Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 239

January 31, 2018: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: The Longest Yard(s)

[Each of the last six years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudysome sports histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s sure to take home the championship!]On what the changes between an original film and its remake can tell us about American narratives.I’m not going to try to make the case for the original The Longest Yard (1974) as some sort of American classic, but it does offer a pretty gritty and realistic depiction of prison life and community amidst its more comic moments and its lovable underdogs sports story. The film’s sadistic Warden Rudolph Hazen, played to sleazy perfection by Eddie Albert, could be transplanted without much revision to a more overtly realistic contemporary film such as Cool Hand Luke (1967). And as the disgraced football star turned convict, Burt Reynolds feels precisely as flawed and frustrating yet ultimately heroic as Paul Newman in that film or Jack Nicholson in the following year’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). So you know what, maybe I am making the case for Longest Yardas a minor American classic, perhaps not quite on par with those contemporary films or another like Dog Day Afternoon (1975), but in the conversation at least.It will likely come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Adam Sandler’s film oeuvre that the 2005 Longest Yard remake, starring Sandler in the Reynolds role and James Cromwell as the Warden (among many other celebrity roles), is not a classic, minor or otherwise. While I try not to sum up entire works with one moment or detail, I’d say this one qualifies: in the original film, the climactic game between the prisoners and guards was a brutally realistic grudge-fest, with lives and futures on the line; in the remake, that’s ostensibly still the case, but at one point Sandler’s quarterback gives one of the guards a wet willy. I can’t say it any more clearly than does the Wikipedia entry on the remake and its critical reception: “the greatest complaint from critics was that it replaced the original’s dark comedy and grit with juvenile humor and visual gags.” Since “juvenile humor and visual gags” is what you’ll find if you look up “Adam Sandler” in the dictionary, it’s fair to say that his presence had a lot to do with that change; but I would also argue that the two films reflect a significant difference in our national narratives about prison.In this post on Dog Day Afternoon, I wrote about the 1971 Attica Prison rebellion, and the way those prominent and controversial events foregrounded issues of prisoner treatment and life in this easily overlooked American community. Popular and influential films like Luke and Yard likewise reflect the presence of those issues in the era’s collective conversations. In the 21st century, on the other hand, we tend not to think about our prisons and their communities at all; when we do, as John Oliver highlights in this brilliant piece, it’s mostly as fodder for jokes about prison rape (perhaps the least appropriate subject for jokes imaginable) or as the subject of melodramatic entertainments like Oz and Orange is the New Black. So if the remake is set in the same community that was the subject of those gritty, socially realistic earlier films but is instead full of dumb jokes and silly entertainments untethered from reality (which are the variant definitions of “Adam Sandler”), that would seem to be a pretty accurate depiction of the way we now engage with prison, when we engage with it at all.Next MovieStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

January 30, 2018: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Hoosiers and Rudy

