Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 426

December 14, 2011: Cross-Culture 3: A Transnational Force

[To follow up and complement last week's posts on how our understanding of historical periods and communities looks very different through a cross-cultural lens, this week I'll focus on five seminal moments in American popular culture for which the same is true. This is the third in that series.] [Also: In response to a couple of reader comments, I'm going to be trying out a new style for this week's posts, one with mostly shorter paragraphs for potentially less difficult online reading. If it works—and feel free to weigh in!—I'll try to utilize it for at least some of my posts going forward.]One of the most popular and influential American movies (and movies period) was very directly influenced by a Japanese film—and, critiques of the American director notwithstanding, that influence is a very positive thing.Few cultural texts have had a more significant and ongoing presence over the last three decades than George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) and its many sequels, prequels, novelizations, television spinoffs, parodies, merchandising and marketing and material culture connections, animated versions, Wookie-centric Christmas specials, and the like. Because of that lasting presence, and perhaps especially because a whole generation of students and scholars has grown up alongside Luke Skywalker and friends, Lucas's prominent debt to Joseph Campbell's analyses of heroism and mythologies has likewise been very well established and documented; which is to say, this is a pop culture text and artist whose multigenerational and cross-cultural (at least in the sense of Campbell's ideas linking myths from multiple cultures) connections and influences seem already well known.Far be it for me to disagree with that longstanding and very thoroughly developed assessment—did you note the ridiculously comprehensive Lucas-Campbell chart at that link?—but there's another, also very influential and much less broadly known, source for Lucas's first film. As this website conversation highlights, Lucas's initial story outline for Star Wars (particularly in the story's initial events and exposition) closely parallels Akira Kurosawa's 1958 film The Hidden Fortress; Lucas would change certain events and details between that outline and the film's screenplay, but many of the Kurosawa echoes remained very much present in the finished film, as mashups of the two movies such as this one cleverly highlight. Such mashups could be used as exhibits in a plagiarism case against Lucas, and indeed many who have noted the similarities to Fortress have done so in a critical way, arguing that at least Lucas owed Kurosawa a more overt acknowledgment of the influence as Star Wars gained in popularity and Lucas became one of the most famous and wealthiest filmmakers of all time.Certainly I believe that Kurosawa's film should be better known, not only because of its clear influence on Lucas's early ideas for his own series, but also because it seems (from, admittedly, the handful of clips I have seen and the descriptions I have read) to be an interesting if minor work from one of cinema's most prolific and talented artists. Yet far from serving as an indictment of Lucas or his film, this additional influence highlights, to my mind, just how genuinely and impressively American Star Wars really is: inspired in equal measure by centuries of cross-cultural mythology and a Japanese film, with the seminal fantasy series by a British author thrown in for good measure; starring young American actors and some of England's most established screen veterans; shamelessly cribbing from the styles and stunts of early serials and pop culture classics like Buck Rogers; with all those elements thrown into a space opera blender and turned into a hugely unique and engaging entertainments. Lucas had called his first, much more grounded and local and historically nostalgic, film American Graffiti (1973)—but it's Star Wars that really exemplifies the cross-cultural, multi-genre, intertextual, inspiring mélange that is American culture and art.Now's that a Force to be reckoned with! Another moment tomorrow,BenPS. Any cross-culturally influenced or influential films you'd highlight?

