Slums on Screen

Author(s):  
Igor Krstić

Despite the rise of the ‘cinematic city’ as an acknowledged paradigm in film and urban studies, ‘cinematic slums’ have remained severely under-researched, even though near to one billion people – almost one third of the global urban population – call slums their home. Accordingly, the author asks how this hard and unyielding way of life was depicted on screen; how have filmmakers engaged historically and across the globe with the social conditions of what is often perceived as the world’s most miserable habitats? Combining approaches from the social sciences and the humanities, the book provides an interdisciplinary perspective while outlining a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, Elendsviertel, gecekondu, barrios populares or chawls of our diverse ‘planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film and media culture. From Jacob Riis’s How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of slum representations of different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predecessors. It focuses thereby particularly on the way filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes of representation to convey life in our ‘planet of slums’.

While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Costas Gaganakis

<p>This article attempts to chart the “paradigm shift” from social history, dominant until the early 1980s, to new cultural history and the various interpretive trends it engendered in the 1990s and 2000s. The privileged field of investigation is the history of the Protestant Reformation, particularly in its urban aspect. The discussion starts with the publication of Bernd Moeller’s pivotal <em>Reichsstadt und Reformation </em>in the early 1960s – which paved the way for the triumphant invasion of social history in a field previously dominated by ecclesiastical or political historians, and profoundly imbued with doctrinal prerogatives – and culminates in the critical presentation of interpretive trends that appear to dominate in the 2010s, particularly the view and investigation of the Reformation as communication process.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 98-102
Author(s):  
N.S. Badalova ◽  

Discussed are actual questions of a sociological analysis of the social adaptation of various ethnic groups, since globalization disrupts the natural course of this process. We consider it important to preserve the ethnic identity of each nation, subject to their active participation in modern general civilizational development, in order to make a worthy contribution. In order to identify the characteristic features of social adaptation of ethnic groups, two were selected: Khinalugs and Talyshs. The method of analyzing the history of the development and formation of these peoples and the modern conditions of their life revealed the characteristic features of social adaptation here. The considered facts and tendencies in the vital activity of the indicated nationalities gave grounds to draw the following conclusions. In the life of the Hinalugians, their geographical isolation from the rest of the world played a decisive role, which helped them to preserve their unique language and way of life. Now, thanks to the expanded possibilities of communication, this village is exposed to the active influence of the outside world, which fundamentally changes the nature and possibilities of social adaptation of each subsequent generation of people. The Talyshs, being a larger ethnic unit, were subjected to assimilation and other influences of the external world more actively. Despite this, they managed for many decades to preserve their originality. In the modern era of globalization, the general social processes actively influence the process of their social adaptation. Thus, the self-consciousness of the ethnos is destroyed, the self-consciousness of the national identity is formed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (01) ◽  
pp. 218-224
Author(s):  
Ali Farhadov
Keyword(s):  

The article is devoted to the history of religious reforms in the Islamic world. The goal of the reform of Islamic thinking is to return to the roots, the Koran, to cleanse the religion of heresy, and later the incorrect elements introduced into it. Islamic laws and the way of life outside of them should be open to the new, since the peculiarity of Islam is the newness of religion for every time. According to the Muslim reformists, the renewal, first of all, must occur in Islamic thinking.


2003 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Jeolás

Este artigo, baseado em pesquisa sobre o imaginário da aids entre jovens, busca compreender a noção de risco como uma categoria sociocultural, cujos significados se acumulam nos conceitos de várias áreas do conhecimento e nos usos de senso comum. O perigo, o mal e o infortúnio sempre foram moralizados e politizados nas diversas culturas humanas e a história da aids não poderia ser diferente. Os simbolismos culturais sobre contágio, doenças transmitidas pelo sexo e pelo sangue e os valores atuais da sexualidade, incluindo as relações de gênero, estão presentes na forma como os jovens representam o risco do HIV. Além disso, não se pode desconsiderar a ambivalência que os riscos assumem atualmente para os jovens: alguns negados e afastados, outros aceitos e valorizados. No caso da aids, a busca pela vertigem e pelo êxtase, componentes do sexo e das drogas, distancia o discurso dos jovens sobre risco do discurso preventivo, baseado na racionalidade do comportamento individual, assumindo valores distintos ligados a experiências cotidianas. Youngsters and the imagery of AIDS: notes for the social construction of risk This article, based on research about the imagery of AIDS among youth, aims to understand the notion of risk as a social-cultural category, whose meanings are piled upon concepts of several areas of both knowledge and common sense usages. Danger, evil and misfortune have always been moralized and politicized in the different human cultures and it could not be different in the history of aids. Cultural symbolism about infection, sexually and blood transmitted diseases, as well as sexuality’s current values, including here gender relations, are present in the way the youth represents HIV´s risks. Besides, the ambivalence these risks assume for the youth nowadays cannot be disregarded: some are denied and put aside, others are accepted and valorized. In the case of AIDS, the search for vertigo and ecstasy, components of sex and drugs, distances the youth’s discourse about risk from the preventive discourse, based on the rationality of individual behavior, assuming distinct values linked to everyday experiences.


