Áine Mangaoang

Writing

For a complete list of publications, see my University of Oslo homepage.

Recent highlights

Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online (2020)

Áine Mangaoang, “‘I See Music’: Beyoncé, YouTube, and the Question of Signed-Songs.” In Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online. Martin Iddon & Melanie Marshall (eds.), Indiana University Press.

Who runs the world? The Beyhive knows. From the Destiny's Child 2001 hit single "Survivor" to her 2019 jam "7/11," Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has confronted dominant issues around the world. Because her image is linked with debates on race, sexuality, and female empowerment, she has become a central figure in pop music and pop culture. Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online explores her work as a singer, activist, and artist by taking a deep dive into her songs, videos, and performances, as well as responses from her fans. Contributors look at Beyoncé's entire body of work to examine her status as a canonical figure in modern music and do not shy away from questioning scandals or weighing her social contributions against the evolution of feminism, critical race theory, authenticity, and more. Full of examples from throughout Beyoncé's career, this volume presents listening as a political undertaking that generates meaning and creates community. Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online contends that because of her willingness to address societal issues within her career, Beyoncé has become an important touchstone for an entire generation—all in a day's work for Queen Bey.

Reviews:

“Iddon and Marshall's Beyoncé is poised to expand critical conversations about the biggest and most influential pop star of the 21st century.”

~ Daphne A. Brooks (Yale University) Author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom

Reviews

"There can be little doubt that Ireland is an enduring and prolific presence in the world of popular music. The editors of this book are to be congratulated on drawing together a quality cast of contributors, whose expertise in various aspects of Irish popular music serves to produce a rich and compelling exploration of the significance and legacy of Irish popular music artists in both local and global contexts."

Andy Bennett (Griffith University), author of Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place

 "Made in Ireland is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging study of popular music (broadly understood) in Ireland currently available. The contributors come from a variety of disciplines and offer a number of illuminating perspectives that should make this book of interest to readers in popular music studies more broadly."

Timothy D. Taylor (UCLA), author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets 

 

"This unique volume addresses a number of lacunae in Irish Music Studies in a way that broadens and deepens the field immeasurably. Extending far beyond the jigs and reels of pub sessions or performances at rural song circles, Made in Ireland is both urgent and immediate in its examination of Ireland’s direct engagement with rock, hip hop, country, punk, and other popular genres. Underlying these sounds is a pulse of identity, rebellion, and connection to place and scene that no other current book explores."

Sean Williams (Evergreen State College), author of Focus: Irish Traditional Music 

Dangerous Mediations: Pop music in a Philippine prison video (2019)

by Áine Mangaoang

Co-Winner of The 2021 International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) Woody Guthrie Award for the most outstanding books on popular music, together with Deborah Wong’s Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko 

In 2007, an unlikely troupe of 1500 Filipino prisoners became Internet celebrities after their YouTube video of Michael Jackson's ground-breaking hit 'Thriller' went viral. Taking this spectacular dance as a point of departure, Dangerous Mediations explores the disquieting development of prisoners performing punishment to a global, online audience. Combining analysis of this YouTube video with first-hand experiences from fieldwork in the Philippine prison, Áine Mangaoang investigates a wide range of interlocking contexts surrounding this user-generated text to reveal how places of punishment can be transformed into spaces of spectacular entertainment, leisure, and penal tourism.

In the post-YouTube era, Dangerous Mediations sounds the call for close readings of music videos produced outside of the corporate culture industries. By connecting historical discussions on postcolonialism, surveillance and prison philosophy with contemporary scholarship on popular music, participatory culture and new media, Dangerous Mediationsis the first book to ask critical questions about the politics of pop music and audiovisual mediation in early 21st-century detention centres.

For more details, visit the Dangerous Mediations Bloomsbury homepage.

Reviews

“In this rich ethnographic case study, Áine Mangaoang brings together a welcome, provocative and highly original mix of music, YouTube and prison. She raises thoughtful questions about participation and incarceration, leisure and exploitation, the global and the local, that will resonate far beyond her case.” 

