Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 372
October 3, 2013
October 3, 2013: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: MacFarlane Prize Winners
[This past weekend, the New England American Studies Association held its annual conference. This week, I’ll follow up some of the most inspiring aspects of the conference and some of the many great talks I heard there. If you were part of it, or if you have your own thoughts on any of these topics, please chime in!]
On two undergraduates carrying the AmericanStudies torch for an impressive new generation.Another inspiring part of my work for this year’s NEASA conference was as the chair of the MacFarlane Prize Committee. The MacFarlane Prize, created to honor Lisa MacFarlane, is awarded annually for outstanding undergraduate American Studies work; this year we awarded two, one for an essay and one for a senior thesis. The two winners exemplify two distinct but equally vital sides to the discipline:1) The thesis winner, Julia Falkowski of Connecticut’s Trinity College, wrote about a historical and traditional Americanist topic: the interconnections and influences between 19thcentury authors Sarah Josepha Hale and Edgar Allan Poe. In so doing, and in bringing a number of different disciplinary approaches and lenses to bear on these two complex figures, she demonstrated just how much there remains to say about our literary, cultural, and national history, particularly when American Studies helps us to say it.2) The essay winner, Sara Gilford of New York’s Barnard College, focused on a much more contemporary topic: the use and abuse of post-9/11 narratives in both American culture and educational curricula. But her essay was informed by ongoing American narratives and histories, making it just as contextualized and rich in its analyses as Julia’s was in the other direction. The best AmericanStudies scholarship can of course inform present debates and issues, and Sara’s essay exemplified that potential.Give me hope for the future, these folks and their many great fellow submitters do. Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On two undergraduates carrying the AmericanStudies torch for an impressive new generation.Another inspiring part of my work for this year’s NEASA conference was as the chair of the MacFarlane Prize Committee. The MacFarlane Prize, created to honor Lisa MacFarlane, is awarded annually for outstanding undergraduate American Studies work; this year we awarded two, one for an essay and one for a senior thesis. The two winners exemplify two distinct but equally vital sides to the discipline:1) The thesis winner, Julia Falkowski of Connecticut’s Trinity College, wrote about a historical and traditional Americanist topic: the interconnections and influences between 19thcentury authors Sarah Josepha Hale and Edgar Allan Poe. In so doing, and in bringing a number of different disciplinary approaches and lenses to bear on these two complex figures, she demonstrated just how much there remains to say about our literary, cultural, and national history, particularly when American Studies helps us to say it.2) The essay winner, Sara Gilford of New York’s Barnard College, focused on a much more contemporary topic: the use and abuse of post-9/11 narratives in both American culture and educational curricula. But her essay was informed by ongoing American narratives and histories, making it just as contextualized and rich in its analyses as Julia’s was in the other direction. The best AmericanStudies scholarship can of course inform present debates and issues, and Sara’s essay exemplified that potential.Give me hope for the future, these folks and their many great fellow submitters do. Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
October 2, 2013
October 2, 2013: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: Diverse Voices
[This past weekend, the New England American Studies Association held its annual conference. This week, I’ll follow up some of the most inspiring aspects of the conference and some of the many great talks I heard there. If you were part of it, or if you have your own thoughts on any of these topics, please chime in!]
On three participants who exemplify the cross-communal possibilities of American Studies.I mentioned Mike Millner and Jonathan Silverman’s compelling talks about culture and casinos in yesterday’s post; the audience of that panel likewise contributed their own complex responses and ideas to the conversation. And one main reason why the discussion was particularly strong was the diversity of perspectives it, like the conference overall, included. For example:1) Sharing many ideas was the conference’s keynote speaker, the impressive Native American Studies scholar Mark Rifkin. As he does in that great book, Mark brought sophisticated theoretical and analytical perspectives to bear on the panel’s topics and many related questions and themes.2) Adding her ideas to the mix was Clarissa Ceglio, one of the founders of ConnecticutHistory.organd a leading voice in public history, museum studies, and many related fields. Clarissa’s connections of our discussion to key questions in museum studies revealed just how productive these kinds of interdisciplinary conversations can be.3) Also in the audience was Tall Oak, a regional Native American elder, historian, and activist. I wrote in the lead-up to the conference about my excitement that we were involving the Native American community directly, through the site and in other ways, and Tall Oak’s presence, voice, and ideas validated just how important and inspiring it is to make such communal connections.Made for a really rich discussion! Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On three participants who exemplify the cross-communal possibilities of American Studies.I mentioned Mike Millner and Jonathan Silverman’s compelling talks about culture and casinos in yesterday’s post; the audience of that panel likewise contributed their own complex responses and ideas to the conversation. And one main reason why the discussion was particularly strong was the diversity of perspectives it, like the conference overall, included. For example:1) Sharing many ideas was the conference’s keynote speaker, the impressive Native American Studies scholar Mark Rifkin. As he does in that great book, Mark brought sophisticated theoretical and analytical perspectives to bear on the panel’s topics and many related questions and themes.2) Adding her ideas to the mix was Clarissa Ceglio, one of the founders of ConnecticutHistory.organd a leading voice in public history, museum studies, and many related fields. Clarissa’s connections of our discussion to key questions in museum studies revealed just how productive these kinds of interdisciplinary conversations can be.3) Also in the audience was Tall Oak, a regional Native American elder, historian, and activist. I wrote in the lead-up to the conference about my excitement that we were involving the Native American community directly, through the site and in other ways, and Tall Oak’s presence, voice, and ideas validated just how important and inspiring it is to make such communal connections.Made for a really rich discussion! Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
October 1, 2013
October 1, 2013: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: The Site
[This past weekend, the New England American Studies Association held its annual conference. This week, I’ll follow up some of the most inspiring aspects of the conference and some of the many great talks I heard there. If you were part of it, or if you have your own thoughts on any of these topics, please chime in!]
