Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 425
January 25, 2012
January 25, 2012: Mexican American Wars
[This week, I'll be following up Monday's post on Arizona's assaults on the Tucson Mexican American Studies program and arguing for four crucial ways in which American identity and culture are interwoven with Mexican American Studies. This is the second in the series.]
The most overt historical origin points for Mexican American relationships and identities are far different from, and in many ways precisely opposite to, our most prominent narratives of them.
This is certainly a competitive category, with the Spanish American War being the strongest alternative competitor (and the Civil War creeping up the list, due to the many arguments that it wasn't about slavery), but I would argue that no American military conflict is more consistently and egregiously misunderstood than the Mexican American War. Perhaps "misunderstood" is the wrong word, since it doesn't seem to me that there's much understanding or even specific information at all about the war in our popular narratives; instead, it seems clear to me that the entirety of the war has been reduced to a sense (thanks largely to John Wayne et al) first of a vast army of Mexicans massacring a small, brave band of rugged frontier types at the Alamo, and then of American forces avenging them while rallying behind the (still celebrated) cries of "Remember the Alamo."
There are so many inaccuracies within those images that it's difficult to know where to start, but the central problem is this: neither the Alamo nor the subsequent military actions were part of the Mexican American War, nor did they involve the United States of America at all! The battle of the Alamo took place in 1836, after a group of (largely) European American settlers in the Mexican state of Tejas had decided to declare their independence from that nation and establish the separate Texas Republic; Mexico's president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna led an army to put down the rebellion, and the Alamo was the first battle in that war. (The somewhat less famous massacre of Texas Republic troops at Goliad was the second.) It is indeed the case that Sam Houston led an army that responded to those losses and defeated Santa Anna's forces at San Jacinto, and perhaps they were shouting "Remember the Alamo" while they did so; but that too took place in 1836, and helped cement the Texas Republic's status as an independent nation. Ten years later, in 1846, the United States initiated its own hostilities with Mexico, largely in order to complete the annexation of the Texas Republic into the nation (which was one of the two prominent results of the 1848 US victory in the Mexican American War; I'll discuss the second, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, tomorrow).
If virtually all of the histories we associate with the Mexican American War are actually from a decade prior to it, it stands to reason that there's plenty that can and should be added to our understanding of that war, perhaps especially in terms of the almost certainly illegal actions taken by the Polk administration to foment the conflict. But if we do connect, with more nuance and analysis, the 1836 events and the Texas Republic to the later war, our narratives of Mexican American history change even more significantly. After all, the Texas Republic's secession from Mexico was not at all unlike the Confederacy's secession from the Union; supporters of the Republic would argue that Santa Anna was a brutal dictator who had forced the Republic's hand, but of course the Confederacy took much the same position toward the federal government and the Lincoln Administration. Whether the analogy holds or not, it's at least crucial to note that "Texas" was a Mexican and Mexican American community for centuries, and that even during the period of the Texas Republic and the later Mexican American War it remained as much a part of Mexican American identity as it did European American. Certainly the 1848 US victory led to the temporary expulsion of many Mexican Americans from the state, but that shift in no way elides the long history of Mexican American identity there (nor of course has it remained static in the century and a half that followed).
Over the next two posts, I'll try to amplify what this kind of shifted understanding of Mexican American history, community, and identity can contribute to our American narratives and histories. More tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
1/25 Memory Day nominee: Charles Reed Bishop, the businessman who moved to Hawaii in the mid-19th century and became one of the most inspiring benefactors of the state's native population, educational system, and cultural heritage and identity: founding with his native Hawaiian wife a school for young natives, working after her tragically early death to preserve the school (in conjunction with his more general support for Hawaii's land through his founding of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society), and endowing a trust that has continued to benefit young Hawaiians to this day.
The most overt historical origin points for Mexican American relationships and identities are far different from, and in many ways precisely opposite to, our most prominent narratives of them.
