Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 423

February 17, 2012: Love Lessons

[The last in the love-inspired series, on some of this American Studier's loves!]

When I was 5 (or so), I fell in love with Edward Ormondroyd's David and the Phoenix (1957). Ormondroyd's whimsical and magical and deeply affecting children's novel taught me a great many serious and life-defining things, from the power of the imagination to recognizing and accepting and growing through loss. But it also taught me about fauns and Pan, about banshees and sea serpents, about some of the truest meanings of mythology and fantasy and story in ways that prepared me for much of what I would love most over the next three decades, from Tolkien and George R.R. Martin to Leslie Marmon Silko and Junot Díaz. And most of all, Ormondroyd, like Lobel and Sendak and Seuss and their peers, taught me to listen and to read.When I was 15 (or thereabouts), I fell in love with Alistair MacLean's H.M.S. Ulysses (1955). MacLean's gripping and thrilling and hugely moving novel of a British destroyer in the North Atlantic during World War II taught me about the deadly serious power of waves and wind, of frost and ice, of the true meaning of a U-Boat lying in ambush or a fighter plane bearing down on a convoy. But it also taught me about cowardice and heroism, about victory and defeat, about some of the truest meanings of sacrifice and brotherhood and history in ways that likewise prepared me for much of what I would love over the next two decades, from O'Brien and Samuel Eliot Morrison to Ambrose Bierce and Kurt Vonnegut. And most of all, MacLean, like Chesnutt and Faulkner and Penn Warren and others, taught me that history is alive and present still.

When I was 25 (more or less), I fell in love with Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000). Nolan's challenging and funny and profoundly unique and perfect film about a man with no memory who cannot escape the past taught me about the ways in which story and structure and style can so fully complement and complicate and enrich theme and meaning, making every moment and frame and choice part of an absolutely unified whole. But it also taught me about memory and truth, about story and identity, about how much narratives can define who we are and who we have been and who we hope to be, ideas that have prepared me for much of what I have written and thought about over the decade since. And most of all, Nolan, like Sayles and Jason Bourne and Shakespeare in Love and others, taught me that great art can be both entertaining and thought-provoking in equal measure.As I approach 35 (nearly), I'm still in love with all those texts and artists, all those meanings and lessons, and many more. I am who I am because of them, as I am because of the love of the many amazing people with whom I've shared such works (most especially Mom, Dad, and Connie). But I have also fallen in love with Aidan Orion Tsao Railton (2005) and Kyle Vincent Tsao Railton (2007). Those two smart and crazy-making and beautiful boys have taught me more than I could ever put into words here, and of the many things I love to imagine about them, high on the list is when I can help them find new loves of their own—and add those loves and their lessons to my identity. Happy Valentine's week! More this weekend, the next guest post!

BenPS. Links:

1)      Part of the opening chapter of David: http://www.purplehousepress.com/david_ex.htm

2)      Some good info on MacLean and Ulysses: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/maclean.htm

3)      The great last scene from Memento (only watch if you've already seen the movie!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqW9fnkhqrs&feature=related

4)      Any loves and lessons you want to share?

2/17 Memory Day nominee: Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party whose complex and influential 20th century American life also included community social programs and activism in Oakland, publishing the memoir Revolutionary Suicide (1973), and receiving a PhD in social philosophy from UC Santa Cruz (all before it was tragically cut short by a senseless street killing when Newton was just 47).

February 16, 2012: Remembering Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Celebrating the inspiring cross-cultural life and incredible work of a truly unique and talented photographer.

I'll publish the last post in my love-inspired series tomorrow; but even though this post wasn't originally part of the week's plans, it's certainly inspired by three very parallel and important emotions. For one thing, I love Yasuhiro Ishimoto's photographs, and I hope this space has consistently made clear just how highly I value the kinds of emotions and responses that beautiful and powerful works of art can inspire. In fact, the kinds of empathy that great works of art can create—the kind I feel, for example, for the African American father and daughter captured in one of the dozen shots in this CNN gallery—is, I would argue, very similar in crucial ways to the love and connection that we can feel for important people and voices in our lives.

