Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 141

April 15, 2021: Latin American Invasions: Panama

[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]

On what it would mean to truly grapple with our history of alliances with dictators.

In this post from almost exactly two years ago, on the anniversary of the famous toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, I wrote at length about the history of American relationships to brutal dictators. I likewise dealt with those histories in this Saturday Evening Post column on America’s longstanding and complex relationship to a neighboring nation to Saddam’s Iraq, Iran. Those Middle Eastern nations and histories are of course far from the only ones that feature American alliances with dictators—indeed, from South Vietnam to South Africa to South America, the history of American foreign policy in the 20thcentury is dominated by such cozy relationships with brutal regimes and leaders. And perhaps nowhere and in no period is that history more prominent than in the Caribbean and Central America in the second half of the 20th century, as the bogeyman of Communism led the United States into alliance after alliance with some of the period’s most violent and horrific dictatorial leaders and governments (many of them, indeed, trained at the School of the Americas).

For more than three decades, Panama’s Manuel Noriega was simply another one of those allies. Noriega trained at the School of the Americas in the 1950s and became a CIA asset in that same era, and he would remain in that role for more than 30 years, much of it spent as chief of military intelligence in the brutal regime of President Omar Torrijos. When Torrijos died in 1981, Noriega took over as president, and seems to have brought even more blatant illegality to his administration, all while remaining an asset and ally of the United States. It was only when the U.S. learned toward the decade’s end that Noriega likewise had relationships with other nations and their intelligence agencies (and with drug traffickers, but I would argue that it was much more the former that truly offended the CIA) that the relationship began to sour. In 1988 federal grand juries in Florida indicted Noriega on racketeering, money laundering, and drug trafficking charges; he naturally refused extradition, and the George H.W. Bush administration took that opportunity to invade Panamain late December 1989. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the invasion as a “flagrant violation of international law,” but it succeeded at capturing Noriega and installing a new U.S. ally, Guillermo Endara, as the new president in his place.

Noriega was a dictator and criminal, and Endara seems to have represented a real change, a leader who truly sought to bring democracy to Panama. Yet any explanation of the U.S. invasion which focuses on that democratizing effect needs to grapple with the inarguable fact that for the prior decade of Noriega’s rule—and the prior two decades of Torrijos’—the United States maintained an alliance with the nation’s dictatorial regime instead. It was the relationship, rather than our commitment to democracy, which changed (a sentence which could be applied quite similarly to the Bush administration’s other foreign war, with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). None of that makes the goal of a more democratic Panama any less meaningful—but that story should both center on figures like Endara and feature the United States as a longstanding opponent of democratization. Until we can truly begin to grapple with that American role around the world, for at least the entire second half of the 20thcentury (and, as this week’s series reflects, well before that), our sense of both U.S. and global history will remain partial at best and blatantly propagandistic at worst.

Last InvasionStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?

April 14, 2021: Latin American Invasions: Granada

[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]

On fictional and symbolic wars, on and off the big screen.

One of the most interesting and telling trends in mid-1980s popular culture would have to be the constant presence of films in which the US (or at least its action hero proxies) fought and won fictional wars around the world. Some of those wars explicitly pitted the American forces against the Soviets, whether as guerrillas at home (as in Red Dawn[1984], when a group of teenagers led by Patrick Swayze manage to emerge victorious against the Soviet army), as superior military forces abroad (as in the climactic sequence of Top Gun [1986], when Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer take out a group of Russian fighters), or as all-natural boxing champs on Russian turf (as in Rocky 4 [1985], when Sly Stallone climbs some snowy mountains and gains enough strength to beat the Soviets’ drug-enhanced machine). But our filmic victories likewise extended to Central America (as in Schwarzenegger’s Commando [1985]), Afghanistan (Rambo 3 [1988]), and even Vietnam (Rambo 2 [1985] and Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action[1984]), the site of the humiliating defeat that certainly contributed to the need for these kinds of fictional victories. The latter two films, in which Stallone and Norris combine to kill roughly 32,281 Vietnamese soldiers during peacetime, make for a particularly salient double-feature, especially when paired and contrasted with the period’s two most famous films about the actual Vietnam War, Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Platoon(1988).

