April 30, 2024: Communist Culture: Dos Passos and Wright

[In honor of May Day/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On two strikingly parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s American arcs.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, despite our longstanding collective national antagonism toward communism there have been both moments and communities in which the political philosophy has had substantially broader and deeper appeal. In the 1930s, two such factors came together to help produce a sizeable and vocal cohort of writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Great Depression’s heightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed to highlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of unchecked capitalism, leading a number of American writers and artists to imagine and depict alternative social and communal ways of living; and those economic woes, coupled with the continued destructive forces of segregation, lynching, and other communal ills and threats, led many African Americans similarly to seek an alternative to the dominant American systems.

Those responses happened (and thus differed) within multiple communities, but they can be succinctly illustrated by two individuals, writers whose most significant novels bookend the 1930s in American literature and culture. John Dos Passos had been publishing fiction since the mid-1920s, but it was the trilogy that came to be collected as U.S.A. (1938)—The 42^nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—that exemplified both his stylistic experimentation and his socialistic philosophies. Richard Wright launched his career with the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) but truly entered the literary stratosphere two years later with Native Son (1940), the best-selling and hugely controversial novel that features both one of American literature’s most eloquent defenders of communism (in the lawyer Max) and a character (protagonist Bigger Thomas) whose tragic and brutal arc makes numerous, purposefully ineloquent but nonetheless compelling arguments for the philosophy.

In the 1940s to 50s, both writers famously broke with those philosophies and with the Communist Party: Wright in one pivotal moment, the essay “I Tried to Be a Communist” (1944); and Dos Passos more gradually, in a series of public statements and positions that culminated in his qualified support for Joseph McCarthy (among other turning points). Yet I would also argue that their shifts represent two quite distinct personal and national narratives: Dos Passos genuinely seemed, in response to World War II, the Cold War, and other factors, to change in his political and social perspectives; whereas to my mind Wright’s perspectives remained largely unchanged, and he came instead to see, as does for example Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the Communist Party as an imperfect and indeed failed vehicle through which to seek such political and social change. Such a distinction would of course become even more important in the 1960s, when a new generation of African American activists found anew a compelling alternative in American socialism.

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

April 29, 2024: Communist Culture: “The Palace-Burner”

[In honor of May Day/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On the masterpiece of a poem that destroys easy “us vs. them” narratives.

I made the case for my favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in one of my first posts, and did so in large part through her best poem, “The Palace-Burner” (1873). There are a lot of factors that make “Palace-Burner” one of the great American poems, including its exemplification of Piatt’s frequent use of a unique and multi-layered perspective that I named in my first book the dialogic lyric, an individual speaker’s perspective filtered through conversation and the shifts and evolutions it always produces. But at the top of the list for me would be Piatt’s incredibly sophisticated representation—through the lens of a mother and young son discussing a newspaper picture of a female rebel from the 1871 Paris Commune—of what I called in this post three crucial and interconnected levels to empathy: “connecting to seemingly distant others, working to understand those to whom we’re close, and examining our own identities through those lenses.”

This wasn’t necessarily the case in the 1870s (although given the immense popularity of Horatio Alger novels in the period, maybe it was), but over the century and a half since I would say that there have been few world communities with which Americans have had, collectively, a more difficult time empathizing than communists. Of course there are significant exceptions, both in terms of time periods during which that philosophy has seemed more appealing (such as the Great Depression, about which more in tomorrow’s post) and in terms of American communities who have been sufficiently disenfranchised from our dominant national narratives to see the wisdom of such alternatives (such as African Americans in the mid-20^th century, on whom likewise more tomorrow). But when it comes to our overarching, dominant narratives, communism has been one of the most consistent “them’s” to our constructed “us” for a long while; we can see both sides of that equation, for example, in our consistent need to define the Soviet Union as “godless” in contrast to equally constructed images of the United States as a “Christian nation.”

There would be various possible ways to complicate and revise that kind of “us vs. them” narrative, including highlighting the many originating and influential forms and moments of American socialism and communism. But Piatt takes another, and to my mind particularly compelling, tack: creating in her poetic speaker a woman who seems thoroughly removed from not only communism but political conversations in general (especially in the “separate spheres” mentality that continued to reign for most middle-class American families in the period); and then giving that speaker the opportunity to consider whether and how she and a foreign communist woman might have anything in common. Neither the speaker nor the poem come to any easy or comfortable answers—empathy is neither of those things in any case—but they ask the questions, and that seems to me to an impressive model for all of us.

Next cultural communism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?

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?