Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 285

July 18, 2016: VikingStudying: Elementary Explorers

[Earlier this month, my fiancé and I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]On a striking change in elementary school social studies, and what it might mean.As part of his 4thgrade social studies work this year, my older son had an extended unit on explorers and exploration. As with every aspect of the boys’ education to date, I was profoundly impressed by how much more nuanced and comprehensive was the unit than the equivalent from my elementary school days (which, at least according to my rapidly fading memories, largely focused on Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492). Yet when he brought home the extensive materials at the unit’s end, I was especially struck by one particular detail: the clear and straightforward emphasis on the Vikings as the first European culture to reach the Americas, nearly half a century before Columbusand his fellow Age of Exploration peers. If I had to guess (and as always I welcome more information from more knowledgeable folks in comments!), I would bet that even a few years back, such a unit might have at most presented the possibility or theories of a Viking arrival—but in these materials the Viking voyages were treated as historical facts, no different from the Silk Road journey of Marco Polo or the circumnavigation of Vasco de Gama.This educational shift could have a number of meaningful effects, and I’ll focus on a couple in particular here. For one thing, including the Vikings can help emphasize for students the messy, dynamic, multi-faceted nature of the exploration and contact period and its histories. From what I’ve experienced and seen, too often the period has been presented to young students as a series of individual and isolated moments: Columbus “discovers” the New World, then some time later the Pilgrims arrive, etc. Besides the easily overlooked complexities within each of those particular histories, that narrative entirely elides how many different communities arrived throughout the Americas over a period of more than 600 years, how many different indigenous cultures they encountered there, how many European American communities and settlements were temporary or failed (and yet what each contributed to the evolving world of the post-contact Americas), and many other historical messinesses. Obviously elementary school social studies units are going to have their simplified or reductive sides, but those things aren’t necessarily the same as inaccurate, and to my mind presenting the exploration and contact period as messy and multi-part is far more accurate to that time and world.Including the Vikings doesn’t just shift the historical narratives or images being presented, though—it also and just as importantly can shift the implicit but influential definitions of American identity that units like these can create. We’re in Massachusetts, so of course the unit still featured a good bit on the Pilgrims and Puritans and those origin points for post-contact America; but it very overtly did so as one of a collection of such origin points, a group that also included the Vikings, the Spanish, the Dutch, other English colonies such as Roanoke and Jamestown, and broader historical and cross-cultural factors such as the Silk Road and global trade. Moreover, the unit featured a great deal of attention to Native American cultures, a complement to an earlier 4thgrade unit in which groups of students were given particular native tribes about which to create elaborate multi-part dioramas and projects. Taken together, these emphases can’t help but portray an America that has been as multi-cultural (and –lingual) from its earliest moments of existence as it is in the 21st century—and can’t help but lead, I believe, to follow-up questions about what each of those cultures and communities has added to the mix of who and what we are. This week I’m considering one particular such culture, but the addition of them to the roster of elementary explorers reflects and extends these broader trends as well.Next VikingStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?

