Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 199

May 28, 2019: Decoration Day Histories: Frederick Douglass

[Following up Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]On one of the great American speeches, and why it’d be so important to add to our collective memories.In a long-ago guest post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic blog, Civil War historian Andy Hall highlighted Frederick Douglass’s amazing 1871 Decoration Day speech (full text available at that first hyperlink). Delivered at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery, then as now the single largest resting place of U.S. soldiers, Douglass’s short but incredibly (if not surprisingly) eloquent and pointed speech has to be ranked as one of the most impressive in American history. I’m going to end this first paragraph here so you can read the speech in full (again, it’s at the first hyperlink above), and I’ll see you in a few.Welcome back! If I were to close-read Douglass’s speech, I could find choices worth extended attention in every paragraph and every line. But I agree with Hall’s final point, that the start of Douglass’s concluding paragraph—“But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic”—is particularly noteworthy and striking. Granted, this was not yet the era that would come to be dominated by narratives of reunion and reconciliation between the regions, and then by ones of conversation to the Southern perspective (on all of which, see tomorrow’s post); an era in which Douglass’s ideas would be no less true, nor in which (I believe) he would have hesitated to share them, but in which a Decoration Day organizing committee might well have chosen not to invite a speaker who would articulate such a clear and convincing take on the causes and meanings of the Civil War. Yet even in 1871, to put that position so bluntly and powerfully at such an occasion would have been impressive for even a white speaker, much less an African American one.If we were to better remember Douglass’s Decoration Day speech, that would be one overt and important effect: to push back on so many of the narratives of the Civil War that have developed in the subsequent century and a half. One of the most frequent such narratives is that there was bravery and sacrifice on both sides, as if to produce a leveling effect on our perspective on the war—but as Douglass notes in the paragraph before that conclusion, recognizing individual bravery in combat is not at all the same as remembering a war: “The essence and significance of our devotions here today are not to be found in the fact that the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle.” I believe Douglass here can be connected to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and its own concluding notion of honoring the dead through completing “the unfinished work”: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” That work and task remained unfinished and great long after the Civil War’s end, after all—and indeed remain so to this day in many ways. Just another reason to better remember Frederick Douglass’s Decoration Day speech.Next Decoration Day history tomorrow,BenIPS. What do you think?

