Picturing Cuba

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Art History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
American Art ◽  
Defining Moments ◽  
Cuban Art ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
Multidisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Historical Trajectory

This book delves into several defining moments of Cuba’s artistic evolution from a multidisciplinary perspective, including art history, architecture, photography, history, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Situating Cuban art within a wider social and historical context, fifteen prominent scholars and collectors scrutinize the enduring links between Cuban art and cultural identity. Covering the main periods in Cuban art (the colonial, republican, and postrevolutionary phases, as well as the contemporary diaspora), the contributors identify both the constant and changing elements and symbols in the visual representation of Cuba’s national identity. The essays collected in this volume provide insightful information and interpretation on the historical trajectory of Cuban and Cuban-American art. From colonial engravers to contemporary photographers, several generations of Cuban artists have been fascinated—perhaps even obsessed—with picturing Cuba’s landscapes, architecture, people, and customs. Each generation of artists focused on various tropes of Cuban identity, whether it was the tropical environment, the lights and colors of the island, certain human types, the fusion of European and African traditions, or the uprootedness produced by exile and resettlement in another country. Even when artists shed the attempt to represent their subject matter realistically, they sought to contribute to a longstanding national tradition in dialogue with a broader international scenario. The cumulative result of more than three centuries of Cuban art is a kaleidoscopic view of the island’s nature, population, culture, and history.

Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
renée c. hoogland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Art History ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Claude Cahun

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.

On the specfics of postcolonial research in the conetmporary Ukrainian literary studies

2019 ◽  
pp. 446-461
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Baydalova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Science Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modus Vivendi ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude

The postcolonial studies have been under discussion in the Ukrainian historiography, social science, culture studies and literary criticism since 1990 years. They have originated from American, European, and Australian academic studies and became more and more popular in modern Ukrainian culture recently. The nation and the nationalism, Orientalism, multicultural and ambivalent individuality self-presentation, the search of cultural identity, the problem of ambivalent attitude to the past are in the paradigm of postcolonial studies. The problems of national identity, the totalitarian past, the interactions with neighboring countries especially Russia and Poland, the instable Ukrainian society’s condition are analyzed under the postcolonial ideas in the Ukrainian intellectual discourse. The postcolonial theory has become the main interpretative strategy of the Ukrainian researchers lately. Nevertheless, there is no unconditional modus vivendi in the Ukrainian academia about postcolonial conceptions, strategies and principles. One of the most important unsolved issues is the question of correlation of postcolonial and postmodern components of the Ukrainian national literature. The inclusion of the studies of trauma and anticolonial and posttotalitarian discourses into the framework of the postcolonial studies is the most distinguishing feature of postcolonial studies in the Ukraine.

Romantic Capabilities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Contemporary Media

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

scholarly journals A descriptive mode in art and the issue of a representation

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-17
Author(s):  
O. V. Bezzubova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
American Art ◽  
Pictorial Representation ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Visual Culture Studies ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Research

The predominant for XX century art studies tradition was seriously reconsidered during the 1970– 1980s during the so called «new art history» development, when many received concepts were called into question. A notion of descriptiv e mode of painting proposed by an American art historian S. Alpers is of great interest in this context because it allows us to revise the homogeneous development of European art. While elaborating the concept of descriptive mode of painting, Alpers took under consideration a wide range of historical and cultural sources thus contributed to the new research approach nowadays known under the title of visual culture studies. It is not less important that she also focused on the issue of pictorial representation, which inquires the essence of the work of art.

scholarly journals Book Review: Reading Harper Lee: Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 267
Author(s):  
Arianne A. Hartsell-Gundy
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Harper Lee

Reading Harper Lee: Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman by Claudia Durst Johnson is meant to assist students studying the work of Harper Lee by providing context for her life and work and examining key topics such as race, class, and gender. It functions in some ways as an update to Johnson’s Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents (Greenwood, 1994) since it includes analysis of Go Set A Watchman. Rather than being a replacement for the 1994 reference work, it functions as a great complement for a student studying Harper Lee. While Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird provides numerous primary documents to help a student understand the historical context, Reading Harper Lee provides a more concise analysis of themes, which potentially makes it more accessible to a student new to literary criticism.

