Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 154

November 14-15, 2020: Anniversary Acknowledgments

Following up the week’s 10th anniversary reflections, a few words of thanks and appreciation (not including my folks and my sons, whom I thank today as I do everyday!):

1)      Irene Martyniuk: I’m a big believer that we are and have to be our own first audience for a blog, especially in those early days when we can’t be sure that many other folks are reading. But even in the early days, and most every day since, my colleague and friend Irene has been not just a loyal AmericanStudies reader, but one who shares her own responses and ideas for many of my posts and series. I’ll go one step further: I don’t know if I would have kept the daily blogging going, certainly not in the early days and maybe not at some tougher points along the way, without Irene’s reading and responses. Thanks, Irene!

2)      Rob Velella: What we also need, especially in the early days of blogging, is peers and compatriots, folks who are doing their version of the same thing and with whom we can feel that sense of solidarity and community. No other public scholarly blog did that for me half as perfectly as Rob’s American Literary Blog; Rob and I came to realize we had a lot more in common and to build on than that, including the Massachusetts city of Waltham (Rob’s hometown) once I moved there in January 2013, but I’ll always be especially grateful to the American Literary Blog for helping show me the way, giving me another platform (and helping me give Rob one), and being such a great AmericanStudying blogging buddy. Thanks, Rob!

3)      Guest Posters: Both Irene and Rob have contributed Guest Posts to AmericanStudies, and they’re not alone; I’m now at more than 55 Guest Posts and counting! Some of them have come from old friends and even family members; others from longstanding colleagues, at FSU and beyond; and still others from folks I’ve not yet had the chance to meet in person. But no matter who they are, those Guest Posters have without exception contributed my favorite posts across this blog’s 10-year history. I always say that public scholarship is a form of teaching, and by that I don’t mean that I’m the authoritative voice at the front of the room; I mean that, like the best classrooms always are, it’s a conversation and a community. These 55+ folks have helped make sure that AmericanStudies is a wonderful, evolving and expanding version of both of those things. Thanks, Guest Posters!

4)      Crowd-Sourcers: My second favorite type of post are the crowd-sourced ones, which as you can see under that hyperlinked label now number more than 120. I love the chance to share so many voices and ideas in those posts, but I think I love even more the collecting of those contributions: putting out the call on Facebook and Twitter, and through the responses getting reminded of the many awesome folks, from every stage and side of my life and identity, to whom I’m connected. And those posts can serve both those purposes as long as this blog is online, the internet exists, society doesn’t crumble, etc.—they can continue to offer crowd-sourced suggestions on so many topics, and can continue to remind me of how lucky I am in my friends and communities. Thanks, Crowd-Sourcers!

5)      You (Yes, You): From what I can tell, as of late 2020 AmericanStudies gets between 400 and 500 discrete views a day. I highlight that number to say two things: as I’ve said many times before, I’d really love to hear from y’all, whether in comments here or by email, about what brought you here and what you found; but even if I never do, I want you to know that I’m profoundly appreciative that you’ve spent a bit of your time in this space with me. Thanks, you!

Back to our regular programming with a new series starting Monday,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

November 9-13, 2020: AmericanStudies’ 10th Anniversary and Online Public Scholarship

 [NOTE: I’ve written a lot of meta-posts over the years (so many that I decided to create a whole Label for such posts), but this is probably going to be the most meta one yet. But I think 10 years of daily AmericanStudying merits some reflection, in November 2020 more than ever.]

On where we’ve been, where we are, and where we go from here.

