October 10, 2011: Columbus Days

In honor of … well, I’ve never been quite sure what we’re meant to honor today: the brave but delusional Italian-born Spanish explorer who thought (until the end, apparently) that he’d found China and ended his days having been thoroughly disgraced and dishonored, not to mention imprisoned and driven mad? The centuries of disease and slavery and genocide and strife that followed his voyages? Good sales at department stores? The long weekend? I dunno. But on the occasion, at least, of Columbus Day, here are six posts in which I tried to engage with the complex realities of the exploration and settlement era:

November 9: Mi Casas Should Be Everybody’s Casas: On Bartolome de las Casas, the Spanish Priest who devoted his life to fighting against the abuse and enslavement of Native Americans.

November 22: Very Different Pictures: On the first truly brutal conflict between the Massachusetts Puritans and the local Native American nations, the Pequot War—and the 1820s novel that reimagined the conflict through Pequot eyes.

November 25: A Thanksgiving Turkey: On Rush Limbaugh’s version of the First Thanksgiving, William Bradford’s account of the same event, and the propaganda of history.

August 25: Not Just Any John Smith and August 26: The Indian Princess: A complementary pair of posts on the narratives, images, and (as best as we can tell) realities of two of the most important early Virginians.

September 27: Accent-uate the Positive: My argument about the true American language is grounded in my desire to define a series of 16^th and 17^th century moments, and more exactly encounters and conversations between distinct cultures in those periods, as the origin points for the first truly American identities.

Now get out there, wander into your neighbor’s yard, insist that you’ve really discovered the lost city of Atlantis, and enslave him and his family; it’s the least you can do today. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any explorers, early arrivals or settlers, or stories from America’s first centuries you find particularly interesting?

October 7-9, 2011 [Link-tastic Post 3]: NEASA Conference

Rounding out the week of NEASA-focused blogging by providing, one more time, a handful of the links through which you can connect to the conference and all of the AmericanStudies voices and conversations it will highlight:

1)      www.neasa.org: Our official site includes, at the Conference tab, all the info you can want about the conference, including the most updated program.

2)      www.regonline.com/2011neasaconference: Want to register for the conference? This is the direct link to do so. I’d sure love to see you in Plimoth!

3)      http://neasaconference.blogspot.com: Live halfway around the world from Massachusetts? Then take part in our conference conversations virtually at the pre-conference blog!

4)      www.plimoth.org: Our amazing conference site, Plimoth Plantation.

5)      http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu: Official site for our great keynote speaker, James Loewen.

I know I’ve already asked a lot of you when it comes to this conference and the blog and etc. But if I can make one more request: if you take part in any list-servs or other online conversations with an interest in AmericanStudies, belong to any relevant institutions or organizations, have colleagues and friends who might be interested, and otherwise have any possible places and ways to publicize the conference, I’ll ask you to please consider doing so, even just by sharing this post. Public scholarship works best when it’s engaging with a broad and diverse public, and that’s my number one goal for this conference, and for NEASA more broadly, by far. Thanks! More next week, a special Columbus Day post,

Ben

PS. Since I’ve done so much publicizing this week, anything you’d like to publicize here? Feel free to use the comments to toot your own horn, it’d be only fair.

October 6, 2011: Native Voices

I learned a lot in the process of researching and writing my dissertation/first book—which is about as logical and unnecessary a clause as I could write, I suppose, but nonetheless profoundly true—but nothing took me more by surprise, nor on some level bothered me more deeply, than part of what I learned while researching my chapter on the “Indian question,” on Gilded Age national narratives and historical literary texts about Native Americans and the many complex issues and identities to which that community connects. (I say “part” because I also and much more happily during that chapter’s work learned, for example, of powerful and significant texts by William Justin Harsha and Sarah Winnemucca.) As I read through as much of the relevant scholarship—on my specific authors and texts, on the time period and historical contexts, and on Native American literature and identity more generally—as I could find, I discovered that many of the scholars distinguished, explicitly and consistently, between “Native scholars” and “non-Native scholars”; when engaging with the work of their peers and colleagues, that is, these scholars (and I didn’t keep count but I would say it was at least a sizeable minority and perhaps the majority of those I read) made the effort not only to find out the ethnic/racial identities of their peers, but then foregrounded those identities in their own responses to other scholars.

