Fall 2007 Culture

volume 5, issue 2
anamesa
John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Masters Program in Humanities and Social Thought

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
New York University
volume 5, issue 2
www.anamesa.org
Anamesa
an interdisciplinary journal

The Culture Issue

fall
2007
anamesa
The Culture Issue r fall 2007
The Culture Issue r fall 2007
The mission of ANAMESA is to provide a forum in which

NYU graduate students may share their interdisciplinary work
and examine that of fellow students. We produce two issues per
year that cycle through four themes: Democracy, Culture, Violence,
and an Editors Choice. Our intention is to generate and transmit
knowledge among disciplines by engaging the broad themes that ground
our work, establishing a record of how NYU graduate students have
thought about these issues over time.
ANAMESA
volume 5 | issue 2
fall 2007 r The Culture Issue
an interdisciplinary journal
issn:
1559-4963
blur boundaries, re-imagine links, explore the between
Cara Shepley
Editor in Chief
Caitlin Kerker Mennen
Art Director
Todd Woodlan
Design and Layout Editor
Anna Bardaus, Arcynta Childs, Kate Crouse, Luke Epplin, Pei Palmgren, Eduardo
Saldaa-Piovanetti, Georgiana Toma, Tim Welsh
Editorial and Proofreading Team
Anna Bardaus, Dana Leventhal, Pei Palmgren
Design and Layout Team
Yael Korat, Kevin Sheldon
Webmasters
We at Anamesa extend special thanks to Martiza Coln, Larissa Kyzer, and Yael Korat
for their continued support and invaluable assistance.
Anamesa is a biannual publication funded by the following entities of New York
Universitys Graduate School of Arts and Science: the Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies and the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Masters Program in
Humanities and Social Thought.
www.anamesa.org
anamesa.journal@gmail.com
anamesa : Greek. adv. between, among, within
Contents
Letter from the Editor
ii
Essays
Culture and the Crescent City | Eleanor Rae
The Intangible Unique | Kevin Sheldon
Workshopping American Culture | Jessica Rivers
Venezuelan Beauty Myth | Michelle Roche
3
27
43
63
Fiction and Poetry

Joe Norkis Walks the Bridge Home | Jesse Francis
1970s: Looking Back and Out | Ekaterina Svetova
Baile del pasado | Chandani Patel
In Matisses Landscapes | Luke Epplin
The Market Woman/Quitandeira | Agostinho Neto
translated into English by Chandani Patel
1
19
41
61
82
Photography
Flamenco | Chandani Patel
FAD | Chandani Patel
Varanasi at Dawn | Cara Shepley
Faith on the Wall | Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo
Before the Show | Luke Epplin
Soldiers March | Cara Shepley
Cultura de Madres | Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo
Fiestas Patrias | Luke Epplin
2
18
26
40
42
60
62
81
On the Cover: Umbrellas in Hiroshima by Cara Shepley
Contributors
84
THE CULTURE ISSUE | i
Letter from the Editor
Nahru once said that culture is the widening of the mind

and spirit. An interdisciplinary effort, Anamesas mission has always been
to broaden understanding by bridging gaps and moving between, among
and within various modes of thought and meaning. In turn, The Culture
Issue seeks to expose those frames that inspire an ongoing conversation about
cultures triumphs, limitations and apathies. Seemingly simple, this endeavor is
complicated by the fact that Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress,
the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties (Aim
Csaire). If culture is everything and everywhere, if it is already between, among
and within, then what do we gain by defining its slippages and indeterminacies?
This Culture Issue has no single answer to this question. In these pages, we
do not purport to define culture, nor do we claim any right to do so. Rather, the
Fall 2007 offering is a reminder that no matter what culture is or isnt, no matter
how inequitable, oppressive, glorious or evergreen, culture is above all a fact of
our, well, our culture. Culture creates itself each and every day.
One way to approach the essays in this volume is through perspective
in the context of space. Michelle Roche examines the culture of Venezuelan
femininity on the national level even as her argument hinges on global flows and
postcolonial thought. Eleanor Raes timely essay on New Orleans takes up the
awaharlal
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ways that culture forms, conforms, deforms and reforms a city defined in terms
of its identityhowever disingenuouswithin the United States. Zooming in
one step more, Jessica Rivers explores her experience with culture in the ESOL
classroom, revealing a small space inhabited by mighty forces. Kevin Sheldon
pushes beyond the physical parameters of space to suggest that an aura in art can
exist even where nothing tangible does.
As for the poetry, fiction, and photographs, we thought of each piece as a
portraita small but telling moment that suggests how culture weaves in and
out of lives, through time, and across physical and fictive spaces. These pieces
enhance and inform the issues tone, and offer a variety of approaches to that
curious thing thats nowhere and everywhere: culture.
Thanks to everyone who participates in Anamesas creation or enjoyment
were all in this together. In mutual support and encouragement, we create our
very own cultural moment by allowing this journal to continue in its course.
Please contribute: www.anamesa.org.
Cara Shepley
Editor in Chief
THE CULTURE ISSUE | iii
Joe Norkis Walks the Bridge

Home
by Jesse Francis
No one ever gave Norkis a ride home.

Crossing that bridge, you could almost see
the smell coming up off of him, blurring
the sun, radiating
one of those appalling and natural
odors of chance and environment
the dried sweat smell of damp
onions and garlic or smelling
an unwashed potatomusty,
thick and earthenthe kind you feel
between your teeth,
gritty:
The hot sun coming up after a cool morning rain,
or the wet, fish-filled smell wafting up the hill
from the muddy river on a hot summer day,
the air so still and stifling.
THE CULTURE ISSUE | 1
Flamenco
by Chandani Patel
June 2005
Granada, Spain
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Culture and the Crescent City

Understanding Urban Image and Revitalization
in the Case of New Orleans, Louisiana
by Eleanor Rae
eeped in mythology, romance, and fantasy,
New Orleans is a
city whose reputation espouses the character of a spectacular cultural
heartland. After Hurricane Katrina swept through the Gulf Coast in
late August 2005, however, the picture of New Orleans began to change. The
Big Easy became an image of destruction and despair; perhaps even more
severely, New Orleans emerged as the manifestation of American inequality,
governmental incompetence, and domestic chaos in the First World. A place
that had been constructed and relished for its provision of a liminal cultural and
sexual experience now found itself in the center of a Category 5 hurricane, and
in the eye of a social, political, economic, and cultural storm. It is important to
comprehend the processes, dynamics, and most importantly the people that have
been and continue to be transformed by the representation of New Orleans,
both before and after this critical historical moment.
The city of New Orleans and the Katrina disaster raise several questions
about the phenomenon of a city with culture, and more explicitly, provoke an
examination of how this culture is both destroyed and rebuilt. In this analysis of
the New Orleanian experience, I will explore two crucial areas. First, I will look
at how the image of New Orleans as a cultural city has been created, fostered,
and perpetuated throughout the 20th century. In this section, I will consider
the rise of tourism along with the marketing strategies and specific notions of
heritage and exoticism that emerge as the salient characteristics of New Orleans
appeal; additionally, I will address the clash between these characteristics and the
realities of New Orleans before and after the hurricane. Secondly, I will look at
the players of this complex storythose who shape the agenda for, and the
vision of, New Orleans, and the actors who manipulate both the strategies and
stakes of reconstruction efforts. In this closing section, fundamental questions
about the impacts of race, class, status, and political power will come to the
fore.
A City with Culture

It is impossible to analyze the strategies that inform the image and identity
of New Orleans without a discussion of tourism. While the attraction of domestic
and international tourists plays a central role in contemporary New Orleanian
life, the city has not always been a tourist destination.1 In fact, urban tourism
across the United States did not fully develop until the early twentieth century.2
Anthony Stanonis argues that the interwar period shaped the way that civic
leaders chose to market their respective cities;3 in New Orleans, city boosters
began to upgrade the citys infrastructure (roads, levees, etc.), as well as to invest
in attractions such as the waterfront, iconic buildings, and the Mardi Gras
festival.4 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, severe economic, social and cultural
pressures led to the manipulation and myth-making of both urban and national
identities.5 New Orleans businessmen recognized the economic viability of
tourism, and a growing national sense of nostalgia (precipitated greatly by the
Great Depression and Second World War), and based New Orleans myth on a
romantic, exotic past.6
These two characteristics about New Orleansits antiquity, and its
foreign-nesshave come to dominate the discourse, representations, and also the
identity of this Southern city. In 1922, the New Orleans Convention and Tourist
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Bureau declared that the new slogan for the city would read New Orleans
Americas Most Interesting City;7 the different architectural styles of the citys
buildings, and the presence of outside cultures (Creole, French, Caribbean,
Spanish, and so forth) contributed the real framework on which the image of New
Orleans, designed to make a profit, could be built. The phenomenon of Mardi
Gras capitalized on the notion of New Orleans as a place seeped in history and
tradition; as Stanonis explains, the practice of carnival turned back the clock,
allowing tourists and residents to imagine themselves in some pre-modern era in
which revelry could reign.8 These perceptions of New Orleans remain in place
today. In author Peirce Lewis examination of the intrigue of New Orleans, he
claims that the city contains an eccentricity, a foreign-ness, a special genre de
vivre and genius loci that separates it from all other urban areas, at least in the
United States.9 His book, written in 2003, demonstrates that the notion of New
Orleans as a unique and different place has remained a prominent perspective.
The strategy to understand, depict, and indeed sell New Orleans as an island
of exoticism and an historical relic in America must be unpacked. Just as the
phenomenon of urban tourism does not emerge out of a vacuum, the particular
characteristics that became the image of New Orleans must be understood
within their particular contexts. Brian Graham has carefully examined the use
of heritage to attach meaning to the present through connections made to a
socially agreed-uponand constructedpast. In this sense, heritage acts as a
knowledge, a cultural product, and a political resource with valuable social and
political influences.10 Particularly in the case of New Orleans, I would add that
heritage can also serve a critical economic function within a societythe practice
of cultural tourism and the commodification of heritage are yet another means
by which the concept of heritage has made its impact. As Graham makes clear,
heritage is yet another type of capital.11 However, while Graham argues that
heritage is mostly internally consumed,12 I believe that heritage plays an essential
role on both external and internal scales. The strength of heritage, local memory,
and an authentic belief in a rich urban past contribute substantially to the
viability of selling a heritage myth to outsiders.13 Grahams work also confirms

how the concept of a romantic and celebrated history is created and maintained
by a complex interweaving of real and constructed events, structures, and ideas.
In addition to the qualities of antiquity and heritage, the image of New
Orleans as a cultural city also revolves around the conceptualization of the
Crescent City as an exotic, unique, and foreign locale.14 As Lewis states, New
Orleans is understood (and understands itself) as an islanda Creole island in a
Cajun region, an island in Louisiana, an island in The South, and an island in the
country.15 In terms of its relationship with the rest of the southern United States,
Lewis asserts, in the fundamental things that set people apart from one another
culturallyhow they speak, eat, drink, dress, shelter themselves, and even how
they view sexOrleanians do not seem like southerners.16 In addition, due
to its climate, architecture, port, and variety of influences from the Caribbean,
New Orleans enjoys the status of its historic function as a worldly city, ripe
with exotic and foreign intrigue.17 The appeal of objects, people, and cultures
perceived of as unique, foreign, and exotic has been studied largely by Edward
Said in his examination of Orientalism.18 While there are several substantial
differences between the types of exoticism displayed through Orientalism, and
the image presented (and self-promoted) by New Orleans, recognition of how
the foreign-ness of objects, traditions, and cultures attract people to one another
is buttressed by Saids work. Another parallel to the New Orleans case is the
popularity of exotic items within the museum culture; New Orleans utilizes the
notions of awe, difference, and cultural distinctiveness at an urban scale.
New Orleans status as an eclectic, eccentric, and fascinatingly cosmopolitan
citya global crossroads19worked to establish and highlight its difference
from an increasingly homogenized nation.20 Moreover, the exoticism of New
Orleans contributed to the enticement of a place far, far away from the troubles,
and the monotony, of home. The music, architecture, cuisine, and demographics
of New Orleans are engaged in a dialectical relationship with the imagery
strategies that emerged throughout the past century. As Abrahamson notes, it is
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a combination of myths, brand value, and a notion of authenticity that contribute

