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Tatlin’s Fish: Art and Revolution in Everyday Life

Tucked into the pages of Nikolai Punin’s diary is a sliver of silver paper made into the shape of a fish. Its scales have been drawn with what appears to be black marker or charcoal in an Impressionist style on one side and in a Cubist style on the other. The fish has two fins along its underside and a pointed tail, most of which have brightly-colored orange tips, and there is a razor-like saw of a fin on its backside. An orange piece of yarn is tied to its mouth as if the fish had been caught with it, making it easy to hang or pull out of a book. The whole object is about the length of a page and, since it was found in a book, one can assume it was made to be used as a bookmark.

Both sides of the fish are decorated in silver and orange (Punin papers, Harry Ransom Center).

The fish was a gift from the famous Soviet avant-garde artist, Vladimir Tatlin, to his friend, the art historian Nikolai Punin. The two men worked together at The Museum of Painterly Culture in Petrograd in the early 1920s just after the Russian Revolution when the diary was written. Punin worked in the Department of General Ideology and Tatlin was producing an experimental play by the poet Velimer Khlebnikov, another friend and collaborator in the circle of Russian revolutionary, avant-garde artists. For Punin, Tatlin represented a particular quality of Russian art that made it surpass the latest Cubist innovations in painting coming from France. In 1921, Punin had already written a polemic entitled, “Tatlin (Against Cubism).” In this short work, he argued that Tatlin made the same innovations in art as the French Cubists, but surpassed them because the tradition of icon painting in Russia gave the Russian avant-garde a particular appreciation of the paint surface. The lack of a Renaissance tradition of perspectivalism, according to Punin, also gave the Russian avant-garde a much freer relationship to space. Punin referred to The Fishmonger, as one of three paintings that represented Tatlin’s start in this direction. In that painting we can see multiple fish that have the silver and orange coloring as the paper fish found in Punin’s diary. Tatlin’s early experiences with church art, painting icons, and copying wall frescoes, was crucial in the development of his style as well as his ideas about the role of art in revolutionary society. The icon was both a work of art and an object for everyday use. This emphasis on the image as everyday object became important in expanding Tatlin’s creative pursuits to include the construction of utilitarian objects to transform the nature of everyday life in the USSR during the transition to socialism.

The Fishmonger, by Vladimir Tatlin, 1911 (via Wikiart).

In 1923, Tatlin became the Director of the Section for Material Culture at the Museum of Painterly Culture. During his tenure there, he authored several documents outlining his general program for the role of material culture in the USSR. In an article written under his direction called “The New Way of Life,” he described a series of new projects and prototypes, namely a new design for a coat, and one of five new designs for an oven that could cook and keep food warm for 28 to 30 hours and also keep the home heated economically. Tatlin incorporated the text of “The New Way of Life” into a controversial work of the same name, a photo-montage showing images of the designs that were meant to depict that revolutionary new way of life. He created it for display in the showroom of the Section for Material Culture and the designs were also shown at the Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Tendencies. Punin wrote a favorable review of Tatlin’s work in the exhibition, but other critics who believed that art should occupy a place “beyond the realm of the everyday” found the designs inappropriate. Tatlin’s work was revolutionary in that it challenged this traditional boundary between art and the everyday.

A New Way of Life, by Vladimir Tatlin (via Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

The fish is an important indication of a close personal and professional relationship between the artist, Vladimir Tatlin, and his admiring critic, Nikolai Punin, and it represents the ways that Tatlin and Punin tried to outline a new revolutionary program for art. It also is an example of that very revolutionary impulse in that it is an object to be contemplated for its aesthetic beauty and also to be used for a utilitarian purpose as a bookmark. Tatlin’s work paved the way for a new interpretation of art as something that could be figurative as well as useful; art in revolutionary society could have a place in the daily lives of every individual and not only in the lofty realm of the art establishment. This little fish offers a window onto the theories of the period of the Russian Revolution, when people sought to rethink the entire Western European model of not only aesthetics but also society.

Tatlin’s fish can be found in The Punin Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Additional Sources:
Anonymous, “New Way of Life,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).
John E. Bowlt, review of O Tatline, by Nikolai Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996).
Christina Kiaer, “Looking at Tatlin’s Stove,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds (2008).
Jennifer Greene Krupala, review of O Tatline by N. Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, The Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 3 (1996).
John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (1983).
Nikolai Punin, “Tatlin (Against Cubism),” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).

The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones (2016)

By Diana Bolsinger

Robert Jones interprets many of today’s most contentious political and cultural battles as the product of shifts in America’s demographic make-up. He convincingly shows that ongoing demographic shifts in America’s ethnic mix are accompanied by unprecedented changes in religious affiliation. White Christian (by which he means Protestant) Americans dominated American politics and social life for most of our nation’s history. Jones dates the shift away from this dominance to the election of John F. Kennedy – a Catholic– in 1960, with the change accelerating through the 1960s and 1970s. In subsequent decades, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans surged, along with increases in the numbers of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and others. The last year that Protestants represented a majority was 2008. Jones uses survey data to identify a generational shift within Protestant mainline and evangelical movements, finding younger believers to be far more accepting of gay and interracial marriage.