On two compelling sides to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center.There’s just something about having a scholarly conference at a historic or cultural site—I felt it with the 2009 NEASA conference at the Lowell Boott Cotton Mills Museum, the 2010 conference at the Mass Historical Society, and certainly with my own 2011 conference at Plimoth Plantation; and I felt it again, with particular force and clarity, this past weekend. Partly it’s a matter of direct contexts—the potent benefit to talking about issues of Native American identity, community, history, sovereignty, and so many more in one of the region and nation’s most impressive spaces devoted to those themes. But it goes way beyond that—many of the panels had nothing explicitly to do with Native American issues, but were nonetheless enriched immeasurably, as were the conference’s more informal and ongoing conversations and connections, by their surroundings.There’s far more to say about those surroundings, about the Museum, than I can include here—I’ve already urged you to check it and other regional Native American museums out for yourself, and you should! But I did want to take this opportunity to highlight two very distinct but equally compelling and significant aspects of the Museum. First, I was struck during this visit by the genuine breadth of the Museum’s permanent exhibits, which guide visitors from the Ice Age up through contemporary life on the nearby reservation, with numerous stops along the way. In its own way, and despite the far more limited resources and space, the Museum tells a parallel story to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, just filtered through the lens provided by this particular place and community. As such, visitors to the Museum come away with a deeply contextual and compelling sense of life (in every way) as it has unfolded for first millions of years, then thousands of years, then the last few centuries, and then in the daily experiences of contemporary Americans. That’s a really ambitious goal, and one the Museum pulls off in spades.The second aspect I want to highlight couldn’t feel more different, but is unquestionably part of our 21st century engagement with the place and with Native American communities overall: the Museum is located adjacent to Foxwoods, the resort casino operated by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe. Two of my NEASA Council colleagues and friends, Michael Millner and Jonathan Silverman, gave excellent talks on the complex relationships between the tribe, the casino, other historic and cultural sites, and images and realities of Native American life (past and present). As Jonathan in particular acknowledged, the casino is an incredibly fraught and contradictory space, one that represents on the one hand an important step forward for the tribe and yet on the other hand conjures up (in its own iconography and in the popular imagination) images that are at best stereotyped and at worst directly harmful toward Native Americans (I once heard an intelligent and generally well-informed woman argue that since the casinos now exist, Native Americans must be doing very well and certainly don’t need our help any more). But whatever we make of it, to my mind a visit to the Museum should also include a thoughtful encounter with Foxwoods—just try to keep your wallet safely out of reach while you’re there.Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On two compelling sides to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center.There’s just something about having a scholarly conference at a historic or cultural site—I felt it with the 2009 NEASA conference at the Lowell Boott Cotton Mills Museum, the 2010 conference at the Mass Historical Society, and certainly with my own 2011 conference at Plimoth Plantation; and I felt it again, with particular force and clarity, this past weekend. Partly it’s a matter of direct contexts—the potent benefit to talking about issues of Native American identity, community, history, sovereignty, and so many more in one of the region and nation’s most impressive spaces devoted to those themes. But it goes way beyond that—many of the panels had nothing explicitly to do with Native American issues, but were nonetheless enriched immeasurably, as were the conference’s more informal and ongoing conversations and connections, by their surroundings.There’s far more to say about those surroundings, about the Museum, than I can include here—I’ve already urged you to check it and other regional Native American museums out for yourself, and you should! But I did want to take this opportunity to highlight two very distinct but equally compelling and significant aspects of the Museum. First, I was struck during this visit by the genuine breadth of the Museum’s permanent exhibits, which guide visitors from the Ice Age up through contemporary life on the nearby reservation, with numerous stops along the way. In its own way, and despite the far more limited resources and space, the Museum tells a parallel story to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, just filtered through the lens provided by this particular place and community. As such, visitors to the Museum come away with a deeply contextual and compelling sense of life (in every way) as it has unfolded for first millions of years, then thousands of years, then the last few centuries, and then in the daily experiences of contemporary Americans. That’s a really ambitious goal, and one the Museum pulls off in spades.The second aspect I want to highlight couldn’t feel more different, but is unquestionably part of our 21st century engagement with the place and with Native American communities overall: the Museum is located adjacent to Foxwoods, the resort casino operated by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe. Two of my NEASA Council colleagues and friends, Michael Millner and Jonathan Silverman, gave excellent talks on the complex relationships between the tribe, the casino, other historic and cultural sites, and images and realities of Native American life (past and present). As Jonathan in particular acknowledged, the casino is an incredibly fraught and contradictory space, one that represents on the one hand an important step forward for the tribe and yet on the other hand conjures up (in its own iconography and in the popular imagination) images that are at best stereotyped and at worst directly harmful toward Native Americans (I once heard an intelligent and generally well-informed woman argue that since the casinos now exist, Native Americans must be doing very well and certainly don’t need our help any more). But whatever we make of it, to my mind a visit to the Museum should also include a thoughtful encounter with Foxwoods—just try to keep your wallet safely out of reach while you’re there.Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
September 30, 2013
September 30, 2013: NEASA Conference Follow Ups: The Blog
[This past weekend, the New England American Studies Association held its annual conference. This week, I’ll follow up some of the most inspiring aspects of the conference and some of the many great talks I heard there. If you were part of it, or if you have your own thoughts on any of these topics, please chime in!]
