Culture Of Spectacle Research Articles

Remixing Britishness: Affect and National Pride in the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

During the London 2012 Opening Olympic Ceremony, emotional moments such as the torch relay and the celebration of the National Health Service affected many viewers. Such a spectacle of national history and culture was wide-sweeping and is still remembered today as a moment of triumph for the country. With the Paris 2024 Olympics only months away, it becomes timely to observe how the sensorial spectacle of the Olympics works to create a certain emotional effect in its viewers, and how they leave with a specific understanding of what the nation stands for. Crucially, it is imperative to survey the ways in which national histories and cultures have been edited for an "Olympic affect" during the Opening Ceremony and comprehend why they play such a crucial role in contemporary political discourse. The London 2012 Opening Olympic Ceremony revealed a particular perspective on British history, used emotion and spectacle to recount a specific version of events, and attempted to garner a certain sense of national pride during a time of national crisis. In examining specific visual and auditory cues of this Opening Olympic Ceremony, this study will define the "Olympic affect" and examine the idealised Britishness that is performed, so that we may understand what kind of affectual and political power the Olympics hold.

Mekepung Jembrana Tradition As a Source of Creation of Documentary Film

The Mekepung tradition in Jembrana, Bali, particularly in the form of buffalo racing, is a deeply rooted cultural spectacle representing joy and celebration for agrarian communities. This research aims to explore this tradition and create a documentary film to preserve and promote its significance. Employing a qualitative descriptive method and utilizing the documentary film structure approach, the study incorporates observation, interviews, and documentation to gather authentic data. The documentary follows a three-part story structure, capturing the essence of Mekepung through genuine visual presentations and a well-structured narrative flow. Embracing a performative documentary style, the film emphasizes captivating packaging and meticulous craftsmanship. The creation process encompasses pre-production, production, and post-production stages. Ultimately, the Mekepung Jembrana documentary not only showcases buffalo racing but also serves as a vital tool for cultural preservation and awareness for future generations, ensuring the continuity of this cherished tradition.

Designing for Sustainability: Exploring the Intersection of Creative Arts in Digital Sustainable Ecology by Interactive Animation

This article presents doctoral research examining the intersection of creative arts and sustainable development, focusing on interactive animation in the digital sustainable ecology. The research problem addressed is the sustainability of cultural creativity within the realm of digital media ecology, expanding the traditional understanding of ecological sustainability. The study objective aims to investigate the interplay between interactive animation, sustainable development, and digital cultural communication, exploring potential approaches for designing sustainability within interactive animation. The methodology involves drawing upon media ecology theory, conducting content analysis, and performing a comprehensive literature review and case study analysis. Findings indicate that interactive animation expresses frontage scientific concepts through artistic language, promoting cultural reflection and humanistic communication in the digital ecological environment. Interactive animation facilitates the collection of objective behavioural data, integrating scientific concepts into creative design and iterative research for sustainability. The research highlights the significance of creative arts in addressing challenges and opportunities associated with sustainable technology advancement. Exploring the intersection of creative arts and sustainable development via interactive animation, the study deepens participants' understanding of the art form which engages them in the realms of art and science. Implications include fostering cultural spectacle, promoting humanistic meditation, and integrating scientific concepts into creative design, ultimately contributing to sustainability in the digital ecological environment. Contributions involve providing insights into the potential of interactive animation as an academic research tool, expanding ecological sustainability understanding, and emphasizing the role of creative arts in advancing sustainable technology.

Bound and Burdened: How Contemporary Empalaos Rituals in Valverde Rewrite Crypto Muslim and Jewish History in Late Medieval Iberia

Abstract: Los Empalaos is a Semana Santa practice and living medievalism maintained today in the town of Valverde de la Vera in Extremadura, Spain. The town situates this practice in opposition to the luxurious daytime Holy Week festivities of major Spanish cities like Seville. A ghostly, endurance-based midnight performance enacted by lace-draped devotees, this spectacle draws pilgrims and tourists from across the world to the tiny town. Los Empalaos is traced by contemporary practitioners to fifteenth-century festivities that grew up around the expulsions of Jews. These recalled forced performances by converts intended to display their total transformation into "good Spanish Christians" through public bodily suffering and humiliation. This article argues that Los Empalaos uniquely incorporates a complex interplay of gender, rural and ethnoreligious identity, and traumatic historical memory while drawing on acts and events from late medieval Spain. This festive ritual encoded traces of Crypto-Jewish and Crypto-Muslim lamentations. The article reflects on the historicizing narrative of contemporary Semana Santa festivities as critical cultural spectacles whose repertoire recreates and transforms the medieval imaginary, obfuscating Jewish and Muslim histories.

