May 31-June 1, 2025: May 2025 Recap

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

May 5: The Works Progress Administration: EO 7034: A series for the WPA’s 90^th anniversary kicks off with three significant elements of the Executive Order that established it.

May 6: The Works Progress Administration: My Column on Federal Workers: I wanted to make sure to include as part of this series one of my recent Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns on federal workers during the Depression.

May 7: The Works Progress Administration: The Arts: The series continues with three quotes that together help sum up the creation and arc of the WPA’s vital artistic & cultural programs.

May 8: The Works Progress Administration: Iconic Individuals: Three iconic & inspiring individuals linked to the WPA, as the series labors on.

May 9: The Works Progress Administration: Wartime Evolutions: The series concludes with two distinct but interconnected ways the WPA evolved during WWII, and what we can do with the combination.

May 10-11: A Works Progress Administration for the 21^st Century: Unlikely as the idea is in May 2025, a special follow-up post making the case for a new WPA!

May 12: Spring Semester Reflections: Major American Authors of the 20^th Century: For this year’s Spring semester reflections series, I paid tribute to my late Dad’s presence in my courses, starting with a Langston Hughes poem I taught the day after he passed.

May 13: Spring Semester Reflections: American Literature II: I also taught Gatsby the day after Dad passed, so shared how a debate I had with him helped shape my teaching.

May 14: Spring Semester Reflections: First-Year Writing II: The series continues with how I got to feature my Dad’s work in my FYW courses.

May 15: Spring Semester Reflections: Graduate Research Methods: My Dad’s focus on psychoanalytical theory isn’t my own, but I found a way to include it in my Grad course nonetheless.

May 16: Spring Semester Reflections: Student Tributes to Dad: The series concludes with a handful of moving tributes to my Dad as a teacher from former students.

May 17-18: What’s Next: And a weekend follow-up post highlighting three things I’m looking forward to in the Fall semester!

May 19: Malcolm X’s 100^th: The Autobiography: For Malcolm Little’s 100^th birthday, a series on cultural representations of Malcolm kicks off the complicated layers to his own text.

May 20: Malcolm X’s 100^th: An Opera: The series continues with two distinct and equally important ways to contextualize the opera X (1986).

May 21: Malcolm X’s 100^th: Lee’s Film: Three interesting contexts for Spike Lee’s epic 1992 biopic, as the series marches on.

May 22: Malcolm X’s 100^th: A Cameo in Selma: Malcolm isn’t a main focus of Ava DuVernay’s film, but his powerful scene reflects the film’s overall goals.

May 23: Malcolm X’s 100^th: One Night in Miami: The series concludes with a recent film adaptation that embodies the important goal of humanizing our heroes.

May 24-25: Malcolm X’s 100^th: Malcolm in 2025: A special weekend follow-up post highlighting three lessons we can learn from Malcolm in 2025!

May 26: 2020s Blockbusters: Top Gun: Maverick: A Memorial Day series on recent summer blockbusters kicks off with a problem & a possibility with our cultural moment of ubiquitous sequels.

May 27: 2020s Blockbusters: Inside Out 2: The series continues with two distinct ways to contextualize the highest-grossing film of 2024.

May 28: 2020s Blockbusters: Jurassic World: What’s not new in the recent Jurassic Park films and what is, as the series explodes on.

May 29: 2020s Blockbusters: Barbie: What I liked a lot about the recent mega-blockbuster, and what I loved.

May 30: 2020s Blockbusters: Live Action Disney: The series and month conclude with three ways to explain the large and growing corpus of live-action remakes of animated films.

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!

May 30, 2025: 2020s Blockbusters: Live Action Disney

[Moviegoing has unquestionably changed a great deal in recent years, but there is still a place for the summer blockbuster, and I believe there always will be. So for the unofficial kickoff of another summer season, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent such blockbusters!]

On three ways to explain the large and growing corpus of live-action remakes of animated films (besides, y’know, the oodles and oodles of money they make).

1)      Nostalgia: I began this week’s series with a post on sequels/reboots/new entries in franchises and nostalgia, and it seems entirely clear to me that that widely shared and very human emotion is also a primary motivation for remaking beloved animated films, often in ways that hew quite closely to the original despite the shift to live-action. Not sure I need to say too much more about this item than that!

2)      Disney and IPs: I don’t want to sound entirely like one of those old dudes yelling at the clouds about this, so let me start by saying that I’ve enjoyed a number of the Disney-funded films and TV shows in both the Star Wars and Marvel Universes. There’s no necessary reason why works that are part of existing intellectual properties can’t also be enjoyable and engaging and even interesting cultural texts, after all. But nonetheless, the Mouse’s trend of squeezing every last drop out of every IP they own is, at the very least, exhausting, and I don’t think we can minimize that goal when we consider these remakes of prior Disney projects.

