Search results for ""Author Art, Culture"

Investigations into the cultural significance of that most familiar and charismatic group of animals, bears. Bears are iconic animals, playing a variety of roles in human culture. They have been portrayed as gods, monsters, kings, fools, brothers, lovers, and dancers; they are seen as protectors of the forest; symbols of masculinity; a comfort for children; and act as symbols for conservation and environmental issues. They also symbolise wilderness, reinforcing and maintaining our connection to the natural world. And stories abound of cultures that gathered berries in the same fields as bears and fished on the same rivers; consequently a wealth of myths, legends and folklore has informed us of our place in the world and the deep connection we have with bears. The essays collected here provide a rich selection of views on the human/bear relationships. They explore how bears are an influence in contemporary art, and how they are represented in the illustrations in children's literature and in museum exhibitions. The connection between bears and native peoples, and how contemporary society lives alongside these animals, provides an understanding of current attitudes and approaches to bear management and conservation. The history of captive bears is brought into contemporary relief by considering the fate of captive bears held in Asian countries for bile production. Other pieces look at how bears feature in gay culture, and are an intrinsic component to researchon the Yeti and Sasquatch. Together, these articles present an insight into the changing face of attitudes towards nature, species survival and the significance of conservation engagement in the twenty-first century. Biologists, historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, conservationists and museologists will all find riches in the detail presented in this bear cornucopia. OWEN NEVIN is Associate Vice-Chancellor, Gladstone Region, CQUniversity, Australia; IAN CONVERY is Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Cumbria; PETER DAVIS is Emeritus Professor of Museology in the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University. Contributors: Philip Charles, Melanie Clapham, Ian Convery, Koen Cuyten, Elizabeth O Davis, Peter Davis, Sarah Elmeligi, Beatrice Frank, Barrie K. Gilbert, Jenny Anne Glikman, Tracy Ann Hayes, Mike Jeffries, Jón Jónsson, John Kitchin, Miha Krofel, Gareth Longstaff, Henry McGhie, Jeff Meldrum, Owen T. Nevin, Heather Prince, Lynn Rogers, Kristinn Schram, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir, Russ Van Horn, Mark Wilson, Samantha Young.

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The first academic study of the phenomenon of The Archers fandom from the fans themselves. The fourth instalment in the Academic Archers collection, Fandom Culture and The Archers looks beyond the popular success of the Archers to explore how the program, and the themes it discusses, are used in teaching, learning, research and professional settings, and how the Academic Archers fandom helps shape these real life impacts. The chapters explore first the nature of Archers fandom, looking at how academic fans of the show have translated the storylines and issues discussed into theoretical tools, exploring topics from therapy, to the evolution of listening to the show in the digital age. The authors then turn their attention to the use of The Archers in educational and professional settings, exploring its use in both formal educational settings, and in community-led art projects, as well as the show’s engagement with and potential impact on feminism. Providing the reader with increased insight on the impact of the Archers beyond popular culture, Fandom Culture and The Archers is essential reading for fans of the show and fandom and cultural studies scholars alike.

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The day the towers fell, indelible images of plummeting rubble, fire, and falling bodies were imprinted in the memories of people around the world. Images that were caught in the media loop after the disaster and coverage of the attack, its aftermath, and the wars that followed reflected a pervasive tendency to treat these tragic events as spectacle. Though the collapse of the World Trade Center was "the most photographed disaster in history," it failed to yield a single noteworthy image of carnage. Thomas Stubblefield argues that the absence within these spectacular images is the paradox of 9/11 visual culture, which foregrounds the visual experience as it obscures the event in absence, erasure, and invisibility. From the spectral presence of the Tribute in Light to Art Spiegelman's nearly blank New Yorker cover, and from the elimination of the Twin Towers from television shows and films to the monumental cavities of Michael Arad's 9/11 memorial, the void became the visual shorthand for the incident. By examining configurations of invisibility and erasure across the media of photography, film, monuments, graphic novels, and digital representation, Stubblefield interprets the post-9/11 presence of absence as the reaffirmation of national identity that implicitly laid the groundwork for the impending invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Deeping It analyses drill's fight against moral panic and its fraught relationship with the police and political authority in the UK, exemplified by constant censorship, racism, and moments such as when a drill duo became the first people in British legal history to recieve a prison sentence for simply performing a song. Policing, policy and criminalisation are the cornerstones of colonial suppression; art, self-expression and collective action are beacons of resistance. Deeping It places drill firmly in the latter category, tracing its production and criminalisation across borders and eras of the British Empire, exploring drill's artistic singularity but also its inherent threat as a Black artform in a world that prioritises whiteness. Intervening on this discourse steeped in anti-Blackness, this Inkling 'deeps' how the criminalisation of UK drill cannot be disentangled from histories, technologies, and realities of colonialism and consumerism.

