Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 246
October 24, 2017
October 24, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: Weird Sciences
[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]On two sides to science in 80s popular culture, and how Stranger Things engages with both.Among the many ways it significantly influenced film and pop culture in and after the 1980s, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) helped establish a particular, highly critical image of scientists and science in such cultural texts. Although in a later version of the film Spielberg replaced his scientists’ guns with walkie-talkies, in the original these supposed men of knowledge tellingly wielded such weapons, one of many ways that their pursuit of the film’s titular alien and of those kids who help him is treated as highly hostile and threatening. Such intimidating and dangerous scientists also feature heavily in other 80s films across a variety of genres, from comedies such as Ghostbusters (1984; granted, the heroes are also rogue scientists, but the villain works for the EPA!) and Real Genius (1985) to teen dramas such as War Games (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986). Despite many differences, all these stories share a sense that scientists are willing and able to threaten and kill in service of (if not indeed as) their goals.Yet in many of those same films, the protagonists and heroes could also be defined as scientists—not necessarily professional and certainly not official ones, indeed often young people who have not entered professional or official worlds at all, but nonetheless still characters who view science and knowledge as sources of power and utilize them in service of their goals and victories. Even more exemplary of that narrative is the film which gives my post its title, Weird Science (1985); while that film’s two uber-nerdy protagonists (played by the decade’s go-to actors for such characters, Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) certainly do not expect all of the effects of their scientific experiments, and encounter threats both silly and serious as a result, the ultimate message nonetheless validates, as do most of the films I’ve mentioned thus far, such scientific pursuits and the kind of nerdy dedication that they require. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the key difference between the heroes and villains in many of these films comes down to the contrast between an idealized vision of science as serving all humankind and one that serves instead as a source of division and violence (whether incidental or intended).As will be addressed in every subsequent post this week, and most especially in both my Friday post and the weekend Guest Post, Stranger Things does its cultural work in direct but complex engagement to a variety of 1980s tropes and trends. That’s most definitely the case when it comes to these competing yet complementary 80s cultural visions of science: the show features a menacing human villain in scientist Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) and his plethora of well-armed and willing-to-kill henchmen and –women; yet its youthful protagonists are defined centrally not only by nerdy interests like yesterday’s topic Dungeons & Dragons, but also specifically by their love of all things science, a passion encouraged by one of the show’s most heroic characters, middle school science teacher Mr. Clarke. Indeed, one of the show’s most crucial sequences (SEMI-SPOILER ALERT) hinges on the boys constructing a sensory deprivation tank under Mr. Clarke’s guidance, an apparatus that directly parallels one used by Brenner and his evil scientists yet serves what we might call precisely the opposite purpose. Just one of many scenes and ways through which Stranger Things extends, echoes, and adds to such 1980s images and narratives.Next StrangerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?
Published on October 24, 2017 03:00
October 23, 2017
October 23, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: Dungeons & Dragons
[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]On the stigmas and the benefits of D&D and other role-playing games.As I’ll write a good bit more about in later posts this week, Stranger Things is chock full of references to 1980s culture, so much so that there is already a great deal of work dedicated to finding every such reference. Many of them, as I’ll argue in Friday’s post, are more about engaging with the audience’s expectations and emotions, and don’t necessarily contribute in any direct way to the show’s plot or themes. But the first episode’s opening scene (after a brief prologue as you can see) offers an ‘80s reference that is both more straightforward and far more crucial than most of those that follow it. The four middle school boys on whom much of Stranger Things will focus are taking part in what seems to their chief leisure time activity: a role-playing campaign in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. The monster who concludes their campaign offers one overt moment of foreshadowing for the show that this scene introduces. But I would argue that Dungeons & Dragons also helps us see two other sides to these young protagonists: their status as outcasts; and their imaginative power.On the first note, I’m ashamed to admit that I (a former role-player myself, although I spent more time with Middle-earth Role Playing [MERP] than D&D) hesitated a bit in deciding to make role-playing one of this week’s focal points. The reason for my reluctance is the enduring social stigma that comes with the subject, and really with any reference to Dungeons & Dragons. You’d think that the widespread popularity of video games (including many, such as Skyrim and World of Warcraft, that owe quite a bit to D&D and its ilk), of fan conventions like Comic-Con, of fantasy literature, films, and television shows, and the like would have changed these narratives, but I don’t believe that it necessarily has: to my mind, and in my experience, cultural references to D&D almost always entail the same tired clichés of socially awkward nerds in their parents’ basements (which is, not coincidentally, where the Stranger Things kids are playing their campaign), creating fantasy worlds to escape the tragicomic circumstances of their realities. Moreover, the broader and even more damaging social narratives and fears, of D&D turning teenagers into suicidial or even homicidal outcasts, have likewise remained in play, at times virtually unchanged from the first such stories when D&D was new. There are a variety of ways to push back on those stigmas and argue instead for social, communal, and individual benefits to role-playing games (including some exemplified by the pieces at those last two hyperlinks); here, I’ll just highlight two that are also illustrated nicely by Stranger Things (in specific ways that I won’t spoil if you haven’t had a chance to check out the show yet). For one thing, role-playing games require consistent leaps of imagination in a way that differentiates them from many other toys or games—on the part of the game-master, the person in charge of creating the world and scenarios and guiding the other players into and (to a degree) through it; but also from all those players, who have to both respond to what’s unfolding in front of them and yet create their own stories and futures. And for another, the specific experience of being the game-master—of creating that world and its different narratives, of conveying it to the players, and yet then of being required to adjust and shift it as the game plays out, and even to scrap any or all of it in favor of where the players are going and of producing the most fun and meaningful experience as a result—offers vital preparation for a number of adult roles and responsibilities, including both parenting and teaching.Next StrangerStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?