[Each of the last six years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudysome sports histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s sure to take home the championship!]On the appeal of underdog champions, and the untold sides to their stories.If yesterday’s two types (heroic losers like Rocky Balboa and lovable losers like the Bad News Bears and Costner’s protagonists) occupy two spots along a spectrum of sports movie protagonists, then heroic underdog champions occupy a third, even more inspiring slot. Such characters are as admirable and heroic in their personal qualities as Rocky, but seek something more than just going the distance—they want to achieve the unlikeliest of victories, to knock off the seemingly unbeatable champion. Perhaps the most striking such underdog champions in both sports and sports movie history are the Miracle on Ice hockey gold medalists of 1980—but since that group was still an Olympic team for one of the most successful nations in Olympic history, I would argue that the midwestern protagonists of Hoosiers (1986) and Rudy (1993), both films directed by David Anspaugh and written by Angelo Pizzo, provide even more clear examples of this type.It’d be hard to decide which of those inspired-by-a-true-story underdog victories is more unlikely and more inspiring. The Hickory high school team in Hoosiers (based loosely on Milan High’s 1954 championship season) is coached by two men as collectively flawed as Buttermaker in Bad News Bears—Gene Hackman’s Norman Dale has been dismissed from his prior job for losing his temper and striking a student; Dennis Hopper’s Shooter Flatch is an alcoholic town outcast—and has barely enough players to field a team, yet goes on to win the state championship against a vastly more deep and talented South Bend team. Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, whose life and events are portrayed relatively close to accurately by Sean Astin and company, is the undersized son of an Illinois factory worker who refuses to give up on his dream of playing football for Notre Dame, overcoming numerous challenges and obstacles and finally making his way onto the team and into the final game of the season, in which he sacks the quarterback on the final play and is carried off the field by his teammates. Having critiqued lovable loser films for their merely pyrrhic victories, it’d be hypocritical of me not to applaud films that depict underdog victories, and such stories are indeed undeniably appealing and affecting. Yet in order to tell their stories in the way they want, these films also have to leave out a great deal, elisions that are exemplified by the way racial issues are not addressed in Hoosiers. For one thing, Hickory’s opponent in the championship game, South Bend, is intimidating in large part because it features a racially integrated team, which would have been a significant rarity in 1952 and which would seem to make them a team worth our support. And for another, as James Loewen has written in his groundbreaking book Sundown Towns (2005), southern Indiana in the early 1950s was a hotbed of overt and violent racism; to quote Loewen, “As one Indiana resident relates, ‘All southern Hoosiers laughed at the movie called Hoosiers because the movie depicts blacks playing basketball and sitting in the stands at games in Jasper. We all agreed no blacks were permitted until probably the '60s and do not feel welcome today.’ A cheerleader for a predominantly white, but interracial Evansville high school, tells of having rocks thrown at their school bus as they sped out of Jasper after a basketball game in about 1975, more than 20 years after the events depicted so inaccurately in Hoosiers.” Such histories don’t necessarily contrast with those featured in these films—but it would be important to complement the films with fuller engagement with their perhaps less triumphant contexts.Next MovieStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

January 29, 2018: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Bad News Boys and Bears

[Each of the last six years, I’ve used the Super Bowl week to AmericanStudysome sports histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s sure to take home the championship!]On the American obsession with lovable losers, and a problem with it.One of the best sports movies of all time, Rocky (1976), features a protagonist whom I’d call a heroic loser. That is, even before Rocky Balboa went on to win all the climactic fights in his subsequent films, his initial losing effort against Apollo Creed was a reflection of his heroic qualities: his grit and perseverance, his desire and ability to “go the distance.” Well, that’s not the kind of loser I’m going to focus on in this post. These losers are the drunken coach and his team of misfits and outcasts who lose the championship game and then start a brawl with the winners ( The Bad News Bears ), the drunken career minor leaguer who ends his career setting a record that nobody will remember and then quitting ( Bull Durham ), the drunken washed out golfer who blows his one chance at redemption due to a stubborn insistence on perfection over success ( Tin Cup ). Other than drunkenness, what defines this bunch is precisely how anti-heroic they seem.But on the other hand, they are the heroes of their stories, each of which culminates very fully with a moment that asks us to cheer for the protagonists—often in the precise moment of their lovable losing (such as Tin Cup’s catastrophic final hole), and always in triumphs that are framed as far more important than the actual on-field victories would have been (the Bears proving that they’re a team, Costner’s characters getting the girl). Concurrently, their stories’ actual victors are typically framed as either unlikable snobs (the Yankees in Bears, Don Johnson’s rival golferin Cup) or at best clueless jocks who will never understand what’s most important (Tim Robbins’ star pitcherin Bull). In a nation that was created out of a revolution that pitted farmers against the world’s greatest army, a nation whose general and first president pretty much never won a battle in the course of that revolution, it’s easy to see where this embrace of losers over snobs, the flawed but lovable everyman against the powerful champion, arises—and easy to embrace it ourselves as well.I enjoy those characters and their stories as well, and am certainly not advocating rooting for the Redcoats during the Revolution (you definitely lose your AmericanStudier card for that one). But I think there’s a subtle but significant problem with these lovable loser stories, now more than ever: they make it much easier to swallow substantial inequalities, to see it as sufficient to achieve pyrrhic victories against the powers that be and thus leave those powers ultimately unscathed. That is, whereas Rocky hit the unbeatable champion Apollo hard enough that he famously noted, “There’ll be no rematch,”in these lovable loser stories the champions don’t seem much affected at all—it’s simply about the little guy achieving whatever victory he can reasonably get, and us all being happy with that. And at the end of the day, that seems like a recipe for giving up even the idea that either side can win—an idea that, mythic as it may too often be, is to my mind at the core of the best version of American identity and community.Next MovieStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?

