scholarly journals National, Regional, or Just Catholic?—Dilemmas of Church Art in a German–Polish Borderland. Upper Silesia, 1903–1953

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Jerzy Gorzelik
Keyword(s):  
Imagined Communities ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Sacred Art ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
God's Will ◽  
National Community ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Art Works ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Church Art

The rise of nationalism threatened the integrity of the Catholic milieu in borderlands such as Prussian Upper Silesia. Facing this challenge, the ecclesiastical elite developed various strategies. This article presents interpretations of sacred art works from the first half of the 20th century, which reveal different approaches to national discourses expressed in iconographic programs. The spectrum of attitudes includes indifference, active counteraction to the progress of nationalism by promoting a different paradigm of building temporal imagined communities, acceptance of nationalistic metaphysics, which assumes the division of humanity into nations endowed with a unique personality, and a synthesis of Catholicism and nationalism, in which national loyalties are considered a Christian duty. The last position proved particularly expansive. Based on the primordialist concept of the nation and the historiosophical concept of Poland as a bulwark of Christianity, the Catholic-national ideology gained popularity among the pro-Polish clergy in the inter-war period. This was reflected in Church art works, which were to present Catholicism as the unchanging essence of the nation and the destiny of the latter resulting from God’s will. This strategy was designed to incorporate Catholic Slavophones into the national community. The adoption of a different concept of the nation by the pro-German priests associated with the Centre Party—with a stronger emphasis on the subjective criteria of national belonging—resulted in greater restraint in expressing national contents in sacred spaces.

scholarly journals On the Reasons for the Presence of Kitsch in Contemporary Religious Sp

2019 ◽  
Vol ENGLISH EDITION (1) ◽  
pp. 189-201
Author(s):  
Beata Skrzydlewska
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Art History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Sacred Art ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Art Works ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

The study is the attempt to identify the sources of the kitsch phenomenon in contemporary religious art in Poland. The main subject of the study regards church interiors, particularly art works present in the sacred spaces of the Catholic church in Poland. The analysis, which does not include the notion of kitsch or other aspects of this problem, will be presented from the point of view of a person who has been scientifically and practically engaged in the protection of religious art monuments for years. Observations made during the implementation of projects for church museums, providing advice on the monument protection, as well as didactic work as a lecturer of art history in clerical seminaries prompted me to reflect on the level of Polish sacred art and its significance for the reception of the message of the Church.

scholarly journals “There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Webster
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
National Community ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1950S

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.

Sacred and profane: Pastoral care in the parish church

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Varnam
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Wall Paintings ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
Church Art ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This chapter argues that the profane challenge posed by lay misbehaviour and sacrilege in the church paradoxically strengthens sacred space. Sermon exempla from the literature of pastoral care (e.g. Mirk’s Festial, Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne) show how devils and demons assist in the cleansing of the church from profane contamination and the chapter argues for the integral relationship between violence and the sacred, focusing on the punishment of sinners and on the sacrificial blood of Christ, depicted in lyrics and wall paintings. The chapter reassesses the relationship between church art and sermon exempla and argues for a symbiotic relationship that presents the material church and its devotional objects as living, breathing actors in the drama of salvation. The performance of narrative exempla animates the visual depictions of angels, devils, and saints in the church who come to life to protect and fight for their sacred spaces.

Public Reading and the Civil War Draft Lottery

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-30
Author(s):  
Colleen Glenney Boggs
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Draft Lottery ◽  
And Function

Establishing a methodology for the book as a whole, this first chapter argues that the draft connected the abstractly political and concretely biopolitical via acts of public reading that occurred at the site of the draft lottery, when names were drawn that were then further disseminated in print. A popular literary trope, reading the names generated a citizenry that could be individuated (to the level of the subject) and function as a collective (generate populations), with the draft operating as an important hinge between these two scales of biopower. The draft lottery and its depictions in images and poetry, including Herman Melville’s, formed an assemblage that connected embodied with imagined communities and linked American lives to national ideology. Wartime print periodicals did not merely report on but actively participated in practices of public reading that drew on a range of gestures to facilitate military subject formations.

