Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 200

May 15, 2019: Spring Semester Reflections: Chopin and Far in American Lit II

[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 the delightful surprises that come with juxtapositions of stories.As I wrote back in my semester preview post, I added a couple new short texts to my very-familiar American Literature II syllabus. One of them was one of my favorite American short stories, Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” (1909). I’ve written about Far’s story about as often as I have any single literary text, not only in this space but in my third book, for multipleonline writing gigs, as part of this recently published Oxford Research Encyclopedia article on “The Chinese Exclusion Act and Early Asian American Literature,” and I imagine in a few other places I’m forgetting right now. Which is to say, I would have said that I had about as clear an existing take on Far’s story as I did on any work. But besides the obvious and awesome benefit of getting student perspectives, adding a text to a syllabus also opens it up through the other texts that surround it, and I experienced that effect very fully with the pairing of Far’s story and another short story in that same week, Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” (1898).Pairing Far’s story with Chopin’s text opened up both works in complex and compelling ways. I should note that I had already started to rethink aspects of gender and motherhood in Far’s story as a result of the wonderful student paper I highlighted in this post (and indeed, my experience teaching Far in that online American Lit II course went a long way toward convincing me to bring her story into the in-person class as well). But with Chopin’s story in the mix, I began to think more actively about whether the couple’s experiences in Far’s story might destroy their marriage, and more exactly whether the wife and mother in “Free,” Lae Choo, might seek solace with another man as does Chopin’s protagonist Calixta. Because Far’s story focuses so fully on its themes of immigration and exclusion, and because through that lens her married protagonists seem to be entirely on the same page in their quest to reunite with their stolen child, it’s easy to lose sight of just how differently the two characters react and act at times. Indeed, the husband and father, Hom Hing, limits his wife’s freedom to act in ways that are not dissimilar to (if certainly not identical to) the government’s actions in the story. Does that mean that infidelity or other marital strife is in the couple’s future? Who knows, but Chopin’s story pushes us to consider such possibilities.Pairings always work both ways, of course, and Far’s story similarly allowed me to reexamine Chopin’s text (which I have taught in every American Literature II section for more than a decade, making it a very familiar one as well). In particular—and this is likely a startling admission from someone who has defined himself so fully as a Dad for the last thirteen-plus years, but it’s the truth—I had never focused very much on the character of Bibi, Calixta’s young son. We know his absence from the home during an approaching hurricane, along with that of her husband/his father Bôbinot, is an initial source of concern for Calixta that she forgets in the passion of her own sexual storm, although she still seems genuinely relieved and happy to see him and welcome him home at the story’s end. But all those points are still really about Calixta and her emotional and psychological states. What about Bibi’s perspective, though? What might the future hold for his young person, a child who is part of a seemingly far more stable home environment than the boy in Far’s story (and certainly that home is not threatened by exclusionary laws and bigotries in the way that Far’s is) yet who, we see all too clearly, occupies a world full of its own fraught adult realities? If it were ever possible to overlook such questions (and for this reader at least it had been), Far’s story demands that we consider them, one more beneficial effect of this serendipitous pairing.Next reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring reflections you’d share?

May 14, 2019: Spring Semester Reflections: Espada and Cisneros in Ethnic American Lit

