I think that comic strips and graphic novels are a pretty cool form of literature in that they allow for the exploration of controversial topics by offering a more palatable medium of communicating ideas.  In my mind, I understand The Eternaut almost more as a graphic novel than a comic strip, since it has one continuous plot line that lasts over the course of the print (I guess it should be noted though that at the time it was printed it was published and read in installations, whereas now we can access the full thing all at once).  The style of the drawings, as well as the dark, apocalyptic tone and plot line, reminded me a lot of Watchmen (which was actually also originally published as a serial and later compiled as a graphic novel).  Approaching the topic of global radioactive destruction shortly after the end of World War II during the midst of the nuclear arms race, The Eternaut expresses the concerns of outside countries that could become the indirect victims of offshore testing in the Bikini Islands or US-Russia mutually assured destruction.  Not being directly involved, Argentinians may have felt little agency in swaying the outcome of US-Russian relations.  Yet, they still had much to lose as a result of nuclear warfare.  As a graphic novel, the Eternaut both depicts and manages legitimate fears of the future of the world, depicting “gently” through pictures a scary imagined future that was not out of the realm of possibility.

The Mafalda comics reminded me a lot of Calvin and Hobbes and the Peanuts cartoons in their simple, innocent sensibility.  While I think comic strips often carry a lighter feel and may be held in lower serious regard than graphic novels, their messages can sometimes be more important/relevant to day-to-day life than serious graphics.  For instance, the strip about the moms drinking tea (pg 2), the “Sorry mom I’m busy” strip (pg 4), and the “If we don’t hurry up and change the world, the world changes us!” strip (pg 3) are all very refreshing in pointing out the adult’s farcical sense self-importance and serious outlook on life.  My two favorite Mafalda comics were the tax comic and the soap opera comic on the last page.  I think the reason I like them is that 1. they made me laugh, but also 2. they demonstrate that children are much more perceptive than they are often given credit for, and can even be more attuned to some realities of life than adults.

With both The Eternaut and Mafalda, I said they reminded me of comics that I know in English.  I would be curious though if they would have the exact same feeling had I read/understood them first in Spanish as they were originally written.

As of 10:40pm, I have not yet read the Gomez-Pena topography piece.  While I plan to have it done by class tomorrow, I will only focus on the Roman-Velazquez and Beltran readings in this post.

I found the Roman-Velazquez reading on salsa to be particularly interesting in part because I am in UBC’s Latin Dance club and have been taking beginner salsa classes this term.  From this experience, I think that there is a lot to be said for music and dance as a point of entry into a culture.  As Roman-Velazquez comments on page 121, the initial biases associated with ethnicity often vanish quickly in salsa; evaluations of talent and level of integration are instead based on capability.  Thus, while salsa follows “Latin” rhythm and instrumental patterns, neither performance of the music nor dance is restricted to those of Latin American backgrounds (except in the area of vocals, where language and native level of fluency in Spanish still presents a barrier to entry for singers).  In my salsa class, neither of my teachers are Latin American.  Sebastian, the lead, is a caucasian man no taller than 5’3″.  Yuki, the follower, is a heavy set woman with an accent I would guess is from Southeast Asia.  I would not peg either one of them as a salsa dancer if I saw them walking down the street, yet their sense of rhythm, style, and familiarity is immediately apparent the instant you dance with them.  Also, amongst the other students in the class, it is very clear that a Latin background in no way implies an inherent salsa talent; the male lead who can out-salsa most of the other guys in the class is from Eastern Europe, while one guy who grew up in Mexico as a kid often struggles to stay on top of his feet.

The lack of obstacles involved in creating music and dancing make them two elements of culture that are fairly universally accessible and thus make them transportable, as seen in Roman-Velazquez’s example of salsa culture in London.  However, different locations have distinct styles, exemplified in the story of Colombian Roberto Pla, who had to alter his percussion style so those in Britain could “digest it” (p.122).  On page 120, Roman-Velazquez writes that “places are important sites for the meeting and exchange of different cultural practices and possible cultural transformations.”  This made me curious about a hypothetical situation: what if mestizaje mixture of White, Latin, and African cultures took place in a location other than South America.  If Portugal and Spain had decided to bring natives from South America to labor on settlements in Africa, would the resulting culture be radically different from what was created in Latin America??