3)      Artistic Vision: Tim Burton. Kenneth Branagh. Jon Favreau. Bill Condon. Marc Forster. Guy Ritchie. Robert Zemeckis. Barry Jenkins. Those are just some of the talented directors who have made live-action Disney remakes over the last couple decades. I’m sure they were well-compensated for their efforts, and I’m also sure that none of them would list the Disney remake at the top of their career achievements. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t bring their own artistic vision to the projects, and make them significantly more unique than they might otherwise have been. If we’re going to have such movies—and it seems clear that we’re going to—they might as well be made by talented folks seeking to do their own thing while still (of course) operating within the project’s parameters. Which, ultimately, describes the ideal summer blockbuster, no?

May Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer blockbusters, recent or otherwise, you’d analyze?

May 29, 2025: 2020s Blockbusters: Barbie

[Moviegoing has unquestionably changed a great deal in recent years, but there is still a place for the summer blockbuster, and I believe there always will be. So for the unofficial kickoff of another summer season, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent such blockbusters!]

On what I liked a lot about the recent mega-blockbuster, and what I loved.

In lieu of a first paragraph here, I’m going to recommend that y’all check out an excellent August 2024 podcast episode, of Liam Heffernan’s America: A History podcast and featuring guests Jon Mitchell and Vaughn Joy, on both the 2023 Barbie film and all things Barbie. Take a listen if you get a chance, and then come on back (or stay here first, whatever works for ya) for my own thoughts on the film.

There’s a lot I enjoyed about Barbie, which made me laugh out loud a number of times (no easy feat, as folks who know me can attest) and ultimately moved me deeply. The most moving element is the one I’ll dive into in the final paragraph, so for this one I’ll talk about a corollary to the humor—just how consistently and thoughtfully the film took me by surprise. I don’t know what I necessarily expected from a movie about the world of Barbie dolls, but I know for sure that to my mind virtually nothing in this film was predictable—and yet as I watched it pretty much every one of those unexpected elements also felt natural, made sense within the world and story that was being created and portrayed. I think that’s really a miracle when we’re talking about a film based on a toy, which is what made it so silly when a ton of other toy-based movies were greenlit (or at least considered) in the aftermath of Barbie’s mega-success. Maybe the Polly Pocket movie will be just as thoughtful and unique and effective, but boy howdy do I doubt it.

Interestingly enough, the thing I loved about Barbie, and the element that moved me deeply, was in fact directly connected to the fact that this was a film inspired by a toy. Nearly 13 years ago I blogged about toys targeted at girls, and while I was focused there on new toys like the girl-centric Legos, the truth is that dolls have been girl-centered toys for centuries at least. And at least in American history, no doll has been more successful and enduring than Barbie, making this particular toy an easy and understandable target for those who want to critique the gendering of toys and childhood. That’s a perspective that the film certainly shares at times, but ultimately it moves in a very different direction, considering how both Barbie and the film’s human characters (especially the mother-daughter duo at the story’s center) have to navigate these issues of gendered expectations, ideals, limits, and more. That led up to one of my favorite movie moments in a long time, Barbie’s conversation with her creator Ruth Handler, which, to round off this post, was both entirely unexpected and profoundly moving.

Last blockbuster tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer blockbusters, recent or otherwise, you’d analyze?

May 28, 2025: 2020s Blockbusters: Jurassic World

[Moviegoing has unquestionably changed a great deal in recent years, but there is still a place for the summer blockbuster, and I believe there always will be. So for the unofficial kickoff of another summer season, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent such blockbusters!]

On what’s not new in the recent Jurassic Park sequels/reboots/whateverwecallthemnow, and what is.

I blogged about the original Jurassic Park (1993) almost exactly a decade ago, as part of a 2015 Memorial Day BlockbusterStudying series. This post will definitely be in conversation with that one, so I’d ask you to check it out if you would and then come on back for today’s thoughts.

Welcome back! Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the whole of any of the newer Jurassic Park films, which kicked off with 2015’s mega-hit summer blockbuster Jurassic World and has continued through Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), Jurassic World Dominion (2022), and the forthcoming Jurassic World Rebirth (2025). But I have seen lots of clips and have read a lot about them, and it seems clear to me that they are continuing the trend on which I focused in that 2015 post: drastically simplifying the complicated scientific ideas and multilayered characters that Michael Crichton’s original novel did feature, in favor of much more cartoonish heroes and villains, lots of dino action, clever deaths, and the like. I have little doubt that if the films did more of the former and less of the latter, they not only wouldn’t be the blockbusters they are, but probably wouldn’t exist because the first one wouldn’t have been the success it was either. But if we’re going to claim that we’re investigating ethical and moral questions around science (to quote a wise man, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”), I’d prefer that we do so with a bit more thoughtfulness than these films display.

Spoiler alert: this isn’t going to be one of those final paragraphs where I make the case for a radical re-viewing of my post’s topic. But there is one new element to Jurassic World (and, I believe, its sequels) that I find more interesting: Chris Pratt’s character Owen Grady, an ethnologist who has learned how to train and work with dinosaurs (specifically velociraptors, the franchise’s consistent breakout dinostars). That’s a pretty ludicrous concept, which of course makes it totally appropriate for a series that has depended on such at every step. But does it also represent something distinct for the series, it seems to be: an emphasis on dinos as characters in their own right, and even potentially heroic ones, rather than a challenge that our heroic characters must overcome (they’re not necessarily villains in the earlier films, a title reserved for the human bad guys, but I think “challenge” is an accurate term). If we’re gonna keep making blockbuster dinosaur films, reframing them as more clearly about the dinosaurs seems like a very good call.