[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 two distinct but complementary ways to challenge exclusionary propaganda.In the preview post for my Ethnic American Literature course, I wrote about the incredibly complex and crucial task of teaching such topics and themes in 2019. Well, the first few months of 2019 didn’t disappoint (or rather they did in so, so many ways, but not in living up to such predictions): the semester opened in the midst of a government shutdown over false, xenophobic, white supremacist narratives of a border and immigration “crisis”; and it featured in its early weeks a presidential “emergency” declaration over that same “crisis,” with all the subsequent and ongoing debate and fallout. While I wrote a lot about those issues and themes, especially for my Saturday Evening Post gig , I didn’t necessarily bring them into my classes as often as I might have (no doubt in part because I felt that both I and we needed spaces where we weren’t bombarded by those horrific unfolding histories). But certainly we connected to such contemporary issues at multiple moments in the course of the Ethnic American Lit class, and never more so than in Unit 3, a pairing of various late 20thand early 21st century poems by Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada with the opening couple dozen stories from Sandra Cisneros’s short story cycle The House on Mango Street (1984). Many of Espada’s poems directly challenge both border/immigration policies and practices and the kinds of exclusionary and bigoted attitudes that underlie anti-immigrant sentiments. That’s particularly true of a poem like “Federico’s Ghost” (1990), which uses the life and death (and afterlife) of a migrant laborer to expose a variety of destructive social and historical forces. But in its own more subtle and funny way, a poem like “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits” (1999) is just as activist, as it forces its non-Latino, non-immigrant American readers (indeed, all of its readers, but perhaps those with particular force) to think about both the lives and stories of those around them and the way their attitudes and actions might affect those fellow Americans. Reading these poems helped us talk about questions of culture and language, of heritage and identity, of what links figures like Federico and Jorge to those in other class texts (like Richard Wright in Black Boy or Michael Patrick MacDonald in All Souls , to name two) as well as what distinguishes their American experiences. All discussions that help challenge the propaganda underlying white supremacist exclusions.Espada’s poems and protagonists tend to offer such challenges overtly and purposefully, while Esperanza, the youthful narrator of Cisneros’s stories, tends to focus far more consistently and understandably on childhood concerns of family and friends, bicycles and boys, and other such topics. As that hyperlinked story illustrates, those concerns themselves often connect to cultural, social, and historical issues, even if Esperanza herself isn’t always aware of the broader contexts (she is in that particular story, to be sure). But even when the stories remain focused on simpler or more universal experiences of childhood and growing up, they nonetheless offer a potent challenge to propagandistic fears of immigrants. Esperanza, after all, is (like Cisneros) the daughter of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. (and possibly undocumented ones; we’re not told their immigration status, but they are at least in a similar socioeconomic status to many undocumented arrivals, as the book’s titular first story reflects), an embodiment of the American future that seems to so terrify those who offer dire warnings about “migrant caravans” and the like. Reading Cisneros’s stories thus helps us engage with the specific realities (rather than the fears) of such lives and families and communities, and at the same time to recognize that their stories are very much like all of ours.Next reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring reflections you’d share?

