April 27-28, 2024: April 2024 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

April 1: Satire Studying: African American Satire: An April Fool’s series on satire starts with a link to my recent Saturday Evening Post Black History Month column.

April 2: Satire Studying: Innocents Abroad: The series continues with the double-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.

April 3: Satire Studying: The Interview: What’s problematic, and what’s important, about a hugely controversial cinematic comedy, as the series pokes on.

April 4: Satire Studying: TV Satires: Four news and sketch comedy shows from which we can learn a lot (but which I originally posted in 2017, so add more recent nominations please!).

April 5: Satire Studying: The Big Short and Vice: The series concludes with value and limits of satire when it comes to contemporary, contested events.

April 6-7: Emily Lauer on Comics Analysis & Editing as Public-Facing Scholarship: My newest Guest Post from a familiar friend of the blog—Emily Lauer with her record-setting 4^th Guest Post!

April 8: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Vaughn Joy on No Way Out: A series on the 60^th anniversary of Poitier’s groundbreaking Oscar win kicks off with a FilmStudier I really love on Poitier’s cinematic debut.

April 9: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Blackboard Jungle: The series continues with a Poitier character who’s very similar to a 1980s favorite, and one important distinction.

April 10: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Defiant Ones: Two different genres through which to contextualize Poitier’s 1958 prison break film, as the series roles on.

April 11: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Two 1967 Classics: Standout speeches and sweet sendoffs in Poitier’s pair of pitch-perfect 1967 films.

April 12: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Lillies of the Field: The series concludes with what was historic about Poitier’s Oscar-winning role, what wasn’t quite, and what’s importantly outside that framing.

April 13-14: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: 21C Heirs: A special weekend follow-up on noteworthy performances from five of our best contemporary Black actors (not including Denzel and Morgan who could each get whole posts for their work alone).

April 15: Mythic Patriotisms: The 1776 Project: For Patriots’ Day this year I wanted to trace some histories and layers to one of the main categories in my book Of Thee I Sing, starting with a post on how a project dedicated to “patriotic education” embodies the worst of mythic patriotism.

April 16: Mythic Patriotisms: The National Anthem: The series continues with two layers of mythic patriotism found in the lesser-known later verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

April 17: Mythic Patriotisms: “Self-Made”: How an iconic American narrative is mythic patriotic in both meanings and effects, as the series pledges on.

April 18: Mythic Patriotisms: Defining America’s Origins: The multiple mythic patriotic layers to an origin story that centers on the Pilgrims/Puritans.

April 19: Mythic Patriotisms: Love It or Leave It: The series concludes with the 1960s constructions of a phrase that sums up mythic patriotism’s exclusions.

April 20-21: Mythic Patriotisms in 2024: There’s never been a moment with more overt mythic patriotism than our own, and for this weekend follow-up I both analyzed that presence and asked for connections to chances to talk more about these topics!

April 22: Climate Culture: Cli Fi: An Earth Day series on cultural works about the climate crisis kicks off with a stunning recent novel that extends the long legacy of cli fi.

April 23: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up: The series continues with the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and an important recent variation on the genre.

April 24: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”: Two complementary ways to read a climate change moment in Jericho Brown’s powerful 21^st century sonnet, as the series rolls on.

April 25: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”: What’s specific and what’s universal in Karen Russell’s amazing 2021 short story.

April 26: Climate Culture: Climate Songs: The series and month conclude with five examples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis, including Midnight Oil’s great album Resist (2022).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

April 26, 2024: Climate Culture: Climate Songs

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On five examples of pop music perspectives on the climate crisis.

1)      Don Henley, “Goodbye to a River” (2000): As I highlighted in this post featuring Henley’s successful efforts to preserve Walden Woods, the former Eagle has become one of our most prominent and dedicated environmental activists. So it makes sense that he penned an early and excellent climate crisis song, from his wonderfully political yet deeply personal album Inside Job. That album was hugely prescient about the nascent 21^st century, and never more so than its fears for a changing planet.

2)      Common, “Trouble in the Water” (2014): If Henley’s song is a lament, Common’s track (featuring a ton of guest contributors) is a righteously enraged banger. Many of its targets are human forces, like the corporate fuckery called out in bars such as “Everything was people/Until you showed up on the land to fuck the people/Contaminate the ocean/Now the water is lethal/Four bucks for two liters/That should be illegal.” But as Common’s anthem depicts all too potently, it’s on our environment that such man-made trouble will have the most damaging effects.

