The Atlantic World Research Network

April 24, 2009—Minshall’s Masks, Dancing Mobiles, and Walking Sculptures: A Legacy for Mas’ Mask Makers in Trinidad

      The Lunchtime Colloquia for the 2008-2009 school year ended in a celebratory way, as Professor Deborah Bell from the UNCG Theatre Department offered a presentation that led into much discussion of mask making in the carnivals of Trinidad.  In a presentation that featured a slideshow showcasing carnival masks and the men who make them, Dr. Bell discussed both the history of this unique art and the threat that modern commercialism brings. 

      As Dr. Bell explained, the history of Trinidad—influenced by Spanish and French Canadian colonists, as well as the indentured servants and African slaves who stayed after their former owners left—makes the country particularly well-suited for the diversity and spectacle of carnival.  These qualities are personified in the key figure of the presentation, the “mas’ man” Peter Minshall.  Dr. Bell’s presentation focused on the Trinidad-born mas’ man (“mask maker”), whose training at the St. Martin’s School of Design in London helped him develop a unique blend of European and Trinidadian aesthetics.  Minshall changed the way we think about masks, and his work poses the following question: does a mask consist only of what covers the face, or does it include everything that frames the covering as well?  Where do you draw the line between mask and costume?  It’s all part of the masquerade.   

      Dr. Bell also discussed the mas’ men who followed in the spirit of Minshall, such as Brian McFarlane, Jason Griffith, Geraldo Vieira, and Sheldon Clemdore.  As this continuing of the tradition suggests, community is the heart of carnival and drives the celebration.  However, carnival is growing more commercial, as it costs too much for most mas’ men to participate without funding from companies and donors.  Furthermore, where carnival was the celebration of everyday people, the audience now consists largely of wealthy tourists who can afford a plane ticket to Trinidad.  The question remains: is this bad?  Although there is a danger of diluting the tradition of carnival, Trinidad is historically built on diversity brought from across the seas. 

March 3, 2009--Economies of Cultural Exchange: Trade, Gift, or Trojan Horse?

AWRN welcomed Colloquium leaders Dr. Gail McDonald and Dr. Bruce Caldwell back to the UNCG campus. Dr. Caldwell, until recently a member of our Economics Department, is now Research Professor in the Department of Economics and Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy, Duke University; while Dr. McDonald, a former member of our English Department, is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton in England. Dr. Caldwell is an historian of economic ideas, and Dr. McDonald is a scholar of American literature who specializes in modernism. Together they led a discussion on the topic “Economies of Cultural Exchange:  Trade, Gift, or Trojan Horse?” 

Dr. McDonald opened the Colloquium by noting the influence on her thinking of The Gift, a short book by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss that is best known for being one of the earliest and most important studies of reciprocity and gift exchange. Mauss argues that giving an object creates an inherent obligation on the receiver to reciprocate the gift, and creates an alternative system to that of market value for understanding human social, ethical, and aesthetic exchange. “What conditions are good for the Arts?” and “How has trade benefited and/or affected the Arts?” Dr. McDonald asked. She acknowledged the crucial role of voluntary gifts by the wealthy in supporting the arts, and noted the sometimes messianic “one world” rhetoric employed by arts organizations to inspire such giving. But she also recognized the very common distaste for markets among artists and arts groups.

Dr. Caldwell began his portion of the presentation with questions from 18th-Century Scottish economist Adam Smith and his seminal book The Wealth of Nations, and from 20th-Century Austrian free-market economist F. A. Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom. “Why are some countries so very poor and others wealthy?” Smith asked. Dr. Caldwell also asked, “What is it about markets that people hate so much, excepting economists, of course?” Using Smith and Hayek, Dr. Caldwell explained the spontaneity of markets, the evolution of cultures from hunter-gatherers to contemporary society in which strangers deal with each other and necessarily have had to develop a system of trusting strangers. As an instance of spontaneous economic order, Dr. Caldwell used the example of Paris being fed. Nobody plans on feeding Paris each day, but it happens, because of the “invisible hand of markets.” He asked whether markets in art might have a similar effect.  

“Should the Arts be subsidized?” was a hot question debated by the professors attending.

The Director of the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Nancy Doll, related that the NEA was awarded 50 million dollars in the new national Stimulus Package.  The senators were persuaded to award this money not because of aesthetic value, but because it was shown good for the economy, for instance, by employing large numbers of people. Some attending argued that if the government can subsidize beef and dairy farmers, it can subsidize painters and musicians. Others noted that, with the exception of figures like Shakespeare, much great and lasting art is not initially lucrative, and is created by struggling and marginal figures like Vincent Van Gogh, pursuing their personal visions though working in relative poverty; while state-supported art in the USSR was some of the worst in human history.

February 2, 2009--Transcultural and Transatlantic German Studies

At the February 2 AWRN Colloquium, German professors Susanne Rinner and Arndt Niebisch drew a record gathering of professors from disciplines as varied as Art, Music, English, Classical Studies, History, and African American Studies for a discussion of the topic of “Transcultural and Transatlantic German Studies.” 

Professor Niebisch’s presentation, “Transmissions: The Atlantic as a Space of Techno-Aesthetic Imagination,” outlined the history of Marconi’s transatlantic radio transmissions and subsequent monopoly of Atlantic radio waves (making him, Arndt suggested, an early Bill Gates). The dangerous nature of this monopoly came to light with the sinking of the Titanic, when. Dr. Niebisch’s research probes the significance of this dynamic, as well as the Lindbergh flight and response to that flight by author Bertolt Brecht and composers Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith, whose Opera on Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight was written exclusively for performance via the radio—a.k.a. “the apparatus.” 

The focus for Dr. Rinner’s talk, “Triangular Tryst: Americans, Germans, and Jews in Contemporary German Literature, Film and Art,” was The Reader, the 1995 novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, and the current film version. Susanne discussed this and other German novels published since the 1989 reunification as these works engage across the Atlantic with questions of the Holocaust, Germany’s Nazi past, and portrayals of collective guilt extending beyond Germany to America.   

After these lunchtime presentations, a lively conversation around the table followed as we considered the radio and the airplane as Modernist icons of communication, connection and progress, and discussed whether the film version of The Reader was seeking subtly to connect Germany’s Nazi racist past with American racial injustice by portraying an American Jewish family that employs a black household servant.