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National Imagination |
Interview with Professors Marvin D'Lugo, Alice Valentine and Michael Spingler
What is this course all about?
Marvin:
The course is cross disciplinary and cross-language focused. And it was intended to give students an understanding of the cultures in which the languages that they study operate. We offer the course each spring as a team-taught course representing three different cultures. What we are interested in is the ways communities were formed and stabilized through visual culture as well as through literature and the arts. By visual culture we mean: art, architecture, urban planning, film, music.
Using French culture as an example, Michael Spingler - who is very interested in the architecture and urban planning of Paris and its ideological implications - looked at how the French people represent themselves. The phrase he used is "Staging the Nation." We were looking for ways that students could engage in an equivalent way to understand visual culture through visual culture itself - rather than to talk about paintings we look at the paintings. We post them on Blackboard — Clark's virtual classroom. And in the last three years, we have tried to integrate new technologies like putting images and videos up on Blackboard and asking students to respond to these visuals via virtual chat rooms.
Alice:
I've been involved for two years. I think what makes the course exciting for us might also make it exciting for the students. It's very dynamic and we've reinvented it again this year. As a thematically structured course, we deal with three themes: the warrior nation, gendered nation, and the dialogical nation. We look at these themes within the three cultures: Argentina, Germany, and Japan.
What is the active learning component of the course?
Marvin:
We wanted to break the mold of students reading books and writing papers and listening to us talk. What we did was an experimental roundtable discussion which is on last year's Blackboard, in which Alice, Michael and I are videotaped in conversation around Michael's theme: Staging the Nation. The assignment was for students to respond to our discussion in a nonsynchronous chat room. They could go in anytime in a two-week period and had to make one statement and respond to two other statements by classmates. One of the most amazing things that we discovered with the exercise is that in our presence, whether in small discussion groups or in the lecture, students can be inhibited to speak out. But using this medium, students had such profound and thoughtful things to say.
Anything else?
Marvin: Through some of the students' visual culture projects, students learn to make connections, such as the Americanization of karate. Students have to write three papers for the course, but one of them can be a visual culture project — meaning they have the option to create one of these "papers" using video or CD or any other multimedia. The idea behind it is that we don't want to cut the students off or put blinkers on their imagination. The idea is to incorporate the readings, images and the course themes into a multimedia project.
Alice: And the students love it. They are willing to put in a lot more time to work on these things because it interests them.
Marvin: We had a student who came alive in the middle of the course on Japan. He wanted to do something on the samurai. What he did was an amazing project where he documented the samurai exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum in 2003. He interviewed the curator and kept going back to the exhibit. He created a PowerPoint presentation which is on CD. He presents images of why the samurai were so important to the Japanese right at this uneasy time - 1870-71-when they were becoming a nation, and he asked why did they look back to this invented samurai past?
Michael: When you're reading a difficult text, you usually go back and reread it a couple of times. But when you go to a museum show you usually only go once. What's absolutely extraordinary is that he went back time and time again and revisited that show; saw that show 7-9 times. It's like going back and struggling with a difficult book. Each time he went back, he learned more and saw more. One of the ideas of the course is look long, look hard, then look again, then reflect. Part of the course is teaching them how to see. How to look for details. Because there really is a cliché about the fact that this is a visual culture. If it means people watch a lot of television, true. But what that means is that we all had to learn how to look at things in an analytical way. And I think that's one of the things we're doing in the course as well.
Can you describe the three themes?
Marvin:
The Warrior Nation in the case of Germany is those representations of the German as a warrior which has been perhaps ignoring the large periods of German history when the country was not a warring nation. There are certain images that are still retained. Walter presents the origin of militarism in Germany and the visual icons that go along with that, such as Kaiser Wilhelm's reconstruction of himself as a great military man and Nazi Germany.
Alice:
The Japanese version of the Warrior Nation is the samurai. I'm hoping next year we might be able to use a little bit of footage from the film "The Last Samurai." We look at how the samurai as a national symbol has been reinvented over time as a unifying force and point of identification.
Marvin:
In Argentinean culture, we use the gaucho. We look at the historical, cultural and political imagery of the gaucho in the middle of the 19th century. We trace what turns out to be a masculine culture rooted in a kind of machismo that rules everything else. What we are trying to get students to see is how each of these icons serves as a point of identification for cultural communities and how they are used for cultural production.
Marvin:
The Warrior nation is the easiest for students to understand.
Alice: Cowboy culture is a good example. We often ask the students to reflexively look at their own culture. I think it's safe to say that none of us are cowboys! And we probably don't know any real cowboys. But as an icon, we can trace the image of the cowboy in our culture all the way up to the Marlboro Man.
Marvin: By the Gendered Nation we typically mean everything that's been excluded in the Warrior/patriarchal society. We deal with women as representations; women as the creators of cultural production; women as a source of intervention and resistance within a society. In the case of Germany, Walter shows a film that comes out of the tradition of women film makers: "Germany Pale Mother," which is a mother's rereading of recent German history. What's interesting is that we've found cognates relatively easily in each of the three cultures we've chosen.
The term "Dialogical Nation" comes from a Russian literary critic. Dialogical imagination is the moment when a culture becomes aware that it is not self sufficient; when it is aware of other cultures.
Alice: For example in Japan, they seem remarkably aware of how they are performing for others. Modern Japan (1868 and on) is the awareness of others seeing Japan and so Japan performs "Japaneseness" for others. To explain this to students we showed a clip from the film "Topsy Turvy" about the making of "The Mikado."
Michael: The French have a long history with not only how they are perceived, but also very carefully determining that perception. It's rooted in their language. They are a great example of the connection between language, the national imagination and all sorts of linguistic problems. The French set out to make French take the place of Latin by forming the Academe Francaise to govern the language. It still exists today. They set out to control national speech. They wanted to be the new Rome. Using their language, then, the French have tried to monopolize high culture — which is why if you want to sell overpriced goods, you call your store a "boutique" not a "bodega."
Marvin:
One way we summarize all three course themes is through audio and visual aids. Argentina is going to be doing the tango. The tango is a dance and a series of songs that emerged out of the blending of immigrant culture and the gauchos. It became popular in the brothels, where sons of the upper class went and learned the dance. Then they brought it to Europe where it became the rage. The singer responsible for the popularization of the tango was born in France, came to Argentina as a young boy, became a popular singer there, made films for Paramount in Paris about Argentina and popularized the tango. So the tango is one of those dialogical experiences of Argentina and the world. There's a long culture of how the Argentines have used the tango not just as a dance or a series of songs, but as a kind of medium in which they can express themes about themselves and their politics.
Alice: I'm going to show the film "Tampopo." In contrast to France who wants to make its language and culture hegemonic, the Japanese are always presenting themselves and making themselves understood to the West in the West's own iconography. At the same time, there is a lot of tension about what is uniquely Japanese. The Japanese think that no one understands what they are really like, yet they are constantly presenting themselves in these framed and stereotypical ways - whether it's by martial arts, tea ceremonies or women in kimonos. The Japanese seem to have a mirror that they keep looking into to see themselves and how others perceive them.
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