Jones argues that it is this demographic shift that has driven the furor over several key issues in recent years, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and a number of initiatives to infuse politics with “Biblical values.” Jones cites polling data indicating evangelical white Protestants are the least likely group to have black friends to explain their alienation from movements such as Black Lives Matter. He likens the passion driving the religious white conservative reaction to the “anger and denial” stage of grief, predicting believers will eventually refocus their energies on strengthening their own community of believers.

(via Jeff Kubina)

Jones’s interpretation of today’s culture wars is shaped by his own liberal outlook, but his account should also be interesting to conservative readers. Regardless of one’s political views, the demographic changes he outlines are real and are changing America’s politics and culture. The data Jones provides derives from solid sources. Most of the explanations for the rise of the “angry voter” behind the Trump campaign have focused on economic issues. While Jones does not address the 2016 presidential campaigns, his work provides a useful background on how demographics also factor into the rise of Trump’s popularity. The results of the campaign should also prove an interesting test of Jones’s argument that “White Christian America” has lost the political clout to dominate national politics.

Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016)

Sound Maps: The New Archive (No. 6)

by Henry Wiencek

In the study of history, it’s easy to fall back on national identities: “Irish music,” an “English accent,” “American Exceptionalism” are just a few examples. But a closer examination of the local cultures—music, dialects, history—that exist within nations demonstrates how misleading those generalizations can be. Just look through one of the British Library’s “Sound Maps” and you’ll be convinced. This remarkable site takes many of the library’s 50,000 recordings of music, regional accents, and oral histories and arranges them geographically on Google Maps. The project is at once global and local—each sound map is an aural window into a unique part of the world. You can hear birds chirping in Algarve, Portugal, a folksinger perform in Carlistrane, Ireland, or the local dialect in Morton, Mississippi.

One of the most fascinating—and addictive—features on the site is “Your Accents,” a global map of the world’s seemingly endless variety of dialects. The map features recordings of people from across the globe reading the same English phrases, allowing listeners to discern how each locality articulates “scone,” “garage” and “schedule” among other richly pronounceable words. The most immediate differences are apparent along national lines, as English, Indian, American, and various other accents contour the words in unique ways. But the map goes even deeper—revealing the astonishing regional differences that exist within those nations. Although people from Brighton and Leeds ostensibly share an “English” accent, the sonic differences between them are vast.

Other sound maps use the same technology to tell far more sobering stories. “Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust” archives oral histories of that traumatic epoch. Again using Google Maps, the page arranges survival stories based on geographic origins: individuals from France, England, Germany, Poland and even Azerbaijan are all represented. These unique and deeply affecting histories underscore the striking heterogeneity of the Holocaust’s victims and survivors. They were rich and poor; came from big cities and small towns; and identified as religiously devout and irreligious. By mapping their oral histories, the British Library visually captures that geographic and experiential diversity. And by letting them speak, reinforces the kinds of variations that get flattened out or even erased when reading text on a page.

The British Library’s “Sound Maps” is an invaluable tool for anyone interested in hearing what the world sounds like. Cultural historians and preservationists will take particular interest in the collections of music and dialects—time capsules of old folkways quietly vanishing in a globalizing world. Readers may note the site’s emphasis on English speaking regions, especially the UK, but the geographic breadth of its collection remains deeply impressive. These maps do not just capture the sounds of the world, they capture its most compelling minutiae: the small town pubs, the remote jungles, and the fascinating people.

Explore the latest finds in the NEW ARCHIVE:

Charley Binkow on iTunes’s salute to Black History Month

And Henry Wiencek finds a new way of looking at Emancipation

Photo Credits:

Screenshot from “Your Accents” sound map (Image courtesy of the British Library)

Screenshot from “Jewish Survivors Of The Holocaust” sound map (Image courtesy of the British Library)

Quebecois lumbermen making music with a violin and sticks, 1943 (Image courtesy of National Film Board of Canada)

Getz/Gilberto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

by Edward Shore

“I’m not a sociologist but it was a time when people in the States wanted to turn to something other than their troubles,” Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto mused in 1996. “There was a feeling of dissatisfaction, possibly the hint of war to come, and people needed some romance, something dreamy for distraction.” This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of 1964’s Getz/Gilberto, the triumphant collaboration between North American jazz saxophonist Stanley Getz (1927-1991), Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto (b. 1931), his then-wife, Astrud Gilberto (b. 1940), and their friend and compatriot, the composer Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim (1927-1994).

Getz/Gilberto was not North America’s first encounter with bossa nova, the lyrical fusion of samba and cool jazz emanating from the smoky nightclubs, recording studios, and performance halls of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1950s. Yet the eight-track LP was by far the most successful. Propelled by the genre-defining single, “The Girl From Ipanema,” Getz/Gilberto spent ninety-six weeks on the charts and won four Grammy awards, including Best Album of the Year in 1965. Other tracks, including “Para Machucar Meu Coração,” “Desafinado,” and “Corcovado/Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars,” also became jazz standards. “Americans are generally not very curious about the styles of other countries,” Astrud Gilberto insisted. “But our music was Brazilian music in a modern form. It was very pretty and it was exceptional for managing to infiltrate America’s musical culture.”

What explains Americans’ love affair with bossa nova in the winter of 1964? Part of the answer lies in the power of popular music to relieve a broken heart. Critics associated Getz/Gilberto’s cool, sophisticated sound with the Kennedy White House, where music, high fashion, and glamorous parties had been hallmarks of “Camelot” on Pennsylvania Avenue during the early 1960s. Perhaps audiences sought to recapture a bit of the mystique that had vanished when President Kennedy was slain in Dallas, Texas, only five months before the record’s release.

