Cultural policy and revolutionary music during China’s Cultural Revolution: the case of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra

This paper examines the relation between the cultural policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the music of model plays (yangbanxi 样板戏), especially music produced by Western symphony orchestras, during the ten-year Cultural Revolution in China. It takes the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO) as the focal point of this historical episode. Model plays of the Cultural Revolution promoted communist and revolutionary themes. All aspects of their performance were examined for conformity to Maoist thought. This paper explores how the CCP’s ideology and its cultural policy were embodied in revolutionary music, using one of the model plays, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, as an analytical case study. Most of the historical materials cited in this research are held by the SSO Archive. The SSO played a crucial role in creating and performing the music for Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The academic value of its archive has long been overlooked. This paper provides a new perspective on the Cultural Revolution, one viewed through policies of a Western symphony orchestra, and it suggests that scholars apply the term ‘cultural policy’ more deliberately in future studies of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.     

Troubling Naturalism: Shirana Shahbazi's The Curve

This article performs a reading of Shirana Shahbazi's photo-based mural The Curve (2007), an artwork that interrogates the production of knowledge based on various ideas of truth in representation. The Curve meditates on knowledge production in relation to three sites: contemporary documentary photography, the history of northern European still-life painting, and the murals of religious leaders and martyrs that adorn Tehran. The effect of these multiple citations is the creation of an artwork that cannot be comfortably contextualized either in Western art history or in contemporary Iranian visual culture. The Curve thereby anticipates and attempts to block its own assimilation into art historical and critical discourses that reduce the work of Iranian artists to static reflections of a particular geographical and political reality. The artwork thus demands a consideration of the ways in which context, as a term in contemporary global art history, is ideologically constructed within a certain network of power relationships.     

Restorationist Counter‐Enlightenment: Thomas M'Crie on the Concept of Civil Liberty

Enlightenment notions for Counter‐Enlightenment purposes have not to date been used to provide a comprehensive context for Scottish religious history‐writing in the age of Counter‐Revolution and Restoration. The Evangelical historian and divine Thomas M'Crie's studies on Scottish Reformation history, Life of John Knox and Life of Andrew Melville, published in 1811 and 1819 respectively, exhibit an abundance of historiographical material for research. M'Crie was among the most renowned writers of his own time, but his historical works have been briefly passed over in recent secondary sources. The main purpose of this study is to rescue M'Crie's historical works on the Scottish Reformation past from near oblivion. This article argues that M'Crie produced an apology for the Scottish Reformation, adopting an aggressive style that attacked Scottish Enlightenment historians and thinkers such as William Robertson and David Hume, especially in the matter of their treatment of John Knox and Andrew Melville. M'Crie tried to restore his chosen past in order to influence the religious and political affairs of Scotland. In M'Crie's Counter‐Enlightenment historiography, the concept of civil liberty and Presbyterianism become interchangeable in a Restorationist religio‐political discourse. That is why M'Crie's enthusiasm for the Scottish Reformation constitutes the most representative example of the Presbyterian interpretation, which held its own against Enlightenment influence.     

Rousseau's argument for property

Camille Desmoulins's Le Vieux Cordelier is one of the best known newspapers of the French Revolution. Yet, despite this, there has long been uncertainty over the intellectual content of the newspaper and, in particular, over Desmoulins's use of Tacitean passages to support his views. This article seeks to shed light on this important newspaper by setting it not just in the context of the debates of the winter of 1793–1794, but also in that of the ideas and arguments of the Cordelier Club. The article demonstrates that in drawing on English republican ideas in Le Vieux Cordelier, to assert classical democratic republicanism against the views upheld by the Hébertists and the Revolutionary Government, Desmoulins was writing firmly in the tradition of the Cordelier Club.     

