CIAO DATE: 12/2010
Volume: 27, Issue: 3
Fall 2010
The Global Canon (PDF)
This special edition of World Policy Journal has been two years in the making. In the fall of 2008, we assigned the novelist and screenwriter Warren Adler to speculate on the world of literature and creativity in 25 years. Almost as an aside, Adler suggested that whatever the nature of creative expression, there is one certainty—that there will never be a Global Canon. The Western Canon, which has held sway since the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare, will continue to provide inspiration to the world’s writers and thinkers for the foreseeable future, Adler wrote, and certainly for the next quarter century. We had more readers comment on this single, passing remark than any other we have published in recent years. We wanted to take a moment (or, actually, half of this issue) to examine this idea in depth, from the perspective of those who create and are, in turn, influenced by the work of their peers and those who have gone before them. Is there, as World Policy Journal suggests in every issue, a truly global network of creativity—not only in the written word, but in art, drama, music, film, television and beyond? The answers arrived and the results, we believe, will surprise and entertain. For the first time in our quarter century as a publication, we consider poetry, music, painting, internet art, film from Nigeria, plays from Peru—the entire gamut of human creativity—to arrive at the conclusion we suspected from the start: That today, for perhaps the first time in human history, a Global Canon has arrived.
The Big Question: Is There a Global Canon? (PDF)
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Kayhan Irani, Timothy D. Taylor, Cynthia MacMullin, Miranda Kennedy, Alyce Mahon
Our world is increasingly interconnected, and artistic theft has never been easier. There were lines once, rooted in Europe, that delineated and informed the creation of a canon of great works. Those lines are now blurred, or have disappeared altogether. Artists collaborate across countries and continents, inspiring their brethren, prompting further acts of thievery. Art, literature and music live in a world without borders, where national identities can mean everything or nothing. These recent, ongoing developments have called into question the very notion, and relevance, of a Western Canon. Is a Global Canon emerging? A panel of experts, assembled by World Policy Journal, weighs in.
Anatomy of a Music Video (PDF)
Teaching the Canon (PDF)
David Palumbo-Liu, Dr. Paulo Lemos Horta
The debate over the emerging Global Canon falls within the scope of the academy, comprised of individuals who play a critical role in determining the leading works of art and literature. We engaged two professors in a discussion of the ever shifting, and increasingly global nature of literature curricula in their college classrooms. We questioned them about the specific goals of their literature classes, what role non-western writers played in class discussions, and how the diverse backgrounds of their students influenced the classroom dynamic. We began the conversation, in the form of an e-mail exchange, moderated by World Policy Journal editors, with a simple question: What goals do you have as professors of world literature, with respect to your students’ curricula and their lives beyond the classroom? PALUMBO-LIU: First, to present literature in its historical context, regionally, nationally and globally, to show the connection between the particular “local” situation of the work of literature, its relation to broader contexts and even the notion of “universal” values. Often this is dialectical— by discussing the particular and the universal, we find our senses of both modified. Second, to present literature as literature; that is, as a specific way of putting language together that is unique to literature. This is done with due respect to the fact that different cultures have alternative discourses, which approximate what western society understands literature to be. I attempt to raise the question regarding the kinds of social and cultural functions literature performs, and how these functions are manifested elsewhere. My hope is that if I meet these objectives, they will have a kind of ethical effect—that [my students’] assumptions about the world, of how “other people” act, about other values, ways of thinking, would be different.
Map Room: The New Library (PDF)
Nestor K. Bailly
The world’s libraries hold at least 1.5 billion items, according to the listings of World- Cat, the massive catalog of the Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center. Books are no longer just printed and bound words gathering dust on shelves. The holdings of national libraries (at right) may still be greater than their digital counterparts, but scanned books, available on the Internet, are revolutionizing the role of the library in civil society. In August 2010, Google estimated there are some 130 million books in the world that it hopes to digitize, and they are not the only ones with such a mission.
