Sound, Technology, and Culture in French Indochina

In the 1920s, European radio enthusiasts organized clubs in Hanoi, Saigon, Hai Phong, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh. Periodicals and letters from the time provide insights on this burgeoning amateur radio culture. Members shared experiences, debated the potential of the technology, and used radio to broadcast records of music, story-telling, and other forms of light entertainment. Chapter 1 examines how these radio clubs were established in the urban centers of French Indochina and how they impacted cultural life in the colonial territories. The chapter begins with a consideration of cultural colonialism, broadcasting technology, and music in the French Empire. Archival sources provide evidence on the styles of music and recording technologies in circulation in early twentieth-century mainland Southeast Asia, when telegraphy, phonograph recordings and radio broadcasts informed the social construction of state and empire. Exclusive membership regulations of the Indochinese radio clubs, which restricted most of the indigenous population, were undermined during the Japanese occupation (1940–45). And the Japanese promotion of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken) followed by a famine in 1944–45 fomented unrest among the indigenous population. During the August Revolution of 1945, the Viet Minh and other insurrectionaries commandeered these sound reproduction technologies to broadcast news of their uprising.

The Resonance of Music Across Cultures

What predestines music to be able to transgress geo-cultural boundaries? I argue that music’s sensuous, bodily-affective immediacy requires a mode of cross-cultural translation via what I call auditory resonance—the spontaneous attunement of listeners with the sonic presence of music through media-technological transmission despite vestiges of cultural colonialism and other sociopolitical barriers. I trace such resonance effects from German Romanticism through our global present, focusing especially on the conversations between two Japanese cultural figures, the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the novelist Haruki Murakami. These texts show that the category of auditory resonance is more suitable for addressing European music’s global significance than its traditional claims to transcultural universality. Keywords: Music, resonance, immediacy, presence, media technologies, cultural translation, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Walter Benjamin, Seiji Ozawa, Haruki Murakami

How Digitization is Empowering Vietnamese Cultural Professionals to Preserve, Present, and Promote Art and Culture Online: Navigating Challenges whilst Harnessing Opportunities to Create a Digital Culture

The ability to publish and provide access to cultural resources via free, open source digital platforms is empowering Vietnamese cultural professionals to promote their culture to local and international audiences. Digitization projects now include the use of 3D, VR, and AR digital technologies for the purpose of being published on digital platforms. This is creating an emergent digital culture in Vietnam, with an increasing amount of available resources online. Digitization projects are now used to preserve cultural heritage as well as to present and promote contemporary art and culture. This reflects a change in practices amongst cultural professionals in Hanoi, in terms of how digital technologies are used and the value placed on making cultural resources publicly accessible online. However, as new content, knowledge, and voices are able to participate in the online discourse on art and culture, the question remains as to whether this digital transition is creating greater equality and inclusion in the cultural sector or if it is exacerbating already existing forms of digital cultural colonialism. This paper presents findings from 50 interviews with cultural professionals working in the cultural sector in Hanoi about their digitization projects and digital work practices, the developments in digitization in Hanoi’s cultural sector over the past five years, how cultural professionals are utilizing the opportunities afforded by digital technologies for cultural preservation and promotion, as well as the challenges they face in carrying out digitization projects.

Indian Cultural Nationalism – Defining New Contours (Desha-shastra)

Nation and nationalism are one of the most discussed terms in modern academics and popular media. India has embraced the people, practices, cuisines, customs, faiths, rituals, religions from different parts of the world. And it is an ever growing accommodative spirit of India and its nationalism. Not ‘only, rather’ but ‘also’ is the Indian approach. It has withstood cultural colonialism in one thousand years. The cantors of India have changed with time but have not given up on culture. Therefore a serious study of Indian view of nationalism as expressed by its ancient seers and modern thinkers is the need of the hour. The paper has three sections: 1. Definition of Cultural Nationalism in Indian approach; 2. Some main concepts of Indian Cultural Nationalism and 3. Indian Cultural Nationalism in the contemporary time Received 9th December 2020; Revised 15th March 2021; Accepted 28th March 2021

“Seignior Nicolo” by Yurii Kosach and Gogol text in ukrainian literature of the 20th century

