Modernity, Postcolonialism, and Theatrical Form in Uzbekistan

Slavic Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura L. Adams

In this article Laura Adams examines cultural change in Uzbekistan through the evolution of European-style theater during the twentieth century. The adoption of this theatrical form was part of a broader project of cultural modernization undertaken first by the Jadids and then by the Soviets. It was also an example of a colonial hierarchy of cultures, which deemed European forms to be more advanced than indigenous ones. In spite of a pervasive discourse about the renewal of national culture, however, European-style theater continues to be strongly supported in Uzbekistan today. Adams argues that both modernization and colonialism contributed to an internationalist orientation among Uzbekistan's cultural elites. This orientation makes an investment in indigenous cultural forms less desirable, since they are only intelligible on a local level. European-style theater, however, enhances the value of national culture both by marking its modernity and by communicating national content in an internationally understood and valued medium.

ICONI ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Nadezhda A. Tsareva ◽  

The relevance of the topic is due to the attention to trends in the development of culture. The synthesis of cultural forms is one of the important factors in the dynamics of culture. The teaching of Russian symbolism about the synthesis of cultures was analyzed in the scientifi c literature of the entire twentieth century. The novelty of the research is to compare the idea of art synthesis in the early twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Two aspects of the idea of synthesis are considered: 1) the relevance of the idea of art synthesis in the postmodern era; 2) music and the visual series as organizing centers of art synthesis in the era of information technology. The purpose of this article is to examine the teaching of Russian symbolism about the integration of various forms of art and the features of synthesis in the postmodern era. The idea of integrating cultural forms was one of the key elements in Russian symbolism at the beginning of the twentieth century and was interpreted as a real prospect for the development of culture. In a broad sense, synthesis in symbolism meant the integrity of life, the integration of all spheres of human activity, the “organic connection” of cultures of the past and present. The synthesis can be realized on the basis of the art of symbolism, which can create a new culture. The synthesis of arts was understood as the beginning of the formation of a new culture. The core of the synthesis of arts, the symbolists saw music. Postmodern art is characterized by synthetism. Computer and information technologies create new forms of synthetic media art. The video series becomes the center of integration construction of postmodern audiovisual culture forms. The symbolist idea of the synthesis of arts as the beginning of cultural change in the postmodern era remains a utopian project. But the creation of new art forms in postmodern culture i s based on integration. New technologies are becoming a factor that determines the specifi cs of the synthesis of arts and infl uences the dynamics of culture. Both in Russian symbolism and in modern art, the goal of art synthesis is to present an integral image of the world, to form a system of worldview attitudes.


Author(s):  
Hannah Holtschneider

This book analyses the religious aspects of Jewish acculturation to Scotland through a transnational perspective on migration, focused through an examination of Jewish religious leadership and authority in the international context of Anglophone Jewish history in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on British Jewish history in the first half of the twentieth century, and on the biography of one significant actor in a so-called ‘provincial’ Jewish community, this monograph explores the development of a central feature of British Jewish religious history: power relations within Jewish religious institutions, and particularly relations between the assumed centre (London) and the ‘provinces’ at a time of massive demographic and cultural change. With immigration stagnating and immigrants now poised to stay rather than seeing Britain as a staging post in their journey west, Jewish communities had to come to terms with the majority of their congregants being first generation immigrants, and to deal with the resulting cultural conflicts amongst the migrants and with those resident Jews whose families had acculturated and anglicised one or more generations previously. Salis Daiches’s life journey (1880-1945) highlights central aspects of the processes of adjustment in communities across the United Kingdom from the perspective of the ‘provincial periphery’. Competing religious ideologies in the early twentieth century are a crucial element in the history of British Jewry, rather than a transient social phenomenon. Religion as performed, taught, and thought about at a local level by ‘religious professionals’ is a vehicle for the exploration of the migration.


Author(s):  
Matthew Hobson

This chapter provides a brief introduction to how the historiographical development of Roman studies, since mid-twentieth century decolonization, has altered our understanding of the developments which took place in North Africa following the destruction of Carthage in 146 bce. The reader is introduced to literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources of evidence, which have traditionally been used to argue for either cultural change or continuity. After an initial examination of the immediate aftermath of the Third Punic War, Roman land appropriation and taxation, the focus is on sources of evidence usually described as “Punic,” “neo-Punic” or “Late Punic,” covering the spheres of municipal institutions, language use, and religious and funerary rituals. The vibrant multiculturalism and regional diversity of the Mediterranean and especially North Africa, both before and after the Roman conquest, is the dominant theme. This is used to shift emphasis away from grand explanatory paradigms based on essentialist identity categories, and toward a more nuanced picture of the complex and multivariate processes of cultural development and integration.