For another thing, I admire his consistently impressive responses to what must have been very challenging and difficult life experiences, from his leaving Japan (where he and his parents had moved shortly after his 1921 birth in California) in 1939 to avoid military service to, ironically and tragically, his being held in a Japanese American internment camp for two years during the war. Rather than allow his perspective or work to be negatively impacted by such experiences, Ishimoto made them part of his art and identity in the best senses, as exemplified by his arguments (textual and photographic) in the book A Tale of Two Cities (1999) for what both sides of his heritage and life had contributed to his career and vision. What I love most about America is precisely its ability to yield such amazingly inspiring lives and stories, voices and identities, and Ishimoto is an entirely worthy addition to the American Hall of Inspiration.

And for a third thing, I will freely admit that I had only barely heard of Ishimoto prior to a couple of days ago, when my good friend and colleague Jeff Renye passed along the above link to the CNN gallery (which also includes, if you scroll over the right-hand side of the page, an obituary for Ishimoto, who recently passed away at the age of 90). That's not a good thing in and of itself, of course, and so I'm writing this post in large part to argue for why Ishimoto should occupy a more prominent place in our national narratives and consciousness than (if I'm any indication) he does. But what is a good thing, and what is in fact at the heart of my goals for the American Studier website and much of my ongoing work, are the kinds of collaborations and learning that Jeff's sharing exemplifies, and that define just how powerfully our perspectives and ideas, our voices and identities, can be influenced and strengthened by all those around us. (ADDENDUM: Look for some additional thoughts of Jeff's in the first comment on this post!)

Lots to love! Last post in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any nominees of yours for the Hall of Inspiration? Share the love!

2/16 Memory Day nominee: Henry Adams, who built on the legacy of his uber-American family to become one of our most inspiring Renaissance Americans: from his novels, non-fiction, and unique and powerful memoir to his pioneering identity as a transnational, cosmopolitan traveler and thinker.

February 15, 2012: Love, Puritan Style

[The next post in my love-inspired series, on John Winthrop and Puritan ideals of love and charity.]

There's an old joke, perhaps most famously repeated by George Bush (the elder), that a Puritan was a person who couldn't sleep at night, worrying that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. If the Puritan settlers of New England are primarily known in our national narratives for contributing significantly to a couple of the most idealized aspects of American identity (work ethic, pursuit of freedom), they are secondarily and still centrally known as an extremely stern and dour group, a people for whom confession and penitence made for a perfect Friday night. And not without some accuracy—this is the community, after all, that within a century of arriving in America had banished two of its most prominent but slightly unorthodox citizens (Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson) for heretical beliefs and practices and had executed numerous other citizens for witchcraft-related crimes. Within the Puritans' first decade in America, for that matter, the community's leadership found it necessary to destroy (literally, burning much of it to the ground) Thomas Morton's "heathen" community of Merrymount (famous in its own era, and immortalized two centuries later in a Hawthorne short story, for its Maypole and friendly relationships with local Native Americans) and exile Morton to England.There's no question that the Puritans' search for a space in which they could practice their religion freely was (at least in their first century in America) complemented by a need to define almost everyone else, including at times members of their own community and congregations, as outside of that religion and so unwelcome in their settlements. But a focus on that side of their identity can elide another equally significant, and much more appealing and inspiring, side: their strong and consistent emphasis on communal cohesiveness and support, on a community in which the leaders and the most successful make it one of their central goals that all citizens, especially those who are least prosperous, are taken care of. In part that emphasis stemmed from practical realities and concerns, from the community's decades of exile and wandering (first to Holland and then, when that nation turned out to be little more welcoming than England had been, to America) and the near-constant reminders that they could count on almost no one other than each other for support and survival. But these concepts of community were likewise central to many of the Puritans' fundamental understandings of both their own identities and their Christian faith, as exemplified by one of their founding American texts: John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630), better known as the Arbella sermon since he wrote and delivered it on board that ship some time before its Puritan passengers arrived in Boston to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony (with Winthrop as the first governor).

