Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 399
December 12, 2012
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.
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
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!
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
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!
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, 2012
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
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
December 7, 2012
December 7, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Five
[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). That has led up to this Pearl Harbor-centered post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]
On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.” We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pear Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian and educator Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, the Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). The White House statement hyperlinked at “National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day” in the intro section above illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So last chance—what do you think? Thoughts on these issues and questions, on any of the week’s posts, or on any related themes for that crowd-sourced post?12/7 Memory Day nominee: Willa Cather, for her Nebraska trilogy to be sure, but for a career’s worth of equally unique, impressive, and enduring American stories.
On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.” We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pear Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian and educator Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, the Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). The White House statement hyperlinked at “National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day” in the intro section above illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So last chance—what do you think? Thoughts on these issues and questions, on any of the week’s posts, or on any related themes for that crowd-sourced post?12/7 Memory Day nominee: Willa Cather, for her Nebraska trilogy to be sure, but for a career’s worth of equally unique, impressive, and enduring American stories.
December 6, 2012
December 6, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Four
[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]
On a childhood building models, and what they can help us understand.I’m not sure exactly when it started, but by the time I was in middle school I was seriously into model-building. I know that I constructed some trucks, a few planes, maybe the occasional car, but the vast majority of the models I built were of naval ships. I distinctly remember a box in our upstairs bathroom full of those completed steel-gray models—battleships, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, PT boats, troop carriers and amphibious landers, you name it and I had at least a few in my assembled fleet. The hobby hasn’t continued into my adult years (although I look forward to making some models with my boys, and especially my very careful and mechanically minded older son), but I’m sure that the skills it helped me hone—reading and following directions, precision, patience—have come with me into lots of other aspects of my life and identity.Yet as I think back on those model ships, I have to admit that I don’t know that they communicated much at all about the complex realities of their uses, their histories, the battles and conflicts in which they participated. Obviously they weren’t necessarily designed to do so—or at least I’ve never encountered a plastic model that comes with any way to represent the effects of explosions, of aeriel bombardment or ship-to-ship combat, or the like—and there’s no reason why they would have to; there are plenty of other ways for interested young people to learn about war, after all. But you could make the case, and I think I might be inclined to agree, that in the absence of any such contexts and complications, military models can help convey ideals of war as a purely exciting and noble pursuit, something that every young person can imagine participating in heroically. For one of the most clear and compelling accounts of such youthful ideals and what they can produce, I can’t recommend strongly enough Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July(1976).I remember one model that was very different, though. That was a model of the beachhead at Tarawa (that’s not the one I had, but it’s not dissimilar), the Pacific Island which became the site of one of World War II’s most horrific and destructive battles. The model of course couldn’t convey every detail of the battle, but it did a couple of things that were distinct from the ships: it forced me to consider the experiences and lives (and deaths) of the individual soldiers I was putting down on the beachhead; and it inspired me to investigate the battle I was assembling, and so to learn about the U.S. casualties, the Japanese defenders who literally fought to the last man to hold the island, and so on. Doing so didn’t stop me from working on those other kinds of models, but it did make it much harder for me to entirely ignore or elide the contexts—or, more exactly, the defining realities—of the Pacific Theater, of World War II, and of war in general. That’s a perspective worth modeling, I’d say.Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on modeling or other connectinos to war, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/6 Memory Day nominee: Ira Gershwin, who with his brother and partner George contributed some of America’s most memorable and enduring songs and musicals.[image error]
On a childhood building models, and what they can help us understand.I’m not sure exactly when it started, but by the time I was in middle school I was seriously into model-building. I know that I constructed some trucks, a few planes, maybe the occasional car, but the vast majority of the models I built were of naval ships. I distinctly remember a box in our upstairs bathroom full of those completed steel-gray models—battleships, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, PT boats, troop carriers and amphibious landers, you name it and I had at least a few in my assembled fleet. The hobby hasn’t continued into my adult years (although I look forward to making some models with my boys, and especially my very careful and mechanically minded older son), but I’m sure that the skills it helped me hone—reading and following directions, precision, patience—have come with me into lots of other aspects of my life and identity.Yet as I think back on those model ships, I have to admit that I don’t know that they communicated much at all about the complex realities of their uses, their histories, the battles and conflicts in which they participated. Obviously they weren’t necessarily designed to do so—or at least I’ve never encountered a plastic model that comes with any way to represent the effects of explosions, of aeriel bombardment or ship-to-ship combat, or the like—and there’s no reason why they would have to; there are plenty of other ways for interested young people to