Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 219

September 27-29, 2018: Tina Powell's Guest Post

[Dr. Tina Powell teaches writing, American and refugee literature, and more at 
Concord University. I'm excited to share this timely Guest Post, part of a larger 
book project she's working on!] The first time I taught le thi diem thuy’s novel the gangster we are all looking for, a novel about a young Vietnamese girl and her family’s flight from Vietnam and their resettlement in the United States, my undergraduates struggled with the novel.  We had extensively discussed the history of the Vietnam War and the refugee crisis it created, the US response to that crisis through policy and rhetoric, as well as trauma theory to provide a foundation for discussing the narrative structure le uses.  They, on some level, acknowledged the complicated relationship between the US and Vietnam and could explain how that relationship plays a significant role in le’s and other Vietnamese refugee narratives they were reading.  At the same time, their insistence that le’s protagonist, the young girl at the heart of the novel, was “going crazy” largely referred to how she moved around and experienced the site of her resettlement – the San Diego area – and how the narrative increasingly relied on fragmentation, ekphrasis, and palimpsest to more effectively illustrate the trauma of flight and resettlement.  References to “craziness” became their shorthand way of expressing frustration at the texts.  They had expected that the arrival of refugees to the US signaled a more positive outcome that would affirm the US as the “hero” – the rescuer – in the larger story.  They expected what Mimi Thi Nguyen describes as the US “rescue[ing] [one] from [a] psychic death through the gift of freedom as a promise of care [that] encodes a benign, rational story about the United States as the contested superpower on the world stage” (2).  But le’s novel, and many other refugee narratives focused on resettlement, resist that tidy relationship as refugees face significant systemic barriers to that “promise of care.”
Just as my students expect that those refugees arrive in a place that is stable and safe, refugees flee hellish landscapes with faith that where they end up will be significantly better.  And sadly, as Central American families fleeing violence have experienced, the US is not a safe haven.  Southeast Asian refugees fleeing wars and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in the late 1970s/1980s arrived in the US and faced many systemic issues that affect so many disenfranchised Americans.  This contradiction adds to the trauma of flight as well as shapes the ways that refugees move through and engage with their new surroundings.  Even today, resettlement agencies in some areas have failed to provide adequate housing for refugees.  


Camp Talega: Quonsets at Camp Pendleton -- makeshift housing originally set up to house incoming Southeast Asian refugees.  Photo Credit: Megan Burks
Trinh T. Minh-ha, in writing about hers and other refugee experiences, emphasizes that “the state of indeterminateness and of indefinite unsettlement” goes beyond transit; in fact, it persists in resettlement and as such, we need to be attuned to critical engagement with the very systems involved in practical coordination and development of resettlement resources.  In thinking through how to discuss texts like le’s, we need to not only discuss the experience of fleeing one’s home, but also the traumas the US forces on third world populations, as well as how refugees shape their new home in response to that experience.  As Yen Le Espiritu suggests, we must “look for the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering” (3); the home, in particular, is a space where public, private, political, and collective memories and lives structure the rituals of domestic space.
For instance, le’s novel confronts not just the difficulties of flight and war, but also the realities of the disenfranchised of the US.  From economic instability to affordable housing barriers, the world that le’s protagonist lives in is not one created to provide safety and stability for refugees to thrive; it is a world created by decades of policies implicitly designed to continue to disenfranchise minorities and the poor.  le’s family moves between multiple housing complexes – makeshift housing on base, a sponsor’s house, converted military barracks, apartment complexes that look prisons, buildings falling apart from neglect, and residences forcibly vacated through mechanisms like imminent domain – each a less stable place than before.  As le moves, the complexes bleed together; each poorly maintained property is indistinguishable from the next, much like the residents who live there.  However, le takes care to pay attention to those residents; her description of those complexes is imbued with the remnants of lives destroyed by poverty.  The  
“empty chest of drawers, a dusty mattress with broken springs, eight bent spoons, a dead lamp with a melted cord, ashy paper, two chairs with missing legs, one chair with a broken leg, smoke-stained curtains and scattered across the floor stuffing from the torn cushions of an orange plaid couch” (56) 
and intimate pictures left behind of unhappy, sick, and destitute couples.  The presence of photographs and remnants of lives – rather than the presence of people – allows le to make their presence felt while also emphasizing their disposability to corporate and government interests.  Much like le’s family, these absent people are too easily co opted or erased for property owners’ profit.  The physical detritus of these forgotten lives mixes with evidence of current residents to produce a cacophony of sounds that are distinguishably separate from the lives of those behind manicured lawns.
Certainly, there are many systemic issues to tackle when examining Vietnamese refugee resettlement literature; but housing holds such a significant place in American identity that it demands careful attention.  Home ownership allowed a large portion of whites to establish economic stability in the postwar years and, even after the housing crisis, it still remains an important marker of the nation’s economic strength.  From the forced removal of native peoples, the Homestead Act, to redlining practices, home ownership has functioned as a necessary goal to achieve (symbolic) status as a fully accepted American citizen.  And yet, lack of affordable and safe housing, as well as discriminatory policies, contradicted the picture Ronald Reagan painted at the 1980 Republican National Convention of Southeast Asian refugees as ideological descendents of (white and assimilated) immigrants.  Housing -- and the private space it holds -- provides a picture of stability, safety, and security – that “promise of care” -- that refugees hope to see. 
Aguilar-San Juan, Karin.  Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America.  Minneapolis:            U of Minnesota P, 2009.Espiritu, Yen Le.  Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es).  Oakland: U of California Press, 2014.le thi diem thuy.  the gangster we are all looking for.  New York: Anchor Books, 2003.Nguyen, Bich Minh.  Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.  New York: Penguin Books, 2007.Nguyen, Mimi Thi.  The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham: Duke UP, 2012.Trinh T. Minh-ha.  Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event.  New York: Routledge, 2010.

