All posts by rhargrov

Profile: Daniela Bartalesi-Graf

Interview and profile

When people discuss the challenges facing EU nations, Italy is often left out of the conversation. However, hopefully that will change thanks to Daniela Bartalesi-Graf’s efforts. Bartalesi-Graf is a lecturer at Wellesley College, and her research interests primarily focus on 20th century Italian culture. She came to the U.S. over twenty years ago, initially planning to attend graduate school to study classics. Those plans, however, were put on hold with the arrival of her child and the conclusion that studying classics and tending to a newborn would be too much to handle. Instead, she ended up deciding to spend more time delving into modern Italian culture and teaching Italian language at Wellesley College. In the process, she has written or co-authored three books and constructed a massive open online course (MOOC) for Italian language through edX Edge at Wellesley.

One of those books, Italy from Fascism to Today, traces the construction of modern Italy after WWII. Italy rarely seems to be part of the same clique as France, Germany, or Spain that remain on people’s consciousness abroad, and this is strange considering the fact that Italy faces many of the same challenges. “Italy is becoming a country of immigration– of mixed migration and immigration. A lot of immigrants are coming into Italy so Italy is becoming a multicultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic society with people coming from Northern Africa, the sub-Saharan continent, the Middle East.”

According to Bartalesi-Graf, Italians deal with those issues slightly differently than other European nations, and it’s partially because Italy has never had the same long colonial history that other European nations have had. This in turn has affected the way that they deal with immigration. She says, “Italy is probably the country that had to adjust the quickest to this new phenomenon. Other countries because of their previous colonial powers have had immigration since the 50s. Italy had less time to adjust.”

On the other hand, she points out that in some ways, Italy’s immigrants are much more integrated than immigrants in other countries like France, where many immigrants are relegated to banlieues and are somewhat segregated. “In Italy, this doesn’t happen as much. There are mostly mixed neighborhoods. In general, you have neighborhoods, especially in the outskirts of cities, where retired Italians live, lower-class Italians, and immigrants all live together.”

This integration is certainly a unique outcome for new immigrants to a country, though Bartalesi-Graf also adds that that doesn’t mean that immigrants to Italy don’t experience challenges when they arrive. One of the biggest barriers to cultural integration for immigrants is Italians’ own pride in their native culture. “It’s a culture where there are very defined ideas about how you should eat, divide your day, what the meal times are. These are very ingrained, fixed ideas. Italians have a hard time adjusting and changing their ideas about different or possibly better ways of dealing with meals and stuff like that.”

These seemingly small cultural differences create barriers between cultures and have caused divisions between Italians and immigrants, particularly in the name of preserving culture. The country has seen inroads made by small political parties such as Lega Nord (“The Northern League”) that attempt to keep immigrants out of Italy. Lega Nord is well-known for exhibiting xenophobia and propagating hateful views, with some of their ads featuring racist caricatures. “Many Italians want to protect their culture. This movement [Lega Nord] is manipulative in many ways that plays on fears of losing jobs and the economic crisis.”

However, it’s somewhat too simplistic to say that Italians are simply racist or xenophobic like in other countries. Unlike other places around the world, Italians’ aversion to immigrants does not appear to be racially motivated. “I think it’s less racially based. For example the groups that are most discriminated against are Albanians and people from Romania. They’re not necessarily as distinguishable from Italians and they ignite some irrational fears [in Italians.]”

That fear for Italian culture is an awful shame, because as Bartalesi-Graf points out at the end of the interview, there’s a great deal to be proud of. When asked what aspects of Italian culture she is most proud of, she says, “The arts. The incredible patrimony of the arts. The richness of the arts.” Italy is not a stagnant country, and unfortunately it is often forgotten in the discussion of EU nations. But it is a country with a rich historical legacy trying to regain its footing while facing new challenges. The question that remains for Italians is how to preserve a storied past and create a future that includes more voices and experiences, and how to create a new cultural legacy. Professor Bartalesi-Graf will surely be a part of that discussion, and her work will hopefully allow people to put Italy back into a larger consciousness.

Lust and Caution

Book or movie review

Ang Lee’s 2007 film, Lust, Caution, received attention for a number of reasons. The number of trophies it received internationally could have sated even the most ardent trophy collector’s appetite. It also received attention for its graphic, achingly realistic ten-minute sex scene between two main characters, which reportedly took over 100 hours to shoot. People praised the movie’s elegance and the performances. But one issue with the movie is that people defined it as an espionage thriller. But that marketing choice does not address one of the most fascinating aspects of the story: the “love” story.

