Forging Connections
Hyperfluidity as Authenticity: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Bad Bunny
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Analee Paz, Tyler Welsh
Scholars often view authenticity as a set of stable characteristics that communicators translate to audiences. However, in an increasingly mediated and technologically fragmented world, communicators often face challenges when cultivating identification with audiences. Inaccurate media representation, stereotypes, and information overload can prevent audiences from identifying with communicators who seek to create authentic connections. Thus, a central question guides this project: How does a communicator create and communicate authenticity in a hypermediated world? This paper seeks to answer this question by focusing on how Puerto Rican entertainer Roberto Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny, navigates this difficult communication situation. Ocasio’s ability to find massive success in the entertainment/media industry demonstrates a nuanced understanding of authenticity and provides a template for communicating with diverse audiences across a variety of media. We argue Bad Bunny represents a hyperfluid authenticity which allows a communicator to continuously adapt their persona, image, and identity while still remaining true to their “self.” Utilizing the method of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we demonstrate how Bad Bunny cultivates a hyperfluid authenticity by examining his mediated representation in music, fashion, and performance. Bad Bunny’s various modes of discourse offer an opportunity for scholars to investigate how hyperfluid authenticity functions and the various communicative elements it requires. This project seeks to provide an explanation of not only how Bad Bunny negotiates the various challenges communicators face, but also how hyperfluid authenticity might offer a new understanding of what authenticity means to audiences today.
Cultural Tourism and the World Acadian Congress
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christina Keppie
This paper examines the role of cultural tourism as an organization in the creation/maintenance of identity membership for cultural minorities, namely the Acadians. Building on previous work that examined the regional/local meaning and ideological perceptions of Acadian membership, I present the existence of a vacuum in the understanding of diasporic Acadian identity. I come to this understanding through an examination of the power of cultural tourism as a tool in ideology/knowledge making, as well as through a qualitative analysis of Acadia’s most celebrated organization, the World Acadian Congress (CMA), a civil society platform established through cultural tourism over twenty-five years ago as a means of building bridges between Acadians from around the world. The CMA provides an arena for Acadians to express their cultural vitality through a sense of mutual collectiveness. However, like all cultural festivities, the CMA not only provides an arena for collective membership building, but it also unveils the social and political concerns of many Acadians and promotes the French-first linguistic ideology of the Société nationale de l’Acadie (SNA), a non-profit organization that also acts as the CMA’s overseeing structure. This CMA-SNA relationship creates an ideological umbrella and a hierarchical power within the diaspora. The result is that various communities of the Acadian diaspora receive little consideration in Acadian relations and politics. This is particularly true for American Acadians living in more rural, borderlands regions where French has no official status, such as in northern Maine.
"Words Simple as Grass" - Whitman and the Internalization of Nature: Reading and Teaching Walt Whitman in a Time of Crisis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Steve Schessler
Walt Whitman strives to create a literary legacy that establishes itself as arising from the past, America's national history closely twined with its natural history. From this situation, he seeks to project his work and America’s character, as he defines it, into a future nation. As we read and reach Whitman during a time of climate crisis, the analyses and conversations change, with students placing greater emphasis on Whitman's insistence on a healthy present - and a healthy society - that grows by internalizing the lessons of Nature. Following the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism, Whitman argues for a harmonious coexistence of self, nature, and society as the essence of his artistic expression. These messages resonate as a response to current crises, with additional urgency informed by Whitman's employment of paratactic temporality throughout his work in Leaves of Grass, as he, for example, seeks to “raise the past on the present, / (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past)”. Whitman here becomes that “perennial tree,” growing out of the soil of America’s plural democracy, much as the voice of the poet grows out of the voices of the many. By emphasizing the dependence of individual identity on community identity - and of both as dependent on Nature - Whitman delivers a timely message of connection and the value of art as a response to crisis.
