Ideological Borders Research Articles

The Familial Grotesque in the Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Author(s): Ng, Andrew Hock Soon | Abstract: Framing the representation of the family in Shirley Lim’s poetry against the concept of the grotesque, this essay aims to demonstrate how the aesthetic category is arguably enlisted as a symbol referring to the trope – or more accurately, with particular members of the family– in order to mount a criticism against it, or less directly, the Confucian, male-biased symbolic order that underscores it. That the maternal-figure is most often transfigured as a grotesque embodiment in Lim’s poems is telling in its implication of the poet’s own ambivalent feelings towards her own mother whom she recognizes as a woman who illustrates empowering individualism but also reprehensibility. As such, while some of her poems express affirmation of the grotesque’s capacity for transgressing ideological borders and confusing distinctions, others are less celebratory of the concept, which they evoke explicitly to clarify the family’s monstrous dimensions.

Transforming the Liminal Hero: Border-Crossing Interconnections in The Taking of Tiger Mountain and Its Textual Pedigree

Previously known as a Hong Kong director of action-filled and visually spectacular blockbusters, Tsui Hark made a surprising move in 2014 by shooting a 3-D remake of the 1970 Maoist revolutionary opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy in mainland China. Existing scholarship tends to see the remake as a reflection of the close marriage between politics and commerce in contemporary Chinese cinema. This paper attempts to offer a more nuanced perspective on the remake, revealing its long historical dimension that generated complexity and subtlety in Tsui’s directorial approach. Rather than just commercially packaging and disseminating current state ideology, the remake reflects Tsui’s long-term personal and artistic navigation across multiple national and ideological borders. It embodies Tsui’s signature way of constructing alluring cinematic shapes for a liminal “Chineseness” that lacks substantial reference, consistency, and clear origin. Precisely for its void in the core, the “Chineseness” may offer traces of identification for a diverse range of Chinese cultural, political, and ethnic subjects.

Crossing ideological borders: How to contribute to depolarization within society and on a global level?

Crossing ideological borders: How to contribute to depolarization within society and on a global level?

