MONOCULTURE – ARTEFACTS

(c) Wim Van Eesbeek

MONOCULTURE - Culture Wars. Belgian context

Photo: Wim Van Eesbeek

De schoolstrijd (The School Struggle)

Article 17 of the Belgian 1831 constitution deals with freedom of education. The article stipulates on the one hand that everyone is free to set up a school on the basis of their own philosophy of life and own pedagogical project and on the other, that parents have the right to enrol their children in a school of their choice. This freedom contributed to the so-called ‘verzuiling’ (pilarisation or compartmentalisation) of the new Belgian state. The totality of life – from education and youth movement, to politics and care – was organised within one’s own philosophy of life, e.g. liberal, Catholic or socialist. People grew up in largely separate, monocultural ‘pillars’. At various moments in the history of Belgium, battles erupted between these ‘pillars’, in which the grip on youth, through education, was an important point of contention.

In the 19th century, the first School Struggle between Catholics who dominated so-called ‘free’ education (‘vrij onderwijs’) and liberals, who favoured a stronger state education (‘officieel onderwijs’), was mainly about primary education. As more and more young people received secondary education after WWII, in the 1950s, the latter became the focus of the second school struggle. The main protagonists were Catholic Minister of Public Education Pierre Harmel, who ensured that, for the first time, ‘free’ secondary education could receive subsidies from the state, and his successor, the socialist Leo Collard, who scaled down these subsidies, among other things. At the height of the struggle, in the mid-1950s, massive demonstrations were organised, some ‘liberal’ products like Tiense Suikerraffinaderij sugar were boycotted, and in the – ‘pilarised’ – media especially Collard was portrayed as a devil. The 1958 School pact was a compromise between the various parties and it democratised Belgian education. Since then, there has been a relative School peace in Belgium.


MONOCULTURE – Unipolarity

With The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama proclaims the victory of Western democracy over communism and all other ideologies. Since the 1990s, Fukuyama’s triumphalist image has often been adopted by politicians from centrist parties in the West. Fukuyama looks back at the history of the past centuries and sees a continuous clash of ideologies, driven by the logic of modern science on the one hand and the struggle for human recognition on the other. According to Fukuyama, human history is universal, progressive, and going in one direction. He sees an evolution that started under the impulse of the European Enlightenment, and that evolves towards a global monoculture of liberal capitalism. In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington argues that the end of Cold War ideological bipolarity will lead to inevitable instability, but on the cultural axis. He describes civilisations as the highest rank of cultural identity. According to the author, the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of China would challenge Western dominance. Instead of the false universalism of Western culture, he suggests a strategy that, whilst abandoning the idea of universalism, would reaffirm Western identity in order to “renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.” An example of extreme cultural determinism, which omits any interdependency of cultures, the book has been criticised by various academic writers and is often regarded as a theoretical legitimisation of the aggressive side of US foreign policy.


MONOCULTURE – Human Zoo

M HKA. Photo: Wim van Eesbeek

Facilitated by the two emerging scientific disciplines of ethnology and anthropology, ‘ethnological exhibitions’, also referred to as human zoos, emerged in the late 19th century, operating as the most significant events for propagating imperialism. Introduced in Europe by Carl Hagenbeck, a German merchant of wild animals, they were a spectacle of ‘exotic’ indigenous peoples from the distant territories of Africa, the Arctic, India, Ceylon and Southeast Asia, typically housed within the constructed setting of a native village. Hagenbeck’s exhibitions in the Tierpark, Hamburg-Stellingen, were chosen as the reference for subsequent human zoos within the framework of colonial exhibitions. Organised to boost trade, they also displayed a range of ethnographical material accompanied by individuals originating from colonies. Perhaps the most visited and notable colonial exhibitions were those held in Paris in the tropical garden of the Bois de Vincennes and the Jardin d'Acclimatation. Despite enormous interest from the general public and the millions of visitors attending the exhibitions, there was a certain rise in social consciousness – thus, there was a call to boycott the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition supported by famous Surrealist artists and members of the French communist party.