Published on October 23, 2017 03:00
October 21, 2017
October 21-22, 2017: Children’s Histories: The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball
[This weekend I’ll be at a book signing for an excellent new young adult historical novel, Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball . So this week I’ve AmericanStudied the histories within and behind a handful of children’s books and authors, leading up to this special post on Yang’s book.]On what a young adult novel can add to our collective memories.As someone who believes that the story of the Chinese Educational Mission is one of the American histories most in need of adding to our collective memories—for its own complex and inspiring sake, and for the many histories to which it connects—I’ve thought a great deal about where and how we might turn to help create such an addition. There are historical texts we could all peruse, such as Yung Wing’s autobiography My Life in China and America (1909). There are websites we could all visit, such as CEM Connections, an evolving compilation (by their descendents) of biographies of the 120 Educational Mission students. There’s the idea of constructing a historic site for the Chinese Educational Mission in Hartford (where its headquarters were located), a project that is purely hypothetical at the moment but to which I remain broadly committed nonetheless and which could become a space for visitors to learn more about the CEM. And of course there are various works of scholarlyand narrative history on or related to the CEM, each of which has something to add to how we remember and understand this community, moment, and set of American histories and stories.Until I learned of Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball (2017), however, I’ll confess that I had not thought nearly enough about what children’s or young adult literature have to offer (this despite all the good reminders that this week’s blog subjects, among many others, have provided me over the years). Yang’s young adult novel focuses on a fictional protagonist, Woo Ka-Leong (also known as Leon), who, along with his older brother, becomes one of the 120 young men who travel from China to the United States to take part in the Chinese Educational Mission. Just as I have done in my own writing about the CEM students, Yang uses their connection to baseball as a lens through which to write about a number of aspects of this community: of course their complex and evolving relationship to and combination of aspects of both American and Chinese culture, but also their relationship to each other (Leon and his brother diverge on the idea of the sport in particular), to European American peers and adversaries, and to a number of other historical and symbolic issues that I won’t spoil here. Just as my teacher and mentor Proal Heartwell does in his book A Game of Catch (2014), Yang makes baseball a perfect lens through which to frame her ethnic historical young adult novel.That’s one lesson of Yang’s book, I’d say—the reminder (one critics of Colin Kaepernick and his peers would do well to remember) that sports, far from being separate from our social and political issues, always echo and extend those other cultural and historical elements. Helping young adults think about that side to sports is a great goal for any YA novel, I’d say. Another vital goal is to highlight the similarities and differences that audience members might find with historical and cultural figures and communities. Of course a Chinese American reader might find very different such comparisons to Leon than a European American one, and my mixed-race sons might find there own ways in—but in each and every case, there would be shared aspects and divergent ones, echoes of our own lives and identities and moments that feel quite distinct or unfamiliar. The more all readers—and perhaps especially young adult readers—can find both those familiar and those unfamiliar sides to characters and stories, the more they can both recognize our shared humanity and empathize with the very different ways folks have experienced human history. Yang’s book, like the other great texts I’ve highlighted this week, help YA readers and all of us do both of those important things.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other children’s histories or stories you’d highlight?