This is certainly a competitive category, with the Spanish American War being the strongest alternative competitor (and the Civil War creeping up the list, due to the many arguments that it wasn't about slavery), but I would argue that no American military conflict is more consistently and egregiously misunderstood than the Mexican American War. Perhaps "misunderstood" is the wrong word, since it doesn't seem to me that there's much understanding or even specific information at all about the war in our popular narratives; instead, it seems clear to me that the entirety of the war has been reduced to a sense (thanks largely to John Wayne et al) first of a vast army of Mexicans massacring a small, brave band of rugged frontier types at the Alamo, and then of American forces avenging them while rallying behind the (still celebrated) cries of "Remember the Alamo."
There are so many inaccuracies within those images that it's difficult to know where to start, but the central problem is this: neither the Alamo nor the subsequent military actions were part of the Mexican American War, nor did they involve the United States of America at all! The battle of the Alamo took place in 1836, after a group of (largely) European American settlers in the Mexican state of Tejas had decided to declare their independence from that nation and establish the separate Texas Republic; Mexico's president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna led an army to put down the rebellion, and the Alamo was the first battle in that war. (The somewhat less famous massacre of Texas Republic troops at Goliad was the second.) It is indeed the case that Sam Houston led an army that responded to those losses and defeated Santa Anna's forces at San Jacinto, and perhaps they were shouting "Remember the Alamo" while they did so; but that too took place in 1836, and helped cement the Texas Republic's status as an independent nation. Ten years later, in 1846, the United States initiated its own hostilities with Mexico, largely in order to complete the annexation of the Texas Republic into the nation (which was one of the two prominent results of the 1848 US victory in the Mexican American War; I'll discuss the second, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, tomorrow).
If virtually all of the histories we associate with the Mexican American War are actually from a decade prior to it, it stands to reason that there's plenty that can and should be added to our understanding of that war, perhaps especially in terms of the almost certainly illegal actions taken by the Polk administration to foment the conflict. But if we do connect, with more nuance and analysis, the 1836 events and the Texas Republic to the later war, our narratives of Mexican American history change even more significantly. After all, the Texas Republic's secession from Mexico was not at all unlike the Confederacy's secession from the Union; supporters of the Republic would argue that Santa Anna was a brutal dictator who had forced the Republic's hand, but of course the Confederacy took much the same position toward the federal government and the Lincoln Administration. Whether the analogy holds or not, it's at least crucial to note that "Texas" was a Mexican and Mexican American community for centuries, and that even during the period of the Texas Republic and the later Mexican American War it remained as much a part of Mexican American identity as it did European American. Certainly the 1848 US victory led to the temporary expulsion of many Mexican Americans from the state, but that shift in no way elides the long history of Mexican American identity there (nor of course has it remained static in the century and a half that followed).
Over the next two posts, I'll try to amplify what this kind of shifted understanding of Mexican American history, community, and identity can contribute to our American narratives and histories. More tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
1/25 Memory Day nominee: Charles Reed Bishop, the businessman who moved to Hawaii in the mid-19th century and became one of the most inspiring benefactors of the state's native population, educational system, and cultural heritage and identity: founding with his native Hawaiian wife a school for young natives, working after her tragically early death to preserve the school (in conjunction with his more general support for Hawaii's land through his founding of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society), and endowing a trust that has continued to benefit young Hawaiians to this day.
January 24, 2012
January 24, 2012: Mexican American Literature
[This week, I'll be following up Monday's post on Arizona's assaults on the Tucson Mexican American Studies program and arguing for four crucial ways in which American identity and culture are interwoven with Mexican American Studies. This is the first in the series.]
The last few decades in American literature and culture reflect just how impossible it is to define those elements without Mexican American writers and artists.
If I had to identify one and only one work of American literature from the 1980s to which we American Studiers can and should continue to turn—a ridiculous hypothetical, of course, but nonetheless the kind of question that can crystallize our analytical preferences—I would go with Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984). I would do so in part for literary reasons: Cisneros uses the complex form of a short story cycle, a group of distinct but interconnected short fictional works, as well as it has ever been used; she likewise creates with stunning ease the evolving narrative voice of a young girl over a period of many years of her life. But the book also engages in profoundly compelling depth with a host of crucial American conversations about identity, nearly all captured in the five-paragraph story "My Name": multigenerational familial and cultural heritages and influences on an individual; bilingual and multicultural experiences and identities for the child of immigrants; communities of neighborhood and place, peers and education, class and status; gender roles and stereotypes across cultures and generations; and more. And it's so consistently readable and engaging, funny and moving, that it's very easy to get students into it and into all those questions as a result.