When I started this blog in early November of 2010, I know I had no idea what it would become, much less the countless places it would take me (which is really everywhere that my career has gone over this past decade, on which see the links to the right!). But I did know why I was starting it: the 2010 midterm elections, and my sense, through but also beyond them, that profoundly ahistorical and propagandistic voices like that of Glenn Beck and his “Beck University” were shaping our collective conversations about American history and identity. As I noted in that hyperlinked post, in April 2010 more than 50% of Tea Party folks had identified Beck as the person from whom they’d “learned the most about America,” and it felt quite clear to me that that horror was due not just to Beck’s influence and reach, but also and perhaps especially to the general abandonment of such public and public scholarly conversations by, y’know, actual scholars. There were prominent and successful individual exceptions (such as Kevin Levin, about whose blog and its influence on me I’ve written quite a bit in this space), however, and inspired by them I set about figuring out how I wanted to share my own scholarly voice, interests, ideas, and experiments in this online writing space.

As I write this post in mid-October 2020 (on the afternoon of Thursday, October 15th, to be exact; if I’m gonna get meta I might as well go all in), while so much about America and the world in this moment feels uncertain, there are a few things I know for sure, and one of them is this: public scholarship, and specifically online public scholarship, is no longer an exception—it’s the shared and stunningly successful norm. I’m not in any way taking credit for that sea-change, although I do consider myself part of a pioneering cohort within that broader community, and as I noted in this post I’ve had the chance to work extensively in the process with other such pioneers like Heather Cox Richardson who have become defining public scholarly voices in this moment. I’d say the same about public scholarly twitter, a sub-community within that overarching one which has become hugely present and influential over the last year or so—I’ve also been tweeting since November 2010 and doing more consistent and overt public scholarly work in that space since at least early 2014, so believe I’ve been able to witness and add my voice to that evolving and amplifying community as well. I’m not saying that every scholar has to be part of these efforts, nor that there isn’t still value in scholarly work aimed at more academic or specialized audiences—but when it comes to whether online writing and public scholarship are legitimate, both within and beyond academia, I think as of late 2020 the question is entirely settled.

Which makes it, again, one of the only settled questions in late 2020 America. To keep the meta-ness going, I thought about holding off on writing this post until after the election, since of course everything about the future of public scholarship, like everything about the future of everything, depends in significant measure upon what happens in early November. But then I thought about this blog’s origin point, and realized something: while I was indeed inspired by a particular election, the blog was never, not in those earliest days and certainly not ever since, about that election, or any election, or any politicians, or all politicians, or politics. Of course I’ve intersected with such topics, just as—and that’s the key, just as—I’ve intersected with pretty much every other topic that falls under the purview of AmericanStudies. So whoever is president as of January 2021, the work will continue—in this space, in my book which drops on January 15th, in my Saturday Evening Post column, on twitter, and in every other place where I add my thoughts and voice to those ever-growing ranks of online public scholars. The work will evolve as the nation and world do, influenced but not limited by such political developments (among many others). But no matter what, la lucha continua, and I’ve never been prouder to be part of it than I am at this 10th anniversary moment.

A few anniversary acknowledgments this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Public scholarly voices, sites, conversations you’d highlight?

November 7-8, 2020: Pivotal Elections: 2020 and the New Lost Cause

[To say that the 2020 presidential election was a pivotal one in American history is to significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of others, leading up to this special weekend post on this year’s results.]

On our 21stcentury neo-Confederates, and how we can make sure this time is different.

From a certain perspective, the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in my hometown of Charlottesville could be said to have used that city’s Lee and Jackson statues as simply an excuse for far broader and deeper expressions of the white supremacist and neo-Nazirage, hatred, and violence that have fueled the Trump cult and era. Yet the renewed emphasis throughout 2020 on the battle over Confederate monuments and memory has revealed the opposite: that these forces of 21stcentury exclusion are quite specifically the heirs to the Confederacy, and more exactly and crucially to the neo-Confederate movement that dominated the century and the nation between 1865 and the Civil Rights era and through which, as Heather Cox Richardson’s new book provocatively and to accurately puts it, the South won the Civil War. It’s no coincidence that much of the best and most vital public scholarly AmericanStudies work published over the last year, from Richardson’s book to Adam Domby’s The False Cause to Kevin Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates to Nina Silber on Gone with the Wind and much more, has focused on the rise and persistence of Confederate memory in so many corners of American society and culture.

