Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 232

April 28-29, 2018: April 2018 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]April 2: Theater in America: Provincetown and Trifles: A theateriffic series starts with the moment, community, and play that signaled a dramatic shift.April 3: Theater in America: The Iceman Cometh: The series continues with a dark and compelling portrait of hollow dreams, and where it comes up short.April 4: Theater in America: Depression Drama and Odets: Activist drama in- and outside of approved spaces, as the series plays on.April 5: Theater in America: Hansberry’s Husband and Wife: Lorraine Hansberry’s realistic, flawed, and deeply moving married couple.April 6: Theater in America: Angels in America and Rent: The series concludes with two dramatic works that helped change our national conversations on AIDS.April 7-8: Crowd-sourced American Drama: My latest crowd-sourced post, featuring the responses and thoughts of fellow AmericanStudiers. Add yours in comments, please!April 9: Great American Novel Studying: The Blithedale Romance: A series on great American novels starts with the novel that shifted yet continued Hawthorne’s streak of masterpieces.April 10: Great American Novel Studying: The Great Gatsby: On Gatsby’s anniversary, the series continues with the novel’s limits and how to complement them.April 11: Great American Novel Studying: The Marrow of Tradition: A character whose presence and absence both reflect a novel’s greatness, as the series rolls on.April 12: Great American Novel Studying: Ceremony: Three pages that exemplify Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel’s inspiring greatness.April 13: Great American Novel Studying: Endings: The series concludes with happy, sad, and perfect endings to great American novels.April 14-15: Great American Novel Studying: Recent Contenders: A special weekend post highlighting five recent novels that stake their claim to the GAN title.April 16: NeMLA Recaps: Back to the Board: A series recapping the recent Northeast MLA Convention starts with two reasons why I’m rejoining the NeMLA Board.April 17: NeMLA Recaps: West of Sunset and Historical Fiction: The series continues with two takeaways from Stewart O’Nan’s inspiring opening night creative event.April 18: NeMLA Recaps: Castillo, Nixon, and the Present Crises: The depressing yet bracingly hopeful themes of two special lectures, as the series rolls on.April 19: NeMLA Recaps: Two Teaching Roundtables: What I learned from two impressive roundtables on the fraught and crucial question of Teaching under Trump.April 20: NeMLA Recaps: Three Other Inspiring Panels: The series concludes with three of the many great American Lit panels I attended as the incoming Area Director.April 21-22: NeMLA and You: A special weekend post, on three ways you can get involved with NeMLA for next year’s convention in Washington, DC and beyond!April 23: Assassination Studying: In the Line of Fire: An assassination series start with the scene that humanizes the JFK assassination, and the flaws of the film that surrounds it.April 24: Assassination Studying: James Garfield: The series continues with the mundane nature of our second presidential assassination, and why it matters.April 25: Assassination Studying: William McKinley: “Where was he radicalized?” and the McKinley assassination, as the series rolls on.April 26: Assassination Studying: John Wilkes Booth: On the date of his death, three stages in the life and story of our most dramatic assassin.April 27: Assassination Studying: Squeaky Fromme: The series concludes with the silly and deadly serious sides to Gerald Ford’s wannabe assassin.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 27, 2018: Assassination Studying: Squeaky Fromme