December 13, 2011: Cross-Culture 2: A Striking Voice

[To follow up and complement last week's posts on how our understanding of historical periods and communities looks very different through a cross-cultural lens, this week I'll focus on five seminal moments in American popular culture for which the same is true. This is the second in that series.] [Also: In response to a couple of reader comments, I'm going to be trying out a new style for this week's posts, one with mostly shorter paragraphs for potentially less difficult online reading. If it works—and feel free to weigh in!—I'll try to utilize it for at least some of my posts going forward.]The most famous voice in American literature, that of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, was quite possibly inspired by, and at the very least is cross-culturally connected to, African American voices.Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, in Green Hills of Africa (1935; a character expresses the sentiment in dialogue on page 23 of that Google book), that "all modern American literature comes from" Twain's novel, that "all American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." While public and critical responses to the novel's themes and representations of (and of course words for) race and identity have of course varied dramatically, both over the years and in contemporary debates, it's fair to say that perspectives on Twain's style in the novel have been much more consistent: that the novel's narration, and more exactly Twain's creation of the vernacular narrating voice of its title character, is a watershed moment in American literary and cultural history. While it's important to reiterate clearly that the most famous single word included (frequently) in Huck's narration is "nigger," one prominent Twain scholar, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, has nonetheless made an extended and provocative case that Huck's identity, and especially his voice, is strikingly connected to African Americans in both Twain's life and in American culture more generally. Fishkin's book, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (1994), marshals a range of evidence, both from the novel and from biographical, rhetorical, and historical contexts for Twain's work and period, in support of that perspective. Many other scholars have pushed back on Fishkin's arguments, including (I note both for full disclosure and to be able to link this great website) a certain AmericanStudier's  Dad, but the fact remains that a core value of literary interpretation is its ability to balance multiple convincing (or at least sophisticated) readings of a work, and Fishkin's book has to my mind added the possibility of African American influences for Huck's voice and identity as one such reading to the roster.In any case, I don't think we need to go as far as Fishkin to note one strikingly cross-cultural attribute of Huck's voice (as Twain creates it). Twain's novel, like much of his early writing, rests comfortably in the post-Civil War sensation that was local color writing (now usually known as regionalism), and thus it might seem no surprise that he works to create authentic dialect voices for his local characters (even though he also makes fun of that practice in the "Explanatory" note that precedes his novel). Yet in my pretty extensive reading of local color literature, I have very rarely encountered another Southern white character who speaks in an uneducated dialect voice; perhaps in order to contrast Southern whites with African Americans, local color writers who focused on this region (most of them in the genre known as the plantation tradition; but I would likewise say this of those like Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt who certainly rejected that genre's nostalgia) tended to represent the speech of their white characters in standard English and that of black characters with dialect. While Huck's dialect is of course not identical to Jim's, its presence at all signals a cross-cultural connection between the two characters and their worlds that is itself striking and (especially for readers of the time) provocative.None of this of course is a substitute for what Fishkin, Railton Pére, and me would all agree you should do: read the book! But it's pretty neat to think that one of the voices with which all modern American literature originated was cross-cultural in core and crucial ways. Another moment tomorrow,BenPS. Any cross-cultural literary characters or works you'd highlight?

December 12, 2011: Cross-Culture 1: It's Not Only Rock and Roll

[To follow up and complement last week's posts on how our understanding of historical periods and communities looks very different through a cross-cultural lens, this week I'll focus on five seminal moments in American popular culture for which the same is true. This is the first in that series.] [Also: In response to a couple of reader comments, I'm going to be trying out a new style for this week's posts, one with mostly shorter paragraphs for potentially less difficult online reading. If it works—and feel free to weigh in!—I'll try to utilize it for at least some of my posts going forward.]The origins of rock and roll in America are significantly more cross-cultural, and most crucially more multi-directional in their influences, than our dominant narratives of it recognize.To be sure, it's virtually a truism that early white rock pioneers like Elvis learned—often, the narrative goes, stole—many of their most popular songs and sounds from black artists; rapper Eminem's self-definition (from the song "Without Me") as "the worst thing since Elvis Presley / To do black music so selfishly / And use it to get myself wealthy" exemplifies the widespread acceptance of this narrative. And there's no doubt that one of the moments that most explicitly established Elvis as a pop cultural force, his 1956 performance of "Hound Dog" on the Milton Berle Show, fits this narrative very fully: the song had originally been recorded by blues artist Big Mama Thornton in 1952, yet it was Elvis's cover, accompanied by his controversial pelvic gyrations on the show, that catapulted both the song and Presley into the big time.That's already a sort of cross-cultural influence, of course, although a mostly one-sided and thus less than ideally communal one. But the specific details of "Hound Dog" reveal a much more complicated and (to my mind) inspiring cross-cultural origin: the song was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a Jewish-American songwriting team that also produced some of the decade's biggest hits for African American artists, including The Coasters' 1958 #1 record "Yakety Yak," Wilbert Harrison's 1959 #1 "Kansas City," and Ben E. King's 1960 #1 "Stand By Me" (which King co-wrote).  By any measure, Leiber and Stoller's songs, as sung by these African American artists, helped establish rock and roll as a central cultural presence—and in their mentoring of a young (also Jewish-American) Phil Spector, they likewise directly contributed to rock's expanding success over the subsequent decades.There were of course many other late 1950s artists and moments that likewise contributed to the explosion of rock and roll, and I would similarly stress the multi- and often cross-cultural aspects of the period: from African American pioneers such as Little Richard (who came out of the Southern gospel tradition), Chuck Berry (who grew up playing the Missouri blues), and Bo Diddley (a Chicago bluesman) to the three artists killed in the tragic 1959 plane crash (Mexican American teen sensation Ritchie Valens and Texans Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper), from the Detroit "singing cowboy" Bill Haley (most famously of The Comets) to the Louisiana rockabilly of Jerry Lee Lewis, these early rockers came out of every region and tradition and profoundly influenced both each other's work and the history of American music and culture.Rock and roll has often been called a genuinely American form of music, and I would most certainly agree: its cross-cultural origins exemplify the best of our national community and conversations. Another cross-cultural moment tomorrow!BenPS. Any rock and roll origin points, songs, or artists you'd highlight?