May 13, 2019: Spring Semester Reflections: Hurston and Beyoncé in 20C Af Am Lit

[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 adding African American women’s voices into our collective conversations more fully.The last half-dozen years have been an incredible time for African American filmmaking. Starting with the phenomenal success of Twelve Years a Slave (2013; I know any “starting point” for this kind of trend is simplistic at best, but I do think McQueen’s film was a hugely influential one in this recent period), and continuing through such disparate films as Selma (2015), Moonlight (2016), Get Out (2017), Black Panther (2018), and BlacKkKlansman (2018), these African American-made and –focused films have consistently achieved both critical acclaim and financial success. Yet despite all their differences, I would argue that all of those films have focused more on African American male characters than on African American female ones; although Black Panther in particular did feature a number of compelling female characters, it still boiled down to a conflict between its two central men. While the wonderful recent film If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) did feature an African American female co-lead and narrator (Tish, played by the very talented newcomer KiKi Layne), as well as an Oscar-winning supporting character played by the great Regina King, I would still argue that the film’s central story is that of its male protagonist, Stephan James’s Fonny. I was thinking about all of these things quite a bit in the course of my 20thCentury African American Literature class, perhaps especially because I had chosen four main texts by male authors and two by female authors. By the time I started to really question that ratio (not the individual choices, but the overall balance), it was too late to change out any main texts; I made sure to include more supplemental readings by female authors than male ones to help redress this balance, but also made sure to foreground questions of gender, sexuality and sexual preference, and other parallel threads throughout our conversations (of all our texts). That was made significantly easier because our second main text was Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), one of American literature’s most potent examinations of African American women’s experiences, perspectives, and identities. From its famous opening paragraphs, an extended metaphor about the similarities and differences between men’s and women’s dreams, on through its protagonist Janie’s concluding argument (to her best friend Phoeby) that “You got to go there to know there,” Hurston’s novel engages with women’s lives and communities on both the broadest and the most intimate levels. It’s no coincidence that Richard Wright, whose works I greatly value but who was not the most progressive thinker when it came to gender, had such issues with Hurston’s book.Throughout the semester I complemented our shared readings with class-opening multimedia texts, leading up to a series of stunning student presentations on such texts and artists in the course’s final weeks. For our first day with Hurston’s novel, I shared “Redemption”/“All Night,” one of the songs and short films from Beyoncé’s ground-breaking Lemonade (2016) visual album. As often happens with paired texts, that work’s images of grandmothers and granddaughters, Southern settings and histories, and familial and cultural legacies spoke to and were informed by Hurston’s opening chapters in ways I couldn’t possibly have imagined until we were in that space and encountering those texts together. And if I’m being honest, that moment powerfully affected my perspective on Beyoncé—I had always felt that her towering cultural presence was a bit more about overall image than artistic power; but through re-examining this particular text of hers, and putting it in conversation with Hurston’s novel, I realized that no small part of my own failure to engage sufficiently with Beyoncé’s works has been a reflection of the need in my own perspective and life for more African American women’s voices. I hope that this class helped push me as well as my students in that direction, but I have more work to do to be sure. Next reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring reflections you’d share?

May 11-12, 2019: "I Stand Here Ironing" and the Challenges of Motherhood

[In honor of this wonderful chance to celebrate some of the most wonderful people I know, how one of the great American short stories can help us remember the toughest and most inspiring sides of motherhood.]On a short story that helps us remember and celebrate one of society’s toughest and most vital roles.
I would be the first to admit that I am doing what is without a doubt my most important life’s work—as a dad to these two crazy and crazy cute young dudes—in near-ideal conditions. However you slice it, from past role models to present support from family and friends, economic security to good health, neighborhood and community to (at least when it comes to something like mixed-race identity) a very tolerant and open-minded historical era and time period, I can’t imagine there being more positive influences on my ability to be a good dad (don’t worry, I’m knocking on wood while typing all that). And still, it’s hard. It’s hard especially on two distinct and crucial levels: on its own terms, it’s hard to feel day in and day out like I’m doing everything I can do for and with them, to prepare them for the best and happiest and most successful futures and lives; and in a broader context, it’s hard much of the time to feel as if I’m balancing out parenting and my career in ways that are mutually productive. And I don’t think those things are even vaguely distinctive for me—quite the opposite, I think they’re indications of just how hard these questions are for everybody.
But of course the reality is that these questions are much, much harder for a great many Americans. If even one of those positive influences that I listed above is replaced with a negative one—if one doesn’t have much familial or social support, if one’s financial situation is unstable or disadvantaged or bleak, if health issues become prominent, if one’s community is dangerous or threatening, and so on—the difficulties increase exponentially. And if multiple or even most of the influences become negative, if in fact being a good parent becomes an effort to rise above (rather than, in my case, to live up to) all of what surrounds one—as, I believe, is the case for many of the impoverished families and parents with whom my Mom worked for many years in a Head Start-like program in Central Virginia(although she and that program are, just to be clear, one extremely positive influence in their worlds)—well, I can’t even imagine how difficult it becomes at that point. And yet, as if so often the case, a singular and singularly amazing work of American literature allows me to imagine, even in a small way, what it feels like to be in that situation, to try to parent well, or even perhaps just to parent at all, in the face of most every single factor and influence and aspect of one’s situation.
That work is “I Stand Here Ironing,” a short story by Tillie Olsen. Olsen spent the first half of her life living with these questions, as a working single mother who was trying both to be a good parent and to find time or space to hone her considerable talents as a creative and critical writer; when she finally achieved success, with the book of short stories Tell Me a Riddle (1961) that featured “Ironing,” she spent the second half of her life writing about (among many other things) precisely these questions, such as in the unique and important scholarly study Silences (1978) which traces the effects of work and parenthood on women writers in a variety of nations and time periods. Yet I don’t think she ever captured these themes more evocatively or perfectly than in “Ironing,” a brief story in which a mother imagines—while performing the titular act of housework—how she might describe her relationship to her oldest and most troubled daughter (named Emily) to a school official who has asked her to do so. Although the narrator is now in a more stable situation, the first years of her daughter’s life comprised her lowest point in every sense, and for much of the story she reflects with sadness and regret and pain on all that she was not able to offer and give to and be for her daughter during those years. But she comes at the end to a final vision of her now teenage daughter that is, while by no means idealistic or naïve, a recognition that Emily is becoming her own person, that she is strong and independent, and that she has the opportunity to carve out a life that, at the very least, can go far beyond where it began.
It’s a beautiful and powerful story, and a very complex one, not least because no parent can read it with the perspective of simply a literary critic or a distanced reader in any sense. It pushes us up against the most difficult aspects of this role, makes clear how much more difficult still they can be than most of us (fortunately) will ever know, and then finally reminds us of the absolutely unalterable and singular and crucial meanings of what is, again, the most important thing we’ll ever do. Word to your mother. Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Mother’s Day texts or contexts you’d share?