to how a city image can be effectively constructed and in a sense bought.21
Despite the significant links between reality and image, however, the gaps
that exist between the image that the city officially promotes and the actual
circumstances for many New Orleanians challenge the achievement of an
unequivocal, unanimous, or authentic branding effort. Rather, the construction
of New Orleans as a picture of antiquity, difference, spectacle, and abandon
seriously and dangerously displaces the unattractive realities that the city also
has to display. For many New Orleanian residents, the myth of an exotic oasis
to which they can escape from everyday struggles is an illusion: New Orleans
is not an island of retreat, spectacle, and foreign-ness for everyone. Many New
Orleanians instead face a less enchanting reality.
As an illustration of that reality, the 2000 U.S. Census reported that 27.9%
of New Orleanian residents live below the poverty line, a statistic almost three
times the national average.22 Looking only at the black population, this figure rises
to over 35%.23 Thus, not unlike America in general, a hugely disproportionate
number of black citizens in New Orleans are poor. New Orleans may be
constructed as a cultural oasis, but economically, socially, and politically, the
city blends into the broader histories of poverty, discrimination, and inequality
of the Deep South. It cannot be disregarded that New Orleans is located in
Louisiana, one of the two poorest states in America, along with its neighbour,
and other Hurricane Katrina target, Mississippi.24 Both states suffer from high
unemployment and underemployment rates, homelessness, and failing education
systems.25 A severe lack of financial resources has thus defined and crippled the
lives of many local residents.
The image of New Orleans as an exception, a theme-park, and a spectacle of
the exotic crashes against these political, racial, and social realities. Jazz, the blues,
Mardi Gras and other cultural hallmarks of the city share a different tradition,
and were built to tell a different version of realityone that celebrates black
expression and protest. These forms are designed to articulate, publicize, and
challenge the devastating realities of the status quo. The official cultural image
of New Orleans, however, has no place for unpleasant and disruptive histories
and meanings. Unfortunately, with deleterious and obfuscating effects, these
features are appropriated and hollowed of their political past in order to produce
a specific neutralized, romanticized, and commodified version of urban culture
and identity. The contradiction between the impoverished realities of many New
Orleanian citizens and the desired blemish-free version of the city presents
a challenge to the urban vision; this gap is breached by disconnecting cultural
forms from their less attractive political contexts.
Hurricane Katrina created another paradox for the image of New Orleans:
How could a place constructed as timeless, exotic, and carefree now be recognized
and treated as somewhere personal, local, unglamorous, and serious? This was
the moment where the culture city became the disaster city; during the media
storm that followed in Katrinas wake, the spectacle of foreign-ness and laissezfaire gave way to a spectacle of destruction and barbarity. Regrettably, while
Katrinas images may have revealed the colour and income of the majority of
the hurricanes victims, they did so as spectacles of destruction and incivility.
Thus, these representations also failed to incorporate the systemic, structural,
and deeply political histories of racism, inequality, and poverty in New Orleans.
The construction and promotion of New Orleanian identity as either a spectacle
of culture or a spectacle of disaster simultaneously occludes and legitimates
the citys history of economic and political divisions along racial lines. In both
portrayals, New Orleans is reduced, simplified, and depoliticized. In both
portrayals, another less palatable culture within New Orleans is obscured: the
culture of oppression, political struggle, and racial disenfranchisement.
Players
In order to understand the past, and the possible future for the city of New
Orleans, it is critical to demystify the myriad of people, and their agendas, that
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bear down on this single metropolis. The history of how the image of New
Orleans has transformed and been transformed is a history that is inextricably
linked to issues of class, inequality, and race. Throughout the boom of New
Orleans tourism in the twentieth century, it was white elites who were creating
and shaping the official marketing of the city.26 Following the First World War,
tourist sites in New Orleans were created by and for white people, and were
also constructed in order to display a non-existentor at least a subservient
black culture.27 Most saliently, the white elites opposition and suppression of
jazz exemplifies attempts made by white leaders and citizens to control and
marginalize what they deemed as a threat to greater society.28 Even as jazz became
incorporated into the citys image, civic leaders only presented a whitened
version that merely served the purpose of restating supposed racial hierarchies.29
Sanitizing the expression of jazz and appropriating it into the acceptable white
culture, and white spaces, of New Orleans acts to deprive this musical form of its
political content and political history. Making a naturalized, neutralized version
of jazz was the crucial means by which this form could be co-opted as a cultural
signifier for all of New Orleans.
However, despite these dominant processes and agendas, black individuals
and communities were not suppressed; in a variety of important and lasting ways,
these groups influenced (and enhanced) the cultural capital of New Orleans
and in fact contribute to the contemporary imagination of New Orleans as a
city with culture. Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair, Brenda Marie Osbey,
Mahalia Jackson, and numerous others stand as monuments to the beauty,
intelligence, and moral power of the black community in New Orleans.30 The
history of New Orleans cultural image thus includes two seemingly conflicting
stories: first, the experience of segregation, oppression, and controlled tourism
by a white elite, but also the indomitable spirit, creativity, passion, talent,
and influence of the black community. Jazz may have been appropriated and
sanitized by a white New Orleanian group, but nevertheless, the political and
racial protest at the root and soul of these musical forms has not disappeared.
Neutralizing the history and content of jazz for the sake of a clean, untroubled,
and commodified city image cannot entirely obliterate the profound meaning
that jazz holds for those who sing, play, or listen to it with political expression
in mind.
Hurricane Katrina was also unable to occlude the racialized expression of
New Orleans; instead, growing inequality and poverty along racial lines was
highlighted by the disaster, and broadcast to the world. It was poor, mostly black
residents who Americans watched for days in squalid conditions at the Louisiana
Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Centre. It was poor, mostly black
residents of the seventh, ninth, and 13th wards who stand to lose much more
from Hurricane Katrina than the owners of mansions, luxury apartments, office
buildings, and hotels.31 As a natural disaster, Katrina must be understood as a
storm that was felt by and wounded an entire city;32 yet, despite the breadth of
its destruction, one must also recognize and pay careful attention to the patterns
within its wrath. Put simply by journalist David Brooks, Katrina was a natural
disaster that interrupted a social disaster.33
Thus, in a similar vein to the appropriation of jazz, the storm may have
exposed the racial, economic, and social divisions of New Orleans, but it
did so in particular and limited ways. Hurricane Katrina recast the cultural
image of a carefree, exotic, romantic New Orleans with a new, continually
spectacularized, picture of the city. New Orleans was not simply portrayed as
a culture of barbarity and despairtelevision, internet, and newspaper images
also connected an unmistakable black face and body to the citys destruction
and danger. Therefore, not only were the poor, mostly black residents of New
Orleans suffering disproportionately from the storm due to their social and
economic vulnerability, they were now also demonized as the actors within the
post-Katrina descent into Hell on earth.34 The new image of New Orleans
Disaster Zonedisplaced the previous image of a cultural oasis, yet many prior
characteristics were simply manipulated to fit within the emerging rhetoric. The
exotic blackness of pre-Katrina residents became Othered Third World black
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bodies, the spectacle of Mardi Gras and the sexual license of the burlesque hall
evolved into stories (mostly later revealed as false) of rampant rape and abuse
in the mass shelters, and notions of a carefree city now translated into chaos.
Fundamentally, throughout the transition between both New Orleanian
representations, political and historical contingencies were naturalized or
ignored. The social, economic, and profoundly racial framework of the city
were depicted, but they remained obfuscated by pictures and rhetoric; sanitized
black culture became demonized black culture, and the systemic crises of New
Orleans continued unaddressed.
The gross disparities engulfing New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina
were revealed in profoundly narrow, depoliticized, and destructive ways. The
hurricane also uncovered (and contributed to) a growing but problematic desire
to revitalize the city, and a counter-effort to change its course. In their analysis
of post-crisis urban resilience, Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella describe
how recovery efforts frequently have the aim of restoring a post-disaster city to
normalcy.35 In New Orleans, however, many believe that the normal state of
affairs before Katrina hit was an unacceptable standard. Returning to conditions
of profoundly racialized poverty, inequality, and disenfranchisement would
simply ignore the social disaster that both preceded and determined Katrinas
effects. Thus, in contrast to the standard recovery approach, many actors in New
Orleans, often from the black community, have instead focused on a rebuilding
and renewal strategy that seeks to create a city that is more equitable, inclusive,
and socially sustainable.36 Furthermore, many residents and activists have
recognized that an image of the city that occludes the racialized impact of Katrina
would not only be a failure, it would be an injustice to those who suffered most
profoundly from the storm.37 As one local activist, Kalamu ya Salaam, believes,
when the history is written, we want these people to be documented.38 The
danger of ignoring the incorporation of Katrina, and the socio-economic
disclosures of Katrina, into the citys history, story, and imagery are clear; as
poignantly described by one novelist, there exists a deplorable possibility that
the dark history will be buried, along with the black bodies. And that means
a lot of black culture will be buried with it.39 Clearly, many New Orleanian
residents are aware of what is at stake: they are unwilling to accept yet another
depolicitized, neutralized, and sanitized representation of their experience, and
their city. Culture in New Orleans cannot only be constructed as spectacle, or
as an unblemished vision of the citythe culture of black expression, political
frustration, and systemic oppression is, however unpalatably, also a part of this
citys history, reality, and meaning.
There is one fear in particular that emerges in opposition to the control
of New Orleans revitalization by elites. Tourism in the Crescent City, while
arguably a central component of the citys economy, is also accused by many
of being responsible for the citys cultural deterioration.40 This anxiety about
tourisms negative role in New Orleans preceded Hurricane Katrina but
accelerated once discussions about rebuilding the city were underway. One
New Orleans resident poignantly describes her nightmare: New Orleans
becoming an antiseptic version of something real.41 As Lewis explains, the
tourist industry over the past two decades has transformed the once-beautiful
and authentic French Quarter into a Creole Disneyland residents who once
added to the areas charm have moved away.42 Inflated attention to particular
tourist districts also perpetuates and legitimizes the neglect of non-tourist
areas,43 further intensifying and exaggerating the chasm between the prosperous,
romantic side of New Orleans and the less glamorous impoverished realities of
many who live there.
The problematic tourist vision promoted by city and state businesses and
governmentsthrough marketing, major infrastructure investments, and so
forthcontinues not only unabated but in fact stronger than ever just one year
after the hurricane.44 The construction of New Orleans as an unblemished city
with culture is once again dominant, and this process is restaging the dilemmas
of neutralization and depoliticization. Author George Lipsitz concludes that
projects underway fail to promote a vital and diverse New Orleans; instead,
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governments and developers are creating homogenous shopping malls, housing

units for the upper classes, and Wal-Marts.45 Moreover, they are using the
mistaken philosophy that these investments will eventually trickle down to the
citys disadvantaged classes.46 Frighteningly, some officials do not even bother to
make an argument for such benefits; for Republican congressman Richard Baker,
Katrina was an act of God that helpfully cleaned up New Orleans in a way the
government never could.47
This variety of interests makes clear that there is no single, unified vox populi
that can hope to speak for all of those responding to a disaster.48 In this panoply
of voices, opinions, and perspectives, there are challenges to be sure, but there
is also profound strength, creativity, and potential. In New Orleans, accepting
and giving authority to a myriad of voices is an important strategy for urban
revitalization. Businesses, tourist organizations, and political elites often have
the financial resources, media access, and established networks to monopolize
the decisions that will come to shape city life, but they also prompt residents to
ask, who [are] these suits who presume to speak for New Orleans culture?49
Powerful individuals or groups may be acting in self-interest, or for the good
of a broader society. At worst, some hold a vision for New Orleans that seeks
to recreate a past where the majority of the population was white and where
black people knew their place.50 At best, leaders from these elite groups aim
to reconstruct New Orleanian society in a way that addresses and reforms the
imbalances of history. However, regardless of their intentions, these groups only
manage to represent particular, and usually advantaged, sectors of society while
leaving out several other marginalized communities and actors whose voices are
important contributions to a sustainable social future.
Fortunately, there are groups that have emerged following Katrina who are
mobilizing alternatives to the goals and investments of local and state governments.
These groups are contesting the image of the city as an unblemished cultural
spectacle, and as a place ridden with crime and poverty that needs to be saved
by a certain type of redevelopment. Even more importantly, associations such as
the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Committee are strengthening
the voice of marginalized groups that wish to gain access to the vision and
creation of New Orleans future.51 It is this plurality of voice and influence that
gives hope to New Orleans and ensures a valuable sense of inclusion among the
citys residents.
In The Making of an Urban Landscape, written before Hurricane Katrina
hit, author Peirce Lewis states, New Orleans will remain a special place
only if the city takes special measures to define the qualities that made it that
way, and to defend them with all the power at its disposal.52 Lewis properly
addresses the dilemma New Orleans faces, which has been made even more
salient by the effects of the hurricane; however, he fails to unpack the dynamics
underlying how a city gets defined and defendedand who and what is
silenced along the way. It is insufficient to claim that the city must act in a
certain way as decisions are not made in a power vacuum since the city is
far from a monolithic entity. Furthermore, in contemporary society it is also
essential to recognize that the city is not a bounded entitycountless external
actors, governments, and forces are influencing and informing urban life. The
resilience of a city is increasingly underwritten by outsiders;53 in the case of
New Orleans, federal and international aid, charity organizations, multi-state
assistance efforts, media representation, and even the particular agenda of the
President54 can and do affect realities and decisions at the city level. Unless we
continue to ask questions about who is rebuilding what for whose benefit, the
reconstruction of New Orleans will remain solely, and unsustainably, a function
of political and economic strength.55
n many ways this paper is an exploration of urban identityan
endeavour to comprehend the processes and people implicated by both

internal and external conceptions of a city. It is an attempt to gain insight
into the construction and perception of cultural value, as well as the destruction
and revitalization of both physical and intangible cultural life. By examining the
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role, expression, and reconstruction of culture in a particular time and place, we

can demystify the structures and forces of cultural production within a specific
context. Most importantly, by identifying and questioning the constellation of
individual and group influences within the city of New Orleans, we have the
opportunity to challenge patterns and strategies of exclusion, marginalization,
and inequality. So far, both plurality and progress face substantial obstacles.
Yet time has not run out, and there are encouraging numbers of actors and
communities willing to transform New Orleans at this critical juncture in the
citys history. In the words of one journalist: This is the post-Katrina moment.
Lets not blow it.56 r
Notes
1 Anthony Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern
Tourism, 1918-1945, (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), 12-13.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid, 22.
4 Ibid, 15-16, 22, 26.
5 Ibid, 2.
6 J. Mark Souther, New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent
City, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 40-41.
7 Stanonis, 28.
8 Ibid, 182.
9 Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed., (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2003), 5-8, 171.
10 Brian Graham, Heritage as knowledge: Capital or culture? Urban Studies. 39.5/6 (May
2002): 1006.
11 Ibid, 1015.
12 Ibid, 1006.
13 Mark Abrahamson, Global Cities, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37.
14 Stanonis, 26, 241.
15 Lewis, 12.
16 Ibid, 16.
17 Ibid, 5, 8.
18 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Revisited ed., (New York:
Penguin, 1995).
19 William Porter, Resurrecting a citys spirit, The Denver Post 23 Sept. 2005: A-01.
20 Andres Viglucci, Gumbo City lament: Can the city that gave the United States its soul
culturally and musically and gastronomicallyreally be wiped out forever? Unthinkable,
The Gazette (Montreal) 10 Sept. 2005: A4.
21 Abrahamson, 36-37.
22 Virginia R. Dominguez, Seeing and Not Seeing: Complicity in Surprise, Social Science
Research Council (2006), http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Dominguez/.
23 Clyde Woods, Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? American Quarterly
57.4 (Dec. 2005): 1010.
24 Ibid, 1009.
25 Ibid, 1009-1011.
26 Stanonis, 195-197, 234.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid, 195-207, 234.
29 Ibid, 197.
30 George Lipsitz, Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and
Competitive Consumer Citizenship, Cultural Anthropology, 21.3 (Aug 2006): 458-460.
31 Ibid, 465.
32 Jane Schneider and Ida Susser, eds., Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a
Globalized World, (New York: Berg, 2003), 19.
33 David Brooks, Katrinas Silver Lining, New York Times 8 Sept. 2005: A5.
34 Sarah Kaufman, The Criminalization of New Orleans in Katrinas Wake, Social Science
Research Council (2006), http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Kaufman/.
35 Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, eds., The Resilient City: how modern cities
recover from disaster, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12.
36 George Lipsitz, New OrleansOne Year After Katrina, Cultural Anthropology (2006),
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/17.
37 Porter, A-01.
38 Salaam quoted in Porter, A-01.
39 Gaiter quoted in Porter, A-01.
40 Viglucci, A4.
41 Harris quoted in Porter, A-01.
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ANAMESA
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
Lewis, 160-161.
Ibid, 161.
Lipsitz, One Year After.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Woods, 1014.
Vale and Campanella, 341.
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the near death of a great American city,
(New York: Random House, 2006), 291.
50 Ibid, 219.
51 Lipsitz, One Year After.
52 Lewis, 103-104.
53 Vale and Campanella, 342.
54 Lipsitz, Learning, 452.
55 Vale and Campanella, 19.
56 Brooks, A5.
Fad
by Chandani Patel
June 2005
Barcelona, Spain
18 |
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1970s: Looking Back and Out

An excerpt from The Age of Lucya: An
Exercise in Personal History
by Ekaterina Svetova
World. The East was Far. The West,

Zpad in Russian, was even farthera dangerous place from whence
blew a steady wind of threat. The very word harbored an implication
of decay, death. Zpad was the place where the Sun set, where you could fall
and perishzapstwithout a chance of coming back. The conveniently
compartmentalized Soviet mind created a more general name for the place, both
to the East and to the West, where all the cool stuff came from: the multi-colored
felt pens and chewing gum, coveted blue jeans and fashionable music, all the
little things that created desire within a good Soviet child. That land of ever green
grass was the mysterious ZagranitsaBeyond-the-Bordersthe Abroad.
Everybody had an opinion about it, but very few had been there.
We had several foreign things in our home. Some innocuous, normal objects
from brotherly socialist republics, like an occasional Czech glass dish, and a
couple of items brought from really foreign, not-so-friendly countries, like my
mothers vintage English jacket and my Japanese pencil holder.
Other objects masqueraded as normal. Some of the vinyl disks bearing
a stamp of the Aprelevka music factory in Cyrillic type in reality contained
music by my favorite band, and those four were foreigners, I knew for sure.
When they belted Kin Babe Lom! they sang about love thats not for sale,
e lived in the center of the
and not Throw the Crowbar to Grandma! like some of my unsophisticated

schoolmates insisted.
Considering that even a decade ago one could get in trouble for listening
to jazz, the release of The Beatles music in the tightly censored USSR must have
been a major ideological indulgence. Miraculously, in the 70s, their vinyl disks
were officially sold in music stores. To downplay rock-n-rolls foreign origins,
the album covers never had the name of the band on them, but a ambiguous title
in Russian: A Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble, lyrics and music by Dzhon Lennon
and Pol Makartni. I may be getting it all wrong though, and the explanation for
all the anonymity may not be political, but the reluctance of the Soviet music
industry to pay for the international copyright, but that seems like too simple of
an explanation.
Some foreigners were OK. There was the French Chansonier Joe Dassin.
Besides having a velvety voice, being the son of a Communist sympathizer made
him our kind of guy. There was the friend of the Soviet people, the American
rebel Dean Reed, who introduced my generation to an eclectic mixture of
popular foreign tunes, from West Side Storys Maria to Guantanamera. I
loved singing along to the little vinyl 45 EP, making up the foreign words as my
ears misheard them, the ghost of Lady Mondegreen proudly soaring over my
little head.
Some officially sanctioned propaganda was printed for us by the West.
One I remember was a small and thick British literary quarterly called Anglia,
and the other a large-format, colorful Amerika magazine. Every once in a while
my father would bring home one of these.
So, the same Americans who, as I was told at school, were bent on destroying
us with nuclear war, who threatened us from outside the protective Iron Curtain,
those Americans were nice enough to print a magazine for us in Russian. Arent
Americans bad? I remember asking, and I swear, I remember my fathers a
whole nation cannot be good or bad speech. He did add pointedly that exactly
because Americans are people just like us, I should not believe all the propaganda
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in their glossy magazine.