For jazz critic Howard Mandel, Getz/Gilberto was like “another tonic for the assassination’s disruption, akin for adults to the salve upbeat the Beatles had provided for teenagers’ after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.” Gilberto’s hushed vocals and understated guitar, Jobim’s gentle piano, and Getz’s lush saxophone transported weary listeners to a sun soaked, tropical paradise light years removed from the turmoil confronting the United States in the winter of 1964.

Yet the Brazil of North American fantasy–languid, exotic, and serene–contrasted sharply with reality. By late 1963, the United States had declared Brazil a “trouble spot” in its hemispheric crusade against communism. Traditional elites and U.S. Cold Warriors opposed Brazilian President João “Jango” Goulart and his center-left agenda, which extended voting rights to illiterates, taxed foreign corporations, and introduced land reform. Meanwhile, peasant agitation in the Brazilian Northeast, the fulcrum of the global sugar trade, deepened the anxieties of U.S. policymakers who feared that Latin America’s largest economy might soon follow in Cuba’s footsteps. In March 1964, the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Brazilian military secretly began plotting Goulart’s overthrow.

While “The Girl from Ipanema” climbed to the top of the Billboard charts, U.S. warships penetrated Brazilian waters to support a military coup d’état on April 1, 1964, terminating the country’s brief flirtation with social reform. The United States had once again intervened in Latin America to preserve an illusion of tropical tranquility that existed only in the imaginations of ruling elites, intelligence agencies, and North American consumers. The military dictators who succeeded Jango and controlled Brazil for the next two decades understood the uses of music just as well and embraced bossa nova for its commercial appeal, apolitical subject matter, and potential to smooth over the nation’s deep-seated socio-political divisions.

Yet the marriage between bossa nova and the dictatorship was not to last. A younger generation of Brazilian artists, including Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Rita Lee, and Tom Zé, fused elements of bossa nova with rock n’roll, psychedelia, experimental theatre, and Brazilian folk music into the colorful, exuberant countercultural movement known as Tropicália. Gone was the “tall, tan, young, and lovely” morena of Ipanema Beach. By 1968, the regime’s censors raced to cleanse Brazilian popular music of anti-establishment themes, even forcing Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, two of the country’s most visible stars, into exile in the United Kingdom. The coup government ultimately turned its back on bossa nova, too. In 1969, the regime sacked Vinícius de Moraes from his post in the Foreign Ministry after the legendary composer, playwright, and original author of “The Girl from Ipanema” criticized the dictatorship’s restraints on artistic freedom.

Popular interest in bossa nova continued to wane over the course of the 1970s. Outraged by U.S. sponsorship of the military regime, Brazilian musicians distanced themselves from a style that enjoyed intimate ties to the “giant from the North.” A blend of rock, samba, and jazz known as MPB, or “música popular brasileira,”eclipsed bossa nova as Brazil’s national sound. MPB artists like Chico Buarque, Jorge Ben, and Novos Baianos camouflaged criticisms of government repression, social injustice, and imperialism with irresistible melodies, appealing to a growing audience of middle-class youth. Meanwhile, in the slums and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador, a young generation of Afro-Brazilians challenged the nation’s vaunted reputation as a “racial democracy,” while embracing cultural symbols of Black Power and the African Diaspora, including soul, funk, and reggae. Amid this rising tide of popular protest against the regime, bossa nova, with its dreamy, cool detachment, appeared painfully at odds with the struggles of ordinary Brazilians.

Still, the genre remains a major force in Brazilian pop culture and “world” music. The millions of tourists who visit Rio de Janeiro every year arrive at an airport named after Tom Jobim. Inevitably, more than a few vacationers board their flights home in “Girl from Ipanema” t-shirts purchased at the airport gift shop. Bossa nova also experienced a brief resurgence in the mid-1990s. Red Hot+Rio, a compilation album produced by the AIDS-awareness organization Red Hot in 1996, paid tribute to the musical career of Tom Jobim and featured covers by artists including Sting, Astrud Gilberto, and David Byrne. Today, pop stars like Marisa Monte, Celso Fonseca, and Uruguay’s Jorge Drexler refashion bossa nova sounds for contemporary audiences. And what about the song that made bossa nova an international sensation? “The Girl From Ipanema” currently ranks as the second-most-recorded pop song of all time, after the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Amid the pageantry surrounding the upcoming FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, look for “The Girl From Ipanema” to sway gently back into the spotlight.

Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto perform “The Girl From Ipanema” in 1964:

Hear more Bossa Nova:

João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim in a 1992 live concert

Elis Regina and Tom Jobim performing “Aguas de Março” in 1974

Astrud Gilberto’s comments can be found in “Interview with Astrud Gilberto,” by Howard Mandel, Verve Records, Re-issue of Getz/Gilberto, 1996, liner notes.

Howard Mandel’s comments come from correspondence with the author, January 2014. A special thanks to him from the author.

