Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 395

December 25, 2012: Making My List (Again), Part Two

[Last year around the holidays, I shareda few itemson my AmericanStudier wish list, things I hopeAmericans could do and be. In this most wonderful time of the year™, I wanted to do the same with a handful of new wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves. Please share your own wishes and hopes, and I’ll add ‘em to the weekend’s post and make sure the Elves get ‘em too. Thanks, and happy holidays!]
On the lessons that I wish we could all take away from one of our holiday classics.In the final moments of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), perhaps the single film that best represents the holiday season for many Americans (including this AmericanStudier), the angel Clarence sums up one version of the final’s ultimate message. “Dear George,” he writes in a book that Jimmy Stewart’s character opens as the film concludes, “Remember no man is a failure who has friends.” Not a bad message at all, particularly in a society that has for so long defined success—and saw in this presidential election a renewed emphasis on such definitions—in direct relationship to wealth. Yes, George Bailey is getting a big bucket of money dumped in front of him at this climactic moment in the film, but that money directly exemplifies his community of friends, and how much they care about him and are willing to support him as he has always supported them. Works for me, Clarence.But the moment and film also provide at least two other, interconnected but distinct, lessons that I believe we could likewise focus on much more fully. For one thing, the reason George has all those supportive friends is because of what he’s been able to do and mean in his individual life, as a person of integrity who has dedicated his time to doing right by those around him and his community. One reason, to go back to yesterday’s post, why it can be hard for us to feel hope these days is that it can feel so impossible for an individual to make any kind of meaningful difference—but George illustrates that possibiility for sure. And for another thing, despite that individual success George is anything but a self-made man—as the film’s conclusion reflects so perfectly, every individual’s power is ultimately and happily dependent on the communities of which he’s a part; we are thus at our best, individually and collectively, when we all succeed together. To quote another piece of good advice, from my boy Bruce, “Remember, in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.”So, AmericanStudies Elves, I wish that all Americans could remember these lessons from one of our most enduring holiday texts. That success is a community of supportive friends; that each of us can make a big difference in those communities and in our nation; and that we’re all in it together. Think that about says it all!Next wish tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this wish? Wishes of your own you’d share with the Elves?

December 24, 2012: Making My List (Again), Part One

[Last year around the holidays, I shareda few itemson my AmericanStudier wish list, things I hopeAmericans could do and be. In this most wonderful time of the year™, I wanted to do the same with a handful of new wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves. Please share your own wishes and hopes, and I’ll add ‘em to the weekend’s post and make sure the Elves get ‘em too. Thanks, and happy holidays!]
On the Christmas Eve attitude I hope we can all find a way to embrace more fully.It’s a cliché, but having spent these last five Christmas Eves with boys who were old enough to know what was coming, I can say with certainty that it’s one of the most accurate clichés out there: nothing exemplifies excitement and anticipation like a kid on Christmas Eve. I know the boys would disagree, and so would my youthful self, but honestly I think that the excitement is the best part of the holiday—better than the presents themselves, better even than the family togetherness (that’s good, but hopefully not unique to the holiday), and definitely better than the inevitable letdown when all is opened and moving back toward normal. To me, the magic of Santa is likewise caught up in the anticipation, and the traditions that go with it—hanging stockings, putting out the milk and cookies, preparing the house in that time before anything has happened and when it’s all still in the future to which we look forward so excitedly.I don’t want to speak for everybody here—or at least, as always, I’d love to hear your own thoughts, even (no, especially) if they entirely disagree with mine—but I think we’ve largely lost the possibility for that kind of anticipation, as a society. Obviously it’s always been and always would be harder for adults to feel such pure excitement than for kids, given all the things we carry around in our heads and lives, the hopes and pressures, the responsibilities and worries, the memories and baggage. But I also feel as if the constant stream of bad or threatening news, the very real effects of recession and climate change and political and cultural and social divisions, the way in which any triumph or positive moment seems immediately and inevitably greeted by a backlash of naysaying and anonymous internet trolling, just so many aspects of our 21st century moment make it very hard to feel, or at least to keep, an individual (much less a communal) sense of anticipation and excitement about what the future might bring.And that’s a very bad thing. I’ve written many, many times here about my current book project on hope, and at the end of the day that’s what hope is: anticipation and excitement that the future might be good, might be better, might be what it ideally could be. So AmericanStudies Elves, today’s wish is that we can find a way, as a nation, to get back to Christmas Eve-level anticipation and excitement about the future, at least sometimes and in some ways. How we do that is obviously another and a tough question—I believe, as the book will argue, that it comes at least in part from a more accurate awareness of our past, of where we’ve been, of who we are. But as with any positive change, part of it will also just be admitting the possibility, recognizing that we can and should strive for such excitement, that there’s nothing wrong with believing at night in the magic of a next morning on which our wishes can come true.Next wish tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this wish? Wishes of your own you’d share with the Elves?

