What is cultural planning?

What is cultural planning about? As always, metaphors secretly direct and limit what we are able to think and formulate. One can, roughly, distinguish between metaphors taken from the mechanical and taken from the organically. Is cultural politics and management about good ways to ‘produce’ culture or is it about ‘cultivating’ culture? Or – the same opposition now transferred to the organically – is cultural politics about how to squeeze oranges in the best possible way or about growing oranges? Is cultural politics about realizing ‘projects’ or ‘creating possibilities’? The current domination of mechanical metaphors is assessing ‘productivity’ is not without danger

Rights or containment? The politics of Aboriginal cultural heritage in Victoria

Aboriginal cultural heritage protection, and the legislative regimes that underpin it, constitute important mechanisms for Aboriginal people to assert their rights and responsibilities. This is especially so in Victoria, where legislation vests wide-ranging powers and control of cultural heritage with Aboriginal communities. However, the politics of cultural heritage, including its institutionalisation as a scientific body of knowledge within the state, can also result in a powerful limiting of Aboriginal rights and responsibilities. This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage through a case study of a small forest in north-west Victoria. Here, a dispute about logging has pivoted around differing conceptualisations of Aboriginal cultural heritage values and their management. Cultural heritage, in this case, is both a powerful tool for the assertion of Aboriginal rights and interests, but simultaneously a set of boundaries within which the state operates to limit and manage the challenge those assertions pose. The paper will argue that Aboriginal cultural heritage is a politically contested and shifting domain structured around Aboriginal law and politics, Australian statute and the legacy of colonial history

Out of Time

A review of Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2014)

Style, Narrative, and Cultural Politics in Bullitt

Peter Yates’s 1968 film Bullitt cemented the reputation of its star, Steve McQueen, as “the essence of cool” – to borrow a phrase from the title of the 2005 documentary that reflects on the star’s legacy. As the film reveals, however, and the documentary explores, Bullitt is fraught with narrative problems, its now iconic set-pieces seemingly purchased at the expense of coherent and accessible plot development. Meanwhile the film’s formal experimentation – internally motivated by the thematic preoccupation with “noise” and freeways – heightens the ecstatic presentation of actor/protagonist as image (and of the autonomization of “style” in general), which in turn can be read as an ambivalent response to the cultural politics of the late 1960s. This paper explores the ways in which various elements of style, narrative, and cultural politics interact within the context of the film, placing Bullitt at a pivotal moment in both cinematic and cultural history.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Aesthetics relation between art, culture, politics: social turn

Рукопись поступила в редакцию 1 июня 2016 г.This article deals with the problem of important social turn in the relationship between politics and art in the contemporary situation. In the postmodern sense, the relation between politics and art is assumed as performance or, in other words, as the representation of art and politics in the realm of cultural discourses and figures. The relations between art and politics in the contemporary sense may be assumed in terms of this triple definition, as: the transfer of politics into art, as the spectacularization of politics through art, and as a potential field of intervening critical, subversive practices in the global-transitional social processes of performing forms of life in the realm of expansive neoliberal capitalism and its global crisis

Migrants, Media and Cultural Politics in China

A review of Wanning Sun, Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York and London, 2014

The politics of media and cultural policy

This paper considers the role of academics in current debates on media and cultural policy in the UK. Although theories of the intellectuals differ widely as to what such a role might be, they point to a more general issue: the struggle for social recognition by contending forms of expertise. The policy field is one arena in which such contention occurs. Although the digital revolution is beginning to erode distinct policy regimes, broadcasting policy debate still conserves some long-standing features. Dominated by a few protagonists occupying positions of institutional power and critical, academic influence is at best marginal. For its part, cultural policy is being increasingly displaced by creative economy policy. This has been a New Labour project, initiated and from time to time sustained by a policy generation rooted in think tanks, consultancy and advising, with its academic critics largely unheard. Despite its shaky foundations, creativity policy has achieved a hegemonic position in British debate and is influential internationally. Nearer home, it has been uncritically adopted in Scotland – an illuminating case of policy dependency. The paper concludes with some reflections on policymakers’ resistance to academic arguments

The Predicament of Nature: Keiko the Whale and The Cultural Politics of Whaling in Iceland

This cultural analysis reconsiders the modernist narrative about the politics of whales and whale hunting in order to explore Icelandic responses to the return of the killer whale Keiko (star of the Free Willy movies) to Icelandic waters in 1998. Ambivalence about Keiko’s plight required cultural creativity to block identification with the whale since in Icelandic hegemonic discourse such feelings have been associated with the supposed irrationality of foreign protests against whale hunting. This essay draws on Bruno Latour’s writings about the politics of nature to argue for abandoning nature in a step toward the ethnographic study of human-nonhuman relations

Exit and voice revisited: the challenge of migrant media

This paper discusses the implications of transnational media production and diasporic networks for the cultural politics of migrant minorities. How are fields of cultural politics transformed if Hirschmann’s famous options ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ are no longer constituting mutually exclusive responses to dissent within a nation-state, but modes of action that can combine and build upon each other in the context of migration and diasporic media activism? Two case studies are discussed in more detail, relating to Alevi amateur television production in Germany and to a Kurdish satellite television station that reaches out to a diaspora across Europe and the Middle East. Keywords: migrant media, transnationalism, Alevis, Kurds, Turkey, German

This Time He Moves! The Deeper Significance of Hou Hsiao-Hsien\u27s Radical Break in Good Men, Good Women

Following the recent success of Taiwanese film directors, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwanese film is raising its profile in contemporary cinema. This collection presents an exciting and ambitious foray into the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan film that goes beyond the auterist mode, the nation-state argument and vestiges of the New Cinema. Cinema Taiwan considers the complex problems of popularity, conflicts between transnational capital and local practice, non-fiction and independent filmmaking as emerging modes of address, and new possibilities of forging vibrant film cultures embedded in national (identity) politics, gender/sexuality and community activism. Insightful and challenging, the essays in this collection will attract attention to a globally significant field of cultural production and will appeal to readers from the areas of film studies, cultural studies and Chinese culture and society