Continental Drift: Negotiating Male Performance in Canadian and American Cinema from the Late Sixties

Michel Brault's Entre la mer et l'eau douce (1967), one of the most accomplished feature films of the Quiet Revolution period, follows the journey of singer-songwriter Claude Fournier from the Charlevoix region to Montreal, where he drifts through a series of marginal jobs and love relationships before returning, disappointed, to his rural village. A portrait of “in-betweenness” in terms of identity, space and time, Brault's film tells the story of Quebec's increasing urbanization and of a people's collective entry into modernity, yet has received much less critical attention than other Quiet Revolution classics such as [Agrave] tout prendre and Le chat dans le sac. This article proposes a reading of this film that recognizes its importance as a key cinematic stepping stone in the Quebec national project, but also places it within a larger context of “coming-to-the-city” narratives. How does comparing Entre la mer et l'eau douce to English-Canadian and American classics which tackle similar themes (i.e., Goin' Down the Road, 1970; Midnight Cowboy, 1969) enable a larger discussion of the representation and appropriation of space, place and movement in the North America imaginary and Quebec's place therein?     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

黄胄的一九七三年

按美术史家们的划分,黄胄一生大致经历了两个创作高峰：前一个阶段是20世纪50年代后期至60年代前期。黄胄以写实主义画风崛起于画坛,成就他名声作品的如《苹果花开的时候》、《打马球》、《洪荒风雪》、《赶集》、《庆丰收》、《金色的道路》、《新生》等都产生于这个阶段;另一个高峰期是在文革结束后的80年代,黄胄被压抑了许久的创作激情终于等到了时候,     

The lesser gods of the Sahara

Abstract

Following a highly publicised expedition in the 1950s, the Tassili-n-Ajjer mountains of the Central Sahara (Algeria) were presented to the world as ‘the greatest museum of prehistoric art in the whole world’. Many of the claims of the expedition's leader, Henri Lhote, were misleading. A number of the paintings were faked, and the copying process was fraught with errors. The ‘discovery’ can only be understood within the political and cultural context of the time, namely the Algerian Revolution, France's attempt to partition Algeria, and the prevailing views of the Abbé Breuil, the archadvocate of foreign influence in African rock art. The expedition's methods caused extensive damage to the rock art while the accompanying looting of cultural objects effectively sterilized the archaeological landscape. Any restitution process must necessarily include a full recognition of what was done and the inappropriateness of those values.     

Illusions of revolution: François Furet's critique of Marx

In this article it will be argued that François Furet's attempt in Interpreting the French Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of Tocqueville and Cochin's historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. It does so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and revolution as act. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur's interventions in the historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. In response to Furet's oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the ‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx's accounts of the French Revolution. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet's critique fails to capture the allegorical nature of the political in Marx's thought, and underplays the significance of revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their attempted unity. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx.     

The strategic anthropologist

Ken Booth's Strategy and ethnocentrism, published in 1979, deserves to be promoted in scholars' esteem to the very small category of works regarded as classics about strategy. Three reasons serve to explain why, over the years, it never received the acclaim it merits: the relatively undistinguished publisher; ironically, the subsequent debate over more than a quarter of a century about culture as a factor necessary for the understanding of strategy; and the attractively accessible style in which Booth expressed himself. Strategy and ethnocentrism is witty and even occasionally amusing—characteristics apt to trigger a response of some disdain from over‐serious scholars. We can now assess Booth's book in its proper context, which is the long if very thinly populated history of strategic ideas, largely free of unduly distorting ‘presentist’ concerns. The fact that Strategy and ethnocentrism was written in the context of the Cold War really does not matter for the quality of its argument. This work is a classic because it speaks to all periods and about all participants in strategic history. The originality of Booth's treatment of culture does not lie so much in the realm of his grasp of its relative strategic significance, but rather in his relentless unwrapping of the actual, or certainly potential, harm, including unanticipated self‐harm, of ethnocentricity. Today, studies of culture and strategy are not in short supply, but works that compel readers to attempt to take due account of their own ethnocentric frailties are in desperately short supply.     

Was there a French Sonderweg?

The notion of a historical Sonderweg (special way) is applied to the case of France in this article. It takes the Revolution as the seminal event in modem French history, and examines rival interpretations of its legacy; after the demise of the Marxist interpretation, these can be characterised as Whig‐Republican and Tory‐Tocquevillian. It concludes by offering a third interpretation—that the Revolution's real bequest to France was Bonapartism.     