On the limitations, possibilities, and future of our pre-conference blog.This year’s conference marked the third in a row for which we’ve created a NEASA Pre-Conference blog, a space where presenters can share some of their ideas and work and start the conference conversations early (as well as extend them to folks who can’t be at the conference itself). The prior two years’ blogs are still online, here and here, which makes for particularly easy comparisons across the three years of blogging. On one level, unfortunately, those comparisons are a bit discouraging: the number of posts has gone down each year, as have the number of comments on those posts. There could be lots of practical and unavoidable reasons for that decline (from busier schedules and worries about job security/tenure [for which such blogging doesn’t generally count] to the need to do more teaching or research work in the summer), and it’s too small of a sample from which to draw any conclusions in any case; but still, of course I’d rather see the conversations gaining steam, ideally even building from year to year but at least feeling broadly communal in their own right.On the other hand, the internet in general tends to focus far too narrowly on quantity, on things like hits and pageviews, which while the most calculable part of blogging and web usage are not necessarily a measure of anything substantive (and I write that as a blogger who checks his own stats more than is probably healthy). Certainly I hope, and believe, that the folks who have contributed to each year’s pre-conference blog have gotten something out of the experience; speaking for those of us who have followed the posts, I can say unequivocally that we’ve gotten a great deal out of reading these thoughts, more than we could just by attending the conference panels (and of course there are always more panels and talks at a conference than any one person could attend and hear). Moreover, I think there’s significant practical and symbolic value to treating a conference as a conversation, and an ongoing and multi-layered one at that—a conversation that exists before and after the conference’s few days, that includes both those at the conference and many interested folks not there, and that, quite simply, is worth sharing.So as long as I’m part of the NEASA Council (and I hope to be until they pry AmericanStudies from my cold dead hands, or thereabouts), I can promise that I’ll do my part to keep the pre-conference blog going. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t evolve or change, can’t be done differently, can’t indeed improve in ways that might well facilitate more contributions or conversations. So for those reading this who’ve been part of NEASA and/or the blog over the last few years, and for those reading this interested in scholarly blogging—which, hey, is pretty much everybody reading this!—I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this kind of pre-conference blog could work, what it could be or do, how we could get more folks involved (from inside and outside the conference community), and so on. What say you?Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think?
On the limitations, possibilities, and future of our pre-conference blog.This year’s conference marked the third in a row for which we’ve created a NEASA Pre-Conference blog, a space where presenters can share some of their ideas and work and start the conference conversations early (as well as extend them to folks who can’t be at the conference itself). The prior two years’ blogs are still online, here and here, which makes for particularly easy comparisons across the three years of blogging. On one level, unfortunately, those comparisons are a bit discouraging: the number of posts has gone down each year, as have the number of comments on those posts. There could be lots of practical and unavoidable reasons for that decline (from busier schedules and worries about job security/tenure [for which such blogging doesn’t generally count] to the need to do more teaching or research work in the summer), and it’s too small of a sample from which to draw any conclusions in any case; but still, of course I’d rather see the conversations gaining steam, ideally even building from year to year but at least feeling broadly communal in their own right.On the other hand, the internet in general tends to focus far too narrowly on quantity, on things like hits and pageviews, which while the most calculable part of blogging and web usage are not necessarily a measure of anything substantive (and I write that as a blogger who checks his own stats more than is probably healthy). Certainly I hope, and believe, that the folks who have contributed to each year’s pre-conference blog have gotten something out of the experience; speaking for those of us who have followed the posts, I can say unequivocally that we’ve gotten a great deal out of reading these thoughts, more than we could just by attending the conference panels (and of course there are always more panels and talks at a conference than any one person could attend and hear). Moreover, I think there’s significant practical and symbolic value to treating a conference as a conversation, and an ongoing and multi-layered one at that—a conversation that exists before and after the conference’s few days, that includes both those at the conference and many interested folks not there, and that, quite simply, is worth sharing.So as long as I’m part of the NEASA Council (and I hope to be until they pry AmericanStudies from my cold dead hands, or thereabouts), I can promise that I’ll do my part to keep the pre-conference blog going. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t evolve or change, can’t be done differently, can’t indeed improve in ways that might well facilitate more contributions or conversations. So for those reading this who’ve been part of NEASA and/or the blog over the last few years, and for those reading this interested in scholarly blogging—which, hey, is pretty much everybody reading this!—I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this kind of pre-conference blog could work, what it could be or do, how we could get more folks involved (from inside and outside the conference community), and so on. What say you?Next follow up tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think?
September 28, 2013
September 28-29, 2013: September 2013 Recap
[A recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]
September 2: Labor Day Special: To celebrate Labor Day, I highlighted a handful of posts in which I’ve addressed work and the labor movement.September 3: Virginia Daytrips: Frontier Culture Museum: A series on AmericanStudies trips in the Commonwealth starts with a site that makes a compelling argument about our communal identity.September 4: Virginia Daytrips: Colonial Williamsburg: The series continues with the inevitably presentist and propagandistic sides to any historic reenactment.September 5: Virginia Daytrips: Monticello: Two tours that help visitors consider some of the contradictions and complexities of one of our most famous historic houses, as the series rolls on.September 6: Virginia Daytrips: Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center: The series concludes with the limitations and possibilities of a museum that goes really big.September 7-8: Crowd-sourced Daytrips: The responses of fellow AmericanStudiers to this week’s series, as well as a prior one on New England daytrips.September 9: Newport Stories: Cornelius Vanderbilt II: A series on stories connected to Newport’s The Breakers starts with the complex man who built the mansion.September 10: Newport Stories: The Omelet King: The series continues with the very American story of the Newport chef who made good (and made good eggs).September 11: Newport Stories: Gertrude Vanderbilt: The Vanderbilt daughter who looks like just another rich heiress—until we look closer.September 12: Newport Stories: Alice and Alva Vanderbilt: The two sisters-in-law whose identities and lives took dramatically different turns, as the series rolls on.September 13: Newport Stories: To Preserve or Not to Preserve: The series concludes with the million-dollar question behind Newport’s historic mansions.September 14-15: Public AmericanStudying Update: A follow up to my first two book talks of the fall, at Boston’s Suffolk and Wellesley Universities.September 16: Gloucester Stories: Judith Sargent: A series inspired by a visit to our oldest seaport starts with the house that imprisoned and liberated one of my favorite American women.September 17: Gloucester Stories: The Sense of the Past: The series continues with some of the reasons to better remember Gloucester’s long-term American histories.September 18: Gloucester Stories: Rocky Neck: On the historical and contemporary Art Colony that complicates and enriches our narratives of Gloucester.September 19: Gloucester Stories: What’s Next: Thinking about where a city like Gloucester goes from here, as the series rolls on.September 20: Gloucester Stories: Hammond Castle: The series concludes with the historic site that’s just too weird, and too American, not to include.September 21-22: Welcome to AmericanStudier!: An introductory post for those visitors and readers who are new to the blog, and everybody else too! (Now permanently featured to the right on the blog’s home page.)September 23: Justice is Not Color Blind: Scottsboro: A series on race and the American justice system starts with the book that helps us think about why dark histories happen, and what we can do about it.September 24: Justice is Not Color Blind: The Hurricane: The series continues with the benefits of both macro and micro approaches to a historic injustice.September 25: Justice is Not Color Blind: Duke: On the swinging pendulum, the benefit of the doubt, and the role of public scholars.September 26: Justice is Not Color Blind: Oscar Grant: What has and has not changed in the age of digital and social media, as the series rolls on.September 27: Justice is Not Color Blind: The New Jim Crow: The series concludes with the deeply depressing book that we should all read.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What would you like to see covered on the blog? Guest Posts you’d like to write?