[On April 26th, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations and their contexts!]On the silliest and yet the most serious would-be political assassin in American history.Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s famous nickname is only one of many silly details about President Gerald Ford’s unsuccessful 1975 assassin. Fromme wore a flowing red robe and elfin red hat to Sacramento’s Capitol Park, where Ford was holding a televised event; she carried a pistol with no round in the chamber, and when she was immediately restrained by the Secret Service after pointing the gun at Ford, she emphasized to the cameras that the gun “didn’t go off.” Later she would tell the court during her trial that she “was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy water, and respect for creatures and creation.” When the prosecuting attorney recommended a harsh sentence, Fromme threw an apple at him (drawn from the folds of another flowing robe) and knocked off his glasses (“Sandy Koufax couldn’t have thrown a better pitch,” her defense attorney noted when asked about the incident). Much of Fromme’s assassination story reads more like a minor Wes Anderson film than an act of attempted political violence.Yet there’s a problem with that image, and it has to do with how Fromme spent the eight years prior to her pseudo-assassination attempt. In 1967, when she was only 19 years old and a homeless Junior College dropout, she met Charles Manson on Venice Beach, and quickly fell under the psychotic cult leader’s spell. Although she was not charged with taking part in the Manson Family’s brutal 1969 murder spree, she and other followers camped outside the trial, carving X’s in their foreheads when Manson did so and working to prevent other Family members from testifying against Manson. When Manson was sentenced to life in prison, Fromme and others continued the Family’s legacy of violence as well as its relationship with the Aryan Brotherhood, and she (along with other Family and Aryan Brotherhood members) played some role in the brutal murder of a young married couple (James and Lauren Willett) in Stockton (CA) in the fall of 1972. Although she was not connected to any crimes between 1972 and 1975, she was living with another Family member throughout this time, and the red robe she was wearing at the time of her assassination attempt was in honor of Manson’s nickname of “Red”for her. None of those histories necessarily mean that Fromme was really trying to assassinate Ford in 1975, but they do significantly change any image of her as a silly environmental activist or performance artist or the like. Indeed, the question I raised about Leon Csolgosz in Wednesday’s post—where was he or she radicalized?—has a crystal clear answer for Lynette Fromme, and that answer is “In the midst of one of the most brutal and horrific cults in American history.” Given that, I can’t help but wonder if some of the sense of silliness (which to be clear I’ve given into myself) is a form of white privilege, an inability to see a petite white woman as part of a group of bigoted, violent killers and criminals. Yet that’s precisely what Fromme was, and what she apparently remained throughout her three-plus decades in prison: a disciple and devotee of one of the most despicable figures in American history. Fortunately she was not able to commit an act of political violence in service of those beliefs, but she quite possibly took part in—and at least overtly condoned and supported—multiple, far more violent acts against innocent, private people. This is not a would-be assassin to laugh at.April Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?

April 26, 2018: Assassination Studying: John Wilkes Booth

[On April 26th, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations and their contexts!]On three stages to the drama of John Wilkes Booth.I think it’s generally well-known that John Wilkes Booth was a professional actor before he became involved in the Confederate conspiracy that led to him assassinating President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on April 14th, 1865. Perhaps our collective memories also include the detail that John’s brother Edwin Booth was an even more acclaimed and successful actor, likely the most famous of their generation. But I’m not sure very many Americans know that their father, Junius Brutus Booth, was a prominent English actor who ran away to America with his mistress Mary Ann Holmes to start a family—but was still married to Adelaide Delannoy Booth for the first three decades of his time in America, making both John and Edwin (along with their eight siblings) illegitimate (Junius and Adelaide only finalized their divorce when John was thirteen years old). Illegitimate sons who go into the same profession in which their father achieved fame, competing with each other (and their brother Junius Brutus Booth Jr., another professional actor) as well as that father—I’m not sure exactly what Dr. Freud would have to say, but I’m quite sure he’d have some thoughts.Perhaps such potential familial and psychological issues go hand-in-hand with his theatrical training to explain the deeply dramatic nature of John’s assassination of Lincoln. It’s not just that he was the conspirator assigned to kill the president, nor that he chose to do so at a theatre where he was a well-known performer and guest (although yes on both counts). It was also and especially his actions after he shot Lincoln: jumping down from the president’s box onto the stage; raising a knife above his head (he had just stabbed Major Henry Rathbone, a Union officer present in the box with the Lincolns); and proclaiming “Sic semper tyrannis [Thus always to tyrants]” before making his escape. Of all the political assassinations about which I’ll write this week, and really all the ones with which I’m familiar at all, it’s only Booth’s of Lincoln that I would call as much performance art as violence, or for that matter at least as much about the assassin as about his intended target. None of that lessens the horror and tragedy of the assassination in the slightest, but it does reflect another layer to the lifelong drama of John Wilkes Booth’s identity and career.That drama had one more particularly prominent stage, but one that was also much less within Booth’s control: the 12-day manhunt that concluded with Union Army Sergeant Boston Corbett shooting Booth as he hid inside a Virginia barn that soldiers had set on fire. Yet while Booth was more the subject of than the actor in this final drama, I have to believe he would have enjoyed the nationwide headlines and attention, the obsession with finding Lincoln’s assassin that consumed the nation throughout those twelve long days in April. Many late 20thcentury assassins or would-be assassins have been described as seeking celebrity or fame through their acts of political violence (including the young woman on whom I’ll focus in tomorrow’s post), but I don’t believe that any of them have come close to the notoriety achieved by John Wilkes Booth. The manhunt wasn’t a particularly long-running drama, but I would argue that it took and held center stage in the public consciousness far more fully than any theatrical production with which the Booths (brothers, father, any of them) were involved. A bittersweet final victory for our most dramatic assassin.Last assassination studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?