Lust, Caution, based on a novella by Chinese author Eileen Chang, primarily takes place from 1938 to 1942 during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. From its trailer and synopsis, it appears to be a love story with gorgeous cinematography and period costumes, but it’s something much darker in the end. A young woman, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), escapes from Shanghai to Hong Kong for safety and begins her studies at Lingnan University. There, she follows a classmate, Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom), into the resistance movement. Kuang, Wong Chia Chi, and a group of other students develop a plot to kill Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), the leader of the secret police of China’s puppet government propped up by the Japanese. When Mr. Yee moves to Shanghai, so does the operation. The plan is to have Wong Chia Chi pose as Mrs. Mai, seduce Mr. Yee, and have him in a position for the co-conspirators to kill him. Of course, complications arise when “Mrs. Mai” develops an emotional connection with Mr. Yee, and their twisted relationship may unravel the entire operation.

“Lust, Caution” was originally written by Eileen Chang, a prolific Chinese author. Chang’s work is marked by precise, evocative language and a deep-seated pessimism in regards to human relationships. The portraits of “love” in her works rarely feature grand romantic gestures and instead focus on people’s selfish, fickle natures and the sharp edges of emotional connections. Moreover, the world that she creates in her fiction is one that is irredeemably desolate with just enough flashes of goodness to keep despair alive when goodness does not win out.

This loyalty to the tone of the source material does this espionage thriller a world of good. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai skillfully portrays Mr. Yee’s hard, cold brutality towards Mrs. Mai. Remarkably, instead of leaving the viewer repulsed, his actions leave room for intrigue. For example, during a particularly rough sex scene between the two, despite the fact that his actions are violent and steely, by the end, the viewer gets to see just enough tenderness to understand that he is not a complete monster.

That’s because Chiu-Wai takes advantage of the small moments and actions to give his monstrous character some humanity. He doesn’t make Mr. Yee out to be an antihero; his actions make it very clear that this is a violent, self-serving man. Rather, Chiu-Wai maintains an aloofness while giving the viewer quick peeks at Mr. Yee’s humanity. This comes through the most in a scene at a jewelry shop where Mr. Yee gives Mrs. Mai a diamond ring. His tone remains flat and he doesn’t smile, but his eyes betray an affection that is so strong that one has to look away; the sudden intimacy is just that jarring.

On the other hand, a diamond ring and a doting look do not love make. In any case, it isn’t clear whether or not Mrs. Mai loves Mr. Yee. The murkiness between her role as a spy and her role as his lover constantly makes the viewer wonder who she is pretending to be, and sometimes, whether she is pretending at all. Tang Wei’s portrayal is rooted in Mrs. Mai’s portrayal in the book, and in the novella, Mrs. Mai’s character, whose perspective guides the book, is almost completely inscrutable. However, Tang Wei improves upon it by betraying slightly more emotion– enough to humanize her a bit more, but not the point where, by the movie’s end, we can say that we sincerely know her. It’s hard to even tell if Wong Chia Chi even gets lost in Mrs. Mai because we’ll never know where Wong Chia Chi begins and Mrs. Mai ends.

This question of whether we’re seeing Wong Chia Chi or Mrs. Mai is maintained by Tang Wei’s skillful performance. Like the world in Eileen Chang’s writing, the viewer gets to see just enough to remain intrigued and invested and too little to feel that they can begin to predict the character’s actions. When we see her interact with Mr. Yee, she remains cautious and affectionate and it’s difficult to tell whether it’s acting for the sake of the movement or the rather normal process of falling in love. Tang Wei gives us a character that is unknowable without being flat, and perhaps it’s because in a way, she gives us two characters who are inseparable.

That sense of the unknown in plain sight is a palpable source of tension in the film, even aesthetically. There are shadows, because what espionage thriller would be complete without them? But the movie is mostly composed of sharp details that end up creating more unease than outlines of figures in the dark. This is a period thriller composed of trench coats and stern faces, yet it’s also a relatively well-lit one that shows us banal, dull street scenes in quick cuts that leave the viewer’s heart racing. The camera work makes perfectly normal scenes and interactions feel disorienting and ominous.

Unlike conventional thrillers, the tension in Lust, Caution does not come from car chases. Its tension is rooted, in fact, more in the tradition of romantic movies. Its tension comes from the same “Will they or won’t they (kill each other)?” question that serves as the driving force of love stories. However, the movie invites another question as well, which is, “Is this love at all?”