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Is culture brokered like stocks, real estate, or marriage? In this engaging book, Richard Kurin shows that cultures are also mediated and indeed brokered by countries, organizations, communities, and individuals - all with their own vision of the truth and varying abilities to impose it on others. Drawing on his diverse experiences in producing exhibitions and public programs, Kurin challenges culture brokers - defined broadly to include museum professionals, film-makers, journalists, festival producers, and scholars of many disciplines - to reveal more clearly the nature of their interpretations, to envision the ways in which their messages can "play" to different audiences, and to better understand the relationship between knowledge, art, politics, and entertainment. The book documents a variety of cases in which the Smithsonian has brokered culture for the American public: a planned exhibit on Jerusalem had to balance both Israeli and Palestinian agendas; debates over the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival presented differing visions of the American South; and the National Air and Space Museum's controversial display of the Enola Gay prompted the Smithsonian to re-examine the role of national museums. Arguing that cultural exhibits reflect a series of decisions about representing someone, someplace, and something, Reflections of a Culture Broker discusses the ethical and technical problems faced by not only those who practice in a museum setting but also anyone charged with representing culture in a public forum.

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The Bolshevik Revolution uprooted not only the social and political systems of the Russian Empire, but existing artistic institutions and traditions as well. Following the revolution, Soviet artists working in all different media had to respond to the urgent problem of how to make art relevant, even essential, to the revolutionary project undertaken by the Bolshevik Party. Focusing on the years 1921–1934, Manufacturing Truth explores the great upsurge in documentary methods and approaches in the arts and reveals how the documentary impulse influenced the development of Stalinist culture. Documentary approaches in literature and film became a central means for redefining the role of the artist, of art itself, and of the institution of art in the new post-revolutionary Soviet society. The documentary impulse offered theorists and practitioners from a wide variety of artistic factions an opportunity to make their art relevant to the revolutionary project. Participation in this trend was supported not only by the avant-garde, which initiated it, but by representatives of artistic movements across the political and stylistic spectrum, in a variety of media. In using documents and documentary methods, writers and filmmakers of the era imparted to their artistic work a kind of authenticity, conveying a sense that they were producing an objective record of a reality that was being rapidly and radically transformed. At the same time, through the act of recording the building of socialism they became participants in the process, thus responding to a perceived historical imperative. As Soviet artists struggled toward the objectivity of historical processes, however, the tension between the two competing aspects of the documentary impulse—its evidentiary quality "fact" and its discursive quality "artifact"—grew into a contradiction. The anxiety of Soviet authors to be relevant to the revolution led them to the near effacement of authorship itself. Papazian analyzes the works of Sergei Tretiakov, Dziga Vertov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Zoshchenko to reveal how the documentary impulse defined each author's individual artistic trajectory and led him inexorably to the socialist realist aesthetic.

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Technology Platforms for 3D Cell Culture: A Users Guide points to the options available to perform 3D culture, shows where such technology is available, explains how it works, and reveals how it can be used by scientists working in their own labs. Offers a comprehensive, focused guide to the current state-of-the-art technologies available for 3D cell culture Features contributions from leading developers and researchers active in 3D cell technology Gives clear instruction and guidance on performing specific 3D culture methods, along with colour illustrations and examples of where such technologies have been successfully applied Includes information on resources and technical support to help initiate the use of 3D culture methods

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The Crisis of Meaning was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Pick up any newspaper and it is clear that the United States is facing a democratic crisis. Recent culture wars and debates about political correctness and culture have illustrated how conventional definitions of citizenship and national identity have been thrown into question.Investigating what he views as an inseparable link between culture and politics, David Trend analyzes how notions of patriotism, citizenship, community, and family are communicated within specific public and private institutions. He extends the meaning and purpose of pedagogy as a cultural practice outside the classroom, focusing on political activism in education, the mass media, and the art world.The Crisis of Meaning supplies a crucial theoretical understanding of the ways in which the pedagogical and political intersect at a variety of cultural sites, as it points us toward a "democratic" process of national identity formation. It is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the connections between education and politics.David Trend is executive director of the Center for Social Research and Education in San Francisco and also executive editor of the Socialist Review. He is the author of Cultural Pedagogy: Art/Education/Politics (1992).