The Paradox of Black Citizenship

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christen A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
State Terror ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
The City

This chapter discusses the politics of citizenship, blackness, and exclusion in Bahia, taking up the question of Afro-nationalism. It argues that black people confront visible and invisible human walls in their everyday attempts to access resources and dignity in the city, and these walls are often subtle, elusive, and guileful. The police and other residents tasked with maintaining security act as a border patrol that delineates the boundaries of the moral racial social order. Spatial practices of race performatively and theatrically press the black body to the margins of national belonging. Through these embodied practices, the state produces national frontiers of belonging along the cartographic lines of a racial hierarchy. The maintenance of racial democracy as a national ideology depends on the diffuse, mundane repetitions of violence in states, cities, and neighborhoods as well as the more spectacular moments of state terror that we associate with police violence.

scholarly journals Inscriptions in the Artistic Structure of the Items of Medieval Silversmiths. Works of Church Art from Tikhvin in the State Russian Museum

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-493
Author(s):  
Anna A. Makarova ◽  
◽  
Olga V. Klukanova ◽  
Nadezhda V. Pivovarova ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Applied Art ◽  
Art Works ◽  
State Museum ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Technical Features ◽  
Church Art ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Made In

The article presents the results of studying inscribed and dated objects of applied art of the 16th–17th century from the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The subject of the research is the set of church plates from the monasteries of the Dormition of Our Lady and the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in Tikhvin and the precious tsata from the Tikhvin icon of the Mother of God (Stockholmskaya) from the Tikhvin Cathedral of the Transfiguration. In 1928, the items were given to the State Russian Museum from the department of ecclesiastical property of the State Museum fund. The majority of these items were made in the Moscow workshops. The study provided an opportunity to identify the items fabricated by Tikhvin silversmiths. The authors analyze the iconography, style, structural and technical features of a number of art works including liturgical vessels, a church lamp and several altar Gospels. The study substantiates new attributions of the chalice and the church lamp from the Cathedral of Dormition of Our Lady. Attention is given to the inscriptions on the items. The authors examine the specifics of the forms of inscriptions and cite new data on the donors such as Ivan Nikitich Romanov, Ivan Ivanovich Shuiskii and the Mikhalkov family.

scholarly journals Problems of Digital Perceiving and Preservation of Living Cultural Heritage in Bulgarian Christian Religious Practices

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-171
Author(s):  
Liana Galabova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Value ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Direct Transmission ◽  
Heritage Preservation ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Cultural Interpretation ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Church Life ◽  
Church Art

Contemporary technological mediation of the perceiving of Christian religious practices raises new questions of cultural interpretation, related to re-conceptualisation of participation in church life and belonging to Bulgarian traditional confessions. Unpopularity of cultural value of documenting of living religious heritage creates polemics about the opportunity of photographing and filming in sacred spaces, exposing of observed church events in media and direct transmission from sacral sites also during creation of church art and practicing of other religious rituals. Therefore attempts to balance ethnic, confessional and liturgical dimensions with tourist and public interests in accordance to global development of that discussion and potential effects of stability or instability of emerging new traditions, deserve scholarly attention. Keywords: Digitalisation, Living Heritage, Christianity, Religious Practices, Heritage Perceiving, Heritage Preservation, Church Arts

scholarly journals A digital territory to be appropriated: the state and the nationalization of cyberspace

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Thanos Koulos
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Internet ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Basic Proposition ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Government Websites ◽  
Globalized World ◽  
Production Mechanisms ◽  
Or History

Next to land, water, air and space, cyberspace is the complex socio-technical setting often called the ‘fifth domain’. Nationalism has taken over the organization of the first four domains, in the form of constructing national states, national territorial waters and national airspace. The basic proposition of this article is that the ideology of nationalism has also infiltrated the fifth domain – cyberspace – in two ways. First, through state-led cyber-nationalism via official government websites that present ‘national’ achievements and propagate the official state positions on disputes about territory, symbols or history. Second, through individual communities who use the internet to sustain a sense of national belonging and/or to promote and disseminate their nationalist ideals. Both ways are important in an online national identity (re)production framework that, in a fluid, global, modern world, functions supportively towards the traditional national identity (re)production mechanisms. This article aims to examine the patterns of the nationalization of cyberspace through an analysis of state-led institutions and government websites that aim to enhance national identity and the sense of national belonging in a globalized world, as well as to propagate official state positions. It will focus on Greek, Dutch, US and Israeli websites. The term ‘nationalization’ in this context denotes the ideological charging of the cyber-footprint of the nation: how the internet produces and re-produces the nation, how the users partake in the national community by way of ‘consuming’ the digitalized national ideology, and the way cyber-nationalism defines people’s sense of belonging.

CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE POST-COLONY: MUSIC, NATIONALISM AND STATISM IN MALI, 1964–75

Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Thomas Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
National Community ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
First Republic ◽  
State Patronage ◽  
Music Nationalism

ABSTRACTThis article examines the shifting experience of national belonging and state patronage at a crucial juncture in Mali's post-colonial history, the ten-year period that marked the end of the country's First Republic (1960–8) and the beginning of its Second Republic (1968–91). My focus is on the contested politics of culture that characterized this period, elucidated through the experiences and expressions of two popular dance bands, Las Maravillas de Mali and Les Ambassadeurs du Motel. By following the post-colonial careers of Las Maravillas and Les Ambassadeurs I explore social and musical encounters with national community and state authority from which broader questions of political sovereignty and accountability emerge.

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