Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 292

April 27, 2016: Short Story Cycles: The House on Mango Street

[This semester, as part of my Ethnic American Lit course, I’ve taught all or part of three short story cycles: Love Medicine, The Joy Luck Club, and The House on Mango Street. So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy those three works, as well as a few other examples of this complex literary genre.]On two childhood experiences that the young adult cycle gets perfectly right.I taught exceprts from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street(1984) in my Ethnic American Lit course for a reason: the identity and perspective of young Esperanza Cordero, first-person narrator of the book’s many short short stories, are deeply informed by her cultural heritage as the daughter of Mexican American immigrants. For evidence, I point you to the book’s fourth story (and the first in which we meet Esperanza by name), “My Name,” which foregrounds the cultural, linguistic, and immigrant issues and experiences that will continue to impact and influence Esperanza’s childhood across the cycle. Yet precisely because Esperanza is a child and then young adult throughout the book (which begins when she’s about 9 and ends as she prepares to leave for college), Cisneros’ stories also engage consistently—and about as well as any American literary works ever have—with some of the most shared and foundational aspects of childhood.One of those is childhood friends. From Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in their respective Mark Twain novels to Scout and Dill in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, there have been plenty of childhood friendships in classic American literature, but to my mind none have captured the rhythms and rituals of childhood play among peers nearly as well as does Cisneros in stories like “Our Good Day” (set at a moment when Esperanza and her friends Rachel and Lucy are inseparable) and “And Some More” (when they and Esperanza’s sister Nenny are in the middle of an argument and hate each other). Partly what distinguishes Cisneros’ stories and depictions of friendship from those others is her use of pitch-perfect dialogue, creating the voices and conversations of these young girls in a way that’s both thoroughly natural yet helps advance her book’s themes at the same time. But those dialogues, like everything in House on Mango Street, are framed by Esperanza’s narration and voice, and the closing paragraph of “Our Good Day” reflects how wonderfully that narration shapes these moments of friendship: “Down, down Mango Street we go. Rachel, Lucy, me. Our new bicycle. Laughing the crooked ride back.”If such moments of friendship (at its best and at its worst) represent one way to define childhood, another way would be to see it as a series of small realizations, seemingly minor epiphanies about the world through which our perspectives gradually expand and mature. One of the best examples in House on Mango Street is in “Darius & the Clouds,” in which Darius, “who doesn’t like school, who is something stupid and mostly a fool, said something wise today.” The kids are looking up at the clouds and naming their shapes, and Darius, pointing to “that one there,” says, “That’s God. … God? somebody little asked. God, he said, and made it simple.” Like many of the characters in individual Cisneros stories, Darius will largely disappear for the rest of the book—but clearly the character and moment were meaningful for young Esperanza, and they become one of many such stories in which her perspective shifts and grows, often directly impacted by those same childhood peers and neighborhood friends. By the end of Cisneros’ unique and wonderful short story cycle, Esperanza has been profoundly changed by all those moments and stories—and so have we.Next cycle tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other short story cycles you’d highlight?

