Performing the Past in the Present

2021 ◽  
pp. 704-720
Author(s):  
Rowan McLelland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Creation

This chapter explores the conscious adoption, reformation, and indigenization of ballet in China in the mid-twentieth century to foreground how this historical development has contributed to the creation of a new genre of ballet unique to China in the contemporary period. Using The Red Detachment of Women (1964, [红色娘子军]) and the more recent Eight Heroines (2015, [八女投江]), the chapter highlights ballet’s contemporaneity in China at the convergence of the unique legacy of the sociopolitical reimagining of the form with tangible links to both the past and the present in ballet in the Global North as a modern transnational practice. It concludes that it is in its very divergence from the style of contemporary ballet more commonly performed in the West that Chinese contemporary ballet embodies the pluralistic cosmopolitan values that contemporary ballet adopts.

The New Islamic State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhad Khosrokhavar
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
The West ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

The creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) changed the nature of jihadism worldwide. For a few years (2014–2017) it exemplified the destructive capacity of jihadism and created a new utopia aimed at restoring the past greatness and glory of the former caliphate. It also attracted tens of thousands of young wannabe combatants of faith (mujahids, those who make jihad) toward Syria and Iraq from more than 100 countries. Its utopia was dual: not only re-creating the caliphate that would spread Islam all over the world but also creating a cohesive, imagined community (the neo-umma) that would restore patriarchal family and put an end to the crisis of modern society through an inflexible interpretation of shari‘a (Islamic laws and commandments). To achieve these goals, ISIS diversified its approach. It focused, in the West, on the rancor of the Muslim migrants’ sons and daughters, on exoticism, and on an imaginary dream world and, in the Middle East, on tribes and the Sunni/Shi‘a divide, particularly in the Iraqi and Syrian societies.

The Palestinian Debate

Worldview ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 7-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry W. Roeder ◽  
Franklin C. Marcus ◽  
Henry S. Sizer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Bank ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The West ◽  
Independent State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
West Bank And Gaza ◽  
Palestinian Question

People seeking a settlement of the Palestinian question have focused on several options during the past few years. These proposals cover a wide range of choices from annexation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza, to a Palestinian semiautonomy in the same territories, to some kind of union with Jordan. However, the only viable proposal is an arrangement that satisfies the population most directly involved; i.e., the Palestinians. And they will be satisfied with nothing less than true independence from both Israel and Jordan for the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Just as other “peoples” have done before them, the Palestinians today are struggling for one thing above all else: the powerful idea of “self-determination” or “sovereignty.” In the twentieth century that means an independent state.

An Attempt to exhaust Memory. The Function of the List in the Works of Georges Perec

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Jagoda Kryg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
The Past ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The One

The aim of the article is to analyse the function of the list in the works of Georges Perec, a French writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Writing by enumeration was one of the most important literary strategies practiced by the author and it took various forms depending on the specific text. Enumeration in Perec’s work can thus be perceived as a mnemontechnical tool, thanks to which it becomes a way to force one's memory to remember what is forgotten. This mne-motechnical aspect will be particularly important in the literary project called Lieux où j’ai dormi. Simultaneously, the creation of literary lists and enumerations can be linked to author’s need to control his surrounding reality. From this perspective, the list gives the illusion of double control. On the one hand, it fights the obliteration of traces of the past, and on the other, by recording even the most trivial elements of the reality, it seems to be a way to consolidate it.

Future Impossible Communities

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-102
Author(s):  
Jossianna Arroyo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The West ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
Key Interventions

This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.

The Contested Past: The Boxers as History and Myth

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American History ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Complex Case ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Pattern ◽  
High Degree ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Martin Luther King

The mythologized past is the past that predominates in the minds of most people. Therefore, even as historians strive to counter it, it behooves us to study it with care. Although any aspect of the past has the potential to live on as myth in the present, certain events and persons, because they resonate with themes of broader historical scope and importance, have this potential to an especially high degree. Thus, in American history, where racism has been such a pervasive historical pattern, figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King who helped to ameliorate the condition of blacks are often treated in larger-than-life terms. To take a more complex case, in China in the twentieth century, where the West has been by turns hated as an imperialist aggressor and admired for its mastery of the secrets of wealth and power, the Boxers, because they attacked both the West and its modern secrets, have been alternately praised and reviled.

