Dangerous Mediations

Winner of The Woody Guthrie First Book Award 2021 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 Mediations is the first book to ask critical questions about the politics of pop music and audiovisual mediation in early 21st-century detention centres.

Áine Mangaoang is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Popular Music at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Norway.

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction Interlude I: 'The Evil of the Thriller' Chapter 1: Seeing Sound: Locating Music and YouTube's Symbiosis Interlude II: 'You're Fighting for your Life inside a Killer, Thriller' Chapter 2: Performing Postcolonialism: Filipino History Through Four-Part Harmony Interlude III: Fade to Black Chapter 3: Penal Tourists: The Birth of CPDRC's Prison Pop Programme Interlude IV: 'Music, the Language of the Soul' Chapter 4: Beats Behind Bars: Music, Docile Bodies, and the Digital Panopticon Interlude V: Michael Jackson, the Undead, and the Posthumous Duet Chapter 5: Thrilling: Remediating Thriller Interlude VI: 'It's More Fun in the Philippines' Chapter 6: 'Together in Electric Dreams': Hybridity, Nostalgia, and Imagination in CPDRC Interlude VII: 'Thank you for the Music' Chapter 7: YouTube's Penal Spectators Coda: Dangerous Mediations, Prisoners of Love, and Other Considerations Appendix Abbreviations and Glossary Notes References Index