Topography of Post-Soviet Nationalism: The Provinces—the Capital—the West

Slavic Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 508-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Parts
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Postimperial Identity ◽  
Soviet Nationalism ◽  
High Literature

The cultural myth of the provinces provides the contemporary cultural elite with a semiotic apparatus for formulating Russia's new, postimperial identity. Today, cultural production locates true Russianness outside newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow. In mass culture, the traditional privileging of the center over the backward provinces gives way to the view of the provinces as a repository of national tradition and moral strength. Conversely, high literature and art-house films provide an alternative, harshly critical image of them. In both cases, a particular concept of Russianness is negotiated, one in which the provinces play a central role. Ultimately, both redirect nationalist discourse away from the deeply unsatisfying model of Russia versus the west and instead offer a hermetic national identity based on an “us versus us,” rather than “us versus them,” model.

The Language of Adam, Epistemic Crisis, and the “Radical Truths” of John Dee

2021 ◽  
pp. 161-173
Author(s):  
Anton V. Karabykov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Traditional Epistemology ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
Linguistic Material

The life and work of John Dee (1527–1608/9), an English mathematician, eru­dite and occultist, remains an enigma that gives rise to intensive controversies, puzzles scholars, and nourishes imagination of mass culture makers. The aim of the article is to consider a magical practice of the late Dee and a unique narrative recorded in his diaries, in a context of the intellectual situation of that epoch. The analysis is concentrated on a role of those practice and narrative in dialectics of the search for the perfect language which took place in the West in 15th–17th cc. A technical facet of crystallomancy and its standing in the Renaissance culture as well as conditions and motives urging Dee to invest his years in practicing the magic of that kind. A special attention is paid to the course and results of re­vealing of the primordial tongue by the ‘angels’ and to the Adamic myth that accompanied the linguistic material and informed of substance, functions, and historical fate of Ursprache. It is argued that despite its reprehensibility crystal­lomancy took a relatively high cultural status and a wide spreading. Dee became its convinced adept due to a deep inner crisis caused by eschatological anxiety, collapse of traditional epistemology, and discontent with his previous intellectual initiatives. As spirits claimed, the language that they were imparting to him con­nected the protoplasts with God and angels in Eden and served Adam as a per­fect instrument of knowledge and magic. Explaining his lasting failure of com­prehending of the revealed language the spirits persuaded Dee that it was not time yet for activation of its potencies but that it was very near though known only to God. That time had never come in the magician’s life. Nonetheless, glad­ness of (seeming) communication with the ‘angels’ compensated for bitterness of futile expectations.

Transit to East Germany: The Distribution and Reception of Once Upon a Time in the West in the German Democratic Republic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Stott
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Business Professionals ◽  
The West ◽  
Nation States

This chapter examines the relocation, transition, and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western in a hitherto under-researched context: the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), prior to its unification with the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1990. It explores the selection, distribution and reception of Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968) in the German Democratic Republic as a case study of how international cultural transfer causes objects of cultural production to be repositioned as they enter a new reception context. It also examines the ideological, economic, and sociological concerns underpinning the decisions of those who facilitated the movement of film across the political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries of nation states. In East Germany, the facilitators involved in the selection, censorship, dubbing, and promotion of films were mainly government administrators rather than film business professionals, because film was a state-controlled industry. The chapter focuses on the ‘official’ reception of the film on the basis of available censorship protocols and government policy papers, as well as print media sources.

Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-213
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
The Great Depression

Chapter 4 begins at the point at which the Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘readies’ project supposedly failed: after the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology was published in 1931. Featuring experimental texts by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others, the readies project has hitherto been considered one of many modernist casualties of the Great Depression. This chapter finally reveals its full story, and details how Rose Brown led the development of a new working reading machine in the 1930s and beyond. Anthology contributors including James T. Farrell, Norman MacLeod and the Browns had begun to chart a course beyond the binary orbits of dour social realism and ‘ivory-tower’ aestheticism. The chapter combines new readings of these American super-realist writers with extensive archival research using a meta-formational approach, which relies on (rather than is undermined by) different disciplinary approaches to cultural production. Reconstructing the Browns’ journey from the rural labour institute Commonwealth College to the Polytechnic Museums of Russia – from the burgeoning microfilm industry in New York City to their plantation in Brazil – it reveals how the Browns’ proletarian class politics and Veblenist technicities articulate a sustained and dialogic engagement between modernist vanguards and mass culture.