TRADISI RAWAH AMPING DI DESA JIRAK KABUPATEN SAMBAS TAHUN 2002-2023

The rawah amping tradition, a cultural gem of Jirak Village, is now in risk of being lost. Nevertheless, the rawah amping tradition was successfully revived due to the diligent efforts of the community and the Village Government. The objective of this study is to ascertain the evolution of the rawah amping custom in Jirak Village from 2002 to 2023. The research methodology used is the historical research technique, including four distinct stages: heuristics, verification, interpretation, and historiography. The main sources for study consist of village authorities, committees, and practitioners of the rawah amping tradition. Secondary sources include books, journals, online newspapers, and other pertinent materials. The research findings indicate that the evolution of the rawah amping tradition in Jirak Village can be categorized into two distinct phases. The initial phase, spanning from 2002 to 2010, is characterized by a decline in the practice of rawah amping, which involved modest and limited-scale expressions of gratitude following the rice harvest. During the period of 2011-2023, the rawah amping tradition underwent a systematic and planned process of strengthening and reaffirmation, ultimately transforming into a festive celebration known as the amping party. In addition to serving as a means of expressing thanks, the practice of this ritual has evolved into a cultural spectacle.

A Conversation with Manuel Borja-Villel

Abstract One could argue that Manuel Borja-Villel fuses the position of the melancholic museum director, mourning the loss of the emancipatory projects of the recent past, with that of the activist utopian museum director, elaborating, if not enacting, the urgently needed changes necessary for a different future of institutional and cultural practices to be achieved. Since his initial appointment at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona in 1990 and continuing on to this January, when he left his directorship of the Reina Sofía, Borja-Villel has advanced, or rather re-embodied, the great tradition of the progressive museum director of the 1920s and ‘30s, from Alexander Dorner in Hannover to Alfred Barr in New York. Theirs was a tradition that defined the functions of the curator as being those of a scholar, cultivating historical memory as a form of collective enlightenment and visionary innovation as the dissemination of current critical thought and oppositional practice. As directors, they had imagined the museum to be an extension of the public sphere, one whose functions were comparable to those of libraries and the various faculties of the university: to collect and organize knowledge and critical and historical reflection in order to satisfy the largest possible public's desire for cultural literacy, beyond the inherited or enforced distinctions of class privileges. Unlike that of his contemporary American colleagues, Borja-Villel's institutional success was not the result of incessant compromises with the ever-intensifying demand to turn the museum's exhibitions into an expanded field of spectacle culture. Nor did he expand the museum's collections to serve as the affirmative substrate of speculative investment. Borja-Villel—until now protected by the legal principles of a recently restituted liberal-democratic state—could develop and sustain his exemplary practice of organizing truly historical exhibitions and building a formidable collection within the boundaries set by his comparatively limited access to public resources. Not to have yielded to those pressures, to private capital and its property control, is undoubtedly one of the reasons the newly emerging reactionary forces in Spain (as everywhere else) determined that it was time to conclude its support for the aspirations that had emerged from the oppositional practices of Conceptual art and institutional critique that had been formative for Borja-Villel (much more so than for any other museum director known to us in either Europe or the United States). Typically, to mention just a few examples, the first great comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Hans Haacke's work was organized by Borja-Villel, as were the first major European retrospectives of Marcel Broodthaers and James Coleman, of Lygia Clark and Nancy Spero. And another, equally ground-breaking exhibition (among dozens of others), Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer's The Potosí Principle—one of the first comprehensive projects to construct a site-specific mirror for Spain's colonial history—could not have happened anywhere but at the Reina Sofía.

