Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 422
January 19, 2012
January 19, 2012: American Studies in the Senior Capstone Course
[As the spring semester gets underway, this week I'll be blogging about aspects of my spring courses that connect to, have been influenced by, and can help reveal some of my perspectives on American Studies. I'll leave out Introduction to American Studies, not 'cause it's not a fun course—it's on the 1980s! I get to team-teach with a historian!—but because the connections are a bit obvious. This is the third in the series.]
My recent American Studies experiences have informed, and in turn been informed by, even the most explicitly English-centered course I teach.
Our required senior English Capstone Course is, as you would expect, very much about the discipline of English, on multiple levels. It brings together English Majors from our four departmental tracks (literature, professional writing, theater, and secondary education) to discuss their own experiences and assemble their senior portfolios; it gives us a space to talk about what the different aspects of English entail and analyze some shared readings to that effect; and it allows for practical conversations about and work toward the students' future goals and possibilities. Having had the chance to teach my first two Capstone sections last semester, and gearing up for another one this spring, I can testify that the course is indeed centrally focused on the discipline of English—yet at the same time, I have brought a core aspect of my recent American Studies efforts into the course, with exciting and surprising results.
As I have written about many times in this space (particularly in the posts captured under the "Meta-Posts" category), and as this blog and the new website themselves hopefully illustrate, I have come to feel more and more strongly over the last few years that public scholarship is a necessary and vital part of what us American Studiers (and scholars period) can and, if and when we're up for it, should do. There's perhaps no national issue for which that's truer, and on which our public scholarly perspectives have more value, than education, and so when it came time to pick a shared reading for the secondary education part of the syllabus, I went with a recent book that both represents and can help elicit nuanced and important public scholarship: Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System. For the two weeks that we discussed Ravitch's book, I asked the students to imagine themselves public scholars in the making, and to think about what arguments and ideas they'd want to advance in public conversations and debates about education and its many related issues. It made for a really provocative and compelling couple of weeks, and certainly exemplified the interconnections between English and broader, public, American Studies questions.
I'm hopeful that those couple weeks influenced the students as they move forward, since all of them have the potential to be (whatever specific careers and futures they end up in) part of our public conversations in meaningful ways. And in any case, I can already say that the class discussions have influenced my own perspective on public scholarship in at least one very important way. During the final discussion, a debate on what kinds of educational policies and approaches we as a nation should take moving forward, a student asked a very salient question: given the role and power of big money in the world of education, as in every other sector of our society, what difference does it make what we think and say? My answer at the time was that, while we perhaps cannot influence policies or governments or leaders in the way that money can and does, we can most definitely influence narratives, can contribute to and even (particularly as communities) shift the stories and histories and ideas that are part of our conversations and debates. The more I've thought about it, the more I believe that that's maybe the only, but also the most important, thing that public scholars can do—and of course that one of the best things we can do in a classroom (English or otherwise) is to help students become better participants in and shapers of such discussions.
Pretty important goal, at least! Last course tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any public conversations you'd highlight, and/or stories or ideas you'd want to add into our national conversations?
1/19 Memory Day nominee: Edgar Allan Poe, one of the couple most famous American writers (you get a football team named after you, you're at the top of the list) but still underappreciated for the breadth and depth of his talent: the guy helped create and popularize not only realistic psychological horror, but also the detective story, science fiction, and modern literary criticism—all before the age of forty! (To say nothing of his innovative, mathematically precise yet still emotionally resonant poetry.)
My recent American Studies experiences have informed, and in turn been informed by, even the most explicitly English-centered course I teach.
Our required senior English Capstone Course is, as you would expect, very much about the discipline of English, on multiple levels. It brings together English Majors from our four departmental tracks (literature, professional writing, theater, and secondary education) to discuss their own experiences and assemble their senior portfolios; it gives us a space to talk about what the different aspects of English entail and analyze some shared readings to that effect; and it allows for practical conversations about and work toward the students' future goals and possibilities. Having had the chance to teach my first two Capstone sections last semester, and gearing up for another one this spring, I can testify that the course is indeed centrally focused on the discipline of English—yet at the same time, I have brought a core aspect of my recent American Studies efforts into the course, with exciting and surprising results.
As I have written about many times in this space (particularly in the posts captured under the "Meta-Posts" category), and as this blog and the new website themselves hopefully illustrate, I have come to feel more and more strongly over the last few years that public scholarship is a necessary and vital part of what us American Studiers (and scholars period) can and, if and when we're up for it, should do. There's perhaps no national issue for which that's truer, and on which our public scholarly perspectives have more value, than education, and so when it came time to pick a shared reading for the secondary education part of the syllabus, I went with a recent book that both represents and can help elicit nuanced and important public scholarship: Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System. For the two weeks that we discussed Ravitch's book, I asked the students to imagine themselves public scholars in the making, and to think about what arguments and ideas they'd want to advance in public conversations and debates about education and its many related issues. It made for a really provocative and compelling couple of weeks, and certainly exemplified the interconnections between English and broader, public, American Studies questions.
I'm hopeful that those couple weeks influenced the students as they move forward, since all of them have the potential to be (whatever specific careers and futures they end up in) part of our public conversations in meaningful ways. And in any case, I can already say that the class discussions have influenced my own perspective on public scholarship in at least one very important way. During the final discussion, a debate on what kinds of educational policies and approaches we as a nation should take moving forward, a student asked a very salient question: given the role and power of big money in the world of education, as in every other sector of our society, what difference does it make what we think and say? My answer at the time was that, while we perhaps cannot influence policies or governments or leaders in the way that money can and does, we can most definitely influence narratives, can contribute to and even (particularly as communities) shift the stories and histories and ideas that are part of our conversations and debates. The more I've thought about it, the more I believe that that's maybe the only, but also the most important, thing that public scholars can do—and of course that one of the best things we can do in a classroom (English or otherwise) is to help students become better participants in and shapers of such discussions.
Pretty important goal, at least! Last course tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any public conversations you'd highlight, and/or stories or ideas you'd want to add into our national conversations?
1/19 Memory Day nominee: Edgar Allan Poe, one of the couple most famous American writers (you get a football team named after you, you're at the top of the list) but still underappreciated for the breadth and depth of his talent: the guy helped create and popularize not only realistic psychological horror, but also the detective story, science fiction, and modern literary criticism—all before the age of forty! (To say nothing of his innovative, mathematically precise yet still emotionally resonant poetry.)
January 18, 2012
January 18, 2012: American Studies in the Survey Classroom
[As the spring semester gets underway, this week I'll be blogging about aspects of my spring courses that connect to, have been influenced by, and can help reveal some of my perspectives on American Studies. I'll leave out Introduction to American Studies, not 'cause it's not a fun course—it's on the 1980s! I get to team-teach with a historian!—but because the connections are a bit obvious. This is the second in the series.]
Beyond the obvious historicisms, it's really what I ask of my students that illustrates the American Studies influences in my survey courses.
If American Studies is by many definitions grounded in the intersections between History and English—and that's how we set up our American Studies program at Fitchburg State University, to be jointly housed and operated by those two departments—then a chronologically divided, two-part American lit survey course is, from its very concept, connected to American Studies. Certainly my particular syllabi for American Literature I and II echo that idea, divided as they are into time-period based Units (The Revolutionary Era and The Early Republic, to cite two from Am Lit I; The Late 19th Century and The Turn of the 21st Century, to cite two from Am Lit II) in the details of which I consistently locate for students the particular authors and works we're reading. Yet I would argue that what is most uniquely American Studies about the American Lit II course I'm about to teach can instead be found in work that I ask of the students.
Throughout the semester, the most consistent place where students in my survey courses add their perspectives into our conversations is in their individual presentations. Each presentation focuses on a particular author and text, and the first two things I ask the students to talk about are par for the course: a biographical detail or two that they've discovered and that seem relevant to our reading; a close reading analysis of a passage from the text that stood out for them. But while those two elements unquestionably help frame our discussions throughout the semester, it's the third presentation subject that most successfully brings in each student's own American identity and interests: I ask the presenter to make an "outside connection," to link the author and/or text to some other issue, work of art (from any genre), historical event, contemporary event, personal experience, to which it connected for him or her. When a student compellingly connects a Langston Hughes poem to a Talib Kweli record, and talks about how each have helped her understand race and community in America—well, it doesn't get much more American Studies than that!