September 2: Labor Day Special: To celebrate Labor Day, I highlighted a handful of posts in which I’ve addressed work and the labor movement.September 3: Virginia Daytrips: Frontier Culture Museum: A series on AmericanStudies trips in the Commonwealth starts with a site that makes a compelling argument about our communal identity.September 4: Virginia Daytrips: Colonial Williamsburg: The series continues with the inevitably presentist and propagandistic sides to any historic reenactment.September 5: Virginia Daytrips: Monticello: Two tours that help visitors consider some of the contradictions and complexities of one of our most famous historic houses, as the series rolls on.September 6: Virginia Daytrips: Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center: The series concludes with the limitations and possibilities of a museum that goes really big.September 7-8: Crowd-sourced Daytrips: The responses of fellow AmericanStudiers to this week’s series, as well as a prior one on New England daytrips.September 9: Newport Stories: Cornelius Vanderbilt II: A series on stories connected to Newport’s The Breakers starts with the complex man who built the mansion.September 10: Newport Stories: The Omelet King: The series continues with the very American story of the Newport chef who made good (and made good eggs).September 11: Newport Stories: Gertrude Vanderbilt: The Vanderbilt daughter who looks like just another rich heiress—until we look closer.September 12: Newport Stories: Alice and Alva Vanderbilt: The two sisters-in-law whose identities and lives took dramatically different turns, as the series rolls on.September 13: Newport Stories: To Preserve or Not to Preserve: The series concludes with the million-dollar question behind Newport’s historic mansions.September 14-15: Public AmericanStudying Update: A follow up to my first two book talks of the fall, at Boston’s Suffolk and Wellesley Universities.September 16: Gloucester Stories: Judith Sargent: A series inspired by a visit to our oldest seaport starts with the house that imprisoned and liberated one of my favorite American women.September 17: Gloucester Stories: The Sense of the Past: The series continues with some of the reasons to better remember Gloucester’s long-term American histories.September 18: Gloucester Stories: Rocky Neck: On the historical and contemporary Art Colony that complicates and enriches our narratives of Gloucester.September 19: Gloucester Stories: What’s Next: Thinking about where a city like Gloucester goes from here, as the series rolls on.September 20: Gloucester Stories: Hammond Castle: The series concludes with the historic site that’s just too weird, and too American, not to include.September 21-22: Welcome to AmericanStudier!: An introductory post for those visitors and readers who are new to the blog, and everybody else too! (Now permanently featured to the right on the blog’s home page.)September 23: Justice is Not Color Blind: Scottsboro: A series on race and the American justice system starts with the book that helps us think about why dark histories happen, and what we can do about it.September 24: Justice is Not Color Blind: The Hurricane: The series continues with the benefits of both macro and micro approaches to a historic injustice.September 25: Justice is Not Color Blind: Duke: On the swinging pendulum, the benefit of the doubt, and the role of public scholars.September 26: Justice is Not Color Blind: Oscar Grant: What has and has not changed in the age of digital and social media, as the series rolls on.September 27: Justice is Not Color Blind: The New Jim Crow: The series concludes with the deeply depressing book that we should all read.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What would you like to see covered on the blog? Guest Posts you’d like to write?
September 27, 2013
September 27, 2013: Justice is Not Color Blind: The New Jim Crow
[In this week’s series, I’ll highilght American histories and stories that help us contextualize one of the summer’s most controversial moments: the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. Like that case, each of these topics was and is a lightning rod—but what good is AmericanStudies if it can’t help us take hold of such charged conversations? Add your thoughts to the electric mix, please!]
On the broadest, and most disheartening, context for race and justice in 21stcentury America.I’ve written before in this space about the way that wars, even those with the most noble or necessary purposes, tend to draw out and feature the very worst in human behavior. I’ve also used that dark reality to make my case for why the phrase and concept “the war on terror” has been the worst outcome from the September 11thterrorist attacks (and, fortunately, one that seems to be waning in our national conversations). And I’ve likewise argued for the striking wrong-headedness of the “war on drugs,” a conflict that has produced just as many dark effects as and is just as impossible to imagine “winning” as the war on terror, and one directed even more overtly at those who are already victims (at least if you believe, as I do, that the war on drugs is much more consistently a war on drug users and drug addicts than on dealers or other criminals).Given all of that, I can’t imagine a more trenchant and timely book, nor a more thoroughly depressing and horrifying one, than Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Moreover, while Alexander’s work focuses first and foremost on the drug war and related realities of our horrifically distorted justice system, her title indicates the book’s broader and crucial historical sweep: her connection of these contemporary realities to the histories of racism and discriminationthat have (as I hope this week’s series has illustrated) so long been intertwined with law and justice in America. Quite simply, the book is like The Wire in public scholarly form, only without the wonderful performances and moments of humor and occasional happy endings and Omar Little-y goodness(show spoilers in that video) to distract us from the crushing weight of all the wrongs that both the show and book document and deconstruct.So how on earth do we—we public scholars, we Americans, we people period—respond to such realities? Other than by weeping softly, anyway, which I’m pretty much doing right now. It’s not a magic bullet by any means, but I think one important step is simply to read Alexander’s book, and thus to raise our communal awareness of all these interconnected histories and current events, issues and themes. I’m proud to say that my own institution, Fitchburg State University, has chosen The New Jim Crowas its first Common Community Read; over the next couple of years I’ll get some direct evidence for what such communal reading and engagement might mean, and will keep you posted for sure. Awareness and engagement are of course only the first steps, and can’t themselves solve—or even necessarily address—any of the root causes or problems that contribute to this dark national reality. But if we’re going to fight this war—to fight againstthis war, that is—they’re a pretty important ground from which to do so.September Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?