[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?]

September 24-26, 2018: NeMLA Panels You Should Submit To!

This coming Sunday, September 30th, marks the submission deadline for most of the panels (and roundtables, and seminars) for next spring’s 50th anniversary NeMLA Convention (March 21-24, 2019, in Washington, DC)! You can’t go wrong with any of the proposed sessions (for the full list see this CFP), but for this week-long special post I wanted to highlight a handful of AmericanStudies sessions to which you should definitely consider submitting abstracts. Let me know if you have any questions, and I hope to see you all in DC in March!1)      African American Literature and the Ironies and Ideals of Freedom (one of two sessions I proposed in my new role as American Literature Director)2)      Highlighting and Reading Latinx Female Writers (my other proposed session, a roundtable hoping to find a productive way to respond to the Junot Díaz #metoo scandal)3)      Images of America in World Literature4)      American Postmemory: Slavery in Black and White5)      Teaching American Literature as Post-Colonial LiteratureAgain, there are plenty more American sessions (and sessions of all types) at the CFP, so I’m sure you can find something that speaks to your interests, fellow AmericanStudiers. Hope to see you all in Washington! September Recap this weekend,BenPS. Lemme know any questions or thoughts, please!

September 22-23, 2018: Mass Protest Studying: The Boston March for Science

[On September 17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that event and four other mass protests, leading up to this special weekend post on lessons from an inspiring mass protest in the age of Trump.]Thanks to the Scholars Strategy Network (for which I’m a Boston Chapter co-leader) and their connection to Boston March for Science organizer Ashley Ciulla, I was able to record a video for the March’s participants, speak at an SSN event the night before, and attend the March itself on April 22nd, 2017 at Boston Common. Here are three takeaways from that inspiring and important protest:1)      Science and Activism: In the initial stages of conversation about the national (Washington) March for Science, of which the Boston March was an off-shoot, a number of scientists expressed concerns about being perceived or defined in any way as partisan activists. I understand those concerns, but as I argued in my recorded video, the truth is that American naturalists and scientists have pursued concurrent and interconnected public activisms throughout our history. Moreover, those activisms have never been, and I would argue are not now, partisan or political in any narrow sense; instead, these are public arguments for the roles that knowledge and investigation can play in support of the common good. While I don’t believe all scientists have to link their research to such collective arguments, I think each and every one has the right to do so, and that the more who do, the stronger our society will be. I felt that strength at the March for Science to be sure.2)      Scientific Community: I also felt there the perhaps underrated importance of science as a communal endeavor. That is, our narratives of science sometimes portray it—as I wrote in this post on our images of individual inventors—as the solitary pursuit of iconoclastic geniuses. Such individuals certainly have always played a role, but, as I argued in that post, any lasting and meaningful scientific invention or innovation takes a village to complete and sustain. The Boston March for Science featured a number of interesting speakers who shared a wide variety of perspectives and experiences, but a central thread across all of the speeches that I had the chance to hear was the importance of the scientific and social communities in which these individuals had pursued their work. And the March itself, of course, embodied another such inspirational scientific and social community, one only temporarily gathered in the same physical space but committed to a more enduring sense of solidarity among all the participants and their respective institutions and cohorts.3)      Supporting Science: That communal spirit certainly offers one important way in which we can all support scientists and their work. But equally vital, and a significant part of the motivation for holding a March for Science in 2017, is public, governmental support for the sciences. I don’t imagine I need to tell any readers of this blog about the deep, distressing cuts to scientific funding in President Trump’s first budget—most of them just proposed at this point, making it all the more important to highlight and challenge them. But it’s also important that we confront the gradually eroding public consensus on the value (and unfortunately even the most basic truths) of scientific inquiry and knowledge, a long-term trend that predates Donald Trump and can’t be addressed simply by resisting those proposed budget cuts. The March for Science participants were, of course, a self-selected group of those who do believe in and support the sciences; finding ways to broaden and deepen those attitudes as we move forward must be a vital goal for all of us.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