Winthrop's sermon is remembered largely (if not solely) for a phrase from its penultimate paragraph, "city upon a hill." But while subsequent quotations of the moment have read it as a celebration of America's potential and identity—as in the closing of Reagan's Farewell Address, where he consistently misquoted it as "shining city upon a hill"—Winthrop there is arguing to his audience that if they are to be celebrated (and not condemned), they must do their best to practice what they preach and believe, "for we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill." As the sermon's title indicates, and as virtually every one of its thirty-odd paragraphs argues, the central element of Puritan belief and practice as defined by Winthrop is "Christian charity," a phrase which encompasses both the modern idea of charity (giving to those less fortunate) and the word's Scriptural origins (in the Greek word agape, which can be translated as both "charity" and "love"). Lest there be any doubt of Winthrop's emphases, he includes in the midst of the sermon a series of "Questions" that might challenge the idea that all members of a community should give to support those who need it, and answers each question with passion, arguing throughout that the only way the Puritans can embody Christian identity and practice its love is to be entirely and communally charitable. "We must," he argues just before the "city" line, "be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities."There's plenty to criticize in the Puritans, from those exiles and executions to the brutal wars with neighboring Native Americans about which I've already written in this space. There are also lots of reasons to make sure that we see them as one of many founding American communities, rather than our shared and singular point of origin. But there's also lots in their identities and words, their practices and beliefs, that can impress and inspire—and I'd say Winthrop's sermon and the visions of community, charity, and love it constructs are at the top of that list. Next love-inspired post tomorrow,

BenPS. I'd love for you to be charitable with your ideas and connections! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

2/15 Memory Day nominee: Susan B. Anthony, one of a handful of American reformers whose efforts (centrally on behalf of suffrage, but also for numerous other causes including abolitionism, temperance, labor, and education reform) transcended their era and established her as a model for impassioned, effective, and meaningful activism.

February 14, 2012: Love in Color

[The next post in my love-inspired series, on broadening our national narratives and images of interracial relationships. Happy Valentine's Day!]

I don't have the slightest bit of hard proof for this (if such a thing could be produced in any case), but I believe that when we Americans think and talk about interracial relationships, we do so first and foremost, and perhaps much of the time solely, through the lens of black and white. As is often, and I hope overtly, the case, my starting point for this idea is my own perspective, my own engagement with such simplifying national narratives—despite my own interracial marriage to someone whose identity falls outside of that binary, I believe that I do tend to link the topic explicitly and consistently to issues of black and white (as illustrated by an earlier post on cultural representations of controversial issues, where I mentioned Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and All in the Family/The Jeffersons in relation to interracial relationships). And moving beyond my own individual perspective, I would cite two quick (and very distinct) examples of this trend at work more broadly: the Supreme Court case that overturned all remaining state laws outlawing interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia (1967), was responding not only to a marriage between a white man and a black woman but also to a statute that framed the issue in terms of those two races, and thus the Court's decision likewise focused (not entirely, but at times) on how such laws treated "the white and Negro participants in an interracial marriage"; and one of the best scholarly works on images of this topic in our literary history, Werner Sollors' Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997), likewise focuses (as its title indicates) on those two racial identities and communities.

The respective prominence of two American films released within a year of one another, Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1991) and Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala (1992), provides another illustration of this trend, as well as an opportunity to move beyond any one understanding of interracial marriage and toward a more meaningful analysis of the issue in American culture and identity more broadly. Both films were successful at the (domestic) box office, especially in relationship to their respective budgets and releases: Lee's film grossed $32.5 million, on a budget of roughly $14 million and a wide release; Nair's grossed $7.3 million, on a budget of under $1 million and a pretty limited release. Both similarly received prestigious recognition from film festivals and awards ceremonies dedicated to supporting independent films: Nair's triumphed at the Venice Film Festival and won an Independent Spirit Award (among others); Lee's won at Cannes and a New York Film Critics Circle Award (ditto). Yet it seems clear to me that Lee's film has lasted in our public consciousness in a way that Nair's has not. While there are any number of plausible factors for that difference, many of which have little to do with race—Lee was only two years removed from Do the Right Thing (1989) , the film that had put him on the map in a major way, while Nair had directed only one other, relatively unknown feature film, Salaam Bombay! (1988) ; Lee's film featured a star-making, award-winning turn from Samuel L. Jackson as a mercurial crack addict (although Nair's film did star Denzel Washington in an award-winning role, just two years after winning an Oscar for Glory, so this factor doesn't quite hold up)—I think it's fair to say that Lee's portrayal of a romance between an African-American architect and an Italian-American secretary tapped into our dominant narratives about interracial relationships much more fully than Nair's depiction of a Ugandan-Indian-American motel employee falling for an African-American carpet cleaner.