That semester-long American Studies presence in my American Lit II course gets amplified like crazy (technical pedagogical lingo there) in the final couple weeks of the semester. Having reached the 21st century (especially with our last readings, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and a short story by Junot Díaz), we spend our final two class discussions hearing about the students' 21st century American identities; I ask each of them to share an artist (in any medium and genre, and from anywhere in the world) who has been an important influence and inspiration, and to highlight a bit of a particular, exemplary work of that artist's. As I wrote in this blog post, I've learned more about contemporary culture (especially music, but also film, photography, graphic art, comics and graphic novels, and, yup, literature) from these student perspectives than any other source (even my trusty Entertainment Weekly). But the conversations also illustrate, informally but unquestionably, the real value of an interdisciplinary American Studies perspective—we'll move from Eric Carle to Eminem, Jodi Picault to the graffiti artist Banksy, with each additional pair of voices (the artist's and the student's) contributing another layer to our sense of 21st century American and world culture and identity.
I'm excited to hear my students' American Studies perspectives this semester, and will be sure to keep you posted! Next course tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any influential and inspiring 21st century artists you'd share?
1/18 Memory Day nominee: Daniel Hale Williams, the first African American cardiologist and a physician and surgeon of tremendous talent and influence, but also a pioneering social activist: Williams opened the Provident Hospital and Nursing Training School for young African Americans, served as surgeon-in-chief at Washington's Freedmen's Hospital, and, when denied membership in the American Medical Association, founded the National Medical Association.
Beyond the obvious historicisms, it's really what I ask of my students that illustrates the American Studies influences in my survey courses.
If American Studies is by many definitions grounded in the intersections between History and English—and that's how we set up our American Studies program at Fitchburg State University, to be jointly housed and operated by those two departments—then a chronologically divided, two-part American lit survey course is, from its very concept, connected to American Studies. Certainly my particular syllabi for American Literature I and II echo that idea, divided as they are into time-period based Units (The Revolutionary Era and The Early Republic, to cite two from Am Lit I; The Late 19th Century and The Turn of the 21st Century, to cite two from Am Lit II) in the details of which I consistently locate for students the particular authors and works we're reading. Yet I would argue that what is most uniquely American Studies about the American Lit II course I'm about to teach can instead be found in work that I ask of the students.
Throughout the semester, the most consistent place where students in my survey courses add their perspectives into our conversations is in their individual presentations. Each presentation focuses on a particular author and text, and the first two things I ask the students to talk about are par for the course: a biographical detail or two that they've discovered and that seem relevant to our reading; a close reading analysis of a passage from the text that stood out for them. But while those two elements unquestionably help frame our discussions throughout the semester, it's the third presentation subject that most successfully brings in each student's own American identity and interests: I ask the presenter to make an "outside connection," to link the author and/or text to some other issue, work of art (from any genre), historical event, contemporary event, personal experience, to which it connected for him or her. When a student compellingly connects a Langston Hughes poem to a Talib Kweli record, and talks about how each have helped her understand race and community in America—well, it doesn't get much more American Studies than that!
That semester-long American Studies presence in my American Lit II course gets amplified like crazy (technical pedagogical lingo there) in the final couple weeks of the semester. Having reached the 21st century (especially with our last readings, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and a short story by Junot Díaz), we spend our final two class discussions hearing about the students' 21st century American identities; I ask each of them to share an artist (in any medium and genre, and from anywhere in the world) who has been an important influence and inspiration, and to highlight a bit of a particular, exemplary work of that artist's. As I wrote in this blog post, I've learned more about contemporary culture (especially music, but also film, photography, graphic art, comics and graphic novels, and, yup, literature) from these student perspectives than any other source (even my trusty Entertainment Weekly). But the conversations also illustrate, informally but unquestionably, the real value of an interdisciplinary American Studies perspective—we'll move from Eric Carle to Eminem, Jodi Picault to the graffiti artist Banksy, with each additional pair of voices (the artist's and the student's) contributing another layer to our sense of 21st century American and world culture and identity.
I'm excited to hear my students' American Studies perspectives this semester, and will be sure to keep you posted! Next course tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any influential and inspiring 21st century artists you'd share?
1/18 Memory Day nominee: Daniel Hale Williams, the first African American cardiologist and a physician and surgeon of tremendous talent and influence, but also a pioneering social activist: Williams opened the Provident Hospital and Nursing Training School for young African Americans, served as surgeon-in-chief at Washington's Freedmen's Hospital, and, when denied membership in the American Medical Association, founded the National Medical Association.
January 17, 2012
January 17, 2012: American Studies in the Literature Classroom
[As the spring semester gets underway, this week I'll be blogging about aspects of my spring courses that connect to, have been influenced by, and can help reveal some of my perspectives on American Studies. I'll leave out Introduction to American Studies, not 'cause it's not a fun course—it's on the 1980s! I get to team-teach with a historian!—but because the connections are a bit obvious. This is the first in the series.]
In both overt and subtle ways, my work in a class focused very closely on American literature is
informed and strengthened by an American Studies perspective.
Although you wouldn't necessarily know it from this blog, I'm still (and happily) an English professor first and foremost, and as such I get to teach at least one upper-level literature course in most semesters. This semester that course is The American Novel to 1950, and my syllabus for it is, as is the case every time I teach an upper-level lit, most definitely focused on literary analysis: from the students' weekly Blackboard posts on different elements of fiction (characterization, narration and perspective, imagery, and so on) to the assignment sequence (grounded in close reading, developing to analyses of a whole text and then of different genres of the novel in relationship to each other), and much else besides. Yet that literary focus doesn't mean that the course isn't influenced by my American Studies perspective, and here I'll describe both an overt and a more subtle AMST presence in this classroom.
The most overt American Studies presence comes on the third day of the four that we spend discussing each novel. While I base these lit courses (like all my other courses) on student discussions as much as possible, I decided a couple years back that there was a place for a bit more in-depth lecturing, and that said place was on the third day: having given the students a chance to establish their takes over a couple days of discussions (including one based on extended Blackboard analyses), I can add in a few analytical frames and topics of my own, to help drive their second-week discussions and analyses. And those frames and topics are, in both their variety and my attempt to present their interconnections, entirely grounded in an American Studies approach. For Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, for example, I highlight and ask the students to analyze photographs of turn of the century New York, muckraking progressive exposes of sweatshops, pieces from the Jewish Daily Forward , and more; for Willa Cather's My Ántonia, we look at early Western novels and films, Eastern European folk tales, and material culture artifacts from the frontier, among other sources. In each case, neither the interdisciplinary intertexts nor my own ideas are presented as "authoritative," but rather as additional texts for the students to discuss and incorporate into their analyses.
There's likewise a more subtle American Studies presence at work throughout the semester, though, and it comes through my chronology and choice of texts. It's probably inevitable that a course on the novel through 1950 would be organized chronologically, but I'll freely admit that a central goal in choosing the two novels to represent each genre (Romanticism, Realism, Modernism) is to represent at the same time core questions of American identity and community across these time periods. So my defining Romantic novel (Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables) is centrally concerned with how the American past defines our early republic existence and whether and how we can move beyond those histories; my central Realistic ones (Twain's Adventures of Huck Finn, Chopin's The Awakening, and Cahan's novel) engage directly with the social conflicts and changes through which late 19th and early 20th century America evolved; and my Modernist ones (Cather's novel and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury) directly and meta-textually question what role fiction and storytelling have in depicting modern American identities and lives. We don't necessarily talk a lot about these undercurrents on a day to day basis in the class, but my hope is that by analyzing these novels, the students are also gaining a broader sense of how American perspectives and conversations evolved over the 19th and early 20th centuries.
That's the plan, anyway! More American Studies influences in my courses tomorrow, as the first day of classes gets underway!
Ben
PS. Any interesting courses you've taken or taught and would highlight here?
1/17 Memory Day nominee: Ben Franklin, not because he wrote a relatively self-aggrandizing autobiography that helped launch the idealized "self-made man" narrative, nor because he gradually changed his mind on his xenophobic opposition to Germans in Pennsylvania (although he did indeed change), but because he was one of the first and remains one of the most impressive genuinely renaissance Americans, and one who (the Germans notwithstanding) modeled attitudes of tolerance and community that can and should inspire all Americans.
In both overt and subtle ways, my work in a class focused very closely on American literature is
informed and strengthened by an American Studies perspective.
