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Chapter 6 considers the way in which cultural products, goods, and services form part of cultural heritage and how they can be protected and promoted through cultural policies and law. The dual economic and cultural character of this heritage is considered and some important contextual issues introduced, including cultural diversity, globalization, culture and development, and human rights. The protection of cultural expressions and their diversity is also placed within a wider economic, political, and international law context, especially with regard to trade liberalization within the World Trade Organization. UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is placed within this context and is examined in detail, with attention to such questions as the rights and duties of States Parties, the role of civil society, how sustainable development is treated under the Convention, and the international cooperation and assistance framework it establishes.

September 11, 2001, moved a Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod congregation to face the global and local realities of Islam. Although congregational leaders agreed on the ultimate goal of saving Muslim souls, they debated the nature of Islam (does it come from the same God Christians worship or not?) and the best strategy for approaching Muslims with the Gospel (should we emphasize the contrasts or the commonalities between Christianity and Islam?). The issue of religious truth thus came to the fore: Is Islam a true religion, a false religion, or one that is partially true? In addition, St. Silas also sought to distinguish the core claims of the Gospel from cultural expressions of Christianity.

Chapter 7 looks at Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property Law. The appropriateness of intellectual property rules for protecting traditional cultural expressions and knowledge are addressed, with particular attention given to copyright law, patent law, and industrial property rights. The limitations of intellectual property rules for protecting for cultural heritage are identified. The application of intellectual property rules to traditional cultural expressions and knowledge is then examined with regard to both protection afforded by existing intellectual property treaties which are analysed here, and in relation to work that has been undertaken in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) since 2000 to develop sui generis rules that can afford better protection for traditional cultural expressions and knowledge. To this end, the WIPO Revised Provisions for Protecting Traditional Cultural Expressions (2014) and the WIPO Draft Articles on the Protection of Traditional Knowledge (2014), both in draft form at time of writing, are examined.

This chapter charts the ways in which diasporic identities and communal attachments are expressed by the artists among the respondents and focuses on their cultural expressions as a diasporic practice and form of engagement. Just as Lebanese immigrants navigate between the homeland, the host society, and the larger diaspora, so too do the artists among them express sentiments of nostalgia and displacement but also possess global feelings of belonging and cosmopolitanism. Lebanese diasporic artists express their belonging to a global community and cosmopolitan duty through their art work which emphasizes global social change, justice, and ways of thinking. This focus on artists illustrates direct engagement with the diasporic existence, but at the same time, their interest in social change encompasses their homeland, their host society, and the world at large.

This chapter considers what exactly a place is and how people make one. It focuses on cultural expressions of place, both in the more passive form of regional culture and in the more assertive form of regionalism. It then turns to literature and the aesthetic structure of literary regionalism, rooted in classical pastoral and encountered most often in the contemporary regional mystery. Examples of these genres will flesh out the understanding of how regional literature operates and why its appeal is so strong.

Displaced Chagos islanders are not only embroiled in political mobilisation and protest: they also participate in cultural expression in exile. This chapter illustrates how representations of a homeland in song lyrics and oral narratives have been transformed through experiences of displacement and relocation, and asks to what extent such transformed representations help or hinder political and legal struggles in exile. Focusing on the relationship between displacement and musical production, it reveals the changing structure and thematic content of Chagossian song lyrics by comparing the lyrics of songs composed by Chagos islanders while living on the colonial Chagos Archipelago with those composed by displaced Chagos islanders living in exile. The latter songs form part of an emergent collective historical imagination motivated by the political and legal struggles for compensation and the right to return to Chagos.

This chapter discusses the concept of incarnation in US discourse, which draws its persuasiveness from the rhetorical tension and interplay between two different geographical models of culture. Here, the discussion is divided into two main sections. The first examines spatial determinism, and the second studies the natural environment that is reproduced in the structure of cultural expression. The chapter also takes a look at symbolic geography, symptomatic spaces, spatial symbolism, poetic naturism, and symptomatic spatial poetics.

This chapter shows how the histories of Polynesian island nations are very much bound up with Christianity. The growth of charismatic movements in Polynesia, against a backdrop of rapid social change and transnational circulations between the island states and strong diasporic communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, has resulted in a type of “nonconformist liberation.” Polynesian youth are drawn to the more individuated understanding of moral consciousness, as well as the new possibilities for bodily movements and cultural expression such as dance. Thus, local culture, the chapter suggests, might in fact have a positive moral valency for contemporary Christians.

The formal characteristics of the computer game as an independent form need examination if it is to be treated with the seriousness, as a massively popular form of cultural expression, that it deserves. To simply condemn or ignore this developing form of fiction as ‘childish’, rather than recognise its ‘immaturity’, might well be a mistake. This study offers suggestions, through example, of a practice of reading computer games that in no way constitutes a rigid methodology, but might be among the first faltering steps towards such a critical undertaking.

The historic and ethnographic material uncovered during this study reveals the Theban west bank as a rich and fascinating field site. Overshadowed and obscured by the practice and marginalizing dominance of a differently focused academic discipline and the wholesale global preoccupation with ancient Egypt that its practice and analyses continue to inspire, this study has attempted to return to Qurnawi, the degree of historic and contemporary visibility that their place in this archaeological landscape warrants, and the level of academic interest that its social and ethnographic specificity merits on its own terms. Greater insight into the social history and contemporary cultural expression of the former inhabitants of the Theban “City of the Dead” further exposes the color of the rich social fabric that this community of the living has brought and continues to bring to the Luxor west bank.

This book begins by presenting the common understanding that the Communist Party hindered black cultural expression during the 1940s. The chapter shows that the Communist-led Left promoted several cultural organizations to draw black cultural workers into its orbit. Most important was the National Negro Congress (NNC) to which numerous black artists and writers contributed their talents. The NNC was a coalition of civil rights groups and labor organizations. It was officially launched in 1936 at a national conference in Chicago. It reached out to the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which heavily recruited African Americans into the labor movement. NNC organizers also worked on the cultural front by convening panels with artists and writers at its conferences, organizing campaigns against discrimination in Hollywood, and holding mass rallies to fight discrimination.

This chapter examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and American travel journals to reveal the manner in which they portrayed West Africans in order to create the moral and social justifications for slavery and racial stereotypes. It argues that European travelers often ignored the ritualistic purpose of West African music and dance and instead reduced West Africans to servants, prostitutes, and entertainers. These societal positions were developed on the premise of European hegemony and aimed to create an African commodity. Throughout West Africa, music, song, and dance were important cultural expressions. However, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, European and American travelers distorted these expressions in order to project and fulfill their own desires. This chapter shows how travel narratives presented the identity of West Africans as malleable and capable of being shaped according to the desired purpose of the gazer. Through their creation of the innate dancers and singers, it contends that travel journals contributed to the subjugation and reconfiguration of the black body through its neglect of the actual culture and tradition of the performing arts.

This chapter describes the musical life of the 1950s, examining the political climate of the late Batista era, along with its social problems and cultural expression. It focuses on how a country with many social problems could have been the center of vibrant musical development.