What could be more antithetical than the alliance of the words“culture”and“political power”?Yet,for over fifty years,the process of European integration has been linking these opposing concepts.European culture,‘...What could be more antithetical than the alliance of the words“culture”and“political power”?Yet,for over fifty years,the process of European integration has been linking these opposing concepts.European culture,‘a sort of UFO’for most Europeans and it has become a major political and philosophical issue.Given their political and strategic importance so-called‘geo-cultural’issues have been called upon to constitute,along with geopolitical and economic issues,a governance axis.The European Union’s current mode of cultural action,intrinsic to national policies,is unable to address these issues.Indeed,the EU should completely rethink its conception and political implication of culture,and recognize its great importance,both for the success of European integration,and for the new civic relationships which are developing today in local,national and global communities.展开更多
Literature has always been nurtured by travelling texts,people and media—travelers along the Silk Road, European troubadours,oral storytellers and singers, translations and today through the proliferation of modern m...Literature has always been nurtured by travelling texts,people and media—travelers along the Silk Road, European troubadours,oral storytellers and singers, translations and today through the proliferation of modern media.For centuries,colonization and slavery,trade and business,teaching and research have instigated migratory movements that changed the direction of literature.Cultural encounters fostering exchange of values, themes,forms and languages have been and still are the driver of this process,making such encounters more salient for literature than the local confinement of national literatures which,after all,has only been a predominant practice during the last few centuries.This dynamics of exchange has been most challenging and productive,when they have also been most complex and marred by conflicts,as has been the case between cultures defined not only by different languages but also by different cosmologies and anthropologies.In this article I discuss literary and cultural encounters on the basis of the Indian-Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World(1916),in which the encounter happened between Western,mainly European,and Eastern,in this case Indian,and world views clashed to the detriment not only of the life of characters but also of their entire social environment.Beyond its social themes the novel offers through its narrative structure a view of the full complexity of encounters with a resonance in today’s globalized world.展开更多
Increasingly,cities have turned to mega-events as part of strategies to secure much desired global recognition and attract future economic investment.These events have a broad range of physical effects on the city and...Increasingly,cities have turned to mega-events as part of strategies to secure much desired global recognition and attract future economic investment.These events have a broad range of physical effects on the city and can also introduce new concepts of the city.For historic cities,mega-events can potentially have a profound influence on the city’s urban heritage,both physically and how heritage comes to be understood and defined.Recent changing trends in mega-events could come to see them more closely integrated into the existing city fabric,making the potential impact of mega-events on built heritage more pronounced.One long-standing event embedded within the city fabric that serves as a noteworthy example is the European Capital of Culture(ECoC),operating for 30 years and travelling between more than 50 cities.The paper presents the European Capital of Cultures of Genoa 2004,Liverpool 2008 and Istanbul 2010 as three diverse cases with differing themes and roles for heritage in order to review the potential synergy or friction between events and heritage and calls for heritage actors to become more involved in these processes.展开更多
文摘What could be more antithetical than the alliance of the words“culture”and“political power”?Yet,for over fifty years,the process of European integration has been linking these opposing concepts.European culture,‘a sort of UFO’for most Europeans and it has become a major political and philosophical issue.Given their political and strategic importance so-called‘geo-cultural’issues have been called upon to constitute,along with geopolitical and economic issues,a governance axis.The European Union’s current mode of cultural action,intrinsic to national policies,is unable to address these issues.Indeed,the EU should completely rethink its conception and political implication of culture,and recognize its great importance,both for the success of European integration,and for the new civic relationships which are developing today in local,national and global communities.
文摘Literature has always been nurtured by travelling texts,people and media—travelers along the Silk Road, European troubadours,oral storytellers and singers, translations and today through the proliferation of modern media.For centuries,colonization and slavery,trade and business,teaching and research have instigated migratory movements that changed the direction of literature.Cultural encounters fostering exchange of values, themes,forms and languages have been and still are the driver of this process,making such encounters more salient for literature than the local confinement of national literatures which,after all,has only been a predominant practice during the last few centuries.This dynamics of exchange has been most challenging and productive,when they have also been most complex and marred by conflicts,as has been the case between cultures defined not only by different languages but also by different cosmologies and anthropologies.In this article I discuss literary and cultural encounters on the basis of the Indian-Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World(1916),in which the encounter happened between Western,mainly European,and Eastern,in this case Indian,and world views clashed to the detriment not only of the life of characters but also of their entire social environment.Beyond its social themes the novel offers through its narrative structure a view of the full complexity of encounters with a resonance in today’s globalized world.
文摘Increasingly,cities have turned to mega-events as part of strategies to secure much desired global recognition and attract future economic investment.These events have a broad range of physical effects on the city and can also introduce new concepts of the city.For historic cities,mega-events can potentially have a profound influence on the city’s urban heritage,both physically and how heritage comes to be understood and defined.Recent changing trends in mega-events could come to see them more closely integrated into the existing city fabric,making the potential impact of mega-events on built heritage more pronounced.One long-standing event embedded within the city fabric that serves as a noteworthy example is the European Capital of Culture(ECoC),operating for 30 years and travelling between more than 50 cities.The paper presents the European Capital of Cultures of Genoa 2004,Liverpool 2008 and Istanbul 2010 as three diverse cases with differing themes and roles for heritage in order to review the potential synergy or friction between events and heritage and calls for heritage actors to become more involved in these processes.