One could get plenty of mileage trying to figure out which factors have most contributed to the two films' respective legacies (or, quite possibly, discovering that I'm wrong about those legacies), but again and as usual my ideal would be a different and I believe more broadly productive emphasis: what we can gain by watching both films, not only individually but also as a pair of contemporaneous cultural representations of interracial relationships in the closing decade of the 20th century. And I think that both are particularly interesting, and particularly if complicatedly interconnected, in their depictions of the protagonists' families and social networks. I don't mean just how those families and networks respond to the interracial relationships themselves—certainly the near-universal judgments and critiques from all three (or four, if New York African American is considered distinct from Mississippi African American) cultural communities are telling, but I think the films are at least as interesting in how they construct the complex worlds of their respective settings and the familial and social networks within them. That means in each case both a kind of immigrant community (very literally and recently for the Ugandan Indian family in Mississippi; more as a vibrant and ongoing heritage for the Italian Americans in Jungle) and a homegrown African American one, but also includes other social and cultural factors—such as drug culture or the rise of an African American urban middle class in Jungle and the dictatorship and impact of Idi Amin or African American life in the post-Civil Rights South in Mississippi—that add significant layers and complications to any black and white vision of these different communities.

And that's my ultimate point here (along with, y'know, watch these imperfect but unique and compelling movies): it's not just that interracial relationships are more than black and white, or that American ethnic and racial history likewise entails more than that duality. Both of those statements are true, and well worth our acknowledgment and engagement, but what both of these films also portray and symbolize is just how colorful American identity, and the social and familial and romantic relationships that comprise it, really are. Next love-inspired post tomorrow,Ben

PS.  1) Not the very beginning, but a pretty early sequence from Jungle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRvG9NHgTy42) Great scene (set in Uganda as the Indian family's father returns there briefly) from Masala: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4S6KAV1VHM

3) OPEN: Any representations of interracial relationships you'd add into the mix?

2/14 Memory Day nominee: Anna Howard Shaw, the women's rights and suffrage activist who was also the first female ordained Methodist minister in America, received the Distinguished Service Medal for her efforts during World War I, and extended her activism to an important anti-lynching conference in the final months of her life.

February 13, 2012: Remembering Nat Love

[Extending last week's Black History Month series, but also moving into a week of posts inspired by love, here's a repeat of a post from about a year ago on Nat Love, one of the turn of the 20th century's most unique and interesting Americans.]

For those scholars who like to identify and define certain dominant American narratives—a group that, it will surprise no reader of this blog, would include a certain AmericanStudier—the Western frontier presents a particularly challenging topic. On the one hand, no one could dispute that many of our most mythologized, iconic, and heroic national figures are Western in origin; but on the other hand, what do those figures symbolize? Do they represent the carving out of a path for American "civilization" as it moved west (Daniel Boone) or an attempt to escape that path (Natty Bumppo)? Did they take the law into their own hands (outlaws like Billy the Kid) or maintain law and order in a wild society (marshals like Wyatt Earp)? Were they cowboys and railroad men, doing the dangerous but somewhat corporate work of settling the frontier? Or Indians and bandits, existing outside of, and perhaps (as the kids' game implies) in opposition to, those types?The answer, of course, is yes, our frontier myths encompass all of those roles and identities and many others as well. After all, of the many ways in which we could argue that the frontier exemplifies America (an argument that AmericanStudiers as diverse as Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Alexis de Tocqueville have all made), to my mind the most convincing is in its thoroughly cross-cultural community, the ways in which every prominent Western event and site and place were constituted out of at least a couple different cultures and identities, peoples and perspectives. Many of those cross-cultural contacts were far from ideal, violent clashes and conflicts between the army and Native American tribes, Irish and Chinese rail workers, California squatters and Mexican landowners, and many other variations. Yet while such violent encounters have understandably been the focal point of many of the recent revisions of frontier history—just as the violence of the Wild West was a focal point for many of the original stories of the region—these cross-cultural and combinatory Western communities could also produce unique and impressive American identities, lives and stories that embody the best possibilities of such a hybrid setting. And at the top of that list would have to be Nat Love (1854-1921).