Themes in Motion: Exploring the Linguistic Landscape of Kumasi with Cultural Spectacles

Themes in Motion: Exploring the Linguistic Landscape of Kumasi with Cultural Spectacles

Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture

Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about "extraordinary" bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as "unexpected" from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human—continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. Although scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenth-century aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a self-identical, logical "whole" likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human. In a previous "Forum on (New) Directions" (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to "unexpected" bodies in our field. Stephanie M. Hilger's"Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century" calls attention to the health humanities, which "allow for a fresh perspective"; she elaborates: "Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind."1 Eleoma Bodammer's "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies" seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that "could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions."2 This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the "body" and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth-century literature, culture, and the body. [End Page 137] The contributions to this forum bring the "unexpected" bodies into focus: they are extraordinary, anomalous, amorphous. Inspired by two panels sponsored by the LLC Forum Executive Committee on Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century German Literature, the contributors contemplate a range of human and nonhuman bodies marked by gender, ability, race, anomaly, and associations in the material and ecological environment. Bodies of water, plant life, bewitched bodies, and aesthetic, "uncontainable" bodies—all invite an innovative reimagining of German-speaking European literature and culture in multiple representations of nonnormative, nonconforming bodies. Patricia Anne Simpson University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College Birgit Tautz University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College NOTES 1. Stephanie M. Hilger," Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 301–06, here 304. 2. Eleoma Bodammer, "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 307–313, here 310. Supplemental Bibliography Allingham, Liesl. "Gender and Narrative Crisis in Christoph Martin Wieland's 'Novella without a Title.'" The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 56, no. 4 (2015): 427–44. Google Scholar Calzoni, Raul and Greta Perletti. Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015. Google Scholar Dale, Amelia. The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2019. Google Scholar Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Google Scholar Deutsch, Helen and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Google Scholar Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Google Scholar Farr, Jason S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2019. Google Scholar Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Google Scholar ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Google Scholar ———, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles...

A SPECTACLE THAT REPRODUCES INEQUALITY: THE PLATFORM AND SQUID GAME

Sosyal bir gerçeklik olarak eşitsizlik, film ve dizi sektöründe sıklıkla işlenen temalardan birisidir. Bu temadan hareket eden sinema yapıtları tıpkı diğer toplumsal sorunlarda olduğu gibi eşitsizliği de kurgusal bir düzlemde ve eleştirel bakış açısıyla daha çarpıcı bir şekilde anlatmayı hedeflemektedir. Modern sinemanın 1960’larla birlikte ön plana çıkan toplumsal sorunları ve onları üreten sosyal, ekonomik ve siyasal nedenleri eleştiren yapısı, güncel yapıtlarda da kendisini gösterir. Ancak sinema, gösteri kültürü aracılığıyla eleştiri nesnesini yeniden üreten modern paradoksun içinde kalmaya devam etmektedir. Filmlerin gelişen teknoloji ve küreselleşmeyle birlikte günümüzde çok daha kitlesel bir erişim imkânına ulaşması, toplumsal sorunları konu alırken sinemanın bu sorunları yeniden üreten paradoksal mekanizmasının işlerliğini azaltmamıştır. Bu çalışmada, ilgili argümandan hareketle bir toplumsal sorun olarak eşitsizliği konu edinen ve bunu Netflix gibi yeni medya araçlarının anlık erişim hızıyla geniş kitlelere ulaştıran iki popüler yapıtın söz konusu paradoksu tekrarladığı iddia edilmektedir. Bu bağlamda çalışmada The Platform (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019) filmi ve Squid Game (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2021) dizisinin ilk sezonu ilgili metodoloji çerçevesinde ters üçgen yöntemi izlenerek eleştirel bir perspektiften incelenmiştir.

Spectacle of musealization and literaturization of the world in post/postmodern society

This article discusses current issues in the evolution of museums worldwide, influenced by global phenomena. The globalization of culture, on the one hand, and the musealization of the world, on the other hand, become the plays of a spectacle of the contemporary world. The museum cultural model becomes dominant in today’s society, influencing all spheres and finding representation in the world’s literatures. Among the various approached theories, the concepts of musealization of the modelled world as a cultural spectacle, “the world as a museum”, imaginary museum, the literaturization of the museum and the musealization of literature. From this perspective, the theses of the Nobel laureates in literature Mario Vargas Llosa and Orhan Pamuk are analysed. In Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence, the museum is the structuring narratological axis of the novel, its theme and compositional nucleus.

Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach

Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach

Can we still be at home? Agnes Heller and China

This paper offers a short history of Agnes Heller’s relationship to China through three aspects: imaginative aesthetic enjoyment, real encounters with Chinese cultural spectacles and actual audiences, and the construction of an academic community through creative dialogue. These discussions suggest that Heller felt at home in China. Although Heller has passed away, a home for us remains in her work through remembering her and engaging further with her writings.

