[It’s been a
while since I spent
a week highlighting the amazing work done by my fellow
AmericanStudies scholars. So for this week’s series I thought I’d highlight
five recent books by scholars with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working on the NEASA Council.
I’d love to hear in comments about books and scholars, recent or otherwise,
that have inspired you!]
On the
challenging book that illustrates how constructed and contested even the seemingly
simplest American concepts are.
I’ve been
eagerly following Holly Jackson’s
evolving work on family, race, and blood in late 19th century
American literature, culture, and society since 2005, when I heard her give a
NEASA talk on her
discoveries about the identity of novelist Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins. That
work has culminated (although I’m sure not concluded) in her book American
Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850-1900 (Oxford
UP, 2013). American Blood is the densest
and most theoretically driven of the works I’ve highlighted this week, making
it more what I’d call academic than public scholarship (which isn’t in any way
a critique, just a categorization). But it also offers an incredibly important public
AmericanStudies lesson.
I’ve blogged
many times before, such as in this
2012 election post, about the subtle but crucial importance of contesting
our collective use and definition of “American.” So much of the time it seems
as if we assume that the word has a stable or fixed meaning, when in fact
nothing could be further from the truth. Recognizing and analyzing the constructed,
contested nature of the term is thus an important project, and one that would of
course affect all Americans. But even this AmericanStudier has to admit that
there are other terms that are both even more fundamental and more generally
treated as stable and simple than “American,” and toward the top of that list would
have to be “family.” Yet as Jackson’s book convincingly demonstrates, family
has been just as constructed and contested a concept in American culture and society
as any.
It’s
particularly significant that Jackson highlights and traces such constructions
and contestations throughout the 19th century. It’d be hard for
anyone to argue that family doesn’t have diverse meanings and narratives
associated with it in our 21st century moment, or that they haven’t
been developing throughout much of the last half-century. But indeed, many
arguments about those contemporary meanings—perhaps even our dominant shared
take on them—see them precisely as changes, shifts away from more stable or
agreed-upon prior visions of family. So Jackson’s book might be more dense and
theoretical than what I’d generally categorize as public scholarship, but I can’t
imagine a more important public scholarly takeaway than what she has to
contribute to our collective understanding of the foundational but far from simple
concept of family.
Last NEASA book
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Books or scholars you'd share? I'd love to hear about them!
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