As I draft this post at 9:15am on Friday November 6th, and while knocking on every available piece of wood, it seems that the cult leader of this new neo-Confederate movement has been defeated by a challenger who made Charlottesville the literal and symbolic starting point for his presidential candidacy. But as armed cult members stage angry protests outside election centers (and target them in domestic terrorist plots), and that cult leader and his allies stoke their fires of victimhood and resentment (I’m not going to hyperlink to news stories about any of those evolving horrors, but we all know it’s happening), it’s worth remembering that it was precisely the narrative of a “Lost Cause” that fueled the late 19th century neo-Confederates—even, or perhaps especially, as they and their perspective quickly and thoroughly regained prominence and poweron the national political scene. This movement managed to convince much of the rest of white America that it was a tragic victim in need of sympathy, forgiveness, and a welcoming embrace, all while constructing (literally and figuratively) monuments to and representations of a nation (not the Confederate States of America, but the United ones) defined by white supremacist exclusion. When they met resistance, especially from Americans of color, they targeted them with horrific racial terrorism that was at best ignoredand at worst sanctioned by far too much of white America.

Those last two sentences could describe where we’ve been over the last few years and where we are in 2020 America without much revision. So what can we do to make sure that this moment doesn’t play out in those same destructive ways? You know me well enough to know that my first answer is that we need to better remember our collective histories, including those highlighted in every hyperlink in this post; until we can truly grapple with how white supremacist and neo-Confederate America was been 1865 and 1965 (and beyond), we can’t possibly respond to the parallel trends in our current moment. But more specifically, we need to remember, listen to, and amplify the voices of African Americans and Americans of color, both from across our histories and in our present moment. From Ida B. Wells to Nicole Hannah-Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois to Ibram Kendi, Fannie Lou Hamer to Stacey Abrams, A. Philip Randolphto John Lewis, Jack Johnson to Colin Kaepernick, Carter G. Woodson to the 1619 Project, and so so many more, these figures and voices, communities and stories reflect the worst of our history and identity but also model the best, exemplifying the inclusion and critical patriotism that have always resisted white supremacy and pushed toward a nation truly defined by liberty and justice for all. For the last 150 years we collectively failed to live up to that vision or hear and support those exemplary American voices—this time, let’s learn from the worst and be our best.

Special 10thanniversary post drops on Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 6, 2020: Pivotal Elections: 1968

 

[To say that the 2020 presidential election will be a pivotal one in American history is to significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results.]

On a strikingly singular and influential choice, and why it’s far from the whole story.

I’ll admit that I haven’t gone back to every presidential election in order to confirm this hypothesis, but I’m pretty sure that only one incumbent president has ever decided, mid-campaign, to stop running for re-election. And it’s important to note just how mid-campaign, indeed just how late in the campaign, that decision was: it was April of 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson announced his decision to withdraw from the race and cede the Democratic nomination over to another candidate (still to be determined at that time, of course). As that hyperlinked article traces at length, he had his reasons (mostly tied to the ongoing and increasingly catastrophic Vietnam War, on the success of which he had staked his presidency and against which the anti-war Democratic candidate George McGovern had been campaigning for some time) and communicated them quite clearly. But none of that meant that the decision was any less stunning, nor that it didn’t hugely shake up the campaign’s remaining seven months—and, given just how significant that election year was, the entirety of American politics.

So it would be easy to boil that 1968 election down to that striking moment and its effects—easy but entirely inaccurate, I’d say. Indeed, I would go further and say that that moment was only the second most stunning and influential in that election season, because almost exactly two months later, on the night of June 5th, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles by a militant terrorist named Sirhan Sirhan. Just a few hours before his murder Kennedy had won the California Democratic Primary, making him the front-runner in the campaign to replace Johnson as the nominee; he was also an inspiring figure who seemed poised to unite more conservative Johnsonian Democrats and more radical McGovernite ones, and in so doing offer not just the party but the whole country a possible path forward from one of our most divided and challenging periods. The tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination thus goes far beyond any one campaign or election, of course—but it nonetheless yet again, and even more potently, reshaped that election just months before the conventions, leaving Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the only nationally viable candidate (he and Kennedy had been neck-and-neck for delegates) and the eventual Democratic nominee.

