Rebuilding the homeland in poetry and song: Simin Behbahani,Dariush Eghbali,and the making of a transnational national anthem

ABSTRACT

This article traces the transformation of an Iranian nationalist poem by Simin Behbahani entitled “I Will Rebuild You, Homeland” (1981) into an expatriate national anthem, and the poem-song’s subsequent incorporation into protests and political speeches by individuals and groups in and outside of Iran. Employing musical and textual analysis, interviews, and a transnational perspective on cultural circulation and reception, I show how exile pop singer Dariush Eghbali’s adaptation of the original poem mobilized the text and opened it to audience participation. The article argues that the poem and its musical–textual permutations exemplify contemporary Iranian practices of national identification in which conflicting parties attempt to motivate “the Iranian people” to political ends. As actors from around the world and across the political spectrum repeatedly turn to nationalist poetry, song, anthem, and political speech, we observe how mass-mediated popular culture reveals ongoing recourse to nationalist forms even in transnational space.     

Postnational family/postfamilial nation: family,small town and nation talk in Marcos and Brocka

Abstract

This article explores the concept of authenticity, and its articulation with longstanding Japanese discourses of modernity, among contemporary Japanese lifestyle migrants in New York City. Considering the cases of artists in particular, it examines how migrants narrate the ideals and goals of life in New York City, thereby elaborating on concepts of the self, authenticity, meaning, and national cultural identity.     

The work of the audience: visual matrix methodology in museums

ABSTRACT

Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-led, group-based method that creates a “third space” research setting to observe audience groups re-enacting lived experience of an event or process that takes place in the third space of a cultural setting. In this article, the method is described through its use in relation to an art-science exhibition, Human+ Future of the species, where three audience groups with investments in technology worked with exhibition material to achieve a complex ambivalent state of mind regarding technological futures. The visual matrix has been designed to capture the affective and aesthetic quality of audience engagement in third space by showing what audiences do with what is presented to them. We argue that such methodologies are useful for museums as they grapple with their role as sites where citizens not only engage in dialogue with one another but actively re-work their imaginaries of the future.     

Keep Fit and Play the Game

ABSTRACT

This article provides new insight into the modernization of the monarchy after the First World War by exploring how George VI promoted fitness and outdoor recreation during the interwar years. Sport functioned as a site of cross-class male bonding which formed part of a wider strategy by the monarchy to strengthen social cohesion. The new royal charities raised substantial funds, and they established a national fitness movement during the 1930s which was supported by the National Government, Labour leaders and the Trades Union Congress, but eschewed extremes on both left and right.     

‘A Dangerous Revolutionary Force Amongst Us’

ABSTRACT

Historians of nineteenth-century British tea consumption have highlighted the function of the substance as an index of middle-class civility and marker of national identity. In this article, I maintain that concerns about tea drinking were equally prominent throughout the late Victorian period. As medical practitioners increasingly intervened in food matters, apprehension about the physiological and psychological consequences of increasing access to tea in working-class communities proliferated. This pessimistic discourse can be firmly situated in the context of broader debates about national decline, physical and mental deterioration, the subversion of gender roles in the domestic sphere and Imperial expansion.     

Armenian Homelands and Homecomings, 1945–9

ABSTRACT

This article, based on research in the Armenian National Archives, focuses upon a neglected aspect of early Cold War history, the repatriation of diasporan Armenians to the Soviet Union (1945–9). I highlight the contested and historically conditioned nature of homelands, examining the multiple ways in which Soviet authorities and diaspora agencies attempted to authenticate Soviet Armenia as a ‘homeland’. Armenian constructions of homeland were transformed through the process of homecoming, and I examine attempts to reconcile the realities of life in the Soviet Union with diasporic visions of homeland based on an idealized national past.     

Arts councils,policy-making and “the local”

ABSTRACT

In the British Isles, national policies for the arts are primarily viewed as the responsibility of arts councils with statutory duties to distribute state funding that meet the requirements of both “arms-length” principles and national strategic frameworks. This paper explores the tensions between policy making for the nation-state and for “the local” through comparative research on the arts councils (and equivalent bodies) in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with senior representatives from these organisations, it explores their notions of, responsibilities to and affiliations with “the local”. Findings suggest that despite their different models and relationships to the nation-state, and the disparities in the scale of investment, these national policy bodies commonly rely on networked governance to facilitate their relationship to “the local” which risks reproducing national interests, limiting the localised agency of place-based approaches and contributing to a culture of competition within cultural policy.     

