Nightlife is a living phenomenon. Whether working the dancefloor or gossiping in the smoking area, sneaking a bump in the bathroom or cruising the bathhouse, nightlives tell stories about how individuals and communities reconcile with their quotidian day to day by finding life—or, to put it queerly, getting their life—in the night. Nightlife studies is an emerging subdiscipline in the humanities and social sciences; ethnomusicologists Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta and M. Myrta Leslie Santana have shaped the subdiscipline through their respective monographs,1 and its methodological approaches are constantly evolving in light of global and local politics. Central to nightlife ethnographies and histories are the experiences and identities of its actors: the DJs, bartenders, drag performers, organizers, and partiers—even those who get rejected at the door. Nightlife studies present innovative frameworks for understanding how people negotiate senses of belonging and being through collective musicking, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.In Living at Night in Times of Pandemic: Night Studies and Club Culture in France and Germany, coeditors Anita Jóri and Guillaume Robin set out to address the complexities of nightlife in France and Germany before, during, and after the pandemic. The collection was developed after a 2022 Parisian conference of the same name and includes scholarship and creative writing by a mix of junior scholars, graduate students, and nightlife practitioners. Living at Night is a valiant effort toward offering a “comprehensive understanding of today’s electronic nightlife and culture” (p. 14). The collection’s contributors pursue this complicated task through a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies, frameworks, and topics across three thematic sections: “Scenes and Communities,” “Diversity and Inclusion,” and “Perspectives: Social and Ecological Challenges for a Sustainable Club Culture.”The first section explores how nightlife practitioners have developed distinct identities for and from Berlin’s nightlife scene. Frédéric Trottier-Pistien introduces the musical and unofficial diplomatic ties between Berlin and Detroit by exploring how artistic collaborations between techno DJs and producers have fostered a transnational diplomatic relationship known as “town twinning” between the two cities (p. 28). Drawing from ethnographic accounts of his experience as a French techno-tourist in Detroit, the chapter demonstrates how Detroit’s techno scene has been shaped by and against the Berlin scene. Sophie Abidi introduces readers to key aspects of nightlife subcultures in Berlin: music, fashion, and drugs. These categories are used in part to reveal that if one were to (attempt to) party at Berghain, for example, they would encounter “electro and techno genres” (p. 50), the all-black “techno look” (p. 54), and lots of ketamine (p. 56). Abidi’s careful listing of musical, aesthetic, and experiential phenomena in Berlin reinforces her argument that “the choice of attendance to a party relies upon a decision from the ‘clubber’ to participate and interact with a desired scene and subculture of their aspiration” (p. 50). Finally, Diana Weis narrates the luxury fashion brand Balenciaga’s turn toward Berghain-inspired fashion: leathery, kinky, and black. Weis details Berghain’s aesthetic history and practices through a critique of “subcultural capital” and its affiliation with perceptions of authenticity. Weis applies the concept of code switching, as it appears in fashion theory, to argue that “the consumption of expensive designer pieces, often regarded as shallow and empty in itself, gains meaning through the added element of coolness and authenticity, of being knowledgeable enough to understand the reference” (p. 75). Popular commodifications of Berghain’s historically “authentic” fashions therefore blur the line of who is and isn’t “in the know.”The section’s biggest shortcoming is its lengthy literature reviews that delay the authors’ arguments and obscure the overall coherence of their chapters. Abidi exclusively discusses scholarship from over twenty years ago, demonstrating a facility with foundational literature at the cost of contributing to recent discourses. Similarly, Trottier-Pistien’s chapter contains a single paragraph that extends across two and a half print pages, with the author’s statement of their contribution buried more than halfway through said paragraph. Despite these structural flaws, the section introduces both scholarly and nonacademic readers to Berlin’s, and specifically Berghain’s, customs, aesthetics, and transnational resonances.In the second section, coauthors xan egger, neo seefried, and Mascha Naumann critique the emergence of the terms diversity, inclusion, and awareness in Berlin. The authors argue that most of Berlin’s clubs’ and organizers’ uses of these terms are vague and neoliberal, ultimately performing “an ‘enlightened,’ politically correct attitude in order to build an image” (p. 102). While this highly detailed chapter casts a larger net than necessary for its argument, it reminded me of a question I contend with in my own research: What is queer about queer nightlife? This question appropriately followed