Although you wouldn't necessarily know it from this blog, I'm still (and happily) an English professor first and foremost, and as such I get to teach at least one upper-level literature course in most semesters. This semester that course is The American Novel to 1950, and my syllabus for it is, as is the case every time I teach an upper-level lit, most definitely focused on literary analysis: from the students' weekly Blackboard posts on different elements of fiction (characterization, narration and perspective, imagery, and so on) to the assignment sequence (grounded in close reading, developing to analyses of a whole text and then of different genres of the novel in relationship to each other), and much else besides. Yet that literary focus doesn't mean that the course isn't influenced by my American Studies perspective, and here I'll describe both an overt and a more subtle AMST presence in this classroom.
The most overt American Studies presence comes on the third day of the four that we spend discussing each novel. While I base these lit courses (like all my other courses) on student discussions as much as possible, I decided a couple years back that there was a place for a bit more in-depth lecturing, and that said place was on the third day: having given the students a chance to establish their takes over a couple days of discussions (including one based on extended Blackboard analyses), I can add in a few analytical frames and topics of my own, to help drive their second-week discussions and analyses. And those frames and topics are, in both their variety and my attempt to present their interconnections, entirely grounded in an American Studies approach. For Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, for example, I highlight and ask the students to analyze photographs of turn of the century New York, muckraking progressive exposes of sweatshops, pieces from the Jewish Daily Forward , and more; for Willa Cather's My Ántonia, we look at early Western novels and films, Eastern European folk tales, and material culture artifacts from the frontier, among other sources. In each case, neither the interdisciplinary intertexts nor my own ideas are presented as "authoritative," but rather as additional texts for the students to discuss and incorporate into their analyses.
There's likewise a more subtle American Studies presence at work throughout the semester, though, and it comes through my chronology and choice of texts. It's probably inevitable that a course on the novel through 1950 would be organized chronologically, but I'll freely admit that a central goal in choosing the two novels to represent each genre (Romanticism, Realism, Modernism) is to represent at the same time core questions of American identity and community across these time periods. So my defining Romantic novel (Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables) is centrally concerned with how the American past defines our early republic existence and whether and how we can move beyond those histories; my central Realistic ones (Twain's Adventures of Huck Finn, Chopin's The Awakening, and Cahan's novel) engage directly with the social conflicts and changes through which late 19th and early 20th century America evolved; and my Modernist ones (Cather's novel and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury) directly and meta-textually question what role fiction and storytelling have in depicting modern American identities and lives. We don't necessarily talk a lot about these undercurrents on a day to day basis in the class, but my hope is that by analyzing these novels, the students are also gaining a broader sense of how American perspectives and conversations evolved over the 19th and early 20th centuries.
That's the plan, anyway! More American Studies influences in my courses tomorrow, as the first day of classes gets underway!
Ben
PS. Any interesting courses you've taken or taught and would highlight here?
1/17 Memory Day nominee: Ben Franklin, not because he wrote a relatively self-aggrandizing autobiography that helped launch the idealized "self-made man" narrative, nor because he gradually changed his mind on his xenophobic opposition to Germans in Pennsylvania (although he did indeed change), but because he was one of the first and remains one of the most impressive genuinely renaissance Americans, and one who (the Germans notwithstanding) modeled attitudes of tolerance and community that can and should inspire all Americans.
January 16, 2012
January 16, 2012: The Real King
[I wrote this post back in December 2010 and re-posted it on last year's MLK Day, but I think it bears repeating, especially since I know lots of readers are new to the blog and site since then. So here 'tis, and the teaching posts will begin tomorrow.]
It probably puts me at significant risk of losing my American Studies Card to say this—and you have no idea how hard it is to get a second one of those if you lose the first—but I think the "I Have a Dream" speech is kind of overrated. I'm sort of saying that for effect, since I don't really mean that the speech itself isn't as eloquent and powerful and pitch-perfect in every way as the narrative goes—it most definitely is, and while that's true enough if you read the words, it becomes infinitely more true when you see video and thus hear audio of the speech and moment. But what is overrated, I think, is the weight that has been placed on the speech, the cultural work that it has been asked to do. Partly that has to do with contemporary politics, and especially with those voices who have tried to argue that King's "content of their character" rather than "color of their skin" distinction means that he would oppose any and all forms of identity politics or affirmative action or the like; such readings tend to forget that King was speaking in that culminating section of the speech about what he dreams might happen "one day"—if, among other things, we give all racial groups the same treatment and opportunities—rather than what he thought was possible in America in the present.But the more significant overemphasis on the speech, I would argue, has occurred in the process by which it (and not even all of it, so much as just those final images of "one day") has been made to symbolize all of—or at least represent in miniature—King's philosophies and ideas and arguments. There's no question that the speech's liberal univeralism, its embrace (if in that hoped-for way) of an equality that knows no racial identifications, was a central thread within King's work; and, perhaps more tellingly, was the thread by which he could most clearly be defined in opposition to a more stridently and wholly Black Nationalist voice like Malcolm X's. Yet the simple and crucial fact is that King's rich and complex perspective and philosophy, as they existed throughout his life but especially as they developed over the decade and a half between his real emergence onto the national scene with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and his assassination in 1968, contained a number of similarly central and crucial threads. There were for example his radical perspectives on class, wealth, and the focuses of government spending, a set of arguments which culminated in the last years of his life in both the "Poor People's Campaign" and in increasingly vocal critiques of the military-industrial complex; and his strong belief not only in nonviolent resistance (as informed by figures as diverse as Thoreau and Gandhi) but also in pacifism in every sense, which likewise developed into his very public opposition to the Vietnam Year in his final years. While both of those perspectives were certainly not focused on one racial identity or community, neither were they broadly safe or moderate stances; indeed, they symbolized direct connections to some of the most radical social movements and philosophies of the era.
To my mind, though, the most significant undernarrated thread—and perhaps the most central one in King's perspective period—has to be his absolutely clear belief in the need to oppose racial segregation and discrimination, of every kind, in every way, as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Again, the contrast to Malcolm has tended to make King out to be the more patient or cautious voice, but I defy anyone to read "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"—the short piece that King wrote in April 1963 to a group of white Southern clergyman, while he was serving a brief jail sentence for his protest activities—and come away thinking that either patience or caution are in the top twenty adjectives that best describe the man and his beliefs. King would later expand the letter into a book, Why We Can't Wait , the very title of which makes the urgency of his arguments more explicit still; but when it comes to raw passion and power, I don't think any American text can top the "Letter" itself. Not raw in the sense of ineloquent—I tend to imagine that King's first words, at the age of 1 or whenever, were probably more eloquent than any I'll ever speak—but raw as in their absolute rejection, in the letter's opening sentence, of his audience's description of his protest activities as "unwise and untimely." And raw as well in the razor sharp turn in tone in the two sentences that comprise one of the letter's closing paragraphs: "If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me."I guess what it boils down to for me is this: to remember King for one section of "I Have a Dream" is like remembering Shakespeare for the "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy in Hamlet. Yeah, that's a great bit, but what about the humor? The ghost? The political plotting and play within the play? The twenty-seven other great speeches? And then there's, y'know, all those other pretty good, and very distinct, plays. And some poetry that wasn't bad either. It's about time we remembered the whole King, and thus got a bit closer to the real King and what he can really help us see about our national history, identity, and future.
BenPS. What do you think?
1/16 Memory Day nominee: Dian Fossey, the pioneering zoologist and activist whose work with gorillas, both as a scientist studying them in the wild and as a political advocate of protecting them and their habitats, embodies the best of public research and studies (and made for a pretty good film to boot).