But it wasn’t only on the silver screen that the US was fighting and winning largely fictional but hugely symbolic wars. The decade’s one actual shooting war, the two-day 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, was to my mind at least as fabricated and stage-managed as the Hollywood conflicts of the next few years. I don’t intend in any way to downplay the experiences of the more than seven thousand American servicemen and -women who served in the conflict, and I most especially don’t want to elide the casualties (50 dead and 115 wounded on the American side, many more among both Grenadian forces and civilians) and the effects of those losses on numerous families and lives. At the ground level, to a significant extent and to the best of my knowledge, war is war, and I can neither speak for what it means for those who go through it nor argue that the experience of any war is more or less affecting and meaningful than any other. But from its tactical name of Operation Urgent Fury to its ostensible main purpose—to protect a group of American medical students who were studying at the island’s university—and many other details and elements, the rhetoric of the war seems comically out of balance with its realities, as if there was the actual invasion and then the narratives of the invasion, and the two bear only a casual relationship to one another at best.

That is of course my interpretation, and there’s plenty of primary source material (such as that in my hyperlinks) through which you can and should develop your own (if you’re interested). But no matter what happened on the ground in Grenada, an American Studies analysis of the war would have to take into account the legacy of the prior war in which the United States had been involved, the new kind of Cold War foreign policy that the Reagan Administration had sought to pursue (or at least the new tough-guy narratives of such policy that it had worked to create) over its first two and a half years in office, and the representations of war that would emerge in our popular culture just after this invasion. Moreover, it would be important to connect this particular attempt to unseat a revolutionary Latin American regime to the very different kind that the US government (or at least certain figures within it) would undertake a few years later in Nicaragua, where secret funds and support were provided to the Contras in their violent battle against the Sandinista regime; the two situations and nations were distinct in many ways, but it’s certainly possible that the very mixed international reception of the Grenada invasion (a United Nations resolution condemned it and Margaret Thatcher’s governmentprivately rebuked Reagan as well) led to the much more secretive and behind the scenes efforts in Nicaragua. All of which is to say, this highly minor war reflected, contributed to, and can help us perceive and analyze a great many broader narratives and trends in the period.

In part I’m trying here to reverse an existing scholarly argument, one which sees the wars fought in and after the 1990s (such as the invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War) as narrated and understood in significant measure through the lenses of Hollywood films, video games, and other pop culture materials. There’s certainly some truth to that, but it’s likewise true that many of those pop culture images of war emerged after the nation’s first truly media-friendly conflict, a war in which the urgency and fury could be found mostly in the name and the narratives, far from the small island toward which they were officially directed. Next InvasionStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?

April 13, 2021: Latin American Invasions: The School of the Americas

[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]

On three telling stages in the history of a longstanding, controversialUS government institution.

1)      The Latin American Ground School: In 1946 the U.S. government formed the Latin American Training Center-Ground Division (soon shortened to the Latin American Ground School) at Fort Amador in the Panama Canal Zone. The institution’s official purpose was to provide a location for “administrative tasks involved in training the increasing number of Latin Americans attending U.S. service schools in the Canal Zone,” and that certainly was a central function of the training center for its first couple decades (and remains one today, on which more below). But the 1946 origin point was far from coincidental, as from the beginning the center represented an overt attempt to use U.S. military and governmental power to push Latin America and the Western Hemisphere away from potential Soviet/communist influences. That would all become far more overt still after the 1959 Cuban revolution, as illustrated by President Kennedy’s 1961 order that the center teach tactics “to thwart armed communist insurgencies.”

2)      The School of the Americas: Just two years after Kennedy’s order, the center’s name was formally changed to the “U.S. Army School of the Americas,” and the official language of instruction was changed to Spanish. Those steps would seem to reflect an increasing emphasis on Latin American communities and audiences, and yet over the next few years, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and military personnel would train at the school. They did so as part of the Jungle Operations Committee and Course, a program which utilized the school’s setting to train soldiers and personnel destined for the unfolding war in Vietnam. At the same time, elements of the Vietnam conflict influenced the trainings offered at the school, including (according to both historians and former instructors like Major Joseph Blair), illegal subjects such as torture and assassination. The school’s relationship with dictators and death squads had long been a fraught one, but it was during this 1960s moment that such emphases (for US soldiers as well as Latin American students) seem to have been formalized and amplified.  

