Ideas of Reality: Antonio Dias between Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Milan

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-99
Author(s):  
Sérgio B. Martins

Despite the fact that the growing reception of Antonio Dias (b. 1944) in the English-speaking world is happening under the sign of global art history, the trajectory of the Brazilian artist in the 1960s and 1970s actually suggests both a counter-genealogy and a counter-geography of the global. This essay explores this situation by recontextualizing Dias's emergence vis-à-vis the critical debate on realism and underdevelopment that marked the Rio de Janeiro avant-gardist scene of the mid- to late-1960s and involved writers such as Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, Mário Pedrosa, Pierre Restany, and Frederico Morais. It subsequently argues that such critical terms simultaneously both change and remain crucial as Dias moves away from Brazil, first to Paris, late in 1966, and then to Milan, in 1968, inflecting the artist's recourse to the English language and his turn to painting as his preferred medium even as he began to circulate amongst artists associated with Arte Povera and Conceptualism in Europe.

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaakov Ariel

Since the 1960s, remarkable changes have taken place in the relationship between the Christian and Jewish communities in the West. A movement of interfaith dialogue stood at the center of the developments, serving as a catalyst that helped to bring about reconciliation and improvement in the attitudes of Christians towards Jews. Beginning in the English-speaking world at the turn of the twentieth century, the dialogue between Jews and non-Jews gained more ground in the decades between the two world wars. The movement of interfaith reconciliation advanced considerably in the years after World War II and reached a "golden age" in the late 1960s and 1970s, when an unprecedented momentum for reconciliation and dialogue between the faiths flourished in Europe, America, Israel, and other countries. Despite occasional set-backs and while involving mostly members of liberal or mainstream groups, this movement helped to improve the relationship between Christians and Jews in an unprecedented manner and on a worldwide scale.


Author(s):  
Alasdair Pettinger

A minimal definition of travel writing might be any account of a journey or description of a place that is based on firsthand experience. As such, it may be found in many different kinds of text: diaries, letters, postcards, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, essays, official reports, promotional brochures, and ethnographies, as well as travel books. Travel writing is often distinguished from guidebooks on the one hand and imaginative fiction, drama, and poetry on the other, but the term may sometimes include them, especially when discussing writings from before the 19th century, when such distinctions would have carried less weight with authors and readers. While it has long served as a vital source material by historians and biographers, travel writing rarely, even in those cultural histories documenting the “images” of or “attitudes” toward “other” races or nationalities that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, attracted the kind of close critical attention commonly given to literary fiction until the 1980s, coinciding with several related developments. First, there was an increasingly politicized self-questioning within literary studies and anthropology, combined with an interdisciplinary theoretical sophistication. Second, beyond the academy, there was a surge in popularity of literary travel writing, associated with authors such as Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, and others, promoted especially in the English-speaking world by Granta magazine. Within two decades, travel-writing studies could claim to be an academic discipline in its own right, with dedicated journals, textbooks, research centers, and conferences. If most of the influential early studies were dominated by anglophone critics studying anglophone texts, the field has since broadened significantly. Nevertheless, many studies of travel writing, without announcing it in their titles, continue to be largely concerned with English-speaking authors, often British. The reasons for restricting their scope in this way are rarely explicitly addressed; it is as if this is a default position for the scholars concerned rather than because “British and Irish travel writing” is a coherent object of study as such. As in many other fields, “British” is often used when “English” would be more accurate, and “English” sometimes silently includes texts that might be better described as Scottish, Welsh, or Irish.