May 25-27, 2019: Remembering Memorial Day

[Before a series on Decoration Day, the holiday that preceded and evolved into Memorial Day, a special post on shifting our collective memories of the holiday’s histories.]
On what we don’t remember about Memorial Day, and why we should.
In a long-ago post on the Statue of Liberty, I made a case for remembering, and engaging much more fully, with what the Statue was originally intended, by its French abolitionist creator, to symbolize: the legacy of slavery and abolitionism in both America and France, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the memories of what he had done to advance that cause, and so on. I tried there, hopefully with some success, to leave ample room for what the Statue has come to mean, both for America as a whole and, more significantly still, for generation upon generation of immigrant arrivals to the nation. I think those meanings, especially when tied to Emma Lazarus’ poem and its radically democratic and inclusive vision of our national identity, are beautiful and important in their own right. But how much more profound and meaningful, if certainly more complicated, would they be if they were linked to our nation’s own troubled but also inspiring histories of slavery and abolitionism, of sectional strife and Civil War, of racial divisions and those who have worked for centuries to transcend and bridge them?
I would say almost exactly the same thing when it comes to the history of Memorial Day. For the last century or so, at least since the end of World War I, the holiday has meant something broadly national and communal, an opportunity to remember and celebrate those Americans who have given their lives as members of our armed forces. While I certainly feel that some of the narratives associated with that idea are as simplifying and mythologizing and meaningless as many others I’ve analyzed here—“they died for our freedom” chief among them; the world would be a vastly different, and almost certainly less free, place had the Axis powers won World War II (for example), but I have yet to hear any convincing case that the world would be even the slightest bit worse off were it not for the quarter of a million American troops who lives were wasted in the Vietnam War (for another)—those narratives are much more about politics and propaganda, and don’t change at all the absolutely real and tragic and profound meaning of service and loss for those who have done so and all those who know and love them. One of the most pitch-perfect statements of my position on such losses can be found in a song by (surprisingly) Bruce Springsteen; his “Gypsy Biker,” from Magic (2007), certainly includes a strident critique of the Bush Administration and Iraq War, as seen in lines like “To those who threw you away / You ain’t nothing but gone,” but mostly reflects a brother’s and family’s range of emotions and responses to the death of a young soldier in that war.
Yet as with the Statue, Memorial Day’s original meanings and narratives are significantly different from, and would add a great deal of complexity and power to, these contemporary images. The holiday was first known as Decoration Day, and was (at least per the thorough histories of it by scholars like David Blight) originated in 1865 by a group of freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina; the slaves visited a cemetery for Union soldiers on May 1st of that year and decorated their graves, a quiet but very sincere tribute to what those soldiers have given and what it had meant to the lives of these freedmen and –women. The holiday quickly spread to many other communities, and just as quickly came to focus more on the less potentially divisive, or at least less complex as reminders of slavery and division and the ongoing controversies of Reconstruction and so on, perspectives of former soldiers—first fellow Union ones, but by the 1870s veterans from both sides. Yet former slaves continued to honor the holiday in their own way, as evidenced by a powerful scene from Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper” (1880), in which the protagonist observes a group of ex-slaves leaving their decorations on the graves of the Union dead at the cemetery where he works. On the one hand, these ex-slave memorials are parallel to the family memories that now dominate Memorial Day, and serve as a beautiful reminder that the American family extends to blood relations of very different and perhaps even more genuine kinds. But on the other hand, the ex-slave memorials represent far more complex and in many ways (I believe) significant American stories and perspectives than a simple familial memory; these acts were a continuing acknowledgment both of some of our darkest moments and of the ways in which we had, at great but necessary cost, defeated them.Again, I’m not trying to suggest that any current aspects or celebrations of Memorial Day are anything other than genuine and powerful; having heard some eloquent words about what my Granddad’s experiences with his fellow soldiers had meant to him (he even commandeered an abandoned bunker and hand-wrote a history of the Company after the war!), I share those perspectives. But as with the Statue and with so many of our national histories, what we’ve forgotten is just as genuine and powerful, and a lot more telling about who we’ve been and thus who and where we are. The more we can remember those histories too, the more complex and meaningful our holidays, our celebrations, our memories, and our futures will be. Next Decoration Day post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 24, 2019: As American as Blue Jeans: Advertisements, Then and Now

[On May 20, 1873 dry goods retailer Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received a patent for work pants reinforced with metal rivets, and blue jeans were born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Strauss and a few other contexts for those uniquely American articles of clothing!]On what two sets of histories and two contemporary spots reveal about advertising blue jeans.1)      Cowboy ads: As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, the association of blue jeans with cowboys has been kept alive and ever-present over the last century largely through pop culture, and most especially through advertising. A Pinterest search for “Vintage Western wear,” for example, brings up countless ads for Levi’s and other denim brands featuring cowboy imagery and iconography. The question about such ads, I suppose, is whether they’ve been targeted entirely toward outsiders, or whether insiders to those geographies or communities might genuinely have been influenced by them as well. The (1958) second hyperlinked ad above, for example, notes that Levi’s is “in tune with Western tastes” (a groan-worthy pun, as the pictured cowboy is strumming his six-string), which feels to me as if it’s targeting Easterners or others seeking to understand and replicate such tastes. But of course, ranchers and other Westerners needed to buy clothing too, so perhaps Levi’s was trying to genuinely align its marketing campaigns (and its product) with those Western tastes.2)      Women’s jeans over time: As that LiveAbout article traces nicely, ads for women’s jeans have since at least the 1930s likewise linked their product to Western imagery through such phrases as “Original Western Blue Jeans” and “Jeans for Country Living.” But while of course there have long been cowgirls and female ranchers and other such roles, the iconography of women and the West has more frequently portrayed them as the helpmates to male figures, as in the 1950s Levi’s ad featuring the picnicking woman whose jeans are “right … for leisure.” And beginning around the 1960s, those highlighted ads evolved to focus far more on fashion, both through “regular” women models and (increasingly over time) through supermodels such as Brooke Shields, Anna Nicole Smith, and Claudia Schiffer. To some degree, the gradual but unmistakable shift of blue jeans from (ostensibly) working apparel to part of a fashionable ensemble can be traced through that last half-century of evolving ads and images.3)      21st century ads: The associations of jeans with cowboys and the West certainly haven’t gone away, as illustrated with particular clarity by the 2010 Wrangler ad entitled “A Cowboy’s Life.” Yes, that 21st century cowboy has a family and various leisure activities, but he’s still entirely intertwined with iconic images, all the way through the final shot of him literally riding off into the sunset. But then there’s 2017’s wonderful Levi’s ad “Circles,” which portrays Americans (or humans, as there’s no reason its images have to be limited to the US) of just about every ethnic and cultural type, all unified through their joyous participation in dancing circles and, yes, their blue jeans. I know full well that ads are always carefully and to a degree cynically constructed, but they can at the same time reveal genuine and important cultural and historical shifts—and “Circles” suggests that, like every part of Americana, blue jeans can and must evolve to better reflect our deeply diverse society and world.Special Memorial Day post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

