Native American Expressive Arts

Author(s):  
Anya Montiel

Opening with the life and art of Dakota artist Oscar Howe, the chapter discusses the “Indianness” of Native art and the frustrations experienced by Native artists over the years surrounding their creative expressions. The chapter is arranged chronologically, opening in the late nineteenth century and highlighting sample exhibitions, artworks, and artists from the United States in order to illustrate broad conceptual issues. These include Indian authenticity and identity, differences between fine art and “crafts,” traditional versus contemporary art forms, the role of the arts in economic development, and the impact of federal power on the arts. The chapter draws examples from painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance art. It concludes with a proposal for understanding Native art inspired by the words of Santa Clara artist Rose Simpson.

Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


Peyote Effect ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Dawson

This chapter explores the first sustained efforts to enact a federal ban on peyote in the United States. Missionaries and Indian Agents began pressing for a ban in the late nineteenth century, only to be thwarted by Native American peyotists and their allies in the Bureau of American Ethnology, who argued both that peyote worship should be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that it was not deleterious to the health of individual peyotists. By 1917, however, state governments were beginning to pass local bans, with the first prohibitions passed in Colorado and Utah. In early 1918, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the cause, holding hearings on a proposed ban. The record of those hearings offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that racial anxieties were articulated through anxieties over peyotism in the early twentieth century. The ban passed the House but failed in the Senate.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.


2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-282
Author(s):  
MINA YANG

AbstractWhile Moulin Rouge! (2001) riffs on and even exaggerates conventions from classic Hollywood backstage musicals, it owes a clear debt to an even earlier musico-dramatic genre – the opera. Combining operatic and film musical elements with those of pop videos, contemporary cinema and the rave scene, Baz Luhrmann's film engages with many of the thorny issues that have concerned opera critics of late, such as power, gender, exoticism, authorship, and identity construction and performance. The spotlight on the central love triangle of a consumptive courtesan, a writer and a wealthy patron makes possible a deeper scrutiny of traditional gender roles in the production and reception of Western art. The film's formulaic plot and the backstage musical format render transparent the commercial impetus behind the creative process and demystify the role of the Romantic artist-genius. Finally, the transnational and transhistorical elements of the film – a mostly Australian production team and crew, American and British pop songs, a Parisian backdrop, the Bollywood-inspired show-within-a-show, numerous anachronisms that refuse to stay confined within the specified time setting of the late nineteenth century – disrupt the Classical ideals of artistic unity and integrity and suggest new postmodern geographies and temporalities. This article considers how Luhrmann, by simultaneously paying homage to and critiquing operatic practices in Moulin Rouge!, deconstructs and reinvents opera for the postmodern age.


2005 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Allen

Some of the late nineteenth century success of Liberia coffee, sugar, and other commodities can be attributed to the leasing of plantations to enterprising foreigners, although a few leading politicians did own successful farms … For most Americo-Liberians, the role of dirt farmer was decidedly beneath their station.Yet the reasons for this apathy among most Americo-Liberians for agriculture, which prevailed up to the early 1870s, were not far to seek. The majority of them being newly emancipated slaves, who had in servitude in America been used to being forced to work, erroneously equated their newly won freedom with abstinence from labour.Both arguments are inaccurate, yet the authors made essential contributions to the writing of Liberian history. J. Gus Liebenow became renowned within Liberian academic circles for his earlier book, Liberia: the Evolution of Privilege. In that book he analyzed the policy that enabled the minority Americo-Liberians (descendants of free blacks from the United States who founded Liberia in 1822), to monopolize political and economic power to the exclusion of the majority indigenous Africans for more than a century. M. B. Akpan dissected Liberia's dubious political history and concluded that Americo-Liberian authority over the indigenous population, was identical to the discriminatory and oppressive policy practiced by European colonizers in Africa.


2000 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian A 'Hearn

Recent work by Robert Putnam has revived a contentious debate about the role of culture in Italian regional disparities. Southern Italy is argued to have been locked in an impoverishing, no-trust equilibrium. This article explores an apparent exception to Putnam's historical evidence: the South's late-nineteenth-century cooperative banks (banche popolari). Econometric investigation reveals important differences in the strategy and performance of these banks in North and South during the crucial decade of the 1890s, and shows that these differences cannot be attributed to differences in the local environment. In fact, the evidence is broadly consistent with Putnam's hypothesis.


Author(s):  
Ariel Osterweis

By paying particular attention to the role of the dancing body inBlack Swan(2010), this chapter interrogates the status of virtuosity and performance in a film that insists on the horror of transformation.Swan Lakeis significant in dance history for introducing thefouettéturn, the modern mark of female virtuosity in ballet from the late nineteenth century onward. Director Darren Aronofsky relies upon filmic techniques to invoke the dismantling effects of ballet technique, demonstrating how the pursuit of virtuosity narrates a story of the attainment, surpassing, and failure of technique. He does so by drawing upon lowbrow “body genres” (Linda Williams) to depict an otherwise highbrow art form.Black Swanportrays artistic ambition through a ballerina’s (and Odette/Odile’s) erratic transformation from human to animal. Mirroring, doubling, and reversibility (Vivian Sobchack) are tropes for Nina (Natalie Portman) and her alter-ego. Embodied by Nina and Lily (Mila Kunis), self andotherperform a necessarily entangled pas de deux, one in which the seemingly perfect image of the other simultaneously haunts and motivates the dancer, a figure for whom psychological control diminishes as artistic control accrues.


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ori Preuss

The article reconstructs the largely forgotten role of key Brazilian intellectuals in the Latins-versus-Anglo-Saxons debates that developed around 1898, emphasizing the embeddedness of their thinking in the transnational crossings of men and ideas within South America. It thus challenges the common depiction of late-nineteenth-century Latin Americanism as a purely Spanish American phenomenon and of the United States as its major catalyst, allowing a more nuanced understanding of this movement' s nature.


Author(s):  
G. A. Bremner

This chapter traces the movement outward and influence of the Gothic Revival movement beyond Europe during the mid to late nineteenth century. It considers the impact of this movement on both secular and religious buildings, focusing on how this particular style of architecture found its way into the wider British world, and into corresponding Anglophone cultures such as the United States of America, and what its transmission meant culturally and institutionally. Although much of the chapter’s content focuses on church buildings, other building types considered include museums, universities, and government legislatures. It is argued that the medievalizing tendencies brought by the broadcasting of the Gothic Revival movement were intended to capture and symbolize the essential image and values of European, Christian culture as it sought to inculcate such values though education, religion, and government.


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