Published on October 21, 2017 03:00
October 20, 2017
October 20, 2017: Children’s Histories: The Boneshaker
[This coming weekend I’ll be at a book signingfor an excellent new young adult historical novel, Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the histories within and behind a handful of children’s books and authors, leading up to a special post on Yang’s book.]On more overt and more subtle lessons from a tale of historical horror.More than five years ago (ah, how time flies when you’re AmericanStudying!) I wrote a post about young adult novelist John Bellairs and his supernatural horror novel The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull (1984). In the years since I’ve had the chance to share Bellairs’ books with my sons, and we’ve experienced together the chills and discomfort (in a good sense) about which I wrote in that post. I don’t know many other children’s authors like Bellairs, but earlier this year we discovered a book that’s very much in his tradition: Kate Milford’swonderful The Boneshaker (2010). Moreover, while Bellairs’ books do tend to be set in a vaguely past moment (to feel slightly antiquated on purpose, that is), Milford’s novel is much more overtly historical: it’s set in 1913 Missouri (in the fictional crossroads town of Arcane), and is as interested in conjuring up that historical period and place as in its teenage protagonist Natalie Minks and the supernatural horrors she and her family and friends face. As a result, The Boneshakercommunicates a number of complex and compelling historical lessons along with more than its fair share of chills.Many of the novel’s most overt historical lessons concern the constrasting yet interconnected presences of traditional and modernizing influences in that 1913 moment. Without spoiling any specifics, I can safely say that the novel’s villains are a group of traveling snake-oil salesmen, huckers and con artists led by the sinister Jake Limberleg. They gain access to the town in part because the more modern Doc Fitzwater departs in the opening chapter, driving his fancy new car to a neighboring town that has been struck by a flu epidemic. In between those two ends of the spectrum are Natalie and her family: her father is a mechanic obsessed with new technologies (an obsession and set of skills he has passed on to Natalie), while her mother is a kind of town mystic who knows its past and stories (knowledge and talents she has likewise passed on to Natalie). To combat Jake and his crew, Natalie needs both sides of her heritage and identity, offering a compelling case for the roles of both past and future. But even beyond the book’s plot, these distinct influences position 13 year old Natalie as a particularly interesting representive of a moment and nation on the cusp of the 20th century but still very much linked to and defined by its 19th century past. That’s a complicated but crucial historical lesson, and one Milford’s book conveys on these multiple levels of setting, plot, and characterization.The novel features a number of other interesting characters, but for both me and my sons by far the most compelling was old Tom Guyot. A supremely talented African American guitarist whose story features a prominent crossroads encounter with the Devil, Tom clearly echoes Robert Johnson, the real yet semi-mythic blues guitarist who was born in neighboring Mississippi just two years before The Boneshakeris set. Yet Tom differs from Johnson in a couple key ways: he was born into slavery, and brings that historical legacy into the novel; and he chose not to make a deal with the Devil during their crossroads encounter, a choice that echoes into the novel’s present and plot in many ways. Moreover, Tom becomes a crucial mentor and friend for Natalie, a role that partly echoes that of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(another novel set in Missouri) but with none of that novel’s controversial and (to this AmericanStudier) too casual racism. In an understated but potent way, then, Tom allows Milford to revise longstanding mythic images of African Americans (such as Johnson and Jim), to make slavery and its legacies part of her book’s setting and historical moment, and to feature a powerful and heroic African American character (something still too rare in much children’s and young adult literature). Just one more vital historical (and contemporary) lesson in a book the boys and I highly recommend.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other children’s histories or stories you’d highlight?
Published on October 20, 2017 03:00
October 19, 2017
October 19, 2017: Children’s Histories: Little House on the Prairie
[This coming weekend I’ll be at a book signingfor an excellent new young adult historical novel, Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the histories within and behind a handful of children’s books and authors, leading up to a special post on Yang’s book.]On a key difference between the TV show and the books, and why it matters.I watched a good bit of the TV adaptation of Little House on the Prairie (1974-1982, but I mostly watched it in subsequent reruns on TBS) growing up, but only one episode stands out in my memory: “Gambini the Great,” an episode early in the show’s 8th season (the penultimate season, and the final one featuring Michael Landon before the show changed its title to Little House: A New Beginning for the 9thand final season) in which the Wilder family’s adopted son Albert (Matthew Laborteaux) becomes enamored of the titular aging circus escape artist/daredevil. Albert’s father Charles Wilder (Landon) tries in vain to convince Albert that the openly and proudly non-religious Gambini (Jack Kruschen) is not someone to idolize or emulate, and is proven tragically yet righteously accurate when Gambini dies in a stunt gone wrong. As I remember it, the show and Charles (pretty much always the show’s voice of unquestioned authority) present this tragedy as, if not explicitly deserved due to Gambini’s lack of religious faith, at the very least a clear moral and spiritual lesson for Albert, and one that he takes to heart as he returns fully to the fold of the family’s religious beliefs.Albert was a character not present in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of books (in which Little House on the Prairie was the third of eight published novels, with a ninth published