Cosmopolitan Culture Research Articles

ГЕТЬМАН У ПЕРУЦІ. ЗОВНІШНІ ФОРМИ РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦІЇ ГЕТЬМАНСЬКОЇ ВЛАДИ ЧАСІВ КИРИЛА РОЗУМОВСЬКОГО

The article deals with the transformations of visual representations of power of the last hetman of Cossack Ukraine Kyrylo Rozumovskyi (1750-1764). The traditional elements of the ruling elite’s representation included the court of the ruler with its hierarchy, system of political roles, staff, etiquette and ceremonial, capital and numerous residences. Among the hetman, various groups of nobles, courtiers, attendants, representatives of the social strata took part in the performative actions. Political representational acts, including elections, inagurations, investitures, as well as religious and personal celebrations of rulers, such as, hunting and banquet, were the most common. Each action had its own ceremonial scenario that was full of explicit or hidden meanings. Rozumovskyi radically changed the ideology and forms of the external representation of the Hetman's power. Old clothing, churches and fortresses were replaced by the European cosmopolitan and secular courtly culture. Hetman preferred to look like a European nobleman. The cult of the head of the Cossack Troops, as the first knight among equals, transformed into the image of an enlightened ruler and protector of the Little Russian (Malorossia) country. The way of life of the Hetman's court changed significantly. While the traditional banquets and hunts preserved, the new artistic entertainments, such as concerts, spectacles, balls and masquerades, appeared. A renewed hetman’s capital in Baturin with its exquisite palace and park, university, state institutions and factories, reflected this new concept of power.The political aspect of symbols and ceremonials was especially important field of semantic changes. Being a relative of the ruling dynasty and possesing a hetman's title, Rozumovskyi placed himself outside the existing ruling hierarchies both in the Russian Empire and in the Hetmanate. As plans for the establishment of hereditary hetmanhood in Ukraine were made, the visual symbols of the future political project were formed. They combined a symbolism of the "Little Russian (Malorossian) nation" with the Rozumovskyi’s personal coat of arms and monograms. This symbiosis clearly reflected the political ambitions of the Hetman who wanted to see himself as a half-sovereign ruler.

Dreaming of Palestine: James Joyce's Ulysses and Plantation Modernism

Dreaming of Palestine:James Joyce's Ulysses and Plantation Modernism Amy Clukey (bio) Agendath Netaim: planters' company. To purchase wastesandy tracks from Turkish government and plant witheucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north ofJaffa. You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam ofland for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons.Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation. Everyyear you get a sending of the crop. Your name enteredfor life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay tendown and the balance in yearly installments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15. —James Joyce, Ulysses1 The plantation has long been central to conceptions of Caribbean and southern US literature, but it is rarely considered in relation to European and American modernism.2 Modernist fiction that depicts urbane cosmopolitanism, bohemian revelry, and flânerie may seem far from Haitian sugarcane fields and Georgian cotton estates, except perhaps in the most indirect of ways: if colonialism enables European modernity, then those scattered colonies provide raw materials for commodity production, which in turn generates the cosmopolitan culture of metropoles. On closer inspection, however, the plantation is not the exclusive purview of modernists from the peripheralized West Indies or US South like Jean Rhys, William Faulkner, or Eric Walrond. Plantation fiction is, in fact, a significant genre of global modernism, and the plantation haunts metropolitan literatures as surely [End Page 167] as it does the supposedly regional literatures of the Caribbean, southern, and Harlem renaissances of the early to mid-twentieth century. Metropolitan novels like Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) present the colonial periphery at the imperial core where the plantation irrupts into the streets of Boston, London, and Dublin. Such instances provides insistent—if frequently unrecognized—reminders that these urban centers are shaped by plantation colonialism, agriculture, labor, culture, and ideology. Joyce's work has been thoroughly examined from postcolonial perspectives, including its influence on West Indian writers like Derek Walcott.3 Such criticism does not explicitly consider Joyce's fiction in relation to transnational, national, or regional plantation cultures. I read Ulysses as a case study for plantation modernism to show that plantation culture undergirds a vast range of modern and modernist cultural production in Europe itself. Situating Joyce within a network of plantation modernists brings him into dialogue with a range of both metropolitan and colonial writers in ways that go beyond implicitly hierarchical models of influence. My comparative plantation framework puts Joyce on equal footing with writers from throughout the global plantation complex to reveal shared aesthetic and political concerns at work in his fiction. Within this context, Stephen Dedalus's famous declaration "History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" resonates with Faulkner's assertion that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" and Rhys's statement that "the past exists—side by side—with the present, not behind it; that what was—is" (Joyce, Ulysses, 28).4 Like his contemporaries Rhys, Faulkner, and Walrond, Joyce interrogates narratives of the plantation constructed by previous generations of writers. This literature includes early official histories of plantation colonialism from metropolitan perspectives like Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (1633) and Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry's history of Saint Domingue (1789). It also includes nineteenth-century romances like Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), William Earle's Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800), Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal (1826), and Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia (1887). Much of this early literature adopts planter perspectives to legitimate colonialism and the African slave trade in the New World; it constructs deceptively linear narratives that obscure the violent gaps and silences that constitute plantation culture. Modernist writers inherited the ideological and aesthetic legacies of plantation literature, and, as I discuss, they grapple with the representational challenges it presents. Modernism limns the plantation past, maps its present, and imagines its future. In Tropic Death (1926), Walrond compiles ten stories about the United States–occupied...