September 21, 2018: Mass Protest Studying: The Armies of the Night

[On September 17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post on mass protest in the age of Trump.]On a literary classic that narrates but also challenges mass protests.
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968) isn’t just (as I wrote in this post) the best book from Normal Mailer’s crazy prolific and diverse decade, nor even Mailer’s best book period; I think it’s one of the great works of 20th century American literature, full stop. There are lots of elements that make it so great, from those that I’ll admit might be somewhat particular to this AmericanStudier’s obsessions (such as the book’s structural division, as stated in the title, into two parts that mirror two different emphases of the phrase “historical novel”) to those that are more universally effective (it’s extremely funny, for example). It’s at once an incredibly detailed and grounded depiction of a particular historical event and moment (a 1967 anti-Vietnam marchin which Mailer participated) and a broad engagement with many of the most significant themes and questions at the hearts of America and the 1960s. There’s no question that it’s a Norman Mailer book—the writer’s trademark ego is prominently on display throughout—but to my mind likewise no question of its greatness.
There are also, however, very specific, contemporary reasons to read Armies in our own moment. The book’s occasion is a protest, or more exactly two distinct protests: the first a reading and lecture by Mailer, based on his 1967 pamphlet Why Are We In Vietnam? ; the second the following day’s anti-war march. In part the inclusion of the former protest reflects that famous Mailer ego, as it allows Mailer to feature himself and his exploits far more than would be possible in an account solely of the march (during which he was arrested, but which nonetheless featured some 200,000 protesters rather than just one drunken and belligerent writer). But in part the two protests mirror the book’s two structural sections and their interconnected yet distinct categories of history and novel: the march being, from its origins and purposes on, very much a self-consciously historical event, a grappling with the era’s biggest issues on America’s most mythologizing stage; while the lecture, on the other hand, represents a likewise purposeful and complex act of story-telling, a fictionalization of self and of history in equal measure. That doesn’t mean that Mailer necessarily privileges the lecture over the march, but it does, in my reading, allow the former to influence the latter, set the stage for the march through the lecture’s emphasis on story-telling and narratives.
It would be crazy to suggest that Mailer’s semi-coherent lecture had as much historical or national meaning as, or even influenced its own moment or audience as much as, the following day’s march. But it would not be nearly as crazy to note that protests, like any other events, are often and mostly meaningful in direct correlation to how they’re narrated, to the representations they receive in the media (it’s no coincidence that Mailer begins the book with a quote from Time), to the stories that are told of them. In fact, such questions of narration are particularly salient for protests and other similar social and political events—since these events will always be judged through the lens of their effects, of the impacts and changes they produced, it becomes that much more crucial how they’re represented, by whom, and from what perspective. Moreover, as Mailer’s book makes clear, such narrations have at their best an ability to humanize everyone involved in and impacted by events far more than might otherwise be the case—in Mailer’s hands, not only the many different communities of protesters but also the policeman and national guardsmen become fully-realized American characters, participants in this event who not only retain their humanity, but through it become the heart of an event that illustrates the nation’s divisions but also reflects the larger community to which all Americans still belong (whether they like it or not).
I’m not a postmodernist about the past—I know that historical events happened, independent of (and more significantly than) any subsequent narration of them—and I don’t think Mailer is either; he took part in the march, was arrested in the course of it and spent a weekend in jail as a result, and in those and other ways recognizes its tangible and meaningful realities. Yet as much of my work for the last decade at least has hopefully illustrated, I believe that no political or cultural or ideological battles are more important than those over narratives, over which stories we tell and how we tell them. Mailer’s book not only exemplifies that idea, but likewise models the kinds of complex and human stories that can comprise a richer and more genuinely communal American history and identity, making it an essential American text for sure.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