It probably puts me at significant risk of losing my American Studies Card to say this—and you have no idea how hard it is to get a second one of those if you lose the first—but I think the "I Have a Dream" speech is kind of overrated. I'm sort of saying that for effect, since I don't really mean that the speech itself isn't as eloquent and powerful and pitch-perfect in every way as the narrative goes—it most definitely is, and while that's true enough if you read the words, it becomes infinitely more true when you see video and thus hear audio of the speech and moment. But what is overrated, I think, is the weight that has been placed on the speech, the cultural work that it has been asked to do. Partly that has to do with contemporary politics, and especially with those voices who have tried to argue that King's "content of their character" rather than "color of their skin" distinction means that he would oppose any and all forms of identity politics or affirmative action or the like; such readings tend to forget that King was speaking in that culminating section of the speech about what he dreams might happen "one day"—if, among other things, we give all racial groups the same treatment and opportunities—rather than what he thought was possible in America in the present.But the more significant overemphasis on the speech, I would argue, has occurred in the process by which it (and not even all of it, so much as just those final images of "one day") has been made to symbolize all of—or at least represent in miniature—King's philosophies and ideas and arguments. There's no question that the speech's liberal univeralism, its embrace (if in that hoped-for way) of an equality that knows no racial identifications, was a central thread within King's work; and, perhaps more tellingly, was the thread by which he could most clearly be defined in opposition to a more stridently and wholly Black Nationalist voice like Malcolm X's. Yet the simple and crucial fact is that King's rich and complex perspective and philosophy, as they existed throughout his life but especially as they developed over the decade and a half between his real emergence onto the national scene with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and his assassination in 1968, contained a number of similarly central and crucial threads. There were for example his radical perspectives on class, wealth, and the focuses of government spending, a set of arguments which culminated in the last years of his life in both the "Poor People's Campaign" and in increasingly vocal critiques of the military-industrial complex; and his strong belief not only in nonviolent resistance (as informed by figures as diverse as Thoreau and Gandhi) but also in pacifism in every sense, which likewise developed into his very public opposition to the Vietnam Year in his final years. While both of those perspectives were certainly not focused on one racial identity or community, neither were they broadly safe or moderate stances; indeed, they symbolized direct connections to some of the most radical social movements and philosophies of the era.
To my mind, though, the most significant undernarrated thread—and perhaps the most central one in King's perspective period—has to be his absolutely clear belief in the need to oppose racial segregation and discrimination, of every kind, in every way, as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Again, the contrast to Malcolm has tended to make King out to be the more patient or cautious voice, but I defy anyone to read "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"—the short piece that King wrote in April 1963 to a group of white Southern clergyman, while he was serving a brief jail sentence for his protest activities—and come away thinking that either patience or caution are in the top twenty adjectives that best describe the man and his beliefs. King would later expand the letter into a book, Why We Can't Wait , the very title of which makes the urgency of his arguments more explicit still; but when it comes to raw passion and power, I don't think any American text can top the "Letter" itself. Not raw in the sense of ineloquent—I tend to imagine that King's first words, at the age of 1 or whenever, were probably more eloquent than any I'll ever speak—but raw as in their absolute rejection, in the letter's opening sentence, of his audience's description of his protest activities as "unwise and untimely." And raw as well in the razor sharp turn in tone in the two sentences that comprise one of the letter's closing paragraphs: "If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me."I guess what it boils down to for me is this: to remember King for one section of "I Have a Dream" is like remembering Shakespeare for the "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy in Hamlet. Yeah, that's a great bit, but what about the humor? The ghost? The political plotting and play within the play? The twenty-seven other great speeches? And then there's, y'know, all those other pretty good, and very distinct, plays. And some poetry that wasn't bad either. It's about time we remembered the whole King, and thus got a bit closer to the real King and what he can really help us see about our national history, identity, and future.
BenPS. What do you think?
1/16 Memory Day nominee: Dian Fossey, the pioneering zoologist and activist whose work with gorillas, both as a scientist studying them in the wild and as a political advocate of protecting them and their habitats, embodies the best of public research and studies (and made for a pretty good film to boot).
January 14, 2012
January 14-15, 2012: The Year Ahead
Four developing American Studier stories on which I'm looking forward to keeping you updated as this year unfolds.
As usual (at least for my University's spring schedule), MLK Day marks the final day of winter break, and so this coming week an American Studier's thoughts (and, as you'll see blog posts) will turn to the spring semester ahead. But while the semester's five courses and an upcoming thesis defense (for a grad student on whom you'll hear more this week too) will most definitely occupy a lot of my pedagogical and scholarly energy and focus, as they should, there are other American Studies projects on which I'll continue to work throughout the spring and beyond. Here are four at the top of that list.
1) American Writers Museum Traveling Exhibition: As I noted in Friday's post, the NEH proposal has gone out, and we won't hear until August whether our year of planning for the exhibition has been funded; so I'm partly being my eternally optimistic self by noting that I'll be working more on this project in the year to come. But as that post also illustrated, I've made amazing scholarly connections through the project no matter what, and I'd like for that trend to continue! So, per this post's request, howsabout you help make that happen and talk to me about some contemporary 1st or 2nd generation immigrant American authors you'd highlight?
2) New England American Studies Association: Despite my tyrannical reign as NEASA President having ended, they haven't found a way to get rid of me yet (cue maniacal laughter), and I'm looking forward to working on both of the year's big, in-development NEASA events. In May, we'll hold the second Spring Colloquium; this one, preliminarily scheduled for Saturday May 12th, will be at Salem's House of the Seven Gables, and will feature both a morning conversation about historical and cultural institutions and an afternoon walk and talk along the historic waterfront area. And October will feature the next Fall Conference—look for a first Call for Papers and a lot more details soon, but I can report that the conference will focus on the Digital Humanities, will likely be held at the URI Providence campus, and should be another great American Studies time!
3) Book Three: This summer and my fall sabbatical (my first!) will, I pledge here publicly in the hopes that I will thus feel even more forced to hold myself to it, allow me to complete a first manuscript of my third book, about which I wrote a good bit in this post. I've felt more and more strongly over the last year or two that the book's three most central and interconnected ideas—that we as Americans need to do a better job engaging with our darkest histories and stories; that some of our best novels can help us to do that; and that it's only through such engagement that we, like those novels' characters, can move into a genuinely hopeful future—are vitally important to our national community and future. So it's time for me to say what I have to say about them!
4) American Studier: Obviously I'm excited about this website, about all the great work that Graham Beckwith has done to make it so impressive, and about my own ideas for where it can go next—but I'm most excited at the thought of all the content and ideas and contributions that other American Studiers can, and I hope will, bring to the site in the year ahead. That means you—so start a Forum conversation, send along an Analytical Piece of your own, email me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) a suggestion, and otherwise get involved and help make this site as communal and American Studies as possible!
More next week, teaching posts as the new semester begins,
Ben
PS. What are you working on, looking forward to, excited about in the year to come?
1/14 Memory Day nominees: I can't decide between Tillie Olsen, the hugely unique author and activist who helped change the way Americans think about class, gender, motherhood, and identity (among other themes); and Julian Bond, the Civil Rights leader, legislator, and scholar who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and whose influences on 20th and 21st century America are immeasurable. So let's call it Olsen-Bond Day!
1/15 Memory Day nominee: Martin Luther King, Jr., who of course already has a holiday in his honor but who deserves it as much as anyone I will or could nominate all year.
As usual (at least for my University's spring schedule), MLK Day marks the final day of winter break, and so this coming week an American Studier's thoughts (and, as you'll see blog posts) will turn to the spring semester ahead. But while the semester's five courses and an upcoming thesis defense (for a grad student on whom you'll hear more this week too) will most definitely occupy a lot of my pedagogical and scholarly energy and focus, as they should, there are other American Studies projects on which I'll continue to work throughout the spring and beyond. Here are four at the top of that list.
1) American Writers Museum Traveling Exhibition: As I noted in Friday's post, the NEH proposal has gone out, and we won't hear until August whether our year of planning for the exhibition has been funded; so I'm partly being my eternally optimistic self by noting that I'll be working more on this project in the year to come. But as that post also illustrated, I've made amazing scholarly connections through the project no matter what, and I'd like for that trend to continue! So, per this post's request, howsabout you help make that happen and talk to me about some contemporary 1st or 2nd generation immigrant American authors you'd highlight?
2) New England American Studies Association: Despite my tyrannical reign as NEASA President having ended, they haven't found a way to get rid of me yet (cue maniacal laughter), and I'm looking forward to working on both of the year's big, in-development NEASA events. In May, we'll hold the second Spring Colloquium; this one, preliminarily scheduled for Saturday May 12th, will be at Salem's House of the Seven Gables, and will feature both a morning conversation about historical and cultural institutions and an afternoon walk and talk along the historic waterfront area. And October will feature the next Fall Conference—look for a first Call for Papers and a lot more details soon, but I can report that the conference will focus on the Digital Humanities, will likely be held at the URI Providence campus, and should be another great American Studies time!
3) Book Three: This summer and my fall sabbatical (my first!) will, I pledge here publicly in the hopes that I will thus feel even more forced to hold myself to it, allow me to complete a first manuscript of my third book, about which I wrote a good bit in this post. I've felt more and more strongly over the last year or two that the book's three most central and interconnected ideas—that we as Americans need to do a better job engaging with our darkest histories and stories; that some of our best novels can help us to do that; and that it's only through such engagement that we, like those novels' characters, can move into a genuinely hopeful future—are vitally important to our national community and future. So it's time for me to say what I have to say about them!