Human zoos were also part of the colonial sections of Belgian International Exhibitions from the end of the 19th until the mid-20th centuries. One of the most remarkable events was the 1897 Tervuren Exhibition, which displayed the products and people of the Congo Independent State, which was in the personal possession of King Leopold II until 1908. A lavishly illustrated guide book in the style of Art Nouveau provided an insight into the grandeur of the exposition that took place in the newly built Palais des Colonies and its gardens, where scenes of everyday African life attracted thousands of visitors. Besides being major propaganda for the economic potential of Belgian presence in the Congo, it also emphasised the ‘civilising’ work of Belgian missions. Colonial exhibitions contributed the most to the creation of the image of the inferior savage Other, and the legitimatisation of colonialism.


MONOCULTURE – Eugenics in North America

Madison Grant was an American writer and zoologist known primarily for his work as a eugenicist. The subtitle of the book refers to the key theory promoted by Grant – the superiority of Nordic race and its responsibility for human development. Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was an American historian, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and author of several books which advocated eugenics and scientific racism. His strategy to frighten readers with the spectre of a race war, by presenting the enemies of the 'white race' as being strong enough to pose an existential threat, but weak enough to defeat, is still being practiced, some hundred years later, by white supremacists. James Woodsworth’s book served as a blueprint for Canada’s 'Immigration Act' enacted soon after the publication of the book. In this book, Woodsworth provides a hierarchy of races and ethnicities based on their ability to assimilate into Canadian society. Those belonging to 'prohibited classes' were deported and denied entry to Canada.


MONOCULTURE – Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004) was a Hollywood actor and an American politician who served as the 40th President of the United States from 1981 to 1989. His political stance is characterised by the devotion to the ideals of modern conservatism in its neo-liberal form, in particular, a strong favour for capitalist economics. The economic policies promoted by Reagan in the 1980s went down in history as 'Reaganomics'. Rendezvous with Destiny is the key passage of the famous A Time for Choosing speech that was presented by Reagan during the 1964 U.S. presidential election campaign on behalf of Republican party candidate Barry Goldwater. The speech earned him prominence as a leading conservative spokesman. A Record from Ronald Reagan To All Californians is similar in rhetoric, but much shorter and fairly light on ideological content, this record was part of Reagan’s campaign for governor in the 1966 election. Appealing to reduce government regulation, he calls out for Californians to vote for him if they “believe in their destiny” and their own decisions. Another distinctive feature of Reagan’s speeches is the emphasis on his non-political, unprofessional background. Speaking in the persona of a colonist from Boston, in Freedom's Finest Hour Reagan tells the story of the American War of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution with his famous eloquence. All is intended to create a feeling of pride for America and the Constitution. Young America's Foundation (YAF) is a conservative youth organisation established in 1960. In his speech, addressed to YAF in 1975, Ronald Reagan expressed his support to the organisation and its activity. Reagan's endorsement of the YAF was considered a having greatly helped his presidential campaign.


MONOCULTURE – Congress For Cultural Freedom

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an organisation, founded in 1950 at a conference that gathered a group of anti-communist intellectuals in West Berlin. Organised in response to the formation of The World Peace Council by the Soviet Union, the CCF aimed to withstand post-war sympathies towards the USSR. Covertly funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it was established to oppose global Communism, counter Cold War neutralism, and to promote Western cultural and liberal values. The organisation was active in thirty-five countries, organising cultural events and conferences, publishing books and numerous periodicals. Another important vector of the campaign was aimed to alter the perception of the U.S. in Europe through the promotion of American modernist art. The covert enterprise dissolved in 1967, after the disclosure of the CIA’s active involvement.