Amerika had been published since 1956 by the USIA (The United States
Information Agency) specially for the Cold War Soviet Union. The sleek book
was heavy with varnished paper, and smelled like real Zagranitsaa whiff of
another world. Each issue of this lavishly produced magazine presented another
facet of American life. Inside were artful photographs of the ancient green
sequoia forests, the red Grand Canyon, the blue Atlantic Ocean, and the silver
skyscrapers of New York City. There were cowboys smiling before a backdrop
of long-horned cattle, beauty pageant finalists with their toothy pasted-on grins,
cosmonauts (called astronauts in America) beaming next to the model of the
Lunar module. There were impossibly dark-skinned jazzmen with impossibly
white teeth. There were politicians with babies of all colors, all baring their teeth
(and gums) in the variety of unfamiliar fashions.
Each issue had a particular piece of Americana on the cover. I remember one
featuring disheveled Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, whose bizarre tin-button stare
gave me the creeps. The one that I loved the most was the cover with a carousel
horse. I can still see it now. The horse is carved out of wood and painted in the
most precise detail; its head is life-like, with moist shiny eyes and passionately
blown nostrils; this is contrasted by a fantastic mane, each wooden curl flowing
like waves, and each wave a different color; the bridle encrusted with bright
glass jewels and trimmed with polished copper nails. The horses body is lithe
and elegant, yet perfectly proportionatenot at all a toy. An elaborate saddle
finishes the realistic effect. There are other figures in the blurred background of
the photograph, deer and giraffes, and, I think, an occasional unicorn.
I knew there was a whole carousel somewhere. Across the ocean. Across
the universe. A carousel I would never ride.
Another issue celebrated the American movie industry. There was a page
of Disney cartoons, and an article on the animated Grinch who stole Christmas.
Almost half of the issue was devoted to a new sensationStar Wars. The
seduction was complete at first sight. The sky full of stars beckoned. The donut-
haired princess and the bathrobe-clad knight looked like my long-lost friends.
This world was so close, so palpably real on the glossy page, and yet light years
away.
A six-year-old, sitting in my parents single-room apartment in 1970s
Moscow, in the censored, deficit-ridden Soviet Union, I wished the Iron Curtain
would lift just a little, and I could get just one ride on the jewel incrusted carousel
horse, or take one glimpse at the Millennium Falcon.
Who could have known that a time would come when I would ride on the
Carousel in Central Park, see Luke Skywalker on the big screen of the Siegfield,
and there would be nothing I would desire more than to go back to being an
oblivious child in the safety of my parents homeif only for a moment.
r
I might have had a fascination with exotic foreign objects, but my heart
belonged to my Motherland. I was a happy Soviet child.
We lived like everybody else, modestly. The rent and utilities were priced
in single digits. Education and medicine were free. My mothers salary as senior
engineer at the House of Optics was 150 roublesthe price of a months worth
of groceries, or, a pair of imported German leather high-heel boots, if one is
lucky enough to find one. My fathers salary was maybe twice as much. Only big
industry bosses made over 400 roubles. A Government minister had a standard
salary of 700 roubles. My grandmothers pension bought me treats, like little
cheap toys and fruit.
Nothing was in all-year supply. Strawberries came in June, cherries in
August, the best apples and pears in September. We ate tangerines only once
a year, for New Years Eve. Flowers also only came in season, except for the
ubiquitous red carnation, the official Communist flower. I preferred the tallerthan-me gladioli because it reminded me of Roman swords. I especially liked the
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blood red ones, the ones young pioneers used to present to Comrade Brezhnev
during televised Party celebrations.
Yes, there were food lines. Mostly in winter. In Russia the agricultural
season is twenty-five days, as compared to twice that in Eastern Europe, not to
mention in the tropics. In winter most local vegetables, except the onions and
potatoes of the previous harvest, were in short supply. Imports were limited, so
on rare occasions when exotic bananas went on sale, people would go wild. To
me it didnt matterlines or no lines, my grandmother always seemed to create
a feast out of the available supplies. To her, waiting in a fifteen minute line to buy
some veal was nothing like standing for two hours in the cold to redeem ration
stamps during the war.
Some shortages were inexcusable or seemed trivial, like the notorious toilet
paper lines. I do remember asking about it. Indeed, doesnt it seem strange that
in a country abundant with paper mills, the people, all as one, had to wipe with
cut-up newspapers? Of all the deficitswhy toilet paper? My father, who always
made a point of explaining the world to me in earnest, offered that our economy
sometimes lacked resources, because we, the Soviet people, had to spend too
much on defense, coping with the arms race.
As someone who started his engineering career in a highly secretive Soviet
aviation firm, my father knew what he was talking about. So did my mother,
whose right-out-of-college job was at the mysterious House of Optics, the
leading Soviet research institution that specialized in, among other scary things,
laser-guided warhead development. Come think about it, everybody in my
peaceful world worked for war. Or, as they saw it, they worked to prevent the
war that all the enemies of the Soviet country couldnt wait to wage.
Its natural for a child to have fears, but some fears come hand in hand with
shame. It is an insult to human dignity to grow up scared of being out of work,
homeless, sick. It is humiliating to be afraid of poverty. It is shameful to have a
fear of not being good enough, thin enough, or a fear of being rejected. Soviet
children were more familiar with another kind of fear. Our righteous horror was
the nuclear war. I was afraid of war every day and every night.
Other than constant nightmares about nuclear Holocaust, life looked good
to me at six. There was nobody to envy or pity. All my friends parents worked,
like my mom and dad. Almost all were engineers, just like them. All the homes
I visited had the same plain furniture. Same bookshelves hosted the same leather
bound tomesa green collection of Chekhov, a red collection of Mayakovsky,
yellow Tolstoy (not Count Leo, but the other one, Alexei). I believe the Counts
collection was gray. There were the dark-olive volumes of the Masterpieces of
World Literature, the ever continuing series of classical literary texts from all
over time and space, identical tomes distinguishable only by thickness, from the
skinny The Harrying Of Cualnge to the fat and forbidden The Twelve Caesars
with academic commentaries on every ancient depravity.
It seemed that everybody had both parents at home. Everybodys
grandparents were around, grandma often living in the only bedroom, and
the rest of the family in the living room. Everybodys apartment was small.
Everybody had purebred dogs in their small apartments. Few families had cars,
but those who did had the same models. Few families had more than one kid. All
my friends were only children.
For a child like me there was a comfort in this unobtrusive sameness, a
sense of recognizeability, control. Goodness was guaranteed. Every radio station
played the same harmonious tunes. The songs sung the beauty of Russias golden
rye fields and translucent birch tree forests; they told of first love and cherished
joys of motherhood; they inspired one to live and work for the Motherland. All
television channels (I believe in the 70s in Moscow there were only three or four)
showed the same movies about the life of the Soviet workers, the great sacrifice
that the Soviet people paid for victory over Fascism, or about the triumph of true
love over materialism and prejudice. Radio and television constantly broadcasted
theater performances of classics from Homer to Dickens, not counting the
endless operas. I preferred cartoons. Cartoons were funny. Yes, healthy humor
was allowed. Self-deprecating (but always within the limits of tastefulnone
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of that bourgeois tackiness!) comedians exposed laziness, ignorance, selfishness,

materialismall the vestiges of the past that held Soviet society back from
entering into the Communist future. And the future was guaranteed to be
shining, if always somewhat remote. I didnt care about what Communism was
exactly, but it seemed to be something nice and definitely possible, even if not
necessarily attainable any time soon.
In the anticipation of Communism, everybody did their part. My father
designed computer systems so that planes could fly, my mother developed optics
so that people could see, and my grandmother took care of me so I could grow up
to be smart and healthy and ready to work for the good of my great Motherland.
If we werent great, they wouldnt want to destroy us, right? And, although my
parents never taught me to be patriotic, I understood.
I lived in a mighty country.
I loved and was loved.
I had a bright future to look forward to.
And if there was something dark, unsightly, or unwanted that flowed
beneath the taut shiny surface, well, my family was there to make sure it didnt
touch me. And I let them, like when our fox terrier Mitzi died of old age and they
told me she went away to the forest to live with the wolves. I believed them.
Since then Ive lost several dogs. Now I know that dogs die, while the
wolves only grow bigger and badder, and, eventually, come out of the forest. As
for me, forever a Soviet child, I mourn the loss of my own innocence. r
Varanasi at Dawn
by Cara Shepley
April 2006
Varanasi, India
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The Intangible Unique

The Aura of Mass-Produced Art
by Kevin Sheldon
I will say thats one of the Great Mysteries of Cinema that weve now
lost. A movie used to exist only during the time it was playing on the
screen. There was no object you could hold that was the movie unless
you tried to put your hands on the reels of film in the projection booth.
But even then, the film was only alive as the strip of images moved
through the projector. For most of the first century of the existence of
motion pictures the average moviegoer could not own a film. It was
an evanescent experience, like a dream you cant fully remember. You
could only rent it as it flashed before your eyes.
-Jim Emerson, editor, www.rogerebert.com, March 16, 2006
hile a sculpture or painting exists in a permanent instance,
movies (or plays, concerts, and the like) exist only for a limited
duration and then are gone until they begin anew. Far from being
only a phenomenon of time, this has repercussions in the physical dimension
as well. Emerson says that film is an evanescent experiencebecause it exists
only as long as you are watching it, film can not be contained, can not be felt.
Emerson admits, however, that he is talking about an era that has been lost.
You can, of course, hold something. He hints at this when he qualifies unless
you tried to put your hands on the reels of film in the projection booth. In
addition to the original reels, nowadays you have your choice of media to hold:
VHS cassettes, DVDs, CD-ROMs, computer hard drives, etc. Along with these
physical manifestations of a movie has come the sale of such tangibles and their
entrance into our lexicon; it is not uncommon to hear someone say they bought
the new Harry Potter movie or own Braveheart after purchasing a DVD, even
though they obviously do not own the movie in the same way that someone
who lays out money for an original Van Gogh now owns the painting.
In the case of certain art forms that can be considered experiential as
opposed to physical, discussions of ownership and physical manifestations need
to be looked at differently. In The Culture Industry Revisited, Bill Ryan says
that the use-value of products of the culture industry lies in their ostensible
originality.1 Walter Benjamin, however, claims that mechanically reproduced
art, such as film, lacks that originality. So the dawning of the age of mechanically
reproduced art necessarily diminishes the quality of art that is now being massproduced.
When art has a definite physical original, such as a painting or sculpture,
any reproduction thereof is necessarily lesser, a copy. But does this description
hold true for experiential art? Does it make sense to talk of a copy of a film,
when all physical manifestations of a film are copies to begin with? If we can not
place our hands on one specific object and call it the first, can we still identify an
original?
If we are to have any reasonable discussion of the quality of film, television,
and the like, we can, and must, still identify an original.2 As Raymond Williams
has said, the methods of mass transmission are neutral. It is only the ends to which
they are put that can have a cheapening effect.3 Whether or not art was made to
be mass-produced does not directly affect its quality or even its originality. The
best recent example of this is the Special Edition re-releases of George Lucass
Star Wars trilogy. Though roughly the same in overall content, the re-releases
tweaked many of the visuals and even some elements of the plots. As a result,
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there was outcry from dedicated fans who believed that the movies had been
unconscionably tampered with. Regardless of how similar these movies were
overall, they were not the originals. They were not Star Wars. For Benjamin,
this sentiment would be ridiculous. How could Star Wars even have an original,
since there is no unique that bathes us in the aura of its physical presence? And
yet anybody who attended a screening of the original film in 1977 had the same
experience and anybody who saw the movie in 1997 had a different one.4 My
position is that Benjamins definition of an aura does not suffice for art forms
that lack a physical original; in the case of forms such as motion pictures, while
the original still exists, it is a combination of elementsfrom images to sounds
to narrativesthat make up a unique total. Changes, no matter how subtle or
welcome (even by the original artist), create something different, and when we
discuss the aura of such art we need to refer to the feeling gained by sitting
through it and experiencing the original impact of these collected elements rather
than a particular physical iteration. Whatever effect might be gained from the
story, characters, imagery, sound, and all else that makes up the film is that films
aura, and all of those elements need to be presented in precisely the same way
for an authentic viewing of the original film. Once the film has been altered in
even the slightest way, that aura has been replaced.
The Intangible Unique

