Screening the Art World

Unlike most studies of the relationship between cinema and art, which privilege questions of medium or institutional specificity and intermediality, Screening the Art World explores the ways in which artists and the art world more generally have been represented in cinema. Contributors address a rarely explored subject -art in cinema, rather than the art of cinema - by considering films across genres, historical periods and national cinemas in order to reflect on cinema’s fluctuating imaginary of ‘art’ and ‘the art world’. The book examines the intersection of art history with history in cinema, cinema’s simultaneous affirmation and denigration of the idea of art as ‘truth’ and what this means for cinema’s understanding of itself, the dominant, often contradictory ways in which artists have been represented on screen, and cinematic representations of the art world’s tenuous position between commercial good and cultural capital.

Urban morphogenesis analysis based on geohistorical road data

Road networks result from a subtle balance between geographical coverage and rapid access to strategic points. An understanding of their structure is fundamental when it comes to evaluating and improving territorial accessibility. This study is designed to provide insight into the progressive structuring of territorial patterns by analyzing the evolution of road networks. Studying road network morphogenesis requires geohistorical data, provided here by historical maps from which earlier road networks can be digitized. A hypergraph is constructed from these networks by combining road segments into “ways” on the basis of a method for defining the continuity of road segments. Next, indicators are computed for these ways based on topological and geometrical features. The road patterns of three cities in the Burgundy Franche-Comte region of France (Dijon, Besançon, and Pontarlier) at three historical periods (the 18th, 19th, and twentieth centuries) are then analyzed. In this manner, their topological features and centrality characteristics can be compared from snapshots at different times and places. The innovative method proposed in this paper helps us to read features of the road patterns accurately and to make simple interpretations. It can be applied to any territory for which data is available. The results highlight the underlying structure of the three cities, reveal information about the history and the functioning of the networks, and give preliminary insights into the morphogenesis of those cities. Prospectively this work aims to identify the mechanisms that drive change in road networks. Detecting stability or variation in indicators over time can help in identifying similar behavior, despite geographic and cultural distances, as well as evolution mechanisms linked to specificities of each city. The study of road network morphogenesis can make a major contribution to understanding how road network structure affects accessibility and mobility.

Shifting Horizons - A Line and Its Movement in Art, History and Philosophy

What happens when horizons shift? More specifically, what occurs when that line, which in everyday experience appears so consistent and omnipresent, reveals itself to be contingent? And if the horizon line is mutable, what does that imply about the systems of knowledge, order, and faith that the seemingly immutable horizon appears to neatly delimit and order? These are the questions that the volume of essays addresses, offering perspectives from multiple historical periods and disciplines that tackle instances in literature, history, and art in which shifts in conceptualizing the horizon made themselves manifest.

Utopian and insular spaces in Chinese literature: An island approach

In response to the relative lack of scholarly attention paid to the relationship between island utopia and Chinese literature, this paper studies the imagination of both island and insular geographies in Chinese ‘utopian’ literature using an island-sensitive approach. Employing an expanded and constructive conception of the island, the paper examines the heterogeneity of Chinese island and insular imaginaries in literary works from diverse historical periods, especially in relation to the dominant western model of the remote tropical oceanic island. Based on the finding that the alterity of Chinese island and insular imagination lies as much in its depiction of spatial ambiguities as in its mixing of diverse figures, I reflect further on the benefits and perils of adopting a west-inflected island approach in examining the imaginary landscapes of utopianism and insularity in Chinese literature. It is argued that Chinese island literature is more a reading effect enabled by an imported theoretical approach than any inherent tradition in itself. In the end, two paths for innovating island aesthetics and epistemologies in cross-cultural contexts are proposed.

Inversions in US Presidential Elections: 1836–2016

Inversions—in which the popular vote winner loses the election— have occurred in four US presidential races. We show that rather than being statistical flukes, inversions have been ex ante likely since the early 1800s. In elections yielding a popular vote margin within 1 point (one-eighth of presidential elections), about 40 percent will be inversions in expectation. We show this conditional probability is remarkably stable across historical periods—despite differences in which groups voted, which states existed, and which parties participated. Our findings imply that the United States has experienced so few inversions merely because there have been so few elections (and fewer close elections). (JEL D72, N41, N42)

Albanian Myths and Custom Law in Literature

Mythology plays a very important role in the general culture of the Albanian people, and the influence of the latter is undoubtedly seen in the later literature, developed in different historical periods, while mythology is taken as an important basis for a series of canons both in a structural manner as well as with the inclusion of a number of literary figures. Albanian mythology consists of a complete and diverse catalog of cults and beliefs which together have developed into a rich treasure which from time to time has inspired later Albanian writers, from the Middle Ages to modern ones. This article serves as pamphlet which explains the Albanian mythology in bold lines, including the main constituent elements of this mythology, the impact that this mythology has had on the daily customary life of the Albanian people, as well as the inevitable impact that the latter has had on the literature of the country.