Photo Credits:

1964 LP cover of Getz/Gilberto (Image courtesy of Verve Records)

Creed Taylor, Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, João Gilberto and Stan Getz recording together (Image courtesy of last.fm)

Brazilians marching against the country’s military dictatorship, 1964 (Image courtesy of Mount Holyoke College)

Musical team on Getz/Gilberto: (from left) Stan Getz, Milton Banana, Tom Creed Taylor, João Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto (Image courtesy of last.fm)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating The Modern Nation Through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

by Ahmad Agbaria

On June 8, 2010 an Egyptian Google executive based in Dubai, named Wael Ghonim, was stunned by a YouTube video that featured a fellow citizen by the name of Khaled Said, bloodied and disfigured. It turned out that the Egyptian police had beaten Said to death and mutilated his body. Appalled by this short video that ran viral through Arab social media, Wael Ghonim created a Facebook page that came to symbolize the involvement of ordinary people in creating change. “We are all Khaled Said” was the name of the Facebook page, adding the motto “today they killed Khaled, and if I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they’ll kill me.” This internet-based movement contributed to fomenting the uprising in Egypt that ultimately overthrew the corrupt, 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak. Throughout modern Egyptian history, the media and popular culture have played a crucial role in shaping and informing major political events, as Ziad Fahmy makes evident in Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture.

Fahmy argues that the illiterate and lower classes played an important role in forging Egyptian nationalism. Drawing on otherwise unconsulted sources in colloquial Egyptian, such as songs, popular poems, vaudeville plays, and other sources in the spoken and vernacular Cairene dialect, Fahmy shows that popular culture was instrumental in helping to create a new national identity. Fahmy’s study of these sources fills a sizable gap in the historiography of Egyptian nationalism by lending a voice to the majority of the population. While previous research on Egyptian nationalism was built on intellectual history (Gershoni, Rethinking Nationalism and Smith The Ethnic Origins of Nations), Fahmy’s Ordinary Egyptians turned the approach to Egyptian nationalism from elites to non-elites.

The primary problem that Fahmy raises relates to many third world societies. How can we investigate nationalism in societies with more than 90 percent illiteracy? Focusing on Egypt in the last quarter of nineteenth century and the beginning of twentieth, when no more than 6.8% of the population was literate, Fahmy unequivocally discards Eurocentric theories as counterproductive when applied to illiterate societies. Thus he supplements the study of print capitalism by a more inclusive media capitalism, which is better able to account for unnoticed or undocumented cultural occurrences. “Cultural products,” writes Fahmy in the preface, “are not socially relevant unless they are communally and socially activated.” In other words, Fahmy is concerned with the ways individuals and communities communicate with and digest cultural information. Print capitalism was a luxury in late-nineteenth century Egypt. The illiterate population, who couldn’t relate to a written newspaper, still actively participated in creating national identity through the new mass media and entertainment industry. Earlier theories of nationalism that dismissed “orality and direct social interactions” ignored not only the experiences of the vast majority of the population, but more importantly, as as Fahmy notes, paraphrasing Mikhail Bakhtin,they ignored the “social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages.”

Fahmy stresses the centrality of Cairo and to a lesser extent Alexandria as hubs of cultural activity that radiated and distributed the popular Cairene dialect throughout Egypt. Thanks to the new industrial infrastructure (railroads, telegraph, and post office), the urban areas and the countryside became more connected. New musical and comedic theater troupes could reach more isolated populations. Editors of popular journals, Ya’qub Sannu’, ‘Uthman Jalal, and ‘Abdellah Nadim, defiantly used the colloquial Egyptian language, jokes, azgal (colloquial poetry), and cartoons as a counterhegemonic tools to include the masses in the nascent Egyptian identity.

The second half of Ordinary Egyptians shows popular national identity developing political significance. The more the British colonial authorities (and the elite who were complicit with them) attempted to staunch the press and forcefully impose the press law, the more popular illicit publications became. The masses that took to the streets in the spring 1919 revolution provided undeniable evidence of popular culture’s effectiveness.

Not every popular act, song, or poem, however, should be construed as counterhegemonic or helping in creating the new nation. In Ordinary Egyptians, Fahmy leaves no space for what Rogers Brubaker coined, “National Indifference”. For Brubaker people can be mostly indifferent about their identity and ethnicity. Certainly, people sing national songs, but they also sing and recite poems out of pleasure in the first place, rather than to express sympathy for the nation or animosity toward the British.

Fahmy succeeds remarkably well in discrediting the top-down understanding of cultural diffusion, though he over estimates the role of the capital cities, Cairo and Alexandria, in originating and disseminating culture. His strong point, however, is the discussion of the role of popular culture in Egyptian nationalism. Thus, the contemporary uprisings in Egypt that ousted Housni Mubarak can be seen as a current reincarnation of previous revolutions that were driven, at least in part, by public mass media and popular culture.

You may also like:

Yoav di-Capua’s FEATURE piece on his recent book, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past.

Yoav di-Capua’s blog post about political and social conditions in Egypt eight months after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011.

Lior Sternfeld’s review of Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

Making History: Robert Matthew Gildner

Interview by Zach Doleshal

For the fifth installment of our “Making History” series, Zach Doleshal talks to Robert Matthew Gildner, a senior doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Robert explains why 1952 represented a unique moment for indigenous Bolivians, why previous historians have overlooked this history, and how a trip to Holland inspired him to work on Latin American history.

