December 31, 2020: Year in Review: Migration and Refugees

[I thought about skipping my annual year in review series—who really wants to have any more 2020 vision?!—but as I wrote this past weekend’s post, I realized that the year featured significant developments on a handful of central world issues. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy those, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways, on these and any other 2020 hindsights (and 2021 foresights)!]

On a short story that helps cut to the heart of an ongoing horror.

It was almost impossible, in the final months of 2020, to pay attention to all of the important news stories that broke; not that that was in any way a new problem, but I nonetheless felt that constant struggle for focus to be amplified as we all tried simply to navigate the conclusions of the Fall semester, of the multi-month crisis of democracy following the 2020 presidential election, of the end of a very, very long year. So it’s fair to say that a couple of late 2020 stories about the ongoing human rights abuses of migrant and refugee families and children at the US/Mexico border—a story about how the federal government had purposefully made it much harder to reunite separated families (illegal actions that reek of Stephen Miller’s xenophobic touch), and a related one about just how much children remain separated from their parents long after that policy was supposed to have ended—largely flew under the radar for far too many of us (this AmericanStudier very much included).

The frustrating absence of such stories from much of our collective consciousness isn’t simply about information overload, however. Precisely because the government has kept these individuals and families so isolated and separated, so hidden from even those tasked with helping them (much less our society as a whole), it can be quite difficult (speaking for myself, at least) to get to the human heart of what is happening to these people, of the intimate realities of the detention process and centers, of all that has been done and is still being done to these fellow humans and Americans (for that they are, despite our government’s and system’s most xenophobic and destructive attempts to define them otherwise). There certainly has been excellent investigative journalism despite those imposed limits—I would point for example to this stunning late August piece from Carmen Molina Acosta, an editorial intern with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) who clearly has a very bright future in journalism, on the horrors of COVID in the detention centers—but there we’re back to the information overload challenge.

Such journalistic pieces are still entirely worth reading and sharing, to be clear. But I also believe that cultural works have a role in play in cutting through the noise and helping us understand and empathize with the human experiences of these migrants and refugees. As part of my two online Short Story sections this Fall, I taught one stunning such cultural work: Cristina Henriquez’s “Everything Is Far from Here” (2017). Henriquez’s short story stays solely and fully within the perspective of her main character, a refugee woman and mother experiencing individual versions of detention and separation from her young son; readers get only the briefest glimpses of the broader social and political contexts for those experiences, both in the US and in her Latin American country of origin. But that’s precisely the vital strength of short stories—using literary elements like narration and perspective, descriptions and imagery, dialogue and free indirect discourse (the intimate representation of a character’s inner thoughts, a really powerful literary concept and effect despite the overly theoretical name) to locate readers within such an experience and world. If I could ask all Americans to read one text about the ongoing border horrors, I think I’d go with this simple, brutal, vital short story.

Last 2020 vision tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 2020 reflections you’d share?

December 30, 2020: Year in Review: Economic Inequality

[I thought about skipping my annual year in review series—who really wants to have any more 2020 vision?!—but as I wrote this past weekend’s post, I realized that the year featured significant developments on a handful of central world issues. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy those, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways, on these and any other 2020 hindsights (and 2021 foresights)!]

On more and less frustrating cultural depictions of deep poverty, and what 2020 can remind us of.

As I draft this post in late November, one of the most prominent and controversial current cultural works is Hillbilly Elegy (2020), the Ron Howard-directed film adaptation (which like so many 2020 films went straight to streaming on Netflix) of J.D. Vance’s equally prominent and controversial 2016 memoir (subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis). That hyperlinked Entertainment Weekly review is just one of many (if not, indeed, all) that have slammed the film, and some of those flaws sound specific to bad filmmaking; but I would also argue that they are not unrelated to the overhyped memoir’s own flaws, specifically in its stereotypical and ultimately profoundly prejudiced depictions of Appalachian culture and deep poverty in America. Although Vance was himself an insider to that culture, having grown up in Middletown, Ohio, it seemed to me—and, more importantly, to other Appalachian scholars and authors who have pushed back on his book’s representations—that his ultimate goal was to depict Appalachian Americans as the cause of their own late 20^th and early 21^st century struggles, and in the process to distinguish his rugged individualism as the cause of his escape from that culture and subsequent life success.