Soviet Orientalism across Borders: Documentary Film for the Turkish Republic

Soviet Orientalism across BordersDocumentary Film for the Turkish Republic Samuel J. Hirst (bio) In the early 1930s, Ankara’s requests for productions about Turkey created a dilemma for Soviet filmmakers.1 How could a single propaganda film satisfy two governments with conflicting ideologies? Moscow knew that Communists languished in Turkish jails, and the Turkish military had already blocked screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin).2 Yet Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and many of his supporters sympathized with elements of the Soviet project, and their proposition was intriguing.3 Ultimately, film as a revolutionary tool brought representatives of the Turkish and Soviet states together, and their joint cinematographic endeavors help explain similarities in practices across state and ideological borders. A Bolshevik faith in the persuasiveness of scientific truth facilitated cooperation, for it suggested that objectivity could overcome subjective difference. When Boris Shumiatskii—head of the Soviet film industry for much of the decade—reviewed an early proposal for Soviet-Turkish cinema, he [End Page 35] argued that the creation of a common set of images would avoid “ideological concessions” for both sides. The trick, he claimed, was to produce a work that was “logical, true, and historically founded.”4 Shumiatskii echoed prominent members of the Soviet avant-garde who maintained that film was an artistic medium uniquely capable of documenting reality. Supraideological alliance led one enthusiastic Soviet reviewer to hail cinematographic cooperation as a world historical event. He alluded to the Tower of Babel and proclaimed the Soviet-Turkish venture evidence that national and ideological “boundedness” (ogranichennost´) could be breached.5 Shumiatskii and the reviewer both underestimated the challenge of making a Soviet representation of reality recognizable to their Turkish counterparts, but Shumiatskii’s logic is revealing. Turks who participated in these efforts also appreciated film’s capacity to be a documentary tool, and both sides hoped the camera could historicize Turkey—that is, simultaneously capture Turkey’s particularity and situate the country in a broader historical process. The latter was particularly important, for Soviets and Turks felt that Turkey had long been the subject of ahistorical orientalist fantasies. During a brief but intense moment, Soviet and Turkish elites negotiated how best to present an image of modern Turkey on the screen. Forgoing Istanbul’s alleyways, Sergei Iosifovich Iutkevich’s Ankara—Serdtse Turtsii (Ankara—The Heart of Turkey) celebrated the Republican capital and was released in Turkey and the Soviet Union in 1934. Novelty was in the title of Idet novaia Turtsiia (The New Turkey on the Move), which Esfir´ Il´inichna Shub worked on in 1934 and early 1935. Shub’s experience testifies to the difficulty of these projects, as she had long left the project by the time Ha-Ka Studio released the 1937 Türk İnkılâbında Terakki Hamleleri (Steps of Progress in the Turkish Revolution).6 She had complained when her producer, Halil Kamil, refused to let her film camel caravans and peasant women riding donkeys because they would inevitably be cut, but her plan for the film suggests she was perfectly ready to speak a language acceptable to Turkish censors.7 Her script promised “factory buildings stretching out” along the Golden Horn [End Page 36] as symbols of progress, “nothing like” the romanticized depictions left by the French writers Pierre Loti and Claude Farrère, whom she dismissed as retrograde.8 Industry was one of many themes recognizable to both Soviet and Turkish audiences, and finding shared symbols was not difficult. Iutkevich’s Ankara presented the hallmarks of modern times—not only factories but also what one reviewer called “the face of the new Turkey … institutes, the art of the youth, scientific laboratories, construction, new factories, new buildings, and hydroelectric plants.”9 In the discussions of these films, participants and viewers repeatedly staked claims to define interwar Turkey. Propaganda film was a favored instrument of contemporary states, but here representatives of two competing states employed the practice together. The sense of a shared foe evident in Shub’s reference to French novelists proved crucial in this collaboration. This episode offers a new perspective on what a line of distinguished historians has referred to as “Soviet modernity.”10 Soviets and Turks...

Biologia versus kultura. Przegląd bioewolucyjnych i kulturowych teorii wojny w przedpaństwowych społecznościach pradziejowych

The paper’s main aim is to outline the problem of polarisation of contemporary discussion concerning the concept of origins of warfare. Basically, two leading trends can be distinguished: the first one accentuates the biological basis of human violence and places its origins deep into our evolutionary past. The second one recognises conflict as a relatively late and typically cultural phenomenon in human prehistory, which cannot be interpreted in terms of natural selection and evolution. The existence of a sharp ideological border between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ enables a comparison of both perspectives and facilitates the analysis of internal dynamics of their development.

The Great War, the child’s body and the American Red Cross

This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations.

In the pursuit of freedom: Art and animals under socialism

The experience of socialism and its legacies in Eastern Europe created a specific context for artists’ engagement with animals and their approach to the natural world. The blueprint for building the socialist utopia had spared little concern for the environmental consequences of breakneck industrialisation, with rivers rerouted, landscapes devastated and nature viewed purely as a material resource. The welfare and interests of animals were far down the list of priorities in a system which valorised the proletariat and demanded sacrifices for the glorification of the socialist state. The cruel fate of the world’s first space traveller, Laika the dog, who was sent on a one-way mission into orbit in 1957, was symbolic of official attitudes towards animals under socialism, as well as providing a focus for feelings of empathy from human subjects that felt equally oppressed. It was in the 1960s that live animals first entered artistic practice through happenings and performances, which occurred in parallel with the neo-avant-garde exodus from studios and galleries to enter public space and natural environments and was part of the utopian drive to abolish the distinction between art and life. However, it was only after the changes brought by the countercultural orientation of 1968, with the emergence of the women’s liberation movement, a new concern for human rights and the rise of ecological thinking that neo-avant-garde artists began to conceptually address the position of the animal. Birds turned out to be particularly appropriate living metaphors to convey the suppressed desire for freedom, as well as offering a way to explore the ethical and environmental dimensions of relations between the human and the animal. This paper explores changing attitudes and approaches to animals in East European art of the neo-avant-garde during the Long Sixties through an examination of key works by István Harasztÿ from Hungary, Slovak artist Peter Bartoš and Petr Štembera from the Czech Republic, while considering the impact of new thinking about the natural environment across the porous ideological borders of the Cold War. Engagements with the animal were most frequently conceived in metaphorical terms as a means to talk about the human condition which, due to the specific social, historical and political circumstances of the Eastern Bloc, was particularly true of artists living under socialism.