There are, I know (or have a sense of), hugely significant issues and stakes to the question of who is and is not a Native American, or more exactly who is and is not accepted as part of a particular nation and tribe. There are also broader and somewhat more cross-cultural but certainly just as fundamental and meaningful conversations about authenticity and cultural sovereignty to which that question likewise connects. Yet at the risk of becoming a parody of a self-centered academic, I would quote my own response to some of those questions at the end of that chapter’s introductory section, since I still believe this very fully (if anything, even more strongly than I did then): “While I no more wish to subsume Native readers in my own (Amer-European [a phrase from an earlier scholar from whose ideas I was pivoting here]) perspective than I want to replace Native writers with non-Native ones, it seems to me that a central job of American literary criticism—and all American literature, for that matter—is to include multiple writers and multiple readers in its purview, to allow seemingly disparate groups to illuminate and enrich each other. That so much criticism and literature has failed to do so, has canonized non-Native authors who ignored or stereotyped Natives, only highlights the need for breadth and inclusion as the work of recovery and rereading moves forward.” I would now add AmericanStudies as a central focus in that quote, and in fact would argue that those ideas are even more relevant to conversations about American identity and community than they are for literary history and criticism.

I’m thinking about that earlier discovery and response of mine today in the context of this week’s blog focus on the upcoming New England American Studies Association conference. One of my most central goals in planning the conference—second only to my desire to get as many people to attend and be part of it as possible, to which I say, one more time (well, maybe not one more, but another time), join us!—has been to include, in a central and highlighted way, as many Native American voices and perspectives as possible. That’s particularly true of the two late afternoon/early evening events: the Friday evening reading by four prominent regional Native American authors; and the Saturday evening tour with Native Plymouth Tours. But it’s perhaps even more true, in terms of the ideals of my book quote and perspective, of Friday’s plenary panel: the panel focuses on images and narratives of Plimoth, and two of the five featured speakers are a Wampanoag historian and author (Joan Avant Tavares) and an Aquinnah historian and author (Linda Coombs); both women have worked directly with Plimoth Plantation on various projects, but both are also just powerful and inspiring authors and voices in any conversation. Yet I will admit that I’m most excited not just at the thought of their presence and presentations, but also at hearing how their ideas converse with the three others on the panel (Joe Conforti, a scholar of New England and American Studies; Cathy Stanton, a scholar of cultural and heritage tourism and sties; and Kevin McBride, a cultural and archaeological anthropologist) and how the collected audience responds and engages with them as well.

As with most anything about which I’ve written here, this isn’t ultimately an either/or dichotomy—we can and should find ways to hear Native American voices on their own terms, as I hope the conference will exemplify; but we can, I firmly and fully believe, also strive to create conversations in which no individual ethnic or cultural voices quite stand out, but rather many of them blend and interconnect and influence each other and form a cross-cultural dialogue that is, quite simply, American. More tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      A late 20^th century philosophical take on the question of authenticity and identity: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/#Aut

2)      An interesting take on ethnicity, authenticity, and autobiographical life writing: http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/symp/p_o.htm

3)      OPEN: What do you think?

October 5, 2011: Of Plimoth Plantation

The museum and historic site at Plimoth Plantation is a hugely interesting and significant AmericanStudies space for at least three distinct, if interconnected, reasons. For one thing, since the Plantation’s origins in the late 1940s, it has worked to create what is usually known as a living history museum, a site in which highly trained and educated “interpreters” reenact the identities and voices and perspectives of early 17^th century Pilgrims. The work done by such living history museums has become an increasing subject for scholarly research and analysis; it’s not unrelated to Civil War reenactments, but with an explicit and central emphasis on education, with the reenactors not so much fulfilling their own interests or passions (as do Civil War reenactors) as seeking to connect audiences to the people and period they’re recreating. The performers are exceptionally good at what they do, almost disconcertingly so; for an AmericanStudier like me, it’s difficult to talk to them without trying constantly to break the fourth wall and discuss their own choices and goals. But we’ll get the chance to have some of those conversations, with a good deal less awkwardness, in Special Sessions at the NEASA conference next month!