MONOCULTURE – Universal Languages

Esperanto is the mostly widely used artificial language in the world. In 1887, Ludwik Zamenhof (1859-1917), the inventor of Esperanto, published a small book in Russian entitled Международный язык / Lingvo Internacia (commonly referred to as Unua Libro). Declining the principle of authorship, he modestly signed the book as Dr. Esperanto, meaning “one who hopes”. The hope was to create a language that would promote a peaceful coexistence between people of different cultures. Esperanto gained popularity with many Esperantist groups popping up around the world. Despite repression throughout the 20th century by authoritarian regimes, the development of the Esperantist community has continued into the present day. Jarlibro is the oldest continuous publication of the Universal Esperanto Association. La Nova Epoko (The New Epoch) was an international literary and social magazine of general left-wing orientation, founded in 1922 by four Soviet Esperantists. The initiator of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhof was the first to translate the entire Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh or Old Testament) into Esperanto. The New Testament was translated later by a team of Esperanto speaking British clergy and scholars from the British and Foreign Bible Society, and completed in 1912. The translations of both Testaments were then harmonised and printed in 1926 as La Sankta Biblio (The Holy Bible) often called La Londona Biblio (London Bible).


MONOCULTURE – The Corn Campaign

image: (c) M HKA

The Corn Campaign
The Corn Campaign was the mass introduction of corn into the agriculture of the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s as a solution to the problem of feeding livestock. The idea of introducing the foreign crop came to Nikita Khrushchev, then the head of the USSR, in 1955 when he met the American farmer Roswell Garst, who told him about the role of corn in US agriculture and its advantages. Shortly after Khrushchev’s trip to the United States, American seed corn was imported to the USSR. The Ministry of Agriculture established a corn research institute in Ukraine, issued a new scientific journal dedicated to the crop, and launched one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the USSR. Endless slogans in newspapers praised “the queen of the fields”, and through poems, songs, posters, souvenirs, and even a full-length animated film titled Чудесница (Chudesnitsa), the government sought every opportunity to popularise the fodder crop. Mass propagation of corn did not take into account the climate of the country, nor the agricultural traditions. In the early 1960s, a quarter of arable land was occupied by corn, which led to a shortage of wheat by autumn 1962. The inevitable failure of monocultural corn farming led to an agricultural crisis and the subsequent failure of Khrushchev’s political career.


MONOCULTURE – Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism was an artistic phenomenon and 'creative method' of the Soviet Union. Introduced as a doctrine of the single creative method in 1934 during the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, it was applied to all spheres of artistic endeavour. Often characterised simply as a style, it hardly fits into such category due to the obvious lack of a clearly articulated artistic language, or rather, the consistent erasure of any formal stylistic features. The relation of Soviet Realism to previous realistic traditions in art and to reality itself is also complicated. Aimed to present an analysis of “reality in its revolutionary development” and establish “a culture of the masses that had yet to be created”, it was primarily oriented not toward the Soviet reality of the time, but the bright Socialist future. This utopian aspiration and the belief in the transformative potential of art and strong collective spirit, makes Socialist Realism a total and totalitarian aesthetical-political project, or, as put by theorist Boris Groys – Stalin’s gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Deeply rooted in communist ideology, Socialist Realism was not simply its product, but the very means of production. This makes it an example of a unique propagandist strategy.


MONOCULTURE – Eugenics in Great Britain

image: (c) M HKA

Sir Francis Galton introduced the very term eugenics and laid the foundations for a movement that would develop in the following decades. Inspired by the theory of evolution by natural selection introduced by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin, he dedicated his studies to the improvement of the human race. Galton was convinced that eugenics studies could replace Darwinian ‘natural selection’ with more effective processes. G.K. Chesterton’s book is a significant, but rare example of anti-eugenic essays circulating at that time in Britain. He predicted the abuse of eugenics and believed that it would be used as means of suppression of the poor. Even though Chesterton was accused of irrationality because of his ideas, the book had a considerable influence on British parliament. Despite the fact that the movement of eugenics was founded in Britain, the eugenics legislation as it was introduced in the United States and later in Germany was never passed in Britain.


MONOCULTURE – Soviet Propaganda

image: (c) M HKA

The Novosti Press Agency was founded in 1961. The Agency operated as an impressive propaganda machine with numerous branches all around the world and a total annual publication circulation of 20 million copies. Their range of books covered such topics as the Soviet contribution to the economic development of 'Third World’ countries, the Soviet policy of support for National Liberation Movements, criticism of “contemporary colonialism” and the imperialist policy of the West. First Time in Moscow tells the story of a fictional African child called Dudu, who was given a free trip to Moscow as the winner of a contest. The patronising and romanticised tone of the book makes it a striking example of propaganda material created in the USSR under the “International Friendship” policy. The Peoples’ Friendship University was founded in 1960 and later renamed after Patrice Lumumba following the assassination of the Congolese independence leader in 1961. The University was praised for its educational accomplishments and was considered as an epitome of solidarity and internationalism by its proponents, and denounced as a communist institution for spy recruitment by its opponents. The very concept of a university established especially to provide education for students from 'Third World' countries was also questioned by the very governments of the countries it was aimed at.

