Professor Javier Pescador Co-Curates Exhibit on Detroit-Tenoxtitlan

An exciting exhibit on the Detoit/Tenoxtitlan Ofrenda to Diego Reivera and the 2008 Dia De Muertos will open at the MSU Museum on November 2 at dusk. There will be music and tamales. The exhibit will be on display from November 1-16. 

2008 marks the 75th anniversary of Diego Rivera´s most accomplished frescoes in the United States. In March 1933 the Detroit Institute of Arts inaugurated this masterpiece, the most controversial work of art in Michigan history. Criticized and defended by city leaders, art critics and common folk on all sides of the political spectrum, Rivera´s mural summoned thousands of viewers to Woodward Avenue to witness a unique artistic interpretation of Detroit´s industrial might.

Conceived both as a Dia de Muertos ofrenda and a shrine to the Great Lakes, the installation combines contemporary visual arts with Ancient Mexican designs and motifs to evoke Diego Rivera’s short-lived but fundamental experiences and artworks in Michigan. Inspired by Rivera’s mural work in the DIA, the installation brings alive the Aztec goddess Coatlicue as a manifestation of the vital forces in the Great Lakes, while portraying Michigan’s endangered wildflower, the Dwarf Lake Iris, as the original four-petal xochitl that represents the four corners of the Aztec cosmos and the foundation of life, beauty and art.
The offering celebrates the unique approach to art in Diego Rivera’s swift and spectacular muralist career in the United States and his permanent quest for meaning and beauty in ancient Mexican cultures and nature. It evokes the unique attraction Rivera’s artwork manifested for utopian connections between mankind, nature and progress, while reminding us of the universe view in Ancient Mexico by which human renewal and fulfillment are only achievable through a sacred respect for nature and an unconditional love for beauty. In xochitl in cuicatl… Infused by ancient Mexican cultural elements and excited by the notion of Detroit as the city of the future, Rivera´s artistic impulses manifested a rare blend of unconditional reverence for technological advancement, industrial design and manpower with a deeply rooted faith in ancient Mexican cultural and religious values. The outcome witnessed by thousands of spectators was an astonishing 27-panel monumental work that merges Aztec deities with modern machines, Quetzalcóatl with Henry Ford, and the ancient Aztec rhythm of communal labor with the Ford River Rouge plant´s assembly line. For Diego Rivera, in more than one sense, the ancient Aztec city of Tenoxtítlan (now Mexico City) represented the utopian past of mankind, just as Detroit symbolized the utopian future.
Detroit-Tenoxtítlan celebrates the artistic impulse, life and creative energy of Diego Rivera Barrientos in Detroit, Michigan, in the context of a unique and sacred festivity for people of Mexican descent: the Day of the Dead. El día de los Muertos, an ancient Mexican celebration in which families reconnect with departed ancestors, provides a unique opportunity to remember Diego´s passionate and provocative perspectives on life, history, art and culture. The realm of the “fleshless” or the dead (Mictlán in Nahuatl, Xibalbá in Maya), according to Ancient Mexican traditions, is conceived to be in a fluid relationship with the world of the “flesh” or the living. “The fleshless ones” are considered to be a living presence in this world while the “living ones” contemplate death as the natural progression of life and renewal. Diego Rivera reflected and expressed this duality in many of his artistic works, including the frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Detroit-Tenoxtítlan is a community-oriented art project consisting of an (ofrenda de Muertos) displayed at the Mixigan State University Museum. The installation reflects on the Téyotl, the creative impulse of Diego Rivera´s artistic life, his deep desire to connect art with community, and his relentless conviction to express with art his unshakeable dream for human advancement and scientific progress. “Detroit-Tenoxtítlan” is an experimental artwork that reflects upon the main protagonists of the turmoil surrounding Rivera´s frescoes in Detroit, as well as the adverse conditions faced by Chicano families in the Great Lakes in the middle of the Great Depression.

