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Casta Paintings

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)

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.

Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey (2009)

How can we make sense of the coexistence of bumper stickers depicting Rambo and Che Guevara in a traffic jam in Bangkok, Thailand? Although this book never answer its opening question, such an insight might allow us to understand Casey’s attempt to explore the different uses of an image that remains remarkably vital decades after its capture. In this sense, Casey insists, the book is less about Guevara himself and more about what we, as society, have created as “Che.” The icon is a repository for a collective set of dreams, fears, beliefs, doubts, and desires. The elusive character of such an object, both extremely present and full of competing meanings, took Casey to an impressive array of places and actors. He offers a thorough description of how the original image was taken at the Havana studio of Alberto Díaz Martinez “Korda”; the active role of the Cuban state in promoting the icon before its international appearance in 1967, seven years after the original shoot; the centrality of the European leftist network in disseminating of the image; and the divergent Latin American appropriations of Che’s guerrillero heroico in diverse places like Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Miami.

In this creative book, journalist Michael Casey follows the trajectory of this commodified image. He traces the connections between peoples, places, and meanings but without establishing direct causalities The apparent paradox of a worldwide-established commodity that does not benefit just one producer elucidates how commodity chains are webs and exchanges that are not always clearly guided. Casey identifies one tension as central to understanding Che’s afterlife: “the commoditization of an anticapitalist rebel who opposed all that his hypercommercialized image now represents.” The author inserts Che’s powerful icon into a larger chain of meaning in which the Cuban revolution has become a successful brand, a logo, an ideal abstraction. In short, what Casey explores in his book is not Ernesto Guevara’s biography but, to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s words, the “cultural biography” of one thing, and he finds a symbol that links diverse persons, places, and ideas. In his attempt to understand this object he draws on the entangled stories of the person related to that abstraction, the actors who contributed to creating and distributing it, and some of those who constantly give meaning to a now-immortal picture.

While Che’s Afterlife offers an extraordinary amount of evidence and revealingly inter-connected stories, the author’s conception of Latin America is ahistorical — a timeless world of magical realism. In addition, Casey insists throughout the book upon a paradoxical and ambivalent representation of Che as an anticapitalist symbol subsumed by the capitalist vortex and he revives the old western/non-western tension once prevalent in Latin American studies, without showing any interest in explaining why we “still” consider Latin America to not be part of the West. Nonetheless, the very stories he highlights complicate the simple image he wants to maintain. In the context of a growing literature on Guevara’s life and the continued iconic power of Che’s visual image, this book offers a satisfying account of the intertwined stories of the icon, the historic persona, and the specific agents and spaces that shaped the popularity of this symbol.

An image of Che in Kasaragod India, 2004. Via WIkimedia Commons.

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil by Bryan McCann (2004)

National identity has been both a dream and a nightmare for historians. When they attempt to historicize the concept, it becomes a thick web of actors, motives, and unintended consequences. Exploring the “invention of tradition” underlying modern national identities proves an appealing but extremely difficult task. In Hello, Hello Brazil, Bryan McCann offers a suggestive method to master this process. By tracing the emergence of Brazilian popular music, he successfully shows how the “traditional” samba was composed in an unequal exchange between regional musicians and composers, state officers, recording managers, radio producers, and radio broadcasters. The history of modern Brazilian music must be understood, then, within the broader debate on “Brazilianness.”

Between the late 1920s and 1950s, three processes converged to foster the emergence of the new popular music: industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratic centralization. At the same time, the cultural context saw an intensification of exchanges between high culture and popular innovators, a rapid growth of the broadcasting industry, and an activist government under the Vargas regime that aimed to manage cultural production. McCann inserts the history of the samba into the broader struggles around the definition of tradition, authenticity, and national music. He shows that samba was at the center of a broad political and cultural transformation, that allowed converting a “small collection of popular musical forms into both a thriving industry and a consistently vital mediation on the nature and contradictions of Brazilianness.” For example, the quest for authenticity connected with the rise of the samba included purist understandings of tradition that saw the American presence as a threat to Brazilian folklore. While the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was an active defender of “authentic” Brazilian music and an enemy of international influences, another of Brazil’s famous musical nationalists, Ari Barroso, pointed out that “international influence was inescapable.”

Although the opinions were divided, McCann insists that Brazilians were not immune to American influence, having instead an ambivalent relationship with its seductive and repellent qualities. McCann argues that far from erasing Brazilian traditional music, as Villa-Lobos feared, the international presence fostered the quest for authenticity. An appealing desire for the “exotic” led U.S. record labels like Columbia to make recordings of the “most legitimate Brazilian music.” Furthermore, for MacCann, American record executives did not attempt to “Americanize” Brazilian music. Instead, they sought to make the Brazilian popular cultural market similar to that of the United States.