But at the same time, even in a presidential election year, the presidential election is only one of the nation’s stories, and quite frequently (as this year has amply demonstrated) not the most significant story at that. So while Robert Kennedy’s assassination might have been the campaign’s most striking moment, I would have to argue that the year’s single most meaningful event was another, even more tragic murder: the April 4th Memphis shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. by the white supremacist domestic terrorist James Earl Ray. I’ve long argued that we place too much emphasis on presidents in our histories and collective memories; even the most influential presidents (and that list would certainly include both Johnson and the 1968 victor Richard Nixon, along with, y’know, that dude who by the time this post airs will either be a lame duck or continuing his effort to destroy the American Experiment) are hardly ever the most significant figures or actors in their historical moments. In both his inspiring life and his tragic death, and by every other measure I could imagine, King was a more defining American than either of those presidents, or any other political figure associated with the 1968 campaign. To tell the story of that campaign, that election, or any other aspect of America in 1968 without foregrounding King would be to miss the point quite seriously.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other pivotal elections you’d highlight?

November 5, 2020: Pivotal Elections: 1932

[To say that the 2020 presidential election will be a pivotal one in American history is to significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results.]On a frustrating undercurrent to a landslide election, and why the positives remain nonetheless.As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’m writing and scheduling this week’s blog posts (other than the weekend post on this year’s election results, of course) in the summer, so I can only speculate about how they might relate to the eventual results of the 2020 presidential election. But it’s certainly fair to say that I hope the 1932 presidential election—in which a deeply divisive and unpopular Republican incumbent (Herbert Hoover) closely linked to an unfolding national and global crisis (the Great Depression) was soundly defeated (472 electoral votes to 59, and a popular vote triumph of more than 7 million votes, 22.8 million to 15.7 million) by his Democratic challenger (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)—might serve as a parallel to 2020. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme (as someone famous, although probably not Mark Twain, put it), and as of this July moment at least 2020 and 1932 feel like they have the possibility to become a pleasantly rhyming couplet indeed. One thing that hasn’t happened as of my writing this post is Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s choice of his Vice Presidential running mate. I’ve seen a good bit of debate over whether and in what ways that choice can influence an election’s results, but of course whether it actually does or not, the choice is often made due to electoral concerns. That was most definitely the case in 1932, when the more liberal New Yorker Roosevelt chose as his running mate a more conservative politician from a very different region (and one who had been seeking the 1932 nomination himself before Roosevelt secured it): Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, a Southern Democrat from Texas. Garner’s specific roles and duties as VP during Roosevelt’s first two terms remain uncertain (when Roosevelt declared his intention to run for a 3rd term in 1940 Garner left the administration and unsuccessfully opposed him), but to my mind it’s impossible to separate this choice of Roosevelt’s from the frustrating reality of the Roosevelt administration’s and the New Deal’s consistent appeasement of Southern (often white supremacist) Democrats at the expense of Americans of color. This wasn’t as bad as Lincoln choosing Andrew Johnson in 1864 (fortunately FDR didn’t die in office while Garner was VP, for one important difference), but I’d put it in that conversation.So we can’t remember the 1932 election without factoring Garner in, just like we can’t analyze the New Deal’s inspiring programs and positive effects separately from those white supremacist elements. But while imagining counter-factuals in which Roosevelt chooses a different VP and pursues a different course for passing the New Deal has some value (especially in forcing us to remember those aspects of his campaign and administration), those are far from the most likely alternative histories; much more likely, as is the case with any election, is the election going a different way, Hoover winning a second term, at least the next four years of Depression-era America being driven by the same presidential administration and its allies. None of us know for sure what that would have looked like or meant, but the lessons of Hoover’s four years in office provide some guidance, and I think it’s fair to say that things would have gone much, much worse than they did under Roosevelt. Critical patriotism (the subject of my soon to be released book!) requires engaging with our most frustrating histories, but it also means not throwing out the good because it isn’t perfect—and the result of the 1932 presidential election was very good indeed. Last election tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other pivotal elections you’d highlight?