3)      Childish Gambino, “Feels like Summer” (2018): This song (from actor Donald Glover’s rap persona Childish Gambino) occupies a third genre, a sweet summer ballad—yet one that asks us to look closer and think deeper while we bop along. Never more so than in the second verse: “Every day gets hotter than the one before/Running out of water, it’s about to go down/Air that kills the bees that we depend upon/Birds were made for singing, waking up to no sound.” I don’t know if Karen Russell listened to “Feels like Summer” before imagining a future with no birds in the short story I wrote about in yesterday’s post, but I know her story and Gambino’s song make for a particularly powerful pairing.

4)      Billie Eilish, “All the Good Girls Go to Hell” (2019): As I’ve blogged about many times (and even included as an example of critical patriotism in the 1980s chapter of my most recent book), rap has a long tradition of social commentary. I don’t know that pop music has the same legacy necessarily, and of course social commentary isn’t the only thing music can or should do in any case; but there certainly is plenty of socially conscious pop music, and singer-songwriter Billie Eilish’s amazing 2019 track is a great recent example. I’m not sure there’s a more hard-hitting nor better three-line verse from the last decade of pop music than “Hills burn in California/My turn to ignore ya/Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” Whew.

5)      Midnight Oil, Resist (2022): I blogged for my Valentine’s series last year about one of the many great songs on Midnight’s Oil latest album. The whole album is deeply connected to the climate crisis, but it’s the first song, “Rising Seas,” which is a particularly bracing and vital example of where climate change music is here in the 2020s. Listen, get mad, and recognize that, as Oil puts it in the final lines of the impassioned “At the Time of Writing,” “At the time of writing we were on the brink/At the time of writing we still had time to think.”

April Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 25, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Ghost Birds”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On what’s specific and what’s universal in Karen Russell’s amazing story.

I first encountered “The Ghost Birds” in the Best American Short Stories 2022 anthology (well worth getting your hands on as those collections always are), but it originally appeared in The New Yorker in October 2021. Whether you’re a subscriber or not you should be able to read it as one of your free articles for the month, so in lieu of a full first paragraph here I’ll recommend that you read this phenomenal short story and then come on back for a couple of my thoughts.

Welcome back! At the heart of Russell’s story is a depiction of a very real natural phenomenon: the annual flight of Vaux’s Swifts, migratory birds who settle in spaces like (most famously) the chimney of a Portland (Oregon) elementary school. Most of the cultural works about climate change that I’ve encountered focus on its effects for human characters and communities, which is of course understandable (these are texts created by human artists, after all) but also both limited and ironic given the role that humans have played in creating this crisis. Russell’s text certainly still features central human characters as I’ll discuss in a moment, but from its title on it is also deeply concerned with what a climate crisis future might look like for the natural world, including the dystopian yet frustratingly realistic concept of a world from which birds have almost entirely disappeared. I really don’t like to think about that possibility, which is precisely what makes Russell’s story so important, both as a unique work of climate culture and as an intervention in our own moment.

But that’s not what made Russell’s story hit me so hard the first time I read it. Her narrator and protagonist Jasper is a single father, one who is trying desperately to reconnect with his teenage daughter Starling (he’s a birder through and through) through a shared trip to try to find those titular ghost birds. It’s not just that I’m a divorced single father too, but also and especially that I think all the time about the climate crisis as it connects to my sons and their futures (not least because they have become very dedicated activists for that cause on a variety of fronts). Concerns about what the future will hold for our kids are of course one of the most universal human perspectives and experiences, and yet one that needs to be depicted through specific moments and emotions if a cultural work centered on that perspective is going to ring true. And for this reader, Russell’s story, despite its setting in a dystopian future, rings as story as any I’ve read in a while.

Last climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 24, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On two complementary ways to read a climate change moment in a 21^st century sonnet.

I’ve written about the great contemporary poet Jericho Brown in multiple posts here, including this one on his wonderful TED talk and this one on a few different ways and settings in which he engages his audiences. As part of the latter post, I mentioned his poem “The Tradition” (2015), which was the first work of Brown’s I encountered (as the epigraph for Jesmyn Ward’s phenomenal 2016 collection The Fire This Time) and which I’ve had the chance to teach many times since. “The Tradition” is a particularly interesting poem from a contemporary poet in that it’s technically a sonnet, both in 14-line length and in terms of elements like the final rhyming couplet (an aspect of the Shakespearean sonnet in particular); but Brown also purposefully plays with that poetic tradition very fully, creating line and section structures that utilize yet also deconstruct the classical form, just as he brings into his diction both Latin words and deeply 21^st century details and names.

