Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 172

April 14, 2020: Arab American Stories: Yarrow Mamout

[April isn’t just National Poetry Month; it’s also National Arab American Heritage Month. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the many compelling Arab American stories & figures I feature in the final chapter of my book We the People, leading up to a weekend post on contemporary Arab American writers!]On the Early Republic figure who became an iconic image of the new nation.As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, a significant portion of enslaved African Americans were Muslim, many of them from cultures that would also be defined as Arabic (especially North African ones like Morocco and Tunisia). While there is great value in remembering that historical community as a whole, the vast majority of those Muslim and Arab Americans, like the vast majority of all enslaved people across the more than three centuries of American slavery, are unfortunately not specifically or individually remembered. But as the United States moved into the Revolutionary era and its aftermath, collective histories began to be produced more regularly, and thus individual Americans to be highlighted more frequently. That’s true of a number of Arab Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War, a list that includes Bampett Muhamed, Yusuf ben Ali/Joseph Benhaley, and Joseph Saba. And it’s true of one of the more famous individuals from the post-Revolution Early Republic period, Washington, DC’s Yarrow Mamout (also known as Muhammad Yaro). Like most Early Republic figures, Mamout had been in America since well before the Revolution: he was sold into slavery in the West African nation of Guinea in the early 1750s (when he was around 14 years old) and brought to Annapolis, Maryland. For the next half-century Mamout was enslaved on both the Samuel Beall plantation in nearby Takoma Park and at Samuel’s son Brooke Beall’s home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington; over those decades Mamout developed a reputation as a skilled handyman and brickmaker. Thanks to the gradual earnings those trades brought him, in the late 1790s he was able to purchase his freedom from the Beall family, and he subsequently bought his own home in Georgetown; the neighborhood had become home to a sizeable African American community in the Early Republic period, and Mamout would serve as one of that community’s most prominent investors, financiers, and community leaders. Better remembering impressive individuals like Mamout, after all, likewise helps us better remember such communities, which even when they were located in the nation’s capital during that formative period have too often been forgotten.Mamout himself might have been forgotten after his 1823 death if it were not for his connection to another prominent Early Republic figure, the painter Charles Willson Peale. Peale painted renowned portraitsof many of the framers and Revolutionary icons, and in 1819 he learned of Mamout and sought him out as another potential subject. He did end up painting a beautiful and deeply human portrait of Mamout, and during their sessions learned a great deal of Mamout’s story and life, which Peale documented in his meticulously kept diary. That account has become an important primary source reference for biographers of Mamout, but it also reflects Mamout’s presence and role in the broader communities of Georgetown and the Early Republic US. As Peale writes, “Yarrow owns a House & lots and is known by most of the Inhabitants of Georgetown. … He professes to be a mahometan [Muslim], and is often seen & heard in the Streets singing Praises to God.” Both the portrait and this prose description are images of Mamout, snapshots into an identity and life that spanned the most formative three-quarters of a century in American history—a period in which Arab Americans like Yarrow Mamout played compelling and important roles.Next Arab American story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Arab American figures or stories you’d highlight?