On the broadest, and most disheartening, context for race and justice in 21stcentury America.I’ve written before in this space about the way that wars, even those with the most noble or necessary purposes, tend to draw out and feature the very worst in human behavior. I’ve also used that dark reality to make my case for why the phrase and concept “the war on terror” has been the worst outcome from the September 11thterrorist attacks (and, fortunately, one that seems to be waning in our national conversations). And I’ve likewise argued for the striking wrong-headedness of the “war on drugs,” a conflict that has produced just as many dark effects as and is just as impossible to imagine “winning” as the war on terror, and one directed even more overtly at those who are already victims (at least if you believe, as I do, that the war on drugs is much more consistently a war on drug users and drug addicts than on dealers or other criminals).Given all of that, I can’t imagine a more trenchant and timely book, nor a more thoroughly depressing and horrifying one, than Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Moreover, while Alexander’s work focuses first and foremost on the drug war and related realities of our horrifically distorted justice system, her title indicates the book’s broader and crucial historical sweep: her connection of these contemporary realities to the histories of racism and discriminationthat have (as I hope this week’s series has illustrated) so long been intertwined with law and justice in America. Quite simply, the book is like The Wire in public scholarly form, only without the wonderful performances and moments of humor and occasional happy endings and Omar Little-y goodness(show spoilers in that video) to distract us from the crushing weight of all the wrongs that both the show and book document and deconstruct.So how on earth do we—we public scholars, we Americans, we people period—respond to such realities? Other than by weeping softly, anyway, which I’m pretty much doing right now. It’s not a magic bullet by any means, but I think one important step is simply to read Alexander’s book, and thus to raise our communal awareness of all these interconnected histories and current events, issues and themes. I’m proud to say that my own institution, Fitchburg State University, has chosen The New Jim Crowas its first Common Community Read; over the next couple of years I’ll get some direct evidence for what such communal reading and engagement might mean, and will keep you posted for sure. Awareness and engagement are of course only the first steps, and can’t themselves solve—or even necessarily address—any of the root causes or problems that contribute to this dark national reality. But if we’re going to fight this war—to fight againstthis war, that is—they’re a pretty important ground from which to do so.September Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?
September 26, 2013
September 26, 2013: Justice is Not Color Blind: Oscar Grant
[In this week’s series, I’ll highilght American histories and stories that help us contextualize one of the summer’s most controversial moments: the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. Like that case, each of these topics was and is a lightning rod—but what good is AmericanStudies if it can’t help us take hold of such charged conversations? Add your thoughts to the electric mix, please!]
On what has changed, and what hasn’t, in the age of digital and social media.On New Year’s Day, 2009, 22 year-old Oakland resident Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer while detained (along with many others) at the city’s Fruitvale Station train stop. Grant was returning from New Year’s Eve partying in San Francisco, and was unarmed; Johannes Mehserle, the officer who killed Grant, claimed he had intended to use his Taser to subdue the allegedly combative young man, who was lying face down at the time. Mehserle was eventually found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and not guilty of second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter; he served roughly seven months in the Los Angeles County Jail before being released in June 2011. This dark and tragic history has recently returned to the public eye thanks to the acclaimed independent film Fruitvale Station (2013), which uses the final day in Grant’s life to chronicle the young man’s shortcomings, possibilities, and killing.The shooting, which was not at all unlike numerous other incidents over the last decade, received the attention and response that it did thanks in large part to digital and social media. Multiple cell phone videos of the incident were recorded at the time and have since surfaced; each is of course as partial and haphazard as any such video would be, but collectively they provided a far fuller picture of the moment than would have been otherwise possible. Similarly, the spread of those videos, as well as details of protests and collective action, on social media brought the case to a significantly wider swath of the American public (at least those under a certain age) than would have ever learned about it from the Bay Area media coverage. In short, what differentiated Grant from those many other unarmed African American victims was simply and solely the ways in which new media captured and highlighted his death—it’s fair to say that whatever justice was achieved in the subsequent trial would not have been possible without this digital and social coverage; and certainly there would not be a film, and perhaps not the Oscar Grant Foundation which that film is supporting, without it.Yet it’s far from clear, to this AmericanStudier at least, that the tangible results of the case—the conviction of and sentence for Mehserle, the financial aftermath for Grant’s family, and so on—are the slightest bit different from (for example) those in the 1999 Amadou Diallo shooting or the 1992 Rodney King beating(which itself received attention in large part because of the home video taken by a bystander). There’s certainly something to be said for changing the narratives, the conversation, the way in which we engage with and understand such dark histories and the issues to which they connect, and clearly digital and social media have done that. But absent other changes—and from King to Diallo, Grant to Trayvon Martin, it’s hard to feel that much has changed—the fundamental question becomes that age-old professorial one: So what?Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On what has changed, and what hasn’t, in the age of digital and social media.On New Year’s Day, 2009, 22 year-old Oakland resident Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer while detained (along with many others) at the city’s Fruitvale Station train stop. Grant was returning from New Year’s Eve partying in San Francisco, and was unarmed; Johannes Mehserle, the officer who killed Grant, claimed he had intended to use his Taser to subdue the allegedly combative young man, who was lying face down at the time. Mehserle was eventually found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and not guilty of second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter; he served roughly seven months in the Los Angeles County Jail before being released in June 2011. This dark and tragic history has recently returned to the public eye thanks to the acclaimed independent film Fruitvale Station (2013), which uses the final day in Grant’s life to chronicle the young man’s shortcomings, possibilities, and killing.The shooting, which was not at all unlike numerous other incidents over the last decade, received the attention and response that it did thanks in large part to digital and social media. Multiple cell phone videos of the incident were recorded at the time and have since surfaced; each is of course as partial and haphazard as any such video would be, but collectively they provided a far fuller picture of the moment than would have been otherwise possible. Similarly, the spread of those videos, as well as details of protests and collective action, on social media brought the case to a significantly wider swath of the American public (at least those under a certain age) than would have ever learned about it from the Bay Area media coverage. In short, what differentiated Grant from those many other unarmed African American victims was simply and solely the ways in which new media captured and highlighted his death—it’s fair to say that whatever justice was achieved in the subsequent trial would not have been possible without this digital and social coverage; and certainly there would not be a film, and perhaps not the Oscar Grant Foundation which that film is supporting, without it.Yet it’s far from clear, to this AmericanStudier at least, that the tangible results of the case—the conviction of and sentence for Mehserle, the financial aftermath for Grant’s family, and so on—are the slightest bit different from (for example) those in the 1999 Amadou Diallo shooting or the 1992 Rodney King beating(which itself received attention in large part because of the home video taken by a bystander). There’s certainly something to be said for changing the narratives, the conversation, the way in which we engage with and understand such dark histories and the issues to which they connect, and clearly digital and social media have done that. But absent other changes—and from King to Diallo, Grant to Trayvon Martin, it’s hard to feel that much has changed—the fundamental question becomes that age-old professorial one: So what?Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
September 25, 2013
September 25, 2013: Justice is Not Color Blind: Duke
[In this week’s series, I’ll highilght American histories and stories that help us contextualize one of the summer’s most controversial moments: the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. Like that case, each of these topics was and is a lightning rod—but what good is AmericanStudies if it can’t help us take hold of such charged conversations? Add your thoughts to the electric mix, please!]