If those living history components to Plimoth go back many decades, the second AmericanStudies element is significantly more recent. Just a few hundred yards from the Plantation recreation is the Wampanoag Homesite, a very different kind of living history: while the Homesite’s spaces and places, its tools and cooking processes and the like, are indeed recreations of their 17^th century equivalents, the staff of Native Americans (many Wampanoag, but others from various other nations) exist entirely in our 21^st century moment, providing their own perspectives on the historical, cultural, and national questions to which the site connects. More broadly, the Homesite illustrates just how fully and to my mind successfully Plimoth has worked in the last few decades to provide a historical and educational experience that does full justice to the Wampanoag community and stories. Certainly it’s possible to experience the Homesite and Plantation as two very distinct and separate spaces, an effect that could be called a component to multicultural American history and identity more generally; but at least in part the job of the Plantation is to tell each part of the story, and then to allow its audiences to consider for themselves how those parts and communities interconnect.

Yet the Plantation’s third AmericanStudies element exemplifies the site’s most complex but, I would (unsurprisingly) argue, its most crucial goal: highlighting the ultimately and fundamentally interconnected stories and identities of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. This element, the orientation film, is one that at many museums would likely be the least interesting or innovative feature; but at Plimoth the current film, entitled “Two Peoples: One Story,” was produced by the History Channel and is, despite its relatively straightforward basic agenda (to introduce arriving audiences to what they’ll find out at the Plantation and Homesite), a complex and very impressive work. For example, the Wampanoag characters/actors in the film speak in the Wampanoag language, a small detail that is anything but when we recognize the long history of Native American languages being silenced or even actively repressed in favor of English. Yet it’s really the film’s title that reflects its most impressive quality, its consistent insistence on cross-cultural story- and history-telling, on narrating the stories of these two communities as, from those first 1620 moments down to the present museum experience, entirely and crucially intertwined. That doesn’t meant that the film elides the more destructive results of contact for the Wampanoag nation—far from it—but it does give every arriving visitor a clear reminder that the story of Plimoth Plantation is a story of multiple cultures coexisting and conversing and influencing one another in every way, from the most negative to the most potentially inspiring.

All three elements will in fact be focal points at the conference—at those Friday and Saturday special sessions (and at Friday’s featured plenary panel as well, for that matter), but also throughout the conference in other, informal but important ways. I haven’t ever attended a conference where the site was as much a conference subject as any panel conversation, but there are few sites that are better equipped to serve that role than Plimoth Plantation. More tomorrow, as the NEASA-focused week rolls on,

Ben

PS. Four links to start with:

1)      Google books version of one of the best scholarly analyses of Plimoth’s living history performances, by former interpreter turned professor Stephen Eddy Snow: http://books.google.com/books?id=RbHQq37ydHsC&pg=PR11&lpg=PR11&dq=stephen+eddy+snow+performing+pilgrims&source=bl&ots=LPjBxQ5rRD&sig=IWQzEYK_cVw6uSsznoWzVTr2QLc&hl=en&ei=qKqLTpzkNseFhQePhsjUAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

2)      Some official info on the Wampanoag Homesite: http://www.plimoth.org/what-see-do/wampanoag-homesite

3)      Story on the Wampanoag Homesite that includes some relevant info on the film: http://www.wampspeaker.com/press.php

4)      OPEN:  Any museums or historic sites that you’d highlight?

