Aboriginal arts practices in the southeast of Australia have, since the early years of colonisation, been rarely considered within the realm of authentic Aboriginal arts practices. Such attitudes were a reflection of the colonial encounter and associated attempts to assimilate the Aboriginal population with the White. This thesis explores Aboriginal arts practices and asserts that there has always been Aboriginal art in the southeast and that, despite the overwhelming effects of colonisation, the work of Aboriginal artists provides a distinct and definite counter-history to that endorsed by the dominant culture. Using published historical and contemporary accounts and recent interviews from Aboriginal artists and arts workers, this thesis investigates the continuation of the knowledge and practice of southeast Australian Aboriginal art and its connection to culture, identity and wellbeing. It explores the corresponding adaptations and changes to these practices as Aboriginal people contended with the ever-expanding European occupation of the region from 1834 onwards. / This project adopted a collaborative research methodology, where members of the Aboriginal arts community were consulted throughout the project in order to develop a study which had meaning and value for them. The collaborative approach combined an analysis of historical data along with the stories collected from participants. By privileging the Aboriginal voice as legitimate primary source material, alternative ways of exploring the history of Aboriginal art were possible. Although the story of Aboriginal art in the southeast is also one of tensions and paradoxes, where changes in arts practices frequently positioned art, like the people themselves, outside the domain of the ‘real’, the findings of this project emphasise that arts practices assist people with connecting and in some cases reconnecting with their communities. Aboriginal art in the southeast is an assertion of identity and wellbeing and reflects the dynamic nature of Aboriginal culture in southeast Australia.

Thesis (doctoral) - Universität, Tübingen, 2000.

One medium has dominated accounts of American art in the years following the Second World War. The period witnessed, in the words of one critic, a 'Triumph of American Painting', with advances in the easel picture far surpassing those in other media. Whilst more recent accounts have nuanced this view, drawing attention to developments in music and sculpture, literary contributions to the new American modernism have gone almost without assessment. Were there advances in literature comparable to those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, David Smith and John Cage? Drawing extensively on his unpublished writings, After the New Failure of Nerve reveals the poet Charles Olson to have been the keenest literary advocate of the new American avant-garde and one of the most astute observers of its conditions and possibilities. Paying special attention to unpublished notes, lectures, and correspondence, the thesis utilises Olson's early writings in order to examine the momentum given early postwar modernism by a potent contemporary reaction against abstract rationality, a reaction identified at the time as a 'New Failure of Nerve'. Born of recent disillusionment with 'scientific' Marxism and New Deal progressivism, the thesis demonstrates the several ways in which this 'New Failure of Nerve' fuelled vanguard American art from the middle of the Second World War to the end of the decade. It argues that the new critique of abstract rationality - which was also reflected in the contemporary American work of the Frankfurt School - defined the way American artists understood the function of postwar modernism, the posture of the postwar modernist artist, and the status of the postwar modernist artwork. This pivotal moment in the history of modernism was shaped, I contend, by a philosophical critique explored most ambitiously by an American poet.

This thesis offers a new policy history of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency responsible for providing grants to artists and arts organisations in the United States. It focuses in particular on the development of conservative perspectives on federal arts funding from the 1950s to the 1980s, and hence, illuminates the broader evolution of conservative political power, especially its limits. The most familiar narrative holds that the Endowment found itself caught up in the Culture Wars of the late 1980s when Christian right groups objected to certain federal grants, particularly to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait with Whip. This thesis, however, uncovers the older origins of conservative opposition to state support for the arts, analyses conservative conceptions of art, and illuminates the limited federal role the right sought to secure in the arts in the post-war period. Numerous studies have analysed the meanings and origins of the Culture Wars, but until now, scholars had not examined conservative approaches to federal arts politics in a historical sense. Historians have generally been too interested in explaining change to the detriment of examining continuity, but this approach under-emphasises the long-term tensions that underlie seemingly sudden political eruptions. This work also offers a deep account of the conservative movement and the arts world, an area that has so far been almost completely ignored by scholars, even though a focus on marginalised players is essential to understanding the limits of conservatism. In a general sense then, this thesis evaluates the range and diversity of the conservative movement and illuminates the overall odyssey of the right in modern America. In so doing, it provides a new insight into the ways we periodise political history and also invites a broader view of how we understand politics itself.

