scholarly journals Colonialism, Cosmopolitanism, and Nationalism: The Performativity of Western Music Endeavours in Interwar Shanghai

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
HON-LUN HELAN YANG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Music History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Music ◽  
The West ◽  
Municipal Council ◽  
Treaty Port ◽  
Asian Cities ◽  
The One

Abstract This article examines the meaning of Western music performances in interwar Shanghai through the theoretical framework of performativity that originated in John Austin's speech act and Judith Butler's notion of identity as performed. The early concerts of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra (SMO), I suggest, were an assertion of settler sovereignty in a treaty port such as Shanghai. Therefore, Chinese musicians performing Western music – propagated through the establishment of the National Conservatory of Music by Chinese elites in Shanghai's French Settlement in 1927 – was the embodiment of three contradictory ideals: colonialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Zooming in on four SMO concerts that featured Chinese musicians in 1929, I argue that they were sites of identity and power negotiation, the SMO and the Chinese musicians asserting quite distinct performative utterances. On the one hand, the performing Chinese body enacted the cosmopolitan outlook that the Municipal Council was eager to project, not only for the sake of ideology but also to increase SMO's concert revenue by appealing to the increasing number of Chinese concert attendees. On the other hand, it meant national glory to Chinese residents in Shanghai, marking Chinese musicians participating in a global musical network. Lastly, this study draws attention to the diverse geographies of Western music in the twentieth century and its coeval development beyond the West, testifying to the timely need for a global music history in which the musicking of Western music in so many Asian cities should be interwoven into its narrative.

Berlin Walls: Dahlhaus Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne C. Shreffler
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The West ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

As exemplified in writings by Carl Dahlhaus and Georg Knepler, a debate about music historiography took place in East and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. A comparison between two books, Dahlhaus's Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Foundations of Music History) and Knepler's Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverstäändnis (History as a Means of Understanding Music), both published in 1977, is instructive as a measure of the two poles of the Methodenstreit: the one centered around music as autonomous work, the other around music as a human activity. The central questions raised prove uncannily current. The two scholars, who knew each other and respected each other's work, were both based in Berlin; but with Dahlhaus in the West and Knepler in the East, they represented the two different political systems that existed in the divided city between 1945 and 1989. In their work, and especially in these two books, Dahlhaus and Knepler defended their own positions and sought to point out weaknesses in the other side. While Dahlhaus's work is well known in English-speaking musicology, Knepler's is not. His contribution to music history and historiography was comparable to Dahlhaus's in importance, however, and his ideas anticipate many tenets of the "new musicology."

scholarly journals Introduction: Labour Institutions in a Global Perspective, from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Freedom Of Contract ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
The One

SummaryComparative analyses of labour often assume a dividing line between free and forced labour which is universally applicable. The contributions to this special theme argue that the tensions between “freedom” and “unfreedom” may be identified more precisely as those between multiple notions and practices of contract, status, and social conditions. Free and unfree labour on the one hand, status and contract on the other, are historically determined categories. This introduction argues that those histories do not run in parallel but are strictly intersected. From that point of view, social and economic inequalities are mutually linked to legal entitlements; a modification in legal entitlements strongly influences the economic and social equilibrium, and vice versa. Underlying this conclusion is a perspective that is resolutely non-Eurocentric and global. We do not endeavour to find the “missing” freedom of contract in the “periphery”, nor do we consider the “cultural” and economic domination of “the West” as a starting point. We stress instead the mutual connection between “peripheries” and “core” categories and practices. Such a bilateral circulation of ideas and practices contrasts with the argument according to which “the West” invented “freedom” and coercion as well.

State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury

APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
The Other ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.