April 25, 2018: Assassination Studying: William McKinley

[On April 26th, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations and their contexts!]On the still highly relevant but tricky question raised by our third presidential assassination.First, it’d be disgenuous of me not to share this earlier post on William McKinley’s 1901 assassination, in which I argued for a couple reasons why (despite the killing’s obvious horror and tragedy) I couldn’t entirely mourn McKinley’s death. I can’t say that my position on that has evolved in the last couple years; while certain orange current commanders in chief have pushed most everybody further down the list of worst US presidents, I would still say that McKinley likely and comfortably occupies a spot in the top ten. To be honest, McKinley’s inaction in response to the 1898 Wilmington coup and massacre—and, more exactly, in response to the most heart-rending letter from an American citizen to her president I’ve ever encountered—would be enough all by itself to merit his inclusion on the worst-of list, and it’s far from the only black mark on the McKinley administration. Obviously McKinley did not deserve to die and his assassination was a national tragedy, but his was far from a good presidency and I won’t pretend otherwise.When it comes to the specific details of his assassination, I think they reflect a particularly clear version of a question that has become part of many contemporary conversations about terrorists or mass shooters: where was he radicalized? Unlike the obviously Confederate or strikingly personal motivations of the Lincoln and Garfield assassins, the factors that pushed former steel worker Leon Czolgosz to shoot President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901 were far less immediately apparent. Historians have generally boiled those factors down to anarchism, one of the late 19th century’s most consistent boogeymen and often a short-hand for cultural fears of various groups (Eastern and Southern European immigrants, Jews, communists and socialists, labor activists, and intellectuals, among others). Czolgosz had attended a speech by the radical activist Emma Goldman on May 6th, 1901 in Cleveland, and the moment has become a particularly clear touchstone for arguments that he was radicalized into an anarchist perspective by the experience and saw assassinating the president as his way to contribute to the cause. That may well be the case—but at the same time, it’s difficult for me to believe that Czolgosz went from having no radical opinions on May 5th to assassinating the president on September 6th, and so attributing the change solely or even mostly to Goldman feels like both a simplistic answer and a way to further demonize such socialist activists. I’ve seen some historians make the case that it was the violent suppression of an 1897 strike by Slavic miners at Pennsylvania’s Lattimer Mines that truly angered Czolgosz and set him on the path toward political violence, and to my mind that narrative makes a great deal of sense, both in terms of the longer arc of an individual’s radicalization and as a event sufficiently egregious (it came to be known as the Lattimer Mines Massacre) to engender political violence. Yet even then, I’m highlighting a single event or moment as the source of Czolgosz’s radicalization, when the likeliest explanation is both multi-faceted and gradual, a lifelong series of stages that led him to the Exposition grounds with a pistol hidden beneath his handkerchief. We would do well to remember the long arc when we consider the radicalization of today’s politically violent actors as well.Next assassination studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?