July 16-17, 2016: Hybrid Grad Course on 20th Century Women Writers

[This Wednesday, my summer hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicked off (we started with a discussion of Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!). So this week I’ve AmericanStudied some exemplary such writers, leading up to this weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]A few of the many reasons I’m excited to start that hybrid grad course:1)      Sharing Sui Sin Far with grad students: I’ve taught Mrs. Spring Fragrance or excerpts from it in a few different settings, from the first iteration of my revised Ethnic American Literature course to at least a couple distinct Adult Learning classes. But I don’t believe I’ve had the chance to share Far and her writings with our graduate students yet—and besides being a favorite writer and voice of mine, I would say she’s a pitch-perfect example of an American author who should make her way onto high school syllabi much more frequently than she currently does. Most of our grad students are present or future teachers, and so I’m doubly excited to share Far with this course and see what they think!2)      Ditto with The House on Mango Street : Our last long/main reading is Sandra Cisneros’ short story cycle, and the same thing is true: I’ve taught excerpts of House in many different courses, but have never had the chance to work with it in a graduate class. My guess it that many more (if not all) of the students will have read some or all of Cisneros’ book than will be the case with Far, which yields its own kind of pleasure: the chance for all of us to return to a familiar author and work and find new depths and power in their richness. As I wrote in that hyperlinked post, I don’t know of any work that combines engaging readability with thematic depth better than House, and I can’t wait to see what the grad students do with it!3)      The hybrid days/Blackboard posts: When I taught my first hybrid course, last summer’s grad class on Analyzing 21st Century America, I wasn’t sure what to expect; students respond online in one way or another in almost every class I teach, but I had never had class “meetings” that were explicitly located in such online spaces and conversations. But those grad students rose to that challenge as well as they always do, and both worked with the online materials and created analytical conversations in response to them extremely impressively and provocatively. Now that the initial jitters are out of the way, I’m simply looking forward to reading their responses and conversations, contributing my own voice to the mix, and seeing how these hybrid meetings complement and enhance our in-person ones. As always, I’ll keep you posted!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d highlight?

July 15, 2016: 20th Century Women Writers: Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

[This Wednesday, my summer hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicked off (we started with a discussion of Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]On a few reasons to read the only published short story by one of our greatest novelists.I can’t imagine that I have to spend much time on an AmericanStudies blog making the case for Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and professor and scholar and speaker and icon who is without much argument the single most significant American literary figure of the last half-century (or at the very least would have to be a starting point for that debate). Despite those many achievements and successes, she’s still best-known for her novels, and for good reason: between The Bluest Eye (1970) and last year’s God Help the Child (2015) she’s published 11 novels, and with each has significantly contributed to and redefined the forms, themes, and trajectory of American fiction, literature, and culture. If those novels (and of course those yet to come) were Morrison’s sole literary legacy, they would be more than enough to cement her position as one of our greatest writers.They’re not, though—and because they’re her most consistent and central body of work, they can sometimes overshadow her efforts in other genres, such as her one published short story, 1983’s “Recitatif.” “Recitatif” is unique, not only among Morrison’s works but in American literature more broadly, in the clever and provocative way it unsettles our ideas about race and identity: Morrison creates two central characters, the narrator Twyla and her girls’ home roommate Roberta, who are overtly defined as black and white; but we are never informed which character is which race, and our reading of the story becomes a continued exercise in examining and engaging with how, where, and to what end we identify racial and cultural identities. That might sound like more of a parlor game than a literary text, but I assure you that it’s not, or rather that it’s both—that while we do participate in a sort of game while reading and re-reading Morrison’s story, in the process we are thinking in unique ways that no other text (to my knowledge) prompts about those questions of identity, identification, and what they do and don’t reveal about individuals and communities. That effect alone makes Morrison’s story a must-read for any AmericanStudier, I’d say.Like any great short story, however, Morrison’s has multiple layers, and as we move through a handful of stages in the lives of those two mysteriously racialized protagonists we’re also being led through a compelling historical journey in two distinct but interconnected ways. We move forward chronologically with the protagonists, from what seems to be an early 1960s starting point through the height of the 60s counter-culture, the shifts into the 1970s, and a busing/segregation crisis, among other flashpoints. And at the same time we are continually moving backward into the protagonists’ memories, as they return again and again to the mysterious, traumatic, and defining story of what happened to a disabled, seemingly abused woman who worked at the girls’ home. Race is only one factor in any individual’s identity, of course, and through these parallel journeys Morrison’s story likewise engages at length with how both the sweep of history and the intimacy of memory inform and influence and amplify and shift each and every identity and life as well. All great reasons not to leave this singular short story aside in our readings of an American legend.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d highlight?