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Assembling buildings designed by modern star architects from Tadao And - o to Peter Zumthor, this photography book is a total - work - of - art: its felicitous interplay of brilliant architectural photography, exquisite book design, and texts approaching the subje ct from the angle of the history of thought places Marcel Chassot’s imagery within European cultural history. Once it plunges into Chassot’s architectural photography, the eye feasts on a wealth of scenes from the repertoire of outstanding international c ontemporary architecture. Each of the photographs aptly captures a prototypical subject. Colouring, the arrangement of lines, lighting, as well as the photographic means are employed with such precision that viewers feel as if they are in a visual laboratory where photography interprets architecture in its particular language. In his essay the author Wolfgang Meisenheimer looks into the fundamental principles of Chassot’s photographic world view and distinguishes between three layers of thought in which the work is rooted: the Euclidian orders, echoes of the modern philosophy of the lived body, and the legacy of Cubism from the beginnings of modern painting.

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Does it matter whether your users prefer Mozart to Madonna? the Beatles to Beethoven? While these questions are far from novel to the library profession, rarely does their significance extend beyond the arena of policy debate. In leisurely and thoughtful prose, Sanna Talja raises the discourse to a higher level, inviting us to witness the evolution of music collections in public libraries. She considers the variable conceptions of art, culture, and civilization and their effect in the formation of the library institution. Users' interpretations are compared with the main principles of collections work, and the results are applied towards an understanding of the library's unique position in society.

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Dorothea Arnold’s career in Egyptology is distinguished by the scope of her scholarship and by her understanding its detailed messages. She has brought her keen sense of observation and meticulous archaeological reflection to publications and exhibitions that have enriched our understanding of sculpture and relief, pottery and models, the Old Kingdom through the Roman Period. This volume published in her honor reflects her wide-ranging interests. It contains seventy articles by sixty-four Egyptologists, conservators, and scientists, who examine aspects of art history, archaeology, burial customs, language, chronology, conservation, and museum studies covering all periods of ancient Egypt.

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This book offers an overview of bourgeois culture and aspects of everyday life in the German cultural area from the Renaissance to the end of the 18th century. At the same time the reader is introduced to fundamental research problems. The spectrum of topics ranges from life styles to clothing and eating habits, from consciousness of time to rites de passage, birth, marriage and death. Special attention is paid to the role of female and male citizens in music, literature and fine arts. This is a concise introduction for history and art history students, scholars and everyone interested in the pre-history of the modern world. References from important sources define the text; together they are useful resources for teaching.

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When we open our closet doors each morning, we seldom consider what our sartorial choices say, whether we tend toward jeans and a well-worn concert t-shirt or wingtips and a three-piece suit. Yet, how we dress divulges more than whether we crave comfort or couture; our clothing communicates who we are and how we relate to our culture. But how does a Balenciaga bag or a tough leather jacket topped by liberty spikes signify these things? Fashion in Popular Culture considers this question. Combining fashion theory with approaches from literature, art, advertising, music, media studies, material studies, and sociology, contributors from across Europe, Australia, and the United States consider the function of fashion within popular culture. Fashion, they show, has the capacity to both influence and be influenced by popular culture, and its meaning is also contingent upon context. Chapters in the book cover both historical and contemporary concerns, addressing a variety of other questions, including the role fashion plays in subcultures. For students and scholars of fashion and popular culture—or anyone fascinated by what clothing can convey—Fashion in Popular Culture offers an engaging, interdisciplinary analysis.

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Hungarian urban culture in the 20th and the 21st centuries.When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of European modernity. This volume expands the scope of literary urban studies by focusing on Budapest and Hungarian small towns, offering in-depth analyses of the intriguing link between literature, the arts, and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The case studies situate Hungarian urban culture within the global flow of ideas as they explore the period of modernism, the mid-century, and the post-1989 era in a context that moves well beyond the borders of the country.Contributors: Árpád Bak (University of Leeds), Éva Federmayer (Eötvös Loránd University), Magdolna Gucsa (Eötvös Loránd University / ÉHESS), Ágnes Györke (Károli Gáspár University), Ferenc Hörcher (Eötvös József Research Centre), Tamás Juhász (Károli Gáspár University), György Kalmár (University of Debrecen), László Munteán (Radboud University), Ágnes Klára Papp (Károli Gáspár University), Márta Pellérdi (Pázmány Péter Catholic University), Eszter Ureczky (University of Debrecen).This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/

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The African diaspora – a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism – has generated a wide array of artistic achievements, from blues and reggae, to the paintings of the pioneering African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and video creations of contemporary hip-hop artists. This book concentrates on how these works, often created during times of major social upheaval and transformation, use black culture both as a subject and as context. From musings on “the souls of black folk” in late nineteenth-century art, to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the twenty-first century, this book examines the philosophical and social forces that have shaped a black presence in modern and contemporary visual culture. Now updated, this new edition helps us understand better how the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been a transformative moment in which previous assumptions about race, difference, and identity have been irrevocably altered, with art providing a useful lens through which to think about these compelling issues.With 218 illustrations in colour