Artists: Gabrielle Pescador and Juan Javier Pescador, Michigan State University. Gabrielle Pescador is a multimedia/performance artist. She has presented and performed in Canada, Singapore and the United States. Her work combines music, performance, painting, textiles and outreach programs. Juan Javier Pescador has presented his photographic work in different venues. His solo exhibitions Peregrinos del Norte: Religious Rituals among Mexican/Latino communities in the Great Lakes and Sunday Heroes: Sports and Leisure Culture in Detroit and Chicago have been featured in galleries, museums and community centers in Chicago, East Lansing, Ann Arbor, Albion, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Oberlin, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon.

Posted on 1 October 2008 | 1:45 pm

History Department Speaker Series: Sam Quinones, “So far From Mexico City, So Close to God: True Tales of Why Mexicans Migrate”

The Department of History’s Speaker Series kicks off this Thursday in Room115 CIP (International Center) from 3:00 to 5:00pm. Join us for a talk by Sam Quinones, Los Angeles Times journalist, and author of: Antonio¹s gun and Delfino¹s Dream: Truer Tales of Mexican Migration & Truer tales from another Mexico.

Talk Title: ³So Far From Mexico City, so Close to God: True Tales of Why Mexicans Migrate²

Date & Location: Thursday, September 25, 2008 in room 115 CIP (International Center)

Time: 3:00-5:00pm

Please contact Dr. Jerry Garcia (garcia86@msu.edu) or Dr. Sean Forner
(saforner@msu.edu) for additional information.

Posted on 23 September 2008 | 3:48 am

Talk by Professor Leslie Moch, Becassine the Cartoon Migrant: A Century of Caricature and Reaction in France

Dr. Leslie Moch, our Modern French historian, will give a paper entitled  "Bécassine the Cartoon Migrant: A Century of Caricature and Reaction in France" on Friday September 19 from 1-3 pm in Room 102 International Center as part of the New Research on Women and Gender: Global and local Perspectives Coolloquium.

Paper Abstract: This presentation analyzes the development of Bécassine, a French comic book character for children who was a stupid maid from the province of Brittany, and the Breton response to this character. Although cartoons belittling migrants and domestic servants have been common for well over a century (in contrast to the much older figure of the clever servant in the works of Shakespeare, Molière and Beaumarchais) Bécassine had unusual staying power. She was created in 1905 and celebrated her centenary in 2005. The depiction of Bécassine as a witless young woman and village bumpkin in the city evolved in several distinct ways throughout the her first 30 years as the belle époque gave way to World War I and the interwar years. Outside the realm of the cartoon, this charter took on several distinct meanings to filmmakers, museum displays, and Bretons themselves. She was the object of literary attacks and violent public actions. This presentation traces the development of Bécassine and explains why virulent responses to this character occurred when and as they did. Finally, it analyzes the rehabilitation of Bécassine in this century

Leslie Page Moch is Professor of History at Michigan State University who taught in Illinois and Texas as well as in Michigan after receiving the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her first book, Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth-Century France, was followed by articles in the American Historical Review, French Historical Studies, and Social Science History. In addition to edited books such as European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (with Dirk Hoerder), she published Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650, as well as other articles and essays. Moch is currently writing a history of Bretons in Paris with the working title of The Pariahs of Yesterday.

Posted on 14 September 2008 | 11:18 am

Professor John Waller has published “A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plaque of 1518 (Icon Books)

Professor John Waller has published a fascinating new book,  "A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plaque of 1518 (Icon Books, 2008). The History Department was fortunate to have a preview of this work in a seminar that John presented in 2005. The book is available at  to be purchased at http://www.iconbooks.co.uk/book.cfm?isbn=978-184831021-6.

John Waller Talks About his Work:  John was interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s morning news program on Friday September 12. The full interview is available at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7612000/7612071.stm

Abstract: In July 1518 a terrifying and mysterious plague struck the medieval city of Strasbourg. Hundreds of men and women danced wildly, day after day, in the punishing summer heat. They did not want to dance, but could not stop. Throughout August and early September more and more were seized by the same terrible compulsion. By the time the epidemic subsided, heat and exhaustion had claimed an untold number of lives, leaving thousands bewildered and bereaved, and an enduring enigma for future generations. Drawing on fresh evidence, John Waller’s account of the bizarre events of 1518 explains why Strasbourg’s dancing plague took place. In doing so it leads us into a largely vanished world, evoking the sights, sounds, aromas, diseases and hardships, the fervent supernaturalism, and the desperate hedonism of the late medieval world.