July 14, 2016: 20th Century Women Writers: Leslie Marmon Silko

[This Wednesday, my summer hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicked off (we started with a discussion of Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]Two texts that can complicate and enrich our understanding of a unique and vital writer.I’ve written a good bit about Leslie Marmon Silko in this space, and in every such post have focused specifically on aspects of her debut novel, Ceremony (1977). I’ve had good reasons for doing so—not just that Ceremony is one of my couple favorite American novels (although yes), but also that it is (to my mind, but I’d argue the case any time) one of the most unique and important works of 20th century American literature. It’d be important in making that case to contextualize and complement Silko’s novel both with an influential predecessor such as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1969) and with the works of her many contemporaries in the “Native American Renaissance” of the 1970s and 80s. Yet all great individual works have contexts and complements, and none of those for Silko’s work take away from the unquestionable significance and power of Ceremony. I’d put it on the short list of greatest American novels, and am continually blown away that it was Silko’s debut novel, published before she was thirty years old.Because Ceremony was the debut novel in a multi-decade career that has continued into our own 21st century moment, however, no understanding of Silko’s works can or should stop there. Just a few years after that debut, Silko published Storyteller (1981), a hugely distinct work in both form and content. Formally, the book includes not only short fiction by Silko but also Laguna Pueblo folktales and numerous photographs (taken by Silko or her family members) of her Laguna Pueblo reservation and the surrounding communities and settings. Although some of the book’s individual short stories have been frequently anthologized (such as the mysterious “Yellow Woman,” which I’ve taught in my First-Year Writing I course for more than a decade), the ideal way to read them is as part of that multi-genre and –media whole, as the stories themselves engage with themes of Native American spirituality and storytelling, community and setting, and history and identity in ways that parallel and depend upon the book’s materials and contexts. For all those reasons and more, Storyteller reflects very distinct and important sides of Silko’s talents and works, and demands its own attention.And then there’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). This novel of Silko’s is once again formally distinct from her earlier works, this time moving through numerous perspective characters, settings across North and Central America, and time periods to create a multi-generational historical novel of European and Native American contact and conflict. But I would argue that it differs even more in tone, focusing consistently on darker and more horrific histories and stories, and on protagonists whose lives and professions (such as arms and drug dealers, assassins, corrupt leaders, even a black market organ dealer) mirror and amplify those darknesses. Certainly characters like Tayo in Ceremony and the unnamed narrator of “Yellow Woman” have their struggles and traumas, but they are also seeking healing or wholeness or a way to move forward through those histories into a future beyond them. The characters and stories in Almanac, on the other hand, not only exist and dwell in the dark histories, but reflect a world in which (in a reductive but not I believe inaccurate summary of the novel’s central themes) it is only through present darkness that justice can be achieved for those who have suffered from it in the past. That’s a far different theme from those at the heart of Ceremony, and an illustration of why we need to read and engage with all of Silko’s works to understand her multi-faceted and evolving career.Last writer tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d highlight?