Benjamin claims that while art has always been in some form reproducible,
the advent of technology eased and abetted reproduction to a degree that the art
landscape was changed. This has inherently altered our culture. As Raymond
Williams notes, the very use of the word culture in modern contexts developed
during the Industrial Revolutionour culture is a by-product of that era.5 In
one respect, this altered existing forms of art, as paintings could be replicated,
sculptures copied, etc.; in another respect, it created new art forms brought about
by this burgeoning technology.
To Benjamin, Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is

lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the
place where it happens to be.6 This is necessarily a physical concept. Though
Benjamin mentions both time and space, the position of the work of art
therein is a unique existence at the place where it happens to be. In the case of
a painting, sculpture, or other single artifact, this makes sense. To see the Mona
Lisa, you have to go to the Louvre, and if you are anywhere else, you are not
really looking at the original work of art. This focus on the physical, however,
becomes virtually meaningless when discussing art that specifically arose out
of the era of mechanical reproduction. In film, television, and radio you do not
begin with a single item that you then manufacture many copies of. You start
with the many. And in the case of experiential art, you are hardly even concerned
with physicality at all. Holding a reel of film is not in itself an artistic experience.
The film must be screened. And it does not particularly matter if one person is in
New York and another is in London; if the two are watching identical versions
of a movie, they have the same experience.
While it seems that, for Benjamin, movies lack an aura altogether, the aura
is in fact there, but not tied to location or to physical space. Rather, it is tied to
the total experience of watching a filmthe sights and sounds and storiessuch
that changing any part of it, when the movie is viewed a second time, strikes the
viewer as different. This is not the film watched the first time. This is not the real
film.
Benjamin writes, The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced
object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes
a plurality of copies for a unique existence.7 In the case of physical art, this makes
senseif you have a plurality, you do not have a unique existence. But in the case
of art that is only produced en masse, when the experience is the only singular
item, then there is nothing stopping it from existing in many places and also still
being unique. The physical is separated from the uniqueness. For the purposes of
this essay, we can refer to this uniqueness as the intangible unique.
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ANAMESA
The search for uniqueness in contemporary culture is a controversial subject

because there is a growing feeling in the culture industries that their output is
in fact extraordinarily malleable. The example of Star Wars, cited above, speaks
to this. George Lucas believed that since he owned the movies, he could change
them and re-release them and still call them the original Star Wars Trilogy. He
compounded this artistic hubris by releasing a third version on the DVD set in
2004 and yet a fourth version for the individual DVD releases in 2006. From
extended and unrated editions to directors cuts to TV shows being altered for
DVD to popular music being re-released as remixes and dance tracks, current
popular culture is littered with alternates, substitutes, and replacements. It is
easy to reconcile all of this if you do not grant any particular authenticity to
the originals to begin with. To grant that authenticity, you would first need to
recognize an original.
Oddly enough, Benjamins description of authenticity lends itself perfectly
to film, theatre, television, and their artistic brethren: The authenticity of a thing
is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its
substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.8
If the history of art, when applied to the physical, refers to the changes which
it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various
changes in its ownership,9 then the history of these non-physical arts refers
to the story, the images, the music, all the elements of its creation and how
they are now seen after the days or decades since the films creation. When you
replace 1970s visuals used in Star Wars with modern special effects, arent you
destroying that very history? When you reconfigure the storyline created years
ago for a movie into one more palatable with modern sensibilities, arent you
erasing that record of how things were at the time, how storylines were created?
In short, when you modify experiential art to be other than it originally was,
arent you changing the very aspects that create its authenticity, thus changing
the experience of someone who views it, and therefore destroying the aura?
Whatever changes are made to film, television, music, or the like, necessarily
create something new, apart from the original, and hence the experience of the
original is lost.
Selling the Unique

Probably because of the very nature of these experiential art forms as forms
born directly out of the age of mechanical reproduction, they are also the ones
most often spoken of in relation to the culture industry. As defined by Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, the culture industry is that vast socio-economic complex
that makes its living feeding cultural products to us, the willingly-manipulated
masses. In the fascist dystopia they imagined, it is the easily-reproducible arts
that become the tools of the industry: Because millions participate in it, certain
reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in
innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods.10
Our society has become quite proficient at capitalizing on culture for
exploitation of various forms, from the political to the purely economic.
As Adorno and Horkheimer write, The culture industry can pride itself on
having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into
the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle, on divesting amusement
of its obtrusive navetes and improving the type of commodities.11 This
commodofication, however, does not diminish the relevance of these cultural
items as art forms. It simply shows powerful art being turned to other powerful,
non-artistic purposes. For Adorno and Horkheimer, upon being turned to these
commercial purposes, art stops being artor if the art was created for these other
purposes to begin with, it was never art in the first place. Adorno claimed that
cultural entities typical of the culture industries are no longer also commodities,
they are commodities through and through.12 However, this distinction exists
primarily in the minds of the culture industrys own agents and not necessarily
in the art or its audience. If an artist honestly and truly creates something, and
it is later viewed by an individual who appreciates and respects it as art, does it
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particularly matter that some other organization saw profit to be gained in the
work and paid to distribute it to the venue in which the person later saw it? Does
it by necessity taint the art? It would not seem so. While it is true that in culture
industries, exchange value has replaced use value,13 this imposition is not true by
default for the entirety of the society in which that culture industry exists. It may
usually or often be true, but not always.
All of this comes back to the intangible unique. Adorno and Horkheimer
write that today the industry continues to churn out standardized products for
distribution and exchange on the market.14 This standardization has to have a
model, and that model is the unique for that work of art, even if it is not a single
physical item, as in the case of the original Star Wars films. Whether you think
film, television, and popular music are wonderful art forms or mere tools of a
fascist elite, you must accept the existence of authenticity in the art forms. There
must be an aura in order for it to be either effective art or effective propaganda.
In short, the very terms by which Adorno and Horkheimer disdain the products
of the culture industry explain just why there is other, inherent worth in those
products to begin with, possibly on a totally non-industrial level.
Enjoying the Unique

While Adorno would clearly have us believe that the products of the
culture industry are essentially worthless on an artistic level, the concept of the
intangible unique might help free the artistic appreciation of modern culture
from the cynicism attached to knowledge of its method of creation.
The crucial starting point is, of course, an acknowledgement that art can be
art even when it is bought and sold. Adorno felt that commodification turned
art into something else, which affected its audience in a very different way than
true art. Raymond Williams, however, maintains that the methods themselves
are neutral. There is nothing inherently un-artistic about film or television, only
about the way they are sometimes used as mere tools of capitalism. Like its
counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own

language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary,15 and this language can speak
in many different ways. What matters is not the language itself but what is said.
The aura, the essential component of the viewing experience, is always
present in Adornos view of art. That reproduced art could be viewed in
someones living room as opposed to the place where it was supposed to be
viewed is problematic for him. Mechanical reproduction enables the original to
meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph
record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art;
the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds
in the drawing room.16 Adorno writes, The situations into which the product
of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of
art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.17 This contradicts
Benjamins comparison of art in the age of mechanical reproduction with art that
came before. He writes,
The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in
the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely
changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different
traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than
with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of
them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura.18
Benjamin recognizes that a single artifact has different meanings to different

people based on the context in which it is viewed. While the art has a single
aura, that aura produces different effects depending on the context in which it is
viewed. Mechanically reproduced art does exactly the same thing. Benjamin is
talking about different contexts based on time, which makes sense with art that
is based on a single physical presence, but with art that is not based on a single
physical presence contexts based on space need also be applied. If it is perfectly
fine for art to produce different effects when viewed by different groups over
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time and still have a single aura, why is it not also reasonable for art to produce
different effects when viewed by different groups at the same time, who have
different contexts because of their individual location or history?
This leads directly into the mechanical ages possibly greatest gift to
culture: the democratization of art. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote decades ago,
Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is
now a thing of the past Consumers now find nothing expensive.19 Certainly
the ability to watch an opera on PBS in ones home is infinitely more fiscally
reasonable to most people than actually purchasing tickets to see it at the Met.
Similarly, they write that if technology had its way the film would be delivered
to peoples homes as happens with the radio.20 Well, technology is certainly
having its way now. Since both film and radio are experiential art forms, the
intangible unique allows these films to be enjoyed in the home just like radio.
Technology allows this uniqueness to be delivered right into your home exactly
as it first appeared in a theater, albeit on a slightly smaller screen.21
Anybody who is as nauseated by the idea of jazz replacing the symphony
as Adorno was would not champion the idea of arts democratization. But many
others would welcome the opportunity for so many more people to enjoy
art, and the subsequent emergence of art forms no longer reliant on bourgeois
elitism. Adorno and Horkheimer write, The purity of bourgeois art, which
hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the
material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower
classeswith whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its
freedom from the ends of the false universality.22 Experiential art, however, is
infinitely more democratized through the intangible unique. Because the same
legitimate, authoritative experience can be had without having to be in a specific
place at a specific time, many more people can enjoy and be affected by it. This
is, incidentally, why mass culture can be so effective as propaganda. Adorno and
Horkheimers worst-case scenario of the industries takeover of culture actually
gives a lot of credit to the industries output of art. If mechanically-reproduced
art did not have an aura, it would not be able to do all the things Adorno and
Horkheimer are afraid of.
r
With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness
for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between
its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature In the
same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of
art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we
are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.
This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable
exemplifications of this new function. 23
In the preceding analysis, Benjamin describes the shift in function of

photography and film. In addition to those, we must add all other forms of
art whose genesis is enmeshed in the development of techniques of mechanical
reproduction (or production). For as with all other things, new tools of
production inevitably lead to different ends. What Benjamin did not realize was
that applying identical techniques of analysis to products of different techniques
of production is problematic. All art has an aura that is granted by its authenticity
and uniqueness, but when modes of production differ, that uniqueness and
the resultant authenticity come from very different places. Benjamin himself
said, Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous
collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic
poem in the past, and for the movie today.24 As such, must not we incorporate
the simultaneous collective experience into our definition of unique?
As Williams suggested, The word, culture, cannot automatically be
pressed into service as any kind of social or personal directive... The arguments
which can be grouped under its heading do not point to any inevitable action or
affiliation.25 Culture is not any one thing, even if there does exist a noticeable
trend to the ways in which certain entities try to use it. Thankfully, art is stronger
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than that; it has an intrinsic strength of form that can overcome the circumstances
of its creation.
he existence of the intangible unique, like the word
culture
itself, does not argue for or against the quality of art. It provides the
means for art to be aesthetically pleasing, honest and true, or a tool of
fascist domination. The constant is that art that is a by-product of mechanical (re)
production is not tied to a single physical artifact. Instead, it gets its authenticity
from the originality of the experience of someone viewing or hearing that art
the way it was first presented, regardless of when or where the presentation is
finally taking place. Its aura comes from this uniqueness, this sequence of images,
sounds, and ideas that could be mapped out or described but never physically
touched or held. It is intangible, but still very real. Even if you cannot look at
an object and call it the Star Wars, that does not mean that an original does
not exist, and when it is changed and modified, the experience of watching what
it once was is inevitably lost. A new experience has been created, and however
good or bad it may be, it is not the original. The aura of that intangible unique
has been lost. r
Notes
1 Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor Adorno on Mass Culture,
(Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 33.
2 You might have noticed a lack of a specific categorization of these physical and
experiential art forms. That is partly because I dislike placing art into categories. It is also
because in many cases, there are no clear lines. For the most part, things such as painting
and sculpture and what are known as the fine arts fit into the first category while things
such as film, television, radio, theatre, and what are commonly known as the performing
arts fit into the second. I believe that by understanding the rest of my argument, the reader
will understand in each particular circumstance which art theyre familiar with can best be
understood in each way.
3 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 300.
4 By experience, I refer to the impact of the overall combination of factors and elements
comprising the work. The actual way this might affect two different people watching the
same film is not necessarily the same, of course, much as the emotional experiences of two
different people looking at Michelangelos David might also differ, but they both saw the
same David.
5 Williams, vii.
6 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. Andy
Blunden, 1998. From http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/
benjamin.htm, 3.
7 Ibid, 4.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid, 3.
10 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception, trans. Andy Blunden, 1998. From http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/
adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm, 2.
11 Ibid, 18.
12 Theodor Adorno, Culture Industry Reconsidered, New German Critique 6 (1975): 13.
13 Cook, 26.
14 Ibid, 3.
15 Adorno and Horkheimer, 10.
16 Benjamin, 3.
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18
19
20
21
Benjamin, 5.
Adorno and Horkheimer, 27.
Ibid, 27.
Interestingly, theres another debate arising in regards to home theater systemsis the
experience of watching a film in your home the same as doing so in the theater? Smaller
screen, but technology is making it closer and closer. Some people find it preferable because
you dont have to be in a noisy, crowded, dirty theater. As the technology for home viewing
changes, this raises other questions that could be factored into the discussion of finding a
films unique.
23 Benjamin, 6.
24 Ibid, 12.
25 Williams, 295.
Faith on the Wall

by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo
June 2007
Lomas de Zamora, Argentina
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Baile del pasado/

Dance from the past
by Chandani Patel
Dance from the past
Al principio:
Duna dun dum dum dum
At the beginning:
Bailo sin pensar,

en el ritmo de
las canciones de mi pueblo.
I dance without thinking,

in the rthym of
of the songs of my village.


Oigo los pasos,

el tambor resonando
dentro de m,
celebracin de la vida.
I hear the footsteps,

the drum beating
within me,
celebration of life.
Ms rpido,
Dunanana dunanana
Dun dunana dun
Faster,
Dunanana dunanana
Dun dunana dun
Huelo el incienso,
veo los cuerpos
en mi periferia.
I smell the incense,

I see the bodies
in my periphery.
Dunananana dunananana
La sangre fluye a mis pies

mueve los latidos
del pasado.
Dum
Dum
Dum
Blood flows to my feet

move the beats
of the past.
Dum
Dum
Dum
Before the Show

by Luke Epplin
September 2006
Santiago, Chile
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Workshopping American Culture

The Formation of the Multicultural Group in
the ESOL Classroom
by Jessica Rivers
acked tightly together, we sat at
Golden Gate restaurant in New

York Citys Chinatown sharing twelve tiny dim sum dishes, cutting
the last day of class to eat lunch together outside the familiar confines
of a room we had shared from Monday to Thursday, nine am to twelve pm
from September 2006 to June 2007. We were thirteen Chinese men and women
varying in age and from all regions, one Puerto Rican grandmother of three,
who had spent the last 50 years in the Lower East Side, a forty-something Polish
computer repairman, whose wife and child still lived in Poland, and me, a New
York University graduate student from South Carolina. Some, agile with their
chopsticks, coached others as we ate. The conversation drifted from upcoming
family trips to what we would do with our free time now that class was over to
how and where we would find ways to speak English during the summer.
Dispersed across the five boroughs of New York City, situated in diverse
socio-economical positions, coming from various parts of the world, and varying
in age from 25 to 73, how did we become a multicultural group? This
paper will explore this issue and explain how the ESOL (English and a Second
or Other Language) classroom can become a site of multiculturalism not only
to rehearse for and perform the acquisition of English, but also to workshop
American culture.
I will momentarily extract the ESOL classroom situation from the lifelong
process of learning to speak a second language in the United States in order
to determine what such an experience suggests about the performances of the
formation of group and multiculturalism in practice. How are the terms
of individual cultural identification, multiple co-present communities, and the
urban American experience negotiated in this environment?
In my discussion of the inner workings of our ESOL class, I will use the
four walls of the classroom as temporary contextual boundaries. Even so, it is
important to keep in mind the tremendous context of the city that hovers just
outside those four walls, and even more so, inside the bodies that enter that space
everyday. Thus, this paper enters into the complex discourse of the theoretical,
methodological, pedagogical, and ideological issues concerning the varieties
of English used in various sociolinguistic environments.1 The Family Literacy
Program description posted on the University Settlement2 website speaks to the
complex intersection of the ideologies of literacy, community, immigration and
proto-typical American life:
The Lower East Side has always been a community of new immigrants; thus the
Literacy Program has always been at the core of our services. We offer intensive
English classes in which approximately 300 adults, from many different countries
and at all ability levels, learn to read, speak and write in English each year. At the
same time, our multilingual, multicultural staff provides a practical introduction
to American life, helping students gain a foothold in their new home.3
I will focus on the classroom as the middle ground between the outer
context of the city, the world that molds it, and the unknowable interiors of the
individuals within it. This dubiously situated problematic is expressed on a larger
scale in Zygmunt Baumans Cultural Variety or Variety of Cultures, in which
he describes Globality of Culture as scenes that limit the range of scenarios
which can be staged, yet do not determine which scenario will eventually be
chosen, nor the style of production.4 This Globality of Culture was represented
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in the ESOL class, which experienced the pressures of University Settlements

