Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 122

November 27-28, 2021: Emily Lauer’s Guest Post on Afrofuturism in Museums

[I’ve been fortunate enough to share a couple Guest Posts from my NeMLA colleague and friend Emily Lauer, and am excited to share another this weekend!]

In New York City on Museum Mile, both the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art now feature Afrofuturist rooms. At the Cooper Hewitt, the temporary exhibit is called “Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects” and the museum’s website explainsthat this “Selects” room “is the 19th installation in the exhibition series that invites designers, artists, architects and public figures to explore and interpret Cooper Hewitt’s collection of more than 215,000 objects. The exhibition will be on view [through]  Feb. 13, 2022.” A few blocks down at the Met, “’Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room’” opened on November 5th of this year, and will be an ongoing exhibit, nestled amongst other period rooms.

 

Both of these exhibits are richly imagined and immersive, as one might expect from their hosting institutions. Further than that, I was interested to realize that they both imagine Afrofuturism similarly. Each concocts a speculative scenario in which free, relatively comfortable and homed Black people intentionally enact the role of the museum, adventuring around time and/or space to gather items that are then put on display.

 

At the Cooper Hewitt, Jon Gray’s premise is that a post apocalyptic future has a Black adventurer gathering artifacts from the ruins, and those artifacts are displayed in this gallery. At the Met, the premise of the room is that the people who lived in Seneca Village discovered time travel and the “period room” is full of the residents’ finds they’ve gathered while time traveling.

 

Just as Hollywood loves making movies about Hollywood, and authors love writing novels about authors, so too it should not be surprising that the speculative fiction scenarios of museums feature their protagonists enacting the role of the museum. Of course the scenarios envisioned for these rooms make good use of the setting of their fictions, but in doing so they are offering one very specific take on what Afrofuturism is. If either of these rooms was a visitor’s first exposure to the idea of “Afrofuturism,” the visitor would come away with an incomplete understanding of the concept.

 

By envisioning Afrofuturist protagonists enacting the role of the museum, both rooms seem to imply that Afrofuturism is concerned with collecting and exalting vestiges of the past. In fact, many Afrofuturist visions don’t do that and the relationship between Afrofuturism and museums is more fraught in pop culture than implied by these rooms.

 

For instance, think of the scene in the 2018 film Black Panther when Killmonger liberates an African artifact held by a western museum, immediately using it. Or even more analogously, consider how Janelle Monae’s music video for Q.U.E.E.N. from 2013 explicitly features time-traveling rebels “frozen in suspended animation” in a “living museum” who break free of these bonds, perhaps the opposite of the premise of the Afrofuturist rooms currently on display on Museum Mile.

 

Thus, these rooms seem like they are explicitly looking for ways that museums could take part in a Afrofuturist vision. Instead of seeing the museum as the pillaging colonizing force, or a symbol of stultifying repression, the Cooper Hewitt and the Met want to see themselves, and their roles as museums, in more positive ways. Both of their Afrofuturist rooms, therefore, have the effect of putting the museum’s role on a kind of pedestal by imagining the protagonists of their Afrofuturist visions engaging in museum behavior, a “cool” way to see curatorship, and a way to see curatorship as cool.

 

If the video for Q.U.E.E.N. might be said to be Afrofuturism for musicians, both the new immersive rooms at the Cooper Hewitt and the Met might be said to be Afrofuturism for museums.

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Museums or museum spaces you’d highlight?]

November 27, 2021: November 2021 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

November 1: Action Figures: John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart: A series inspired by Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday kicks off with the film that complicates two Hollywood lives and legacies.

November 2: Action Figures: Gordon Parks and Shaft: The series continues with how one of our greatest artists helps us analyze the problems and possibilities of Blaxsploitation.

November 3: Action Figures: Charles Bronson and Death Wish: On Bronson’s birthday, one famous contemporary legacy of his watershed role, and a surprising 21stcentury echo.

November 4: Action Figures: Arnie and Sly: What differentiated the 80s action superstars and one important parallel, the series shoots on.

November 5: Action Figures: Black Widow: The series concludes with how the recent Marvel film echoes yet also revises a frustrating longstanding action trope.

November 6-7: Crowd-sourced Action Figures: The latest installment of one of my favorite parts of the blog, crowd-sourced weekend posts!

November 8-12: 11 Years of AmericanStudying!: Speaking of favorite parts of blogging, another is thinking about all that’s been part of this space over its now 11+ years!

