̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - empire

Modern art’s missing chapter

sjr81 — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 01:01:34 +0000

After being awarded £100,000 by the Art Fund to build a collection of work from Australia, South Africa and Canada, the museum officially opened ̽��ֱ��Power of Paper yesterday. ̽��ֱ��exhibition focuses on artworks made in those countries during an epoch of decolonisation.

It exhibits for the first time in the UK some of the earliest prints made by Aboriginal, Inuit and black South African artists – a rich variety of indigenous art from the 1950s onwards as the end of empire informed works reflecting attachments to land and belief, as well as struggles with violence, dislocation and contemporary city life.

"This show is a revelation," said Nicholas Thomas, Director of MAA and the exhibition's curator. "It presents visions of place and history that are rarely given the attention their eloquence and power deserve, even in today's supposedly global and inclusive art world.

“I'm taken aback by the sheer artistic accomplishment of all the works included, but also love the quirkiness of the artists' take on everything from empire, to township life, to climate change. Why should a military helicopter be hoisting an oversized caribou, walrus and polar bear through the air? You need to come to the show to find out."

Modern art was more than just a project of great Europeans. From the late 1950s onward, as the end of empire gathered momentum, artists in native and local communities began to produce work in modern media in both remote community workshops and city studios; wryly expressing everyday life in townships or settlements, and often illuminating both personal and collective concerns in artworks that could be evocative, oblique or polemical.

Responding to the very limited representation of modern indigenous art movements in British collections, in 2011 the Art Fund awarded the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge £100,000 to build a collection of work on paper from Australia, Canada and South Africa.

For more than two years, working with a network of artists, workshops and specialist curators, Thomas embarked on what he described as a ‘dream shopping trip’, building a unique collection of around 300 works. While some of the artists are internationally famous, only a few of the works have been on display in Europe.

Art on display in Britain for the first time includes the very first prints produced at the famous Rorke’s Drift print workshop, which played a major role in the development of black art during apartheid.

South African artist Frank Ledimo, whose work King Ubu Encounter (2002) is featured in the exhibition, said: “I create work that is based on the urban landscape in which I live. I have been fascinated by the representation of the figure to relay messages of urban squalor, city life, survivors and victims of urbanisation.”

Added Thomas: “ ̽��ֱ��Power of Paper gives voice to great but marginalized artists, whose words caption their own work. ̽��ֱ��exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom.”

̽��ֱ��Power of Paper runs at MAA until December 6, 2015. ̽��ֱ��exhibition will also feature a working press with opportunities to participate in practical workshops as visitors explore the medium of printmaking as a form of expression.

̽��ֱ��artworks of black and indigenous peoples – a missing chapter in the history of modern art – is brought into sharp focus in a ‘revelatory’ exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

̽��ֱ��exhibition's most vital message is that art has offered a route to freedom

Nicholas Thomas

Joseph Pootoogook

Joyfully I Saw Ten Caribou

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Out of the ashes of Empire

admin — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:27:36 +0000

Barack Obama’s resolution to kick off foreign policy for his second term with a tour of the Asia-Pacific region, at the end of 2012, was testimony not only to that area’s growing economic importance, but also to the increasing significance of its politics. East Asia, Southeast Asia and the disputed China Seas now comprise the theatre in which the world’s two superpowers meet. In the eyes of many, it is there that key decisions about supremacy, ideology – perhaps world politics as a whole – will, in future years, be made.

In the West, China’s rise is the subject of constant media analysis and it has almost become de rigueur to ask ourselves how well we really understand this new giant of the world stage. But as America begins to ‘pivot’ eastwards, by striking deals with China’s neighbours, perhaps it is as important to question how much we understand East Asia as a whole. Do we really know what drives the world view of South Korea, or Taiwan, for example? And given the growing importance of that theatre, how effective is our grasp of how these countries view one another?

