Visibility and Performance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Nielson
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender

The chapter looks at the role of slave women as court musicians during the early Abbasid Empire and their variegated activity as entertainers, intimate companions, and symbols of status for visiting dignitaries and urban society at large. From the eighth century onward, the demand for singing girls in Abbasid cities and courts led quickly to the foundation of music centers, specialized trade in musical concubines, and the development of a complex hierarchy among court musicians organized around the intersection of musical prowess, extramusical performance, and gender. The chapter brings together social history, gender, and the development of performance tradition in the medieval Middle East.

Goddess on the Frontier

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Bryson
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Yunnan Province ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Frontier Region ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender ◽  
Shifting Identities

This book follows the transformations of the goddess Baijie, a deity worshiped in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to understand how local identities developed in a Chinese frontier region from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. Dali, a region where the cultures of China, India, Tibet, and Southeast Asia converge, has long served as a nexus of religious interaction even as its status has changed. Once the center of independent kingdoms, it was absorbed into the Chinese imperial sphere with the Mongol conquest and remained there ever since. Goddess on the Frontier examines how people in Dali developed regional religious identities through the lens of the local goddess Baijie, whose shifting identities over this span of time reflect shifting identities in Dali. She first appears as a Buddhist figure in the twelfth century, then becomes known as the mother of a regional ruler, next takes on the role of an eighth-century widow martyr, and finally is worshiped as a tutelary village deity. Each of her forms illustrates how people in Dali represented local identities through gendered religious symbols. Taken together, they demonstrate how regional religious identities in Dali developed as a gendered process as well as an ethno-cultural process. This book applies interdisciplinary methodology to a wide variety of newly discovered and unstudied materials to show how religion, ethnicity, and gender intersect in a frontier region.

scholarly journals Myths of Male Same-Sex Love in the Art of the Italian Renaissance

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-95
Author(s):  
Ann Haughton ◽  
Ann Haughton
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Primary Case ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Cultural Mores ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender

Visual culture has much to contribute to an understanding of the history of sexuality. Yet, to date, the depiction of pederasty in the art of the Renaissance has not been covered adequately by dominant theoretical paradigms. Moreover, the interpretive approach of traditional art historical discourse has been both limited and limiting in its timidity toward matters concerning the representation of sexual proclivity between males. This article will address the ways in which Italian Renaissance artistic depictions of some mythological narratives were enmeshed with the period’s attitudes toward sexual and social relationships between men.Particular attention is paid here to the manner in which, under the veneer of a mythological narrative, certain works of art embodied a complex set of messages that encoded issues of masculine behaviour and performance in the context of intergenerational same-sex erotic relationships.  The primary case studies under investigation for these concerns of gender and sexuality in this particular context are Benvenuto Cellini’s marble Apollo and Hyacinth (1545), and Giulio Romano’s drawing of Apollo and Cyparissus (1524). By incorporating pictorial analysis, social history, and gender and sexuality studies, new possibilities will be offered for evaluating these artworks as visual chronicles of particular sexual and cultural mores of the period. Furthermore, this article will consider how visual representation of these mythic narratives of erotic behaviour between males conformed to the culturally defined sexual and social roles relating to the articulation of power that permeated one of the greatest milestones in art history.

Conflict Management in the Middle East

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faten Ghosn
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Conflict Management ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Singular Stress ◽  
Dominant Strategies ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Arab Israeli Conflict ◽  
And Gender

Although the Middle East is a dynamic region that has witnessed countless endeavors dealing with managing, resolving, and preventing conflicts from even emerging, most of the mainstream academic and policy focus has been on the Arab-Israeli peace process, in general, and the strategies of negotiation and mediation, in particular. This article goes beyond the dominant strategies of conflict management and the singular stress on the Arab-Israeli conflict by focusing on the different types of mechanisms available for actors in dealing with their conflict, including track-two diplomacy, the role of culture and gender in conflict management, and, last but not least, the emerging interest in the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

Rome, the Arabs, and Iconoclasm

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Edward J. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Iconoclastic Controversy

By the early seventh century a combination of Persian invasions and, ultimately, Arab conquests removed the Roman Empire from the Middle East and North Africa. Although the emperor Heraclius sparked a brief but dramatic Roman resurgence in the early 630s, these traumatic losses pushed Romans to reintroduce the rhetoric of decline and renewal. Instead of focusing on the traditional, pagan Roman past as Romans had done in earlier centuries, their seventh- and eighth-century counterparts thought about how the empire’s Christian religious practices had fallen away from the ideals that had once made Rome a powerful Christian empire. One result was the Iconoclastic controversy, an argument between Romans who embraced the role of icons in Christian worship and others who wanted to suppress their use. Both sides claimed that the religious practices for which their opponents advocated had broken with the traditions that had once made the empire strong.