Technoflâneurs e faquires: Arte do outro lado da fractura digital

In this article we look at four international artists whose art has its origin in common civilian life and its concerns. The story of this art should be re-written in terms of a historiography of the average underprivileged common person, who does not reap the benefits of a discriminatory economy. Artists discussed here, namely, Daniel Cruz (Chile), Gilbert Prado (Brazil), Kausik Mukhopadhyay (India) and Probir Gupta (India) have been creating art on the impoverished side of the digital innovation divide, in their own niche and horizons of belief. Discarded gadgets, scraps, broken circuits or sensors, microphones and other junk are incorporated to create fragile but impactful installations. Junk animism and low-fi artificial intelligence often inform their work. Such artists do not inhabit traditionally known borders of nation, class or identity but only a space across fault lines which divide and exacerbate human society from within. Cruz’ project titled Surfonic exists on the margins of internet gateways. Mukhopadhyay uses scrap media for his installations. They exploit so much technology as just to animate their art. This commitment to voluntary defeatism upends a culture of spectacle. The artist is like a flaneur or technological fakir, quintessentializing human experience against the greed and pretensions of a global market of art.

On Guard: The Discourse of Difference in Trudeau’s Speech on National Unity

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s July 1, 2017 speech to commemorate 150 years of Canadian Confederation and its seemingly banal content and delivery ironically beckons for critical attention. Delivered to the Prince of Wales on Parliament Hill and millions via television and Internet, the address capped off the immense cultural spectacle of Canada’s sesquicentennial with tributes to Canadian exceptionalism in battle and in sport. However, behind references to reconciliation and tolerance is a well-documented history of contestation that runs contrary to the international myth of Canadian unity. This essay deconstructs a consonance of perspectives on Indigenous relations, multiculturalism, and citizenship proposed by Prime Minister Trudeau in his Canada 150 address on Parliament Hill that is inconsistent with a defining decade of Canadian resistance. I analyze the speech’s attempts to whitewash Canada’s colonial origins and dispel numerous claims of peaceful coexistence between the nation-state and various minorities, fundamentally challenging perceptions of Canadian identity and national values.

Próba nakreślenia teorii konferencji jako pedagogiczno-artystycznego widowiska kulturowego. Na przykładzie przebiegu konferencji „Od inspiracji do kreacji. Wyzwania edukacyjne i artystyczne”

The aim of the article is an attempt to outline the theory of the conference (scientific), taking into account its actual course, including the reported content, as the ontic basis of its real structure. At the heart of this concept is a myth whose stories form the basis for the emergence of cultural spectacles. In the case of a conference conceived as a spectacle, the founding form (myth) is skholé. The conference itself is shaped in two overlapping areas: firstly, it is subject to the process of ritualization, and secondly, it is subject to the coexistence of universal praxis. In view of the subject of the conference mentioned and analyzed here, this theory takes into account aesthetic and pedagogical interactions (principles), ignoring others (ethics, economy, politics, religion). The conference theory should contribute to the understanding of its coherent thinking and operation structure; the importance of its impact on its participants, the legitimacy of its organization and study; the possibility of consciously shaping its course, in the cognitive - methodological context (I omit the otherwise important socio-cultural aspects).

Seeing Red: Visuality, Violence, and the Making of Textiles in Early Medieval Enigmatic Poetry

This essay explores a group of thematically related, enigmatic poems in Old English, Anglo-Latin and Old Norse that play with gender through their representations of violent textile production. The tenth-century Exeter Book’s Riddle 56, eighth-century archbishop Tatwine’s Enigmata 11 and 13, and the traditional eddic-style poem Darraðarljóð merge the highly gendered activities of textile production and warfare, questioning binaries and naturalized categories in the process. This process ends with the containment of gender play during the act of solving and interpreting the enigmatic, which restores the status quo. In analysing the space that enigmatic poetry provides for subversive gender play, this essay argues that both types of gendered labour feed into a culture of spectacle, making witnessing and sight essential to the way the texts navigate both domains. Exploring the visibility of both textile production and violence in early medieval England, it further emphasizes that the latter encompasses not only warfare, but also criminality and martyrdom, disability, and sexualized violence. Ultimately, the visceral and highly visual nature of the poetic representations reflects a cultural familiarity with both textile-making and violence that readers with temporal distance risk overlooking.