 


MONOCULTURE – Segregation

Photo: @ Wim van Eesbeek

Following the abolition of slavery by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the United States experienced a century of legally regulated racial segregation. In the Southern States, the Jim Crow laws (named after a racist caricature from a popular song) pursued a strict separation between the white and black populations at local and state level: from separate schools, hospitals, and restaurants to separate trains, public toilets, parks and cemeteries. The Supreme Court approved these segregation laws, basing its decision on the concept of 'separate but equal'. Since the individual states were themselves responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure was equal for all, this concept was of course never reality. In this way, a racist policy was pursued in the South that closely resembled the apartheid that came later in South Africa. Only in 1964, and under the pressure of civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, and organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Civil Rights Act prohibited all segregation by law. Although “equality before the law” has existed since then, discrimination remains a reality in many areas of the United States until today.


MONOCULTURE – Objectivisme

image: (c) M HKA

Objectivisme
Ayn Rand, originally Alisa Rosenbaum (1905-1982), was a Russian-American writer. Famous primarily for her novels that gained worldwide and enduring success, she is also renowned for her philosophical framework called Objectivism, which maintains a lasting influence on popular thought. Her ideas were partially predetermined by her own biography –  her father’s business was seized by Bolsheviks in 1917, which dramatically changed her family’s way of life. She left communist Russia for the United States in early 1926. Rand was driven by the idea of men’s need for rational morality, a morality code which would oppose any collective, religious, mystical or emotion based moral concepts. A person’s life was understood by Rand as a standard of value, with reason as the only guide to action, and thus the highest moral purpose was the achievement of one’s own happiness. The fundamentals of Rand’s philosophy: reality as “an objective absolute”, primacy of reason, the ethics of selfishness and the moral defence of 'laisséz-faire' capitalism, were developed through her public lectures, books and newsletters.


MONOCULTURE – Modernist architecture

image: (c) M HKA

Modernism in architecture became an international movement by 1928 with the establishment of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) or International Congresses of Modern Architecture. CIAM’s objectives went beyond the questions of style and formalism of architectural principles, approaching modern architecture and urban planning as a reformatory socio-political tool. The Athens Charter is considered the manifesto of CIAM. Edited by Le Corbusier, the charter has 95 points on the planning and construction of cities. Two principal approaches towards modern architecture of the 1950s can be distinguished. The first can be described as a regionalist approach that focused on the climate and geography of a region, but paid little attention to cultural analysis or existing vernacular tradition. This can be illustrated by the various ‘African experiments’— regionalist modernist projects of the leading British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. In the 1950s the couple joined Le Corbusier to work on the creation of Chandigarh, the new capital of the divided Punjab in India. The modernist architecture of Chandigarh is widely regarded as one of the prominent experiments in urban planning and a symbolic statement of the radical break from tradition and colonial past of the newly independent India. Although the purity of the modernism was initially supposed to be protected “from whims of individuals” by the Edict of Chandigarh (as prescribed by Le Corbusier), the universal functionalism of modernist residential architecture has been challenged by various forms of ad hoc urbanism, inspired by local traditions of urban life.


MONOCULTURE – OSPAAAL and Tricontinental

OSPAAAL

The Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) was founded in Havana, Cuba, in January 1966 as the outcome of the first Tricontinental conference. OSPAAAL was intended to unite the revolutionary national liberation movements of the three ‘Third World’ continents (Africa, Asia, and Latin America), together in the spirit of international anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist solidarity. In the general declaration of the first conference, which took place during the active US intervention in Vietnam, the organisation explicitly criticised ‘Yankee imperialism’. Delegates at the Tricontinental Conference not only condemned racial discrimination and the South African apartheid regime, but also expressed their support for Civil Rights movements everywhere and advocated for global military resistance. Other topics included new models of economic development with the Global South as one entity. The distinct socialist stance of the Tricontinental movement, which emerged just four years after The Cuban Missile Crisis, was opposed by the United States through the extensive counter-revolutionary activities carried out in the region by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The spirit of Tricontinental prevailed throughout the 1970s, but began to fade in the 1980s.