Nancy Baym, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, USA

“An enlightening, extensive, and engaging work! Áine Mangaoang's explanation of the phenomenal popularity of the Dancing Inmates' Thriller, a YouTube sensation, unearths layer after layer of paradoxes embedded in Philippine history, musicological studies, prison performances and digital cross-currents. The tensions that spring from navigating between rehabilitation and oppression, creativity and captivity, entertainment and punishment, submission and assertion, cultural identity and stereotyping, among others, make Dangerous Mediations a cautionary tale in adapting inmate performance, especially of the digital variety, as a vehicle for prison reform.”

Ricardo Abad, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

“This book deepens our understanding of the mediation of music in the digital era. Through a wide-reaching analysis, Mangaoang reveals the subversive potential of music and how new media texts are bound up with power, punishment and postcolonialism.”

Barley Norton, Reader and Senior Tutor in Music, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Ceol Phádraig: Music at St Patrick’s College Drumcondra, 1875-2016 (2019)

Mangaoang, Á. “Music and Tourism”. In Ceol Phádraig: Music at St. Patrick’s College Drumcondra, 1875-2016. J. Buckley & J. O’Flynn (eds.) Peter Lang: Dublin, 2019.  

The book records and interprets key musical developments, appraises the work of major contributors, and captures the activities of students, staff and visiting musicians at St Patrick’s College up to its incorporation into Dublin City University in 2016. It represents a major scholarly work that details the progress of music at a university college in Ireland, and it is envisaged that its varied chapters and themes will evoke further memories and discussions among graduates of the College and others.

Mapping Popular Music in Dublin: Executive Report (2016)

Mangaoang, Á. and O'Flynn, J. Mapping Popular Music in Dublin: Executive Report. Fáilte Ireland & Dublin City University, 2016.

The Mapping Popular Music in Dublin ( MPMiD) research project sought to map popular music experience in Dublin by looking at popular music from the viewpoint of fans (citizens and tourists), musicians, and music industry personnel. By providing the first comprehensive overview of popular music experience in Dublin to date, this report aims to inform tourism, civic, culture and music industry organisations.

Performing the Postcolonial: Philippine Prison Spectacles after Web 2.0 (2014)

Mangaoang, Á. “Performing the Postcolonial: Philippine Prison Spectacles after Web 2.0” Postcolonial Text, Special Issue: The Parapostcolonial, 9(4), 2014: 1-18.

This essay argues that the legacy of colonialism lives on in contemporary Philippine experience, a century after the Philippine Exhibit of the St. Louis World Fair (1904). Drawing from the renowned Philippine phenomenon of the Dancing Inmates of Cebu – a group of 1500 prisoners at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre (CPDRC), this essay traces the noticeably American nature of the Philippine state after decades of explicit and implicit US imperialism. The CPDRC prisoners' performances, both during the live hataw sayaw and recorded iterations via YouTube, with hundreds upon hundreds of clearly marked Filipino prisoners at its core, become metaphors for twenty-first-century postcolonial Philippine attempts to assert their independence from the United States.

Torture: International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (2013)

Mangaoang, Á. “Dancing to Distraction: Mediating ‘Docile Bodies’ in ‘Philippine Thriller Video.’” Torture: International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (Special Issue on Music & Detention), 23(2), 2013: 44-54. 

The essay explores how seemingly innocuous products of user-generated-con- tent are imbued with ideologies that obscure or reduce relations of race, agency, power and control. By contextualising the video’s origins, I highlight current Philippine prison conditions and introduce how video-maker/ programme inventor/prison warden Byron Garcia sought to distance his facility from the Philippine prison majority. I then investigate the ‘mediation’ of ‘Thriller’ through three main issues. One, I examine the commodification and transformation from viral video to a thana-tourist destina- tion; two, the global appeal of ‘Thriller’ is founded on public penal intrigue and essentialist Filipino tropes, mixed with a certain novelty factor widely suffused in YouTube formats; three, how dance perfor- mance and its mediation here are conducive to creating Foucault’s docile bodies, which operate as a tool of distraction for the masses and ultimately serve the interests of the state far more than it rehabilitates (unconvicted and therefore innocent) inmates.