January 27-28, 2018: January 2018 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]January 1-5: New Books for the New Year: 2018 kicks off with a handful of recent and new releases which I’m excited to read in the new year.January 6-7: Crowd-sourced Books for the New Year: A crowd-sourced follow-up, with suggestions from fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!January 8: Gay Rights Histories: The Society for Human Rights (1924): A series in honor of Harvey Milk’s 30th anniversary kicks off with the nation’s oldest gay rights organization.January 9: Gay Rights Histories: Harvey Milk: For the 30th anniversary of his inauguration, on Milk’s tragic assassination and remembering his legacy beyond it.January 10: Gay Rights Histories: 1950s Discriminations: The series continues with two horrific 1950s decisions and whether we can find light in such dark moments.January 11: Gay Rights Histories: Stonewall: The significance of violence for civil rights movements and remembering beyond it, as the series rolls on.January 12: Gay Rights Histories: 1970s Advances: The series concludes with three 1973 moments that helped advance the movement in distinct but interconnected ways.January 13-14: Gay Rights Histories: Fitchburg State’s Exhibition: A special post on two of the many reasons to love FSU’s striking visual exhibition on the movement.January 15: MLK Day Figures: The Real King: A MLK Day series kicks off with my annual post on remembering King beyond “I Have a Dream.”January 16: MLK Day Figures: Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker: The series continues with two inspiring and groundbreaking Revolutionary era African American leaders.January 17: MLK Day Figures: David Walker: An aggressive, impassioned, and vital Early Republic African American voice, as the series rolls on.January 18: MLK Day Figures: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: An African American author and reformer whose works and efforts spanned much of the 19thcentury.January 19-21: MLK Day Figures: James Weldon Johnson: The series concludes with the professor, preacher, poet, and performer who embodies the concept of a Renaissance person.January 22: Spring Semester Previews: 19C African American Lit: A Spring preview series on teaching particular texts kicks off with Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves” (1843).January 23: Spring Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone: The series continues with two distinct but complementary reasons to teach more drama in literature courses.January 24: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature I: A moment that delightfully solidified the joys of teaching Fanny Fern, as the series rolls on.January 25: Spring Semester Previews: American Lit Online: For my second online course, the question of substituting shorter works for novels in an online literary survey.January 26: Spring Semester Previews: Talking Exclusion & Inclusion: The series concludes with my next book talk, my broader goals for the project, and how you can help!Super Bowl series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