The Unveiled Apple: Ethnicity,Gender, and the Limits of Inter-discursive Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art

In the past two decades, Iranian contemporary art has been eagerly embraced by international art venues. The transportation of artworks from Tehran to mostly western European and North American cultural centers entails inter-discursive translations that will render them legible for their reception in a new context. This paper argues that bound up in these translations are performative acts of language that label these artworks as markers of ethnic alterity, unexplored localities and most of the time associates them with issues of gender and femininity (and therefore limited to the vocabulary of “veil,” “plight of women” and “sexual inequality”). Looking at a seven-minute piece of video-art by Ghazaleh Hedayat entitled Eve's Apple (2006), the article examines this predicament and the possibilities for the artists to circumvent it. It argues that Hedayat's video enables an observation of the performative dominance of Western discourses of art history that mark the limits of inter-discursive interpretation in disciplines such as art history and art criticism.     

Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A cultural history

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.     

Franco Venturi's ‘crisis’ of the Old Regime

This paper discusses Franco Venturi's concept of a general European ‘crisis’ in the period 1768 – 89, which is covered in volumes III, IV and V of Settecento riformatore. With this concept Venturi allied himself with R. R. Palmer, A. Sorel, J. Juarès and others who sought to explore the larger context of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Critics of the English translation of Venturi's volumes III and IV (1989?–?91) have failed to perceive a European political crisis in this period. However, Venturi's concept also involved a birth of European public opinion, a development that has been affirmed in English, French and Italian studies more recently, despite a tendency to substitute a cultural for a political history of the Enlightenment.     

TO WRITE THE HISTORY OF EQUALITY

This article discusses the history of equality and recent efforts to write that history in the context of a detailed discussion of Siep Stuurman's The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. It begins by pointing out the surprising paucity of writing on the history of equality, particularly its conceptual and intellectual history, despite that notion's centrality in modern political and philosophical discussion. It proceeds to examine recent efforts to make amends for that lack. What Pierre Rosanvallon has described as the contemporary “crisis of equality” gives urgency to these efforts, while also, it is suggested, providing an opportunity to more fully explore the contingencies and complexities of this beguiling notion. Stuurman's examination of the invention and deployment of “cross‐cultural equality”—the basic equality of all people living in the world, regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, or race—is an important step in this exploration. But as Samuel Moyn has emphasized in his own recent intervention on the history of social rights in an unequal world, it is not, on its own, enough. Future efforts to write the history of equality must integrate the social and economic dimensions of the idea more fully in an effort to better understand our contemporary dilemma.     

Reading versus Seeing? Winckelmann's Excerpting Practice and the Genealogy of Art History

From his arrival in Italy in 1755, Winckelmann's work is infused throughout by a fundamental antinomy: reading versus seeing. This antinomy possesses for him a decidedly epistemological significance: it allows him to present himself as the father of a discipline deserving of its name, i.e., the history of art. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), he claims to break with a long tradition of art discourse which had been primarily supported by ancient texts, basing his book instead on the direct observation of the artworks. The aim of this paper is to critically examine this antinomy. How does seeing relate to reading in his working method? What relationship does art history, in the empirical dimension Winckelmann wanted to give it, have to book knowledge? Winckelmann's excerpts collection provides valuable answers to these questions. Following an old scholarly tradition, Winckelmann used to write down passages of his readings, constituting a vast handwritten library of excerpts which never left him. The result of this intense excerpting practice consists in some 7,500 pages, which allow to better define the share of empirical observation and book-based knowledge in his approach to ancient art.     

French radicalism through the eyes of John Stuart Mill

The paper attempts to highlight some under-researched aspects of the interaction between British and French radical political thinkers and activists during the period between the July Revolution of 1830 in France and the early years of the Third Republic. It focuses in particular on the decisive impact that the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830 had for the perception of French politics by the most Francophile British radical, John Stuart Mill. In this context, Mill's astonishingly dense coverage of French affairs in The Examiner and the relation between that coverage and Mill's radical agenda at home are explored. The Revolution of February 1848 and the establishment of a Republic in France raised new hopes and led to a new round of Anglo-French radical co-operation and manifestations of fraternity. However, it was the frustration of the expectations raised by 1848 (fatally by the time of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d’état in December 1851) that had the most profound effect on the perception of French radicalism outre-Manche. A detailed analysis of which French ‘radical’ parties, factions and personalities attracted Mill's sympathies and support from 1830 to the beginnings of the Third Republic is offered, along with the reasons why Mill was attracted by some of the people and factions in question and not by others. The paper winds up with a few comments on Mill's strenuous efforts to contribute to Anglo-French mutual understanding and fellow-feeling and his strategies to that effect.     