Cisneros is an individual author who no more represents all of Mexican American literature, in her own moment or more broadly, than any other individual could; so I highlight her central 1980s achievement not to suggest that she can stand in for a larger community, but rather as one part of a larger argument that we cannot understand or define our national literature over the past few decades without including in prominent roles many Mexican American writers. You can't talk about late 20th and early 21st century American fiction without including Cisneros, Rudolfa Anaya, Ana Castillo, and many others; parallel poetry conversations would have to include Lorna Dee Cervantes, Gary Soto, M. Miriam Herrera, Alfred Arteaga, and more; recent national debates over identity, community, and education have been informed by no works more than the memoir and scholarly non-fiction contributions of Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez; playwrights such as Luis Valdez and Esteia Portillo Trambley helped change the possibilities for 20th century American drama; and the list goes on. And while the community of prominent Mexican American writers has exploded over these decades, an American Studier can and should go back into our literary history to appreciate the contributions of an earlier author like María Amparo Ruíz de Burton.
As the Mexican American student protests in Tucson—and the vibrant existence of the Mexican American Studies program in which they're enrolled—reflect, however, perhaps the most exciting and important Mexican American influences are those that continue to unfold into our 21st century moment, community, and identity. Once again I could list numerous writers and artists whose voices and works exemplify those influences, but I'll focus on just one: Luis Alberto Urrea. Urrea's thirteen books to date span literary genres, time periods, styles, and themes, from his The Devil's Highway (a Pulitzer Prize-finalist for nonfiction, and one of many Urrea books to narrates the stories and lives of contemporary Mexican American immigrants) to the historical novel The Hummingbird's Daughter, collections of poetry such as The Fever of Being to his memoir Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life . Urrea is no more reducible to a single genre or literary voice as he is solely defined by his Mexican American heritage; instead, what he exemplifies is how much Mexican American writing and culture has become a central part of every aspect of our literary and national conversations and identities. To read his works is to read 21st century America, sin pregunta.
Next Mexican American Studies influence tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any Mexican American authors or artists you'd highlight?
1/24 Memory Day nominee: Edith Wharton, the novelist and scholar who was the first American woman awarded the Pulitzer prize, who became a self-educated authority on topics as diverse as architecture and travel, and whose best works of fiction engage realistically with both social and psychological identity as well as any American writer.
The last few decades in American literature and culture reflect just how impossible it is to define those elements without Mexican American writers and artists.
If I had to identify one and only one work of American literature from the 1980s to which we American Studiers can and should continue to turn—a ridiculous hypothetical, of course, but nonetheless the kind of question that can crystallize our analytical preferences—I would go with Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984). I would do so in part for literary reasons: Cisneros uses the complex form of a short story cycle, a group of distinct but interconnected short fictional works, as well as it has ever been used; she likewise creates with stunning ease the evolving narrative voice of a young girl over a period of many years of her life. But the book also engages in profoundly compelling depth with a host of crucial American conversations about identity, nearly all captured in the five-paragraph story "My Name": multigenerational familial and cultural heritages and influences on an individual; bilingual and multicultural experiences and identities for the child of immigrants; communities of neighborhood and place, peers and education, class and status; gender roles and stereotypes across cultures and generations; and more. And it's so consistently readable and engaging, funny and moving, that it's very easy to get students into it and into all those questions as a result.
Cisneros is an individual author who no more represents all of Mexican American literature, in her own moment or more broadly, than any other individual could; so I highlight her central 1980s achievement not to suggest that she can stand in for a larger community, but rather as one part of a larger argument that we cannot understand or define our national literature over the past few decades without including in prominent roles many Mexican American writers. You can't talk about late 20th and early 21st century American fiction without including Cisneros, Rudolfa Anaya, Ana Castillo, and many others; parallel poetry conversations would have to include Lorna Dee Cervantes, Gary Soto, M. Miriam Herrera, Alfred Arteaga, and more; recent national debates over identity, community, and education have been informed by no works more than the memoir and scholarly non-fiction contributions of Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez; playwrights such as Luis Valdez and Esteia Portillo Trambley helped change the possibilities for 20th century American drama; and the list goes on. And while the community of prominent Mexican American writers has exploded over these decades, an American Studier can and should go back into our literary history to appreciate the contributions of an earlier author like María Amparo Ruíz de Burton.