One of those 21^st century details is the poem’s allusion to climate change in its middle third (lines 5-8), where Brown writes (in between the names of flowers that are the poem’s most consistent throughline), “Summer seemed to bloom against the will/Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter/On this planet than when our dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks.” In a poem that’s so much defined by the relationships between tradition and change in all the ways I just highlighted, this moment certainly reflects how climate change functions as an overt disruption to even the most seemingly consistent cycles: how familiar, even indeed unchanging, elements like the sun and the seasons have become different as a result of this new reality. “News reports claimed” might make it seem that the poem’s speaker isn’t himself sure of the veracity of that reality, but the poem’s final couplet includes the phrase “Where the world ends,” so I’d argue that he is well aware of at least the possibility of those genuine changes leading to catastrophe.

On the other hand, the catastrophic losses with which “The Tradition” ends are due not to climate change or natural disaster but racist and institutional violence, as illustrated by the final line’s names of three young Black men killed by the police (“John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”). And seen through that lens, the poem’s climate change lines read a bit differently: as not a radical shift so much as yet another unfolding history (not unlike the systems like slavery and sharecropping alluded to with “dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks”) that targets people of color and the disadvantaged far more consistently and destructively than it does the planet’s more privileged communities. That kind of discriminatory targeting is its own American (and really global, but this is AmericanStudier) tradition, after all, and one that doesn’t disappear with the emergence of new 21^st century issues. All of which makes Brown’s poem an even more multilayered and meaningful work of climate culture to add into this week’s series.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 23, 2024: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and an important variation.

It makes perfect sense that the first climate change film would have been a disaster movie. By far the most consistent type of disaster on which that longstanding genre focuses (although not the only one of course, and thank goodness or there’d be no Airplane!) is the natural disaster: whether relatively everyday ones like fires and floods, more extreme ones like mega-earthquakes and –tsunamis, or thoroughly extreme ones like volcanoes and asteroids, it’s very often nature that is creating the catastrophic conditions which jumpstart these movies. Which makes The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a film in which rapidly worsening climate change causes a huge number and variety of natural disasters (including pretty much all of those referenced above, among others) to strike Earth all at once, just about the most iconic disaster film of all time. In 2004 that premise seemed like dystopian science fiction; twenty years later, it hits a whole lot closer to home. But either way, I don’t know that there could be climate change cinema without the genre of the disaster film.

But here’s the thing about disaster films: they have to find their way to some sort of a happy ending. Of course there’s been plenty of destruction and death along the way, so things won’t simply return to the way they were; but for at least some of our characters, usually the protagonists natch, there’s got to be a sense at the film’s conclusion that they will be okay moving forward. (There are of course, as with every rule, exceptions.) The Day After Tomorrow certainly doesn’t try to pretend that the world hasn’t changed—indeed, one of its final moments involves astronauts on the International Space Station looking down upon a profoundly changed planet—but nonetheless, much of the film’s conclusion focuses on our main characters, who have survived the catastrophic events and are reunited with loved ones to uplifting notes on the musical score and so on. As realistic as disaster movies can (at least at times) be, that is, there’s still a layer of melodramatic storytelling that makes the genre somewhat less well-equipped to really confront the worst possibilities of the climate crisis.

And then there’s Don’t Look Up (2021). In many ways Don’t Look Up seems to be another classic disaster film, with the impending disaster this time a comet with the potential to destroy all life on Earth, the usual scientist characters who figure out the disaster before everyone else, and so on. But Don’t Look Up turns out to be a satire instead, and so all the folks in that “everyone else” don’t pay any attention to the scientists and the disaster continues unabated—right up to (SPOILERS) an ending in which apparently no one, not our protagonists or anyone else, escapes the disaster with their lives. That might seem pretty bleak, and in some ways it certainly is—but as you can see from that hyperlinked clip, there’s also a remarkable degree of tenderness and shared humanity in that ending, and I find those emotions more realistic and moving than a more typical happy ending could possibly be. As a subgenre, the climate disaster movie might just have to evolve from the familiar tropes, and if so Don’t Look Up offers at least one model for how to do so.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 22, 2024: Climate Culture: Cli Fi

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On the long legacy of cli fi, and a stunning recent novel that reveals the genre’s true potential.

The term “cli fi” (for “climate fiction”) has only been around for the last 10 years or so; it was apparently first coined in 2011 by activist and author Dan Bloom to describe Jim Laughter’s novel Polar City Red, and then gradually picked up by various media voices and stories around 2013-2014. But as with so many literary genres, there are numerous earlier authors and works that can productively be classified within this frame, including Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1889), Laurence Manning’s The Man Who Awoke (1933), multiple novels by J.G. Ballard, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), among others. While all of those works are distinct and specific, I’d say that all of them fall under the broad umbrella of science fiction, wedding as they do their realistic depictions of science and the natural world to imagined futures in which (generally) worst-case climate and environmental scenarios have come to pass and humans (individually and/or collectively) are dealing with the aftermaths.

