Cultural Production Research Articles

Alain Locke's Value Theory and Pragmatist Defense of Beauty

Abstract: This essay explores Alain Locke's value theory in relation to his defense of beauty in the 1920's "beauty vs. propaganda" debate. Animated by a pragmatic commitment to resolving real-life value conflicts, many theories of valuation—including those proposed by Ralph Barton Perry and John Dewey—explored the question of whether values can be formed beyond interest and whether they can be arranged in a single hierarchy and compared. Locke turned to transvaluation—changes in value category—as a potential resolution for real-life value conflicts. This essay examines how Locke's philosophical work as a value theorist can be brought in relation to his other forays into African American cultural politics: mainly, his unremitting defense of beauty and cultural production even in the face of more urgent imperatives like civil and political rights.

Narrativity and the Idea of Narrative Identity in Law

Abstract How can an extension of the legal perspective with the idea of narrative unity be presented using the law and literature movement? Considering law as a complex semiotic object that is a product (and carrier) of culture makes it possible to see elements of narrativity from a theoretical and legal perspective. This is a significant phenomenon, especially aft er the cultural turn in the humanities. This article presents a problematisation of narrativity in legal discourse and the theory of law. As is well known, the theory of narration and the concept of narrativity have been widely used in the humanities, mainly in literary theory. I propose extending the narrative perspective to law by showing what research directions can be observed when using the concept of narration in the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of law. Finally, I discuss the thesis of narrative identity in relation to law. I adopt the perspective of examining law in the light of literary analysis.

No Future in Retrospect

Life-writing by punks has grown at a remarkable rate and constitutes a significant new addition to the canon of punk cultural production that deserves an equal place alongside music, fashion, and zines. Punk has always sought to document itself in the form of recordings, film, photography, fanzines, and video. It is time to add memoirs to these archival impulses and examine how punk culture is now mediated and sustained by autobiography. Whereas punk life writing might be dismissed as so many nostalgic trips down memory lane, this article begins from the premise that writing about a life involves more than nostalgia. Considering punk memoirs as works that offer new ways of thinking about a life attached to punk, this article surveys a broad range of punk memoirs and asks questions that reframe some punk scholarship by emphasizing how individuals live within and outside of punk simultaneously. What are some of the dominant features of punk memoirs? What kinds of interventions do they make? How do they introduce and develop particular ways of documenting and thinking about punk culture and its legacies? How does life writing about the past transform punk in the present? What ways of thinking, lines of inquiry, understanding, and feelings do memoirs establish and examine as central to the thought of punk, in particular, and the study of culture more broadly? The article seeks to demonstrate how these trajectories might shift and renovate work undertaken by scholars of punk.

Homemaking in White America: The Jue Joe Ranch, 1919–1958

abstract: Housing is an important architectural construct in the process of immigrant resettlement in receiving countries. This study situates the Jue Joe Ranch in the San Fernando Valley within the social and political contexts of spatial exclusion in agriculture and suburbia, as well as the identity formation processes of the family from 1919 to 1958. I argue that the homemaking practices of the Jue family constituted a spatial, architectural resistance to White dominance based on the family's changing Chinese American identities. Homemaking operated not only as a social response, but also as a temporal and spatial process articulated through various scales. While the first-generation immigrant Jue Joe used the land and buildings primarily as spaces of food production, the second- and third-generation children employed the built environment mainly for cultural production. They strategically and tactfully expressed their longing for the material aspects of Chinese traditions through the interior spaces and intangible everyday practices. These embodied experiences, which communicate important voices of resistance to spatial assimilation, continue to define the meanings of home for immigrant communities in America today.

Sissy the Archive: Ambivalent Intimacies between “Sissy” and “Trans” in Trans* Archives and Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: In this article, I examine the ambivalent relation between sissies and trans women in historical and contemporary trans cultural production. Sissification porn depicts a forced-feminization fetish in which a man is “nonconsensually” transformed into a girlish bimbo. His masculinity and selfhood are “negated” through fantasies of masochistic feminized embodiment. Trans-exclusionary feminists claim that sissy porn induces gender dysphoria in its viewers and converts unsuspecting cis men into trans women through sissification. Rather than simply repudiating any relation between the trans woman and the sissy, I insist on tarrying with the negativity of sissification and the bad affects saturating this relation as the figure of the sissy haunts trans archives. Recent fiction and criticism by Imogen Binnie, Torrey Peters, Alison Rumfitt, and Andrea Long Chu reveal an ambivalent intimacy between the trans woman and the sissy. In sitting with this ambivalence, I critique a desexualized (trans)gender identity without dissolving the negativity of the sissy into a countercultural, queer pleasure.

