Assistant Professor in the History Department and the College of Letters, Javier Castro-Ibaseta arrived on campus this year from Spain. He sat down with The Argus to discuss his love of American universities, one of his favorite books, and his efforts to close the rift between intellectual history and popular history.
Argus: What do you think of American academic life?
Professor Javier Castro-Ibaseta: I really like it, it gives me everything I want: open discussion, great students, and a lot of freedom to teach. I like the atmosphere of American liberal arts colleges. When I first encountered the American system, I was surprised how available professors were. I remember talking to the first ranked historians—the people whose books you read. I never thought I’d be able to talk to them, and I was surprised how open they were. They let me speak about my projects and they listened to all my ideas.
A: What books are you reading now?
JC: I’m interested in a book called “The Aesthetics of Resistance” by Peter Weiss. This book is very weird because the author is not a historian. He’s mainly known as a playwright and disciple of Bertolt Brecht [a German poet and playwright]. He mainly wrote theater plays, but this is a fictional novel. It is presented as his autobiography, but it’s actually not his real autobiography. It is his autobiography as he would have liked it to be. For example, he was German and he was born in the middle class as a son of artists—he was bourgeois. In this fictional autobiography he depicts himself as a son of a working class man and as a proletarian. The first part is set in Germany in the thirties, and he’s part of the Communist resistance under Hitler’s rule. In the second part of the book he goes to Spain to fight in the civil war. Peter Weiss never went to Spain to fight in the civil war, but it’s what he would have liked to have done. The main theme in this book is the role of art, literature, painting and sculpture in the creation of a working class consciousness. This culture is not seen from the point of view of ideology, but from a working class viewpoint.
A: What do you think of the book?
JC: It’s a fascinating interpretation of art and history from a working class perspective. His project was trying to find the role of art within the working class movement. So he imagines his whole life as the search for elements for making that project possible. By combining art, literature, resistance and revolution this project comes together. It’s a remarkable novel. It’s a serious attempt to write European history, and a great book to learn European history from the inside, and not just as raw data.
A: Did he ever write a real autobiography?
JC: I don’t think so, no. I think he considered his own life quite boring—no adventure, no real conflict. He never fought the Nazis, or fought in the Spanish war. He didn’t believe his life was interesting enough to write a book about.
A: Have you always been interested in art history?
JC: I’m interested as a historian in the role of culture in the making of history. My own work tries to understand the role of literature in 17th century Spanish political life, how it affected the Spanish people, and how it helped them to understand politics. I’m interested in how they considered theater, satire or the novel as a tool for understanding their environment in everyday life. This book puts together art history and history in one historical narrative.
A: Have you always been interested in studying history through the eyes of the lower classes?
JC: I was educated in intellectual history. But when I decided to focus on studying literature, I became more aware of the problem of audiences. For example, theater in early modern Spain was very popular and people of all the classes went to the theater. People did not have to be literate to understand the plays. It was like the movies are today, and everyone in 17th century Spain went to the theater. I started to be more concerned about the effects of the political theories that they were hearing in plays on the popular audience. And what was the effect of political satire on the lower class people? I’m now more concerned with the lower class people, which is a change from my older perspectives. This is something I’m learning now, and it’s fascinating. There are a lot of surprises awaiting intellectual historians who become more aware of popular culture.
A: Has your research changed since you’ve started focusing on popular culture?
JC: There has been a growing gap between historians of the intellectual life and historians of the popular culture. I’d like to find a middle ground, and find out what happens when these two worlds collide—like in the theater when lower class people would meet high literature people. In the 17th century, popular culture and intellectual history were not separated. There were spaces for the two of them to meet. I’m interested in how popular and intellectual traditions changed when they met in these spaces.
A: How do historians deal with this problem?
JC: There’s a gap between social history and intellectual history. It’s a gap between fundamentally materialist historians and fundamentally idealist historians, though that is an oversimplification. This gap still exists even after all the post-modernism. It’s a very difficult gap to break. But a book like “The Aesthetics of Resistance” is a good example of how to make good cultural history that is not the history of ideologies. Experience is a good ground to understand the relationship between culture, ideological ideas and everyday life.
A: How would you go about researching everyday life in the 17th century?
JC: That’s a major problem in historiography, especially in the early modern period. Now you have a lot of material like diaries and blogs. In the 19th and 20th century, literature rates grew so that you now have more material written by popular classes, like letters. But you don’t have material like that from back then. It’s a great concern of historians of popular culture in the early modern period. The biggest problem is that most of the time you have to go to sources produced by higher classes speaking about the popular classes, so then it’s a biased source. You have to be very careful, but there are sources out there. But that’s what makes good history—trying to discover what you can trust from what you can’t.