BY JOAN BRISTOL Mexico has multiple and contradictory identities in the imaginations of both Mexicans and foreigners. Ads and popular media romanticize Mexico as the land of mariachis, beaches, and picturesque ruins of ancient civilizations. Increasing instability, however, due to the drug trade and loss of governmental control in many areas has replaced romance with [...]
BY SIBA N. GROVOGUI The term Global South (GS) gained currency at the conclusion of the Cold War. It is not technically a directional designation, or a point due south to a fixed north. It is a symbolic designation of former colonial entities engaged in political projects of decolonization towards the realization of a postcolonial [...]
BY JOHANNA BOCKMAN In 1975, Soviet economist Leonid Kantorovich and American economist Tjalling Koopmans jointly won the Nobel Prize in Economics “for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources.”1 How could an economist of socialism and an economist of capitalism share this prestigious prize? Michael Bernstein, historian of the United States and Provost [...]
BY RICK DAVIS In some sort of ideal world, language would not be a barrier to cultural understanding. Literature, scholarship, sacred texts, jokes, journalism, nuance and even subtext would flow across actual and virtual borders. Difference would be celebrated without being flattened out. Access to rhythms of words (and life), patterns of thought, hopes, dreams, [...]
BY STEVEN A. BARNES In early March 2006, I visited a graveyard in the empty Central Asian steppe near Spassk, just south of the city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. This cemetery held the unmarked remains of prisoners of the former Soviet Union’s Gulag—the notorious system of forced labor concentration camps and internal exile—and the multi-national [...]
BY REBECCA BRYANT By the time this article appears, the presidential election campaigns now in full swing in Cyprus should have resulted in a new president for the Republic. It is quite likely, according to many polls, that the new president will also be the old one. Tassos Papadopoulos, president since 2003, presided over an eventful [...]
BY MICHELE GREET Traditionally, the field of Art History has focused predominantly on art produced in Europe. Over the past several decades, with the increased emphasis on globalism and multiculturalism, the field has expanded to include non-European regions. Consequently, Latin American art has begun to achieve long overdue recognition in both museums and academic institutions. [...]
BY LINDSAY IRVINE History, though sometimes preserved in stones, is not static. History is a living organism that changes as we understand and incorporate traumatic events into our lives and our world. The human imagination has commemorated these events in numerous ways across countless generations, but most have been lost in the sands of time. [...]