November 13-14: 11th Anniversary Tributes: And even better than that is paying tribute to the folks who have inspired my work here, like the four family members I highlighted in this post.

November 15: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: The Women Who Began It: A series on an important 65th anniversary kicks off with the Montgomery women & activism that truly launched the boycott.

November 16: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Rosa Parks: The series continues with the many layers to Parks before, during, and after the boycott.

November 17: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Three More Key Figures: A trio of vital bus boycott figures beyond Parks and MLK, as the series marches on.

November 18: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: King’s Book: A specific and an overarching significance to MLK’s first book, a history of the boycott.

November 19: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Aftermaths: The series concludes with important victories, and horrific backlash, and the importance of remembering both.

November 20-21: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: 21st Century Legacies and Echoes: A special weekend post on three lessons from Montgomery for our own moment.

November 22-26: Indigenous Voices for the Harvest Festival’s 400thAnniversary: For the 400th anniversary of “the First Thanksgiving,” a special post highlighting Wampanoag & indigenous voices & communities we should all listen to, this year more than ever.

Guest Post later today,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

November 22-26, 2021: Indigenous Voices for the Harvest Festival’s 400th Anniversary

This fall marks the 400th anniversary of the 1621 Harvest Festival that Americans have long referred to as “the first Thanksgiving.” I can think of no better way to commemorate that complex occasion than by expressing my gratitude to a handful of the many indigenous voices and communities that have helped me better remember and understand Native American histories and stories.

1)      Linda Coombs: I’ve had the chance to work with and learn from Linda since the 2011 New England American Studies Association Conference at Plymouth Plantation, and am still learning from her through our work together on America the Atlas this year. In my experience, there’s no voice, historian, scholar, activist, and community member who has more to tell us about the histories, identities, and ongoing story of the Wampanoag than Linda. 

2)      The Aquinnah Cultural Center: While Linda lives and works in the Cape Cod indigenous community of Mashpee (on which more in a moment), she is a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard, and has worked quite a bit over the years at the tribe’s Aquinnah Cultural Center (also known as the Aquinnah Wampanoag Indian Museum, and located near the historic Gay Head cliffs and lighthouse). I don’t know any space, in-person or online, that has more to tell us about the tribes and their histories and culture.

3)      Dawnland Voices: Much of what I’d want to say about the wonderful Dawnland Voices anthology (now also an evolving website) was said by my friend and the project’s editor Siobhan Senier in that hyperlinked Guest Post. It can feel at times difficult to connect with the voices and perspectives of pre-contact indigenous communities (including the Wampanoag), in part because much of what was published for many centuries came from (or at the very least was filtered by) European American arrivals and cultures. But Dawnland Voices has helped change all that, and as a result is a truly must-read text and collection of voices.

4)      The Wampanoag Homesite: After a few years when I spent quite a bit of time at and around that Plimoth Plantation (now renamed Plimoth Patuxet), both because of my 2011 NEASA Conference and because both boys went there on 4th grade field trips, I haven’t had the chance to get down there in a while (not , in fact). So I’m not sure whether and how they’ve continued to develop my favorite element, the Wampanoag Homesite. But I sure hope that visitors (post-COVID, at least) can continue to learn from the indigenous performers and historians who share Wampanoag and other cultural and communal histories, information, and present realities at that vital interpretative space.

5)      Mashpee: I’ve written a lot, in this space and elsewhere, about the complex and vital histories of the Mashpee community, as well as their ongoing 21stcentury battle for sovereignty and survival. It’s that final subject that I want to emphasize once more here: the Mashpee Wampanoag, like the Aquinnah Wampanoag and every other indigenous tribe and nation, are entirely present in our 21st century American society, in its political and social divisions and debates, and in our overarching identity and community. All the more reason to listen to and learn from these voices and resources.

May you all have a restful, rejuvenative, and thoughtful Thanksgiving holiday! November Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Other indigenous voices you’d share?

November 20-21, 2021: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: 21st Century Legacies & Echoes

[November 13th marked the 65th anniversary of a key moment in the unfolding history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of layers to that Civil Rights Movement activism, leading up to this weekend post on 21st century legacies and echoes!]

On three lessons from Montgomery for our own moment.

