Recent discussions on colonialism and coloniality in academic and community contexts have not been fully informed, only understanding the past from a present-day context. This article provides a deeper, more experiential understanding of this culturally complex phenomenon by combining three research methodologies: structured regional research, ethnography informed research and multidisciplinary wellbeing research. The article examines traces of colonialism in the Far West Rand area of South Africa, at a time of expanding mining operations when it was rare for people to think of themselves as ‘colonists’ with a colonial vision. Yet, structured regional research points to a history of immense urbanisation, linked to immigration and strong, almost dominant, features of colonialism. Two other, totally different, research methods have also observed the same phenomenon, adopting a more experiential angle to communities in the Far West Rand. These community experiences relate more closely to a coloniality imagery manifested primarily in ideas and opinions about contemporary service delivery, poverty and land use issues.
{"title":"Recognizing Traces of Colonialism and Coloniality in a South African Mining Region: Surfacing the Past in Regional, Ethnographic and Well-Being Research","authors":"Elize S. van Eeden, Sulevi Riukulehto","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0287","url":null,"abstract":"Recent discussions on colonialism and coloniality in academic and community contexts have not been fully informed, only understanding the past from a present-day context. This article provides a deeper, more experiential understanding of this culturally complex phenomenon by combining three research methodologies: structured regional research, ethnography informed research and multidisciplinary wellbeing research. The article examines traces of colonialism in the Far West Rand area of South Africa, at a time of expanding mining operations when it was rare for people to think of themselves as ‘colonists’ with a colonial vision. Yet, structured regional research points to a history of immense urbanisation, linked to immigration and strong, almost dominant, features of colonialism. Two other, totally different, research methods have also observed the same phenomenon, adopting a more experiential angle to communities in the Far West Rand. These community experiences relate more closely to a coloniality imagery manifested primarily in ideas and opinions about contemporary service delivery, poverty and land use issues.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135965211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sarah Ann Frank, <i>Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France</i>","authors":"Emily Marker","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0290","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135965212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article traces the cultural history of a portrait format popularised through the global expansion of lithographic printing. This format combined a traditional portrait vignette with a lithographic facsimile of the sitter’s signature. Such ‘facsimile-autographed’ portraits evoked the notion that sitters had physically signed their own likenesses – testifying not only to the veracity of the depiction, but displaying an indexical trace of embodied agency. The article argues that this format afforded a particularly cogent way to conceptualise and communicate ideas about selfhood and society in liberal, romantic, and nationalist political programmes. Such lithographic portraits did not simply ‘encode’ or ‘reflect’ these new ideas, however, but were part of a technological revolution that decentralised the production of mass media and thereby reshaped the societies in which such novel ideas flourished. By connecting the various expressions of public selfhood found in facsimile-autographed portraits to the way lithography expanded audiences and reshaped modes of conceptualising public and private life over the course of the nineteenth century, this article argues that established scholarly concepts like the ‘romantic self’ or ‘liberal self’ might be reconsidered through a new, technomaterial heuristic: the ‘lithographic self’.
{"title":"The ‘Autographic Self’: Facsimile Signatures and Lithographic Portraiture at the Crossroads of Liberalism, Romanticism and Nationalism, c. 1800–60","authors":"Tom Young","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0286","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the cultural history of a portrait format popularised through the global expansion of lithographic printing. This format combined a traditional portrait vignette with a lithographic facsimile of the sitter’s signature. Such ‘facsimile-autographed’ portraits evoked the notion that sitters had physically signed their own likenesses – testifying not only to the veracity of the depiction, but displaying an indexical trace of embodied agency. The article argues that this format afforded a particularly cogent way to conceptualise and communicate ideas about selfhood and society in liberal, romantic, and nationalist political programmes. Such lithographic portraits did not simply ‘encode’ or ‘reflect’ these new ideas, however, but were part of a technological revolution that decentralised the production of mass media and thereby reshaped the societies in which such novel ideas flourished. By connecting the various expressions of public selfhood found in facsimile-autographed portraits to the way lithography expanded audiences and reshaped modes of conceptualising public and private life over the course of the nineteenth century, this article argues that established scholarly concepts like the ‘romantic self’ or ‘liberal self’ might be reconsidered through a new, technomaterial heuristic: the ‘lithographic self’.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135965222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei's case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.
{"title":"Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching's Hong Kong Stories","authors":"Jessica Siu-yin Yeung","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0288","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei's case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135965224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spanish horror films set in the late Franco period are a highly successful genre. However, academics have criticised its study, arguing that such films are of low quality. Nevertheless, the genre is a fundamental cultural source for understanding how fiction interacts with a society’s fears as it undergoes a profound transformation. This article aims to analyse the ways rituals were represented as allegorical figures of the anxieties and conflicts in the final years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1968–1975). On the one hand, we will examine the three main discourses that were instrumental to the founding of monstrous cults based on gender, class and nationalism. On the other hand, we will analyse the intermingling of political violence and modernisation through the performance of rituals. Satanic rituals served as visual metaphors for a reality constructed from the Manichaean vision of Catholicism and the exclusionary nationalism of Francoism imposed through political violence.