4) American Studier: Obviously I'm excited about this website, about all the great work that Graham Beckwith has done to make it so impressive, and about my own ideas for where it can go next—but I'm most excited at the thought of all the content and ideas and contributions that other American Studiers can, and I hope will, bring to the site in the year ahead. That means you—so start a Forum conversation, send along an Analytical Piece of your own, email me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) a suggestion, and otherwise get involved and help make this site as communal and American Studies as possible!
More next week, teaching posts as the new semester begins,
Ben
PS. What are you working on, looking forward to, excited about in the year to come?
1/14 Memory Day nominees: I can't decide between Tillie Olsen, the hugely unique author and activist who helped change the way Americans think about class, gender, motherhood, and identity (among other themes); and Julian Bond, the Civil Rights leader, legislator, and scholar who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and whose influences on 20th and 21st century America are immeasurable. So let's call it Olsen-Bond Day!
1/15 Memory Day nominee: Martin Luther King, Jr., who of course already has a holiday in his honor but who deserves it as much as anyone I will or could nominate all year.
January 13, 2012
January 13, 2012: Transnational American Studiers
[This week I'll be blogging about fellow American Studiers, colleagues and friends who exemplify the best kinds of scholarly engagement with our national histories, stories, and identities. That's in addition to other folks about whom you've already heard in this space, a list which would include Caroline Rody, Karl Jacoby, Christopher Cappozzola, Mike Branch, Heidi Kim, Kevin Levin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rob Velella, Larry Rosenwald, Steve Railton, my web guru Graham Beckwith, and many more. This is the fifth in the series.]
Scholars at the forefront of the transnational turn in American Studies exemplify how the field, like our nation, continues to evolve and deepen.
I have written in a couple of posts here, especially this request for ideas (which is still in effect!), about my ongoing work for the American Writers Museum, and more exactly my writing of an NEH proposal for a traveling exhibition on first- and second-generation immigrant writers and 21st century American literature. Hopefully the proposal (submitted this week) will be accepted and you'll get to hear a lot more about the exhibition in this space; but even if it isn't, one immensely inspiring benefit of my work to date has been the opportunity to recruit into the project and work closely with some very smart and impressive fellow American Studiers. At the top of that list are two scholars who embody the contemporary and ongoing transnational turn in American Studies: David Palumbo-Liu and Elena Machado Sáez.
Palumbo-Liu's own career trajectory strikingly mirrors that transnational turn—he first trained in East Asian area studies and classical Chinese literature, shifted into comparative literature (in which he received his PhD and the program in which he directs at Stanford), and then has gradually become one of America and the world's foremost scholarly voices in Asian American Studies (a program he founded at Stanford). Rather than seeing those different disciplines as separate or discrete, though, I would argue that Palumbo-Liu's work consistently reveals how interconnected and cross-culturally influential his different interests are, as illustrated by books such as his co-edited Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies (1997) and his own Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (1999). And his forthcoming The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age promises to connect such transnational literary interests explicitly to some of the most crucial and defining public and communal questions of our 21st century moment.
Machado Sáez's career and work are just as centered on transnational literary and cultural identities and themes, directed in her case not across the Pacific but throughout the Western Hemisphere. She teaches Latino/a American and Caribbean American literature and theory at Florida Atlantic University, and has in just a half-dozen years already established herself as an expert scholarly voice on those cross-cultural and evolving fields. Her co-authored The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (2007) makes clear that such transnational and cross-cultural studies represent more than just an enlarging of what "American" or American Studies includes—that, in fact, such ideas have the power to fundamentally change how we think about our national literature, culture, and identity. And her current project, Caribbean Diasporic Historical Fiction: Marketing Multicultural Ethnics, Promoting Postcolonial Ethics—from which this compelling article on Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is drawn—promises to further push and enrich transnational, cross-cultural, and hemispheric American Studies.
Hard not to be inspired by the work of these two American Studiers, isn't it? As with all eight of this week's other subjects, they reveal the breadth and depth, the power and significance, of what this discipline has been and continues to be and offer for all Americans and citizens of the world. One more follow up this weekend,
Ben
PS. Any other American Studiers you'd highlight? Feel free to write about them in the Forum as well, or to share your own American Studies ideas and analyses here and/or there.
1/13 Memory Day nominee: Salmon Chase, best known as Lincoln's crucial Secretary of the Treasury and then as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who swore in Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson and helped uphold the 13th and 14th amendments during Reconstruction, but just as inspiringly an abolitionist lawyer and activist who helped form the 1840s Liberty Party and continued after the war to take important stands such as his support for voting rights for black men.
Scholars at the forefront of the transnational turn in American Studies exemplify how the field, like our nation, continues to evolve and deepen.
I have written in a couple of posts here, especially this request for ideas (which is still in effect!), about my ongoing work for the American Writers Museum, and more exactly my writing of an NEH proposal for a traveling exhibition on first- and second-generation immigrant writers and 21st century American literature. Hopefully the proposal (submitted this week) will be accepted and you'll get to hear a lot more about the exhibition in this space; but even if it isn't, one immensely inspiring benefit of my work to date has been the opportunity to recruit into the project and work closely with some very smart and impressive fellow American Studiers. At the top of that list are two scholars who embody the contemporary and ongoing transnational turn in American Studies: David Palumbo-Liu and Elena Machado Sáez.
Palumbo-Liu's own career trajectory strikingly mirrors that transnational turn—he first trained in East Asian area studies and classical Chinese literature, shifted into comparative literature (in which he received his PhD and the program in which he directs at Stanford), and then has gradually become one of America and the world's foremost scholarly voices in Asian American Studies (a program he founded at Stanford). Rather than seeing those different disciplines as separate or discrete, though, I would argue that Palumbo-Liu's work consistently reveals how interconnected and cross-culturally influential his different interests are, as illustrated by books such as his co-edited Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies (1997) and his own Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (1999). And his forthcoming The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age promises to connect such transnational literary interests explicitly to some of the most crucial and defining public and communal questions of our 21st century moment.
Machado Sáez's career and work are just as centered on transnational literary and cultural identities and themes, directed in her case not across the Pacific but throughout the Western Hemisphere. She teaches Latino/a American and Caribbean American literature and theory at Florida Atlantic University, and has in just a half-dozen years already established herself as an expert scholarly voice on those cross-cultural and evolving fields. Her co-authored The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (2007) makes clear that such transnational and cross-cultural studies represent more than just an enlarging of what "American" or American Studies includes—that, in fact, such ideas have the power to fundamentally change how we think about our national literature, culture, and identity. And her current project, Caribbean Diasporic Historical Fiction: Marketing Multicultural Ethnics, Promoting Postcolonial Ethics—from which this compelling article on Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is drawn—promises to further push and enrich transnational, cross-cultural, and hemispheric American Studies.
Hard not to be inspired by the work of these two American Studiers, isn't it? As with all eight of this week's other subjects, they reveal the breadth and depth, the power and significance, of what this discipline has been and continues to be and offer for all Americans and citizens of the world. One more follow up this weekend,
Ben
PS. Any other American Studiers you'd highlight? Feel free to write about them in the Forum as well, or to share your own American Studies ideas and analyses here and/or there.
1/13 Memory Day nominee: Salmon Chase, best known as Lincoln's crucial Secretary of the Treasury and then as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who swore in Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson and helped uphold the 13th and 14th amendments during Reconstruction, but just as inspiringly an abolitionist lawyer and activist who helped form the 1840s Liberty Party and continued after the war to take important stands such as his support for voting rights for black men.
January 12, 2012
January 12, 2012: International American Studiers
[This week I'll be blogging about fellow American Studiers, colleagues and friends who exemplify the best kinds of scholarly engagement with our national histories, stories, and identities. That's in addition to other folks about whom you've already heard in this space, a list which would include Caroline Rody, Karl Jacoby, Christopher Cappozzola, Mike Branch, Heidi Kim, Kevin Levin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rob Velella, Larry Rosenwald, Steve Railton, my web guru Graham Beckwith, and many more. This is the fourth in the series.]
American Studies work being done around the globe importantly complements, and often complicates and challenges, the work being done by those of us within the US.