As the Mexican American student protests in Tucson—and the vibrant existence of the Mexican American Studies program in which they're enrolled—reflect, however, perhaps the most exciting and important Mexican American influences are those that continue to unfold into our 21st century moment, community, and identity. Once again I could list numerous writers and artists whose voices and works exemplify those influences, but I'll focus on just one: Luis Alberto Urrea. Urrea's thirteen books to date span literary genres, time periods, styles, and themes, from his The Devil's Highway (a Pulitzer Prize-finalist for nonfiction, and one of many Urrea books to narrates the stories and lives of contemporary Mexican American immigrants) to the historical novel The Hummingbird's Daughter, collections of poetry such as The Fever of Being to his memoir Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life . Urrea is no more reducible to a single genre or literary voice as he is solely defined by his Mexican American heritage; instead, what he exemplifies is how much Mexican American writing and culture has become a central part of every aspect of our literary and national conversations and identities. To read his works is to read 21st century America, sin pregunta.
Next Mexican American Studies influence tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Any Mexican American authors or artists you'd highlight?
1/24 Memory Day nominee: Edith Wharton, the novelist and scholar who was the first American woman awarded the Pulitzer prize, who became a self-educated authority on topics as diverse as architecture and travel, and whose best works of fiction engage realistically with both social and psychological identity as well as any American writer.
January 23, 2012
January 23, 2012: Mexican American Studies
Why American Studiers should be paying particularly close and committed attention to what's happening with Tucson's Mexican American Studies program.
There are plenty of reasons for any American, or human, to be upset with what has happened in Arizona (and specifically Tucson) over the last year or so; in fact each subsequent event and story has seemingly amplified the level of ridiculous and upsetting news. Last May the state's legislature passed and its governor signed into law HB 2281, a law that bans the state's schools from "teaching classes that are designed for students of a particular ethnic group, promote resentment, or advocate ethnic solidarity over treating pupils as individuals." Earlier this month, as the law went into effect, the authorities decided to focus its first effects on Tucson's famous and award-winning Mexican American Studies program, and they've done a good deal more than just cut funding for the program or the like—they've forced teachers to remove all materials from their classrooms, banned numerous books and authors entirely, and otherwise directly attacked the program and its participants. And last week, when students at Cholla High School marches to the program's headquarters in protest—an action that would seem worth celebrating whatever one's stance on the program—they were not only met with anger, but punished for their action by being forced to perform janitorial duties at their school.
I could easily write the rest of this post, and in fact a whole series of posts, on just how un-American, in the most profound sense of the (controversial I know) phrase, those latter two actions—banning books and punishing students for social protest and activism—are. But I hope and believe that no one reading this post would disagree with those sentiments. Moreover, while those actions are inarguably extreme and divisive, it is I would argue in fact the opening salvo in this series of events, the passage of HB 2281, that represents the most fundamentally and troublingly un-American action of all. In the subsequent posts this week, I will make the case for many of the moments, figures, and ways in which Mexican American Studies is inseparable from American Studies, the aspects of our national community, history, story, and identity that cannot be understood or narrated without the inclusion of Mexican American Studies.
Yet even if we leave aside that specific focus and kind of program, as of course the original law did, I would likewise argue that the law's own language is profoundly disconnected from American identity. That's true in a cause and effect way, to be sure—the idea that classes "designed for students of a particular ethnic group" will lead, as the sentence's grammar implies, to "resentment" or the valuing of "ethnic solidarity over" individual identity, is nonsensically disconnected from the long sweep of American history, in which individuals have formed and maintained connections with both their particular groups and cultures and at the same time with the broader nation around them (one composed of course of other individuals doing the same). But it's even more inaccurate to argue, as the law explicitly does, that programs like Tucson's are "designed for students of a particular ethnic group"—quite the contrary, I believe that ethnic studies programs are designed for all American students, both those with connections to the groups in question and those outside of them; that's important if we define America as composed of a set of different ethnic groups and communities, and even more crucial if we define it (as I do) as composed ultimately of the cross-cultural encounters and transformations between and across those communities.
