Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 286

July 6, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: Suffrage Activists at the Centennial Exposition

[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 national divisions and critical patriotism at America’s 100th birthday celebration.
Birthday parties tend to bring out both the best and the worst in those being celebrated, so perhaps it should be no surprise that America’s 100th birthday party, the Centennial Exposition held over the six months between May and November of 1876 in Philadelphia’s newly designed Fairmount Park, was nothing if not profoundly divided in all sorts of complex ways. I’ve written at length (in the Intro to my first book) about the most defining such division, between the Exposition’s ostensible purpose (to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and thus reflect on America’s historical origins and identity) and its central focus and tone (a thoroughly forward-looking celebration of the nation’s material and cultural prowess and possibilities for continued upward progress). But on any number of specific issues and themes the Exposition displayed similarly multiple personalities: for example, it featured the first American statue dedicated to an African American figure (African Methodist Episcopal Church founder Richard Allen) but also included a restaurant known as the Southern Restaurant where a group of “old-time darkies” continually serenaded patrons with happy songs of the antebellum South.
Of the many such divisions and contradictions present on and around the Exposition grounds, though, I don’t know that any were as striking as those connected to women’s identities, perspectives, and issues. The Exposition was the first World’s Fair to include women’s voices in a central way, both in planning (through an all-female Women’s Centennial Executive Committee) and on the ground (through the Women’s Pavilion that was created as a result of that committee’s efforts and fundraising). The Pavilion was certainly a striking success in many respects, featuring work created and designed solely by women; yet it was equally striking for the near-complete absence of political perspectives or issues, including the most prominent such issue of the period, women’s suffrage. Since the inception of the Women’s Committee organizations such as the National Woman Suffrage Association had protested the absence of such perspectives and voices from the committee and in the planning process, not only from a representational standpoint but through the lens of a particularly salient irony: that women from around the country were asked to contribute money and support to this federal organization, but could not themselves vote in a federal (or any other kind of) election. The NWSA in fact scheduled their national meeting for Philadelphia in May, on the same day that the Exposition (including the Women’s Pavilion) opened, presenting another division within that city and moment for sure.
Yet the most overt and symbolic (yet also very real and critically patriotic) such division would be presented on July 4th. On that day, for obvious reasons, the Exposition reached its fever pitch, with numerous activities and events focused around a main stage where impressive speakers and Americans gathered to lead the festivities. The NWSA asked if they could be a part of that stage and those festivities and were refused, but in truly American (and Revolutionary) fashion they created a second stage of their own elsewhere on the grounds. From that stage they read the full text of the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments of Women,” a text that had been initially composed for the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY, and had become as much a founding document for this organization and cause as the Declaration of Independence was for the nation of which they were a complicated but vital part. Those contrasting stages were only one of many July 4th, 1876 events that highlighted such complex national conversations and divisions—word was just reaching the East on this day of Custer’s defeat at  Little Big Horn; a group of parading black militiamen in Hamburg, South Carolina refused to cede the sidewalk to a white group, leading to a violent reprisal and the start of multiple days of anti-black violence in the town—but their location and proximity can drive home just how multivocal America was in this Centennial year, and in particular how much critical patriots like these suffrage activists were adding their voices to the mix.Next critical patriot tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?

July 5, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: William Apess’ “Eulogy on King Philip”

