[This past
weekend, I had the opportunity to attend my first Southern Historical Association
annual conference, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Thanks to a We’re History piece of mine, I was invited by Elaine Frantz
Parsons to take part in a wonderful panel on the Reconstruction-era KKK. In
this series I’ll follow up both that panel and other takeaways from this great
conference!]
A couple
highlights from the conference’s rich, provocative, and complementary special
sessions:
1)
The SHA conference opened with a Thursday
evening plenary panel on the concept of integrated justice after Civil Rights—movements
and activisms for justice as indivisible, across all the different issues and
identities that are too often treated as distinct or even competing. Chaired by
scholar and filmmaker Michael Honey,
the panel featured Greta
de Jong speaking about racial and economic justice movements, Adolph
Reed on the need to rethink race and justice in America, Judge Jed Rakoff on the legal
and justice systems in the 21st century, and Julie Saville
on ethos and friendship as models for integrated justice. As someone centrally
concerned with cross-cultural American histories and identities, I found
Saville’s frame the most striking, particularly when I think about some of the
exemplary cross-cultural American friendships to which we could turn for
models: Ely
Parker and Lewis Henry Morgan, to name only one example. But we can’t
idealize such relationships without engaging with the darker side of our
histories and current society as well, and this panel moved between those
different modes very effectively.
2)
That plenary panel had been organized by SHA
President Barbara Fields, and was complemented by her sweeping and stunning
presidential address the following evening. As I mentioned to a colleague after
the talk, Fields’ address felt like a career culminating reflection on her own
life and identity, her inspirations from her graduate mentor C.
Vann Woodward, her huge range of scholarly subjects (slavery and
segregation, the Civil War, environmental and economic histories, American
myths and narratives, and much more), and some (if not indeed most) of the
dominant and defining issues in American histoy. Yet at the same time that
Fields’ address felt reflective, it also felt urgently invested in the present
and especially the future, and in considering precisely what historians and
public scholars can do (and what we can’t) to impact them. Like the plenary panel,
Fields’ tone shifted from pessimism to optimism, often in the same moment: such
as her breathtaking final lines, in which she recognized that much of our current
moment could be seen as inevitably moving toward destructive futures and yet
quoted Woodward to note that perhaps our job is to resist the inevitable. At a
time when it’s difficult not to feel pessimistic for all sorts of reasons (I
write this post in the shadow of both the Paris terrorist attacks and the
bigoted and divisive responses to them by far too many), Fields offered not a
salve for that perspective, but a vital engagement with and response to it.
Next SHA follow
up tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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