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This collection is an essential guide to, and critique of, visual arts regeneration strategies mobilized by local and national governments attempting to brand their cities in contemporary regional and global markets for lucrative industries, tourism and heritage recognition. Looking at cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, Da Zha Lan in China, Bogata in Colombia and Rio de Janiero in Brazil and case studies in the former USSR, it offers critical analyses of the history of regeneration policies and practices with a unique focus on the use of architecture, art and visual culture as vehicles for the re-design and re-presentation of cities. Themes treated include sustainability and energy production for cities, sexuality and architecture, surveillance and power on the streets, utopian imaginings of alternative societies and consultation for social change in building.

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This book traces the trajectory of John J. McDermott’s philosophical career through a selection of his essays. Many were originally occasional pieces and address specific issues in American thought and culture. Together they constitute a mosaic of McDermott’s philosophy, showing its roots in an American conception of experience. Though he draws heavily on the thought of William James and the pragmatists, McDermott has his own unique perspective on philosophy and American life. He presents this to the reader in exquisitely crafted prose. Drawing inspiration from American history, from existentialist themes, and from personal experiences, he offers a dramatic consideration of our culture’s failures and successes. McDermott crosses disciplinary boundaries to draw on whatever works to help make sense of the issues with which he is dealing—issues rooted in medical practice, political events, pedagogical habits, and the worlds of the arts. His work thus resists simple categorization. It is precisely this that makes his vibrant prose appealing to so many both inside and outside the world of American philosophy.

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Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world?Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.

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Raised by his grandparents in the tiny village of Metlakatla, Alaska, David A. Boxley left a secure teaching job in his hometown to pursue an uncharted path as a full-time Tsimshian artist, ultimately leading a revival of traditional culture, art, dance, and song. Tsimshian Eagle: A Culture Bearer's Journey chronicles Boxley's life and art through images and interviews. What emerges is a boundlessly creative, restless man who has dedicated his life to keeping Tsimshian culture alive.

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The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 thrust the nation into the public consciousness as never before. That terrible event piqued interest in a remarkable country with a rich history as both the first black republic in the world and the first country to break free of European imperialism in Latin America. Haiti Rising brings together more than 20 of the most prominent authorities on Haiti in to provide both a historical and cultural introduction to Haiti and a chance for earthquake survivors to testify to their experiences. Ranging widely across politics, society, history, art and culture, contributors such as Maryse Condé, Yanick Lahens, Evelyne Trouillot, J. Michael Dash and Laurent Dubois illuminate this most extraordinary of countries and the tragedy that befell it in 2010. Haiti Rising will stand as a written document of this cataclysmic event in Haitian history and as a monument to the experiences of those who were in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. It is vital reading for anyone who wants to find out more about Haiti, and the prospects for its future. All royalties from the book will be donated to the Haitian Art Relief Fund.

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This book offers a comprehensive study of an art history teaching block in an upper class in a Waldorf school, covering a diverse range of work through the ages of history. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Teaching Art History guides readers through human history via a study of art and culture. Journey from the beginnings of art in palaeolithic times to the art of ancient Egypt and the Greco-Roman era, and to European art from the Renaissance onwards. Van James is both an experienced teacher and accomplished artist, making his presentation of the subject clear and full of life. While this text is aimed at teachers of pupils in Class 9 (14-15 years old), it also features practical ideas for projects for other classes too. Featuring examples of student artwork as motivation for what pupils can produce when they are inspired to record history through art, this book also describes the positive impact that immersion in art and culture can have on teenagers. A fascinating and engaging resource for teachers and anyone curious to learn about the study of art through the ages.

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Peter Fine's innovative study traces the development of a mass visual culture in the United States, focusing on how new visual technologies played a part in embedding racialized ideas about African Americans, and how whiteness was privileged within modernist ideals of visual form. Fine considers the visual and material manifestations of this process through the history of three important technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction – typography, lithography, and photography, and then moves on to consider how racialized representation has been configured and contested within contemporary film and television, fine art and digital design.

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How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web.A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.

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50 common cultural mistakes made in business are presented in the form of short conversations which show that there's always a reason why people do the strange things they do, the reason is almost never to upset you, and there's always a way round.The Art of Doing Business Across Cultures presents five brief, unsuccessful conversational exchanges between Americans and their business colleagues in 10 different locations-the Arab Middle East, Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, and Russia.