[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 one speech that offers two complementary models of critical patriotism.Many of the ways I’d make the case for William Apess as an exemplary American critical patriot were summed up in this post. I don’t think it’s the slightest bit hyperbolic to describe Apess as the 19th century’s Martin Luther King Jr.—a fiery preacher of supreme oratorical and rhetorical talents who dedicated his life to pursuing civil and human rights for his people and for all his fellow citizens of the world, one whose life was tragically cut short but who achieved a great deal in that time and has left a lasting legacy down into our own. If Apess’ era had had the technology to record and broadcast his speeches, or even to publish his writings in more mass-market ways, I have no doubt that we’d listen to and read his voice and words alongside those of King (and yesterday’s subject Frederick Douglass) and our other most potent orators. And however and wherever we encounter them, we consistently find in Apess’ works models of bitingly critical yet still patriotic visions of our shared American society, community, identity, and history.In that prior post I focused on Apess’ 1833 essay/sermon “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” but I would argue that his critical patriotism is best illustrated by his January 1836 speech “Eulogy on King Philip.” Delivered at Boston’s Odeon lecture and concert hall, which had opened the year before and would go on to host speeches and readings by such luminaries as William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe, Apess’ stunning speech uses his own life story and mixed-race heritage (as scholar Patricia Bizzell traces at length in this excellent piece) to argue for his alternative vision of American history, community, and identity. While much of the speech is as righteously angry about both past injustices and present oppressions as was “Looking-Glass,” the final lines, addressed overtly to his (likely entirely non-native) audience, reflect the optimistic core of Apess’ critical patriotism: “You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers’ crimes; neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it; and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever, is the wish of a poor Indian.”While Apess thus ranges across a number of topics and themes in the course of his speech, its central focus is indeed King Philip (Metacomet), the 17th century Wampanoag chief and distant ancestor of Apess’ mother who was and remains best known in American collective memory for the 1670s war that came to bear his name. Yet from the start of his speech, Apess presents a stunning shift in those narratives, arguing that this supposed enemy of the English should be collectively remembered instead as a revolutionary hero: “so will every patriot, especially in this enlightened age, respect the rude yet all accomplished son of the forest, that died a martyr to his cause, though unsuccessful, yet as glorious as the American Revolution.” Arguing for that vision of Philip, in the same 1830s Boston that was cementing its collective narratives of the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, was as bold a rhetorical move as Douglass’ July 4thspeech. Yet if we can see the Massachusetts Puritans and the Wampanoags as two founding American cultures (as I’ve argued multiple times in this space), there’s no reason why we can’t see Philip as a revolutionary, critical patriot, one whose tragic end shouldn’t overshadow his work toward a collective American community.Next critical patriot tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?

July 4, 2016: Modeling Critical Patriotism: Frederick Douglass’ July 4th Speech

[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 stunning speech that challenges us as much today as it did 165 years ago.I’ve written many times, in this space and elsewhere, about the inspiring history of Quock Walker and his Revolutionary-era peers. Walker, his fellow Massachusetts slaves, and the abolitionist activists with whom they worked used the language and ideas of the Declaration of Independence in support of their anti-slavery petitions, and in so doing contributed significantly to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more inspiring application of our national ideals, or of a more compelling example of my argument (made in the second hyperlinked piece above) that black history is American history. Yet at the same time, it would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to claim that Walker’s case was a representative one, either in his era or at any time in the two and a half centuries of American slavery; nor I would I want to use Walker’s successful petition as evidence that the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” sentiment did not in a slaveholding nation include a central strain of hypocrisy.If I ever need reminding of that foundational American hypocrisy, I can turn to one of our most fiery texts: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass’s speech is long and multi-layered, and I don’t want to reduce its historical and social visions to any one moment; but I would argue that it builds with particular power to this passage, one of the most trenchant in American oration and writing: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” The subsequent second half of the speech sustains that perspective and passion, impugning every element of a nation still entirely defined by slavery and its effects. Despite having begun his speech by noting his “quailing sensation,” his feeling of appearing before the august gathering “shrinkingly,” Douglass thus builds instead to one of the most full-throated, confident critiques of American hypocrisy and failure ever articulated.As an avowed and thoroughgoing optimist, it’s far easier for me to grapple with Quock Walker’s use of the Declaration and the 4th of July than with Douglass’s—which, of course, makes it that much more important for me to include Douglass in my purview, and which is why I wanted to begin this week’s series with Douglass’s speech. There’s a reason, after all, why the most famous American slave is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman—we like our histories overtly inspiring, and if we’re going to remember slavery at all, why not do so through the lens of someone who resisted it so successfully? Yet while Tubman, like Walker, is certainly worth remembering, the overarching truth of slavery in America is captured far better by Douglass’s speech and its forceful attention to our national hypocrises and flaws. And despite the ridiculous current attacks on “too negative” histories or “apologizing for America,” there’s no way we can understand our nation or move forward collectively without a fuller engagement wth precisely the critically patriotic lens provided by Douglass and his stunning speech.Next critical patriot tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Critical patriots you’d nominate?