Next blockbuster tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer blockbusters, recent or otherwise, you’d analyze?

May 27, 2025: 2020s Blockbusters: Inside Out 2

[Moviegoing has unquestionably changed a great deal in recent years, but there is still a place for the summer blockbuster, and I believe there always will be. So for the unofficial kickoff of another summer season, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent such blockbusters!]

On two distinct ways to contextualize the highest-grossing film of 2024.

First of all, there’s absolutely nothing surprising about the fact that Inside Out 2 was 2024’s top-grossing film. As the above hyperlinked list illustrates, five of the year’s top ten films were animated, and a sixth (Mufasa: The Lion King) could certainly be defined as such as well (and at least represents a sequel to an animated film; well, a prequel, but you know what I mean!). Moreover, the other four of the five top-grossing Pixar films of all time were likewise sequels, including Incredibles 2, Finding Dory, and the third and fourth installments in the Toy Story franchise. While animated films might not fit our stereotypical definition of a summer blockbuster (at least not as well as did yesterday’s subject Top Gun: Maverick, for example), in truth there’s no surer thing in Hollywood than drawing kids to the movies over the summer, and of course most such kid audience members will require at least one adult ticket purchase to accompany them. Moreover, while many films over the last few years have not made it to theaters at all, it seems to me that big-budget animated films are still likely to have at least some form of theatrical run, making it even more probable than ever that such films will occupy prominent places in the roster of box-office blockbusters.

With all those caveats aside, however, it’s still interesting to me that Inside Out 2 specifically tops both of these lists (ie, is both 2024’s and Pixar’s highest-grossing film), and I think we can contextualize that striking success in a couple distinct ways. I haven’t seen the film, but from what I can tell it is very much in conversation with a longstanding and consistently popular film genre: high school dramedies, and especially high school dramedies focused on teenage girls’ experiences. That is, by aging the original Inside Out’s protagonist Riley Andersen up two years and making her an incoming high school student in the sequel, director Kelsey Mann and her co-screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein made a very smart choice, taking what had been more of a children’s film initially and shifting it into that teen/high school setting and genre. To cite just one example (of a film celebrating its 30^th anniversary this summer, which doesn’t make me feel ancient or anything), Clueless (1995) was one of the most unexpected summer blockbusters of the 1990s, raking in more than $10 million its opening weekend to put it just behind the far more conventional summer film Apollo 13 in that weekend’s box office. Teenagers might be an even more reliable summer audience than young kids, as they can get themselves to the movies—and these consistent teen hits indicate as much.

It would be wrong to suggest that such teen hits always or only focus on female protagonists—Stand By Me (1986) opened in August, to name just one male-centered teen blockbuster. But I do believe that a significant majority of these summer successes are more focused on female characters and thus (to be reductive about it I know) on appealing to women as a primary audience—and in the case of Inside Out 2, while of course its female protagonist was an existing character to whom the sequel understandably returned, I think it missed an opportunity to add in a teenage boy as (for example) a second protagonist with his own set of animated emotions. I fully understand how fraught that idea might be in execution (as the Dad of two still-teenage sons, believe me I fully understand it), but I would also note (as many others have as well) that one of the central stories of the last few years has been a two-part failure to engage with teenage boys’ emotional lives: a failure of our society as a whole to do so; and a concurrent failure of teenage boys to find healthy outlets for doing so, leading far too many of them to the likes of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan et al. Obviously those are issues way beyond any one film or even the medium as a whole—but if there’s gonna be an Inside Out 3, I’d love for it to take a stab at the complicated and crucial question of young men’s emotional lives.

Next blockbuster tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer blockbusters, recent or otherwise, you’d analyze?

May 26, 2025: 2020s Blockbusters: Top Gun: Maverick

[Moviegoing has unquestionably changed a great deal in recent years, but there is still a place for the summer blockbuster, and I believe there always will be. So for the unofficial kickoff of another summer season, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent such blockbusters!]

On a problem and a possibility with our cultural moment of ubiquitous sequels.

A good bit of the frame for today’s post is parallel to what I wrote in this prior post about The Force Awakens (2015), nostalgia, and multi-generational storytelling. So if you don’t mind checking out that post and then coming back here, I’d appreciate it!

Welcome back! I haven’t yet had a chance to see one of the biggest blockbuster films of recent years, Top Gun: Maverick, and I don’t know that I will as I believe the original Top Gun (1986) is one of the worst blockbuster films ever made. That’s a personal opinion, of course (although as that hyperlinked article reflects, I’m not alone in holding it), but I do think it illustrates a larger problem with the genuinely ubiquitous presence of sequels, prequels, reboots, and other uses of existing intellectual properties in our current pop culture zeitgeist. The more this kind of cultural product dominates the landscape, the more of these existing/prior works filmmakers and creators will have to return to—and there quite simply aren’t that many 1980s films (or works from any decade/moment) that have enough going on to make a sequel or reboot worthwhile or meaningful. I don’t think it’s my Star Wars fandom alone that distinguishes that film franchise, and its truly imaginative and culture-changing storytelling across so many decades and so many different media (into all of which a sequel like The Force Awakens slotted thoughtfully, as I argued in that prior post), from a simplistic and vapid individual blockbuster film like Top Gun.