Again, there are all sorts of specific arguments in favor of Tucson's program, and of course the place of Mexican American Studies in American Studies and identity. I'll try to make a few of them for the rest of this week. But the law is even more sweeping, and more sweepingly un-American, than that, and should likewise be responded to in those broad terms. More tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
1/23 Memory Day nominee: Gertrude Belle Elion, the Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher and chemist who was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants and one of America's most pioneering female scientists, creating her own career and opportunities as well as much of the field of modern medical research.
There are plenty of reasons for any American, or human, to be upset with what has happened in Arizona (and specifically Tucson) over the last year or so; in fact each subsequent event and story has seemingly amplified the level of ridiculous and upsetting news. Last May the state's legislature passed and its governor signed into law HB 2281, a law that bans the state's schools from "teaching classes that are designed for students of a particular ethnic group, promote resentment, or advocate ethnic solidarity over treating pupils as individuals." Earlier this month, as the law went into effect, the authorities decided to focus its first effects on Tucson's famous and award-winning Mexican American Studies program, and they've done a good deal more than just cut funding for the program or the like—they've forced teachers to remove all materials from their classrooms, banned numerous books and authors entirely, and otherwise directly attacked the program and its participants. And last week, when students at Cholla High School marches to the program's headquarters in protest—an action that would seem worth celebrating whatever one's stance on the program—they were not only met with anger, but punished for their action by being forced to perform janitorial duties at their school.
I could easily write the rest of this post, and in fact a whole series of posts, on just how un-American, in the most profound sense of the (controversial I know) phrase, those latter two actions—banning books and punishing students for social protest and activism—are. But I hope and believe that no one reading this post would disagree with those sentiments. Moreover, while those actions are inarguably extreme and divisive, it is I would argue in fact the opening salvo in this series of events, the passage of HB 2281, that represents the most fundamentally and troublingly un-American action of all. In the subsequent posts this week, I will make the case for many of the moments, figures, and ways in which Mexican American Studies is inseparable from American Studies, the aspects of our national community, history, story, and identity that cannot be understood or narrated without the inclusion of Mexican American Studies.
Yet even if we leave aside that specific focus and kind of program, as of course the original law did, I would likewise argue that the law's own language is profoundly disconnected from American identity. That's true in a cause and effect way, to be sure—the idea that classes "designed for students of a particular ethnic group" will lead, as the sentence's grammar implies, to "resentment" or the valuing of "ethnic solidarity over" individual identity, is nonsensically disconnected from the long sweep of American history, in which individuals have formed and maintained connections with both their particular groups and cultures and at the same time with the broader nation around them (one composed of course of other individuals doing the same). But it's even more inaccurate to argue, as the law explicitly does, that programs like Tucson's are "designed for students of a particular ethnic group"—quite the contrary, I believe that ethnic studies programs are designed for all American students, both those with connections to the groups in question and those outside of them; that's important if we define America as composed of a set of different ethnic groups and communities, and even more crucial if we define it (as I do) as composed ultimately of the cross-cultural encounters and transformations between and across those communities.
Again, there are all sorts of specific arguments in favor of Tucson's program, and of course the place of Mexican American Studies in American Studies and identity. I'll try to make a few of them for the rest of this week. But the law is even more sweeping, and more sweepingly un-American, than that, and should likewise be responded to in those broad terms. More tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
1/23 Memory Day nominee: Gertrude Belle Elion, the Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher and chemist who was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants and one of America's most pioneering female scientists, creating her own career and opportunities as well as much of the field of modern medical research.
January 21, 2012
January 21-22, 2012: American Studies for Lifelong Learning
[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 fifth and final entry in the series.]
An exciting new course and opportunity gives me the chance to bring some of my public scholarly American Studies goals to a new and significant community and conversation.