learn about war, after all. But you could make the case, and I think I might be inclined to agree, that in the absence of any such contexts and complications, military models can help convey ideals of war as a purely exciting and noble pursuit, something that every young person can imagine participating in heroically. For one of the most clear and compelling accounts of such youthful ideals and what they can produce, I can’t recommend strongly enough Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July(1976).I remember one model that was very different, though. That was a model of the beachhead at Tarawa (that’s not the one I had, but it’s not dissimilar), the Pacific Island which became the site of one of World War II’s most horrific and destructive battles. The model of course couldn’t convey every detail of the battle, but it did a couple of things that were distinct from the ships: it forced me to consider the experiences and lives (and deaths) of the individual soldiers I was putting down on the beachhead; and it inspired me to investigate the battle I was assembling, and so to learn about the U.S. casualties, the Japanese defenders who literally fought to the last man to hold the island, and so on. Doing so didn’t stop me from working on those other kinds of models, but it did make it much harder for me to entirely ignore or elide the contexts—or, more exactly, the defining realities—of the Pacific Theater, of World War II, and of war in general. That’s a perspective worth modeling, I’d say.Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on modeling or other connectinos to war, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/6 Memory Day nominee: Ira Gershwin, who with his brother and partner George contributed some of America’s most memorable and enduring songs and musicals.[image error]
December 5, 2012
December 5, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Three
[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]
On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded World War II films.Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more in common than just their Pacific Theater settings. Or at least they have one pretty obvious and striking thing in common: each uses a huge and star-studded cast to capture a wide range of soldier and officer experiences within its focal battle. Midway features Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Erik Estrada (among others!); Lineincludes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing of the equally big-name actors, such as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by Malick during editing). When it comes to cast size and scope, the two films are similarly old-school epics to be sure.The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see: long, long shots of waving grass and the like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in which the films were made and the distinct genres in which they could be classified. For example, Midway makes significant use of stock footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial battles and from numerous other films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film features no such footage. That’s partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footagewas still somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they experience those events; whereas in Line individual characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be quickly shown before we get back to the characters.To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films break down along the “period fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I delineated in this post. As I noted there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual works—it would be silly to claim that Midwaycould be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one important way or another; and some of Line’s key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind about its star-studded cast, and the individual characters they create and interactions they portray; while Line’s famously haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees those individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While that distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex and interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching both provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray war.Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on either or both of these films, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two titanic 20th century cultural icons and influences, Walt Disney and Little Richard.
On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded World War II films.Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more in common than just their Pacific Theater settings. Or at least they have one pretty obvious and striking thing in common: each uses a huge and star-studded cast to capture a wide range of soldier and officer experiences within its focal battle. Midway features Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Erik Estrada (among others!); Lineincludes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing of the equally big-name actors, such as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by Malick during editing). When it comes to cast size and scope, the two films are similarly old-school epics to be sure.The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see: long, long shots of waving grass and the like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in which the films were made and the distinct genres in which they could be classified. For example, Midway makes significant use of stock footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial battles and from numerous other films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film features no such footage. That’s partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footagewas still somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they experience those events; whereas in Line individual characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be quickly shown before we get back to the characters.To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films break down along the “period fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I delineated in this post. As I noted there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual works—it would be silly to claim that Midwaycould be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one important way or another; and some of Line’s key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind about its star-studded cast, and the individual characters they create and interactions they portray; while Line’s famously haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees those individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While that distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex and interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching both provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray war.Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on either or both of these films, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two titanic 20th century cultural icons and influences, Walt Disney and Little Richard.