Robert Matthew Gildner is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of The University of Texas at Austin. He is currently writing his dissertation, tentatively titled, “Integrating Bolivia: Revolution, Race, Nation, 1952-1964,” which investigates the cultural politics of national integration in Revolutionary Bolivia to rethink postcolonial nation-state formation in Latin America. Abolishing colonial hierarchies of caste to transform segregated societies into unified republics was at the heart of Latin America’s postcolonial predicament. This predicament was especially acute in Bolivia. Indians constituted seventy percent ofthe population, but remained politically excluded and socially marginalized by a European-decedent, orcreole, minority still a century after Independence. Following the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, a new generation of creole nationalists sought, once and for all, to break with the colonial past. They uprooted the entrenched system of ethnic apartheid that characterized pre-revolutionary society and integrated Indians into a modern nation of their own making. In subsequent years, artists, intellectuals, socialscientists, and indigenous activists worked to transform Bolivia from a segregated, multiethnic society into a unified nation. “Integrating Bolivia” interrogates the dynamic interplay between state and societyas these diverse agents negotiated the terms of indigenous inclusion and the content of national culture.

Although the government granted political citizenship to indigenous Bolivians, it was the cultural politics of revolution that ultimately determined the limits of ethnic inclusion. State officials created a new national culture for the integrated republic, one that venerated Bolivia’s mixed Andean and Hispanic heritage. Historians recast national history as a multiethnic struggle against foreign economic exploitation. Archeologists reconstructed Tiwanaku, identifying in the pre-Hispanic ruins the primordial origins of Bolivian nationhood. Anthropologists studied rural communities, expanding the definitionof cultural patrimony to include indigenous art, music, and dance. Despite the inclusive veneer of this national culture model, it generated novel forms of indigenous exclusion by subsuming ethnic identity to national identity. This ambitious project to decolonize Bolivia thus operated to recolonize it on new terms. Yet, the Revolution did not result in the devastation of indigenous civilization, as dominant historiographical trends contend. Rather, by controlling their cultural representation in the narrow apertures opened by this exclusionary model, indigenous activists successfully bridged political citizenship and ethnic recognition.

Robert’s next project will use a transnational study of Andean mountaineering to examine the relationship between the physical environment, human geography, and nation-state formation in Latin America. During the nineteenth century, political leaders in the fledgling Andean republics of Bolivia, Ecuador,and Peru confronted a similar problem: forging cohesive nation-states in ethnically-fragmented and geologically-diverse territories. As national leaders struggled to overcome the daunting human andphysical geography of the Andes, mountaineering played a critical role in territorial integration, the making of environmental policy, and the definition of geopolitical frontiers. This project examines the adventures and imaginations of British, French, and German mountaineers, their engagement with rural indigenous communities, their reliance on local geographic knowledge, and their connections to liberal political projects across the Andes during a period of capitalist incursion and national consolidation.

Robert Matthew Gildner’s research and teaching focus on the cultural, political, and intellectual history of modern Latin America, with an emphasis on the Andean region. His broader research interests include indigenous politics, historical memory, race/ethnicity, and the construction of knowledge. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Award, and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships.

You may also like:

Jessica Wolcott Luther’s interview for Making History, in which she talks about her dissertation on the history of slavery in seventeenth century Barbados.

Christina Salinas’ interview for “Making History,” in which she tells us about her childhood growing up on the Texas-Mexico border.

The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo by Lauren Derby (2009)

by Lauren Hammond

Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, remains a figure of mythic proportions in the popular Dominican imagination. A light-skinned mulatto with Haitian ancestry, Trujillo rose from obscurity as a sugar plantation guard to establish one of Latin America’s most enduring dictatorships. His appetite for women was legendary and common belief held that he never sweated. Trujillo’s minions, and even foreign governments, lavished him with praise and an array of titles from Generalissimo to Benefactor of the Fatherland to Restorer of Financial Independence. However, outside portrayals of Trujillo as a make-up wearing megalomaniac and revelations of his regime’s oppression, many questions remain about the mechanisms of state power and relations between the Dominican populace, Trujillo, and the state. In The Dictator’s Seduction, Lauren Derby uncovers the cultural economy “that bound Dominicans to the regime.” She reinterprets the regime’s theatricality – pageants, parades, and the practices of denunciation and public praise – as critical in obscuring the inner workings of the regime and argues that the Trujillato gained and maintained the support of the masses, albeit in attenuated form, by creating a new middle class and co-opting Dominican understandings about the embodiment of race, gender, sexuality, and the process of community formation.

Derby’s most salient observations of the populist dynamics of the Trujillo regime come through her examination of the ritualized practices of denunciation and praise and the tensions between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy. Amongst ordinary citizens, state workers, and party officials, accusation reflected the Caribbean practice of gossip as a means of social control, while panegyric was used for personal gain. The conflict between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy reflected this dynamic. Founded in 1930, the massive Dominican Party created a new, darker middle-class indebted to the regime for its new identity. State workers, on the other hand, continued to hail from lighter-skinned elite families. While this divide played on pre-existing socio-racial tensions, Derby demonstrates that Trujillo and his proxies also encouraged a culture of enmity between state and party officials. This left members of both groups vulnerable to charges of corruption, disloyalty, and moral failings, which could result in social death. In a culture sensitive to the loss of personal honor and respect, Dominicans lived in fear of social isolation. Moreover, state bureaucrats and Dominican Party workers used praise of Trujillo and their efforts on his behalf to improve their positions within the Trujillato and as a means of defense against condemnation.