December 17-23, 2012: AmericanStudier Needs You!

[As this website’s first year draws to a close, I still greatly need your input for the year(s) to come! So I’m re-posting and keeping up for a week this September post on the many different ways you can contribute to the site. But please feel free to share other suggestions, of any and all types, in addition to what I mention here. Thanks in advance!]

[IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: As of right now, it kind of looks like americanstudier.org has gone defunct. But I most definitely hope to recreate it, or something like it, in the year(s) to come. So I'll leave this post scheduled and ask still for your input, not only on all these aspects of that prior site but on anything and everything you would like to see, read, find, contribute, etc, on an AmericanStudier website. The sky's the limit, folks! So I'd love to hear your thoughts, even more than I already did.]
On my ongoing goals for this here AmericanStudier website.The American Studier website that Graham Beckwith and I designed and created has been up and running for nearly a year now, and there’s a lot about it that I’m already proud of for sure. It’s become a very good home for the daily blog posts and Memory Day calendar nominees, which have so far been and might always be the most consistently updated part of the site. But I’ve also, and even more importantly, really enjoyed the chance to include and highlight the voices and ideas of fellow American Studiers: in the Analytical Pieces section; in Forum posts; and in suggestions for Archives, Collections and other Resources, to name three places that have been constructed out of those other voices. My most central goal for the site is that it become generally communal and collaborative, and these represent definite starting points in that direction.I’d love to build each of those sections further in the year(s) ahead, so if you have: briefer American Studies questions, perspectives, interests, and thoughts, create a Forum thread; longer analytical takes that haven’t found a home (or that have but to which I can link), share ‘em (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) for the Analytical Pieces section; suggestions for good American Studies Resources (online, archives and collections, in any of that page’s categories, etc.), send ‘em along; and so on. But I’m even more interested in seeing what we can do with the least developed (to date) part of the site, the Multimedia page. As you can see, I’ve created some preliminary categories and have posted a few examples for each; I’d love if every American Studier who visits this site could share one or another text (available, at least in part, online) that he or she believes we should all engage, making that page a genuine database of American Studies primary sources. But I’m also open to other ways to think about American Studies and to analyze our history, culture, identity, narratives, and so on—so if you have suggestions on how a page like that could be constructed, please send ‘em my way (again, brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) and I’ll make sure to credit you and your work.Those are some of my ideas and hopes. But the truth, to get all Rumsfeld-ian for a moment, is that I don’t know what I don’t know, and I need your help on that front even more fully. I’d say that’s particularly true when it comes to teachers, professors, and program directors in American Studies—what would benefit you all when it comes to a site like this? We could create a whole Pedagogy page, for example—what would you like to see there? What kinds of materials and resources could make your jobs easier, would benefit your students, could help you use a site like this in a course or the like? I’ll ask the same question of students, at every level—what could this site include and do to help you in your work? Ditto for researchers and scholars outside of any academic or educational setting—what would help you pursue your interests or work? No matter who or where you are, the simple fact is this: I would love to get a sense of those things, of what brings you to the site and of what could make it even more successful as a resource for you. That question, in any and every form, is what I hope will drive my—our—work on the site as it and we move forward.Next series next week,BenPS. You know what to do! Answers to any and all those questions, now and at any moment down the road, will be greatly appreciated and very valuable.12/17 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two unique, talented, and influential20th century culturaland artistic figures, Arthur Fiedler and Erskine Caldwell.12/18 Memory Day nominee: Ossie Davis, for his lifetime of charistmatic performances, his careerof impassioned activism, and his inspiring marriage.And that’s it, a whole year of Memory Day nominees! See the Memory Day Calendar for the complete current roster, and please share your own nominations as Comments there!