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the editor

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2015/03/mcdonald_s_in_decline_the_chain_wants_to_be_more_like_fast_casual_restaurants.html

RE: Turn it around, McDonald’s (March 12, 2015)

Justin Peters coined the term “sloppy locavore” to describe people who purchase their fast food from Shake Shack, Chipotle, and Five Guys rather than McDonald’s. He argues that McDonald’s is the food of “the people” and that places like Shake Shack are treading on McDonald’s, an establishment that serves “the poor” and customers that want convenient, empty calories. What Peters’ defense seems to ignore is that McDonald’s steep decline in profits shows that people are simply not interested in buying dessicated hamburgers anymore. Worse, he seems to equate cheap food with poor quality and glorifies it in the article. To him, the great danger of Shake Shack and McDonald’s decline is that the golden arches will be replaced with a place whose food is edible and slightly more expensive. Yet he doesn’t consider the possibility that consumers deserve a better product from McDonald’s.

Peters derides “sloppy locavores” in his argument. So I’d like to bring in a similar phrase to describe his argument: sloppy populism.

The Last One in Line

Op-Ed

The first time I saw a Lega Nord (“Northern League”) advertisement was in an Italian seminar during my junior year of college. My mother, a southern Italian woman, rarely discusses the politics of her homeland, so I wasn’t very familiar with the right-wing party. Lega Nord is a small northern party whose support has fluctuated since its conception in the 1990s. I later learned that its platform was meant to promote more regional autonomy among Italy’s states. Some even demanded that Northern Italy secede from the rest of the country.

This ideology wasn’t reflected in the actual advertisement, which was literally a line of racist caricatures standing in front of a closed door. The first was an East Asian man with buck teeth. The next was a weary Roma woman (the politically correct term for what many know as gypsies) with a kerchief on her head. She is followed by an African man with massive lips dressed in a purple tunic. Finally, a bearded Arab man dressed in white carrying a curved sword is at the end, and he pushes an elderly white Italian man behind him. The headline above their heads reads, “Indovina chi è l’ultimo? [Guess who’s the last one?]”

It’s a ridiculous ad, one that is clearly playing on the fear of foreigners taking jobs, and the racism within it was so over the top that a viewer could easily wonder if it was fake (it wasn’t). That ad and the mentality surrounding it truly captures Italians’ peculiar views on race. Italians are very capable of being racist, just like anybody else. But their brand of racism is inextricably tied up with nationality and fear of a changing Italy.

Part of the reason that the ad was so surprising to me was the fact that the experience my father had in Italy was so different. My dad, who is a black American, described Italy as the first place where he felt comfortable in his own skin. It was the first place where he wasn’t followed around in stores, and he still recounts the story of an old woman who left him alone in her shop. He ends with, “I just couldn’t believe it. That had never happened to me before.”

However, this is because it doesn’t have to do with blackness, or at least not entirely. Italians don’t have the same racial history as Americans. They don’t have the same hang-ups or stereotypes because their history evolved differently. Italians don’t follow black people around stores because they never learned to be wary of black people.

That doesn’t mean that they aren’t suspicion of Africans though, and that is the key distinction. For Italians, black people from the States are cool because they’re American. If you examine the Lega Nord advertisement, the point isn’t that the person is black, even though the artist took great care to capitalize on certain African features to make a point. The viewer is meant to look at the tunic and realize that he is African and hate him for the fact that he is African, not because he is black. In other words, if a shopkeeper is following around a black person in a store, it’s not because he’s black, but because he’s African and therefore “foreign.”

Many Italians view foreigners with a great deal of suspicion, and a lot of this fear has to do with cultural and lifestyle changes due to modernization. Before the 60s, Italians had been more divided by region because fewer people had cars and reliable transportation to travel. More women stayed at home as housewives while men went out to work, and the country was largely divided along the lines of Catholics and communists. In short, Italian society had distinct divisions in place that Italians could easily adhere to. But after the 1960s, more Italians had cars, women gained more independence and education, regional dialects began to die out, and the country imported much of its culture from the States. As regionalism gave way to nationalism, Italy started to look an awful lot like the U.S. and eventually the question arose of what exactly it meant to be Italian.

Naturally, the problem with that question is that it’s nearly impossible to answer. On the other hand, immigrants provide an easy answer of what an Italian is not simply due to their place of birth. The wild caricatures that Italians associate with immigrants serve as convenient examples of what it means to not be Italian. An Italian doesn’t wear tunics. An Italian isn’t black. An Italian doesn’t wear turbans. Certain features are a convenient way to decide what an Italian is not, and the conclusion that many Italians have come to is that an Italian is is white and Catholic.