July 2-3, 2016: June 2016 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]May 30: Better Remembering Memorial Day: A Memorial Day series kicks off with my annual post on how to better remember and celebrate this American holiday.May 31: Decoration Day Histories: Douglass: The series shifts to remembering Decoration Day with a post on one of the great American speeches and why we must remember it today.June 1: Decoration Day Histories: Roger Pryor: The invitation and speech that mark two shifts in American attitudes, as the series rolls on.June 2: Decoration Day Histories: Rodman the Keeper: The text that helps us remember a community for whom Decoration Day’s meanings didn’t shift.June 3: Decoration Day Histories: So What?: The series concludes with three ways to argue for remembering Decoration Day alongside Memorial Day.June 4-5: The 1876 Election and 2016: A special post on what a controversial and destructive election can help us understand, and perhaps prevent, about our upcoming one.June 6: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Lahiri’s In Other Words: My annual Beach Reads series starts with a memoir I’m mostly—but not entirely—excited to read.June 7: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Coates’ Black Panther: The series continues with the comic book that’s bringing me back to the genre after decades away.June 8: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Erdrich’s LaRose: The difficulties of breaking teaching and reading habits and a book that could help me do so, as the series rolls on.June 9: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds: A poetry collection you should pack right next to that page-turning thriller in your beach bag.June 10: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Cultural Memoirs: The series continues with three contemporary memoirs of race and heritage.June 11-12: Crowd-sourced Beach Reads: As always, the crowd-sourced Beach Reads post brought out many wonderful suggestions—add yours in comments!June 13: ApologyStudying: Lessons from Canada: A series on historical apologies starts with one key difference between the U.S. and our northern neighbor.June 14: ApologyStudying: Japanese Internment: The series continues with two things the internment apology got right and one place where it came up short.June 15: ApologyStudying: Apologies to Native Americans: Two official apologies to Native Americans and the distance we have yet to go, as the series rolls on.June 16: ApologyStudying: The Chinese Exclusion Act: What it means to apologize for something we don’t remember well, and how one might affect the other.June 17: ApologyStudying: The Reparations Debate: The series concludes with the elephant in the ApologyStudying room and how the week’s other topics might affect it.June 18-19: ApologyStudying: Apologizing for America?: A special weekend post that combines a few further thoughts of mine with some responses from fellow ApologyStudiers.June 20: SummerStudying: The Fresh Prince and “Summertime”: A series on summer texts and contexts starts with two ways to AmericanStudy the Fresh Prince.June 21: SummerStudying: Nostalgia and “The Boys of Summer”: The series continues with the limitations of nostalgia and why it’s a vital perspective nonetheless.June 22: SummerStudying: Irony and “Summertime Sadness”: The artistic and humans roles and meanings of irony, as the series rolls on.June 23: SummerStudying: Utopias and the Summer of Love: How two historical utopias can help us better understand the 1960s social experiment.June 24: SummerStudying: Kids and “Summertime Blues”: The series concludes with what a summer classic reveals about the voices of youth.June 25-26: Crowd-sourced SummerStudying: Another great crowd-sourced post, full of responses and nominations from fellow SummerStudiers—add yours in comments!June 27: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: Racist Classics: A series on the novel’s 80th birthday starts with whether and how to view and re-view racist classics.June 28: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: Hattie McDaniel: The series continues with the limits and power of the actress’s Academy Award-winning performance as a slave.June 29: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: The Plantation Tradition: One important, if ironic, way that Mitchell’s did revise historical propaganda, as the series rolls on.June 30: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: Revisiting Rhett Butler: Why I’d still critique Mitchell’s romantic hero, and a side of him I’ve come to better appreciate.July 1: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: The Worst and Best of Popularity: The series concludes with the problems and possibilities presented by troubling popular art.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

July 1, 2016: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: The Worst and Best of Popularity

