This paper explores the development, entrenchment, and renegotiation of Greek American identity in the context of competitive folk dance festivals since the 1970s. These festivals, which each year attract thousands of Greek American youth, constitute sites of intensive culture-work, where Greek Americans – mostly children and teens affiliated with a local Greek Orthodox parish – reimagine and redefine what it means to be a member of the Greek diaspora in the 21st century. More specifically, the festivals serve as a site where Orthodox Christian values and Greek folk culture are adapted to the neoliberal order and reemerge as competitive and individualistic, and hence compatible with not only the market fundamentalist drive to domination but also hegemonic models of race, class, and gender. My working hypothesis is that contemporary American notions of ethnic whiteness and unmarked racial identity, neoliberal capitalist values around the nexus of labor-productivity-pleasure, and the cultural politics of Greek Orthodoxy in contemporary America intersect and intertwine in the context of expressive culture at these sites. Further, I observe that the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America harnesses young people’s drive to participate in Greek culture and express their collective ethnic identity through dance as a means of tightening their control and strengthening their power to police the borders of Greekness, while also simultaneously depoliticizing their engagement with American society and emphasizing the ethnoreligious politics of the Orthodox Church in line with an emergent, reactionary “Neo-Byzantine” ideology.

Your Name (2016) is a critically acclaimed movie directed by Makoto Shinkai that tells the story of two teenagers, Taki and Mitsuha, who unexpectedly swap bodies. Their journey is filled with longing and love, exploring themes like gender identity, climate change, and the Shintoism idea of musubi. Best described by the grandmother of Mitsuha, “musubi is the old way of calling the local guardian god.. So the braided cords that we make are the god's art and represent the flow of time itself. They converge and take shape. They twist, tangle, sometimes unravel, break, and then connect again. Musubi - knotting. That's time.” This Shinto concept is a harmonious connection between all things, whether nature, people, or the events that unfold within the universe. In the context of Your Name, musubi can be interpreted as the mystical and spiritual ties that bind the characters and their experiences. This paper explores how the musical soundtrack in this film, composed by RADWIMPS, bridges the metaphysical and emotional by examining compositional choices that signify musubi. Drawing from conversations surrounding the study of music, representation, and spirituality within anime, I discuss how musical motifs and orchestration guide the audience towards an understanding of the characters' interactions with the movie's idea of musubi. I argue that Your Name’s soundtrack functions as a sonic embodiment of musubi. Its role within the film highlights how music actively constructs cultural and spiritual meaning, guiding audiences through its nonlinear temporality and deepening the film’s engagement with Shinto cosmology.

Housed in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame archives is the bootleg tape collection of New York City (NYC) punk participant James Brawley. From 1974-1993, Brawley amassed 1,400 bootleg tapes documenting the NYC underground music scene. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame website describes the collection as offering a firsthand perspective on the evolution of NYC punk. However, this paper argues that the breadth of Brawley’s tapes suggests reading his collection as a sonic memoir instead of a targeted history. Unlike histories, memoirs don’t claim to be objective accounts, enabling memoirists to tell their histories through their affective experience with less concern for accuracy. In the vein of a memoir, the Brawley Collection doesn’t attempt to document a definitive history of NYC punk. Instead, as I demonstrate through an accounting of his archive, the tapes document a broader affective experience of the 1970s/1980s NYC soundworld in which James Brawley circulated.

Key to Brawley’s archive and entrance into the historical record was the medium of the cassette tape. In listening to his tapes, Brawley’s curatorial hand becomes evident in how we encounter his archive, determining what gets recorded, the grouping of performances together on the same tape, and notes Brawley makes on the J-cards to guide us to particular performances. In discussing Brawley’s tapes, I examine how media technologies shape the historical record by exploring how the cassette tape empowered James Brawley to tell his story through these bootleg recordings and influence the legacy of NYC punk.