China and “Modernity”: the Uses of the Study of Chinese History in the Past and the Present

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Zurndorfer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Data ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
The Past

AbstractThe central focus of this paper is the lack of impact Euro-centric theories of development have made on twentieth century historical writing by leading Chinese and Japanese scholars. The author reviews publications by three important historians, Naitō Konan, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, and Yü Ying-shih, all of whom attempt to locate China's first experience with “modernity” prior to nineteenth or twentieth century encounters with the West. Although all three historians differ in their interpretation of the concept “modernity,” they find Chinese culture a central feature in the identification of this concept. Furthermore, all three writers rely upon historical evidence, in particular economic and social data, to counter claims of China's history as a process of linear development.

EMIGRANTS “MEMORY STORIES” OF ROMUALD WERNIK

2019 ◽  
pp. 349-357
Author(s):  
Oleksii Sykhomlynov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Broad Concept ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Negative Feelings

Nostalgic discourse is an important feature of the Polish boundary and emigration literature of the twentieth century. This is a large-scale and widespread trend. She is an appeal to memories and nostalgic poetics. We can talk about a certain discourse of the past memoirism, which is understood as a norm and strategy used in the creation of text or expression-statement. The basis of creative interpretation in this case are cultural and social models, which become the norm, point of reference, the basis of the text or statement, which have certain genre features. The tragic experience of social and political events of the twentieth century: the loss of small homelands and the breakdown of ties with the broad concept of “ideological homeland”, caused the emergence of a new type of literature, full of poetics of memoirs. “Memory-nostalgia” becomes one of the main thematic and artistic components of the literature of the frontier, illustrating the emergence of nostalgic discourse, a certain norm and strategy for the creation of literary texts that have specific features and are found in poetry, prose or essay in the ethno-cultural model of literature polish-ukrainian frontier. Memoirs – this is a subjective understanding of certain historical events or biographies of a particular historical figure, carried out by the writer in an artistic form with the use of his true documents of his time, a deep correlation of his own spiritual experience with the inner world of his heroes. Nostalgia is a type of vulnerability that appears today in the literature more often than any other, and is a specific form of perception of reality and the way of world perception. Today, the “literature of exiles” often refers to the theme “lost paradise of childhood”, people are tired of their youth and the place where the artist’s socialization took place. This is the essence of the nostalgic worldview. There is awareness of the irretrievability of the past, but it does not cause negative feelings, only generates a sweet pain of memories. In this context, an interesting example of nostalgic prose is the works of Romuald Wernik, an emigrant, writer from the Polish-Ukrainian borderland, historian of art, political publicist.

scholarly journals THE SALA DE INVESTIGACIONES —FONDO RESERVADO OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SAN MARCOS CENTRAL LIBRARY, LIMA, PERU

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Loza Nehmad
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rare Book ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Library System ◽  
The Past ◽  
San Marcos ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Manuscript Collections ◽  
The University

The Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) was founded in 1551 in Lima, Peru, and for centuries has remained the major university in the country. But during the past several decades, a number of other universities, both public and private, have been created in Lima, and San Marcos now shares with them a space that, until the mid-twentieth century, was almost exclusively its own. Today, the rare book and manuscript collections within the library system are among the most important in the country. A recent development has been the creation of the Sala de Investigaciones Bibliográficas-Fondo Reservado,1 which contains . . .

scholarly journals WINCKELMANN’S APOLLO AND THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF RACE

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (59) ◽  
pp. 6-35
Author(s):  
Lasse Hodne
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Male ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Male Body ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Different Types

The taste for classical art that induced museums in the West to acquire masterpieces from ancient Greece and Rome for their collections was stimulated largely by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the past decade, a number of articles have claimed that Winckelmann’s glorification of marble statues representing the white, male body promotes notions of white supremacy. The present article challenges this view by examining theories prevalent in the eighteenth century (especially climate theory) that affected Winckelmann’s views on race. Through an examination of different types of classicism, the article also seeks to demonstrate that Winckelmann’s aesthetics were opposed to the eclectic use of ancient models typical of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document