The Evidence of the Conversation Piece

ABSTRACT

The picture discussed apparently represents a ‘snapshot’ of eighteenth-century family life. However, it is argued in this article that it is problematic to approach such visual material as if it can render direct evidence of a past, historical reality. This is not simply because art may distort or misrepresent its subject matter. Such an approach is also in danger of ignoring the potential evidence embodied in the representation itself – in this case, both a highly self-conscious ‘display’ of modern life and an historically meaningful act of artistic prowess.     

Tales of the Unexpected

ABSTRACT

Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I have refuted this principle and made an attempt to show its inherent contradictoriness. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to grand historical narratives through the use of a research model which I call the ‘singularization of history’. In this article I show how the use of the traditional microhistorical methods blinded me in a research project. This blind spot in my research caused a major oversight in my findings – a shocking sequence of events was brought to my attention from an unexpected direction and revealed the weakness in my approach. The article deals with the need to rethink the whole concept of historical research and how the methods of microhistory can play a role there with the aid of what I call the ‘textual environment’.     

Unsettled “structure of feeling” of Chinese migrant workers – cases from the service sector of Shanghai

The suffering, struggling status and controversial political identity of Chinese internal migrant workers have put them in the academic spotlight for decades. An abundance of literature has analysed the problems faced by Chinese migrant workers from mainly three theoretical perspectives. However, not enough attention has been paid to migrant workers’ subjective understandings and feelings about their work and lives. The current article tries to illuminate the ambivalent feelings of migrant workers of the service sector in Shanghai, based on a brief comparison between migrant workers of three Asian countries, and the interviews with 16 Chinese migrant workers, two government officers and two local citizens in Yan community attached to Po district of Shanghai. It is argued that the migrant workers share an unsettled “structure of feeling” in everyday practices. They simultaneously feel bewildered and sanguine, depressed in a sombre mood and happy, passionate and indifferent. The unsettlement of the structure of feeling constitutes a political passivity for migrant workers. It is urgent to find ways to break up such a stalemate of consciousness.     

Gender and everyday evasions: moving with Cantopop 1

Abstract

In this paper, gender negotiations in the production, musical forms, and consumption of Cantopop are taken as a cultural exemplar for a social and political imagination of ambivalence, which seems to be shaping popular life in Hong Kong. It has three focal points – musical forms and expressions of Cantopop (style, lyrics, iconography, affect), gender politics, and ‘everyday‐ness’ – which converge to mark a notable cultural logic performing an enlarging sense of ambivalence about a city that has seen a shift from high moments of economic prosperity to the current postcolonial uncertainties. In other words, Cantopop signals a shift in our sensibilities, a redrawing of our affective map of everyday life after an important historical and politico‐administrative shift. In a sense then, this paper explores Hong Kong's changing identity within the sight and sound of popular culture, by specifically tracing some of the ways in which gender politics is inscribed, coded, negotiated, performed, or simply flirtingly posed on the surface of popular culture.     

Interdisciplinarity and the History of Emotions

ABSTRACT

Historians of the eighteenth century have only partially theorized about the relationship between poverty and crime; in particular, few have attempted to measure its nature and extent in detail. Moreover, such scholarship has investigated the phenomenon in urban environments, rather than rural contexts. This article examines the incidence of theft in the eighteenth century and utilizes Oxfordshire as a prosperous rural area. By seeking to eliminate endemic poverty from such calculations, the article more accurately investigates whether a link between crime and poverty is evident. By blending qualitative and quantitative approaches, the article also provides a suggested methodology for further micro-histories of this kind across a range of socio-economic areas in Britain and beyond during the early industrial period.     

Interrogating the Eyewitness

ABSTRACT

Following on from Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing (2001), this article considers again the potential for collaboration between historians and art historians, and presents ‘ten commandments' to be borne in mind by historians who wish to make use of visual materials in their work.     