May 23, 2019: As American as Blue Jeans: Jean Jackets

[On May 20, 1873 dry goods retailer Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received a patent for work pants reinforced with metal rivets, and blue jeans were born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Strauss and a few other contexts for those uniquely American articles of clothing!]On three famous denim jackets that embody three recent eras.1)      Bruce: What, you thought I’d start somewhere else?? Bruce Springsteen certainly didn’t originate the blue jean jacket (per this Glamour piece that history seems to go back about as far as blue jeans themselves, nearly a hundred years pre-Boss), and he was by no means the first celebrity of the media age to be spotted in one (yesterday’s subject James Deanmight hold that honor), but I don’t think it’s just the Bruce-ophile in me talking when I say that Springsteen’s ubiquitous denim jacket (and blue jeans) during the Born in the U.S.A. era (when he graduated from rock star to rock god) helped launch the 1980s as the decade of the jean jacket. Like Dean, Bruce was only play-acting the part of a workin’ man (he notes at the outset of his recent Broadway show that this was the first time he’d ever worked a five-day-a-week job)—but so were nearly all of us who wore those ‘80s jean jackets, after all.2)      Thelma: Geena Davis’s Thelma in 1991’s Thelma and Louise was a fictional character as well, but one closely linked to her working-class identity and life. The jean jacket she sports for much of the film could be analyzed as part of that identity and status, but I would say that it also and perhaps especially reflects a rock ‘n roll rebel layer beneath the shy country girl exterior we meet at the start of the film. Thelma and Louise’s plot mostly depicts Thelma’s arc toward the full expression of that rebellious self, and could thus be read as a turning point towards a decade that would feature other prominent rebellious and angry female icons, including a few years later Alanis Morissette (who’s been known to sport a jean jacket of her own). As the 80s turned to the 90s, that is, jean jackets evolved but endured—and if any up-and-coming AmericanStudiers wanna write a thesis on the jean jacket and American culture from Bruce to Thelma, the idea is all yours!3)      Miley: As with most everything else in the 21st century, it’s difficult to determine whether more recent iterations of famous jean jackets have represented genuine self-expressions or nostalgic embraces of those prior pop culture eras and identities. It’s likely a bit both, as illustrated by one of our contemporary culture’s true chameleons, Miley Cyrus. But one of Miley’s first such jean jackets was the revealing one she sported in 2013 (see the story hyperlinked under her first name above), at the moment when she was just beginning to shift from the childish Hannah Montana character into the far more adult and rebellious Miley Cyrus one (which may or may not be her, y’know, authentic self). So however we read that particular jean jacket or any of Miley’s clothing and identity choices and stages, I’d have to say that once again, perhaps as always, the denim jacket has embodied an era and zeitgeist in American popular culture. Last blue jean studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 22, 2019: As American as Blue Jeans: James Dean

