On the jokes,
the ideals, and the realities of a strange juxtaposition.
In the same
hotel as ALA, and often in immediately adjacent rooms and spaces, was some sort
of convention for the Family
Research Council, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and Tony Perkins’ evangelical,
conservative political and social organization. That led to lots of jokes from
ALA attendees about comparisons between the two organizations, and since I just
linked to a Southern Poverty Law Center page on the FRC, you can guess that I
made a few of those jokes myself. (“We all have our sacred texts,” I noted; “Mine
just happen to be by Chesnutt, Faulkner, and Silko.”) Since I find the FRC, at the
leadership level at least, to be neither Christian nor conservative
according to any meaningful definition of those terms, I don’t feel badly about
making those jokes; but at the same time, I recognize that they’re not the
ideal perspective to take on this coincidental juxtaposition.
To put it
bluntly, if I’m serious about trying to produce public AmericanStudies scholarship—and
I am—then I have to be willing and able to
talk to audiences, individual and communal, whose perspective on any number
of issues and on America itself is different from my own. I hope and believe
that some such audiences have been part of my year
of book talks, and that the talks have felt respectful and engaging even to
those audience members who might disagree with many or even all of my ideas. But
those would be random such audience engagements, unplanned and haphazard and
difficult to assess—here was the opposite, a chance to connect with a built-in,
clearly identified audience who are overtly interested in American identity and
community and yet hold such distinct, contrasting perspectives on those topics
from mine. I’m not saying I should have walked into their prayer breakfast and
started declaiming (even if I would have been allowed to do so); but rather
that I could have easily stopped an individual or two with the FRC badge and
asked if we could talk for a bit about both of our perspectives.
So that would
have been the ideal—but I have to be honest, I literally couldn’t and can’t
imagine actually doing so. Does that make me cowardly, or unwilling to put my
words into action? Maybe. Does it instead make me not a total loud-mouthed jerk?
Also maybe. But what I’d really say it makes me is realistic about one of the
most frustrating but undeniable elements to 21st century American life:
the way in which different communities exist in almost entirely different
realities. How can any individual shift in historical understanding make a dent
in a distinct reality and the worldview that comes from it? How can any
nuanced, subtle change in perspective compete with such defining ideas and
ideologies? I simply don’t know—but if I’m going to keep moving forward with
these public scholarly goals, I’d better keep thinking about possible answers.
Crowd-sourced
follow ups this weekend,
Ben
PS.
So one more time: were you at ALA? If so, what stood out to you?
I worry, and always have worried, that "American Identity" is a subjective term. And while it is subjective, as all historical perspectives are, it's the idea that some subjectivities are more valid than others. That while I consider myself a "flaming liberal" others could easily put me in a conservative camp. My 10th grade history teacher, who was an is a misogynistic jerk made a great point one day inbetween bad-mouthing title 9 and pointing out that women destroyed the single-income economy. He said that all scales must be put in proper perspective, that my views of gender equality (and neutrality, as I have been very lucky to work with some brave young people whose gender of the mind and body conflict have helped me re-term it) are actually quite conservative, as I see a citizen's rights as paramount. The idea that the government would want to ban abortion is very liberal when looked at through the lens of government invading on the individual's freedoms and rights.
ReplyDeleteWith that in mind I worry that our nation's "trend" towards fundamentalism (which is really what this all boils down to, and I am speaking as a proud culturally-catholic person) will allow a narration of American Identity that is trying to define the terms liberal and conservative to their own standards and remove that sliding scale that my history teacher (whose name I can't recall, how's that for respect?) spoke of.
But the biggest fear is that this new 'historiography' denies the most important fact that any historian must be aware of at all times. They are being subjective. And through that acknowledgement of subjectivity comes a larger tolerance to contrasting ideas, theories, accounts and philosophies. But without this little reminder that "we can't keep ourselves out of the narration so at least admit you are throwing yourself in the narration" we lose that goal of objectivity.
I worry about my students growing up in a country with a very strange definition of itself, but what worries me more is that they are growing less and less aware that those coming up with the definition are doing so with an agenda.
Well said, AnneMarie.
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