One of the very best things about my nearly seven years teaching at Fitchburg State University has been the opportunity to work with a wide variety of student populations and communities. That includes not only the different undergraduates and the grad students about whom I wrote on Friday (most of whom are already secondary educators or otherwise working in the field), but also particularly exemplary and driven undergraduate students as part of an annual Leadership Day, interested community members and educators from around the state as part of a Teaching American History workshop, and local high school students through an English Department-sponsored writing contest, among other communities. And this year I have the chance to work with another group: senior citizens from more than a dozen local communities, through a five-week course I'll be teaching in the Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (AFLA) program.
When I was offered the chance to do the course, I knew right away that I wanted to do something that lines up with my goals and ideals for public scholarship, for a couple of key reasons: this is a community of students for whom, it seems to me in the abstract at least, the question of how what they're learning connects to their lives and worlds and perspectives and identities is rightly paramount; and it's likely to be a community of students whose American experiences will comprise a vast and very significant range of histories and stories, and thus a community with whose voices I'm very eager to put my own perspectives and ideas about America into conversation. Moreover, I was offered the course right after giving a fall graduate colloquium talk, where I shared some histories and stories related to the Chinese Exclusion Act and immigration in America; the audience responses to that talk reinforced for me a sense, one that influenced my creation of this blog in the first place, that there are many vital, complicated, dark and yet often also inspiring American histories and stories that are not widely known or part of our national conversations and narratives.
So my preliminary plan (which will remain very open, as the course doesn't have outside readings so it really unfolds for those couple of hours on each of five Fridays in February and March—which means that suggestions will be very welcome and appreciated!) is to focus each class on a different moment that is under-represented in our conversations and narratives, to bring in various primary sources and works to help us think about each, and then to get the students talking about their own perspectives and what these different moments and sources might contribute to them. As of right now those five moments are: Competing women's voices and roles at the 1876 Centennial Exposition; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the early history of immigration and law in America (links above); the 1898 Wilmington (NC) Massacre, lynching, and race in Jim Crow America; the Bonus Army March, the Depression, and class and protest in America; and the American Indian Movement takeovers and controversies of the 1970s, and Native American presences and voices in late 20th century America.
I've got plenty of starting points, but would love your thoughts as always—texts or stories or histories I could use to help frame those different moments? Other moments or histories you'd nominate as alternatives? Perspectives of any kind on this course and working with a community of students like this? Share, please!
Ben
PS. You know what to do!
1/21 Memory Day nominee: Roger Nash Baldwin, the influential social worker and probation officer who, in response to World War I and the need for an organization to support and defend conscientious objectors, helped found and then directed for many years the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), spearheading many of the ACLU's signature legal and social efforts.
1/22 Memory Day nominee: Noah Phelps, the Revolutionary War officer whose efforts as a spy led directly to one of the war's earliest and most significant victories (Ethan Allen's capture of Fort Ticonderoga), and who continued to serve the new nation politically for many years, chairing the meeting that passed Connecticut's Articles of Confederation and serving as a delegate to the state's Constitutional Convention.
An exciting new course and opportunity gives me the chance to bring some of my public scholarly American Studies goals to a new and significant community and conversation.
One of the very best things about my nearly seven years teaching at Fitchburg State University has been the opportunity to work with a wide variety of student populations and communities. That includes not only the different undergraduates and the grad students about whom I wrote on Friday (most of whom are already secondary educators or otherwise working in the field), but also particularly exemplary and driven undergraduate students as part of an annual Leadership Day, interested community members and educators from around the state as part of a Teaching American History workshop, and local high school students through an English Department-sponsored writing contest, among other communities. And this year I have the chance to work with another group: senior citizens from more than a dozen local communities, through a five-week course I'll be teaching in the Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (AFLA) program.