From Global Risk to Private Catastrophe: The Domestic and the Planetary in Daniel Kramb’s From Here and Susannah Waters’ Cold Comfort

Climate change is at the heart of recent critical debates about the role of the global and the local in the critical practice of the environmental humanities. While critics like Ursula K. Heise and Timothy Clark have argued for putting the global at the conceptual centre of inquiry, others have warned that such a wide focus obscures the localized effects of climate change and their connection to histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Rather than privileging one side of this argument over the other, this paper seeks to put both perspectives into a productive dialogue that focusses on how literature can connect the local histories and global environmental risks. The paper draws on two relatively unknown novels, Susannah Waters’ Cold Comfort (2007) and Daniel Kramb’s From Here (2012), in order to show how the threat of climate change disrupts understandings of scale that structure our social lives by linking global forces to moments of domestic and intimate crisis. From Here’s protagonist is a cosmopolitan culture worker, whose perpetual uprootedness becomes the vantage point for her political engagement with the threat of climate change. Cold Comfort’s Alaska Native protagonist finds her house literally tilting due to the melting permafrost ground, while domestic violence and sexual abuse make her home uninhabitable. Despite the huge disjuncture in the contexts they portray, the texts share an interest in the disjuncture between awareness and agency, in the impact of climate change on domestic and intimate relationships, and in links between the private, the political and the planetary.

MODEL INSTITUTIONS AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL REFORM IN EARLY VICTORIAN BRITAIN

AbstractThis article reconsiders the nature and novelty of social reform in Britain during the early Victorian period. Historians have long ceased to debate the period in terms of a ‘revolution in government’, or the beginnings of a welfare state. Instead, the current consensus presents a picture of only modest, fitful change. Neither the state, nor the overall ideological landscape, was radically transformed. This article seeks to reinject a sense of transformative change back into these decades. It does so by examining a neglected facet of this otherwise richly served period of social reform: the formation and functioning of a series of self-styled ‘model’ institutions that spanned the fields of education, prisons, housing, and sanitation. In particular, what the use of these model institutions brings into sharp focus are the radical changes that occurred in the geography of social reform, which at this point began to develop according to multiple spatial relations, extending at once within and beyond Britain. Between them, they helped to engineer a truly cosmopolitan culture of social policy-making, which was both multi-directional – policies flowed outwards and inwards – and composed of multiple relations, national, imperial, and transnational.