April 26, 2016: Short Story Cycles: The Joy Luck Club

[This semester, as part of my Ethnic American Lit course, I’ve taught all or part of three short story cycles: Love Medicine, The Joy Luck Club, and The House on Mango Street. So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy those three works, as well as a few other examples of this complex literary genre.]On two easily overlooked histories at the heart of the bestselling cycle.Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) is one of the most popular and influential American novels (or collections, or—so it goes with short story cycles!) of the last quarter-century. While there are many elements that have contributed to that success, I would argue that there’s a particularly universal appeal to the book’s focus on four mother-daughter relationships, and to Tan’s creation of the evocative and engaging perspectives and voices of those women (who narrate their individual stories to each other as intended audiences). And Tan’s short story cycle links those universal parent-child dynamics to one of the most widely shared American stories, that of first and second generation immigrant families experiencing the old and new worlds of their two cultures, and the issues of assimilation, acculturation, language, culture clashes, tradition and change, and more that come with those experiences. All of which is to say, it’d be possible to argue that the specific Chinese and Chinese American contexts of Tan’s book could be shifted to other cultures without changing much about Joy Luck Club.Possible, but wrong. Despite those universal and American connections, Tan’s book is profoundly linked to and influenced by Chinese American histories, and indeed can help us better remember a couple often forgotten such histories. For one thing, there’s the vital World War II setting of the mothers’ immigrations to the U.S., a key historical moment in the evolution of American immigration law. For the first time since the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), a few Chinese arrivals were allowed to enter the United States legally—as long as they could prove that they were fleeing the war’s horrors, as part of an annual quota of 105 visas allowed by a 1943 revision to the Exclusion Act (I disagree with the term “repeal” in that description, as the law remained in force for virtually all Chinese arrivals). Besides helping us better remember the discriminatory origin points and gradual, often painful evolution of our immigration laws, this World War II moment also powerfully informs both the immigration experiences and the perspectives of Tan’s mother characters. As she describes the arrival process for an exemplary such mother, in the short prefatory text that opens her book, “Then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.”Notwithstanding those challenges and frustrations, the mother characters are able to immigrate to the U.S.—and they settle and begin their new lives in San Francisco, a city with its own longstanding, too often forgotten or minimized Chinese American histories. That is, of course 20th century San Francisco is known for its Chinatown and Chinese American community, but far too often (I would argue) our collective narratives portray that community as a relatively recent or new one. Whereas in historical reality, San Francisco’s Chinese community predates Anglo arrival and settlement, going back to the early 19th century when the city and California were under Spanish and then Mexican rule. Better engaging with that longstanding history helps us see the experiences of Tan’s characters and families—and perhaps especially of her daughter characters, growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown—not as simply immigrants from one culture moving into another, but as new arrivals to and members of a hybrid cultural community that has existed within multiple nations, across multiple centuries. A hybrid community nicely reflected by the hybrid literary genre of Tan’s short story cycle.Next cycle tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other short story cycles you’d highlight?

April 25, 2016: Short Story Cycles: Love Medicine

[This semester, as part of my Ethnic American Lit course, I’ve taught all or part of three short story cycles: Love Medicine, The Joy Luck Club, and The House on Mango Street. So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy those three works, as well as a few other examples of this complex literary genre.]On two complementary roles of the opening story in a devastating, beautiful cycle.Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (originally published in 1984 and revised and expanded in 1993) opens with a complex, multi-part short story, “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” (note that, like many of the stories/chapters in Erdrich’s book and most short story cycles, “World’s” was initially published separately in the magazine version at that link). “World’s” focuses first on a particular moment, the last day and death of one character, June Kashpaw, as described by a third-person narrator; then its second through fourth sections feature the first-person narration of another character (June’s niece Albertine Johnson) portraying what the aftermath of that moment reveals about the Kashpaw family and Ojibwe (Chippewa) reservation that will be focal points throughout Love Medicine. In all those ways, “World’s” serves as a framing story for the book that follows—but it also serves two other, complex and resonant roles in Erdrich’s text.For one thing, “World’s” helps us understand the chronological shifts that comprise Erdrich’s structure. While this opening story is set in 1981, roughly the book’s present, the next three stories are set in 1934, the earliest moment on which it will focus; the remainder of the book gradually moves back up to the present, culminating in a group of stories set later in the 80s than “World’s.” There are many ways we might analyze this structural choice, but I would link it to a central thread of “World’s”: Albertine’s return to her reservation home (she is studying nursing at a college in Fargo) and the questions and conversations about family histories and identities that she finds and participates in there. Given that the three 1934 stories are narrated by Albertine’s grandparents Marie and Nector (the first two of the stories) and their peer and fellow family matriarch Lulu (the third story), it’s fair to say that these stories—and thus in a real sense the rest of the book—represent direct responses to such family history questions, opportunities for these individuals to express their identities, relationships, and understandings of the families and communities of which they’re part.The book’s structure culminates in another four-part story, “Crossing the Water.” Like “World’s,” “Crossing” has plenty to do on its own terms, such as introducing one final first-person narrator (young King “Howard” Kashpaw, a fourth generation character who despite being five years old has plenty to add to the book’s narratives) and culminating the self-discovery arc of another (Lipsha Morrissey, who learns of and meets his father Gerry for the first time). But since Lipsha is June’s son (another fact he has learned in the course of the book and comes to understand fully here), and since he ends the story driving back to his reservation home in a car that the family metonymically associates with June (it was purchased with her life insurance payout), Lipsha and “Crossing” also echo and complement Albertine and “World’s” and their framing roles in Love Medicine. Taken together, these two stories frame the book’s multi-generational family histories through the lens of two of its youngest characters, both separate from the reservation and its Ojibwe community and culture yet still deeply influenced and even inspired by them. I can think of few better arguments for the unique value of a short story cycle than the role that Love Medicine’s individual opening story plays in framing these structural, perspectival, and thematic elements.Next cycle tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other short story cycles you’d highlight?