October 4, 2011: NEASA Follow Ups

Just a few follow ups to yesterday’s post about the New England American Studies Association conference and blog:

I’ve gone back and added a “New England ASA” label to all of the earlier posts that focused on NEASA activities and the conference; those six posts, with this as the seventh, can give you a lot more information about the conference and sense of my goals and perspective for it and NEASA more generally. I see it as a great place to put many of my ideals for public scholarly connections and conversations into practice, and would love as always to get perspectives and responses from as many of my readers here as are at all interested.

For the blog, seriously, please check it out (http://neasaconference.blogspot.com). As much as I like my own blog here, the posts over there have videos (including, among many others, a Bugs Bunny cartoon and a telephone company instructional video from the 1950s!) and works of art, songs and cartoons, and so much more. They’re as diverse and multimedia and engaging and challenging as AmericanStudies itself, and they really, really deserve some more feedback and responses. Since I can already tell you are readers of discerning and sophisticated AmericanStudies tastes, I will just ask one more time that you bring those tastes over to the blog and, well, feast.

Finally, here are some quick links to sites and info for some—and I emphasize some—of the amazing people whose voices and work we’ll feature at the conference; I’ve chosen just one link for each person, but there are many more where these come from:

1)      (Saturday) Keynote speaker James Loewen
2)      (Friday) Plenary panelist and Friday evening reader Joan Avant Tavares
3)      Plenary panelist Linda Coombs
4)      Plenary panelist Joe Conforti
5)      Plenary panelist Cathy Stanton
6)      Plenary panelist Kevin McBride
7)      Friday evening reader Melissa Zobel
8)      Friday evening reader Larry Spotted Crow Mann
9)      Friday evening reader Mihku Paul
10)   Saturday Special Session presenter and Plimoth Plantation Curator Karin Goldstein
11)   Saturday late afternoon tour guides Native Plymouth Tours

Can you tell that I’m excited for this conference? Remember to check out the full program draft at http://www.neasa.org (the Conference tab), and please consider joining us at Plimoth! (And check out at the blog in any case!) More tomorrow,

Ben

October 3, 2011: Join Us, Pleas

In one month and one day, the New England American Studies Association’s 2011 conference will begin. As you probably know (since I’ve bludgeoned you about the head with the info on more than one prior occasion), the conference will be held this year at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and focuses on the theme of “American Mythologies: Creating, Recreating, and Resisting National Narratives.” As you can see from the latest program draft, available at the website linked above, the conference is really rounding out nicely—besides all of the great panels, we have James Loewen’s keynote address, a plenary panel on Plimoth and Plymouth featuring five distinct and impressive voices, a Friday evening reading and performance by regional indigenous writers, special sessions for secondary educators and on Plimoth’s facilities, an end-of-conference tour by Native Plymouth Tours, and a lot more. And you can have access to all of that, including to Plimoth Plantation for both days, for only a $20 Attendee registration fee! If you’re regionally located and have any interest in AmericanStudies (and duh, you’re reading this blog!), please consider joining us—the registration form is here, and you can of course email me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) with any questions.

I know, of course—and am extremely excited to know—that many of the folks who have found their way to this blog are anything but regional to the New England area. But even if you live in Iran, or Singapore, or Latvia, or the UK, or Canada, or Brazil, or any of the many other countries from which folks have accessed pages here, you can and most definitely should join our conference conversations at the pre-conference blog: http://neasaconference.blogspot.com. Hopefully you all have found things to interest you here (and please as always leave comments with your perspectives and thoughts!), but I’m one AmericanStudier—the pre-conference blog has featured dozens, with still more to come in the next five weeks leading up to the conference. All the earlier posts are still there, archived by categories, so you can and will find something up your alley; and again new posts will be going up over the next weeks as well. The blog has had pretty much everything, with only one exception: not quite as many comments and responses as our incredible roster of presenters and posts deserve. So I’ll ask, for the last time in this space, I promise, if you can click over to the blog and add a comment on any post that interests you there—it’ll mean a lot to the poster, and just as importantly will get your voice and ideas into the conference conversations in this virtual but no less significant way.

