Banishing the past: The German avant-garde and Nazi art

How do radical changes in cultural policy affect artistic reputations? Nazi policy to control memory—through the stigmatization of artists and the confiscation of their art—was less than fully successful for two main reasons: (1) Refugees and the German need for foreign exchange carried many pieces into the international market, where they escaped destruction from bombing raids; and (2) in post-war Germany a considerable effort was made not only to connect with a “broken” tradition but also to locate victims and to salvage as much of their work and reputations as possible. Allied efforts to banish Nazi-approved art from the collective memory have been far more successful. Many works that survive still rest in repositories not open to the public and, while work by a few Nazi favorites are still in demand, public commemoration remains politically controversial. Whether the reputation of an artist survives such sharp breaks in the political culture depends not only on the physical preservation of prior work but also on decisions as to who merits a place in the archives accessible to posterity.     

Gender role stereotypes in fine art: A content analysis of art history books

This paper reports findings from a content analysis of the gender role images in the works of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Modern art in three major Western art history textbooks. Males were overrepresented as subjects; males and females were presented in stereotypic roles and activities; the Madonna and the idle nude were common female images; males were overrepresented in portraits. Fine art as presented in major art history books was found to embody the gender role stereotypes of the wider society.     

Lifting the Veil: African American Images and the European American Gaze

Patricia Hill Collins presents and discusses gender and gender role norms, behaviors, and ideologies among African Americans in an interdisciplinary diagnostic endeavor that calls attention to health, economic, behavioral, and psychosocial patterns related to social injustice and inequality. Collins presents several popular culture, mass media, and social science literature topics that call for a progressive Black sexual politics necessary for African American empowerment. A most crucial and apparent point of Collins's discussion is that improvement in the lives of African Americans requires inspection and analysis of gender and sexuality related intragroup variation and diversity. I situate this discussion primarily within a post-civil rights ideological revolution related to the European American “gaze,” multiculturalism, and European American emotional ambivalence toward the Black body. It is proposed that Collins's analysis of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality among African Americans occurs within an American context that reciprocally impacts African American intragroup dynamics.     

Organizing the past: A history and its (de)construction

This paper explores some aspects of the textuality of historical narrative as a mode of organizing the past, drawing its inspiration from the work of Hayden White. The paper is unusual in that it takes as its central text for analysis a piece of historical narrative constructed ‘naively’ by the author prior to the writing of the current paper. This text, which attempts to account for the varying development of the discipline of Business History in Britain and the United States, is explored for its narrative implications and implicit story-lines. The reactions of a number of readers of the original text are also examined, and an attempt is made to account for these in terms of the types of story each reader understands the text to be telling.     

Resistance to the political representation of alien populations: the European paradox

This article addresses the issue of the resistance of European nations to granting unnaturalized citizens the right to vote in local, regional, and national elections. It argues that this political inflexibility contrasts with the economic flexibility these nations demonstrated when they made a call for labor to overseas populations, former colonies, and other countries, and which they exhibit now as they work to modernize production systems in their industries. Because of this lack of political representation, local authorities have proven disinterested in migrants' concerns and migrants have become subjects of the labor market, rather than of the law. Overall "political underdevelopment" will only intensify the turbulence projected for Europe's economy.     

Public Conceptions and Images of the European Union: The Case of Slovenia

The intention of this article is to show the way the conceptions and perceptions of (Western) Europe and the European Union (EU) are constructed and articulated by general public opinion as well as by political parties and intellectual circles in Slovenia as a candidate country for the accession into the EU. It is also discussed how the images concerning reference countries and the future position in the integration process are connected with the process of formation of national selfunderstanding and identity. Some elements of so-called Euro-realism which is the common denominator of prevailing European orientation are outlined and explained.     

