Pictures of Persuasion: Hong Kong’s Colonial Travel Posters (Published)
Hong Kong Baptist University recently purchased one of the world’s finest collections of vintage Hong Kong travel posters. The collection, which includes approximately one hundred posters dating from 1930-1980, is significant in many ways. These pictures of persuasion “offer a wealth of art, history, design, and popular culture for us to understand”. The posters provide a glimpse into evolving mid-century commercial art and the visual languages of Western modernism. Perhaps more importantly, however, they offer a valuable historical and social perspective on Hong Kong’s self-conception and its image in the West during the city’s late colonial period. The posters touch on many important historical themes, including a defence of colonialism, Hong Kong’s local and overseas identities and the ways people shared a now-lost urban environment. Hong Kong’s colonial travel posters belong to the collective memory of Hongkongers and the city’s rich cultural heritage.
Keywords: Colonialism, Commercial Art, Hong Kong, Identity, Travel Poster
REVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS IN SEMBENE OUSMANE’S GOD’S BITS OF WOOD (Published)
Literature is not just a piece of writing, which only entertains. It also performs some other functions such as teaching moral lessons and healing souls. Literature has turned out to be a medium of appending contemporary or conventional realities through the exposition of the socio-cultural and political experiences of a given society; since it (literature) is a product of a particular human society. A creative art is designed to x-ray life, with a view to display human experiences, feelings, imaginations, observations, predictions and suggestions for realistic purposes. Literature is one of the major weapons for class and/or societal struggles. This paper focuses on societal issues raised in Sembène Ousmane’s God’s bits of wood Marxist theory of violence is our theoretical framework in evaluating the writer’s preoccupations. As its purpose, the paper makes it bold to validate the fact that art and society are two interlocking entities. It is obvious that the oppressed in Sembène Ousmane’s God’s bits of wood are well mobilized and they behave as true agents of positive social transformation. They are very effective in the reconstruction agenda demonstrated in the novel. The paper ends by identifying the fundamental systemic challenges, which confront African societies during the colonial period and even now in the perceived global village and the writer is seen as one who embraces his environment and time very religiously in his artistic creation with a view to solving some common societal problems. Literature, therefore, is capable of activating and promoting the expected development in human societies.
Keywords: Art, Capitalism, Colonialism, Development, Protest