Cultural Formation and Appropriation in the Era of Merchant Capitalism

AbstractDiscussions of ‘cultural appropriation’ in popular culture suffer from an inherited politics of authenticity and ownership originating in a liberal legal–ethical framework. Here, I use Raymond Williams’s and Stuart Hall’s cultural theory to pinpoint the place at which cultural-appropriation discourse goes wrong – an essentialist and anti- historical notion of colonial encounters. We can overcome these limits through Marxist cultural and historical analysis. Outrage about colonial violence which most often roots appropriation discourse is better understood within the context of an account of the transition to capitalism beginning with the Low Countries and their eastern colonies. Furthermore, the Marxist idea of the cosmopolitan cultures of both capital and labour offers a productive path for the history of culture rooted in the same colonial encounter.

Muslim Education in Murshidabad, a Bengal District during 1704-1947: A Review

<p>The historic city of Murshidabad-the earstwhile nawabi capital –a city founded in the year 1704 by Murshid Quli Khan, the Mughal diwan of Bengal. In 1704 Murshid Quli Khan transferred the capital of Bengal from Dhaka to Murshidabad and named the city after his name .The town is situated on the left bank of river Bhagirathi. It is the northern most district of the Presidency Division of West Bengal and lies between 23 o 43’ and 24 o 52’ north latitude and 87 0 49’ and 88 0 44’ east longitude .<strong> </strong>Under the Nawabs Murshidabad’s glory reached to the highest peak in almost all arenas. As a trading centre Murshidabad became famous. Many scholars came here and settled and they mixed with the local people freely and there developed a cosmopolitan culture. According o Sushil Chaudhury ‘‘It was a golden day of Murshidabad under the Nawabs’’.<strong> </strong>By the middle of the 18<sup>th</sup> century Murshidabad became one of the greatest centre of culture and education as the nawabs were the patrons of learned persons. But after the battle of Plassey the scenario of Murshidabad started changing .With the establishment of the British power we see gradual decline of its culture and education. Many of the British policies directly affected Murshidabad such as the shifting of court to Calcutta, introduction of permanent settlement, introduction of western education and declaration of English as the official language instead of Persian. Murshidabad is the only district of West Bengal where Muslims outnumbered the Hindus since 1901 and formed the majority community. Presently this district is a backward district of West Bengal .When we enquire the causes of this backwardness we find education as one of the major causes. The present paper is a modest attempt to analyse the educational progress in Murshidabad under the Nawabs and also under the British. The paper will also enquire the causes of educational backwardness of this district.</p>

Transgender Identity, Sexual versus Gender ‘Rights’ and the Tools of the Indian State

Sexual and gender minorities in contemporary India are formed in the interstices between the neoliberal, Hindutva state; transnational discourses of liberal democracy and sexual ‘rights’; as well as cosmopolitan culture and global LGBT movements. As is evident in recent court judgments and legislation, particularly since 2014, postcolonial Hindu nationalism has created cultural conditions where forms of queer gender are permissible while queer sexuality is generally unacceptable. In recent years, significant developments have focused on transgender communities, complicating activism surrounding sexual and gender identities. By positing some identities as state-sanctioned acceptable citizens and others as not, certain ‘transgender’ individuals are conceptualised as bearers of rights while finding other facets of their identities discriminated against and maintained as illegal. The 2014 Supreme Court NALSA v. Union of India judgment and The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 passed by the Lok Sabha, alongside further judgments and legislation affecting wider LGBT communities, have kept discourses fixed on sexual and gender identities and their relationship to Indian citizenship at the forefront of discussions of gender justices and injustices in India today. Focusing on recent judicial and legislative developments, this paper examines how transgender rights are being granted in the context of the neoliberal, Hindutva state and considers which forms of transgender identity are currently being conceptualised as legitimate and authentic in such discourses, which can serve to bolster larger right-wing visions and ideologies of the nation and its citizens. It contemplates the ways in which gender ‘justices’, framed in relation to both transnational LGBT rights discourses and right-wing agendas, are conceptualised and played out on the bodies of sexual and gender minorities.