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Emerging in the late nineteenth century and gaining currency in the 1930s and 1940s, Afrikaner nationalist fervour underpinned the establishment of white Afrikaner political and cultural domination during South Africa's apartheid years. Focusing on manifestations of Afrikaner nationalism in paintings, sculptures, monuments, buildings, cartoons, photographs, illustrations and exhibitions, Troubling Images offers a critical account of the role of art and visual culture in the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary, which helped secure hegemonic claims to the nation-state. This insightful volume examines the implications of metaphors and styles deployed in visual culture, and considers how the design, production, collecting and commissioning of objects, images and architecture were informed by Afrikaner nationalist imperatives and ideals. While some chapters focus only on instances of adherence to Afrikaner nationalism, others consider articulations of dissent and criticism. By 'troubling' these images: looking at them, teasing out their meanings, and connecting them to a political and social project that still has a major impact on the present moment, the authors engage with the ways in which an Afrikaner nationalist inheritance is understood and negotiated in contemporary South Africa. They examine the management of its material effects in contemporary art, in archives, the commemorative landscape and the built environment. Troubling Images adds to current debates about the histories and ideological underpinnings of nationalism and is particularly relevant in the current context of globalism and diaspora, resurgent nationalisms and calls for decolonisation.

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Eradicating once and for all the unfounded notion that Frye was not a political writer, this eleventh volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together all of Northrop Frye's writings on politics, culture, the arts, history, literature, mass media, and music. Written between 1934 and 1986, these collected works illustrate the extent of Frye's engagement with the unfolding events of twentieth-century political life, from the Great Depression to the Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney era. The centrepiece of the volume, Frye's learned and wide-ranging contribution to the Canadian confederation celebrations, The Modern Century (1967), is accompanied by pieces that reflect Frye's observations on such diverse political events as the Oxford 'King and Country' debate and the Vietnam war, revealing Frye the literary theorist as Frye the political entity. Jan Gorak's extensive introduction and annotations serve to historicize Frye and situate him and his work in the historical and critical context of twentieth-century Canada and North America. Frye's work is discussed in relation to that of T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Raymond Williams, Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, E.J. Pratt, A.J. M. Smith, F.A. Underhill, J.S. Woodsworth, George Grant, and especially Oswald Spengler. Erudite and enlightening, Frye's comments on politics are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them, and this volume will be a valuable reference for understanding the essential Frye.

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Providing an understanding of the history, evolution, and universality of dance as an art form, this guidebook explores the significance of dance in culture, the relationship of dance to other art forms, the contributions of great pioneering choreographers, dancers, and teachers, and the creative process. Highlighting an extensive range of types of dance—including ballet, modern, jazz, tap, folk, ethnic, and social—this comprehensive collection features a variety of engaging essays written by experts in their respective fields. Students of dance, professionals, instructors, and enthusiasts will learn what to look for during a performance, and how to appreciate dance styles from around the world. This newly revised edition includes five new chapters and an extensive, annotated appendix of film resources giving helpful suggestions for viewing that will enhance the dance experience.

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Explores how contemporary German-language literary, dramatic, filmic, musical, and street artists are grappling in their works with social-justice issues that affect Germany and the wider world. Social-injustice dilemmas such as poverty, unemployment, and racism are subjects of continuing debate in European societies and in Germany in particular, as solutions are difficult and progress often comes slowly. Such discussionsare not limited to opposing newspaper editorials, position papers, or legislative forums, however; creative works expound on these topics as well, but their contributions to the debate are often marginalized. This collectionof new essays explores how contemporary German-language literary, dramatic, filmic, musical, and street artists are grappling with social-justice issues that affect Germany and the wider world, surveying more than a decade's worth of works of German literature and art in light of the recent paradigm shift in cultural criticism called the "ethical turn." Central themes include the legacy of the politically engaged 1968 generation, eastern Germany and the process of unification, widening economic disparity as a result of political policies and recession, and problems of integration and inclusivity for ethnic and religious minorities as migration to Germany has increased. Contributors: Monika Albrecht, Olaf Berwald, Robert Blankenship, Laurel Cohen-Pfister, Jack Davis, Bastian Heinsohn, Axel Hildebrandt, Deborah Janson, Karolin Machtans, Ralf Remshardt, Alexandra Simon-López, Patricia Anne Simpson,Maria Stehle, Jill E. Twark. Jill E. Twark is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University. Axel Hildebrandt is Associate Professor of German at Moravian College.