I hope you’ll consider coming to Plimoth in November if you’re able, but if you’re reading this, that makes you definitely able to come to the blog. And I’d sure love to see you there! Thanks, and more tomorrow,

Ben

PS. No links this time, just a reiteration of those conference ones above. Join us, one way or another, won’t you?

October 1-2, 2011: American Wedding

My sister is getting married this weekend, an occasion which makes me feel a variety of things; but, I must confess, chief among them is old. When you’re five years older than a sibling, I guess it’s just always hard not to think of that person as young; even when she has graduated from college with honors and worked in the publishing world and then gone to law school and now works at a prestigious Manhattan firm and makes frequent business trips to Switzerland and etc., she’ll always partly still be the 2 year-old with whom you played My Little Pony back in the day, y’know? But of course time marches on whether we care to admit it or not, and the reality is that she’s an amazing woman and is marrying a great guy and I’m proud and happy and excited to be part of it and lots of other good things too.

But for this blog, I wanted to highlight a couple of ways in which this wedding definitely captures some of that historically complex and cross-cultural American spirit for different aspects of which I’ve spent so much time over the last couple years (and so many posts here) arguing. For one thing, there’s my own small but hopefully enjoyable contribution to the occasion: I’ll be reading a poem that my sister and her fiancé chose, John O’Donahue’s “Beannacht (Blessing).” O’Donahue, who passed away in 2008, was a Celtic philosopher as well as a poet, a writer who tried very explicitly to merge ancient traditions with contemporary ideas, and represents for that reason alone an exemplary voice and perspective for Americans as well. But O’Donahue’s poem, which he wrote in tribute to his very traditional mother, has become indeed a blessing for many American audiences; that connection led to an NPR story on him and the poem which included him reading it aloud (link below), a story and reading that my sister and her fiancé heard on their car radio. A traditional Celtic voice and blessing meeting 21^st century technology, and subsequently crossing the sea to join an American wedding—sounds right to me.

And then there’s the wedding’s location. It’ll be held specifically at a farm in Chilmark, up-island on Martha’s Vineyard; a beautiful spot, but I’m thinking here a bit more broadly, about the Vineyard’s multi-century American history (as traced most fully by my grandfather Art Railton). Just up the road from the wedding site is Aquinnah, home to the Vineyard’s remaining and in many ways reenergized Wampanoag tribal members (some of whom are likely descended from the first Native Americans to attend and graduate from Harvard, in the mid-17^th century); just down the road is Menemsha, the fishing village where both the declining fortunes and yet persevering efforts of the island’s commercial fishermen are most overtly found. The farm itself is on the cusp of a couple different histories, connecting both to the Island’s roots in local agriculture (the summer West Tisbury agricultural fair up-island remains as vibrant as ever) and to its evolving and deepening status as a tourist resort (where farms are wedding sites as much as producers). As isolated and individual as it is, the whole of the Vineyard is really also representative of an America where commerce and production seem to be declining in favor of tourism and service—but where at the same time ethnic communities that have long been marginalized and ignored are finding strengthened and revitalized voices and identities. The pains and promise of the early 21^st century in America are all there among the beautiful beaches and historic homes.

I’m not such an AmericanStudier that I’ll be thinking of all of this on Saturday—mostly I’ll be making sure I read the poem successfully, helping to keep my boys from destroying the cake, and sending good wishes to the newlyweds. But it’s nice to think about all of the ways in which this family occasion connects us, as so many things to, to the larger narratives of American identity and culture with which we’re surrounded. More next week,

Ben

PS. Three links to start with:

1)      The audio of O’Donahue reading his poem (his Irish accent is much cuter than mine): http://being.publicradio.org/programs/john_odonahue/ss_beannacht/ss-beannacht.shtml

2)      A story on Caleb’s Crossing, a novel by Vineyarder Geraldine Brooks about one of those first Harvard Native American graduates: http://www.pri.org/stories/arts-entertainment/books/caleb-s-crossing-the-story-of-harvard-s-first-native-american-graduate3980.html

3)      OPEN: Any AmericanStudies links in your big life occasions and moments?