April 24, 2018: Assassination Studying: James Garfield

[On April 26th, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations and their contexts!]On the mundane nature of our second presidential assassination, and why it matters.As I’ll discuss more in Thursday’s post, the Lincoln assassination was literally and figuratively dramatic (if not melodramatic) in numerous ways: from its theatrical setting and actor assassin through many other heightened and extreme details, moments, and contexts. Interestingly enough, our second presidential assassination, the shooting of President James A. Garfield by Charles Guiteau on July 2nd, 1881, was instead in many ways at the thoroughly mundane end of the spectrum. Guiteau was a disgruntled office seeker who had supported Garfield’s candidacy, believed he was owed a foreign service position, and when denied that opportunity decided to kill Garfield in the hopes that his Vice President, Chester Arthur, would be more willing to appoint men like Guiteau to such roles. After he shot Garfield while the president waited for a train to New Jersey for his summer vacation, each man’s actions and statements reflect the moment’s mundane qualities: Garfield simply exclaimed, “My god, what is this?”; while Guiteau was captured immediately and stated, “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”That relatively mundane quality to the Garfield assassination reflects some important historical contexts. The Lincoln assassination had been perceived as an anomaly, as part of the Civil War’s violence and extremes, to the point where Garfield did not have any sort of armed guard with him in public settings like the train station; even this assassination did not fully change that narrative, as the Secret Service did not formally add presidential protection to their duties until after McKinley’s assassination in 1901. The motivation behind this assassination was likewise far different from the multi-layered Confederate conspiracy of which John Wilkes Booth was part; Guiteau was a strikingly ordinary man (he didn’t even speak French, despite his desire for the position of Consul to France) who embodied the era’s consistent but hardly world-changing debates over patronage, government office-holding, and related issues. I don’t mean in any way to downplay the horror or tragedy of Garfield’s shooting and death (particularly the gruesome fact that he was in intensive care for eleven weeks before succumbing to his wounds on September 19th), but compared to the Lincoln assassination this second presidential shooting was as undramatic as it gets.Perhaps due to that lack of drama, I would argue that the Garfield assassination is far less present in our collective memories than Lincoln’s (or Kennedy’s, although of course television and video contributed mightily to the latter’s prominence). Yet as I just noted, those very mundane qualities can tell us a good bit about the assassination’s historical moment and contexts. Moreover, as I argued in this post, in just a few months in office Garfield had already begun a number of important efforts; fortunately his successor Arthur continued many of them, but nonetheless the assassination represented (as they always do) a political and social attack just as much as a personal and violent one. Finally, I would also argue that the mundane side to the Garfield assassination itself reflects a step in the gradual acceptance of political violence as a possibility (if not a reality) within our society, a shift that would likewise have to be linked to the rise of guns and gun violence as a part of America’s social landscape. All reasons to better remember our second presidential assassination, relatively boring as it might be.Next assassination studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?

