Hong Kong Cantopop

Author(s):  
Yiu-Wai Chu

Cantopop, the most representative genre of Hong Kong popular music, is a major part of the popular cultural phenomenon of Hong Kong. Once the leading pop genre of Chinese popular music across the world, Cantopop has a history that needs to be written, which is especially important for the present and the future of Hong Kong, a city whose citizens have been witnessing the decline of not only its popular cultures but also core values. Toward this end this book aims to contribute the first full-length study of Hong Kong Cantopop in English. First, the book offers a critical account of the development of Hong Kong Cantopop in a readable style. Second, it is useful for refreshing English-speaking readers’ understanding of Cantopop and its cultural and social significance. Third, it provides insight into the issue of local culture widely discussed in the relevant debates in the field of cultural studies. This book shows how the rise of Cantopop is related to an upsurge of Hong Kong culture in general, and how its decline since the 1990s is connected to changes in the music industry as well as geopolitical landscape. As such, this book is not only a concise history of Cantopop but also of Hong Kong culture.

Author(s):  
Sharon Hecker

Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) is one of the most original and influential figures in the history of modern art, and this book is the first historically substantiated critical account of his life and work. An innovative sculptor, photographer, and draftsman, Rosso was vital in paving the way for the transition from the academic forms of sculpture that persisted in the nineteenth century to the development of new and experimental forms in the twentieth century. His antimonumental, antiheroic work reflected alienation in the modern experience yet showed deep feeling for interactions between self and other. Rosso's art was transnational: he refused allegiance to a single culture or artistic heritage and declared himself both a citizen of the world and a maker of art without national limits. This book develops a narrative that is an alternative to the dominant Franco-centered perspective on the origin of modern sculpture in which Rodin plays the role of lone heroic innovator. Offering an original way to comprehend Rosso, the book negotiates the competing cultural imperatives of nationalism and internationalism that shaped the European art world at the fin de siècle.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Bertrams ◽  
Julien Del Marmol ◽  
Sander Geerts ◽  
Eline Poelmans

AB InBev is today’s uncontested world leader of the beer market. It represents over 20 per cent of global beer sales, with more than 450 million hectolitres a year flowing all around the world. Its Belgian predecessor, Interbrew, was a success story stemming from the 1971 secret merger of the country’s two leading brewers: Artois and Piedboeuf. Based on first-hand material originating from company and private archives as well as interviews with managers and key family actors, this is the first study to explore the history of the company through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The story starts in the mid-nineteenth century with the scientific breakthroughs that revolutionized the beer industry and allowed both Artois and Piedboeuf to prosper in a local environment. Instrumental in this respect were the respective families and their successive heirs in stabilizing and developing their firms. Despite the intense difficulties of two world wars in the decades to follow, they emerged stronger than ever and through the 1960s became undisputed leaders in the national market. Then, in an unprecedented move, Artois and Piedboeuf secretly merged their shareholding in 1971, though keeping their operations separate until 1987 when they openly and operationally merged to become Interbrew. Throughout their histories Artois, Piedboeuf, and their successor companies have kept a controlling family ownership. This book provides a unique insight into both the complex history of these three family breweries and their path to becoming a prominent global company, and the growth and consolidation of the beer market through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ema Hrešanová

This paper explores the history of the ‘psychoprophylactic method of painless childbirth’ in socialist Czechoslovakia, in particular, in the Czech and Moravian regions of the country, showing that it substantially differs from the course that the method took in other countries. This non-pharmacological method of pain relief originated in the USSR and became well known as the Lamaze method in western English-speaking countries. Use of the method in Czechoslovakia, however, followed a very different path from both the West, where its use was refined mainly outside the biomedical frame, and the USSR, where it ceased to be pursued as a scientific method in the 1950s after Stalin’s death. The method was imported to Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s and it was politically promoted as Soviet science’s gift to women. In the 1960s the method became widespread in practice but research on it diminished and, in the 1970s, its use declined too. However, in the 1980s, in the last decade of the Communist regime, the method resurfaced in the pages of Czechoslovak medical journals and underwent an exciting renaissance, having been reintroduced by a few enthusiastic individuals, most of them women. This article explores the background to the renewed interest in the method while providing insight into the wider social and political context that shaped socialist maternity and birth care in different periods.


2012 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES ROBSON

The reception of Aristophanes has gained extraordinary momentum as a topic of academic interest in the last few years. Contributions range from Gonda Van Steen's ground-breaking Venom in Verse. Aristophanes in Modern Greece to Hall and Wrigley's Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007, which contains contributions from a wide range of scholars and writers, a number of whom have had experience of staging Aristophanes' plays as live theatre. In Found in Translation, J. Michael Walton has also made strides towards marrying the theory of translation to the practice of translating Aristophanes (something I have myself also sought to do in print). And with the history of Aristophanic translation, adaptation, and staging being rapidly pieced together (in the English-speaking world at least, where Hall, Steggle, Halliwell, Sowerby, Walsh, and Walton, for example, have all made their own contributions), much of the groundwork has been laid for a study such as is attempted in this article. Here I aim to take a broad look across a range of translations in order to see how one particular text type within Aristophanic drama has been approached by translators, namely Aristophanes' lyric passages. The aim of this study will be to give both an insight into the numerous considerations that translators take into account when translating Aristophanic lyric and an impression of the range of end products that have emerged over the last two hundred years.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Michał Mazurkiewicz

