Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 179

January 23, 2020: Expanding Civil Rights Memories: Lillian E. Smith

[For this year’s MLK week series, I’ll highlight under-remembered figures, histories, and stories that can expand our collective memories of the Civil Rights Movement. Leading up to a special weekend post on 21st century voices!]As is pretty much always the case when I write about the need to better remember figures (or histories, or stories, or texts, or or or), I’m using myself as a case study, rather than in any way pretending that I’ve got it all figured out. That’s particularly evident when it comes to the amazing Lillian E. Smith, about whom I’ve only learned in the last year or so thanks to my friend Matthew Teutsch taking over as the new Director of the Smith Center. But having begun to learn about Smith, I’ve quickly realized how indispensable a voice she is for so many reasons, including how she can help us expand our collective memories of the long Civil Rights Movement. Check out this November Saturday Evening Post piece of mine on Smith for a lot more on what makes her such a unique and powerful writer and voice!Last post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Civil Rights figures, histories, or stories you’d want to add to our collective memories?

January 22, 2020: Expanding Civil Rights Memories: Bayard Rustin

[For this year’s MLK week series, I’ll highlight under-remembered figures, histories, and stories that can expand our collective memories of the Civil Rights Movement. Leading up to a special weekend post on 21st century voices!]On the Civil Rights leader who illustrates the possibilities and challenges of intersectionality.I’ve written a good deal in this space about the concept of hybridity (often linking it to my own idea of cross-cultural transformation, but the two concepts are of course closely tied), and about the processes of creolizationthat have influenced so many American identities and communities. For a time hybridity was a central frame through which many scholars of identity developed their ideas, but in recent years it has been supplanted by a somewhat parallel yet also distinct concept: intersectionality. As I understand it, intersectionality refers not so much to hybrid combinations of identities and more to the ways in which different sides of an individual’s identity (her race/ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, class, and so on) can both relate to one another and influence her perspective and actions (even when they seem tied to one particular category). Two individuals about whom I’ve written in prior MLK week posts, Yuri Kochiyama and Coretta Scott King, certainly demonstrated the role intersectionality played in the Civil Rights Movement; and in an even more striking way, so did King’s colleague Bayard Rustin.Rustin’s major contributions to the Civil Rights Movement itself represented one layer of intersectionality, as he consistently linked class, work, and labor union activism to his civil rights initiatives. A member of the Communist Party for many decades, he was, for one example, the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which prominently featured labor leader and socialist A. Philip Randolph; a few years later Rustin would himself co-found and direct the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, which focused on integrating unions and linking the labor movement to African American communities and issues. Yet it was in response to another layer to his own identity that Rustin pursued his most unique intersectional activism: a gay man, he both fought for gay rights (doing so most publicly in the 1980s, before his death in 1987) and worked behind the scenes to make the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent racial activist efforts more tolerant and accepting of gay and lesbian members and Americans. Along with writer James Baldwin, Rustin was likely the most prominent African American gay man of the 20th century; and while Baldwin consistently occupied an iconoclastic position outside of any communal movement, Rustin fought for the intersections of his sexual and racial activisms.Yet an accurate history of Rustin’s efforts has to include the fact that for many decades, and certainly throughout the era of the Civil Rights Movement, he lost that battle. That meant not only that he had to remain far quieter on the gay rights front than he likely preferred (again, not become a public spokesperson for the movement until the 80s), but also that he took on fewer public roles within the Civil Rights Movement as a result (it seems) of fears that he would be a controversial or even ineffective leader due to his sexuality (as well as his overt history with the Communist Party). None of that means that he could not be in his lifetime an activist for these multiple causes (he certainly was), nor that fighting for them at different times is necessarily a bad thing (no one, nor any movement, can fight for every issue at every moment). But it does remind us that intersectionality isn’t just about the role and influence of different sides to our identities—it’s also, and perhaps just as significantly, about the balances and choices we all have to make, as individuals and as communities. If Bayard Rustin helps us think about those challenges as well, that’d be just one more layer to his inspiring life and work.Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Civil Rights figures, histories, or stories you’d want to add to our collective memories?