That definition is narrow-minded and harmful for the future of Italy. In order for this issue to be addressed, Italians need to start focusing on the more complicated question of what an Italian is in the modern era. Immigrants to Italy have shown us that Italians can be Muslim, can be black, can be Asian. But it’s time for Italians to recognize this new diversity and start to focus on what it actually means to be Italian. History has shown us that Italians can be poetic, revolutionary, ambitious, and deeply patriotic. There’s a rich and beautiful history to be written once the country lets new Italians become a part of it.

Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls: Choose One of the Above

Report on a cultural event

The exhibit, “Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls?” was in Gallery 178 of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Even before checking the map, I could visualize where it would be. In many museums in the U.S., there is an Africa, Asia, Oceania section (often dimly lit) where all “ethnic” art is crammed in while Europe gets the run of the rest of the museum. And this is where Gallery 178 was. I immediately started to get worried.
“Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls?” is centered around a piece in the MFA called Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk. When the viewer walks into the exhibit, the piece is on a table at waist-level in a glass case. It’s a colorful piece depicting four women holding a long, white piece of silk with two other women siting on a pale green mat, while others pound silk on the right edge of the painting. This exhibit had been inspired by more recent interpretations of the piece arguing that the piece has sexual undertones due to the piece’s actual title: Picture of Pounding Silk– a common metaphor for desire. Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk was what inspired the exhibit, but the big question, at least according to the exhibit’s title, seemed to be what exactly Chinese women were supposed to be– court ladies or pin-up girls.
As I moved towards the left, navigating the space clockwise, I confronted the wall text introducing the exhibit. Part of it stated that, “In a sense, this exhibition is not about women, but about men. How men imagined or desired women to be.” While that was a thoughtful idea to acknowledge in the context of this exhibit, I rolled my eyes. Of course it’s about how men imagined or desired women to be. Isn’t that all art is?
On the first two left walls, there were domestic scenes from the southern Song dynasty with intricately detailed backgrounds. These paintings were subtly suggestive, inviting the reader to pay attention to small actions. Here, a hand on the knee, very little personal space between two figures, or Buddha hand citrons hinted at an erotic undertone.

When I turned the corner to the back of the exhibit, I initially didn’t fully take in the content of this set of paintings on the back wall. They were parts of a 12-page album created by Meng Lu Jushi during the late 18th or early 19th century. Many of them had a muted greyness to them, and all I could see from a distance was that there were women. As I got a bit closer, I was able to see that the scene wasn’t quite as conservative as it seemed from a distance. Small dots of pink turned out to be nipples, and I realized that unlike Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, the sensuality of this series was more pronounced.
I paused for a moment. Something felt strange about all of this. East Asian women are often sexualized in the Western imagination, and it was hard not to feel uneasy about erotic paintings of Chinese women being located in the back. It felt like stepping to the back of a 90s video store where the “adult” videos were hidden. Perhaps the curators meant to keep certain body parts away from the gaze of curious museum-going children. But something about putting the erotic pieces on the back wall and in a small alcove initially hidden from view felt needlessly prudish.

I turned towards the alcove where the paintings were even more explicit, with several nude and partially nude couples having sex. They were stunning, composed of thin lines, fine details and vivid colors. And it was these paintings that made me reconsider the exhibit as a whole. Seeing those paintings and the title of the exhibit in a Boston art museum initially made me think that I was just seeing another instance where East Asian women were eroticized.

But that conclusion does not do justice to the subjects. Regardless of what the wall text said, this exhibit is about women. Several of the paintings included women in loving embraces (sometimes with one another) and even being given a sex toy by an older woman. In other words, these women were exercising erotic autonomy. Just because a subject is erotic does not necessarily mean that it’s eroticized.

Nor does that mean that the exhibit is without its problems. Part of the issue, I later realized, is the title. While it’s empowering to see instances where women are acting on their desires, the fact that the title includes “pin-up girl” seems to trivialize these works. Pin-up girls are almost exclusively for male consumption, and it’s problematic not to notice the issue with making images of East Asian women available for mass consumption by a Western audience, even if it’s in a museum. When they’re the subject of the painting, they feel like agents, but in the context of a museum exhibit with a title that includes “pin-up girls,” it makes them seem more like objects. Additionally, the court lady and pin-up girl dichotomy is extremely limiting, and that entire question feels a bit silly. The question invites the viewer to only consider women as part of one of two categories, an exercise that’s neither provocative or productive. The exhibit doesn’t do a particularly good job of answering its own question, though perhaps that’s for the best since it’s a shallow one anyway.

