Friend and foe: Wei Te-Sheng on Taiwanese emotions towards Japanese colonization and the Japanese perspectives of Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Tets Kimura ◽  
Shih-Ying Lin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Taiwanese Identity ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In Warriors of the Rainbow, Wei Te-Sheng sharply distinguished between heroes and villains in the 1930 Musha incident – the Taiwanese heroes fight against the Japanese villains. This contrasts with Kano, where Wei presents the romantic Orient of Japanese colonization through baseball games. Although his films are not always historically accurate in details, they realistically represent Taiwanese collective emotions towards Japanese colonization. Preferencing Japanese colonization over Chinese administration is not unusual in today’s Taiwan and thus not original to Wei. Taiwan’s Japanese colonial past was previously acknowledged by two well-known Japanese writers, Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi, in the late twentieth century when Taiwan newly asserted its freedom of expression. This article will analyse the role played by Japan in establishing the creation and projection of a unique Taiwanese identity in the field of popular culture by employing a ‘point of view’ framework from narratology.

Divine Text, National Language, and Their Publics: Arguing an Indonesian Qur'an

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 758-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Webb Keane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
National Language ◽  
Local Form ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Transnational Community ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractThe entry of a universal revelation into the mundane world of language threatens to be paradoxical: it must take a specific and local form. As such, it becomes implicated in nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other sources of community. This article centers on a small melodrama in late twentieth-century Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims of any country. After undergoing a mid-life spiritual awakening, H. B. Jassin, a modernist literary critic, editor, and ardent defender of freedom of expression, undertook two projects intended to convey the aesthetic power of the Qur'an to a non-Arabic speaking public. But if Qur'anic Arabic summons a transnational community of the faithful, standardized Indonesian was developed to address a nation of citizens. If scripture speaks in a divine, uncreated idiom, the national language is shaped by human efforts. Jassin's career had served a vision of literature and its public whose values and semiotic ideologies were dramatically at odds with Qur'anic traditions. Although this may appear at first glance to be a familiar story of progress and its opponents, this article asks whether Jassin's critics grasped something about signs and communities that his defenders did not. Examining the furor that resulted from his Qur'ans, it explores an array of conflicting assumptions about language, freedom, truth, and people's lives together in the late twentieth century.

Samba

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika Lior
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Afro Brazilian

Modern samba music and dance began in Rio de Janeiro’s Afro-Brazilian communities in the early 1900s and spread rapidly to international audiences through twentieth-century technologies of mass media, recording, and cinema. Rio’s samba developed from Bahian samba de roda, which has been danced and played by enslaved Africans and their descendants from the sixteenth century to the present. Modern samba differed from the circular samba de roda through its harmonic elements, the linear use of space, increased speed and footwork, and stylized upper body positions. First brought to the US by Brazilian sensation Carmen Miranda through Hollywood films of the 1940s, samba’s numerous rhythmic variations have achieved broad global recognition in the twenty-first century. The fast-paced samba no pé singularizes Rio’s world-famous carnaval, which expanded through modern industrial fabrication of floats and costumes and through increasingly cross-national commerce while continuing to capitalize on influences from traditional Afro-Brazilian dance and percussion. The partner dance samba de gafieira has spread from its origins in Rio’s neighborhoods to nightclubs in urban locations across Brazil, North America, and Europe. Meanwhile samba reggae, a late twentieth-century reappropriation of samba within northeastern Brazil that integrates African aesthetic elements with reggae beats and steps has become emblematic of Bahian popular culture.

The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Hamera
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Human Motor ◽  
Modernist Project ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson, arguably the most notable popular-culture virtuoso of the late twentieth century, cannot be understood outside the economic moment that produced him. This essay examines relations between his virtuosity as a dancer and the trajectory of American deindustrialization in the period 1983–88. Through the trope of the human motor, Jackson's virtuosity produces nostalgia for a vanishing industrial past, while barely containing the contradictions and exclusions endemic to the industrial modernist project, especially those involving race. This trope is activated by the intersection of his movement vocabulary and his recurring invocations of hard work. Jackson's dancing in this period reveals a neglected aspect of virtuosity in dance more generally. As an allegorical presentation of idealized relations between the body and work abandoned by the relentless motility of capital, Jackson's virtuosity allows audiences to view these disappearing modes with a romantic backward glance.

scholarly journals Barriers to the Self

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Wall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Common Thread ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Perception Of Self ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article explores Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1967) and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994) through the effects that depression has on the creation and perception of self in young women. Depression is explored in terms of the barriers it erects around young women’s attempts to conceptualise selfhood as it forms in adolescence. This article particularly focuses on the problem of productivity in both texts as protagonists Esther Greenwood and Elizabeth Wurtzel appear to view productivity, particularly academic and literary, as the means through which they will create and establish a coherent self. This fetishised productivity is halted by their depressions, illustrating a further tension between the wider capitalist society which demands productivity and the destabilising nature of depression. Whilst Esther and Elizabeth have different experiences, due to the periods of composition, both characters and texts have striking similarities which suggest that there is a common thread which unites the experiences of female depression in the late twentieth century.

“The Most Important Biblical Discovery of Our Time”: William Henry Green and the Demise of Ussher's Chronology

2000 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald L. Numbers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Human History ◽  
Saturday Evening ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Evangelical Protestants ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Princeton Theological Seminary ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In 1650 the distinguished church historian Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland announced his meticulously calculated time of the Creation: early Saturday evening, 22 October 4004 B.C.E., a date immortalized in the margins of countless Bibles for nearly three centuries. Among evangelical Protestants who believed in the inerrancy of Scripture this date came to mark the beginning of human history. For some believers it remained a landmark until the late twentieth century; others abandoned it as early as the 1860s. Among American evangelicals no one played a more important role in discrediting Ussher's chronology than William Henry Green, an Old Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. One of Green's Princeton colleagues called his demonstration of Ussher's fallacy “the most important biblical discovery of our time.” In some ways it was, although its full impact did not come until the second half of the twentieth century.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

FOLLIES: ARCHITECTURE FOR THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY LANDSCAPE

1985 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-141
Author(s):  
Anthony Vidler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

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