ideology, in order to try to create societal change. In this section, I use FG Bailey’s concepts from political anthropology and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Combining these theoretical frameworks allows for the ethnographic data to reveal the way that games are played by the rap polities, to demonstrate how the groups are organized, form networks, maintain those orders and the threats that rap polities encounter, in their aims at garnering fame, money and societal power. The stated goals of many of the rap polities are to challenge the current political and economic elites in Colombia whom they believe are an oligarchical regime, that unjustly take advantage of the people and resources of Colombia. The rap artists believe that by forming their own businesses, being able to create social and political solidarity around the dissemination of their messages contained within their music through mass communications networks and working hard for progressive change, Colombia can become a more equal and just nation. This dissertation showcases the rap artists quest for this kind of greater equity and justice in Bogota, Colombia.
Bunting-Hudson, Laura. 2017. The Art of the Hustle: A Study of the Rap Music Industry in Bogota, Colombia. Ph.d. diss. Teachers College, Columbia University.