Performing Bandung: China’s dance diplomacy with India,Indonesia, and Burma, 1953–1962

While dance was a common element of international diplomacy activities around the world during the 1950s and early 1960s, scholars have only recently begun to focus attention on this topic, especially as it concerns relationships forged beyond those of the Cold War superpowers. Using previously unexamined historical materials such as rare photographs and performance programs, dancer biographies, autobiographies and personal interviews, unpublished institutional histories, and contemporary periodicals, this article demonstrates not only that dance was an integral part of China’s inter-Asian cultural exchange between 1953 and 1962, but also that the PRC developed a distinct approach to dance diplomacy. Through a series of exchanges with India, Indonesia and Burma, China’s foreign ministers and dancers developed and refined a method of dance diplomacy in which the primary goal was to learn from, rather than export to, these neighboring countries. This approach harnessed the affective power of embodied aesthetic culture to literally “perform” Bandung ideals, namely, cooperation and mutual respect among Asian nations and an anti-imperialist cultural stance. Through the establishment in 1962 of the Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble, the PRC institutionalized this model of dance diplomacy, expanding it to include the entire Third World. Bandung-era dance diplomacy initiatives of the 1950s and early 1960s not only supported important new international alliances and political movements, but also asserted China’s self-identity as part of the East in the way that challenged Eurocentric ideals previously entrenched in China’s domestic dance field.     

Teenage Kicks: Exploring cultural value from a youth perspective

In contemporary accounts of cultural value, young people's perspectives are often restricted to analyses of their encounters with formal cultural institutions or schools or to debates surrounding the cultural implications of new digital spaces and technologies. Other studies have been dominated by instrumental accounts exploring the potential economic benefit and skills development facilitated by young people's cultural encounters and experiences. In this paper we examine the findings of a nine month project, which set out to explore what cultural value means to young people in Bristol. Between October 2013 and March 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council “Teenage Kicks” project organised 14 workshops at 7 different locations across the city, with young people aged 11–20. Working in collaboration with a network of cultural and arts organisations, the study gathered a range of empirical data investigating the complex ecologies of young people's everyday/“lived” cultures and values. Young people's own accounts of their cultural practices challenge normative definitions of culture and cultural value but also demonstrate how these definitions act to reproduce social inequalities in relation to cultural participation and social and cultural capital. The paper concludes that cultural policy-makers should listen and take young people's voices seriously in re-imaging the city's cultural offer for all young people.     

Theorizing difference and difficulty: “wreading” Asian American poetics in South Korea*

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on a personal experience teaching and studying Asian American poetry in South Korea, this paper examines how and why Asian American poetry in South Korea has been marginalized in the academia and argues that Asian American poetry needs to be newly dealt as a frontier that vigorously experiments the role of cultural poetics and humanities in and out of the university programs. The reception of Asian American poets and their poetry in South Korea is inseparable from the interpellation and understanding of Asian Americans as subject. This essay, rather than inscribing Anglo American critical frame that has focused on the reductive reading of essentializing racial traits and minority identities, tries to build a platform for inviting inter/cross-cultural thinking under the umbrella of poetry reading. Through the process of “wreading” Asian American poetry, I argue that difficulty and difference can be reinterpreted as practical monitors for alternative reading of Asian American poetry against the grain of the white Anglican national self of America.     

Montana's Indian Education for All: Applying Multicultural Education Theory

Montana's constitutional commitment to the cultural heritages of American Indians exemplifies the practical application of multicultural education. In this article, the authors explore the goals and evolution of Indian Education for All within a multicultural education framework, and discuss how educators are best prepared to implement this transformative educational policy.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

Drawing Parallels in Search of Educational Equity: A Multicultural Education Delegation to China Looks Outside to See Within

In 2004, a professional delegation of multicultural educators visited the People's Republic of China to explore how diversity issues are addressed and how students are prepared for entry into the international workforce. The delegation, sponsored by the People to People Ambassador Programs, observed numerous parallels to the American system of education, including the challenge of providing equity for students of minority cultures, especially those in poor rural areas, and the conflict between modernization and preservation of cultural heritage.     

Collective Face,Politeness Strategies,and Discomfort: Communication of American Domestic Students and Chinese International Students

This two-by-three between-subjects factorial study tested how American domestic students and Chinese international students responded to a scenario of performance failure by a friend whose membership varies across conditions. The study measured collective face, politeness strategies, and participants’ discomfort feelings. Robust findings were observed in the condition where Chinese participants imagined witnessing an ingroup-friend’s incompetence resulting in the strong correlation between collective face and discomfort. The cultural difference between these two groups regarding relating self-images to group-images is also observed. The implications of the study in assessing collective images, identities, and values for intercultural communication research are discussed.     

