scholarly journals Zenitism and orientalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Iva Glišić ◽  
Tijana Vujošević
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
World War ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Global Demand ◽  
The Aesthetic

Reflecting on the centenary of the birth of Zenitism, this essay examines how the movement engaged with stereotypes about the Slavic Orient, and in particular the discourse on Balkanism. The European orientalist reading of the Balkans became especially profound in years surrounding the World War I. Seeking to invert derogatory characterisations of the Balkan Peninsula, Zenitists would embark on a mission to "Balkanise Europe" by presenting the artist from the East as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force emerging from a cultural tabula rasa. Zenitism sought to destabilise the dominant Orient-Occident discourse by establishing parallels between existing negative stereotypes of the Balkans and the aesthetic tropes of the European avantgarde. Specifically, Zenitists established the Balkan "Barbarogenius" as the archetypal modernist primitive - precisely the figure conjured by the European intelligentsia as the saviour for its listless modern condition. In addition, the Zenitist movement established an analogy between the hallmark fragmentation of the Balkans and the cultural cacophony of the avant-garde. The political and aesthetic strategies of the movement, the authors assert, bear a striking similarity with those of the Black Atlantic, and its 'in-betweenness'-its ambition to straddle two opposing worlds. Organised around its eponymous journal Zenit, which was conceptualised as "the first Balkan journal in Europe and the first European journal in the Balkans," Zenitism employed European avant-garde aesthetic strategies while simultaneously rejecting European claims to cultural supremacy. For Yugoslav, Soviet, and Western European audiences, the journal had two parallel goals: the creative "Balkanisation" of Europe, and a commitment to dismantling Yugoslav "nesting orientalisms" by fighting against the reproduction of negative stereotypes among the region's own inhabitants. Against a backdrop of European crisis and a global demand for a renewed emancipatory struggle, the ambition of Zenitism holds strong appeal today.

scholarly journals Augusta Cesarca (nie)realistyczny portret przygłuchej Tonki

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
The Aesthetic

In the centre of the article’s interest, there are the expressionist ideas present in the work by Croatian writer from the inter-war period (1893–1941). The mini-novel/novella in question entitled Tonkina jedina ljubav (1931) is considered the work belonging to the epoch of the new/social realism which dominated in the 1930s, however, the author, as is shown on the basis of the article’s research, did not managed to free himself from influence of expressionism that shaped the most Croatian consciousness as for the avant-garde historical time (1910–1930). Focusing attention on a disabled woman along with her small-town environment of Zagreb before the World War I, the author draws her exaggerated, cartoonish portrait which has little to do with the realistic and mimetic reflection of reality. The work is a kind of aesthetic and ethical provocation, and serves as unmasking the idyllic image of Zagreb which turns out to be a city inhabited by intolerant and narrow-minded society convinced, however, of its civilisation superiority. The titular character is a victim of this society, and at the same time she remains its part. The aesthetic and ethical provocation concerns the disabled woman together with „inefficient” society living in the terrifying city.

The Great War of the Postcards

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Book Illustrations ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.

scholarly journals Symbolism at war: Charles Ricketts and the politics of the stage

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 318-336
Author(s):  
Ana Parejo Vadillo
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Landscape

This article considers the effect of World War I on Charles Ricketts’ work for the stage as an avant-garde set and costume designer. It looks at his cosmopolitan designs in the context of European symbolism. The first part of the essay focuses on Ricketts’ symbolist manifesto ‘The art of stage decoration’ (1913). The essay then examines his designs for three Shakespeare plays that toured Le Havre in 1918 to entertain the troops. I argue that, in the aftermath of the war, Rickett’s symbolism became the lens through which he assessed the complex political landscape of the 1920s, and suggest that his stance against realism politicized his practice and explains his interest in Mussolini’s fascism.