me into Ines Liotard’s chapter on the reception of academic queer theory within queer techno scenes. Liotard places techno music’s historical trajectory alongside the development of queer theory to argue that queer theory and techno music are intertwined through their respective transnational and intellectual hybridizations. Liotard proposes that “appropriations of queer theory”—by which Liotard means usages and understandings of the term queer—in queer nightlife can be identified in four ways: militant, committed, ordinary, and academic. Liotard ultimately demonstrates how “queer does not hold a uniform meaning for everyone” (p. 124). Diana Raiselis then dissects uses of the term awareness in Berlin over the past decade. Raiselis critiques readings of nightlife utopianism and the implementation of safe(r) spaces through a focus on the queer feminist Berlin club collective Lecken. Through interviews with Lecken’s awareness team and participant observation in Lecken’s parties from 2020 to 2023, Raiselis examines “both the possibilities and shortcomings of care work” (p. 131) and how its tensions pervade queer nightlife.This section’s greatest strength is its authors’ complication of various terms—diversity, inclusion, awareness, queer—and how they are applied to queer nightlife in Berlin and Paris. In doing so, the authors encourage readers to consider who belongs in queer nightlife, and how our spaces may be (re)configured to challenge the cisgender white gay hegemony of queer nightlife. There are frequent digressions and overly prescriptive categorizations throughout the section, particularly in Liotard’s chapter. Despite this, the section resonates with Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramon H. Rivera-Servara’s goal in Queer Nightlife: to “understand how queer subjects utilize, if not wield, the night in order to reorganize their relationships to time and space alike.”2Edna Hernández González begins the third and final section by considering how light pollution detrimentally affects a city’s more-than-human inhabitants, “advocating for a right to darkness” (p. 150). Drawing from fieldwork in France, Hernández González brings ecocriticism to bear on nightlife studies by investigating how city officials, nightlife practitioners, and climate activists can capitalize on nightlife while conserving its defining darkness and protecting nocturnal biodiversity. Coeditor Guillaume Robin presents the findings of his ethnographic study of Berlin’s migrant techno community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Robin’s study involves twenty-eight participants who migrated to Berlin from foreign countries and quantitatively assesses how they grappled with desocialization amid the pandemic. Robin argues that his interlocutors resisted desocialization through clandestine free parties, or resist-dances, where they kept dancing together despite restrictions on nightlife. Max Eulitz describes his experience visiting an underground club in Kyiv just a few months after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Eulitz’s poignant essay immerses readers into the “seemingly paradoxical atmosphere of optimism” (p. 192) among young Ukrainians in Kyiv who cope with their collective grief through nightlife. The book concludes with Robin’s interview with Katharina Wolf. Wolf is the project coordinator at Clubtopia, a Berlin-based initiative focused on environmentally friendly nightlife practices. The interview bookends the section nicely, offering an interlocutor’s valuable perspective that complements Hernández González’s chapter. These two bookending chapters imagine what it would take and outline what steps are being taken to reduce nightlife’s carbon footprint and make nightlife an environmentally sustainable industry.This section has the most to do with the book’s ostensibly unifying topic: the COVID-19 pandemic. Elsewhere in the book, the pandemic is mentioned either in passing or not at all. Jóri and Robin open the book with details about the pandemic’s effects on nightlife in France and Germany (pp. 9–10), but these details do not appear again until the third section. On one hand, there are some missed opportunities: While reading Robin’s chapter, it occurred to me that nightlife scholars have seldom considered the effects of the pandemic on disabled and immunocompromised partiers who were likely unable to join the alternative, clandestine parties in Berlin. On the other hand, we may not yet be far enough removed from 2020 to make prescriptive, comprehensive judgments about the pandemic’s effects on nightlife. The book as a whole prioritizes its “comprehensive” (p. 14) mission over its titular theme of nightlife in/and the pandemic, making its contribution to the subdiscipline unclear and, at times, unconvincing.Living at Night symbolizes a renaissance of nightlife studies. The collection successfully introduces both academic and nonacademic audiences to various facets of nightlife culture and studies in France and Germany (with stops in Detroit and Kyiv) and poses productive questions for future research. Most importantly, the book responds in capacious ways to nightlife scholars and practitioners’ guiding question: Who gets to live at night?
Paul David Flood (Thu,) studied this question.