1)      Boycotts: It seems to me that in recent years boycotts have often come to feel like an expression of overblown consumer anger for unnecessary or at least silly reasons—people burning all their Nike gear in response to the Colin Kaepernick ad campaign, to cite just one example. But while any form of protest and activism can have its more extreme and/or unhelpful versions, those are not in any way a reason to dismiss the entire concept. And at their best, boycotts offer a crucial means through which communities can use the power of the pocketbook to highlight, challenge, and hopefully counter failures and injustices, not just from corporations but for the systems that they’re part of. Montgomery exemplifies those possibilities and should inspire us to keep using boycotts when and how we can.

2)      Domestic Terrorism: I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about the white supremacist campaign of sniping/shootings against the newly integrated buses in December 1956 (which I discussed at greater length in Friday’s post), but I also believe that that shame is very much all of ours. Virtually all of the white supremacist domestic terrorism that has marred the last two centuries of American life (yes, going back well before the Civil War) remains entirely absent from our collective memories and narratives. Indeed, I can think of few ironies more ironic than the fact that nearly all of American society for the last two decades has been influenced by fears and narratives around “terrorism,” yet we apparently remain almost entirely unable to confront the reality that it is white supremacist domestic terrorism which has always been, and remains to this day, the most destructive form.

3)      Education: Earlier this month I was one of many folks who wrote about the ongoing debates around racism and anti-racism, “Critical Race Theory,” and American education (for many of the other great pieces and voices, see this Twitter thread). There are various factors in that current debate, including the last two years’ school closures and the related question of parental involvement in education. But it’s impossible to separate that debate from the argument, which we’ve seen from numerous state legislatures among other quarters, that teaching histories of race and racism is somehow destructive or even un-American. I hope it goes without saying that I could not possibly disagree more, and I would say Montgomery provides a perfect case in two counterpoints: that the histories of racism and racist violence on the one hand and inspiring alternatives and activisms on the other are at the heart of American history and of how and what we should teach, learn, remember, and engage if we have any chance of moving forward together.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

November 19, 2021: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Aftermaths

[November 13th marked the 65th anniversary of a key moment in the unfolding history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that Civil Rights Movement activism, leading up to a weekend post on 21st century legacies and echoes!]

On important victories, horrific backlash, and the importance of remembering both.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott ended with a pair of court decisions that were in their own way just as important to the early Civil Rights Movement as Brown v. Board. On June 5, 1956, a federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s racial segregation on buses was unconstitutional; the state appealed the decision, and on November 13th of the same year (the anniversary which inspired this entire week’s series of posts) the United States Supreme Court upheld the ruling. Perhaps the precedent of Brown would have inevitably, eventually undermined racial segregation in all areas and forms—but given that prior decision’s education-specific focus, it’s at least fair to say that subsequent cases which addressed racial segregation more broadly were necessary and crucial in the lead up to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And given the central significance of transportation to both the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the Supreme Court’s support for that discriminatory system, it’s quite poetic that it was buses which provided the vehicle for this crucial legal victory.

Buses also became one of many sites of immediate and horrifically violent white supremacist backlash to these legal victories, however. Desegregated buses began operating in the city on December 20th, and over the following week snipers shot at multiple buses; the first shootings apparently and fortunately yielded no casualties, but on December 28thsnipers badly wounded 22 year old Rosa Jordan, a pregnant African American woman traveling on an integrated bus. That violence was complemented by other domestic terrorist attacks in the city over the same period, including a December 23rd shotgun blast through Martin Luther King Jr’s front door and the January 10th, 1957 bombings of four Black churches and the homes of both Ralph Abernathy and Reverend Robert S. Graetz, one of the city’s most prominent white allies of the boycott. The Montgomery City Commission suspended all bus service for three weeks after those bombings; while the integrated buses eventually resumed operation, the white supremacist violence likewise continued, including the January 23rdlynching of 24 year old Willie Edwards by members of the city’s Ku Klux Klan.

Beyond the simple and crucial fact that they all happened, there’s another reason to better remember both these victories and these horrors in the aftermath of the boycott: they complicate a pair of overly simplified and interconnected narratives of the Civil Rights Movement. One of those narratives boils the movement down to singular figures and moments—especially MLK and “I Have a Dream,” but also for example Rosa Parks (and an inaccurate vision of her at that, as I highlighted Tuesday). The other emphasizes too fully the inspiring and unifying sides to those figures and moments, and in so doing downplays the ongoing backlash, violence, and domestic terrorism with which white supremacist America met the movement, in its own era and for the half-century since. The harder and more meaningful truth of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement alike was that its victories were hard-won and multi-layered, fraught and fragile, part of the longstanding and evolving battle between inclusion and exclusion, mythic and critical patriotism, the best and worst of America. We’re not gonna get anywhere until we can remember all those layers to our histories, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott is a vital case in point.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sides to this history or histories like it you’d highlight? 