Of the many inspiring things about the fall's New England American Studies Association conference, I was particularly excited that we had such a large international turnout—multiple scholars (at least half a dozen) from Great Britain, a couple each from Canada and Germany, and one from Denmark. Any scholarly conversation and community is of course enhanced by the addition of different, international perspectives and voices, but I think such additions are particularly key when it comes to American Studies; it can be difficult to separate our own American experiences and identities from our scholarly and analytical perspectives, and while there's value in acknowledging our own influences, there's potential limitation there as well. Which makes the work of exemplary international American Studiers like Maureen Mahoney and Velichka Ivanova that much more important.
Mahoney is working on her PhD in History at Ottawa's Carleton University, writing about European influences, American internationalism, and the late 19th century City Beautiful movement, but she's already making a major impact on American Studies scholarship and conversations through her work as a founder, editor, and contributor for NeoAmericanist , an Open Access (which means entirely free!), "interdisciplinary online journal for the study of America." Founded and run by American Studies students around the world, the journal consistently exemplifies not only the best of cutting-edge American Studies scholarship, but also the kinds of young voices and perspectives that can help the field move into the 21st century even more fully. Mahoney's own article in the journal's debut issue, on George Bush (the elder), masculinity, and the invasion of Panama, certainly embodies all those elements; but the full contents of the current issue, featuring articles on the Lost Cause and cultural performance, Woody Allen and kitsch, Boston's Civil War draft riot, political sermons as cultural texts, vampires in contemporary narratives, and 19th century novelist George Lippard, even more clearly demonstrates the range of American Studies work being done by these international students.
Ivanova, a literary scholar who teaches at the New Sorbonne University in Paris and the University of Strasbourg in Alsace, is further along in her American Studying, having published in 2010 her first book, a comparative study of themes of utopia and history in the novels of Philip Roth and Milan Kundera. That cross-cultural subject, one influenced by Ivanova's own multi-national heritage and experiences, already reflects the value of an international American Studies perspective. But Ivanova has exemplified that value even more overtly, assembling an impressive and impressively multi-national collection of scholars and writers (including, I'm honored to say, this AmericanStudier) for her recently published edited collection Reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral (2011). Roth's novel is explicitly and centrally interested in core American histories and narratives, both specific to the end of the 20th century (reflecting on the 1960s, for example) and broadly defining (the American Dream, for another), and there's something truly inspiring about seeing a community of international scholars analyze those subjects and the novel, often in explicitly multi-national literary, historical, and cultural contexts.
In a moment when one of the most-frequent refrains from Republican presidential candidates is a critique of President Obama's supposed "European influences" and the like, let's celebrate instead the genuinely international community of American Studies scholars. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any international American Studiers or work you'd highlight? Any ones within our borders?
1/12 Memory Day nominee: Ira Hayes, the Pima Native American (from the Gila River community) whose service with the Marines during World War II was immortalized in his role as one of the six Iwo Jima flag raisers, who played himself in a subsequent film about the battle, and whose complex and tragic yet also crucial American identity and life have been further immortalized by such artists as Tony Curtis, Johnny Cash, and Clint Eastwood.
American Studies work being done around the globe importantly complements, and often complicates and challenges, the work being done by those of us within the US.
Of the many inspiring things about the fall's New England American Studies Association conference, I was particularly excited that we had such a large international turnout—multiple scholars (at least half a dozen) from Great Britain, a couple each from Canada and Germany, and one from Denmark. Any scholarly conversation and community is of course enhanced by the addition of different, international perspectives and voices, but I think such additions are particularly key when it comes to American Studies; it can be difficult to separate our own American experiences and identities from our scholarly and analytical perspectives, and while there's value in acknowledging our own influences, there's potential limitation there as well. Which makes the work of exemplary international American Studiers like Maureen Mahoney and Velichka Ivanova that much more important.
Mahoney is working on her PhD in History at Ottawa's Carleton University, writing about European influences, American internationalism, and the late 19th century City Beautiful movement, but she's already making a major impact on American Studies scholarship and conversations through her work as a founder, editor, and contributor for NeoAmericanist , an Open Access (which means entirely free!), "interdisciplinary online journal for the study of America." Founded and run by American Studies students around the world, the journal consistently exemplifies not only the best of cutting-edge American Studies scholarship, but also the kinds of young voices and perspectives that can help the field move into the 21st century even more fully. Mahoney's own article in the journal's debut issue, on George Bush (the elder), masculinity, and the invasion of Panama, certainly embodies all those elements; but the full contents of the current issue, featuring articles on the Lost Cause and cultural performance, Woody Allen and kitsch, Boston's Civil War draft riot, political sermons as cultural texts, vampires in contemporary narratives, and 19th century novelist George Lippard, even more clearly demonstrates the range of American Studies work being done by these international students.
Ivanova, a literary scholar who teaches at the New Sorbonne University in Paris and the University of Strasbourg in Alsace, is further along in her American Studying, having published in 2010 her first book, a comparative study of themes of utopia and history in the novels of Philip Roth and Milan Kundera. That cross-cultural subject, one influenced by Ivanova's own multi-national heritage and experiences, already reflects the value of an international American Studies perspective. But Ivanova has exemplified that value even more overtly, assembling an impressive and impressively multi-national collection of scholars and writers (including, I'm honored to say, this AmericanStudier) for her recently published edited collection Reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral (2011). Roth's novel is explicitly and centrally interested in core American histories and narratives, both specific to the end of the 20th century (reflecting on the 1960s, for example) and broadly defining (the American Dream, for another), and there's something truly inspiring about seeing a community of international scholars analyze those subjects and the novel, often in explicitly multi-national literary, historical, and cultural contexts.
In a moment when one of the most-frequent refrains from Republican presidential candidates is a critique of President Obama's supposed "European influences" and the like, let's celebrate instead the genuinely international community of American Studies scholars. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any international American Studiers or work you'd highlight? Any ones within our borders?
1/12 Memory Day nominee: Ira Hayes, the Pima Native American (from the Gila River community) whose service with the Marines during World War II was immortalized in his role as one of the six Iwo Jima flag raisers, who played himself in a subsequent film about the battle, and whose complex and tragic yet also crucial American identity and life have been further immortalized by such artists as Tony Curtis, Johnny Cash, and Clint Eastwood.
January 11, 2012
January 11, 2012: New England American Studiers
[This week I'll be blogging about fellow American Studiers, colleagues and friends who exemplify the best kinds of scholarly engagement with our national histories, stories, and identities. That's in addition to other folks about whom you've already heard in this space, a list which would include Caroline Rody, Karl Jacoby, Christopher Cappozzola, Mike Branch, Heidi Kim, Kevin Levin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rob Velella, Larry Rosenwald, Steve Railton, my web guru Graham Beckwith, and many more. This is the third in the series.]
How a couple of regional colleagues can reveal the incredible range of contemporary, exemplary American Studies scholarship.
Long-time readers of this blog know well how much I've been influenced and inspired by my work over the last few years with the New England American Studies Association; for new readers, the relevant posts are collected under the "New England ASA" category on the right. But even before I had the chance to serve as the organization's president and organize a conference and so on, just serving on the NEASA Council already helped me to recognize and appreciate two interconnected and impressive facts: New England is full of folks doing amazing American Studies work (in and out of the academy, to go back to yesterday's subject); and the different disciplines and approaches contained within the field of American Studies are even broader and richer than I had previously imagined. Many of my NEASA colleagues could be used to illustrate those facts, but I'm going to focus here on two: NEASA's current webmaster, Jonathan Silverman; and one of its most successful past presidents, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui.
Jonathan Silverman teaches in the English and American Studies Departments at UMass Lowell, and so might on the surface seem to share an American Studies approach with this American Studier. But as I have discovered through my work with him, Jonathan's American Studies lens is just as significantly, and very uniquely, informed by a combination of four other elements: analytical tools drawn from the worlds of popular and visual culture, as illustrated by his great book on Johnny Cash; a connection of those skills to the kinds of arguments and work at the heart of composition studies, as illustrated by his co-edited reader; an interest in international experiences and perspectives, as illustrated by his work as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies in Norway; and all of it viewed and written through the lenses of a long-time journalist and media scholar. Jonathan's newest project, on the international and national meanings of horse racing, demonstrates anew how much this combinatory American Studies perspective can tell us about the societies and worlds in which we live.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, who teaches in Anthropology and American Studies Departments at Wesleyan University, has a much more unified, if still impressively deep and multi-faceted, lens through which she has done and continues to do her exemplary American Studies work. She is one of New England's and America's most prominent and influential scholars of indigenous cultures and histories: her most central interest is in the indigenous Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cultures, as illustrated by her first book on colonialism, sovereignty, and indigeneity in Hawaii and by her two scholarly projects in progress; but she has linked that specific scholarly pursuit to comparative analyses of and activism with Maori groups and other Pacific Islanders, to a radio program that explores indigenous political and social issues across the US and beyond, to the founding of the national Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and to important work on a number of related American Studies issues of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, democracy and activism, and more (all of which were exemplified by the NEASA conference she organized in her year as president).
