Narrative Nuance
Asynchronous Session
Genealogies from Representation to Narrative View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Julie Codell
Revising the conventions of painting, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) reinvented several genres we might call familial—portraiture of friends, family and patrons or en famille, using narratives from literature, history, or mythology, as a familial history of a nation or culture, e.g., domesticating the childhood of religious or historical figures, and imaging issues, like marriage, or family members' identities. They re-evaluated the bourgeois family, family rituals, and abject family figures. These artists made historical and literary identities metaphorically familial and national by turning their represented subject into narratives about Victorian family, nation, social class and adding psychological dimensions to their images. Through an uncanny doubling of models with mythic, literary or historical figures, artists intervened in cultural histories to expose how canons are formed and to radically revise and "genealogize" presumed origins of national culture, turning representation into narrative. These artists expanded the familial by putting lovers and family into historical, literary and mythic narratives. They invented their own antecedents or cultural patrimony, including Dante, Chaucer and the Romantic poets, among several acts of lineage making—Rossetti and Swinburne's biography of Blake and William Michael Rossetti's biography of Shelley. Blake and Keats were relatively unknown in 1848 when the PRB promoted their entrance into national literary history, while also claiming to be their cultural progeny. Their attention to early Italian and Flemish art and Hogarth did the same for art history's still-emerging canon.
From Representation to Narrative: Anti-canonic to Canonic, Representing the Other in Ethnomusicological Ensembles View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ted Solis
Ethnomusicologists typically think of themselves as the most anti-canonic, flexible, and open-minded of academics. Most were trained in the Western European art music (WEAM) tradition. However, while early nurtured in those musical performance practices and social behavioral assumptions, many have come to question the supremacy, autonomy, and unassailability of that tradition and its canon which includes both particular preferred genres and forms, and particular exalted composers. Ethnomusicologists typically eschew these “preferences,” at least in their research. This rejection of WEAM protocol and canon, however, is much less evident in world music ensembles taught by ethnomusicologists in academic institutions. In fact, in such ensembles we see something of the very processes of exaltation and essentialization, found in WEAM, which originally fed many ethnomusicologists’ presumed un-sentimental and un-hagiographic musical views. We might go so far as to term this process “internal orientalism,” in which many ensemble directors perpetuate and elevate a particular world music ensemble canon. The resultant narrative is one embracing mainly particular representatives of “great traditions” (Hindustani and Karnatak Indian classical, Ghanaian Ewe for West African, Arab for Middle Eastern, Central Java and Balinese for Southeast Asian gong chime ensembles, and others). These ensembles were all in fact established earlier by prestigious founding scholars of the field, whose predilections (often based upon serendipitous connections and first encounters with the ensembles) were later rationalized and prioritized as possessing self-evident aesthetic and pedagogic values. In this way, ethnomusicologists re-apply the very hegemonic hierarchies they had thitherto questioned.
War is Worse Than Hell: Philosophical Reflections on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Pauley
In this now famous and celebrated collection of closely related stories about a U.S. platoon in Vietnam, O’Brien makes a number of philosophically intriguing claims. In this short essay, I develop a thesis that O’Brien’s reflections on the reality of war tell us something very precise about the human condition, namely that it is haunted by contingency. That war is “worse than hell,” a statement made in one of his stories, I read O’Brien as saying that war accentuates and highlights how human existence is essentially chaotic. Our own mortality, which is embedded in every step within life itself, is fully and finally disclosed in war. A temptation then arises to say that war is epistemically valuable in that it reveals and discloses the nature of our lives. I argue that this temptation must be resisted and that O’Brien gives us reasons to resist it within his account. The center of the argument is that stories reveal several aspects of war that war itself does not and cannot reveal. I conclude that if this argument is sound then it will have to point to the ontological value of stories as, in some ways, transcending the meaning of actual experience.
"Gotta Stem the Evil Tide": OZ Magazine as Sex Education Agent in 1960s-70s Britain View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ya'ara Gil-Glazer
The British-Australian counterculture magazine Oz (1963-1973) was the brainchild of a group of students who used it as a platform for discussing sex, erotica, and anti-establishment issues. Characterized by a provocative and subversive image-text rhetoric, it is considered the most psychedelic underground publication of the period. Particularly provocative and controversial was the “School Kids Issue” (May 1970), whose teenage guest editors were indicted for obscenity, and later acquitted. From a contemporary perspective, Oz may be characterized as open and activist in the spirit of the social protests of the 1960s and early 70s, but at the same time outright sexist. For example, the front page of “School Kids” features images of free and passionate lesbian sexuality, whereas its inner pages include a comic strip that depicts the violent deflowering of an objectified passive female figure. The trial dwelled on these two examples, but not from a critical feminist standpoint, but from a conservative one disapproving of the explicit discussion and visualization of sexuality as such. This paper discusses the sexual-erotic discourse in Oz from the perspective of critical pedagogy, which considers the mass media and visual culture as educational agents with a major role in shaping perceptions regarding various social issues, including gender and sexuality: Did its outrageous image-text messages educate its young readers to healthy, equal, and objectification-free sexuality, or rather reproduce sexism and misogyny? This question is examined in a contextual approach, given hegemonic and subversive conceptions of sexuality during the period under discussion.
Transcultural Choreographies of the Cuban Revolution (1960s-70s): In Contrapunteo with the Legacy of Fernando Ortiz View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lester Tome
In the 1960s-70s, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC) produced dozens of works that integrated Afro-Cuban dance and music. I analyze how that choreographic output sought to cultivate a national ballet aesthetic while advancing the Cuban Revolution’s antiracist program. The ballets conformed to the state’s cultural policy of valorizing and institutionalizing the Afro-Cuban heritage. Since the island’s rich dance history had long been emblematic of the transculturation of European and African traditions, dance spectacles served as convenient pedagogical tools for the government to promote social acceptance of an afrodiasporic definition of Cuban culture. I propose that the choreographies not merely visualized such an afrodiasporic narrative of the nation but enacted the very process of transculturation by hybridizing ballet and Afro-Cuban expressions such as rumba and the ritual dances from the santería religion. Under the Revolution, the concept of transculturation (coined by the influential Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz two decades earlier) became a state-sanctioned paradigm of cultural production. I argue that choreographers, dancers, and institutions such as the BNC were instrumental in making transculturation part of official discourse. Integrating oral history, archival research, and performance analysis, I detail the compositional strategies of juxtaposition, counterpoint, and fusion through which choreographers operated transculturation of ballet and Afro-Cuban dance. Simultaneously, I probe the limits of representation in those choreographic experiments, which, reflecting Ortiz’s ambiguous ideology of transculturation, could obscure conflict in racial relations and underscore, instead, images of racial reconciliation in line with the Revolution’s political priorities.
The Role of the Viewer in Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mei-Hsin Chen
The dawn of the image era in the 1950s led to a reconsideration of the methodology of art history. Since then, art critics and scholars have paid more attention to the role of the viewer in art and thus developed viewer-centered theories of art. Such changes, which greatly influenced the visual aesthetics of the 1960s, were carried over into the field of art history in the 1970s. This study discusses authors such as Clement Greenberg, Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers, who place the experience of the viewer and visual culture at the center of their studies to examine the use of these components in the methodologies suggested by the new art history.
