Digital Resources: The José Guadalupe Posada Collection at the Ibero-American Institute

Author(s):  
Ricarda Musser

The Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer Kulturbesitz (IAI; Ibero-American Institute at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) owns a collection of some 750 works of Mexican popular culture, the majority of which were illustrated by the printmaker and engraver José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913) and printed by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo (1850–1917), whose company operated from the 1880s to the 1940s. The collection is comprised of a broad range of media, from chapbooks and magazines to Hojas sueltas (broadsheets). The texts of the published works cover a broad range of topics, on the one hand drawing on themes from Ibero-American—and especially Mexican—oral traditions and popular piety; and on the other hand, covering current affairs in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, abroad. The majority of the texts are in prose. Various forms of poetry, above all corridos (ballads), are also featured. The Posada Collection continues to be systematically enlarged and forms part of the Ibero-American Institute’s exceptionally rich collections of popular culture around 1900 from Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Completely in open access, it is one of the IAI’s most consulted digital collections.

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1021-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrika Dahl

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.


Author(s):  
Mônica da Silva Ribeiro

Research on questions related to colonial Brazil has always been a challenge for historians of the period. In addition to the habitual adversities of historiographic research, studies of the colony have presented some specific difficulties as it involves documentation with at least three centuries of existence. For this reason, these primary sources have often seriously deteriorated due to the actions of time, environmental factors, or bad conservation. In addition to these problems, there exists the question that these documents are scattered among various archives in different regions of Brazil and on the other side of the Atlantic in Portugal, since the central administrative bodies of the Portuguese Empire were concentrated there, from where they communicated with their colonies and conquests. To shorten these distances, preserve the sources, and allow wide-ranging democratic access, websites have emerged to host the digitalized documentation of archives, libraries, and research collections. Since the 2000s, websites with both specific and more general subjects have been created, covering a wide range of content related to colonial Brazil, organized in digital collections. Various types of sources, such as cartographic, iconographic, and textual which allow aspects from social, political, economic, and cultural history to be dealt with, among others, can currently be found and analyzed without researchers having to physically visit institutions, which can be many kilometers from their residence. Much work which previously was either not done or which was limited due to the lack, or even the complete absence, of documents can now be carried out, which above all collaborates with the growth of the area.


Author(s):  
Marta Massi ◽  
Chiara Piancatelli ◽  
Sonia Pancheri

Albeit often perceived as two worlds apart, low culture and high culture are increasingly converging to collaborate in mutually advantageous ways. Brands—including the name, term, sign, symbol, or combination of them that identify the goods and services of a seller or group of sellers, and differentiate them from those of the competitors—are the new territory where high culture and low culture co-exist and collaborate, creating new possibilities of cross-fertilization and hybridization between the two. Through the analysis of successful examples coming from different industries, this chapter aims to highlight how brands have blurred the distinction between low culture and high culture. On the one hand, brands can use the heritage of the arts world to gain authenticity and legitimate themselves in the eyes of consumers and the society. On the other hand, artists and arts organizations, such as museums and other art institutions, can indulge in popular culture in order to become appealing to younger target markets and enhance their brand awareness and image.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 44-67
Author(s):  
Ekaterina B. Kriukova ◽  
Oxana A. Koval

The article presents a survey of the 20th century intellectual quests related to the problem of the author and her status. The question of authorship becomes a key issue in the modern era for both philosophy and literature. On the one hand, both fields reflect upon the authorship as their own intrinsic principle, on the other hand, both literature and philosophy question the privileged position of the author as the sole meaning-maker. The undertaken comparison of the original interpretations of the prominent 20th century thinkers allows us: (1) to demonstrate how the ideological content of the concept itself has changed, the author being labeled as a co-participant, producer, collective subject, function within discourse, non-reader, and witness; (2) to introduce different strategies of understanding the author’s figure, depending on the chosen point of view; (3) to trace the logic of the transition from the modern to the postmodern through the explication of relations between the author and the character (M. Bakhtin), the author and his work (W. Benjamin), the author and popular culture (T. Adorno), the author and the discourse (M. Foucault), the author and the letter (M. Blanchot), and the author and the Other (G. Agamben).


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ophira Gamliel

Jewish history in Kerala is based on sources mainly from the colonial period onward and mostly in European languages, failing to account for the premodern history of Jews in Kerala. These early modern sources are based on oral traditions of Paradeśi Jews in Cochin, who view the majority of Kerala Jews as inferior. Consequently, the premodern history of Kerala Jews remains untold, despite the existence of premodern sources that undermine unsupported notions about the premodern history of Kerala Jews—a Jewish ‘ur-settlement’ called Shingly in Kodungallur and a centuries-old isolation from world Jewry. This article reconstructs Jewish history in premodern Kerala solely based on premodern travelogues and literature on the one hand and on historical documents in Old Malayalam, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic on the other hand. Sources of the early modern period are then examined for tracing the origins of the Shingly myth, arguing that the incorporation of the Shingly legend into the historiography of Kerala Jews was affected by contacts with European Jews in the Age of Discoveries rather than being a reflection of historical events.


Philotheos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Danilović ◽  

There is almost no Christian who has never heard about John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers since the Apostle Paul himself. He is honored as a saint, and his Liturgy is the most celebrated one in the Byzantine Rite even today. On the other hand, the story about the Gittite Goliath and a young boy named David, the future king of Israel and the one from whose royal line Christ will be borne, is one of the most read and used biblical stories. Art, music, popular culture, even sports, and politics – all of them, in their own way, used this story to tell how a tiny ruddy boy can win the giant. But how was it in the time of Saint Chrysostom? How did he read this story? If one knows the difference between the Greek and Hebrew version, which one did John read and preach to his community? Can his approach to this biblical text help us better understand Church Fathers’ exegesis and the Bible itself?


Author(s):  
Alan L. Berger

Widespread discourse about the Holocaust entered American popular culture in the seventies in two main ways: a series of television shows that purportedly focused on the destruction of European Judaism and two books that dealt specifically with the children of survivors. The television miniseries, Gerald Green's Holocaust (1978), suited the national need for simplified history and melodrama. Moreover, given the American penchant for ethnic identifiers, Holocaust became known as the Jewish Roots. The networks soon aired other Holocaust programs, including Herman Wouk's far less commercially successful The Winds of War. The resultant Holocaust discourse was frequently poorly informed and historically naive. On the one hand, it reflected a tendency in Western culture to think that the Holocaust ended definitively in 1945. On the other hand, this discourse frequently neutralized the evil of nazism.


2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
REBECCA L. STEIN ◽  
TED SWEDENBURG

The marginalization of popular culture in radical scholarship on Palestine and Israel is symptomatic of the conceptual limits that still define much Middle East studies scholarship: namely, the prevailing logic of the nation-state on the one hand and the analytic tools of classical Marxist historiography and political economy on the other. This essay offers a polemic about the form that alternative scholarly projects might take through recourse to questions of popular culture. The authors argue that close attention to the ways that popular culture ““articulates”” with broader political, social, and economic processes can expand scholarly understandings of the terrain of power in Palestine and Israel, and hence the possible arenas and modalities of struggle.


2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Walkerdine

This article explores the regulation of childhood at the end of the twentieth century by focusing on the figures of the proto-violent boy and the proto-sexual girl in relation to the figure of the dangerous and predatory male adult. These figures, who represent the Other to normal childhood, are explored with respect to popular culture, examining computer games on the one hand and popular song and dance on the other. It is argued that conceptions of childhood for the next century need to engage with the specificity of the sites in which subjectivities are constituted and to move away from the simple dichotomies of normality and pathology.


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