Sorry for the late posting! It’s been a hectic end of term, but here some of my thoughts on “the end of popular culture” readings. The readings from this week all particularly take up the construction of cultural identity and its embodiment, quite literally in the text by Mary C. Beltrán, The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle and Patria Román-Velázquez’s The Embodiment of Salsa. Each texts takes its own approach to understanding hybridity and the negotiation that happens in the process. I particularly too up Patria Román-Velázquez’s text. This piece examines the construction of identity, specifically Latin American identities in London, through the embodiment of salsa. The author describes embodiment in this context as “the way in which body and music are informed by specific ideas of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity” and engages with “two theoretical explanations: one which considers the relationship between the body and music, and one which considers the cultural construction of bodies in the sense in which bodies are not neutral biological essences.” The author grounds the relationship between music, body and place, by turning to Raymond Williams and Susan McClary citing that, “the embodiment of salsa is approached as a two-fold process whereby bodies are experienced through music, when present, and whereby music (again, when present) is experienced through our bodies.” Velásquez notes, again referencing McClary, that this model is highly contextual and is contingent upon “socially constructed meanings” and “genre specific codes.” This highlights the importance of cultural practices and social norms that help inform the practice and performance of this relationship (between body and music) beyond “corporal movements and rhythms.” It is here the author reiterates their concern with the construction of the “Latinised body in relation to salsa” through these cultural and social contexts rather than just musicality. The author frames these contexts as historically constructed and lacking in “fixedness” to locale. Or more generally that cultural identities are constructed and therefor can exist and be experienced anywhere. Velázquez “attempts to highlight that ‘Latin’ is not a fixed category, but open to change and transformation, whilst acknowledging its continuity.” The author makes the argument for those performing the genre who have no natural, direct, or indirect “link with Latin America.” The author disputes the use of the word “natural” especially when it comes to who can inherently play or perform salsa, describing the genre as having to be “learned. “Despite assumptions about a ‘natural’ Latin affinity for dance and rhythm, in playing salsa, as in dancing, the rhythms have to be learnt.” Further deviating from any definition of the genre as natural or inherent to a single cultural identity, Velázquez frames salsa as a product of hybridization, so to speak, as it pulls from African rhythms and European melodic patterns. I found this to be interesting way to examine hybridity, as not specific to locale, and therein subject to evolving and redefining popular culture.
Hybridity: Hybrid Cultures in Globalized Times
The author, Néstor García Canclini begins the text regarding “Rethinking Identities through Hybridization” by stating that, “one must begin by accepting the dispute over whether ‘hybrid’ is a good or bad word. That the word is widely used is not sufficient for us to consider it respectable. On the contrary, its profuse employment favors the assignment to it of divergent meanings.”
The author highlights the common theme of ambivalence in delimiting theories of mixture, noting that the employment of such terms in different contexts makes uniform definitions difficult. It is also important to note his insistence of the removal of the good/bad dichotomy, as this allows for the understanding of hybridization as a process and not necessarily a uniform negative or positive result. Canclini provides readers a foundational definition by delimiting his own understanding of hybridization. “I will start with a first definition: I understand for hybridization sociocultural processes in which discrete structures or practices, previously existing in separate form, are combined to generate new structures, objects, and practices.”
The author takes the example of the common framing of Spanglish, or the “hybrid” language that takes from both English and Spanish. This notion undermines or ignores the potential for both English and Spanish to be the result of hybridization of other languages (Arabic, Latin, etc.) The author makes two points here, that hybridization is a generative process, which combines previously separate structures, to create new structures, as well as putting forth the notion that culture (and its extensions) are also inherently a processes of hybridization. The author goes on to say, “by reducing the conceptual hierarchy of identity and heterogeneity in favor of hybridization, we remove support from policies of fundamentalist homogenization or the limited (segregated) recognition of “the plurality of cultures,” making the case for a theory of mixture that avoids hierarchy or privileging one culture over another.
The author further examines the process of hybridization as facilitated by globalization. Canclini states that, “globalizing processes accentuate modern cross-cultural contact by creating world markets for money and material goods, messages, and migrants. The flows and interactions that occur in these processes have diminished the power of border and customs agents, as well as the autonomy of local traditions, and have fostered a greater variety of hybridizations in production, communication, and styles of consumption than in the past. ” In this way we can see how physical trade and exchange by way of globalization allow for the movement of products and cultural practices that cannot be contained by borders or territory lines.
