{"title":"Ukiyo-e between Pop Art and (Trans)cultural Appropriation: On the Art of Muhamed Kafedžić (Muha)","authors":"Srdan Tunic","doi":"10.17885/heiup.ts.2017.1.23706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.ts.2017.1.23706","url":null,"abstract":"This article is based on a curatorial study of Muhamed Kafedžic’s oeuvre and our collaboration between 2012 and 2015. The work examines the paintings of the Sarajevo-based artist and questions the meaning and applicability of cultural appropriation theories to his work. The goal is to present a complex procedure of the appropriation of processes and styles in art history, usingin Kafedžic’s example of a hybrid of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock printing (17th–19th centuries) and American pop art painting (20th century), predominantly in the style of Roy Lichtenstein. My intention is to emphasize how Muha’s artwork has an element of dislocation, or outside-ness, in both place and national tradition, which consequently develops into a trans-cultural perspective, using Japanese (pop) art as a trans-national networking point.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"259-283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44292254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Dividing up the [Chinese] Melon, guafen 瓜分\": The Fate of a Transcultural Metaphor in the Formation of National Myth","authors":"R. Wagner","doi":"10.17885/HEIUP.TS.2017.1.23700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17885/HEIUP.TS.2017.1.23700","url":null,"abstract":"This study sets out to join a discussion which tests a number of assumptions current in the study of conceptual history. These assumptions are: Conceptual history can only be studied within a given language; concepts are articulated in abstract words, and other forms such as metaphors only serve to explain, but have no standing of their own; the sources for conceptual history are core texts with great authority often written by authors of great intellectual consequence; concepts are part of an environment of other concepts, but their reality fit and their institutional connection (promotion, ban) are not part of conceptual history. The test case is the use of the Chinese term melon-division, guafen , for the partition of a state. The study traces the early uses of guafen as a term for “partition;” its stabilization in this function; its negative valuation through association with the partition of Poland, and its systemic use in international law. It then follows the history of the new guafen notion in China since the 1830s as a concept and a historical prospect. None of the narratives of China’s guafen ever gained discursive hegemony, in part because the country’s partition did not materialize. Unwilling to let go of the powerful guafen narrative, however, the reformers, who used the term according to their changing local agendas, adjusted their story: division did not materialize even in 1900 when China’s standing was lowest and foreign troops had occupied the capital. Instead, an invisible partition into zones of influence was taking place. The reformers used new media, including the cartoon, to “translate” the Western image of a Chinese cake being divided into a literal rendering of a melon being cut up, although the image was now badly suited. The poor fit notwithstanding, guafen was also taken up by the early Communists. It eventually became the PRC master narrative of China’s relations with the Powers (Russia, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States), a narrative only occasionally and indirectly challenged by artists such as Zeng Fanzhi. The result is that none of the traditional assumptions about conceptual history can stand the test. The study provides evidence advancing the notion that concepts in the form of words, metaphors, and images cross cultural and language borders through “translation.” The result is the formation of a transcultural and translingual vernacular for words, metaphors, and images that is largely invisible on the surface but retains strong links over time among the connected items.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"9-122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48845418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Violence Curtain: Occupied Afghan Turkestan and the Making of a Central Asian Borderscape","authors":"T. Nunan","doi":"10.17885/HEIUP.TS.2017.1.23588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17885/HEIUP.TS.2017.1.23588","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the history of Soviet-Afghan encounters in northern Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Drawing on archival materials from the former Soviet Union as well as recently published memoir collections by Soviet border guards, it shows how during the 1980s, northern Afghanistan was subjected to a unique regime of degraded sovereignty. While all regions of Afghanistan were subject to military occupation by the Soviet Army, in northern Afghanistan, 62,000 Soviet Border Troops occupied the northern reaches. Their goal was not only to secure the Soviet-Afghan border, but also to eliminate mujāhidīn forces in Badakhshan, encourage peaceful and commercial cross- border interactions between Soviet and Afghan Badakhshan, and secure the entire territory inside an “antiseptic” green zone extending 100 to 120 kilometers into northern Afghanistan. As they did so, many elements of the Soviet border regime migrated into Afghanistan itself. Building on earlier work on the making of the Soviet border through areas of security inside the USSR, this piece shows the afterlives of that border as something also capable of being extended outside the USSR itself. In doing so, it not only enhances our understanding of the Soviet-Afghan War but also reveals the Soviet Union and its border forces to be transnational actors in their own right, rather than mere defenders of a statist territorial order.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"224-258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47518120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'More fun than the locals’: cultural differences and natural resources","authors":"M. Rolls","doi":"10.1163/23751606-01301001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23751606-01301001","url":null,"abstract":"In the latter half of the 1990s there was a long-running but unreported conflict over use of a coastal rock platform on the Central Coast of New South Wales, just to the north of Sydney. This multifaceted dispute was between poor Korean Australians from the inner suburbs of Sydney and locals. The source of this conflict was the manner in which the rock platform was being used, how its resources were exploited and the type of social life that accompanied these activities. Different peoples brought different understandings to the rock platform, and they acted in accordance with those understandings.For many older settler Australians, and for the diminishing number of those ‘on the land’, the essence of what it is to be Australian is found outside of urban environments. Colloquially referred to as ‘the bush’, this can mean virtually any rural, remote, regional, or non-urban setting. For those living in cities, and for more recent immigrants to Australia, national parks are one site that provides ready access to ‘the bush’. As with the coastal rock platform, different peoples bring different understandings to their encounters with national parks and ‘the bush’, and their use of these places changes accordingly.This paper begins with a description of the rock platform incident, before moving on to discuss the response of different immigrant groups to national parks and other open public spaces.