When I was offered the chance to do the course, I knew right away that I wanted to do something that lines up with my goals and ideals for public scholarship, for a couple of key reasons: this is a community of students for whom, it seems to me in the abstract at least, the question of how what they're learning connects to their lives and worlds and perspectives and identities is rightly paramount; and it's likely to be a community of students whose American experiences will comprise a vast and very significant range of histories and stories, and thus a community with whose voices I'm very eager to put my own perspectives and ideas about America into conversation. Moreover, I was offered the course right after giving a fall graduate colloquium talk, where I shared some histories and stories related to the Chinese Exclusion Act and immigration in America; the audience responses to that talk reinforced for me a sense, one that influenced my creation of this blog in the first place, that there are many vital, complicated, dark and yet often also inspiring American histories and stories that are not widely known or part of our national conversations and narratives.
So my preliminary plan (which will remain very open, as the course doesn't have outside readings so it really unfolds for those couple of hours on each of five Fridays in February and March—which means that suggestions will be very welcome and appreciated!) is to focus each class on a different moment that is under-represented in our conversations and narratives, to bring in various primary sources and works to help us think about each, and then to get the students talking about their own perspectives and what these different moments and sources might contribute to them. As of right now those five moments are: Competing women's voices and roles at the 1876 Centennial Exposition; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the early history of immigration and law in America (links above); the 1898 Wilmington (NC) Massacre, lynching, and race in Jim Crow America; the Bonus Army March, the Depression, and class and protest in America; and the American Indian Movement takeovers and controversies of the 1970s, and Native American presences and voices in late 20th century America.
I've got plenty of starting points, but would love your thoughts as always—texts or stories or histories I could use to help frame those different moments? Other moments or histories you'd nominate as alternatives? Perspectives of any kind on this course and working with a community of students like this? Share, please!
Ben
PS. You know what to do!
1/21 Memory Day nominee: Roger Nash Baldwin, the influential social worker and probation officer who, in response to World War I and the need for an organization to support and defend conscientious objectors, helped found and then directed for many years the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), spearheading many of the ACLU's signature legal and social efforts.
1/22 Memory Day nominee: Noah Phelps, the Revolutionary War officer whose efforts as a spy led directly to one of the war's earliest and most significant victories (Ethan Allen's capture of Fort Ticonderoga), and who continued to serve the new nation politically for many years, chairing the meeting that passed Connecticut's Articles of Confederation and serving as a delegate to the state's Constitutional Convention.
January 20, 2012
January 20, 2012: American Studies in the Grad Lit Theory 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 fourth in the series.]
My American Studies training and perspective has helped me to create what is, I hope, an accessible and practical, and most importantly a productive, graduate English course in literary theory.
When I taught our graduate program's Literary Theory course for the first time, back in the spring of 2008, I began the class with a (somewhat dated) pop culture analogy for how surprised my own grad school peers would be at the thought of me teaching such a course: "Ben and literary theory," I imagined them arguing, "are like Britney Spears and panties: maybe they've been in the same room at some point, but you've certainly never seen proof, and it's quite possible that they haven't." That was an overstatement, of course—I took my own intro to theory course at the start of my grad training, for example—but there's no question that I've been, and remain, very resistant to employing theory in my own work. I believe that resistance is directly connected to my American Studies perspective, and that it has helped me create an accessible, practical, and productive kind of lit theory course.
I would never try to argue that American Studies scholarship hasn't been informed by theory, in both (to my mind) helpful and less helpful ways; Michel Foucault in particular has been utilized by many American Studiers over the last few decades. But I would note that the very nationally-specific focus of American Studies has made, and continues to make, it more difficult to directly apply the ideas of theorists from other countries to American Studies questions; the most exemplary works of American Studies scholarship, after all, are profoundly grounded in broad and deep engagement and analysis of American sources and evidence, across disciplines and media and time periods but always connected by this place and community. So while a theorist might well help provide analytical frames through which an American Studier can engage with his or her subjects—as, for example, I used Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic to help develop my first book's analyses of voice in American culture and literature—those frames remain (again to my mind) very much a supplementary focus in such scholarly projects.