Author(s):  
Miroslava Chávez-García

To explore the ways in which migrants negotiated longing, gender, intimacy, courtship, marriage, and identity across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the 1960s and 1970s, chapter 1 opens by examining and analyzing the broader racial, labor, and environmental contexts shaping José Chávez’s—the author’s father—experience as a Mexican laborer in Imperial Valley in the 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, it pays attention to working and living conditions in el valle and how those contributed to his loneliness, isolation, and ambivalence as a border dweller, despite his status as a green card holder and his ability to engage in return migration. Next, it examines letter writing as a form of courtship as detailed in the love letters he crafted and the cultural tools—stylized letter writing, the English language, portraits, songs, movies, and the radio—he drew upon to convince Maria Concepción “Conchita” Alvarado—the author’s mother—to accept his marriage proposal. Finally, it shows that while Conchita never formally agreed to the nuptials, she walked down the aisle and married José, an act that set her life on a new course. Indeed, within a few days, she left her hometown and relocated with José to the Mexicali-Calexico border, where they set out to create a new future for themselves.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-586
Author(s):  
Peter Burke

The 1960s and 1970s marked a turning point in the encounters between generalist historians and art historians regarding the study of art. Before that moment, art history, from its very inception as an independent department in universities, had been entirely distinct from the discipline of generalist history. However, three case studies—art and the Reformation, the rise of the art market, and the proliferation of political monuments—reveal the convergence between the two disciplines that has unfolded during the last half-century, culminating in recent discussions of agency and attempts to answer the question, What is Art?


2018 ◽  
Vol 79 (11) ◽  
pp. 617
Author(s):  
Kelly McElroy ◽  
Laurie M. Bridges

It is widely accepted that English is the current lingua franca, especially in the scientific community. With approximately 527 million native speakers globally, English ranks as the third most-spoken language (after Chinese and Hindu-Urdu), but there are also an estimated 1.5 billion English-language learners in the world.The preeminence of English reflects the political power of the English-speaking world, carrying privileges for those who can speak, write, and read in English, and disadvantages to those who cannot. This is also the case in scholarly communication. Linguist Nicholas Subtirelu identifies three privileges for native English speakers: 1) easier access to social, political, and educational institutions; 2) access to additional forms of capital; and 3) avoiding negative opinions of one’s speech.For example, we were both born into families that speak American English at home, we were surrounded by English books and media growing up, and our entire education was in English. Even defining who counts as a “native” speaker can be refracted through other social identities. As college-educated white Americans, our English is never questioned, but the same is not true for many equally fluent people around the world. 


Author(s):  
Hye Seung Chung ◽  
So-hee Kim

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. Propelled by underdog protagonists who can only communicate through shared corporeal pain and extreme violence, Kim's graphic films have been classified by Western audiences as belonging to sensationalist East Asian “extreme” cinema, and Kim has been labeled a “psychopath” and “misogynist” in South Korea. Drawing upon both Korean-language and English-language sources, the book challenges these misunderstandings, recuperating Kim's oeuvre as a therapeutic, yet brutal cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment (political anger and resentment deriving from subordination and oppression). The book argues that the power of Kim's cinema lies precisely in its ability to capture, channel, and convey the raw emotions of protagonists who live on the bottom rungs of Korean society. It provides historical and postcolonial readings of victimization and violence in Kim's cinema, which tackles such socially relevant topics as national division in Wild Animals and The Coast Guard and U.S. military occupation in Address Unknown. The book also explores the religious and spiritual themes in Kim's most recent works, which suggest possibilities of reconciliation and transcendence.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Roger Smith

<p>Ernst Lissauer’s “Haßgesang gegen England” is an Anglophobic German poem, written in the early weeks of the First World War. This thesis examines the poem’s reception in the German and English-speaking worlds, the imitations it inspired, the opposition it provoked, and the enduring discourse it instigated. The study begins by outlining Lissauer’s biography, and places his “Haßgesang” within the context of contemporary German poetry of hate. It discusses the changing reception of the poem in the German-speaking world over time, and the many and varied German works it inspired. The “Haßgesang” is shown to have captured the Zeitgeist of Germany at the beginning of the First World War, but to have been later rejected by the German public and renounced by its author, while the war still raged. The poem also established a discourse on hatred and hatefulness as motivating factors in war, sparking debate on both sides. In the English-speaking world, the “Haßgesang” was viewed by some as a useful insight into the national psyche of the Germans, while for others it merely confirmed existing stereotypes of Germans as a hateful people. As an example of propaganda in reverse the poem can hardly be bettered, inspiring parodies, cartoons, soldiers’ slang and music hall numbers, almost all engineered to subvert the poem’s hateful message. The New Zealand reception provides a useful case study of the reception of the poem in the English-speaking world, linking reportage of overseas responses with new, locally produced ones. New Zealand emerges as a geographically distant but remarkably well-informed corner of the British Empire. Regardless of the poem’s literary quality, its role as a vehicle for propaganda, satire and irony singles it out as a powerful document of its time: one which cut across all strata of society from the ruling elite to the men in the trenches, and which became an easily recognised symbol around the globe.</p>