Family Literacy Program via the physical structure (a large square room with a
window on one wall), the course description (an emphasis on immigrants need
for an English literacy course), the geographical location (the Lower East Side,
which has always been a community of new immigrants), and the ideological
stance (multiculturalism). These influences prescribed the boundaries of
possible social interactions and demographic groupings that could occur, but
they were unable to definitively determine our emergent style of production,
as in the moment-to-moment direction of our in-class conversation, nor which
scenarios would affect each of us most significantly.
Acting as a Community
I pause here, at the border of these complexities, to talk about the dynamic,
multi-cultural production of our group. Due in part to the classrooms
Chinatown YMCA location, there was an overwhelming Chinese majority in
the classroom, which encouraged the Chinese students to speak as specifically as
possible about their hometown or province, often leading to heated debates about
education, politics, and democracy in place such as China, Taiwan, and Hong
Kong. At the same time, these students were intrigued by their non-Chinese
peers. While precisely how the other students felt about the Chinese majority
remains unclear, the initial intimidation was palpable. With time, the students in
the minority grew more overtly interested in and receptive to participating in the
Chinese cultural debates that continued to arise during class.
How did this figure into our discussion of American culture? Ethnicity
was placed on the chopping block right along with the other cultures at stake
in the classroom. It rapidly shifted from a safely privileged position of wonder
to a site of deconstruction right along with the cultural references the students
carried with them. So, while it is true that Cantonese was often spoken before
class started, and would occasionally manifest itself in outbursts of surprise,
the classroom offered a space for cultural explorationnot just American,

but Chinese, Polish, and Puerto Rican as well as those we could only
imagine. By far, the students looked the most thoroughly for oddities and
particularities in cultures other than their own. They were also very amenable
to discussions that created messy lists on the board of similarities and differences
among holiday, familial, and food traditions. As I linger at this space between the
students individual narrations of self, queries into others stories, and my own
listening for the collective identity of the class, I recognize the porosity of these
divisions in terms of context and linguistics. It is also important to highlight that,
in referring to our class as a multicultural group, I am not focused solely on racial
or ethnic composition; rather than acting as a description of who we were, the
term operates as shorthand for what we did.
Does my calling our multicultural community a production negate the
power of the lived experience? No, rather the lived experience of the notion
community is what calls its effects into being, always reshaping the term even
as it produces it. Still, it may be of some use to at least momentarily recognize the
performativity of this collective space in contrast to the lives of individuals outside
of the classroom. As Folklorist Dorothy Noyes puts it, The community exists
in its collective performances: they are the locus of its imagining in their content
and of its realization in their performance.5 When University Settlement explains
that their programs cater to the needs of the community, they bolster it in several
ways: first, by choosing the oft-nostalgically loaded concept of community to
set the protocol of the collectivity, secondly, by gathering people from all five
boroughs and designating them The Community, and finally, by enacting The
Community in the performance of the programs they offer. As an extension
of this project, our class called the multicultural community into existence
through our performance of it, socially constructing the classroom as we met
and interacted.
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Spatial Orientation
The spatial orientation of the classroom also proved important to the
collective performance of the class. We were located in classroom B on the
second floor of the brand new Chinatown YMCA on the corner of Houston
St. and Bowery St. The performativity of this space began with the students
and my socially reconstructing the room as we literally altered its physical
setup. Setha Low, scholar of environmental psychology and anthropology,
describes the emergent, dialogical act of social construction of space as the
actual transformation of spacethrough peoples social exchanges, memories,
images, and daily use of the material settinginto scenes and actions that
convey meaning.6 In a quite literal sense, we transformed the space in all of the
aforementioned ways, perhaps unintentionally.
In contrast, there was at least one instance in which we purposely
manipulated the space in order to make it our own, by deciding for ourselves
the orientation of the desks. On the second day of class, I told the students I
was uncomfortable with the arrangement of our seven long desks. They were
organized into two long rows facing a whiteboard near the classroom door, which
meant we had to keep our backs to the window. We decided the class would
function better if the desks formed a semi-circle, but the length of the desks in
contrast to the length of the room turned the shape into a capital U. The students
seemed satisfied with the setup, and the room resembled less a serious, divided
academic space, and more a book club meeting or even an actors workshop.
From that day on, the students took the classroom arrangement quite personally.
If the first students to arrive each day found the room to be organized differently
from what was decided the second day, they would correct it. One morning,
however, someone had rearranged the desks in the opposite direction, facing
the classrooms window instead of the door. I was pleasantly surprised by the
change of scenery, and so were the students; they all laughed as they entered. But
the next day when I arrived, the students were already arranging the desk back
into the formation established the second day.

There are several reasons why the students kept the same desk order
everyday. They wanted to respect my wishes, because I was their teacher. They
were exceedingly deferential to me despite the fact that the majority of them
were at least ten years my senior. In this respect, the organization of the desks
acted as a structural counterpart to the respect they showed in numerous other
forms, bodily, material, and verbally. For instance, they insisted on calling me
Teacher instead of my first name as I was instructed to require them to do.
Another reason was their desire to familiarize and maintain the organization
of the space in order to feel more comfortable. Their familiarity with the space
provided them with comfort, and while it did not counteract their unfamiliarity
with English, it at least lessened the unease of the awkward process of learning a
second language as adults.
In relation to this spatial construction, each student had his or her specific
locality, cliques formed, and casual classroom friendships were established.
Halfway through the term a few students moved the desk they shared forward.
However, their intention was not to be closer to me. Rather, it was a reaction to
one of the students nearby, who had a habit of sneezing loudly, which annoyed
the students nearly to anger. For the remainder of the school year, that group
moved their desk slightly forward at the start of each class session. The students
found ways to make the class their own by accustoming themselves personally
with the space and then staking claims over it. Their informal regulation then set
the stage for other forms of socio-spatial construction to take place.
Class Performance
A large part of this collective classroom performance occurred through
the act of repetition, made possible by the methods of formalization, which
Dorothy Noyes describes as the controls placed on such features as prosody,
register, and lexicon that both limit reference and assist memory.7 While much
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of the verbal interaction in class consisted of repetition of vocabulary words and

phrases, there was, in my experience, a significant difference between the crowd
that becomes one body and one voice,8 which encourages the identification of
the individual with the strength of the whole, and the ESOL classroom. While
the former is a show of unified action, in which individuals lose themselves in
the crowd, the latter calls attention to the distinctions of each person, as varying
accents and pronunciations form not a single voice but multiple voices within
each word. Furthermore, it occurs within the rather intimate confines of the
classroom, encouraging each student to focus on his or her own pronunciation
so that s/he may improve. The numerous individual voices are still discernible
despite their relative temporal unity. Despite the fact that the class was filled with
a unified desire to learn how to pronounce and use English, it remained divided
in the realizations of that act, and recalled individuality and generated a space for
personal creativity. The students pronounced and defined words together, but
individually made sentences expressing how they would use each new term in
their own lives.
Theatrics of the Classroom Experience

Speaking quite literally, in the most conventional theatrical settings,
there are precise lines, bodily movements and emotions to be memorized and
rehearsed so that the actor can call upon them immediately and definitively for
each performance. If we stretch those theatrical conventions to include movies,
TV shows, and the like, we see there are prompts to cue the actor if he or she
forgets a line, and multiple cuts exists in which to perfect each scene. Despite
their differences in execution, these types of theater are significantly similar in
their reliance on a director and the artifice s/he oversees in order to produce the
spectacle. Obviously, the ESOL individual does not have the luxury of clear,
reliable directions outside of the classroom. These differences occur between
what happens in a theater, and the transition between what happens inside
and out of the ESOL classroom, especially at the moment when performance
moves beyond rehearsal. Yet, the space between formalized unity and personal
creativity discussed above suggests that the ESOL class may be comparable to
the workshop-rehearsal phase of the performance process Richard Schechner
describes in Between Anthropology and Theatre: training, workshop, rehearsal,
warm-up, performance, cool-down, and aftermath.9 Focusing on his analysis of
the workshop-rehearsal phase is particularly useful to the study of the social
construction of the ESOL classroom because of ESOLs and Schechners mutual
interest in (re)creating behavior, captured here in Schechners description of
restored behavior as:
living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of
behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed: they are independent of the causal
systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence.
They have a life of their own. The original truth or source of the behavior may
be lost, ignored, or contradicted even while this truth or source is apparently
being honored or observed.10
Schechner claims that restoring behavior is the work of all practitioners

of arts, rituals, and rites.11 I would extend Schechners theory to the ESOL
pedagogical domain because of its intentions to compel students to rearrange
and reconstruct their self-narratives by looking into the events of their own
lives and combining them with the events of the master narrative that informs
American culture and self-image. In our classroom, words, phrases, thoughts and
experiences were momentarily isolated from their causal systems and assumed
lives of their own for every individual in the room. For many of these students
it might have been the first time they had ever heard the words. Whether or not
it was, the students held words up against their interior linguistic and ideological
systems and then considered their placement in their wordbanks-in-progress.
Behavior, of course, extends far beyond words in the ESOL classroom, and
all expressions of culturebodily, idiomatic, and auralwere deconstructed in
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that place. In this sense also, the ESOL classroom was a workshop-rehearsal
space. Just as actors merge the personal events of their lives with scripts, ESOL
students bring with them personal experiences and cultures and blend them
with what themes and notions they learn about the American experience. If
we can imagine momentarily that just as the in-workshop actors behaviors
are separate from those who are behaving them, the expressions of personal
experiences shaped by a new language and context in the ESOL classroom are
distinct from the individuals present, then both the behaviors and the expressions
can be stored, transmitted, manipulated, transformed.12 It is the momentary or
imaginary separation between selves and behaviors that allows the mixture or
overlapping of self narrative and collective narrative to then occur.
The best instances of this fusion were those that involved fantasizing. For
example, the students responded strongly to describing what they would do on
their dream vacations. This prompt offered them an opportunity to consider
previous personal incidents alongside experiences they could only imagine. Many
students wanted to go to Europe or Asia, and they almost unanimously agreed
they would go shopping and sightseeing. One student in particular, though,
offered a fantasy both personal and relatable to the group, both idiosyncratic in
his telling of it and capable of speaking to and through discourse the class had
encountered daily surrounding the American dream.
He was a widowed 73-year-old, working part-time at a restaurant equipment
store, and his dream was to go to Hawaii. Even on the most superficial level
everyone agreed that they understood his desire to go to Hawaii because of the
images they had seen of its tropical paradise. But he then explained further that
he wanted to go so that he could see his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren
for the first time in 10 years. His behavior in class and his utterances of what
he would do in Hawaii combined nostalgia for the early days of parenthood
and idealizations of seeing for himself his sons success in America. The class
became emotional as he spoke, sharing in the narrative event as they witnessed
his personal pain in relation to their own experiences of separation, loneliness,
and familial aspirations. Such a scenario offered a rich, layered and dynamic
space for personal creativity within the confines of a story and a culture. The
behaviors tested in the classroom, just as those in the theatre workshop, could
be tried on, rearranged and personalized. While in one respect they remained
uncertain and available for interpretation in this space, they also offered a certain
element of personal and group ownership of memories and fantasies alike. In
theater collective emotions are felt through combined or solitary performances
of individual actors interpretations of the narrated event, and in this respect,
the theatre analogy provides a language with which to describe the ever-shifting
multicultural group identity of our ESOL classroom as equal parts individuation
and collectivity.
The correlations Schechner sees between the workshop-rehearsal phase
of the performance process, and the ritual process categorized by Victor Turner
are helpful in interpreting the process of multicultural socialization that occurs
in the ESOL classroom:
Workshops, which deconstruct ordinary experience, are like rites of separation
and transition while rehearsals, which build up, or construct, new cultural items,
are like rites of transition and incorporation. Workshops and rehearsals converge
on the process of transition.13
Our everyday work in class consisted of combining training (during which

the students repeated after me vocabulary and everyday phrases: traffic,
accidents, government, public education occupation, babysitter, I
would like to talk to your supervisor, etc.), workshops (during which, though
simple words and slow speech, we would take apart cultural constructs such
as nationality, success, minorities, crime, etc. to better understand
how to talk), and rehearsals (during which the students would put the words
back together when it was time to write or converse in small groups, rehearsing
the syntax as they fit foreign words to their personal thoughts, in the form
of responses to prompts such as Write a paragraph about what you did this
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weekend or Talk about the biggest issues of crime in New York City).
Each day in class was a rehearsal of how to participate in the performance
of living in an American city. Our textbooks offered a variety of scenarios to act
out and blanks to fill in, questioning each student about how s/he would act in
scenarios such as parent-teacher conferences and job interviews. In his analysis of
the differences between traditional performances and contemporary Western
performances, Schechner presents a fitting description of outcome expectations
of ESOL participants:
In Euro-American theater it is not so important that an artist be shaped to
conform to a particular set of performative expectations already laid down by
tradition. It is more important that the artists instrument (=body and soul)
be able to flexibly adapt to this or that temporary grouping of people and with
them swiftly and efficiently release feeling . . . invent or call upon a stock of
movements, gestures, voices, and emotions14
The description of the requirements of an artist is only partly true of

the immigrants, because to a large extent s/he is expected to conform to a
particular set of performative expectations already laid down by tradition. That
expectation could take the shape of preconceived notions Americans may have
towards whatever traditions the immigrant brings with him or her, or conversely,
the expectation that the immigrant should immediately and without question, fall
in suit with the traditions of American culture. Fortunately, this dichotomy
does not exist hard and fast in reality, but Schechners description does in part
seem to apply more fully to the common urban experience. It is the task of the
ESOL class, as University Settlement conceives it, to inscribe the written, bodily,
and oral know-how onto the students bodies so that they can not only pass
among various groups in the city, but also engage actively with them.
Performing the Multicultural Group