Not long before Hillbilly Elegy returned to the public eye, I finished teaching a very different cultural work: Stephen Crane’s short story “An Experiment in Misery” (1894). I said much of what I want to say about that unique and compelling story, and its complement “An Experiment in Luxury,” in this post on that America in the Gilded Age Honors Seminar course that I had the chance to teach again this semester. Here I’ll just say that Crane uses an outsider character—the unnamed young protagonist (of both stories) who opts to live for a time as a homeless person in an effort to better understand that world—in a way that, counterintuitively but to my mind unquestionably, allows for more empathy with his text’s disadvantaged characters (both inside the story and for its readers) than the insider Vance is ever able to muster. Perhaps because Crane’s is a work of fiction, he doesn’t try to diagnose the causes of those characters’ situations in the same way that Vance seeks to, but I would argue that’s part of the story’s strengths: Crane seems to see his characters not as social symptoms or part of a political debate but as human beings, and I would argue that’s a vital first step to any cultural depiction of deep poverty (and just about everything else).

Despite those differences (which, to be clear, make Crane’s story far more worth your time than Vance’s book), however, both texts do depict their disadvantaged characters as “others”—other to both the young man (despite his experiment) and the reader in Crane’s story, other to both Vance (despite his childhood) and the reader in Hillbilly. Whereas one of the most central lessons of 2020 would have to be to remind us of an easily forgotten and never more salient idea: “there but for the grace of God [or, for those of us who don’t believe, but for blind luck] go I.” It’s long been a frustrating reality of American life that far too many Americans are just one significant crisis—whether a medical issue, the loss of a job, or otherwise—away from reaching desperate straits, including such effects as eviction/foreclosure and homelessness. And this year has seen a veritable epidemic (and I use that term as purposefully as possible) of such crises, reminding us that homelessness, deep poverty, and other systemic issues of economic inequality do not threaten some Americans—they threaten a significant percentage, if not indeed most, of us.

Next 2020 vision tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 2020 reflections you’d share?

December 29, 2020: Year in Review: Climate Change

[I thought about skipping my annual year in review series—who really wants to have any more 2020 vision?!—but as I wrote this past weekend’s post, I realized that the year featured significant developments on a handful of central world issues. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy those, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways, on these and any other 2020 hindsights (and 2021 foresights)!]

On the longstanding history of defining environmental disasters, and how it’s not nearly enough to understand the present.

In one of my very first posts, just over ten years (!) ago, I highlighted (as a context for the great film Chinatown) one of my favorite works of AmericanStudies scholarship: David Wyatt’s Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California (1997). As you might expect from his title, Wyatt’s focal fires are mostly metaphorical/symbolic (specifically around issues of race and culure), although he does feature the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the accompanying, actual fire as one of those five. But there’s certainly also a case to be made that natural disasters, including that 1906 catastrophe among the many other floods and hurricanes and volcanic eruptions and the like that I’ve written about in this space over the last decade, offer a potent way to frame and analyze American history. After all, while virtually everything about America and the world has changed over the last few centuries, the presence and potency of natural disasters, and their ability to affect and reshape so much of society, has remained a constant.

One of the first major global news stories of 2020 was a horrific such natural disaster, the wildfires that absolutely ravaged so much of Australia for more than six months (from September 2019 through March 2020). And here in the United States, that news story foreshadowed our own year-long, historically horrific California wildfires, which by the year’s end had burned more than 4% of the state’s land, making this the worst wildfire season in recorded history (and it was a season that extended and has continued to extend well beyond the Golden State). For those of us on the East Coast, it was at times possible (if not ideal) to forget just how much of the United States was devastated, affected, and threatened by wildfires throughout 2020—but I try as best I can not to suffer more from such East Coast bias than is inevitable for someone who has pretty much only ever lived along the I-95 corridor, and from a national perspective there’s no doubt that these catastrophic wildfires were one of the biggest stories (if not indeed the single biggest story) of this year.

And that very ubiquity illustrates a complicated but crucial fact: the long history of environmental disasters can’t quite capture the realities of our present, climate change-driven moment. Indeed, I think it’s no longer accurate to think about such things through the lens of individual disasters—the globe as of late 2020 is one overarching environmental disaster, reflected through so many different trends from wildfires to the constant “worst hurricanes ever” to tornadoes (more complicatedly, although debatable causes doesn’t change their destructive effects) to so, so much more. When I want to get really depressed, particularly about the world into which my sons are growing up, I read the stories about how we’re already past the point of no return when it comes to global climate change. But when I want to counter that feeling, I think about my sons and their generation, about for example my older son’s proposal-in-progress for a climate change-battling project this coming summer (more on that in this space as the contours develop!). Both depression and inspiration seem important emotional states when it comes to climate change at the close of 2020.

Next 2020 vision tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other 2020 reflections you’d share?