Cultural surveillance in the algorithmic sociality: The evolution of humanistic myth and technological myth in the post-coronavirus world

This analysis studies the development of Walter Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, Debold’s culture of spectacle, Michel Foucault’s regulatory power, and outlines their key characteristics in the course of post-coronavirus art world. Taken together, it examines the totalitarian and collective cohesiveness of arts reproduction in the digital spatiality, and argues that there is the continuing cultural surveillance to shape aesthetic communication, in its evolution from celluloid resurrection to streaming media. It evaluates some consequences of cultural classification struggle, and arts mediocrity have been taken up and developed in the power circuit of media agencies.

A “splendid flying field” in Indianapolis: Aviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era

A “splendid flying field” in IndianapolisAviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era Brian M. Ingrassia (bio) In 1917, Carl Graham Fisher offered the facilities of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to the United States federal government for the training of military aviators and the building of aircraft. He asserted that the Speedway, constructed nearly a decade earlier in 1909, was the best place in America to carry out such work. The government partly took Fisher up on his offer, and the 328-acre facility became a focal point for World War I aviation. By autumn of that year, Fisher was mapping and marking cross-country flying routes throughout the lower Great Lakes region; he even began imagining aerial routes along the transcontinental highways he had spearheaded earlier in the decade, especially the east-west Lincoln Highway. In so doing, Fisher seemed to lay the foundation for an aviation network centered on Indianapolis. The war’s aftermath, however, saw the Speedway turn in a different direction. In May 1919, racing returned to Indianapolis in a form made more dangerous than ever before by wartime technological developments. And although there was serious discussion of turning the raceway into an airport in the mid-1920s, the track’s owners chose spectacle over commercial or military utility, cementing the facility’s identity as a site for thrilling motor sports. The story of Great War aviation at Indianapolis, which remains obscured in standard narratives, has a threefold significance.1 First, as historian Mark Foster implies in his brief treatment of the subject, the Speedway’s wartime service was part of Carl Fisher’s project of developing transportation infrastructures connecting early-1900s people and cities.2 Second, it shows that the Midwest, as historian Kristin Hoganson has perceptively argued, was not disconnected from global currents; rather, the region contributed to larger projects of nationalism and imperialism.3 Third, the story hints [End Page 109] at how Midwesterners adopted and adapted transportation technologies for innovative purposes not limited to utilitarian movement of people or goods. Scholar Jason Weems contends that aircraft helped Midwesterners comprehend their region, a former frontier based on a seemingly “infinite notion of the future.” By the twentieth century, though, the “very grid that had once led settlers to a manifest destiny now appeared to lock them in place.”4 Settled in the middle, they turned to modern technologies and cultural spectacles. After World War I, Fisher and his fellow racing moguls had an opportunity to transform the Hoosier track into a regional aviation hub, but instead they doubled down on popular culture, maintaining the IMS grounds as a place for racing before then selling the facility to famed Great War aviator Eddie Rickenbacker right as the postwar economy peaked in 1927. Airplanes may have offered early-1900s Americans a near-utopian “instrument of reform, regeneration, and salvation,” yet motor sport impresarios ultimately chose the racing spectacle.5 The Speedway became a place where Midwesterners fashioned a modernity based on culture as much as upon commerce. The central figure in this story, Carl Fisher, was the guiding spirit behind Indianapolis’s speedway, which itself was modeled on the Brooklands automotive and aerial facility built in Surrey, England, in 1907. Fisher, who made a fortune through a headlamp company called Prest-O-Lite, used his wealth to promote automotive travel, pop-culture spectacles, and real-estate ventures in Miami Beach, Florida, and Montauk Point, Long Island. Fisher was like a playful version of Henry Ford, shaping American landscapes and mobility in his own distinctive way. He and three other Hoosier industrialists—James Allison, Arthur Newby, and Frank Wheeler—built Indianapolis’s famous speedway as a tar-and-gravel track in early 1909 and then, after a series of deadly crashes that summer, repaved it with three million vitrified bricks later that year. In its early years, Indianapolis’s speedway held both auto races and aviation contests, making the regional metropolis a focal point for transportation-based spectacle. By 1911, the 2.5-mile oval held its first 500-mile race, which marked its claim to global fame. When the U.S. entered the Great War, aviation was still an important part of the...