April 23, 2018: Assassination Studying: In the Line of Fire

[On April 26th, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations and their contexts!]On a scene that humanizes the JFK assassination, and the shortcomings of the film around it.At the heart of Wolfgang Petersen’s film In the Line of Fire (1993) is one of those unforgettable, quiet, potent Clint Eastwood monologues. Eastwood’s character Frank Horrigan is an aging Secret Service agent who was part of John F. Kennedy’s Dallas detail; the film’s villain, psychopath Mitch Leary (John Malkovich), is threatening to kill the current president, and while so doing taunts Horrigan with his failures during the Kennedy assassination and wonders if Horrigan has or ever had the guts to take a bullet for the president (an overt, and of course the most unique and difficult, part of the job of every Secret Service agent). In that linked monologue, Horrigan opens up to his fellow agent and love interest Lilly Raines (Rene Russo) about his failures on that November day in Dallas and how they have shaped his perspective and identity ever since.It’s an amazing couple minutes of film, and a nice reminder that Clint Eastwood is more than just an unhinged RNC speaker or over-the-top “Get off my lawn”caricature of a Grumpy Old White Man. But the In the Line of Fire monologue also does important, complex cultural work when it comes to the JFK assassination and the kinds of questions I raised (vis a vis Susan Cheever’s controversial article) in this post. The assassination has long exemplified the “Where were you when you heard the news?” narrative of history, a reflection on just how communally traumatic its horrific events were. And if on the one hand the Secret Service’s failures seem to have done their part to contribute to that trauma, on the other it’s important to note that the trauma might be particularly devastating when the answer to that “Where were you” question is, “I was a few feet away from Kennedy’s car but did nothing to stop his killing.” At the very least, Eastwood’s monologue does what great art so often does: forces us to think about the humanity within history, complicating and enriching our perspective on that shared, national history in the process.Unfortunately, the rest of Petersen’s film not only fails to live up to that moment of complexity and humanity, but actively undermines the questions it raises. For one thing, Malcovich’s character and the way he drives the film’s plot is just another example of a psychotic, cat-and-mouse blockbuster bad guy, no different from contemporary villains such as Dennis Hopper in Speed (1994) or Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away (1994) or the like. And for another, more important thing, in order to complement that blockbuster villain, the film turns Eastwood’s agent into precisely the kind of superhero stereotype that the history of the Secret Service reveals to be nonsense; [SPOILER ALERT] in the film’s climax, for example, Horrigan not only proves to Leary, Raines, himself, and everyone else that he is willing and able to take a bullet for the president, but after being gravely wounded continues to chase and eventually overpowers and kills the would-be assassin. This action-movie silliness doesn’t ruin the seriousness of Eastwood’s earlier monologue, necessarily; but it reflects a film that as a whole fails utterly at maintaining that kind of humanity.Next assassination studying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?

April 21-22, 2018: NeMLA and You

[This past weekend was the 2018 Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and this week I’ve highlighted some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to this weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]On three ways you can get involved with NeMLA.1)      Run for office: As I hope Monday’s post made clear, the NeMLA Board is a truly unique and inspiring community to be part of. If you’re interested in joining, the positions that will be elected this coming year are Second Vice President (part of a multi-year position that leads to the Presidency), the Creative Writing Director, the French and Francophone Director, and the Spanish and Portuguese Director. Next year, besides Second VP again, there will be elections for British Lit, German Language & Lit, Italian Language & Lit, the CAITY Caucus (Contingent/Adjunct/Independent/Two-year), the Diversity Caucus, and the Grad Student Caucus. Between the two years that covers just about everybody, so if you’re in the Northeast US (or thereabouts) I really encourage you to consider running for the Board and joining this great organization and community.2)      Come to the convention: If you’re not in the Northeast, or not able to make that kind of multi-year commitment, I still can’t encourage you enough to submit an abstract for the annual NeMLA convention (if you haven’t already done so, and again if you have!). Future conventionswill be held in DC (2019), Boston (2020), and Philadelphia (2021), and I can guarantee great sessions, wonderful connections to local events and institutions, and a collegial and welcoming community. You can propose panels or roundtables for the DC convention now, and then the CFP for submissions to those panels/roundtables will be out soon with a September deadline. Hope to see you next year in Washington!3)      Talk to me: Questions about any of that? Contributions to the work of the American Literature area for the next few conventions? Other ideas for NeMLA? You know where to find me (and comments here work well too)!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. NeMLA responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?