December 15-16, 2012: Crowd-sourced Fireside Reads

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ve highlighted authors and books that fit that bill. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from other Fireside Read suggestions by fellow AmericanStudiers—share your warm and cozy nominations below, please!]
Irene Martyniuk writes, “Any Dickens. I'm no fan of Dickens, but if you must read him, a fire is good. This is the man who includes spontaneous human combustion in Bleak House and defends it. Joyce, of course. Snowbound? Try Ulysses . If not, revisit Portrait . Well worth it. Proust. Science fiction and fantasy. Escape that snow. Dune . Just Dune. Don't worry about the later 5 books. Dune will stick with you. Same for Stephen R. Donaldson. Giants and leprosy and white gold. Amazing. Martin Amis' London Fields . Hilarious and complicated. Like Amis himself, I suppose.”Isabella Greene writes, “Margaret George's The Autobiography of Henry VIII . A huge work of historical fiction where you can totally lose yourself in the life of one of the most complicated, fascinating, and in many ways, most disturbed monarch of all time. I'm gonna have to otherwise go with my girl Margaret Atwood. Both The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake have that dark, apocalyptic density that will give you shivers even sitting by the fire.”On Twitter, Kris Schindler nominates “anything by or about Katherine Graham.”
Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What would you highlight for a good winter's read?12/15 Memory Day nominee: Maxwell Anderson, for his important and influential plays, his interestingly varied collection of screenplays, and his equally talented AmericanStudier of a son.12/16 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two very different but equally pioneering and impressive 20th century icons, Margaret Mead and Morris Dees.

December 14, 2012: Fireside Reads, Part Five

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ll be highlighting authors and books that fit that bill. Add your own nominees for Fireside Reads for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post and help us all stay warm and cozy, won’t you?]
On some worthy additions to the series from outside of our borders.This is an AmericanStudies blog, but good Fireside Reads can of course come from anywhere. So here are a handful of long, complex, and very fire-worthy novels by (for today) honorary AmericanStudiers:1)      David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)2)      Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter (1999)3)      Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998)4)      Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra (1975)5)      THIS SPACE FOR RENT! YOUR FIRESIDE READ HERE!Sorry to yell, but it’s true—I need your nominations for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post. BenPS. Do I have to ask again?12/14 Memory Day nominee: Margaret Chase Smith, one of the 20thcentury’s most prominent and influential political figures and voices, and the author of one of America’s most brave and important speeches.