I have similarly, if perhaps counter-intuitively, tried to make literary theory supplementary to both primary texts and the students' own interests and voices in my grad lit theory course. For example, the course is organized around two-week units in which we first read and discuss a work of literature (such as Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw), with no contexts of any kind (theoretical or otherwise) between the students and the text; having developed those analyses, we then add in some theoretical essays and ideas in the second week, allowing the students to make them a part of their evolving conversations rather than a focus in their own right. Even more illustrative of my goals for the course is the final, seminar paper, in which I ask the students to pick a primary text of their own (something they use in their own classrooms and/or scholarship, something they're passionate about or interested in exploring further, etc), and then to think about how a few of the theorists and essays with which we've engaged can supplement and strengthen their own analyses of that work. The first two times I've taught the class have yield a very impressive range of subjects for those seminar papers—from Shakespeare to House of Leaves , Milton to In the Lake of the Woods —and I'm very excited to see where this semester's grad student's go.
Pretty good semester all the way around, I'd say—and one very much influenced by American Studies. As is the one newest and most unique course I get to teach, on which more in this weekend's post,
Ben
PS. Any theorists or theoretical ideas that you'd highlight as helpful or important for American Studies?
1/20 Memory Day nominee: Buzz Aldrin, the pioneering astronaut and advocate for space exploration who performed America's first spacewalk, was one of the first men to walk on the moon, and has continued to make an impassioned case for the values of exploration and science ever since—most especially and inspiringly in his books for and work with schoolchildren.
My American Studies training and perspective has helped me to create what is, I hope, an accessible and practical, and most importantly a productive, graduate English course in literary theory.
When I taught our graduate program's Literary Theory course for the first time, back in the spring of 2008, I began the class with a (somewhat dated) pop culture analogy for how surprised my own grad school peers would be at the thought of me teaching such a course: "Ben and literary theory," I imagined them arguing, "are like Britney Spears and panties: maybe they've been in the same room at some point, but you've certainly never seen proof, and it's quite possible that they haven't." That was an overstatement, of course—I took my own intro to theory course at the start of my grad training, for example—but there's no question that I've been, and remain, very resistant to employing theory in my own work. I believe that resistance is directly connected to my American Studies perspective, and that it has helped me create an accessible, practical, and productive kind of lit theory course.
I would never try to argue that American Studies scholarship hasn't been informed by theory, in both (to my mind) helpful and less helpful ways; Michel Foucault in particular has been utilized by many American Studiers over the last few decades. But I would note that the very nationally-specific focus of American Studies has made, and continues to make, it more difficult to directly apply the ideas of theorists from other countries to American Studies questions; the most exemplary works of American Studies scholarship, after all, are profoundly grounded in broad and deep engagement and analysis of American sources and evidence, across disciplines and media and time periods but always connected by this place and community. So while a theorist might well help provide analytical frames through which an American Studier can engage with his or her subjects—as, for example, I used Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic to help develop my first book's analyses of voice in American culture and literature—those frames remain (again to my mind) very much a supplementary focus in such scholarly projects.
I have similarly, if perhaps counter-intuitively, tried to make literary theory supplementary to both primary texts and the students' own interests and voices in my grad lit theory course. For example, the course is organized around two-week units in which we first read and discuss a work of literature (such as Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw), with no contexts of any kind (theoretical or otherwise) between the students and the text; having developed those analyses, we then add in some theoretical essays and ideas in the second week, allowing the students to make them a part of their evolving conversations rather than a focus in their own right. Even more illustrative of my goals for the course is the final, seminar paper, in which I ask the students to pick a primary text of their own (something they use in their own classrooms and/or scholarship, something they're passionate about or interested in exploring further, etc), and then to think about how a few of the theorists and essays with which we've engaged can supplement and strengthen their own analyses of that work. The first two times I've taught the class have yield a very impressive range of subjects for those seminar papers—from Shakespeare to House of Leaves , Milton to In the Lake of the Woods —and I'm very excited to see where this semester's grad student's go.
Pretty good semester all the way around, I'd say—and one very much influenced by American Studies. As is the one newest and most unique course I get to teach, on which more in this weekend's post,
Ben
PS. Any theorists or theoretical ideas that you'd highlight as helpful or important for American Studies?
1/20 Memory Day nominee: Buzz Aldrin, the pioneering astronaut and advocate for space exploration who performed America's first spacewalk, was one of the first men to walk on the moon, and has continued to make an impassioned case for the values of exploration and science ever since—most especially and inspiringly in his books for and work with schoolchildren.
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.
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