posthumously), and thus represents one of many elements that were added, tweaked, or significantly changed in adapting the books into the show. But I would go further, and argue that the overt and pedantic religious themes and lessons exemplified by an episode like “Gambini the Great” were also far more central to the TV adaptation than the novels. That’s not to suggest that religion and spirituality weren’t elements of the novels and their portrayal of the Wilder family and its world, but I believe they were just that: elements, details of the family’s identity and community and experiences that could be paralleled by many other such elements and themes. Perhaps it’s the nature of episodic television (particular in its pre-serialized era) to need more of a moral, a sense of what an audience can and should take away from the hour-long, at least somewhat self-contained story they have just watched. Likely the show’s producers also learned quickly just how compelling and charismatic a voice they had in Michael Landon’s, and wanted to use him to convey such overt morals and messages. But in any case, I believe (and as always, correct me if you disagree!) that the show tended toward such overtly pedantic (and often, although certainly not exclusively, religious) moral lessons far more than did the novels.Although the word “pedantic” does tend to have negative connotations, I mean it more literally, in terms of trying to teach the audience a particular lesson; that is, I’m not trying to argue through using that word that the novels were necessarily better or more successful as works of art than the show because of this difference. At the same time, however, I do believe that the difference produces a significant effect, one not so much aesthetic as thematic, related in particular to how each text portrays history. To me, the novels seek to chronicle the pioneer/frontier experience for their focal family and community, describing a wide range of issues and concerns that were specific to that communal experience (if, of course, very different from the concurrent experiences of other Western communities, such as Native Americans, with whom Wilder engages to a degree but certainly far less, and at times more problematically, than would be ideal for a more accurate portrait of the American West). Whereas the TV show consistently seeks to make use of its historical setting to convey broader and more universal messages (about religion and morality, but also about family, relationships, communal obligations, and more). Which is to say, I would argue that, to use the terms I deployed in this post, while Wilder’s novels certainly qualify as historical fiction (as well as autobiographical fiction), the show seems more to be period fiction, with somewhat less to teach its young audiences about the history itself.Next children’s history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other children’s histories or stories you’d highlight?
Published on October 19, 2017 03:00
October 18, 2017
October 18, 2017: Children’s Histories: Dr. Seuss and Propaganda
[This coming weekend I’ll be at a book signingfor an excellent new young adult historical novel, Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the histories within and behind a handful of children’s books and authors, leading up a special post on Yang’s book.]On the iconic author’s surprising starting points.As I wrote in one of my earliest posts, it’s possible to read The Cat in the Hat (1957) as particularly radical in its portrayals of family and gender roles (especially in relationship to dominant 1950s images and narratives). But even if you don’t subscribe to that reading of Cat, it’d be very difficult to argue that its author, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), didn’t have a substantial and generally very radical impact on the world of children’s books and animation—not just in his voice and style, his silliness and playfulness, his breaking of virtually every formal and generic rule, but also in his subtle but frequent inclusion of progressive themes and morals, including prominently the anti-Cold War (and anti-war period) ethics of The Butter Battle Book , among many other such messages.Which makes it that much harder to grapple with the fact that Geisel got his start crafting animated propaganda films for the military during and after World War II. But he did—first making army training films (featuring the cautionary tales of one Private Snafu) as part of Frank Capra’s Signal Corps (the organization that produced the most prominent U.S. WWII propaganda, the epic eight-part Why We Fight series), then branching out into even more overt anti-Axis propaganda works. Geisel even continued to make such films in the aftermath of the war, creating works to be distributed to soldiers in occupied post-war Germany. To call these films propaganda isn’t to critique them, necessarily—the term has come to be used pejoratively much of the time, but at its core it’s simply descriptive, a categorization of works that are overtly designed to further political purposes. Geisel’s World War II works were precisely that, and achieved their purposes clearly and convincingly.As the Capra reference indicates, Geisel was far from alone as an artist who enlisted in the war effort—in fact, he was more the norm than the exception. Moreover, it’s even possible to link his World War II works directly to (for example) his later anti-Cold War messages, since in both cases he could be seen as opposing the proliferation of violence and war (in the first case by the Axis powers, in the second by the Cold War superpowers). But for me, the problem is more one of style—whatever else we say about propaganda films, they are by design and necessity both straightforward and conservative, neither of which are terms that we would likely apply to most of Seuss’s subsequent children’s books and works. Of course we can simply say that Seuss evolved and changed, as does any artist (especially a talented one) over the length of a long career. But we also have to consider that each stage of Seuss’s career tells us something about the man and his work, and can’t dismiss or minimize the first stage just because it doesn’t line up with how we (or at least I) like to think of him.Next children’s history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other children’s histories or stories you’d highlight?
