Escape to Germany in Syrian Television Drama: From Cross-Cultural Gender Constructions to Transnational Tropes of Masculinity and Homeland

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-447
Author(s):  
Rebecca Joubin ◽  
Sophia Nissler

Looking at programs from the 1960s onward, this article shows the persistence and evolution of the gender imbalance in Syrian television characters' relationships with Germany. Before the 2011 uprising, screenwriters linked women charac ters to Germany as a way to challenge patriarchal standards of sexuality and gendered conceptions of national belonging. As the war has ensued, this trope has vanished. Meanwhile, long-standing narratives about men emigrating to Germany continue to represent abandonment of the homeland and have become intensified through nationalist nostalgia.

Sociologija ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dusan Mojic

The paper deals with the most important contributions in studying cultural influences on organizations. The interest of social scientists in this topic began in the 1960s, based on the belief that it was necessary to overcome the dominant parochialism of US researchers in organizational theory and practice. Increasing internationalization of business activities, especially in the 1970s, imposed the need for large-scale studies and for finding practical solutions to the completely new problems encountered by multicultural organizations whose number was constantly rising. In spite of numerous and serious difficulties in every cross-cultural organizational study, several decades of development in this field have produced important theoretical and empirical contributions, enabling further advances in this scientific and practical discipline.


1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh ◽  
Stephen Lacey

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.


Author(s):  
Sabine Dabringhaus

China’s minority policy after 1949 combined the Qing legacy with a socialist affirmative strategy. The concept of a multiethnic Chinese state derived from Qing ideology and policy in the 18th century, when the Qianlong emperor realized his vision of universal rulership by expanding the Qing empire deep into Central Asia. During the nation-building period of the first half of the 20th century, the imperial geobody was reconstituted as a Sinocentric and multiethnic nation-state. Ideological rivals the Guomindang and the Communist Party both pursued hegemonic strategies of national unity by constructing a new myth of national belonging firmly rooted in history. But China’s weak international position and the internal crisis of the Republican state prevented the implementation of any territorial concept of national unity. In the People’s Republic of China, ethnic diversity was restructured according to a majority-minority dichotomy. Historical multiculturalism was reduced to fifty-six rigid minzu “containers” defined by strictly applied criteria of language, religion, and customs. The minorities were integrated into the unitary Chinese nation and granted only regional autonomy. Although the autonomous regions produced expectations of belonging among their titular nationalities, the official minority policy was strongly assimilationist in the 1960s and 1970s, generating centrifugal forces of ethnic resistance. Since the 1990s, a popular nationalism stoked by the central government has been expanding into a broader sense of Chineseness in a globalizing world.


2005 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lez Cooke

In recent years, American television drama series have been celebrated as ‘quality television’ at the expense of their British counterparts, yet in the 1970s and 1980s British television was frequently proclaimed to be ‘the best television in the world’. This article will consider this critical turnaround and argue that, contrary to critical opinion, the last few years have seen the emergence of a ‘new wave’ in British television drama, comparable in its thematic and stylistic importance to the new wave that emerged in British cinema and television in the early 1960s. While the 1960s new wave was distinctive for its championing of a new working-class realism, the recent ‘new wave’ is more heterogeneous, encompassing drama series such as This Life, Cold Feet, The Cops, Queer as Folk, Clocking Off and Shameless. While the subject-matter of these dramas is varied, collectively they share an ambition to ‘reinvent’ British television drama for a new audience and a new cultural moment.


Author(s):  
Simeon Man

This chapter examines the Vietnam War through the lens of South Korea and the Philippines and their respective nation-building projects in the 1960s. It demonstrates how the two countries’ efforts to modernize their national economies dovetailed with and were dependent on their participation in the U.S. war. As the two governments mobilized their citizens for war, they generated discourses of gendered national belonging and racial intimacy with the Vietnamese that obscured their complicity with U.S. imperialism. The chapter further argues that the Vietnam War functioned as an engine of subempire for South Korea and the Philippines, that is, the relations of violence that were necessitated by the two countries’ incorporation into the capitalist world system. The chapter ends by examining the emergent counterpublics in South Korea and the Philippines that challenged their governments’ complicity in the war and their narrowed conception of citizenship and economic development.


1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-62
Author(s):  
David Goble ◽  
Ann Knowles

AbstractWhile there has been much concern over television’s influence on children, few studies have investigated the way young children and adults differ in their ability to distinguish the behaviour of “good” and “bad” television characters. The present study investigated the extent to which preschool children, primary school students, and adults differed in their interpretations of the actions of a stereotypically good and a stereotypically bad character. An edited television drama programme was examined for comprehension and for the extent to which children and adults differed in their belief that the characters in the programme were real. Preschool children were found to evaluate characters similarly to adults, although significant differences were evident in their comprehension of the programme and their judgement of the reality of the television content.