September 20, 2018: Mass Protest Studying: The Bonus Army

[On September 17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post on mass protest in the age of Trump.]On the veterans movement that ended in both tragedy and success.
Americans have a long tradition of marching on Washington in protest. And I’m not trying to seem young and talk about the 1960s like they require getting into the way back machine—I’m talking about a long tradition, one that actually predates the Constitution and even led to a particular clause being included in it. In 1781, with the Revolutionary War still ongoing but entering into a significantly less heavy phase, much of the Continental Army was demobilized without pay, and in 1783 a large number of veterans marched on Philadelphia (which was the nation’s capital at the time, so this counts), surrounded the State House, and demanded that money; Congress fled to New Jersey, forces in the regular army expelled the protesters, and four years later the Constitution was framed to include a section noting that the Posse Comitatus Act (which forbids the use of the army in civilian police work) did not apply within the borders of Washington, DC. But despite this founding presence of marches on Washington, I would argue that the 1932 Bonus Army, in its own moment and most especially in the years afterward, signaled the true arrival of this form of social and political activism.
The Bonus Army, which was the popular shorthand by which the self-titled Bonus Expeditionary Force came to be known, was a gathering of over forty thousand World War I veterans, family members, and interested parties that descended on Washington in the spring of 1932. The vets, who had not in many cases been what we would consider adequately compensated during the war, had been awarded Service Certificates by a 1924 law; but those certificates did not mature and could not legally be paid until 1945, and with the Depression in full swing and veterans hit particularly hard by unemployment and its attendant ills (as they always seem to be), the Bonus Army decided to push for immediate payments. To say that their march on and then multi-month occupation of Washington ended badly is to understate the case—in late July the Hoover administration ordered the army (led in prominent roles, interestingly enough, by Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Patton) to remove the marchers, and in the course of that removal the marches (who again included women and children in significant numbers) were driven out with bayonets and poison gas, and their makeshift camp was burned to the ground. Hoover wasn’t likely win the 1932 presidential election in the best-case scenario, but these events, coming about three months before that election, likely cemented Roosevelt’s victory.
And it’s precisely the aftermath of the Bonus March, the way in which such a literal and tragic defeat became a multi-part public relations and then very real victory, that made it a potent model for future protesters. Among the Roosevelt administration’s earliest actions was an effort to reach out to the marchers, with Eleanor Roosevelt in particular working to get many of them enrolled in the Works Progress Administration. When Roosevelt balked at actually changing the law to pay out the Service Certificates early, Congress stepped in, overriding a presidential veto, and paid the Certificates in full in 1936, nearly a decade before they would legally come due. And many contemporary observers and subsequent historians have credited the publicity surrounding the Bonus Army with contributing heavily to the creation of the GI Bill of Rights in 1944, an act that made immeasurably better the reentry into civilian life for veterans of World War II. For all these reasons, organizers and leaders of the 1963 Civil Rights-connected March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom cited the Bonus Army very specifically as a key influence and inspiration, and of course many later groups have likewise taken up similar strategies of social and political protest and activism on the most national and public stage. Last protest tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 19, 2018: Mass Protest Studying: The NYC Draft Riots