[On May 20, 1873 dry goods retailer Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received a patent for work pants reinforced with metal rivets, and blue jeans were born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Strauss and a few other contexts for those uniquely American articles of clothing!]On how blue jeans help us understand the iconic American actor, and what’s missing from the image.The opening lines of Lana Del Rey’s song “Blue Jeans” (from her 2012 album Born to Die) compare the speaker’s lost lover to a very famous American look: “Blue jeans, white shirt/Walked into the room you know you made my eyes burn/It was like James Dean, for sure.” Inspired by that evocative opening description and simile, there are (as of the mid-March moment in which I’m writing this post, anyway) at least a dozen James Dean tribute videos on YouTube that set images of the actor to Del Rey’s song. Which makes sense, not just because Dean was so well known for that particular ensemble, but also because the tragically early death of this beautiful young man makes Del Rey’s nostalgic lament for lost love especially pointed for such multimedia tributes. Nostalgia,after all, is as much (if not entirely) about an image in our mind in the present as about any actual past reality, and that can be said for both a lost love and a legendary pop culture figure in equal measure.Even in his own era, of course, James Dean was one of those pop culture figures who came to be associated with—indeed I would argue largely defined by—images(in both the literal sense and the idea of constructed narratives). That’s a phenomenon that has become quite common, if not ubiquitous, in our 21stcentury moment of social media and reality TV and, yes, these here intertubes; but such prominent pop culture images were more unique and striking in the early 1950s period of Dean’s rapid ascendancy to film stardom. And with more of an emphasis on still images than in our fully multimedia internet age, particular articles of clothing or accessories became central to many of those pop culture iconic images: Brando’s t-shirt, Marilyn’s billowing dress, Elvis with his guitar strung across his hips, and James Dean in those blue jeans. The contexts for each of those images were distinct and specific, and would of course evolve and shift over time; but each also seemed to capture a particular element of the famous figure’s image and appeal. And in Dean’s case, that element could be described as a complex combination of fashionable beauty and rebellious roughness, of a pretty face that we could still believe as a rebel without a cause.Such iconic images are always partial and/or over-simplified, though, and in Dean’s case his tragically brief life only amplifies those qualities. Dean’s larger-than-life persona can make this difficult to remember, but he really became famous for two films, both released in the same year (1955) as his auto accident and death: East of Eden (1955) and Rebel without a Cause (1955). (He also appeared posthumously in 1956’s Giant.) And while he did wear those famous jeans in both films, he did so in two quite distinct contexts: the rural setting for which they were initially invented in East (also largely the case with Giant); and as part of the new, suburban rock ‘n roll vibe for which jeans were being adapted in Rebel. So even in these two films from a single year, Dean’s iconic attire and image would have to be analyzed differently—and when we factor in his theatrical and television work from the prior few years, the picture gets even more multi-layered (to say nothing of where his career might have gone post-1955). He might well have continued to wear those blue jeans—once an image gets established it can be very difficult to shake, as aforementioned contemporary figures like Marilyn Monroe knew all too well—but if our narratives of them had remained static they would have become increasingly inaccurate. Dean’s tragic death shouldn’t keep us from complicating and extending the image.Next blue jean studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 21, 2019: As American as Blue Jeans: Cowboys