On the pendulum, the benefit of the doubt, and the role of public scholars.There’s a school of revisionist historical scholarship that actively seeks to recover and portray the less attractive (or, to put it more bluntly, bad) sides of idealized public figures and events, to tear down (for example) some of the “great men” on whom historiography long depended. I think that kind of revisionism was never as widespread as its critics would argue, and is largely absent from contemporary work; but it certainly was a prominent part of the field in the 1970s/80s era, accompanying (if not necessarily caused by) the rise of multiculturalism. And while I find it too simplistic in its attitudes toward its subjects—mirroring, ironically, the mythologizing of the “great man” narrative and its ilk—I also understand and to an extent agree with the rationale behind such revision. After all, when the pendulum has been located so consistently on one side of its arc, it almost has to swing all the way to the other if a full trajectory is ever to be achieved.But when the pendulum swings, it has effects in the present as well as on our sense of the past—contemporary impacts that are just as understandable but that also have the potential for more genuine damage. Exemplifying that possibility would be the infamous Duke lacrosse case, the 2006 incident in which three white members of that team were accused of rape by a young African American woman (a student at nearby North Central Carolina University) who had attended (and likely stripped at) a house party. In an earlier era, perhaps even a couple decades earlier, the privileged white male students would have been given the benefit of the doubt, and it would have been very difficult to charge them with assaulting an African American woman; in this case, thanks in part to that swinging pendulum and to other factors (including an overzealous and unethical prosecutor), it was the woman whose story received that benefit, despite substantial evidence in favor of the lacrosse players’ stories. More than a year later, long after the team’s 2006 season had been canceled, the coach forced to resign, and so on, the state’s Attorney General dropped all charges against the three players and the prosecutor was disbarred; the fallout from the case has continued in a variety of forms since.One of the more controversial aspects of the case were the actions of the so-called Group of 88, a group of Duke faculty members who co-signed an advertisement (which appeared in the Duke Chronicle but is no longer available online) addressing both the case and broader issues of racism and sexism on campus. As a public scholar, one who works to address contemporary as well as historical issues and themes, I’d be a hypocrite to critique any other scholars for doing the same. On the other hand, by addressing an ongoing investigation and trial, and moreover one that involved students at their own institution, these faculty members did reflect, at least in part, one of the dangers as the pendulum swings—that too overt revisionism does not allow for the kinds of thoughtful and nuanced analyses that scholars would otherwise bring to their work. A statement addressing issues of sexism and racism in general, on the other other hand, would be a perfect example of how public scholars can engage with the broader issues at stake in any event, while reserving judgment on the specifics of a case and hopefully in the process contributing to communal and analytical narratives rather than divisive accusations.Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the pendulum, the benefit of the doubt, and the role of public scholars.There’s a school of revisionist historical scholarship that actively seeks to recover and portray the less attractive (or, to put it more bluntly, bad) sides of idealized public figures and events, to tear down (for example) some of the “great men” on whom historiography long depended. I think that kind of revisionism was never as widespread as its critics would argue, and is largely absent from contemporary work; but it certainly was a prominent part of the field in the 1970s/80s era, accompanying (if not necessarily caused by) the rise of multiculturalism. And while I find it too simplistic in its attitudes toward its subjects—mirroring, ironically, the mythologizing of the “great man” narrative and its ilk—I also understand and to an extent agree with the rationale behind such revision. After all, when the pendulum has been located so consistently on one side of its arc, it almost has to swing all the way to the other if a full trajectory is ever to be achieved.But when the pendulum swings, it has effects in the present as well as on our sense of the past—contemporary impacts that are just as understandable but that also have the potential for more genuine damage. Exemplifying that possibility would be the infamous Duke lacrosse case, the 2006 incident in which three white members of that team were accused of rape by a young African American woman (a student at nearby North Central Carolina University) who had attended (and likely stripped at) a house party. In an earlier era, perhaps even a couple decades earlier, the privileged white male students would have been given the benefit of the doubt, and it would have been very difficult to charge them with assaulting an African American woman; in this case, thanks in part to that swinging pendulum and to other factors (including an overzealous and unethical prosecutor), it was the woman whose story received that benefit, despite substantial evidence in favor of the lacrosse players’ stories. More than a year later, long after the team’s 2006 season had been canceled, the coach forced to resign, and so on, the state’s Attorney General dropped all charges against the three players and the prosecutor was disbarred; the fallout from the case has continued in a variety of forms since.One of the more controversial aspects of the case were the actions of the so-called Group of 88, a group of Duke faculty members who co-signed an advertisement (which appeared in the Duke Chronicle but is no longer available online) addressing both the case and broader issues of racism and sexism on campus. As a public scholar, one who works to address contemporary as well as historical issues and themes, I’d be a hypocrite to critique any other scholars for doing the same. On the other hand, by addressing an ongoing investigation and trial, and moreover one that involved students at their own institution, these faculty members did reflect, at least in part, one of the dangers as the pendulum swings—that too overt revisionism does not allow for the kinds of thoughtful and nuanced analyses that scholars would otherwise bring to their work. A statement addressing issues of sexism and racism in general, on the other other hand, would be a perfect example of how public scholars can engage with the broader issues at stake in any event, while reserving judgment on the specifics of a case and hopefully in the process contributing to communal and analytical narratives rather than divisive accusations.Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
September 24, 2013
September 24, 2013: Justice is Not Color Blind: The Hurricane
[In this week’s series, I’ll highilght American histories and stories that help us contextualize one of the summer’s most controversial moments: the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. Like that case, each of these topics was and is a lightning rod—but what good is AmericanStudies if it can’t help us take hold of such charged conversations? Add your thoughts to the electric mix, please!]
