Showing papers in "Culture & History Digital Journal in 2013"

Human Zoos or Ethnic Shows? Essence and contingency in Living Ethnological Exhibitons

Abstract: [] The aim of this article is to study the living ethnological exhibitions. The main feature of these multiform varieties of public show, which became widespread in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe and the United States, was the live presence of individuals who were considered “primitive”. Whilst these native peoples sometimes gave demonstrations of their skills or produced manufactures for the audience, more often their role was simply as exhibits, to display their bodies and gestures, their different and singular condition. In this article, the three main forms of modern ethnic show (commercial, colonial and missionary) will be presented, together with a warning about the inadequacy of categorising all such spectacles under the label of “human zoos”, a term which has become common in both academic and media circles in recent years. [RESUMEN] ?Zoos humanos o espectaculos etnicos? Esencia y contingencia en las exposiciones etnologicas ‘vivas’.- El objetivo del articulo es estudiar las exhibiciones etnologicas vivas, una multiforme modalidad de espectaculo publico que se extiende durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y la primera mitad del XX y que presenta como caracteristica esencial la presentacion “en vivo” de individuos considerados primitivos. Aunque tales personajes, los nativos, en ocasiones ejecutan ciertas destrezas o elaboran determinadas manufacturas de cara al publico, lo mas habitual es que su unico cometido sea mostrarse a si mismos, exhibir sus cuerpos y sus gestos, su condicion diferente y singular. Revisamos las tres principales formas de show etnico moderno (comercial, colonial y misional) y advertimos sobre lo inadecuado de englobar todos estos espectaculos bajo el calificativo de “zoos humanos”, expresion que se ha extendido tanto en el ambito academico como en el mediatico durante los ultimos anos.

Another History for Another Psychiatry. The Patient’s View

Abstract: This article aims to summarise, in the first instance, some of the historiographical trends which have built a “critical” history of psychiatry from the 1960s onwards Thereafter, it will demonstrate, with suitably significant examples, how methods and discourses were being refined and updated, before reaching a proposal for a new cultural history of psychiatry and subjectivity In our analysis, special emphasis is placed on the “patient's view” This renders necessary the task of identifying little consulted sources, such as the writings of the mad, and the incorporation of interdisciplinary hermeneutic tools, including, most notably, those taken from cultural studies and, in particular, written culture Finally, it will offer a reflection on the epistemic role that this historiographical approach could play in the construction of new ways of understanding mental health, such as that represented by so-called post-psychiatry

Aesthetics and Empire: The Sense of Feminine Beauty in the Making of the US Imperial Archipelago

Abstract: This article examines the “sense of beauty” in the United States imperial archipelago, composed of the island territories of Cuba, Hawai`i, Philippines, and Puerto Rico, all acquired in 1898. The theoretical connection among these two elements –aesthetics and empire– is provided by a revision of the concepts “economy of colonial desire” and “complex of visuality.” This paper analyzes the most advanced visual technology of the late nineteenth century: the mass- produced, printed photograph. In particular, it focuses upon the representations of feminine beauty as found the illustrated “new-possessions” books which described recent island acquisitions of the United States. The connections between aesthetics and the forms of governance in each territory will also be elucidated.

Enlivening the dying ruins: history and archaeology of the Jesuit Missions in Ethiopia, 1557–1632

Abstract: A summary is presented of the recent archaeological research led by the University Complutense of Madrid on the residences and monuments of the Jesuit missions in Ethiopia, most of them built at the end of the Mission period, between 1621 and 1632. The paper examines the known mission sites in turn, concentrating on the most important ones located in the region of Dembya, north of lake Tana. The emphasis has been put on the contrast between the information available from historical sources, mainly from the Jesuits’ writings and letters, and that obtained in the field, concluding that the differences are limited to the natural tendency to embellishment and self-praise by the missionaries. Finally, the conclusions expose the cultural problems that still exist in Ethiopia to treat this “dark” historical period of the country.