‘Subtopias of Good Intentions’

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the cultural and political meanings of everyday landscapes in postwar Britain. Public discussions of these landscapes have moved beyond relatively narrow questions about the aesthetics or design of public space to consider broader issues of land use, national identity, historical tradition and the management of social change. They have fed into anxieties about postwar reconstruction and the spread of ‘subtopia’, national decline, and more recent concerns about conservation and heritage. The article argues that the recurrent fear that Britain is being colonized by standardized subtopian clutter has tended to ignore more subtle historical shifts, produced by changing relationships between government and commerce, public and private space, urban centre and suburban periphery.     

Play in the house of order: The Necessary Stage's BrainStorm

Abstract

This article opens up the question of modernity in relation to Yan’an woodcuts by recounting the Matisse debate among artists in Yan’an circa 1942, during the War of Resistance against Japanese occupation. Yan’an woodcuts did not move in a direction akin to the stylistic reform engaged by Western modernism; instead they pushed modern Chinese woodcuts to develop according to the requirements of ‘national form.’ Yan’an woodcut artists’ exploration of ‘national form’ involved a synthesis of folk aesthetics and woodcut techniques with the creation of modern‐style woodcuts, and a synthesis of revolutionary content with the artistic expression of national form. In this way a new kind of artistic ideal was realized. Compared with contemporary artistic questions in the West, the formal questions of Chinese revolutionary art surpassed the artistic as such to support rich social content and revolutionary discourse. The establishment of national language in art accords with the desire and imagination to construct of a new kind of modern nation‐state.     

Royalty,Romance and Recreation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the growth of ‘heritage tourism’ by looking at three royal palaces: the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and Hampton Court, each of which underwent a process of textual and architectural reconstruction during the nineteenth century which repositioned them both historically and culturally. It is argued that visitor responses to these sites were rarely, if ever, inspired by nationalism or royalism; more to the fore were Gothic and romantic sensibilities, popular conceptions of the past which were often democratic and self-improving, and the time-honoured practices of popular pleasure.     

Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland. By Elizabeth Ewan and Janay Nugent

ABSTRACT

In response to recent discussions in the UK about the history national curriculum in schools, Cultural and Social History invited several historians to comment on the issues. Their responses to our questions have been interleaved and lightly edited.     

The Power and Function of Images in Northern Europe During the Migration Period

ABSTRACT

In the fifth and early sixth centuries, numerous objects in northern Europe were decorated in a particularly consistent visual style (‘Germanic Animal Style I’). This article argues that we should treat these images not simply as representations of cultural notions, but as an active part in the process of creating a shared elite identity, formed during a particular period of historical crisis.     

‘An attractive and improving place of resort’

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between zoological collections, urban improvement and civic identity in early nineteenth-century Britain. While national zoological collections like London Zoo have been studied by scholars as important sites for research and education, gardens in the provinces have received less attention. The article examines several of these institutions, outlining the circumstances surrounding their foundation and considering how they integrated themselves into their respective local communities through educational initiatives and carefully planned fund-raising strategies. It argues that zoological gardens served to situate cities within a wider imperial context, highlighting their regional importance and global connections.     

Refugee,returnee, borderland: the accidental activists and Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean

ABSTRACT

Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.     

Same-sex intimacies in Syariffudin's Mairil and the queering of authenticity

ABSTRACT

The rise in LGBT-themed novels in Indonesia over the last decade demonstrates the sea-change in social attitudes and the public presence of sexual and gender minorities in Indonesia. The genre emerges from the popularity of sexually-charged novels by female authors such as Ayu Utami and Djenar Maesa Ayu. However, many novels were criticised for the supposed westernisation of Indonesian culture that threatens the national identity and moral disposition of its readers. This article explores the underlying themes of these criticisms—nationhood, cultural authenticity, and morality—and juxtaposes them with the claims of cultural authenticity and legitimacy made by gay and lesbi Indonesians. Representations of “traditional” homoeroticisms in the novel Mairil by Syarifuddin bring these lines of arguments together and synthesise a discursive space where cultural and national authenticities are “queered.” It is my contention that religious and traditional elements that foster same-sex practices offer a key to queer legitimacy for Indonesian sexual minorities.     