Reframing the Visualizing Cultures Controversy: Let's Talk about the Digital Medium

This think piece returns the MIT controversy to an analytical frame that was largely ignored in 2006—the digital. Online reading habits have changed the ways of how we navigate the Web. Surfing through hyperlinks gave rise to decontextualization and the decoupling of images from their explanatory texts. The MIT controversy opened our eyes not only to the destabilizing effect of knowledge production in the digital era but also the perils of participatory culture online. The 2006 debate also drove home the crisis about online publishing: materials published online are never going to be completely acceptable to a “global audience” who straddles across diverse ethnic, cultural, religious, national, and ideological borders. Running through this piece is a complementary theme—the “racialization of point of view”—which further tied the participants of this controversy to a polarizing, dichotomous positioning of “us” versus “them” and “Free America” versus “Red China,” from which an internationalist position was difficult to emerge.

Indigenous: It Depends How You Look at It. What You Call It. How You Live It.

In this article, we use examples from contemporary Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore and the works of the Spiderwoman Theater Troupe to explore how contemporary Indigenous artists in the Americas negotiate the representation of Indigenous identities, identities which are always performed and entangled in a mesh of geographical locations, cultural practices and ideological borders. Through their artistic productions, many Native artists and authors participate in a larger community of voices discussing what it means to be Indigenous in the Americas and what ethical responsibilities or commitments to community are entailed in and by their work.

Rattling Sabres and Evil Intruders: The Border, Heroes and Border-crossers in Panfennist and Soviet Socialist Realist Literature

In this article I analyse Russian and Soviet Karelian literary texts written in Finnish at the time and in the style of socialist realism, and Finnish poems, songs and novels of the same era, proposing the idea of a ‘Greater-Finland’. I turned my attention to the question of how the depiction, construction and use of borders is handled in the respective texts, and look to determine whether the opposed ideologies of Soviet Communism and Panfennism led to similar or different artificial results. This analysis proves that the texts of the two ideologies generally draw strict distinctions between the ‘heroes’ of their own side and the bad ‘Others’. Only the heroes of the plot are able to either cross borders or to establish new ones. While in the Soviet texts opponents of Soviet society inside the Soviet Union are depicted as foreign and separated through ideological, symbolic and topographical borders, the Karelians in the Finnish texts are suspected as a hybrid people, spoiled by their contact with the evil Russians.

Borders and Go-Betweens

This chapter aims at discussing the socialist international truck drivers during the Cold War as a liminal group, stemming from two basic considerations: The first one is that roads and borders, which constitute the essence of the international truck drivers’ identity, practices and status, should be considered as classical liminal spaces; and the second is that the notion of liminality should be used as an independent analytical concept, not directly related to the ritual context. Drawing on state archival documents and interviews with former Bulgarian international truck drivers, the chapter conceptualizes the road system as a liminal space, then outlines the Bulgarian policies and practices governing border activity during the Cold War, within which Bulgarian international truck drivers emerged as a group. Further, the truckers are presented as crossing state and ideological borders, as oscillating between different official and non-official practices related to the ambivalent characteristics of Cold War relations, as possessing boundary and thus contradicting identities, and as existing in between different social statuses. This analysis of the liminal status and activities of the truck drivers allows for the grasping of the ambivalence of the Cold War as simultaneously a global conflict and an everyday experience, as a time of seclusion and intensive contacts, and allows us to look at the Cold War processes not just from below, from the standpoint of people of a lower-class position, such as the truckers, but from inside—from the interstitial space of the transnational road network, which both epitomized the ambivalence of the Cold War, but also was shaped by it.

