In the Center

By Patricia Winton

An Italian television program called S.O.S Tata, based on the American show Nanny 911, offers some uniquely Italian views on childrearing. In one memorable show, the stay-at-home dad can’t cope with two small children behaving badly. He feeds them dinner around five PM and has them tucked into bed before his professional wife returns home from work. The parents enjoy a relaxing evening alone.

The Tata identifies this practice as the root of all the family’s troubles. She modifies the household routine by having the children stay up much later and participate in dinner preparations. The children set the table although one is so small that she can only manage to carry one plate at a time from the cupboard to the table, with dad’s help. In this scenario, the meal preparation takes much longer and the children stay up much later, but the Tata approves. Like most Italians, she believes that children must not live separate lives.

And in Italy, children are central to almost all aspects of daily life. People seek children’s opinions and respect their ideas. I often see a grandfather accompanying his granddaughter to school, for example. When they exit the building, he’ll ask, “Today should we go this way or that way.” The child usually ponders for a moment and chooses a route, which they follow.

Children are included in conversations. I remember observing a couple of women conversing on a subway platform in Washington, D.C. a few years ago. One of the women had a small child in a stroller in front of her. The child was struggling to remove her sweater, grunting with the effort. The adults paid no attention. That would never happen here. The conversation would include all three people.

Adults make children feel important. I recently walked down the street behind a woman pushing a stroller. An acquaintance approached and bent down to talk to the child, saying “Ciao, how are you, Elena,” before standing upright to greet the mother. A three-way conversation ensued. When the man took his leave, he reached down to caress the child’s cheek and say “Ciao” again before shaking hands with the mother.

In Italian restaurants, children accompany their parents—even to the most elegant ones. The waiters fawn over children, often bringing them a special treat. If there are few children, a waiter might even pick up a child and take her into the kitchen for a quick tour (and a sample of the dessert to come). The idea of an "adults only" restaurant is unthinkable.

Family includes multi-generations, and family occasions include everyone. At these events, everyone gathers around the dining table; children aren’t sent to separate children’s tables. At anniversary parties and promotion celebrations, children are on the guest list. Children, not just flower girls and ring bearers, attend weddings and receptions, too.

Do Italian children misbehave? Absolutely. Do Italian parents chastise their children for that behavior? Definitely. But Italian adults don’t expect perfection from their children. They expect them to run and jump and get dirty, and they provide ample opportunities for these activities.

As a result, Italian children grow up with oodles of self-esteem. Sometimes the result produces behavior in adults that can seem self-centered. People hate waiting in lines and push through crowded streets as if they were empty. But in a strange way, it also produces a generosity of spirit that continues to be passed to the next generation.

Hot Fusion, Tropical Beats

The spicy pepper mixture known as chutney in India has a second meaning in the Caribbean, where it’s also a type of Indo-Caribbean music with deep roots but a short history. It's also as diverse as the people who created it.

Chutney music goes back to the late 1950s, when a dance album called The King of Suriname released in the tiny South American nation of the same name. The music made a splash among East Indians across the region, and the singer, Ramew Chaitoe, became known as the father of chutney music.

Chaitoe sang primarily Indian religious songs known as bhajans in a Creolized Hindi. One song in particular, Raat Ke Sapne, became a dance hit that was popular for decades. The song is about separation, an apt subject for Chaitoe’s primary audience whose ancestors were brought by the British to the Caribbean sugar belt as indentured laborers to replace the freed slaves.

A decade after Chaitoe’s historic recordings, another Surinamese, Dropati, released an album (Let’s Sing and Dance) of traditional wedding songs that became another hit and earned her the title of the mother of chutney music. The King of Suriname and Let’s Sing and Dance remain two of the bestselling East Indian albums, though the genre itself has changed dramatically.

In 1970, a Trinidadian named Sundar Popo had a #1 hit song in Guyana and Trinidad with his song Nana Nani (which means “grandfather" and "grandmother”). Sung in Creolized Hindi and English, with lyrics like “Nana drinkin' white rum and Nani drinkin' wine,” the song was heard all over the islands in the ‘70s, and gave way to the term chutney for this form of music. Sundar Popo sang folk songs with influences of West Indian calypso sounds on topics that reflected life of the Indo-Caribbeans, touching on themes of emigration, repression, and discrimination in his songs. Other chutney music artists emerged, singing about everything from female oppression to life on a sugar plantation.

Today chutney music has gone mainstream, an amalgam of calypso and Trinidadian soca, using electric guitars and synthesizers, and Indian popular music and traditional instruments, such as the dholak (a double-headed hand drum played horizontally), the dhantal (a long steel rod played with a metal horseshoe-type piece), and the harmonium (something like a small keyboard similar to a reed organ). And it’s not just East Indians creating this music; Afro West Indians have gotten in on the act, and the genre has spread to a wider, mainstream Caribbean audience. A musician named Atiya all the way over in Holland shot to fame performing her own Indian soca music.