January 21, 2020: Expanding Civil Rights Memories: Women and the Bus Boycott

[For this year’s MLK week series, I’ll highlight under-remembered figures, histories, and stories that can expand our collective memories of the Civil Rights Movement. Leading up to a special weekend post on 21st century voices!]Two years ago, I focused the second piece for my bimonthly “Considering History” column for the Saturday Evening Post on the African American women whose anti-sexual assault activism led directly to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and a key origin point for the Civil Rights Movement. (A piece that, as I note there, was indebted to historian Danielle McGuire’s amazing book At the Dark End of the Street .) Those histories significantly change and expand our collective memories of the boycott, of Rosa Parks, of the Civil Rights Movement, and of the long, 20thcentury evolution of what we’ve come to know as the #MeToo movement. For all those reasons, I would ask you to read that Saturday Evening Post piece(and ideally McGuire’s book as well) and help add these women and this activism into our collective memories!Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Civil Rights figures, histories, or stories you’d want to add to our collective memories?

January 20, 2020: The Real King

[My annual MLK Day post kicks off a week on under-remembered figures, histories, and stories from the Civil Rights movement.]On the limits to how we currently remember King, and how to get beyond them.
It probably puts me at significant risk of losing my AmericanStudies Card to say this—and you have no idea how hard it is to get a second one of those if you lose the first—but I think the “I Have a Dream” speech is kind of overrated. I’m sort of saying that for effect, since I don’t really mean that the speech itself isn’t as eloquent and powerful and pitch-perfect in every way as the narrative goes—it most definitely is, and while that’s true enough if you read the words, it becomes infinitely more true when you see video and thus hear audio of the speech and moment. But what is overrated, I think, is the weight that has been placed on the speech, the cultural work that it has been asked to do. Partly that has to do with contemporary politics, and especially with those voices who have tried to argue that King’s “content of their character” rather than “color of their skin” distinction means that he would oppose any and all forms of identity politics or affirmative action or the like; such readings tend to forget that King was speaking in that culminating section of the speech about what he dreams might happen “one day”—if, among other things, we give all racial groups the same treatment and opportunities—rather than what he thought was possible in America in the present.
But the more significant overemphasis on the speech, I would argue, has occurred in the process by which it (and not even all of it, so much as just those final images of “one day”) has been made to symbolize all of—or at least represent in miniature—King’s philosophies and ideas and arguments. There’s no question that the speech’s liberal univeralism, its embrace (if in that hoped-for way) of an equality that knows no racial identifications, was a central thread within King’s work; and, perhaps more tellingly, was the thread by which he could most clearly be defined in opposition to a more stridently and wholly Black Nationalist voice like Malcolm X’s. Yet the simple and crucial fact is that King’s rich and complex perspective and philosophy, as they existed throughout his life but especially as they developed over the decade and a half between his real emergence onto the national scene with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and his assassination in 1968, contained a number of similarly central and crucial threads. There were for example his radical perspectives on class, wealth, and the focuses of government spending, a set of arguments which culminated in the last years of his life in both the “Poor People’s Campaign” and in increasingly vocal critiques of the military-industrial complex; and his strong belief not only in nonviolent resistance (as informed by figures as diverse as Thoreau and Gandhi) but also in pacifism in every sense, which likewise developed into his very public opposition to the Vietnam Year in his final years. While both of those perspectives were certainly not focused on one racial identity or community, neither were they broadly safe or moderate stances; indeed, they symbolized direct connections to some of the most radical social movements and philosophies of the era.
To my mind, though, the most significant undernarrated thread—and perhaps the most central one in King’s perspective period—has to be his absolutely clear belief in the need to oppose racial segregation and discrimination, of every kind, in every way, as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Again, the contrast to Malcolm has tended to make King out to be the more patient or cautious voice, but I defy anyone to read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—the short piece that King wrote in April 1963 to a group of white Southern clergyman, while he was serving a brief jail sentence for his protest activities—and come away thinking that either patience or caution are in the top twenty adjectives that best describe the man and his beliefs. King would later expand the letter into a book, Why We Can’t Wait , the very title of which makes the urgency of his arguments more explicit still; but when it comes to raw passion and power, I don’t think any American text can top the “Letter” itself. Not raw in the sense of ineloquent—I tend to imagine that King’s first words, at the age of 1 or whenever, were probably more eloquent than any I’ll ever speak—but raw as in their absolute rejection, in the letter’s opening sentence, of his audience’s description of his protest activities as “unwise and untimely.” And raw as well in the razor sharp turn in tone in the two sentences that comprise one of the letter’s closing paragraphs: “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”I guess what it boils down to for me is this: to remember King for one section of “I Have a Dream” is like remembering Shakespeare for the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in Hamlet. Yeah, that’s a great bit, but what about the humor? The ghost? The political plotting and play within the play? The twenty-seven other great speeches? And then there’s, y’know, all those other pretty good, and very distinct, plays. And some poetry that wasn’t bad either. It’s about time we remembered the whole King, and thus got a bit closer to the real King and what he can really help us see about our national history, identity, and future. Next MLK week post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Civil Rights figures, histories, or stories you’d want to add to our collective memories?