December 10-11, 2011: So What Now?

In the past week's posts, I have tried first to lay out some of my fundamental ideas about American diversity and identity, and then to consider (with help from some exemplary scholars) what those ideas might mean for revised histories and understandings of the arrival and exploration, Puritan, Revolutionary, and Civil War eras and communities. I certainly don't feel any need to argue in this space, or more exactly for readers who are interested in the conversations to which this space connects, for the value of those kinds of historical implications; we all, I believe, would agree that they are in of and themselves important and worthwhile. Yet I know that, pat cliché about "those who do not understand the past" notwithstanding, it is not nor should it be a given that new historical narratives or understandings necessarily change things for us in the present and future; that is, while I most definitely believe that they do lead to such changes, I likewise believe that it is incumbent on us A`mericanStudies scholars to make that case consistently, explicitly, and clearly.I would go about making that case in a variety of ways, but here will focus on two, one more of a corrective to and the other more of an inspiration for our current and future conversations and community. For the former, I believe that many of the usages to which we put our past, especially the over-simplified, mythologized, and too often propagandistic usages in political contexts, would be greatly complicated, if not overtly refuted, by these different historical narratives and understandings. To take only one example, many political usages of the Founding Fathers and their ideas and writings (including the most prominent contemporary such usage, by the Tea Party) tend to connect those Revolutionary voices to critiques of government activism and programs, arguments for individual liberty in contrast with (and potentially threatened by) state authority, and so on. Yet if we define the Revolutionary era in significant measure through those African American slaves who used the Declaration and its ideas to argue for their own freedom, and even more crucially did so by appealing to the new post-1776 state legislatures and so to the power of their own governments to protect them from an unjust tyrannical social system (a power for which James Madison argued at length in Federalist 51), then our perspective on what the Revolution and its core ideas might mean for a contemporary understanding of the state's role in protecting and extending rights to all Americans would, to my mind, look very different indeed.While I think such historical correctives are definitely important—and are in fact a main reason why I moved into public scholarship at all, to try to push back on the mythologizing historical narratives being advanced by "historians" at Glenn Beck University and the like—it's fair to say that their main effect is likely not going to be a unifying one, that they do not offer clearly shared histories for an already divided national community. Fortunately, I believe that my particular brand of historical revisionism does have precisely such unifying potential. On the broad level, a main reason why I developed my cross-cultural transformation definition of American identity is that it represents what I see as a shared national experience, one that is a key, connective part of the heritage and identity of all Americans (rather than, for example, a multicultural historical narrative, which emphasizes a number of distinct cultural heritages and identities). And more specifically, these revisions of historical periods can provide similarly unifying and, often, inspiring national histories and stories—narratives that neither privilege one group at the expense of others (ie, the idealizing of the Puritans) nor emphasize division and discord (ie, the Revolution's hypocrisies related to slavery), but that instead highlight cross-cultural efforts and successes that illustrate the best of an era's national meanings. Such successes were never absolute and did not—and thus in our narratives would not—elide the more divided sides to our national community, but they offer inspiring glimpses of an alternative, much more genuinely ideal America for which we can certainly continue to strive.That's the goal, at least! More next week, but (while I hope this goes without saying) I'd sure love to hear your takes on the histories and images of different time periods, or American communities and identities in general, in comments. BenPS. What I just said!