Author(s):  
JOÃO DE PINA-CABRAL

Charles Boxer's Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825, which came out nearly half a century ago, has found a readership beyond the circle of those interested in the history of Portuguese overseas expansion. Boxer was perfectly conscious, as he produced it, of the impact his essay would have. He found in the discourse of race an instrument of mediation that allowed him to continue to develop his favoured topics of research in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The response to Boxer's book points to the highly charged atmosphere that continues to surround all debates concerning ‘race’ and, in particular, those that compare North American notions of race with those that can be observed elsewhere in the world. This chapter attempts to shed new light on what caused such a longstanding cross-cultural misinterpretation.


Anthropology ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Beatty

Psychological anthropology is the study of psychological topics using anthropological concepts and methods. Among the areas of interest are personal identity, selfhood, subjectivity, memory, consciousness, emotion, motivation, cognition, madness, and mental health. Considered thus, hardly a topic in the anthropological mainstream does not offer grist for the analytical mill. Like economic or political anthropology, psychological anthropology can be seen as a perspective on the social as well as being a subfield of the broader discipline. The overlap in subject matter with the related discipline of psychology is obvious, but the approach, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and comparativism, is usually quite different. Moreover, as a reflexive endeavor, psychological anthropology shines a light not only on the cultural vehicles of thought (language, symbolism, the body) but also on the concepts we use to think about those means. Psychological anthropologists are concerned, for example, not merely with emotional practices in diverse cultures (what angers people? how do they express it?), but in the shape and cross-cultural validity of the concept of emotion. To the ethnographic question, “How do the Nuaulu classify animals?” they add, “How is their classification structured and what does that structure reveal about broader processes of cognition?” Some of the basic categories of psychology—self, mind, emotion—turn out, in cross-cultural perspective, to be less self-evident, less transparently objective than expected. While rough equivalents can often be found in other linguistic traditions, the scholar soon finds that English (or French or Malay) is not a neutral inventory of psychological universals. Comparison can be corrosive of confidence. And perhaps more than in other subfields, in psychological anthropology there is a full spectrum from the hard scientific to the soft interpretive. Indeed, a divergence between a scientific, positivist psychology—confident in its categories and methods, bent on universals—and a relativist, meaning-oriented, often doubt-ridden constructionism is one of the productive tensions that animate inquiry. Until recently, the subfield has fared very differently on either side of the Atlantic. With some exceptions, anthropologists in Britain and France until at least the 1960s pursued strongly sociological or structuralist agendas unsympathetic to psychological anthropology. American anthropologists, with their broader conception of culture and interest in individual experience, led the way with culture and personality studies, a diverse body of work that has a recent reinvention in person-centered anthropology. Parallel endeavors in psychoanalytic anthropology and cognitive anthropology drew on different intellectual traditions. These complementary, sometimes rival, approaches span and crosscut in surprising ways the scientific-humanistic division that characterizes anthropology generally. Psychiatric anthropology has, from the beginning, formed an important strand of psychological anthropology besides having some overlap with medical anthropology.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Smart

Bertolt Brecht's dramaturgy was as influential upon the development of British drama on television between the 1950s and the 1970s as it was in the theatre. His influence was made manifest through the work of writers, directors and producers such as Tony Garnett, Ken Loach, John McGrath and Dennis Potter, whose attempts to create original Brechtian forms of television drama were reflected in the frequent reference to Brecht in contemporary debate concerning the political and aesthetic direction and value of television drama. While this discussion has been framed thus far around how Brechtian techniques and theory were applied to the newer media of television, this article examines these arguments from another perspective. Through detailed analysis of a 1964 BBC production of The Life of Galileo, I assess how the primary, canonical sources of Brecht's stage plays were realised on television during this period, locating Brecht's drama in the wider context of British television drama in general during the 1960s and 1970s. I pay particular attention to the use of the television studio as a site that could replicate or reinvent the theatrical space of the stage, and the responsiveness of the television audience towards Brechtian dramaturgy.


Author(s):  
Iain Robert Smith

In 1974, producer Hulki Saner hired acclaimed director Metin Erksan to direct an unofficial remake of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). The resultant film, ?eytan, took the plot, characters and set-pieces from the prior film and translated them into a predominantly Islamic setting. This process of intercultural dialogue exemplifies Yesilçam, a cycle of low-budget cinema from Turkey that flourished throughout the 1960s and 1970s in which elements of Western popular culture were being borrowed and remoulded into the Turkish context. Drawing on Tom O’Regan’s model of cultural exchange and transmission, this article seeks to build a model of intercultural dialogue attendant to the underlying tensions and negotiations within this hybridised cultural text, an issue of particular contemporary resonance at a time when the EU is proposing 2008 as the ‘Year of Intercultural Dialogue’ and Turkey is itself in talks over its accession to the EU. Building upon that oft used model of Istanbul as a ‘cultural bridge’ between East and West, this article shall examine how Turkish cinema of the 1970s drew upon and appropriated elements from US popular culture. While ?eytan has been dismissed by some cultural commentators as derivative plagiarism, this article argues for a more nuanced model of cross-cultural exchange based around dialogue and interaction, attendant to the interstitial relationships through which cultures meet and interact.


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