“To Reach the Lands of Freedom”: Petitions of Polish Displaced Persons to American Poles,Moral Screening and the Role of Diaspora in Refugee Resettlement

ABSTRACT

In 1949, in the wake of the USA’s Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the American Committee for the Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons received thousands of letters from refugees of peasant and worker background residing in camps in Germany and Austria. These potential immigrants appealed to the Polish diaspora for help with securing assurances of accommodation and work which would enable them to resettle in the USA. This paper investigates the discursive strategies of the authors and the wider meanings of their emigration endeavour. Firstly, it demonstrates that non-elite Displaced Persons (DPs) adopted the language of martyrology, patriotism, anti-Communism and freedom to maximise their chances of emigration. These DPs did not evoke the language of rights as they appealed to the traditional network of support, based on benevolence and familiarity. Secondly, it argues that the American Poles and Polish social elites played a crucial role in resettlement of the DPs, providing an additional layer of screening, here called ‘the moral screening’. It is an example of how ethnic and cultural communities mediated the resettlement procedures supervised by international humanitarian organisations. Using a ‘history from below’ approach, this article argues that during this episode of migration, political and economic ideological underpinnings intertwined.     

Johnnie To's “northern expedition:” from Milkyway Image to Drug War

Abstract

After the Regulations on the Administration of Movies came into force in 2002, Johnnie To became famous for sticking with the Hong Kong market while Hong Kong filmmakers rushed north. In Drug War, his 50th film, he decided to bring his unique genre to the Mainland for the first time. Drug War was the first Johnnie To gangster film to be shot entirely in the Mainland. Despite its outstanding box office record in the Mainland, some Johnnie To fans would lament that his typical style is missing in Drug War, a film that has become “realistic.” This paper argues that Johnnie To's “northern expedition.” backed up by a tradition of translations between business and pleasure, has to be interpreted against the backdrop of his production company Milkyway Image (HK) Ltd. Johnnie To, as a migrant crossing the border, brought with him the long tradition of cultural translations from Milkyway Image, which acted as a “seed of the untranslatable” in Homi Bhabha's term. It was this untranslatability of Milkyway-cum-Hong Kong flavour that distinguished To from other Hong Kong directors who were assimilated into the Mainland market as a simple mélange. To capture the rich inter-textual allusions to not only Milkyway Image but also to Hong Kong in Drug War helps one to understand how Hong Kong cinema can move on in the age of Chinese cinema.     

Impaction : telling a story of a 20 year leftist journal

Based on interviews with 30 female readers of BL (‘boys’ love') manga conducted in Taipei in 2005, this paper analyses the BL scene in Taiwan from the perspective of its social utility as a discursive arena enabling women collectively to think through transforming social ideologies around gender and sexuality. This form of participatory pop culture is most interesting, I argue, not because of any unilateral subversiveness vis-à-vis culturally dominant understandings of (feminine) gender or (homo)sexuality—although it does often contest such dominant understandings. Rather, it is important in providing a space for the collective articulation of young women's in-process thinking on these questions. The paper also engages with the Japaneseness of the genre as consumed in Taiwan in order to consider the imaginative function that its perceived cultural ‘otherness’ performs.     

Cultural History’s Absent Audience

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders Peter Mandler’s essay ‘The Problem with Cultural History,’ and the complexities of locating evidence of culture’s impact upon ordinary people, or ‘throw.’ A brief examination of the history of market research and public opinion surveys in the 20th century offers important lessons for the cultural historian faced with locating and interpreting evidence of audience response that is either rarely there, or more disturbingly, rarely meaningful by our current standards of interpretation. Ultimately this paper asks of my fellow cultural historians: Does culture matter as much as we cultural historians want it to?     

Where Magic Lives: Disney's Cultivation,Co-Creation,and Control of America's Cultural Objects

The Walt Disney Company today is a veritable cultural machine, churning out new products and recycling old in ways that build and maintain a consumer base that spans generations. Although it is true that Disney's contemporary box office success is subject to significant competition, the company has a distinct advantage: A strategic grasp on key cultural objects-characters the American public has grown to hold quite dear-and the means with which to maintain and promote them. Disney products thus serve as both memory takers and memory makers, absorbing original works and forming a cultural heritage that is reinforced and reproduced cooperatively between Disney and the American public.     

The art of the good life: culture and sustainable prosperity

ABSTRACT

The creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and re-thought, but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in particular, how it might encourage a kind of “sustainable prosperity” wherein human flourishing is not linked to high levels of material consumption but rather the capabilities to engage with cultural and creative practices and communities. We critically explore these ideas in three locations: a London borough, a deindustrialised city in England’s midlands and a rural town on the Welsh/English border. Across these diverse landscapes and socio-economic contexts, we look at different versions of the good life and at the possibilities and constraints of cultural activity as a way of achieving kinds of sustainable prosperity.     

Rethinking participation in the Aarhus as European Capital of Culture 2017 project

This paper examines the relationship between cultural participation and regional development with reference to the European Capital of Culture in 2017. From the bidding stage, Aarhus 2017 claimed it put “participation” at the heart of its strategic plans, through consultation at roadshows and exhibitions. In addition, it aspired to use culture as a catalyst for development not only in the city of Aarhus but across the region of Central Denmark. This paper, therefore, examines how participation is defined and implemented to address regional development in the Aarhus 2017 process through textual analysis of documentation from Aarhus 2017 and delivery partners as well as over 20 interviews with managers and participants involved in a range of 2017 projects. The paper argues against the common prioritisation of urban and professional cultural institutions and makes the case for decentralised cultural provision that supports both amateurs and professionals through a regional networked structure.     