How does the formation of a group occur in the context of an ESOL
classroom and what relations can we see between it and other collective formations
across the urban landscape of the city? What language do we use to describe the
culture of such a motley group? Does the label multicultural, which I have
employed uncritically throughout this essay, suffice?
Timothy P. Powell laments that multiculturalism is a term co-opted from
every angle by entities [which] maintain such starkly different ideological
agendas, [that] any search for consensus almost immediately flounders on a sea
of apparently ceaseless semantic flux.15 Is it as some believe an empty signifier
or can it be applied in and outside of the classroom?
Out of the numerous centers of the discourse on multiculturalism, I will
focus briefly on the issue Zygmunt Bauman takes up in Cultural Variety or
Variety of Cultures because the dialectic between the multicultural and the
multicommunitarian he describes as primarily a struggle between individuals
and communities, institutionalized or not, seemed to play out on several levels in
our ESOL classroom. Applying Alain Touraines definitions, Bauman proffers
that there is societal tension between multicultural and mulitcommunitarian
policies. While the multicultural proposes that cultural choice should ultimately
be left up to the individual, the multicommunitarian is founded in communities,
which are formed after the pattern of social systems, that is such communities
as aspire to pre-empt cultural choices by the conjunction of institutionalised
power and communal consensus.16 The dynamics of our ESOL classroom, in
various maneuvers by the institution (University Settlement and its clientele)
and the students, unraveled any work towards establishing a dichotomy between
these terms.
There was an institutionalized order to the program whose designs to
preempt simple consensual cultural decisions among this community were
continually devastated by the students application of individual cultural choice
manifested in their unwillingness to come to any easy communal consensus.
There were vocabulary terms each week, as well as impossibly large topics to
discuss using those vocabulary words alone, which the students were instructed
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by the textbooks to reach a consensus. While some topics served to highlight

a relative consensus among the students on their quotidian importance, none
resulted in unanimous consensus of perspective or on appropriate reactions
and responses to the issues at hand. Apartment renting and home ownership
proved to be extremely important themes throughout the year in our classroom.
Many students related them to every other subject we broached; some of these
connections were obvious, such as in reference to the quality of a neighborhood,
but the students brought up these issues in discussions on education, occupations,
and vacation, as well. Yet the class never neared consensus. Each time these issues
arose a lively debate ensued, exposing individual prejudices and preferences, and
calling attention to differences. For instance, one student suggested that picking
up garbage had to be one of the worst jobs in the city. Immediately many of the
students responded that she was wrong; as evidence, they explained that they
had heard otherwise in the talk around their neighborhoods: the job paid very
well, and it had nice, regular hours, because it worked similarly to a union. The
conversation then shifted gears as students chimed in to describe a monopoly
of sorts on the garbage circuit. In their neighborhoods, only Italians and their
friends could get jobs, and they had heard there were covert, illegal agreements
between the city government and the garbage company. In response to these
comments other students reacted not only in disagreement with these claims,
but also with personal stories of interaction with Italians as well as descriptions
of the cleanliness or filth of their area. The conversation remained splintered and
divergent, and setting aside questions of validity and sources, it was fascinating
to feel how serious the mood of the class suddenly became when the potentially
abstract issue of vocation preference arose, touching on the sensitivity of each
individuals personal pride.
The program also determined a priori the composition of the communities
that would come in contact in non-native English speaking environments, which
the workshop atmosphere of the class took apart on a daily basis. There were
several textbooks to work through and lengthy tests required each semester
to continue receiving federal funding. In contrast to the consensus-desiring

assignments mentioned above, the thrust of these tests and texts was to simplify
and compartmentalize cultural differences to teach the students to distinguish
similarities from differences among many cultures and to give them the words to
describe those differences in contrast to American culture. For instance, these
texts would open with a glimpse of a typical experience in a local community
college or ESOL classroom. The texts invited the students to answer rather
uncritically questions based on the stereotypes provided in the images and
dialogues. Furthermore, these texts prompted the students to compare their
native country to America in confined stereotypical terms. Fortunately, in
general the students took note of the social artifice by laughing incredulously at
the images, stories and questions.
The programs preconceived notions about the students taking the ESOL
course did not always match the reality of their situations. For instance, as the
website description states, the staff was there to help students gain a foothold in
their new home (my emphasis). As it were every student in my class, in spite of
being immigrants, had lived in New York at least twice as long as I had, and some
had lived in New York longer than I have been alive; it is worth noting here that I
had actually been in New York for less than a year at this point. In the compilation
of their personal narratives, the students showed me a New York that combined
their individual insight with the citys urban street lore. In this vein, the class
became more of an exchange than the one-way street version of academia, where
the teacher speaks and the students listen. The students left their imprint on the
classs proceedings as much as the classs linguistic and contextual structure did
on them; the class offered them words to share their stories, and the students
offered each other and me the experiences that had informed their existence. By
looking at this exchange through the lens of Schechners workshop phase, we see
that those narrated events took on lives of their own, by expressing a behavior
neither me nor not me.17 As such, they had significant implications. In
Schechners view of the course of events in the actors workshop,
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earlier rehearsals and/ or performances quickly become the reference points, the
building blocks of performance. . . The it is not the event but earlier rehearsals
or performances. Soon reference back to the originalif there was an original
is irrelevant.18
Likewise, the personas as well as the behaviors and cultures we took apart
and put back together in class became their own reference points. Furthermore,
since these behaviors were in some respect at least temporarily or theoretically
separated from the individuals present, each of us had the opportunity to claim
or refuse the interpretation of culture, even if only silently or momentarily. In
this sense, we created our own (multi)culture everyday, the origins of which
may have been pre-determined, but now were not necessarily paramount to the
individuals present. Within the classroom, the students had the opportunity to
choose, and in this sense the group that came together within that space was
multicultural. Thus, our own elaborate, dynamic, multilayered, and forever
unfinished narrative was (re)constructed piece by piece throughout the year.
Choice as the Performative Base of Multiculturalism
herefore, a workshop on choice, the linchpin that connects the
multicultural to the multicommunitarian, took place within our ESOL

classroom right alongside our deconstruction of American culture. In
reference to the unlikely disruption of constant transmission of information in
terms of the passage of performance, Schechner states,
restored behavior involves choice. Animals repeat themselves, and so do the
cycles of the moon. But an actor can say no to any action. This question of
choice is not easy . . . but at least there is an illusion of choice, a feeling that one
has a choice. And this is enough.19
The restored behavior of the workshop and of the ESOL class is the key to
this choice (or the illusion of it). While we must keep in mind that the students and
I were performing for each other, we were at the same time primarily rehearsing.
The ESOL class was a performance of rehearsal and open-ended in that generally
there were no set answers although there were grammatical regulations. The
ESOL class was only ever a workshop-rehearsal; while it may appear that it was
never intended to be a place for public performance, it inevitably became one
because we were an audience as well. The behaviors created in that space were
optionsthe students, like actors, could say no to any action. They could
verbally say no in class or even do so silently by not participating. The choice
was theirs as to what they would make of the experience, and it still is, as to
how they will arrange and reconstruct for themselves the cultural behaviors we
developed in that space. In and outside of the class, the students were faced with
multicommunitarian pressures, but at the same time, for better or worse, they
were always faced with a choice.
It is hard to tell whether or when our ESOL class got past the rehearsal
stage. When did the students stop practicing and start performing? Did the
students sacrifice individuality in order to learn how to play their part in various
groups: the one formed in class, the one coalescing on the streets of New York
City, or even that big one called America? Our cultural production was the
multicultural group, our performance was a long series of negotiations of what
we did and did not have in common, and our discovery was the seemingly endless
amount of options for cultural behaviors within the four walls of our classroomworkshop. r
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Notes
Rakesh M. Bhatt, World Englishes, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30 (2001): 527-550.
The organization through which my class was offered.
http://www.universitysettlement.org/what/adult-literacy.html
Zygmunt Bauman, Cultural Variety or Variety of Cultures, Making Sense of Collectivity,
(London: Pluto Press, 2002), 176.
5 Dorothy Noyes, Group, Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, (Urbana: U
Illinois, 2003), 30.
6 Setha Low, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture, (Austin: U Texas, 2000),
128.
7 Noyes, 30.
8 Ibid.
9 Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology, (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania,
1985), 99.
10 Ibid, 35.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid, 36.
13 Ibid, 21.
14 Ibid, 20.
15 Timothy Powell, All Colors Flow into Rainbows and Nooses: The Struggle to Define
Academic Multiculturalism, Cultural Critique, 55 (Autumn 2003): 152-181.
16 Bauman, 176.
17 Schechner, 110.
18 Ibid, 52.
19 Ibid, 37.
1
2
3
4
Soldiers March
by Cara Shepley
May 2005
Beijing, China
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In Matisses Landscapes
by Luke Epplin
What remains when all perspective is lost?

Broad bands of colorblue, green, and brown
The breakdown of earth and sky, vertical rivers,
A gold sun as round as a rusted pocketwatch
Tucked between impastoed clumps of clouds.
And all those unshaded bodies, out of proportion and
Necessarily nude, bending to feed a red turtle:
Survivors in this horizonless world.
Cultura de Madres
by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo
June 2007
Buenos Aires Capital Federal, Argentina
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Venezuelan Femininity
The Painful Embodiment of Beauty
by Michelle Roche
I went back home to Caracas, Venezuela, for the

first time in about four months, the first thing my mother said when she
saw me was: My God, you are fat! I had gained about twenty-two
pounds, yet had not realized it. I spent each day of my two-week-long vacation
working out for hours and dedicating myself to a strict diet regime. For the first
time ever, I felt out of place in my favorite dance club: while the zipper of my old
dress was on the verge of explosion, 16-year-olds wore miniskirts that showed
their size-two bodies and cleavage that showed off their breast implants. All over
the place I felt women looking at me, measuring my thighs and disapproving of
my hips feeling pity for that oversized-me. Under the dance clubs darkness,
wounded by blue, green and red flashes of light, I looked grotesque, abnormal,
in Michel Foucaults use of the word. Women questioned my appearance, rejoiced
at my newly-gained weight, because my abnormality established a contrast and
validated their Barbie-like bodies. It also produced a subtle power dynamic in
the room: the Barbies were quick to find dancing partners that night (and for the
rest of their lives?) and I, Miss Piggy, remained sitting at the bar watching them
have a good time (hoping it was not for the rest of my life). Today, I am back to a
size six, but my family and friends advise me to keep dieting, since six is already a
big and unfashionable size. My grandmother prays to the Virgin Mary that
ast summer when
I be as beautiful and thin as I was before having the idea of going to graduate
school in New York City.
This anecdote is indicative of womens obsession with beauty standards in
Venezuela. Venezolanas are proud to say that they are the most beautiful in the
world. Yet, I wonder, are they naturally beautiful, or do they make certain body
aesthetics a standard of normality (Foucault) and therefore build themselves up
to be beautiful? Body aesthetics in Venezuela are constructed as metaphors for
success and even normality. Obesity is not a pressing problem for this society;
depression and self-pity are.
In this essay I will analyze Venezuelan beauty standards through a
Foucauldian lens of production. Female beauty in Venezuela has a dual cultural
importance. On the one hand, since women themselves produce the idea that
Venezuelan ladies are pretty, they perpetuate the countrys patriarchal system,
by which Venezolanas role in society remains secondary to mens, and reduced
to their attractiveness. On the other hand, Barbie-like prettiness (mainly tall,
blond, white and skinny women) is the foundation for this cultures body
aesthetics, reinforcing what Latin American researcher Nelly Richard calls
cultural mimesis, a representation of foreign cultural traits without any
awareness of its context. 1 Therefore, in Venezuela, this beauty myth is a
device by which women insert themselves into a national macho system and,
more importantly, into a foreign modernization process. Naomi Wolf defines
the beauty myth as a behavior that perpetuates the modern patriarchal power
structure, economy, and culture through the establishment of the quality of
beauty as a currency system. 2 In Venezuela, the prevalence of Barbie-like
body aesthetics represents the idea that Venezuelans can only be modern by
looking like Anglo-Americans; it is a measure of success, like having a thousand
dollars in a foreign bank.
Accepting this beauty myth allows Venezuelan women a way to emulate,
or embody, modernitythey become modern by subscribing to the
aforementioned Western standards. Similarly, democracy is a device used to
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make Venezuelan society egalitarian through modern and inherently Western

political ideas. Venezuelan body aesthetics draw on national and international
cultural influences, proving that Venezuelan culture and its societal manifestations
include a mixture of foreign-inspired national desires. First, during Spanish
colonial times, a woman was beautiful inasmuch as she could resemble the
Virgin Marys life and looks: beautiful Venezuelans were chaste and white, as the
Spanish Counterreformation pictured Virgin Mary to be. Later, as the country
became democratic, women were beautiful inasmuch as they could resemble
Anglo-Americans, because they represented the political ideal of modernity and
development: democracy. Oddly, democracy, as the surplus of modernitys belief
of the infinite progress of science and knowledge towards social betterment, was
a device emulated in looks, rather than a process to understand and practice. In
sum, self-regulating body aesthetics were inspired first by Spanish repressive
Catholicism and then by American democratic freedoms.
Michel Foucault explains that power devices are individually articulated as
self-regulating means of cultural standards dissemination, which explains why
it is so difficult to overcome the grip some forms of power have over people:
they are not imposed by power structures, but rather made into a system of
communication where everybody participates. 3 For instance, the Venezolana
beauty myth is a manifestation of the countrys cult of virility practiced by
women through what Latin American feminist researchers call marianismo, the
female counterpart of machismo. 4
Marianismo is an ideal, based on the Virgin Marys Biblical representation,
which prescribes womens appropriate behavior; its image is self-abnegating
motherhood.5 Ironically, through marianismo Venezuelan women have a
prescribed foreign-inspired and contradictory role in society: to be both sexy
and chaste. When Venezuelans were trying to emulate colonial Spanish culture,
women mimicked the maternal and morally sound role of the Virgin Mary.
Nowadays, as the country tries to emulate democracy in the first world, its
women imitate what they believe is the epitome of their place in this political
system: Barbie dolls. The paradoxical relationship of these two roles for women,
the chaste mother and the Anglo-fashionite, describes the contradiction of
contemporary Venezuelan femininity.
Jana Sawicky, using Foucaults theories, says that a disciplining practice
is one of labeling one another or ourselves as different or abnormal. 6 In this
case, the Venezuelan female custom of labeling their bodies as beautiful is a
disciplining practice of producing themselves through a patriarchal society, where
the expected behavior and looks are determined by marianismo and American
pop-culture. Such definition of disciplinary practices is related to another concept
in Foucaults theory: self-surveillance. Sandra Bartky defines self-surveillance as
an image of normative femininity, which has come to replace the religiously
oriented tracks of the past. 7 Thus, marianismo is a self-surveillance method
by which women themselves make sure to perpetuate Catholic morals. The
Venezuelan beauty stereotype is a self-disciplining practice used by women
themselves as a method of self-surveillance under a macho society, based on
ideas of beauty resulting from a postcolonial cultural mimesis.
In order to analyze the development of the beauty myth in Venezuela and
the paradoxical relationship between the Virgin Mary and the American Barbie,
I will describe first the perpetuation of this myth in contemporary society, and
then trace the historical background of female beauty behaviors in the country.
The following paragraphs will explain how the beauty myth prescribes behaviors
related to female excessive grooming as an example of self-repression. Then, I will
use historical examination, a classical Latin American methodological approach,
to show how female beauty has been constructed in the country since Spanish
colonization.
Images of the Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf explains that the beauty myth is composed of emotional
distance, politics, finance and sexual repression,8 concluding that it strengthens
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modern patriarchal institutions: the beauty myth is always actually prescribing