3)      The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC): Due in no small part to the long-developing controversies over such programs and practices, and in particular to 1990s Congressional debates over whether to defund and close the school entirely, in 2001 the school’s name was once again changed, this time to WHINSEC. The question of whether anything else has changed is an open one: Blair has argued that “there are no substantive changes besides the name”; while researcher Ruth Blakeleyhas concluded that after the change “a much more rigorous human rights training program was in place than in any other US military institution.” That debate is of course a crucial one, but in any case it is telling that this institution has continued to exist into the age of the “war on terror,” and that is has clearly exerted a significant ongoing influence over the hemisphere (more than 19,000 Latin American students have trained at WHINSEC since the name change).

Next InvasionStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?

April 12, 2021: Latin American Invasions: Nicaragua

[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]

On two conflicts that are all too representative, and how to remember them specifically nonetheless.

In one of the many snarky and pointed footnotes in his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), Junot Díaz (or perhaps his narrator Yunior, as it’s never quite clear who authors those footnotes and cases can be made for either man) writes, of the 1965-1966 U.S. invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic (on which more in this weekend’s Guest Post!), that “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.” The same could be said of many other 20th century U.S. occupations, including another of the Dominican Republic (between 1916 and 1924), a handful of occupations of Cuba between the Spanish American War and the Communist Revolution, and of course the South Asian conflicts in both the Philippines and (most famously and most frequently compared to Iraq) Vietnam. Indeed, few histories seem as consistently central to the American Century as the occupying, conflicted, controversial, enduring presence of U.S. military forces around the globe.

In many ways, the 1909-1910and 1912-1925 U.S. occupations of Nicaragua simply exemplify those enduring histories. Just look at some of the quotes from those relevant years on the Stanford timeline at that first link: “U.S. troops impose a puppet government”; the puppet ruler “requests U.S. military assistance to control civil unrest,” but “Nicaraguans resist U.S. occupation and the national hero, Benjamin Zeledón, dies”; as a result of their presence in the nation “the U.S. acquires the right to build” canals and naval bases there, “provoking anti-North American sentiment and guerilla warfare in Nicaragua, and eliciting protests from other Central American countries”; “when U.S. forces withdraw, rebellions ensue; the marines return to quell the disturbances”; and so on and so forth. Four different presidents, from both parties, led the U.S. during those decades, but in Nicaragua, as in so many other places around the world before and since, the story remained the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as our French friends (no strangers to 20thcentury international occupations themselves, of course) might put it.

Yet at the same time, lumping all such international occupations together is a limited and ultimately problematic thing to do: for lots of reasons, but mostly because it reduces these specific situations and histories, and even more so these individual nations and communities, to interchangeable parts of an ongoing pattern. Take Benjamin Zeledón, for example, the lawyer, politican, and military leader who was killed by U.S. Marines in 1912, at the age of 33, while leading the fight to depose the U.S.-backed (and perceived U.S. puppet) President Adolfo Díaz. Zeledón seems to have a great deal in common with José Martí, but with one crucial difference: Martí led Cuba’s fight against Spanish occupation, aligning him with the U.S. (as did his prior years of exile in America); while Zeledón’s battle was against U.S. occupiers and their Nicaraguan allies. Perhaps that’s one reason why nearly all of the web pieces I could find on Zeledón, including the two to which I’ve linked above, are written in Spanish; remembering this man and his story, including it in our U.S. histories, would force us to think about the effects of our Nicaraguan occupations in a tangible and unsettling way. I’d say it’s long past time we did so.

Next InvasionStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?

April 10-11, 2021: NeMLA Recaps: Virtual Conferences

[A couple weeks back, NeMLA held our 52ndannual—and first entirely virtual—convention. So this week I’ve highlighted a handful of the convention’s stand-out remote events, leading up to these broader reflections on virtual conferences.]