To call something 'inverted' or 'topsy-turvy' in the sixteenth century is, above all, to label it as abnormal, unnatural and going against the natural order of things. The topos of the world upside-down brings to mind a world returned to its initial state of primeval chaos, in which everything is inside-out, topsy-turvy and out of bounds: fish live in trees, children rule over their parents, wives command their husband and rivers flow back to their source. This thesis undertakes a detailed account of the development of the topos of the world upside-down in sixteenth-century French literature and visual culture. By examining different uses of this topos - comic, moralising and polemical - it relates the transformations of the topos to religious, social and political conflicts of the period. To explain the shift of this topos from comic and moralising device to satirical and polemical tool, this thesis argues that troubled times produce troubled texts. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis, two kinds of evidence will be examined: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 present diachronic evidence of the 'polemicisation' of the topos of the world upside-down in literary genres of the period (adages, paradoxes and emblems) and within François Rabelais's body of work; Chapter 3 and 4 provide synchronic evidence of the polemical use of the topos of the world upside-down during the French religious wars in Huguenot and Catholic polemic and in depictions of socio-political turmoil. Charting the variety of uses of the topos of the world upside-down throughout the sixteenth century, this thesis connects the world upside-down and its historical context; and contributes to the scholarship on religious polemic.

In the interwar period, Prague became one of the important centers of immigration from the former Russian empire, mostly thanks to the receptive stance of the fledgling republic and its political representation. This dissertation, dedicated to the visual art scene of "Russian Prague", does not confine itself to only consider artists who found themselves in exile in Czechoslovakia. Rather, it focuses on the position of Prague within the larger network of contacts of the Russian diaspora as such, and surveys relations of the local exile community with other émigré centers, especially Paris. By engaging perspectives of institutional frameworks, acquisition practices and strategies, as well as their political motivations, this study takes the Russian art collection of the Karásek Gallery, state purchases of Russian art, the Archive and Collection of Slavonic Art at the Slavonic Institute, the Scythian group and the permanent art exhibition of the Russian Cultural-Historical Museum as symptomatic examples that reveal the shifting boundaries of the notion of "Russian art outside Russia." It also brings the artistic production of the interwar period into conversation with that of the art traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia. All the described phenomena are characterized by rich international contacts and a...

No description available.