I didn’t intend to write for that long on salsa.  The one thing I will say on Jennifer Lopez is that it would be interesting to compare the construction of her “cross-over” stardom to the construction of male Latin-American cross-over stars, mainly in terms of the emphasis placed on physicality vs. personality and talent.

From the introduction, I was reminded a lot of Roger Keesing’s “Theories of Culture Revisited” in that hybridization could provide an angle through which anthropologists could still maintain their field of study.  Canclini describes that “The emphasis on hybridization not only puts an end to the pretense of establishing ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ identities; in addition, it demonstrates the risk of delimiting local, self-contained identities or those that attempt to assert themselves as radically opposed to national society or globalization” (xxviii).  In this way, hybridization deals with both the issue of the coral reef approach to cultural identity as well as the concept of radical alterity that Keesing was concerned with.

The concept of “audiovisual democracy” from page 211 resonated with me.  Canclini defines audiovisual democracy as a phenomenon in which “the real is produced by the images created in the media” (211).  In the reading, Canclini uses the term in the context of electronic technologies stepping in to take the place of what he calls “urban culture,” which is created by direct in-person interactions.  He explains that “mass mediatization” (209) represents a more efficient way of organizing the public than these interactions since it allows information to be spread to from urban to rural areas (and potentially vice versa) through the television.  This causes a shift in individuals’ perceptions of reality from something to take part in and experience firsthand, to something that is to be received.  Reality thus becomes defined as something made up by public opinion polls, and “the citizen becomes a client, a ‘public consumer'” (211).

I can see two very clear applications of this phenomenon of audiovisual democracy today.  The first is in the public opinion polls during the 2016 American election.  Many public opinion polls predicted that Hillary Clinton would win.  Reports of these statistics circulated heavily on television and in the echo chambers of social media to people who wanted to hear such statistics, thus creating an illusory reality in the mind of many Americans that Clinton’s prospects were better than they really were.  Donald Trump’s election then came as a massive shattering of “reality” (granted, Clinton did win the popular vote but her lead was not significant enough to match perceptions created by polls).  The second relevant application of audiovisual democracy I see is in climate change denial.  I learned in one of my classes this past week that 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming exists and that humans are the cause of accelerated warming.  Of the 3% that disagree, 2.8% disagree with the clause that humans are the cause of accelerated warming (not with the phenomenon of global warming itself).  But due to the proliferation of political rhetoric in the media, only 47% of Americans perceive that there is consensus in the scientific community on the existence of climate change.  Both of these examples demonstrate that when the citizen is turned into a mere consumer, the media is granted reign over what is reality (kind of scary!!!).

The biggest thing I came away with from this week’s readings is the intense melodrama surrounding Latin American mass culture.

When I read the quote on the very first page of Ortega’s piece about the game of 1950 being “Our (Brazil’s) catastrophe, our Hiroshima” (43), I was put off.  When the United States bombed Hiroshima in 1945, upward of one hundred and fifty thousand people died within the first year and many Japanese civilians who survived continued to suffer the effects of intense radiation exposure for years afterward.  I’m sure the quote did not explicitly intend to downplay the gravity of Hiroshima.  I am also both Japanese and American so I think I am particularly sensitized to the issue.  But my bottom line is that I was skeptical as I started reading the first few pages.

Continuing with the reading, however, it became clear to me that in some ways there actually are odd parallels between Japan and Brazil in terms of their lasting fascination with their respective “catastrophes”.  Moving forward from the bombing, Japan viewed itself as a victim of World War II, and consequently has channeled much energy into tying it’s national identity to the concept of peace.  For Brazil, the loss of 1950 was a manifestation of Brazilian’s underlying worry that they “were naturally a defeated people”(55).  As large scale, public example of the country’s “stray dog complex”(55), the game of 1950 solidified Brazil’s national identity as one of a people destined to fight an uphill battle against their inherent bad luck.  The most painful piece for me was when I read how the Maracana stadium “gave Brazil a new soul”(46) as it attempted to establish itself in the modern world.  I don’t know if Bellos adopted some melodrama himself in assessing whether the game caused or was the cause of Brazil’s upward battle mentality, but importance of the game in Brazilian history is certainly not lost.