On the benefits of the macro and micro approaches to representing history.I wrote at the end of yesterday’s post about comforting but limiting mythologized historical narratives, the kind in which (for example) great men (or women) achieve meaningful advances, bad people produce the dark histories, and never the twain shall meet. The problem with those narratives isn’t just that the world doesn’t work that way—it’s that they make it impossible to get at either the complex realities orthe deeper truths of the past. Take the case of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, for example—by all accounts, including his own, boxing champ Carter had a lengthy and deserved criminal record at the time of 1966 arrest and 1967 trial for triple murder; it’s also undeniable that the evidence against Carter was (at best) extremely weak, and almost certainly manipulated and falsified by racist police offers on a vendetta against Carter, and after nearly twenty years in prison Carter was freed in late 1985. But can we tell the latter story while acknowledging the former aspects of Carter’s identity and life?In his 1975 song “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan opted to focus entirely on the macro histories, the story of individual and institutionalized racial prejudice and injustice “in a land where justice is a game.” As such, Dylan’s song focuses at length on the identities and perspectives of Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley, the two career criminals on whose testimonies much of the case against Carter depended; and very little on those of Carter, about whom (outside of the details of the arrest and trial) we learn only that he was a “number one contender for the middleweight crown” who “could take a man out with just one punch / but he never did like to talk about it all that much.” Dylan’s choice makes sense, particularly given the broader histories of racism and lynching with which the Carter case must be contextualized (alongside the 1966 race riotsthat were unfolding at the time of Carter’s arrest, and to which Dylan alludes in the line “Four months later the ghettos are in flame”), and in light of which the individual identity of an African American man made absolutely no difference. But on the other hand, for those who learn about Carter’s case from Dylan’s song, the specifics of Carter’s own life and identity would seem to be part of the story as well, not because they necessarily change the broader realities but precisely because those realities tend to elide individual identity.More than two decades later, Norman Jewison’s 1999 film biopic The Hurricane took a distinctly different approach to the story. The film is far from a documentary, and has been critiqued for its factual inaccuracies; but where it succeeds, thanks both to its intimate focus and to a truly stunning performance from Denzel Washington, is in its extended development of Carter’s character and perspective. As such, the film directly flips the narratives of faceless or interchangeable African American men within a racist system, becoming instead, quite literally, the story of Carter/Washington’s face as it evolves over his time in prison. That is, while its simplifications of some of the case’s broad details require an audience to investigate further in order to learn more about the relevant histories, its close attention to Carter helps it reveal profound truths about what such broad systems and histories can do to the people caught up in and affected by them. While Dylan’s song is the story of the kind of tragic storms that so often have swept our nation’s race relations and dynamics, the film is instead the story of The Hurricance himself; both have a great deal to tell us about ourselves.Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the benefits of the macro and micro approaches to representing history.I wrote at the end of yesterday’s post about comforting but limiting mythologized historical narratives, the kind in which (for example) great men (or women) achieve meaningful advances, bad people produce the dark histories, and never the twain shall meet. The problem with those narratives isn’t just that the world doesn’t work that way—it’s that they make it impossible to get at either the complex realities orthe deeper truths of the past. Take the case of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, for example—by all accounts, including his own, boxing champ Carter had a lengthy and deserved criminal record at the time of 1966 arrest and 1967 trial for triple murder; it’s also undeniable that the evidence against Carter was (at best) extremely weak, and almost certainly manipulated and falsified by racist police offers on a vendetta against Carter, and after nearly twenty years in prison Carter was freed in late 1985. But can we tell the latter story while acknowledging the former aspects of Carter’s identity and life?In his 1975 song “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan opted to focus entirely on the macro histories, the story of individual and institutionalized racial prejudice and injustice “in a land where justice is a game.” As such, Dylan’s song focuses at length on the identities and perspectives of Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley, the two career criminals on whose testimonies much of the case against Carter depended; and very little on those of Carter, about whom (outside of the details of the arrest and trial) we learn only that he was a “number one contender for the middleweight crown” who “could take a man out with just one punch / but he never did like to talk about it all that much.” Dylan’s choice makes sense, particularly given the broader histories of racism and lynching with which the Carter case must be contextualized (alongside the 1966 race riotsthat were unfolding at the time of Carter’s arrest, and to which Dylan alludes in the line “Four months later the ghettos are in flame”), and in light of which the individual identity of an African American man made absolutely no difference. But on the other hand, for those who learn about Carter’s case from Dylan’s song, the specifics of Carter’s own life and identity would seem to be part of the story as well, not because they necessarily change the broader realities but precisely because those realities tend to elide individual identity.More than two decades later, Norman Jewison’s 1999 film biopic The Hurricane took a distinctly different approach to the story. The film is far from a documentary, and has been critiqued for its factual inaccuracies; but where it succeeds, thanks both to its intimate focus and to a truly stunning performance from Denzel Washington, is in its extended development of Carter’s character and perspective. As such, the film directly flips the narratives of faceless or interchangeable African American men within a racist system, becoming instead, quite literally, the story of Carter/Washington’s face as it evolves over his time in prison. That is, while its simplifications of some of the case’s broad details require an audience to investigate further in order to learn more about the relevant histories, its close attention to Carter helps it reveal profound truths about what such broad systems and histories can do to the people caught up in and affected by them. While Dylan’s song is the story of the kind of tragic storms that so often have swept our nation’s race relations and dynamics, the film is instead the story of The Hurricance himself; both have a great deal to tell us about ourselves.Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
September 23, 2013
September 23, 2013: Justice is Not Color Blind: Scottsboro
[In this week’s series, I’ll highilght American histories and stories that help us contextualize one of the summer’s most controversial moments: the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. Like that case, each of these topics was and is a lightning rod—but what good is AmericanStudies if it can’t help us take hold of such charged conversations? Add your thoughts to the electric mix, please!]