[On September 17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post on mass protest in the age of Trump.]On a popular historical film that gets a Civil War mass protest frustratingly wrong.
I try not to watch movies with my AmericanStudier’s eyes, at least not first and foremost; certainly there are films (like many from my favorite filmmaker, John Sayles) that tap into my scholarly ideas and passions quickly and fully, and in that case I feel no guilt about becoming an AmericanStudier while watching them, but for the most part, I think I’m able to watch a movie as an engaged and present audience member initially, and then step back after it’s done and consider AmericanStudies kinds of questions and connections further. But sometimes my scholarly perspective and connections do make it impossible for me to stay in the moment while watching a particular film or scene, pull me out of what the filmmaker is trying to accomplish and even, in the worst case scenario, pit me against the film’s choices or purposes. And I don’t think that has ever happened more fully or more strikingly than with the climactic sequence of Martin Scorsese’s historical epic Gangs of New York (2002).
The explicit focus of that climactic sequence is the moment when Leonardo DiCaprio’s Amsterdam Vallon can take his long-anticipated and much-delayed vengeance on Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher (who killed Amsterdam’s father in the film’s opening fight but for whom he has worked for much of the film), but that personal plot climax plays out against the backdrop of (and is influenced and even further delayed by) the 1863 New York City draft riots. Scorsese’s choice to use those riots as his setting for this final section is, to my mind, extremely disturbing on a couple of levels: most overtly, because he takes a hugely complex and dark national moment and turns it into simply (or at least mostly) a set of complications for his hero’s plan for revenge; but more subtly and even more frustratingly, because the community that is rioting—the city’s Irish American immigrants—are (or have been throughout the film) DiCaprio’s people, the community that he has joined and fought for and with (not in the false way he has joined with Bill, but as his real home and family in the absence of his father), making the draft riots into an event that, if we stop to analyze who’s who as we’ve met them, we would in the movie’s logic have to identity with and even support.
It’s not possible to overstate how wrong that kind of sympathy would be. The causes of and factors behind the riots were certainly complex and multi-part, but at their heart they illustrated the resistance of the city’s Irish American population to being drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War. And in case the reasons for that resistance were unclear, most of the more than 100 New Yorkers who were killed during the riots were African Americans—not because they were taking part in the fighting on either side (the riots pitched the Irish community against the police and then the Union Army itself), but because the rioters were actively seeking them out and lynching them. Certainly there are, again, other social and cultural forces that were relevant too, many of which (like Boss Tweed’s corrupt political reign) the movie includes in its broad if (I believe) relatively superficial historical purview, and no analysis of the riots would be complete if it did not engage with those forces as well. But at the end of the day, these riots were not markedly different from the many other 19th century moments when significant portions of the white populations of American cities rose up in violent opposition to African American communities; and if anything, the fact that these riots took place during the Civil War, when many Northern whites and (by this time) blacks were dying in support of the rights of their African American countrymen, only highlights the ugliness of these events in contrast.
DiCaprio’s final voiceover in the film (set against an evolving New York City backdrop that culminates, controversially or at least shockingly given the film’s 2002 release date, in a view of the World Trade Center) notes that gang leaders and members like his father, Bill, and himself are no longer remembered in New York, “as if we were never here.” The moment (and thus the film’s) implicit argument is that we should better remember these New Yorkers, include them more fully in our history of the city and of the nation beyond it. Fair enough, Marty, but if we do so, we’d better make sure we include the draft riots too, and not as popcorn entertainment to cheer for. Next protest tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 18, 2018: Mass Protest Studying: The Whiskey Rebellion