So no, I don’t think we needed another Top Gun film. But from what I can tell (and again, haven’t seen it, so as always I welcome responses and challenges in comments!), Maverick does do one really interesting thing that is a positive possibility when it comes to these ubiquitous sequels (and that does link it to Force Awakens and the entire recent Star Wars trilogy): it actively thinks about time. That is, despite star Tom Cruise’s seeming agelessness, he is of course three and a half decades older than he was in the original film, and thus his character Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is likewise. Much like the smash hit TV show Cobra Kai (which I also haven’t seen, outside of clips here and there, but when does that stop an AmericanStudier?!), Maverick is thus able to not just continue the original story, but to reflect actively on the passage of time, on themes of continuity and change, on the relationships (limiting and enriching alike) between the past and the present. Maybe I’m biased because those are the kinds of questions that define every part of my work and career, but I believe we all can benefit from asking them, of our pop culture stories and our own identities and everything in between. If even silly blockbusters can help us do so, then count me in!

Next blockbuster tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer blockbusters, recent or otherwise, you’d analyze?

May 24-25, 2025: Malcolm X’s 100th: Malcolm in 2025

[May 19^th marks the 100^th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to this special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]

On three of the many lessons from Malcolm X’s life and work worth learning from in our own moment.

1)      Cross-Cultural Connections: I’ve written a few times in this space (and elsewhere) about Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese American activist who became so close to Malcolm that she was famously photographed cradling his head just after his February 1965 assassination. Kochiyama’s activisms were consistently defined by cross-cultural connections, whether to the Civil Rights Movement or Puerto Rican independence fighters or illegally imprisoned Muslim Americans after 9/11. But her relationship with Malcolm X likewise reminds us that he too forged such cross-cultural connections, that his work was undertaken in conversation and collaboration with others doing the work (despite the narrative of him as a separatist, which does reflect some of his views but is far from sufficient to understanding him). Now more than ever, we must all hang together, and I value all reminders of such solidarity from across our histories.

2)      Antisemitism: None of us are perfectly able to embody such solidarity, though, and in one key area Malcolm fell short, and indeed too often expressed the divisions and discriminations that are the opposite of solidarity. Due in part to his dozen years as a leader of the radical Nation of Islam (NOI), and in part to what seem to have been his personal prejudices, Malcolm consistently voiced and advocated for antisemitic ideas and narratives, including not just through statements like “In America, Jews sap the very life-blood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of Israel” but also through distributing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to NOI members. In 2025 America accusations of antisemitism are too often used as an excuse for persecution of other endangered individuals; but that incredibly frustrating trend can’t allow us to dismiss the genuine presence of antisemitic views and narratives in our moment and society, including if not especially among communities that should be allies of those facing such hate.

3)      Human Heroism: Remembering that most frustrating side of Malcolm’s views helps us do what I argued throughout this week’s series cultural works can also do: see such historical figures as human, with all the layers (from the best to the worst of us) that that implies. Obviously that doesn’t excuse the worst, nor mean that we have to simply accept it without critique or challenge; but at the same time, I’ve never encountered a historical figure who didn’t have layers that needed such critique and challenge, and so we can and must engage them while still finding and focusing on figures whose best can inspire our own best. This concept of human heroism feels to me like a parallel to others on which I’ve focused in recent years, from critical patriotism to critical optimism. I need to keep thinking about it, but I believe it has real value, and certainly can help us see a figure like Malcolm X as a human hero.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?

May 23, 2025: Malcolm X’s 100th: One Night in Miami

[May 19^th marks the 100^th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to a special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]

I’m going to keep this post relatively short, as I haven’t yet had a chance to watch Regina King’s 2020 film adaptation of Kemp Powers’s 2013 stage play One Night in Miami. I hope to do so soon, as it looks like a fascinating way to reimagine all four of its central historical figures as well as contexts related to race in America, the 1960s, celebrity and cultural impact, and more. But what I especially want to highlight here is something that I discussed a bit in yesterday’s post on Selma but that it seems like this film develops even further: the reminder that any historical figure, including if not especially one as individually iconic as Malcolm X, existed in social communities. More exactly, One Night in Miami seeks to examine the friendships between its four focal figures, and thus when it comes to Malcolm to consider how such relationships might have shaped as well as been shaped by his personal, political, religious, activist, etc. interests and actions. It can be very hard with such icons to remember and engage with those human sides of their lives and identities—but I believe cultural works are uniquely positioned to help us do so, and I look forward to checking out this unique and compelling such cultural work very soon.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?

May 22, 2025: Malcolm X’s 100th: A Cameo in Selma

[May 19^th marks the 100^th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to a special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]

On two ways to analyze Malcolm’s brief appearance in Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014).

