Beyond Satire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Crespi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Journey To The West ◽  
Treaty Ports ◽  
War Of Resistance

Zhang Guangyu’s illustrated taleJourney to the West in Cartoons(1945) has been described as a colorful, whimsical, but also trenchant lampoon of bankrupt politics and society under Nationalist rule at the close of the War of Resistance against Japan.Journeyis indeed a masterful example of satire, but it is also a remarkable work ofmanhua, a genre of verbal-visual art often referred to as “cartoon” that flourished in China’s treaty ports in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter proposes that when viewed in conversation with the history of China’smanhua, Zhang’s fanciful allegory describes a symbiosis betweenmanhuaand the popular print genre of the pictorial magazine, the medium in whichmanhuathrived during the interwar years.

Fictive Mode, ‘Journey to the West’, and Transformation of Space: ‘Ali Mubarak’s Discourses of Modernization

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-358
Author(s):  
WEN-CHIN OUYANG
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Theoretical Principle ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The West ◽  
Arab Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Journey To The West

I begin my exploration of ‘Ali Mubarak (1823/4–1893) and the discourses on modernization ‘performed’ in his only attempt at fiction, ‘Alam al-Din (The Sign of Religion, 1882), with a quote from Guy Davenport because it elegantly sums up a key theoretical principle underpinning any discussion of cultural transformation and, more particularly, of modernization. Locating ‘Ali Mubarak and his only fictional work at the juncture of the transformation from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’ in the recent history of Arab culture and of Arabic narrative, I find Davenport's pronouncement tantalizingly appropriate. He not only places the stakes of history and geography in one another, but simultaneously opens up the imagination to the combined forces of time and space that stand behind these two distinct yet related disciplines.

Century of Ukraine's diplomatic service

2017 ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Yuriy Makar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
State Committee ◽  
The West ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National University ◽  
Central Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth

On December 22, 2017 the Ukrainian Diplomatic Service marked the 100thanniversary of its establishment and development. In dedication to such a momentous event, the Department of International Relations of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University has published a book of IR Dept’s ardent activity since its establishment. It includes information both in Ukrainian and English on the backbone of the collective and their versatile activities, achievements and prospects for the future. The author delves into retracing the course of the history of Ukrainian Diplomacy formation and development. The author highlights the roots of its formation, reconsidering a long way of its development that coincided with the formation of basic elements of Ukrainian statehood that came into existence as a result of the war of national liberation – the Ukrainian Central Rada (the Central Council of Ukraine). Later, the Ukrainian or so-called State the Hetmanate was under study. The Directorat (Directory) of Ukraine, being a provisional collegiate revolutionary state committee of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, was given a thorough study. Of particular interest for the research are diplomatic activities of the West Ukrainian People`s Republic. Noteworthy, the author emphasizes on the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic’s foreign policy, forced by the Bolshevist Russia. A further important implication is both the challenges of the Ukrainian statehood establishing and Ukraine’s functioning as a state, first and foremost, stemmed from the immaturity and conscience-unawareness of the Ukrainian society, that, ultimately, has led to the fact, that throughout the twentieth century Ukraine as a statehood, being incorporated into the Soviet Union, could hardly be recognized as a sovereign state. Our research suggests that since the beginning of the Ukrainian Diplomacy establishment and its further evolution, it used to be unprecedentedly fabricated and forged. On a wider level, the research is devoted to centennial fight of Ukraine against Russian violence and aggression since the WWI, when in 1917 the Russian Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, started real Russian war against Ukraine. Apropos, in the about-a-year-negotiation run, Ukraine, eventually, failed to become sovereign. Remarkably, Ukraine finally gained its independence just in late twentieth century. Nowadays, Russia still regards Ukraine as a part of its own strategic orbit,waging out a carrot-and-stick battle. Keywords: The Ukrainian People’s Republic, the State of Ukraine, the Hetmanate, the Direcorat (Directory) of Ukraine, the West Ukrainian People`s Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, Ukraine, the Bolshevist Russia, the Russian Federation, Ukrainian diplomacy

scholarly journals In the garden of the world

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Castorina
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Journey To The West ◽  
First Time ◽  
Shed Light

In the garden of the world. Italy to a young 19th century Chinese traveler. On September 14th, 1859, at the first light of dawn, a young Chinese traveler named Guo Liancheng 郭連城 (1839-1866) landed in Civitavecchia, Italy, after a long journey of overland travel and months of navigation. Coming from a small village far from the capital, he was only 20 years old and was in the company of an Italian priest, Luigi Celestino Spelta. Guo was not the first Chinese man to visit Europe but before leaving, he decided to keep a daily journal of his experience, published soon after his return with the title of Xiyou bilüe西游筆略 (Brief Account of the Journey to the West). This book presents for the first time the story of Guo Liancheng, exploring a still little-known aspect of the history of the contacts between Italy and China. Following the pages of Guo Liancheng’s journal, the author tries to shed light on its contents and features and to analyze the image of Italy described in the pages of Brief account of the Journey to the West, the earliest firsthand account on the Bel Paese ever published in China.

Clerics and Communists

2016 ◽  
Vol 67 (9) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Bashir Saade
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Complex Interaction ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The West ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mcgill University

<div class="bookreview">Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab, <em>The Shi'ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah's Islamists</em> (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 350 pages, $49.95, hardcover.</div>In the West today, political Islam is mostly equated with ISIS's spectacle of violence, and with the narrow, bigoted understanding of religion and society that inspires it. It will thus intrigue many readers to discover that the legacy of Islamic intellectual and political activity, from the turn of the twentieth century until today, bore the imprint of a complex interaction between Communist and leftist traditions. A recent book by two professors at McGill University, Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab, takes on the ambitious task of tracing the history of the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes confrontational relationship among Shi'i communities and clerics in Lebanon, along with occasional discussions of related issues in Iraqi politics. Based on a rich set of primary documents from both countries, the authors describe in great detail the rise and fall of the Communist experience in the region, the shortcomings of the left as it was gradually superseded by Islamic party formations, and the deep debt of the latter to the former.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-9" title="Vol. 67, No. 9: February 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Lost in translation? The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith (Dasheng qixin lun) and its modern readings

2008 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Tarocco
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The West ◽  
Textual History ◽  
English Translations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lost In Translation

AbstractThe Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (foshen), and one mind (yixin), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Aśvaghoṣa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society.

VII.—Excavations at Kusura near Afyon Karahisar: II

Archaeologia ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 217-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winifred Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
The West ◽  
Fresh Material ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
History Of

At the outset of the 1937 excavations, we had certain main objects in view. The most important, since it affected the history of Anatolia as a whole, was to decide what culture was represented by our third and latest period, called C. The particulars wherein C differed from the preceding periods, B and A, were obvious: during B, which may have come to an end in the twentieth century, the settlement clearly belonged to the ‘west Anatolian group’, known from Troy, Lesbos, Yortan, and the Pisidian sites; A could be regarded as an earlier stage of B, not yet modified by western influence (see p. 237, below); C, however, seemed hard to parallel. The acquisition of fresh material, and a careful study of the collections in the museums at Ankara and Istanbul has now enabled us to recognize C as Hittite in the wide sense of the term used by archaeologists to-day. The C pottery has many points in common with the monochrome Hittite wares of Alişar II, Alaca Hüyük, Haşhüyük and even Bogazköy, while the smaller antiquities from C and Alişar II are much closer than was previously supposed. That Kusura should display local peculiarities is not surprising, when we consider its distance from the larger Hittite centres.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document