The Ortega reading gave me a new respect for the Telenovela.  At home, my family used to sometimes turn on Univision, and I was never able to get over my sensitivity to the cheesiness of the shows.  I was unaware of the role that Por estas calles played in shaping Venezuela’s national identity or political climate.  It was striking to me that the show was not totally censored for contributing to the volatile political climate.

Collectively from the two readings, I have realized that melodrama is not something to be seen necessarily as a negative thing, since it can play a crucial role in the development of identity in a way I did not previously recognize.

I read Ortiz and most of Millington but I just focus on Ortiz here because I have more coherent thoughts:

I did not know that Ortiz coined the term “transculturation”.  To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t totally sure what transculturation was explicitly supposed to mean until looking at this reading.  I thought that it was cool that we were looking at an examination of the word in the text in which it was first used by the person who created it since many words are assimilated into the English language over time and it can be difficult to identify their exact origins.  Ortiz defines transculturation as the process of transitioning from one culture to another that “necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture” (102).  I was intrigued by Ortiz’s analysis of the painful process of transculturation for Africans in Cuba.  While both black and native labourers were subjected to harsh treatment under the status of slaves and both experienced cultural oppression under the newly dominant Spanish culture, the “Indians suffered their fate in their native land, believing that when they died they passed over to the invisible regions of their own Cuban world” (102).  While being forced to adapt to a new culture would be difficult under any circumstance, for the Africans it would have been many times worse, having just been “torn from another continent” and facing the prospect of having to “recross it (the ocean) to be reunited with their lost ancestors” (102).

Ortiz also nuanced that “To a greater or lesser degree whites and Negros were in the same state of dissociation in Cuba” (102).  Regardless of status in the master-slave dynamic, the process of relocating and re-establishing one’s sense of identity in a new place can be a difficult and sometimes painful process.  Obviously, having had some form of conscious say in the decision to relocate would have made things easier for the Spaniard.  The fact that some brought their families with them also would have eased the transition.  But the bottom line is that uprooting and re-rooting in a new environment where one faces an intersection of culture(s) is hard.  To an extent, I feel like many university students face a similar challenge when first arriving at school, since for many people it represents their first time not living in their family home and many travel outside their province or country.  I live in the United States which is about as close of a country to Canada as you can get.  The independence and exposure I have gained within UBC’s diverse population has been one of my favorite parts of this year.  However, even coming from somewhere as close as America, I still occasionally felt a sense of cultural isolation in the first semester and resonated with what Ortiz described (thinking about it once over, I’m not totally sure if what I experienced was culturally related or just college angst??)

I really liked the Campbell reading, especially how it broke down the murals in terms of their historic significance and their implicit symbolism.  The following are some of my thoughts I wrote down as I was reading the passage.

On pages 30-31, Campbell quotes Arnold Belkin lamenting the “fall” of Mexican muralism, saying, “If mural painting is being developed with increasing vigor in other countries, how can we allow it to die here?  Earlier in this century Mexican muralism was an inspiration for the rest of he world.  Now it is up to us to restore that inspiration.”  This idea of creating or restoring inspiration struck me as funny, since inspiration usually seems to me to be something organic and highly individualised.  Fabricating or forcing inspiration misses the point.

I was intrigued by the conflict between Hijar and Ehrenberg over the question of whether H20’s murals were “Mexican muralism”.  Hijar argued that Ehrenberg’s murals took a scientific direction, deviating from the Mexican muralism’s “two basic tendencies” of “institutional muralism and an oppositional muralism integrated to communities of struggle” (p. 32-33) and thus undermining the art form.  Ehrenberg responded by embracing this notion of deviation.  To me, the entire argument seems arbitrary, since it seems to me that murals painted in Mexico by Mexicans should logically be considered “Mexican muralism” regardless of whether they follow the Mexican school or not; getting caught up in the technicalities of defining art takes away from the art itself.