scholarly journals Long March of women: Labour movement and its impact on the intellectual and social history of conflicts

2021 ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
Jelena Lalatović
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Gender History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Second World ◽  
Women’S History

This paper analyzes basic theoretical notions of the oppression of women, class inequality, women's history, and gender history discussed in the study named Dugi ženski marš. Položaj radnica i ženski aktivizam u Hrvatskoj između dvaju svjetskih ratova authored by a croatian historian Ana Rajković (2021). What is more, the paper examines the role of these assessments in creating the historiographical narrative as a whole. The study by Ana Rajković is an innovative synthesis of various insights about women's history in both the labour and feminist movement in Yugoslavia in the interwar period. Furthermore, the study provides possibilities for (re)interpretation of these insights in the context of women's contemporary social and intellectual history. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to re-examine the theoretical and methodological differences between contemporary historiography, of which Ana Rajković is a representative, and seminal historical syntheses in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, whose main focus was also on female members of the communist movement and their activity in the interwar period.

Fort Napier

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dominy
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
History Of ◽  
African Soil ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Settler Society ◽  
Distinctive Role

This book traces the social history of the imperial garrison in the Colony of Natal in order to elucidate the reproduction, adaptation, and modification of Victorian British society on southern African soil. More specifically, it examines the divisions in colonial society and the influence of the garrison in shaping those divisions. The book considers a number of interrelated themes: class and gender, hierarchy and discipline, race and labor, pageantry and government, and the economic impact of garrisons and their costs. These themes are contextualized in relation to the distinctive role of Fort Napier as a garrison center. This chapter compares Fort Napier with other garrisons worldwide, including those in Gibraltar, Halifax, and Montreal; the jailer garrisons in Australia; and the garrison in New Zealand. It argues that Fort Napier and its garrison are unique because they influenced not only a settler society but also a major African society.

Performing the Ramayana Tradition

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
North India ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific

Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, edited by Ramayana scholar Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha, scholar of Theater and Performance Studies, examines diverse retellings of the Ramayana narrative as interpreted and embodied through a spectrum of performances. Unlike previous publications, this book is neither a monograph on a single performance tradition nor a general overview of Indian theater. Instead, it provides context-specific analyses of selected case studies that explore contemporary enactments of performance traditions and the narratives from which they draw: Kutiyattam, Nangyarkuttu, and Kathakali from Kerala; Kattaikkuttu and a “mythological” drama from Tamil Nadu; Talamaddale from Karnataka; avant-garde performances from Puducherry and New Delhi; a modern dance-drama from West Bengal; the monastic tradition of Sattriya from Assam; anti-caste plays from North India; and the Ramnagar Ramlila. Apart from the editors’ two introductions, which orient readers to the history of Ramayana narratives by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban, Sankaradeva, and others, as well as the performance vocabulary of their enactments, the volume includes many voices, including those of directors, performers, scholars, connoisseurs, and the scholar-abbot of a monastery. It also contains two full scripts of plays, photographs of productions, interviews, conversations, and a glossary of Indian terms. Each essay in the volume, written by an expert in the field, is linked to several others, clustered around shared themes: the politics of caste and gender, the representation of the anti-hero, contemporary reinterpretations of traditional narratives, and the presence of Ramayana discourse in everyday life.

Translator's Preface: A Note on Settler Colonialism

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darryl Li
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Social History ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Village

The Journal of Palestine Studies presents an original translation of a 1981 article by Yugoslav anthropologist Nina Seferović (1947–1991) on “Bushnaqs”—Palestinians whose ancestors hail from the territory of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. Seferović describes the circumstances of the Bushnaqs' departure in the late nineteenth century; the distinct community they founded in the village of Caesarea near Haifa; and their assimilation into the Palestinian nation. This study is a contribution to the social history of Palestine that raises productive questions about the legacies of the Non-Aligned Movement and about the role of race and temporality in framing such categories as settler and native in the broader examination of settler colonialism. Below, in order of appearance, are Darryl Li's translator's preface, “A Note on Settler Colonialism,” illuminating and explicating the original study; Nina Seferović's article, “The Herzegovinian Muslim Colony in Caesarea, Palestine,” and an appendix titled, “Balkan Migration to the Middle East.” A substantial section of endnotes follows, divided into three corresponding parts.

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