Arendt, Koselleck, and Begreifen: Rethinking Politics and Concepts in Times of Crisis

Reinhard Koselleck has long been regarded as a particularly eminent theorist of socio-political concepts, while Hannah Arendt had not been in focus as a conceptual author until recent times. This article explores the common thinking space between Arendt and Koselleck through their thesis about the gap, rupture, crisis, or break in the tradition of political thinking and historical periods and how this is linked to their notion of conceptuality, i.e. Begreifen (understanding). Despite the impression that each of them focused on the one main break between the past and the future, Arendt and Koselleck both studied multiple breaks and crises in the Western political tradition. The article attempts to show how their distinctive thinking and rethinking of political concepts (Begreifen) are related to these breaks through several direct and indirect encounters and how these are both close and apart at the same time. While they have different concepts of politics and the political, their understanding of the breaks in time and crises can be read as complementary, especially considering their concern with returning the responsibility for actions and concepts to the human sphere.

Evolution of “Ethnic” Business in Russia: Comparative Analysis of Entrepreneurship of Migrants from Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the entrepreneurial activity of migrants from Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan in Moscow and the Moscow region who have created a business in the period from the 1990s to the mid-2010s. The study was carried out on the analysis of 58 interviews with entrepreneurs and representatives of public organizations and journalists, as well as a survey of entrepreneurs of Kyrgyz origin conducted in 2017-2019. The comparison is based on the analysis of the factors and characteristics such as structural opportunities and limitations; motivation to engage in entrepreneurship; features of the formation of start-up capital, the composition of partners, personnel and consumer audience; types of entrepreneurial strategies; the role of ethnicity and ethnicity, as well as networks based on ties with relatives, fellow countrymen and compatriots. It is concluded that the concept of “middleman minority” is most suitable for describing the ideal type of entrepreneurship of migrants from Azerbaijan, and “ethnic economy” for migrants from Kyrgyzstan. However, the business activity of migrants is not limited to these types. The peculiarities of entrepreneurship of migrants, a variety of specific entrepreneurial strategies are born at the intersection of the mutual influence of migration history, socio-demographic characteristics and various socio-economic, political and local contexts in different historical periods.

Oceanic Spaces in American Girl Historical and Contemporary Literary Discourse

The American Girl series is a constantly evolving book series for children featuring the lives of girls living in different historical periods of the US, starting from the colonial era up to nowadays. The aim of this paper is to study the verbal and nonverbal portrayal of the oceanic spaces of the past in the books about the historical characters and their rediscovery in the books about the contemporary characters. An attempt is made to analyse the different roles of oceanic images in stories of migration and mobility of the American Girls, their families, friends, acquaintances both in the past and in the present. The images of the oceans in the books about the historical characters and in those about the contemporary characters are analysed separately and the results are compared and contrasted. It is assumed that the oceans which are depicted both verbally and nonverbally in the American Girl series have become not only territorial borders for some of the characters but also metaphoric ones.

A Landscape Matrix Proposal For Haliç (Golden Horn) Coastal Zone

The impacts of urbanization on landscapes andecosystems have been increasing globally. Howurban landscape is shaped, in other wordsdesigned, is a fundamental human activity interms of urban sustainability. Landscape is oftendealed with mostly by aesthetic concerns whichpresents sustainable/ecological/naturalqualities only at formal level, is limited bylegislative framework, hardly responds tohuman needs and behavioral patterns and lacksa holistic approach within the Turkish spatialdesign practice. This study aims to develop alandscape matrix in the example of Istanbul(Golden Horn) region as an open spaceoperation model within the existing urbantexture, which the built environment has beenrepresented with different layers of historicaldevelopments. The matrix presented in thisstudy presents a design process on the basis ofurban ecology as well as the physical and socialrelations of the study area located in the GoldenHorn, one of the cultural identity values ofIstanbul, formed by urban layers belonging todifferent historical periods. It is thought that theconstruction of the coastal and hinterlandrelationship through the open space system bothcontributes to the dissolution of the urbantexture towards the coastal zone andstrengthens the character of the waterfront.