Search Results (5)

The Western is, in many respects, the essential American film genre, “a cornerstone of American identity” (Kitses). Yet, despite its distinctly American character, the genre has exerted a fascination all over the world. This contribution examines the Western as a site of transnational cultural exchange and as an illustration of what Stephen Greenblatt calls cultural mobility. In the work of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), Western elements are evoked, which provide complex comments on the influence of American culture on Japan in the post-WWII years. While Seven Samurai appears to embrace the promise of class eradication as a result of Westernization, its American remake The Magnificent Seven (1960) shows a particular fascination for the decidedly Japanese aspects of the material, namely the idea of a warrior class dissociated from society. The Italian remake of Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars (1964), shows how the Western can function not only as an external comment on American culture, in its cynical redefinition of the cowboy hero, but also as an amalgam of cultural practices and symbols, reaching from Japanese samurai codes to Christian Catholic redeemer imagery, that through their stylization expose the performativity of culture as such. Full article

The colonial visual archive has occupied in recent decades the work of scholars and artists from indigenous and racial minority communities, who revealed it as a major apparatus of historical meta-narratives. This article aims at pushing forward this preoccupation by revealing an additional scene: the art of Mizrahi women, descendants of Jewish communities of Arab and Muslim countries. Relying on a visual culture approach and focusing on an analysis of artworks by Mizrahi artist Vered Nissim, as well as on photographs of Mizrahi women, fund in Zionist archives, I demonstrate how Nissim’s work challenges the racial category of Mizrahi women as “natural workers”, constructed in the Zionist historical meta-narrative. Nissim does so by re-enacting the category’s paradigmatic visual image—the Mizrahi women cleaning worker—in a different way, visually and discursively. Body, voice, and visual image, three instances of the subjectivity of Mizrahi women cleaning workers that were separated, shaped, and mediated through Zionist colonial visual archives unite in Nissim’s work when embodied by a real Mizrahi woman cleaning worker: her mother, Esther Nissim. By casting her mother to play herself over the past twenty years, Nissim creates political conditions for the appearance of her mother as the author of her own history as she orally, bodily, and visually writes it in front of her daughter’s camera. Thus, Nissim joins a transnational phenomenon of global south artists who create political conditions enabling the self-imaging of colonized peoples, empowering the reading of colonial imagery and the historical meta-narratives attached to it through their situated knowledge and lived experience and, thus, constructing a counter history communicated visually. Full article

Seismically triggered landslides are a major hazard and have caused severe secondary losses. This problem is especially important in the seismic prone Mailuu-Suu catchment in Kyrgyzstan, as it hosts disproportionately sensitive active or legacy uranium sites with deposited radioactive extractive wastes. These sites show a quasi-continuous release of radioactive contamination into surface waters, and especially after natural hazards, a sudden and massive input of pollutants into the surface waters is expected. However, landslides of contaminated sediments into surface waters represent a substantial exposure pathway that has not been properly addressed in the existing river basin management to date. To fill this gap, satellite imagery was massively employed to extract topography and geometric information, and the seismic Scoops3D and the one-dimensional numerical model, Hydrologic Engineering Centre, River Analysis System (HEC-RAS), were chosen to simulate the landslide-induced mass transport of total suspended solids (TSS) and natural radionuclides (Pb-210 as a proxy for modeling purposes) within the Mailuu-Suu river networks under two earthquake and two hydrological scenarios. The results show that the seismically vulnerable areas dominated in the upstream areas, and the mass of landslides increased dramatically with the increase of earthquake levels. After the landslides, the concentrations of radionuclides increased suddenly and dramatically. The peak values decreased along the longitudinal gradient of river networks, with the concentration curves becoming flat and wide in the downstream sections, and the transport speed of radionuclides decreased along the river networks. The conclusions of this study are that landslides commonly release a significant amount of pollutants with a relatively fast transport along river networks. Improved quantitative understanding of waterborne pollution dispersion across national borders will contribute to better co-ordination between governments and regulatory authorities of riparian states and, consequently, to future prevention of transnational political conflicts that have flared up in the last two decades over alleged pollution of transboundary water bodies. Full article

From global monitoring to regional forest management there is an increasing demand for information about forest ecosystems. For border regions that are closely connected ecologically and economically, a key factor is the cross-border availability and consistency of up-to-date information such as the forest type. The combination of existing forest information with Earth observation data is a rational method and can provide valuable contribution to serve the increased information demand on a transnational level. We present an approach for the remote sensing-based generation of a transnational and temporally consistent forest type information layer for the German federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Existing forest information data from different countries were merged and combined with suitable vegetation indices derived from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 imagery acquired in early spring. An automated bootstrap-based approximation of the optimum threshold for the distinction of “broadleaved” and “coniferous” forest was applied. The spatially explicit forest type information layer is updated annually depending on image availability. Overall accuracies between 79 and 96 percent were obtained. Every spot in the region will be updated successively within a period of expectably three years. The presented approach can be integrated in fully automated processing chains to generate basic forest type information layers on a regular basis. Full article

Gisaku (2005), by Baltasar Pedrosa, is a unique Spanish movie that was produced to sell the Spanish country brand to visitors attending the Spanish Pavilion at Expo Aichi 2005. It is a cartoon feature production that builds a fantastic plot combining the Expo’s theme, the Spanish institutional objective of showing a good image of the country, and the aim of pleasing the target. This paper focuses on the last issue, more specifically on the narrative and production strategies of transcultural exchange developed to attract the Japanese audience. We analyze the movie from a discursive perspective. It is our hypothesis that Gisaku tries to empathize with its target by constructing a certain representation of the Japanese national culture the features of which come from an imagery of Japan negotiated in both traditional and renewed ways from Spain. It is a hybrid anime that deals with transnational representations of the Japanese national identity. Full article