Just over ten years ago, I wrote a piece about Selma and its representations of history for my Talking Points Memo column. While I didn’t address the film’s depiction of Malcolm X in that column, I’m certainly continuing to consider those overarching questions in this post, so in lieu of a first paragraph would ask you to check out that prior column and then come on back for those further thoughts.

Welcome back! I know that my use of “distort” in that column’s title and main idea is a controversial one, but I stand by my meaning: that our dominant narratives of the Civil Rights Movement, in cultural works as in every other layer of collective memory, have been those of white perspectives, and thus that we were and remain long overdue for narratives shaped by Black perspectives instead (even if, per the example on which I focused there, Lyndon Johnson comes off looking worse as a result). The film’s depiction of Malcolm X is shaped in a parallel but slightly different way: Selma’s central shaping perspectives are those of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King; so when Malcolm X enters the story (played by Nigel Thatch, who has reprised the role in the recent TV series Godfather of Harlem), it’s through their eyes that we see him, especially in the scene when Coretta convinces Malcolm to support her husband despite their differences. That makes Malcolm’s role in the story the equivalent of what literary critics would call a foil—a supporting character (or other element of a text) who exists to shed light on the main character through comparisons and contrasts.

That’s unquestionably the case for Malcolm’s role in Selma, but I would also add this: Malcolm and Coretta’s conversation is one of many scenes in the film where multiple African American characters discuss strategy, usually without any white characters present; indeed, I would argue that the majority of the movie’s scenes feature such conversations. (Including the best scene by far and one of my favorites in 21^st century cinema to date, between King and the young John Lewis; it doesn’t seem to be online at the moment, but is well worth seeking out.) This might seem like a given in a film about one of the key collective actions of the Civil Rights Movement, but I’m pointing it out because I believe it was truly groundbreaking in 2014, and is still a rarity (although other recent films such as Rustin [2023] have extended the tradition). Even the subject of yesterday’s post, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X biopic, due to its epic scope and multiple throughlines doesn’t make such conversations a central element. Which means that even though Malcolm’s appearance in Selma is a brief one, it’s also groundbreaking in its cinematic depiction of his strategic thinking within the movement and in conversation with other movement leaders—making this a meaningful cameo to be sure.

Last MalcolmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?

May 21, 2025: Malcolm X’s 100th: Lee’s Film

[May 19^th marks the 100^th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to a special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]

Three interesting contexts for Spike Lee’s epic 1992 biopic.

1)      A Long-Gestating Script: One of my favorite things about writing this blog is how much I learn from researching just about every post, even on subjects about which I have some starting point knowledge (which isn’t always the case, to be clear). Case in point: I had no idea that the original screenplay on which Lee based his film had been written, or at least started, in the late 1960s, by none other than James Baldwin (collaborating with the formerly blacklisted screenwriter Arnold Perl). Baldwin was never quite able to crack the code of adapting Malcolm’s autobiography into a screenplay, and the project subsequently passed through a number of other talented hands, from David Mamet to David Bradley among others. But when Lee took over as the film’s director (more on that in a moment), it was Baldwin and Perl’s screenplay to which he returned, and so this 1990s film truly had 1960s roots.

2)      An Alternative Director: If that long-gestating script was one reason why it look a good while to make Malcolm X, another was that a different Hollywood director was initially attached: Norman Jewison, who had made In the Heat of the Night (1967) among many other acclaimed films over his long career. A number of African American artists and critics, including Spike Lee himself, protested that move, however, arguing that a Black filmmaker should be the one to direct this marquee project. Producer Marvin Worth (who had been attached to the project since the days of Baldwin and Perl’s initial screenplay) ultimately agreed and asked Jewison to step down in favor of Lee, but it’s interesting to think about what version of the film Jewison might have made—and we have some indications of an answer when we look at the civil rights film Jewison made with star Denzel Washington later in the decade, The Hurricane (1999). At the very least, the two films make for an interesting pairing!

3)      An Interesting Request: In any case, Lee did direct the film, and the result (while to my mind a bit long and meandering at times) is an impressive and important biopic, featuring a career highlight performance from Denzel (which is a competitive category to be sure). Shortly before the film was due to be released in late 1992, Lee put out a controversial request that students skip school to attend screenings (and that adults take the day off from work, but the school idea received more pushback). As an educator and a parent, I understand why people might have resisted the idea; but as an educator and a parent, I also agree with Lee that education and development take multiple forms, and that cultural works have an important role to play in those processes. Hell, my entire elementary school missed class for an assembly where we watched the “Thriller” music video/short film (true story); and while I enjoyed those dancing zombies like everyone one, I’d say the best cinematic representation to date of Malcolm X is a slightly more worthy reason to miss school!

Next MalcolmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?

May 20, 2025: Malcolm X’s 100th: An Opera

[May 19^th marks the 100^th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to a special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]

On two distinct and equally important ways to contextualize the opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986).

As an Appendix to his collection Silent Interviews (1994; the Appendix begins on page 298 of that PDF), the novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany included an extended November 1986 conversation with the composer Anthony Davis on the occasion of his then-new opera X. It’s a really wonderful and illuminating interview, and so in lieu of a full first paragraph I’d ask you to check that out if you would, and then come on back for some further thoughts of mine.

