Creative Arts, Education, and Culture in Global Perspective

Abstract

A wide lens on the world of Greater China offers a breathtaking view of the rich diversity of cultural expressions that spread across a continent and its outer island nations. In reverse, close-up images reveal the details of the nature of the creative spirit that constitutes much of the Sinophone world. A compendium of chapters that sample the expressive practices in music and the visual arts in Greater China bring attention to the dichotomy of diversities and commonalities present within a cultural region, and offer prospects for the study of multiple variations within a larger and more unified cultural perspective. Greater China’s multiple artistic communities serve as a reminder of ways in which many broad geographic regions share a measure of history, heritage, language, and cultural values. We need only to look at much of Central America, or southern Africa, or South Asia, to recognize similar dynamics of cultural commonalities that run parallel to multiple distinctive cultural expressions as well. This chapter will take a broad view of some of the processes and practices of the creative arts in Greater China, and in other world regions, and will reflect upon important principles of multiculturalism, of new awakenings to cultural and artistic identities that may be in part shared across a region and yet also distinctive of a particular location or group. The organization of the book into sections on (a) arts, culture, and education and (b) issues of cultural transmission and transformation offers possibilities and prompts for this writer to delve into cross-cultural examination of these matters on a wider scale, in other regions, as the potential universal principles that may be apparent and worthy of consideration as a means of finding relevance for a readership of these chapters beyond Greater China as well as within it.