Cultural Policy In The Sudan

"It is now widely acknowledged that the issue of Sudan's cultural and political identity is one of the root causes of the Sudanese crisis that has crippled the country since its independence in 1956 and plunged it into a civil war regarded as the longest in Africa. Nevertheless, this issue continues to be a grossly neglected topic in scholarship concerning Sudan. On the other hand, the politics of intellectual and artistic production have been inseparable from the pivotal issue of identity ever since the advent of Sudanese nationalism in the 1920s. But there has yet been no publication dedicated to the topic of identity as one of the major concerns in modern Sudanese artistic production. This study thus undertakes a critical examination of key discourses concerning the cultural basis of modern Sudanese literature, visual art, music, and dance, and it attempts to highlight their underlying political and ideological orientations. The terms Arabism, Afro-Arabism, Africanism, Islamism, and Sudanism have developed within these discourses as defining concepts describing the country's ethnic and cultural origins, thereby serving as identity constructs. The study also examines the relation between the political and the artistic institutions as well as the policy of the ""Islamization of the Arts"" launched by the present Islamist regime and its outcome. The study may also be viewed as an endeavor to ""discover"" within the aesthetic field the missing ""Sudanese"" collective memory. Stated otherwise, this is an effort to redeem the lost ""Sudanese"" pedigree that has long been deliberately mystified, misconceived, and misconstrued for the for the sake of certain political and cultural strategies. Another aim of the study is to introduce Sudanese arts and the specific Sudanese aesthetic/political debate concerning the topics of culture and identity to both the general reader and specialists as well as to Africanists in general and scholars of African arts and literature in particular."

Little known in the United States and Western Europe, the Sudan is nevertheless a country of major importance in international affairs. This analytic introduction to the modern Sudan, first published in 1985, provides a summary of the basic dynamics of the country’s political, social, cultural, and economic life, as well as a general framework for interpreting the modern Sudanese experience. The authors present a clear picture of the Sudan as a distinctive entity with an identity all its own, revealing, however, that almost paradoxically one of the most significant aspects of that identity is the place of the Sudan as a special link between different cultural patterns and socio-political styles. The Sudan is both a bridge and a melting pot, and this provides the foundation of its unique character.

Sudanese Intellectuals in the Global Milieu: Capturing Cultural Capital propels Sudanese intellectuals into the global intellectual milieu and argues for their place in world intellectual history. The contributors posit that Sudan is currently in its most uncertain and perhaps most generative period, as the unrest, conflicts, and upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries threw Sudanese intellectuals and activists into identity, economic, environmental, religious, and existential crises. Despite these crises, the unrest has created a period of knowledge production and cultural production in Sudan. The contributors to the collection are Sudanese intellectuals who explore the history and evolution of knowledge production, thought, and cultural capital in Sudan.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: 90, Ben Gurion University, course: European Colonialism in the Middle East, language: English, abstract: In 1900 Bernard Shaw completed the difficult task of drafting the Fabian's society position in the manifest Fabianism and the Empire. The society's progressive program advocated for socialist values, social justice and women rights. Against the background of these modern and leftist values though, the society's position on imperialism is somehow astonishing. One of the motives for its supportive stand on imperialism lies in the yet valid division they made between domestic and international politics. Edward Pease's The History of the Fabian society addresses the international system, for example under terms of efficiency and colonialism. According to him "the only valid moral right to national ... possession is that the occupier is making adequate use of it for the benefit of the world community." From the "International Socialist point of view" national sovereignty and noninterference are not acceptable and the world must strive for an "international civilization" according to socialist merits. Pease as well as Bernard Shaw in Fabianism and the Empire accept colonialism as a fact and furthermore they illustrate the Great Powers' advance as colonizers "only [as] a question of time." Their exclusive focus was the benefit of the British Empire without a minimal consideration of the dignity or the right to self-determination of the people the British were occupying and exploiting. "As for parliamentary institutions for native races, that dream has been disposed of ... [t]hey are as useless to them as a dynamo to a Caribbean." Following this theoretical background, the ensuing paper will focus on the British colonial policy in Sudan. Edward Shaw points out two possible "imperial policies" of which the second is "a bureaucratic policy

UNESCO pub. Study of the methods of cultural policy in Senegal - describes the institutional framework, investment policy and relevant educational reforms designed for the promotion and dissemination of culture and the protection of cultural property, and covers intellectual and artistic spheres, science, technology and education, etc.