On p. 35 Campbell writes that the text on Diego Rivera “is enjoined mythically by the editors of the collection through a suppression of standard historical points of reference such as a bibliographical data or contextual information for the selected texts.  Hence the anthology positions Rivera and his muralism within the same timeless national cultural space as the archaeological digs and pre-Colombian pyramids on the tourist maps.”  This idea of authors working collectively to create build up an artist who transcends a time stamp is kind of cool but also makes you consider the influence of historical framing in the process of popularizing or highlighting certain aspects of culture.

The quote “there is a salient contradiction between the mural image as monument of an official national identity and that of tendentious re-motivations of national cultural patrimony,” (p.36) resonated a lot with me.  While I agree that there is this inherent contradiction in the government using a symbol of uprising as a unifying national image, the fact that there is conflict embedded in the national symbol of a nation ravaged by conflict is kind of perfect.  Furthermore, the fact that both the people and the government created and defaced one anothers’ murals adds to the perfection in my mind.

Lastly, Vasconcelos’ image of a post-racial society sounds less racist and more aesthetically pleasing the way it is framed in this reading.  When you remove yourself from the details of his writing, it does seem creative to combine the encouragement of the arts and nationalism into one project.  This is not to say, however, that I don’t still take issue with what he wrote in his paper.

Ran out of words/time for Taussig.  Looking forward to class discussion.

Beginning with the Vasconcelos’ The Cosmic Race, the idea of a sort of post-racial society made up almost entirely by his “fifth race” or “Cosmic Race” seems desirable in theory.  To have a society in which people no longer feel the need to distinguish the race of others seems promising for the prospects of inclusion and peace in a society.  Yet, I have a couple with this concept.

First off, while the world may be moving very slowly in a post-racial direction, having a true single fifth race is just too idyllic for me to realistically embrace. I think that abolishing racial discrimination goes against human nature, since the construct of race is so deeply intertwined into various social structures.  Vasconcelos doesn’t really seem to face the feasibility of his dream (also he was writing in the 1920s???).

Second, even if the races were indeed to blend together, I think it would have unintended consequences for cultures and future cultural presentation.  I think the elimination of race would further the phenomenon of the cultural melting pot- an concept popularly associated with American culture.  In the melting pot theory, all different cultures are tossed in together to create one new blended culture with aspects of each “ingredient” culture.  Just as the races would blend together in Vasconcelo’s vision, I feel that culture too would blend together.  This idea of the cultural melting pot is popularly associated with the United States.  While we discussed in class how culture is a multi-faceted concept, in my mind I do associate it somewhat with race, even if subconsciously (that may be just me, I’m not sure).  Whether such a cultural blending would be a bad or good thing I think is up for debate- we talked in class about how some anthropologists may rally for the “preservation of culture” in order to maintain their jobs.

For the Wade reading, I thought that the way he described mestizaje as an “all inclusive ideology of exclusion” that is actually dependent on “the ideology of its excluded others” on page 243 was nicely nuanced.  Also makes me think about the United States, where popular culture has long borrowed from African American culture while the country has marginalized its black citizens (I’m thinking culture mainly in terms of music right now, particularly regarding the development of the Swing Era, rock n’ roll, and rap/hip hop/R&B).

Arguedas and “The Pongo’s Dream”

I definitely found satisfaction in the way the story ended, even though you felt throughout the reading that justice had to be coming.  I think this story is interesting because I Wikipedia-ed Arguedas and it said that he came from a fairly well-off family.  Since his father was often absent and he didn’t get along well with his step-family, he spent a lot of time with the house servants.  This makes me wonder if his cruel and distasteful depiction of the lord in his tale was supposed to be reflective of his impression of his own family.  I also thought it was interesting to glimpse the bits of Catholicism woven into the story in the references to the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the judgement at the end.  It exemplifies the point from the Rowe, William, and Schelling reading how bits of European culture (i.e. Spanish Catholicism) were adopted into the fabric of Latin American popular culture, making it impossible to extract colonial influence from “pure” Latin American culture; it has all become intertwined over time.