A Mongrel Canon (PDF)
Joel Whitney
In 1994, the critic Harold Bloom mounted a vigorous public defense of the western literary canon, which was then under siege. In his volume, “The Western Canon,” Bloom lauded the tradition of great western books, portraying himself as a singular reader in a one on one reverie with each of twenty-six canonical authors. No aspect beyond aesthetics, or influence, should count. Or so he argued from one side of his mouth. But the Bloom-related buzz came from the very theme he pretended his readers should ignore—the political context surrounding the book, a context which, sadly, belatedly, persists. For the main problem with Bloom’s stance is that, as many writers with origins outside or partly outside the West can tell us, the Canon is universal in ways Bloom simultaneously grasps and discounts. Bloom’s is a one-way universality found when productions of Shakespeare travel to Tehran. But all too rarely does Tehran get to Stratford-upon-Avon.
The Photographer (PDF)
Polibio Diaz
The Musician (PDF)
Asaf Avidan
The Filmmaker (PDF)
Franco Sacchi
The Internet Artist (PDF)
Rafael Rozendaal
The Playwright (PDF)
Gonzalo Rodriguez Risco
Visual Artist (PDF)
Mayra Barraza
Digital Art: Ryoji Ikeda (PDF)
A Nobel Sensibility (PDF)
Horace Engdahl
Because of the attention that the literature prize attracts across the world and because of its prestige, the Nobel laureates have inevitably come to be seen as forming a kind of modern canon. This has provoked the critical reproach that many of the 20th century’s greatest writers are missing from the list, and that it includes too few women and not enough non-Europeans. I believe that the Academy members who comprised that first Nobel Committee in 1901 would have been terrified had they realized what they were about to set in motion. Certainly in those first few years no one thought of the prize as a means to define a canon. (Nor was the concept of a canon applied to contemporary literature— that is a late development.) Alfred Nobel’s will intends to reward a literary work published in the previous year—a single book, not a body of writing. Nobel clearly wanted the literature prize to act in the present, rather than crown masters for all time. As it turned out, the Swedish Academy gave the prize a distinctly monumental character. In doing so, it could appeal to the wording of the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the final document that directs the activity of the Nobel Prize committees. According to the statutes, older works may be awarded, “if their significance has not become apparent until recently.” This concession was used to motivate the practice of considering a lifetime’s creativity rather than an individual work. The phrase “during the preceding year” was interpreted in a broader sense, as a demand for the continued viability of a work.
Keeping it Real: Watching the World Watch TV (PDF)
Eric Hoyt
Ewa Mularczyk remembers the electrifying first season of “Big Brother”—the show that entombs ten strangers for three months in a house wired with hidden cameras and microphones—in Poland. When a housemate on Polish “Big Brother” was broadcast bathing nude, the nation reacted with horror and fascination. “It was the first time we ever saw anything on TV like that,” Mularczyk says. At that moment she became, like millions of other viewers watching their own country’s versions of the show across the world, a “Big Brother” addict. When it first premiered in the Netherlands, in 1999, the show generated many viewers and much controversy. Within three years its production company, Endemol, had licensed or produced the format in 42 countries. But Mularczyk went further than most “Big Brother” fans. She became a reality television producer, moving from Poland to Los Angeles in 2001. To date, she has worked on “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Dr. 90210” and “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.”
Toward a Universal Cinema (PDF)
Steven Soderbergh burst on the international film scene more than two decades ago with his extraordinary indie success, “sex, lies, and videotape,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival—at 26, the youngest director ever to receive the festival’s top honor. There followed a succession of Oscar nominations and big budget Hollywood successes, including “Erin Brockovich,” “Traffic,” “Ocean’s Eleven” and its sequels, followed by the four-hour, two-part epic, “Che,” chronicling the life of the Argentine revolutionary. Soderbergh talked in his Manhattan production studio with World Policy Journal Editor David A. Andelman and World Policy Institute senior fellow Silvana Paternostro, who also served as associate producer of “Che.” WORLD POLICY JOURNAL: When you began making films, what were your influences? STEVEN SODERBERGH: Looking back on it, I was extraordinarily lucky. I was attending this laboratory school on the Louisiana State University campus and had access to a lot of films that under ordinary circumstances I never would have been exposed to. I was hanging out with these college film students and seeing movies from all over the world, in addition to classic American films. Watching “8 1/2,” or “Blowup,” or “High and Low” at 14 and 15 is a really extraordinary experience. They imprint you in a way that’s unique, you’re such a sponge at that age. I think it resulted in my work having this funny combination of both aesthetics—there’s a very American desire to entertain and to tell a story, but there’s also a very European approach to style and character that is obviously influenced by those early experiences. So I’m kind of amazed when I think C•NVERSATI•N 58 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2010 that when I grew up in Baton Rouge I actually got this incredibly varied cinema diet. I can’t imagine what kind of career I would have if I hadn’t seen all of those films during that period.