December 13, 2012: Fireside Reads, Part Four

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ll be highlighting authors and books that fit that bill. Add your own nominees for Fireside Reads for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post and help us all stay warm and cozy, won’t you?]
On the birthday boy who exemplifies one of the most American literary genres—and whose novels will send the best kind of winter chills down your spine.When I was initially thinking about what to include in this blog’s purview, I went back and forth on whether to include topics that are particularly, deeply personal, authors or texts or events that have captivated my attention and interest at various moments in my life (and still do) but that aren’t necessarily quite as far-reaching in their significance as others on which I’ll focus in this space. But what I have realized, at least as of this point in my thinking, is a combination of two things: everything here is here, first and foremost, because I care deeply about it, so it’s kind of silly to try to parse out which ones I care about for which reasons; and the central reason why I care about these things enough to consider ‘em as topics isn’t just that they make me happy, but that I think they’re meaningful and powerful enough to merit our attention. Which is to say: I love the movie Willow (that’s right, I do), but I’m not going to create an entry on it. But birthday boy Ross MacDonald’s series of hardboiled PI novels? Yes, yes I will.At one early point in my plans for a dissertation—and I do mean early; I was the kind of high school nerd who was already thinking of dissertation options—I thought about tracing the 20th century evolution of the hardboiled PI novel, from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane to Ross MacDonald, and up to the female authors (Marcia Muller, Sara Paretksy, Sue Grafton) and protagonists who dominated the 80s and 90s in the genre. The character type is one of the most genuinely and meaningfully American in any artistic medium, and so we can certainly identify core elements of our national identity in each time period across those different authors—Hammett’s cynical and bitter PIs in the late 20s and early 30s shifting to Chandler’s more intellectual Phillip Marlowe in the 40s, for example. In the 50s and 60s, Spillane and MacDonald created amazingly contrasting PIs: Spillane’s Mike Hammer is an old-school hard-ass and misogynist, a creature of the masculine 50s, someone who watches a woman strip naked for him, thinks to himself that “she was a real blonde,” and then shoots her dead in cold blood a moment later; while MacDonald’s Lew Archer is a romantic idealist, an echo of the Beats and counter-cultures of these decades, someone who often articulates a cynical perspective aloud but whose narration is consistently lyrical and impassioned, sympathizing with the worst in who and what he finds in the course of his investigations and consistently seeking the best in them (including falling in love multiple times, and never once, to my knowledge, shooting one of them in cold blood). Archer’s voice and MacDonald’s prose style are consistently pitch-perfect, and make any one of the twenty or so books in the series (which MacDonald published between 1949 and 1976, while publishing a number of other works under other names; MacDonald itself was a pseudonym for Kenneth Millar) well worth a read. But in the series’ best novels—and I think the high-water marks are The Chill (1964), The Underground Man (1971), and Sleeping Beauty (1973)—MacDonald also creates rich and layered multi-generational historical mysteries, plots that stretch back decades and involve literally dozens of characters, different families and settings and eras, and a wide range of core social and political issues. The structures of these novels are ridiculously tight and impressive and the payoffs deeply satisfying (let’s just say that The Chillin particular is very aptly named), but this historical depth makes these books a lot more than just pleasure reads; they are American sagas without question, tracing families and relationships and identities and places across much of the 20th century, considering how both one very full and compelling world (that of Southern California) and the diverse and changing nation that it in many ways encapsulates grew and decayed, lived and died, from the end of World War II to the post-Vietnam and -Watergate era. Some of the authors with whom I was obsessed for a time I look back on and, well, I try not to look back on ‘em; I won’t name names, but one such rhymes with Dom Chancy. But every time I’ve gone back to MacDonald in the two-plus decades since my first encounters, I’ve found new aspects within these texts, new ways in which they can help me understand not only the mysteries of love and relationships and family (as can, say, Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle as well), but also of American identity; there is perhaps no character type more American than the hardboiled PI, and no PI more worth our time and attention than Lew. Final Fireside Reads tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do—nominations for Winter Reads, please!12/13 Memory Day nominee: Ella Baker, whose mentoring and leadershipinspired virtually every Civil Rights activist, and helped change the course of Americanand world history.