THE TEMPEST AND THE BRITISH IMPERIUM IN 1611

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
TRISTAN MARSHALL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Proper Context

Recent moves by New Historicists to evaluate theatrical material from the early modern period have been at the expense of what historians would recognize as acceptable use of historical context. One of the most glaring examples of the dangers of taking a play out of such a proper context has been The Tempest. The play has had a great deal of literary criticism devoted to it, attempting to fit it into comfortable twentieth-century clothing in regard to its commentary on empire, at the expense of what the play's depiction of imperialism meant for the year 1611 when it was written. The purpose of this paper will therefore be to suggest that the play does not actually call into question the Jacobean process of colonization across the Atlantic at all, and suggests that of more importance for its audience would have been the depiction of the hegemony of the island nation of Great Britain as recreated in 1603. Such a historical reconstruction is helped through contrasting Shakespeare's play with the Jonson, Chapman, and Marston collaboration, Eastward Ho, as well as with the anonymous Masque of Flowers and Chapman's Memorable Masque. These works will be used to illustrate just what colonialism might mean for the Jacobean audience when the Virginia project was invoked and suggest that an American tale The Tempest is not.

An Iskandarnāma of Nizami Produced for Ibrahim Sultan

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lâle Uluç
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Visual Data ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Basic Task ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This paper introduces a copy of the Iskandarnāma of Nizami dated 1435 and dedicated to the Timurid prince Ibrahim Sultan, grandson of the eponymous founder of the Timurid dynasty. It discusses the various features of the manuscript together with comparable examples from the same period, and also focuses on Abu al-Fath Ibrahim Sultan ibn Shah Rukh and his role as both a military leader and a patron of the arts during his tenure as the governor of the provinces of Fars, Kirman, and Luristan (1414–35). Utilizing the visual data together with the historical context of the period, this essay interprets one of the illustrations of the Iskandarnāma, hoping to fulfill what David Summers called “the most basic task of art history,” which he says “is to explain why works of art look the way they look.” The addition of this Iskandarnāma manuscript to the surviving corpus of works that can be connected to Ibrahim Sultan will provide a further insight into the important patronage of this Timurid prince.

The total archive: Data, subjectivity, universality

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Jardine ◽  
Matthew Drage
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
World Health ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Archive Data

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Raw, roast or half-baked? Hogarth’s beef in Calais Gate

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piers Beirne
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Art History ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Species ◽  
The Political ◽  
Green Criminology ◽  
Repressed Memory ◽  
Roast Beef

Scholars of human–animal studies, literary criticism and art history have paid considerable attention of late to how the visual representation of nonhuman animals has often and sometimes to great effect been used in the imagining of national identity. It is from the scrutinies of these several disciplines that the broad backcloth of this article is woven. Its focus is the neglected coupling of patriotism and carnism, instantiated here by its deployment in William Hogarth’s painting Calais Gate (1749). A pro-animal reading is offered of the English artist’s exhortation that it is in the nature of ‘true-born Britons’ to consume a daily dish of roast beef served with lashings of francophobia and anti-popery. The article suggests that alert contemporary viewers of Calais Gate would nevertheless have noticed that Hogarth’s painterly triumphalism ironically rekindles the repressed memory of English military defeat and territorial loss. Because the political and religious borders between England and France were so easily defaced and refaced, the accompanying air of uncertainty over national identity would also have infiltrated the perceived authenticity of English roast beef. The article draws on animal rights theory, on nonspeciesist green criminology and on green visual criminology in order to oppose the historical dominance of human interests over those of other animal species in discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm.

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