The case of Asialink’s arts residency program: towards a critical cosmopolitan approach to cultural diplomacy

This paper explores the ways in which one of Australia’s cultural diplomacy initiatives aimed at bringing Australia closer to Asia – the Asialink Arts Residency Program – may provide valuable insights for reimagining cultural diplomacy with a revised understanding of the national interest that reflects the increasingly transnational realities of the contemporary world. Drawing on extensive data gained from interviews and an online survey, the author found that program participants are engaging in exceptionally complex and at times unintended activities, and that policy concerns, such as positive image projection abroad, are rarely high on the residents’ list of priorities. However, these experiences are of particular value for the national interest, in ways not yet formulated by or included in existing cultural diplomacy discourses. With the findings in mind, the author takes a critical cosmopolitan approach to reconceptualising cultural diplomacy.     

浅析日本的公共外交及其局限

二战后,由于日本政治、军事外交的开展受到诸多因素的制约,公共外交就成为日本摆脱美军占领体制、发展与邻国关系以及谋求政治大国地位的重要途径。通过人员及文化的相互交流、加强对外宣传、推行外向型的文化教育、经济与文化援助以及动漫外交等手段,日本的公共外交取得了很大的成就。但受自身独特政治文化及国内右倾化思潮的影响,加之其受日美基轴及相关政策的掣肘,日本战后以来的公共外交并没有达到预期的效果。     

Pop-culture diplomacy in Japan: soft power,nation branding and the question of ‘international cultural exchange’

This paper critically examines the development of what is known as ‘pop-culture diplomacy’ in Japan. In the postwar era, the country’s cultural diplomacy was propelled by the necessity to soften anti-Japan perceptions, notably in Southeast Asia. In the late 1980s, the popularity of Japanese media culture in Asia began to attract the attention of policy makers, while subsequent globalized practices of soft power and nation branding gave greater emphasis to the use of media culture to internationally enhance the image of the nation, which has meant the promotion of ‘pop-culture diplomacy’ and, more broadly, ‘Cool Japan’. It is argued that pop-culture diplomacy goes no further than a one-way projection and does not seriously engage with cross-border dialogue. The Japanese case also shows that pop-culture diplomacy hinders meaningful engagement with internal cultural diversity and suggests the necessity of taking domestic implications of cultural diplomacy seriously.     

Canadiana Abroad: The Department of External Affairs' Book Presentation Programmes, 1949–1963

This article examines one aspect of Canada's early cultural diplomacy. During the late 1940s, the Department of External Affairs frequently received requests for Canadian books from foreign libraries. At the same time, many officials were eager to promote Canadian culture abroad. The Annual Book Presentation Programme was inaugurated with the intention of creating “repositories of Canadiana” which might stimulate interest in Canada among foreign readers. Although the budget for the program was always modest, over the years the department's book gifts did fulfill their aim, creating a basis for the later growth of Canadian studies in universities abroad.     

The conférencier in the purple robe: Chen Jitong and Qing cultural diplomacy in late nineteenth-century Paris

ABSTRACT

The establishment of Chinese legations abroad in the late Qing coincided with the emergence of a number of learned societies and transnational knowledge communities in the late nineteenth century. To what extent did the Chinese diplomats residing in Europe engage with these organizations in their interactions with the West? This paper examines an understudied aspect of late Qing foreign relations by tracing the activities of the diplomat-writer Chen Jitong (1852–1907) in several learned societies in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s. While serving as a secretary at the Qing legation in Paris, Chen also became a member of several Parisian learned societies (sociétés savantes). By enthusiastically participating in the meetings of these societies, contributing to their official journals, and delivering speeches at international congresses organized by these groups during the 1889 World’s Fair, Chen established a presence for Qing China in several nongovernmental international organizations. While the intellectual foci of these learned societies ranged from folklore studies, to architectural preservation, to ethnography, Chen contributed his own unique perspective and sensitivity as a Qing literatus in his representation of Chinese society and culture, which he also successfully fused in his writings about China for a French audience. I argue that Chen’s participation in the French and international learned societies should be understood as a form of late Qing cultural diplomacy, where what was at stake was not political sovereignty but the right of Chinese self-representation and contending notions of civilization.     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.     

Errichtung und Zurechnung von Ressortforschungseinrichtungen. Eine Frage des Bedarfs an wissenschaftlicher Expertise?

The Constitution and Attribution of Government Research Agencies. A Matter of Need for Science‐generated Policy Knowledge? Government research agencies are a form of extra‐university research institutions. In contrast to other extra‐university research facilities they are subordinate to and financed by respective German governmental departments. As their mission they provide science‐generated information, services, and monitoring to support the governmental departments. In science studies researchers proclaim a rigid association between the installation, attribution, and development of government research agencies and the increasing need for science‐generated policy knowledge. The article examines this assumed association based on the personal, institutional, financial, and mission specific development of government research agencies between the years 1965 and 2005. According to the results the expansion of government research agencies stagnates – like science in general.