[June 30thmarks the 80th anniversary of the initial publication of one of the 20th century’s bestselling novels, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind(1936). So this week I’ll offer a handful of thoughts on the book and its legacies, as well as some of the broader issues to which it connects.]On the problems and possibilities presented by troubling popular art.A few years back, I started a week-long series on popular fiction with a post on the continued relevance of Jane Tompkins’ scholarly concept of the “cultural work” done by 19th century popular novels. As I noted there, Tompkins sought to revise and expand the literary canon as it had been developed over the prior half-century of criticism by redefining “greatness,” focusing not on intrinsic aesthetic qualities or successes so much as texts’ extrinsic social and cultural effects. Her most central example was the 19thcentury’s bestselling American novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that exemplifies cultural work, having impacted American society(in its own moment and for the century and a half that has followed) on countless levels. If we were to apply the same lens and argument to 20thcentury American literature, it’d be difficult to make the case for another work having been more popular and successful—and thus, at least potentially, having had a wider and more significant set of effects, in its own moment and in subsequent decades—than Gone with the Wind.Yet as my posts this week have illustrated, from the perspective of either progressive political beliefs or a multicultural definition of American identity Mitchell’s novel did far different, and far more destructive, cultural work than did Stowe’s (which was itself, to be clear, far from perfect on issues of race and culture, but still significantly better-intentioned than Mitchell’s book). So what do us public AmericanStudies scholars do with that sort of popular fiction, one where the popularity and appeals and legacy are impossible to separate from cultural work that we’d spend a career resisting and challenging? The easy but (to my mind) unacceptable answer would be to argue that Mitchell’s novel (and/or the just as popular film adaptation) should be, not censored entirely, but less frequently read or viewed, that its continued cultural presence should be minimized. Yet even if that weren’t a deeply problematic thing to argue (and I would say that it is, one that’s much too close to censorship for my liking), I don’t believe it would lead in our current society to collective conversation or understandings. Instead, public scholars arguing that something shouldn’t be read as much seems guaranteed simply to put it on a required reading list for those individuals and communities who feel themselves opposed to our perspectives.So if we accept that Mitchell’s compelling and enduring novel will continue to be read, what then? We could of course make the case for other texts that complement and complicate her novel, although the two contemporary works that I would particularly highlight—W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America(1935) and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936)—are about as far from page-turning bestsellers as books can get. But in any case, it’d be even more important to talk collectively, as I’ve tried to model in individual ways this week, about Gone with the Wind itself—about its strengths as well its flaws, about why and how it has endured as well as what mythic and troubling narratives it has reflected and perpetuated, about what it means to love a work of art and how even (indeed, especially) when we do it’s important to be able to be analytical and critical about it. I believe those are conversations we can all take part in, ones that parallel the best kinds of classroom discussions, and ones through which we can help a popular work like Gone with the Wind move into its ninth decade in a meaningful as well as pleasurable way.June recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Memories or perspectives on Gone with the Wind you’d share?

June 30, 2016: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: Revisiting Rhett Butler

