Word: 20th
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...true to Africa and to the African language, Gikuyu, in which the novel was written. Thiong’o’s latest book, written in the African oral storytelling tradition, tackles modern Africa, deftly navigating the way in which its world has been turned upside-down in the 20th century. The 2006 novel is set in the Republic of Aburiria, a fictional African country in the midst of a serious crisis. The Cold War has just ended and the Ruler, installed by the United States to crush the Communists, has found himself sidelined by the Americans who no longer...
...infrastructure and nonfunctioning government. So perhaps it makes sense that Rome's city council, eager to point out that stasis is not Italy's natural condition, is sponsoring an exhibition that showcases the fastest of the country's past glories. "The Legend of Speed: Art, Motorization and Society in 20th Century Italy" at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni takes visitors on a journey through a century of Italian art, design, fashion, cinema and technology to remind them of what global pacesetters Italians have been. Stretched to its conceptual limits, the show's theme of velocity allows for the inclusion of many...
...fascinating as the show is, the concept of speed ultimately loses momentum. Small wonder, perhaps, given that the two most important Italian art movements of the second half of the 20th century, Arte Povera and Transavanguardia, were the antithesis of all things speedy: the former championed the use of humble, often recycled materials while the latter marked a return to painting after it fell out of fashion during the postmodern art movements of the '60s and '70s. And surely it is no mere cultural accident that Italy's biggest recent contribution to the international Zeitgeist is Carlo Petrini's Slow...
...there any reasonable way to permit the movement of antiquities across national borders and still protect archaeological digs? Cuno wants to revive the practice of partage, the system that prevailed in expeditions through the first part of the 20th century. Under partage, the source country kept much of what was found, but archaeologists took home a share for their affiliated museums and universities. Today the source nation keeps almost everything, despite the fact that a foreign museum or university is usually paying for the dig. "If archaeologists were to say, 'We're going to withdraw our expertise until...
Dimitrios Pandermalis knows all about the idea of the universal museum. He doesn't think much of it. "A translation of the imperialism of the 19th century to the globalization of the 20th century" is what he calls the concept, and his view counts. Pandermalis is president of the organization behind the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, conceived as a standing rebuke to the British Museum's continued possession of the most passionately disputed cultural property of them all, the 5th century B.C. Elgin Marbles. Those are carvings taken from the Parthenon in the early 19th century at the direction...