[On September 17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post on mass protest in the age of Trump.]On two entirely distinct ways to AmericanStudy one of our first domestic crises.First, at the risk of self-plagiarism, I’m going to copy a paragraph from my prior post on George Washington’s second term; my apologies, but the ideas are relevant to this post as well: “George Washington was reeelected unanimously (and unopposed) in 1792, the last time a president ran uncontested, but much of his second term was dominated by unexpected crises and scandals. That included the unfolding effects of the French Revolution and the related European wars, about which I’ll write more below; but no event was more striking and significant than the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Tensions had been boiling over since Washington and his Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton instituted a new whiskey excise in 1791, and came to a head three years later when a group of Pennsylvania farmers destroyed a tax inspector’s home and began armed resistance against the federal government. When diplomatic resolutions failed and Hamilton led a military force (of 13,000 militia men) against American citizens, it became clear that Washington’s honeymoon period was over; the presidency and government had become the controversial and debated entities that they have remained ever since.”One way to analyze the Whiskey Rebellion would be to do so through the lens of Hamilton, and more exactly his complicated relationship with President Washington’s other most prominent Cabinet member, Secretary of State (during Washington’s first term) Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton and Jefferson represented the clear and striking distinction between the Federalists, with their emphasis on a strong central government, and the emergent Democrat-Republicans (known at the time of the Constitutional debates as the Anti-Federalists), with their resistance to that concept. And the Whiskey Rebellion certainly illustrated some of the tensions that such distinct perspectives could and did produce in the new American polity. But it’s also worth noting that just as Hamilton became closely connected in our national narratives and consciousness to banks, so too did Jefferson come to be associated with what he called “yeomen farmers”—and the two men thus embodied, at least in those dominant images, the opposed groups at the heart of the Whiskey Rebellion’s conflict. There’s an entirely different, and far less civically minded, way to analyze the Rebellion, however. Perhaps because of our temporal distance from its events, perhaps because it was fought over something as seemingly silly as alcohol, or perhaps because farmers occupy such a generally positive place in our national narratives (see the recent Super Bowl ad, for example), it’s tough to see the rebels as the 18thcentury equivalents to contemporary armed domestic terrorists such as the Hutaree Militia. But it’s also tough to come up with convincing reasons why these Early Republic violent insurrectionists, shooting federal agents rather than paying taxes, were different from such 21st century extremist groups. The fact is, as long as we’ve had a federal government, we’ve had Americans who position themselves in armed opposition to it—and that’s a dark and troubling but unavoidable American history.Next protest tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 17, 2018: Mass Protest Studying: Occupy Wall Street

[On September 17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post on mass protest in the age of Trump.]On a frustrating side to the groundbreaking mass protest, and a more important effect.I wrote in this space about Occupy Wall Street just a few months after it began, as part of my 2011 year-end series, and would still emphasize many of the same historical and cultural contexts that I highlighted in that post (many of which, it turns out, will be focal points for later posts in this week’s series). More broadly, I would argue that if anything the subsequent six and a half years have driven home far more clearly and frustratingly one of my main points in that post: the many parallels between our contemporary moment and the late 19th century Gilded Age, an era full of layers and contradictions but most centrally defined by striking, growing, and hugely destructive inequalities across a wide range of communities and issues. (But also by images of gold, making a president who literally shits on a golden throne about as on-the-nose as a metaphor can possibly get.) If we are indeed inside a new Gilded Age, then the Occupy Wall Street protests could be seen a vital origin point for the kinds of collective protests and activisms that helped produce the prior Gilded Age’s progressive, muckrakers, and other voices of resistance and reform. The Occupy protests also have a good deal in common with another Gilded Age movement of mass protest and resistance, the incipient labor movement. While the late 19th century labor movement achieved many vital victories and reforms, it also found itself inextricably linked to a historical tragedy where mass protest and mob violence became frustratingly interconnected: the May 1886 Haymarket bombing. As I wrote in that hyperlinked post, there’s no way to know whether the Haymarket bombers had anything to do with the labor movement (or anarchism, or etc.); but at the very least domestic terrorists used the occasion of a justified mass protest to enact an act of violence. And similarly, while the rise of antifa and its central strategy of (often) violent leftist mass protest is a separate 21st century trend from Occupy Wall Street, I would argue that the two communities overlap (or at least occupy a continuum) and are at times difficult to separate—justified and overtly peaceful mass protests in service of vital social and political goals blending far too closely with extreme and often violent mob actions. (To be fair, antifa does many other things as well, but mob violence is a part of the movement without question.) Violence and mass protest are never entirely unrelated, but to my mind they cannot become too closely tied without producing a fundamental and frustrating shift in purpose for the protests themselves.Frustrating continuums or not, however, the Occupy Wall Street protests themselves remained largely nonviolent and peaceful, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Moreover, I think OWS achieved at least one hugely important effect that has endured long beyond the disassembling of the camps: a crucial reframing of national narratives to include issues like the minimum wage and the need for a living wage, student loan debt and the cost of higher education, health care costs and realities, predatory banking practices and loan forgiveness policies, and many more. All of those issues pre-dated Occupy of course, but as often with mass protests Occupy helped draw sustained and substantive attention to them, forcing them into our collective conversations. As a result, Occupy-linked political figures like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been able to make their fights for these and other parallel issues central to their public service work and identities, extending Occupy’s protest activisms into the policy-making arena very successfully. As the rest of the week’s posts will illustrate, mass protest is most effective when it creates legacies that survive and thrive long after the protests have concluded—and on that note, OWS has to be counted as one of the most effective and important mass protests in American history.Next protest tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 15-16, 2018: 21st Century Massacres and Hate Crimes