On what a virtual conference can’t quite do, what it can, and what the combination might mean moving forward.

I’ve written many times before, most clearly in this post, on all that NeMLA has meant and continues to mean to me. As I hope that post illustrates, if I were to sum that decade-plus of connections to NeMLA up in a single word, it would be “community,” with all that the term connotes in the most practical and the most idealized senses. If any organization could convey such communal warmth and solidarity in an all-virtual setting, it would be NeMLA, and I definitely felt that community at various moments throughout the conference, particularly in conversations before and around events (such as Grace Sanders Johnson’s Special Event as I highlighted in Tuesday’s post). But what can’t really happen at a virtual conference is the more spontaneous expressions of that community—running into folks in the exhibit hall, seeing an old friend at a panel, the receptions after such Special Events, and so on. I missed those a lot, and very much hope to return to them in 2022 in Baltimore.

At the same time, NeMLA 2021 felt accessible in ways that none of those decade-plus prior conferences had. One of my panelists took part in our session from his home in Kuwait; I chatted with a CV clinic mentee who was in India at the time; both speakers and audience members spoke of being able to come to sessions right after parenting or teaching or fulfilling other parts of our lives and obligations; and so on. As I understand it, this conference had significantly more attendees than we have ever had before (at least in recent memory), and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was the virtual format which made it possible for many of those folks to join us, to add their voices and work to our NeMLA community. Given that expanding that community has been one of my most consistent goals in my work on the NeMLA Board, from my time on the presidency track through my now-concluded service as the American Area Director, I have to admit that I love the thought that, even amidst everything happening here in 2021, we were able to add so many folks to our NeMLA family (while, from what I can tell, keeping many of the folks who have been part of prior conferences in the fold).

I’m not on the Board any more, so my thoughts about future conferences are just that: thoughts, the perspective of someone who plans to stay connected to the organization and conference but will have no direct say in their directions moving forward. But speaking for myself, I’ll say that I very much hope NeMLA 2022 will be in-person but can still feature virtual/remote options for attendees as well, to keep building on those accessibility advances for those who need them, while returning for as many folks as possible to the communal experience in its fullest form. To be honest, that feels to me like the future of academic conferences: a hybrid, multi-layered event that can be different things to different people, bringing folks together both in-person and virtually. I know that balance might not be easy, and again I can’t say for sure what NeMLA will do; but it feels to me like a great goal through which to incorporate these positive developments while still doing all that NeMLA has done so well for so long.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on either NeMLA 2021 or virtual conferences overall?

April 9, 2021: NeMLA Recaps: A Few Other Highlights

[A couple weeks back, NeMLA held our 52ndannual—and first entirely virtual—convention. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the convention’s stand-out remote events, leading up to some broader reflections on virtual conferences.]

I had the chance to attend a number of other great NeMLA 2021 sessions as an audience member. Here are a few more AmericanStudies-related highlights:

1)      Writing History in 18th and 19thCentury Women’s Writing: This excellent panel was organized by my twitter friend Kait Tonti, who also presented brilliantly on the late 18th century Quaker poet Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin’s complex poetic engagements with George Washington’s legacies. While I had never heard of Schieffelin before Kait’s awesome talk, the other two presentations offered an opposite and equally stimulating effect: opening up compelling new angles on familiar authors and histories, Mary Balkun on Phillis Wheatley and the Revolution, and Gailanne Mackenzie on Emily Dickinson’s domestic quarantine (and our own!).

2)      Creative Anxiety in the Works of Shirley Jackson: This panel was personal, in the best sense: Kaitlynn Chase, one of our most talented Fitchburg State English Studies alums, presented a wonderful paper on Eleanor Vance in Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. But while I was there to cheer on Kaitlynn, I also learned a great deal from the other presenters: Chris McComb on Jackson’s dualities of identity and voice; Alessandra Occhiolini on disability in We Have Always Lived in the Castle; and Kelly Suprenanton humanity, community, and the end of the world. A great example of how single-author sessions still have so much to offer!