Sci fi cli fi (say that five times fast) has continued to be a prominent sub-genre here in the 21^st century, as exemplified particularly clearly by science fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy (comprising the novels Forty Signs of Rain [2004], Fifty Degrees Below [2005], and Sixty Days and Counting [2007]). But as we’ve moved further and further into a world where climate change is not an imagined future scenario but a very, very real present reality, we’ve concurrently seen authors begin to produce as well cli fi novels and stories that depict, respond to, and engage in more socially realistic ways that present world. That list includes, among others, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), a number of the stories in John Joseph Adams’ edited anthology Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015), and one of the most acclaimed and powerful American novels in recent memory, Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018).

Yet in truth, to classify The Overstory as an example of more contemporary and/or socially realistic fiction is no more accurate than to describe it as science fiction. Powers’ book does trace the individual yet ultimately interconnected stories of nine realistic fictional characters, all Americans living in our early 21^st century moment, all descended from family and communal histories involving trees in central ways. But through that shared theme, and through his structural and narrative choices as well, Powers ultimately produces a work that I would call a historical novel in which the history (as well as the present and future) of the world is viewed through the lens of trees and forests, rather than through the perspectives or experiences of humans (individual or collective, fictional or real). Which is to say, Powers’ first cli fi novel (his latest, 2021’s Bewilderment, has been described that way as well, but I haven’t had the chance to read it) isn’t just about climate change or environmentalism—it makes the environment, and specifically trees, its main character, main narrative perspective, and ultimately main emphasis, above (in every sense) and beyond us transient humans.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

April 20-21, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms in 2024

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ve highlighted a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to this special weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

On two ways that mythic patriotism can help us understand this year, and one related request.

I’ll start with the request: Of Thee I Sing came out in March 2021, just two months after the January 6^th insurrection (I gave my first book talk on the project on January 7^th, which was, well, a whole lot); but I believe that the contested history of American patriotism is if anything even more relevant to 2024 than it was in that moment. I’ve had the chance to talk about the book and those subjects a lot over the last three years, but I nonetheless believe we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to those conversations, and would hugely appreciate any and all connections to opportunities and communities to keep the conversation going. That includes classes/students (high school as well as higher ed), book clubs and discussion groups, organizations and institutions of all kinds, podcasts, whatever you got! (I’m also very willing to travel within reason, so I’m not talking just virtual by any means.) Feel free to email with any ideas, and thanks very much in advance!

There’s no doubt that the MAGA movement has leaned as heavily into the rhetoric and symbolism of patriotism as any political community in my lifetime. I don’t disagree with Jon Stewart’s recent Daily Show rant that a movement defined so completely by allegiance to an individual, and a dictatorial one at that, really doesn’t embody any recognizable form of American patriotism. But I do think the concept of mythic patriotism in particular can help us understand some of the essence of this movement’s ideologies, some of what they mean by phrases like “Make America Great Again” (or its telling predecessor “I want my country back!”). Or, relatedly, why this movement, like Donald Trump’s own political ascendance, began so clearly with Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, one of the most blatant symbolic challenges to white supremacist visions of American politics, society, community, and identity as in any way homogeneously or essentially white. Birtherism was perhaps the first defining conspiracy theory for a movement that is more or less entirely defined by conspiracy theories, and it was a mythic patriotic conspiracy theory if ever there’s been one.

If MAGA has been the defining political force of the last decade or so, the last few years have been especially defined by anti-education efforts (and related trends like book bans and attacks on libraries), and it seems clear that such culture wars debates will play a significant role throughout this election year as well. As I discussed in Monday’s post on the 1776 Project, it’s difficult for me to overstate how central mythic patriotism is to these attacks on educators, curricula, books, and any and all other forces that challenge this specific vision of American history and identity. Moms for Liberty and all the others behind these efforts can talk all they want about threats to children or “grooming” or whatever other justifications they’re advancing, but the essential truth is that these educational elements are dangerous to these groups and this perspective precisely inasmuch as they offer challenges and alternatives to white-centered (and often overtly white supremacist) visions of America. And that’s the thing with mythic patriotism, as I’ve highlighted throughout this series—it not only excludes many Americans from its vision of our history, it also excludes all those who would challenge and counter that vision. Identifying and responding to such mythic patriotism is thus a crucial 2024 goal.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?