Fascism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Griffin

In the entry on ‘Fascism’ published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘authority’, the ‘right’: a fascist century (un secolo fascista). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams of the 1930s have come to naught. Whatever impact they have had at a local level, and however profound the delusion that fascists form a world-wide community of like-minded ultranationalists and racists revolutionaries on the brink of ‘breaking through’, as a factor in the shaping of the modern world, their fascism is clearly a spent force. But history is a kaleidoscope of perspectives that dynamically shift as major new developments force us to rewrite the narrative we impose on it. What if we take Mussolini’s secolo to mean not the twentieth century, but the ‘hundred years since the foundation of Fascism’? Then the story we are telling ourselves changes radically.


2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-86
Author(s):  
Steve Jenner ◽  
Brent MacNab ◽  
Richard Brislin ◽  
Reg Worthley

A great number of studies have been reported based on Hofstede’s seminal work on national culture (1980). Our findings for a very recent sample of people attending executive and MBA programs found no significant differences in Power Distance between the United States (U.S.), Mexico and Canada. Our results suggest that caution should be taken in automatically assuming cultural parity between the U.S. and Canada and that more traditional culture positions between the NAFTA member nations may be more subject to change than stable through phenomena like crossvergence. Our findings suggest that Hofstede’s (1980) study provides one useful framework; however, the relative positions of national culture are not necessarily applicable to present day.


Author(s):  
Claire Drewery

This chapter traces an early-twentieth century cultural change in perceptions of the nature and representation of reality, the breakdown of the dominant Victorian discourses of humanism and realism and the concurrent Modernist reconstitution of the human subject. I examine this epochal shift through a consideration of May Sinclair’s engagement with contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytical discourses, her personal crisis of Anglican faith and her growing interest in philosophical Idealism. The theme of guilt, this chapter will claim, is closely associated in Sinclair’s writing with the Modernist re-examination of both physical and textual bodies in the light of burgeoning contemporary discourses – both philosophical and scientific – surrounding subjective identity. Guilt is constantly evoked through an emphasis on spirituality and mystical themes and their frequent juxtaposition with psychoanalytic theories of sublimation.


Author(s):  
STEPHEN BANFIELD

Between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a cultivated relationship with the music of a favoured period in the distant national past was a pervasive aspect of high, and sometimes lower, musical culture in England. This chapter first sketches a general picture of that relationship before presenting some particular case studies. It addresses the following questions: to what extent does Tudorism in music refer to the revival of music itself, to what extent to its stylistic emulation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English compositions? Was it a matter of appealing to the Tudors to set a political agenda for music? Tudorism in English music was many things but also one very definite thing — a conscious modelling of style or atmosphere in musical composition on that of a perceived golden age of national culture. It was in some respects part of the early music movement that Harry Haskell identified as beginning in 1829 with Mendelssohn's revival of J. S. Bach's St Matthew Passion, yet not the same thing insofar as that movement was about reviving discarded old music and Tudorism was about creating new music in an earlier image.


Author(s):  
James Morton

Chapter 10 explores the changing uses of Byzantine canon law among the Italo-Greeks in the thirteenth century. The Greek churches and monasteries of southern Italy became increasingly integrated into the administration of the Roman church following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Nonetheless, as the Salentine Group shows, some Italo-Greeks continued to copy nomocanons as late as the fourteenth century. Chapter 10 argues that the manuscripts retained a value as sources of cultural authority, explaining and justifying Greek religious ritual, even as they lost their value as sources of legal authority. To illustrate this point, the chapter begins with a discussion of Nektarios of Otranto’s Three Chapters, a polemical work of c. 1220–1225 that relies heavily on citations of Byzantine canon law to refute Latin attacks on Greek rites and customs. It then considers who these refutations were aimed at, looking in particular at the abortive attempt of Archbishop Marinus of Bari to outlaw Greek baptism in 1232 as a specific example of Latin criticism. It notes, however, that criticism like this from the official church hierarchy was rare and that controversy was probably more restricted to an unofficial, local level. The chapter concludes by examining evidence that canon-law based defences of Greek religious practice were not just aimed at Latins but also at other Greeks. As many Italo-Greeks began to adopt (consciously or otherwise) Latin rites into their worship, more conservative sections of the community attempted to resist such cultural change by mobilising canon law as polemic.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Erika Hanna

The introduction sets up the story which will be told in the following five substantive chapters. It provides an introduction to the history of Irish photography in the twentieth century and explores how it has been understood by historians. It then goes on to lay out the argument which will be developed throughout the rest of the book. That is, over the course of the twentieth century, photography allowed ordinary Irish people to create spaces of self-expression and contest authority in ways which would have a fundamental impact on the nature of Irish society, and that reading photographic sources can provide us with a new way in to stories of social and cultural change from the perspectives of those on the margins of power.


2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.


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