Moving images of exclusion: Persisting tropes in the filmic representation of European Roma

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the most prominent tropes in the earliest and most recent filmic representations of Roma. Stereotypical images of Roma abound in many fictional features as well as documentaries, from the representation of Roma as eternal nomads to racially prejudiced depictions of Roma women and the alleged innateness of music to Roma. Because images and modes of representation change over time, the paper juxtaposes the earliest portrayals of Roma with those produced in the last 15 years. The analysis particularly centres on two dominant reoccurring tropes: types of spaces typically occupied by Roma in film, that is the lack of a place or so-called placeless-ness of Roma; the gendered other, or the Roma woman and the culturally and ethnically othered Roma musician. Ultimately, by analysing how these tropes have persisted in varying forms over 100 years, this work points to the filmic imagery that perpetuates antiziganism, but also how the same has changed over the years to offer possible counter-narratives.     

The individual in Japanese history: Parallels to and divergences from the European experience

This paper shows that Japan underwent a sequence of historical periods during which the level of technical development and the place of the individual in society paralleled that of similar periods in Europe. Particular attention is paid to 16th-century Japan, a period remarkably similar to the European Renaissance in its individualism and socioeconomic and cultural vitality. In both Japan and Western Europe, this renaissance followed the breakdown of an imperium and its replacement by a feudal system. The historical parallel continues with those parts of Europe in which absolutist governments were successfully imposed, since Japan underwent a similar phenomenon, accompanied by a similar decline in individualism and in technological development. Although no definitive conclusions can be reached, the paper explores the implications of these parallels for our understanding of both Japan and the general historical and psychological processes involved in the growth of individualism and technology.     

Changes in the Political Iconography of East Central European Capitals after 1989 (Berlin,Warsaw, Prague,Bratislava)

The fall of communism in 1989/1990 has led not only to the establishment of new political systems and ideologies, but also to significant modifications in the visual self-representation of the respective states in Eastern and East Central Europe. Statues of communist heroes were abolished and replaced by monuments and memorials reflecting the new political situation. New state buildings were erected, and the old ones remodelled and adapted to the representational needs of the new authorities. In some cases, the political changes even have had a strong impact on principles of city planning, effecting urban structures of symbolic value.

The focal points of these developments are the capital cities, being principal places of the execution of state power as well as of its self-representation. However, the conditions for the staging of the state in the capital are in each case different. They depend on one hand on the architectural shape and historic role of the city, and on the political situation and self-image of the state on the other.

The article provides a comparative analysis of the changes in the political iconography of four East Central European capitals—Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava—since 1989, focusing on selected monuments, architectural projects for state institutions and concepts of town planning.     

Monumentally Indian: The Photography of Edward Curtis and the Cuzco School of Photography

Abstract

‘Monumentally Indian’ analyzes the similarities and differences in the representation of indigeneity in photography in the US and the Southern Peruvian Andes during the first decades of the twentieth century. The article shows an underlying (and often unconscious) poetic at work in the critical and popular reception of these photographic archives that undermines their potential for creating a radically new visual field.     

The cool welcome and the responses to it: Australian-Hungarians negotiate social reality in Hungary after 1989

This article examines the social aspects of Australian-Hungarians’ return to Hungary after the collapse of communism. I suggest that one of the most disillusioning aspects of homecoming for this group of Australian-Hungarians was the cold welcome they received from those who had stayed behind. The main task of this article is to analyse how returnees grappled with the negative attitudes of the stayees. Three major strategies are identified by means of which returnees facilitated their feeling of belonging: contestation, acceptance or dismissal of stayees’ perspectives. Returnees’ efforts to achieve a sense of belonging suggest that the nature of national membership is fundamentally fragile and porous and underlines that self-definitions are far from being either unconditional or ascribed. By placing contrasting narratives side by side, this article draws attention to the intersubjective elements involved in defining belonging.     

Materials relating to East European Jewish history and culture in the archives of the former Soviet Union

The Kiev Institute of Jewish (from the early 1930s “Proletarian”) Culture (Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul'tury, IEPK), based at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAS), was one of two such organisations in the inter-war period. This article discusses the fate of its archive, a rich source that included material from Leningrad and elsewhere, in the wake of two interventions; firstly, its sudden closure in 1936 by the Soviet authorities and, secondly, the Nazi occupation of Kiev in the Second World War. As a consequence, the archive was scattered to the winds, ending up in two continents.