July 13, 2016: 20th Century Women Writers: Sylvia Plath

[This Wednesday, my summer hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicks off (we’ll be starting with a discussion of Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]On the poet who reminds us not to settle for accepted narratives about any writer or works.
This past semester my Major American Authors of the 20th Century course spent two weeks with Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, the fourth time I’ve taught her and that book in that class; I have also twice spent two weeks with her novel The Bell-Jar (1963) in a post-1950 American novel class. As I wrote in the opening paragraph of this post, each time I’ve had the chance to read and study Plath’s work in these settings, I’ve found more—more depth and complexity, but also, and most importantly for my point here, more breadth and variety—in her writing. That might seem to be logical enough, given the benefits of in-depth study of any author, but I believe that my experiences with Plath, and the knowledge and perspective I’ve gained through them, actually and very significantly reveal two ways in which widely accepted, oversimplifying narratives can hinder our analysis and understanding if we’re not careful.
For one thing, there’s Plath’s biography, and more exactly the most famous detail from that biography: her suicide. It is indeed the case that Plath committed suicide at the age of 30, in February, 1963 by turning on her gas stove and sticking her head inside; it’s also the case, as both her confessional and heavily autobiographical poem “Lady Lazarus” and similarly autobiographical work in The Bell-Jar illustrate, that Plath had attempted suicide almost exactly a decade earlier, at the age of 20. So it’s entirely understandable that the narratives about Plath’s suicide—which are, to be clear, also the most prominent narratives about her writing—treat it as a final, unsurprising moment in a consistent psychological and emotional pattern. And that may indeed be a fair assessment, but I’m pretty sure that very few AmericanStudiers or readers of Plath’s works know the details of her life at the time of her suicide: Plath had moved to England to live with her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, but in late 1962 Hughes left her and their two small children for another woman; the winter of 1962-1963 was one of the coldest ever recorded in London, and Plath could not afford to pay for consistent heat in her flat so she and her children were likely damn near frozen by February; her kids were also apparently suffering from the flu and had been for some time; and Plath was trying to write between roughly four and eight every morning, because it was the only time that was genuinely hers and because she needed to publish to earn enough to support her children. These facts do not necessarily elide the long-term psychological causes, nor do they answer the question (as noted in the hyperlinked bio above) of whether Plath hoped or planned to be discovered and saved. But knowledge of them does, I hope, make it impossible to treat Plath’s suicide as just the act of a disturbed or self-centered and –pitying person.
And for another thing, there are the poems. The Collected Poems , compiled by Hughes over the two decades after Plath’s death and published in one volume in late 1981, is most impressive for both the sheer number of poems it includes (224, all written between 1956 and 1962; and another fifty drawn from the many more she wrote prior to 1956) and for the variety and breadth of those poems (even those from the same year, and often from within a day or two of one another, are generally strikingly distinct in structure, style, imagery, and theme). I could point to a particular poem or two to make my case, but thanks to the magic of the web I don’t have to—just go to the Google Books version above or to this “Browse Inside” version and sample a few pages from anywhere in the volume (other than the eleven pages devoted to Plath’s longest single poem, “Three Women”). The poems of Plath’s that get anthologized and taught most frequently (including by me in my second-half American lit survey) are “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” both produced in her final months of writing and collected in the posthumous Ariel (1966); each is well worth reading and analyzing, but that standard pairing and focus are in some ways hugely limiting to our sense of Plath, both as a poet (both poems over-use Nazi/Holocaust imagery) and as a person (both lend credence to the whole “depressed and fixated on death” narrative). To me, what the Collected Poems proves is that Plath was a prodigious talent, one of 20thcentury America’s most versatile and best poets—that is of course an opinion, but it’s a much better-supported one thanks to the book; and those narratives that seek to dismiss her talent, just like those that seek to oversimplify her suicide, had at least better be prepared to engage with the evidence.
That, ultimately, is the only broad point I’m trying to make here, but it’s a pretty key one. Sweeping narratives aren’t necessarily a problem, and perhaps are inevitable—I’m guilty of constructing plenty of ‘em I know—, but far too often they exist in spite of, rather than in conversation with, the available evidence. So at least we AmericanStudiers owe it our subjects, our audiences, and ourselves to read and engage with that evidence as best we can before we deploy, endorse, or even revise the narratives. Next writer tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d highlight?