[On September 10th, 1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied historical massacres, leading up to this special weekend post on contemporary hate crimes.]On the contemporary crime that most echoes historical massacres, and its connection to an even more troubling broader trend.If I had to identify one 21st century act of violence that most clearly extends the legacy of the kinds of massacres about which I’ve written this week, it would be Dylann Roof’s June 17th, 2015 killing of nine African American parishioners (including Senior Pastor Clementa Pinckney) and wounding of another at Charleston (SC)’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episocal Church. Roof overtly targeted members of a particular racial and ethnic culture, and for just as overt white supremacist reasons (he said to the victims “I have to do this because you are raping our women and taking over the world” before opening fire), and did so at a site of crucial cultural and historical significance for that community. While he was a single shooter, compared to a rampaging mob or a military force or the other large-scale perpetrators of the week’s historic massacres, Roof was part of extremist online communities that to my mind represent 21stcentury equivalents of those historic mobs, and in his ugly manifesto entirely defined his violent actions and their purposes as part of those broader, communal efforts. So for all those and other reasons I would call Roof’s shooting a 21st century massacre (not just a mass shooting, which of course it certainly was but tragically only one of so many in recent years), and as a result an extension of these dark and horrific historical legacies into our own moment.At the same time, Roof’s shooting could just as easily and with just as much accuracy be described as an early example of one of the last few years’ most horrific trends: white supremacist hate crimes against Americans of color. Of course such racial/ethnic hate crimes have never been absent from American history and culture, and African Americans in particular have been subject to them in increasing numbers for many years now (even if we leave police shootings aside, killings such as George Zimmerman’s February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin or Michael David Dunn’s November 2012 shooting of Jordan Davis embody such 21stcentury anti-African American hate crimes). But even those anti-African American hate crimes have become more blatantly white supremacist in the last couple years (I write this not long after the horrific stabbing murder of teenager Nia Wilson in Oakland by a racist killer), and have been paralleled by other racist hate crimes committed against members of so many different American cultures (Sikh Americans, Indian Americans, Muslim Americans, Mexican and other Latinx Americans, and many many more). Indeed, I’m not sure any single awful trend has been more consistent in the age of Trump than these hate crimes against Americans of color—perhaps ridiculous Trump Tweets, but those have overtly been linked to said crimes so I’ll go ahead and lump them in as part of the same trend.Obviously (I hope) I would never in any way downplay the horrors of large-scale massacres, but to my mind there’s something uniquely and perhaps especially horrible about these seemingly constant 21st century hate crimes: their everyday, almost ordinary nature. Almost by definition a massacre is such a striking event that it stops communities, and even the nation, in their tracks; President Obama traveled to Charleston to deliver the eulogy at the funeral of the Emanuel AME victims, for example. Whereas in 2018, racial and ethnic hate crimes, big or small, barely register as news at all; it’s on the small end of the spectrum to be sure, but when “Fuck n[-words]” was written on the walls of two bathrooms at my sons’ elementary school in Needham, MA this past academic year, the event was noted as terrible but wasn’t the subject of extensive school meetings or even multiple emails or the like. I’m not suggesting that we are at a point where a hate crime on the level of Dylann Roof’s would barely make a ripple in our news cycle—but I think it would be possible for us to get there, and there’s no doubt that the general ubiquity of racist hate and violence is at the very least a troubling trend.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