Gender and Social Exclusion in European Migration Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 658-676
Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Other ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
The One ◽  
European Migration

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.

scholarly journals The Orderliness of Music from the Perspective of Complex Information Systems

Proceedings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Shan Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
20Th Century Music ◽  
Complex Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

By applying the concept of natural science to the study of music, on the one hand, we can understand the structure of music macroscopically, on the other, we can reflect on the history of music to a certain extent. Throughout the history of western music, from the classical period to the 20th century, music seems to have gone from order to disorder, but it is still orderly if analyzed carefully. Using the concept of complex information systems can give a good answer in the essence.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
First Language ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

Managing to Avoid Innovation

1999 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Vaux ◽  
M. P. S. F. Gomes ◽  
R. J. Grieve ◽  
S. W. Woolgar
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Manufacturing Companies ◽  
Small Companies ◽  
Small Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Technology And Innovation ◽  
Company Culture ◽  
The One

This paper addresses differences in the way that the problems of small UK firms are construed by policy makers on the one hand, and by the executives of small companies on the other. The authors employ a discursively-based analysis of interviews carried out with managers of small manufacturing companies in the West London area. They suggest that SME executives construe their attitudes to advanced technology and innovation within the terms of some clear, but implicit management values which tend to lead to the perception of innovation as a risk to be managed, rather than an opportunity to be exploited. It is suggested this has significant implications for attempts to change small company culture.

Political Matrix and Political Representation: Prolegomenon to a New Departure from an Old Problem

1969 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt ◽  
Heinz Eulau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Past Century ◽  
City Councils ◽  
Political Units ◽  
The One ◽  
Special District

Scholars interested in theorizing about political representation in terms relevant to democratic governance in mid-twentieth century America find themselves in a quandary. We are surrounded by functioning representative institutions, or at least by institutions formally described as representative. Individuals who presumably “represent” other citizens govern some 90 thousand different political units—they sit on school and special district boards, on township and city councils, on county directorates, on state and national assemblies, and so forth. But the flourishing activity of representation has not yet been matched by a sustained effort to explain what makes the representational process tick.Despite the proliferation of representative governments over the past century,theoryabout representation has not moved much beyond the eighteenth-century formulation of Edmund Burke. Certainly most empirical research has been cast in the Burkean vocabulary. But in order to think in novel ways about representative government in the twentieth-century, we may have to admit that present conceptions guiding empirical research are obsolete. This in turn means that the spell of Burke's vocabulary over scientific work on representation must be broken.To look afresh at representation, it is necessary to be sensitive to the unresolved tension between the two main currents of contemporary thinking about representational relationships. On the one hand, representation is treated as a relationship between any one individual, the represented, and another individual, the representative—aninter-individualrelationship. On the other hand, representatives are treated as a group, brought together in the assembly, to represent the interest of the community as a whole—aninter-grouprelationship. Most theoretical formulations since Burke are cast in one or the other of these terms.

The foundations and prerequisites of imagology

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-74
Author(s):  
Valerii P. Trykov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Engineering ◽  
Dominant Strategy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Role ◽  
The West ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
Eu Project

The article examines the conceptual foundations and scientific, sociocultural and philosophical prerequisites of imagology, the field of interdisciplinary research in humanitaristics, the subject of which is the image of the “Other” (foreign country, people, culture, etc.). It is shown that the imagology appeared as a response to the crisis of comparatives of the mid-20th century, with a special role in the formation of its methodology played by the German comparatist scientist H. Dyserinck and his Aachen School. The article analyzes the influence on the formation of the imagology of post-structuralist and constructivist ideological-thematic complex (auto-reference of language, discursive history, construction of social reality, etc.), linguistic and cultural turn in the West in the 1960s. Shown is that, extrapolated to national issues, this set of ideas and approaches has led to a transition from the essentialist concept of the nation to the concept of a nation as an “imaginary community” or an intellectual construct. A fundamental difference in approaches to the study of an image of the “Other” in traditional comparativism and imagology, which arises from a different understanding of the nation, has been distinguished. It is concluded that the imagology studies the image of the “Other” primarily in its manipulative, socio-ideological function, i.e., as an important tool for the formation and transformation of national and cultural identity. The article identifies ideological, socio-political factors that prepared the birth of the imagology and ensured its development in western Humanities (fear of possible recurrences of extreme nationalism and fascism in post-war Europe, the EU project, which set the task of forming a pan-European identity). It is concluded that the imagology, on the one hand, has actualized an important field of scientific research — the study of the image of the “Other”, but, on the other hand, in the broader cultural and historical perspective, marked a departure not only from the traditions of comparativism and historical poetics, but also from the humanist tradition of the European culture, becoming part of a manipulative dominant strategy in the West. To the culture of “incorporation” into a “foreign word” in order to understand it, preserve it and to ensure a genuine dialogue of cultures, the imagology has contrasted the social engineering and the technology of active “designing” a new identity.

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