Historically, the emergence (and re-emergence) of these nations after World War II is a surprisingly neglected topic. Many people are only vaguely aware that, until 1945, many parts of China, along with Taiwan, the Koreas and sections of Indochina, were at various times part of an expanding Japanese Empire that began in 1895. At its height, in 1942, this territory spanned 2.8 million square miles. Yet when two atomic bombs effectively ended the war in August 1945, the entire Empire disappeared, almost overnight.

In the wake of this collapse, new political entities appeared, but it was not always clear what the extent of their power was, or who managed which territory. “Before the Japanese Empire, nation states had not existed in East Asia the same way they had in Europe,” said Dr Barak Kushner, an historian based at the Department of East Asian Studies. ̽��ֱ��next decades would see millions of lives lost as competing forces sought to stamp their authority on parts of Japan’s former Imperial domain, with bitter conflicts in China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and spilling into Indochina, which later developed into the longer Vietnam War.

Post-war East Asian identities formed, then, not in the context of China’s rise, but Japan’s retreat. Historians, meanwhile, have tended to investigate this story from America’s viewpoint, not least because they lacked access to many first-hand sources that could tell the tale from an Asian perspective. Now that is beginning to change. Recent years have witnessed the declassification of numerous government and private archives. Even China recently opened up many of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs records up to 1965. For researchers, this is a golden opportunity to examine and understand what motivated and inspired the emergent powers of East Asia as they came into being.

Kushner is the Principal Investigator for a major new project which, over five years, will attempt to research that issue. Funded by the European Research Council, its title is ‘ ̽��ֱ��Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965’. Its main focus, however, will be the war crimes trials that took place in East Asia after the war, as the new administrations attempted to bring Japanese war criminals, and those people who were believed to have supported the Japanese regime, to justice.

̽��ֱ��records of those trials offer a perhaps unrivalled view of how political and legal authority was brokered. As these countries stepped out of the Imperial shadow, the trials became statements of whom they believed themselves to be as Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese citizens, rather than subordinates of Japan.

This was not simply a matter of enfranchising former Imperial subjects, however. Ethnicity, let alone loyalty, in East Asia was exceptionally blurred. Millions of Japan’s own people remained in both Asia and the western Pacific. Their own stricken government did not want them back and many wanted to stay. In some countries, like China, where Chiang Kai-shek actively courted the Japanese to help him in the civil war, their expertise was still much in demand. Elsewhere, people who had for decades lived as Imperial subjects were, in the space of a few weeks, expected to abandon that way of life and all its symbols for something more ‘indigenous’. Many, not surprisingly, struggled to understand what that meant. Identity was flexible to say the least.

Against that backdrop, the trials began. “ ̽��ֱ��business of identifying who was in power and how a break with the past was to be achieved all came out in the trials,” Kushner said. “They were platforms from which the new authorities could make a statement about their emergent identities. That was not an issue that the Americans, conducting trials in Japan itself, had to worry about; for them identity was a moot point.”

For this reason, the project will not look at the US-backed ‘Tokyo Trial’ that arraigned the ‘Class A’ war criminals who had prosecuted Japan’s war. Instead, it will focus on 5,700 class B/C criminals who were tried around East Asia. These were people who had allegedly committed crimes on the ground – rape, murder, illegal incarceration, the abuse of POWs, or general ‘crimes against humanity’. Tens of thousands more were tried for treason and collaboration. In both cases, the penalty, if found guilty, was often death.

̽��ֱ��process varied across the region. In China, 30,000 people were charged from 1945–1947 and 15,000 convicted for treason alone. Such was the zeal of the Kuomintang that in the end evidence collection was capped because the courts could not cope, and the government was more concerned about the civil war with the Communists.

In Korea, by contrast, tensions along the 38th parallel induced the southern administration to ignore collaborators altogether, and set about trying Communists from the start. In Taiwan, even identifying collaborators was coloured by the trials’ function as a stage for the Chinese Nationalists as they sought legitimacy.