January 26, 2018: Spring Semester Previews: Talking Exclusion & Inclusion

[As another semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to hear what your spring looks like and holds!]On my next book talk, my broader goals, and how I’d love your help.It was nearly a year ago that I had the chance to give my first talk on my next book (still in progress), Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America; since then I’ve given additional versions of the talk at other local spaces, as well as highlighting different pieces of it as part of adult learning courses and in public scholarly writings such as this one on Yung Wing. But this February, on Valentine’s Day no less, I have the chance to deliver a new book talk at a very exciting setting: I’ll be giving a Fitchburg State University Harrod Lecture, which is a biannual university-wide series devoted to highlighting the great work being done by our FSU faculty. I had the chance to give a Harrod Lecture back in October 2008, on the topic that would become my second book Redefining American Identity, and found the experience, the audience response and conversation, and the setting to be among the most inspiring I’ve encountered in all my years in academia. I’m honored and excited to be part of the Harrod series once more, and am sure that I’ll once more get a great deal of continued inspiration for the book in progress (and beyond) from the experience.At the same time, though, my goal for Exclusion & Inclusion—and the reason I’m working with an agent, Cecelia Cancellaro of Word Literary Services—is that it be the most public of all my books and projects to date. And while the FSU Harrod Lectures are open to community members from beyond the campus, most of the folks in the audience will indeed be colleagues, students, and others from the academic setting of FSU. So as I finalize the book manuscript over the next couple months, and hopefully move toward securing a publisher and bringing this project into the world, I would love the opportunity to share it with more non-academic and public audiences as well. My year-plus of book talks for The Chinese Exclusion Act offered me a model for connecting to those kinds of settings and audiences, and of course I’ll be reaching out to those and similar institutions and spaces; but in truth, I believe that any individual’s perspective and connections are too limited to truly achieve the kinds of public engagement for which I’m hoping and working. To quote Bruce, “you got to have help.” So I would greatly appreciate any ideas you all might have about spaces, places, groups, or other opportunities to share a talk on “Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America.”Finally—and I hope it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway—I’d love the chance to reciporate, here or otherwise. So let me know about any upcoming talks, projects, work of yours, in comments or by email, and I’ll make sure to spread the word as well!January Recap this weekend,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Spring previews of your own to share?

January 25, 2018: Spring Semester Previews: American Lit Online

[As another semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to hear what your spring looks like and holds!]On substituting shorter works for novels in an online literature course.In the brief Spring preview post with which I concluded December’s Fall semester recaps, I wrote about one of the challenges I’ve faced in planning my first online literature survey, the section of American Literature II I’m teaching online this Spring: how to present historical information and contexts in a manner that will allow students to engage with, digest, and make use of those materials. That remains a work in progress as of this writing, but I’m generally planning to create brief informational sheets, distribute them at the start of each course unit/time period, and ask students to engage with them in quick and focused ways; I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes in my May semester recaps series (ah, the dream of May in January in Massachusetts). Here I wanted to engage with another challenge that this online survey has presented, especially compared with my first online literature course on The Short Story: the presence of novels on my existing Am Lit II syllabus.Those seven novels—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Marrow of Tradition, Quicksand & Passing, The Great Gatsby, Ceremony, and The Namesake—form the core of my American Lit II syllabus, not only because of their own complexity and importance (although alert blog readers might note that they include some of my very favorite books and authors) but also as pairings that help guide us through our class units/time periods: Twain and Chesnutt in the late 19thcentury, Larsen and Fitzgerald in the early 20th century, and Silko and Lahiri in the late 20th/early 21st century. Yet from a pretty early moment in thinking about this online version of the course, I knew that it I didn’t want to ask students to read novels or longer works, and decided to substitute multiple shorter ones in place of those books (to which we dedicate two weeks each in my standard syllabus). That includes short works by these authors themselves, sometimes excerpted from the novels (we’re reading the opening few chapters of Huck Finn, for example) and sometimes distinct from them (we’re reading Charles Chesnutt’s 1898 short story “The Wife of His Youth” in place of Marrow).I’m certainly not wedded to the need for long works in a literature survey—we only read shorter works in my American Literature I class, and likewise will only be reading shorter ones in my 19th Century African American Literature survey this semester. So part of the challenge here is simply about adjusting my perspective and expectations for this particular course, in every prior version of which I have used longer works in that anchoring role. But at the same time, I used them in that role because I believed that otherwise the incredible breadth and range of American literature from 1865 to 2018 could be simply overwhelming, not only on its own terms but also as a way to think about American culture and history across that century and a half (which is to my mind an important goal for a literature survey). So without them, and multi-day conversations about them, to help in that structuring way, I will have to figure out how to use the aforementioned information sheets, as well as unit-opening emails to the students, to help provide some frames that can help guide us through our units and the many authors and texts that now populate them. You know I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!Last preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Spring previews of your own to share?