November 18, 2021: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: King’s Book

[November 13th marked the 65th anniversary of a key moment in the unfolding history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that Civil Rights Movement activism, leading up to a weekend post on 21st century legacies and echoes!]

On a more specific and a more overarching significance to Martin Luther King Jr’s first book.

As I shared earlier in this week’s series, I’ve written a couple different pieces for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column about the Montgomery bus boycott, and my central goal in both has been to push beyond some of the most familiar collective memories of that moment and early Civil Rights Movement activism. Certainly there’s more to the story of Rosa Parks than the familiar narratives generally capture; but similarly, the boycott is often framed as an early example of King’s leadership, while in truth his role was entirely that of a supporting figure, arriving to bolster the already underway and impressive efforts of local leaders like Parks and her colleagues (many of them women, as I also highlighted in those pieces). King did give an early December speech at the city’s Holt Street Baptist Church that powerfully expressed the boycott’s origins and goals, but (to reiterate one of my main points from Monday’s post and really for this whole week’s series) to focus too much of our attention on that speech is to miss quite a bit of the more multi-layered histories of this crucial event.

Interestingly, one of the texts that can most effectively help us push beyond those more narrow and partial histories of the boycott was also authored by King: his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Because King had become so closely associated with the boycott, publishers began approaching him to write a book about it, and in October 1957 he signed a contract with Harper & Brothers for the manuscript that would become Stride. Although by 1957-8 King was already hugely prominent as an individual voice and leader of the evolving movement, he saw this first book of his as far more of a collective history than a personal memoir, calling it in its Preface “the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.” As such, Stride is a text that help us understand not just the details and stages of the boycott, but also some of the ways in which those who organized and took part in it perceived their efforts, making it a striking and significant combination of a primary and a secondary source.

That specific historical and analytical lens makes King’s book well worth a read, but it’s not the only significant layer to Stride Toward Freedom. Roughly halfway through, in the book’s sixth chapter “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King takes a step back to consider his own arc and influences when it comes to that philosophy of nonviolent activism and civil disobedience, writing publicly for one of the first times about such what he had learned from figures as Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and others. As with every other aspect of King’s life and legacy, his ideas about those topics have been at best simplified and often misrepresented over the years since, especially by conservatives who seek to claim that they are the true descendants of King and his movement. Fortunately, King left a rich archive through which we can engage his own perspective and ideas, about specific histories like the bus boycotts, overarching concepts like nonviolence and civil disobedience, and most every other aspect of his work and the movement, and this chapter in Stride represents an early and important piece within that collection.

Last bus boycott layer tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sides to this history or histories like it you’d highlight? 

November 17, 2021: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Three More Key Figures

[November 13th marked the 65th anniversary of a key moment in the unfolding history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that Civil Rights Movement activism, leading up to a weekend post on 21st century legacies and echoes!]

On a trio of vital bus boycott figures beyond Rosa Parks (and MLK, on whom more tomorrow):

1)      Claudette Colvin: After more than a half-century of frustrating erasure, in recent years we’ve started to collectively remember a bit more fully the young woman who undertook first the same civil rights protest as Parks, and who was deemed unsuitable for national attention because she was pregnant. Yet as the first hyperlink above reflects, collective memory isn’t nearly enough, not when Colvin continues to be defined and limited by the criminal record attached to that brave activism. She needs our full support, as the American hero she was and is.

2)      E.D. Nixon: Women like Colvin, Parks, and the others about whom I wrote in Monday’s linked article were the true originators of the boycott. But the labor movement played a key role in launching and amplifying that civil rights protest, and spearheading that interconnected labor activism was Nixon, president of the Montgomery branch of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union. MLK called Nixon “a symbol of the hopes and aspirations of the long oppressed people of the State of Alabama,” and through his creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) Nixon became just as practically influential as he was symbolically meaningful.