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Set like a stronghold south-west of the Caucasus mountains, Armenia is caught between East and West. Briefly a great empire in the first century BCE under King Tigranes the Great, Armenia was later incorporated first by the Sasanian and then the Byzantine Empires. Armenian art, literature, religion and material culture have reinterpreted elements of a wide variety of cultures. Spanning over two and a half millennia, the history of Armenia and the Armenian people is a series of riveting tales, from its first mention under the Achaemenid King Darius I to the independence of the Republic of Armenia from the Soviet Union. With the help of the Bodleian Libraries' magnificent collection of Armenian manuscripts and early printed books, this volume tells the story of the region through the medium of its cultural output. Together with introductions written by experts in their fields, close to one hundred manuscripts, works of art and religious artefacts serve as a guide to Armenian culture and history. Gospel manuscripts splendidly illuminated by Armenian masters feature next to philosophical tractates and merchants' handbooks, affording us an insight into what makes the Armenian people truly unique, especially in the shadow of the genocide that threatened their annihilation a hundred years ago: namely their spirituality, language and perseverance in the face of adversity. VISIT THE EXHIBITION Armenia: Treasures from an Enduring Culture October 2015 – January 2016 Bodleian Library, Oxford

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Set like a stronghold south-west of the Caucasus mountains, Armenia is caught between East and West. Briefly a great empire in the first century BCE under King Tigranes the Great, Armenia was later incorporated first by the Sasanian and then the Byzantine Empires. Armenian art, literature, religion and material culture have reinterpreted elements of a wide variety of cultures. Spanning over two and a half millennia, the history of Armenia and the Armenian people is a series of riveting tales, from its first mention under the Achaemenid King Darius I to the independence of the Republic of Armenia from the Soviet Union. With the help of the Bodleian Libraries' magnificent collection of Armenian manuscripts and early printed books, this volume tells the story of the region through the medium of its cultural output. Together with introductions written by experts in their fields, close to one hundred manuscripts, works of art and religious artefacts serve as a guide to Armenian culture and history. Gospel manuscripts splendidly illuminated by Armenian masters feature next to philosophical tractates and merchants' handbooks, affording us an insight into what makes the Armenian people truly unique, especially in the shadow of the genocide that threatened their annihilation a hundred years ago: namely their spirituality, language and perseverance in the face of adversity. VISIT THE EXHIBITION Armenia: Treasures from an Enduring Culture October 2015 – January 2016 Bodleian Library, Oxford

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It has always been the case that the teaching of art has had to deal with social changes. We are currently facing historic challenges and phenomena which we could never have imagined – the global financial crisis, the massive migration flows, and the ubiquitous spread of new technologies in our everyday life. Creative competence is needed for overcoming the disciplinary boundaries and in order to make equal opportunities for education possible in a diverse society. This publication takes a critical look at the role of art and design education amidst these social changes – using theoretical reflection, practical experience, and empirical analysis.

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This is a cultural history of mathematics and art, from antiquity to the present. Mathematicians and artists have long been on a quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. Taking readers on a tour of the practice of mathematics and the philosophical ideas that drive the discipline, Lynn Gamwell points out the important ways mathematical concepts have been expressed by artists. Sumptuous illustrations of artworks and cogent math diagrams are featured in Gamwell's comprehensive exploration. Gamwell begins by describing mathematics from antiquity to the Enlightenment, including Greek, Islamic, and Asian mathematics. Then focusing on modern culture, Gamwell traces mathematicians' search for the foundations of their science, such as David Hilbert's conception of mathematics as an arrangement of meaning-free signs, as well as artists' search for the essence of their craft, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's monochrome paintings. She shows that self-reflection is inherent to the practice of both modern mathematics and art, and that this introspection points to a deep resonance between the two fields: Kurt Godel posed questions about the nature of mathematics in the language of mathematics and Jasper Johns asked "What is art?" in the vocabulary of art. Throughout, Gamwell describes the personalities and cultural environments of a multitude of mathematicians and artists, from Gottlob Frege and Benoit Mandelbrot to Max Bill and Xu Bing. Mathematics and Art demonstrates how mathematical ideas are embodied in the visual arts and will enlighten all who are interested in the complex intellectual pursuits, personalities, and cultural settings that connect these vast disciplines.

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Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, Foreign Bodies examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France's colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the "oriental woman," and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place. The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Instead, she shows how colonial products and ideas permeated the domestic culture and shaped its evolution. Finally, the book proposes that the feminine figures of Orientalist texts are often interwoven with representations of language, and more specifically with representations of language as an alien and resistant code—something other than the transparent medium of ideas. It suggests that in promoting awareness that language is not simply the neutral medium of thought and experience, these veiled figures of language function as "foreign bodies," creating disruptive effects within an economy orchestrated toward the production of knowledge of the other. However, the book also argues against the view, espoused by certain critics, that the self-reflexivity of Orientalist writing fully counteracts its polarizing political effects, arguing instead for a process of "double reading" that acknowledges both the geopolitical power encoded within Orientalist representation and the ways in which specific texts resist this power.