Kushner believes that as this process went on, over almost 20 years, 1945 became less significant as a marker for the war’s end and the dawn of a new age. As well as the trials themselves, media coverage, films, literature, monuments and memorials reinforced specific views of what had happened under the Japanese as these cultural responses emerged from the judicial process. And in Japan itself, many people adopted the stance of part-chastened aggressors and part-victims of deeply partial tribunals, in what Kushner calls a “discordant swirl of public opinion.” Little wonder that he anticipates the project will lead not only to a powerful retelling of this chapter in East Asian history, but “policy-relevant findings regarding Asian regionalism” as well.

One reason that ideology and identity during this period remain understudied is that many historians have, understandably, focused on the details of war crimes themselves rather than on the subsequent trials. Accounts of the latter have also tended to dwell on specific and personal aspects of the process, such as individual memoirs, or localised grudge-matches that played out during the hearings. Kushner hopes to move beyond this, arguing that while personal recollections are important in the historical record, the legal process was an expression of broader, large-scale ambitions that offer a genuinely transnational perspective on East Asia after the war. “ ̽��ֱ��war crimes trials are the point at which the precedents for public attitudes thereafter are set up,” he added. “They provide a written record on which a number of post-war policies about authority would be based. ̽��ֱ��time is now ripe to investigate them, and start a new historical assessment from the inside.”

̽��ֱ��new identities and ideologies that emerged in East Asia after the fall of Japan’s Empire have rarely been studied. Now, as the region again becomes a major theatre in world politics, a new project aims to tell that history from the inside.

̽��ֱ��time is now ripe to start a new historical assessment from the inside

Barak Kushner

Center for Research Libraries in Chicago

Cartoon produced as state propaganda in China during the 1950s

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Kaiser, Reich and the making of modern Germany

bjb42 — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:19 +0000

An epic new history of the final 300 years of Germany's first Reich reveals how the period gave birth to modern German identity and principles that still underpin its attempts to lead Europe today.

A decade in the making, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (1493-1806), by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge historian Dr Joachim Whaley, is the most comprehensive survey of Germany's early modern history ever undertaken, the first book of its kind since the 1950s, and one of the most substantial works of historical scholarship published in the UK this year.

̽��ֱ��two-volume study tells the story of more than 300 principalities and about 1,500 other minor territories. Together, these made up the later Holy Roman Empire, which covered much of northern and central Europe and constituted Germany's original Reich.

Whaley believes that their story challenges much of what we think we know about Germany and its people today. With Europe in crisis and many nations looking to Germany for leadership, he argues that the period reveals a deeper history of political co-operation and consensus, which is usually overlooked because of Germany's recent, often darker past. Today, the very word "Reich", which has associations with the disastrous Third Reich, has become taboo. ̽��ֱ��first Reich was very different.

Historians themselves have also neglected the last three centuries of the Holy Roman Empire. Typically, the period has been portrayed as one of decline, in which the Empire fragmented into warring territories, was split by the Catholic-Protestant divide of the Reformation, was ravaged by the Thirty Years War, and eventually became meaningless. Even some well-respected histories of Germany give its final decades only a handful of pages.

After 10 years researching and writing the book, Whaley argues that it is time to look again. Rather than a weak, dysfunctional precursor of the strong Germany that emerged in the 19th century, the new study suggests that the latter-day Holy Roman Empire was a successful political entity in itself.

What we struggle with, he adds, is that its model was very different to our own idea of what a "state" should be. In an era before nations, the Empire was a "federative state" - made up of territories with interlocking identities. People saw themselves as both local and German, but there was no Imperial capital and ‘Germany’ comprised territories that today are part of France, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria, as well as the Federal Republic of Germany. While this political system may sound alien now, the book argues that by and large, it worked.

" ̽��ֱ��history of German-speaking Europe in this period has been seen as the history of localities and territories, but it is also the history of the union of those entities and their survival," Whaley said. "Usually historians see this time as one of division in which the Empire failed to function as a nation state. What we forget is that for 300 years, it also held the German-speaking territories together as a legal and cultural community, in spite of numerous changes and external threats."