January 24, 2018: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature I

[As another semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to hear what your spring looks like and holds!][Fanny Fern is a perennial favorite on my American Lit I syllabus, so I wanted to share this prior semester recap post on some of the reasons why students, and I, love so much.]On a moment that delightfully reinforced one of my longest-held scholarly beliefs.I’ve loved Fanny Fern since the first time I encountered her writing, in a few newspaper columns that were part of my (American) History and Literature Sophomore Tutorial. I loved her even more when I got to study her at length in a graduate school class with Carolyn Karcher, including reading all of Fern’s autobiographical, socially satirical novel Ruth Hall (1854) alongside many more of those columns. Since then, I’ve made a couple selected Fern columns a consistent part of my American Literature I syllabus, reading her alongside Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson in a week dedicated to expanding our images and narratives of the American Renaissance era to include different women’s voices and texts. Those two columns have always gone over well with students, but they’re very short (probably 2 pages total) and far more readable than Fuller or Dickinson, so I couldn’t use that response as definite confirmation that my Fern-love was widely shared.Well, consider my love shared. Fern’s Ruth Hall and a collection of many of her columns comprised one of our six main/long readings in my The Romantic Era in America senior seminar in the Spring 2015 semester, alongside Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Stoddard’s The Morgesons. Each of those other five authors and texts had their adherents in the class, and if I were to teach it again (this was my first time), I would probably keep all of them on the syllabus. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the Fern unit was the clear winner—the students took immediately and consistently to her wit and humor, her hyperbole and sarcasm, her creation of outrageous personas and subjects; and at the same time they recognized the serious issues underlying those stylistic elements (from domestic violence and abuse to poverty and prostitution, among many others), and appreciated Fern’s ability to balance those aspects of her texts and engage with her audiences on many levels simultaneously and successfully.To paraphrase the great Jack Nicholson line from the film As Good As It Gets, this collective response certainly made me feel good … about me. But it also and more importantly confirmed the significance of what I would call one of my most central lifelong scholarly goals: to add into our collective memories and conversations the figures, texts, stories and histories that have too often been forgotten or excluded instead. Fern is a great example, one hugely interesting in her own right but also connected to many other social, cultural, and historical issues from the period. And the truth, as my students’ responses amply demonstrated, is that better remembering such figures and voices isn’t the slightest bit like taking our medicine, forcing ourselves to do something unpleasant but necessary. Instead, it very frequently helps us connect with fun, engaging, inspiring works and lives, while at the same time expanding our collective perspectives in vital ways. Like Fern’s balance of humor and activism, that’s a very nice combination indeed.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Spring previews of your own to share?