Features of Ukrainian cultural sphere adaptation to the conditions of the Russo-Ukrainian War (based on data of UCF survey)

Since the problems of the Ukrainian cultural sphere in the context of war are usually studied in relation to consumers of cultural products, the article emphasizes the expediency of studying the state of culture from the point of view of its direct creators. Using the author’s methodology and on the basis of empirical study, the article highlights the peculiarities of the Ukrainian cultural organizations and cultural figures’ adaptation to the сrisis provoked by russia’s armed aggression. The key factors of cultural organizations and creative industries’ successful adaptation to the war conditions are identified. The survival strategy of cultural workers and institutions can be described as cost savings, along with maintaining activities, creating new products and services, and taking active measures to attract additional funding. It is concluded that adaptation does not always take active forms and is not necessarily associated with positive changes in the organization. Often, adaptability is only the result of passive adaptation to the conditions of war. Special attention is paid to the analysis of changes in the level of adaptability of cultural organizations in the dynamics (from November 2022 to December 2023). Despite the fact that the adaptability index tends to increase in comparison with 2022, there is an increase in neutral assessments of the prospects of their organizations and a decrease in positive expectations among respondents. Based on the respondents’ answers, matrices of motivational and demotivational factors of adaptability were constructed. This allowed us to distinguish adapted and non-adapted organizations and workers and the primary obstacles to adaptation. The results of the study show that cultural institutions need support from the state but the specifics of the request depend on the legal form of the organizations. Groups with high and low levels of adaptability were identified, which requires the development of additional support programs for vulnerable cultural organizations and cultural figures.

Research on Digital Cultural Products of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes

In the context of rapid advancements in digital technology, the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, a World Cultural Heritage site, are experiencing a revitalization through digital means. This study systematically explores the current state and cultural value of digital cultural products related to the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, analyzing the application of new-generation digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) in the Dunhuang cultural heritage. Through literature review and market research, the study categorizes various digital cultural products, including digital collections, applications, digital collectibles, and digital avatars. It also examines their significant value in heritage preservation, global dissemination, cultural creative industry development, and educational promotion. This research not only provides empirical support for digital innovation in Dunhuang culture but also offers valuable insights for the digital development of other cultural heritages.

Arena and (Re)Stabilization of Reog Bulkiyo Dance Cultural Production

Contestation among traditional art performances, in the technology and information era, creates complex and diverse challenge to the dance of Reog Bulkiyo. In 1999, the dance had to be stopped following the regeneration and economical problem. Although Reog Bulkiyo has been performed again since 2009, the conditions which makes this dance can be produced is still inexplicable. This article attempts to explain why dance experiencing production and activity stagnation. Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural production theory is used to analyze this problem, while ethnographic qualitative is used as the method. This study found that Reog Bulkiyo dance is in the arena of traditional dance art which has a double-tiered structure. The first structure leads to popular culture, while the second structure leads to art culture. In the first structure, Reog Bulkiyo dance group uses relational capital with relatives, social and Islamic groups to survive in the midst of competition with other popular arts. The dance then gains a relationship with the academy and the state which provides relational, cultural, and symbolic capital in the form of granting intangible cultural heritage status. These two relations give Reog Bulkiyo dance group the opportunity to maintain its cultural production.

How Does China-chic Design Conquer Chinese Consumers? – A Study on Brand Loyalty Influencing Factors Based on The Palace Museum's Cultural and Creative Products –

How Does China-chic Design Conquer Chinese Consumers? – A Study on Brand Loyalty Influencing Factors Based on The Palace Museum's Cultural and Creative Products –

Illocutionary Acts Found in the Summer I Turned Pretty Film

This study aimed to analyze the type of speech acts and the classification This text discusses the importance of language as a system of communication between speakers and listeners, and how language is used to convey feelings or share information through speech acts. illocutionary acts refer to the intended meaning of a statement. It is an example of a form of speech act that has been culturally defined and is distinguished by a distinctive illocutionary force. For instance, making promises, giving advice, and making threats are all instances of illocutionary activities. Speech acts theory looks at the pragmatic function of utterances.The theory is premised on the belief that language is used to perform actions. Films are cultural products produced by certain cultures that help individuals of various languages and cultures to communicate with one another. The text presents a literature review that discusses the different types of illocutionary acts and how they are used in human communication. Finally, the text presents the research methodology, findings, and discussion of a study that analyzes the types of illocutionary acts used in the conversations of season 2 of "The Summer I Turned Pretty." The study uses a qualitative method to analyze the data and identifies representative and directive illocutionary acts in the conversations. Overall, the text provides an overview of the importance of language and speech acts in human communication, and how they are studied in the field of pragmatics.