Deadly Gold (PDF)
Thomas Lee
Dunkwa-on-offin, Ghana—An illegal gold mine collapsed in these remote jungles on June 27, 2010, after heavy rains hit central Ghana. At least 100 people were buried, but that’s just an estimate. The owner had no idea how many of his 136 hires were working at the time of his arrest, and the dozen illegal miners who survived kept their mouths shut, fearing prosecution. This is hardly a rare incident, but it provides a vivid snapshot of the deeply rooted abuses in Ghana’s ancient and ever more profitable gold complex.
Ingenuity, Peanut Butter, and a Little Green Leaf (PDF)
J.T. Simms
I first learned of moringa early in my service. It’s a small, thin tree, with medallionshaped leaves resembling cooked spinach. Each serving contains more vitamins and nutrients than any other food in West Africa, and maybe the world. Native to India but found throughout the tropics, it contains, gram for gram, more vitamin A than carrots, more vitamin C than oranges, more potassium than bananas, more iron than spinach, and, astonishingly, more protein and calcium than milk. And, as a tree, it’s a permanent fixture that, once matured, is capable of being harvested every few weeks.
An Ugly Exploration (PDF)
Jonathan Ewing
addis ababa, Ethiopia—After the battle he was given the ugly task of counting the bodies and separating them—Ethiopian from Chinese. This wasn’t an easy job. Each time he finished the tally, he’d forget the number and have to start again. This happened to Omar Muktar four times. He was shocked by what he had just seen and participated in. He counted the body of a Chinese oil worker who lay partially covered by a cardboard box. Next, there was the body of a uniformed teenager, one of the Ethiopian guards assigned to protect the Chinese. A group of five bodies lay across a wooden set of stairs near the barracks, where staff from China’s Zhoungyan Petroleum Exploration Bureau [zpeb] lived, just outside the town of Abole, in Ethiopia’s Ogaden desert. These are Muktar’s recollections. On April 24, 2007, he along with several hundred separatist rebels from the Ogaden National Liberation Front [onlf] attacked the Chinese-run oil installation near Abole. They entered the barracks in time to see the Chinese flee. Those who were too slow tried to hide under beds or in closets before they were shot at close range. Sometimes they were shot in the head, Muktar said, which made it very difficult to identify them later.
The Balkans' Underbelly (PDF)
David L. Phillips
prishtina, Kosovo—For nearly two years Kosovo, the world’s newest nation, has struggled to be recognized as a sovereign state. On July 22, 2010, the International Court of Justice [ijc] removed uncertainty about Kosovo’s status since its declaration of independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008—concluding that the declaration did not violate international law. But Kosovar Albanians knew long before the court’s opinion that their freedom from Serbia was, and remains, irrevocable. They would never stand for the return to Serbian control.
The Roots of Hate (PDF)
Michael J. Jordan
heves, Hungary—The past few years have been turbulent for Szabolcs Szedlak, far worse than most Hungarians could have imagined two decades ago, when they tore a hole in the Iron Curtain and changed their world. Szedlak, 34, came of age during the tumult of the postcommunist transition from dictatorship to democracy. Back then Hungarians were told, and many believed, they’d become like neighboring Austrians—a BMW in every driveway. Just don’t remind folks of those daydreams in this bleak corner of northeastern Hungary.
Censorship: Might vs. Right
David A. Andelman
We hit the road before dawn on May 14, 1982, headed for Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. There were four of us in the car—our two-man CBS News crew (cameraman and soundman), the Tel Aviv bureau producer and me. Tensions were mounting with Lebanon, which was then serving as the sanctuary for the leadership and many followers of the Palestine Liberation Organization [plo]. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was already looking for a reason to send forces in, to discredit and destroy the plo. But the plo had maintained a ceasefire for nearly a year, and appeared to be pursuing a diplomatic strategy. Its tactics were frustrating Begin’s plans. Still, we’d had reports of Israeli forces on the move, massing on their side of the frontier. So we were heading north to shoot a segment.