April 13, 2020: Arab American Stories: Estevanico

[April isn’t just National Poetry Month; it’s also National Arab American Heritage Month. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the many compelling Arab American stories & figures I feature in the final chapter of my book We the People, leading up to a weekend post on contemporary Arab American writers!]On the enslaved explorer who helps us revise our understanding of the earliest American histories.One of the historical figures about whom I’ve thought the most consistently and deeply over the last decade is Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the early 16th century Spanish explorer who ended up wandering across North America for nearly a decade and became in the process something quite different, a multi-cultural identity and perspective that I called in my book Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (2011) one of the first truly American identities. Beginning with that book I’ve continued to think and write a good deal about, and likewise teach quite frequently, excerpts from Cabeza de Vaca’s Narrative, but I’m ashamed to admit that it was only while writing about Cabeza de Vaca for a chapter in We the People that I started to think more fully about (and ultimately include in a separate chapter in that book) one of the three companions who accompanied him throughout his journey: Estevanico(also known as Estebanico, Esteban the Moor, and Mustafa Azemmouri, his many names themselves reflecting the fraught question of investigating his life and experiences), an enslaved Moroccan man who became through those experiences a prominent explorer in his own right. (I was greatly aided in that thinking by a wonderful recent historical novel about Estevanico, Laili Lalami’s The Moor’s Account[2015].)The start of Estevanico’s story was all too typical in the age of exploration: in his early 20s he was kidnapped by Portuguese slave traders and sold into slavery in the Moroccan coastal town of Azemmour; and he ended up enslaved to a Spanish nobleman, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza. De Carranza brought Estevanico with him on the ill-fated 1527 Narváez expedition to Florida, and after that expedition’s shipwreck and collapse Estevanico ended up with Cabeza de Vaca, de Carranza, and another man (“the fourth,” de Vaca writes, “is Estevanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor”). The decade that followed changed Estevanico’s life and fate just as fully as it did de Vaca’s; while de Vaca returned to Spain after the men finally encountered another Spanish expedition on the continent’s west coast, Estevanico remained in the Americas and continued his explorations, serving as an enslaved guide for both Antonio de Mendoza (the first viceroy of New Spain) and Friar Marcos de Niza. While leading de Niza’s 1539 expedition among the Zuni tribe in present-day New Mexico, Estevanico disappeared—he might have been killed by the Zuni but also might have chosen to escape to freedom and join their community (among other potential fates), one more telling ambiguity in the life of this unique contact era figure.I’ve written a good bit (including in Redefining American Identity, but also in this space) about how Cabeza de Vaca helps us reframe that era of initial contact between European and Native cultures, but to be honest Estevenico does so even more potently. For one thing, he (like another striking contact era figure, Tisquantum) helps us recognize the central presence of slavery, and of individuals and cultures affected by it, at and after every moment of contact. And for another, related thing, Estevanico makes clear that both Arab and Muslim Americans were part of this evolving place and identity from its earliest moments—often in direct relationship to the system and experiences of slavery, but also and in any case as a set of figures, communities, and cultures that contributed significantly to the origin and development of America. I’ll highlight a few more such figures in my next posts in this series, but there are none who were present earlier or more foundationally than Estevanico.Next Arab American story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Arab American figures or stories you’d highlight?