December 9, 2011: So What 4

I was going to focus in this fourth and final post on reimagining moments in our history through a cross-cultural lens on the Civil War, and specifically on African American soldiers and civilians during and after it—but one of our greatest bloggers, both on the Civil War and on issues of race in American identity, beat me to it. So here's Ta-Nehisi Coates' story on African Americans and the Civil War, published in the latest issue of The Atlantic:http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/why-do-so-few-blacks-study-the-civil-war/8831/I'm going to try to pull these different threads together for a week-culminating post on a new vision of our history overall, so look for that this weekend! BenPS. Any thoughts of yours on historical periods we can or should reimagine? Any responses to any of this week's posts?

December 8, 2011: So What 3

Over a year ago, in one of my earliest posts here, I wrote about African American slaves who, in the first years after the Declaration of Independence, brought petitions before the newly formed state legislatures to argue for their freedom, using the language and ideas of the Declaration and of the American Revolution more broadly in support of their cause. As I wrote in that post, those petitions explicitly blur, and thus complicate, two of our most prominent and usually contrasted narratives of the Revolution: those that focus on the Founding Fathers and their inspiring arguments for liberty and democracy and a new form of government and nation; and those that note, as did Edmund Wilson in his magisterial American Slavery, American Freedom, the abiding irony of American slavery alongside—and in fact for many of the Founders as a financial and social base for—these central arguments for liberty and equality.Similarly blurring those two narratives are many of the Revolutionary-era poems of Phyllis Wheatley. As I noted in the later paragraphs of this post on Wheatley, there were few if any American literary works—creative works, that is, rather than more overtly political ones like Tom Paine's pamphlets—that made the case for the Revolution with more power than her "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth"; and while in a subsequent pro-Revolution poem like her ode to General Washington Wheatley mostly mutes her own identity as an African American slave, in "Dartmouth" she makes that experience of slavery the explicit grounding for her embrace of liberty and support of the Revolutionary cause. So is it possible to read the whole of the Revolution as, in a partly symbolic but also partly literal sense, descending from a figure like Crispus Attucks, the mixed-race, Wampanoag and African American dockworker whose death at the hands of British soldiers helped define the "Boston Massacre" and hasten the Revolution? Can we read this event, which would come to be so prominently led by and connected to a group of landed and relatively privileged white men, as instead profoundly connected to some of America's most overtly and crucially cross-cultural individuals and communities? And what would that shift mean for our images of the Revolution and the nation it created?There are of course many different possible answers to those questions, but there are also prominent and significant recent works of AmericanStudies scholarship that have begun fleshing out such images of the Revolution. At the top of that list would have to be Douglas Egerton's Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America , a book that analyzes at length key figures such as Quok Walker (one of the first and most famous of the slave petitioners) and Thomas Jefferson's servant Richard (with whom Jefferson explicitly argued over slavery and its meanings and effects) in order to understand the Revolution through the lens of this American community. Egerton's conclusions mostly focus on how the Revolution's promise did not ultimately play out for African Americans, but such failures should not mask the significantly different images of the Revolution that he creates through this new viewpoint and framework. And adding another, even more centrally cross-cultural and transnational layer to such ideas is Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness , one of the most seminal works of cultural studies and a text that seeks (very compellingly) to illustrate core elements of modern, post-Enlightenment identity through the experiences of the African, Caribbean, American, and British Atlantic, not as distinct worlds but as one continuous, interconnected, cross-culturally transformative and transforming space. Through Gilroy's lens, the Revolution no more simply oppressed African Americans than it ultimately separated America from England—each might have been a political outcome, but the cross-cultural connections between these communities would only deepen as a result of the Revolutionary era's events and changes. More tomorrow, one more period and exemplary work,BenPS. Any events, images, figures, or texts from the Revolutionary era that you'd add to our understanding and histories of it?