January 18-19, 2020: Book Talk and Project Updates

[As of next week my sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this week I’ve shared some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, leading up to these updates on book talks and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]Happy MLK weekend! I’ve got a new Saturday Evening Post Considering History column coming up on Monday, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, two quick updates on book projects:1)      I’m excited to announce here that I’ve signed a contract for my next book, which like We the People will appear in Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series. Tentatively titled My Country ‘Tis of Thee, this project will trace the history of competing American patriotisms—celebratory, mythologizing, active, and critical. Feels like a great complement to We the People and like a particularly important topic to be writing about in this crucial election year. Watch this space for more info!2)      But We the People continues to feel more and more relevant with every passing day, so I’m excited that the book talks for that project will continue. Here’s a current list of those upcoming talks, but as ever I’m open to any and all suggestions and connections for other possibilities (including online spaces where I can share the book). Thanks! (And if you aren’t able to get to a talk in person, here’s a video of December’s Boston Athenaeum talk!)Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What’s on your Spring 2020 horizon, and/or what are you working on?

January 17, 2020: Spring Semester Previews: Adult Learning Classes

[As of next week my sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this week I’ll share some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, focusing on new readings I’m adding this semester and leading up to some updates on book talks and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]On adapting the same overall topic for two very different adult learning settings.This Spring I’ll be teaching once again for the two adult learning programs for which I’ve had the chance to teach most frequently over the last half-dozen years: Fitchburg State’s Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) and Assumption College’s Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE). (I’ll also be teaching a second course for Beacon Hill Seminars on the subject of my most recent book, We the People, but that’s a topic for another time/post!) But for what I’m pretty sure is the first time across all those classes and semesters and programs, I’ll be teaching the same basic topic in the same semester (indeed, basically across ten consecutive weeks, as the two five-week courses abut one another) for both ALFA and WISE. Both classes will focus on readings and conversations related to a topic that is not coincidentally also a central subject of my proposed next book project (for more on which watch this space, natch): examples and models of critical patriotism from both American history and our contemporary moment.I’m not gonna pretend for a moment that I plan to reinvent the wheel for each of these two very similarly focused classes—I’m sure it’s obvious to any reader of this blog that I enjoy the feeling of having multiple balls in the air, but that’s a very different thing from juggling chainsaws and I try to steer clear of the latter as much as possible. But at the same time, I quite literally can’t run the two classes in exactly the same way, as the programs themselves operate differently: ALFA classes cap at about 25, meet in FSU classrooms, and are intended to run as discussions/seminars; while WISE classes cap at around 75, meet in large lecture halls/auditoriums, and are intended to run mostly as lectures (with time for questions/responses from the students at the end of each session). So, for example, I can and generally do ask ALFA students to read materials in between classes, as that makes it much easier to have full discussions of them during our sessions; but not only is there not really space for such discussions at WISE classes, but I would also feel badly asking them to read materials when there isn’t much opportunity to share their thoughts on them. So while I’ll likely share many of the same voices and texts in both classes, I’ll do so in those significantly distinct ways—which, I hope, will lead to distinct yet interconnected insights and ideas for the book!Speaking of, book updates this weekend,BenPS. What’s on your Spring 2020 horizon?

