Jazz in the USSR: Freedom, Popular Culture, and ‘the Decadent West’

March 29, 2019 Dora Vrhoci

Still from Valery Todorovsky’s 2008 musical Stilyagi. Image source: http://popkult.org/hipsters/. — Still from Valery Todorovsky’s 2008 musical *Stilyagi*. Image source: http://popkult.org/hipsters/.

Feeling a bit jazzy today? Not in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The USSR and jazz had a love-hate relationship ever since the country’s formation in the early 1920s: the officials hated it, the youth loved it.

Bungo Stray Dogs: A Crash Course in World Literature

February 15, 2019 Dora Vrhoci

Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Or maybe Fitzgerald isn’t really your thing, but you simply can’t get enough of E. A. Poe’s short stories.

Now, how would you react if Jay Gatsby suddenly started walking down the streets of Yokohama and, or wait, let me rephrase this. How would you react if Jay Gatsby suddenly started flying above the streets of Yokohama in Moby Dick with Herman Melville, E. A. Poe and Mark Twain aboard, while H.P. Lovecraft is wading in the Tsurumi river below them, after having transformed into a giant, humanoid octopus?

Well, these are all pretty mainstream events in Bungo Stray Dogs.

‘Reinventing the Wheel’: How the Current Anime and Manga Scene Is Drawing Its Inspiration from the Theme of ‘the Doppelgänger’

January 26, 2019 Dora Vrhoci

Anyone who has ever read Sui Ishida’s popular dark fantasy manga series Tokyo Ghoul or watched at least one episode of its anime adaptation probably noticed that the series largely builds its plot around the theme of the so-called ‘(evil) double’ or ‘the Doppelgänger’.

Acting Locally, Thinking Globally: What the Anti-Nuclear Movement Can Teach us about “New [Transnational] Modes of Observation of the World”

December 21, 2018 Dora Vrhoci

The 24th UN Climate Change Conference (COP24) has just wrapped up in Katowice, Poland. The conference’s main objective was to reach a decision that will ensure full implementation of the Paris Agreement (the so-called Katowice Package) and this way further lower greenhouse gas emissions globally. However, reaching a decision which will appeal to all the signing-parties of the Paris Agreement is not a piece of cake, as different national actors are still tackling the issue of climate change at their own pace, while the discrepancy in terms of technological possibilities of controlling climate change between developed and developing countries is still enormous.