Marta Minujín's Destructive Intervention

On June 6, 1963, after living in Paris for several months, Argentine artist Marta Minujín performed her first happening, The Destruction, at the Impasse Ronsin, the now legendary abode of many modern and neo-avant-garde artists. This article examines how The Destruction responded to the mediatization of Nouveau Réalisme's performances, especially Niki de Saint Phalle's Tirs, by entering a Duchampian discourse through its destabilization of authorship, originality, and authenticity—concepts central to Modernism and the anchoring of art's market value. In addition, The Destruction used Brechtian strategies and routinized actions to undercut the ritualism, immediacy, and collaboration fundamental to the emancipatory promise of both French and US happenings as developed by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Allan Kaprow, respectively. In its self-conscious consideration of the intertwinement between performative art forms and spectacle culture, Minujín's first happening thus opened a path of inquiry that later Argentine avant-garde artists of the sixties would continue to explore.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies

Reviewed by: The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies ed. by David Murphy Yohann C. Ripert The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies ED. DAVID MURPHY Liverpool UP, 2016. xii + 224 pp. ISBN 9781781383162 cloth. The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies is a collection of ten essays that investigate art performances and postcolonial practices at a major cultural event promoted by Léopold Sedar Senghor, as well as the event's influence in large-scale spectacles of culture and the role of archives and archival-making from 1966 to 2016. Edited and introduced by David Murphy, the book is the only publication dedicated to a festival that some have cited as the "apotheosis" of Negritude (vii). Its most important contribution to the fields of African and postcolonial studies, however, is to combine multifaceted readings that go beyond Negritude and question the ways in which both Cold War ideology and Pan-African ideals haunted the First World Festival of Negro Arts, including how painters, choreographers, writers, and intellectuals have used the encounter to strengthen the ties between the African "homeland" and black peoples in the diaspora—especially in the United States. Though the book does not expand on the history of preceding cultural events (such as the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists and its second iteration in 1959, as well as the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression) to a 1966 festival (FESMAN) that aimed to create a platform for bolstering transnational blackness, David Murphy's thorough introduction theorizes the festival as "an attempt to produce a global community through a shared blackness" (5). Engaging with the most recent literature on aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial period, Murphy focuses on the political climate framing the festival's organization and stages its performance within a double bind that black intellectuals, artists, and statesmen faced after independence: between the reality of nationalism and the imagination of a postcolonial globality. To that end, Murphy questions both the "involvement of the important US delegation" in Senegal and the larger "role of culture in a post-imperial world" (9). In the volume's first part, "Contexts," each chapter engages with the double bind by offering a remarkable archival work on different aspects of the festival: staging of a "tradition" in art exhibitions (Vincent), creation of an "authentic" African ballet (Kringelbach), performance of the past in carefully programmed theatrical plays (Quinn and Bush), and coverage in popular media (Jaji). Perhaps [End Page 202] the strongest connection between these five chapters is their critical approach to the influence of and challenge to Senghor's aesthetic positions at the festival. Hélène Kringelbach not only analyzes how "the past was being reimagined in neo-traditional performance through the selection and standardization of a limited number of preforming practices" (74), she also retrieves from the archives a letter between Senghor's longtime ally Alioune Diop and Gray Cowan (Columbia University professor and future President of the African Studies Association) for academic expertise on "traditional African dances"—a request that seems to reveal an ideological contradiction between Senghor's strong sense of traditionalism and a lack of knowledge about those supposedly innate traditions. Similarly, Brian Quinn's close reading of Senghor's and Malraux's opening speeches revisits the "reworking of the relationship between culture and the State" (84) and then proceeds to analyze the behind-the-scenes of the festival's staging of Amadou Cissé Dia's Les Derniers Jours de Lat Dior to uncover a troubling instrumentalization of culture that "heads of states such as those in the audience at FESMAN" (95) can use for the mobilization of a nationalist sentiment. In the second part of the book, "Legacies," the focus turns to the festival's afterlives: from the 1969 Algiers festival conceived as a direct response to the Dakar event (Anderson) and the 1977 Lagos Festival explicitly hailed as its direct successor (Apter), to the making of the PANAFEST archive that examines the relation between those three festivals and the Zaire 1974 music festival (Vincent and Malaquais) and a more theoretical consideration of "festivalism" in Africa...