Much of what we know of Love we have learned from the man himself, courtesy of his engaging and mythologizing autobiography, Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907). That book's subtitle is over forty words long and yet still manages only to highlight some of the diverse worlds and identities through which Love moved in the course of his very Western and very American life: from his birth in slavery to dual frontier careers as a cowboy on the cattle ranges and a prize-winning rodeo competitor known as "Deadwood Dick." The subtitle doesn't even get to Love's final iteration as a Pullman conductor, returning to the West where he had made his name and fortune as a buttoned-up representative and spokesman (quite literally, as this section of the narrative reads at times like an advertisement) for the technology and comfort of the new railway lines. These hugely diverse stages and worlds can make the narrative feel scattershot in tone and focus, and Love similarly divided in perspective, but that's precisely what makes the book and the man so emblematic of the frontier—this is a man who was born a slave and who still experienced frequent racism in his Pullman work, but who also became one of the period's most celebrated rodeo performers and a frontier legend; a man who worked as a cowboy alongside peers from every culture and community in the west, went to work for one of the Gilded Age's most successful corporations, and closes his book addressing eastern audiences who have likely never been further west than the Mississippi.

There's no way to boil that life and identity down to a single type or narrative; his subtitle couldn't even boil it all down to forty words. Many of the frontier's cross-cultural experiences were, again, not nearly as successful as Love's, but that too is central to the point—a narrative of the frontier, like a narrative of America, would need to include both Love and Little Big Horn, and everything and everybody in between and alongside. "Cowboys and Indians," that is, can and must mean both mythic confrontations and the possibility that the "and" does indeed symbolize connection and community. More tomorrow, on one of the smartest and scariest novels I've ever read.Ben

PS. Three links to start with:1)      Full text of Life and Adventures: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/natlove/natlove.html
2)      A great companion website for a great book on one of those very violent cross-cultural contacts, Karl Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008): http://brown.edu/Research/Aravaipa/
3)      OPEN: Who or what would you add to our stories of the West?2/13 Memory Day nominee: Chuck Yeager, the aviator and World War II veteran whose test flights contributed directly to the development of the space program, helped change the course of American and world history, and led to his starring role in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.

February 11-12, 2012: Remembering Whitney Houston

A brief tribute to one of late 20th century America's most talented and troubled stars.

Whitney Houston, who died Saturday, wasn't nearly as significant a historical and cultural voice and presence as the folks on whom my Black History Month series focused. Moreover, since I know very little about her career and life, I'm not particularly qualified to write a tribute to her at this tragic final moment. But there's no question that she was one of the most talented singers in American pop music history, that for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s she was one of the most potent cultural icons on the planet, and that with those qualities she inspired many listeners and fans. And there's similarly no question that her descent since that time into a spiral of, apparently, drugs and poverty and self-destruction is one of the sadder American cultural stories in recent memory.

So here's to remembering Whitney Houston, not in this tragic moment, nor during that long spiral, but as she was, when she was as good as they get. More next week,

Ben

2/11 Memory Day nominee: Lydia Maria Child, about the many facets of whose justified status as "The First Woman in the Republic" I wrote at length in that linked post—and for further details of which I cannot recommend highly enough Carolyn Karcher's comprehensive cultural biography with that title.

2/12 Memory Day nominee: Cotton Mather, partly because he helps us understand the complex and telling national tragedy that was the Salem Witch Trials, but mostly because the rest of his life and work, especially in advocating for smallpox inoculation, were so important and inspiring.

February 10, 2012: Remembering David Walker

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see
Remembering one of the most aggressive, impassioned, and eloquent—if tragically short-lived—voices for social equality in our nation's history.

