Search results for "aesthetics"

When Ethics and Aesthetics Are One and the Same: A Wittgensteinian Perspective on Natural Value

2015

Many environmental philosophers have held naturalness to be a primary source of nature’s value. Seen this way, the nature that is most valuable is wild nature, and ‘wild’ is that which is unmodiled by human activity. However, accounts of our attributions of value to the wild often have an aura of elusiveness to them, as if what really matters about nature being wild could not ultimately be captured by words. In an attempt to account for what really matters, I relate our fascination with wild nature to a famous Wittgensteinian quote—‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one and the same’ (Tractatus 2006a: 28, §6.421)—and inspect the ways in which important dimensions of our attributions of value to wil…

Oppressive Faces of Whiteness in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress

2018

Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress contributes significantly to the literary debate on the definition of whiteness. The socio-historical construction of whiteness emerging from the novel is amplified by white imagery dovetailing with the claims made about white people directly. For the African American first person narrator, Easy Rawlins, living in post-World War II Los Angeles, whiteness mostly spells terror. The oppressive faces of whiteness consist in the following trajectories: property relations, economic exploitation, labour relations, the legal system, different miens of oppressive white masculinity denigrating blackness, spatial dynamics of post-World War II Los Angeles and the w…

Affects and emotions in cultural research : cornucopia or Pandora’s box?

2020

Glimmering utopias: 50 years of African film

2010

The history of African film began in the 1960s with the independence of the colonies. Despite all kinds of political and economic difficulties, numerous films have been made since then, featuring wide-ranging processes of consolidation, differentiation and transformation which were characteristic of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. However, these feature films should not merely be viewed as back references to specifically African problems. The glimmering fictions are imagination spaces. They preserve ideas about how the post-colonial circumstances should be approached. Seen from this perspective, the history of African film may be studied as a history of African utopias. Die Geschichte des…

Post memory and cinematic affect in The Midwife

2017

The Second World War has proved a rich source of inspiration for fiction films worldwide. The Finnish fiction film The Midwife (Kätilö, Antti J. Jokinen, 2015) is aimed at an international audience with a story that takes place in the context of the Lapland War in Finland in 1944. The film tells of a romantic relationship between a local woman and a member of the German army, in a highly affective manner. This article argues that the film downplays elements that might have interested the national, or local, audience, and that it privileges affect over knowledge. To bring out the film’s transnational character, the article begins by analysing it in the context of national, or local, and glob…

Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq

2021

The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, ra…

Maoism and Postmodernism

2015

In this essay I discuss the emergence of the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution in China and its appropriation in cultural revolutions in Europe and the United States to show how this image resonated with similar cults of popular icons in the West and lent itself to the formulation of theories and practices of postmodernism. The image quality of these cults facilitated the rise of the Mao-craze in the late 1980s and 1990s when political pop productions of Mao by Chinese artists emerged in New York and were then transplanted to China where they met with transfigurations of Mao’s legacy in the People’s Republic. The final stage of postmodern variations of Mao is reached with the presiden…

Coordinated Interpersonal Behaviour in Collective Dance Improvisation: The Aesthetics of Kinaesthetic Togetherness

2018

International audience; Collective dance improvisation (e.g., traditional and social dancing, contact improvisation) is a participatory, relational and embodied art form which eschews standard concepts in aesthetics. We present our ongoing research into the mechanisms underlying the lived experience of "togetherness" associated with such practices. Togetherness in collective dance improvisation is kinaesthetic (based on movement and its perception), and so can be simultaneously addressed from the perspective of the performers and the spectators, and be measured. We utilise these multiple levels of description: the first-person, phenomenological level of personal experiences, the third-perso…

PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY COMPONENTS OF A DANCE TEACHER

2018

The concept of professional identity is considered and topical from the perspective of different occupations. The professional identity of the dance teacher has so far not been researched scientifically and there are no studies about this concept. The article focuses on the term “teachers professional identity” and the formation process of the dance teacher’s professional identity model, as well as the explanation of components of this model from a dance teachers point of view. The aim of this article is to create a professional identity model of the dance teacher by analyzing scientific literature and using professional experience. The professional activity of the dance teacher directly af…

Bodily Flashes of Dancing Women: Dance as a Method of Inquiry

2003

In May 1997 I was in Nicaragua researching a dance ritual known as May Pole. The act of dancing itself became a method of inquiry in my research process. This article concentrates on the interaction of two dancing women, Evelyn and me. My dance experience has acquired different interpretations in relation to time and context as I have reflected on it. I also enrich this experience with other dance experiences to explore my dancing body in its different forms. This hermeneutical starting point creates the conditions for trusting my instrument, my body, as a source of bodily knowledge.