[On May 20, 1873 dry goods retailer Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received a patent for work pants reinforced with metal rivets, and blue jeans were born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Strauss and a few other contexts for those uniquely American articles of clothing!]On myths, realities, and an iconic American type.As is often the case with mythic images, the cultural narratives of the American cowboy developed most fully in an era when that role was (at least to a degree) passing into history. Thanks to sources as varied but related as the traveling Wild West Shows, Western dime novels, and bestselling individual works like Owen Wister’s hugely popular novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), by the early 20th century the figure of the cowboy was one of the most prominent and iconic American types. Yet by that period various factors, from the construction of fences and the creation of large-scale/corporate ranches to the increasing urbanization of the nation (and in particular the development and expansion of Western cities like Los Angeles, Denver, Cheyenne, and many more), had significantly lessened the role and presence of cowboys in the Western United States. Certainly this economic and historical role continued to be present in and after those changing times and settings, but various aspects of the iconic imagery (which of course were always partly cultural constructs) were by the early 20th century and would remain thereafter largely mythic.There are lots of specific individual elements and details out of which such iconic images are constructed, but for cowboys one such element has long (at least since their late 19th century invention) been blue jeans. I’ll analyze recent and contemporary blue jean advertisements in depth later in the week’s series, but here I’ll note that for as long as I can remember (and it seems for much longerthan this 41-year old AmericanStudier could remember), cowboys have been one of the most frequent (if not the single most prominent) focal types in such blue jean ads. That’s partly of course intended as a way to romanticize the jeans, to link them (for purposes of selling them to consumers who are very likely not cowboys in any practical or meaningful sense) to these iconic and popular cultural image. But it likewise reflects the way in which the iconic and popular image is assembled out of such specific elements, both in its initial or foundational forms and then in how those starting points are passed down and amplified through various media.So if we try to get past those multiple layers of advertising and marketing, of imagery and myth-making, is there any there there? On the one hand, of course there is: blue jeans were and are a real article of clothing, and as I detailed in yesterday’s post were indeed invented to serve as work pants for particular kinds of Western labor (a category that certainly would include the economic role of the cowboy in a prominent way, even more so in the late 19thcentury before the most widespread versions of the shifts I described above). But on the other hand, I’m not sure that 21st century narratives of cowboys and blue jeans have any more to do with those historical facts than would Revolutionary-era legacies of tri-corner hats if that form of apparel were to make a comeback. The analogy doesn’t quite hold, since after all blue jeans have never gone away, and so the legacy is at least more of a persistent through-line. But at the very least, any association of blue jeans with cowboys in 2019 has to grapple with the layers of legend and simulacra that have accumulated over the last 150 years.Next blue jean studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 20, 2019: As American as Blue Jeans: Levi Strauss

[On May 20, 1873 dry goods retailer Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received a patent for work pants reinforced with metal rivets, and blue jeans were born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Strauss and a few other contexts for those uniquely American articles of clothing!]On three exemplary stages to the blue jean mogul’s American story.Levi Strauss was born Loeb Strauss, into a Jewish family in Buttenheim, Bavaria (part of the era’s German Confederation) in 1829. When he was still a boy his two older brothers Jonas and Louis immigrated to the United States and started a successful New York City dry goods and clothing business, J. Strauss Brother & Co.; in 1847, when Levi was 18, he, his mother, and his two sisters immigrated (in steerage, natch) to join the brothers, and he soon changed his name to Levi. The development of New York City Jewish American communities that were deeply intertwined with the city’s and nation’s dry goods and garment trades is often seen as a late 19th century phenomenon (the era in which Abraham Cahan’s short story “A Sweatshop Romance” ([1898] and novel The Rise of David Levinsky [1917], two of the earliest literary chronicles in English of those histories, are set). But Strauss’s family and story remind us that these histories and communities were developing throughout the 19thcentury, and indeed well before. Since New York City itself developed as a major metropolis in many ways in those antebellum decades, it’s fair to say that immigrant families and communities like these were really foundational contributors to such urban growth, rather than the later additions to already-established urban spaces that they are often described as.Levi himself wasn’t in New York for too long, however; the company’s success led him first to Louisville (where the family were opening a new branch, along with another in St. Louis opened by his sister Fanny) and then in 1854 to San Francisco, where he opened his own wholesale business, Levi Strauss & Co. The Gold Rush era was by then fully underway, California had finally been annexedinto the United States, and San Francisco was becoming the urban center of both those unfolding American historical trends. Much of the story of the early- to mid-19thcentury in the United States is of the nation’s Westward Expansion, running through Midwestern communities like Louisville and (especially, thanks to its image as the Gateway to the West) St. Louis and all the way to the Pacific. While those histories are often still narrated through images of rugged pioneers and lawless mining towns and the like, the truth (along with all the non-Anglo cultural communities generally left out of those images, of course) is that expansion required the development of full communities and cities, and those urban worlds required, among many other things, wholesale retailers. Levi Strauss would become one of the most famous such Western retailers, but he was one of many in this mid-century moment.Strauss’s fame represents a third, and particularly complex, exemplary side to his American story, however. From what I can tell, the idea for blue jeans really came from Jacob Davis, another Jewish immigrant to the United States (from Latvia, where he was born Jacob Youphes in 1831 before immigrating in 1854 and changing his name) who had been working as both a wholesaler and a tailor throughout the West before settling in Reno in 1868. Davis bought his cloth and other dry goods from Strauss, and when he came up with the idea for cotton denim pants reinforced with copper rivets to make them more robust for work environments, he went to Levi for financial backing. That meant that Levi Strauss & Co. were on the 1873 patent application along with Davis; after they received the patent, Levi brought Davis to San Francisco to manage his manufacturing plant there. By the time of his 1908 death, Davis had certainly done well, but as an employee of Levi Strauss & Co., the firm that would become and remains synonymous with the blue jeans that Davis invented. This certainly doesn’t reach the level of Thomas Edison and Lewis Latimer, but it’s in that ballpark: an invention credited not to the inventor himself, but to the business mogul who employed, profited from, and achieved eternal notoriety from the inventor and his ideas. Ain’t that America?Next blue jean studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