Mass Culture
Big Snakes on the Streets and Never Ending Stories: The Case of Venezuelan Telenovela
Ortega begins the passage my asserting that “the telenovela is an important expression of Latin American popular culture not only because of its success with public, but also because it reflects this public’s symbolic and affective world.” In Venezuela the genre is divided into two phases, the “proto-novela” (1953-1972) and the contemporary telenovela(1973-1992). These genres break down further into the “cultural novela” and the “urban novela.” The author positions the telenovela in context to the North American soap opera claiming that both “coincide, in a general way, in thematic treatment of family, power relations, the bad woman… etc.” The distinction therein is that, “the central motivations of the soap opera are money and sex, whereas the motivation for the telenovela, according to Jose Antonio Guevara, is the continuation of a family: to fall in love, to marry, to have children.” The telenovela works to contrast extremes (rich, poor, good, and evil) to yield melodrama. The author later sites Peter Brooks regarding melodrama, claiming that, “[it] is a popular form not only because it is favoured by the audience, but also because it insists– or tries to insist– in the dignity and importance of the ordinary.” Ortega believes that, melodrama included, the purpose of the telenovela is to illuminate problems within “contemporary society” directly opposing soap opera’s entertainment purposes. Telenovelas also depart from soap operas in their diverse audiences and evening broadcasting times
Structurally speaking, the telenovela has the classic beginning, middle, and end that characterize fully-resolved stories, unlike soap operas. Making reference to William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, the author cites these two saying, that the telenovelas origins “can be traced through a series of popular forms, beginning with folletin, or newspaper serial, itself transitional in that it was a first step whereby traditional oral themes and styles entered the medium of print at the same time as their audience negotiated literacy”. The most important influence, according to the author, was the radio soap opera. Ultimately this passage worked to emphasize the role of telenovelas as “technological apparatus to recreate the country as fiction.”
Mexican Muralism:
Mexican Muralism and the Official Public Sphere:
The text begins with highlighting a duality in the presence of mural art, a recurring theme of culture and more specifically pop culture within Latin America. The author describes the palimsest-like qualities of muralism, or the ability to be painted over and reworked by way of either remediation or censorship. The author turns to art critic Alberto Hijar, to negotiate two tendencies within Mexican muralism, who sites both an “institutional muralism and an oppositional muralism” (33). The author, in regards to understanding the contemporary framing of Mexican muralism, maintains that, “one must first turn away from the dominant officialized mural image of the the present and draw into view instead the prior practical constitution of Mexican muralism as an element of the Mexican public sphere, considering mural production in relation to official discourse and policy both as a publicly significant cultural practice and as an object of public administration” (40). The author goes on to say that , “national identity had been effectively linked to aesthetic form and practice, and consequently the mural image became a field of political contest” (47). Here the dualistic aspects of muralism become more explicitly clear, the space between policalization and aestheticization. We see the mural as both an art object and a mechanism, or tool used in the process of critique, dissent, and furthering of political movements. The positioning of muralism then, inherently becomes political. This is clear within the canon of the Mexican School, yielding the work of “los tres grandes:” Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. These works contributed the catalyst for revolutionary imagery within mural discourse. The author states, conversely, that their monumentality, “contributed to the eclipse of later mural production in critical and historiographical accounts of development in Mexican art” (31). This notion works two-fold to acknowledge the significance of the artists within the canon and culture, but also a sort of complicitness in a kind domination. “The question of post-Mexican School mural production is thus complicated precisely by the prior positioning of Mexican muralism within the official public sphere and subject to the formal dominance of Mexican visuality” (32). This text critically looks at the canon of Mexican muralism, the departures of oppositional and institutional muralism, and the instances where the two become frustrated, informed by the other, and perhaps even mutualistic. I will come back to analyzing the Spirit Queen’s Court. The style is quite a bit more cumbersome.
Theory of Mixture
Theory of Mixture
Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience* – Peter Wade
Peter Wade begins this text by grounding his understanding of mestizaje or mixture in Latin America as “not just as a nation-building ideology—which has been the principal focus of scholarship, but also a lived process of racial-cultural mixture…” (239). The author works to acknowledge the nuanced understanding of mestizaje, with no single definition, but a negotiation between diversity and homogeneity. Wade asserts that the scholarly discourse that surrounds mestizaje, “privilege[s] two assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje are essentially about the creation of a homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the nation as racially-culturally diverse; and second, that mestizaje as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalizes blackness and indigenousness, while valuing whiteness” (240). He maintains these assumptions are reductive. His piece reemphasizes the notion of “lived-experience” not limited to Latin America, but also in the US and Europe, moving through the ambivalence and confliction in the “process of hybridity” (241). This notion is interesting to me because the same sort of rhetoric is often touted in regards to Canadian nationality and identity construction with the terms like “multiculturalism” or “cultural mosaic.” Multiculturalism works similarly to homogenize an identity of difference or holding all cultures in a position of “equality.” This too is a sort of highly contested ideology wherein the term is used navigate a culture of hybridity.