[June 30thmarks the 80th anniversary of the initial publication of one of the 20th century’s bestselling novels, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind(1936). So this week I’ll offer a handful of thoughts on the book and its legacies, as well as some of the broader issues to which it connects.]On why I’d still critique Mitchell’s hero, and a more interesting side I’ve come to better appreciate.Earlier in the week I referenced my first published article, which appeared in the Southern Literary Journal just over 13 years ago: “‘What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?’: Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation.” The quoted question in that title comes from the pivotal scene, early in Mitchell’s second half, when Scarlett finds Rhett in jail; he’s shot and killed an African American man for “being uppity to a [white] lady” (614), and asks the question of Scarlett. But as I noted in yesterday’s post, for the whole first half of the novel Rhett has resisted and challenged the stereotypical “Southern gentleman” worldview on issues like slavery and the Civil War, such as in the key scene where he argues that the “Southern way of living is as antiquated as the feudal system of the Middle Ages. … It had to go and it’s going now” (238). This moment and statement in prison thus represents a striking change in his perspective and character—one that will continue throughout the remainder of the novel, culminating in his final decision to leave Scarlett in search of somewhere in the South “where some of the old times must still linger” (1022).In my article I called Rhett’s transformation into a conservative white supremacist the greatest failing of Mitchell’s novel, and I would still say the same. After all, she creates Rhett as a really compelling and attractive romantic male lead (including for the reason I’ll get to in the next paragraph), and thus draws readers into feeling the same continued interest in him that Scarlett does (despite Scarlett’s repeated attempts to focus instead on the far more conventional Ashley Wilkes). As a result, we’re willing to go along with Rhett into those white supremacist perspectives far more easily than we otherwise might have been (at least if we’re more progressive readers), and even to see our own move, like his, as simply a begrudging recognition of the realities of Reconstruction’s “horrors,” of racial equality and the threat of miscegenation, and a bunch of other mythic nonsense that Mitchell’s second half fully and frustratingly perpetuates. (Rhett’s and Scarlett’s realizations of what “Reconstruction in all its implications” means [635] indeed comprise a key arc of Mitchell’s second half.) For all those reasons, with Clark Cable’s uber-charismatic film performance layered on top of them, I would call Rhett one of the most destructive characters in American literature.No literary work can or should be defined through the lens of a single social or political issue, though, and Mitchell’s novel isn’t simply or solely about race and the South (important as it is to keep those themes in mind). And if we turn instead to the question of gender roles and expectations, Rhett, like Scarlett, becomes a more consistently complex and genuinely attractive character. As I argue in my article’s opening, Scarlett appears to be a Southern belle stereotype (with her “magnolia-white skin” and “seventeen-inch waist” [5]) but throughout the novel challenges and undermines those images, becoming instead an increasingly independent and strong woman. Similarly, while Rhett could be superficially described as a classic gentlemanly suitor, I would argue that his continued interest in Scarlett is due instead to his recognition of how different she is from the stereotype—particularly if we contrast their relationship with that of the far more conventional/stereotypical Southern characters Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. If readers are going to continue falling in love with Rhett—and again, it’s very hard to read Mitchell’s novel and not find him attractive—at least he offers (especially for the time periods of the novel’s 19th century setting and its early 20thcentury publication) a relatively nuanced and thoughtful portrayal of gender and identity.Last Gone post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Memories or perspectives on Gone with the Wind you’d share?

June 29, 2016: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: The Plantation Tradition

[June 30thmarks the 80th anniversary of the initial publication of one of the 20th century’s bestselling novels, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind(1936). So this week I’ll offer a handful of thoughts on the book and its legacies, as well as some of the broader issues to which it connects.]On one important—if ironic—way that Mitchell’s novel revised historical narratives.I’ve been pretty hard on Gone with the Wind in this week’s first two posts, and am going to continue to be pretty hard on it in the last two; to paraphrase one of my very favorite film lines, the contexts for which would comprise a huge spoiler for the film in question so I’m not gonna give them, “Gone is a goddamn legend; it can handle it.” But I would be remiss if I didn’t dedicate at least one post to highlighting and analyzing an aspect of Mitchell’s novel that deserves a great deal of praise: the skeptical, and at times even downright subversive, perspectives on the antebellum South and the Civil War that she allows her main characters Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara (respectively) to voice in some key passages in the novel’s first half. To cite only a couple examples: Rhett tells Scarlett that he’s happy to make his wartime fortune out of “the wreckage” of the antebellum South (193-194), having consistently poked fun at that society and its stylized and outmoded customs and social mores during the novel’s pre-war period; and when it comes to the war Scarlett goes even further, arguing in response to some proudly Confederate neighbors that the South’s cause is “not sacred” but rather “silly” (171).You don’t have to be particularly familiar with the literary and historical contexts for Mitchell’s novel to recognize such lines for the unexpected and surprising moments they are. But there’s one especially salient literary context that makes the point even clearer: the plantation tradition. As scholar Donna Campbell details at length on that site (part of her wonderful webpage), the plantation tradition comprised a dominant form of American local color writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, one through which idealized images of the slave South and the Lost Cause and many related historical myths were created, amplified, and communicated to mass national audiences. Mitchell would famously write to Thomas W. Dixon, one of the tradition’s most prominent and influential purveyors, that she was “practically raised” on his novels; she sent him the letter in response to one from Dixon to her in which he had called Gone “the greatest story of the South ever put down on paper.” Yet despite the similarities in her second-half portrayal of Reconstruction to those in Dixon’s Clansman and Birth of a Nation (the troubling issues about which I wrote in Monday’s post), there’s simply no way to read Gone with the Wind and miss the distinctions in her first-half depictions of the antebellum South and the Civil War from those of the plantation tradition’s defining works.Or so you’d think. Yet one of the most enduring legacies of Mitchell’s novel (and, certainly, its film adaptation) has been the formation of communities of Windies, groups of uber-fans who have undoubtedly read the novel as frequently and thoroughly as any audiences could and yet who seem to focus much of their attention on recreating precisely a “moonlight and magnolias” version of the antebellum South. How do we explain this central Gone with the Wind irony? Certainly Mitchell’s troubling second half, and especially Rhett Butler’s culminating conversion to a nostalgic Lost Cause devotee (on which more tomorrow), has played a role. So too has an overarching fascination with the Old South and its belles, beaus, and balls, a cultural narrative that has adopted Gone as an iconic text despite the novel’s aforementioned critiques of many elements of the Old South. Whether we place the blame more on Mitchell or on her (and our) culture and society, we can in any case certainly learn a lot about how historical myths are created and perpepuated. Yet we shouldn’t allow that process to overshadow the interesting moments and ways in which Mitchell’s characters and novel resist and challenge such mythmaking.Next Gone post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Memories or perspectives on Gone with the Wind you’d share?