Welcome back! The starting point for Delany’s interview with Davis is a mutual recognition that Black people have long been subjects of operas, both around the world and in the United States specifically, but very rarely have had the opportunity to compose such cultural works (at least not ones that have seen the light of day). Perhaps that genuinely groundbreaking nature of Davis’s opera (which was co-written with two family members, as the libretto is by his cousin Thulani Davis and the story by his brother Christopher Davis) helps explain why it seems to have frustratingly vanished in its own moment; certainly it helps explain why the opera has made a triumphant comeback in the 2020s, although I shudder to think about its fate in the Age of Trump. In any case, I have to believe that Malcolm would have loved that he was the subject of such a controversial and crucial cultural work, even if he might have sneered a bit at the upper middle class (if not upper class) pretensions of the genre overall (it seems that Malcolm sneered at his co-author Alex Haley’s own such upbringing, anyway).

At the same time, I think it’s vital that we not limit our lens on X to questions of race and representation—there’s a reason, after all, why a good deal of the conversation between Delany and Davis focuses instead on the genre and traditions of opera, and on related questions of music, performance, staging, and more. I’ll admit to knowing very little about the apparently two-century history of American operas; and I have only recently started to learn more about the pioneering African American composer William Grant Still, who, along with his fellow and somewhat better-remembered composer Scott Joplin, penned groundbreaking operas in the early 20^th century. (I would add another groundbreaking early 20^th century work, Zitkala-Ša’s Sun Dance Opera [1913], to that list as well.) All of which is to say, for those Americans—and I would count myself in this unfortunate category, at least until very recently—who see opera as an almost entirely foreign art form, there’s a long and fascinating legacy of American opera to be recovered and restaged, and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X deserves a prominent place in that pantheon.  

Next MalcolmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?

May 19, 2025: Malcolm X’s 100th: The Autobiography

[May 19^th marks the 100^th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to a special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]

On the inevitable limits of autobiography, and why this one is especially vital nonetheless.

For whatever reason I haven’t written a lot in this space about The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), but I have dedicated a number of posts to the genre of life writing overall, and I hope every time I’ve done so I’ve made clear how much mythmaking is inevitably part of such texts. From St. Augustine to Richard Wright, Ben Franklin to James Frey, and everywhere in between, any act of autobiographical writing—while without question engaged with identity in real and meaningful ways—entails a good bit of storytelling, of the crafting of a narrative that (like all narratives) features choices of what is included and what is excluded, what is emphasized and what is minimized, and perhaps most of all what is intended for an audience and for what reasons. None of which is meant as a criticism necessarily, but I would be highly critical of anyone who argued or implied that in reading an autobiographical work we are definitively learning about the life or identity of the person in question—which doesn’t mean we can’t learn such things from them (and lots of other things), just that we do so as we always do as readers of a text, through analysis and interpretation and critical engagement.

All of which is not only true of, but also in one important way exacerbated in, Malcolm Little’s autobiographical book. Because despite its title the Autobiography isn’t exactly a piece of autobiographical writing—the young African American journalist and future novelist Alex Haley served as its ghostwriter, authoring the book out of a series of conversations and collaborations with Malcolm over the last few years of Malcolm’s life. That Haley would go on to write his own very complicated piece of autobiographically inspired fiction, Roots (1976), adds one further layer to the questions of the Autobiography’s genre. But even without that additional detail, the very nature of the Autobiography’s dual and in at least some important ways dueling authorships—a subject that, to his credit, Haley did not shy away from addressing, especially in the Epilogue he appended to the book when it was published a few months after Malcolm’s assassination—forces any reader to think critically about what is and is not part of the book, about the motivations of each of these distinct authors and voices, about all the layers that are inevitably part of the genre but that, again, are taken to another level by this uniquely composed autobiographical work.

So maybe we can’t be sure that we’re learning precise or at least simple truths about Malcolm X when we read his Autobiography—but along with all the things we can still learn about the man and his perspective, identity, and story, there are of course lots of other meaningful lessons to be drawn from this monumental work. I think it’s quite telling, for example, that when Eric Holder was ending his tenure as the first African American U.S. Attorney General in early 2015, he recommended that “every American” read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Holder makes that case through Malcolm’s own evolutions, arguing, “To see the transition that that man went through…from petty criminal, to a person who was severely and negatively afflicted by race, to somebody who ultimately saw the humanity in all of us.” I would agree, but I would also complement that perspective with an emphasis on the layers of American history that the book forces us to examine, many of them the worst of our prejudices and discriminations and white supremacist violences and their effects. Malcolm’s own voice throughout his public activist life demanded that we look long and hard at the worst of us, and I believe his complicated and crucial book does the same.

Next MalcolmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?

May 17-18, 2025: What’s Next

Following up the week’s semester reflections series, here are a few upcoming things—teaching-wise and otherwise—I’m looking forward to!