{"title":"Satanic Rituals in Spanish Horror Films and the Franco Dictatorship","authors":"Erika Tiburcio","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0289","url":null,"abstract":"Spanish horror films set in the late Franco period are a highly successful genre. However, academics have criticised its study, arguing that such films are of low quality. Nevertheless, the genre is a fundamental cultural source for understanding how fiction interacts with a society’s fears as it undergoes a profound transformation. This article aims to analyse the ways rituals were represented as allegorical figures of the anxieties and conflicts in the final years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1968–1975). On the one hand, we will examine the three main discourses that were instrumental to the founding of monstrous cults based on gender, class and nationalism. On the other hand, we will analyse the intermingling of political violence and modernisation through the performance of rituals. Satanic rituals served as visual metaphors for a reality constructed from the Manichaean vision of Catholicism and the exclusionary nationalism of Francoism imposed through political violence.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":"128 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135965219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Throughout history marking the home has often been used to convey urgent information about the ‘health’ of its inhabitants. These strategies frequently target the door or entrance to the household, as it presents a porous boundary between public and private spheres. This chapter engages with several historical examples that examine how the door has been marked during periods of ‘death’ and ‘disease’ in order to prevent further spread of contagion. Specifically, it explores the use of the Plague Cross during the Great Plague of London in 1665, which became a means to regulate the movement of the infected. This is compared with modern-day forms of inscribing the door and how ‘Plague Markings’ have re-emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion considers that while these forms of inscription often serve valuable public health functions, they are also embroiled in a distinct politics of regulation. In many cases, marking sites of ‘contamination’ facilitates the categorisation of the ‘Other’ which defines who and what is able to enter society. Inscribing the door thus becomes an act of ‘the powerful’, signalling who is able to exert control over the body and the threshold.
{"title":"Plague Markings: Doors and Disease","authors":"Edward Brookes","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0285","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout history marking the home has often been used to convey urgent information about the ‘health’ of its inhabitants. These strategies frequently target the door or entrance to the household, as it presents a porous boundary between public and private spheres. This chapter engages with several historical examples that examine how the door has been marked during periods of ‘death’ and ‘disease’ in order to prevent further spread of contagion. Specifically, it explores the use of the Plague Cross during the Great Plague of London in 1665, which became a means to regulate the movement of the infected. This is compared with modern-day forms of inscribing the door and how ‘Plague Markings’ have re-emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion considers that while these forms of inscription often serve valuable public health functions, they are also embroiled in a distinct politics of regulation. In many cases, marking sites of ‘contamination’ facilitates the categorisation of the ‘Other’ which defines who and what is able to enter society. Inscribing the door thus becomes an act of ‘the powerful’, signalling who is able to exert control over the body and the threshold.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135965227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Craig Griffiths, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0282","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44115208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the Third Reich, a modern shape of everyday objects was propagated as realising a German nation defined as an organic and racial entity. What happened to this cultural nexus after 1945? Historical scholarship has emphasized above all that modern design went on to be successfully framed as a cultural good that redeemed West Germany from the Nazi past. This redeeming opposition between the political meanings of modern design before and after 1945, however, appears less clear-cut if one acknowledges the structure of denial in post-war discourses by focussing on the silences, omissions and discrepancies in various publications. Such an analysis exposes how the coding of modern design as ‘timeless’ together with its promotion in the context of the Marshall Plan made it possible to blur any historical understanding of how the underlying notions of everyday aesthetics had been intertwined with racially loaded ideas of the German people. This obscurity in the context of a not yet decolonized West facilitated the continuing influence of at least some aspects of modern design’s more troubling political legacies.
{"title":"‘A Final Solution for Humanity’? Modern Design and the Ambivalence of Redemption in Post-War West Germany","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0278","url":null,"abstract":"During the Third Reich, a modern shape of everyday objects was propagated as realising a German nation defined as an organic and racial entity. What happened to this cultural nexus after 1945? Historical scholarship has emphasized above all that modern design went on to be successfully framed as a cultural good that redeemed West Germany from the Nazi past. This redeeming opposition between the political meanings of modern design before and after 1945, however, appears less clear-cut if one acknowledges the structure of denial in post-war discourses by focussing on the silences, omissions and discrepancies in various publications. Such an analysis exposes how the coding of modern design as ‘timeless’ together with its promotion in the context of the Marshall Plan made it possible to blur any historical understanding of how the underlying notions of everyday aesthetics had been intertwined with racially loaded ideas of the German people. This obscurity in the context of a not yet decolonized West facilitated the continuing influence of at least some aspects of modern design’s more troubling political legacies.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48366362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms levelled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism.
{"title":"Fears of Enchantment: Advertising Theory in Britain and the Making of a Modern Myth","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/cult.2023.0277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2023.0277","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms levelled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41814710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：