Asturias Legends

The descriptive detail in Asturias’ legends is impressive; almost a little overwhelming sometimes.  In Legend of the Singing Tablets, I liked the number of senses that are engaged while reading.  At points, however, I thought it was a little hard to pick out what detail was important to the build up of the story and what was added richness.  This is what I pulled from it:

On page 84, Utuquel declares “to create is to steal,” suggesting the practice of re-purposing the work of others.  But later he says, “All works of art are foreign, and belong to those who borrow them from the interior of themselves,” implying that the person also steals from their own soul, which is somewhat disconnected from their physical being. On page 88, Asturias writes “many are the poets condemned to deposit white cloudlets in the craters of volcanoes, seeds left over from the colors that the sun steals from the moon, the price that must be paid for the tablet, in order to form the rainbow.”  These various quotes together suggest that art and poetry can be short-lived and sometimes heartbreaking careers for the physical person of the artist and the creative soul within each artist, but it is the accumulated contributions of these “suffering artists”, if you will, that leads to great beauty.

I’m still working through the reading; as other people noted, it’s pretty long.  However, I think this reading is a really important one since it traces the roots of “popular culture” in Latin America back to the cultural practices of native tribes prior to colonization.  This is a cool concept since the term “pop culture” is associated in my mind with much more contemporary times.  However, this reading reminds me that 1492 was once considered “contemporary” and there were popular aspects of culture then just as there are today.

Right near the beginning on page 52, Rowe and Schelling write “…it is important, when considering the ways in which the past is used as a resource for imagining an alternative future, to bear in mind that the peasant population of the Andes… do not hold standard Western notions of time and history.  Their ideas are imbedded in everyday life, and it is on this level that we need to look if we are to appreciate how Andean conceptions of the world are experienced and passed on.”  This reminds me of the Ben Highmore reading we looked at, which emphasized that culture is normal; phenomenon we consider foreign about other people’s cultures to them may simply be aspects of their everyday lives they don’t think twice about.  Another example of this is in the lack of translations for certain Spanish words, such as art pieces that are neither “popular art” nor “folk art” but posses more cultural significance than “handicrafts” (page 68).

It also seems like the antagonism that we discussed last class in relation to populism has existed in Latin America dating back to the arrival of the colonists in 1492.  I feel like this reading has given me a sense that there has always been an ongoing struggle by some group of oppressed people for adequate representation.  For Evita Peron, the struggle was between the corrupt in power and the populists.  In this reading, the oppressed people started out as the groups of Incan, Mayan, Andean, and Aztec people struggling against the white colonists.  The reading also describes how, over time, the people became more assimilated to European culture and industrialization progressed.  Conflict emerged between those pushing capitalism in the cities cities and the poor rural laborers and those left unemployed in the midst of urbanization.

I began reading Evita Peron’s My Message this week.  The first thing that stood out to me was the ease with which I could read her writing.  I think that her style ties in well with her message that she is a person for the people; her simple way of writing makes her accessible to larger audiences of varying levels of education.

A few of her phrases also struck me as particularly notable.  On page 57, she writes, “Fanaticism turns life into a permanent and heroic process of dying; but it is the only way that life can defeat death.”  In general, I think her use of the term “fanaticism” is intriguing, since it is a word that can hold both positive and negative connotations depending on how it is used in context.  Evita Peron chooses to interpret the term in a positive sense.  This quote left an impression on me since it presents fanaticism as both the path towards dying and the way of overcoming death, which is rather contradictory.

Her comparison of fanatics, enemies, and those who are indifferent is also worth mentioning.  Peron seems to oppose “the indifferent” more than she opposes individuals who she perceives as “enemies” of the people.  On one hand, this makes sense because at least enemies present stronger emotional sentiments and voice/take action on what they believe.  In contrast, the indifferent show no passion one way or the other.  However, I still don’t think it is logical for her to so strongly oppose the indifferent in reality, since they pose an obstacle to her desire to empower the working people.  While the indifferent show neither support nor threat to her cause, I feel like it is practically backwards for her to speak more negatively towards them than towards those who are active enemies of the people.

In the Jorge Luis Borges reading, I am confused about who/what “the monster” is.  Since Borges writes, “What I didn’t figure on was that member of the opposing team, healthy patriotism”(p. 203), is the monster a dictator of some sort?  While the casual terms that Borges uses make the text more difficult to comprehend (since I couldn’t always tell when he was using one of his own terms and when he was using the real word for something), they also made me smile when I was reading.  Is he supposed to be portraying a particular ethnicity?