In brief, McCann offers a textured history of the actors, arenas, and trends that played a role in the making of a national music. Hello, Hello shows how these actors intersected to create the discourse that produced new Brazilian popular music. The Vargas era has been widely explored, the process of Americanization of Brazil during his regime also has received scholarly attention, and more recent scholarship has explored the “unevenness” of these exchanges. Nonetheless, MacCann’s book offers a subtle exploration of the entangled processes that led to the emergence of Brazil’s popular music, drawing in the significance of folkloric realms, quests for authenticity, an ambiguous appropriations in its development. It is the “texture” of this process that McCann offers to the reader.

Naming and Picturing New World Nature

by Maria Jose Afanador

When Cassiano dal Pozzo, the Pope’s personal assistant, returned to the Vatican from Spain in 1626, he brought with him a Mexican manuscript on natural history, the Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis. The “herbal” was a marvelous Mexican manuscript containing illustrations of more than 180 plants. Commonly known as Codice de la Cruz-Badiano, it is considered the first illustrated survey of Mexican nature produced in the New World.

In 1552, the son of the Viceroy, Francisco de Mendoza, sent the Latin manuscript to Spain, where it probably remained until the early seventeeth century, when it came into the possession of Diego de Cortavila y Sanabria. It next appeared in the library of the Italian Cardinal Francesco Barberini, where it remained until 1902, when the Barberini library became part of the Vatican Library. The manuscript was rediscovered in 1929 by Charles Upson Clark and finally, in 1991, Pope John Paul II returned the Libellus to Mexico, where it is now in the library of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.

The herbal is organized in chapters associated with parts of the body, starting with afflictions of the head, eyes, ears, nose, teeth, and cheeks; it then goes to the chest and stomach, and continues with the knees and feet; it ends with “falling sickness or comitial sickness” and remedies for “fear or faint-heartedness, mental stupor, for one afflicted by a whirlwind or a bad wind, … and for a traveler crossing a river or lake.” The diseases treated in the herbals are named in Latin in accordance with the tradition of medieval and early modern European herbals. However, the names of the plants are all written in Náhuatl, the indigenous Aztec language.

The manuscript, produced by a Nahua physician, Martín de la Cruz, and translated into Latin by Juan Badiano, was a gift for the king that sought to demonstrate the worthiness of educating the Nahua nobility in the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. At first glance, this marvelous codex resembles a typical medieval herbal. A closer look, however, reveals a fascinating blend of European and Aztec cultures. The codice can be viewed as a form of expression of the Nahua in a context of increased European influence and as a manner of dealing with a changing reality.

Visual culture is a powerful means by which different societies depict reality and convey meanings. The images contained in this sixteenth-century manuscript pose great challenges to scholars willing to consider visual evidence as core material of historical analysis. What was the purpose of the pictographic material as utilized by the authors of the codice? Can we determine which patterns and conventions are purely Aztec or European? Is there such thing as a pure visual tradition? Does it make sense to study colonial sources under the assumption of cultural contamination? Aside from questions of cultural purity or contamination, perhaps a more interesting question to be asked is whether the purpose of these illustrations is primarily informational or aesthetic.

As a gift to the king, aesthetics certainly played an important role in the purpose of the illustrations. The beauty of the pictures is undeniable, and the extensive use of colors to depict nature surpasses other depictions of nature of the time. Although scholars have regarded the manuscript as a European source due to its resemblance to late medieval and early modern herbals, the codice contains pictographic elements of the Nahua tradition such as the glyphs, which convey both descriptive elements and the ecology of the plants. Take for example the Nahua glyph for stone –tetl– which works as a ideogram to point to the rocky soil in which the plant grows in the illustration above. The ants visible among the roots in the illustration below also indicate the environment in which this plant grows. The ants, however, are not associated with any Náhuatl glyph but it was common in European herbals to include associated parasites in such illustrations.

The Codice de la Cruz-Badiano is an example of the encounter of between writing systems, and thus of systems of knowledge, with multiple swings from the pictographic-glyphic tradition to the alphabetical. The illustrations are by no means subordinated to the writing. Visual evidence and linguistic analysis of Náhuatl offer ways of approaching the complexities of cultural forms and to provide information about natural history that was not present in the Latin texts.

This article is excerpted from the forthcoming publication:

Maria José Afanador Llach. “Nombrar y representar. Escritura y naturaleza en el Códice De la Cruz-Badiano, 1552.” In Fronteras de la Historia, vol. 16-1, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, June 2011.