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Analyses the expansion of head and body masking from nineteenth-century Paris to its international maturity in contemporary culture Looks at the presence and development of masquerade in the modernist era - via performance history - with parallel references to theatricality and performativity in visual arts and visual culture Comments upon masquerade's foundation in popular performance throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, frequently alluding to significant images from the history of photography Theorises masquerade within the context of European theatre and drama scholarship, as well as British and European conservatory arts and performance training Employs critical thinking influenced by phenomenological and semiotic analyses of performance This book highlights that masquerade can be regarded as a distinct genre of performance activity that employs elements of the carnivalesque, circus, dance, gestural theatre and theatre of objects. Popenhagen traces artistic disguising from fin de si cle Pierrots in Paris, Marseille and Vienna to early twentieth-century masquerading in Moscow and Z rich. He explores identity play and display through the complementary lenses of image studies, cultural history and performance theory.

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Extensively illustrated with more than 200 examples of the best in contemporary Arabic typography and graphic design, Arabic for Designers is an authoritative guide for designers unfamiliar with Arabic script. Using visual examples and case studies, Mourad Boutros takes the reader through the entire range of graphic design applications – newspaper and television news typefaces, book jacket designs, corporate and brand identity, logotype conversions, advertising, design for print and fine art. The author shows how non-Arabic speaking designers can work with the language and understand and respect its cultural nuances, whilst avoiding the pitfalls and mistakes to which many others have fallen victim. Arabic for Designers demonstrates how designing with Arabic can yield incredibly innovative, beautiful and successful results. Based upon over 40 years’ experience of working with an array of corporate and creative clients, Mourad Boutros addresses the rise in global awareness about Arab culture in ways that inform and inspire. This book is an invaluable reference for design students, design professionals, marketeers and anyone interested in Arabic culture and language.

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This collection of original, state-of-the-art essays by prominent international scholars covers the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture. Provides an invaluable reference resource to all interested in the cultural structures and processes that animate contemporary life Contains 27 essays on the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture, including art, science, religions, race, class, gender, collective memory, institutions, and citizenship Reflects and analyzes the “cultural turn” that has transformed scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.

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This collection of original, state-of-the-art essays by prominent international scholars covers the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture. Provides an invaluable reference resource to all interested in the cultural structures and processes that animate contemporary life Contains 27 essays on the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture, including art, science, religions, race, class, gender, collective memory, institutions, and citizenship Reflects and analyzes the “cultural turn” that has transformed scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.

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Explores the range of vibrant cultural production and political activism of youth in Africa today, as expressed through art, music, theater, and online media. This edited collection focuses on the links between youth and African popular culture. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars explore popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. Essays cover a variety of cultural representations--visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual--created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public and shared locally and globally. The volume examines the range of music, art, and media African youth produce, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, and the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts. Essays further explore why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as symbols of the cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world—a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems.

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Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Zizek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. After the Red Army Faction maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Durrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstuck Ulrike Meinhof, and the blockbuster exhibition Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlondorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success The Baader-Meinhof Complex. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts.

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Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion. Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Mukti Khaire introduces readers to three industry players: creators, producers (who bring to market and distribute cultural goods), and intermediaries (who critique and rave about them). Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Pritzker Prize and The Sundance Institute illuminate how these professionals construct a vital value chain. Highlighting the role of "pioneer entrepreneurs"—who carve out space for radical, new product categories—Khaire illustrates how creative professionals influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways.

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The cultural history of the Cold War has been characterized as an explosion of fear and paranoia, based on very little actual intelligence. Both the US and Soviet administrations have since remarked how far off the mark their predictions of the other’s strengths and aims were. Yet so much of the cultural output of the period – in television, film, and literature – was concerned with the end of the world. Here, Nicholas Barnett looks at art and design, opinion polls, the Mass Observation movement, popular fiction and newspapers to show how exactly British people felt about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In uncovering new primary source material, Barnett shows exactly how this seeped in to the art, literature, music and design of the period.

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This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

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In The Vanishing Christopher Pye combines psychoanalytic and cultural theory to advance an innovative interpretation of Renaissance history and subjectivity. Locating the emergence of the modern subject in the era’s transition from feudalism to a modern societal state, Pye supports his argument with interpretations of diverse cultural and literary phenomena, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, witchcraft and demonism, anatomy theaters, and the paintings of Michelangelo. Pye explores the emergence of the early modern subject in terms of a range of subjectivizing mechanisms tied to the birth of a modern conception of history, one that is structured around a spatial and temporal horizon—a vanishing point. He also discusses the distinctly economic character of early modern subjectivity and how this, too, is implicated in our own modern modes of historical understanding. After explaining how the aims of New Historicist and Foucauldian approaches to the Renaissance are inseparably linked to such a historical conception, Pye demonstrates how the early modern subject can be understood in terms of a Lacanian and Zizekian account of the emerging social sphere. By focusing on the Renaissance as a period of remarkable artistic and cultural production, he is able to illustrate his points with discussions of a number of uniquely fascinating topics—for instance, how demonism was intimately related to a significant shift in law and symbolic order and how there existed at the time a “demonic” preoccupation with certain erotic dimensions of the emergent social subject.Highly sophisticated and elegantly crafted, The Vanishing will be of interest to students of Shakespeare and early modern culture, Renaissance visual art, and cultural and psychoanalytic theory.