Turning a home into the common: the micro-politics of subjectivations in a cohousing community in Seoul

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the micro-politics of a cohousing community called Bin-Zib (Empty/Guests’ House) in Seoul, South Korea. In a society where home ownership has become a financial asset, the residents of Bin-Zib have attempted to turn the home into the common. This paper focuses on how paradoxical principles of the community create Bin-Zib as an argumentative space, where disputes constantly arise. The paper then shows how the practice of communing in Bin-Zib is essentially related to the everyday politics of subjectivation. Finally, the meaning of Bin-Zib in the inter-Asian context will be discussed.     

Cocco's musical intervention in the US base problems: traversing a realm of everyday cultural sensibilities in Okinawa

This essay intervenes in the political contradiction between the pro-base and anti-base positions in Okinawa while at the same time seeking to provide an alternative to the binary at the level of everyday cultural sensibilities. I will accomplish this task by exploring the activities of charismatic Okinawan musician-artist-activist Cocco. More specifically, locating Cocco's music within – and also outside – a long, complicated genealogy of Okinawan popular music, I will trace how she has grounded the formal political problems of the US military in Okinawa's everyday dilemmas concerning money, memory, and globalization. In my view, Cocco has done so in a way that prods us to move beyond the pro-base/anti-base binary and to navigate an uncharted realm of culture, power, and history. I will also pay attention to how the audience in Okinawa and beyond, as a co-producer of Cocco's music community, has participated in this process. In so doing, I will show how Cocco's music has brought to light possibilities of transforming the existing political inequalities from below, possibilities that may be destined to disappear as soon as they are materialized as an explicit political program. I will articulate these possibilities with reference to what French writer-critic-philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1908–2003) once called the ‘unavowable community’.     

Performing Imperial Masculinity in British Theatre in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on theatrical representations of India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with special reference to two stage productions, Ramah Droog (1798) and The Cataract of the Ganges (1823). It argues that whilst the plays may have intended to deploy India as a space upon which to outline a militaristic British national identity and bourgeois gender norms, they in fact reflected contemporary anxieties about the fragility of British imperial masculinity. Moreover, it proposes that though theatre directors sought to impress upon audiences a sense of imperial dominance over the subcontinent through the deployment of visual technologies, such attempts were not wholly successful, with spectators having the capacity to deconstruct the façade that lay before their eyes.     

Crisis of the human and the responsibilities of art/education

In the twenty-first century, we are experiencing a new round of acceleration in the Anthropocene. On all fronts, art and education are facing new challenges and chances. On the one hand, the technological and media developments have compelled art, design, and knowledge production to change, whereas the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence have brought about a revolution in education and learning. As a consequence, the ideas of art education and the form of the university are also remodeled. On the other hand, the reverse side of this technological optimism is the proletarianization of sensibility resulted from digitalized, intelligent, and automated technologies, as the motivations for art are depleted and replaced by the conveniences provided by the big data and artificial intelligence. How to find the force to reverse this trend? And how to locate “another register of the dialectic” – beyond that of the technologization of nature and the naturalization of technology, and of the technologicalization of humans and the humanization of technology – has become the fundamental mandate of art and education in the twenty-first century.     

Louis IX in Medieval Arabic Sources: The Saint,the King,and the Sicilian Connection

This article examines the portrayal of Louis IX in medieval Arabic historiography to show the importance of cross-cultural Mediterranean interaction. It argues that the image of Louis was influenced by information originating from the Sicilian Hohenstaufen court and reports that Frederick II sent to Egypt. Arab historians connected to the courts of Frederick and Manfred disseminated a “Sicilian narrative” that shaped Louis's portrayal in Arabic historiography. This argument on the importance of cross-cultural transfer in understanding Arabic historiography is buttressed by reports about the King, the Pope, and the Emperor that are traced back to the entourage of prominent Muslims closely linked to Sicily. Moreover, it is argued that Arab authors were aware of Louis's proto-sanctity and pious reputation. This led to the infusion of medieval Arabic historiography with Western ideas about sacrosanctity. Finally, this research assesses how the portrayal of King Louis during his captivity was used in internal Muslim rivalries.     