November 4, 2020: Pivotal Elections: 1876

[To say that the 2020 presidential election will be a pivotal one in American history is to significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results.]On what really happened in 1876, and why that remains a vital lesson for 2020.I’ve written quite a bit in this space about the controversial presidential election of 1876: thinking about AmericanStudies contexts for it; and connecting it to the 2016 election (which, obviously, ended up going even worse than that comparison would have suggested). I’ve also written about how we can see the seeds of that 1876 debacle in the significant gains won by Southern Democrats in the 1874 midterms. All of those posts have offered attempts to understand not just literally what took place in 1876 (and the compromise, or “crooked bargain” depending on whom you ask, that facilitated those results), but also and especially the broader national situation and moment for Rutherford B. Hayes’installation as president. But I’m ashamed to say that in all those posts and analyses, I don’t think I’ve ever said as overtly as I should have what really happened in 1876: the American political system entirely abandoned the African American community. More exactly, the Republican Party that had originated out of the 1850s abolitionist movement, fought a Civil War in order to achieve that goal, and (at least in its Radical Republican wing) worked to ensure that Reconstruction would help freed African Americans gain vital rights, turned its back on all those efforts and goals in order to get its candidate, Hayes, elected. Maybe Hayes didn’t directly trade the end of Reconstruction for the presidency (historians are torn on that question), but in any case his first main act as president was to end those policies. When The Nation editorialized not long after Hayes’ inauguration that “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him,” they weren’t just making a prediction—they were assessing, and to be clear were agreeing with, that national political abandonment of the African American community. Playing the “what might have been” game is always fraught, but I think it’s fair to say that the rise of neo-Confederate, white supremacist national narratives over the last few decades of the 19th century (and well into the 20th century) would have gone very differently had this 1876 abandonment not taken place. There are a variety of lessons we can take away from those histories for our current moment, but I suppose the most overt has to be: political power should never be attained at the expense of our most vulnerable communities and fellow Americans. Winning elections is clearly an important political goal, literally never more so than here in 2020—but both the effort to do so and the victory itself have to be accompanied by continued, indeed amplified, battles on behalf of those vulnerable communities. If this moment is going to become a true turning point, a genuine step toward the more perfect union that was all too briefly imagined and then abandoned during Reconstruction, an electoral victory (necessary as it is) will have to be an integral part of that larger and more crucial progress. Next election tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other pivotal elections you’d highlight?