Sports Motifs in Interwar Polish Art — a ReconnaissanceSport is an important cultural phenomenon permeating many spheres of human activity. It has a great strength of influence and is constantly present in art and literature, also in Poland. Artists, especially the ones being lovers of sport, have always been fascinated with the potential existing in different kinds of games. After regaining independence in 1918, physical activity enjoyed great popularity in the awaken­ing Polish state. Sport was seen as achance of broadly understood renaissance of the nation; in addi­tion, its role in preparing the army to fight in the times of still real threats was appreciated. A positive influence of sport on youth was also seen. It also entered the world of art. The aim of this paper is to present Polish artists inspired by sport, also including laureates of the Art Competitions at the Summer Olympics, like for example poet Kazimierz Wierzyński, painter Władysław Skoczylas or sculptor Józef Klukowski. The author analyses both their motivations and the artistic output. The examination is preceded by an introduction showing the beginnings of Polish art inspired by sport and entertainment, whose elements one will find for example in the case of Leon Wyczółkowski or Wojciech Kossak, as well as the beginnings of sports literature. The history of the presence of sport in Polish art and literature is quite rich. The research enquired exploration of the history of Polish antebellum sport, looking over the works of artists interested in sport, as well as familiarising oneself with numerous publications devoted to this phenomenon.


Author(s):  
Meng-Fen (Grace) Lin ◽  
Mimi Miyoung Lee

The power of Internet provides unprecedented opportunities for learners to obtain diverse content and for educators to quickly distribute resources. In the increasing globalized learning environment, OpenCourseWare (OCW) is one of the recent movements to utilize the Internet in making educational materials freely available to the world. However, the fact that these materials are offered mainly in English poses challenges to the non-English speaking population in many parts of the world. In response to such concern in the Great China Region, a localization project called the Opensource OpenCourseWare Prototype System (OOPS) was born in Taiwan in February, 2004 (Lin & Chu, 2005). OOPS aims to break the language barrier and deliver the openly-accessible English educational materials to the Chinese-speaking audience in their native language. This chapter presents the detailed background and history of this project, and highlights three challenges that OOPS has faced in its early stage of development. They are: (1) access to materials, (2) issues about translation, and (3) complexity of intra-cultural communication. Based on the first author’s direct experience with the project, suggestions and implications for future research are also offered.


2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 349-356
Author(s):  
Marcos Câmara de Castro

One of the consequences of any colonisation is the emergence in the colonies of a dominant consular class, one of whose characteristics is cultural snobbery. This snobbery is manifested mainly in cultural choices that ignore local music or include it in an ensemble of strategies to participate in an alleged metropolitan cultural universalism. In Brazil, Villa-Lobos, the Batutas orchestra or the dancer known as Duque, who all enchanted France during the belle époque and who still arouse interest all over the world, were only the tip of an iceberg of popular music. This paper aims to demonstrate how the music and writings of Debussy and Ravel can be helpful in establishing the construction of a true history of classical music in Brazil, beyond the historical Franco-German rivalry.


Author(s):  
Laurence Brockliss

Childhood in western Europe is obviously a vast topic, and this entry will approach it historically and largely chronologically. The study of childhood is still relatively new, and historians have sometimes struggled to construct a history of childhood, with very few firsthand accounts and limited archives. So many children left very few traces of their lives, and historians have had to piece together their history, not from diaries or archives but from court reports, visual representations, and childcare manuals. They have had to struggle to recapture the world of childhood in eras prior to 1800, when sources are especially limited. They, like others interested in childhood studies, have had to address the issue of how to define a child and what childhood is. They have had to contemplate the different historical meanings of the word child prior to 1600 and to resist the temptation to believe that childhood has inevitably improved through the centuries. They have also had to become aware of the dangers of historicizing a phenomenon that has few stable parameters and, in some cultures, may not even exist at all. In several languages there is no word for child; even in English, the word has drastically shifted its meaning over the centuries. These shifts need to be historicized in order to see both the continuities and the discontinuities between the past and the present that suggest that childhood has always been a time of suffering; children have always been the victims of perilous disease, parental neglect, government policy, war, etc. Concurrently, children have also always been the hope of the future, the focus of special love and attention. A historical perspective on European childhoods brings this insight into sharp focus.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Athar Ali

India during the period of the Mughal dynasty (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) is exceptionally well illuminated by a large body of historical literature, mainly in Persian. This literature followed the traditions of classical Persian historiography, the models of which like Yazdi's Zafarnama (a history of Timur) and Mir Khwand's Rauzatu's Safa (a history of the world), both written in the fifteenth century, were widely read in India. By its very volume, if nothing else, Mughal historiography has, however, to be studied and assessed separately. It may be recalled that when C. A. Storey made his great survey of Persian historical literature, works written on Indian history accounted for a major part of it providing 475 items, by authors (nos. 612–1087), as against 299 (nos. –611) concerned with Persia, and Central Asia and countries other than India. And among the works written in India those written in Mughal times again account for the overwhelming part.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 289-309
Author(s):  
Max Schaefer ◽  

This paper seeks to address whether human life harbours the possibility of a gratuitous or non-reciprocal form of trust. To address this issue, I take up Descartes’ account of the cogito as the essence of all appearing. With his interpretation of Descartes’ account of the cogito as an immanent and affective mode of appearing, I maintain that Henry provides the transcendental foundation for a non-reciprocal form of trust, which the history of Western philosophy has largely covered over by forgetting this aspect of Descartes’ thought. I demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Descartes serves as a pre-eminent example of this. Because Heidegger overlooks Descartes’ insight into the essence of appearing, and reduces this essence to the finite transcendence of the world, I maintain that Heidegger reduces trust to reciprocal relations of understanding between beings of shared contexts of significance.


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