July 12, 2016: 20th Century Women Writers: Nella Larsen

[This Wednesday, my summer hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicks off (we’ll be starting with a discussion of Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]On the brief but potent and important career of a Harlem Renaissance writer.
There are lots of different kinds of undeservedly forgotten or obscure writers—from those who published for decades without ever quite achieving the success that they deserved, as did personal favorite Charles Chesnutt; to those who were tremendously influential in their own era but should be better remembered and read in our own, as I argued in this post about Theodore Dreiser (and specifically Sister Carrie)—but to my mind the most mysterious and compelling are those with very short yet very successful careers, the writers who publish one or two great books and then vanish. Part of what makes those cases especially interesting are the aspects of their authors’ identities that contributed to their meteoric rise and fall, aspects that often appear in their fictional texts as well; and part is simply the opportunity that they present for focused attention, the way in which all that they had to say (or got to say, anyway) is to be found in an impressive work or two. And that’s definitely the case with the meteoric, mysterious, and compelling literary career of African American nurse, activist, and Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen.
Larsen was born in 1891 and died in 1964, which means that her life began at what has been called the nadir of African American existence, just before the height of the lynching epidemic and the Supreme Court’s endorsement of Jim Crow segregation, spanned the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance (and Larsen herself moved to New York City in 1914 to attend nursing school and lived there for much of her life), and ended with the Civil Rights movement in full swing. She also attended historically black Fisk University for two years, worked for a time at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and married Elmer Imes, the second African American to receive a PhD in Physics. Yet alongside that roster of links between Larsen and the broader African American community must be put some other, far from simple facts of her identity: that her mother was a Danish immigrant and her father an African Caribbean immigrant from St. Croix who abandoned her (and her mother) at a young age; that she took the surname Larsen from her mother’s Scandinavian second husband; and that she spent a few of her formative years in Denmark with maternal relatives. Since Larsen lived in almost total obscurity for more than 65 of her 72 years, it is nearly impossible to know with any certainty what any of these experiences and heritages meant for her perspective and identity (although biographers have worked hardto ascertain what can be known); what we do have instead are the two unique and profoundly American (in every sense) novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), that constitute her literary identity and legacy very fully and successfully.
I teach both novels in my second-half American literature survey (they’re both very short, really novellas), and their differences make for an interesting and productive pairing. Quicksand is extremely autobiographical, focusing very intimately on the identity and perspective of its protagonist Helga Crane, a half-Danish half-West Indian young woman who moves between the South, New York, and Denmark in search of home, community, romantic connection, and self. Passingis a multi-character study of that titular and very complex racial topic, focusing in particular on two light-skinned African American women and childhood friends (Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry) who have made drastically different life choices (Clare has passed and married a racist white businessman who does not know her racial heritage, Irene has not passed and married a race-obsessed black doctor) and yet whose lives and trajectories intersect fully and tragically in the novella’s events. While both thus likely reveal different aspects of Larsen’s own identity and perspective, the elements that they share are just as significant: a lyrical and powerful style; an extremely impressive ability to create and communicate the perspectives through which the stories are told (Helga and Irene, respectively); and an effortless but crucial concurrent skill at constructing the communities (from a Southern black school to a Harlem party, a whites-only Chicago rooftop restaurant to a fundamentalist black church, and many others) through which these and many other rich and three-dimensional characters move. There are plenty of complex issues to keep literary critics (and survey class students) busy, including central focuses on gender and sexuality, but both books are also and just as importantly readable and engaging stories.Larsen was (falsely, it seems) accused of plagiarism in regard to the short story, “Sanctuary” (1930), with which she followed Passing, and those accusations along with the failure of her marriage seem to have combined to drive her both to Europe for a time and away from writing (and back to nursing) for the remainder of her life. Reading these two novels is thus, again, partly a way into a long and complex American life, one that connects to a great many historical and cultural issues and changes and to which we would otherwise have precious little access. But it’s also a chance to discover a writer who can speak to questions of identity and community, of the searches for self and home, that cut across any culture or period and cut to the heart of what defines all of our American lives. For all those reasons, Larsen has been passed by for long enough. Next writer tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d highlight?

July 11, 2016: 20th Century Women Writers: Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska

[This Wednesday, my summer hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicks off (we’ll be starting with a discussion of Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]On the many distinctions and telling similarity in two compelling Jewish American books.
One evening about five years ago, my younger son taught me more about the Jewish holiday of Purim, in a couple-minute, mostly understandable and criminally cute narrative based on stories they learned in their Jewish Community Center preschool, than I had learned in my prior thirty-plus years of life. There are various ironies of my personal and familial identity illustrated by that anecdote, including the reason for all eight of my maternal great-grandparents’ immigrations to America (to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in late 19th century Eastern Europe), the complicated religious and cultural continuities and changes across my maternal grandparents’ lives and then especially my Mom’s, my own relationship to this Jewish American heritage, and, most ironically and yet most tellingly of 21st century America, the simple fact that my sons, who are a quarter Jewish American and a quarter English-German American and half Chinese American, have (as attendees of that JCC preschool for a few years) already learned and engaged with and performed more of Jewish culture and story in their first decades of life than I ever have and likely ever will.
While all of that is, of course, first and foremost about myself and my multi-generational American family and identity, past, present, and future, it can also connect to an interesting pair of youthful literary characters—one real and autobiographical, one invented and fictional, but both Jewish American children whose lives and voices have a great deal to tell us about family, faith, and our national identities and stories—created by talented women writers in the early 20th century. Young Mary Antinis the protagonist of Antin’s cultural autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), a book that takes its readers from the Pale of a Russian village to a nearly unequivocal celebration of the American Dream as this particular family and narrator find and live it; young Sara Smolinsky is the narrator and heroine of Anzia Yezierska’s realistic and modernist novel Bread Givers (1925), a work which begins with its ten year old narrator and her family already in New York and chronicles especially the cross-generational struggle between Sara and her domineering scholarly father Reb. Like their works and tones, the two writers seem in many ways fully distinct: Yezierska published half a dozen novels and multiple collections of short stories in a long and successful literary career that led her to Hollywood and a romantic relationship with John Dewey; Antin’s few published works, including the autobiography and one other book, They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), a political argument for tolerant immigration policies, appeared within a few years of each other, after which she traveled for a few more years giving speeches about immigration before largely disappearing from the public eye.
They are indeed two very different Jewish American women and authors, and these books, like their others, certainly deserve to be read and analyzed on their own terms. Yet one very interesting and telling similarity lies in the emphasis that both authors and texts place on the wisdom and awareness possessed by their very young protagonists. (A feature shared by another, slightly later Jewish American novel, Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep [1934].) These young women are, of course, being created by older authors, and yet I would argue that neither the thirty-something Antin nor the forty-something Yezierska implies that young Mary’s or Sara’s perception and prescience are creations of their older selves. Instead, it is precisely these protagonists’ youth, and concurrent their explicitly hybrid Jewish American identities, when contrasted with the older voices and more static identities illustrated by both their more Old World-centered family members and their initial encounters with native Americans, that seems to give Mary and Sara their unique and impression perspectives, their visions (whether, again, more positively or negatively) of the communities (familial, spiritual, cultural, and national) in which they are growing up. A compelling lesson for all Americans, and one more reason to read these unique works by two hugely talented women writers.
Next writer tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d highlight?

July 9-10, 2016: Crowd-sourced Critical Patriotisms

[I’ve written a good deal in the last few months about the topic of critical patriotism, a central focus of my recently completed fourth book. So for this year’s 4th of July series I wanted to highlight a handful of distinct examples of perspectives and visions of such critical patriotism. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominations of fellow PatriotismStudiers—add yours in comments!]First, I’d like to highlight once again the wonderful work being done by Ed Simon and Wade Linebaugh at ‘Merica magazine, an online public scholarly journal dedicated to advancing precisely such critical patriotisms.And also to share this quote by James Baldwin: “I love American more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”And and to add that the man who shared that quote on Twitter, Jose Antonio Vargas, is consistently modeling (in his Define American project and elsewhere) such critical patriotisms.Other nominations for models of critical patriotism:Lara Schwartznominates “Thurgood Marshall’s bicentennial speech.”Andrew Lipsett shares a “most recent great one: Obama’s speech at Selma on last year’s anniversary.”Matt Chambersnominates, “Ellsberg, Manning, Snowden, et al.”Rachel Weeks Bright highlights, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton's ‘Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,’ a revision of the Declaration of the Independence,” or “‘This Land Is Your Land,’ which Guthrie wrote as a piece of critical patriotism, but is often presented as uncritical patriotism (simply by expunging later verses).”Emily Lauer Tweets, “Emma Lazarus was constructive with her critical patriotism, and ditto Jon Stewart, I think.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?