1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 65-98
Author(s):  
Gordon Fyfe

This paper is a critique of the contribution of William Ivins's Prints and Visual Communication (1953) to an understanding of the meaning of fine art reproductions. Ivins showed that photographic reproduction was constructed in relation to, and displaced, older ways of reproducing art which were carried out by handicraft engravers. His analysis alerts us to the fact that ambiguity characterized art reproduction before photographs. Art reproductions, then, were interpretations in line based on conventional modes of representation – what Ivins calls a visual syntax. In this respect he enhances our understanding of the social construction of the artist. For Ivins the social history of reproduction seems to end with the camera. This completed an individuation of creativity ushered in with the Renaissance, but which was always qualified by the interfering visual syntax of craftsmen-interpreters. It is argued that the value of Ivins's account resides in its reconstruction of the relationship between handicraft engraving, fine art reproduction and aesthetic objects that have long since slipped from our consciousness.


Author(s):  
Sergei V. Lyovin ◽  

Zemstvo officials occupied a prominent place in the social life of Russia in the post-reform period. Many of them participated in the populist movement in the 1870s, but for various reasons they left it and devoted themselves entirely to the zemstvo service, the reby obtaining the opportunity to legally study the way of life, culture, labour activities of peasants and to defend their interests before the landlords, gubernia and uyezd administrations. N. F. Annensky was one of these devotees. The paper attempts to consider his activities as the head of the zemstvo statistical departments (bureaus) of the Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod gubernias. On the basis of the analysis of diverse archival and published sources the author came to the conclusion that while in the zemstvo service N. F. Annensky made a significant contribution to the development of Russian statistics creating new methods of statistical research by combining assessment and soil work. His experience was fruitfully used by statisticians from other gubernias. N. F. Annensky can rightfully be considered one of zemstvo statistical luminaries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Gerda De Villiers

This chapter examined the concept of ‘Ecodomy’ – life in its fullness – as it unfolds in the Book of Ruth. The book is dated to the post-exilic period in the history of Israel, and is read as narrative critique against the Moabite paragraph in Deuteronomy 23:3–5, and against the way that this text is interpreted and implemented in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, the protagonists in the narrative, become paradigmatic of the situation in post-exilic Israel. Their stories, dealing with loss and the actions they take in order to heal the brokenness become indicative for the post-exilic community. As the narrative plot develops, the chapter aims to indicate how ‘life in its emptiness’ is changed into ‘life in its fullness’ by the courage and creative initiative of individuals, even if it meant overstepping boundaries and challenging the social conventions of the time. Against the exclusivist policy of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Book of Ruth argues that foreigners may be included in the community of YHWH and that their solidarity with Israel is to the benefit of all the people. The point that the chapter wishes to make, is that life in its fullness cannot be taken for granted, but requires effort.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-36
Author(s):  
Katja Kanzler

Abstract The following article outlines a way to conceptualize invective form in popular culture that is particularly interested in accommodating the range, fluidity, and slipperiness that define pop-cultural invectivity. It is an approach that draws on one very well-established concept of formal criticism – that of mode – and one concept that has recently been brought to the fold of formalist inquiry – that of affordance. I will argue that conceiving of invective form in popular culture as a mode and as an affordance allows to address the diversity and range of external forms by which pop-cultural invectivity operates. In addition, it brings into focus the fluidity that marks the repertoire of invective popular culture, its paradoxical tendency to gravitate toward routinization in more set conventions, only to conspicuously push against these conventions’ boundaries. Finally, to conceive of the invective valence of the mode’s repertoire not as a fixed property but as an affordance helps talk about the volatility and dynamism of invective performances in popular culture, the way in which their invective effects are contingent on the social positionality from and for which they realized, and the way in which their invective valence is open for resignification.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-149
Author(s):  
Irina-Andreea Stoleriu

The present study is meant to underline the importance of a famous work from the baroque period, Las Meninas, made by the painter Diego de Silva y Velásquez who has become a source of inspiration for future generations of artists. Numerous modern and contemporary artists have integrally or partially ”paraphrased” Velásquez’s composition by intercepting the portrait of revolutionary group for the time when it was created, extremely innovative regarding its compositional qualities and its hidden meanings which underlined the role and status of the artist in the context of a conservative society. Thus, the painting becomes the living proof of the way in which the artist manages to overcome the limitations of the social status of ordinary human beings, by portraying himself as a close friend of the royal family and by opening, through this type of representation, an important chapter in the history of portraiture.


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