June 28, 2016: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: Hattie McDaniel

[June 30thmarks the 80th anniversary of the initial publication of one of the 20th century’s bestselling novels, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind(1936). So this week I’ll offer a handful of thoughts on the book and its legacies, as well as some of the broader issues to which it connects.]
On the power, limitations, and possibilities of performance.
To follow up on this post on Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus and its cultural legacies, another argument for re-releasing Disney’s controversial and currently shelved film Song of the South (1946) would be that it features one of the final film performances of Hattie McDaniel, the multi-talented singer and actress who performed in more than 90 films (!) between 1932 and 1949 and who became in 1940 the first African American to win an Academy Award (for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind [1939]). In many ways, McDaniel, whose parentswere former slaves and whose father fought with the US Colored Troops during the Civil War, embodies the most inspiring kind of American life; and her Oscar victory, like her legendary and hugely successful film career, reflects just how culturally and socially influential that life was. You can’t tell the story of the rise of Hollywood in the 1930s without a chapter on Hattie McDaniel.
But does it matter to that story that so many of McDaniel’s most famous characters, from Mammy in Gone and Aunt Tempy in Song to the nostalgic post-Civil War mammy figure in Shirley Temple’s The Little Colonel (1935), embodied stereotypical, even mythic, visions of African American identity, figures for whom slavery seemed to be the pleasant idyll of plantation tradition legend and in whose life the highest duty seemed to be caring for young white children? The preponderence of such roles is, to my mind, a reflection of McDaniel’s era and culture far more than of any choices or emphases of hers; but nonetheless, it does seem impossible to tell McDaniel’s individual story without recognizing the ways in which it too often dovetailed with a broader, longstanding, and still in that period dominant narrative of African American identity and community. Which is to say, an Academy Award-winning performance as a mammy is still a performance as a mammy—and one hardly (if at all) distinguishable from century-old images of that stock type.Yet if the type had not changed much, the performers certainly had. The Mammy role in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), for example, was played by a white actress, Jennie Lee, in blackface; a quarter of a century later McDaniel would win her Oscar. Change and progress aren’t always pretty, and they’re hardly ever ideal; but the shift from Lee to McDaniel—like McDaniel’s busy and successful two decades of work more generally—represents change and progress to be sure. Indeed, it’s fair to ask whether the far more complex female slave characters and performances in two ground-breaking recent historical films—DjangoUnchained’s Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) and 12 Years a Slave’s Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o)—would have been possible without Hattie McDaniel and her mammies. I don’t know that they would have—and I certainly know that McDaniel comprised a vital, and far too easily dismissed, step along the way.Next Gone post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Memories or perspectives on Gone with the Wind you’d share?