The goal of this study is to generate a more holistic picture of the diffusion and assimilation of universal human rights norms in diverse cultural and political settings such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The overarching question to be investigated in this thesis is the relationship between the evolving international human rights regime and the emerging human rights normative and legal culture in the Middle East. This question will be investigated in detail with reference to regional human rights schemes such as the Arab Charter of Human Rights, as well as local human rights developments in three Middle Eastern states, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Having gauged the take-up of human rights norms on the ground at the local and regional levels, the thesis examines in full the extent of socialisation and internalisation of human rights norms across the Middle East region at large.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:31:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 HIS - Rodolfo J Hessel.pdf: 20828599 bytes, checksum: 6934781ae98f359a38beedd3868d1b01 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-11-10 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The dissertation has as main proposal, to analyze as the iconography monçoeira was adapted by a political elite and learned inhabitant from São Paulo, a project idealize begun with the objective of executing São Paulo as the largest responsible for the formation of the Brazilian nation, creating for that the idealize pioneer in the end of the century XIX and beginning of the XX. The Monções interfere in that project, because they appear as one of the ideological supports for it implementation, mainly, for being a fluvial road that it was derived of a road used by the pioneers in the century XVIII, until becoming a commercial route that linked Porto Feliz to the gold mines of Cuiabá in a long and difficult trip. The largest implementation of that whole construction iconographic was it then director of the Museum From São Paulo Afonso de Taunay, that was used of a great visual apparatus as pedagogic instrument before the population, his writing and his contusing rhetoric served as support in that process, it was during his administration that several pictures were ordered and formed a room dedicated to the Monções. The image, of this sorts things out, it comes as source of inclusion multidiscipline that dialogues, above all, with a produced textual narrative. This way, it intends to interpret and to analyze the use of the images of the Monções, for an elite from São Paulo, with the support of the public patronage for the construction of a speech nationalism and ideologic. The research emphasizes the importance of a historical moment and it relationship with the history from São Paulo and the national, identifying the point of prominence of that expansionist movement and its connection with an elitist process, that it aimed at to put São Paulo instead of prominence before the remaining of the country / A dissertação tem como proposta principal, analisar como a iconografia monçoeira foi apropriada por uma elite política e letrada paulista, um projeto idealizador encetado com o objetivo de efetivar São Paulo como o maior responsável pela formação da nação brasileira, criando para isso o ideário bandeirante no final do século XIX e início do XX. As Monções inserem-se nesse projeto, pois surgem como um dos suportes ideológicos para sua implementação, principalmente, por ser um caminho fluvial que derivou-se de um caminho utilizado pelos bandeirantes no século XVIII, até se tornar uma rota comercial que ligava Porto Feliz às minas de ouro de Cuiabá em uma longa e difícil viagem. O maior implementador de toda essa construção iconográfica foi o então diretor do Museu Paulista Afonso de Taunay, que utilizou-se de um grande aparato visual como instrumento pedagógico perante a população, sua escrita e sua retórica contundente serviram de apoio nesse processo, foi durante sua gestão que diversos quadros foram encomendados e formada uma sala dedicada às Monções. A imagem, desta maneira, se apresenta como fonte de abrangência multidisciplinar que dialoga, sobretudo, com uma narrativa textual produzida. Deste modo, pretende-se interpretar e analisar a utilização das imagens das Monções, por uma elite paulista, com o apoio do mecenato público para a construção de um discurso ufanista e ideológico. A pesquisa ressalta a importância de um momento histórico e sua relação com a história paulista e a nacional, identificando o papel de destaque desse movimento expansionista e sua ligação com um processo elitista, que objetivava colocar São Paulo em lugar de destaque perante o restante do país

This thesis explores the extent to which elite women of the eighteenth century commissioned architectural works and the extent to which the type and scale of their projects was dictated by their marital status. Traditionally, architectural historians have advocated that eighteenth-century architecture was purely the pursuit of men. Women, of course, were not absent during this period, but their involvement with architecture has been largely obscured and largely overlooked. This doctoral research has redressed this oversight through the scrutinising of known sources and the unearthing of new archival material. This thesis begins with an exploration of the legal and financial statuses of elite women, as encapsulated by the eighteenth-century marriage settlement. This encompasses brides’ portions or dowries, wives’ annuities or ‘pin-money’, widows’ dower or jointure, and provisions made for daughters and younger children. Following this, the thesis is divided into three main sections which each look at the ways in which women, depending upon their marital status, could engage in architecture. The first of these sections discusses unmarried women, where the patronage of the following patroness is examined: Anne Robinson; Lady Isabella Finch; Lady Elizabeth Hastings; Sophia Baddeley; George Anne Bellamy and Teresa Cornelys. The second section explores the patronage of married women, namely Jemima Yorke, Marchioness Grey; Amabel Hume-Campbell, Lady Polwarth; Mary Robinson, Baroness Grantham; Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough; Frances Boscawen; Elizabeth Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery; Henrietta Knight, Baroness Luxborough and Lady Sarah Bunbury. The third and final section discusses the architectural patronage of widowed women, including Susanna Montgomery, Countess of Eglinton; Georgianna Spencer, Countess Spencer; Elizabeth Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort; Elizabeth Home, Countess of Home; Elizabeth Montagu; Mary Hervey, Lady Hervey; Henrietta Fermor, Countess of Pomfret; the Hon. Charlotte Digby; the Hon. Charlotte Boyle Walsingham; the Hon. Agneta Yorke and Albinia Brodrick, Viscountess Midleton. Collectively, all three sections advocate that elite women were at the heart of the architectural patronage system and exerted more influence and agency over architecture than has previously been recognised by architectural historians.