“Supporting excellence in the arts: from measurement to judgement”

The DCMS paper “Supporting excellence in the arts”, also known as the McMaster Review, raised more questions than it answered in terms of how UK cultural policy is likely to develop in the future. Although many of its intentions are laudable, the report fails to resolve the inherent problems associated with defining, measuring and judging cultural “excellence”, even though this forms the core of McMaster's argument about how policy should develop. This may have significant implications for cultural institutions in the future.

In addition, many of the report's recommendations may either be contradictory or impractical in the current policy climate – such as the desire for institutions to take more risks whilst simultaneously increasing visitor numbers and meeting other targets. As such, without a wider change in the Government's approach and a re-acknowledgement of culture's intrinsic value, “excellence” may just become the latest buzzword for practitioners, rather than the key principle upon which future decisions will be based.     

The mediating effect of sociocultural adaptation and cultural intelligence on citizens and migrants: Impact on perceptions of country images

Reports indicate that international migration patterns will continue to grow between 50 and 60 million per decade. Consequently, people’s perceptions of a country’s image will evolve. Country image is an important phenomenon affecting organizations and people’s decisions to travel, invest, study, migrate, and many more. Hence, this study aims to examine the influence of global and local identity on citizens’ and migrants’ perceptions of their countries’ images. In addition, the paper investigates the mediating effect of lower sociocultural adaptation and cultural intelligence on a country’s image. Our sample is drawn from Indonesians and Australians who completed survey questionnaires in the two countries. The sample comprises citizens and migrants (n = 1188) from Australia and Indonesia. The results show local and global identity differences in how individuals perceive other countries. For Indonesians, local identity makes people perceive Australia more positively. In contrast, for Australians, global identity makes people perceive Indonesia more negatively. Furthermore, the results indicate the importance of cultural intelligence over sociocultural adaptation. This paper will make several theoretical and managerial contributions. First, the paper contributes to cultural and identity literature. Individuals’ perceptions of a country are influenced by their identity and values. Second, this study shows the importance of sociocultural adaptation and cultural intelligence. Mere identity (global or local) is insufficient to justify the relationship between identity and perception of a country.     

Discourse of cultural identity in Indonesia during the 1997-1998 monetary crisis

Abstract

‘Asian Pop’ cultural products, which include a wide range of media artifacts such as film, music, television drama, comic books, magazines, websites and fashion, have emerged as a popular choice for youth in Asia in recent times. These cultural artifacts feature prominently in the lives of urban youth in major metropolitan centers throughout Asia. This paper examines how Thai youths have become consumers of Korean pop (K‐pop), following the trend of neighboring countries. The popularization of Japanese pop (J‐pop), Taiwanese‐pop and more recently, K‐pop, is welcomed by the Cultural Industry as a sign of expanding borders and as a major step towards expanding its Asian market. On the one hand, growing consumption and mainstreaming of Asian pop might become problematic due to the notion of cultural ‘McDonaldization’/standardization, in the future. On the other hand, perhaps nationalism and national ties will manage to overrule this projected standardization. This paper explores the Thai youth’s consumption of K‐pop in the process of cultural appropriation vis‐à‐vis their ‘national’ cultural formation in changing socio‐cultural contexts.     

Polygamy in the United States: How Marginalized Religious Communities Cope with Stigmatizing Discourses Surrounding Plural Marriage

This study explores the narratives of 20 members of “The Work,” a polygamist community in Centennial Park, Arizona, to better understand the ways in which religious minorities cope with the stigmatizing discourses of the larger United States culture. This paper examines (a) how participants understand and interpret public discourse surrounding plural marriage, and (b) participants’ communicative strategies for coping with this stigma. Grounded theory analysis revealed that the discursive cultural de-legitimation of plural marriage motivates co-cultural members to engage in network management. Four network management strategies were reported by participants: (1) withdrawing from mainstream society, (2) establishing ingroup solidarity, (3) concealing cultural identification, and (4) educating cultural outsiders.     

Cross-dressing as whitewashing: the Kimono Wednesdays protests and the erasure of Asian/American bodies

ABSTRACT

During the summer of 2015, a series of events at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston called Kimono Wednesdays encouraged visitors to try on a replica of the kimono Claude Monet's wife wore in her husband's 1876 painting La Japonaise and then pose for photos in front of the painting. This seemingly benign act of appreciation sparked protests from those who considered the events as perpetuating an exoticizing imperialist gaze and orientalizing stereotypes. This paper contextualizes this controversy by examining the history of white women cross-dressing as Japanese, how it constitutes a form of naturalized whitewashing linked to the pleasure of consumption through its connections to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885), and how the same act for Asian American women at the turn into the twentieth century is fraught with the anxiety of racial identity suppression.