The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews by Michael N. Barnett

Reviewed by: The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews by Michael N. Barnett Ofer Shiff Michael N. Barnett. The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 348 pp. Barnett starts his book with a story of two banners: one day, as he was driving up to his temple, he noticed that the “Support Israel” banner above the entrance was replaced by a new “Save Darfur” banner. He interprets this new banner as an indication of a growing popularity of tikkun olam activities within the larger American Jewish community. While he attributes this trend in part to a more general wave of voluntarism and humanitarianism across American society, Barnett argues that it is also indicative of changes in how American Jews view their relationship with Israel. The main questions Barnett presents in his book thus concern the relationship between tikkun olam and Israel: Is the greater status of tikkun olam part of a growing “distancing” and ambivalence of American Jews towards Israel? And does Israel become an acceptable outlet only for those looking to accentuate their particularism, but a dead end for those wanting to express their universalism? Barnett tackles these questions through his use of the concept of “Jewish Foreign Policy.” The history of American Jewry, according to Barnett, reflects the Jews’ changing understandings of how they should best protect their interests and promote their values in the world: Should they see their security as bound up with a culture of cosmopolitanism and liberalism that was the basis of their acceptance into American society, or should they give more emphasis to tribalism and to the need to protect themselves against external and internal threats to Jewish survival? Analyzing the history of the foreign policies of American Jews through this lens, he wonders how intertwined cosmopolitanism and tribalism are and how the internal balance between them changes over time. In a most fascinating and original portrayal of American Jewish history, starting from the mid-nineteenth century, Barnett recounts a story of five periods, distinguished from each other by a changing balance between cosmopolitanism and tribalism. Within this larger historical narrative, the post-1967 era’s exhibit of Jewish tribalism is depicted as a temporary aberration. The more general trend, both during the Holocaust and post-1948, was an almost instinctive embracement of liberalism and [End Page 252] pluralism, in the spirit of prophetic Judaism, as the best means to maintain Jewish security. During most of their history, the political theology of prophetic Judaism allowed American Jews to maintain their group identity in a manner that created a virtuous, friction-retardant cycle between the particular and the universal. It was only during the two decades after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War that the balance between universalism and particularism was perceived as dependent upon a vigilant struggle against external and internal threats to Jewish survival and not upon liberalism and pluralism. According to Barnett, “An American Jewry that once saw security as bound up with a culture of acceptance, now found greater reassurance in the threat and use of force” (18). This particularistic trend led American Jewish identity to become increasingly defined by the twin experiences of victimization (the Holocaust) and redemption (Israel). Love for Israel seemed to come at the expense of cosmopolitan sentiments among American Jews. However, according to Barnett, since the late twentieth century there are growing signs that American Jewry’s tribalism is tapering off and cosmopolitanism with explicit references to the prophetic tradition is experiencing a revival. It is in this historical framework that one must understand the growing inner-Jewish debate concerning whether or not American Jews are becoming increasingly “distant” from Israel. American Jews, Barnett suggests, might simply be returning to where they have always been most comfortable. One should thus speak about an inherent state of contradiction: American Jews remain pro-Israel but they also exhibit a growing ambivalence towards Israel’s ethnonational character and policies. This inner tension is most conspicuous among American Jews who want to act as Jews in the support of universal causes. Barnett observes that Israel doesn’t...

Sufi articulations of civility, globality, and sovereignty

AbstractThis article provides an analysis of Sufi life and organization, combining historical depth and theoretical awareness. It investigates how Sufism emerged as an urban phenomenon. Sufi brotherhoods were at the forefront of a proto-globalization based on a hemisphere-wide networking between metropolitan regions, rural provinces, and nomadic formations. Furthermore, cities became nodes within wider circulations, rather than, as in European and Weberian models, centers of corporate powers. The emerging patterns of civility were open-ended, balancing inner cultivation, communicative skills, and outward etiquette. The article shows how this global civility translated into original conceptions of sovereignty that were more malleable than those of the European Leviathan. A millenarian universalism imbued with Sufi saintliness bolstered the centralized sovereignty of early modern Muslim empires. Sufi contributions to these empires nurtured a cosmopolitan culture, facilitating commercial exchange and intelle...