The book’s most interesting claims emerge from Derby’s exploration of popular belief surrounding Trujillo’s invulnerability, which Dominicans attribute to his muchachito, or spiritual guide. After the assassination of Trujillo on the highway between Ciudad Trujillo and San Cristobal, the arranged coup failed to take place because conspirators inside the regime hesitated to believe that Trujillo, who had survived three previous assassination attempts, was dead. Derby shows that Dominicans attributed Trujillo’s invulnerability to his muchachito who purportedly visited Trujillo in his sleep. The muchachito found its roots in a popular mixture of Haitian voodun and Afro-Dominican vodú and was associated with black magic. It told Trujillo how to invest and about plots against him, providing a popular explanation of the apparatus of power. Popular Dominican religiosity viewed the duality of Trujillo and his spirit guide as extremely dangerous and unstable. Many believe that in the end Trujillo lost trust in his muchachito and challenged it. This loss of confianza led to Trujillo’s undoing. Derby also examines the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following Hurricane San Zenón, the coronations of his daughter at the Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity in 1955 and his mistress at the Dominican Republic’s 1937 Carnival, clothing and tiguerage, and the growth of a grassroots religious movement called Olivorismo following Trujillo’s assassination.

Lauren Derby’s monograph makes a significant contribution to Dominican historiography and scholarship on populism, Latin American and Caribbean dictatorship, and gender and sexuality. However, while many of her conclusions are based on a series of oral histories, the voices of her subjects remain largely absent from the text. In addition, at times the work would have benefitted from a more in depth analysis of the complexity of race and national identity in the Dominican Republic. Overall, the text offers much needed assessment of popular culture in the Dominican Republic during and after the Trujillo regime.

Photo credits:

Harris & Ewing, “Former President [of] San Domingo arrives in Capital. Washington, D.C., July 6. A close-up of General Rafael L. Trujillo, former President of the Dominican Republic, made as he stood at attention while the national anthem was being played upon his arrival today,” 6 July, 1939.

via The Library of Congress

Unknown artist, “Insignia of the Dominican Party, the party founded by the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo on 16 August, 1931.”

via Wikipedia

You may also like:

This interview, conducted in May 2011, with General Imbert, one of the men who assassinated Rafael Trujillo in 1961. (BBC News)

Adrian Masters’ review of The Doubtful Strait, Ernesto Cardenal’s poem chronicling the history of Nicaragua from colonial discovery to the Somoza dictatorship.

Casta Paintings

by Susan Deans-Smith

In 1746 Dr. Andrés Arce y Miranda, a creole attorney from Puebla, Mexico, criticized a series of paintings known as the cuadros de castas or casta paintings. Offended by their depictions of racial mixtures of the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies, Arce y Miranda feared the paintings would send back to Spain the damaging message that creoles, the Mexican-born children of Spanish parents, were of mixed blood. For Arce y Miranda, the paintings would only confirm European assumptions of creole inferiority.

Casta paintings first appeared during the reign of the first Bourbon monarch of Spain, Phillip V (1700-46), and grew in popularity throughout the eighteenth century. They remained in demand until the majority of Spain’s American colonies became independent in 1821. To date over one hundred full or partial series of casta paintings have been documented and more continue to surface at art auctions. Their popularity in the eighteenth century suggests that many of Arce y Miranda’s contemporaries did not share his negative opinions of the paintings.

The casta series represent different racial mixtures that derived from the offspring of unions between Spaniards and Indians–mestizos, Spaniards and Blacks–mulattos, and Blacks and Indians–zambos. Subsequent intermixtures produced a mesmerizing racial taxonomy that included labels such as “no te entiendo,” (“I don’t understand who you are”), an offspring of so many racial mixtures that made ancestry difficult to determine, or “salta atrás” (“a jump backward”) which could denote African ancestry. The overwhelming majority of extant casta series were produced and painted in Mexico. While most of the artists remain anonymous, those who have been identified include some of the most prominent painters in eighteenth-century Mexico including Miguel Cabrera, Juan Rodríguez Juárez, José de Ibarra, José Joaquín Magón, and Francisco Vallejo.

Casta paintings were presented most commonly in a series of sixteen individual canvases or a single canvas divided into sixteen compartments. The series usually depict a man, woman, and child, arranged according to a hierarchies of race and status, the latter increasingly represented by occupation as well as dress by the mid-eighteenth century. The paintings are usually numbered and the racial mixtures identified in inscriptions. Spanish men are often portrayed as men of leisure or professionals, blacks and mulattos as coachmen, Indians as food vendors, and mestizos as tailors, shoemakers, and tobacconists. Mulattas and mestizas are often represented as cooks, spinners, and seamstresses. Despite clear duplications, significant variations occur in casta sets produced throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whereas some series restrict themselves to representation and specification of racial mixtures, dress styles, and material culture, others are more detailed in their representation of flora and fauna peculiar to the New World (avocadoes, prickly pear, parrots, armadillos, and different types of indigenous peoples). While the majority appear to be in urban settings, several series depict rural landscapes.