1)      A Return to Honors Lit: I’ve got lots of upcoming classes of course, including one over the summer (a quick version of American Lit II) and the usual balance of things in the Fall (a couple First-Year Writings and another Am Lit II, for example). But one for the Fall semester for which I’m especially excited is my return to our Honors Literature Seminar, after a number of years where other folks have taught that course. I gave brief thought to reinventing the syllabus a bit (something we should always at least consider I believe), but at the end of the day I can’t imagine a more relevant Fall 2025 subject than America in the Gilded Age, and I’m really excited to work with another group of our amazing Honors students to read and discuss and analyze literary, cultural, and historical texts from that all-too-familiar era.

2)      A Public Scholarly Website: When it comes to my own scholarly work, I remain uncertain about when and whether I’ll return to book-length projects, at least in writing—I’m definitely interested in another “season” of my podcast, as I discussed in that post (and for which I’d still love suggestions!). But I’m also excited about another scholarly project, one my wife and I have begun discussing: creating a public scholarly website that can host each of our work in multiple forms, but also and especially serve as a community that can both share others’ existing work and offer folks a place where they can create and publish new work. Much more on that to follow, but please let me know, here or by email, if you have interest, ideas, anything you’d like to contribute to that evolving conversation!

3)      Two Sons in College!: Do I need to say more?! Actually, I definitely do, but I’m drafting this post before we have a definite answer about where my younger son Kyle will end up, and I’ll add a further note once that’s settled. But what I can say no matter what is that, sad as the thought makes me in some ways of course, I’m also really excited to have both boys be part of these communities and conversations, and to be able to share here all the places their education and lives take them.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What’s coming up for you?

May 16, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Student Tributes to Dad

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

I did teach one other course this semester, an Accelerated Online section of The Short Story that started after Spring Break. But in lieu of a post focused on that class, I wanted to use this last post in the series to highlight a few Bluesky threads where folks—many of them former students—shared tributes to my Dad.

This original one: https://bsky.app/profile/americanstudier.bsky.social/post/3ljgoh56ixk2y

This follow-up: https://bsky.app/profile/americanstudier.bsky.social/post/3ljkjgk2xbs2b

and this one from his former grad student Ryan Cordell: https://bsky.app/profile/ryancordell.org/post/3ljgpguto3224

He was loved, as much as a teacher and mentor as he was as a husband, father, grandfather, and man.

Preview post this weekend,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 15, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Graduate Research Methods

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

This semester featured my first-ever section of our Graduate Research Methods course, but I did model that new syllabus on two courses I’ve taught a number of times: Intro to Literary Theory (another Grad class) and Approaches to English Studies (an undergrad one). Which meant we talked here and there about the approach/theory known as psychoanalytical, an approach that defined my Dad’s early career (his dissertation/first book was a psychoanalytical reading of James Fenimore Cooper) and that continued to inform his later interests in topics like authorship. I’ll admit to being far less of a devotee of this approach than my Dad, but I’ll also admit that when we returned fully to this class’s conversations after his passing, I made sure to think through when and how psychoanalytical analysis could help, beyond what I would have been likely to do in another semester. For example, I think Dad’s ideas about the anxieties of authorship and audience have a lot to tell us about Langston Hughes, the poet on whom our middle unit in this course focused. I promise to keep an open mind about this theoretical approach going forward, Dad.

Last reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 14, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: First-Year Writing II

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

I’m sure my Dad taught First-Year Writing in his early years at the University of Virginia, but because of the way that institution and English Department work, overall and in terms of seniority and so on, I believe it had been many many years since he had done so (he taught at Uva for 45 years, so I do mean many many!). As a result, I certainly connect my Literature courses and teaching to him more fully than I do my Writing sections (which I have at least one of, and often as this semester two of, every semester). But when I returned to my FYW classrooms on the Thursday of the week he passed, I had the chance to pay an overt tribute to my Dad and his work: as part of a unit on analyzing multimedia texts we read a Matthew Zoller Seitz article on the “Magical Negro” stereotype, and so I got to share with the students my Dad’s excellent analysis of “Tomming” as both a precursor to that stereotype and a way to analyze it in cultural works. And then we watched the Key & Peele sketch “Magical Negro Fight,” because it’s very relevant to that conversation but also because my Dad really loved all things Key & Peele. I can’t say exactly which of these moments felt most linked to my Dad, because in truth they all were, thoughtfully and humorously and movingly.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 13, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: American Literature II

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

Continuing the thread from yesterday’s post, the other class I taught on that Monday morning was American Literature II, the second-half American Lit survey. That day we were located close in time to Langston Hughes, amidst our Unit on Modernism and the Early 20^th Century, and specifically were on day three (of four) with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (we also briefly added in a supplemental text, Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands,” as we often do in a survey course). That discussion covered a number of turning points in the novel, including the extended flashback in Chapter VI where Nick Carraway narrates the moment when young James Gatz abandons his prior self and heritage to create the new identity of Jay Gatsby. And as we talked about it, I couldn’t help remembering one of the (many) arguments my Dad and I have had about literature over the decades, in this case about whether Gatz’s parents/heritage are implied to be ethnic (read: non-white) in any way. My Dad thought no, I thought yes; as usual I don’t know that I shifted his perspective at all, but as always I know that the debate sharpened my own reading and analysis. Not sure there’s much in my ideas that he didn’t contribute to one way or another!