Published on October 18, 2017 03:00
October 17, 2017
October 17, 2017: Children’s Histories: Curious George
[This coming weekend I’ll be at a book signingfor an excellent new young adult historical novel, Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the histories within and behind a handful of children’s books and authors, leading up to a special post on Yang’s book.]Two very different ways to look at a controversial children’s classic.There were few moments more stunning in my first years as a Dad than the first time I read the original Curious George (1941), H.A. Rey’s classic children’s book, to my boys. Although I had read the book with my own parents many decades ago, I remembered George in the same way that I imagine most folks do—through the entirely unobjectionable PBS show, the many sequels and spin-off books, the merchandising, the great book and toy store in Harvard Square, and so on. So as I read through Rey’s first book, which begins with a happy-go-lucky George being brutally monkey-napped away from his jungle home by the Man with the Yellow Hat, includes George being taken to prison for innocently mis-dialing the fire department, and ends with the Man dropping him at the zoo (where of course he’ll be happier than he was in that jungle home), I had to stop reading multiple times to keep from swearing aloud (which never goes over well during story time).But since I’m an American Studier, and since the boys had enjoyed it and I knew I’d be reading it plenty more times, I immediately began thinking about how I could analyze Rey’s book. The obvious but not at all insignificant connection is to narratives of savagery and civilization, and more exactly (given George’s African home and, y’know, his color) to arguments that Africans were better off in places like America and Europe, even if they had been brought there against their will. Such arguments were still commonplace in Rey’s era—and indeed are still present in our own—and it’s difficult read the original Curious George and not see them echoed in George’s arc, and specifically the contrast between his jungle starting point and his zoo final destination. Rey complicates that arc in one and only one phrase, and a partial one at that: he notes that George is a bit sad as he is carried away from his jungle home, but highlights in the same sentence that he is likewise curious about what’s next. And that’s the last time, as far as we’re told anyway, that the monkey ever thinks about the place where he had grown up and was pictured happily swinging as the book opened.Again, there’s no way around that reading, and I’m not going to argue that Rey’s book is secretly subversive or anything (although I did my part, calling the Man George’s “frenemy” instead of his “friend” every time I read it to the boys). But neither is that narrative the only part of George’s story, nor, I would argue, the one that carried into the remainder of the series and the character’s overarching identity. In those terms I would emphasize instead two more inspiring qualities: George’s titular curiosity, his ability to approach each aspect of his evolving experiences with wonder and a desire to learn all he can (a characteristic which reminds me of another slave turned inspiring figure, Olaudah Equiano); and, more complicatedly but still impressively, his friendship with the Man. Granted, the Man initaited that relationship by kidnapping George in a sack. But in their broader lives together, the two consistently look out for each other, transcending all the differences in their identities and perspectives to become model cross-cultural friends. It’s fair to say that these qualities can positively impact the kids who encounter them—and can help the parents who read Rey’s book stay sane while they do so!Next children’s history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other children’s histories or stories you’d highlight?
Published on October 17, 2017 03:00
October 16, 2017
October 16, 2017: Children’s Histories: Mike Mulligan and His America
[This coming weekend I’ll be at a book signingfor an excellent new young adult historical novel, Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the histories within and behind a handful of children’s books and authors, leading up to a special post on Yang’s book.]How an American Studies approach can help us dig into the many layers of one of our most enduring children’s books.When you have two young AmericanStudiers like I do, you spend a lot of time reading children’s books. (Much less time now that they can and do read to themselves a great deal, and even have started reading to each other; but this post is purposefully and very relevantly nostalgic for my life of a few years ago!) Often the same books over and over again, in fact. While there are few things I would rather do, it’s nonetheless fair to say that an adult AmericanStudier’s mind occasionally wanders during the 234th reading of a particular book; hence my thoughts on The Cat in the Hat and single motherhood in this post, for example. One of the boys’ young childhood favorites, for its construction-vehicle-focus, for its beautiful illustrations, and for its pitch-perfect narrative voice and storytelling, was Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939). And luckily for the American Studier who got to read Mikeat least once a week for a good couple years, the book also reveals, reflects, and carries forward a number of complex and significant American narratives and histories.Burton’s book was written and published during the Great Depression, and it certainly engages with that central historical context in interesting if somewhat conflicted ways. The nation-building work on public/infrastructure projects that Mike and Mary Ann do in the opening pages echoes the Works Progress Administration’s and other New Deal-era efforts, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam, and makes a case for the importance of labor and work more broadly; yet in Burton’s book those projects are apparently quickly forgotten, and Mike