December 4, 2012
December 4, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Two
[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]
Trying to make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by San Diego’s most unique historic site.Floating in San Diego’s harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city’s downtown, is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S. Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004) served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes), flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences; and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. My boys were particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in the giant washers and dryers, and detailed depictions of the sailors whose job it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.That laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring public role of the Midway museum: to help 21st century visitors understand the experiences and identities of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships, at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first Veteran’s Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those connections with past servicemen and women. I’ve visited a number of battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I’ve encountered.There’s another side to that connection, though, and it’s one that is to my mind much less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane’s role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for “close-in bombing” in the war’s later stages. Which is to say, although the placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly participated in President Nixon’s often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly despicable carpet-bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn’t, they most likely dropped napalm and other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of “Live the Adventure, Honor the Legend,” Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable, legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings themselves.A multifaceted, complex, and vital American Studies, public historic site for sure! Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on the Midway, on historic sites, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/4 Memory Day nominee: Cornell Woolrich, the crime and suspense novelist known as the father of noir, not only for his books but for the many influential films that came from them.
Trying to make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by San Diego’s most unique historic site.Floating in San Diego’s harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city’s downtown, is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S. Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004) served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes), flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences; and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. My boys were particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in the giant washers and dryers, and detailed depictions of the sailors whose job it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.That laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring public role of the Midway museum: to help 21st century visitors understand the experiences and identities of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships, at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first Veteran’s Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those connections with past servicemen and women. I’ve visited a number of battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I’ve encountered.There’s another side to that connection, though, and it’s one that is to my mind much less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane’s role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for “close-in bombing” in the war’s later stages. Which is to say, although the placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly participated in President Nixon’s often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly despicable carpet-bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn’t, they most likely dropped napalm and other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of “Live the Adventure, Honor the Legend,” Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable, legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings themselves.A multifaceted, complex, and vital American Studies, public historic site for sure! Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on the Midway, on historic sites, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/4 Memory Day nominee: Cornell Woolrich, the crime and suspense novelist known as the father of noir, not only for his books but for the many influential films that came from them.
December 3, 2012
December 3, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part One
[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]
On the more and less meaningful, complex, and valuable ways in which we remember wars.Michael Kammen, whose Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991) changed my life when I read it in college and remains one of the best American Studies books I’ve ever read (and is just one of many great books he’s written), has persuasively argued that we need at least two distinct concepts for public memory: remembrance, which would describe genuine attempts to remember the past in all its complexity; and commemoration, which would categorize those efforts that are more simplifying and mythologizing, and usually more tied to present concerns than to the past itself. Kammen goes into much more detail and nuance than that, as would I, but ultimately I do think there’s significant value to separating out such thoroughly distinct kinds of public (and at least potentially, for that matter, private) memory and history.There are many applications for that two-part concept, but in following up on an earlier post on the Tuskegee Airmen, it seems to me that our memories of war are particularly ripe for this kind of analysis. I’m thinking especially about cultural memories, stories and representations of war in popular culture—like Lucas’s Red Tails, and like so, so many other war films, TV shows, novels, and more. I would argue that many, if not the vast majority, of those cultural representations are commemorative (which doesn’t have to mean celebratory); that whether the cultural sources seek to celebrate wartime heroism (as does Lucas’ film) to attack the brutalities and horrors of war (as does for example Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket), or to stake out any position in between, they almost always create simplified and even mythologized depictions of war in service of their agendas and goals. They might incidentally introduce complexities and even contradictions (an ironic critique of American racism within the celebratory Red Tails; a positive depiction of soldierly comraderie in the cynical world of Jacket), but to my mind their overall construction of war is far closer to commemoration than to remembrance.We do have models in our popular culture for remembering rather than commemorating war, though. One such model is when a talented artist builds on but deepens and amplifies his or her personal experiences of war and creates a complex and powerful text as a result—Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is one such text, as are the best novels by Tim O’Brien. Just as important, however, are those models that don’t depend on personal experience (at least not of the artist him or herself), and for that I would highlight two complementary films from one of my Memory Day nominees: Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. If we try to consider what a battle like Iwo Jima, or a war like World War II, would look like and mean for those fighting it on both sides, it seems to me that we’re a long way toward remembering war in all its complexities. And it doesn’t hurt that Flags itself focuses directly on the most destructive effects of an emphasis on commemoration, in that case in the post-war lives of the Iwo Jima flag raisers. Commemoration has its value, as Kammen certainly acknowledges. But you know me well enough to know that I greatly prefer remembrance—even more so when it comes to a complex, dark, and crucial historical theme like war. Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on Iwo Jima, on Eastwood’s films, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/3 Memory Day nominee: Gilbert Stuart, who painted some of America’s first and most memorable portraits, and whose imagescontinue to influence how we remember the Revolutionary era.