I'm not saying other regions don't have equally diverse and impressive American Studiers, but I'm pretty proud to call these two (and many others) regional and NEASA colleagues. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any exemplary American Studiers you'd highlight?
1/11 Memory day nominee: William James, the pioneering psychological, philosopher, spiritual thinker, and renaissance American who not only significantly advanced human knowledge and ideas in a number of disciplines but also played a hugely influential role in the careers and lives of both one of our greatest creative writers (his brother Henry) and (to me) the most inspiring single American (W.E.B. Du Bois).
How a couple of regional colleagues can reveal the incredible range of contemporary, exemplary American Studies scholarship.
Long-time readers of this blog know well how much I've been influenced and inspired by my work over the last few years with the New England American Studies Association; for new readers, the relevant posts are collected under the "New England ASA" category on the right. But even before I had the chance to serve as the organization's president and organize a conference and so on, just serving on the NEASA Council already helped me to recognize and appreciate two interconnected and impressive facts: New England is full of folks doing amazing American Studies work (in and out of the academy, to go back to yesterday's subject); and the different disciplines and approaches contained within the field of American Studies are even broader and richer than I had previously imagined. Many of my NEASA colleagues could be used to illustrate those facts, but I'm going to focus here on two: NEASA's current webmaster, Jonathan Silverman; and one of its most successful past presidents, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui.
Jonathan Silverman teaches in the English and American Studies Departments at UMass Lowell, and so might on the surface seem to share an American Studies approach with this American Studier. But as I have discovered through my work with him, Jonathan's American Studies lens is just as significantly, and very uniquely, informed by a combination of four other elements: analytical tools drawn from the worlds of popular and visual culture, as illustrated by his great book on Johnny Cash; a connection of those skills to the kinds of arguments and work at the heart of composition studies, as illustrated by his co-edited reader; an interest in international experiences and perspectives, as illustrated by his work as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies in Norway; and all of it viewed and written through the lenses of a long-time journalist and media scholar. Jonathan's newest project, on the international and national meanings of horse racing, demonstrates anew how much this combinatory American Studies perspective can tell us about the societies and worlds in which we live.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, who teaches in Anthropology and American Studies Departments at Wesleyan University, has a much more unified, if still impressively deep and multi-faceted, lens through which she has done and continues to do her exemplary American Studies work. She is one of New England's and America's most prominent and influential scholars of indigenous cultures and histories: her most central interest is in the indigenous Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cultures, as illustrated by her first book on colonialism, sovereignty, and indigeneity in Hawaii and by her two scholarly projects in progress; but she has linked that specific scholarly pursuit to comparative analyses of and activism with Maori groups and other Pacific Islanders, to a radio program that explores indigenous political and social issues across the US and beyond, to the founding of the national Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and to important work on a number of related American Studies issues of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, democracy and activism, and more (all of which were exemplified by the NEASA conference she organized in her year as president).
I'm not saying other regions don't have equally diverse and impressive American Studiers, but I'm pretty proud to call these two (and many others) regional and NEASA colleagues. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any exemplary American Studiers you'd highlight?
1/11 Memory day nominee: William James, the pioneering psychological, philosopher, spiritual thinker, and renaissance American who not only significantly advanced human knowledge and ideas in a number of disciplines but also played a hugely influential role in the careers and lives of both one of our greatest creative writers (his brother Henry) and (to me) the most inspiring single American (W.E.B. Du Bois).
January 10, 2012
January 10, 2012: Outside the Box
[This week I'll be blogging about fellow American Studiers, colleagues and friends who exemplify the best kinds of scholarly engagement with our national histories, stories, and identities. That's in addition to other folks about whom you've already heard in this space, a list which would include Caroline Rody, Karl Jacoby, Christopher Cappozzola, Mike Branch, Heidi Kim, Kevin Levin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rob Velella, Larry Rosenwald, Steve Railton, my web guru Graham Beckwith, and many more. This is the second in the series.]
Exemplary American Studies scholarship and work happens outside the academy just as frequently, and just as significantly, as it does inside it.
One of the most overt strengths of an interdisciplinary and (relatively) new field like American Studies is that there are few if any traditional, limiting academic definitions of or boundaries around the field. While there's no question that older fields like English and History have undergone significant shifts and broadenings in the last few decades, as reflected by the diversity and breadth of attendees and presenters at the recently completed MLA and AHA conventions, I would still say that traditional, academic versions of those fields dominate many scholarly conversations in and around them (and I'm far from immune to that in my own English work, just to be clear). But since American Studies has from its origins crossed disciplinary and traditional boundaries, it has likewise consistently included in central and influential roles non-academic scholarly voices and perspectives as well—voices and perspectives embodied by my colleagues and friends Mark Rennella and Maggi Smith-Dalton.
Mark's training and background is within the academy—I met him when he was completing his PhD in History at Brandeis University and working as a tutor in Harvard's History and Literature program, and I was fortunate enough to work with him on my senior thesis in that program—and he's done important and inspiring American Studies work therein: his first book, The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters (2008), analyzes turn of the 20th century American writers and artists through a complex and compelling set of interdisciplinary lenses, including new technologies of travel, economics and questions of finance and patronage, and material and urban cultures. Yet while he was finalizing that book Mark was also transitioning into new and seemingly very different institutions and roles, including the Harvard Business School, where he co-wrote a history of the airline industry and ideas of leadership that is a model for linking American Studies questions to seemingly distinct yet ultimately interconnected conversations and settings. As Mark continues to move forward in his academic and non-academic—and always scholarly—American Studies roles, he constantly reminds me that such professional boundaries can be just as inspiringly porous as disciplinary ones.
While I've only known Maggi for the last couple of years—we met through the 2010 New England American Studies Association conference in Boston, and I'm very excited that Maggi has joined the NEASA Council this year—it didn't take long for me to recognize the ways she (and her husband and partner Jim Dalton) embodies the kind of renaissance American Studies identity that I've often written about in this space. She's a talented musician and singer who uses those skills to educate her fellow Americans about history and literature; a regional historian who founded and directs the Salem History Society; and an author and journalist who edits (and usually also writes) the weekly "Salem History Time" column for the Boston Globe online and who has published (among other books) Stories and Shadows from Salem's Past: Naumkeag Notations . To say that all of these activities exist outside of the traditional academy is only a partial and relatively minor truth—instead, it's more accurate to say that Maggi's (and Maggi and Jim's) work has greatly expanded the scholarly conversations and communities centered on Salem, on New England, on music and history, and other significant American Studies topics.
I've got nothing against academic scholarship (duh), but it's infinitely richer and stronger when it engages with the many parallel and interconnected American Studies conversations happening in other scholarly communities—as exemplified by Mark and Maggi. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any non-academic American Studiers, conversations, or communities you'd highlight?
1/10 Memory Day nominee: Robinson Jeffers, the iconoclastic poet whose works compare favorably to modernists like T.S. Eliot, American Studiers like William Carlos Williams, and natural/spiritual poets like Robert Frost, and whose biting and bracing views of human nature offer important correctives to some of our more blithely sunny ideals.
Exemplary American Studies scholarship and work happens outside the academy just as frequently, and just as significantly, as it does inside it.
One of the most overt strengths of an interdisciplinary and (relatively) new field like American Studies is that there are few if any traditional, limiting academic definitions of or boundaries around the field. While there's no question that older fields like English and History have undergone significant shifts and broadenings in the last few decades, as reflected by the diversity and breadth of attendees and presenters at the recently completed MLA and AHA conventions, I would still say that traditional, academic versions of those fields dominate many scholarly conversations in and around them (and I'm far from immune to that in my own English work, just to be clear). But since American Studies has from its origins crossed disciplinary and traditional boundaries, it has likewise consistently included in central and influential roles non-academic scholarly voices and perspectives as well—voices and perspectives embodied by my colleagues and friends Mark Rennella and Maggi Smith-Dalton.