Tricontinental magazine
Tricontinental magazine was launched soon after the Tricontinental Conference as the theoretical organ of the Executive Secretariat of OSPAAAL. It was published in Cuba and a few other countries in Spanish, English, French and other languages. The French edition of Tricontinental was published in Paris by leftist publisher Éditions Maspero despite multiple seizures and bans by the French government. The magazine provided updates and commentary on ongoing independence movements worldwide, as well as speeches and essays written by leading revolutionaries and theorists. The Cuban version of Tricontinental, thoughtfully designed and illustrated, often had a special end sheet mocking American advertisements and revealing the other side of capitalism. The Tricontinental Publishing House also produced films, recordings and propaganda posters. The posters could be found folded and inserted in each issue of the magazine. Although often more radical, the OSPAAAL propaganda material was similar to that of the official Non-Aligned Movement, and shared the same visual language.


MONOCULTURE – Exposition Internationale Coloniale, Maritime et d'Art Flamand, Antwerpen, 1930

In 1930, after 1885 and 1894, Antwerp organised a world exhibition. It would be the third and last time. For Antwerp, the International Exhibition: Colonial, Maritime and Flemish Art was very important. In addition to city marketing, urban expansion – a fully new city section was created between Berchem and the Scheldt, today called the Tentoonstellingswijk (Exhibition District) – as well as major infrastructure works (including the construction of the Waasland Tunnel), the exhibition looked to turn Antwerp into a metropolis for the future. The city itself built two bridges over the Kielsevest and two exhibition buildings, which were subsequently converted into the Christ the King Church on the one hand, and a school (in the Pestalozzi Street) on the other. In these buildings a retrospective of old Flemish art took place – probably the largest ever held. Unlike in 1885 and 1894, the 1930 exhibition did not feature a Congolese village. However, there was another attraction: visitors were able to view a commercially operated 'negro village'. The colonial government wanted to focus on Belgian achievements in mining and agriculture in Congo; on an extensive collection of sculptures, masks and utensils; and on Catholic missions. The monumental 'Congo Palace', especially built for this purpose, acquired an oriental, 'Eastern' character, because the designers believed that black Africa had no architecture of its own.


MONOCULTURE – Apartheid

South Africa was already experiencing racial segregation during British colonial rule. 'Apartheid' refers to the government policy of segregation and white supremacy that was inflicted on the country during the second half of the 20th century. In many languages, 'apartheid' – a loanwordf rom Afrikaans – has become synonymous with all forms of racial segregation. After the 1948 elections, all South Africans were divided into three categories: 'white', 'coloured', and ‘Bantu’ (all Black Africans). The aim of the system was to allow the white minority to rule over the other groups. The main instrument for achieving apartheid was the 'Group Areas Act', which classified people according to 'race' in different residential areas, also introducing a legally established system of separate schools, universities, hospitals, buses and beaches. In the 1990s, after decades of violence and bloody repression, the apartheid regime gave way under international pressure. In 1994, with the first free general elections, the system officially collapsed and Nelson Mandela, figurehead of black liberation movement ANC (African National Congress), came to power.


MONOCULTURE – Bandung Conference, 1955

© Photo: M HKA

Bandung Conference

On April 18-24, 1955, leaders from twenty-nine Asian and African countries, most of which were newly independent, gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, for the first large-scale Asian-African Conference, also known as the Bandung Conference. The key organisers of the meeting included Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The participants of the conference aimed to promote Afro-Asian solidarity against any form of colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as to foster economic and cultural cooperation in the regions. 