May 18-19, 2019: Summer and Fall Book Plans

[April showers bring May flowers, and May flowers bring, besides Pilgrims, the end of another semester. So this week I’ve shared a few reflections from my Spring 2019 semester, leading up to this special weekend post on what’s ahead for the summer and beyond. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections or Summer/Fall plans in comments!]I’ve got a lot on my radar for the summer: a new version of my Analyzing 21st Century America: An Interdisciplinary Perspective hybrid grad class; a new adult learning class (for Assumption College’s WISE program) on “A Skeptic's Guide to American History”; and more, including lots of good times with the boys of course. But to be honest, when it comes to my professional career and identity, my summer plans are centered on a very particular occasion: the release (on my birthday, August 15!) of my forthcoming fifth book, We the People: The 500-Year Battle over Who is an American (part of Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series).Every book project has been and remains meaningful to me, of course, but this one nonetheless represents a distinct step forward into my public scholarly goals. And as such, I am significantly more committed than ever before to getting the word out about it in any and every way. I’m on sabbatical in the Fall, so I will be particularly available to talk about the book and these American histories and stories in any and every setting, community, space, conversation (and to be clear, I’ll be very available and happy to do so throughout the summer as well; my goal isn’t selling books, but sharing these histories and stories). So not for the first time, and definitely not the last time, I ask for all suggestions and ideas, recommendations and connections, inquiries and questions related to this book and to my writing and talking about it. Please feel free to shoot me an email, to comment here, to connect with me on Twitter, to give my office phone a call (978-665-4805), to do whatever you have to do to be part of this summer and fall of book plans! Thanks in advance! Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Spring reflections or Summer/Fall plans you’d share?

May 17, 2019: Spring Semester Reflections: Short Stories in my Adult Learning Class