May 10, 2019: Travel Writing: Exiles’ Returns

[Summertime is perfect for travel, whether around these United States or abroad. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy travel writing across our history, leading up to a special Guest Post from one of my favorite travelers and travel writing fans!]On the promise and perils of returning home after many years away.As many of this week’s posts have illustrated, the romance of traveling abroad, and finding ourselves anew (or perhaps finding new selves) there, forms a common trope in our national narratives across many different time periods and communities. That’s particularly true, I’d say, of our images of artists and authors, as exemplified by the Roaring ‘20s expatriates whose European journeys continue to fascinate us (see Woody Allen’s recent engagement with them in the film Midnight in Paris). We tend to engage much less frequently, however, with the other side of that coin: with what it means when such travelers return to their American homes. Literary and cultural critic Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934) offers a particularly rich and complex examination of what that experience of return meant for those ‘20s expatriates, and more exactly of both the hopes and the fears that those Americans felt as they made their way back to their home.Even more telling, and at the same time substantially stranger and more surprising, are James Fenimore Cooper’s contemporaneous, interconnected, yet dueling fictional representations of the same experience. In 1826, at the height of his first literary successes, Cooper took a job as a US consul and moved his family to France, where he remained, traveling through Europe and continuing to write, for the next seven years. When he and they returned to America, and to his childhood and lifelong home of Cooperstown, in 1833, he found the place after those years away at once familiar and yet changed, nostalgically comforting and yet threateningly foreign. Some of those shifts were in the community (Jacksonian Democracy was in full force, and the nation was indeed changing), while some were in Cooper himself (in his more mature and elite status, in his European-influence d perspective, and more). And as he did throughout his prolific career, Cooper responded to his experiences and the world around him by writing novels, in this case two that he published in the same year: Homeward Bound; or, The Chase: A Tale of the Sea (1838) and Home as Found (1838). The latter novel was subtitled “Sequel to Homeward Bound,” and indeed the two works feature many of the same central characters. Yet on the other hand they feel hugely and interestingly distinct. Partly those are differences in genre and setting: the former is a seafaring adventure that takes its characters to multiple exotic destinations; the latter a comedy of manners set entirely in homes and social settings within New York York and Templeton (Cooper’s fictionalized Cooperstown). But the differences in tone go beyond those elements, and reflect some of the disappointment suggested by the phrase as Found, the gap between the idea of home (toward which the characters ostensibly move throughout Homeward Bound, although in reality they adventure around the world) and the reality of what is encountered when it is reached. That gap is perhaps inevitable for anyone returning home, especially after years away; but it’s also complex and troubling, given the importance that our homes hold in our identities and psyches throughout our lives. In any case, such experiences are likely universal, and Cooper’s novels, like Cowley’s book, can help us understand and engage with them in our own lives.Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other travel writing you’d highlight?

