Spectacular Modernity

In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumerculture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

Contributors to this volume explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional "us." They describe the multifaceted ways "tradition" is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditized goods and services first appeared in the colonial period in such spectacular and spectacularly foreign forms as department stores, restaurants, exhibitions, and staged performances. Today, these same forms have become the media through which many Koreans consume "tradition" in multiple forms. In the colonial period, commercial representations of Korea—tourist sites, postcard images, souvenir miniatures, and staged performances—were produced primarily for foreign consumption, often by non-Koreans. In late modernity, efficiencies of production, communication, and transportation combine with material wealth and new patterns of leisure activity and tourism to enable the localized consumption of Korean tradition in theme parks, at sites of alternative tourism, at cultural festivals and performances, as handicrafts, art, and cuisine, and in coffee table books, broadcast music, and works of popular folklore. Consuming Korean Tradition offers a unique insight into how and why different signifiers of "Korea" have come to be valued as tradition in the present tense, the distinctive histories and contemporary anxieties that undergird this process, and how Koreans today experience their sense of a common Korean past. It offers new insights into issues of national identity, heritage preservation, tourism, performance, the commodification of contemporary life, and the nature of "tradition" and "modernity" more generally. Consuming Korean Tradition will prove invaluable to Koreanists and those interested in various aspects of contemporary Korean society, including anthropology, film/cultural studies, and contemporary history. Contributors: Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Kyung-Koo Han, Keith Howard, Hyung Il Pai, Laurel Kendall, Okpyo Moon, Robert Oppenheim, Timothy R. Tangherlini, Judy Van Zile.

This book explores how the experience of modernization is revealed in China's newly constructed tourist landscapes. It argues that in China's burgeoning ethnic tourist villages and theme parks can be seen all the contradictions, debasement, and liberating potentials of Chinese modernity. Tim Oakes uses the province of Guizhou to examine the Chinese tourist industry as an example of the state's modernization policies and how local people have engaged with these changes.

Only virtuous humans are supposed to move in time to meet their happy destiny or karma. The tale of Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire is such a case of serendipitous mobility towards riches and love – a ‘journey’ in which good heroes and urban communities respecting solidarity are successfully modernised. Unsurprisingly, the film became tangled in many controversies around India’s destiny in the world: the film inserted Mumbai into various financial, political and artistic scenes, increased tourism in its filmed slums, and brought about charity projects in which celebrities and tourist businesses were involved. Slumdog Millionaire served as a global example of a ‘developing country’s’ uneven but unique modernisation. This book examines such mobilities of ideas, art, tourism and activism together. In doing so, it reveals the significance of Mumbai as a post-colonial city in discussions of modernity – a form of mobile adaptation to new world realities. Tzanelli examines the various agents involved in controversies through multiple virtual and real journeys to India’s colonial history and present social complexity, with a view to actualise a post-colonial future, a ‘destiny’ as the country’s serendipitous destination. Addressed to interdisciplinary audiences, the book will be a useful text for students and scholars of globalisation, mobility, tourism, media and social movement theory.

This book offers critical engagements with four objects from the nineteenth century: The ruins of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and the dinosaurs that remain, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and the short novel by H.G. Wells – The Time Machine. These provide very different forms of encounter, but are bound by the shadow of the Great Exhibition of 1851.This immense spectacle helped forge our understanding of display, surveillance and commodity. This legacy can be detected in the development of the modern museum and gallery as well as the shaping of spaces and structures of trade, commerce and political display, denying any possibility of conceptually separating these sites. Linked by a cumulative narrative that binds the mid nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, these four objects are identified as formative traces of the past within the present. They provide models for critical thought and suggest answers to the problematic conditions that they present as ideologically specific relics from a previous age. ,

This book maps out the temporal and geographic coordinates of the trope of sensationalism in the long nineteenth century through a comparative approach. Not only juxtaposing different geographical areas (Europe, Asia and Oceania), this volume also disperses its history over a longue durée, allowing readers to perceive the hidden and often unacknowledged continuities throughout a period that is often reduced to the confines of the national disciplines of literature, art, and cultural studies. Providing a wide range of methodological approaches from the fields of literary studies, art history, sociology of literature, and visual culture, this collection offers indispensable examples of the relation between literature and several other media. Topics include the rhetorical tropes of popular culture, the material culture of clothing, the lived experience of performance as a sub-text of literature and painting, and the redefinition of spatiality and temporality in theory, art, and literature.