Synergy

4

Authors: Dana RADLER

Zamfir Bălan’s recently published volume adds to the corpus of contributions devoted to Panait Istrati’s biography and works. This bilingual edition in Romanian and French brings an exciting insight into Istrati’s childhood and early formative years, his interest for egalitarian, socialist politics, and lifetime friendships such as those with the Russian refugee Mikhail Kazanski, the illuminating encounter and literary guidance received from the French writer, Romain Rolland. Throughout his life, Istrati has followed a committed type of writing meant to support intellectual growth among those with less fortunate prospects than the upper classes of the Romanian society. Bălan’s latest book adds to a publication about Istrati’s experience as a photographer, “Panait Istrati – fotograf și în fotografii”, marking the centenary of his birth over three decades ago (1984).

11

Authors: Aurora BĂGIAG

This research aims to explore the novel Oncle Anghel (first published in 1924) by Panait Istrati, Romanian writer of French expression, from a double perspective: religious and aesthetic. The analysis of the numerous biblical references in the novel allows us to highlight a religious metaphor anchored in a rustic Orthodoxy and packed with preChristian remains. A reading approach from the perspective of early 20th century modernism, which proclaims the absence of God, helps identify the movement towards creative atheism suggested by this work of art, which anticipates the rise of a new dogma. By alternating between the temptation of the Western world and the calling of the East, Istrati’s novel sacralises the artistic act and allows the storyteller to take the place of the divine figure.

13

Authors: Vladlena A. FEDIANINA

All over the world, people profess many religions and beliefs. Nevertheless, the religious life of Japan and its traditional practices remain a mystery to the West. This study analyses the history of one branch of the sophisticated religious system of Japan, namely the Tenjin cult, or Tenjin worship (from its appearance in the 10th century to the present days) and the modern implications of this cult. We demonstrate how, moulded by indigenous beliefs, an “earthly” man became a “Heavenly Deity”, who, in turn, under the influence of Buddhism, was transformed into a bodhisattva, and, in parallel, shaped by Confucian ideas, he turned into the “deity of learning”. We also reveal the syncretism of the archaic attributes and the borrowings throughout the history of the cult and use different examples to illustrate the main features of the religious life of Japan during various historical periods.

13

Authors: Jillian CURR

In Hanan al-Shaykh’s 2001 novel Only in London, four characters from very different national, social, sexual and cultural backgrounds are thrown together on a flight from Dubai to London where their stories of migration, exile, loss and escape intersect and intertwine. In this city scape, the characters negotiate new ‘selves’ breaking out of the stereotypical roles their cultures had required of them. In this fluid and multi-layered world, their dreams of reinvention are played out highlighting new images of the heterogeneity of Arab cultures. This paper will investigate how the city and the characters interact allowing spaces for new identities to develop in, on one level a bordered and defined area of streets and buildings but on another level, a dynamic and fluid environment.

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Authors: Roswitha BADRY

This paper provides an overview of a sample of novels by contemporary Saudi women authors published in the first decade of the 2000s in order to demonstrate to what extent this kind of fiction addresses taboo subjects and thereby not only challenges prevailing gender discourses maintained by the religious-political establishment with the aim of pushing for reform in the absence of independent civil society organizations, but also counters Western and Eastern distorted, stereotyped images of “the Arab woman”.

22

Authors: Maria GRĂJDIAN

This paper focuses on Takarazuka Revue’s strategies to re-invent the concept of “justice” specifically in the context of the French Revolution of 1789 by means of re-contextualizing history in the performance 1789 – The Lovers of Bastille (originally a French rock-opera, premiered in 2012). Founded in 1913 by Kobayashi Ichizō, one of the most significant entrepreneurs in pre-war Japan, the all-female popular musical theatre Takarazuka Revue proved itself along its centennial existence both a faithful mirror of Japanese reality and an influential model for society. This new theatrical performance reconstructs in a specific way asymmetric interactions between identity and alterity, model and copy, history and geography, obtrusively displayed in sparkling tunes, fairy-tale-like sceneries and gorgeous costumes. The last 40 years – since the world premiere of the blockbuster The Rose of Versailles in 1974 – marked an unexpected tendency in Takarazuka Revue’s public appearance, visible both in the lavishness of its performances and in the intensified commercialization of the increasingly androgynous otokoyaku figures (female impersonators of male roles). This presentation takes into account the multiple layers in Takarazuka Revue’s administration and self-orchestration: performance politics, the economic supervision of brand-related consumption, as well as the performances themselves. The transition from ethics to aesthetics and from imagination to ideology in Takarazuka Revue’s marketing of historical-geographical spaces reflects and condenses its metamorphose from an insignificant socio-cultural medium to a powerful political and economic message in post-war Japan, highlighting Japan’s shifting awareness from an “outsider” to the Western world to gradually becoming an “insider”, within the Asian community.