Reactionary Nationalism and Museum Controversies

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
Akiko Takenaka
Keyword(s):  
Aggressive Behavior ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Japanese Military

Using Peace Osaka (an exhibit facility known for its portrayal of the Japanese military’s aggressions during the Asia-Pacific War) as a case study, this essay examines the shift in ways that the war has been portrayed in Japanese museums. Echoing the neo-revisionist turn, a trend that is increasingly apparent in various venues including cultural production and policy making, the exhibit at Peace Osaka will soon be changed in its entirety to erase any traces of aggressive behavior by the Japanese military. The essay argues that the recent shift to neo-revisionism is an example of “reactionary nationalism”: a response to earlier acknowledgements of war responsibility that was not based on a historical understanding of the past.

scholarly journals Looking beyond the idyllic representations of the rural: The Konkan Railway controversy and middle-class environmentalism in India

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Sreeja Jaiswal
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Environmental Values ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Environmental Preservation ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Environmental Controversy ◽  
Environmental Discourses

Post-independence India has had its share of controversies around mega-infrastructure projects that have pitted environmental preservation against development concerns. This article studies the environmental controversy around one such megaproject, the Konkan Railway, employing a framework that integrates the environmental values, beliefs and behaviour of individuals and groups with a historical understanding of political economy and ecology (science). Essentialist and over-simplified environmental discourses, without scientific credibility and not based on historical facts, are often influential in policy making, especially when channelled by the middle classes.  Better understanding our present concerns and guiding decisions and policies to deal with the problems we currently face, requires unmasking the romanticization of the countryside. We must replace the idyllic version of the past with a nuanced historical understanding of the interaction between nature and culture. This article also locates the controversy over the Konkan Railway within the frames used to study Indian environmentalism. The aim is to improve our understanding of the regional, ideological and cultural pluralities in environmental values, beliefs and behaviour of the middle class in India.

scholarly journals Transient soundscape production

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
Daniel Walzer
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Steady Increase ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Music Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scholarly Output ◽  
A Site

Over the past decade, there has been a steady increase of scholarly output examining the multidisciplinary, creative, and theoretical aspects of sound and music production in the recording studio and beyond (Zagorski-Thomas & Bourbon, 2020; Bennett & Bates, 2019; Hepworth- Sawyer, Hodgson, & Marrington, 2019; Thompson, 2019; Zagorski-Thomas, 2014; Frith & Zagorski-Thomas, 2012). Accordingly, a broad range of literature examines sound as a widespread cultural phenomenon (Papenburg & Schulze, 2016) and an essential source for pedagogical and ethnographic modeling in music technology education (Bell, 2018). Advances in technology make the “studio,” long viewed as a site of artistic and commercial production, available to a broader group of composers, musicians, and artists. Similarly, portable digital recorders afford sound artists and fi eld recordists an expansive range of choices to conduct soundscape research and creative practice. What emerges is a hybrid “composer- producer” identity and a studio’s function in the artistic process. This growth is the rise of an independent and transient practice in soundscape production among multidisciplinary composers and musicians. This article advocates for an updated notion of soundscape composition that integrates fi eld recordings, studio production, and collaboration from musicians representing a broad range of stylistic infl uences. Positioning the studio as a site of cultural production and creativity has implications for how soundscape production is taught to young composers. The author argues for a more inclusive, process-oriented view on both creativity and the places where musicians, composers, and producers work. The article includes a case study from the author’s recent album project, narrative analysis, concluding with a discussion on the pedagogical implications of independent soundscape production in education.

scholarly journals From Pacific Scoop to Asia Pacific Report: A case study in an independent campus-industry media partnership

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
David Robie
Keyword(s):  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Asia Pacific Region ◽  
Investigative Journalism ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Civic Journalism ◽  
Innovative Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current Affairs

Media convergence within the news and current affairs landscape over the past two decades has opened opportunities for competing newspapers, television stations and online publishers to form alliances to approach digital and editorial challenges with innovative strategies. The partnerships have often enabled journalists to embrace multimedia platforms with flexibility and initiative. This has fostered a trend in ‘gatewatching’ and a citizen responsive and involved grassroots media rather than legacy mainstream gatekeeping, top-down models. Such committed media attempts in search of investigative journalism accompanied by ‘public’ and ‘civic’ journalism engagement initiatives have also been emulated by some journalism schools in the Asia-Pacific region. This has paralleled the evolution of journalism as a research methodology with academic application over the past decade. Selecting two New Zealand-based complementary and pioneering Pacific digital news and analysis publications, Pacific Scoop (founded 2009) and Asia-Pacific Report (2016), produced by a journalism school programme in partnership with established independent media as a combined case study, this article will demonstrate how academia-based gatewatching media can effectively challenge mainstream gatekeeping media. Pacific Scoop was established by an Auckland university in partnership with New Zealand’s largest independent publisher, Scoop Media Limited, and launched at the Māori Expo in 2009. The article also explores the transition of Pacific Scoop into Asia-Pacific Report, launched in partnership with an innovative web-based partner, Evening Report. The study analyses the strategic and innovation efforts in the context of continuing disruptions to New Zealand’s legacy media practices related to the Asia-Pacific region.

Media and popular modernism around the Pacific War: An inter-Asian story

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meaghan Morris
Keyword(s):  
Smart Phone ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
Cultural Affinity ◽  
Ways Of Life

Across much of the Asia-Pacific today, the smart phone, the tablet and the laptop or home personal computer are vying with the humble TV set not only to promote new models of lifestyle and to distribute communal and national stories but also to circulate other people’s stories and ways of life, complicating notions of heritage and cultural affinity. The proliferation of media technologies and their rapid spread across populations hitherto remote from or hostile to each other has transformed the conditions for the practice as well as the study of memory in this region as elsewhere. Yet, there are precedents for these developments; ‘new waves’ of media culture responded to technological change, colonial conflict, war, revolution and the growing influence of Hollywood across the Asia-Pacific region after the Pacific War. In Australia, one such ‘wave’ was a boom in travel writing from the 1930s to the 1950s, and another was the ‘new Australian cinema’ of the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on work in progress about Ernestine Hill, a mid-twentieth-century writer preoccupied with technology, this article suggests that asking how ‘old’ media have circulated ‘new’ memories of community in the past also opens up a way of situating old Australian national stories in a regional frame today.

scholarly journals ‘Comfort women must fall’? Japanese governmental responses to ‘comfort women’ statues around the world

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1255-1271
Author(s):  
Rin Ushiyama
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Japanese Colonialism ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
The World

This article examines Japanese governmental responses to memorial statues dedicated to ‘comfort women’ – women across the Asia-Pacific whom the Japanese military forced into conditions now recognised as sexual slavery before and during World War Two. This article discusses four cases around the world in which Japanese government officials have demanded the removal of comfort women statues: 1) Glendale, California; 2) San Francisco; 3) Manila; and 4) Berlin. The global expansion of comfort women memorialisation is significant to contemporary statue politics and crises of memory in three ways. Firstly, East Asian diasporas have become important actors in the remembrance of Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War outside East Asia. Secondly, these statues constitute attempts by diasporas to recover and reclaim a traumatic past through material culture. Thirdly, despite the global geographical reach of comfort women memory activism, neither nationalism nor the power of the nation-state have declined in today’s transnational world.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document