When it comes to social progress and change, as I wrote most explicitly in this post on the Civil Rights movement, I think our national narratives tend to emphasize peaceful mechanisms like passive resistance (which is not, as I also argued in this Occupy Davis post, necessarily peaceful nor passive) more than they do aggressive protests or challenges to the established order or society. That's a perfectly understandable perspective, since it allows us to recognize the need for change while likewise celebrating peace, love, and other importantly unifying ideas. But just as Martin Luther King pushed back on such perspectives by arguing for Why We Can't Wait, and just as Frederick Douglass illustrated by challenging his audience directly in his seminal "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech, significant social change depends as well, if not indeed centrally, on aggressive voices and protests.

When it comes to abolitionism, there are certainly no shortage of aggressive voices to include in our national narratives: Douglass himself, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, even (if exemplifying the conflicts that such aggression can produce) John Brown. But perhaps the most aggressive and angry, yet also eloquent and powerful, such abolitionist voice belongs to an almost entirely forgotten early 19th century American: David Walker. Walker's life, and even more so his public prominence, were tragically short-lived—he burst onto the scene as one of Boston's and the nation's most vocal abolitionists in 1827/1828, published his seminal Walker's Appeal in 1829 , and died (probably of tuberculosis) at the age of 33 in 1830—which might explain in part his disappearance from our collective memories. But I would argue that Walker's profoundly radical text and ideas likewise contributed to that elision—and are precisely why we should instead remember and engage with him today.

The most overtly, and not at all unimportantly, radical aspect of Walker's Appeal is its typography: as scholar Marcy Dinius has recently analyzed at length, Walker utilized capitalization, exclamation points, enlarged typefaces, bold and italics, and many other typographical elements to create a text that quite literally yells (screams, even) at its audiences. Yet those typographical extremes parallel the book's many equally aggressive and challenging ideas and elements: Walker's use of the Constitution as a frame, in order to force the nation's hypocrisies to the fore throughout; his arguments for immediate and absolute emancipation by any and every means, including violent slave revolts; and, perhaps most strikingly for the era, his titular and continued address not to fellow abolitionists, nor to slaveholders, or even to white Americans at all, but "to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America." That address, like Walker's book and voice overall, refuses to accept any of the conditions of slavery, including its forced illiteracy and powerlessness, making a case instead for the shared anger, challenge, passion, and eloquence of all African Americans.

Please share Walker's book and voice, and his lasting significance, this February! One more in the series this weekend,

Ben

PS. Any African American texts, voices, or figures that you think we should better remember? Highlight 'em here!

2/10 Memory Day nominee: John Franklin Enders, the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist whose pioneering work with viruses greatly influenced Jonas Salk's development of a polio vaccine, led Enders to be known as "The Father of Modern Vaccines," and reflected, as does his co-authored Nobel lecture, a communal understanding of scientific work and progress.

February 9, 2012: Remembering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see
Remembering an author and reformer whose efforts and works spanned virtually every significant 19th century period, issue, and literary genre.

Many of my nominees for the Hall of American Inspiration have been folks I have called Renaissance Americans, historical and cultural figures whose work, writing, interests, and influences spanned many different subjects and disciplines, communities and events. Such figures, to echo what I wrote about historical and literary inspirations in yesterday's post, exemplify the deepest meaning of an interdisciplinary American Studies approach, making clear that inspirational American identities do not adhere to specific categories or boundaries for where and how their influences are felt. And I don't know that any American has crossed into more spheres of influence, nor done so by overcoming more significant obstacles, than Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper).

Watkins (her maiden name) was born to free African American parents in Baltimore, but in 1825, a period when (as Frederick Douglass's slave experiences of that city around the same time illustrate) the lives and prospects of free blacks were not often far removed from those of slaves. Yet before she had turned 30—while slavery was still the law of much of the land, including of course in Maryland—she had published multiple collections of poetry, including the very successful Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854); had moved to Pennsylvania and was helping William Still run his portion of the Underground Railroad; and was traveling throughout the north delivering lectures on behalf of both abolitionism and women's rights. Her 1860 marriage to Fenton Harper briefly removed her from such public efforts, and had she concluded her public careers at that time her life and works would already constitute an impressive and inspirational part of our histories and community.