John Waller is an assistant professor of the history of medicine at Michigan State University with a joint appointment between the Department of History and Lyman Briggs College. He received his PhD from the University of London in 2001 and is the author of five books on various aspects of social history, history of medicine and the nature of scientific discovery. His most recent book is entitled A Time to Dance, A Time to Die (Icon, 2008), and is a study of an outbreak of compulsive dancing in the city of Strasbourg in 1518. He is currently writing a book, under contract with Oxford University Press, which traces the history of essentialist thought since late antiquity. He has also written several articles for history of science journals.

Posted on 13 September 2008 | 10:53 am

CIC-American Indian Studies Consortium’s Fall 2008 Gradaute Student Workshop

The CIC-American Indian Studies Consortium, which is directed by Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith, will host its Fall 2008 Graduate Student Workshop At Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana on September 11-13, 2008. Designed to introduce CIC-AISC graduate students to archival research in the rich collections housed in various CIC institutions, the Fall Workshop is led by a CIC faculty member. Over the course of three days, graduate students formulate individual research topics and discuss readings relevant to a topic determined by the Workshop Instructor. This year’s workshop will focus on “Ethnohistorical Methods.” The Instructor is Raymond J. DeMallieof Indiana University. “Ethnohistorical Methods” will introduce students to ethnohistory, conceptualized as an interdisciplinary blending of anthropology and history. In essence, the ethnohistorical method entails the application of anthropological approaches to documentary records. Ethnohistory developed in the context of the study of American Indians as a way of integrating diverse types of information about the past from archeology, social-cultural anthropology, linguistics, and history. The appeal of ethnohistory is its potential to provide an in-depth understanding of American Indian peoples over long time spans. Using the anthropological concepts of culture and society to organize and interpret the historical record offers the possibility of understanding historical periods and events from native points of view.

Michigan State University serves as the institutional home for the American Indian Studies Consortium for the Committee on Insitutional Cooperation. Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith, is professor of American history and director of the program.

Posted on 12 September 2008 | 6:45 pm

Talk by Professor Walter Hawthorne, Black Slave Ship Crew: Labor, Bondage, and Freedom in the Early Modern South Atlantic

Dr. Walter Hawthorne, one of our West African historians, will talk as part of the "Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives symposium on Friday September 12, 2008 from 12:15-1:30 in the MSU Museum Auditoirum. His talk is entitled "Black Slave Ship Crew: Labor, Bondage and Freedom in the Early Modern South Atlantic."

Paper Abstract: The talk is based on records from one slave’s 1821 testimony before a commission Rio de Janeiro that heard cases about illegal slave voyages, along with supporting documents from archives in Lisbon and London. It traces a slave seaman’s Atlantic adventures and examines, more broadly, the lives of Africans and Afro-Americans who labored on slave ships in the South Atlantic. Two ships upon which the seaman - Gorge - labored were captured by British anti-slaving squadrons. British officials presented Gorge with two chances to obtain legal “freedom”, first in Freetown and then in Rio. Both times he chose to remain a slave in Brazil.

Dr. Hawthorne argues that Gorge’s choice of slavery reveals much about the complicated meanings of slavery and freedom for Africans in Atlantic communities. Further, he argues that scholarship taking Atlanticist and Africanist approaches to diaspora history has celebrated Africans’ creations and/or recreations of collective identities in the Americas but has not adequately grappled with how individuals perceived and utilized those identities over time and through space.

Though Gorge sometimes said he was of a particular African ethnic group, he did not see his Atlantic identity as growing primarily from things African. Indeed, he took steps to distance himself from other Africans with whom he shared Old World identities. Most often, he defined himself by his work. He saw himself as, first and foremost, a seamen and spent his time with other seamen of many backgrounds. As a seaman, like his famous counterpart Equiano, Gorge freed himself from the social constraints that inhibited both slave and free Africans in the ports that he knew. Ironically, Gorge chose to remain free of those social constraints, even though that meant remaining a slave.

Walter Hawthorne is an associate professor of African History at Michigan State University. He received his PhD from Stanford and is the author of Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 (Heinemann, 2003). He has won two Fulbright awards and with funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship is preparing a book manuscript about linkages between the Upper Guinea Coast, Portugal and Maranhão from 1650 to 1830. He has published articles in Slavery and Abolition, Journal of African History and Luso-Brazilian Review and has a forthcoming piece in American Historical Review.