April 11-12, 2020: Crowd-sourced Poets We Should All Read

[April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate I’ve highlighted a handful of poets, past and present, we should all be reading. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post chock full o’ even more poets to read—add yours in comments, please!]First, I should note that I didn’t get to highlight my own favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in this week’s series. So, well, consider her highlighted!Or my favorite contemporary poet, Jericho Brown!I also can’t end a series like this without highlighting the amazing poetry of my FSU colleague and friend DeMisty D. Bellinger!For a lot more National Poetry Month goodness, check out the International Poetry Circlecommunity organized by the wonderful poet Tara Skurtu! Other poets and poems we should all read:Bill Waddell follows up Thursday’s Li-Young Lee post, writing, “The Lee poem that lives most warmly inside my head is ‘Persimmons,’ also from Rose. That is an extraordinary book—deservedly still in print and popular thirty years on.”Rob LeBlanc nominates Philip Freneau; Charles Reznikoff; Anne Waldman; Ron Koertge; and Diane di Prima. Anne Holub writes, “So I keep coming back to my wee copy of Meditations in an Emergency lately. Frank O’Hara was a doctor, ya know.” She also shares this great conversation with Montana poets about their own recommendations.Jeff Renye goes with Etheridge Knight’s “It Was a Funky Deal.” He adds, “Stephen Crane, Black Riders and Other Lines ; William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ; and T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets .” Rob Velella seconds the Crane love. Kent Rose writes, “Though he's best-known as a musician, Dave Alvin’s Any Rough Times Are Now Behind You is an excellent book of poetry.Seferine Baez nominates “Faudet and Leav—who show a modern romance between writers in their not-so-subtle odes to one another, every volume showing a new side to their relationship, which feels very conversational almost like they’re writing letters to a lover they can’t quite let go of.”Ian Murray writes that [our former FSU colleague] “Ian Williams comes to mind.”Michael Greenwood nominates Langston Hughes.Kylee Acevedo writes, “Anything by miss Ada Limón... But I own Bright Dead Things & adore it.”Olivia Lucier highlights “Pablo Neruda. His odes to, literally anything, are amazing!”Andrew DaSilva seconds Neruda and adds, “Walllace Stevens and his “Sunday Morning” or “The Snow Man”; Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther”; D.H Lawrence’s “Whales Weep Not”; Frank O'Hara and his “To the Harbormaster”; Hart Crane's White Buildings ; “The Diver” by Robert Hayden; Marsden Hartley's “Warblers”; “Take Me Under Your Wing” by Hayyim Bialik; anything by Theodore Roethke; “Mandalay” by Kipling; and lastly if ya wanna spice things up a bit and raise a few eyebrows you can add Radovan Karadzic, although a convicted war criminal he is an award-winning and outstanding poet.”Vince Kling writes, “Since I'm a translator, I recommend above all James Merrill's magnificent ‘Lost in Translation,’ a poem ‘about’ translation as a way of understanding everything life tosses at us. Passionate, elegant, witty, poignant. That said, I'll put in a plug for translators now sneered and jeered at by later translators who can't hold a candle to the older ones. I'm thinking of Scott Moncrieff's rendering of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. All subsequent ‘improvements’ are unable to get away from his masterful version, responsive to every nuance of irony and rhythm in language. And any translation from Russian by the now supposedly discredited Constance Garnett is better than anything that came after. I've got a little list, but just one more—Dante's Divine Comedy in the Dorothy L. Sayers translation.”Shayne Simahk writes, “Shara McCallum is amazing!”Heidi Kim nominates Jennifer Changand Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Kelly Stowell highlights James Nicola's "Curtailed Sonnet." Vicki Ziegler, curator of the wonderful #TodaysPoem community on Twitter, shares, “Abigail Chabitnoy's How to Dress a Fish and Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Lim ón are freshly Griffin Prize shortlisted—really getting into their collections and think they would be good additions.”Also on Twitter, Jeanne Harrisshares this reading of A Knight’s Trail by Wayne Arthur Harris.Finally, the poets Paul Brookes, Meg Kearney, Amy King, Melisa Malvin, Adrian Neibauer, Tom Ratt, and Ron Tobey were kind enough to engage with my Tweets on the week’s series, so I have to return the favor!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other poets you’d highlight?

April 10, 2020: Poets We Should All Read: Robin Jewel Smith’s Suggestions

[April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]For this final post in the series (before that weekend post, so get your nominations in!), I wanted to hand over the blog-reins to one of our most talented young poets, Robin Jewel Smith. Robin is a PhD candidate in English at the University of North Dakota, and her first chapbook, Confessions of a Love Addict, will be coming out this month from Dancing Girl Press. Here are the poets and works Robin shared (in no particular order):Donika Kelly, Bestiary Douglas Kearney, Patter Sally Wen Mao, Oculus Paul Tran, “The Cave” Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude Sadie Dupuis, Mouthguard Tishani Doshi, Girls are Coming Out of the Woods Marwa Helal, Invasive Species Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other poets you’d highlight?

