Suchergebnisse

This compelling book offers a fresh and novel approach to study cultural and artistic expression from the perspective of 'the commons'. It demonstrates how identifying cultures as shared resources is useful in eliciting the main factors and social dilemmas affecting the production and evolution of cultural expression. Adopting the unifying perspective of 'the cultural commons', the chapters provide in-depth analysis of a wide range of cultural resources, including traditional cultural expression, heritage, gastronomy and cultural content in virtual worlds. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and gathering contributions from economic, sociological and legal fields, this timely book proposes a new and complementary research agenda.

The book represents a selection of papers presented at an international symposium in Singapore on the role of theory and practice in the mutually interactive and mutating relations between institutions and cultures. In effect, the papers turn about a single theme: the ways in which power is expressed through those institutions by means of which cultures mediate their requirements. The symposium brought together scholars and academics from a variety of disciplines, including literature, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, comparative literature and comparative religions. In terms of the geography of cultures and the history of institutions, the range of reference to this book of the symposium is global: from Hong Kong awaiting 1997, through the travails of political democracy in Singapore, and Cultural Studies à la Greenblatt or under the aegis of Shakespeare as cultural idol, through German Romantic theory and its relevance to current theorizing about theory in America, to Zen Buddhism and Nagarjuna and how these two sources refract the concerns of Jung, Lacan and Derrida; through Colonialism and postcoloniality and how they have shaped identity and mediated power to the current crises in education created by these mediations, specifically, in literary studies. The aim of the symposium was twofold: to theorize about the impulse to theorize in relation to the plurality of cultures and institutions which comprises our contemporary world; and to ground this impulse in those specificities and contingencies which provide resistance to such theorizing

Preliminary material /Editors Constellations of the Transnational -- Cultural Constellations, Critique and Modernity: An Introduction /Sudeep Dasgupta -- Diasporic Architecture, Whiteness and the Cultural Politics of Space: In the Footsteps of the Italian Forum /Joseph Pugliese -- "Here to Stay": The Performance of Accents in the Work of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Lemn Sissay /Cornelia Gräbner -- Carnival Politics and the Territory of the Street /Esther Peeren -- Shadow Republic: The Concept of Place in Patriot Movement Discourse /Deborah Noel Kaplan -- Politics of Identity and Critical Judgment: Gesher Theater in Israel /Olga Gershenson -- Where in the World? Cultural Geopolitics of East/West Identities /Bianca Kai Isaki -- Whither Culture? Globalization, Media and the Promises of Cultural Studies /Sudeep Dasgupta -- Notes on the Contributors /Editors Constellations of the Transnational -- Index /Editors Constellations of the Transnational.

"In December 2012, the exuberant video 'Gangnam Style' became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video: 'Mitt Romney Style, ' 'NASA Johnson Style, ' 'Egyptian Style, ' and many others. 'Gangnam Style' (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the Web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, the author investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. She discusses a series of well-known Internet memes, including 'Leave Britney Alone, ' the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's 'We Are the 99 Percent.' She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, the author argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book the author makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously."--Provided by publisher.

It is an established historical fact that both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar formed a cultural unity in many different periods. After the military success of Mûs_ ib Nusayr, Islam broght unity to Arabs and many Berber tribes in the Maghrib, but the struggle for independence and the adoption of the eastern Khârijî doctrine always caused struggles. It is a well known fact that the contingent of Berbers among the Muslims of al-Andalus outnumbered considerably the inhabitants from Arab origin. After the decline and collapse of the Umayyads and Hammûdids in al-Andalus, various Berger dynasties seized their power and founded many different kingdoms (Taifas, from Arabic mulûk al-tawâ'if). Arab Andalusi culture flourished, which can be demonstrated by the fact that Arabic became the most important language of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule. On the other hand, large numbers of Andalusis emigrated to the Maghrib in many different periods. Already in the first centuries of Islamic spain, many Andalusis settled in North Africa. These Andalusis fled as a consequence of the drought, or were expelled for having collaborated against the regime or were forced to leave the Peninsula by the Christian Reconquista. Mutual migrations and political unity led to the exchange of many cultural phenomena between the two sides of the Straits. This fourth issue of Orientations focuses on some aspects of the 'cultural transfer between al-Andalus and North Africa,' and particularly deals with some aspects of Poetry, Politics and Polemics from the eleventeenth to the seventeenth century