This community, the study suggests, laid much of the groundwork for German identity today. It began in the 1490s, when the Emperor Maximilian I and the German princes and cities carved out a two-tier system of government based on the concept of Kaiser und Reich. At one level, the Emperor provided governance in negotiation with the princes through the diet, the Reichstag. At the same time, however, all of the territories essentially governed themselves.

Although subject to their immediate ruler, people were also vassals of the Emperor and could appeal to the laws of the Reich as a greater authority. While this led to some periods of instability and even war, Whaley argues that overall, it created a political climate of negotiation, consensus and co-operation, and the recognition that each sub-region of the Empire had certain freedoms.

̽��ֱ��result was a 300-year period of evolution. Maximilian's changes were just the first of different phases of reform which usually emerged because of religious differences, economic problems, social unrest, or wars. Each time, the two-tier system adapted to accommodate the hundreds of territories it contained.

̽��ֱ��Holy Roman Empire never experienced a direct equivalent of the English Civil War or the French Revolution, but the Thirty Years War was perhaps an equivalent. At one level, this was a European war fought largely on German soil. At another level, it was a conflict over the German constitution and another, albeit traumatic evolutionary phase: Ferdinand II aimed to subvert the constitution and establish a strong monarchy; the German princes ultimately succeeded in having the old balance of powers restored. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia refined and renewed the principles established by Maximilian and the German princes around 1500 and this treaty remained the fundamental constitutional law of the Reich for the next 150 years.

̽��ֱ��study argues that this gave early-modern Germany a progressive system of governance. In spite of its highly fragmented state, there was a consistency about the way the different territories dealt with issues like judicial reform, welfare or education. As a result, the community constantly evolved a picture of itself as German: "There was a clear sense of the difference between the extensive rights and liberties they enjoyed as subjects of the Empire compared with, say, the subjects of the king of France," Whaley says.

In times of war, the Emperor was still therefore able to raise an army that had the patriotic fervour needed to defend the Empire's borders. Critically, however, German identity became associated with the principles of the federative state - the protection and preservation of local rights, and unity in diversity. It failed only when it came under overwhelming military pressure from France after 1792 and was dissolved at Napoleon’s insistence in 1806.

Whaley's analysis stops short of claiming that the later Holy Roman Empire was the forerunner of a modern federal Europe. He does, however, suggest that it helps to explain how Germany perceives Europe, and why Germans find the notion of a united Europe more palatable than, for example, the British.

"There is a history here of co-operation, consensus and compromise in German politics which is rarely acknowledged," he says. "For Germans, there is a federal mentality and habit that is deeply ingrained. This expects to deal with things by compromise and works slowly to broker deals and find ways to move forwards. Understanding the history of the Reich cannot help us to construct a blueprint for the future of Europe, but it can help us understand how Germany and Europe have become what they are today."

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (1493-1806) is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Europe is in crisis and its future is said to depend on Germany. ̽��ֱ��most comprehensive study of Germany's early modern history ever undertaken, published this week, questions just how much we know about its past - and how much we understand it as a result.

Understanding the history of the Reich cannot help us to construct a blueprint for Europe's future, but it can help us understand how Germany and Europe have become what they are today.

Joachim Whaley

Jo Whaley

Detail of a map of the Holy Roman Empire, 1492 - 1618.

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̽��ֱ��Athenians: Another warning from history?

bjb42 — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In a new history of the 4th century BC, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Classicist Dr. Michael Scott reveals how the implosion of Ancient Athens occurred amid a crippling economic downturn, while politicians committed financial misdemeanours, sent its army to fight unpopular foreign wars and struggled to cope with a surge in immigration.

̽��ֱ��book, entitled From Democrats To Kings, aims to overhaul Athens' traditional image as the ancient world's "golden city", arguing that its early successes have obscured a darker history of blood-lust and mob rule.

Other reputations are also taken to task: ̽��ֱ��"heroic" Spartans of Thermopylae, immortalised in the film 300, are unmasked as warmongering bullies of the ancient world. Alexander the Great, for all his achievements, is described as a "mummy's boy" whose success rested in many ways on the more pragmatic foundations laid by his father, Philip II.