Posted on 11 September 2008 | 12:35 pm

Teaching Symposium: Using Clicker Technology

The Department will host a demonstration and discussion of clicker technology in the History conference room on Tuesday, September 9 at 4 pm. Clickers are an increasingly popular tool to engage students in large lecture courses. The natural sciences use clicker technology within large lecture classes to check that students are understanding key concepts. In the social sciences, clickers are most useful for engaging student opinions, especially on controversial issues where students are reluctant to speak out in a large class setting. The session is sponsored by i-clicker, one of the companies that we use at MSU. I will talk a bit about how I have used clickers in my large survey course.

Posted on 9 September 2008 | 10:22 am

Department Seminar by Dr. Benjamin Smith, The Secret History of Freemasonry in Mexico, 1920-1940

Professor Ben Smith, our Mexican historian, is presenting a seminar paper in the Department of History on Thursday, September 11, 3:00-5:00 in 340 Morrill Hall. His talk is entitled: "The Secret History of Freemasony in Mexico, 1920-1940."

Paper Abstract: Histories of freemasonry generally fall into two camps. They are either opaque, partisan and tedious or speculative, conspiratorial and alarmist. Both rarely utilize documents from the archives of Masonic lodges. The historiography of freemasonry in Mexico is no different. On the one hand masons, liberals and their sympathizers have argued that lodges formed the foundations of the imagined ideal of the liberal and later the revolutionary republics. They were "egalitarian societies", "sources of liberal instruction" and "the civil base of an embryonic democratic process" which practiced political discussion and elected authorities according to democratic electoral practices. On the other hand, "fanatical" Catholics and skeptical historians have argued that the masons formed the regional rank and file of the nineteenth and twentieth century state’s antidemocratic reality, an informal camarilla of professional bureaucrats and regional strongmen ready to do the dictator’s or the president’s bidding. Building on documents from the Grand Lodge "Benito Juárez" of Oaxaca, this paper argues that this dissonance between the liberty exalted by Masonic rites and texts and the limited nature of the political system profoundly marked the history of the masons in the post-revolutionary era. While weekly debates, annual elections and solemn ceremonies instructed masons in a close approximation of the ideal of post-revolutionary Mexican politics, the increasing links between the Masonic lodges and the state also offered many masons the opportunity to operate within the post-revolutionary political reality. However, as many masons discovered, this practice demanded less welcome virtues of obedience, subordination and unity. These contradictions in turn informed the complex narrative of state-masonic relations during the period as different Masonic groups contested their role in the post-revolutionary world.

Benjamin T. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Modern Mexican History at Michigan State University. His first two books, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Post-revolutionary Oaxaca, 1920-1950 (University of Nebraska Press) and Mercados Mujeres, y Movimientos Populares (Casa de la Cultura, Oaxaca) will be published in 2009. He has published articles in The Americas, the Journal of Latin American Studies, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, numerous Mexican journals and two edited volumes. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled, Religion, Ethnicity and Popular Conservatism in the Mixteca Baja, 1810-2000.

Posted on 5 September 2008 | 1:39 pm

Professor Sam Thomas Curates Exciting New Exhibit at the MSU Museum on Political Cartoons

No Holds Barred: Political Cartoons of the Gilded Age, a new exhibit arranged and currated by Professor Sam Thomas, has opened at the MSU Museum. As we are in the midst of a bitter presidential election context, the exhibit on politics from the late ninteeenth century provides historical perspective on campaigning. Dr. Thomas writes: "Today’s students and scholars, by focusing on political cartoons as an important form of documentary evidence, may not only deepen their understanding of this important period of American history, but facilitate their development of many of the same kinds of critical thinking skills that the study of printed sources makes possible. Cartoons, then, are more than mere illustrations. They are valuable primary sources of the American past."

Dr. Thomas is an expert on the Gilded Age and publishes widely on religion and politics in the late nineteenth century. The exhibit at the MSU Museum will run from August 24, 2008 through the end of December, 2008.

Posted on 27 August 2008 | 2:23 pm