and Mary Ann find themselves unemployed, their own depression (in every sense, as they cry together over a landfill of discarded steam shovels) the text’s real starting point. Similarly, when they journey to the small town of Poppersville to bid on its city hall project, they encounter some of the worst as well as the best of communal relationships during an economic downturn—the penny-pinching, dog-eat-dog mentality of councilman Henry B. Swap is what gets Mike and Mary Ann the job in the first place and motivates at least some of the intense interest in their efforts, even if the community members do seem eventually to bond together in support of those (successful) efforts.Those conflicted themes are not only relevant to the Depression, however—they also reflect a couple of distinct but interconnected dualities out of which much of American populism, at least since the late 19th century Populist movement and party, has arisen. For one, American populism has vacillated significantly between a nostalgic embrace of idealized, seemingly lost historical communities and identities and a progressive push for future change; Burton’s book, with both the villain’s role played by new technologies and Mike and Mary Ann’s Popperville endpoint, seems to side with nostalgia and the past, although I might argue that Mike and Mary Ann have helped moved Popperville a bit more fully into the future in the process. Even if they have, though, they have done so in an explicitly rural, or at least small-town, setting, a world which has likewise been in complicated and often conflicted relationship with the urban throughout the history of America populism. But Mike and Mary Ann’s early identities and works certainly resonate with the urban contexts of the labor movement, and perhaps their arc in the book suggests that the worlds of urban and rural America could no longer afford, in the depression or in the 20th century more broadly, to remain separate in perspective or reality.Next children’s history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other children’s histories or stories you’d highlight?
Published on October 16, 2017 03:00
October 14, 2017
October 14-15, 2017: Guest Post: Nancy Caronia on Italian Americans and Columbus Day
[I knew my friend—and prior Guest Poster—Nancy Caronia had been engaging with this week’s questions already, in and around the Italian American community in particular, so I asked her if she’d be willing to share some of those thoughts. What follows is her challenging and crucial Guest Post on that topic and related questions.]
Ben, you’ve asked a complicated question. Colleagues in Italian American and Italian Diaspora Studies have been working both privately and publicly to ask for the dismissal of Columbus Day and replace it with any number of options, including Italian Heritage Day, Indigenous Heritage Day, and even Ethnic Heritage Day. See this letter and feel free to add your name to this petition. What is interesting to me about the letter is whose signatures are missing. I don’t know the reasons for this absence and I cannot conjecture, but the complications arise around Columbus Day, for me, in that any of the days mentioned above asks us to dismiss one group for another—as though there is not enough room at the table for all of us. Each of us holds an important piece of the intertwining, collaborative and colonial fabric of the project known as the United States.
Many Italian Americans, whether they remember directly or heard the stories, have bought into an assimilation story that suggests they have overcome great strife and deserve to have a day dedicated to their heritage, forgetting or refusing to acknowledge that Columbus is not the symbol of that heritage. In many ways, the strife was not simply overcome with hard work and perseverance, but is a process of suppression that we call assimilation that demands an adherence to homogenization of white nativist traditions, which bury radicalism, union solidarity, or a generalized contentious relationship with white nativism. In other words, assimilation is about embracing the abusers. I heard the Italian American West Virginia writer Denise Giardina speak last night about West Virginia’s socialist roots and she made one statement that I think speaks to Italian American suppression: “There was never a war on coal. Coal has been warring with West Virginia. The coal industry has destroyed what it has built.” She went on to say that she thought West Virginians suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome where they identify with their abusers and that is how an organization like Friends of Coal proliferates in West Virginia. I would suggest that is also how Italian Americans continue to fight for a holiday that has nothing to do with them. (If you have not yet read any of Giardina’s work, might I suggest you begin with Storming Heaven or The Unquiet Earth?)
Indeed, many prominent Italian American politicians are today spouting rhetoric that can be associated with the most conservative and right wing parts of our government. The irony for me is that while they attempt to gain traction with someone like 45, they have been used and dismissed fairly quickly (think of Chris Christie, Rudolf Giuliani, and Anthony Scaramucci). Other Italian Americans simply suggest that what occurred during Columbus’s Voyage of Discovery was a long time ago and we should live in the here and now while pontificating about tradition and cultural history. This last fallacy is predicated upon the idea that somehow Italian Americans above any other ethnic group in the US deserve to have a federal holiday named for them. They forget this holiday was not for them, but a way to reinforce colonial culture in the US while tangentially acknowledging that Italian Americans were more than gangsters or miscreants. From the beginning, Columbus Day has been about separating Italian Americans from the concerns of indigenous populations and African American people even though the concerns of each of these groups is not singular or separate.