May 9, 2019: Travel Writing: The Boston Cosmopolitans

[Summertime is perfect for travel, whether around these United States or abroad. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy travel writing across our history, leading up to a special Guest Post from one of my favorite travelers and travel writing fans!]On two positive effects of an elite community’s international travels.I’ve written a couple times in this space about my undergraduate senior thesis advisor Mark Rennella and his first book, The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters, 1865-1915 (2008). A central goal of Mark’s in that project, as I wrote about in the first hyperlinked post above, was to reclaim the late 19th century figures known as the Boston Cosmopolitans from critiques of them as elitist and out of touch, as emblematic of the Gilded Age’s worst excesses and inequalities. Certainly their propensity for the international travel highlighted in Mark’s subtitle could be seen as exemplifying those latter trends, given how rare it was for most Americans in the era to have the chance to travel abroad (obviously lots of Americans arrived from abroadin the era, but that’s a very different kind of journey, and of course generally took place in very different travel conditions as well). But while the ability to travel abroad might indeed reflect positions of privilege, the experiences and effects of that international travel could nonetheless be positive ones for not only these travelers but American communities and histories overall. Mark makes that case convincingly throughout his book; here I’ll highlight two such positive effects.For one thing, their encounters with international settings allowed these travelers to think about, and at times critique, American culture and society from new angles. Two particularly famous examples of this are Henry Adams’s chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)” in his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1907); and the entirety of Henry James’s travel book The American Scene (1907), written upon the occasion of James’s 1904-5 return to the U.S. after nearly three decades living in Europe. But no single moment better reflects this contrast in settings and perspectives, and the opportunities for it provided by international travel, than Harvard Professor and social reformer Charles Eliot Norton’s encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson on an 1873 steamship voyage from England to the US. As Norton described their conversations in a letter to a friend, Emerson at this late point in his life (he was 70 at the time, while Norton was 45) maintained his “inveterate and persistent optimism,” an element of his distinctly American Transcendental philosophy. Whereas Norton, inspired at least in part by his encounters with European cultures and histories, argued that such optimism “is dangerous doctrine for a people,” as it is “at the root of … much of our unwillingness to accept hard truths.” These international travelers didn’t just gain new perspectives on American identities and philosophies, however; they also influenced and changed American society through what they brought back with them. The most striking example of such effects was offered by my favorite Boston Cosmopolitan, Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose entire Gardner Museum could be accurately described as an American construction assembled out of and atop European and international foundations and intended to allow many fellow Americans to experience those cross-cultural influences as well. But while art and culture were certainly prominent areas where the Cosmopolitans brought their international influences back to the US, they likewise did so in more directly activist arenas, as illustrated by such fellow Gilded Age New Englanders as Edward Bellamy (for whom a year in Hawaii in his late 20s influenced his developing socialist ideas) and Richard Henry Dana III (whose Massachusetts political reforms were inspired in part by European practices). In these and other ways, the evolution of Massachusetts and America in this period was importantly affected by the experiences and lessons of these cosmopolitan travelers.Last travel writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other travel writing you’d highlight?