behavior and not appearance. 9 She concludes that public interest in a womans
virginity has been replaced by public interest in the shape of her body. In other
words, what was once a religious and moral constraint for woman is now
physical, political and, mostly, economic:
Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is
determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief
system that keeps male dominance intactBeauty is not universal or changeless,
though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic
Ideal Woman. 10
The beauty myth is a powerful economic standard that serves the double
function of constraining women in expected behavior patterns and creating
industries to support them. For instance, the influence of the beauty myth in
Venezuela can be analyzed through four variables: first, the cultural obsession
with the Miss Venezuela competition; second, female spending on personal care;
third, the importance given to fashion; and finally, the high percentage of women
that have had aesthetic surgery.
Miss Venezuela, the national beauty pageant, is a cultural symbol of the
country. In the last twenty years Venezuela has had five Miss Worlds, four
Miss Universes, and dozens of other beauty queens in different international
competitions. The Miss Venezuela web page states that in fifty-four pageants,
organized in the last two decades, Venezuelas representatives have been placed
forty-five times among the honor listthis means among the worlds ten most
attractiveand calculates that the country is 84% successful in beauty contests.
11
The first national contest of this kind was held in 1952, but it became a strong
cultural symbol in early 1960s, after democracy was achieved. Ironically, the
first dark-skinned title-holder was Carolina Indriago, in 1998. Coincidentally,
this was the same year populist Hugo Chavez Fras, wonfor the first time
the countrys presidential candidacy, which indicates that Chvezs criticism of
the Eurocentric middle classes imitative culture tainted even aesthetic body
figurations. Since 1981, the Miss Venezuela Organization has directed the
pageant. In 1991 it became the countrys most successful industry, in the sense
that it was among the few Venezuelan brands to be internationally recognized.
This data reinforces the idea that Venezuelan women are the worlds most
beautiful; unfortunately this is a painful and costly standard to fulfill, as the next
paragraphs will show.
Venezuela is the worlds largest consumer of cosmetics per capita. A survey
by the analyst bureau Datanlisis, published by Producto magazine in August
2006, shows that 77% of Venezuelans consider it important to invest in beauty
care. In fact, the data shows that Venezuelans spending privileges first food and
then grooming products. In Venezuela, a country with roughly twenty-five
million inhabitants, the personal care market is valued at about 1.3 million dollars.
12
Moreover, during 2002 and 2003, when the country was in one of its worst
economic and political crisesafter a general strike that paralyzed almost every
industry for two months, including oil, the basis of the economythe market
of personal care grew by 81.4%.13 These statistics demonstrate the importance
of the way you look in Venezuela: it does not matter how much money you
make monthly, you must always spend something in order to look like a million
dollars. For instance, a Venezuelan woman spends more than 20% of her salary,
monthly, in cosmetics and beauty treatments.14
Another cultural signifier related to the body aesthetics paradigm is the
fashion industry. Venezuelans are proud to say that they have produced the
worlds best fashion designers, among them Carolina Herrera and ngel
Snchez, who both have prt-a-porter stores in Manhattanon Madison and
7th Avenues. Venezuela has about thirty major designer names, most of them
with prt-a-porter stores in the capital. These stores cater largely to wealthy
women and produce profits of about two hundred thousand dollars per month,
this in a country facing its worst economic depression since the 1980s. General
clothing retailers in the country make, in a bad year, more than one million
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dollars. 15 Ironically, the beauty myth has created a healthy industry, if not
healthy women.
Finally, the high percentages of aesthetic surgeries in the country show
that the beauty myth is difficult to fulfill in real life. In the last ten years,
plastic surgery in Venezuela has skyrocketed.16 According to statistics from
the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 17 in the last two
years the number of these surgical interventions increased by 60%. The most
common surgical practices include liposuction, breast augmentation, and facial
rejuvenation. Approximately five hundred doctors perform about four thousand
aesthetical surgeries each month, the most popular being breast augmentation.
The cheapest of these procedures costs approximately three thousand dollars.
Today, Venezuelan private banks offer special loans for women that want to have
aesthetic surgeries.18 Even doctors and bankers make money off of the beauty
myth.
In short, Venezuelans proclamation that beautiful women embody national
femininity is not a matter of fact, but a carefully constructed idea by which bodies
are built, groomed, and expensively dressed to fulfill the 35-23-35 profile of the
Venezuelan Barbie: the Miss.
A History of Beauty
According to Wolf, the rise of the beauty myth was just one of several
emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine
sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it.19 Although Wolf refers
here to Western societies, and makes no assumption about Latin American
postcolonial societies, what she states is in fact also true for Venezuela. A close
historical examination of beauty and female behavior standards shows how
the Miss Venezuela stereotype came to stand as a female social behavior once
the Catholic stereotype of virginity became out of date, and Venezuelans were
not worried about imitating Spanish colonial culture, but rather the first world
culture represented by United States.

In order to trace the development of the beauty myth in Venezuela I would
have to start at the very beginningpre-Hispanic timessince the first beauty
standards there were implanted by Spaniards as part of colonization. Before
Spaniards conquered the region we now call Latin America, women had an active
role in the public sphere. In fact, it was Catholicism and its belief in the passive
Virgin Mary that implanted the first modern and Eurocentric codes of conduct
and beauty. By sketching out the colonization process in Venezuela, I plan to
pose the problem of beauty not only as a contemporary cultural phenomenon
but as a long historical and postcolonial issue.
Ermila Veracoechea20 explains that when Spanish Colonialism began in the
land now called Venezuela, the predominant aboriginal group was nomad, the
Caribes (Caribbeans). Their workforce was divided by sexes: while men hunted
and fished, women harvested, collected fruits, made textiles and built utensils
for the household. When Caribes ceased to be nomadic, womens work became
more important: they were farmers. Women were crucial in Indian society,
since it was their duty to sustain the groups subsistence. During colonizations
first decades, when Spaniards seized Indian cities, the colonizers also adopted
aboriginal behavior in order to survive in the new environment.
Historian J. L. Salcedo-Bastardo explains that during Colonizations first
period (14981600), few Spanish women came to America. In fact, for thirty years,
less than 10% of Spanish colonizers were female. In the meantime, Spaniards
took Indian female companions.21 Conquerors journals described the beauty
supremacy of Venezuelan Indianspredominantly the Caribesand compared
them to those in the rest of the region. Conquerors Juan Bautista Muoz, Juan
de Castellanos, Lpez de Gmara, Fernando de Enciso, and Antonio Herrera
explain that aboriginal Venezuelan (from the Caribes tribe) women were more
relaxed22 than others on the South American continent. Apparently, beauty
for the colonizers was directly related to aboriginal womens proclivity to give
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sexual favors to Spaniards.

Namely, Gmara praised Venezuelan aboriginal women for being naked,
white, and to be Indians, discreet. Although the grammar of this quote is
ambiguous (even in its Spanish original) it can be pointed out that one of the
most attractive feature of female Indiansother than living nakedwas that they
looked white, or more likely, that they resembled Spanish skin colorwhich, to
tell the truth was not precisely white, but a darker shade of ita result of years
of Arabian invasion in Spain.
Thus, the crucial feature of beauty in colonial times was skin color. This
explains why Indians and African salves were treated different in colonial
times. Yes, Africans and Indians were both racially different from Europeans,
but Africans were considered animals, and Indians humans, because the latter
group looked white. Moreover, this difference between Indian and Africans
became paradigmatic when Catholicism was established as the official religion.
The colonization process established the Catholic Spanish crowns supremacy,
empowered by the mercantilist economy, by which Venezuela was just a
commodity provider for royal finances. This system nurtured the creation of
feudal-like villas called encomiendas, where Indians lived under the protection
and spiritual (Catholic) guidance of the conquerors. In other words, Indians
were considered free vassals, but also immature, and thus, unable to live freely.
Concentrated populations living in encomiendas facilitated Catholicisms
expansion and the Indian assimilation of Spanish culture. In the mean time,
African slaves were imported: approximately one hundred and twenty thousand
slaves came to Venezuela in the three centuries of Spanish supremacy.23
Yet, the issue of female Caribes beauty was not simply a compliment to
their looks, it was a crucial racial and social differentiation from the rest of the
Spanish empire. Because those Indians looked white, they could be more easily
inserted into Catholic Spanish culture, which stated that European (white)
women were closer to the figure of the Virgin Mary, a idea that was reinforced
by colonial womens education.

In sum, it can be said that Spanish colonization introduced two situations
in the country that did not exist during aboriginal times: racial and gender
discrimination. An astonishing fact of the colonization period was that although
the male Indian population was almost entirely erased from the country, the
female population remained an active part of the new society. This created a
new racial type: the mestizo (crossbreed), a merge of Indian women and male
Spaniards. Thus the true Venezuelan skin color is barely white. The most
important figuration of Venezuelas identity is the idea of a mestizo society, and
a culture of mestizaje, which translates into English as miscegenation, but in the
AngloAmerican tradition it refers exclusively to the sexual union between races,
while for Hispanics it includes the biological and cultural interracial mixing.
Initially, women were used as translators between Indians and Spaniards.
Then, when the Spanish crown established its supremacy, female Indians were
adopted in the encomiendas as farmers, artisans and even conquerors spouses.
This inserted them in the new Catholic culture created by colonization.
In fact, gender and racial discrimination can also be seen in educational
issues. Venezuelan scholar Sheila Salazar points out that during colonial times
womens education was restricted to the higher classes: women of Spanish descent
and black women were forbidden from going to school. Salazar points that the
first school for women was Colegio Jess Mara y Jos, founded in 1770, where
white and orphan crossbred (mestizo) women received instruction segregated
by their upbringing. Classes reinforced moral and religious dictates in order to
make of them virtuous ladies, wives and exemplary mothers.24 Private female
instructors were also frequent, since the idea that women could leave the house
even to receive education was not welcomed. Women were raised and taught to
become wives or nuns.25 In both cases that meant they would live in seclusion,
for married women were not allowed to wander freely around towns.
Private and school instruction was shaped by the ideas espoused by Juan
Luis Vives in the book The Education of a Christian Woman, published in Spain in
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1525.26 Special attention was paid to womens virginity, for In a woman, chastity
is the equivalent of all virtues.27 In his book, Vives advises women, whom are
frequently called virgins, to sleep little and avoid adornments (because they
were manifestations of vanity, a capital sin), the companionship of men, and
dancing. In other words, even when women were not destined to become nuns,
but to become wives, they would have to observe repressive laws:
The first model to place before herselfis the queen and glory of virginity,
Mary, the Mother of Christ, God and man, whose life should be the exemplar
not only for virgins to follow but for married women and widows as well...To
virgins she was a most humble virgin, to married women a most chaste spouse,
to widows a most pious widow.28
Vives points to a very difficult standard to emulate: the Virgin Mary, the
woman that gave birth as a virgin, and whom her husband never touched. This
idea that womens role was to emulate the Virgin Mary is the basis for marianismo
in the Hispanic region. Not surprisingly, the most valuable women in colonial
times were nuns. If we follow Wolf in understanding beauty not as a state of
being, but as a behavior, in Venezuela the beauty standard two centuries ago was
the nun, the closest resemblance to the Virgin Mary.
During the independence process and in the first years of the Venezuelan
republic (from 1830 to 1900), womens role in politics was non-existent. Although
republican government in the country was inspired by Europeans theories,
especially those of the French Revolution, it remains a paradox that books like
Olympe de Gougess Womens Rights Declaration or Mary Wollstonecrafts
A Vindication of the Rights of Women were not even introduced in the times
political debates.29 Rosa del Olmo explains that this situation was a consequence
of Venezuelas closed society in the 19th century, which was still tied to
marianismos idea of a chaste woman-mother-wife.30
The first real change in Venezuelan womens passive role in the public
sphere occurred during Juan Vicente Gmezs dictatorship in 1928, when the
Patriotic Society of Venezuelan Women was created with the aim of defending
the governments political prisoners. This group was the female version of the
Venezuelas Students Federation, a group of male students that advocated for
democracy. Yet the first womens organization was still tied to the womanmother-wife Catholic stereotype, since the members were defenders, the
spouses and sisters, of the new democratic heroes, the same way the Virgin Mary
was Jesuss woman-mother-wife.
The year 1928 is paradigmatic in the countrys modern history, and even
in its history of beauty. That year, Venezuelas Students Federation organized
a festival to commemorate students week, which is celebrated in February just
before Carnival. The highlight of the week was a beauty pageant where the queen
of students was crowned. Her name was Beatriz I. But the contest was really
used as a platform that allowed the Federations leaders to make pro-democracy
political speeches during Gmezs highly censored government.31 For example,
the poem that Po Tamayoa long data oppositionist to Gmezdedicated to
the newly elected queen compared her beauty with the ideal of liberty:
But no, Majesty
I have last till today,
And the name of my girlfriend that reminds me of you!
Is: LIBERTY!
Tell your subjects
so young that they cant know her
to search for her, to look at her in you,
Your smile promises hidden hopes!32
Tamayos poem was not successful in challenging Gmezs dictatorship,
but it did become a turning point in womens democratic history in Venezuela.
Identifying Majesty Beatriz I with the abstract definition of Liberty, Tamayo
and his generation of democrats relegated women to exterior representations of
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liberty. Moreover, they presented a direct link between beauty and liberty, which
is key to the beauty industrys development in the country.
The identification of female beauty with liberty and democracy did not
really change the status of women since colonial rule; it was, in fact, a perpetuation
of marianismothe expected female behavior to be woman-mother-wife,
emulating the Virgin Marywhich created a mechanics where women, in order
to become politically active, disciplined themselves to be beautiful. In doing
so, they upheld a standard that, like democracy, was foreign-inspired. This
reinforced marianismo, because it did not collide with the woman-motherwife stereotype. In other words, the new democratic Venezuelan woman was
not to become part of an equalitarian society, but to represent it.
As a result, current industries of grooming and fashion promise women not
only beautiful bodies, but also a comfortable way of being equal to men, without
losing femininity. The image of the new Venezuelan woman is the professional,
coincidentally the woman that makes enough money to spend on grooming,
buy expensive clothes, and pay for aesthetic surgeries. Not surprisingly, feminist
studies and demands in the country have been relegated to issues of equality into
the work place.
Modern Venezuela, like modern Venezuelan looks, are a consequence
of the countrys oil economy, which began in the 1920s, and the democracys
establishment as political system four decades later. In fact, from 1928 to 1958
Venezuela still was subjected to different forms of dictatorships, but new
democratic political partiesnurtured by the generation of Venezuelas Students
Federationwere clandestinely created. During the late 1950s and early 1960s
Venezuelan political discourses were shaped by fear of Marxists guerrillas
with ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba. In fact, the Venezuelan Communist
Partywhich had been the embryo of most democratic partieswas denied
political participation for economic, rather than for strict political reasons. The
United States, Venezuelas largest oil buyer, was already engaged in The Cold
War. The Red Scare that created paranoia in the United States also shaped
binary discourses in Venezuela. Any political ideology different from that of the
ruling party was identified either as anarchy (in the case of communism) or as
dictatorships (in the case of former power elites and the army). As can be seen,
Venezuelan democracy was not representative.33
The same way that the American Red Scare shaped Venezuelan
political ideas, American culture shaped the beauty myth. A myriad of female
organizations advocating womens equality, from the laws to workplaces, were
created from the 1960s to the 1980sthe first twenty years of democracy in the
country. The logic was obvious: if Venezuela was trying to imitate American
democracy, women had to become an active part of it. Yet, feminist movements
were not welcomed in the country, for marianismo was and is still a powerful
system. In fact, today, even feminist academic research is almost nonexistent
in Venezuela. What Venezolanas imitated was the American looks they saw in
television. In fact, televisions introduction in the country in 1958 was the most
powerful device in perpetuating the Venezuelan beauty myth. For example,
although the Miss Venezuela yearly pageant began in 1952, it was during the
1960s that it became a hit, due to its televised transmission.
Catholicism is still alive