December 7, 2011: So What 2

For my second post in this series on how our narratives and images of particular historical periods would change through an emphasis on cross-cultural diversity (and on exemplary recent AmericanStudies scholarship that can help with such re-visions), I'll move about a century forward in our national history, but keep one of yesterday's focal communities in my revisionist crosshairs. Yesterday's post focused on the first couple centuries of post-contact and post-Columbian history, the 16th and early 17th centuries, and more exactly on both the European explorers and the Puritan settlers who constituted two of the central such arriving communities. Today's post will focus on the late 17th and early 18th centuries, what we might call the settlement and colonial periods; while of course every American culture and community continued to evolve and (I would argue) deepen its cross-cultural connections and influence over those years, my specific subject today remains Puritan New England.If, as I argued yesterday, many of our dominant narratives of the Pilgrims and the first Puritan arrivals emphasize their ideal and inspiring qualities, their mission and faith and "city on a hill" vision and so on, it's fair to say that our narratives of the subsequent generations of Puritans substantially shift those emphases and tones. None of those narratives are as prominent in our national conversations as the Pilgrims or the Mayflower or the city on a hill, but I'd say we have some sense of these subsequent Puritans, and that it's a sense of them (thanks in part to later writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and H.L. Mencken [the source of the famous "somebody somewhere having a good time" definition of Puritanism]) as intolerant and exclusionary and entirely unwilling to entertain even the slightest challenge to the orthodoxy of their beliefs; these are the Puritans who destroyed Thomas Morton's maypole (as immortalized in Hawthorne's "The May-Pole of Merry Mount"), who banished Anne Hutchinson for her antinomian heresies, who forced even a quite zealous and impressive theologian and leader like Roger Williams into exile (well, into Rhode Island, but potato, potahto). Even a genuinely progressive and complex and inspiring spiritual thinker and American writer such as Jonathan Edwards has been, as I argued in this post, folded into those images of a fiery faith that accepts no deviations from its precepts, thanks to the heavily anthologized sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."I'm not going to try to turn the late 17th and 18th century Puritans into the typological predecessors of the hippies or anything, but the more accurate perspective on Edwards would indicate that neither were they quite as intolerant or absolutist as the dominant narratives suggest. Even had they wanted to be, their communities continued to experience complex American cultural encounters, and thus to undergo cross-cultural transformations, throughout these years. And it just so happens that a Fitchburg State English and AmericanStudies colleague of mine, Michael Hoberman, has recently published a hugely exemplary book (his third) that unearths, narrates compellingly, and analyzes a series of such transformations. In the book, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America , Hoberman highlights the small but meaningful presence of Jewish religious and business figures in New England's churches, universities, and cities over this century and a half post-Mayflower, and uses their relationships and conversations with a number of prominent Puritan thinkers and leaders to analyze the men's joint influences and changes, their shared cross-cultural transformations. More broadly and even more significantly, his book makes a compelling case that we can best understand the evolving Puritan identities and communities not by focusing on their insular qualities, but instead by recognizing these kinds of external (yet interconnected and, I would argue, inseparable and profoundly American) presences and influences. We still have a lot to learn about the Puritans through a lens like this, as Hoberman's book proves very successfully and impressively.More tomorrow, on another period and exemplary work,BenPS. Any suggestions for new ways to look at historical periods or communities?

December 6, 2011: So What 1

If you've been well trained by a literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I advanced in yesterday's post might be "So what?" I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be transformed by my ideas back in the "What would change" series of posts (written the week that the book in which I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like "All-American") in response to your hypothetical analytical query. But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods. For the rest of this week's posts I'll address one particular period and what would change, relying in part on an exemplary recent work of AmericanStudies scholarship to help me make my case.For a long time, our national narratives of the first European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified by the recurring "city on a hill" imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative, Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto) who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades, driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely negative and critical, as illustrated by the many protests that met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus's "discovery" for those cultures.There's certainly both historical accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of those cultures. And to that end, I can't recommend highly enough Cynthia Van Zandt's Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America,1580-1660 . Van Zandt's book is exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and encounters on which she focuses. But it's just as exemplary, to my mind, in its fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt's desire to examine aspects of the arrival era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of this period's central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into the remainder of the 17th and 18th centuries, that does not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without them and because, through a more 21st century lens, they provide inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the only options available to early American cultures.More tomorrow, another time period that needs reexamining and another great recent work that can help us to do just that,BenPS. What do you think? Any aspects or stories of the arrival and exploration era you'd highlight?