May 8, 2019: Travel Writing: Thoreau’s Cape Cod

[Summertime is perfect for travel, whether around these United States or abroad. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy travel writing across our history, leading up to a special Guest Post from one of my favorite travelers and travel writing fans!]On two complementary reasons to read Thoreau’s often-overlooked Cape Cod (1865).Between 1849 and 1857, Henry David Thoreau traveled four times to Cape Cod (no quick or easy journey for any Concord resident in those days, much less one who preferred walking to the train). He was as taken by the place as have been so many of its visitors, and eventually compiled his observations and reflections on those journeys into a single book manuscript, treating the four trips as one symbolic meta-visit to the Cape. Not yet published upon his untimely death in 1862, the book was released in 1865, but has I would argue been largely forgotten in the century and a half since; when the Thoreau canon is expanded beyond Walden and “Civil Disobedience” to include his travel writing, the choice is often A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). A Week, like all those works, deserves our attention to be sure, but there’s a case to be made that Cape Cod offers two significant contributions of its own to our collective memories.For one thing, it gives us a far different Thoreau. As was known even to his contemporary Concordians and has become clearer and clearer ever since, the Thoreau of Walden and the like was a carefully constructed persona, an imagined version of the self created in order to model a perspective and identity for those neighbors he was hoping to wake up. Whereas I very much agree with scholar Henry Beston (in his Introduction to an edition of the book) that in Cape Cod we find “Thoreau as a human being,” and more exactly “what he was at the time, a Concord Yankee gone traveling.” He was also one of our keenest observers of and writers about nature, both scientific (particularly as a botanist) and human—and while he included those observations in all his works, the lack of an overt moral or social purpose to Cape Cod allows them to take center stage in a particularly compelling and successful way. Cape Codmay not be as immediate or authentic as Thoreau in his Journals, but it’s a far more concise work and one written with audience engagement in mind, and thus it complements his other published books with a more intimate glimpse into Thoreau than we otherwise get from them.Moreover, Cape Cod also offers an important glimpse into both the natural landscapes and human communities of the region prior to its full development as a tourist getaway. In Chapter IV, for example, Thoreau finds himself on a Wellfleet beach that would become part of the Cape Cod National Seashore (on which more tomorrow): “In short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible--we never saw one from the beach--and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery, as their footsteps in the sand.” And in the very next chapter, he ventures inland to converse with one of the most finely observed human subjects in all his writing, “The Wellfleet Oysterman.” Taken together, these two chapters give us a striking glimpse into Cape Cod in the mid-19thcentury, a world quite apart from Concord and the rest of Massachusetts, and one captured with the unique precision and power of which Thoreau was capable.Next travel writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other travel writing you’d highlight?

May 7, 2019: Travel Writing: Sarah Kemble Knight

[Summertime is perfect for travel, whether around these United States or abroad. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy travel writing across our history, leading up to a special Guest Post from one of my favorite travelers and travel writing fans!]On what a unique American travel narrative helps us understand about the early 18thcentury.If you haven’t taken an Early American Literature class or otherwise looked through an American Lit anthology, I’m not sure how likely you are to have heard of Sarah Kemble Knight and her five-month journey from Boston to New York in 1704-1705. Because there are so few extant literary works (in any genre) from that particular colonial period, Knight’s diary (or journal; it was not private and unpublished in her lifetime but rediscovered by New England luminary Theodore Dwightand released in 1825 as The Journal of Mme Knight ) of her journey is frequently anthologized and taught (either in excerpts or in full), but I don’t know how well-known it is beyond such textbooks and classrooms. Which is a shame—partly because Knight, a widow who had begun running a Boston boarding house after her husband’s death in 1703, was clearly a unique and interesting woman, with a sharp and funny voice and perspective that translate well to the pages of her journal; but also because this unusual piece of early American travel writing reveals a good deal about life in New England and America in the first decade of the 18thcentury.Some of those revelations are seemingly straightforward but difficult to wrap our 21stcentury heads around without the aid of texts like Knight’s. That’s especially true of the single most striking detail about Knight’s journey: that it took her and her guide five months to travel the 220 miles from Boston to New York. They weren’t riding as if the devil were at their heels or anything, but that stunningly extended length of time does reflect a number of significant realities of early 18th century travel and America. There’s the poor condition of even those few roads (like the Boston Post Road that was Knight’s first thoroughfare) that did exist in the era; as Knight writes of one such experience, “the Roads all along this way are very bad, Encumbered with Rocks and mountainous passages, which were very disagreeable to my tired carcass.” Or the very real dangers of crossing rivers during the period, whether on a ferry as she does the Thames River (“the Boat tossed exceedingly, and our horses capered at a very surprising Rate, and set us all in a fright”) or over a bridge as she does in Dedham (“But in going over the Causeway at Dedham the Bridge being overflowed by the high waters coming down I very narrowly escaped falling over into the river Horse and all which ‘twas almost a miracle I did not”). The incredible challenges of Knight’s trek make rush hour traffic on the Merritt Parkway seem like nothing at all, no?Knight’s journal also reveals a good bit about the society and communities through which that five-month journey takes her. On a number of occasions Knight is met with incredulity that she is a single woman taking such a journey alone, as when she writes, “I was Interrogated by a young Lady I understood afterwards was the Eldest daughter of the family [with whom she is staying], with these, or words to this purpose: what in the world brings You here at this time a night?—I never see a woman on the Road so Dreadful late, in all the days of my versall [?] life. Who are You? Where are You going?” Knight also offers her own observations on the social worlds around her, and that progressive gender identity does not free her from such stereotyping descriptions as this of Native Americans she encounters: “There are every where in the Towns as I passed, a Number of Indians the Natives of the Country, and are the most savage of all the savages of that kind that I had ever Seen.” She does add, however, that there has been “little or no care taken (as I heard upon enquiry) to make them otherwise,” making clear that these American identities are a product of collective bigotry at least as much as they are a reflection of Knight’s own prejudices. Just a couple of the early 18th century realities and histories that we can glimpse in this unique piece of colonial travel writing.Next travel writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other travel writing you’d highlight?