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The Culture of Western Europe, George L. Mosse’s sweeping cultural history, was originally published in 1961 and revised and expanded in 1974 and 1988. Originating from the lectures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for which Mosse would become famous, the book addresses, in crisp and accessible language, the key issues he saw as animating the movement of culture in Europe. Mosse emphasizes the role of both rational and irrational forces in making modern Europe, beginning with the interplay between eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century Romanticism. He traces cultural and political movements in all areas of society, especially nationalism but also economics, class identity and conflict, religion and morality, family structure, medicine, and art. This new edition restores the original 1961 illustrations and features a critical introduction by Anthony J. Steinhoff, professor in the department of history at the UniversitÉ du QuÉbec À MontrÉal, contextualizing Mosse’s project and arguing for its continued relevance today.

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Among the buildings on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., only the Pan American Union (PAU) houses an international organization. The first of many anticipated “peace palaces”constructed in the early twentieth century, the PAU began with a mission of cultural diplomacy, and after World War II its Visual Arts Section became a leader in the burgeoning hemispheric arts scene, proclaiming Latin America’s entrée into the international community as it forged connections between a growing base of middle-class art consumers on one hand and concepts of supranational citizenship and political and economic liberalism on the other.Making Art Panamerican situates the ambitious visual arts programs of the PAU within the broader context of hemispheric cultural relations during the cold war. Focusing on the institutional interactions among aesthetic movements, cultural policy, and viewing publics, Claire F. Fox contends that in the postwar years, the PAU Visual Arts Section emerged as a major transfer point of hemispheric American modernist movements and played an important role in the consolidation of Latin American art as a continental object of study. As it traces the careers of individual cultural policymakers and artists who intersected with the PAU in the two postwar decades—such as Concha Romero James, Charles Seeger, José Gómez Sicre, José Luis Cuevas, and Rafael Squirru—the book also charts the trajectories and displacements of sectors of the U.S. and Latin American intellectual left during a tumultuous interval that spans the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal, and the early cold war. Challenging the U.S. bias of conventional narratives about Panamericanism and the postwar shift in critical values from realism to abstraction, Making Art Panamerican illuminates the institutional dynamics that helped shape aesthetic movements in the critical decades following World War II.

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Providing a comprehensive history of Italy from around 1800 to the present, Italy in the Modern World traces the social and cultural transformations that defined the lives of Italians during the 19th and 20th century. The book focuses on how social relations (class, gender and race), science and the arts shaped the political processes of unification, state building, fascism and the postwar world. Split up into four parts covering the making of Italy, the liberal state, war and fascism, and the republic, the text draws on secondary literature and primary sources in order to synthesize current historiographical debates and provide primary documents for classroom use. There are individual chapters on key topics, such as unification, Italians in the world, Italy in the world, science and the arts, fascism, the World Wars, the Cold War, and Italy in the 21st century, as well as a wealth of useful features for students, including: * Comprehensive bibliographic essays covering each of the four parts * 23 images and 12 maps Italy in the Modern World also firmly places both the nation and its people in a wider global context through a distinctly transnational approach. It is essential reading for all students of modern Italian history.

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In this important new book Rein Raud develops an original theory of culture understood as a loose and internally contradictory system of texts and practices that are shared by intermittent groups of people and used by them to make sense of their life-worlds. This theory views culture simultaneously in two ways: as a world of texts, tangible and shareable products of signifying acts, and as a space of practices, repeatable activities that produce, disseminate and interpret these clusters of meaning. Both approaches are developed into corresponding models of culture which, used together, are able to provide a rich understanding of any meaning in action. In developing this innovative theory, Raud draws on a wide range of disciplines, from anthropology, sociology and cultural studies to semiotics and philosophy. The theory is illustrated throughout with examples drawn from both �high� and popular culture, and from Western and Asian traditions, dealing with both contemporary and historical topics. The book concludes with two case studies from very different contexts – one dealing with Italian poetry in the 13th century, the other dealing with the art scene in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. This timely and original work makes a major new contribution to the theory of culture and will be welcomed by students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

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