November 3, 2020: Pivotal Elections: 1860

[To say that the 2020 presidential election will be a pivotal one in American history is to significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results.]On a comparison that has become even more ominous, and what we can learn from it.Almost exactly seven years ago, in late November 2013, I wrote a post comparing that moment to 1860. I’d still make many of the same points today, so will ask you to read that one if you would and then come back for a couple new paragraphs.Welcome back! If anything, I’d say this moment feels even more frustratingly and frighteningly akin to 1860 than that one did, not least because the current president is among the worst in our history (I think Trump is significantly worse than James Buchanan, but Buchanan’s a top-five baddie in any case). That means that we’ve spent the last four years watching so many things get worse, seeing the nation move ever closer to what feels terrifying like the genuine possibility of civil conflict: as I draft this post in mid-June, two African American young men have been found lynched in two supposedly separate incidents in California, perhaps the clearest single detail yet that makes me terrified that white supremacist domestic terrorists are actively seeking to incite a race war; I hope that by the time this post airs those fears will seem less founded, but I have no sense of clarity and certainly no real optimism about that, perhaps especially if the November 3rd election results go the way they desperately need to. While the events of 2020 have (again, as of mid-June) made Trump as unpopular as at any point in his presidency, it still feels as if a significant percentage of Americans live in an entirely alternate universe to the one I inhabit (indeed, it feels that way much more overtly than it did in 2013), which I believe is a necessary prerequisite for such civil conflict. So if Joe Biden wins the 2020 presidential election (which will be unfolding as this piece airs), will the nation descend into a second civil war? Anybody who pretends to be able to predict the future in this moment is a con man or a fool, and I try not be either of those things so I won’t say that I know what’s going to happen, in a such a hypothetical case or in any other. But one important lesson of 1860 is that the Confederate states which seceded after the election did so not because of a divided citizenry or angry armed communities, but rather because their governing bodies voted to do so, drafted statements of secession, and so on (indeed, large cohorts in every Confederate state remained loyal to the Union, and in Virginia such a cohort even formed an entirely new state, West Virginia). Which is to say, resisting a new civil conflict will be at least as much a political as a social process, one that will involve making sure elected officials (even, indeed especially, those fully immersed in the cult of Trump) know that the vast majority of their constituents want the nation to move forward peacefully and productively. Next election tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other pivotal elections you’d highlight?

November 2, 2020: Pivotal Elections: 1800

[To say that the 2020 presidential election will be a pivotal one in American history is to significantly under-state the case. But while in some clear ways this moment feels singular, this is of course far from our only such crucial election. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a special weekend post on this year’s results.]
On the election that definitely changed things in post-Revolutionary America—but also, inspiringly, didn’t.
It’d be an overstatement to say that the first decade of post-Constitution America was devoid of national or partisan divisions—this was the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts and their responses, after all; also of that little rebellion up in Pennsylvania—but I don’t think it’s inaccurate to see the first three presidential terms (Washington’s two and John Adams’s one) as among the most unified and non-controversial in our history. That’s true even though Adams’s Vice President was his chief rival in the 1796 election, Thomas Jefferson; Jefferson had gained the second-most electoral votes, which in the first constitutional model meant that he would serve as vice president (an idea that in and of itself reflects a striking lack of expected controversy!). There were certainly two distinct parties as of that second administration (Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans), and they had distinct perspectives on evolving national issues to be sure; but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of significant partisan divisions between them in that period.
To say that things changed with the presidential election of 1800 would be to drastically understate the case. Once again Adams and Jefferson were the chief contenders, now linked by the past four years of joint service but at the same time more overtly rivals because of that prior election and its results; moreover, this time Jefferson’s running mate, Aaron Burr, was a far more prominent and popular candidate in his own right. And this combination of complex factors led to an outcome that was divisive and controversial on multiple levels: Jefferson’s ticket handily defeated that of his boss, greatly amplifying the partisan rancor between the men and parties; but at the same time Burr received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson, an unprecedented (then or since) tie between two Republicans that sent the election into the hands of the Federalist-controlled Congress. Although most Federalists opposed Jefferson (for obvious reasons), through a murky and secretive process (one likely influenced by Alexander Hamilton) Jefferson was ultimately chosen on the 36th ballot as the nation’s third president.Four years later Burr shot Hamilton dead in the nation’s most famous duel (now more famous than ever, thanks to a certain groundbreaking musical), and it’s entirely fair to say that, in the aftermath of this heated and controversial election, the nation could have similarly descended into conflict. But instead, Burr and Hamilton’s eventual fates notwithstanding, the better angels of our collective nature rose to the occasion—Adams peacefully handed over the executive to Jefferson, all those who had supported Burr recognized the new administration, and the parties continued to move forward as political but not social or destructive rivals. If and when the partisan divisions seem too deep and too wide, and frankly too much for me to contemplate (as, I will admit, they consistently feel at the moment), I try to remember the election of 1800; not because it went smoothly or was perfect (far from it), nor because the leaders in that generation were any nobler or purer (ditto), but rather precisely because it went horribly and was deeply messed-up and the leaders were as selfish and human as they always are, and yet somehow—as untested and raw as we were—we came out on the other side. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll do the same this time.Next election tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other pivotal elections you’d highlight?