The ‘post-human’ Internet dimension: Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei online

Abstract This article presents an argument for the Internet as a novel ‘post-human’ dimension where individuals around the world can explore possibilities for social engagement in a virtual environment beyond the confines of their ‘real’ lives. Artists take to the Internet to conceive original forms of aesthetic expression outside of ordinary objective existence; the diversity encountered within the Internet realm reflects the complexity of our human condition in the twenty-first century. While the authorities in mainland China continue to patrol cyberspace in an effort to maintain control over actual society, some Chinese artists are finding ways to engage the digital sphere to create virtual communities, political opportunities and sensual experiences that transcend corporeal and ideological borders – ostensibly the post-human environs of the Internet surpasses our human reality. Through their dynamic use of social media and other online platforms, artists such as Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei are redefining social activism and artistic praxis in China today.

East and West on the Finnish Screen

Research on Finnish television history has so far emphasized Western influences. However, the Finnish television environment was also in many ways shaped by contacts with socialist television cultures. This article analyses the first volume (1960) of the television magazine Katso to trace the various transnational relations which shaped the early Finnish television environment and to discuss the cultural meanings of socialist television in this environment. Nearly every issue of Katso in 1960 discusses television in a transnational context. Transnational themes fall into four categories: (1) learning about television in other countries; (2) the Eurovision and Nordvision networks; (3) watching television across national borders (Swedish and Tallinn television but also television across surprising distances); and (4) visions of world television. Katso’s understanding of television emphasises the literal meaning of television, to see far. The magazine sets no clear limits to what television could do in terms of overcoming physical distance and ideological borders. The magazine avoids overt politics in discussing television from both the West and the East and represents Tallinn television as a potential source of popular television for Finnish audiences.

Securitisation and the mega‐event: an editorial introduction

I n August 2011 organisers of the London 2012 Olympics staged rehearsals for the Opening Ceremony due to commence exactly one year hence. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were experiencing rioting and looting on a scale not seen for 30 years. Whilst these two events were largely distinct, their simultaneous occurrence underscored an important point. For all the attention to the enclosure, artificial urbanism and contrived spaces that hosting sporting mega events create, they are accommodated in complex and often contested urban settings. Two years later, the links between the politics of the street and the sporting mega-event spectacle became cemented elsewhere. Echoing protests against Mexico City’s profligate Olympic spending at a time of austerity in 1968, June 2013 saw more than a million people take to the streets across 100 Brazilian cities. Although activist causes were manifold they unmistakably coalesced around the social and pecuniary impacts of Brazil’s staging of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. As mega-event spectacles, replete with promises of ‘regeneration’ and ‘legacy’, continue to encroach further into the urban realm, so different levels of action, activism, governance and policy necessarily become drawn together. For sporting mega-events, it is in the realm of security practice where the heat generated by internationally focused agendas abrading with local practices, processes and priorities is greatest. Here, the promise of stringent security guarantees is a precondition for hosts who operate under a constant risk of catastrophic reputational damage should they not be met. Of course, it is rare that, in such a broad sense, ‘security’ can ever be guaranteed and, for planners, its pursuit results in dwindling levels of acceptable risk. When applied to the complex, dynamic and unpredictable realm of the global city, the contemporary stage for sporting mega events, such promises are even harder to keep. The result is uneasy coalitions of international, national, regional and local security practice; a merger of civil, military and criminal justice techniques and technologies of social control; and a proliferation of security priorities. Yet whilst some of these measures may be exceptional for the cities that host them, they often represent very familiar elements of mega-event security programmes.

Scholarly Transgressions: (Re)writing the History of World Christianity

The history of world Christianity has typically relied on certain binary categories such as Western/non-Western, missionary/native, modern/traditional, and liberal/conservative. Our globalizing context, in which well-established political and ideological borders are constantly being crossed, raises questions about the adequacy of such binaries. Using Christianity in North India as a case study, this article explores the limits of these inherited frameworks for the study of world Christianity.

