Cultural expression, creativity and innovation [antikvár]

FOREWORDStuart HallThis collection of essays follows through the line of inquiry opened up by the two previous volumes in The Cultures and Globalization Series. The aim of the series is to track the complex inter-relations between globalization and culture in its many forms in the contemporary world. Volume 3 identifies a particular site of such interactions defined by the inter-relationships between three aspects of the wider question: creativity and innovation, cultural expressions and globalization. The essays and papers collected here offer, from a variety of perspectives, a rich exploration of this field. They present a diverse set of examples and deepen our understanding and conceptualization of the complexities involved in these relationships.The three terms are fully defined in the wide-ranging introductory essay which frames the volume. Here, we try to set the stage for that investigation by looking briefly at the way the concepts have undergone significant changes of meaning in recent years and how these shifts affect their field of operations in the contemporary period. Creativity refers to the capacity, through imagination or invention, to produce something new and original (hence its close relationship to innovation). Innovation underscores the role which the idea of novelty has come to play in modern creative practices and the high value accorded to originality, Modernism's injunction to 'make it new', the significance placed on breaking traditions and the construction of radically new forms. Cultural expressions refer to the many forms in which the values, experiences, ideas, identities, beliefs, hopes, achievements and aspirations of a people or social group find expression and take significant - and signifying - form. Globalization marks the emerging inter-relationships and inter-dependences -economic, political, cultural - between different societies and parts of the world. Its contemporary form defines the new terrain on which cultural practices interact and the 'global' character which creativity, innovation and cultural expressions assume in their contemporary form.In western culture, much reinforced by Romanticism, creativity has been associated with the gifted individual, touched by genius, who is uniquely capable of bringing aesthetic expression to a high pitch of excellence. This excludes many of those civilizations in which the association of creativity with the individual is not so strong (which,