January 16, 2020: Spring Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone

[As of next week my sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this week I’ll share some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, focusing on new readings I’m adding this semester and leading up to some updates on book talks and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]On the first novel I’ll ever teach in hardcover, and why I’m doing so.In my English Studies Capstone course, we read one text for each of our department’s four “tracks” (the concentrations that our English Studies Majors can choose). For the Literature track text, I’ve moved over the years through Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah , and, last spring, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You , our 2018-2019 Fitchburg State University Community Read book. I really love Ng’s novel and would have been more than happy to teach it again this time around, but wanted to challenge myself to use something new, both literally (ie, released recently) and pedagogically (ie, something I have never taught before, in a class that I’ve had the chance to teach nearly once a year for many years now). I debated between many possibilities, including all those highlighted in this October blog series on Recent Reads, before eventually settling on Monique Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits—a book that is not just new, it was published so recently that it is still only available in hardcover, which makes this the first time I’ve ever taught a book for which there was not yet a paperback edition.I didn’t make that decision lightly, as I am fully aware of the financial challenges facing our students (and all college students these days); that was one reason why I decided not to require any texts for my Writing II class, as I discussed in Tuesday’s post. But a Capstone course is different from First Year Writing in many ways, and many of those differences could be boiled down to this: Capstone represents one of the last times when these students will be able to be college students and English Majors in the most idealized ways. That doesn’t mean that such practical challenges and realities are absent, of course (and indeed I dedicate a significant percentage of my Capstone class to focusing on practical topics like resumes and cover letters, grad school applications and options, professional paths, and so on). But at the same time, it means this is a class—again, likely one of the last classes they’ll take as undergrads, and perhaps in their lives—where we can read a wonderful contemporary author and novel, share together in the experience of encountering literature and culture that’s both part of our world yet occupies and creates its own world as well. Truong’s novel is and does all those things beautifully, and I’m excited to share it with my Capstone students.Last preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your Spring 2020 horizon?

January 15, 2020: Spring Semester Previews: The Short Story (Online)

[As of next week my sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this week I’ll share some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, focusing on new readings I’m adding this semester and leading up to some updates on book talks and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]On a change in readings that highlights the fundamental limitations of an online literature course, and why I’m happy to be making it nonetheless.This spring I’ll teach my third entirely online section of The Short Story (and the second in its accelerated, half-semester form; I’ve also taught our American Literature II survey online four times now). For the first two sections I used texts from the Best American Short Stories 2013 anthology for our contemporary readings (paired with older short stories available online), but since I last taught this class I discovered and taught in a couple different settings the (Roxane Gay-edited) 2018 edition, which features some of my very favorite short stories. But here’s the thing: those stories have become favorites not only on their own terms, but also because of the joy of discussing them with a group of students and fellow readers. And not just in general terms (although of course I value such conversations generally)—many of these stories are ambiguous, strange, puzzling, demanding of extended attention and conversation if we are to develop our thoughts and ideas about them. But in an online class, we quite simply won’t be able to have those conversations—of course I ask the students to respond to each other’s weekly posts, and I have found that our students are pretty good at doing so substantively; but that’s still an entirely different thing from in-person, multi-vocal conversations about a shared text in front of us.Those realities of online classes (especially online literature and humanities classes, as I suspect things can work quite differently in online math courses or the like) are what they are, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get to a point where I feel better about them (although as with any topic I cover here I welcome thoughts, responses, suggestions, etc.!). That’s the main reason why I hope never to teach more than one online class a semester, or at the very least that the vast majority of my teaching will remain in person. But if online literature classes are going to exist (they are) and if I’m going to be one of our English Studies faculty who teach them (I am and am happy to be), those classes and experiences will unquestionably go better, feel more positive for me, and be more successful and meaningful for all concerned if I get to share great authors and texts with the students in them. So while I will greatly miss the chance to talk together with those students about “Boys Go to Jupiter” and “Control Negro” and “Come On, Silver” and others, I am nevertheless hugely excited to share those wonderful stories with this community, and to read their responses and readings and analyses. Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your Spring 2020 horizon?