Cultural Conditioning

Blog post on a cultural experience

“Wow, look at that hair! Is that a boy or a girl?”

I didn’t turn towards the tourists, partly because I was embarrassed and partly because I didn’t want to embarrass them by revealing that I knew Mandarin. But their words suddenly made me very aware of my unruly afro and androgynous look.  It’s a strange feeling, knowing that somebody is scrutinizing your body, eyes searching to figure out what this alien creature is. Some feature must have given me away, because after a beat, a woman exclaimed, “It’s a girl!” and the group broke into peals of laughter.

In the U.S., my large afro was my grandmother’s sorrow and the delight of white people in supermarkets. Its size attracted some attention at home, but in Taipei, the comments and stares followed me everywhere. On my morning walk to Chinese class, commuting adults stared at me and groups of kids would pause, mouths open in an O. Initially, the stares combined with the sticky morning heat made the small journey feel endless. For someone as shy as myself, passing under each person’s gaze felt like being put through a gauntlet. Going out felt impossible, and I would retreat to my dorm room as soon I could. Socializing was very difficult when going outside required so much mental energy and my body constantly felt as though it was being stared at to figure out what I was.

But later I found that my hair, the very thing that made me anxious about being around people, was what would get me to fully experience Taiwan. Eventually, hunger (the greatest motivator) and the need for interaction pushed me to go beyond the wordless exchanges of the 7-11.  One day, I got up the courage to order food after school (“Could you kindly give me a shaved ice?”). Since she already had my attention, the shopkeeper peppered me with questions about my hair. “Is it real or is it fake?” “Can I take a picture with you?” In the U.S., the frequency of those questions used to irritate me. But by the time I had been in Taiwan for awhile, hungry for social interaction due to my shyness, I started to grab at every warm question like I was starving and they were bread crusts. Every time I felt the surge of pride in understanding and responding to a question about my hair, an unfamiliar one would pop up. “What do you use on it?” “How long does it take?” The momentary embarrassment at not understanding faded away, and I became adept at smiling, nodding, and gesturing to attempt to communicate until I could go home and, hours later, figure out what was being asked of me.

Handling those simple questions gave me the confidence to continue conversations with the shopkeepers and people that I met. Soon people began to ask me, “What are you doing here?” and “How do you like Taiwan?” In the beginning, I wouldn’t have known how to respond. All I knew of Taiwan was my bedroom and the stares of strangers.

After a month of being there, something changed for me. I stopped seeing the scrutiny and questions about my hair as a hindrance and began to see how those blunt questions and observations were simply gentle curiosity that was rooted in warmth– a warmth that I had mistaken as invasive. A Taiwanese friend confirmed that the body is viewed differently in Taiwan, and that pointing out physical differences was not meant to be hurtful; it was simply another topic of conversation, especially between Taiwanese people who know each other well.

When that realization occurred, Taiwan expanded for me. After we covered the topic of my hair, I had conversations with shopkeepers about their children and how much better Taiwanese food is than “American” cuisine. And one day on the subway, a young Taiwanese woman a couple of years older than me stopped me to ask about my hair.  “It’s so cool!” The woman, Joanna, said it with a tone that allowed me to let my guard down, and after a short talk, we exchanged numbers before parting ways, making vague plans to see each other again.

Surprisingly, I mustered up the courage to follow through on those plans. To my even greater surprise, I made it to Shìlín night market without incident and was rewarded with a wave of relief upon seeing Joanna outside. We proceeded to spend the evening drinking 奶茶 (nǎichá–milk tea) and eating various fried foods while I told her the U.S. isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and she told me that neither was Taiwan, though I’m not sure we believed each other. For Joanna, it probably felt uneventful. For me, I was ecstatic to connect with someone and make them laugh intentionally, for once.

After that, we spent many evenings indulging in 臭豆腐 (chòu dòufu–stinky, fermented tofu) and talking in the Taiwanese night markets. Our conversations taught me so much about this little island, and the topics ran the gamut from gay culture in Taiwan to politics to dating, inevitably returning to food. As I got to know Taiwan– the students, the trains, the bubble tea stands–I no longer noticed being stared at and no longer felt like an oddity. As anyone with curly hair can testify, proper conditioning takes time, and the cultural kind is no different.