Cultural Diplomacy

According to the Public Diplomacy Officer, United States Consular-General Office, Mrs. Rhonda Watson, the focus on black history stems from the fact that for too many years the contributions and accomplishment of African Americans were never recorded in the history books. "It was as if we did not exist and that we didn't even matter,"

Once upon a time migrants left their old countries and severed ties with their homelands, but today with cheaper and more frequent travel and communication that facilitates and defines what we have come to know as globalisation, migrants maintain ties with the countries they came from.

A controversial exhibition of modern American art that was shut down by the U.S. government in the late 1940s has been reassembled for a new, two-year national tour. “Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy” opens Saturday at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art.

As “The Gatekeepers” director Dror Moreh is fond of saying, the power of his Oscar-nominated documentary derives not only from what the subjects of the film have to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but from who is delivering those words.

You could, of course, sit back, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive Sri Lanka's foreign policy, public diplomacy and strategic communication are these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it; using professorial language or plain road-side rhetoric which doesn't make much of a difference.

Few Australians are aware that Indian contingents fought alongside the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli that is so central to the founding myth of Australian (and New Zealand) identity. As cricket legend Rahul Dravid noted in the 2011 Bradman Oration at the Australian War Memorial, appropriately enough, 1,300 Indian soldiers lost their lives at Gallipoli. Indians fought alongside Australians also in “El Alamein, North Africa, in the Syria-Lebanon campaign, in Burma, in the battle for Singapore” during the Second World War.

With liberalization of economies and privatisation in the Middle East, business consultancy agencies had a major role to play in bridging the East Vs West business cultural etiquette & practice conundrum. In the Middle East, there is a great variation in business culture not only from nation to nation but also within countries too. Partnerships are based on mutual trust and principles.

February 23, 2013

The young man looked strange. In fact, as he climbed by mistake onto the Chinese table-tennis team’s bus at the world championships in Japan, in April 1971, he was one of the oddest creatures Zhuang Zedong had ever seen. His pinkish Western skin was framed by brown hair that curled to his shoulders. His goofy grin seemed fixed, naively and nervously, to his face. And when he turned round—for there were no seats, and he was standing facing a bus of crop-haired, staring Chinese—the letters on the back of his training suit read, large as life, “USA”.

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