The Politics of Pretence: Woman and Nation in Laura Restrepo's Delirio

Abstract: This article examines the interrelationships among the text’s major themes: violence, dissimulation and delirium, at both the level of nation and also of family and individual. The dysfunctional character of the Loudono family is reflected in the plight of the nation: while Agustina is the chief victim of her father’s violent outbursts, so the nation is traumatized by the violent outrages committed by the criminal ‘father’, Pablo Escobar. Restrepo shows how, in these circumstances, madness takes its place on the inside of Colombian culture, ceasing thereby to be a state of exception. It is pretence that drives Agustina mad; but Restrepo’s novel is not one-sidedly negative. She locates the possibility of a new order in Agustina’s challenge to patriarchal power through her defiance of her father and through her don de escribir that provides a gender-inflected counterpoint to her mother’s don de encubrir. Particular emphasis is given to the narrative reconstruction of the climactic scene when familial tensions finally spill over: though truth is revealed, the pretence survives unscathed. But Agustina’s own narrative provides a countervailing force: her language declines to conform to the syntax of reason, assuming instead the rhythms of madness. This madness can be seen as creative, a mode of escaping the patriarchal furrow of the male symbolic order and spurious male rationality.

Queer Literature in Spain: Pathways to Normalisation

Abstract: More than any other, the idea of normalisation has provoked deep divisions within queer activism both at a philosophical and also at a political level. At the root of these divisions lies the irreconcilable divergence between an agenda for social change, which advocates the need for society to accept all sexual behaviours and identities as normal, and an approach of radical resistance against some social structures that can only offer a bourgeois and conformist normalisation. Literary fiction and homo-gay-queer themed cinema have explored these and other sides of the idea of normalisation and have thus contributed to the taking of decisive steps: from the poetics of transgression towards the poetics of celebration and social transformation. In this paper we examine two of these literary normalisation strategies: the use of humour and the proliferation of discursive perspectives both in the cinema and in narrative fiction during the last decades.

Queering Gender: The New Femme Fatale in Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004)

Abstract: It is difficult to define film genres in the post-modern cinema, as they are strongly influenced by the conventions of classic genres. Within this context the emergence of transgressive or “dissident” identities have populated such genres and particularly the creation of a modern femme fatale has become a popular and polemical character in contemporary fiction. This new transgressive identity deviates from its counterpart in classical cinema-film noir. Pedro Almodovar’s La mala educacion (2004) reveals that the modern femme fatale has become at the turn of the twenty-first century an integral part of the queer community, thus proposing a new filmic platform of queering gender for the vindication of the rights of the (“other”) stigmatized identities.

Gender, Body and Writing in Ena Lucía Portela’s “Una extraña entre las piedras”

Abstract: This article seeks to fill a gap in Cuban gender studies. The aim here is to explore, through Ena Lucia Portela’s short story “Una extrana entre las piedras”, how intertextuality is used in recent Cuban lesbian narrative to challenge the monologic and homogeneous positions created in terms of post-revolutionary Cuban subjectivities. By inserting the feminine subjects within a transnational debate, this article claims that Portela will create a fluid identity within a context labelled by Portela herself as “pulp”, a heterogeneity framed by discourses that engage with postmodernism, and feminine writing. This article will prove that although the text itself attempts to defy the parameters of French feminists, it ends up representing them through a metanarrative process, which paradoxically places Portela at the forefront of new gender frameworks in Cuban studies, by giving visibility to the generally absent lesbian body.

Fictions of Sex, Fear and Loathing in the Caribbean: Revisiting the Haitian/Dominican Borderland

Abstract: Haitian-Dominican border narratives invariably draw attention to debates concerning the Dominican Republic’s (historical) hysterical drives to maintain an untainted “Raza dominicana” and simultaneously point to the threat posed to this ideal by their othered ethnic neighbours, the Haitians. What is less prevalent is an exploration of the sexual history of the border. Equally sparse are critical explorations of the fictional narratives of this border which privilege sex and the erotic as principal investigative prisms. Yet the literary architecture of the border is unsustainable without its sexual elements. This essay revisits key moments in the narrative construction of the border and investigates a few border texts that participate in the discussion on race and nationhood in the Dominican Republic. The aim here is straightforward; I intend to highlight the tenacious presence of sex and fear in narratives which record, interrogate, denounce or celebrate the border. The putative “problem” of the border, the essay reveals, is as much a problem of gender as it is of race. Accordingly, the fear of black masculinity on one hand and the celebration of new world erotics on the other become key components in unravelling the meanings of border identity.