April 9, 2020: Poets We Should All Read: Li-Young Lee

[April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]On the power of a single perfect poem, and the need to go beyond it nonetheless.For the last 15 years, the contemporary American poet with whom I’ve had by far the most consistent experience is Li-Young Lee. The reason is very specific and somewhat random: when I constructed my first American Literature II final exam at Fitchburg State, back in the Spring 2006 semester, I wanted to include both a prose and a poetic passage for a close reading question; somehow (I honestly have no recollection of how or where) I came upon Lee’s stunning poem “The Gift ” (1986, part of his first published collection Rose), and I felt that it had so many compelling choices, elements, and themes that it would make a great such close reading poetic passage. It did indeed work so well in that context that I’ve kept Lee’s poem in that role for every subsequent American Lit II final exam since, and since I’ve taught at least 20 sections of the course over my 15 years at FSU, that has meant many, many times re-reading “The Gift” as well as reading hundreds of student analyses of it (they get to choose between it and the prose passage for their close reading answer, but I believe the majority have chosen “The Gift” over the years, a testament in and of itself to its quality as poetry tends to be a less popular option than prose in such settings).Another testament to the quality and power of “The Gift” is that it has retained its ability to impress and move me even after all those readings and all those exam analyses. One of the reasons is that Lee’s poem manages to capture the perspective and voice of the speaker (presumably Lee himself, although a persona is never identical to the poet) as both a seven year old and an adult, both a son to a loving father and a loving husband to his wife, existing both in memory and the present. That is does so in four relatively short stanzas, in just thirty precise lines, is to my mind nothing short of a miracle—and it does so while also foregrounding a number of other complex and important human themes, from the power of storytelling to the different shapes that love can take (Lee’s poem embodies the concept of “love languages” long before that was all the social media rage). And on top of all of that, Lee also includes the audience in compelling ways through his use of the second-person “you,” a striking choice that makes the poem itself into a storytelling moment from poet to reader and adds yet another vital layer to its effects and meanings. I guess I just wrote my own final exam close reading of “The Gift,” and the poem is so good that I’m not even mad about that!No poet, especially one with a more than three-decade (to date) career, can or should be reduced to a single poem, however. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know much about Lee beyond “The Gift” before researching this post, and so for example I didn’t know that his family were deeply tied to the early 20th century Chinese government (his great-grandfather was its first republican president) and fled to Indonesia after the Communist revolution in 1949, nor that his father was imprisoned for a year by Indonesian President Sukarno before the family fled once more. Those multi-generational histories and stories, losses and links, are certainly all present behind the family saga of “The Gift.” But they are also part of Lee’s voice and work well beyond that poem, as illustrated for example by the other two poems (“A Story” and “Early in the Morning”) featured alongside “The Gift” on this page. And they remain part of his evolving career, as illustrated by the intimate yet epic titular poemfrom his newest collection, 2018’s The Undressing. The depictions of love and intimacy in that poem feels both similar to and quite distinct from those in “The Gift,” and highlights the continuing arc and growth of this wonderful contemporary American poet.Last poets tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other poets you’d highlight?

April 8, 2020: Poets We Should All Read: Joy Harjo

[April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]On the tremendous significance of a Native American Poet Laureate, and why Harjo goes far beyond that.In June 2019, the Muskogee Creek poet, author, and educator Joy Harjo was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. Harjo is the first Native American Poet Laureate, and while as usual in American history and culture such honors are greatly overdue (not just for Harjo but for so many other Native American poets, past and present), it’s also difficult for me to overstate the importance of a native author receiving this title. Not simply for inclusion, although I wrote a whole book about the value of that concept and believe it is a crucial perspective and goal, for any community and for our national one most of all. But Harjo’s selection also helps us challenge two enduring and pernicious (and often intertwined) myths about the nation: that Native Americans exist somehow outside of the United States (despite being the longest-standing communities in this place, and ones that have been and remain part of every state and region); and/or that they are part of our history but not part of our present and future (the “Vanishing American” narrative). Frustrating as it is for me to think that there are Americans in 2020 who believe either or both of those things to be true of American history and society, I know that there are—and having a Native American Poet Laureate is a clear statement that those narratives couldn’t be further from the truth.But Harjo, who has published eight poetry collectionsamong her many books and publications, is far more than simply our current Poet Laureate, and two particularly amazing poems from across those decades of works illustrate a bit of her stylistic and thematic depth. In this long-ago National Poetry Month post I highlighted “A Map to the Next World” (2000), which among its many stunning qualities reflects Harjo’s ability (a vital one for the Poet Laureate, of course) to bring together specific images and threads from her Creek heritage and culture (and from Native American history and spirituality more broadly) with the kinds of universal human questions and needs that transcend any cultural community and link us all. All of which builds to two of the most pitch-perfect final lines I know: “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end./You must make your own map.” Or, to quote Harjo’s contemporary, the Native American novelist and storyteller Leslie Marmon Silko: “The only thing is: it has never been easy.” Even more difficult, in the most important ways, is “How to Write a Poem in a Time of War,” from Harjo’s most recent collection, An American Sunrise (2019). I honestly don’t feel that I can do justice to that poem in my own exegesis, and would implore you to read it for yourself. But one thing I find particularly striking and effective in “How” is the back and forth between the poem’s main voice and the responses in italics, which directly explore the very goal set out in the poem’s title. “If we begin here,” that voice notes at one point, “none of us will make it to the end/Of the poem,” and the pause after “end” makes clear that it is not simply the poem which we are hoping against hope to make it through. But make it through we must, and while the italicized voice’s first lines in the poem include, “This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold with words,/even poetry,” its (and the poem’s) final line is “Yes, begin here.” If we are to finally begin reckoning with all that a poem like this asks of us, there are few better guides I can imagine than Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.Next poet tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other poets you’d highlight?