January 14, 2020: Spring Semester Previews: First Year Writing II

[As of next week my sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this week I’ll share some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, focusing on new readings I’m adding this semester and leading up to some updates on book talks and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]On a significant change in my Writing II course, and a request for help with it.I feel like over the years I’ve written at least a handful of distinct semester preview posts, for both First Year Writing I and II courses, on my desire to incorporate more online and digital materials, and through them more 21st century topics and themes, into those classes (those hyperlinked posts are just a couple examples of what I know has been a longstanding trend in these semester preview series). I’ve certainly found ways to achieve elements of that goal over my last few sections of First Year Writing, perhaps especially in my current Writing II syllabus that focuses on the overarching topic of “21stCentury Identities.” But at the same time, the first two times I’ve taught with that syllabus (in the Spring semesters of 2014 and 2017), I did utilize a hard-copy anthology (Signs of Life in the U.S.A.) as the source of the majority of our shared readings. It’s a good anthology, one that absolutely and effectively highlights various 21st century topics and content (advertisements, TV and film, social media and digital identities). But as I thought about my Spring 2020 section of Writing II, I realized that asking students to buy a textbook at all, rather than finding materials and readings online, itself reflected a somewhat outdated or at least ironic choice for a course like this one.So I’ve taken the plunge, and for the first time in a First Year Writing class (and one of the only times in any class I’ve taught—I am an English Studies professor after all, and I do like books) we won’t be using any hard-copy texts of any kind. I think I will absolutely be able to find both primary source and scholarly readings and materials online for our three shared Units: analyzing advertisements (past and present, but with an emphasis on the present for sure); writing and analyzing 21st century personal narratives (or other forms of representing our identities); and analyzing film/TV/multimedia texts (same as above about past and present; our model pair of texts are Fruitvale Station and Black-ish ). But between this space and social media, I’ve got a ton of great connections to other 21st century studiers, so: do you have suggestions or nominations for readings or materials, on those or other aspects of 21stcentury identity, that you think would work well for this class? I’ll still be finalizing the syllabus come January, so your suggestions will certainly be able to be part of it if you do. Thanks in advance!Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your Spring 2020 horizon?

January 13, 2020: Spring Semester Previews: Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy

[As of next week my sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this week I’ll share some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, focusing on new readings I’m adding this semester and leading up to some updates on book talks and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]On a long-overdue step toward diversifying my sci fi/fantasy canon.I created and first taught my Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy course in Fall 2007 (in response to student demand for such a class at Fitchburg State), and have had the chance to teach it three times since. And of course I’ve been reading and loving those genres for far, far longer than that. But I’m ashamed to admit that in both the classes and my personal reading experiences, I haven’t read much at all into the long and evolving tradition of African and African American sci fi and fantasy. I love Octavia Butler and taught her time travel historical novel of slavery Kindred in that 2007 course, but that was unfortunately an exception to the general lack of racial/ethnic diversity on the syllabus (which, again, is due at least in part to my own lack of knowledge of these authors and traditions). Given the existence of such vital scholarly books as AndréCarrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction(2016), as well as my proximity to sci fi grandmaster Samuel Delany during my time as a grad student at Temple (where he was for many years a professor), I didn’t really have much of an excuse for that continued ignorance, other than the constraints of time under which we all operate of course.I can’t change those personal and pedagogical pasts, but there’s no time like the present to redress such gaps and failures. So while much of this Spring’s Sci Fi/Fantasy syllabus will look very similar to the last couple iterations, I have subbed out my longstanding 21st century fantasy novel (Robin Hobb’s wonderful Assassin’s Apprentice) for a new text: Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (2015). I hardly ever assign and teach a text that I haven’t had a chance to read prior to the class, but again my reading experience of African American fantasy fiction is painfully limited, so that was likely to be the case regardless of what I chose (and is indeed the case with Wilson’s book). There were of course many other good options for this slot as well, including books by African-born authors such as Nnedi Okorafor and Tomi Adeyemi; I’m determined to read them and others soon, for personal but also pedagogical reasons. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and I’m excited both to read Wilson’s book myself and especially to teach it and hear student responses to this exciting contemporary African American fantasy author and novel. Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What’s on your Spring 2020 horizon?