The Cold War's cultural ecosystem: angry young men in British and Soviet cinema, 1953–1968

Using examples from postwar British and Soviet cinema, this article interprets European Cold War culture within the framework of a shared cultural ecosystem. The case study of reformist movements in 1950s and 1960s British and Soviet cinema makes clear that analogous sociopolitical and economic developments across postwar Europe inspired film heroes, narratives, and aesthetics that transcended national and ideological borders. The concept of a continent-wide cultural ecosystem elucidates how and why specific cultural phenomena—such as the figure of the “angry young man”—reflect an existence of a dynamic trans-systemic Cold War culture.

Thomas Muir: Radicalism, Loyalism and Internationalism in the 1790s

This essay considers the 'political martyr' Thomas Muir as a representation of increased internationalism throughout late eighteenth century Scotland, when a veritable 'patriotic public sphere' developed in Britain. The relation of contemporary radical and loyalist political expressions to Muir's controversial trial for sedition has dominated the few examinations of him available, such as the biographies by Christina Bewley and Hector Macmillan. The unpublished work by George Pratt Insh, however, looked beyond this 'martyrdom' for a more nuanced approach that remains an invaluable source of international archive material. Muir's sentence of fourteen years transportation arose from a discursive realm that negotiated constitutional meanings, contested ideological borders and expressed both authoritarian and popular principles. Muir's conduct justified radical and loyalist rhetoric but also demonstrated his personal transformation from a distinct arena of 'Scottishness' to a more universal approach to politics. As Muir's life and the eighteenth century drew to a close, this transition provided an allegory for Scotland's role on the international stage as the modernisation process continued.

Alimentar: Theorizing Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Mentorship for Democratic Doctoral Education

This conceptual paper suggests ways in which pedagogical practices, curriculum, and mentorship could foster democracy in doctoral education. Building upon critical, dialogic, caring, anti-colonial, and engaged pedagogies, we propose a framework for examining marginal spaces of teacher and student relationships that build upon life-projects (Gunzenhauser & Gerstl-Pepin, 2006) in learning spaces. We use the Spanish terms “alimentar” and “infame” pedagogy to capture dichotomous approaches to teaching at the doctoral level. The challenge to linguistic borders should be read as a metaphor for the challenge of transcending ideological borders of doctoral pedagogy.

Mediterranean Transformations: The Frontier Apulia and its Filmmakers after 1989

The increased mobility in the Mediterranean area is strictly connected with the events of 1989. When Eastern Europe’s ideological borders were demolished, the Southern Italian region Apulia was relocated on the Mediterranean map, and from being on the periphery of the Adriatic, unexpectedly it came to occupy a new, centered place. This geographical repositioning inevitably turned Apulia into a free western frontier and an open shore for waves of migrants. This essay discusses the historical events, international political factors, and global economic interests that determined the new destiny of the region. Since the spirit of the frontier has always inspired writers and filmmakers, it was no accident that Italian directors have chosen Apulia as the set and setting for their new, human odysseys and modern heroes. In order to explain the reasons for the rich film production in Apulia, first, this essay presents the directors whose works contribute to the genre of films on migration and transit to and fro the different shores of the Mediterranean; and second, it analyzes a selection of films by Apulian directors portraying universal, human dramas through local, private stories.

Time borders: Change of practice and experience through time layers

This article explores how landscape practices and meanings have changed in the southeastern border region of Setumaa, in Estonia, during the last one hundred years. Geographers have treated landscapes as consisting of material and mental layers, as well as the driving forces behind them. The ways in which each socioeconomic formation creates its own landscape have also been part of their discussions. To those discussions, we add changing political borders that coincide with formation changes—processes that influence local participation and the open interpretation of the local everyday landscape. Based on this perspective, Setumaa offers a unique study area where a multitude of natural cultural landscape patches with different life trajectories can be found situated close to each other and bounded by formation borders from different time layers. Spatial practices in a landscape depend on time context, thereby creating time borders. We demonstrate how political formations have influenced the Setu region and culture across spatial and ideological borders