The codice is available in facsimile: De la Cruz, Martín, The Badianus manuscript (Codex Barberini, Latin 241) Vatican Library; an Aztec herbal of 1552. Ed. Emily Walcott Emmart. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940.

For more on the codice see:

Debra Hassig, “Transplanted Medicine: Colonial Mexican Herbals of the Sixteenth Century.” Anthropology and Aesthetics 17-18, Spring/‌Autumn (1989).

Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 by Steven Stern (2006)

by Monica Jimenez

Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 is the first book in Steve J. Stern’s trilogy entitled The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. Stern’s trilogy studies the ways that Chileans have struggled to understand the collective trauma of the 1973 military coup and the repressive regime that resulted from it. In his introduction to the trilogy Stern explains that he imagines this process as a ‘memory box’ that contains the community’s conflicting memories and lore, of various kinds, seeking to make sense of this crucial experience The memory box is not hidden away but is vividly present and foundational to the community; people are drawn to it and to engaging with it. This is a beautiful work that explores the difficult themes of collective versus individual memory of events that were both traumatic and terrifying.

Stern relates individual memory narratives and attempts to theorize memory in order to understand the specificity of Chilean struggles to understand their past. In this volume, Stern investigates Chile’s collective memory on the eve of Pinochet’s arrest in London for crimes against humanity. He establishes four types of emblematic memories that have competed in the peoples’ minds: memory as salvation, memory as rupture, memory as persecution and awakening, and memory as a closed box. He argues that on the eve of Pinochet’s arrest, the memory question overflowed ordinary boundaries, connecting the political, the moral, and the existential. It challenged political loyalties and alliances; it entangled the personal and the public. The various emblematic memories had come together in the memory box to form what Stern calls a “memory impasse,” in which no particular memory reigned supreme. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 provides a unique retelling of the critical events that lead to the 1973 coup and the military period that followed it while also raising deeply important questions about collective memory and trauma.

General Pinochet on parade in Buenos Aires, September 11, 1982. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 by Stephen Kern (2003)

by Julia Rahe

The modern individual, living in an era of high-speed technology, international travel and an increasingly worldwide community, may be surprised to learn that there have not always been only four time zones in the continental United States, or that there existed a era when having one’s picture taken was an anomalous, threatening experience. Stephen Kern’s fascinating book, The Culture of Time and Space, investigates these and other radical changes that occurred in people’s temporal and spatial reality at the turn of the twentieth century. Kern calls time and space the universal, “essential” realities through which humans perceive, experience and live life, and he uses them to understand historical change.

According to Kern, the forty years between 1880 and 1918 were a period of unprecedented cultural renovation and refiguring, when changes in perceptions of speed, space, form, distance and direction broke down traditional hierarchies and reconstructed conventional values and understandings. The proliferation of technological advances such as the telephone and the telegraph altered perceptions of time by allowing individuals in one place to experience simultaneous events in another for the first time. The result was a “thickening” of the present as events occurring in different places convened in a single moment. At the same time, advances in transportation created a “cult of speed,” as bicycles, trams and railroads allowed people to travel at faster velocities than ever before.

‘What hath God wrought’?: a map showing the global reach of the Eastern Telegraph Co. System, 1901.

While technological advances altered traditional understanding of time, cultural trends in art and philosophy challenged classical perceptions of space. New artistic movements such as Impressionism and Cubism broke down the illusion of three-dimensional space displayed on the two-dimensional canvas by presenting multiple perspectives to the viewer. These multiple points of view reflected the growing pluralism and confusion of the modern age. New philosophical trends such as Perspectivism also supported ideas about plurality and the subjectivity of personal experience by challenging the notion of an absolute, homogeneous reality.

New art movements such as Futurism, Cubism and Dadaism challenged old notions of perspective and drew inspiration from modern technologies such as the telegraph, the radio and the airplane. This detail from Umberto Boccioni‘s 1911 painting The Noise of the Street Enters the House exemplifies the frenetic energy of this new aesthetics based on speed, urbanism and technological prowess.

Through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated cultural and scientific phenomena, Kern successfully draws conclusions about broader social changes occurring across Europe and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The Culture of Time and Space is a captivating read for a wide audience. Kern’s broad and sweeping, yet detailed, discussion of new trends in art, philosophy and architecture will thrill lovers of material culture, and science and technology buffs will lose themselves in Kern’s explanation of the profound impact of new technological advances on individuals’ perceptions of the world.

All images in this review were published on Wikimedia Commons under a GNU free documentation license.

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