The Populist Palatial

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-218
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Music Hall

This chapter explores the West End music hall, which drew on a heterogeneous audience, drawing all classes in for a smart night out. The argument is that we can observe a cultural style that is called here the ‘populist palatial’, which the West End helped propagate. This meant flattering audiences through spectacular buildings and high profile performers. The chapter looks in particular at the London Pavilion music hall on Piccadilly Circus and at two music hall stars: Jenny Hill and the Great MacDermott. Music hall gave women a voice allowing them to be comedians and the source of knowing humour. MacDermott was associated with music hall jingoism and patriotism. West End music hall expressed something of the liberating set of emotions that urban mass culture released.

scholarly journals ‘Art is my language’: Afghan cultural production challenging Islamophobic stereotypes

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Bilquis Ghani ◽  
Lucy Fiske
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
The West ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Afghan Women ◽  
In Transit

Afghans and Afghanistan have, since September 11, risen to prominence in Western popular imagination as a land of tradition, tribalism and violence. Afghan women are assumed to be silent, submissive, and terrorised by Afghan men, who are seen as violent patriarchs driven by an uncompromising mediaeval religion. These Islamophobic tropes also inform perceptions of Afghans seeking asylum. In transit, identities are further reduced; asylum seekers lose even a national identity and become a Muslim threat – criminals, terrorists or invaders. These narrative frames permeate political discourse, media, and reports of non-governmental organisations (seeking donor funds to ‘save’ Afghan women). Drawing on fieldwork in Afghanistan and Indonesia, this article looks at how Afghans in Kabul and Indonesia are using art and other forms of cultural production to challenge over-simplified hegemonic narratives in the West, to open spaces for dialogue and expression within their own communities, and to offer a more nuanced account of their own identities.

Between Others and Brothers

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-588
Author(s):  
Michelle U. Campos
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Education System ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The West ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Identity Based

Some fifteen years ago, the Israel Museum exhibition “To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel” featured a photograph by the Israeli artist Meir Gal entitled “Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest.” At the center of the photograph was Gal, holding the nine pages that dealt with the history of Jews in the Middle East in a textbook of Jewish history used in Israel's education system. As Gal viscerally argued, “these books helped establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering.” More damningly, he wrote that “the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their origins, and replaced their Jewish-Arab identity with a new Israeli identity based on European ideals as well as hatred of the Arab world.”

scholarly journals Transformations and Mutations of the Chinese Language Publishing Field in the Digital Age

MANUSYA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-112
Author(s):  
Yu-Ching Lee
Keyword(s):  
Business Model ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Value Chain ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Digital Publishing ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
The West

In the traditional publishing arena, the publishing fields around the world all operate according to a fixed value chain system, which has been in operation ever since the existence of the publishing industry over 500 years. Now the publishing industry is going through a transition period toward digitization, which has overwhelmed not only the entire system but the entire publishing field. In this digital age, publishing houses in the West have carried on with their conventional model of value chains and have established a comprehensive digital publishing system. But in Chinesespeaking regions, due to factors such as market traits, consumer reading habits, publishing policies and consumption habits which are vastly different from those in the West, the Western system of digital publishing is not applicable. This study analyzes the Chinese language publishing field by interviewing Cross- Straits publishing experts. The aim is to examine the differences between the publishing structure of Chinese-speaking regions (specifically mainland China and Taiwan), the typical publishing field in the West, and the traditional paper-based publishing field which has existed for hundreds of years. The result shows that Taiwan follows the Western e-publishing model. However, because of the differences in market size and reading habits, the e-publishing model is not applicable in Taiwan. China, on the other hand, has developed its own system called “Internet Literature” in accordance with readers’ reading preferences and habits. Moreover, this model uses the intellectual property to extend the value of publications by transforming literature texts into other forms of cultural production. This publishing business model is carried out by big Internet companies such as Tencent, Baidu, rather than by publishers. These mutations of Internet literature content have really challenged the Chinese state-regulated publishing system, and have become the foundations of a successful business model. This development in China has challenged the conventional definition of publishing, as literature has been a symbol of highbrow civilization whereas Internet Literature is more a symbol of uncultured entertainment.

“Dear Friends”: From People’s Cultural Exchange to People’s Cultural Production

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
T Tu Huynh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Belt And Road Initiative ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Belt And Road ◽  
Cultural Subjectivity

Abstract The article explores how the politics of South-South cooperation, namely between Africa and China, play out at the level of cultural subjectivity, implicating modes of affect and identities that are not captured by the more commonly employed binary framework of “friend” or “enemy.” It asks whether it is possible for the Africans and Chinese to imagine each other without the West as its geocultural dominance diminishes; and if so, how is this being made possible? As modes of transmitting and learning, cultural initiatives under the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and “Belt and Road Initiative” provide a window into both people’s understandings of one another. While necessary for building people-to-people relations, the article, relying on an analysis of data collected from Chinese websites, argues that the state-sponsored cultural exchanges largely reify existing racialized ideas of “the African” and Orientalist views of “the Chinese.” However, building on Simbao’s (2019) point about artists’ works that “push back” against dominant discourse, the article further argues and demonstrates through the journey and works of three artists (Chinese, Kenyan, and Ghanaian) that radical imaginaries reflecting the inner states of acting subjects of China-Africa engagements are available in local cultural productions, uncompromising in communicating shared beliefs and posing challenges to power relations on multiple scales.

Interrogating the Cultural Production of Mexico

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
Brian M. Napoletano
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art History ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The West ◽  
Tourist Town ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Del Rio ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas

As part of a deconstruction of national identity, Jennifer Jolly, in her Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas, analyzes the tourist town of Pátzcuaro in the west-central Mexican state of Michoacán as a microcosm of cultural power in which tourism, art, history, and ethnicity were woven together under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–40).

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