3)      Discourses of Asian American Literature and Studies: As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, expanding and diversifying the American, Transnational, and Diaspora Area has been my central goal over the last few years; so I was very glad to see sessions like this one, and hope they can continue and grow into 2022 and beyond. This roundtable featured five wonderful presenters on the past, present, and future of Asian American Studies (in and out of the classroom): Proma Chowdhury on Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman; Shannon I-Hsien Lee on racial ambiguity and in-betweenness; EnShu Robin Liao on redesigning courses and curricula; Leland Tabareson nerds, weirdos, and anti-racist solidarities; and Xiaobo Wang on Chinese American women’s transnational struggles. Please propose more such sessions for NeMLA 2022, all, and keep all these great conversations going!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. If you took part in NeMLA 2021, reflections you’d share?

April 8, 2021: NeMLA Recaps: Three More of My Chaired Sessions

[A couple weeks back, NeMLA held our 52ndannual—and first entirely virtual—convention. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the convention’s stand-out remote events, leading up to some broader reflections on virtual conferences.]

As part of my final NeMLA as the American Literature and Transnational Studies Area Director, I had the chance to chair six wonderful sessions. So for yesterday’s and today’s posts I’ve briefly highlighted those posts and the awesome presenters who made them go:

1)      Teaching Native American Lit: One of my main goals during my time as Area Director was to expand and diversify our conference conversations, and Native American lit & studies was one of the disciplines I most wanted to amplify. This truly wonderful conversation illustrated just how much we all have to learn when it comes to teaching and studying that discipline, featuring great presentations from Lisbeth Fuisz on rhetorical sovereignty in the classroom, Farhana Islamon using visual images to teach earlier lit, Catherine Umolac on residential school memoirs and archives, and Ron Welburn (one of the scholars and teachers from whom I’ve learned the most in my own career) on adding Eastern and Southern voices and tribes into our conversations.

2)      Racism and Antiracism in American Culture: This panel’s topic was so big, and so timely, that it featured six presenters, each adding a key lens into our crucial conversations about how we read, study, analyze, teach, and talk about these vital 2021 questions. Those six were: Curtis Browneon Afropessimism and Native Son; Alex Davison The Flintstones and white fantasies of temporality; Sydney Delaneyon four artistic re-visions of race and female objectivity; Mitchell Gauvinon Olaudah Equiano’s identities and transformations; John Hadlock on New Negro Romantic poetry; and Kenneth Sammond on teaching the long Civil Rights Movement with visual images. While I was deeply inspired by every panel I got to chair (and attend), this and the teaching Native American lit roundtable were two of the three that most inspired my own continued teaching and public scholarship.

3)      Speculative Art in Dark Times: And this was the third such inspiring panel. I proposed this session in March 2020, when my Intro to Sci Fi and Fantasy class suffered the same abrupt shifts and disruptions of the rest of the world in that month. As we tried to navigate the rest of that chaotic semester, I thought a lot about what fantastic lit and culture can offer us in such moments. I’m still thinking about that a year later, and so too were these four wonderful presenters and talks: Brent Young on realism and fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut; Jason Bartles on the ambiguous utopias of Ursula Le Guin and Angélica Gorodischer; Jess Flarity on 1930s fantastic fascisms in Sinclair Lewis and Karel Ĉapek; and Michael Torregrossa on appropriations of Arthuriana in times of national crisis. Whatever our future holds here in 2021, I believe that both fantastic culture and scholarly voices like these can help us move into more thoughtfully and successfully.

Last recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you took part in NeMLA 2021, reflections you’d share?

April 7, 2021: NeMLA Recaps: Three of my Chaired Sessions

[A couple weeks back, NeMLA held our 52ndannual—and first entirely virtual—convention. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the convention’s stand-out remote events, leading up to some broader reflections on virtual conferences.]