In the context of the Ukrainian Gogol discourse of the 20th century, the paper analyzes fragments from the unfinished Yurii Kosach’s novel “Seignior Nicolo”, which deals with the history of Mykola Gogol. The researcher focuses on the peculiarities of Kosach’s understanding of Gogol and the worldview analogies of the two writers. The concept of symbolic autobiography is understood as a manifestation of the author’s self through the image and history of the other. Presenting the Roman episode in Gogol’s biography, Yurii Kosach tells his own symbolic story, and this relationship between fictitious and real stories functions as a certain way of the author’s symbolic self-representation in his text and through the text. The incomplete Yuri Kosach’s novel about Gogol is considered in the context of ideological discussions about the national and cultural identity of the writer, as a component of Gogol discourse in Ukrainian literature of the 20th century. The problem of Gogol’s duality, understood in ideological and psychological aspects, manifests a worldview split of Yurii Kosach himself, his own drama. Yuri Kosach’s re-thinking of Gogol’s figure must have been an attempt of destroying two main ideological myths: the Russian-imperial, based on the Soviet, socialist-realist Gogol’s cult, and the colonial one, rooted in the Ukrainian populist tradition. In addition, the paper pays attention to the sources of Kosach’s novel and clarifies the historical and psychological contexts of its creation, as well as its inter- and midtextual relations, both with Kosach’s works and Gogol discourse as a whole. It is argued that in the history of Gogol the writer considered the problem of cultural colonialism, both in the political and psychological aspects, in particular the problem of Gogol’s sexuality, ‘fear of sex’, which is associated with colonial subordination and the loss of masculinity. The main personal manifestation of Gogol in the novel by Kosach is a migrant, i. e. a man without ground, an artist without a motherland. The history of Gogol in Rome is examined through the relation of “Seignior Nicolo” to Gogol’s “Rome”, a comparison of the Roman text in Gogol’s and Kosach’s works

Never on Sunday: Feminist questioning of dominant epistemology and philosophical tradition

Through the interpretation of the movie Never on Sunday (1960) by Jules Dassin, this paper opens some important epistemological questions from the feminist perspective. Namely, the film is set in the contemporary Greece, while the main characters are a prostitute Ilia and an American tourist Homer, who is at the same time disappointed in Greece and in the beautiful woman he meets. His inability to understand people and social context in which he finds himself, as well as his effort to educate Ilia and impose her his own values and ideas about ancient Greece reveal much of chauvinism and cultural colonialism, opening questions crucial for feminist and other critical epistemologies which are: who produces knowledge, for whom and how to approach it critically. Finally, through the interpretation of Ilia?s attitude to knowledge, I will turn also to the feminist notion of embodied feminist subject. Apart from that, I will deal with hegemonic attitude of the West towards ancient Greek past.

Reclaiming Arab “Skin”

FQ columnist Bilal Qureshi turns a spotlight on Kaouther Ben Hania’s provocative and daring feature film The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020). Nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature as Tunisia’s first official nominee, Skin is a long-overdue satirization of that earnest and recurring narrative about the helpless migrant refugee and noble white saviors. In telling the story of Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni), a Syrian refugee who makes a Faustian bargain with an art world superstar, Skin asks what it means to be free. Turning the psychological experience of marginalization into a work of palpable and visceral storytelling, the film explores urgent themes that encapsulate the centuries of violence—both physical and psychological—that cultural colonialism has inflicted on brown bodies.

Challenging Perceptions of Modern Arab Art

The understanding of modern Arab art is, more often than not, based on individual and collective perceptions that relate to beliefs, culture, and social constructs. Defining qualities or characteristics that make a work of art “Arab” is not a clear-cut endeavor. Many Arab artists appropriated Western techniques, while they strived to combine their newly acquired artistic processes with content inherent in their respective cultures. Some audiences appreciated the new direction the Arab art was taking; however, many artists were harshly criticized of advocating cultural colonialism. A struggle in the field of art, and in other aspects of life took place, due to the increasing fear of losing one’s own tradition and Arab identity in the face of Western culture. This article explores the nature of modern Arab art and Arab identity, its place within a global modernism, and the ways in which Western influences have shaped its development, in addition to understanding the different particularities that have shaped Arab modernism in art specifically.