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23751606-01301001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41499844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Written Out of History: My Grandfather William Chapman and the Effects of War","authors":"A. Bosch","doi":"10.1163/23751606-01301005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23751606-01301005","url":null,"abstract":"This text is an attempt to trace the case history of an Australian soldier’s participation in World War One and the effects of war on an ordinary Australian family, whose roots are in 19 th century England. Archival documents from the National Australian Archives, diaries of medical officers and soldiers, the Embarkation Roll as well as certificates of marriages and deaths are examined in order to document the historical facts which crossed the boundaries between private and public lives of ordinary people enmeshed in the history of their era.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"71-98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23751606-01301005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42972835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Parallel Processes in English-Hungarian Language Contact Situations","authors":"Éva Forintos","doi":"10.1163/23751606-01301002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23751606-01301002","url":null,"abstract":"In language contact research, there is an interrelationship between language systems, social and communicative factors and psycholinguistic processing. Language contact can be associated with face-to-face communication among community members who use different language varieties, as well as with non-personal contact of people using the written medium. Language contact can contribute to the transfer of linguistic patterns and units from one system to another. Stable contact can result in both lexical and grammatical influences, the process being mutual rather than unidirectional. According to Braunmuller and House, language contact and contact-induced variation and change, which can result in convergence and divergence, are omnipresent characteristic features of languages in use. 1 Winford takes a similar view and argues that the degree and nature of structural convergence depend on an array of linguistic, social and historical factors. However, he remarks that it is problematic to differentiate between internally motivated changes and transmission from external sources. 2 The present research paper deals with the dynamics of the language systems in contact and observes how the languages of bilinguals develop similarities (convergence) and how they distinguish between the two languages in particular ways (divergence). This research employs the corpus of written language samples sourced from the Australian-Hungarian community’s newspaper, entitled Hungarian Life (Magyar Elet). Many of the immigrants who produce text for the newspaper retain the Hungarian language, but have become bilingual in English.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"22-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23751606-01301002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46548599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Senses of an Ending","authors":"Éva Bús","doi":"10.1163/23751606-01301004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23751606-01301004","url":null,"abstract":"It is possible to read Peter Carey’s short story, Concerning the Greek Tyrant , as an adaptation of one of the first grand achievements of the occidental storytelling tradition: The Iliad . When creating one of his “what–if” 1 stories from the raw material of the various myths of the Trojan War, Carey turns the Homeric story on its head, simultaneously challenging concepts central to the latest theories of narrative fiction, such as the question of narrative sequence, shifts in the narrative perspective, the representation of temporal experience, and the technique of metanarrative. When uprooting the myth of the Trojan war from the “lost order of time” and making it a story of “the here and now”, 2 Carey joins an almost three-thousand-year-long tradition while breaking away from it simultaneously. The paper aims to examine a manifest duality of the textual actions 3 in Concerning the Greek Tyrant. Its historical plot 4 appears to be a realistic adaptation of a few of the closing events of the war as reconstructed from a variety of sources on the one hand, and a narrative of how Homer suffers from writer’s block on the other. On the linguistic level of narration, however, the text is permeated by irony, a mastertrope (Burke 1945) whose dialectic nature further enhances the aforementioned duality, and helps the various dimensions of the text reflect and comment on each other.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"56-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23751606-01301004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43869799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Literary Orphans to Award-winning Authorship: Serbian Migrant Writers in Australia","authors":"Nataša Kampmark","doi":"10.1163/23751606-01301003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23751606-01301003","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on literary careers of individual writers, this paper traces the trajectory of Serbian migrant writing in Australia from its beginnings after World War II until the present, arguing that this writing has progressively evolved from being part of a doubly neglected ghetto-like literary community to becoming a fully integrated, award-winning authorship. Each new wave of migrants is viewed as a link in the chain of evolution triggered by migration understood as a change of place. In the case of migrant writers and writers of non-Anglo-Celtic background in Australia, the advantages gained by migration include the access to a large bilingual cultural pool, a doubly informed vision and interpretation of the world, and the privileged position of a mediator between two cultures.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"36-55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23751606-01301003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43454278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Reception of Max Weber’s Cubist Poems (1914) in Taishō Japan","authors":"Pierantonio Zanotti","doi":"10.17885/HEIUP.TS.2016.2.23509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17885/HEIUP.TS.2016.2.23509","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I will analyze the Japanese reception of Cubist Poems , a collection of experimental poetry published in 1914 by the Jewish-American painter Max Weber (1881‒1961). First, I will provide information on this little-known collection and its author. Then I will offer a general description of the structure of the field of cultural production in 1910s and 1920s Tokyo, a period that roughly corresponds to the reign of Emperor Taishō (1912‒1926). To do so, I will use a number of theoretical tools from the works of Pierre Bourdieu. Part of this article will be structured as a historical survey of the presentation of Cubist Poems in 1914‒1925 Japan. As will become clear, in the Japanese cultural world, Weber’s collection provoked an interest that was unparalleled in any other country, perhaps even in the English-speaking world. Finally, I will offer some interpretations of the characteristics of this reception and some hypotheses concerning its causes.","PeriodicalId":42064,"journal":{"name":"Transcultural Studies","volume":"2016 1","pages":"12-52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42248179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}