Archive for January 2015

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[ecrea] History Culture Modernity: New issues online!

Thu Jan 15 09:30:54 GMT 2015



The open-access International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity (HCM) has recently published two new issues. They can be found online by following this link: http://www.history-culture-modernity.org.

A themed issue on Socialist Culture and Modernity offers a selection of papers read at the conference "Modernity, Socialism, and the Visual Arts" held in Germany and Poland in October 2013. Historians, art historians, architectural historians, cultural anthropologists and visual artists discussed the various ways in which socialist cultural history has been presented over the past decades.

* In “Makeshift Modernity”, Susan E. Reid draws on oral history and material culture to apply the concept of modernity to Soviet housing projects. She shows that the inhabitants actively shaped their environments in accordance with their own views, translating the ideological rhetoric of socialist modernity into personal vernacular. Reid argues that these appropriations cannot be understood in terms of modernity or anti-modernity, but that they were fundamental signs of agency. * Vladimir Kuliç analyses how the key symbolic spaces of New Belgrade were shaped by three globalisation projects and investigates how they participated in the shaping of socialist Yugoslavia’s global imaginaries in "New Belgrade and Socialist Yugoslavia's Three Globalisations". * Christina Schwenkel discusses an architectural project in Vinh City, Vietnam in "Traveling Architecture: East German Urban Designs in Vietnam”. East German architects and urban planners took up the reconstruction process in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam or “North Vietnam” after more than 5,000 American air strikes between 1964 and 1973. Schwenkel shows that this is not a simple case of socialist modern architecture being imposed on a socialist Third World Country. * April A. Eisman looks at the impact of East Germany’s gender policies on women painters across four decades. In "From Economic Equality to “Mommy Politics”" she argues that thesepolicies, despite not having achieved the stated goal of true equality, had a positive impact on women artists, and especially painters.


The themed issue on Chinese Modernity sheds light on the historiography of modernity in China. The articles discuss three different periods and three different experiences: Republican China, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Guest editor Gotelind Müller-Saini provides an introduction to the main topics of this issue on history, culture and modernity in China.

* Tze-ki Hon examines the notion of “alternative modernity” that was prominent during Republican China in "The Chinese Path to Modernisation". He discusses the two main areas of contention between the May Fourth intellectuals and their critics: scientism and populism. By comparing the writings of Liang Shuming (1893-1988), Wu Mei (1894-1978), Liu Yizheng (1880-1956), and Chen Yinke (1890-1969), he focuses on their use of “culture” (wenhua) and “morality” (daode) to chart a Chinese path to modernisation. * In "Island of Memories", Lung-chih Chang discusses the “memory boom” in post-martial law Taiwan and examines its implications in our understanding of history, culture, and modernity intheir East Asian context. He discusses the emergence of new academic and public discourses, four major examples of postcolonial historiography and public discourse, and the features of Taiwan’s postcolonial historiography in terms of history and memory. * Stefan R. Landsberger investigates the radical turn in the People's Republic of China from revolution to economic development in "Dreaming the Chinese Dream". How did this path to modernisation affect China’s political, social and artistic cultures? Is China’s present Dream structurally different from the one cherished in 1949? * Thoralf Klein looks at the recent history of China, arguing that although there exists a line between what is modern and what is not (between modernity and its Others), this often appears fuzzy when we look at concrete historical manifestations. His essay "How Modern was Chinese Modernity?" shows that it is essential to incorporate the paradoxes inherent in the modern condition into an analytical framework.


We hope you will enjoy these issues. Please visit our website for more information and new articles. If you are interested in publishing in HCM or if you would like to receive further information, please feel free to contact us at our new email address: (hcm /at/ uu.nl) or join our LinkedIn group.

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