Transnational Study of Culture

In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art.

Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences.

An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

The concept of cultural hybridity seems ordinary now due to the daily usages of the term in a global context, but it covers a lengthy scholarly discourse. In the Winter Semester 2020/21, the discussion of Pnina Werbner's article on the dialectics of hybridity during a Research Area 6 meeting captivated the members' interest. What novel ideas does hybridity bring to different cultural environments, and how? Possible answers were that cultural shifts between the local and the global are involved, as well as encounters and reformulation of identities. The concept helps reflect on the interaction processes between identities and cultures by considering the emergence of new realities.

The interdisciplinary and international conference "Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity," from 23 to 25 June, aimed to shed light on the dynamics and social practices engaging hybridity as a tool of cultural analysis and formation. The experimental format of the laboratory conference aimed to inspire a reformulation of this concept and to bind everyday reality with academic knowledge during the keynote lecture, the two workshops, the eight panels, and the final laboratory debate.

L'auteur aborde la réception par des marocaines des images pornographiques venant de la France, à travers une analyse d'une soirée de femmes réunies autour d'une vidéo dans un quartier populaire d'une ville moyenne de Maroc. Comment est-ce qu'elles utilisent, reprennent, se réapproprient ces images?

The book ‘Madba’(मड़बा) written in three languages: English, Maithili, and Hindi is a collection of studies on various aspects of the cultural and social life of Mithila, the land of Sita. ‘Madba’ portrays not only the cultural life of Mithila but also touches the essence of the cultural life of the entire India. It consists of 14 academic articles dedicated to different aspects of Mithila's cultural & social history. The articles cover a broad range of topics from Intellectual tradition, music, linguistics, Tantra, The Shakti cult, historical study of the cultural seat of Mithila ‘ Saurath’, the significance of 19th c. Rajnagar, the river Koshi, Panji Prabandh, the historicity of the 15th Century Sanskrit text Purushapariksha and its gender study, Nyaya philosophy and jewelry in Medieval Maithili literature.

This paper tries to address the impact of transnational culture to reduce the terrorism. According to the definition, transnational culture consists of three things which are basically cultural diversity, multi-ethnicity, multi-languages. This transnational culture can play a vital role to reduce the terrorism in the Muslim countries especially in Turkey and Bangladesh. For this research purpose, the study obtained the opinions of 59 post graduate students from different universities in Turkey and Bangladesh through a survey on the impact of transnational culture in reducing terrorism. The study found that transnational culture has a significant impact on changing people’s perspective about the need to reduce terrorism in today’s Muslim world. The informants also viewed that the Tawhidic paradigm (Unity of God) offers spiritual dimension to educate and nurture people to respect other views, multi-ethnicity, cultures and languages which may lead to reduce the terrorism in the Muslim nations. Nevertheless, the results of the study are constrained by the size of the sample and robustness of the analyses.