Modernity, Nationalism, and Civilizing the Arts

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
Banu Karaca
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Art World ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
The Arts ◽  
German Art

Unsettling narratives on the purported alterity of Turkey and Germany, Chapter 1 discusses parallels and differences in German (1871) and Turkish nation-building (1923) and the role of art in claiming modern nationhood. It examines tropes of Turkey’s “belated modernity” and Germany’s Sonderweg as two discourses of exceptionalism that have significantly shaped the art world and asks what these tropes reveal and obscure. The young Turkish republic witnessed an enthusiastic embrace of artistic modernism, as Ottoman art was deemed unfit for the modern nation-state. In contrast, Germany officially decried modernism as decidedly “un-German.” It was only in the 1950s that the Federal Republic adopted explicitly occidental cultural policies to overcome longstanding anti-western and anti-modernist currents as part of its post-WWII rehabilitation. How can one explain the persisting asymmetry in the perception of Turkish and German art, given that Turkey’s attempt to align itself with Western modernity by rationalizing artistic expression in the 1920s predates West-Germany’s shift to occidental cultural policies that were only established after 1945? The controversies surrounding “national art” and continued anxieties regarding modern belonging discussed in this chapter show how ideas of modernity and civility remain indebted to processes of violence that art must always disavow.

Modernism and American Ballet

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Economic

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.

Creational Aesthetics and the Challenge of Conceptual Art

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 663-673
Author(s):  
Steven Félix-Jäger
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
Theological Aesthetics ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Essential Form ◽  
God's Image

A trend in theological aesthetics is to advocate for a “creational aesthetic” when discussing the ontology and calling of the artist. In its essential form, a creational aesthetic affirms that artists honor the Creator God by creating art. In some way artists are functioning as God’s image when they make art. While this view is popular in the Christian engagement of the arts, it is uncertain if such an observation is the preeminent way of understanding the role of the artist. Can one be considered an artist if s/he is removed from the tactile process of making? In the contemporary art world, the role of the artist in visual art has come into question with a stronger emphasis on conceptuality, over and against construction. In this article I argue for an alternate way of understanding creational aesthetics that makes room for conceptuality in art.

scholarly journals The Artist and Politics (1954)

ARTMargins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-126
Author(s):  
Bülent Ecevit
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
The State ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Art World ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Political Modernization ◽  
Turkish Society ◽  
Newspaper Articles

This essay analyzes three polemic newspaper articles written in the early 1950s by the art critic, gallerist, and future Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006), “Artistic Awakening in Ankara” (1953), “The Artist and Politics” (1954), and “The Burden of the Intellectual” (1956). It argues that Ecevit's articles document a local intelligentsia's efforts to theorize the role of art in Turkish society at a crucial moment of political transformation. As Turkey abandoned its authoritarian past in order to conduct its inaugural experiment with multi-party democracy, Ecevit's columns took up two of the period's most pressing questions: the extent to which the state should control the local art world, and in what ways Turkey's newly enfranchised citizens might enact their individual rights within the realm of culture. The essay also demonstrates the importance of these three articles to Ecevit's subsequent political and intellectual trajectory: they were central to his lifelong efforts to continue the progressive social and political modernization project of the early Turkish Republic, while developing new forums for its critique, reinterpretation, and reinvigoration.

scholarly journals The Global Diffusion of Work-Injury Insurance: The Role of Spatial Networks and Nation Building

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nate Breznau ◽  
Felix Lanver
Keyword(s):  
Social Insurance ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Spatial Proximity ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Spatial Networks ◽  
Work Injury ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Modern Welfare State ◽  
Nation State Formation

Work-injury law often marks the beginning of the modern welfare state. We argue that work-injury insurance is particularly important to nation state building: it placates myriad social groups’ while binding them symbiotically with the state. We analyze any first laws and first social insurance as outcomes in 150 states (1880-2010). Our network diffusion and event history models reveal that spatial proximity and democratization are key predictors of first laws. However, nation state formation and trade density are additional predictors of social insurance. We conclude with these findings’ implications for understanding nation building within global networks.

scholarly journals Whose game is this? An overview at the role of football in the construction of national identity

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Ivan Đorđević
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Transitional Country ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Ideal

In this paper I will consider the ways in which national identity is constructed through football, by analyzing different case studies foremost in the countries of Western Europe which are, in public narratives, signified as “developed”. I will attempt to point out the fact that, despite the weakening of the prerogative of the nation-state, the identity which refers to such a state is still strong, and that football is one of those cultural elements though which such identification is encouraged and supported. On the other hand, through analyzing the “nation building” through football project in countries which, supposedly represent the ideal for a transitional country like Serbia, in both the economic and political sense, it is my intent to point out that the ideology of nationalism and its instrumentalization in the media, such as that given in the examples, is by no means locally specific nor connected to so-called “insufficiently modernized societies”, where this term, in itself has the ideological weight in context – that we could thus refer to certain societies as “enough” or “completely” modernized. On the contrary, these models, more or less, function the same way everywhere, only they are historically determined, and greatly dependent on momentary power relations, or that which the dominant discourse in continual hegemonic struggles defines as the desirable image of “nation”, “economy” or anything else.

Nation Building

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-60
Author(s):  
Yael Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Administrative Service ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
The Way

This chapter investigates what makes nations so powerful and special. It presents two reasons that come to mind: one obvious the other unexpected. The obvious one is institutional and relates to the alliance between the nation and the state. The unexpected, more surprising, reason concerns the fact that the very same features that make nations attractive allies of the modern state — namely, being natural, historical, and continuous entities — are mostly fabricated. The chapter also explores the way nationalism shaped the modern state and provided it with tools necessary to turn from an administrative service into a caring entity that takes on itself not merely the role of a neutral coordinator but also that of a compassionate and attentive mother(land). Ultimately, the chapter examines the social and political outcomes of the lean state and ponders whether some of the advantages of the nation-state could be recovered.

FROM ‘MIGRANTS’ TO ‘REFUGEES’: IDENTITY, AID, AND DECOLONIZATION IN NGARA DISTRICT, TANZANIA

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
JILL ROSENTHAL
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Nation State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nation State Formation ◽  
Local Narratives ◽  
International Aid Agencies

AbstractThis article argues that international aid to Rwandan refugees in Ngara district during decolonization unfolded as part of a broader project of nation-state formation and regulation – one that deeply affected local narratives of community and belonging. While there is an extensive scholarship on decolonization and nationalism, we know less about the history of the nation-state as a refugee-generating project, and the role of international aid agencies therein. The history of Rwandan refugees in Ngara district, Tanzania, reveals the constitutive relationship between nation-building and refugee experiences, illustrating that during decolonization local political imaginations congealed around internationally-reified categorizations of the ‘refugee’ and the ‘citizen’.

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