Author(s):  
Pauline Greenhill

Films incorporating fairy-tale narratives, characters, titles, images, plots, motifs, and themes date from the earliest history of the cinema, beginning with director Georges Méliès’s Le manoir du diable made in 1896, the year after Auguste and Louis Lumière’s first public showing of their “cinematograph” in Paris in 1895. Fairy tales can be oral (told by people in different geographical locations and at various historical times up to the present) and/or literary (created by known authors) in origin, but they manifest in numerous media, including film. While the Disney formula of innocent persecuted heroines, handsome princes, and happy-ever-afters has dominated popular understandings of such narratives (at least in the English-speaking world), fairy tales need not contain these elements. They concern the fantastic, the magical, the dark, the dreamy, the wishful, and the wonderful. Short and feature length, animated and live action, produced in film stock, video, and digital formats, fairy-tale films have appeared in movie theaters and more recently on television and computer screens. Using Kevin Paul Smith’s classification for literary fairy tales, fairy-tale filmic intertexts can include explicit reference in the title—for example, Duane Journey’s Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (2013); implicit reference in the title—for example, Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s Mirror Mirror (2012); explicit incorporation into the text—as when Micheline Lanctôt’s Le piège d’Issoudun (2003) includes a play of “The Juniper Tree”; implicit incorporation into the text—as when Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) has the mechanical child David’s human mother abandon him in the woods, as do Hansel and Gretel’s parents; discussing fairy tales, as in the “Once Upon a Crime” episode of the American television show Castle (2009–2016), when the writer and police talk about what fairy tales really mean; and invoking fairy-tale chronotopes (settings and/or environments)—as in the portions of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) set in the heroine Ofelia’s father’s magical kingdom. Alternatively, filmmakers may re-vision a story, sometimes with new spin, as when Matthew Bright’s Freeway 2 (1999) relocates “Hansel and Gretel” to 1990s America, with two delinquent teen girls fleeing to Mexico, or may create an entirely new tale—like Pan’s Labyrinth, not based on any specific previous literary or traditional fairy tale. This article focuses on the cinema—movies made for theatrical and/or video release—but draws on television and Internet films when they offer telling illustrations. Most examples are from English-language media. Although classic works like director Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête (1946) have received considerable attention from cinema studies and the fairy-tale structural analysis of Vladimir Propp (1968) has greatly influenced film analysis, only since the beginning of the 21st century has fairy-tale scholarship merged with film scholarship. Scholars of fairy-tale film often consider adaptation and intermediality in cinematic versions of tales. This article uses the example of director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s The Fall (2007), which draws on and references fairy-tale magic to collapse, expand, and generally fictionalize time and space to invoke the postmodern and postcolonial as well as the transnational and transcultural.


Author(s):  
Taoyu Yang ◽  
Hongquan Han

Abstract Shanghai was the first Chinese city to bear the full brunt of Japanese aggression during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). This historiographical article reviews the development of the study of wartime Shanghai in Chinese- and English-language academia in the past two decades. In the People’s Republic of China, Shanghai’s history during World War II has long been a favorite topic for academic historians. In the English-speaking world, however, the history of Shanghai’s wartime experience has only recently become a popular research topic. This article introduces many significant works related to wartime Shanghai, lays out important areas of inquiry, and identifies key historiographical trends. Its conclusion offers some suggestions on how the study of wartime Shanghai can be further advanced in the future.


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