April 7, 2020: Poets We Should All Read: Martín Espada

[April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]A few complementary ways in which the Puerto Rican American poet portrays his heritage.In this post I highlighted Martín Espada’s amazing poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” (1993), which engages with issues of class, labor, and communal and individual identity as well as any brief literary text ever has. If Espada has had one central thematic focus across his long and influential career, it would have to be the intersections of those issues, and the political and social perspectives that they can produce; see, to name only a few examples, “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913,” and “Federico’s Ghost.” As that last poem illustrates, certainly Hispanic American experiences and identities come into many of Espada’s political works—but in a way that usually, intentionally cuts across any specific national or cultural categories or heritages. That is, whether one is from Puerto Rico or any other Latin American community (we don’t learn Federico’s original nationality, even though the threat to “call immigration” makes clear that he has come from elsewhere) is in these works much less significant than the type of work one performs and the social stratum in which one resides.Like any great poet, however, and especially one who has published across multiple decades and collections, Espada is large and contains multitudes. Among them are many poems that do engage specifically with his Puerto Rican heritage; Espada was born in Brooklyn (in the year of West Side Story’s release!) to parents who had moved from Puerto Rico a few years before, and the island continued to play a prominent role in his childhood and family. That’s particularly clear in the dense and evocative “,” which links Espada’s surname to the many linguistic, cultural, historical, and familial legacies it conjures for the poet; while some are not specific to Puerto Rico, most are profoundly tied to the island’s identity. And that poem’s intellectual and often dark portrayal of Puerto Rico is contrasted with and complemented by the descriptive and sensory “En la calle San Sebastián” (subtitled “Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico”), which captures the colors and images, beats and sounds, celebrations and legacies of a historic communal space in the Puerto Rican capital. Taken together, these two poems illustrate just how fully and complicatedly Puerto Rico has continued to resonate in Espada’s perspective, identity, and literary career.Yet whatever Puerto Rico meant and still means to Espada, he was born and raised in Brooklyn—and in one of his funniest and perhaps most personal and revealing poems, “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío,” he reflects on precisely the question of what the island could and could not signify to a child of America (and vice versa). The poem depicts a “fat boy” making “his first visit to Puerto Rico, island of family folklore,” and finding there the presence of both a familiar American drink (Coca-Cola) and a shockingly unfamiliar island one (coco frío). On the one hand, the poem posits an ironic contrast, portraying a Puerto Rico that has adopted American products and traditions while (indeed, at the price of) forgetting their own. Yet at the same time, by keeping the poetic perspective entirely with this young boy, Espada undermines such easy dichotomies: yes, the boy feels, upon tasting coco frío for the first time, “suddenly, Puerto Rico was not Coca-Cola/or Brooklyn, and neither was he”; but of course he is still Brooklyn (born and raised), as much as he is Puerto Rico too, raising the question of just how separate these seemingly distinct places and worlds truly are.Next poet tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other poets you’d highlight?