December 5, 2011: Defining Diversity

I ended Friday's post with a series of questions that I'll repeat here and then take up, one per paragraph: "So did the Immigration Act of 1965 not really change anything? Was America always just as diverse as it is in the 21st century? Have we not lost any unifying elements?" One the first question, I'd have to be a pretty terrible AmericanStudier not to note that the 1965 Act represented a hugely significant change, first and foremost as the first immigration law (since the initial such law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) that expanded rather than limited the communities and individuals who could immigrate under its aegis. Similarly, the Act's move away from explicit restrictions in national origin (especially for all Asian nations, but also for various Latin, Caribbean, and African ones) and to other kinds of preferences (skills, family relationships with current Americans) made it significantly more possible for immigrants from places like Taiwan, South Korea, Egypt, Kenya, Jamaica, and South America (among many others) to come to the US in meaningful numbers, and new communities of immigrants from these nations sprang up in major American cities (and around the country) as a result of the change. While I refuse to see as anything other than rank bigotry arguments like Buchanan's about the negative effects of these changes, they most certainly were made possible by the Act.Yet to address my second question, I would nonetheless describe America's late 20th and early 21st century diversity as different in degree rather than in kind from our earlier eras and identities. I would argue that in part because I want to define America in a significantly more inclusive way from its origin points—to see, for example, early 17th century American identity as including not only the English in colonies such as Massachusetts and Virginia but also the African slaves in Virginia, the Dutch in New Amsterdam, the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest and California, the French in the upper Midwest, the Russians in what would become Alaska, and the countless numbers of Native American nations and tribes throughout those areas and the rest of the continent. Through that lens, diversity has always been one of the most central elements of our national identity, and adding more nations to the mix only amplifies that longstanding reality. And yet even if we focus on the particular nationalities and communities that were most affected by the 1965 Act, a more accurate understanding of American history and identity recognizes that they too had often been part of our national community for more than a century (if not much longer): from early 19th century Chinese Americans like those at the heart of my still-favorite blog post to the multi-century Creolized interconnections between the Caribbean, the Hispanic Americas, and the US about which Edouard Glissant has written so powerfully, and even to the ways in which nations whose inhabitants had been stolen into slavery could now send voluntary immigrants much more easily, the reality is that the 1965 Act just made it easier for core American communities to build on those longstanding historical identities.On the third and final question, of whether we as a nation have lost any unifying qualities—to respond directly to the narrative of decline that truly defines arguments like Buchanan's and Ferguson's—my own argument, the idea at the heart of my second book, is quite literally the exact opposite of theirs. To my mind, the most fundamental origin point for America is not only diversity but hybridity, not only the significant number of distinct cultures and communities that have always inhabited this land but the idea that America itself is constituted out of the cross-cultural, transformed product of the encounters and conversations and intersections between those initially different but ultimately inseparable cultures and communities. While Buchanan and Ferguson have a certain culture in mind for their "us," and while multiculturalists might argue that there have always been many different "us"-es that have combined to form the larger American "us" (e pluribus unum, after all), I would agree with the latter position but also and most significantly argue that there has in fact always been a unifying "us," one that is comprised out of exactly the kinds of hybrid and cross-cultural identities that Buchanan and Ferguson worry have eaten away at their mythic founding community. It's pretty ironic, I'll admit, to find a defining national unity in precisely what the purveyors of our most traditional national narratives see as a threat to national unity—but on the other hand, if we could all come to understand just how cross-cultural America has always been, it'd take the threat of contemporary (or post-1965, or whatever) hybridization and turn it into a promise fulfilled.More tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 3-4, 2011: Heidi Kim's Guest Post