Borrowed Beauties: The National Collection of Artistic Reproductions

Abstract: The role of the copy in the history of art; museums of art reproductions and the Spanish collection at the end of the 19th century; the phenomenon of the copy in ancient Rome and in the successive rebirths and recoveries of the classic in the Western tradition; historical and conceptual paradoxes that encloses the reproduction of sculptures; the incorporation of the national collection of casts to he National Museum of Sculpture.

Gender Symbolic Messages in Music and Magazines Consumed by Young Mexicans

Abstract: Music and magazines are methods of symbolic communication for youth, through which they receive and send concrete messages about social constructs of gender. The aim of this paper is to report the results obtained in the analysis of visual and textual codes in music and magazines consumed by young Mexicans daily. In general terms, the results show a wealth of meanings and values about sexual identity anchored in traditional stereotypes that in some way continue promoting violence against women.

Alexander von Humboldt and British artists: the Oriental taste

Abstract: Humboldtian landscape is the best result of a close relationship between artists and scientists in the context of the Enlightenment. Many artists inspired Humboldt to develop his concept of landscape as the best way of representing Nature, but some British artists in particular were a strong reference for him. Thomas Daniell and William Hodges had travelled to Asia creating a particular imagery, which inspired the desire to travel and the feeling of the exotic taste in Humboldt. Around Humboldt, mainly two types of artists have been studied: on the one hand, painter travellers who received direct instructions from Humboldt after his experience in America, and on the other, artists who started their trips by themselves after reading his works. However, this paper is focused on the links between Humboldt and these British painters of the Orient, whom he met on a European tour with Georg Forster, before making his trip to America.

Josep Renau and the restoration of a committed beauty

Abstract: Besides the question about the link between beauty and commitment, the paper analyses and proposes the restoration of both the existential and creative trajectory of Josep Renau (Valencia, 1907-Berlin, 1982), as one of the greatest Spanish modern painters without any doubt, but also a most singular, versatile and committed one. He was dedicated to painting, muralist painting, illustration, graphics and posters design or photomontage. His very intense development, in a sort of progression in relation to both socio-cultural commitment and artistic renovation, went through artistic and cultural stages of three significant countries binding his life, creativity and pilgrimage: Spain, Mexico and the former German Democratic Republic. Nevertheless, this commitment, so previously linked to his creative development, was simultaneously changing and varying from the impetuous commitment to the Spanish stage, to an endogen commitment of Mexican character and finally to the hexogen German stage, thus becoming from the seventies a functional implication adapted to the social requirement. At any rate, under such conditionings and during his development, he generated a kind of contingent or complex beauty –which we have called “committed beauty”-, the recovery of which must be undertaken while we also restore the figure of the artist himself.

Rewriting Classical Myths: Women's Voices in “Los motivos de Circe” and “Penélope” by Lourdes Ortiz

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to explore the mythical representations in two of the six short stories that make up Lourdes Ortiz's Voces de mujer (2007), previously published under the title Los motivos de Circe . It is well known that most rewritings of the classical myths have been faithful to the “official truth” of the original versions. But recent works in search of other meanings, have explored dimensions often hidden or blurred by the “official” version. This is the case of the short stories in this collection whose protagonists are six archetypal or mythical women and their respectful references to the biblical, Homeric and pictorial world: Eve, Circe, Penelope, Betsabe, Salome and Gioconda. The perspective offered by Lourdes Ortiz about the history of these myths allows us to read the story from the point of view of her female heroines. As such, then, in this article I will focus on two female characters from the Homeric epic: Circe and Penelope.

“Wheat of Portugal” . The African adventure of maize

Abstract: This work focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and starts from the introduction of maize ( Zea mays ) in different places of Africa by the Portuguese. Likewise, it tries to open the way in the jungle of uncertain names and interpretations offered by various descriptions of the period under study, and it poses the need for cultural-historical readings of the phenomenon by comparing different descriptive traditions, with special reference in this case to Ethiopia.