Exploration on the Teaching Reform of Cultural and Creative Product Design Based on the Cultivation of Art and Labour Integration Talents

The teaching mode of art-industry integration talent cultivation is a project-driven design education mode based on the combination of art and skill constructed. The research in this paper explores the creative practice of cultural and creative product design, takes the effectiveness of the combination of art and craft and practice as the evaluation basis, and proposes a PCA point cloud alignment algorithm based on feature matching, so as to realize the innovation of teaching cultural and creative product design. The normalization of point cloud coordinates is achieved by PCA, and the current state prediction and covariance are obtained based on the normalized results. The results show that in the demand analysis of cultural and creative product design, the Kano value of students’ knowledge development demand reaches above 0.703. It shows that in the art-industry fusion talent cultivation mode, the effectiveness of practical teaching should be taken as the research acceptance standard, so as to explore a new mode and a new path about the cultivation of talents of cultural and creative design in colleges and universities.

A taxonomy of artists’ postures to grasp the plurality of cultural production practices: Putting an end to the cicada and the ant

The rooted dichotomy between art and economy tends to simplify our understanding of the conditions under which makers of cultural products operate. The contingencies of the last decades, leading to a greater plurality of artists’ practices, urge us to create new conceptual tools to seize the effective cultural production structures. This paper aims to open this dichotomy - anchored in institutional sociology, creative economy, arts management and cultural entrepreneurship - and to reveal the relational complexity of cultural production. Building on a meta-study of a body of qualitative research published between 2012 and 2022 based on semi-directed interviews, focus groups and case studies about artists’ effective practices in music, performing arts, visual and mediatic arts from underground scenes or marginal communities, we identify 20 postures adopted by artists. We place these postures on two axes reflecting the intensity of economic and artistic logics. This taxonomy explains more accurately today's conditions of cultural production. It allows us to better understand: the multiplicity of artists’ and works’ trajectories, as well as creation networks; the coexistence and co-dependency of postures within the same practice; and the diversity of artists’ practices beyond a disciplinary logic and a linear conception of artistic career.

Design of Intangible Cultural Heritage Products based on 3D Visualization Technology

Design of Intangible Cultural Heritage Products based on 3D Visualization Technology

Reinterpretation of Mythological Characters in Youth Culture

The article deals with the specifics of modern reinterpretation of mythological characters, as well as its representation in youth culture. Mythological subjects and their heroes remain attractive for the creative sphere for many centuries. For young people, immersion in mythology allows them to develop constructive solutions to many issues, to recreate a positive picture of the world through the eternal idea of the triumph of good and justice reflected in ancient texts. It is the reinterpretation approach to the reading of world-famous works that allows us to use a wide range of myth. For example, the interest in the myths of European society in the second half of the 20th century is due to the fact that this time is associated with the threat of the outbreak of nuclear war and, as a consequence, with constant uncertainty and the simultaneous desire of each person for a life-affirming and immutable basis, such as the classical one. The evolution of representations of myth in culture has led to the emergence of reinterpretations of the original source, making some of them popular, including with youth audiences.In the 21st century, other mythological images have emerged in accordance with the challenges of the time, which we consider as cultural products of a new level, characterized not only by an appeal to the classical text, but also by a commercial component. The article provides several examples of how the new artistic presentation of mythological characters is reflected in modern mass youth culture — in literature, video games and cinema. The modern interpretation of the tales of ancient civilizations is based on the cultural preferences of mass viewers: the images of myths can be canonical or modernized, but in any case universal. The process of giving new meaning to myths familiar from the school days from an unexpected (nonclassical) side has been repeatedly discussed in the scientific cultural field.The relevance of reinterpretation of mythological characters in youth culture is due to the desire of the new generation not only to rethink the cultural heritage, but also to get in touch with it.

Emotional Digital Labor Among Young People Within the Context of Lumpencybertariat

Türkiye ranks among the countries with the highest rates of social media usage. Especially among the young population, the prevalence of social media usage reaches the highest rates. This article focuses on the formation of hate within the cultural production processes on social media among young population. The monopolization of social media platforms fosters an economic logic where hateful interactions gain exchange value within algorithmic distribution systems. The online activities of social media users are at risk of being drawn into a “discursive spiral of hate”. Algorithms direct social media activities towards emotional escalation and transform online interactions into the “emotional digital labor”. Thus, the digital cultural production is tended to be dominated by the “lumpencybertariat”. This lumpenization process poses a direct risk to young social media users. This article aims to outline the conceptual framework of the position of lumpencybertariat as the producer of emotional digital labor in the digital capitalism. The possibility of “emotional sustainability” as a potential tool to counter the risk of lumpenization in digital cultural production is discussed.