April 23-24, 2016: Crowd-sourced Patriots

[For this year’s series on genuine American patriots, I focused on contemporary figures who are doing the hard work of patriotism. If there was a through-line to these four, in addition to the ideas I discussed in my Patriot’s Day post, it’d be Howard Zinn’s famous quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and nominees of fellow AmericanStudiers—add your own in comments, please!]First, I’ll add one more great example of online public scholarly patriotism to Friday’s list: ‘Merica Magazine , which was founded by graduate students Ed Simon and Wade Linebaugh precisely to practice this more critical but still celebratory form of patriotism.Responding to the Howard Zinn quote, writes that it “reminds me of a video I saw yesterday of Keith Haring drawing graffiti in an extremely public place; fresh off a train in a New York City train station with dozens of onlookers.”Steve Edwards writes, “I like John Francis, the environmentalist who gave up riding in cars & *talking* in order to protest our reliance on fossil fuels.”Ben Lieberman writes, “George McGovern. Not only a Presidential candidate who combined real policy chops with principle, but a pilot who flew many missions over Europe during World War II”; Ben also nominates “Thurgood Marshall and Nelson Mandela.”Andrew DaSilva nominates, “First are the US patriots. Former State Senator Therese Murray she helped pave the way for major health care legislation. Then there's Congressman Joseph P Kennedy III who has picked up the torch of public service for the people of this great Commonwealth like his great Uncle President John F Kennedy before him filling the shoes of the great liberal icon Congressman Barney Frank. As for foreign patriots I know it's controversial and he maybe a lot of other things but he is most certainly a patriot that being Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel while in the military he saved Israeli lives on the hijacked plane Sabena Flight 571 and while in politics he championed the Israeli cause of continued growth and nationhood. Lastly there's José Mujica former president of Uruguay. He donated a large percent of his salary to charity and although being imprisoned and shot at by the gov't he still went on to serve his country with compassion and humility of a bygone era....”Summer Lopez nominates Jon Stewart.Larry Rosenwald notes that the “first person to come to mind is Edward Snowden.”Robert Gosselin goes with Elizabeth Warren.Heather Richardson nominates Bree Newsome.Adam Lasilla highlights these Freedom University students.The aforementioned Wade Linebaugh goes way back and provocative (in the best sense), writing, “Not (just) trying to be a square peg here, but how about John Brown? He is far from an uncomplicated figure, of course, and memorializing his role in history doesn't need to mean condoning violence in the here and now. But still: a certain (maniacal, homicidal, treasonous) kind of patriot, perhaps.”And AmericanStudier pére Steve Railton goes similarly old-school with Henry David Thoreau!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other figures you’d nominate?

April 22, 2016: 21st Century Patriots: Online Public Scholarship

[For this year’s series on genuine American patriots, I wanted to focus on contemporary figures who are doing the hard work of patriotism. If there’s a through-line to these four, in addition to the ideas I discussed in my Patriot’s Day post, it’d be Howard Zinn’s famous quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Please share your own patriotic nominees, dissenters or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post we can all be proud of!]It will likely come as a surprise to no readers of this blog that I believe AmericanStudies public scholars are among those doing the hard work of patriotism. Here are four places online where you can find some of the best of that work:1)      US Intellectual History blog: The recent post at that hyperlink, by my online friend and Guest Poster Rob Greene, embodies the best of the USIH blog: nuanced, thoughtful, deeply researched, challenging and provocative work that pushes our understandings of American community and identity on every level. There’s no better example of 21stcentury public scholarship as critical patriotism than USIH.2)      Saved By History: Saved by History is the personal scholarly blog of one of the USIH community’s most consistent and interesting voices, cultural and intellectual historian L.D. Burnett. Like most of the best personal scholarly blogs (ie, the models for my own continued work in this space), Burnett’s combines scholarship and research, pedagogy and practice, personal reflections, and links and shout-outs to fellow scholars, offering us a window into the perspective and career of one exemplary public scholar.3)      African American Intellectual History Society blog: I believe that W.E.B. Du Bois would be proud of and inspired by (and definitely want to participate in) the work being done at the AAIHS blog. Need I say any more??4)      NPR’s Monkey See: The public radio pop culture blog likely doesn’t fit with most of our shared definitions of public scholarship—it’s more the combination of reporting and analysis we’d usually associate these days with journalistic bloggers. But to my mind, public scholarship is no longer limited in any sense to the academy (if it ever was), or to certain kinds of scholarly voices or conversations. AmericanStudies public scholarship, to me, is defined by all those doing the hard and vital work of engaging with our culture, society, history, community, and identity, and seeking to bring that work to public audiences. The more sites and voices we can include as part of that public scholarly patriotism, the broader and deeper the conversations will be.Share other inspiring public scholars for the crowd-sourced post this weekend, please!BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other 21st century patriots you’d nominate?