[April showers bring May flowers, and May flowers bring, besides Pilgrims, the end of another semester. So this week I’ll share a few reflections from my Spring 2019 semester, leading up to a special weekend post on what’s ahead for the summer and beyond. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]To be honest, all ten of the stories we read from the Roxane Gay-edited Best American Short Stories 2018 anthology were amazing; you gotta get that anthology, friends! But here are three particular standouts from across our five weeks of paired readings (without saying too much about any of them, because as usual part of the pleasure of a great short story is in how they unfold):1)      Alicia Elliott, “Unearth”: To say that I was disappointed when John Sayles’s in-progress film about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School fell through would be to severely understate the case. The Native American boarding school is one of the American settings and stories most in need of better representation in our cultural texts, and I would have loved to see what Sayles and company did with those histories and stories. Well, we might never get that film, but we do have Elliott’s short and shattering and yet still somewhat hopeful story, which takes a very different angle on the schools and their histories and effects and ends up unearthing so, so much for its protagonist, its themes, and us all.2)      Danielle Evans, “Boys Go to Jupiter”: On the other hand, the Confederate flag might seem to be one of the historical and cultural symbols most thoroughly present in our current collective conversations and memories, most difficult to view through a new lens. Well, I’m here to tell you that Evans has provided such a lens, and in so doing has created one of the richest and most multi-layered short stories I’ve ever read, a text that has a great deal to say about not only that contested symbol, but also social and digital media and identity, race and gender and sex, whether and how a young person can establish an adult identity separate from her starting points, and more. We could have debated the ending of Evans’s story alone for many more 90-minute class periods, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it as well!3)      Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, “Control Negro”: Thanks in no small measure to Get Out , but also to works like Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country among others, the intersections between African American identity and the horror genre have become central to our pop culture over the last couple years. Johnson’s dark and dense story offers its own such intersections, creating a Poe-like unreliable first-person narrator who recounts (confesses?) his Frankenstein-like experiments into race, family, and America. That the story also reframes one of Charlottesville’s many violent and painful recent racist encounters in the process is just one more reason why this story, like all three of these and really all in this magisterial anthology, is well worth your time.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Spring reflections you’d share?

May 16, 2019: Spring Semester Reflections: Celeste Ng in Capstone

[April showers bring May flowers, and May flowers bring, besides Pilgrims, the end of another semester. So this week I’ll share a few reflections from my Spring 2019 semester, leading up to a special weekend post on what’s ahead for the summer and beyond. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]On how a class full of writers can offer distinct and valuable takes on a familiar text.As I mentioned in the preview post for last fall’s Major American Authors of the 20thCentury course, I decided to add to that syllabus a book I had never taught before: our 2018-2019 Fitchburg State Community Read book, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You(2014). Through the work in that class, as well as other Community Read events including my own series-opening lecture on American immigration histories and stories and some conversations about it with Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) students, I’ve spent a good bit of the last year thinking and talking about Ng’s novel. So when I decided to use it as the Literature text in this semester’s section of my English Studies Senior Capstone class (we read one shared text for each of our department’s four concentrations; the last couple times I had used Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s wonderful novel Americanahin that Literature slot), I imagined these conversations about Everything would run parallel to those others of which I’ve been part throughout the year.To some degree that was true—we talked a lot about the themes of culture and heritage, of immigration and ethnicity, of gender and sexuality that Ng interweaves throughout her novel; and talked as well about how she links those issues to specific, complex characters like college-bound Nath. But if there’s one overarching through-line in my Capstone course (and really in the class by default, although I believe I do emphasize it even more than some of my colleagues when they teach the class), it’s writing: the students are working on assembling and framing their Senior Portfolios, a departmental graduation requirement; we read multiple books that focus on writing, including Steven King’s wonderful On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft ; and we talk throughout the semester about how, whichever track the students are officially part of, they all have the potential to be Professional Writers (one of our tracks) if they are interested. And as my many years of reading those senior portfolios have made clear, that’s not just a hypothetical concept—our English Studies majors, all of them, do indeed graduate with diverse and deep training in writing, and thus bring those experiences and skills to their readings of any and all literary texts.When it came to their readings of Ng’s novel in particular, this class full of writers opened up a couple of aspects of the text on which I had not focused nearly as much in my many prior engagements with it. One central focus of our discussions was the very precise and nuanced way that Ng uses narration and perspective—in some ways the novel is narrated by a conventional third-person omniscient narrator, one who can move between different characters’ perspectives and also exists outside of any of them; but both the suddenness with which she makes those moves (sometimes within a single sentence) and the ambiguities that she leaves in each perspective (tied to the titular ideas of what we do and don’t say, share, and know) distinguish her use of that conventional literary device. Moreover, our discussions also touched a good bit on the novel’s complex status as a historical novel that features multiple time periods/settings, and thus briefly but importantly introduces pop culture contexts (for example) from across those distinct eras. That’s one of those writing skills that is easily overlooked, but few things are more important in a novel about history, culture, identity, and community than such contextual details. Thanks to sharing Ng’s novel with this class full of writers, I had the chance to think a good bit more about such vital elements of writing.Last reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring reflections you’d share?