On the more and less meaningful, complex, and valuable ways in which we remember wars.Michael Kammen, whose Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991) changed my life when I read it in college and remains one of the best American Studies books I’ve ever read (and is just one of many great books he’s written), has persuasively argued that we need at least two distinct concepts for public memory: remembrance, which would describe genuine attempts to remember the past in all its complexity; and commemoration, which would categorize those efforts that are more simplifying and mythologizing, and usually more tied to present concerns than to the past itself. Kammen goes into much more detail and nuance than that, as would I, but ultimately I do think there’s significant value to separating out such thoroughly distinct kinds of public (and at least potentially, for that matter, private) memory and history.There are many applications for that two-part concept, but in following up on an earlier post on the Tuskegee Airmen, it seems to me that our memories of war are particularly ripe for this kind of analysis. I’m thinking especially about cultural memories, stories and representations of war in popular culture—like Lucas’s Red Tails, and like so, so many other war films, TV shows, novels, and more. I would argue that many, if not the vast majority, of those cultural representations are commemorative (which doesn’t have to mean celebratory); that whether the cultural sources seek to celebrate wartime heroism (as does Lucas’ film) to attack the brutalities and horrors of war (as does for example Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket), or to stake out any position in between, they almost always create simplified and even mythologized depictions of war in service of their agendas and goals. They might incidentally introduce complexities and even contradictions (an ironic critique of American racism within the celebratory Red Tails; a positive depiction of soldierly comraderie in the cynical world of Jacket), but to my mind their overall construction of war is far closer to commemoration than to remembrance.We do have models in our popular culture for remembering rather than commemorating war, though. One such model is when a talented artist builds on but deepens and amplifies his or her personal experiences of war and creates a complex and powerful text as a result—Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is one such text, as are the best novels by Tim O’Brien. Just as important, however, are those models that don’t depend on personal experience (at least not of the artist him or herself), and for that I would highlight two complementary films from one of my Memory Day nominees: Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. If we try to consider what a battle like Iwo Jima, or a war like World War II, would look like and mean for those fighting it on both sides, it seems to me that we’re a long way toward remembering war in all its complexities. And it doesn’t hurt that Flags itself focuses directly on the most destructive effects of an emphasis on commemoration, in that case in the post-war lives of the Iwo Jima flag raisers. Commemoration has its value, as Kammen certainly acknowledges. But you know me well enough to know that I greatly prefer remembrance—even more so when it comes to a complex, dark, and crucial historical theme like war. Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on Iwo Jima, on Eastwood’s films, or on any related themes for the weekend post?12/3 Memory Day nominee: Gilbert Stuart, who painted some of America’s first and most memorable portraits, and whose imagescontinue to influence how we remember the Revolutionary era.
December 1, 2012
December 1-2, 2012: Chilly Crowd-sourcing
[This week’s series has focused on interesting and telling images of winter in American culture. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the ideas and responss of my fellow AmericanStudiers to that topic and the week’s posts—please add your stone cold suggestions!]
