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The book shows how people have come to approach the writing of imperial histories in the early twenty-first century. It explores the social and political contexts that informed the genesis and development of the Studies in Imperialism series, and the conceptual links it has sought to forge between empire and metropolitan culture. The book provides an insightful account of John MacKenzie's 'Orientalism': the problems of 'power' and 'agency'. The 'MacKenziean moment' needs to be read historically, as a product of the 'delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities', where contemporary popular phenomena and new types of scholarship integrated Britain and its empire. Sexuality made early appearances in the Series through the publication of 'Empire and Sexuality'. MacKenzie's 'Empire of Nature', 'Imperialism and the Natural World', and 'Museums and Empire' convey the impact of his scholarship in the themes of exploration, environment and empire. The historical geographies of British colonialism have enjoyed a prominent place in the Series, and the book explores the ways in which different 'spatial imaginations' have been made possible. Discussions on colonial policing during the depression years, and on immigrant welfare during and after decolonisation, take their cue from MacKenzie's European Empires and the People. The later nineteenth century witnessed the interaction of many diasporas, which in turn produced new modes of communication. By dealing with the idea of the 'Third British Empire' and the role of the Indian press during and after the British Raj, the book repositions British imperial histories within a broader set of global transformations.
registers loss, encapsulated in the oft-cited Italian wordplay, Traduttore, traditore (Translator, traitor). Yet we continue to translate, because the alternative—to shut ourselves off from languages we don’t readily understand—may result in nationalist isolationism and the halting of cross-cultural communication, generating losses far greater than the translator’s betrayals. For the audience well versed in postmodern art theory, it seems naïve to think of art as capable of smoothly traversing national borders and cultural divides. Visual signifiers, like words, are
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
context where the foundation of any cross-cultural communication (discursive, gestural, or both) is the phenomenon of ‘mere coincidence’. While puns and ‘annoying ambiguities’ of all kinds threaten to fragment the ideally spherical identity of the sovereign self, they supply the symbolon hemispherical migrant with the discourse of half signs appropriate to his position. Again, colonial exchanges in nineteenth-century Australia were similarly improvised, and Translations has many examples of ‘symbolic gestures’ where the situation symbolised (an idealised historical
, an excavation of indigenous racisms, and a meditation on the role played by fantasy and empathy in cross-cultural communication. Hence, as will become evident, the delineation of the immigrant is bound up with a complex constellation of themes and never simply an isolated motif. The self is unmoored and problematised in current Irish narratives that set out to envisage ethnic outsiders.1 The protagonists in the narratives examined here find themselves compromised and their belief systems confounded. Ironic insights, elisions, imaginative effusions, and trailing
which manipulates judgement in a manner that evidently distorts cultural communication, and this returns the issue to the public side of the dichotomy. Rorty’s way of making the public/private distinction, then, can privatise art to too great an extent and thus ignore some of more productive resources in Adorno’s con- Conclusion 327 ception. It is not that Rorty would deny that so much contemporary culture really is industrially produced trash, but his manner of making the distinction can lead, by giving up any idea that aesthetic judgement might still sustain the
with an economy of difference to describe how call centre operators are valued for their ability to enact sameness as and difference from their customers in the USA. Similarly, Aneesh ( 2015 : 8) suggests that the successful transmutation of cultural communication into global communication is dependent on workers’ skills in performing, enacting and reproducing two mutually constitutive processes: neutralisation and mimesis. ‘[N]eutralization refers to attempts at paring down unwanted cultural particulars (e.g. accents) while mimesis refers to attempts at mimicking
in Pre-Mutiny India , London Studies on South Asia, no. 7 (SOAS, 1993); R. E. Frykenberg (ed.), Christians and Missionaries in India. Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500 (London, 2003). A. N. Porter, ‘Cultural Imperialism and Protestant Missionary Enterprise 1780–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History , 25:3 (1997), pp. 367–91, provided a major
it on TV, on Youtube, you might say – excuse my language – what is this fucking Miss Nigeria? Let’s see what she is made of. Then you click on it and there she is. She has got sense, I would listen to her. (Interview, 2011) For this organiser, then, the pageant offers hope for societal integration and cross-cultural communication. His words, however, also suggest the limits of those concepts and processes – one might well, he suspects, find racialisation at the end of the multicultural rainbow. And recall here the acceptance speeches during which one awardee