October 31-November 1, 2020: Robin Field’s Guest Post on Toni Morrison & The Rape Novel

[Robin Field is Professor of English at King’s College in Pennsylvania and a longtime friend of AmericanStudier. This post is linked to her recently published, awesome book Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction, and it originally appeared on the Liverpool University Press blog this past week.]

“Quiet as it’s kept”: How The Bluest Eye Inaugurated a New Genre of Fiction 50 Years Ago

The Bluest Eye was released on October 29, 1970. Toni Morrison’s masterful first novel received accolades in Kirkus Review, which called the book a “quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence.” Morrison’s novel about three little Black girls was “perhaps the least likely, least commercially viable story one could tell at the time,” according to Hilton Als in The New Yorker. As Morrison’s literary star rose, The Bluest Eye was recognized for its nuanced depiction of racism and the fetishization of white beauty standards. The novel is now often taught in high schools and universities; but with its popularity comes criticism. The novel appeared on the American Library Association’s “Top 10 Most Challenged Books” list as recently as 2014 for content deemed too graphic for impressionable young people—for Morrison’s novel depicts the rape of a Black girl by her father, the birth and death of her baby, and her fall into madness.

Morrison’s first novel also inaugurates a new genre of American fiction called the rape novel, which I describe in Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction.Before 1970, most depictions of rape in American fiction offered the perspective of the perpetrator enjoying the violence and pain he forced upon a woman. The rape novel instead portrays rape as a violent crime enacting physical and psychological damage upon the victim-survivor. By focusing upon the person harmed, rather than the perpetrator of the violence, the rape novel challenges long-standing misconceptions about rape and disallows a voyeuristic gaze that turns sexual violence into pornographic titillation.

One notorious example of this pornographic voyeurism appears in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), where the Black father Jim Trueblood salaciously describes raping his daughter to a transfixed white man. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes back against “the male ‘glamour of shame’ rape is (or once was) routinely given” (215). Pecola, the eleven-year-old raped by her father Cholly, is driven mad by her father’s assaults and her mother’s refusal to believe what happened. Morrison demonstrates the predominant understandings of rape in the 1970s that blaming the victim for her trauma is easier than trying to understand it. This attitude is epitomized by the reaction of Pecola’s community, as the adults say, “[Pecola] carry some of the blame” and “How come she didn’t fight him?” (189). Such reactions, coming so quickly on the heels of the rape scene that leaves a young girl unconscious on the kitchen floor, underscore how the trauma of rape can be compounded by the callousness of others.  

As a rape novel, The Bluest Eye replaces the pornographic titillation seen in novels such as Invisible Man with the pain of the violated victim-survivor. Yet Morrison, like other authors in the mid-twentieth century, still uses the perspective of the rapist, Cholly, during the scene of the assault. Morrison later recognized the problematics of omitting Pecola’s consciousness, writing in the Afterword of the 1993 edition that the novel does not “handle effectively the silence at its center: the voice that is Pecola’s ‘unbeing.’ It should have had a shape—like the emptiness left by a boom or a cry” (215). Like Maxine Hong Kingston, who portrays another voiceless rape victim in The Woman Warrior (1976), Morrison focuses upon the community’s reaction to the rape. “[T]he victim,” writes Morrison, “does not have the vocabulary to understand the violation or its context.” (214)

The words and the contexts come in the 1980s, when the first-person perspective of the rape victim speaks from the pages of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989). Through reading the harrowing details of sexual violence, readers in the 1980s learned to resist rape myths and support victim-survivors through their processes of physical and psychological recovery. In the 1990s, stories of incest—such as Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1992) and Sapphire’s Push (1996)—implemented complex narrative strategies mimicking certain aspects of traumatic memories. In the twenty-first century, with compassion and understanding for female victim-survivors fully established on the page, the rape novel begins telling the stories of the men and boys who have been raped.