Here are a few articles that might be of use: Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra’s essay on recontextualization of not only Italian American history, but also the history of migration and colonization that happened in the Americas(if you haven’t yet picked up Ruberto and Sciorra’s co-edited two-volume set New Italian Migrations to the United States, Vol. 1: Politics and History since 1945 (2017) and Vol 2: Art and Culture since 1945 (2017), do it!), Elizabeth Mariani’s piece on Indigenous People’s Day, Kelly Castania’s piece on Italian Americans viewing themselves as allies to indigenous people, Bobby Dorigo’s piece on the false construct that Italian Americans have historically even viewed Columbus Day as their holiday, Jim McDermott’s piece on “Why Italian-Americans Deserve a Better Holiday,” Stefano Vaccara’s “Long Live Verdi” piece, and Robyn Pennacchia’s “I am an Italian-American and I Think Columbus Day is Garbage.” There are many more, and I hope my colleagues in Italian American Studies might add to this list.
Lastly, Riggio, the CEO of Barnes & Noble was the Grand Marshall for this year’s Columbus Day Parade. He chose to invite (for the first time mind you), Italian American writers to sit on a B&N-themed float. Internationally-celebrated authors like Gay Talese shared the float with deeply-respected writers like Maria Mazziotti Gillan (her ground-breaking multi-ethnic anthologies are true artistic and communal collaborations and her work at The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, where I first heard Jimmy Santiago Baca, Amiri Baraka, and Allen Ginzberg all read live, is a fundamental and important place for those who are marginalized as students and writers), and lesser-known, but talented writers like Olivia Cerrone (The Hunger Saint) and Annie Lanzillotto (L is for Lion). Lanzillotto hung a circle banner that read: Honor Indigenous, but I could not help but feel that Riggio and the Italian American committee who run the parade were using my writer friends and peers to justify the parade and the holiday. These writers were never asked to march before and to put them on a float with large cut-outs of book covers with canonical Italian male authors (Dante! What an Italian American!) is both problematic and insulting. Lastly, days before New York’s Columbus Day parade, Our Lady of Loreto Church in Brooklyn, NY was destroyed. This church, built by Italian immigrants in 1906, was a true marker of Italian immigration and determination, but it seems we dismiss actual history of immigration in favor of empty symbols that align with genocide, colonization, and the precursor of Manifest Destiny.
At a time when white supremacists are once again rearing the most heinous aspects of white nativism’s construction, it is more important than ever to challenge the discourse that dictates we have to accept what is offered and not expect anything more or to think we cannot change the course of an increasingly dangerous present. I want to be an ally to the indigenous. LGBTQ, immigrant, and all POC communities because the way I see it, my life is not mine own. For better or worse, it belongs to this project known as the United States and each of these individuals and communities help to make me, a child of first and second generation Sicilian and Irish immigrants, what I am and want to be—someone who grows in compassion, but stands in the righteousness of social justice for all. We must resist the easy road or the quick fix. We must engage with the hard dialogue and learn to keep silent and listen. I not only heard Denise Giardina speak this week, but also attended West Virginia University’s 25thAnniversary of the Peace Tree Celebration. Onondagan Chief Oren Lyons spoke, and like Giardina’s talk, I was inspired by his wisdom. Both Lyons and Giardina have dared to stand in their truth no matter the consequences to their careers or lives. Lyons talked about how lacrosse is a hard game and that during his career and the careers of the young men he watches play today how much loss is involved. He said, “They lose. They lose a lot. BUT, they are never defeated.” I want us to recognize that it is not only and always about winning, but about as Giardina said during her talk and Lyons alluded to, the spiritual journey. This journey brings us together in solidarity and allows us to fight injustice wherever we see it or experience it. We must be willing to see each other’s humanity and stand up for anyone who has their basic human rights withheld. Letting go of Columbus Day would be a step forward for Italian Americans that might mean we lose a holiday, but we would gain an expanding consciousness and community. #RESIST[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think, and what would you add?]
Published on October 14, 2017 03:00
October 13, 2017
October 13, 2017: Columbus Day Alternatives: Siobhan Senier on Dawnland Voices
[As I’ve detailed at length here and elsewhere, to my mind Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’m proposing Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and Non-Native Americans in our history (and which could of course co-exist with Indigenous Peoples Day celebrations). This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!][Re-posting this wonderful 2015 Guest Post, highlighting a recent and ongoing cross-cultural effort!]
[Siobhan Senier is Professor of English and Women’s Studies Program Coordinator at the University of New Hampshire. Her groundbreaking scholarship, teaching, and activism in American Studies, Native American Studies, and New England Studies have offered a model for this AmericanStudier for many years, and I’m very excited to share this Guest Post on one of her most important projects.]
