Art and the Creation of Mexico’s Communist Party, 1919–1930

Author(s):  
Stephanie J. Smith

Chapter 1 focuses on the founding of Mexico’s Communist Party in 1919, and the Party’s links to the influential national and international artistic movement active in Mexico throughout the 1920s. Although during these early years the Party’s official membership numbers remained relatively insignificant, this chapter argues that the extraordinary influence of these creative participants, both female and male, on the politics of the period was far from trivial. Art and politics intertwined as artists played major roles in political affairs, and government officials appropriated the arts to transmit the “official” national history.

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-50
Author(s):  
Maya Nadkarni

This chapter narrates the early years of postsocialist transformation as Hungarians sought to make remake themselves as new national subjects amid the remains of multiple discredited pasts and failed historical trajectories. It explores how politicians, activists, and public officials initially conceptualized the problem of socialist remains in terms of physical remainders perceived to be emblematic of the former regime. Politicians, activists, and public officials battled to “spring clean” remains of the communist past in order to restore Hungary to the “authentic” course of national history. The chapter also focuses on the debates that resulted in the removal of Budapest's socialist-era statues to a Statue Park Museum on the outskirts of the city. Supporters justified the creation of the park as a democratic solution to the outrage that communist monuments inspired. Yet the removal of these statues was not a response to a crisis of defacements and public dissatisfaction, but an attempt to cover up the fact that little such crisis existed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamil Zainaldin

The National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 is the most ambitious piece of cultural legislation in American history. The story of its creation and evolution is a tangled one that continues to the present day. This essay looks at NEH and NEA in their early years, their relations with Congress, and the process by which NEH fostered the invention of humanities-based “State Committees,” significantly different in concept from NEA’s innovation of “State Arts Agencies.” The circumstances that led to the creation of these grassroots programs ultimately changed NEH itself while popularizing the novel terminology and concept of “public” humanities work. The essay concludes with reflections about the time-bound quality of NEH and the State Humanities Councils and considers their sustainability in a new century.


Author(s):  
James Herbert

The call for a separate Research Council for humanities was initially met with unfavourable comment. Although the government eventually announced support for the creation of such a research council, it was only after lengthy deliberations that the Dearing Report recommendations were finally granted, hence creating the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This chapter discusses the early years of the AHRC. During these years, the funding of the ARHC was under the prerogative of the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE). The Funding Council was then initiating new models of funding institutions of higher education and the AHRC was generally given less funding. This neglect of the funding of AHRC discouraged humanities scholars to entail directed research. In 1998, the British Academy through Tony Wrigley asked for additional funds from the HEFCE. Upon the commencement of its official existence, the AHRC with its first chief executive Paul Langford prepared the new Board, planned the creation of the research awards department, and planned the integration of the postgraduate awards section in the British Academy within the overall structure of the new organisation. This new organisation was driven by the goal to improve the breadth and depth of the knowledge and understanding of human culture in the past and in the present and thereby enhance the quality of life and the creative output of the nation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ernest Ming-Tak Leung

This article explores a commonly ignored aspect of Japan–North Korean relations: the Japanese factor in the making of Korean socialism. Korea was indirectly influenced by the Japanese Jiyuminken Movement, in the 1910s–1920s serving as a stepping-stone for the creation of a Japanese Communist Party. Wartime mobilization policies under Japanese rule were continued and expanded beyond the colonial era. The Juche ideology built on tendencies first exhibited in the 1942 Overcoming Modernity Conference in Japan, and in the 1970s some Japanese leftists viewed Juche as a humanist Marxism. Trade between Japan and North Korea expanded from 1961 onwards, culminating in North Korea’s default in 1976, from which point on relations soured between the two countries. Yet leaders with direct experience of colonial rule governed North Korea through to the late 1990s.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-148
Author(s):  
Liuba Zlatkova ◽  

The report describes the steps for creating a musical tale by children in the art studios of „Art Workshop“, Shumen. These studios are led by students volunteers related to the arts from pedagogical department of Shumen University, and are realized in time for optional activities in the school where the child studies. The stages of creating a complete product with the help of different arts are traced – from the birth of the idea; the creation of a fairy tale plot by the children; the characterization of the fairy-tale characters; dressing them in movement, song and speech; creating sets and costumes and creating a finished product to present on stage. The role of parents as a link and a necessary helper for children and leaders is also considered, as well as the positive psychological effects that this cooperation creates.


Author(s):  
Christopher Cullen

We look first at the situation in the early years of the restored Han dynasty. Liu Xin’s system continued in use for more than half a century. Then, in 85 CE, Liu Xin’s system was replaced. We have records of the practical and theoretical grounds on which the old system was rejected, and of the creation and implementation of a new system. Next we follow the story of how c. 92 CE Jia Kui advocated a fundamental innovation in both theory and practice: he insisted on the ecliptic as being central to astronomical observation and calculation. The richness of records from this period makes it easy to tell a detailed story of technical innovation in its fullest context, leading up to the work of Zhang Heng (78–139 CE), for whom astronomical calculation was just one of several fields in which he gained a reputation for exceptional originality.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.


Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

This chapter explores the international and interdisciplinary backdrop of Lincoln Kirstein’s efforts to form an American ballet in the early 1930s. The political, economic, and cultural conditions of the Depression reinvigorated the search for an “American” culture. In this context, new openings for a modernist theory of ballet were created as intellectuals and artists from a wide range of disciplines endeavored to define the role of the arts in protecting against the dangerous effects of mass culture. Chapter 1 sheds new light on well-known critical debates in dance history between Kirstein and John Martin over whether ballet, with its European roots, could truly become “American” in contrast to modern dance. Was American dance going to be conceived in nationalist or transnationalist terms? That was the deeper conflict that underlay the ballet vs. modern dance debates of the early 1930s.


Richard Nichols, The Diaries of Robert Hooke, The Leonardo of London, 1635-1703 . Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 1994, Pp. 185, £15.00. ISBN 0- 86332-930-6. Richard Nichols is a science master turned historian of science who celebrates in this book Robert Hooke’s contributions to the arts and sciences. The appreciation brings together comments from Hooke’s Diaries , and other works, on each of his main enterprises, and on his personal interaction with each of his principal friends and foes. Further references to Hooke and his activities are drawn from Birch’s History of the Royal Society, Aubrey’s Brief Lives , and the Diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys. The first section of the book, ‘Hooke the Man’, covers his early years of education at home in Freshwater, at Westminster school and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he soon joined the group of experimental philosophers who set him up as Curator of the Royal Society and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, Bishopsgate. Hooke’s domestic life at Gresham College is described - his intimate relationships with a series of housekeepers, including his niece, Grace Hooke, and his social life at the College and in the London coffee houses.


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