Mary Elizabeth Braddon at the Antipodes: Cosmopolitan Cultural Transfers and the Restructuring of the Nineteenth-Century Book Industry

Mary Elizabeth Braddon at the Antipodes: Cosmopolitan Cultural Transfers and the Restructuring of the Nineteenth-Century Book Industry

GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

This paper aims to analyze an important phenomenon of our world, namely the contradictory relationship between globalization and cultural identity. Globalization is a multidimensional phenomenon that encompasses not only economic components but also cultural, ideological, political and other. Globalization in its archaic forms goes back to ancient history and roots linked to the emergence and spread of human society. The modern form reached in the second half of the 20th century, and the intensity and the culmination of the 80s and early 90s of the 20th century (the global age, postindustrial and postmodern age). Globalization is a complex process that integrates a number of factors whose interaction of globally achieved thanks to the expansion of knowledge, technologies and information across national borders. Impacts encourage globalization manifested in a series of changes in economic, political, social and especially cultural sphere, which is the subject of this paper. The concept of global values, commonly identified with the values of Western culture (americanization, westernization), and the effects of globalization is manifested through its effect on the national cultural forms. In literature and discussions amount to be different points of view the relation between globalization and culture, but the essence of the conflict based on opposing theses that reflect the "dual character" of cultural globalization. The first is a proponent of the negative impact of globalization on homogeneous national and local culture, while the other prefers diversity of cultural content, expressed through the cosmopolitan culture that does not negate the sense of national belonging. The authors in this paper analyze different interpretations of a complex relationship between culture and globalization and to emphasize the positive and negative effects arising from the relationships and connections between the global and the local.

Education and space for mobile lives: A joint studio experiment in Ayvalık

While tragic news of hundreds of refugees, who are trying to reach to Europe through illegal and dangerous routes as they are running from violence of war, rose to rank high on the world agenda, Turkey experience the social, economic and cultural trauma of refugees expressed in millions. Education is one of the critical aspects of the problem, not only as formal education of children but life-saving support for adults who had to adapt themselves to temporary conditions and uncertain future scenarios. With these concerns in mind, the aim of this paper is to convey the process and results of 2015-2016 spring semester conjoint studio of Atatürk University with METU on “education for life-on-move”. Ayvalık is chosen as the project site since it is one of the important destinations of the refugees on their way to Lesbos. Besides, the area is a historic refugee settlement, hosted many different communities, including Greek, Bosnian, Turks etc. for ages. Hence, it developed a pluralist identity and cosmopolitan culture.

Cross-National Differences in the Consumption of Non-National Culture in Europe

This article analyses Europeans’ consumption of and participation in non-national cultural activities. These patterns serve as a measure of Europeans’ affinity with cosmopolitan culture and aesthetic tastes that are associated with other countries. I use survey data recently collected by the Eurobarometer (2013) to analyse the profile of individuals in European countries who engage with another country’s culture and to compare distributions between countries. Examples of indicators include reading books by an author from another country, going to a musical performance from another country, and attending a festival or exhibition from another country. I find low levels of cosmopolitan cultural consumption in the sample as a whole. There are significant differences between countries and among individuals in a specific country in the degree of engagement with another country’s culture. I discuss the implications of the finding that cosmopolitan cultural consumption is not necessarily a very significant phenomenon for different social groups and what this means for the analysis of the link between cultural consumption and social inequality.

A silhouette of utopia: English School and constructivist conceptions of a world society

This article makes a comparative assessment of English School and constructivist world society conceptions. It argues neither provides a clear conception, only its theoretical relief in the analytical abstract. The argument contains five points. First, the English School often refers to the political world beyond the society of states as a world society without sufficient conceptual reasoning or evidence to justify the usage. Second, both literatures betray a limited grasp of the profundity of social transformations a world society entails. Third, this suggests the evidence of a world society is a novel cosmopolitan culture. Fourth, idealism in these literatures is undercut by identifying conflict and instability as a contributing cause of a world society’s potential emergence. Fifth, the contemporary emergence of a world society via human rights is found to be unconvincing. A final gesture of a possible ‘overlapping consensus’ on human rights is made towards a future world society.