April 20, 2018: NeMLA Recaps: Three Other Inspiring Panels

[This past weekend was the 2018 Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]As the incoming American Literature Area Director, I made sure to get to a ton of the convention’s wonderful American Lit panels. Here are three that I would briefly highlight:1)      “Excluded: Neglected Authors Pre-1900”: One of this panel’s presenters couldn’t be there, but the two that were offered this AmericanStudier two distinct but equally important forms of literary historical recovery. Mary Balkunfocused on an American author I had literally never heard of before this moment: Abigail Levy Franks, an early 18th century Jewish American woman living in New York City whose letters to her son in England open up questions of religion and culture, gender and perspective, family and multi-generational shift, and how we define colonial American community and literature. And Robert Wilson talked about James M. Whitfield, a mid-19th century African American poet and activist whose poetryI knew slightly from teaching him in my 19th Century Af Am Lit course but whose journalistic debates with Frederick Douglass and others over black nationalism and colonization were entirely new to me, and significantly shifted my sense of this figure, his poetry, and his cultural and historical role.2)      “Material Culture Studies and American Literature”: Each of the four thoughtful and ground-breaking papers on this panel exemplified different sides to the literary study and meanings of material culture. Wesley McMasters put Edgar Allan Poe’s Philadelphia-era writings in conversation with journalistic texts and contexts from the period. Blevin Shelnutt highlighted the rise of both gaslights and gaslight culture in antebellum New York City. Stephanie Schererused the relationship of paper production to cotton (and thus slavery) and rags (and thus poverty) to open up works such as Melville’s “Tartarus of Maids.” And Brad Congdonfocused on the short stories that Langston Hughes publishedin the first issues of Esquire magazine to think about both the rise of men’s magazines and the culture of the 1930s. So much to keep thinking about in all four talks!3)      “Minor Print Cultures of the 19th-Century United States”: My friend and longtime NEASA colleague Luke Dietrichorganized this panel, with three papers that each highlighted cultural and literary figures and works about which I knew absolutely nothing and into which I’m now excited to delve further. Liana Glew discussed The Meteor , a short-lived but incredibly interesting paper produced in the 1870s by the residents of Alabama’s Bryce Hospital (a mental asylum). Maria Ellenberger discussed mid to late-19th century novels of domestic abuse, including Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life: A Story of To-day (1874). And Monika Giacoppediscussed French Canadian political activist and exile Ludger Duvernayand his radical newspaper (produced from Burlington, VT) Le Patriote Canadien . All three of these impressive speakers and talks reminded me of how much I still have to learn about American literature, culture, and history—one of many reasons I’m so excited to be taking over the NeMLA American Literature Director role!Special post this weekend,BenPS. NeMLA responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?

April 19, 2018: NeMLA Recaps: Two Teaching Roundtables

[This past weekend was the 2018 Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]On two impressive roundtables that offered distinct but intertwined visions of teaching in 2018 America.For my Fall 2017 Semester Reflections series, I focused on various factors under the umbrella heading of “Teaching under Trump.” One of my central points throughout that week’s series was that every class I’ve taught over the last few semesters has been influenced by all that’s taking place in 2017 (now 2018) American society and culture: some more overtly (never more so than the Senior Seminar on Analyzing 21st Century America I was in the midst of teaching when the 2016 election took place), some more subtly (such as the different way I talk about issues of American identity every time they come up in any class, which is of course pretty often for this AmericanStudier), but all influenced in one way or another (or, typically, many ways). If that means that I have become more political in my teaching than I once professed to be, then so be it; certainly I have had more moments of overt classroom advocacy or activism over the last few years than I in did my entire first decade of teaching. But I think it’s at least as accurate to say that our society and world have become so infused by these issues and debates that everything we do in class, including things that don’t seem overtly political at all, has at least some significant connection to social and political contexts.On the first day of the NeMLA convention I attended two pedagogically focused roundtables that thoughtfully addressed the more overt and more subtle forms of classroom politics, respectively. The more overt was “Teaching Early American Literature in a Time of Political Upheaval,” featuring talks by Thomas Doran, Hugh Egan, Teresa Gilliams, Sarah Young, Lucas Hardy, Joshua Bartlett, Todd Thompson, and Alex Moskowitz. To be clear, when I say “more overt” I don’t in any way mean that these wonderful and nuanced individual talks were advocating for any particular form of classroom political engagement, or even for so engaging at all; instead, the roundtable as a whole recognized and responded to many of the same aspects of Teaching under Trump that I discussed above, highlighting various ways in which materials, discussions, and other aspects of Early American Literature classes necessarily connect to, are influenced by, and comment on 2018 social and political debates and issues. Moreover, each and every speaker modeled an approach that welcomes every student perspective and voice, while nonetheless working with the texts and contexts in ways that do not minimize their ability to speak to some of the darkest and most challenging sides to our contemporary moment. I came away from this great discussion even more motivated to seek that elusive combination of textual and historical focus in the classroom paired with collective recognition of the contemporary connections for those topics.Offering a more subtle but just as significant set of models was the second roundtable, “Imagined Connections: The Space of Empathy in the Undergraduate Classroom,” featuring talks by Sarah Foust Vinson and Susan Larkin, Lisbeth Fuisz, Martin Gasper, Kathleen Hanggi, Kerry Hasler-Brooks, Melissa Jenkins, and Matthew Leporati. Questions of empathy in literature and writing classrooms—its possibilities and limits, the role of texts and cultural works, whether and how it can cross boundaries between identities and communities, and so on—are of course not at all limited or specific to this contemporary moment, and these talks rightly engaged with them in ways that would be just as relevant in other times. Yet at the same time, I don’t think it’s just my own argument that empathy is a form of resistance in Trump’s America that made this roundtable and its thoughtful and inspiring talks so particularly salient in 2018. That is, if empathy is both a complex potential goal for any specific class and one of the things that educational spaces and communities can always encourage and amplify, this is a moment when it becomes more important than ever to think about whether, when, and how to work for it. These great talks and speakers gave me plenty of ways to consider those questions as I move forward with my Teaching under Trump.Last recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?