June 27, 2016: Gone with the Wind Turns 80: Racist Classics

[June 30thmarks the 80th anniversary of the initial publication of one of the 20th century’s bestselling novels, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind(1936). So this week I’ll offer a handful of thoughts on the book and its legacies, as well as some of the broader issues to which it connects.]On how to view and re-view classic, racist works of literature and art.
My first published article (on which more later in the week) included an extended reading of Gone with the Wind, and as a tangential but not unimportant part of that work I talked to a number of colleagues and friends about their experiences with the novel; all of the ones who had experiences to share turned out to be female, but I wasn’t framing it through the lens of gender and don’t think that my point here should be either. As I was focusing my scholarly attention specifically on Mitchell’s portrayals of racial issues, I similarly focused my questions on those issues, but found that in each and every case my interviewees (all smart and thoughtful people prone by both nature and training to analyze most everything) really hadn’t thought much at all about race in the novel. They recognized that it was in there and that, as one would expect from a historical novel set in the pre- and post-Civil War era and written in the 1930s South to boot, it didn’t feature the most enlightened depiction of race. But for all of these readers, that had been a very minor and insignificant aspect of the novel, certainly not one that had interfered with (or even really registered amidst) their enjoyment of its plot threads and character arcs and relationships and action pieces and emotional shifts and everything else that made it the beloved uber-bestseller that it was and remains.
To some degree, I think the same process happened for many decades (at least) with D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The racial politics of Griffith’s film, and particularly its portrait of race in the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, are similar to but much more overt and central than those in Mitchell’s novel; to cite one similarity with that difference in degree, Mitchell’s novel features a heroic Ku Klux Klan raid led by one of its male heroes (a scene that none of my interviewees remembered at all), but Griffith’s film climaxes with the KKK riding to save the day and the film’s hero and heroine from marauding African Americans and Northern carpetbaggers (the movie’s original title, derived from the Thomas W. Dixon novel on which it was based, was The Clansman). Yet Griffith’s film was not only the first genuine blockbuster, a hugely successful financial and critical triumph that fundamentally influenced American filmmaking from then on; it remained for many decades a critical darling, and as recently as 1998 was slotted at #44 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years … 100 Movies retrospective. Certainly the film’s landmark technological advancements might merit such continued praise—and certainly recent critical appraisals have grappled with the film’s racial politics much more fully than had my Mitchell interviewees—but nonetheless, for a movie that climaxes with a heroic KKK ride (and that allegedly was used by that organization for recruiting purposes until at least the 1970s) to receive such critical esteem suggests at least a bit of the same kind of cognitive dissonance that Mitchell’s novel evokes.
At the very least, I would argue that no mention of Griffith’s film in any such list should fail to include the two much less successful but interesting and important films that were made in direct response to it. Both were created by African American activists, if in different ways and with very distinct emphases: Booker T. Washington and his assistant Emmett Scott worked with the NAACP to develop the project that would become Birth of a Race (1918), a World War I-set epic featuring two African American brothers who parallel but invert the wartime experiences of Griffith’s protagonists; and novelist Oscar Micheaux created and directed Within Our Gates (1920), a film that focused much more explicitly on issues of race, lynching, miscegenation, and the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction in the South. Neither film was successful in its own era, and both have been almost entirely forgotten since (Gates in fact disappeared until a single print was discovered in Spain in the 1970s), and that’s not without some cause; if we can recognize the technological and artistic achievements of Griffith’s film, we must likewise note that these two are in neither sense impressive. But each nonetheless features images and moments that not only challenge Griffith’s already-iconic ones but also would force American audiences to re-view our sense of our history and identity: a pivotal shot in Race of white and black soldiers heading to Europe together for action in World War I; the surprisingly graphic and brutal lynching sequences in Gates. Films don’t have to make Best Of lists to be well worth our attention.It will I hope come as no surprise to anybody that my ideal would be not at all to replace Griffith’s film or Mitchell’s novel with one or both of these other films. Instead, I think the best case scenario would be one in which we engage with all four texts, both to consider how they form a conversation around a number of crucial shared themes (not only race, but also family and war, among others) and to analyze American art and culture and identity in the early 20thcentury and beyond. There’s no reason to stop engaging with the classics, but we certainly should re-view them with as much context and complexity as possible. Next Gone post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Memories or perspectives on Gone with the Wind you’d share?