The Emergence of Cantopop from Hong Kong's Cultural History from the 1930s to the 1980s

In the 1980s and 90s, Hong Kong-born Cantopop music reached a climax of popularity throughout Asia. The genres development serves as a lyrical mirror reflecting Hong Kongs unique cultural history. First inspired by popular musical forms from the 1920s, its development serves as an artistic resolution to the competition between Asian self-awareness experienced by the British colonys Chinese majority and local pride generated by living in a wealthy Western oasis sheltered from much of the instability that plagued neighboring countries. Cantopop as a distinct cultural product is defined by major historical shifts in Hong Kongs history, from rebellion against British colonial hubris to the aftermath of World War II, international relations during the Korean War, the immigration of musical artists from Mainland China and Taiwan, local reactions to events in China, and Hong Kongs uneven economic advancement as an Asian Tiger. These events would leave a mark on the local Hong Kong identity, expressed musically through Cantopop, as waves of immigration and borrowing from foreign traditions formed a new and distinct political, social and cultural identity. This paper traces and explains this musical development by juxtaposing Hong Kongs history with changing musical trends.

A Palimpsest of Hong Kong Futures Across Three Fictions (1962–2046)

Abstract Hong Kong has been located in the future tense throughout various genres of writing and popular culture, serving as a model for free-market neoliberal thinkers, as a proof-of-concept for future national reunification and as the backdrop for techno-orientalist and cyberpunk narratives. Paradoxically, within recent Hong Kong cultural productions and civil society debates is often a strong sense of a foreclosed future. This paper traces three fictions that together navigate the shifting temporalization of Hong Kong, from Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2004), which adapts the pulp fiction writer frame narrative from Liu Yichang’s The Drunkard (1963). The film’s anachronistic 1960s SF unexpectedly finds its way into an emerging genre/movement as seen in the video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) by Lawrence Lek (2016). These three (science) fiction texts reveal Hong Kong as a palimpsest of temporalities – an impossible fiction of ‘50 years of no change’, which somehow still returns as a site from which to imagine the future.

“Art Is the Armchair in Which the State Sits for Its Own Pleasure”

Abstract In mid-January 1925, André Breton published an editorial, “La dernière grève” (The Last Strike) in the opening pages of the second issue of the new Parisian journal he helped produce, La Révolution surréaliste (Surrealist revolution). Breton’s essay discusses the tentative economic value of cultural and intellectual production in the capitalist economy and calls for artists, philosophers, and scholars to undertake a general strike for a period lasting between several nights to one year. Breton’s “Last Strike” essay influenced another and much more well-known call for an art strike by a French writer who was closely aligned with surrealism, Alain Jouffroy. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Breton’s 1925 “Last Strike” essay in relation to Jouffroy’s late 1960s statements on the art strike and the revolutionary abolition of art, in order to determine the differences and similarities between their approaches, and to demonstrate how surrealism is essential to Jouffroy’s theories about the abolition of art as a key aspect of anticapitalist culture.

“Hello, It’s Me, Auntie Netta! I am Calling from Abroad”: Aunties and Digital Diasporas in Nimmi Harasgama’s Online Performances

The structure of diaspora in the twenty-first century cannot be fully understood without due attention to how diasporic relations to home are mediated by digital technologies. I suggest we must look in the direction of diasporic cultural production that utilizes such technologies to better understand how postcolonial spatiality is unmistakably commensurate with digital diasporas, or advancements in communication technologies that foster new cartographies. This study posits that the campy embodiment of the auntie figure by the Sri Lankan actress Nimmi Harasgama on YouTube (2009–2015) re-imagines diasporic affiliations to home/s by locating and encapsulating diaspora within circuits of digital connectivity. Harasgama’s YouTube alter-ego “Auntie Netta,” is an asylum-seeking diasporic character whose itinerary is makeshift. However, her communication with her friend “Gladys” via Skype calls remains constant. Both beyond and through the jest abundant in these clips, the calls remain an anchor to Netta’s historical sense of self and signify an embodied mapping of the transnational subjecthood occupied by both Netta and her creator, Harasgama. Through a close analysis of Harasgama’s performance and complication of the familiar figure of the auntie, I suggest that the digital diaspora is necessarily configured and co-constructed by the diasporic body, nostalgic memory, and digital connectivity.

Innovation and Promotion of Hainan Li Ethnic Intangible Cultural Heritage Tourism Products

This paper aims to explore the innovation and promotion of Hainan Li ethnic intangible cultural heritage tourism products. Hainan's Li ethnic intangible cultural heritage is diverse and holds significant historical and cultural value. However, its promotion and innovation in the tourism industry still require improvement. This paper analyzes the characteristics, challenges, and potential of Hainan's Li ethnic intangible cultural heritage and proposes a series of innovative and promotional strategies to facilitate the sustainable development of Hainan Li ethnic intangible cultural heritage tourism products.