April 21, 2016: 21st Century Patriots: Santana Young Man Afraid of His Horses

[For this year’s series on genuine American patriots, I wanted to focus on contemporary figures who are doing the hard work of patriotism. If there’s a through-line to these four, in addition to the ideas I discussed in my Patriot’s Day post, it’d be Howard Zinn’s famous quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Please share your own patriotic nominees, dissenters or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post we can all be proud of!]On a young tribal emissary who embodies 21st century communal activism.Most everything I know about Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses, who late last year at the 30th Annual Oglala Lakota Nation Wacipi (Pow Wow) was crowned Miss Oglala Lakota Nation 2015-2016, I learned from this article. I could paraphrase the article’s details and quotes in this paragraph, but instead I’ll ask you to check out that story about the amazing work and voice of this inspiring young activist, and then come back here when you’re done!Welcome back! I’m not sure I can imagine a more fitting moniker than Santana’s Lakota name, When She Speaks They Listen. In the series of testimonials with which late 19thcentury Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca concludes her autoethnographic book Life among the Piutes (1886), a friend of Winnemucca’s notes that “she deserves the attention of our best ears.” Indeed she did, and so too do Santana and her work, both to raise awareness of reservation issues such as domestic violence and teen suicide (among many others) and to “celebrate life,” deserve as wide a hearing and response as possible. To read the quotes of Santana’s in that article, to see the many layers to her community, tribal, and national activisms (while she’s attending college, serving as the president of the Oglala Lakota College Center, and preparing for law school applications), can’t help but inspire renewed commitment from all of us to do our part to better the communities and world we share.None of us can do it alone, of course, and Santana’s story also illustrates how truly communal are these activist efforts. Of particular note is the article’s recounting of her visit to the innovative and successful Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where students from kindergarten through high school all study the Lakota language as a central part of their curriculum. The school’s Lakota language teacher, Waniya Locke, articulates succinctly the connections of language to identity and community: “I invited Miss Oglala Lakota Nation into my classroom to show my students that outside my classroom, people really do care about our language. She encouraged them to continue to speak and grow in the Lakota Language.” Genuine patriotism takes impressive individual voices and leaders like Santana to be sure, but it also takes generations and communities of activists and leaders, like those being educated at Red Cloud. There’s nothing more inspiring and significant, nor more American in the best sense, than that combination. Last patriot tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other figures you’d nominate?

April 20, 2016: 21st Century Patriots: Deepa Iyer

[For this year’s series on genuine American patriots, I wanted to focus on contemporary figures who are doing the hard work of patriotism. If there’s a through-line to these four, in addition to the ideas I discussed in my Patriot’s Day post, it’d be Howard Zinn’s famous quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Please share your own patriotic nominees, dissenters or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post we can all be proud of!]On a wonderful new book that deserves to reference one of the greatest American poems.My main goal for this post isn’t anything I can write myself; instead, it’s to point you to Deepa Iyer’s We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (2015). Combining historical and sociological analysis, interviews and oral histories, and autoethnographic storytelling, Iyer has created a unique and vital book that is a must-read for all Americans. (It would make a particularly interesting companion to a book I reviewed last year, Zareena Grewal’s Islam is a Foreign Country.) Get it, read it, share it, and see if you can attend or even help organize one of the book talks through which Iyer is extending, amplifying, and adding to the book’s stories and effects.So that’s the main thing I wanted to say, and the main reason why Iyer has become a model for me not only of writing and public scholarship but also of genuine 21stcentury patriotism. But I can’t write about a book that paraphrases in its title Langston Hughes’ “I, Too,” on (if not indeed atop) the short list of my favorite American poems, and not say a bit about that connection as well. There’s a lot that I love about Hughes’ poem, including its teachability (I have brought it into at least four different courses and have had one of our best discussions each and every time) and its deceptive simplicity (those five short stanzas, the first and last only one line each; and yet we’ve never run out of things to say). But what I love most (and this won’t be a surprise to anyone who has read the prior posts about my fourth book project) is Hughes’ critical optimism, the way his poem engages directly with some of our darkest American histories and realities yet comes through (not in spite of, but through) them to the joyful hope of “they’ll see how beautiful I am” and the closing hopeful certainty of “I, too, am America.” Iyer’s book manages that same balance, achieves that same critical optimism, and I can’t imagine a more inspiring and vital component to 21stcentury patriotism.Next patriot tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other figures you’d nominate?