English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom

In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo‐liberal ‘free‐market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro‐American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues that the recovery of film from the bureaucratization of its study and its rediscovery as one of the modalities of modernization require both a framework of analysis that is fully conscious of its own historicity and critical role, and a new topography of cinema.     

Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its Mediterranean Neighbours in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries

As scholars of people's physical environments, we tend to view the past according to our own forms of categorisation rather than those of contemporaries. From a medieval Mediterranean perspective, the fragmentation of scholarship caused by modern disciplinary constraints—Islamic, Byzantine, Western—has artificially set apart cultures which had more in common than has hitherto been acknowledged. This is a comparative study of the dress and textile cultures of southern Italy, particularly Apulia, Egypt and the Fatimid Caliphate and regions in the Byzantine Empire, as recorded in dowries, wills and other documents. This article also demonstrates how using the Mediterranean as a framework for comparison allows us to identify new areas where cultural differences really lay.     

The religious,the plural,the secular and the modern: a brief critical survey on Islam in Malaysia

Abstract

The embedization of Islam in Malaysia has gone through a long and complex process that involved an interaction with three major world civilizations (Indian, Chinese and European) and two colonial systems (Dutch and British) during which many aspects of its practices were reconfigured. This paper provides a brief critical survey of the evolution of the said embedization process during which Islam and the Muslims in Malaysia were moulded by a series of sociological realities, namely plural society, secularism and modernity. This has resulted, we argue, in the creation of 'moderate' Islam in Malaysia, one that is quite different from the fundamentalist image of Islam profiled in the contemporary worldwide discourse on global Islam     

A study of the development of contemporary monasteries in Taiwan

This study investigates the modernization of Buddhist Monasteries, as illustrated by three famous monasteries in Taiwan, Fo Guang Shan, Ten Directions Monastery, and Chung Tai Chan Temple. With these three case studies, on one hand we can compare them with traditional Buddhist architecture; on the other hand, we can also observe whether the space form and building style of Buddhist architecture had adjusted, transformed or even changed accordingly as a whole, while the Buddhist monasteries in Taiwan were, at that time, facing the modernization of Buddhism.     

Cultural practices,age and the life course

Social science studies of cultural activity commonly focus on class, gender and ethnicity and often treat age as an unimportant background variable. This article demonstrates the central importance of age as a factor affecting cultural consumption, using data from the “Taking Part” Survey of England. As well as seeking to describe the main aspects of age differentiation, the article unpacks what is often called, in a simplified way, “age effects”. The socio-historical dynamics leading to the existence of age effects are examined, first theoretically, and second, through some empirical examples (doing sport, playing a musical instrument/singing, cinema, visiting exhibitions or collections of art/photography/sculpture, doing textile crafts). A number of influences are shown to account for the importance of age: health, the individual life course, the different socio-economic background of cohorts and other, more complex cohort effects. Possible interpretations of these cohort effects on cultural practices are discussed at the end of the article.     

Theory-based evaluation and the social impact of the arts

The well-documented challenges in researching the social impacts of the arts are closely related to key issues in contemporary social research and evaluation, most particularly the problem of causal attribution. The article contends that some of the most common criticisms of the evidence base for the social impact of the arts relate to the successionist model of change which underpins positivist social science research and evaluation. Illustrating this with reference to research on the arts and quality of life, the article considers the alternative generative understanding of causation that underpins theory-based evaluation (TBE) approaches, favoured recently in the UK as part of the “What Works?” agenda. While these approaches fit well with knowledge about the determinants of arts impact, the article considers whether in fact TBE approaches offer an effective strategy for understanding how and why arts engagement can result in social change. The limitations and possibilities of TBE are considered with reference to four recent UK studies of the impact of the arts on individuals which make use of them.