From Political Theater in Yugoslav Socialism to Political Performance in Global Capitalism: The Case of Slovenian Mladinsko Theater

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-82
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
Dramatic Practice

Political theater is a trend that, during the avant-garde 1920s, emerged at the intersection of efforts to liberate artistic forms and oppressed groups in society. It was an influence on Slovenian theatrical artists at the Workers’ Stage (Delavski oder) already in the interwar period. A trend towards ‘political theater’, one of the tendencies of politicized performing arts in the period, flourished in Slovenia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Against the background of an identity crisis of the Yugoslav state and its ideology, political theater addressed great stories of History and the Revolution in a post-avant-garde manner. During the transition, political theater initially lost its edge but was reborn in the 21st century. As a post-dramatic practice associated with performance, it now parses its own politics. It is a forum for critiquing small, local stories that nonetheless evince the contradictions of a peripheral nation-state in the era of transnational late capitalism.

scholarly journals In Search of Refutation of Rodrik’s Impossibility Theorem

2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
M. V. Kharkevich
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
System Integration ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Impossibility Theorem ◽  
Nation State ◽  
World Culture ◽  
The World

The article is devoted to the analysis of the so called impossibility theorem, according to which democracy, state sovereignty and globalization are mutually exclusive and cannot function to the full extent when present simultaneously. This theorem, elaborated in 2011 by Dani Rodrik, a famous economist from Harvard University, poses a fundamental problem about the prospects of the global scalability of political institutions of the nation-state. Is it in principle possible to globalize executive, legislative and judicial branches of power, civil society, and democracy, or is it necessary to limit globalization in order to preserve democracy and nation-state? Rodrik’s conclusions, in essence, make one give up hopes to create global democratic order against the background of global capitalism. On the basis of the Stanford School of Sociological Institutionalism and the reconstruction of the historical materialism by Jürgen Habermas, the author refutes Rodrik’s theorem. The author’s analysis shows that not only is it possible to build democratic order at the global level, but also that it already exists in the form of the world culture that includes such norms as electoral democracy, nation-state, civil society and other institutions of Modernity. The world culture reproduces fundamental social values, playing the role of social integration for the humanity, while global capitalism provides for its material reproduction, playing the role of system integration. However, since globalization is a more dynamic process than the development of the world culture, between material and ideational universalism arises a gap, which in its turn is fraught with various kinds of political and economic crises.

scholarly journals FROM ŁÓDŹ TO LEIDEN – ON INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS OF THE POLISH INTERWAR AVANT-GARDE

Muzealnictwo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Michał Wenderski
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
De Stijl

This article is dedicated to international connections between selected representatives of Polish and Western avant-gardes in art and literature of the interwar period. Both the nature and the scale of such relations have been exemplified by a number of artists from the “a.r.” group – Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, Henryk Stażewski and Jan Brzękowski, as well as their relationships with the representatives of Dutch and Belgian formations, inter alia “De Stijl” group. The origin of those connections has been briefly presented, along with their nature, dynamics and an impact they made on artworks and theories of chosen artists. Their description is based on archival documents and publications, from which a picture of direct relationships between the leading artists of the European avant-garde emerges – some of them personal, some correspondence-based; they have also been presented in form of a diagram that illustrates the text.

Senghor, Léopold Sédar (1906–2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Taoua
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
African Culture ◽  
Black African ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Philosophy Of Culture ◽  
African Spirituality ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Cultural Theorist

Léopold Sédar Senghor is one of the most influential African poets of the modern era. He also left his mark as a controversial cultural theorist and president of his native Senegal from 1960 until 1981. The poet and statesman participated with Aimé Césaire and Léon Gontran Damas in founding the négritude movement during the interwar period in Paris. Négritude was a cultural revolution that affirmed black African culture across geographical borders, combining a political vision of social justice for all peoples of African origin with an innovative poetic idiom. Senghor’s distinctive contribution to this avant-garde effort was a set of inter-related concepts with which he developed his theory of black African culture. The first was a notion of cross-cultural creativity entailing an interpenetration of African and European cultures. The second was a selective assimilation of certain aspects of French culture into an African conceptual framework. The third was an African version of socialism that integrated a community-centred ethics with a traditional African spirituality. Senghor believed that African culture had unique contributions to make to European thought, and worked to define a theory of culture based on dialogue, reciprocity and an inclusive humanism, which would pave the way for Africa’s integration into a civilization of the universal. His philosophy of culture is unsystematic; it appears as a collection of insights derived from various sources on the central theme of négritude.

The Pitfalls of Realist Analysis of Global Capitalism: A Critique of Ellen Meiksins Wood's Empire of Capital

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
The Us ◽  
Realist Analysis ◽  
New Imperialism ◽  
Us Intervention

AbstractThe dynamics of the emerging transnational stage in world capitalism cannot be understood through the blinkers of nation-state-centric thinking. In her study Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood exhibits the reification and outdated nation-state-centric thinking that plagues much recent work on world capitalism and US intervention, expressed in the confusing notion of a 'new imperialism'. The overarching problems in Wood's study – and, by extension, in much of the 'new-imperialism' literature – is a reified notion of imperialism, a refusal to draw out the analytical, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological implications of capitalist globalisation, and an incessant reification of the state. Instead of a 'new US empire', the current epoch is best understood as a new transnational phase in the ongoing evolution of world capitalism, characterised in particular by the rise of truly transnational capital, globalised circuits of accumulation, and transnational state apparatuses. 'US imperialism' refers to the use by tansnational élites of the US state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend and stabilise the global capitalist system. US militarisation and intervention are best understood as a response to the intractable contradictions of global capitalism.