May 6, 2019: Travel Writing: Good Newes from New England

[Summertime is perfect for travel, whether around these United States or abroad. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy travel writing across our history, leading up to a special Guest Post from one of my favorite travelers and travel writing fans!]On what separates colonial propaganda from travel writing, and what links the two genres.William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation(unpublished in Bradford’s lifetime but completed sometime around 1651) is often considered the definitive account of the Pilgrims’ first few decades in New England, while for those looking to delve deeper Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan(1637) represents a prominent alternative vision of the New England Puritan experience and community. But the first two published texts that documented the unfolding histories of the Plymouth Pilgrim community were written by a less well-known Mayflower passenger and Plymouth luminary: Edward Winslow, himself a multi-term governor of the plantation and the author of Mourt’s Relation (1622; co-written with Bradford, but Winslow was apparently the principal author) and Good Newes from New England (1624; entirely Winslow’s work). While Mourt’s Relation is largely a historical chronicle, documenting the first year or so of the Plymouth community (from the Mayflower’s December 1620 landing off Cape Cod up through the “First Thanksgiving” harvest festival of November 1621), Good Newes reads more like travel writing, describing the settings and worlds of New England at least as much as it does the experiences and lives of the Pilgrims.It’s tricky to call a work travel writing when it serves so blatantly as propaganda on behalf of colonization efforts, though. Much of the tradition of English-language travel writing (and perhaps others, but it’s English with which I’m most familiar) was of course connected to colonies, as illustrated by the extensive travel literature (some of it contemporaneous to Winslow’s book) of Englishmen and women traveling to India. But Winslow isn’t just portraying the experience of moving to or living in this colonial setting—he is, as the title’s Good Newes suggests, overtly trying to sell that setting for continued and amplified colonization. As a result, he’s not quite writing about an unfamiliar world for an outsider audience (as is often the case with travel literature), but working to convince his audiences that they should become insiders to this newly colonized New England world. That central goal links Winslow’s text to one of first and most famous European descriptions of the New World, Christopher Columbus’ in his 1493 letter to Luis de Santangel. While Winslow isn’t quite as hyperbolic (nor quite as overtly exclusionary) as Columbus, he is similarly less interested in detailed descriptions and more focused on making New England as desirable as possible for his English readers.Yet works can be multiple things at once, and I would argue that there are still elements to Winslow’s influential book that can and should be defined as travel writing. The presence of that genre alongside propaganda is illustrated concisely by the second and third sub-topics listed in Winslow’s typically extended full title: “Together with a Relation of such religious and civil Laws and Customs, as are in practice amongst the Indians, adjoining to them at this day. As also what Commodities are there to be raised for the maintenance of that and other Plantations in the said Country.” Columbus focused entirely on such commodities, so much so that he treated the indigenous peoples as literally inconsequential to his letter and colonizing perspective. Winslow certainly does not want to present the Native Americans as an impediment to further English colonization, but at the same time he does recognize their status as distinct communities, and honors this part of the book’s title by paying extended attention to their communal identities in his course of his work. That attention makes Winslow’s book an important early Anglo American text, and one that offers the kinds of glimpses into a specific local world—shaped by the author’s cultural perspective to be sure—that are one of the hallmarks of travel writing. Next travel writing tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other travel writing you’d highlight?