January 23, 2018: Spring Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone

[As another semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to hear what your spring looks like and holds!]On two distinct but complementary reasons to teach more drama in lit courses.The first literature course I ever got to teach was an Introduction to Literature, in my fourth semester of teaching as a grad student at Temple University, and I naturally included a unit on drama, featuring both Hamlet and Death of a Salesman . My second literature course was Six American Authors, an American lit survey I was fortunate enough to teach while adjuncting at UMass Boston, and I once again featured a dramatic work, this time Langston Hughes’s Mulatto. Yet in my thirteen years at Fitchburg State, I’ve consistently struggled to include dramatic works in my literature courses, outside of one section of our American Drama course; it’s only been in Approaches to English Studies (our sophomore-level Gateway course) and English Studies Capstone (our culminating senior-level course) that I’ve found room on the syllabus for drama.For my most recent Capstone section (in Spring 2016) I replaced Death of a Salesman (which I had taught in every prior Capstone of mine) with a much more contemporary play, Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013), a recommendation from my colleague and friend Joe Moser. It’s a wonderful play, funny and relevant and ultimately deeply moving, and we had a lot of fun discussing and performing it in our final unit of the semester. And as we did so, I realized two reasons why I want to find room for drama in my American lit courses as well. For one thing, you can’t read or teach drama without including those aforementioned performances, in order to help analyze acting, staging, audience, and all the related issues so central to dramatic works. And while I feature student voices and presentations in a variety of ways in every literature course, there’s quite simply nothing like having a group of students standing and moving and interacting in performance, and having all of us in the class both help direct and respond to those performative moments.Baker’s wonderful play also reminds us—even when we’re just reading and discussing it more calmly at our desks—of the distinctive qualities of human voice and identity that dramatic works can capture far differently from other literary genres. Dialogue is of course an important part of fiction (and sometimes poetry) as well; but as Baker’s use of pauses and fragments, interruptions and arguments, monologues and silences, and many other elements illustrates, drama can use dialogue (complemented by stage directions, and some of Baker’s are among my favorite such directions ever) with a depth and compelling potency all its own. If one of the main reasons we read and teach literature is to help engage with the human condition in all its complexity and universal significance—and I’d put that close to the top of the list why we do so—then dramatic texts add to that work in ways that, quite simply, would otherwise be minimized if not entirely absent from our classrooms. Teaching The Flick reminded me of that fact, and I look forward to the tough but important work of making room for more dramatic works in my other literature courses.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Spring previews of your own to share?

January 22, 2018: Spring Semester Previews: 19C African American Lit

[As another semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to hear what your spring looks like and holds!]On the contextual and the contemporary importance of a striking speech.When I learned I would have the chance to teach 19th Century African American Literature (the first of our two-course Af Am survey sequence, and a class cross-listed between our English Studies and African American Studies programs) for the first time this spring, I knew I would want to include a number of texts and voices on the syllabus that I have never before taught. Of course folks like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and Charles Chesnutt and Ida B. Wells, favorites whom I’ve taught many times before, would occupy prominent places. But for my own experience and benefit, and even more for the goal of exposing the students to the widest range of texts and figures possible, I wanted to balance such existing favs with ones with which I’m far less familiar. Thanks to the great first volume of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature , I had no shortage of such authors and works to choose from, and included at least one text per week that I’ve never taught before. Today I wanted to focus on one such work, Henry Highland Garnet’s stirring and controversial 1843 speech “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America.” Garnet (1815-1882), a former slave (he escaped from slavery in Maryland with his entire family when he was about 10 years old, moving to New York City) turned Presbyterian minister and Abolitionist activist, delivered his “Address” at the 1843 National Negro Convention in Buffalo. An aggressive and impassioned call for noncompliance and violent resistance—the final paragraph opens, “Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE!”—Garnet’s oration, which came to be known as the “Call for Rebellion” speech, drew forth condemnations from Douglass and other abolitionist leaders, although it also fell just one vote short of approval as an official resolution of the convention. And that duality—the speech’s controversy yet also its popularity—offers a vital illustration of the spectrum of perspectives, voices, arguments, and goals within the nascent Abolitionist movement, much less the broader social and cultural debates over and narratives of slavery and race in America. I can’t imagine a better course in which to engage with that breadth and depth of voices and ideas than a survey of 19th century African American literature, and I hope Garnet (among others, like David Walker) will help us engage with those themes and threads fully and successfully.I plan for the course to focus on those historical topics and frames pretty consistently, but there’s no way that this course—like any in the age of Teaching under Trump, but also in specific and particularly salient ways—won’t engage with 21st century American issues and conversations as well. I haven’t quite figured out the details of this yet (I’m writing this post a couple weeks before the semester starts), but for example I want to have a #BlackLivesMatterthread throughout the semester, to think about what our different authors and texts have to add to that concept and conversation. In the case of Garnet’s speech, even his titular address to a slave audience—as well as the speech’s opening clause, calling that audience his “Brethren and Fellow Citizens”—reflects a humanizing and individualizing perspective on each and every African American slave that wasn’t necessarily central to every Abolitionist argument (at least some of which focused on slavery as a system, on broader moral or economic questions, and so on). One of many interesting contemporary echoes that I look forward to drawing out of this speech and all of the course’s complex and crucial texts.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Spring previews of your own to share?