September 14, 2018: MassacreStudying: My Lai

[On September 10th, 1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary hate crimes.]On three complex, flawed, and powerful engagements with one of our more recent and more troubling dark histories.Among our nation’s darkest histories, only the Japanese internment has produced an official governmental apology (and accompanying financial settlement). Yet it’s fair to say that remorse and regret are two of the central emotions which all such dark memories elicit (or would elicit if they were better remembered) from most Americans. It’s still pretty rare, however, for one of the principal actors in a dark and destructive event to offer his own public apology for that history, and thus to force us to engage communally with such emotions and perspectives. And that’s exactly what Lieutenant William Calley did in August of 2009, during a speech at a Columbus, GA Kiwanis club: apologize for his role more than forty-one years earlier in the Vietnam War’s controversial and infamous My Lai Massacre. The apology, which seems (particularly given the setting) to have been impromptu and thus entirely genuine, no more erases the massacre than the reparations did the Japanese internment—as the My Lai prosecutor put it upon hearing the news, “It’s hard to apologize for murdering so many people”—but it does provide a belated yet still meaningful model for an open engagement with the worst of what American history includes.For the last few decades, long before Calley’s apology, prominent American artists have created their own such engagements with My Lai, or at least with fictionalized versions of such massacres. Two very different 1980s films offer interestingly parallel portrayals: Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) makes a My Lai-like village massacre the center of the conflict between its pair of deeply symbolic leaders, Willem Defoe’s angelic Elias and Tom Berenger’s devilish Barnes, with Charlie Sheen’s Chris Taylor nearly giving into Berenger’s demands to participate in the massacre but ultimately siding with Elias’s resistance to it; while Brian DePalma’s Casualties of War (1989) focuses on a much more intimate yet similar moral conflict, between Michael J. Fox’s idealistic Eriksson and Sean Penn’s cynical Meserve over whether they should rape and murder a captured Vietnamese woman. There’s at least one significant difference, however: in Stone’s film the massacre becomes one scene among many charting the men’s conflict and Taylor’s trajectory, and could thus be forgotten or minimized by an audience; whereas in DePalma’s film the debate over the Vietnamese prisoners forms the movie’s heart, and lingers into and beyond the complex final homecoming scene. Given the controversial and uncertain nature of both My Lai itself and the Vietnam War in general, it’s fair to say that each effect has its place in our engagement with them.And then there’s Tim O’Brien. The Vietnam War’s undisputed chief literary chronicler literature locates a My Lai-like massacre, or rather his protagonist’s post-war relationship to and memories of that event, at the ambiguous center of his most mysterious (in every sense) novel, In the Lake of the Woods (1994). It’s possible to argue that those ambiguities and mysteries make the massacre similarly uncertain, reflecting that side of My Lai’s presence in our national narratives; it’s also possible to argue that the massacre represents the novel’s sole and central certainty, reflecting how much My Lai has come to define Vietnam and its aftermath. The strongest analysis of O’Brien’s novel would probably argue for both sides—his book, after all, is both a mystery novel (which demands a certain answer to key questions of death, causation, and so on) and a postmodern novel (which resists any such certainty and portrays the many sides and versions of any story and history). And so it is with our darkest histories as well, of course—their existence and presence and role are unquestionable and vital; but how we remember them, what stories we tell of them, what they continue to mean for our future identity and community, are open and evolving and contested and crucial questions. Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?