May 4-5, 2019: Rodney King in Context: “Race Riots”

[On April 29th, 1992, civil unrest erupted in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied King himself and other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to this special weekend post on the narrative of “race riots”itself.]On remembering riots specifically while still pushing back on the whole concept.In one of my earliest pieces of online public scholarship (at least outside of the space of this blog), I wrote for Talking Points Memo in the fall of 2014 about the complex, contested, and highly constructed history of the phrase “race riots.” As I noted there, the phrase was developed (at least in an American context) in response to a series of 19th century riots that did indeed tend to feature rioters of a particular race; it just so happened that the rioting race in virtually every case was not African Americans (as the phrase’s always implied and often quite explicit narrative went) but white supremacists. Moreover, these white supremacist mobs were generally rioting in purposeful and planned attempts to attack and destroy African American communities (or other communities of color, such as the Mexican and Filipino American zoot suiters of the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots about which I wrote in Tuesday’s post), which means that these were race riots in terms of their goals just as much as their demographics. So “race riot” would be on multiple levels an accurate phrase to use, if it weren’t, y’know, an entirely inaccurate phrase in the ways it has been used.Beginning in particular with riots like those in Los Angeles, Detroit, and many other cities in the mid- to late-1960s, however, it is important to note that the demographics did change. The majority of the rioters in these cases were generally African Americans (and/or other Americans of color, but principally African Americans), a trend that certainly remained the case in the Rodney King riots of 1992 among other late 20th century histories. As the King riots illustrate quite potently, each of these situations had specific, nuanced, and multi-layered causes and contexts, and it is only by engaging with the distinct riots individually and specifically—including the realities of their demographics, among many other elements—that we can start to recognize, analyze, and hopefully learn from those details. Which is to say, to pretend that the 1992 riots were the same in any substantive way as (for example) the 1898 Wilmington (North Carolina) one wouldn’t just comprise a blatant misrepresentation of the details of each; it would also make it nearly impossible to analyze the 1992 riots (or 1898, or any other, but this week’s series has focused on 1992) successfully and productively. So my first paragraph’s (and prior post’s) main point might feel less relevant to these late 20thcentury histories.I would say the opposite, though. For one thing, the fact that the specifics of these late 20thcentury riots differed in many ways from earlier ones makes the precise point that using a sweeping phrase like “race riots” to describe them all (or any one of them) is at best woefully oversimplified and in many ways entirely inaccurate. And for another, much more complex but even more important thing, the earlier white supremacist riots had a great deal to do with creating the conditions and contexts that contributed to the late 20th century riots. To cite two interconnected examples: Southern white supremacist riots like Wilmington forced many African Americans to migrate to the North, Midwest, and West; and then white supremacist riots in those cities pushed the expanding African American communities into highly segregated and disadvantaged areas within those cities. Miscategorizing the earlier riots as “race riots” perpetrates further historical injustices and violences that not only echo and extend the foundational ones, but make it that much more difficult to understand and analyze 20th (and unfolding 21st) century histories and stories. So let’s just stop using the phrase “race riots,” shall we?Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?