Creativity, Productivity, Aging: The Case of Benjamin Britten

British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) died at the age of only six- ty-three, but ill health in his last years parachuted him into what he himself saw as older age and its consequences. His story of challenge and adaptation allows us to examine the particular impact of illness and impairment on the role of productivity in definitions of creativity. Composing was the life blood of this prolific artist, known for his work ethic and professionalism. Though he completed only nine independent works after his operation, the last works stand as some of his best creations. Britten’s sense of selfhood depended to a large extent upon this self-iden- tification as an active working composer. While he retained this to the end, his other life narrative had to be abandoned with his sudden entry into older age: that of being ever youthful. His self-fashioning as youthful and his tastes— in food, humor, habits—were formed in boyhood and never changed. Yet, through his letters and creative work, Britten reconstructed in the face of the challenges of aging that evolving life narrative of himself as the professional “working composer” that enabled his continuing creativity

The Post Always Rings Twice: The Postmodern and the Postcolonial

It is now a truism of cultural theory that, while the terms postmodern and postcolonial obvi-ously share more than their prefatory posts, the broad cultural enterprises which they have come to designate are by no means conflatable. This detailed critical examination of one controversial case study — the Royal Ontario Museum's 1989-90 Into the Heart of Africa exhibit—and of its aftermath attempts to open up to debate the conflictual space not only between the postmodern and the postcolonial (and therefore between modernity and empire), but also the space between curatorial/designer intention and actual realization in a particular institution, between individual interpretation and community response, between representation as critique and representation as either appropriation or endorsement, and — in the end — between the discursive politics of irony and what Cornel West calls the "cultural politics of difference. Résumé Il s'agit désormais d'une vérité de la théorie culturelle : si les termes postmodemisme et postcolonialisme ont évidemment plus en commun que leur préfixe, les grandes entités culturelles qu'ils en sont venus à désigner ne sont aucunement identiques. Cette analyse critique détaillée d'un cas qui a donné lieu à une polémique -l'exposition Into the Heart of Africa de 1989-1990 au Musée royal de l'Ontario - s'efforce de lancer le débat sur l'espace conflictuel, non seulement entre les époques postmodeme et postcoloniale (donc entre le modernisme et l'empire), mais aussi entre les intentions de la conservatrice ou de la per-sonne responsable de la conception et l'exposition proprement dite, dans un établissement particulier, entre l'interprétation personnelle et la réaction de la collectivité, entre la représentation en tant que critique et la représentation en tant qu'appropriation ou sanction et, finalement, entre la politique discursive de l'ironie et ce que Cornel West appelle la politique culturelle de la différence

Creativity, Productivity, Aging

British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) died at the age of only six- ty-three, but ill health in his last years parachuted him into what he himself saw as older age and its consequences. His story of challenge and adaptation allows us to examine the particular impact of illness and impairment on the role of productivity in definitions of creativity. Composing was the life blood of this prolific artist, known for his work ethic and professionalism. Though he completed only nine independent works after his operation, the last works stand as some of his best creations. Britten’s sense of selfhood depended to a large extent upon this self-iden- tification as an active working composer. While he retained this to the end, his other life narrative had to be abandoned with his sudden entry into older age: that of being ever youthful. His self-fashioning as youthful and his tastes— in food, humor, habits—were formed in boyhood and never changed. Yet, through his letters and creative work, Britten reconstructed in the face of the challenges of aging that evolving life narrative of himself as the professional “working composer” that enabled his continuing creativity

In another time and place: The Handmaiden as an adaptation

This article considers the South Korean auteur director Park Chan-wook’s latest film The Handmaiden, which is the film adaptation of British writer Sarah Waters’s third novel Fingersmith. Transporting the story of love and deception from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the film offers a compelling case of transnational or cross-cultural adaptation. In the process of cultural relocation, the film gives prominence to the ethnic identities and hierarchies in colonial Korea, and in recounting the unfolding lesbian love story between a petty-thief-disguised-as-maid and a noble lady, the film provides a spectacular, visual ‘translation’ of the novel’s approach to the story of same-sex desire. Despite all the changes the film makes to the original novel, the author Waters claims that the film is ‘faithful’ to her work. Taking her comments as a framework, the article explores the ways in which the film carries over the transgressive allure of the original story, while addressing the issues of history and identity in another time and place

Making Mas: TruDynasty Carnival Takes Josephine Baker to the Caribbean Carnival

Jacqueline Taucar, in conversation with Thea and Dario Jackson, investigates the sculptural qualities of the Josephine Baker Mas for the Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Festival in 2011. This article traces the conception, construction, and complexities of choreography for this carnivalesque reimagining of Baker in Paris of the twenties for a contemporary Canadian ambulant expression. This Queen Mas talks back to the objectification by Parisians and embodying Queen Mas as an instance of female empowerment

Reclaiming heritage: colourization, culture wars and the politics of nostalgia

This article considers the discursive continuities between a specifically liberal defence of cultural patrimony, evident in the debate over film colourization, and the culture war critique associated with neo-conservatism. It examines how a rhetoric of nostalgia, linked to particular ideas of authenticity,canonicity and tradition,has been mobilized by the right and the left in attempts to stabilize the confguration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity. While different in scale, colourization and multiculturalism were seen to create respective (postmodern) barbarisms against which defenders of culture, heritage and good taste could unite. I argue that in its defence of the ‘classic’ work of art, together with principles of aesthetic distinction and the value of cultural inheritance,the anti-colourization lobby helped enrich and legitimize a discourse of tradition that, at the end of the 1980s, was beginning to reverberate powerfully in the conservative challenge to a ‘crisis’ within higher education and the humanities. This article attempts to complicate the contemporary politics of nostalgia, showing how a defence of cultural patrimony has distinguished major and minor culture wars, engaging left and right quite differently but with similar presuppositions