Documents found
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292.More information
This article examines how Italian dramatists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represented the Holy Land in the plays that they composed for performance by young men in religious confraternities. The fact that these plays were meant to have a strong pedagogical purpose makes their representation of the Holy Land all the more important not only for the historical aspect of how ancient Palestine was understood and represented in early modern Italy, but also for what this representation meant for Christians and Jews living in early modern Italy. The questions of historical understanding and knowledge are thus closely tied to the questions of the revival of interest in Hebraic knowledge in Renaissance Italy and of the growing anti-Semitism of the time (when ghettos were established in cities such as Venice and Florence, to mention just two). At the same time, when a city such as Florence begins to envision itself and present itself as “the new Jerusalem,” the depiction of Jerusalem (in particular) and the Holy Land (in general) in the religious plays mounted by its young men becomes all the more revealing. The Holy Land can thus be both the exotic Orient and quotidian Florence, part of the East and of the West, both Hebrew and Christian. By extension, the “Jew” can be the “Other” but also the “Self.”
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The article considers the ambiguous characterizations of The Merchant of Venice in light of Protestant and Catholic interpretations of the Eucharist, and raises implications for masculine gender construction in the opposition between Jewish and Christian cultural and theological perspectives. The argument focuses on the character of Antonio, whose masochistic self-sacrifice distorts Paul’s theology of grace. The homoerotic element in Antonio’s drive toward self-sacrifice is crucial in the play’s disruption of orthodox theological positions, and the waning tradition of homoerotic amity evoked by the playwright is related to the connection between amity and Eucharistic theory suggested in the Catholic Thomas Wright’s commentaries on the Sacrament, contemporaneous with the play. Shylock’s independent masculinity, not his effeminacy, ultimately operates as the real source of anxiety for the play’s Christian men, and the narrowing of Christian atonement to the romantic self-interest and masochism of the repressed Antonio contributes to The Merchant’s key suggestion that masculine identity remains dependent on the necessary and rigorous self-discipline imposed by the “law”—theological, moral, and sexual. The play thus implicitly addresses challenges posed by a theology of grace to the process of masculine self-fashioning in the social context of the Reformation.
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Polanski's The Pianist (2002) displays a particular approach of music. The artistic commitment, which is the main subject of the movie, allows the director to question how an individual can face Evil. The way the music is used in this movie in not an unexplored topic of research. However, no study has so far sought to thoroughly show how an analysis of The Pianist can shed new light on Polanski's reflection about the status and function of music, which plays an essential role in the director's filmography. Thus, the main aim of our article will be to question in which way and to what extent music appears to the lead character as a means of survival and resistance against the Nazi's dehumanization process. We will also show that Polanski's vision of music, far from being naive or excessively idealistic, proves to be fundamentally ambivalent.
Keywords: Chopin, Le pianiste, musique de film, Roman Polanski, Shoah, Chopin, film music, The Pianist, Roman Polanski, Shoah
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300.More information
This article explores how the globalized concept of « blackness » that circulates via American hip-hop culture offers a certain reference point that allows many young Ethiopian Jews to anchor themselves within the Israeli landscape. I address the way in which dynamics related to identity take shape through Israeli and Ethiopian constructs of race and ethnicity. In particular I look at one of many strategies used by Ethiopian Israeli youths to stake their place in Israeli society, that is the claim of being Black Jews. This racial label is appropriated by numerous teenagers by way of their identification with hip-hop culture. I propose to analyze how the discourse they produce is articulated to the history and experience of African-Americans, while keeping in mind the constant changes experienced by their community since the beginning of the 19th century and the socio-cultural, political and religious distances that differentiate Israel from the United States.
Keywords: Culture des jeunes, hip-hop, négritude, racialisation, Éthiopiens Israéliens, Youth culture, hip-hop, blackness, racialisation, Ethiopian Israelis, Cultura Juvenil, hip-hop, negritud, racialización, Israelíes Etíopes