July 8, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama

[I’ve written a good deal in the last few months about the topic of critical patriotism, a central focus of my recently completed fourth book. So for this year’s 4th of July series I wanted to highlight a handful of distinct examples of perspectives and visions of such critical patriotism. Please share your own nominees for critical patriots, past and present, for a crowd-sourced weekend post full of fireworks!]On the historical echoes for a controversial sermon, and the subsequent speech that models critical patriotism far more successfully.The controversy almost seems quaint in retrospect, at least in comparison with the Birther nonsense and secret Muslim conspiracy garbage and other uglinesses that have been thrown at Barack Obama throughout his presidency, but in early 2008 the debate over Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s angry, critical sermons about race and religion in America was at fever pitch. As usual these days, much of that debate was based on simplified soundbites or outright misinformation, as illustrated by this piece in which CNN correspondent Roland Martin listened to and provided a transcript of the whole of Wright’s infamous “God Damn America” sermon(actual title: “Confusing God and Government”). Yet even with the full context, there’s no doubt that Wright’s sermon represents an extreme perspective on the nation’s histories and identity, both in its specific details (such as the assertion that the government had known about the Pearl Harbor attacks in advance) and in its overarching arguments (exemplified by lines like “God Damn America for treating us citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme").Those extremes in Wright’s speech and perspective quite directly echo much of the speech with which I opened this week’s series, Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Take this paragraph from Douglass: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.” Yet there are relevant contextual differences between the two addresses that shed a less positive light on Wright’s: the obvious historical ones (that Douglass was speaking in the period of a slave system into which he had himself been born); but also a key distinction in audience (that Douglass was speaking directly to a multi-faceted American community, challenging them to engage collectively with his ideas, while Wright was quite literally preaching to the choir and thus in far more of an echo chamber).We don’t have to go back a century and a half to find a speech that models critical patriotism with more nuance and effectiveness than Wright’s sermon, though. I wrote at some length in this post about Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, which he delivered in March 2008 in direct response to the unfolding Reverend Wright controversy. Although the speech originated and opens with that specific context, it quickly moves into a far more wide-ranging and deep reflection on race in both Obama’s life and identity and in America more broadly, one that uses a blunt examination of such issues and histories to argue for how we can continue moving toward that titular more perfect union. At times progressive critics of Obama’s presidency have wished that he would get angry more frequently or openly, but I think the contrast between Wright’s (justifiable but still to my mind limiting) anger and Obama’s speech illustrates precisely the complex balance (in perspective, in tone, in argument, in ideas) that comprises Obama’s critical patriotism. He’s offered so many models of that vital perspective over these 8 years, just one more reason we need to make sure not to follow him with Trump’s ridiculously simplistic “Make America Great Again” style of patriotism.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?

July 7, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart

[I’ve written a good deal in the last few months about the topic of critical patriotism, a central focus of my recently completed fourth book. So for this year’s 4th of July series I wanted to highlight a handful of distinct examples of perspectives and visions of such critical patriotism. Please share your own nominees for critical patriots, past and present, for a crowd-sourced weekend post full of fireworks!]On an author and book that both introduce under-narrated histories and redefine American identity.
One of my bigger pet peeves with the dominant narratives of American history is the notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few decades. It’s true that the 1965 Immigration Act, the first immigration law that opened up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities, led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20th century: Asian Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s (for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).
Multicultural historian Ronald Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his magisterial A Different Mirror,recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years. While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others, I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group would include Yung Wing, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton , Sui Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American migrant worker, novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression, published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical, complex, deeply moving, and critically patriotic novel America is in the Heart (1946).For the most part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes many fictionalized characters, hence the designation of it as a novel (in the vein of something like On the Road or The Bell-Jar )—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple, interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work) and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath . But despite that tone, Heart’s ultimate trajectory (like that of Steinbeck’s novel, which is why I have paired them in a chapter of my latest book project) is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful. That’s true partly because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound clichéd, but all I can say is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully, as a unique and potent literary model of critical patriotism.Last critical patriot tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?PPS. It's worth adding that Filipino communities had been part of America since the mid-18th century, and had for example taken part in the War of 1812's Battle of New Orleans among other foundational moments.