April 19, 2016: 21st Century Patriots: Alicia Garza

[For this year’s series on genuine American patriots, I wanted to focus on contemporary figures who are doing the hard work of patriotism. If there’s a through-line to these four, in addition to the ideas I discussed in my Patriot’s Day post, it’d be Howard Zinn’s famous quote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Please share your own patriotic nominees, dissenters or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post we can all be proud of!]What’s new about the hashtag activist, what’s not, and what’s perhaps most important.In this Thanksgiving 2014 post on Twitter, I highlighted the emerging community of activists who have begun to use the social media platform for organizing and protest, a trend that has come to be known in the years since as hashtag activism. The phrase originated in part as a critique (similar to the dismissive idea of “armchair warriors” in wartime), but has been fully adopted by the participants in these movements as a reflection of the vital role played by social media in forming, disseminating, and amplifying their messages and actions. Without a doubt one of the most prominent and successful such hashtag activisms has been the #BlackLivesMattermovement, which was created in 2012 in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin killing and George Zimmerman trial by three young activists: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. As Garza writes in this October 2014 herstory of the movement, everything about it was and remains deeply interconnected with and indebted to 21st century digital spaces and technologies.Yet a quick glance at Garza’s biography at the end of that 2014 herstory piece reveals that she likewise has deep roots in and connections to more traditional labor and social activisms. She rose to prominence as the Executive Director of San Francisco’s People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), moved to her current role as Special Projects Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance(NDWA), and has twice received the Bayard Rustin Community Activist award from San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Democratic Clubfor her anti-gentrification work and community organizing efforts in the city. Those roles make clear the ways that hashtag activisms have built upon and paralleled, at least as much as they have changed or contrasted with, longstanding histories of organizing and protest, and how much the two forms continue to evolve together (often with many of the same participants and leaders). And they also remind us that issues of race and ethnicity, labor and work, and neighborhood and community (among many others) are not now, as they have never been, separate spheres that require thoroughly distinct protest movements—indeed, there’s no more potent argument for intersectionality than the necessary links between such movements.If Garza thus reflects many different forms of intersectionality, there’s one in particular that I would highlight as illustrative of her 21st century patriotism. Garza usually self-identifies, as she does in the #BlackLivesMatter herstory, as a black queer woman, and the openness and centrality to her activism of her sexuality is striking, especially in contrast to the challenges that Bayard Rustin’s sexuality posed for her participation in the Civil Rights Movement. But it’s not the historical shift that I want to emphasize, so much as the vital new activist purpose to which both her public identity and her hashtag movement connect. #BlackLivesMatter, that is, isn’t really a civil rights movement, or even a rights movement at all—it’s a movement for the recognition of all identities as equally American, human, and deserving of rights. Both Garza’s work and her own identity and life exemplify that idea, one that (as North Carolina has recently reminded us) remains far less widely shared than it should be. And that makes her a genuine and inspiring 21stcentury patriot.Next patriot tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other figures you’d nominate?