January 19, 2018: MLK Day Figures: James Weldon Johnson

[To celebrate one of my favorite American holidays, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of inspiring African American leaders, starting with my annual post on more fully remembering King himself. And leading up to a special Guest Post from one of my favorite current scholars and writers!]On the professor, preacher, poet, activist, and novelist who embodies the concept of a Renaissance person.
It strikes me, in thinking back on the Americans on whom I’ve most consistently focused in this space—especially the nominees for the Hall of Inspiration, but certainly many of the other authors and historical figures as well—that many if not most of them would fit the definition of a Renaissance man or woman. While I’m sure that says something about my own ideals and emphases (and perhaps my goals for my own career and life, if I’m being fully honest here), I think it also represents a response to some of our contemporary and national tendencies toward specialization and categorization, our attempts to pin everybody’s identity down and figure out what most defines each of us. Certainly the academy has witnessed that trend over the last couple decades (although we might be moving away from it in gradual but real ways right now), but I think many other parallel trends can be found across our cultural narratives—such as the political need to categorize people as diverse as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Micheal Moore, Nancy Pelosi, and Noam Chomsky as all simply “liberals.” For all sorts of reasons, then, Renaissance men and women make particularly good tools with which to complicate such oversimplifying scholarly, cultural, and national narratives.
Yet I would hasten to add, both in general and when it comes to the folks on whom I’ve focused here, that there has to be depth as well as breadth—that for a Renaissance man or woman genuinely to inspire, to exemplify the best of our national histories and identities, he or she must have accomplished some meaningful successes in those many arenas, must offer quality as well as quantity. And the subject of my post today, James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), illustrates that balance perfectly. Johnson’s list of professional and personal roles reads like a LinkedIn template for the late 19th and early 20th centuries: he served as a teacher and principal at one of Jacksonville’s largest public schools; worked in the political and diplomatic realms as a consul (to a couple of Latin American nations) and campaign consultant (for Teddy Roosevelt); edited multiple newspapers, including the very influential African American weekly the New York Age ; received one of the first law degrees granted to an African American; published pioneering works of anthropology and sociology, as well as multiple volumes of poetry, collections of sermons and spirituals (he also wrote the music to the popular song “Dem Bones”and various Broadway shows), and a historical examination of Haiti; served for a decade as the first African American president of the NAACP; and left that role in order to become the first Spence Chair of Creative Literature at Nashville’s Fisk University (a position created specifically for him). He excelled at each of those roles, enriching the particular professions and conversations and worlds and leaving them far different and stronger than had he not ventured into them.
Johnson’s most complex and controversial publication only further proves his ability to produce significant, quality work in each of his chosen roles. That work is his one novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a book that he published anonymously to extremely vocal and divided reception, and for the authorship of which he took credit fifteen years later. Autobiographywas controversial for a couple of related and telling reasons: it offered a realistic and compelling account of its unnamed protagonist’s ongoing experience of “passing” for white, nearly two decades before Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel of that complex identity and issue; and it was unclear to its first audiences whether it was indeed an authentic autobiography or a novel. If the novel gained initial prominence because of those uncertainties and controversies, it remains a vital American text precisely because of what the uncertainties signal: the novel’s extremely complex, ambiguous, and compelling presentation of questions of fact and fiction, racial and national identity, authorship and narration and audience. As a literary critic, I’m tempted to wish that Johnson had written many more novels, so strong and unique is this one; but as an AmericanStudier, I can’t complain about (and instead, again, have the utmost admiration for) all of the other roles and work that occupied Johnson’s time.Special Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Figures or histories you’d highlight?