April 6, 2020: Poets We Should All Read: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

[April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]I wrote about Harper’s inspiring, impressively multi-layered life and career in this post. So here, more specifically, are three of the many Harper poems we should all read:1)      “Bury Me in a Free Land” (1858): Much of the best abolitionist literature was published in nonfiction genres (memoirs, speeches, whatever-we’d-call- David Walker’s Appeal ), but Harper’s poem is one of many she wrote before the Civil War that stand among the very best abolitionist works. What’s particularly striking about “Bury” is how it moves between a deeply personal “I” and a potently collective depiction of the experience of slavery, and does so without blurring the two identities (crucial for a poet who was not herself enslaved) while at the same time making clear the interconnections between them. That relationship, between individuals and the slave system, was a fraught and crucial one for any and all antebellum Americans, and Harper’s poem depicts it as successfully and meaningfully as any text I know.2)      “Learning to Read” (1872): In many of Harper’s antebellum poems the speaker was not Harper but Aunt Chloe, an enslaved woman whose perspective, experiences, and communities Harper created across a number of works. She carried Chloe forward into many of her post-war poems, and the Reconstruction-era “Learning” is a particularly beautiful and significant example. Once again she balances the collective and the individual, the public and the personal, this time through the historical conflicts between Northern educators and Southern Confederates over the literacy (and fate) of former slaves like Chloe. In this case she moves through the collective toward the poem’s pitch-perfect, intimate final three stanzas, and their beautiful images of the newly literate, “independent” Chloe in “a place to call my own.”3)      “Songs for the People” (1895): As writers often do, toward the end of her career and life (she was 70 when “Songs” was published,” although she lived, wrote, and worked for another 16 years) Harper began to reflect more fully on what she had done and why she had sought to do it. “Songs” is an interesting such reflection because, compared to most of Harper’s works including the other two poems in this post, it contains no explicit reference to African American histories and communities; a reader unfamiliar with Harper’s identity and body of work could locate the poem in any community, any nation, in any period. That is clearly part of her point, as her works and career, and the goals for them she communicates in this poem, were indeed significant and universal beyond any such contexts. Yet at the same time, the specific context of the 1890s—of, for example, the depths of the lynching epidemic—adds another layer of power and meaning to the final stanza’s “Music to soothe all its sorrow,/Til war and crime shall cease.”Next poet tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other poets you’d highlight?

April 4-5, 2020: Dolemite is … the Subject of This Post

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up to this special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]On two ways the thoughtfully engages cultural history, and one way it falls a bit short.I was far from an expert on Rudy Ray Moore before watching Eddie Murphy’s mesmerizing performance as him in Dolemite is My Name (2019), and one of the most interesting and important elements of the about which I learned through this historical fiction was his heavy reliance on as initial inspirations for the character of Dolemite. The early scenes in which Murphy’s Moore interviews a group of homeless men in order to tap into their collective memories of this folklore are, I would argue, intentionally ambiguous in tone—like Moore the audience enjoys the men’s performances, but unlike Moore (at least in any visible way) we also feel that he is perhaps exploiting these men for his own future success (which he achieves in no small measure through performing this folk humor). But of course that’s very much how culture always works, with prior genres and forms being used, re-interpreted, and to at least some degree exploited by subsequent genres and forms, and most especially by the artists who succeed in them. And as an older performer (he is already over 40 when we meet him in the film), Rudy Ray Moore himself crossed generations and cultural moments in ways that the film portrays very effectively. One of Moore’s nicknames was the “Godfather of Rap,” and that sobriquet reflects the ways in which he not only carried forward older cultural traditions and genres, but influenced and even . That was true not only because of Moore’s rhyming, spoken word poetry that anticipated the late 1970s genre of rap, but also because his complicated relationships to themes like urban life and community, gender and sex, and the music industry were similar to those that rap music would feature as well. Later in his career Moore even appeared on a number of prominent rap albums, including Big Daddy Kane’s Taste of Chocolate (1990), 2 Live Crew’s Back at Your Ass for the Nine-4(1994), and Snoop Dogg’s No Limit Top Dogg (1999) among others. Since Dolemite is My Nameis set in the early 70s era of Moore’s initial creation of the character and production of his first film (1975’s Dolemite), it doesn’t include these rap relationships in any extended way—but the film’s closing text notes his influence on the development of rap, and long before that the choice to cast Snoop Dogg himself as Moore’ DJ friend Roj helps the audience think about those multi-generational culture influences and legacies. Interestingly, while Dolemite is My Name highlights these past and future cultural influences in thoughtful ways, it falls a bit short on the relationship between Moore and a present/contemporary cultural form: Blaxploitation films (I’m indebted for this paragraph’s ideas to conversations with my Charlottesville High School classmate and friend Michele Townes). The film features a crucial scene where Moore and his friends watch Billy Wilder’s The Front Page (1974); they don’t find the film funny at all, and Moore realizes the need for more films made both for and by the African American community. I take and agree with that overall point of course, but by 1974 it was significantly less true than it had been even half a decade before: Shaft was released in 1971 , for example, and it was just one of many early 1970s films that launched the genre that would come to be known as Blaxploitation. I imagine there would be ways to differentiate the first Dolemite film from other Blaxploitation movies (the new film tries briefly to do so through a scene when Moore meets with a film producer who turns down his request for financing), but there most definitely are other ways in which Dolemitewas directly inspired by movies like Shaft. But no film can include or address everything, and Dolemite is My Name impressively engages multiple cultural legacies while being genuinely entertaining, funny, and moving from start to finish. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other recent comedies you’d highlight?