And as Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans migrated north, to the United States and Canada, so did the music. Record companies and nightclubs promoting this popular party music emerged, especially in Toronto and New York, spreading the Caribbean music scene further. Often, recordings done in the north make their way back to the islands. 

Earlier, some Caribbean governments banned or repressed chutney music because of ethnic discrimination. But by the early to mid-‘90s, both Trinidad and Guyana had East Indian political leaders, which helped lead to a renaissance of this type of music. In Guyana, Terry Gajraj had a top hit with an album called “Guyana Baboo” (Child of Guyana) that evokes nostalgia for Guyanese immigrants everywhere.

In fact, the music has splintered into a dozen other subgenres – dance, folk, hip hop, rap, even appearing in Bollywood films – but even as it moves from the islands onto the international stage, the music remains popular throughout the region and the Caribbean diaspora as the music of their roots, for East and West Indians alike.

Here are just a few popular chutney songs, old and new:

Chutney Pressure: 

Nani Nana:

 Marajin: 

Guyana Baboo:

Off The Beaten Track: Teaching Contemporary Culture

Our guest blogger this week is Dr. Lisa Lipinski, associate faculty and interim chair of arts and humanities at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C.

Last fall, I was asked to develop a new course required of all sophomores at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. I’m an art historian by training and education—I have a doctorate in art history, and my area of specialization is modern and contemporary art. Consequently, the course appeared to be a new area for me, and my friends and colleagues wondered how I was going to teach it.

I began with a course description. A significant part of my education has been what is loosely called “critical theory,” which I drew upon in designing the syllabus, in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Uddin, a faculty member at Corcoran.

The Dunphy family from the
"Modern Family" TV show (source: AdelaideNow)

Contemporary culture is primarily visual and media-dominated. Thus, the focus of the course is on the production and reception of various forms of media: print images and graphic design, TV and cable TV, film and video, computer interfaces and software design, the Internet and web as a visual platform, digital multimedia, and advertising in all media. We also examine other aspects of contemporary culture: news, transportation, urban spaces, entertainment, food, fashion, science, and biotechnology.

If the students are living contemporary culture, why do they need to study it and how would they do so? Yes, students are living contemporary culture every day, and references to contemporary culture abound in their art, which is why students needed a course that addressed contemporary culture from a critical standpoint. The course was not to be a survey of popular culture, but a critical analysis of their own culture broadly speaking, including—but not limited to—the production of artists. The students needed conceptual tools with which to understand contemporary culture. Furthermore, to understand the present moment in our post-industrial culture, as with art history, you have to go back to the past, to the beginning of modernity in the 19^th century, with the rise of cities and industrialization.

A painting by Benoit Piret

Students read influential and intellectually challenging essays by modern and contemporary cultural critics, including Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Laura Mulvey, Raymond Williams, and Marshall McLuhan. They read essays by scholars of visual culture, who analyzed different aspects of contemporary culture of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

As I’ve mentioned, contemporary culture is primarily visual. Through the readings and discussions in class, we probed the issues raised by contemporary culture through the concepts presented in the readings. For example, Guy Debord, member of the French Situationists group of artists and activists, argued that capitalism and the “spectacle” of images was a destructive, invasive force in people’s lives, turning them into passive consumers.

Students’ lives are mediated in ways neither Guy Debord nor I ever imagined when I started graduate school in the mid-1980s. By the end of that decade, I was giving demos for the world’s first web browser, Netscape, at the University of Illinois, but I never imagined how the Internet would transform life and contemporary culture. In my class now, students debate the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (“The medium is the message.”) and Raymond Williams, who argues that new media empowers people. Class discussions often involve the use of the Internet, not only social media like Facebook, but also Second Life, a free 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect, and create. For a humorous parody on the power of technology, see the following Portlandia: Technology Loop.   

 

Modern kids (credit: Stuart Harrison)

With all of the heavy reading and discussion, we still manage to inject some fun into the class. One of the highlights was playing "Connect" on the Xbox. Students took turns competing by dancing to Lady Gaga's "Pokerface." We also took field trips to famous D.C. landmarks, such as Union Station, the Newseum, and the Museum of Natural History, to explore cultural spaces firsthand.

In their daily life students are consumers, but in this course, they become analysts, putting their own culture under the microscope. Besides the concepts, my students learn the process and value of intellectual debate as well as critical thinking.

Illustration in Guy Debord's
La Société du Spectacle (1967)

An idea we came back to frequently in class was the power of capitalism. Contemporary culture revolves around two key features, the commodity and technology. We all agreed that it is difficult if not impossible to opt out of this system, but I was surprised and pleased to know that students still read books for pleasure and don’t spend all of their time on Facebook. Furthermore, I saw an immediate impact of the ideas upon students. By the time we went to the Newseum toward the end of the semester, students were attuned to all the subtle ways we are manipulated in this museum space, from the effect of transparency in the museum’s structural design, which my students agreed was an illusion, to the limited few sponsors’ names on the exhibit labels.

I know we are always looking to the young to help us out of our problems, but with this generation of budding artists, I am hopeful that they have the talent and imagination to visualize better things, and an alternative way of thinking and living.