December 12, 2012: Fireside Reads, Part Three

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ll be highlighting authors and books that fit that bill. Add your own nominees for Fireside Reads for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post and help us all stay warm and cozy, won’t you?]
On my favorite American poet—and one with whom you could spend some tough but rewarding fireside hours for sure.I’ll be the first to admit—well, my students might beat me to it, but I wouldn’t be the last to admit, anyway—that there are some works of American literature that maybe don’t need to be remembered and read widely and frequently. I’m not talking about stuff that’s just not that interesting or worth reading at all, but rather works that are just difficult or obtuse enough that I get why they aren’t part of our broad national conversations, why mostly scholars are the ones reading and discussing ‘em. Even if there’s value to working with them in the classroom—and I tend to think there is, as evidenced by the fact that I once taught a whole class on Henry James!—that doesn’t mean that they’re ever going to be on nation-wide reading lists, nor that they necessarily should be. We can’t read or even be particularly aware of everything without diffusing our attention a bit too fully in any case.All of which is to say, part of me gets why my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, is also one of the least-read of all the American authors with whom I’ve worked. Much of Piatt’s work fell into the categories of children’s or courtship poetry, sweet but very forgettable pieces that paid the bills but weren’t ever destined to set the world on fire. And the more serious and meaningful stuff, well, let’s just say that it gives Emily Dickinson a run for her money—dense, demanding as hell, allusive and elusive poems, the kind of things that my students likely mean when they say “poetry” with that slight shudder (as they often do). But there are a couple of things that Piatt does phenomenally well, and the combination of the two makes her unique and extremely important in our literary history: she creates genuinely dialogic poems, works in which multiple speakers (sometimes all explicitly present, sometimes with certain voices implied) engage with each other’s perspectives and voices in complex and rich conversations; and she tackles huge, defining elements of identity, factors such as gender and class and multi-generational family relationships, without losing a bit of the nuanced and impressive humanity with which she imbues her characters and worlds.To cite one example (available, among many of her best poems, in the excerpts at this link), “The Palace-Burner” (1877): Piatt’s speaker is a mother who is sitting with her (seemingly) young son, looking through old newspapers, when they come upon a picture depicting events from the 1871 Paris Commune (where communist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy and, briefly, governed the city and nation). As the mother talks to her son, responding to his unintentionally insightful questions and thoughts, she moves through a range of themes and emotions, from the revolution’s overarching objectives and realities to the class status and motivations of the picture’s female palace-burner to, ultimately, her own identity as a mother, relationship to her son, and sense of the value and significance of her self and soul. In just nine four-line stanzas, we learn more about this woman and mother-son dynamic—to say nothing of the complex and already then in the process of being forgotten historical event about which they talk—than we might in novels by lesser talents. And despite the distance of over a century and the differences in gender (among others) separating me from Piatt’s speaker, the poem, like all Piatt’s best works, has also taught me a great deal about my own perspective and identity.Piatt’s poetry doesn’t necessarily point us to a lot about American history or identity in specific ways, and of course those are central focuses of this blog and my work and career. But when it comes to doing perhaps the most significant thing literature and art can do—creating voices and identities as rich and complicated and human as our own, and so allowing, or maybe forcing, us to examine ourselves, to consider what and who we are and what we should and can be at our best—she’s way up there. Next Winter Read tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do—nominations for Winter Reads, please!12/12 Memory Day nominee: William Lloyd Garrison, not only for his courageousabolitionism, but for his pioneering journalism and profoundly progressivevision of America and the world.

December 11, 2012: Fireside Reads, Part Two

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ll be highlighting authors and books that fit that bill. Add your own nominees for Fireside Reads for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post and help us all stay warm and cozy, won’t you?]
On an author and book that will introduce you to under-narrated American histories—and grab your heart in the process.One of my bigger pet peeves in the dominant narratives of American history is the notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few decades. It’s true that the 1965 Immigration Act, the first immigration law that opened up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities, led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20th century: Asian Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s (for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).Multicultural historian Ronald Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his magisterial A Different Mirror,recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years. While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others, I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group would include Yung Wing, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (on whom see yesterday’s post), Sui Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression, published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical, complex, and deeply moving novel, America is in the Heart (1946).For the most part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes many fictionalized characters, hence my designation of it as a novel (in the vein of something like On the Road or The Bell-Jar )—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple, interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work) and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath . But despite that tone, its ultimate trajectory is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful—that’s true partly because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound clichéd, but all I can say—and the echo of Reading Rainbow is conscious—is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully.Next Winter Read tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do—nominations for Winter Reads, please!12/11 Memory Day nominee: George Mason!