 


MONOCULTURE – E. Frenkel-Brunswik

image: (c) M HKA

In 1950, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley – a philosopher/sociologist and three psychologists: Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford – published The Authoritarian Personality. They sought an answer to the question of how the destructive ideologies responsible for the atrocities of the Second World War had managed to attract such a huge mass of followers. In her article ‘Personality theory and Perception’ Else Frenkel-Brunswik further elaborates the concept of 'ambiguity intolerance’. With this complex and versatile theory, she examines the connection between the ability to deal with an ambiguous visual language and tolerance for ambiguity in the world, the other and oneself. In Environmental Controls and the Impoverishment of Thought, Frenkel-Brunswik takes a closer look at anti-intellectual tendencies and the attitude towards science in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.


MONOCULTURE – Key Exhibitions in New York

image: (c) M HKA

These two exhibitions, which took place in New York three years apart, are often regarded together, as both were heavily orientated towards the tendency described as ‘identity politics’. Organised in the midst of the so-called ‘cultural wars’, The Decade Show and the 1993 Whitney Biennial in particular, are considered as the first major art exhibitions in the US to give visibility to artists from marginalised groups, whilst also presenting to the wider public such issues as the AIDS crisis, race, class, gender, imperialism and poverty, among others. In the case of The Decade Show, its representational strategy based on the contrasting of artworks of each minoritised group with that of mainstream (Anglo-Saxon/Western) artists promoted the tendency for the exaltation of differences as a mode of practice, since well-established in the US. The exhibitions received a maelstrom of criticism. Some critics felt there was a reductionist approach by the curators of the Whitney Biennial, with the complexity of some artworks reduced to the representation of marginality in essentialist terms. Perceived by some as vehemently political, the displays were described as overly-didactic, and the organisers were accused of pandering to political correctness and sacrificing artistic quality in favour of multiculturalism and identity politics. Although controversial, these exhibitions – and the Whitney Biennial to the greater extent – have had considerable influence on the politics of representation within the artistic sphere.


MONOCULTURE – Das Wunder des Lebens

image: (c) M HKA

Das Wunder des Lebens was a propaganda exhibition organised to promote the racial ideology of the Nazis. It was shown in Berlin at the Kaiserdamm and the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, in 1935, and later travelled to other locations. Organised by Bruno Gebhard (1901-1985), a professional physician who was known as a curator of several renowned propaganda exhibitions, including Die Frau in Familie, Haus und Beruf (1933) and Deutsches Volk-Deutsche Arbeit (1934), the exhibition Das Wunder des Lebens introduced new representations on the theme of ‘Der Mensch' (‘The Human’). The major aspects of this extensive show were 'Die Lehre vom Leben' (‘The Teachings of Life’) with its highlight being the transparent sculpture of man, 'Der Träger des Lebens' (‘The Bearer of Life’) featuring the German family, and 'Die Erhaltung des Lebens' (The Preservation of Life), dedicated to the health system in Germany. Pictorial material presented in the exhibition included healthy 'Aryan' types, different images of Jewish people, images of physically or mentally disabled people, and representations of other 'undesirable' categories who, according to Nazi ideology, were considered to be a threat to German public health. The elaborate avant-garde design of the catalogue of the exhibition was created by renowned designer Herbert Bayer (1900-1985). Neither Gebhard nor Bayer, despite being involved in the organisation of the most significant and popular Nazi propaganda exhibitions, belonged to the Nazi party themselves and had to flee to the US in the following years.


MONOCULTURE – Ursula Le Guin

Photo Credit: @ Wim van Eesbeck

American author and daughter of Theodora Kroeber Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018) is best known for her science fiction books from the late 1960s onwards, in which she questions the conventions of the genre, by creating characters and societies that challenge our understanding of gender, race and political organisation. The Left Hand of Darkness from 1969 is the starting point of a thought process that runs through Le Guin's oeuvre: rethinking and redefining gender and sex. At the novel's centre, we find an androgynous group of people who are both female and male, and who can simultaneously be biological mother and father. Although the book has been described as feminist science fiction and has often been discussed in gender studies, it has also been criticised for the use of the pronoun 'he' to refer to its androgynous characters.