[Heidi Kim is many things—an Assistant Prof of English and Comparative Literature at UNC; the author of a really great dissertation and future book on race and identity in 20th century American literature; a former scientific researcher and consultant who will bring that knowledge and perspective into her next project on genetics, identity, and literature; a hard-core opera and tennis buff who has written online about those passions—but as this post proves, she's also an exemplary AmericanStudier, both in her ability to analyze history, culture, pop culture, media, and literature in complex and illuminating combinations and in her even more crucial ability to bring those interests and topics into her classrooms.]A 1962 Raleigh News and Observer article, revisiting the life of Chang and Eng Bunker, finally dubbed them not just the world-famous Siamese twins, but Siamese Tar Heels.  The story of these twins—ethnic Chinese, Barnum exhibits, world travelers, gentlemen farmers, Buddhist-to-Christian converts, American citizens, fathers of ten and eleven children respectively—often does not include their regionality, but here in North Carolina, Eng and Chang are proud pieces of Carolina history and are as much a part (if a smaller part) of Mount Airy as Andy Griffith!  Chang and Eng, as many historians, including my friend Gary Okihiro, have remarked, are striking figures of American identity, confounding expectations about class, race, religion, and citizenship in the 19th century.  Their public career began in the 1820s, and though they eventually took over management of their own careers (in one notable incident running away from their managers in England and being tracked down in the city of Bath—if only Jane Austen could have met them), they settled down to farming life in North Carolina.  They brought new ideas, such as scientific and technological advances to farming, but also adopted old ones, such as slavery; each brother owned several enslaved African Americans, and the consequent downturn in their fortunes after the Civil War was a large factor in pushing them back out on the road again in the 1860s.  As two of my students, Mary Cooper and Lily Roberts, observed, Chang and Eng forced Americans and Europeans to confront their own conceptions of humanity, modernity and identity that were being reshaped in relation to new outsiders and new imperial ventures.  Cultural critic David Palumbo-Liu has argued powerfully that the Asian within and without American borders was essential to the formation of American national identity as an international industrial power; Chang and Eng's journeys and their own personal struggles form part of that dialogue.Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda (http://www.philipkangotanda.com), so foundational to Asian American theatre, has gone back to this foundational era to reflect on these issues through his new play I Dream of Chang and Eng.  By a fortunate coincidence, I was having dinner with Philip the day that I received an offer of employment from UNC Chapel Hill, and he told me about his play and the Carolina connection.  When I saw that Wilson Library at UNC had Bunker archives (http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/bunkers/bibliography.html)  in the North Carolina Collection and Gallery and the Southern Historical Collection, I knew I had the makings of a great experience for students, Philip, and the public.  My English 265 Honors class on ethnic American literature and history has tackled an ambitious syllabus of literary readings, independent archival and historical research, and event planning in collaboration with Philip.Pedagogically, this has been an interesting and potentially dangerous experiment.  With so many different people, from archivists to publicity managers, to coordinate with at Wilson Library, and with everyone concerned unfamiliar with doing a student public presentation of archival work on this scale, a lot of deadlines and needs were not clear from the outset.  This distraction occasionally spilled over slightly into other areas of the class (for both students and myself), as our attention was divided.  But we all somehow stayed miraculously good-spirited and tolerant (or at least grumbled privately).I gave the students ownership of the event to the maximum that I could, but since I perforce have to grade them, they still felt the need to get my approval, and of course, they also needed information and guidance at times.  They tackled event organization ranging from the blog to the curation of exhibition cases to the painting of a student publicity "cube" (done just yesterday).  What this required was not just an intellectual engagement, but a collaborative spirit and willingness to be social that is more associated with a club than a classroom.   This, as all instructors know, can vary extremely by the particular group of students, but also varies by campus; at my previous institution, I would never have done this, but UNC students are much more community-minded and, in a word, kinder.  With a team spirit fostered by our lively discussions all term, my class has done wonders.  (But I don't know if I would venture this again with a different group; next semester, I'll be doing another student archival project and event with Wilson Library (no doubt there will be another guest post) but it will be scaled back to avoid some of the coordination problems.)To see these wonders, I invite all of Ben's readers who may be in the area to come to our event on Tuesday, December 6 at 5pm in Wilson Library on the UNC Chapel Hill campus.  It will feature some unstaged readings from the play, a presentation of student research, and a lecture by Philip.  However, those of you who can't come can still read more about our work on the student blog, The Chang and Eng Bunker Project. (http://changandeng.web.unc.edu)  Video interviews with students about their research are now up; an interview with Philip Gotanda, event photos and videos will go up next week.  We welcome your comments and feedback on the intriguing Bunkers!Heidi KimAssistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hillheidikim@email.unc.edu