Comfort,Class and Climate Change: The Rise of Glass in Late Medieval and Early Modern Domestic Architecture

ABSTRACT

In the modern world, glass windows are considered an indispensable element of the built environment. Throughout premodern times, however, glass was not universally used in European architecture. This article argues that the rise of glass in Western architecture was neither an inevitable nor a linear process, but rather a response to certain social, cultural and environmental factors that gained increasing relevance from the late medieval period onwards. In other words, glass windows are a cultural convention, reflecting some of the wide-ranging and transformative challenges that Europeans faced in the late medieval and early modern period.     

Gender,affect, and landscape: wartime films from Northern and Southern Vietnam

Abstract

Examining two Vietnamese films, one made in the North in 1959, and another produced in the South during the American War in 1971, this article contends that Vietnam's landscape serves as an affective site for a gendered construction of nationalism within key moments in Vietnamese history. In analyzing the attachments that the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora feel towards their country, I explore a topic rarely discussed in US film scholarship and historicize these filmmaking efforts to demarcate a different way of viewing Vietnam in film. This study demonstrates the importance of understanding how gender and affect are projected onto landscapes in a national cinema like Vietnam's. More exactingly, it emphasizes that affects underlying Vietnamese nationhood and war are undergirded by the political economy of film and filmmaking. My arguments point to the modes of production and circulation of film, which shape the making of affect in Vietnam War discourse. My analyses are framed by the questions: how is affect inscribed in Vietnamese film, and what are its effects on notions of belonging and nationhood? In what ways has affect traveled about Vietnam in the past and present moment? Who is able to access such representations, and why does this matter?     

Re-imagining the local in national cultural policy formulation – the case of the Anglophone Caribbean

ABSTRACT

The formulation of cultural policies in the Anglophone Caribbean constantly straddles the demands of global, regional and national imperatives as a function of its position as a region of post-colonial, small-island states. This paper will argue that the role these factors play in the art of policy making problematises conventions in the current global/local (glocal) debate circulating in the arena of Cultural Policy Studies. The paper shows that cultural policy making in the Caribbean constitutes a mélange of approaches that are in a constant state of contestation during the policy-making process. It employs content analysis of cultural policy texts from selected Caribbean states, as well as an analysis of stakeholder views from the national cultural policy consultations in Trinidad and Tobago to derive its findings. A Five Factor framework was developed to illustrate the range of responses that guide and shape local actors and activities in the national cultural policy domain. The research concludes that the relationship between the national and local (nocal) actors has to be re-imagined if cultural policy is to deliver on its promise of social transformation in the Caribbean.     

Memory films and the politics of revisiting: on Amir Muhammad's films about the Communist Party of Malaya

Abstract

This article argues that Amir Muhammad's two films about the Community Party of Malaya—The Last Communist and Village People Radio Show—can be understood as “memory films”: films that search for, create, question, and function as memories, especially when they are no longer in place, or nowhere to be found. Its reading of Muhammad's films also engages with a discussion of the politics of revisiting as it pertains to the invocation of the Malayan consciousness, the national history and racial conditions of today's Malaysia. Ultimately, it asserts that such films about the communist past engage in a memory war to demand a rethinking of the present.     

Foppish Masculinity,Generational Identity and the University Authorities in Eighteenth-Century Oxbridge

ABSTRACT

This article aims to bring Oxford and Cambridge back into the debate about elite masculine socialization in eighteenth-century England. The ancient universities in this period are too often described by historians as bastions of moral stability and man making. Here, a more complicated view of the universities' role in shaping the identities of young men in the eighteenth century is presented, which takes into account the significant effect of rising student ages and generational and class tensions. In particular, the article traces the characteristics and development of foppish masculine styles among Oxbridge undergraduates, highlights their opposition to book-learning and academic regulations, and analyses the increasing suspicion which they incurred from the university authorities against the background of the American and French Revolutions.