In response to this criticism, Le Guin wrote the essay 'Is Gender Necessary?' in 1976, in which she reflects on her experiment with portraying gender in the book, and examines her own evolving thinking on this subject.

“If we were socially ambisexual, if men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in self-esteem, then society would be a very different thing. What our problems might be, God knows; I only know we would have them. But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation – exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth.” 

The Lathe of Heaven, whose title is a quote from the Chinese poet and Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zi (4th century BC), is about a character whose dreams change the past and the present. This anti-utopia is Le Guin's critique of behaviourism, utilitarianism and eugenics. In addition to being an escape from bitter, inhuman democracies and fascist regimes, the book The Dispossessed, An Ambiguous Utopia is an investigation into the dilemmas of an anarcho-socialist utopia. Finally, in The Word for World is Forest, Le Guin links an anti-colonial and anti-militaristic message to environmental issues and the question of the relationship between language and culture.


MONOCULTURE — Eugenics in Nazi Germany

Eugenics is the set of theories and practices aimed at improving the inheritable qualities of the human race, and engineering a better society. Greek in its origin, the term, which literally means 'well-born', was introduced by British geneticist Francis Galton in 1883, in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. Soon afterwards, the first national eugenics organisation was established in the United States, where eugenics rapidly gained popularity and considerable weight in scientific society. As a result, during the first decades of the 20th century the US states passed numerous eugenic legislations, including sexual sterilisation of persons with inferior hereditary potentialities varying from criminals to the 'feeble-minded'. Eugenic ideas laid the foundation for the development of the Nazi ideology of racial hygiene in the 1930s. Nazi eugenic legislation led to forced sterilisation and murder of thousands of individuals deemed 'unfavourable'. In the decades following World War II, with the adoption of a number of laws protecting human rights, many countries began to abandon eugenics policies.


MONOCULTURE – Nazi propaganda exhibitions

image: (c) Wim Van Eesbeek

One of the most striking historical examples of ideological monoculture in the cultural field was of ‘entartete kunst’ (‘degenerate art’) in Nazi Germany. Holding up the modernist avant-garde, or in fact anything that didn’t fit the narrow ethno-centric definition of German art and culture, was considered as an aberration.

In his book, which was a major inspiration for Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Wolfgang Willrich gives a negative overview of modern art in Germany, viciously attacking such prominent modernist artists as Barlach, Dix, Grosz, Heckel, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff and others whose work fell victim to subsequent confiscation and elimination. Published in 1938, a year after the opening of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, the book of Adolf Dresler is a typical example of Nazi criticism of modernist art, with expressionist and abstract works being juxtaposed with politically favourable German ('Deutsche') works. The artworks condemned by the author were selected from the list of 'degenerate artworks' presented at the infamous exhibition. Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (The Great German Art Exhibition) took place eight times from 1937 to 1944 at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich. The exhibition was propagated as the most important cultural event in Nazi Germany and the main representative of art under National Socialism. Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) was the largest pre-war anti-Semitic exhibition, which was intended to represent a supposed Jewish attempt at bolshevising Nazi Germany.


MONOCULTURE – Négritude books

image: (c) M HKA

Négritude was conceived as an emancipatory cultural movement, initiated in the Interwar period by francophone intellectuals of the African diaspora who sought to reclaim the value of African culture. Léon-Gontran Damas was a French poet, politician, and one of the founders of the Négritude movement together with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. This anthology contains poems by French-speaking authors from six regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, The Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique), Guyana, Indochina, Madagascar and Réunion island. The anthology of African and West Indian poets, edited by Léopold Senghor received much recognition for its introductory essay ‘Orphée Noir’ (Black Orpheus) written by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre characterises Négritude as an "anti-racist racism". The article by Gabriel d'Arboussier, a French-Senegalese politician, denounces Négritude as a reactionary movement for its “particularism”. The arguments of d'Arbousier created the basis of all the following criticism of the movement.  This book is the first volume of the series of books titled Liberté (Freedom). As it states in the introduction, the title expresses the general theme of the texts as the “conquest of freedom as affirmation and illustration of the collective personality of black peoples: of Négritude”.