What do these exquisitely beguiling images tell us about colonial society and Spanish imperial rule? As with textual evidence, we cannot take them as unmediated and transparent sources. Spanish elites’ anxiety about the breakdown of a clear socio-racial hierarchy in colonial society–the sistema de castas or caste system–that privileged a white, Spanish elite partially accounts for the development of this genre. Countering those anxieties, casta paintings depict colonial social life and mixed-race people in idealized terms. Instead of the beggars, vagrants, and drunks that populated travelers’ accounts and Spanish bureaucratic reports about its colonial populations, viewers gaze upon scenes of prosperity and domesticity, of subjects engaged in productive labor, consumption, and commerce. Familiar tropes of the idle and drunken castas are only occasionally depicted in scenes of domestic conflict. In addition, European desires for exotica and the growing popularity of natural history contributed to the demand for casta paintings. The only extant casta series from Peru was commissioned as a gift specifically for the natural history collection of the Prince of Asturias (the future Charles IV of Spain). And despite Dr. Arce y Miranda’s fears, many contemporaries believed the casta series offered positive images of Mexico and America as well as of Spanish imperial rule. In this regard, the casta paintings tell us as much about Mexico’s and Spain’s aspirations and resources as they do about racial mixing. Many owners of casta paintings were high-ranking colonial bureaucrats, military officials, and clergy, who took their casta paintings back to Spain with them when they completed their service in America. But there is also evidence of patrons from the middling ranks of the colonial bureaucracy. Very fragmentary data on the price of casta paintings suggests that their purchase would not have been restricted to only the very wealthy.

The casta paintings were displayed in official public spaces, such as museums, universities, high ranking officials’ residences and palaces, as well as in unofficial spaces when some private collections would be opened up to limited public viewing. The main public space where casta paintings could have been viewed by a wide audience was the Natural History Museum in Madrid.

Regardless of what patrons and artists may have intended casta paintings to convey, viewers responded to them according to their own points of reference and contexts. While much remains to be learned about who saw sets of casta paintings and where they saw them, fragmentary evidence suggests varied audience responses. The English traveler Richard Phillips, visiting the Natural History Museum in Madrid in 1803, enthusiastically encouraged his readers to go and see the casta paintings as exemplary exotica along with Japanese drums and Canopus pots from Egypt. Another English traveler, Richard Twiss, expressed skepticism about the inscriptions that described the racial mixtures depicted in a casta series he viewed in a private house in Malaga. And, to return to Arce y Miranda in Mexico, the casta paintings for him signified a slur on the reputation of creoles in Mexico.

Although we have a good general understanding of the development of this provocative genre much remains to be understood about the circulation, patronage, and reception of the casta paintings. We know, for example, that some casta series found their way to England. One tantalizing piece of evidence comes from the British landscape painter Thomas Jones (1742-1803) who made a diary entry in 1774 about a set of casta paintings he viewed at a friend’s house in Chesham. How these paintings were acquired by their English owners, as purchases, gifts, or through more nefarious means, remains an open question. We also need to know much more about patrons of the casta paintings and the painters in order to deepen our understanding about innovations and new interpretations that appear in this genre.

This is an electronic version of an article published in the Colonial Latin American Review © 2005 Copyright Taylor & Francis; Colonial Latin American Review is available online at www.tandfonline.com http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10609160500314980

For more on casta paintings:

Magali M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003)

María Concepción García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano (1989)

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004)

You may also like: Naming and Picturing New World Nature, by Maria Jose Afanador LLach (here on NEP)

Credits:
1. De Español y Mestizo, Castizo de Miguel Cabrera. Nº. Inv. 00006
2. De Chino Cambujo y India, Loba de Miguel Cabrera. Nº. Inv. 00011
3. Castas de Luis de Mena. Nª.Inv. 00026
Posted by permission of El Museo de América, Madrid

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (1999)

by David A. Conrad

Before John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, many English-language accounts of the United States’ occupation of Japan contextualized the event in terms of American foreign policy and the emerging Cold War. Scholars writing from this Western-centric perspective produced much fine scholarship, and no doubt will continue to do so. But Embracing Defeat shifted the discussion from a debate over American motives to an analysis of the Japanese experience, and in doing so won critical acclaim and popular success. This Pulitzer Prize-winning tome reveals to Western audiences what many in Japan have long understood: that the American occupation was, in many ways, the most transformative event in modern Japanese history.

Dower sets out to convey “some sense of the Japanese experience of defeat by focusing on social and cultural developments. . . at all levels of society.” Initially, the bitter reality that their exhausting war had ended in defeat proved profoundly demoralizing for many Japanese citizens. Dower’s portrayal of the shantytowns of bombed-out Tokyo provides poignant evidence of the impoverished condition in which many Japanese found themselves at war’s end. But as Japan embarked on its long occupation interlude, its citizens seized opportunities to start over, rebuild, and redefine their nation. Defeat became a creative process rather than a destructive one and the people of Japan embraced it with eagerness. In the atmosphere of reform that characterized the occupation, an efflorescence of what Dower calls “cultures of defeat” emerged. For example, kasutori culture explored the sleazy underside of urban life. Radical political movements tested the limits—and sincerity—of American reformism. Changes in artistic images, popular entertainment, songs, jokes, and even the Japanese language itself reflect the vitality and diversity of Japanese culture during the American occupation.

An aerial view of a destroyed residential area of Tokyo after the fire raids.