in Venezuela. This perpetuation of religious morals may seem out of
date, yet this reality is a powerful image of Venezuelan post-colonialism.
Religion and the beauty myth can live together in a country like Venezuela because
Barbie-like Western standards of attractiveness are introduced in this culture
through cultural mimesis,34 or the imitation of foreign standards without any
awareness of the specific traits of cultures where they are being implemented.
In other words, Venezolanas represent beauty as a foreign cultural trait without
reproducing the post-feminist context in which it had been originally created
in America. Why then, if the country still is very much tied to Catholicism has
fashion has become such a strong industry? I believe this is consequence of the
20th centurys quick assimilation of oil riches and democracy in the country.
he practice of marianismo evidences that
76 |
ANAMESA
The aforementioned matches Wolfs views on the beauty myth in Western

societies, because during colonial times public interest was in womens virginity,
and in the 1960sas the democratic system developed in the countryit was
replaced by public interest in the shape of the female body. In other words, Miss
Venezuela, the flesh goddess, replaced the nun, Catholic Gods priestess. Fashion
replaced religion.
Finally, the beauty myth is a power device (Foucault) individually
articulated as self-regulating, because by trying to become beautiful, women are
distracted from the most pressing gender and political issues in the country, thus
perpetuating the idea that womens role is to be mens women-mother-wives
(marianismo). The contemporary massive inclusion of women in the work place
does not really challenge the women-mother-wife stereotype. Professional
women throughout Venezuela are still worried about the way they look, giving
credence to the saying that to look like a million dollars is often more important
than owning the cash. Beauty is a cultural prison that Venezuelan women
embody.
My grandmothers prayers were answered: I am no longer a fat and
abnormal Miss Piggy. Although I still live in the US, I am now a stereotypically
beautiful Venezolanathin and white, of course. As for me, I look forward to
going to my favorite dance club, sitting at the bar and enjoying a 300-calorie
mojito while looking at the rest of the girls dancing their beautiful bodies away:
happy with their Barbie-like appearances, looking like something they will never
bemodern. r
Notes
1 Nelly Richard, Postmodernism and Periphery, Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas
Docherty, (New York: Columbia University Press. 1993), 465.
2 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. (New York:
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), 12. For further information on the Western
beauty myth see: Arthurs, Jane and Grimshaw Jean eds., Womens Bodies: Discipline and
Transgression, (London: Cassell, 1991).
3 Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley,
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Also see: Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni eds.,
Abnormal. Lectures at the Collge de France (1974-1975), trans. Graham Burchell, (New
York: Picador US, 1999).
4 Evelyn P. Stevens, Mexican Machismo: Politics and Value Orientations, The Western
Political Quarterly,18.4 (Dec 1965): 848-857. For further information see: Arrom, Sylvia
Marina., Teaching the History of Hispanic-American Women, The History Teacher, 13.4
(Aug 1980): 493-507; Asuncin Lavrin, Indians Brides of Christ: Creating New Spaces for
women in New Spain, Mexican studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 15.2 (Summer, 1999): 225-260;
Ann Pescatelo ed., Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, (Pittsburg: University of
Pittsburg Press, 1973); and, Evelyn P. Stevens, The Prospects for a Womens Liberation
Movement in Latin America, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 35.2 (May 1973): 313-321.
5 Nikki Craske, Women and Politics in Latin America, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
1999), 12.
6 Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body, (New York and London:
Routledge, 1991), 22.
7 Sandra Bartky, Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, Womens
Studies: Essential Readings, ed. Stevi Jackson, (New York: New York UP, 1993), 227-231.
8 Wolf, 12-13.
9 Italics in the original.
10 Wolf, 12-13.
11 Miss Venezuela Historia, Miss Venezuela Web Page (December 19, 2006),
http://www.missvenezuela.com/
12 Mi Jefe se Pinta, Producto, Number 246. May 2004.
13 Lujo a la Venta, Producto, 258 (May 2005).
14 Mi Jefe se Pinta.
15 Laura Vargas, Moda Urbana, Producto, 276 (Nov 2006).
16 Vanessa Prez Daz, Sin miedo al bistur, El Nacional, (Dec. 2006): A/16.
78 |
ANAMESA
17 Quoted in Sin miedo al bistur.

18 Ibid.
19 Wolf, 13.
20 Ins Quintero et al. Las Mujeres de Venezuela. Historia Mnima, (Caracas: Fondo Editorial de
la fundacin de los Trabajadores petroleros y petroqumicos de Venezuela, 2003), 59-84.
21 J.L. Salcedo-Bastardo, Historia Fundamental de Venezuela, (Caracas: Universidad Central de
Venezuela, Ediciones de la Biblioteca, 1996). To legalize these de facto unions king Ferdinand
the Catholic published a Real Cdula (January 14, 1514) allowing Indians to marry Spanish
conquerors. In the 16th century there were 50 thousand people of Spanish-Indian descendant.
Africans imported to the colonies had not the same deference: law strictly forbade marriages
of Indians or Spaniards to blacks.
22 Ibid, 100.
23 Ibid.
24 Quintero et al., 121.
25 The first convent in the territory was established as early as 1638 in Trujillo, and the second in
1677 in Caracas.
26 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth Century Manual, trans.
Charles Fantazzi, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000).
27 Ibid, 85.
28 Ibid, 119.
29 Rosa del Olmo in Quintero et al., 31.
30 Ibid, 32.
31 The festival was quickly repressed and five students were sent to jail, including Tamayo. In
less than a day, the rest of the 214 students voluntarily turned themselves in. They spent
twelve days in jail before they were released thanks to a womens lobby. This anecdote is
crucial to understanding how the beauty queen represents the idea of democracy in the
Venezuela. Moreover, three decades latter, when the country adopted democracy, at least half
of the integrants of Venezuelas Students Federation were part of a democratic political party.
It was in the early 1960s, when the democratic project was becoming strong in the country,
that Miss Venezuela started to become a cultural icon.
32 Po Tamayo, Homage and Indians demand. To her Majesty Beatriz I, Students Queen,
Guiguin Soy, (December 19, 2006), http://giugin.blogspot.com/2006/06/homenaje-ydemanda-del-indio-su.html The original Spanish: () Pero no, Majestad / que he llegado
hasta hoy, / y el nombre de esa novia se me parece a vos!/ Se llama: LIBERTAD!/ Decidle a
vuestros sbditos/ -tan jvenes que an no pueden conocerla-/ que salgan a buscarla, que la
miren en vos,/ vos, sonriente promesa de escondidos anhelos! (). The translation is mine.
33 For further information see: Daniel Esteller Ortega, La democracia representativa, apuntes
para su historia en Venezuela, (Caracas: Ediciones de la Biblioteca, 1995). For a brief
history of Venezuela see Elas Pino Iturrieta et al., Historia Mnima de Venezuela, (Caracas:
Fundacin de los Trabajadores de Lagovn, 1992).
34 Nelly Richard.
80 |
ANAMESA
Fiestas Patrias
by Luke Epplin
September 2006
Santiago, Chile
The Market Woman/Quitandeira

by Agostinho Neto
translated into English by Chandani Patel
The market

Much sun
the market woman in the shade

of the mulemba.

Orange, my lady
excellent orange!
The light plays in the city

from lights to darks
your hot game
and life plays
in distressed hearts
the game of blind-mans bluff.
The market woman

who sells fruit

sells herself:

My lady
Orange, excellent little orange!
absorbed in the cotton threads

that cover me;
as effort was offered
to the safety of the machines,
to the beauty of the asphalted roads
with buildings of various floors
and to the comfort of rich gentlemen.
To the happiness dispersed through cities
and I
I was getting confused
with the very problems of existence.
There will go the oranges
as I offered myself to alcohol
to anesthetize me
and I handed myself over to religions
to desensitize me
and stunned me to live.
Buy sweet oranges

Buy me also the bitterness
of this torture:

life to crawl.
I have given everything

even though my pain
and the poetry of my naked breast
was entrusted to the poets.
Buy me the childhood spirit

that rose bud

that didnt open;
beginning impelled still for a start.
Now,
I sell my own self.

Buy oranges,

my lady!

Ah!

Orange, my lady!
The smiles were exhausted

With which I cried

I dont cry now.
Bring me to the markets of Life.

My price is unique:
blood.
And there will go my hopes

like the blood of my children went
mixed in the dust of the streets
buried in the plantations
and my sweat
82 |
ANAMESA
Orange, my lady
excellent orange!
Perhaps selling myself

I possess myself.

Buy oranges!
A quitanda

Muito sol
a quitandeira sombra

da mulemba.

Laranja, minha senhora

laranja boa!
A luz brinca na cidade

de claros e escuros
o seu quente jogo
e a vida brinca
em coraes aflitos
o jogo da cabra-cega.
A quitandeira

que vende fruta

vende-se:

Minha senhora
Laranja, laranjinha boa!
Compra laranjas doces

Compra-me tambm o amargo
desta tortura:

a vida a rastejar.
Compra-me a infncia de esprito

este boto de rosa

que no abriu;
princpio impelido ainda para um incio.

Ah!

Laranja, minho senhora!
Esogtaram-se os sorrisos

Com que chorava

Eu j no choro.
E a vo as minhas esperanas
como foi o sangue dos meus filhos
amassado no p das estradas,
enterrado nas roas
e o meu suor
embedido nos fios de algodo

que me cobrem;
como o esforco foi oferecido
segurana das mquinas,
beleza das ruas asfaltadas,
de prdios de vrios andares
e comodidade de senhores ricos.
alegria dispersa por cidades
e eu
me fui confundindo
com os prprios problemas da existncia.
A vo as laranjas
como eu me ofereci ao lcool
para me anestesiar
e me entreguei s religies
para me insensibilizar
e me atordoei para viver.
Tudo tenho dado
at mesmo a minha dor
e a poesia dos meus seios nus
entreguei-a aos poetas.
Agora,
vendo-me eu prpria.

Compra laranjas,

minha senhora!
Leva-me para as quitandas da Vida.
O meu preo nico:
sangue.

Laranja, minha senhora

laranja boa!
Talvez vendendo-me
eu me possua.

Compra laranjas!
Contributors
Luke Epplin studies at the Center for Latin American Studies.

Jesse Francis is a graduate student at NYU.
Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo is a student in the Latin American Studies Program.
She is an experimental cartographer, whose interests include migration, religiosity,
and the performance of conversion.
Chandani Patel is a second year student in NYUs Draper Program in
Humanities and Social Thought whose research interests include postcoloniality
and translation, the role of memory and genealogy in novels, and conceptions of
home in migrant literature. After completing her Masters degree, she intends to
enroll in a PhD program in Comparative Literature.
Eleanor Rae is in her second year of the Draper Program. In her studies she
explores the representation of culture in urban space, the construction of urban
identity, and the processes of city promotion. She is from Toronto, Canada.
Jessica Rivers, a second year Draper student, studies urban oral traditions in
America.
Michelle Roche is a journalist who also writes essays on culture and arts for
publications in Venezuela (El Nacionals Papel Literario) and in the US (Literal
84 |
ANAMESA
Latin American Voices Magazine). She is a M.A aspirant in NYUs Draper

Program whose research interests include Latin American culture and literature
and their relations with modernity in the region. She was born and raised in
Caracas, Venezuela.
Kevin Sheldon works as a writer/editor and information architect for the City
of New York. He is currently completing his coursework in the Draper Program
studying cultural policy and the film industry. He has written on film for New
York Newsday and various websites and periodicals, as well as for previous
volumes of Anamesa.
Cara Shepley is a second year Draper student. She took the photos in this
volume while living, traveling, and falling in love with Asia for two years. This is
her second semester with Anamesa.
Ekaterina Svetova is a Muscovite by birth and a New Yorker by choice. When
she grows up, she wants to be a cosmonaut. She graduates from NYU in the
summer of 2008.
Colophon
300 copies of Anamesa were printed

by Sterling Pierce Co., Inc.
East Rockaway, New York
www.sterlingpierce.com
The text of Anamesa is set in the old-style serif typeface Stempel Garamond,
trademark of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, first released in 1925 by
D. Stempel AG. Stempel Garamond is a revival of the types cut by Claude
Garamond (ca. 1480-1561) in Paris during the first part of the sixteenth century.
The sans serif typeface is part of the Univers family of fonts released by
Linotype in 1997. Univers was originally designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1957
and was painstakingly reworked by Frutiger and Linotype for the updated 1997
version.
The Anamesa masthead is set in Marigold, a font originally designed by
calligrapher Arthur Baker, and released by Agfa Compugraphic in 1989.
Visit www.anamesa.org for more information.
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volume 5, issue 2

John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Masters Program in Humanities and Social Thought

The Culture Issue

The Culture Issue r fall 2007

The Culture Issue r fall 2007

The mission of ANAMESA is to provide a forum in which

blur boundaries, re-imagine links, explore the between

Fiction and Poetry

On the Cover: Umbrellas in Hiroshima by Cara Shepley

THE CULTURE ISSUE | i

Letter from the Editor

Nahru once said that culture is the widening of the mind

THE CULTURE ISSUE | iii

Joe Norkis Walks the Bridge

No one ever gave Norkis a ride home.

the air so still and stifling.

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 1

Culture and the Crescent City

eeped in mythology, romance, and fantasy,

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 3

A City with Culture

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 5

viability of selling a heritage myth to outsiders.13 Grahams work also confirms

a combination of myths, brand value, and a notion of authenticity that contribute

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 7

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 9

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 11

governments and developers are creating homogenous shopping malls, housing

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 13

n many ways this paper is an exploration of urban identityan

endeavour to comprehend the processes and people implicated by both

role, expression, and reconstruction of culture in a particular time and place, we

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 15

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 17

1970s: Looking Back and Out

World. The East was Far. The West,

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 19

and not Throw the Crowbar to Grandma! like some of my unsophisticated

in their glossy magazine.

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 21

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 23

of that bourgeois tackiness!) comedians exposed laziness, ignorance, selfishness,

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 25

The Intangible Unique

hile a sculpture or painting exists in a permanent instance,

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 27

The Intangible Unique

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 29

To Benjamin, Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is

The search for uniqueness in contemporary culture is a controversial subject

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 31

Selling the Unique

Enjoying the Unique

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 33

counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own

Benjamin recognizes that a single artifact has different meanings to different

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 35

In the preceding analysis, Benjamin describes the shift in function of

he existence of the intangible unique, like the word

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 37

THE CULTURE ISSUE | 39

Faith on the Wall

Baile del pasado/

Dance from the past