Many thanks to Ben for inviting this guest post on Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England [BEN: That’s a website for the second iteration of this great anthology, Dawnland Voices 2.0.]. If your concerns here are to introduce “compelling writers and voices,” and to ponder the “differences these might make to our national identity and narratives,” then this new anthology definitely aspires to contribute.
It was more than ten years ago that I started compiling material for this book. Upon coming to teach in New England, I felt a responsibility to represent the indigenous writers of this place. But no one seemed to know who those writers are, aside from the two Heath anthology staples, Samson Occom and William Apess. I hated to see our teaching and scholarship perpetuating the vanishing-Indian mythology. We northeasterners do love our James Fenimore Cooper and apocryphal chiefs jumping off cliffs.
Almost immediately, I figured out that I wasn’t going to be able to publish a collection of regional indigenous writing on my own steam. I started inviting area indigenous writers and historians to my classes, and it became eminently clear that they knew their own literary histories, whether or not these had survived the much-vaunted “test of time.” Wayne Newell (Passamaquoddy) showed me bilingual books Xeroxed or even mimeographed for dissemination among tribal members. The Dove family (Narragansett) kept copies of the short-lived 1930s magazine The Narragansett Dawn, and the many other writings of its editor, Princess Red Wing. Lisa Brooks told me about nineteenth century Abenaki-language primers, long out of print but still cherished and circulated among Abenaki people. And hilariously, tribal elders were patently unimpressed by my archival “discoveries.” When I asked Joan Tavares Avant (Mashpee Wampanoag) if she knew of Wampanoag poets, she hesitated, until I triumphantly showed her Alfred DeGrasse, who had published in the Carlisle Arrow. “Oh, him,” she said, and proceeded to tell me about her great-aunt Mabel Avant, whose poems are still recited at tribal events today.
So I asked as many people as I could whether they would be willing to serve as editors for a new collection of this literature. Indigenous knowledge-keepers, after all, are in the best position to select materials that are meaningful in their communities, whatever their “literary” credentials. They knew where to find historic writings and from whom to solicit newer ones. They knew how to navigate culturally sensitive questions surrounding which texts to include, and which to leave out. They knew how to present this material to a diverse audience of tribal and non-tribal readers. We organized Dawnland Voices by tribal nation, because the editors felt that this best reflected how Native people think of their own literary histories. The beauty of how this played out is that every tribal nation’s section has its own distinct character, determined partly by tribal history and partly by the editor’s knowledge and approach. Jaime Battiste, an attorney by training, selected heavily historic and legal documents for the Mi’kmaq section. Stephanie Fielding and Donald Soctomah used their broad community connections to solicit quite a bit of contemporary poetry for the Mohegan and Passamaquoddy sections. Ruth Garby Torres and Trudie Lamb Richmond drew on their considerable family archives for the Schaghticoke section. Indeed, finding material was never the problem. The book clocks in at nearly 700 pages and includes a rather dazzling variety of genres: a redrawn petroglyph; news articles; a triolet and hip-hop poems; blog entries; political petitions and historic letters; language lessons and recipes. And there was still so much more we could have included.
The anthology thus challenges the formation of “New England,” and of “American literature” more broadly, insofar as it puts the original people of these places, presumed to have vanished, back at the center—not only as authors, but also as stewards and scholars of their own literary histories. Carol Bachofner, one of the Abenaki poets in the volume, calls it “the gathering place.” She says, “it’s like a small village, where all these voices have come together, in terms of historical documents, and exposé, and telling things that were secret for so long because they were painful or shameful, all the way through to the light-hearted song lyrics. . .all of those things have come together and now exist for those people who have forever, really, not understood us, to understand us.” These voices are telling stories of settler colonial violence, yes, but also of continuous indigenous presence, of survival and resilience and resurgence.
Because there was so much more we could have included, we are starting an online extension of Dawnland Voices. [BEN: And now, again, a second version of the anthology, which that website details at length.] We have spaces for tribal historians to upload and curate historic documents; for students to collaborate with Native institutions on exhibits; and for young and emergent writers to share their work. We very much welcome new project partners—whether you are an aspiring Native writer; a tribal member or a museum/archival employee with particular documents to share; or a teacher of Indigenous Studies who would like to involve your students in this kind of work—so please do contact Siobhan.Senier@unh.edu if this looks of interest.[I know Siobhan would still love to hear from you! And please also share your responses to any of the this week’s posts, or to anything else related to Columbus Day, cross-cultural America, and more, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!BenPS. You know what to do!]
Published on October 13, 2017 03:00
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