 Morrison’s The Bluest Eye begins with the words, “Quiet as it’s kept…” (5). Certainly in 1970, the victim-survivor’s story of rape and incest was rarely told with compassion and honesty. Fifty years later, the rape novel as a genre has created community through shared stories and urged social change through education and activism. Today, this activism appears off the page as survivors of all genders have spoken out against perpetrators of sexual violence. Tarana Burke’s phrase “Me Too”has created a community of victim-survivors and an activist movement, about which she recently tweeted“every one that cares about the lives of survivors and wants to bring an end to sexual violence can #acttoo.” Quiet no longer, thanks to the revolutionary words of Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye.

[Election series starts Monday,

Ben]

October 31-November 1, 2020: October 2020 Recap

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

October 5: Recent Reads: How Much of These Hills is Gold: A series on favorite recent reads kicks off with necessary darknesses, literary legacies, and the optimism of recovery and resistance.

October 6: Recent Reads: The Yellow House: The series continues with three books I’d put in conversation with Sarah Broom’s stunning multi-generational family memoir.

October 7: Recent Reads: Washington Black and The Water Dancer: Two recent historical novels that blur the boundaries between realism and the fantastic, as the series reads on.

October 8: Recent Reads: Civil War Scholarship: Three great public scholarly books that reflect the breadth and depth of current Civil War histories.

October 9: Recent Reads: Susie King Taylor’s Memoir: The series concludes with one of my favorite primary source discoveries for my forthcoming patriotism book.

October 10-11: Crowd-sourced Recent Reads: Another great crowd-sourced post, with a ton of recommendations to keep you reading well into 2021 (should we make it there).

October 12: Confederate Memory: Lee and Longstreet: On the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s death, a series on Confederate memory starts with the evolution of my views on two generals.

October 13: Confederate Memory: James D. Lynch’s Poetry: The series continues with three poems that illustrate the late 19th century evolution of Confederate memory.

October 14: Confederate Memory: Henry Adams and Henry James: The parallel but not identical Confederate vet protagonists of two 1880s novels, as the series rolls on.

October 15: Confederate Memory: The Shaaras: The benefits and drawbacks of bestselling historical novels about the Civil War.

October 16: Confederate Memory: Flags, Statues, and Names: Why the current debates and changes are long overdue, and why we need to go further still.

October 17-18: Confederate Memory: Adam Domby’s The False Cause: The series concludes with an appreciation of a recent public scholarly book on Confederate memory.

October 19: UN Histories: The League of Nations: For the UN’s 75th anniversary, a series kicks off with how and why the UN’s predecessor failed, and how it succeeded nonetheless.

October 20: UN Histories: World War II: The series continues with why it’s important, and challenging, to remember the UN’s wartime origins.

October 21: UN Histories: Muir Woods: A potent symbolic expression of memory and community, as the series rolls on.

October 22: UN Histories: Secretary Generals: What three representative UN leaders tell us about the organization and its evolving histories.

October 23: UN Histories: Peacekeeping: The series concludes with what we can learn from longstanding and more recent peacekeeping missions.

October 24-25: The World in 2020: A special post on two ways to analyze our global 21st century moment, and the challenge that lies beyond both of them.

October 26: AmericanSpooking: Scary Stories: My annual Halloween series starts with the limitations and possibilities of scary stories.

October 27: AmericanSpooking: Five Frights: The series continues with five of the scariest works in American literary history.

October 28: AmericanSpooking: American Horror Stories: Whether America can have home-grown horror and where we might find it, as the series scares on.

October 29: AmericanSpooking: Last House on the Left: The pioneering horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for than how it makes us scream.

October 30: AmericanSpooking: The Wendigo: The series concludes with the supernatural legend that also offers cross-cultural commentaries.

Special Guest Post goes live in a few hours,

Ben

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