Dower’s Japan-centered perspective informs his judgment of the occupiers, whom he views as agents of imperialism as well as facilitators of positive change. If the occupation was a prologue to a new period of Japanese history, it was also the epilogue to an era of Western exploitation that began when Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to “open” to Western trade in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dower calls the occupation “the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as ‘the white man’s burden.’” The occupiers, under the leadership of the notoriously vain Douglas MacArthur, lived in enclaves of lavish comfort and issued imperious edicts. Nevertheless, Dower concedes that American reforms were “impressively liberal,” and he is critical of those in Japan and Washington who resisted reform. This group includes Japanese conservative politicians as well as the “old Japan hands” in the U.S. Department of State. To Dower, these were old-fashioned elitists who sought to restrict the influence of average citizens in the new Japan. Dower’s interpretation of the American occupation as a neocolonial as well as a progressive exercise rings true, but it is a delicate balancing act.

Embracing Defeat has received high praise in the academic and popular presses, and justly so. Nevertheless, the book has certain limitations. Dower concentrates almost exclusively on the experiences of urban-dwelling Japanese. The half of the population that lived in rural areas suffered more than their share of hardship during the war, and their story of change and recovery during the occupation is as fascinating as it is neglected. Still, Dower’s exploration of urban cultures in the occupation period is a monumental task, and he executes it marvelously. Embracing Defeat‘s engrossing account of social change during the American occupation of Japan has earned it a permanent place in the literature of that epochal event.

Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in the Renaissance by Ulinka Rublack (2010)

by Benjamin Breen

Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg was, in many respects, a rather typical (if unusually successful) early modern merchant: he worked his way up from an apprentice clerk to a chief accountant in the powerful Fugger banking dynasty, he married, went to war, had children, and, in 1574, he died. Schwarz’s life may well have been forgotten if he had not taken the unusual step of memorializing it in an extraordinary manuscript. In his Klaidungsbüchlein, or “Book of Clothes,” Schwarz commissioned one hundred and thirty seven vivid watercolor paintings depicting the clothes he wore at each stage of his life, from his “first dress in the world” as a days-old infant to the somber robes of mourning he wore as a world-weary man of sixty-seven.

In her brilliant study Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, Cambridge professor Ulinka Rublack uses Schwarz’s book and other largely unexplored visual evidence to argue that clothes matter in history. In the early modern period, the focus of her study, Rublack sees clothing as comprising a “symbolic toolkit through which people could acquire and communicate attitudes toward life and construct visual realities in relation to others.” Personal adornment could create communities and assert individuality; it could display wealth, express political allegiances, proclaim nationality, and visualize inner emotional states. Indeed, owing to harsh “sumptuary laws” forbidding commoners from wearing luxury goods such as pearls, silks or cloth-of-gold, clothing choices could even be a matter of life or death.

Perhaps the most admirable aspect of Dressing Up is the manner in which Rublack combines sophisticated theoretical arguments about the role of clothing in the “self-fashioning” of Renaissance individuals with concrete, lively details and startlingly vivid illustrations (there are one hundred and fifty six in all, many in color). Rublack has a particularly discerning eye for interesting anecdotes. In the introduction alone, we learn that a gang of youths known as the “Leather Trousers Group” terrorized the streets of 1610s Kyoto, that the French essayist Montaigne hated codpieces, and that medieval contemporaries blamed the defeat of the French knights at the Battle of Crécy on their passion for “clothing so short that it hardly covered their rumps.”

Mathhäus Schwarz’s Klaidungsbüchlein, or “Book of Clothes,” documented the Augsberg merchant’s personal adornment from infancy to old age. In the image at left, he stands proudly as a youth of nineteen; at right, we see him in the more sombre dress of a middle-aged man.

Jan van Eyck’s 1433 Man in a Turban, a probable self-portrait, forever immortalized a flamboyant fashion choice in the then-new technique of oil paint.

The book’s illustrations range equally widely. Rublack revisits famous self-portraits by Albrecht Dürer and Jan van Eyck to show how Renaissance artists employed their own bodies to exemplify their creative gifts, and uses evidence from a number of well-chosen woodcuts and etchings to demonstrate how clothing choices expressed national and religious allegiances. Particularly interesting — because they are so rarely used as historical evidence — are the photographs of actual clothing from the medieval and early modern periods. Rublack analyzes an incredibly closely-fitted silk doublet once owned by a medieval French duke, for instance, to argue that the rise of tight-fitting male clothes in the fourteenth century “reinvented masculinity and femininity, as well as a sense of what critics regarded as effeminate.”

Dressing Up draws much of its evidence from the German-speaking lands of the sixteenth century, and a notable secondary argument running through the book is that early modern Germany was far more connected to the wider world than has typically been admitted. Banking houses like Matthaüs Schwarz’s employer, the Fuggers, played an especially important role as financiers of long-distance trading voyages, and Rublack’s book shines in its exploration of how German printed texts made sense of the sartorial choices of indigenous groups beyond Europe (Chapter Five, “Looking at Others”). Throughout, Rublack’s clear writing style admirably balances intellectual heft and archival expertise with a spritely and quietly humorous authorial voice.

Like the “Book of Clothing” of Matthaüs Schwarz, this book is much more than a catalogue of obsolete clothing styles. It is an exploration of human nature, and of how human beings throughout history have expressed their inner lives through their exterior coverings.

Further reading:

Ulinka Rublach on “Renaissance Fashion: the Birth of Power Dressing” in History Today.

More images from Matthäus Schwarz’s Book of Clothes via Res Obscura.

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