April 18, 2016: Patriot’s Day Special Post

[In honor of Patriot’s Day—a holiday up here in New England, at least—here’s my annual post on the easier and harder forms of patriotism. A series on 21st century American patriots will follow!]
On the only time and way we can be patriotic.
One of my favorite literary exchanges of all time, and the one with which I begin the Introduction to my recently completed fourth book, occurs in the opening chapter of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones(1996; the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series that has been adapted into the popular HBO show). Seven year-old Brandon “Bran” Stark is riding home with his father and brothers from his first experience witnessing one of his father’s most difficult duties as a lord, the execution of a criminal; his father insists that if he is to sentence men to die, he should be the one to execute them, and likewise insists that his sons learn of and witness this once they are old enough. Two of Bran’s brothers have been debating whether the man died bravely or as a coward, and when Bran asks his father which was true, his father turns the question around to him. “Can a man be brave when he is afraid?” Bran asks. “That is the only time a man can be brave,” his father replies.
On the surface the line might seem obvious, an appeal to some of our very trite narratives about courage in the face of danger and the like (narratives that operate in explicit contrast to the ideas of cowardice with which I engaged in this post). But to my mind the moment, like all of Martin’s amazingly dense and complex series, works instead to undermine our easy narratives and force us to confront more difficult and genuine truths. That is, I believe we tend to define bravery, courage, heroism as the absence of fear, as those individuals who in the face of danger do not feel the same limiting emotions that others do and so can rise to the occasion more fully. But Martin’s truth is quite the opposite—that bravery is instead something that is found through and then beyond fear, that it is only by admitting the darker and more potentially limiting realities that we can then strive for the brightest and most ideal possibilities. I find that insight so potent not only because of its potential to revise oversimplifying narratives and force us to confront a complex duality instead, but also because it posits a version of heroism that any individual can achieve—if everyone feels fear in the face of danger, then everyone has the potential to be brave as well.
HBO recently premiered the sixth season of their award-winning series A Game of Thrones; the first season covered all of that first book of Martin’s, the second moved on to book two, and so on for subsequent seasons. I’ve watched season one and have mixed feelings, but no matter what the series has brought Martin’s works and themes to a far wider audience. But if that’s one reason why I’m thinking about this exchange today, the other is the aforementioned Massachusetts-specific holiday: Patriot’s Day. As with our narratives of courage and heroism, I believe that far too many of our ideals of patriotism focus on what I would call the easy kind: the patriotism that salutes a flag, that sings an anthem, that pledges allegiance, that says things like “God bless America” and “greatest country in the world” by rote. Whatever the communal value of such patriotism, it asks virtually nothing of individuals, and does even less to push a nation to be the best version of itself (if anything, it argues that the nation is already that best version). So in parallel to Martin’s line, I would argue for the harder and more genuine kind of patriotism, the kind that faces the darkest realities and strives for the brightest hope through that recognition, the kind that, when asked “Can an American be a patriot if he/she is critical of his/her country?,” replies, “That is the only time an American can be a patriot.”
Happy Patriot’s Day! The patriotic series continues tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think?

April 16-17, 2016: Tolkien Takeaways

[On April 16thmy younger son turns 9 years old. He, his brother, and I have spent a good bit of the last few months engrossed in the world of The Lord of the Rings, so for this birthday special post I wanted to highlight a few takeaways from Tolkien’s texts for AmericanStudiers. Add your Tolkien takeaways in comments, please!]1)      Cross-Cultural Transformation: In recent years Tolkien (like his peer and friend C.S. Lewis) has been critiqued for his portrayals of non-European societies and cultures, and rightfully so; Middle-earth’s darker/southern men are frustratingly under-developed and one-dimensional in comparison to his northern societies. But at the same time, the characters and relationship that undergo one of the most significant changes in the course of the story are Gimli and Legolas, a dwarf and elf who begin with the typical antipathy those races feel toward one another and end the best of friends. And characters like Boromir and his father Denethor, who focus solely on their own city/nation (Gondor) and its needs, are proven time and again to be dangerously narrow-minded and myopic. Cross-cultural transformation for the win!2)      Democracy, Ultimately: One of the questions that came up again and again from the boys as we read through the series was why Sam calls Frodo “Mr. Frodo”; the boys understood that Sam began the series as Frodo’s employee (his gardener, specifically), but still couldn’t get why, once they were on their journey together, he continued to address his friend as his boss or superior. There’s no doubt that Sam begins the series as a simple man who is in social status but also perspective and identity below Frodo, and perhaps he remains there in some ways throughout. Yet at the same time, I would argue that the series’ culmination—both in the final stages of Frodo and Sam’s epic journey and in the multiple aftermaths that follow it—both depends on Sam’s actions and heroism and comes to focus on him as the embodiment of the Shire’s and Middle-earth’s future. Tolkien might have begun his world-building with a sense of English prep school elitism, that is, but he ended it with a genuine and inspiring vision of democracy.3)      Gollum and Empathy: In one of the series’ most famous exchanges (and one of the moments that the film versions got exactly right, even though they shifted its setting entirely), Frodo expresses regret that Bilbo did not kill the creature Gollum when he had the chance, and Gandalf disagrees, noting both that “it was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand” and that this pity might decide the fate of all. Given Gollum’s prominent role in the quest’s denouement, it’s easy to focus on the second point, but I would argue that it is in fact the first which drives Tolkien’s development of his most complex and interesting character. And I would go further, arguing that it is not just pity but also and most importantly empathy that the series shows toward the seemingly monstrous Gollum. Tolkien certainly depicts a world with clear powers of good and evil, but also one in which many characters occupy a grayer area between those two extremes, include layers of identity that defy any one categorization and demand empathy if we are to understand them. That’s a very valuable takeaway indeed.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Tolkien takeaways you’d share?