On the book that helps us think about how the most appalling histories can happen—and what we can do about it.As we learn more about the darkest human histories, the toughest question is often not what happened—as hard as it can certainly be to get at, and then to understand, historical truths—but how it did. That is, if we’re not willing to believe that much of humanity is essentially evil (and I definitely am not willing to believe that), we are left with the question of how, in the case of so many historical horrors, large numbers of people directly contributed to (and at least generally supported) them. Probably the most telling example would be the Holocaust; while there is significant scholarly disagreement over exactly how much most Germans—or even most in the Nazi military—knew about the final solution, the very question has led to extended and important works, such as Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996).The same complex and challenging question can be applied to dark, communal American histories such as the lynching epidemic or the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan—it’s relatively easy to acknowledge racial discrimination and violence as overall presences on our landscape, but far more difficult to think about all of the ordinary men and women who comprised those brutal efforts. I know of no book, scholarly or otherwise, that better engages with precisely that question than James Goodman’s Stories of Scottsboro (1994). Goodman’s book narrates the dark and tragic history of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American men who were falsely accused of raping two white women on an Alabama train, railroaded (pun intended) into convictions and then (after the Supreme Court twice vacated the verdict) re-convictions, and wrongfully imprisoned for years (with one dying in prison and the others all dramatically affected in their own ways by the experience). But Goodman goes one step further—through a combination of deep research and (limited but effective) imaginative extension, he constructs the perspectives of many of those involved in the case, including the two accusers (one of whom eventually recanted), the authorities who prosecuted the boys, and those who served on the juries that repeatedly convicted them.It would be possible for such a kaleidoscopic approach to make it seem as if there’s no such thing as historical truth, but through a deliberate balancing act Goodman does the opposite: keeping the case’s most significant truths in front of us, while at the same time helping us to see how those truths could be elided, ignored, and destroyed by so many Americans for so many years. That the boys’ persecutors come across as complex and even sympathetic figures does not lessen in any way the horror of what happened to the boys—but it does make those events a bit more understandable. And as a result, I would argue that Goodman’s book offers an implicit model for how we can respond to such dark histories—not by turning them into mythologized narratives of good and evil, with their accompanying comforting but also limiting effects; but instead by engaging directly with how we (and I do mean “we”) come to support, take part in, and produce such histories. We cannot change the past’s injustices, but we can confront them, and what they tell us about our own capability for injustice as well.Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
On the book that helps us think about how the most appalling histories can happen—and what we can do about it.As we learn more about the darkest human histories, the toughest question is often not what happened—as hard as it can certainly be to get at, and then to understand, historical truths—but how it did. That is, if we’re not willing to believe that much of humanity is essentially evil (and I definitely am not willing to believe that), we are left with the question of how, in the case of so many historical horrors, large numbers of people directly contributed to (and at least generally supported) them. Probably the most telling example would be the Holocaust; while there is significant scholarly disagreement over exactly how much most Germans—or even most in the Nazi military—knew about the final solution, the very question has led to extended and important works, such as Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996).The same complex and challenging question can be applied to dark, communal American histories such as the lynching epidemic or the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan—it’s relatively easy to acknowledge racial discrimination and violence as overall presences on our landscape, but far more difficult to think about all of the ordinary men and women who comprised those brutal efforts. I know of no book, scholarly or otherwise, that better engages with precisely that question than James Goodman’s Stories of Scottsboro (1994). Goodman’s book narrates the dark and tragic history of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American men who were falsely accused of raping two white women on an Alabama train, railroaded (pun intended) into convictions and then (after the Supreme Court twice vacated the verdict) re-convictions, and wrongfully imprisoned for years (with one dying in prison and the others all dramatically affected in their own ways by the experience). But Goodman goes one step further—through a combination of deep research and (limited but effective) imaginative extension, he constructs the perspectives of many of those involved in the case, including the two accusers (one of whom eventually recanted), the authorities who prosecuted the boys, and those who served on the juries that repeatedly convicted them.It would be possible for such a kaleidoscopic approach to make it seem as if there’s no such thing as historical truth, but through a deliberate balancing act Goodman does the opposite: keeping the case’s most significant truths in front of us, while at the same time helping us to see how those truths could be elided, ignored, and destroyed by so many Americans for so many years. That the boys’ persecutors come across as complex and even sympathetic figures does not lessen in any way the horror of what happened to the boys—but it does make those events a bit more understandable. And as a result, I would argue that Goodman’s book offers an implicit model for how we can respond to such dark histories—not by turning them into mythologized narratives of good and evil, with their accompanying comforting but also limiting effects; but instead by engaging directly with how we (and I do mean “we”) come to support, take part in, and produce such histories. We cannot change the past’s injustices, but we can confront them, and what they tell us about our own capability for injustice as well.Next case tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?
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