Grosz, George (1893–1959)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
New Objectivity ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Grosz

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.

scholarly journals Women and War in the Balkans

Aspasia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-154
Author(s):  
Maria Bucur
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Women And War ◽  
History Of

Alin Ciupală, Bătălia lor: Femeile din România în Primul Război Mondial (Their batt le: Women in Romania during World War I), Iași: Polirom, 2017, 392 pp., 48 illustrations, RON 39.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-9-73466-577-8.Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 287 pp., 11 illustrations, GBP 24.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-31611-862-7.

“Population Politics” at the End of Empire: Migration and Sovereignty in Ottoman Eastern Rumelia, 1877–1886

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-985
Author(s):  
Anna M. Mirkova
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
State Building ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Population Politics

AbstractThis article explores the migrations of Turkish Muslims after the 1878 Peace Treaty of Berlin, which severed much of the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire as fully independent nation-states or as nominally dependent polities in the borderlands of the empire. I focus on one such polity—the administratively autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia—which, in wrestling to reconcile liberal principles of equality and political representation understood in ethno-religious terms, prompted emigration of Turkish Muslims while enabling Bulgarian Christian hegemony. Scholars have studied Muslim emigration from the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire gradually lost hold of the region, emphasizing deleterious effects of nationalism and aggressive state-building in the region. Here I look at migration at empire's end, and more specifically at the management of migration as constitutive of sovereignty. The Ottoman government asserted its suzerainty by claiming to protect the rights of Eastern Rumelia's Muslims. The Bulgarian dominated administration of Eastern Rumelia claimed not only administrative but also political autonomy by trying to contain the grievances of Turkish Muslims as a domestic issue abused by ill-meaning outsiders, all the while insisting that the province protected the rights of all subjects. Ultimately, a “corporatist” model of subjecthood obtained in Eastern Rumelia, which fused the traditional religious categorization of Ottoman subjects with an ethnic one under the umbrella of representative government. The tension between group belonging and individual politicization that began unfolding in Eastern Rumelia became a major dilemma of the post-Ottoman world and other post-imperial societies after World War I.

Literary Reflections on Postimperial Violence in East-Central Europe after 1918: Wittlin – Hašek – Vančura

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1 (464)) ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Alfrun Kliems
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Rhetorical Figures ◽  
Remarkable Degree ◽  
World War I Novels ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Jaroslav Hasek

This paper discusses questions like the irony of history, the lack of illusions, and the prophecy of violence in three classic World War I novels by Jaroslav Hašek, Vladislav Vančura and Józef Wittlin, written in the decades after 1918. The novels have at least three aspects in common: first, the poetics of each is marked in a compressed way by the style of narrating the assassination in Sarajevo in 1918; second, three picaresque figures – Švejk, Řeka and Niewiadomski, respectively – standing in the centre of each novel; and, third, in addition to the war itself, each novel looks proleptically at its consequences, even if the narrated time does not extend to the end of the war. The paper tries to reflect on the novels as the literature of post-imperialist violence. Rhetorical figures of barbarization and self-barbarization, inversion of subject and object, fragmentation of space are particularly significant in the books, demonstrating the aesthetic processing of the reversal from euphoria, over the end of the war, to frustration, over the continuing violence. More specifically, these figures correspond with a remarkable degree with the unfulfilled peace after 1918.

French Direct Investments in the Ottoman Empire Before World War I

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Necla Geyikdagi
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Direct Investment ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
World War ◽  
Foreign Service ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Service Companies ◽  
Manufactured Products

Foreign direct investment entered into the Ottoman Empire to support and develop foreign trade. Europeans who wanted to sell their manufactured products and acquire raw materials were instrumental in the construction of trade-related infrastructure in this country. Therefore, the first French investments, like those of other countries, were made for constructing railways and ports. The growth of raw material production in primary commodities, finally led to an increase in the number of foreign service companies such as banks and insurance providers that served these transport and production facilities. The initial motivations of French investors were mainly economic as they tried to find new markets and secure a viable share in these markets before their international competitors. Motives gradually became political as the opinion about the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire got stronger by the end of the nineteenth century. The French government assisted its investors in obtaining important concessions for investments in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Arab provinces of the Empire.

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