In response to Monday’s post on snow, Monica Jackson writes, “This post made me think of Where the Wild Things Are (movie version). I was excited to take my older son to see it when it came out, but in the film the story is so depressing and I think it's because of the snow. Max is sad, alone, and angry because the teenagers are too rough when playing with the snow. They break his fort and hurt him unintentionally, but then it leads into a string of depressing issues that always seem to arise during the winter months. There are layers to winter and snow. It's nice to look at, brings up memories or associations, but it leaves your fingers numb and if you get hit with a snowball, it will sting.”Following up the same post, Ronny Belmontes considers the film Cinderella Man , and specifically the way in which winter can be the toughest time for those experiencing economic and familial hardships; and so Ronny reflects on how Jim Braddock’s young children (as represented in that film) were forced to grow up particularly fast in their coldest moments.Rob Velella follows up the Fireside Poets post, writing, “I love your reading of "Snow-Bound" by putting it in the context of post-bellum America. It's also interesting to note how radical Whittier must have looked in his earlier period when he was using his poetry almost exclusively for the abolitionist cause (and he wrote some violently angry poetry for a Quaker). Longfellow, by far the superior poet, also wrote out against slavery before, as I say, using his poetry as a unifying force to create the American identity - to that end, he used history, calming imagery, etc. The reality was, of course, that it worked, which is reflected by his popularity. Further, I agree with your conclusion: I wouldn't take any of these folks out of our literary history.”Steve Edwards follows up the post on holiday classics by highlighting this interesting and informative story on a revised scene from Rudolph.On Twitter, Luke Dietrich highlights a couple complex American literary representations of snow: “Wallace Stevens' ‘The Snow Man’ is a favorite. The end of Ann Petry's novel The Streetsees NYC blanketed in snow.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? What images or ideas of winter would you highlight?12/1 Memory Day nominees: A tie between William Mahone, the Confederate officer whose complex and inspiring trajectory led to one of the post-war south’s most succesful biracial political parties; and Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who helped his parents escape the Japanese Internment and went on to design the World Trade Towers. 12/2 Memory Day nominee: Harry Burleigh, the composer, musician, and singer who contributed significantly not only to American music, but to Dvorak’s “From the New World.”
In response to Monday’s post on snow, Monica Jackson writes, “This post made me think of Where the Wild Things Are (movie version). I was excited to take my older son to see it when it came out, but in the film the story is so depressing and I think it's because of the snow. Max is sad, alone, and angry because the teenagers are too rough when playing with the snow. They break his fort and hurt him unintentionally, but then it leads into a string of depressing issues that always seem to arise during the winter months. There are layers to winter and snow. It's nice to look at, brings up memories or associations, but it leaves your fingers numb and if you get hit with a snowball, it will sting.”Following up the same post, Ronny Belmontes considers the film Cinderella Man , and specifically the way in which winter can be the toughest time for those experiencing economic and familial hardships; and so Ronny reflects on how Jim Braddock’s young children (as represented in that film) were forced to grow up particularly fast in their coldest moments.Rob Velella follows up the Fireside Poets post, writing, “I love your reading of "Snow-Bound" by putting it in the context of post-bellum America. It's also interesting to note how radical Whittier must have looked in his earlier period when he was using his poetry almost exclusively for the abolitionist cause (and he wrote some violently angry poetry for a Quaker). Longfellow, by far the superior poet, also wrote out against slavery before, as I say, using his poetry as a unifying force to create the American identity - to that end, he used history, calming imagery, etc. The reality was, of course, that it worked, which is reflected by his popularity. Further, I agree with your conclusion: I wouldn't take any of these folks out of our literary history.”Steve Edwards follows up the post on holiday classics by highlighting this interesting and informative story on a revised scene from Rudolph.On Twitter, Luke Dietrich highlights a couple complex American literary representations of snow: “Wallace Stevens' ‘The Snow Man’ is a favorite. The end of Ann Petry's novel The Streetsees NYC blanketed in snow.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? What images or ideas of winter would you highlight?12/1 Memory Day nominees: A tie between William Mahone, the Confederate officer whose complex and inspiring trajectory led to one of the post-war south’s most succesful biracial political parties; and Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who helped his parents escape the Japanese Internment and went on to design the World Trade Towers. 12/2 Memory Day nominee: Harry Burleigh, the composer, musician, and singer who contributed significantly not only to American music, but to Dvorak’s “From the New World.”
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