Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 13

Exploring Cultural Interests
and Values
J.P. Singh
J.P. Singh is Professor and Chair of Culture and Political Economy, and Director of the Institute for
International Cultural Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
The political tumults of ���� – especially the Brexit vote in the United
Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States – have
unhinged cultural assumptions about the world getting closer and the
functioning of democracy. The rise of political populism and the role of
cultural anxieties in Western democracies, but also in places such as India
and Turkey, entails a deeper examination of the formation of political,
social, and economic values and interests. Equally the events of ���� call
into question the extent to which different types of values are shared across
borders ranging geographically from local neighbourhoods to national and
regional markers, or across racial and other identities in cultural terms.
What happened to the idea of universal and shared values of humankind?
How can arts facilitate our understanding about each other? This special
issue brings �� essays from all around the world to illuminate this question.
This issue is a catalogue of cultural conversations rather than a singular
answer to the questions. The essays utilize the arts to motivate a broader
conversation about cultural interests and values. They call upon the arts for
the important function they have always played throughout history, namely
as interpreters of our lives.
The ��th anniversary of the birth of the festival city of Edinburgh offers an
important opportunity in ���� to explore the values that created one of the
largest annual cultural interactions in human history. From its beginning, the
different aspects of the Edinburgh festivals have accommodated conflicting
tenets between elitist and hierarchical values and organic and participatory
visions. Rudolf Bing, an Austrian refugee, created the Edinburgh International
Festival in ����. This evolved into the Edinburgh festivals celebrating their
��th anniversary in ����. The Edinburgh International Festival represented
a hierarchical notion of culture and, in the words of historian Angela Bartie
later in this issue, “the pinnacle of cultural production.” The Edinburgh
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