As part of my final NeMLA as the American Literature and Transnational Studies Area Director, I had the chance to chair six wonderful sessions. So for the next two posts I’ll briefly highlight those posts and the awesome presenters who made them go:

1)      Literary Philly: NeMLA 2021 would have been in Philadelphia if it were in-person, so I had proposed a session on Philadelphia authors and texts. Even though we went virtual, it was still great to hear these takes on more than two centuries of Philly-adjacent literature, from Brian Shieldson Charles Brockden Brown and Andrew Rimby on Walt Whitman to Jennifer McClinton-Temple on Joe Queenan and AmericanStudies Guest Blogger Robin Field on Susan Muaddi Darraj (I also added a brief shout-out to David Bradley). Made me miss my former city, but also made me appreciate all that Philadelphia has contributed to the evolving literatures, cultures, stories, and histories of the U.S.

2)      1776, 1619, and 2021: Defining American Identity: This was another session I initially proposed with Philly in mind, but of course over the last year 1776 has come to be much more broadly associated with particular, often conservative narratives of American origin points, in direct contrast to the 1619 Project. So these five awesome presentations were very salient to our 2021 conversations, as well as our foundational debates over American identity; they featured Lea Borenstein on Black cowboys past and present, Ben Crace on Hillbilly Elegy, Gary Grieve-Carlson on the Puritans and foundational divisions, Tamara Hammondon racism and resistance across our histories, and Ariana Potichnyj on Ben Franklin and Revolutionary traumas.

3)      Sexualities in US Latinx and Latin American Culture: Two of my chaired sessions were ones that I didn’t myself propose but had the chance to chair, and from which I learned a great deal about their compelling topics. This session, the first I’ve attended that featured presentations in Spanish as well as English, featured three great papers on boundary-busting performances of sexuality across cultural works and genres: Alexandra Algaze Gonzalez on Bad Bunny; Lizet Gonzalez on Gloria Anzaldúa; and Mariana Ruiz Gonzalez on the Mexican rap battle tradition of the albur. I really hope that this NeMLA Area can truly live up to the Transnational Studies part of its name as we move forward, and this session was a great model of that ongoing work.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you took part in NeMLA 2021, reflections you’d share?

April 6, 2021: NeMLA Recaps: Grace Sanders Johnson’s Talk

[A couple weeks back, NeMLA held our 52ndannual—and first entirely virtual—convention. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the convention’s stand-out remote events, leading up to some broader reflections on virtual conferences.]

On one specific and one universal inspiration I took from a wonderful Special Event.

For this year’s American Literature & Transnational Studies Area Special Event, I partnered with the British and Global Anglophone Studies Area (and its current Director Thomas Lynn), the Diversity Caucus (and its current President Jennifer Mdurvwa) and the Women’s & Gender Studies Caucus (and its current President Tracee Howell). We were excited to feature as our speaker University of Pennsylvania Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Grace Sanders Johnson, and Professor Sanders Johnson did not disappoint: her talk “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle: Multi-modal and Eco-literacy Approaches to Transnational Feminist Research” was one of the most compelling I’ve ever heard at NeMLA (and that’s a competitive list!). She focused in particular on a Spring 2020 course that she team-taught at Penn with two colleagues, “Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships,” a class that used the topics of ships, boating, and water to engage with a wide and deep range of issues, histories, stories, texts, communities, and identities.

I can’t possibly do justice in this brief post to the layers of Sanders Johnson’s talk and topics, so I wanted to focus here instead on two layers to the manifold inspirations I took away from her talk (which is a key goal of any such Special Event, I’d say). One layer of inspiration was very specific, and was about teaching and pedagogy. I’m not gonna pretend that I’m planning (or able) to incorporate many of the unique and striking aspects of Sanders Johnson’s course, which included all of the students (and professors) using sewing machines to create pieces of a collective sail (a process that continued even after the class went virtual halfway through that chaotic Spring 2020 semester) and all of the students (and professors) acquiring Pennsylvania boating licenses, among other distinctive elements. Instead, the pedagogical inspiration I’m highlighting here is for an overall goal, one that I believe all us professors share but that I have to admit has felt largely absent over the last year: of creating a true classroom community, one in which all the students have clear stakes (not in terms of things like grades, but rather in terms of class meaning and effects for all of us). As I move forward, creating that kind of classroom community is going to have to take new strategies than what I’ve been used to, and Sanders Johnson offered some excellent inspiration for pursuing them.