Mark's training and background is within the academy—I met him when he was completing his PhD in History at Brandeis University and working as a tutor in Harvard's History and Literature program, and I was fortunate enough to work with him on my senior thesis in that program—and he's done important and inspiring American Studies work therein: his first book, The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters (2008), analyzes turn of the 20th century American writers and artists through a complex and compelling set of interdisciplinary lenses, including new technologies of travel, economics and questions of finance and patronage, and material and urban cultures. Yet while he was finalizing that book Mark was also transitioning into new and seemingly very different institutions and roles, including the Harvard Business School, where he co-wrote a history of the airline industry and ideas of leadership that is a model for linking American Studies questions to seemingly distinct yet ultimately interconnected conversations and settings. As Mark continues to move forward in his academic and non-academic—and always scholarly—American Studies roles, he constantly reminds me that such professional boundaries can be just as inspiringly porous as disciplinary ones.
While I've only known Maggi for the last couple of years—we met through the 2010 New England American Studies Association conference in Boston, and I'm very excited that Maggi has joined the NEASA Council this year—it didn't take long for me to recognize the ways she (and her husband and partner Jim Dalton) embodies the kind of renaissance American Studies identity that I've often written about in this space. She's a talented musician and singer who uses those skills to educate her fellow Americans about history and literature; a regional historian who founded and directs the Salem History Society; and an author and journalist who edits (and usually also writes) the weekly "Salem History Time" column for the Boston Globe online and who has published (among other books) Stories and Shadows from Salem's Past: Naumkeag Notations . To say that all of these activities exist outside of the traditional academy is only a partial and relatively minor truth—instead, it's more accurate to say that Maggi's (and Maggi and Jim's) work has greatly expanded the scholarly conversations and communities centered on Salem, on New England, on music and history, and other significant American Studies topics.
I've got nothing against academic scholarship (duh), but it's infinitely richer and stronger when it engages with the many parallel and interconnected American Studies conversations happening in other scholarly communities—as exemplified by Mark and Maggi. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any non-academic American Studiers, conversations, or communities you'd highlight?
1/10 Memory Day nominee: Robinson Jeffers, the iconoclastic poet whose works compare favorably to modernists like T.S. Eliot, American Studiers like William Carlos Williams, and natural/spiritual poets like Robert Frost, and whose biting and bracing views of human nature offer important correctives to some of our more blithely sunny ideals.
January 9, 2012
January 9, 2012: Mentors
[This week I'll be blogging about fellow American Studiers, colleagues and friends who exemplify the best kinds of scholarly engagement with our national histories, stories, and identities. That's in addition to other folks about whom you've already heard in this space, a list which would include Caroline Rody, Karl Jacoby, Christopher Cappozzola, Mike Branch, Heidi Kim, Kevin Levin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rob Velella, Steve Railton, my web guru Graham Beckwith, and many more. This is the first in the series.]
My two central graduate school advisors and mentors model two very distinct but equally important and inspiring American Studies approaches.While my graduate work and PhD were in English (as is my principal faculty position at Fitchburg State University), I nonetheless likewise received extensive training in American Studies scholarship throughout that time, thanks to the two Temple University English professors with whom I was fortunate enough to work most fully: Carolyn Karcher (pronounced "car-share") and Miles Orvell. It's difficult for me to write about either or both of them without turning the piece into a pure and very heartfelt tribute, but I'll try here to stay focused on what I learned about American Studies from these two great scholars (and will note that I tried to highlight, briefly but I hope clearly, everything else I learned from them in the Acknowledgments to my first book). Karcher's American Studies scholarship has consistently been grounded in close and text-based analyses of the literary works and careers of 19th-century American writers: Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and Albion Tourgée, to name only the four on whom she has focused at the greatest length. Yet what Karcher has succeeded in doing, without simplifying her close readings of those authors and texts in the slightest, is to situate her analyses in fully realized and in fact equally complex historical, cultural, and interdisciplinary contexts, revealing in the process as much about America itself as about her specific focal points. Perhaps the clearest (if far from the only) illustration of such American Studies revelations is her The First Woman in the Republic , which entirely lives up to both parts of its self-description as A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child; the book's portrait of Child's life and writings is exhaustive and always specific, yet by the time a reader reaches its conclusion he or she has learned a great deal about literally dozens of significant historical and cultural moments, issues, questions, and narratives from across much of the 19th century.
Orvell's American Studies scholarship has consistently sought to engage with some of the broadest and most defining American ideas and questions: concepts of reality, authenticity, and imitation in American culture and life; the history and practice of American photography; technology and its impacts on the visual arts and culture; popular images and narratives of Main Street. Yet what Orvell has succeeded in doing, without eliding or missing the broad and communal meanings of his subjects in the slightest, is to connect his analyses to nuanced and compelling close readings of individual artists and texts, making clear in the process the specific valences and stakes of his central ideas. A particularly clear illustration of that multi-level American Stuff methodology is the Encyclopedia of American Studies , which Orvell helped create and for which he served as general editor for many years; the EAS is amazingly comprehensive in its range of subjects and disciplines (I helped find pictures for articles on skateboarding, temperance, and the Revolutionary War and wrote ones on Poe, Thoreau, Wright, and Ellison, for example), yet each individual article pays close and convincing analytical attention to specific texts, figures, and details.
Two very distinct scholars and careers, each plenty influential and inspiring, together exemplifying the breadth and depth of what American Studies can be. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any American Studiers you'd like to nominate? Remember, Guest Posts always welcome!
1/9 Memory Day nominee: Joan Baez, the folk singer-songwriter who has been an iconic presence on the American cultural landscape since Woodstock, who has done important activist work on behalf of civil and gay rights, anti-war and anti-poverty efforts, and the environment (among many other issues), and who continues to release powerful new music in the 21st century.
My two central graduate school advisors and mentors model two very distinct but equally important and inspiring American Studies approaches.While my graduate work and PhD were in English (as is my principal faculty position at Fitchburg State University), I nonetheless likewise received extensive training in American Studies scholarship throughout that time, thanks to the two Temple University English professors with whom I was fortunate enough to work most fully: Carolyn Karcher (pronounced "car-share") and Miles Orvell. It's difficult for me to write about either or both of them without turning the piece into a pure and very heartfelt tribute, but I'll try here to stay focused on what I learned about American Studies from these two great scholars (and will note that I tried to highlight, briefly but I hope clearly, everything else I learned from them in the Acknowledgments to my first book). Karcher's American Studies scholarship has consistently been grounded in close and text-based analyses of the literary works and careers of 19th-century American writers: Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and Albion Tourgée, to name only the four on whom she has focused at the greatest length. Yet what Karcher has succeeded in doing, without simplifying her close readings of those authors and texts in the slightest, is to situate her analyses in fully realized and in fact equally complex historical, cultural, and interdisciplinary contexts, revealing in the process as much about America itself as about her specific focal points. Perhaps the clearest (if far from the only) illustration of such American Studies revelations is her The First Woman in the Republic , which entirely lives up to both parts of its self-description as A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child; the book's portrait of Child's life and writings is exhaustive and always specific, yet by the time a reader reaches its conclusion he or she has learned a great deal about literally dozens of significant historical and cultural moments, issues, questions, and narratives from across much of the 19th century.
Orvell's American Studies scholarship has consistently sought to engage with some of the broadest and most defining American ideas and questions: concepts of reality, authenticity, and imitation in American culture and life; the history and practice of American photography; technology and its impacts on the visual arts and culture; popular images and narratives of Main Street. Yet what Orvell has succeeded in doing, without eliding or missing the broad and communal meanings of his subjects in the slightest, is to connect his analyses to nuanced and compelling close readings of individual artists and texts, making clear in the process the specific valences and stakes of his central ideas. A particularly clear illustration of that multi-level American Stuff methodology is the Encyclopedia of American Studies , which Orvell helped create and for which he served as general editor for many years; the EAS is amazingly comprehensive in its range of subjects and disciplines (I helped find pictures for articles on skateboarding, temperance, and the Revolutionary War and wrote ones on Poe, Thoreau, Wright, and Ellison, for example), yet each individual article pays close and convincing analytical attention to specific texts, figures, and details.
Two very distinct scholars and careers, each plenty influential and inspiring, together exemplifying the breadth and depth of what American Studies can be. Next models tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any American Studiers you'd like to nominate? Remember, Guest Posts always welcome!
1/9 Memory Day nominee: Joan Baez, the folk singer-songwriter who has been an iconic presence on the American cultural landscape since Woodstock, who has done important activist work on behalf of civil and gay rights, anti-war and anti-poverty efforts, and the environment (among many other issues), and who continues to release powerful new music in the 21st century.
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