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 12, 2025: Spring Semester Reflections: Major American Authors of the 20th Century

[About halfway through the Spring 2025 semester, I lost my Dad. While that was of course the semester’s most defining moment, it also allowed me to reflect for the remaining weeks on my own teaching in relationship to one of the most dedicated and talented teachers I’ve ever known. So for this semester reflections series, I want to highlight one moment from each class where I’d say I particularly felt my Dad’s presence.]

We lost my Dad on a Sunday morning; on Monday morning, I taught two American Literature courses over Google Meet. I hope that doesn’t seem insensitive or unfeeling; I assure you it was quite the opposite, not least because I was teaching at my Dad’s desk in his study, with his books and papers and so much else of his amazing career and life around me. In Major American we were beginning our second week with Langston Hughes, and discussing in particular his stunning book-length poem/collection “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (1951). At the heart of that collection, in its literal center but also I would argue its philosophical core, is “Theme for English B,” one of Hughes’s most explicitly autobiographical poems and a text focused on an English classroom and assignment. As we talked about “Theme” during that class, and especially as I reflected for a bit on the limits and the possibilities of teaching and writing alike before we move to another focal text, I certainly felt like my Dad, a lifelong writer and teacher and critical optimist about all things literary, was there in the conversation with us.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 10-11, 2025: A Works Progress Administration for the 21st Century

[On May 6^th, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of WPA histories, leading up to this weekend post on why we need a 21^st century revival!]

I’m not gonna lie, I planned the main focal points for this series long ago, before the start of the new Trump administration (another inside baseball blog detail)—and given that the new administration’s #1 priority has been cutting federal jobs and programs and departments, it seems beyond silly to even suggest something like a Works Progress Administration in 2025.

But here’s the thing: I’ve spent a good bit of the last decade-plus of my career arguing that we can’t cede concepts, ideas, ideals over to the MAGA types. Not patriotism, not America, and, yes, not federal workers. So there’s no way I’m gonna let Elon Musk, his DOGE lackeys, and the ostensible President dictate how we think about federal workers and programs in any way, much less in the worst possible ways that they’ve been arguing for in both words and actions over the last few months. Not when we’ve got so many models of the best of federal workers and of America through them, with the WPA a whole host of prime examples.

So yes, I deeply believe we need a new WPA for the 21^st century. The fact that we most definitely will not get it during this administration only makes me more certain that we need to argue and fight for it, and all such ideas that represent our highest ideals, moving forward.

Semester reflections series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

May 9, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: Wartime Evolutions

[On May 6^th, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration [WPA]. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21^st century revival!]

On two distinct but interconnected ways the WPA evolved in the early war years (before Roosevelt discontinued it in December 1942), and what we can make of the combination.

I hadn’t really thought about it this way until researching this series, but thanks to the WPA (and other New Deal programs, but especially the WPA) the U.S. was far better prepared for the transition into a nation at war than otherwise would have been the case. As historian Nick Taylor puts it in his book American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (2008), “Only the WPA, having employed millions of relief workers for more than five years, had a comprehensive awareness of the skills that would be available in a full-scale national emergency. As the country began its preparedness buildup, the WPA was uniquely positioned to become a major defense agency.” Long before Pearl Harbor, it did indeed occupy that position, with between 600,000 and 700,000 WPA workers transitioning to defense projects in the second half of 1940. And after the U.S. formally entered the war, those efforts only ramped up across the country, as literally illustrated by this photograph of WPA researchers preparing an air raid warning map for New Orleans on December 11, 1941.

Of course, “defense” came to mean something much more specific and far more divisive and discriminatory in the days and weeks and months after Pearl Harbor, and unfortunately the WPA also occupied a central position and role in those far different wartime efforts. Indeed, the WPA’s last major project, undertaken throughout its final year of existence, was the construction, maintenance, and staffing of the concentration camps at which Japanese Americans were incarcerated. The infamous Manzanar Relocation Center in California, for example, was estimated to be “manned just about 100% by the WPA.” And Harry Hopkins himself, subject of a good deal of deserved praise in earlier posts in this series, praised wartime WPA administrator Howard O. Hunter for the ”building of those camps for the War Department for the Japanese evacuees on the West Coast.” The camps were a federal construction project, and a tragically sizable one at that, so it stands to reason that the WPA would undertake this effort—but at the same time, this is another side of the WPA I hadn’t known about prior to researching this series, and certainly not one I was happy to discover.

Obviously I’m not going to be able to boil all this down in any succinct way in this final paragraph, but I’ll say this: I’ve written and talked and thought a great deal in recent years about the worst and best of America (a phrase I found myself using constantly in my recent podcast, for example); and I can’t really imagine a more clear and dramatic representation of that phrase than the WPA, the same social relief organization that helped save so many Americans and the nation as a whole to boot, working on one of the most exclusionary and horrific projects in America’s collective history. Our history is so messy, and, as Trip from Glory put it so evocatively, “ain’t nobody clean.” I could end every series on this blog with a version of that sentiment, and maybe I should.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?