- Title Pages
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Text I
- Introduction
- Text II
- I Centaur-songs: Romanticism and broken forms
- Text III
- 2 Singing the unspeakable
- Text IV
- 3 ‘God was in France all Friday’: incoherence from the inside
- Text V
- 4 Sea-changes: minimal texts as regenerative forms
- Text VI
- 5 Forgetting as in(ter)vention: memory and context in very short songs
- Text VII*
- 6 Beating time: resistance and the subaltern voice in prison work songs
- Text VIII
- 7 Fragments and fringes: the view from the centre
- Text IX*
- 8 The intertextuality of the song fragment
- Text X*
- Conclusion
- Text XI
- Intertexts: contexts
- Works cited
- Index of songs
- General index
Beating time: resistance and the subaltern voice in prison work songs
Beating time: resistance and the subaltern voice in prison work songs
- Chapter:
- (p.142) (p.143) 6 Beating time: resistance and the subaltern voice in prison work songs
- Source:
- Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song
- Author(s):
Mary-Ann Constantine
Gerald Porter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
This chapter discusses resistance and the subaltern voice present in prison work songs. It shows that the songs that accompany work and follow its rhythm stand as a collective challenge to ideas of what makes a ‘complete’ or shapely song. The chapter presents excerpts of several prison songs, which show that these songs are full of breaks, have episodes that return to their starting-point, and that their leads are not followed up. These songs assume not only a world ‘out there’, but also a context of more or less indefinite variation.
Keywords: prison work songs, resistance, subaltern voice, leads, episodes, variation
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- Title Pages
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Text I
- Introduction
- Text II
- I Centaur-songs: Romanticism and broken forms
- Text III
- 2 Singing the unspeakable
- Text IV
- 3 ‘God was in France all Friday’: incoherence from the inside
- Text V
- 4 Sea-changes: minimal texts as regenerative forms
- Text VI
- 5 Forgetting as in(ter)vention: memory and context in very short songs
- Text VII*
- 6 Beating time: resistance and the subaltern voice in prison work songs
- Text VIII
- 7 Fragments and fringes: the view from the centre
- Text IX*
- 8 The intertextuality of the song fragment
- Text X*
- Conclusion
- Text XI
- Intertexts: contexts
- Works cited
- Index of songs
- General index
