Villagers’ agency in the Intangible Cultural Heritage designation of a Korean village ritual

This paper examines how the villagers of Pams?m village in Seoul acted as agents in configuring their own cultural identity which explores issues concerning Korea’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) designation system. It delves in detail how villagers practice their ritual of Pams?m Pugundang kut ? amidst the complex process of continuity and change as a way of sustaining and promoting collective village identity. By examining the implications of this cultural practices in contemporary society, this paper ultimately raises the question of who constitutes the true legatee of traditional culture of Pams?m village. The cultural practice of the Pams?m Pugundang kut carried out by the villagers of Pams?m can be interpreted not merely as a critique of the dynamics of political and cultural heritage, but the reconstruction of villager’s identity through the creation and continuation of their long village history. This study provides a useful case in examining a village community which describes in detail how the subject of this study constructs their cultural identity and faces the complex issues concerning Korea’s ICH designation system.     

A Decadence Baedeker: D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.     

Intersectional solidarity? The Armagh women,the British left and women’s liberation

In 1980, three Republican women prisoners held in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland joined the hunger strike being conducted by male Republican prisoners in Maze Prison. Overshadowed by the fatal 1981 strike, the 1980 strike involved these women in Armagh, who challenged the traditional nationalist notion of the strong male warrior, while generating sympathy and solidarity across the globe, including with the far left and the women’s liberation movement in Britain. This article will look at how the left and the women’s liberation movement in both Britain and Ireland looked to portray these women within their competing narratives.     

Nostalgia or das Heimweh: Homesickness and the Press-ganged Soldier in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863)

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) uses nostalgia as a literary aesthetic and historical context to articulate a narrative of disorientating epochal change. Gaskell’s novel draws on nostalgia’s roots as a psychosomatic disease afflicting soldiers displaced by international conflicts to reassert the traumatic roots of a familiar feeling often understood as superficial and insignificant. Nostalgia began as a disease brought on by migration and only later came to be thought of as a type of sentimental memory; first home was far away and then it was long ago. Gaskell’s novel incorporates both, mingling longing for a place with longing for a past. This double distancing articulates an experience of transition within her historical novel. She draws on an eighteenth-century trope used by figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, repurposed for the demands of prose fiction. The homesick soldier who was the first sufferer with pathological nostalgia is cast as the central protagonist of historical transformation and an emblem of uneasy transitions. Sylvia’s Lovers has received scant critical notice to date and, perhaps for this reason, its explicit allusions to nostalgia, and the role they play in Gaskell’s historical imagination, have been left entirely unremarked.     

The evolution of Chinese film policy: how to adapt an instrument for hegemonic rule to commercialisation

Since the 1990s, the Chinese political leadership has gradually embraced the commercialisation of the film sector and has turned the liberalisation of entertainment content production into a strategy for generating legitimacy. This article traces the evolution of Chinese film policy from its Communist origins to the present day, and reveals that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at the same time, has never desisted from using film production to establish hegemony in a Gramscian sense, and that these efforts have even been intensified over the last decade. The second part of the article scrutinises how the CCP’s mechanisms of control and ideological guidance have been adapted to commercialisation and, based on personal interviews with Beijing film producers in 2006 and 2007, investigates the extent to which the intensified efforts of adaptation since 2003 have been able to persuade the private sector of film production to participate in maintaining CCP hegemony.     

Buddhism,Democracy and Power in the 1932 Thai Revolution

The People’s Party toppled the Siamese absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy in Thailand in June 1932. Scholars have generally denied that the revolution had any popular resonance, but this article shows that in Buddhism, the country’s premier cultural form, democratic rhetoric in the 1930s resonated among young monks marginalised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. A group of young monks within the Mahanikai, or Great Order, rebelled against the palace-established Thammayut order that exercised the most power in institutional Buddhism. A “thin” or formal democracy established in 1932 – one displaying the main trappings of a regime of popular sovereignty but purposefully limited in scope by the People’s Party – thus inspired an assertion of a “thick” democracy, or democracy as a much older social value that governed both the Sangha internally and its relations with local communities, which the Mahanikai activists claimed was the core of original Buddhism.

     

The Rejected Candidate: John III Vasa,the Polish-Lithuanian royal elections (1573/1575) and early-modern political decision-making

This article analyses the candidacy of King John III Vasa in the royal elections of Poland-Lithuania in 1573 and 1575. Although the ‘Polish-minded’ policy of John Vasa is commonly known in earlier historiography, Swedish and Finnish historians have not given much attention to John III’s election campaigns in Poland-Lithuania in the 1570s. This article contemplates John III’s candidacy and rejection from the perspective of Poland-Lithuania. The royal elections are analysed as a political decision-making process by the Polish-Lithuanian estates. Thus the article emphasizes the existence of past alternatives and conditions of decision-making in early-modern history.     

A Paper City: On History,Maps, and Map Collections in 18th and 19th Century Paris

ABSTRACT

This essay considers how maps became implicated in historical inquiry, with particular reference to the city of Paris. Three interrelated episodes are discussed, from the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, each associated with specific mapmakers and collectors whose activities shaped the early development of map history. These episodes reveal how maps were historicized in different ways in this period, initially as images created in the present to reveal the past and eventually as objects of historical interest in their own right. It is further argued that this intellectual shift was associated with a growing awareness, especially among state officials, that the study and collection of historic maps had important geopolitical implications. In tracing this story across three episodes in a single urban setting, the essay seeks to make larger observations about the relationship between the map as a visual representation, the map collection as an urban ‘assemblage’ of geographical information, and the city as a physical environment.     

Simon McBurney’s Ambitious Pursuit of the Pure Maths Play

Abstract

When Simon McBurney set out to create a play about the fabled relationship between Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and the self-taught Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, he was immediately confronted by the question of how to engage the mathematics authentically. Undaunted by his own uneasiness with the subject, McBurney incorporated a host of experts into the rehearsal process, calling on mathematical educators, expositors, and Fields medalists to come work with the company. While on the surface maths and drama make an incongruous pair, the result was a vibrant collaboration. The final product — the award-winning play A Disappearing Number — shines an interesting light on the surprising similarity between the creative process in mathematics and the creative process in theatre, especially as manifested by the company at Complicite.