April 3, 2020: 80s Comedies: Working Girl

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up to a special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]On one inspiring and two more frustrating characters in a socially thoughtful dramedy.First things first: I’m a big fan of Mike Nichols’ Working Girl (1988), to the point where I’ve shown it in a couple Writing II classes as our shared multimedia text for a unit/paper where students analyze one of their choice. There are a lot of things that make the film funny and compelling (including a truly great opening and closing credits 80s ballad from Carly Simon), but without question the heart and soul is Melanie Griffith’s career-best performance as protagonist Tess McGill. Griffith delivers the film’s slapstick moments and comic lines pitch-perfectly, and has truly next-level chemistry with her romantic lead Harrison Ford (perhaps not a difficult thing at the height of Ford’s 1980s hotness, but still a vital element of the film’s success); but she also imbues the character with so much charisma, heart, vulnerability, and intelligence that we root for her every step of the way, despite the fact that (and more on this in a moment) she lies and cheats her way through a great deal of the film. I love Tess, love Griffith in this film, and would unequivocally highlight this as one of the decade’s truly great comic and film performances.We have to be able to critique the things we love, though, and I would say that the film’s other two most significant female characters are both in their own ways more problematic than Tess. That’s more obviously the case for Sigourney Weaver’s Katharine Parker, Tess’s duplicitous boss and the film’s villain. Weaver’s villainy hinges entirely on the fact that she steals a great idea of Tess’s and tries to pass it off as her own (despite her claims to be Tess’s biggest champion), and that is indeed a really awful thing to do. But it’s also pretty parallel to much of what Tess does for the remainder of the film once she learns of that action—with Katharine out of commission after a European skiing accident, Tess quite literally steals her identity, from her home and office and wardrobe to her significant other (Ford’s Jack Trainer), lying constantly in order to maintain these appearances. Because we see where Tess starts and what she’s up against, and again because of Griffith’s wonderful performance, we root for her throughout these moments; yet we’re never given any backstory for or really any contextual information at all about Weaver’s character, which makes it impossible to know if she has had to fight a similar fight and deserves similar sympathies. At the very least, that’s not the best contrast to create or villain to rely on in a film about women’s empowerment. The film’s third significant female role, Joan Cusack’s delightful best friend character Cyn, is a lot less complicated: mostly a combination of supportive buddy and comic relief, with an occasional moment of conscienceabout Tess’s manipulations. Cusack is one of our great comic actors, and she unsurprisingly knocks that role out of the park and is another key element of the film’s success. But in terms of the film’s themes, I’d say Cyn presents a bit of a problem: as the film’s ending [SPOILERS, if not unexpected ones I imagine] illustrates, she is presented as purely and entirely happy that Tess has succeeded and gotten the job and life she always wanted; but Cyn and the rest of their friends remain in the office pool from which Tess emerged, and while I suppose one could argue that all of them could be inspired by Tess to follow a similar path, I think it’s more accurate to say that Tess is presented as unique and that neither Cyn nor any of the others are likely to even try for the same next steps. Of course there’s no one path to success or happiness, but this contrast reinforces some overarching class dynamics that are the heart of conversations about work in America but that this funny and fun film isn’t quite willing to get into.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?