April 18, 2018: NeMLA Recaps: Castillo, Nixon, and the Present Crises

[This past weekend was the 2018 Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]On two rightfully depressing special events, and their complementary closing messages.At lunchtime on Friday I left the conference hotel and walked a few blocks to the SPACE Art Gallery to hear Professor David Castillo’s talk on “Truth, Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media: Why the Humanities are More Important than Ever.” Castillo began with various Donald Trump quotes and Tweets, as part of a long first section (really the majority of the talk) on the ongoing and indeed constant devolution of language and assaults on truth, and things didn’t get much happier from there. There’s great value, and real necessity, in compiling together even some of the literally countless outrages and horrors that we’ve witnessed over the 15 months of the Trump presidency (and indeed the nearly three years since Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign), and Castillo did so with precision and thoughtfulness, asking us to consider not only Trump’s own abuses but their many enablers and influences in our political, media, and social landscape more broadly. But that’s still never gonna be the most delightful lunchtime fare, y’know?Later that evening I attended the second of our two annual opening events, the keynote address: Professor Rob Nixon on “Environmental Martyrdom and the Defenders of the Forest.” Nixon began his stunning and moving lecture by dedicating it to the memory of Berta Cáceres, the influential and award-winningHonduran indigenous and environmental rights activist murdered in March 2016, and went on to tell, contextualize, and theorize the late 20thand early 21st century stories of a number of such assassinated or executed figures around the world. Besides the unquestionable value of remembering and commemorating these individuals, there are of course any number of crucial contemporary and longstanding histories and issues to which such memories help us better connect, not only climate change and environmental destruction but indigenous rights, class and economic activism, gender and sexual assault, and the limits and dangers of globalization, among others. Nixon both focused closely on the specific stories and yet consistently highlighted those and other links with care and power. But that’s still never gonna be the most delightful reception fare, y’know?Obviously delighted is not the only, nor often the most important, way that such talks and events should leave us feeling, and so I don’t intend those parallel closing sentences as a critique in any way. But as you all well know, I’m a critical optimist, a role that perhaps does not require delight but certainly needs some forms of hope. And I don’t believe it’s just my critical optimist goggles that allowed me to see moves toward such hope in the final sections of both Castillo and Nixon’s talks. The co-authored project from which Castillo’s talk was drawn is provisionally entitled Humanities to the Rescue , and he made the case explicitly not just for humanities in academia or education, but for what the humanities—their stories, their skills, their ways of thinking and being—can and must contribute to our society, now and moving forward. Nixon’s optimistic closing was more subtle, as befitting his even darker and more solemn subject; but to my mind his arguments for the connections between humanity and human bodies and the forests, the environment, our world—connections made tragically but also inspiringly clear but the lives and deaths and legacies of environmental martyrs—offer a hopeful vision of how we might move into a more sustainable and shared collective future. Both Castillo and Nixon’s optimistic visions are tentative and fragile and very much up in the air—but they’re there, and all the more crucial given the crises on which much of their powerful talks focused.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?