December 10, 2012: Fireside Reads, Part One

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ll be highlighting authors and books that fit that bill. Add your own nominees for Fireside Reads for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post and help us all stay warm and cozy, won’t you?]
On two sprawling novels that’ll take you very far into other American settings—and our shared history.Both Charlottesville, Virginia (where I spent my first 18 years of life) and the Northeast (where I’ve spent the subsequent 17) are, in their own ways, pretty diverse—Charlottesville first in its heavily bi-racial community and then second in all the communities and cultures that the University of Virginia brings to town (and third, more and more since I left, in all the refugee and migrant communities that have come as well); and the Northeast (Boston and Philly specifically) in most every way that big urban American centers are in this 21st century moment. Yet for various but interconnected reasons, I would argue that both places allow their present inhabitants to imagine a relatively stable and static, Anglo-centric, English-speaking local and (at least implicitly) national starting point and past, and then to add other racial and ethnic groups and cultures onto that imagined point of origin: Virginia’s narrative begins with Jamestown and John Smith, Boston’s with the Puritans, Philly’s with William Penn and the Quakers, that sort of thing.Having spent almost all of my life in those places, it has thus come as a particularly significant and much-appreciated shock when I have traveled to places where it is literally impossible not to recognize a much more multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and even multi-lingual American past and point of origin. No place in our country forces that recognition more than New Orleans, but I think the whole Southwest is similarly impossible to narrate without locating Mexican and Native Americans alongside European/Anglo ones at every moment. And it’s thus no coincidence that two of the most multi-lingual and –vocal American novels center on precisely those two settings, although it is at least somewhat coincidental that they were published within only a few years of one another: George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes(1881) and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885). Cable’s multi-generational novel of New Orleans in the years after the Louisiana Purchase features almost as many languages and dialects as it does main characters; for example, its central perspective character is a German-American immigrant who befriends a white New Orleans doctor, a Creole street artist, and a mixed-race businessman within the first few chapters, and then falls in love with a French Creole girl who is lifelong friends with an African American slave (I could go on, but you get the idea). Burton’s novel focuses in a bit more specifically, on a couple of families (one Mexican-American, one Anglo-American) in a California dealing with (among other things) the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, gradual annexation into the United States, and continued battles between Mexican-American landowners, Anglo-American arrivals, the US army, and Native Americans over the region’s land; despite the somewhat shorter list of main characters, that plethora of contexts forces Burton to include a wide range of voices, including ones that speak English, Spanish, a mixture of both, and a number of Native languages (all, as with Cable, partly translated and partly reproduced in various dialect forms).Both novels are huge and far from perfect in structure or style—both rely heavily on love triangles and sentimental romance, for example, to drive their plots and bring their culturally and linguistically divided and even opposed characters and communities together. And we’re talking 19th-century love triangles and romance; which is to say, neither book would qualify for the Beach Read series. But the things that make them difficult and long-winded also make them so American and so great, and at the top of that list would be their very multi-vocality, their inclusion of so many languages and voices and stories and perspectives to construct these communities (past and present) that are at the heart of our national identity. Both do so in part to force their audiences to engage with some of the darkest realities of America’s history: “the shadow of the African,” as one of Cable’s mixed-race characters defines it; the legacy of land theft and cultural discrimination and abuse; and many others. Yet both also believe in and embody the ways in which listening to each other’s voices and stories, languages and experiences, can precisely connect across our divided communities and cultures, and create more truly United States as a result.Next Winter Reads tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do—nominations for Winter Reads, please!12/10 Memory Day nominee: Emily Dickinson!

December 8-9, 2012: Lincoln, Culture, and History

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ve been blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues), which led up to Friday’s Pearl Harbor-centered post. I’d still love any and all responses to those posts or any related themes, but wanted to share as well my thoughts on the current film that has prompted many parallel discussions in the last few weeks.]
My take on the film that has every AmericanStudier talking.I can’t say that I have a ton to add to the interesting and evolving conversations about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. For one thing, some of our most talented and compelling public scholars and historians have already weighed in: see for this example the exchanges compiled by Ta-Nehisi Coates here; or the many posts and responses on Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory blog. I can’t recommend strongly enough that anyone interested in the film and in the questions of how it represents Lincoln, the Civil War, African Americans, and history check out those conversations, and the many spaces and voices to which they link. And to be honest, whatever my own merits as a public AmericanStudier, I have in this case one glaring flaw compared to all those voices: I haven’t seen the film yet!So I can’t—or at least shouldn’t, because god knows us academics are more than capable of analyzing things we haven’t actually seen but should try to resist that urge whenever possible—speak to the film’s specific choices and details. I can say that I was very excited to learn that Ely Parker shows up, played by