The Cosmic Race // La Raza Cósmica – José Vasconcelos
Folklore
The Pongo’s Dream
Jose Maria Arguedas
From the Forward about the Author:
- Learned Quechua from the servants of his household
- He was a novelist and anthropologist
- Peruvian proponent for keeping Quechua alive
- Challenged notions of “modernization”
- “Hombre Quechua Moderno”
- Notion of cultural pluralism
- The ability to maintain unique cultural identities within cultural contexts
- The Pongo’s Dream, is adaption of a story the author heard from a Cusco peasant
- Encompasses the structure of the feudal systems in place during this time
- “suggests the spirit of independence and opposition”
This short story depicts the relationship between a “lord” and servant. Detailing the verbal abuses and commands of the servant. The story shifts when the servant details a dream he has wherein both he and his master die. Two angels descend, cover the bodies of the servant and the master, in fecal matter and honey respectively. In the dream they are meant to lick the body of the other for eternity. While the passage is concise, the conclusion leaves readers to interpret the larger meaning. The story highlights a very literal voice of opposition within the servant and works to undermine the authority and morality of the master. The story also brings divinity as a sort of final judgement or
Miguel Angel Asturias
Legend of the Singing Tablets
Legend of the Crystal Mask
Legend of the Silent Bell
Legend of the Dancing Butchers
This is a collection of four stories written as ornate prose. While the writing style is beautiful and detailed, it borders on verbose, making it cumbersome. The pieces, while effective in calling forth vibrant imagery, lead me to wonder if there are audible renditions available and what kind of clarity it would bring to the pieces. The difficulty I encountered was deciphering symbolic meaning from legitimately occurring plot points. For example, in Legend of the Crystal Mask, the author begins to describe the movement of figures, “…[they] arrayed themselves in order of battle. First flanking him, then forming a file at his front, without war cries, they bent their bows, and fired their poison arrows. A second group of warriors, also made by him, sculpted in stone by his hand, spread out like a fan and, playful as butterflies, surrounded him, pinning him…” (94). On one level, you can interpret this literally as a myth or legend and on another you can analyze it for it symbolic meaning of destroying the systems created by the colonizers.
The Face of Popular Culture
Spectacle and Suspicion:
Spectacle and Suspicion:
A Brief Understanding of Evita Peróns My Message
& Jorge Borges’s A Celebration of the Monster
Evita Perón
Historical Context:
Wife of the Argentine President Juan Perón, served as the First Lady from 1946 until her early death in 1952.
- Champion of labor rights
- Women’s suffrage
- Widely admired by the masses (not without critics)
- My Message
“Recently, in the hours of my illness, I have thought often of this message from heart. Perhaps because I didn’t manage to say all that I feel and think in My Mission in Life, I Have to write again…”
Perón’s My Message, reads as a sort of final provocation and political endorsement of her husband. She proclaims that she wants to, “incite the people” and “to ignite them with the fire of [her] heart”. (This brings into the forefront the “masses” Borges is critical or suspicious of). She speaks passionately from the perspective as someone who came from poverty but alludes to the contradictions of the government systems she participates in. “Everything that the cliques of men with whom I happened to live – as the wife of an extraordinary president—wanted to offer me, I accepted, with a smile, using my face to guard my heart. But smiling, in the middle of the face, I learned the truth of all their lies.” She speaks openly about the support of her husband while describing the misgivings the “cliques of men,” which leaves readers with a strange set of contradictions. The duality of her writing continues. “I can now say how much they lie, all that they deceive, everything they pretend, because I know men in their greatness and in their misery.”
Her choice of words throughout the piece as particularly interesting as it works to both include herself amongst the masses and somehow distances and contradicts herself. In her conclusion she offers an end to class struggle: To avoid a class struggle, I do not believe, as the Communists do, that we must kill all the oligarchs of the world. No.
The path is to convert all the oligarchs of the world and turn them into the people of our class and our race. How? By making them work in order to join the only class that Perón recognizes: the class of men who work.
However, she concludes: “Every exploiter is the people’s enemy. Justice demands that they be destroyed. “Her rhetoric here works simultaneously to promote the politics of her husband, while offering inconsistencies. Despite this, My Message is clearly an impassioned, nuanced, and informed by the historical contexts and conflicts. She clearly is in favour of the the power and strength of the masses. She states that “The Nation belongs to the people.”
A Celebration of the Monster
Jorge Borges
Historical Context:Borges was an Argentine writer who laid the foundation for magical realist literature. He was also a critic of Juan Perón and his political ideologies. Laura Podalsky author of Specular City: Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, helped me better understand the relationship and history between these two texts: “In the late 1940s and early 1950s, authors likes Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Julio Cortazar, all penned short stories critiquing ‘unseemly’ public displays by the masses” (39). “One of the harshest anti-Peronist tracts was Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casare’s “La fiesta del monstruo”, which denounce the Peronists for their grotesque misappropriation of the capital city (40).
Introductions:
My name is Alexandra Rodriguez and I am a third-year Media Studies major. I am particularly interested in the visual arts field, intersectionality, and the creation of spaces for traditionally marginalized voices. I am a second-generation Mexican-American from Southern California. I am deeply interested in both Latinx and Chicano culture, which rely on Mexican and American contexts and narratives, but wish to learn more about the abundant and diverse histories of other Latin American cultures.