“Culture [Wars]” and the African Diaspora: Challenge and Opportunity for U.S. Museums

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-33
Author(s):  
James Counts Early
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
National Culture ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Flash Point ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Wide Context

At the close of the twentieth century, we are witnessing across the globe competing, frequently cataclysmic discourses about identity. These discourses are literally erupting into activities that reshape the meaning of “national culture.” Simultaneously, many of these cultural confrontations are giving visibility and voice to transnational cultural communities. Within this world-wide context, U.S. cultural and educational institutions are at the national frontline of a related volatile, but potentially promising, debate frequently referred to as “cultural wars.” Museums in particular have become a flash point on the cultural landscape of what cultural conservatives Arthur A. Schlesinger and Patrick J. Buchanan accurately, although shrilly, formulate as “a struggle to redefine the national identity.”

Authenticity, hybridity, and difference

Focaal ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 2005 (45) ◽  
pp. 71-93
Author(s):  
Wil G. Pansters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Authoritarian Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Authentic Identity ◽  
Recent Developments

This article studies the transformation of the debate about national culture in twentieth-century Mexico by looking at the complex relationship between discourses of authenticity and mestizaje. The article firstly demonstrates how in the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican national identity was constructed out of a state-led program of mestizaje, thereby supposedly giving rise to a new and authentic identity, the mestizo (nation). Secondly, it is argued that the authentication project around mestizaje is riddled with paradoxes that require explanation. Thirdly, the article studies the political dimension of the authenticity discourse and demonstrates how the homogenizing and unifying forces that spring from the process of authentication played an important role in buttressing an authoritarian regime. Fourthly, the article looks at two recent developments: indigenous cultural politics and transnationalism. Here it is shown how discourses of difference, pluralism, and transnationalism are challenging the central tenets of Mexican post-revolutionary national culture and the boundaries of the national Self.

Poaching and its representation in Edwardian England, c. 1901–14

Rural History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-51
Author(s):  
Stephen Ridgwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Inverse Relationship ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Cultural Usability

AbstractThe poacher has been closely studied by historians of crime and protest in England. While much has been done to reveal the complex nature of poaching, this work has tended to concentrate on the nineteenth century and been largely concerned with practice. By shifting attention to the opening decades of the twentieth century, and by focusing instead on representation, this article explores the place of the Edwardian poacher in a rapidly expanding cultural landscape. Pointing to an inverse relationship between physical presence and representational weight and throw, the article shows how the idea of the poacher was not just a by-product of Edwardian ruralism, but was integral to a deeply felt ruralist sensibility that strongly informed contemporary debates on the control and use of land and related matters of national identity and wellbeing. In considering how this ostensibly marginal figure became so embedded in the popular imagination, the full extent of the poacher’s cultural usability is revealed. Like ruralism itself, the representational poacher had many facets and served many needs.

Exchange Value: British “Scholarship Boys” in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. L. LEMAHIEU
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
First Americans ◽  
Twentieth Century America

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

ARTISTIC ASSIMILATION OF THE WORLD IN THE ESSAY PROSE OF M. G. ATAMANOV (BASED ON THE BOOK “I AM UDMURT. WHY DOES IT HURT?”)

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-464
Author(s):  
Alevtina Vasilevna Kamitova ◽  
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaitseva
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
National Identity ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Topographic Features ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Individual Style

The paper reflects the specificity of the fundamental ideas of the artistic world of M. G. Atamanov, which includes a wide range of literary facts from the content level of the text of the works to their poetics. A particularly important role in the works of M. G. Atamanov is played by cross-cutting themes and images that reflect the author's individual style and his idea of national-ethnic identity. The subject of the research is the book of essays “Mon - Udmurt. Maly mynym vös’?” (“I am Udmurt. Why does it hurt?”), which most vividly reflected the main spiritual and artistic searches of M. G. Atamanov, associated with his ideas about the Udmurt people. The main motives and plots of the works included in the book under consideration are accumulated around the concept of “Udmurtness”. The comprehension of “Udmurtness” is modeled in his essays through specific leit themes: native language, Udmurt people, national culture, mentality, geographic and topographic features of the Udmurt people’ places of residence, the Orthodox idea. The “Udmurt theme” is recognized and comprehended by the writer through the prism of national identity.

Howling “A Hot Time”: The Paradoxical Anthem of the Progressive Age

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
DEIRDRE O'CONNELL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Time Served ◽  
Musical Traditions

This study investigates the shifting meanings invested in the ragtime song “A Hot Time in the Old Time, Tonight” at the turn of the twentieth century. Complicating the tune's place in the canon of military, political, and national anthems was its associations with “vice,” black culture, and white supremacy. By mapping the ritual and representational uses of the song, this investigation demonstrates how “A Hot Time” served paradoxical functions that simultaneously affirmed and unsettled American exceptionalism. In doing so, this article traces the processes of obfuscation whereby black musical traditions and white supremacy defined America's distinctive national identity.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

scholarly journals Problematizing Olympic Nationality

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 374-379
Author(s):  
Peter J. Spiro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Olympic Athletes ◽  
Nation States ◽  
International Solidarity

One can hope that the convening of the Tokyo Olympics will be a cause for global celebration. Tokyo could prove a focal point for international solidarity, a moment of relief and release after all of humanity faced down an insidious, invisible, and largely indiscriminate attacker. Unified as we otherwise may be, athletes will still come to the Games as representatives of nation-states. That may be an unavoidable organizing principle. Less justifiable will be the requirement that athletes be nationals of the states they play for. Under the Olympic Charter and the rules of particular sporting federations, athletes are subject to a non-state nationality regime that restricts the capacity of individuals to compete for countries for whose delegations they would otherwise qualify. This regime looks to maintain the putative integrity of Olympic competition by maintaining the unity of sporting and sociological national identity. But that legacy of the twentieth century no longer works in the twenty first. Nationality and associated criteria for participant eligibility undermine the autonomy of athletes and the quality of participation. The rules can no longer guarantee any affective tie between athlete and nation, instead arbitrarily enabling some, but not all, to compete on the basis of citizenship decoupled from identity. We don't require that athletes playing for our professional sports teams hale from the cities they represent. There's no reason why we need to require more of our Olympic athletes.

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