3)      Ralph Abernathy: The Baptist pastor Abernathy was King’s closest friend and ally throughout the years of the Civil Rights Movement, and had worked to link a network of Baptist churches to the movement since the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but it was with the boycott that he really came into his own as a leading activist and advocate for that movement. I love this story from the first hyperlinked post above, so will share it in full to conclude today’s post: “While King emphasized the philosophical implications of nonviolence and the movement, Abernathy helped energize the people into positive action. ‘Now,’ he would tell the audience following King’s address, ‘Let me tell you what that means for tomorrow morning.’”

Next bus boycott layer tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sides to this history or histories like it you’d highlight? 

November 16, 2021: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Rosa Parks

[November 13th marked the 65th anniversary of a key moment in the unfolding history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that Civil Rights Movement activism, leading up to a weekend post on 21st century legacies and echoes!]

I apologize for linking to Saturday Evening Postcolumns for two posts in a row, but in truth most everything I’d want to say about Rosa Parks, during but also before and after her vital role in the bus boycott (which went way beyond keeping her seat on the bus)y, I said in this December 2020 column on the 65th anniversary of her civil disobedience. So once again I’ll ask you to check out that column if you could, to see all the layers to this activist and legend around and so far beyond Montgomery in 1955-56. Thanks!

Next bus boycott layer tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sides to this history or histories like it you’d highlight?  

November 15, 2021: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: The Women Who Began It

[November 13th marked the 65th anniversary of a key moment in the unfolding history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that Civil Rights Movement activism, leading up to a weekend post on 21st century legacies and echoes!]

For the second piece for my Saturday Evening PostConsidering History column, nearly four years ago now, I wrote about the #MeToo movement against sexual assault and racial violence that really began the Montgomery Bus Boycott (and thus helped launch the Civil Rights Movement). Rather than reprint the whole thing here, I’ll ask you to check out that piece, thanks! [I will add here what I made clear there as well, that that column was entirely indebted to Danielle McGuire’s fabulous book At the Dark End of the Street.]

Next bus boycott layer tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Sides to this history or histories like it you’d highlight?  

November 13-14, 2021: 11th Anniversary Tributes

Last year, I paid anniversary tribute to a number of folks who had made my first 10 years of blogging so great, from individuals like Irene Martyniuk and Rob Velella to groups of people like Guest Posters and crowd-sourced post posters to, well, you! I still thank all of those folks, but this year wanted to go in a different, familial direction for my anniversary tributes, highlighting one thing about each of the four fellow writers that most inspires me in my work here (and everywhere):

1)      Dad: One thing I really love about my Dad’s scholarly writing has been that he’s never afraid to bring his own perspective and opinions in, clearly and engagingly. So much academic and scholarly writing is afraid of the writer’s perspective (hence that stupid rule about avoiding personal pronouns, which I don’t follow and you shouldn’t either)—blogging has thoroughly cured me of that fear, but I had a great model for doing so in the collected works of Steve Railton.

2)      Mom: One thing I really love about my Mom’s evolving creative writing career has been her willingness to rethink, rework, and revise. Writing is so intensely personal that, for many if not most of us, revision can feel like a painfully invasive process (there’s a reason why the phrase “kill your darlings” exists). But it doesn’t have to, not if we recognize that it’s all about making our writing communicate in all the ways we most want it to. I’m not saying it’s been easy for her, but my Mom has modeled consistent and very effective revisions, and as I’ve worked to make that more a part of my work here, I’ve been inspired quite a bit by that model.  

3)      Aidan: Writing seems to come very naturally to my older son (guess those multi-generational genes are doing their thing), and there’s a lot about his voice and style that inspire me. But one thing that’s been part of his writing from a very early age has been his sense of humor—a sense of humor that is also at least in part inherited from his Dad, but that, I will freely admit, I struggled in the blog’s early years to include in my writing and posts here (as in all my early scholarly writing). If I’ve been able to bring my sense of humor more into the blog over the last few years, as I hope and believe I have, inspiration from Aidan’s consistently witty writing has been a key reason why.

4)      Kyle: My younger son is as much of a perfectionist about writing as he is about everything in his life, which is the source of his prodigious talents in so many areas but also the source of much frustration for him. Watching him work so hard to come up with a perfect topic for a paper or piece of writing, when I know he’s already got a ton of great ideas bubbling around his amazing brain, can be a tough one for his Dad. But at the same time, Kyle never settles, never does anything that he doesn’t really commit to and give his all, and I hope and believe I’ve brought that same philosophy to this blog and all its (less than perfect but very heartfelt) topics and ideas over the years.

Here’s to the next 11 years! Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do: say hi!