According to What: Art and the Philosophy of the "End of Art"

In 1964, when Danto first encountered Warhol's Brillo Box, Jasper Johns made a painting titled According to What. Danto's new book After the End of Art also provokes this question because in his restatement of Hegel's verdict on art's historical role he drops an essential part of the implied definition of art: the issue of adequacy between content and presentation. Why dispense with this crucial point of quality judgment? My critique falls into three parts. The first part shows how the whole historical argument rests upon a shift of criteria. According to Hegel art reached its highest point of achievement in classical antiquity when adequate embodiment seemed indispensable to the presence of the spirit. It subsequently lost this exclusive rank—first through Christianity, then through modern philosophy—when a new spiritual self-awareness emerged which no longer seemed to need external manifestation. Although Danto disputes the concept of absolute self-possession as the metaphysical vanishing point of Hegel's construction, he nevertheless subscribes to its apparent evidence in late twentieth-century art and culture. In the second part I discuss the characteristic distortions of Hegelian-type historicism and confront them with both the obvious misrepresentation of the works of art themselves and the different code of conduct in practical art history. This leads to a rather disenchanting conclusion: according to an old, deeply ingrained philosophical prejudice there is no problem about quality in art, because the true yardstick and fulfillment of art is philosophy itself. The final part tries to unpick this tangle by showing that there was in fact, contemporaneous with Hegel, a remarkably different interpretation of the self-same auspices of modern art which comes much closer to its actual achievements, and this without denying the basic philosophical predicament of which Danto has reminded us.     

Baroque Science,Experimental Art? Jusepe de Ribera and other Neapolitan Sceptics

Current attempts by historians of science to revise the narrative of the Scientific Revolution by using the concept of the Baroque have important implications for art history. Correspondences between baroque art and baroque science gain new complexity when the rational, epistemologically optimistic image of the New Science is put in doubt. Rather than a method of objective observation, early seventeenth‐century science and art share an acceptance of the constructed nature of reality, of human epistemological limitations and of the role of passions in the observation of the world. While Caravaggio has revolutionised art precisely through his interest in questions of knowledge and sensorial perception and by his subversive transformation of Renaissance epistemological values and ideals, this article concentrates on the work of Jusepe de Ribera, who made the senses and their shortcomings a major theme of his pictorial research. Ribera's epistemology is examined in the context of contemporary Neapolitan philosophy and science. Through the confrontation of some of the Spagnoletto's paintings with the work of figures such as Giovanni Battista della Porta, Federico Cesi and particularly Colantonio Stigliola, it becomes clear that early modern Neapolitan faith in rational knowledge was more ambiguous than is sometimes assumed.     

Walls of history: the use of mythomoteurs in Northern Ireland murals

This study set out to discover in what way murals may possibly reflect the history of the Northern Ireland conflict. The findings suggest that each conflict group's usage of imagery reflects the reality and the very complicated nature of the Northern Ireland conflict which crosses religious, cultural, and political fault lines. It is also apparent that the symbolism of murals creates its own invented versions of history. This is evidenced by both protagonists' usage of myth-symbol complexes and mythomoteurs in order to legitimatise their ethnic origins, religious and political ideologies. It is also axiomatic that many nationalist murals reflect O'Brien's notion of sacral nationalism. The symbolisation used in some Protestant/loyalist murals reflects Old Testament themes, whereas some nationalist murals reflect New Testament themes. Moreover, there is a profusion of murals reflecting diabolical enemy imagery, sanctification/demonisation imagery, militaristic imagery, ethnic victimisation imagery, ego of victimisation and blood sacrifice imagery in chronicling historic victories, rebellions, massacres, suffering, and imprisonment.