scholarly journals Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa: Inward migration and enclave nationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christi Van der Westhuizen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Local Dynamics ◽  
Primary Mode ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
Territorial Claims

South Africa’s transition to democracy coincided and interlinked with massive global shifts, including the fall of communism and the rise of western capitalist triumphalism. Late capitalism operates through paradoxical global-local dynamics, both universalising identities and expanding local particularities. The erstwhile hegemonic identity of apartheid, ‘the Afrikaner’, was a product of Afrikaner nationalism. Like other identities, it was spatially organised, with Afrikaner nationalism projecting its imagined community (‘the volk’) onto a national territory (‘white South Africa’). The study traces the neo-nationalist spatial permutations of ‘the Afrikaner’, following Massey’s (2005) understanding of space as (1) political, (2) produced through interrelations ranging from the global to micro intimacies, (3) potentially a sphere for heterogeneous co-existence, and (4) continuously created. Research is presented that shows a neo-nationalist revival of ethnic privileges in a defensive version of Hall’s ‘return to the local’ (1997a). Although Afrikaner nationalism’s territorial claims to a nation state were defeated, neo-nationalist remnants reclaim a purchase on white Afrikaans identities, albeit in shrunken territories. This phenomenon is, here, called Afrikaner enclave nationalism. Drawing on a global revamping of race as a category of social subjugation, a strategy is deployed that is here called ‘inward migration’. These dynamics produce a privatised micro-apartheid in sites ranging from homes, to commercial and religious enterprises, to suburbs. Virtual white spaces in the form of Afrikaans media products serve as extensions of these whitened locales. The lynchpin holding it all together is the heteronormative, middle-class family, with consumption the primary mode of the generation of its white comfort zones.

Marquand Library and the Blue Mountain Project

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-42
Author(s):  
Sandra Ludig Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Digital Library ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Major Contributor ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Blue Mountain

Princeton University’s Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology is one of the oldest and most extensive art libraries in America. Founder and namesake Allan Marquand was both an art historian and the creator of a ‘logical machine’ that prefigured modern computers. This shared science and humanities heritage is echoed in the Blue Mountain Project, a new digital humanities initiative to which Marquand Library is a major contributor. This article begins with a brief description of the library’s origins and the development of its facilities and collections. It then reports on Blue Mountain, a digital library of the avant-garde that chronicles the emergence of modernity in the literary, visual and performing arts from 1848 to 1923.

Working Girls

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Ferriss
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Economic Empowerment ◽  
Brand Name ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
College Educated

This chapter argues that chick lit offers an inherent critique of women's economic precarity. Chick-lit novels have been criticized for glamorizing consumption and irresponsibly promoting unchecked consumerism in the young women presumed to be their audience. Certainly chick lit, like all popular media, is inextricably entangled in the capitalist system—an inevitable consequence, it could be argued, of postmodern culture itself. But critics have taken its references to brand-name goods and status as an endorsement of global capitalism. Sustained, critical attention to the texts, however, suggests otherwise. Far from sanctioning aspirational spending or endorsing economic empowerment, prominent chick-lit examples dramatize the precarious economic and social position of young, college-educated, British and American women (of various classes and ethnicities) under late capitalism.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Experimental Theatre

This book examines different kinds of analogies, mutual influences, integrations, and collaborations of the audio and the visual in different art forms. The contributions, written by key theoreticians and practitioners, represent state-of-the-art case studies in contemporary art, integrating music, sound, and image with key figure of modern thinking constitute a foundation for the discussion. It thus emphasizes avant-garde and experimental tendencies, while analyzing them in historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. The book is organized around three core subjects, each of which constitutes one section of the book. The first concentrates on the interaction between seeing and hearing. Examples of classic and digital animation, video art, choreography, and music performance, which are motivated by the issue of eye versus ear perception are examined in this section. The second section explores experimental forms emanating from the expansion of the concepts of music and space to include environmental sounds, vibrating frequencies, language, human habitats, the human body, and more. The reader will find here an analysis of different manifestations of this aesthetic shift in sound art, fine art, contemporary dance, multimedia theatre, and cinema. The last section shows how the new light shed by modernism on the performative aspect of music has led it—together with sound, voice, and text—to become active in new ways in postmodern and contemporary art creation. In addition to examples of real-time performing arts such as music theatre, experimental theatre, and dance, it includes case studies that demonstrate performativity in visual poetry, short film, and cinema.

scholarly journals Über Dichter, Proletarier und Apachen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gérard Raulet
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Collective Dimension

It is somewhat surprising that Walter Benjamin, who has been very much involved with French literature, has shown so little interest in the most prestigious social novelists and in the great social romance cycles. Unlike Lukács, Benjamin evaluates the form of the novel negatively: the novel is not, or no longer, the modern epic. The contemporary novelist differs from the epic narrator in that he has lost the collective dimension. Instead of complaining about this loss, Benjamin accepts it and looks critically for authors and works that experiment new narrative means and at the same time explore new social worlds. But most novels to which Benjamin attributes experimental, or even avant-garde, value have met this challenge the least. They betray their breakthrough either by a purely private social criticism (Julien Green), by a kind of “infantile disease” of commitment (Malraux), or by a mere “cry of indignation” (Céline), which at least has the merit of reintroducing the voice of the Lumpenproletariat into the realm of the novel without mobilizing the “mimicry” of belonging to the proletariat. This essay is part of a larger project on Benjamin and the French intelligentsia of the interwar period.

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