The Between Story: Physical and Psychic Trauma in the Poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Lucille Clifton

Abstract: Rhetorical choices used by Black women poets makes their work a militant force in the theoretical war against racist and sexist oppression. Research on trauma and testimony supports a breakdown of the person’s or character’s sudden brush with death –a moment that will never be fully realized, however it is at the center of explicating the rhetorical signs of trauma. Through a reading of Sonia Sanchez’s poems “Wounded in the House of a Friend” (Sanchez, 1995: 5), “Poem for Some Women” (Sanchez, 1995: 72), “Eyewitness: Case No. 3456” (Sanchez, 1995: 70), and “Poem at Thirty” (Sanchez, 1985: 4), with Lucille Clifton’s “My Friends” (Clifton, 1987: 147), “Shapeshifter Poems” (Clifton, 2000: 52), and “Song at Midnight” (Clifton, 1993: 24), my analysis will trace how traumatic wounding constitutes a psychic wound. It then applies the racialized and gendered reading of the subjects in the poem (insidious trauma), and how time and space relates to the subjects, space, and silences (traumatic realism). With the use trauma theory, I will illustrate how Sanchez and Clifton’s aesthetic forms adapted the militancy of the Black Arts Movement to address the silenced voices. In particular, the silenced voices of subjects continually subsumed beneath the phallocentric undertones challenged by Black feminist discourse, art, and poetry will be addressed.

Arturo de Córdova and the crisis of the bourgeois marriage. On the role of the married women in “Las tres perfectas casadas” and the Married Couples’ Dinner in “Cena de matrimonios” (1952 and 1962)

Abstract: Arturo de Cordova was an international Mexican film star that managed to participate in Mexico, Argentina and Spain cinemas. His career was possible in a transnational cinema that achieved to reach to a wide Spanish speaking audience. In these films, he developed a character that went from the romantic male star to the mature seducer that will have an important role in the post-war middleclass society. He will act as a medium character between active businessman and their wives that will not admit the daily housework and be kept in a private sphere as norm. The analysis will be focussed on two plays that were adapted to the cinema. These plays were written by two Spanish authors; Alejandro Casona in Mexico and Alfonso Paso in Spain, and they were shot in these countries as Las tres perfectas casadas (1952) and Cena de matrimonios (1962). The dramatic similarity in their approach to the conflict between men and women allow us to present the critical view elaborated against the conventions that gave structure to marriage in this society. The fact that De Cordova played the main role points out the Hispanic shared culture about genre matters.

La Minotaura , the Female Minotaur: Aida Toledo’s Version of the Classical Myth

Abstract: The poetry of the Guatemalan poet Aida Toledo, from its beginning, breaks away from the masculine and feminine images created and recreated through centuries by the owner of words and power, man. Toledo, as a consequence of her reflections on gender, questions, changes and pulverizes certain qualities considered to be unique and essential in defining each of the sexes. The poet starts with the Greek myths, as she considerers them to be the sacred pillars in building the Western Culture. Aida Toledo, not satisfied with using the sword of extermination against the eternal masculine and feminine values, uses the ashes from that fire as fertilizer to sprout new life, a life that time and space will shape into new beings, new male and female Minotaur.

Invisible Authorities and Visible Authorizations in “Rompecabezas” by Natalia Smirnoff

Abstract: In the Argentinian cinema of the end of the 90’s and beginning of the 21st century, the representations of femininity and masculinity have become richer thanks to alternative visions, most frequently proposed by female directors. Natalia Smirnoff’s film Rompecabezas (Puzzle) is a perfect example. It tells the story of an ordinary woman whose psychosexual awakening shakes up the invisible forces that had dictated her life up to that point. Rompecabezas explores the everlasting effect and influence on the patriarchal structures in constructing identity. The aim of this work, rooted in a gender perspective, is to study in what way both hierarchy and symbolic systems operate and to what extent Natalia Smirnoff provides us with a powerful (re)vision of transformation for women.

Told by a myth: Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull

Abstract: This article proposes an approach to the novel Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull by Thomas Mann from the point of view of the imaginal psychology of James Hillman. From this perspective the novel seems to illustrate the most innovative thesis of that psychology, which is especially relevant for having been written prior to the formulation of Hillman’s theories. The unplanned correspondence between both ways of thinking furnishes a valuable argument that supports the new conception of human psyche introduced by Carl Gustav Jung and developed in this way by James Hillman.