June 25-26, 2016: Crowd-sourced SummerStudying

[To kick off the summer of 2016, this week’s series has AmericanStudied some famous summer texts and contexts. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post featuring the responses and nominations of fellow SummerStudiers—add your hot takes in comments, please!]Following up Monday’s “Summertime” post, Michael D. Dwyer Tweets, “I just watched the video this AM. It's a great celebration of Philly's public spaces.”Following up Tuesday’s “Boys of Summer” post, Rob Bartolomewrites, “I'm probably just reaching ‘that age,’ but I've found myself thinking more and more about the concept of nostalgia, both on a personal and macro-political level. Really fascinated by all of this.” Later in the week, Rob shares his own summer song nominee, “‘Hot in the City’ by Billy Idol. There's something so timeless and American about it, but it also has such an 80s sleaziness to it.” And Jeff Renye adds, “,Sleazy rock? Put Van Halen’s ‘Panama’on that list.”Following up Wednesday’s “Summertime Sadness” post, Ariana Garcia writes, “I actually compare Lana Del Rey to Lord Byron all the time in my head. She is amazing, easily my favorite female artist. Especially her latest album Honeymoon is incredibly dark, romantic and she's definitely an example, to me, of a modern Byronic Hero. Songs like ‘Terrence Loves You’ and ‘Art Deco’ always give me that image. I love all of her work. Her lyrics get better with every album! Honeymoonactually includes an interlude ‘Burnt Norton’ in which she reads T.S. Eliot's first stanza of Four Quartets.”For other summertime songs, L.D. Burnett highlights, “Don Henley, ‘Boys of Summer’; Beach Boys, ‘California Girls’; Joni Mitchell, ‘Carey,’ ‘California.’ Many more—summer is my season!—but that works for now.”Paige Wallace nominates, “Any music by Good Old War!”Maranda Fluet shares, “‘Faded’ by Alan Walker and ‘Cake by the Ocean’ by DNCE.”Rob LeBlanc highlights, “America’s ‘Sister Golden Hair,’ Looking Glass’ ‘Brandy (You're a Fine Girl),’ Lovin' Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City,’ Patti Scialfa’s ‘23rd Street Lullaby,’ and Animal Collective’s ‘My Girls.’”Ariana Garcia shares, “Death Cab for Cutie’s ‘Summer Skin,’ Modest Mouse’s ‘Missed the Boat,’ Hot Hot Heat’s ‘Middle of Nowhere,’ Lydia’s ‘The Exit,’ Gregory Alan Isakov’s ‘Amsterdam,’ Bon Iver’s ‘Holocene,’ Empire of the Sun’s ‘I'll Be Around,’ Radical Face’s ‘Welcome Home,’ Rogue Valley’s ‘False Floors,’ This Will Destroy You’s ‘They Move on Tracks of Never Ending Light,’ and Industries of the Blind’s ‘I Just Wanted to Make You Something Beautiful.’ It wasn't supposed to be this long but once I get started on music I can't stop! Oops.”Jeff Renye shares “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin, while Ben Lieberman writes, “This will be different from the others: ‘Someone Somewhere in Summertime’ by Simple Minds.Rob Gosselin writes, “Alice Cooper yelling ‘School’s Out.’ Steve Miller's ballad about Billie Joe and Bobby Sue, ‘Take the Money and Run.’ Matthew Sweet and his amazing guitar riffs on ‘Girlfriend.’ Rob adds, “When I was younger I spent two weeks every summer at a camp in Maine. ‘Take the Money and Run’ was on the jukebox. Every time I hear that song, I'm sitting by the side of a lake with a group of teenagers trying to figure out what this crazy world is all about … and I'm still trying to figure it out.”On Twitter, Clarissa Ceglio likewise shares “School’s Out,” writing, “Though it was already 12ish years old by my high school years we'd gleefully crank up the radio for Cooper's song.”Tara Strauch Tweets her “eclectic” summer list: “ Huck Finn , “In the Mood,” and the movie Twister .”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?