That pedagogical and practical inspiration would have been plenty to make this Special Event deeply meaningful, but I also want to highlight a more universal inspiration I took away from Sanders Johnson’s talk. As the “eco-literacy” in her title suggests, Sanders Johnson presented both her talk and her class as direct engagements with and interventions in unfolding 21st century histories of climate change and crisis, and of their effects on our communities, near and far. In one of my 2020 year in review blog posts, I highlighted depression and inspiration as an interconnected pair of emotions that I feel almost constantly at the moment, for lots of reasons but most especially around the issue of climate change and its numerous, unfolding crises. Not gonna lie, depression is often the far stronger side of that coin when I think about these issues—but precisely for that reason, I focus as much as I can on ways of and reasons for finding inspiration, for at the very least engaging with what I and we can do. Sanders Johnson made a potent and convincing case for how our teaching, our work, our conversations, and our communities can and must recognize and engage with the stakes of our moment, and how doing so itself constitutes a form of activism—not the only one nor ultimately sufficient by itself, but part of the equation, and an inspiring part at that.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you took part in NeMLA 2021, reflections you’d share?

April 5, 2021: NeMLA Recaps: Opening Address and Keynote Event

[A couple weeks back, NeMLA held our 52ndannual—and first entirely virtual—convention. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the convention’s stand-out remote events, leading up to some broader reflections on virtual conferences.]

On two ways of thinking about creative and cultural work, and what connects them.

At the heart of Professor Jed Esty’s excellent opening night address, “Victorian Hollywood: The Dreamworlds of Anglo-American Power” (drawn from his current book in progress, Cold War Victorians: How the British Imagination Shaped American Power), was a compelling focus on a particular film: John Ford’s 1937 epic Wee Willie Winkie. This adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 short story (with a change in gender for the titular child protagonist in the film, in order to star nine-year-old Shirley Temple in one of her most dramatic roles and the one she called her favorite in her career) reflects the dynamics between colonizing English and colonized and resisting Indians in 19th century India in multi-layered and fraught ways. Esty paid thoughtful attention to the nuances of the film, but still made the case, as his talk’s title suggests, for how such Hollywood blockbusters not only depict but also contribute to mythic visions of colonialism, imperialism, and Anglo-American power around the world. In this vision, cultural texts like films do significant, and all too often destructive, work in our collective narratives.

As has been the case for the last few years, the convention’s second night featured an interview with and reading from the author of our collective NeMLA Reads Together book: novelist Jennifer Egan, whose historical novel Manhattan Beach (2017) had been our NeMLA Reads Together book for this year’s convention. In the course of her wide-ranging and engaging remarks, featuring a page from her hand-written notebook among many other highlights, Egan thoughtfully and self-reflectively presented the professional, personal, psychological, and public goals of an individual author and artist, making the case for how and why she has been interested in the themes and time periods about which she’s written, how her characters and stories illustrate different sides of her own life and perspective, her hopes to return to the world of her Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) as it and its characters have continued to speak to her, and more. In this vision, cultural works represent powerfully personal visions and identities, and their goal is to connect with audiences in similarly and relatedly personal and meaningful ways.

Of course a film (and one adapted from a previous work like a short story at that) is different from a novel, not only in medium and genre but in the role of the individual artist in creating it. Yet these two talks nonetheless seemed to offer quite distinct visions of creative and cultural works, one far more communal and world-historical, the other much more personal and identity-focused. Both of those frames are important to keep in mind, and ideally both could be applied to individual texts in order to create a multi-layered analysis of a text’s creation and purposes (as well as its textual details of course). But I would also add that there is at least one key feature that these distinct frames share: an emphasis on the power of cultural works, of the vital work that they can do, from our most intimate individual psyches to our broader collective narratives. Sometimes that work is more productive, sometimes it’s more destructive, and often it is both—but in any case, both of these compelling texts and voices can help us make the case for why creative and cultural works need our attention and analysis, and thus why conversations and communities like NeMLA’s are so important.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you took part in NeMLA 2021, reflections you’d share?