Fentor Harper tragically died only four years later, however, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (as she would remain known for the remainder of her life) returned to the public sphere, or really many spheres, with renewed passion and power. She not only continued to work for African American rights, during and after Reconstruction and the many other post-war challenges, but became as eloquent and important a voice for women's rights and suffrage as any American. She contributed so many journalistic pieces on those and other issues that she came to be known as the mother of African American journalism. She released many more collections of poetry, creating in Sketches of Southern Life (1872)'s Aunt Chloe one of the era's most compelling characters and voices. She also published multiple novels, including one of the most important Reconstruction novels in Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) . And throughout she dealt with her period and its far too often dark histories with the combination of realism and optimism reflected in Iola's subtitle and best captured in her most famous lines of poetry: "Yet the shadows bear the promise/Of a brighter coming day."

Please share that poem, and Harper's inspirational life and works, this February! Next in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any inspirational Renaissance Americans (from any community) you'd highlight?

2/9 Memory Day nominee: Tom Paine, the Anglo-American immigrant whose political pamphlets Common Sense and the multi-volume The Crisis complemented, strengthened, and extended the efforts of the Declaration of Independence and early Revolutionary battles, and whose broader political and spiritual philosophizing in The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason provided bracingly radical and democratic visions for a rebellious age.

February 8, 2012: Remembering Anna Julia Cooper

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see

February 7, 2012: Remembering the Harlem Renaissance

[In honor of Black History Month—which was created by my first Memory Day nominee!—this week I'll be remembering amazing African American writers who should be a more central part of American literature and identities. For more on the month's themes and ideas, see
Adding three distinct and equally interesting voices into our collective memories of the Harlem Renaissance.

It seems to me that Americans generally have a sense of the Harlem Renaissance, at least as far as our collective memories of any historical moment or literary and artistic community go. The name itself resonates in our collective consciousness, I'd say, and might even be connected by many American to particularly well-known writers and works from the era: the poems of Langston Hughes for many decades now, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) more recently. Compared to African American writers from (for example) Charles Chesnutt's era, about a couple of whom more in the next couple of posts, the writers and artists who comprised the Renaissance are positively prominent in our national narratives.

But as I have argued many times before in this space, having a general or even specific sense of a history or narrative doesn't mean that there aren't ways we can and should seek to expand, deepen, and strengthen our individual and collective memories, and in this case I would argue that many Harlem Renaissance voices and works deserve a fuller place in those memories. For starters, there's the man known in his own as the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance," Alain Locke; Locke gained that title not only because he expanded his 1925 essay "The New Negro" into a book-length collection of writings and art (with the same title) that really launched the Renaissance, but because his philosophical and practical support for the movement and community, for its ideas and goals, and most especially for its artists were crucial to its growth and success (and remain vital in American life). We can't remember the Harlem Renaissance, it seems to me, and not remember Alain Locke much more fully than we do.

The Renaissance was first and foremost about artists and writers, though, and there's similarly work for us to do in expanding our collective memories of those voices and works. Alongside Hughes's poems, for example, I would say that we can and must include the works of Countee Cullen; Cullen's poem "Incident," from his debut collection Color (1925), represents in particular as clear and potent a statement of the meanings and power of racism and bigotry as can be found in American literature. And alongside Hurston's novel, I would likewise put Jean Toomer's much more modernist and stylistically radical book Cane (1923), a book which includes multiple literary and artistic genres and pushes the envelopes of form and response just as fully as it does our perspectives of race and place. Neither Cullen nor Toomer should supplant Hughes or Hurston, and there are other potential writers and artists who could be added as well; the key, as always for me, is to add voices to our collective memories and stories as much as possible.

So I'll ask again—share Cullen's poem, or a bit of Toomer's book, with somebody this February! Next in the series tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any writers or artists you'd highlight?

2/7 Memory Day nominee: Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose "Little House on the Prairie" books (and the subsequent TV series) defined the frontier and childhood and family for many generations of young Americans, and whose own complicated and multi-stage life and identity can help us understand not only those themes, but also America itself in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.