Perhaps more significantly, however, the study suggests that the collapse of Greek democracy and of Athens in particular offer a stark warning from history which is often overlooked.

It argues that it was not the loss of its empire and defeat in war against Sparta at the end of the 5th century that heralded the death knell of Athenian democracy - as it is traditionally perceived. Athens' democracy in fact recovered from these injuries within years. Instead, Dr. Scott argues that the strains and stresses of the 4th century BC, which our own times seem to echo, proved too much for the Athenian democratic system and ultimately caused it to destroy itself.

"If history can provide a map of where we have been, a mirror to where we are right now and perhaps even a guide to what we should do next, the story of this period is perfectly suited to do that in our times," Dr. Scott said.

"It shows how an earlier generation of people responded to similar challenges and which strategies succeeded. It is a period of history that we would do well to think about a little more right now - and we ignore it at our peril."

Although the 4th century was one of critical transition, the era has been overlooked by many ancient historians in favour of those which bookend it - the glory days of Athenian democracy in the 5th century and the supremacy of Alexander the Great from 336 to 323 BC.

This, the study says, has led to a two-dimensional view of the intervening decades as a period of unimportant decline. Instead, Dr. Scott argues that this period is fundamental to understanding what really happened to Athenian democracy.

Athens was already a waning star on the international stage resting on past imperial glories, and the book argues that it struggled to keep pace with a world in a state of fast-paced globalisation and political transition.

In an effort to remain a major player in world affairs, it abandoned its ideology and values to ditch past allies while maintaining special relationships with emerging powers like Macedonia and supporting old enemies like the Persian King. This "slippery-fish diplomacy" helped it survive military defeats and widespread political turbulence, but at the expense of its political system. At the start of the century Athens, contrary to traditional reports, was a flourishing democracy. By the end, it was hailing its latest ruler, Demetrius, as both a king and a living God.

Dr. Scott argues that this was caused by a range of circumstances which in many cases were the ancient world's equivalent of those faced by Britain today. Athens, for example, committed itself to unpopular wars which ultimately brought it into direct conflict with the vastly more powerful Macedonia. Its economy, heavily dependent on trade and resources from overseas, crashed when in the 4th century instability in the region began to affect the arterial routes through which those supplies flowed.

̽��ֱ��result was a series of domestic problems, including an inability to fund the traditional police force. In an effort to cope, Athens began to create a system of self-regulation, described as a "giant Neighbourhood Watch", asking citizens not to trouble its overstretched bureaucracy with non-urgent, petty crimes.

Ultimately, the city was to respond positively to some of these challenges. Many of its economic problems were gradually solved by attracting wealthy immigrants to Athens - which as a name still carried considerable prestige.

Democracy itself, however, buckled under the strain. Persuasive speakers who seemed to offer solutions - such as Demosthenes - came to the fore but ultimately took it closer to military defeat and submission to Macedonia. Critically, the emphasis on "people power" saw a revolving door of political leaders impeached, exiled and even executed as the inconstant international climate forced a tetchy political assembly into multiple changes in policy direction.

̽��ֱ��name of "democracy" became an excuse to turn on anyone regarded as an enemy of the state, even good politicians who have, as a result, almost been forgotten. Dr Scott's study also marks an attempt to recognise figures such as Isocrates and Phocion - sage political advisers who tried to steer it away from crippling confrontations with other Greek states and Macedonia.

"In many ways this was a period of total uncertainty just like our own time," Dr. Scott added. "There are grounds to consider whether we want to go down the same route that Athens did. It survived the period through slippery-fish diplomacy, at the cost of a clear democratic conscience, a policy which, in the end, led it to accept a dictator King and make him a God."

From Democrats To Kings is published by Icon Books.

̽��ֱ��collapse of Greek democracy 2,400 years ago occurred in circumstances so similar to our own it could be read as a dark and often ignored lesson from the past, a new study suggests.

It shows how an earlier generation of people responded to similar challenges and which strategies succeeded.

Dr. Michael Scott

eguidetravel from Flickr

Athens acropolis

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