Cultural Openness as an Emerging Form of Cultural Capital in Contemporary France

This article explores the changing pattern of cultural privilege in contemporary France. Using French data on cultural practices, including variables on ‘highbrow’ culture, mass culture and cosmopolitan culture, we apply a multi-correspondence analysis (MCA). The findings first show that cultural privilege among French social and educational elites remains primarily a matter of cultural capital endowment, with a structuring contrast between ‘legitimate’ and ‘mass’ culture. The MCA also shows an additional divide between local and global culture underpinned by a strong age gradient. Yet the emergence of a changing pattern of cultural privilege among the youngest cohorts does not imply any clear reduction in cultural inequalities. Rather, it suggests a growing cultural distinctiveness of French elites. Finally, these tendencies should not be easily extrapolated to other contexts as they reflect strong French specificities related to the evolution of social and educational structures during the second half of the 20th century.

Cosmopolitan Cultural Citizenship as an Educational Strategy

Cosmopolitan Cultural Citizenship as an Educational Strategy

“Do You Hear the People Sing” “Lift Your Umbrella”?

Around the world, music serves as an important element of mobilisation for social movements. Singing songs is not only a peaceful protest technique but also helps to construct a protest identity locating and relating the social movement to its political and social environment. Most importantly, a social movement is to a significant extent remembered through its music, and this determines its future impact on local (contentious) politics. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to understand Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement through four YouTube music videos, analysing the lyrics, music, and video imagery in order to carve out core elements and values of the Umbrella Movement. Especially given the importance of Hong Kong’s identity as a “global” city with a cosmopolitan culture and past, the peaceful nature of the movement and the rise of a xenophobic localism in the shape of sarcasm are emphasised.

Pushing the limits of the family on Turkish television: Lost City, an alternative voice?

This article discusses the shift in the representation of the family through a case study of Lost City (2012–2013). The programme challenges the dominant representations of the family on Turkish television that are mostly framed by a particular neighbourhood culture and are characterized by organic solidarity. As outsiders in Turkish society, a prostitute, a Kurdish family and a Black illegal immigrant challenge the unity of the Toptas family that has moved to Istanbul from the Black Sea region of Turkey and who are trying hard to survive against poverty and the ‘cosmopolitan culture’ of the city. The series problematizes the borders of the family as different members of the Toptas family develop new relationships extending the family to include the outsiders of Turkish society. Drawing on Turkish family dramas such as Super Dad (1993–1997), Father’s Home (1997–2002), The Falling Leaves (2005–2010) and Lost City, this article examines the discursive shift in the representation of the family on Turkish television.

Reading the Signs of the Times through a Hermeneutics of Recognition:Gaudium et Spesand Its Meaning for a Learning Church

The pastoral constitutionGaudium et Spesof Vatican II represents a significant shift for the church, not only ecclesiologically but also intellectually, with deep consequences for the culture of the church and especially for Catholic institutions of higher education. This change has clear implications for the core curriculum of a learning Catholic Church—and of every learning Catholic. In the “modern cosmopolitan culture” of the church of Vatican II, the liberal arts have a central place. The ability to make a judgment on “the signs of the times” requires a cultural awareness that is the opposite of utilitarianism. Care for the “common good” requires “core knowledge” because the world—as it is presented inGaudium et Spes—is nontransparent, ambiguous, and ever changing. In this sense the pastoral constitution is an antipositivistic manifesto for humanization that needs to be rediscovered.

Identifying and Explaining Organizational Cultures in the Public Sector: A Study of the Australian Public Service Using the Interaction Ritual Theory of Randall Collins

This article identifies and explains different cultures within the Australian Public Service (APS) using the interaction ritual (IR) theory of Randall Collins. It argues that such cultures vary along two dimensions: power and status. On the power dimension, we may distinguish three cultures: that of the order givers, that of the order takers, and that of those who both give and take orders. On the status dimension, we may distinguish localistic and cosmopolitan cultures. Cultural differences on these two dimensions are associated with variations in organizational rank, educational levels, agency tasks, relationships with clients, and central versus regional office location.