MONOCULTURE – 1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres

image: (c) M HKA

1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (The First World Festival of Negro Arts) was held in Dakar, Senegal, 1–24 April 1966, initiated by Léopold Senghor under the auspices of UNESCO. Visitors from around the world, as well as Dakar residents, were able to attend a vast programme of events, including exhibitions presenting tribal and modern art, conferences and street performances. According to Senghor, the festival was supposed to be an illustration of Négritude, a major showcase uniting the work of African and African diasporia artists. A colloquium that took place two day before the opening, which was considered the intellectual fulcrum of the event, gathered artists and intellectuals to reflect on the role of art in the emerging post-imperial world as well as the meaning of Négritude. The first side of this record consists of texts, music and slave songs, and the second side presents two different aspects of black music – short instrumental improvisations inspired by Senegalese traditional music and 'the Songs of New Nations' – Ghana, Nigeria, Congo – performed by a choir with native drums and percussion.


MONOCULTURE – Sources of Inspiration for Léopold Senghor

image: (c) M HKA

Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) was a German ethnologist, archaeologist, and proponent of a culture-historical approach to ethnology. He is also considered to be one of the key figures that influenced the Négritude movement. In the introduction to An Anthology published on the occasion of Frobenius’ hundred years anniversary, Léopold Senghor claimed that the latter had not only “revealed Africa for the rest of the world”, but also “Africans to themselves”. Indeed, in his Kulturgeschichte Afrikas, the German ethnologist not only points out that the “barbarian negro was a European invention”, but also elaborates on such concepts as emotion, intuition, art, myth, and Eurafrica, which would become crucial for Senghor’s understanding of black subjectivity. Paideuma. Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre (Paideuma. Outlines of a Soul and Culture Theory) is considered Frobenius’ most significant contribution to ethnography. Paideuma can be described as a unique faculty or manifestation of an attitude to life formed by a specific environment and upbringing. Therefore, man is understood as a product of culture, not the contrary.


MONOCULTURE – Soviet National Politics

The culture of nationalities, which was developing in the USSR under the concept of “national in form and socialist in content”, was considered as the main weapon in the struggle against antagonism among the individual Soviet nations. The vagueness of the concept allowed the Soviet government to concurrently implement such policies as the Latinisation of Islam-based cultures, in parallel with campaigns against ‘Great-Russian chauvinism’ aimed to support minorities and promote local languages at work and in schools. In the arts, the policy took even more peculiar forms. 


MONOCULTURE – Universalist Exhibitions

The Family of Man and Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record


The Family of Man was a photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the New York City Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Department of Photography. As described in the catalogue, the exhibition included photographs representing “the gamut of life from birth with emphasis on daily relationships of man to himself, to his family, to the community and to the world we live in – subject matter ranging from babies to philosophers, from the kindergarten to the university, from primitive peoples to the Councils of the United Nations”. The Family of Man was first shown in 1955 from January 24 to May 8 at MoMA, and then toured the world in five different versions for the following seven years. An important part of the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) propaganda programme, the exhibition, which was presented as an expression of humanism, played a significant role in promoting the values of the West as universal in the post-War decades. The version of the exhibition in Moscow (1959) was attended by Steichen himself and later considered by him as “the high spot of the project”. The exhibition was received negatively by photographers, as well as theorists, for its universalism and oversimplification. Philosopher Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies (1957) describes the exhibition as an example of modern myth – in this case that of the ideological representation of “conventional humanism”. According to Barthes: “Everything here, the content and appeal of the pictures, the discourse which justifies them, aims to suppress the determining weight of History: we are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behaviour where historical alienation intrudes some ‘differences’ which we shall here quite simply call ‘injustices’”.

Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record
On August 20th and September 5th in 1977, the NASA space probes Voyager I and II were launched into space. Each of the probes carries a gold-plated phonograph record, providing information should either of the probes ever be found by advanced interstellar civilisations. The identical records, which were described by its creators as “the most complex and informative attempts so far to communicate with other intelligences”, contain 118 photographs of the planet Earth and its inhabitants, greetings in fifty-five languages, including one of non-human origin – from the humpback whale. Many of the images, in fact, had been featured previously in the renowned Family of Man exhibition.