scholarly journals Could Southern Italians Cooperate? Banche Popolari in the Mezzogiorno

2000 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian A 'Hearn

Recent work by Robert Putnam has revived a contentious debate about the role of culture in Italian regional disparities. Southern Italy is argued to have been locked in an impoverishing, no-trust equilibrium. This article explores an apparent exception to Putnam's historical evidence: the South's late-nineteenth-century cooperative banks (banche popolari). Econometric investigation reveals important differences in the strategy and performance of these banks in North and South during the crucial decade of the 1890s, and shows that these differences cannot be attributed to differences in the local environment. In fact, the evidence is broadly consistent with Putnam's hypothesis.

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-282
Author(s):  
MINA YANG

AbstractWhile Moulin Rouge! (2001) riffs on and even exaggerates conventions from classic Hollywood backstage musicals, it owes a clear debt to an even earlier musico-dramatic genre – the opera. Combining operatic and film musical elements with those of pop videos, contemporary cinema and the rave scene, Baz Luhrmann's film engages with many of the thorny issues that have concerned opera critics of late, such as power, gender, exoticism, authorship, and identity construction and performance. The spotlight on the central love triangle of a consumptive courtesan, a writer and a wealthy patron makes possible a deeper scrutiny of traditional gender roles in the production and reception of Western art. The film's formulaic plot and the backstage musical format render transparent the commercial impetus behind the creative process and demystify the role of the Romantic artist-genius. Finally, the transnational and transhistorical elements of the film – a mostly Australian production team and crew, American and British pop songs, a Parisian backdrop, the Bollywood-inspired show-within-a-show, numerous anachronisms that refuse to stay confined within the specified time setting of the late nineteenth century – disrupt the Classical ideals of artistic unity and integrity and suggest new postmodern geographies and temporalities. This article considers how Luhrmann, by simultaneously paying homage to and critiquing operatic practices in Moulin Rouge!, deconstructs and reinvents opera for the postmodern age.


Author(s):  
Ariel Osterweis

By paying particular attention to the role of the dancing body inBlack Swan(2010), this chapter interrogates the status of virtuosity and performance in a film that insists on the horror of transformation.Swan Lakeis significant in dance history for introducing thefouettéturn, the modern mark of female virtuosity in ballet from the late nineteenth century onward. Director Darren Aronofsky relies upon filmic techniques to invoke the dismantling effects of ballet technique, demonstrating how the pursuit of virtuosity narrates a story of the attainment, surpassing, and failure of technique. He does so by drawing upon lowbrow “body genres” (Linda Williams) to depict an otherwise highbrow art form.Black Swanportrays artistic ambition through a ballerina’s (and Odette/Odile’s) erratic transformation from human to animal. Mirroring, doubling, and reversibility (Vivian Sobchack) are tropes for Nina (Natalie Portman) and her alter-ego. Embodied by Nina and Lily (Mila Kunis), self andotherperform a necessarily entangled pas de deux, one in which the seemingly perfect image of the other simultaneously haunts and motivates the dancer, a figure for whom psychological control diminishes as artistic control accrues.


Author(s):  
Anya Montiel

Opening with the life and art of Dakota artist Oscar Howe, the chapter discusses the “Indianness” of Native art and the frustrations experienced by Native artists over the years surrounding their creative expressions. The chapter is arranged chronologically, opening in the late nineteenth century and highlighting sample exhibitions, artworks, and artists from the United States in order to illustrate broad conceptual issues. These include Indian authenticity and identity, differences between fine art and “crafts,” traditional versus contemporary art forms, the role of the arts in economic development, and the impact of federal power on the arts. The chapter draws examples from painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance art. It concludes with a proposal for understanding Native art inspired by the words of Santa Clara artist Rose Simpson.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
CASPER SYLVEST

AbstractThis article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.


1994 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-249
Author(s):  
Douglas Morgan

“I have felt like working three times as hard as ever since I came to understand that my Lord was coming back again,” reported revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most prominent of nineteenth-century premillennialists. Moody's testimony to the motivating power of premillennialism points to the crucial role of that eschatology in conservative Protestantism since the late nineteenth century—a role delineated by several studies within the past twenty-five years. As a comprehensive interpretation of history which gives meaning and pattern to past, present, and future, and a role for the believer in the outworking of the divine program, premillennialism has been a driving force in the fundamentalistand evangelical movements.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Prashant Kidambi

Summary This article explores the interplay of sport, politics and public diplomacy through a case study of the first ‘Indian’ cricket tour of Great Britain in 1911, an extraordinary venture peopled by an improbable cast of characters. Led by the young Maharaja Bhupindar Singh, the newly enthroned ruler of the princely state of Patiala, the team contained in its ranks cricketers who were drawn from different Indian regions and religious communities. The article examines the politics of this intriguing cricket tour against a wider backdrop of changing Indo-British relations and makes three key points. First, it suggests that the processes of ‘imperial globalization’ that were presided over by the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked an important epoch in the evolving relationship between sport and diplomacy. In particular, it highlights the role of sporting tours as instruments of public diplomacy in the age of empire. Second, it shows how the organization of the 1911 tour reflected the workings of a trans-national ‘imperial class regime’ that had developed around cricket in colonial India from the late nineteenth century onwards. Finally, the article considers the symbolic significance that came to be attached to the tour, both in imperial Britain and in colonial India.


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