October 8, 2012: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part One

[For this AmericanStudier, Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’ve decided to propose an alternative, Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and Non-Native Americans in our history. This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On a different and more inspiring vision of the arrival era.

If you’ve been well trained by a literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I advanced in my December 5, 2011 post (and others throughout my writing here) might be “So what?” I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be transformed by my ideas back in the “What would change” series of posts (written the week that the book in which I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like “All-American”) in response to your hypothetical analytical query. But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods.

When it comes to the arrival period, for example, for a long time our national narratives of the first European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified by the recurring “city on a hill” imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative, Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto) who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades, driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely negative and critical, as illustrated by the many protests that met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus’s “discovery” for those cultures.

There’s certainly both historical accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of those cultures. And to that end, I can’t recommend highly enough Cynthia Van Zandt’s Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America,1580-1660. Van Zandt’s book is exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and encounters on which she focuses. But it’s just as exemplary, to my mind, in its fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt’s desire to examine aspects of the arrival era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of this period’s central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into the remainder of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, that does not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without them and because, through a more 21^st century lens, they provide inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the only options available to early American cultures.

Next Cross-Cultural Day nomination tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts, responses, or other Cross-Cultural Day nominations for the weekend post?

10/8 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I fighter pilot who became an aviation pioneer in even more influential ways; and Jesse Jackson, the minister and Civil Rights activist who became a social and political leader in even more ground-breaking ways.

October 6-7, 2012: Brother Ali

Recommending a very unique and talented young American musician.

Thanks to this NPR story—actually, thanks to Rick Perlstein, who shared the link to the story on his Facebook page, and whom I’ve never met nor talked with personally but with whom I am Facebook “friends” nonetheless (ah, the 21^st century at its finest!)—I’ve recently discovered the young rapper and activist Brother Ali. I’m still in the process of exploring his music and work, so I won’t pretend to be an expert, and will just highlight three layers to reasons why I’m drawn to him, and then recommend that you check out more if you’re interested:

1)      His new, fifth studio album is entitled Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color. That’s one of the titles I considered for my current book! Well, maybe not in so many words; but it captures pretty much exactly the two sides to the book’s central idea.

2)      On the cover of that is a photograph of Ali kneeling in prayer (he’s a practicing Muslim American) on an American flag. Word.

3)      Also word: this quote of Ali’s about that image: “It was meant to be a literal depiction of the album title. That the things that we believe about our country — freedom, justice, equality, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, all people being equal — that these things are on the ground, these things are suffering, and so I am kneeling and praying for it. The meaning behind kneeling in this reverent way and praying is only a problem if [people] have believed this lie that somehow being a Muslim and being an American are mutually exclusive.”

Not much I need to add to that! Just, again, that I wholeheartedly recommend checking out some of his music. The “Listen Now” link on his main site is a good place to start!

Next series next week,

Ben

PS. New artists—or old ones you’ve recently discovered—or old ones you’ve long known about—you’d recommend? Share, please!

10/6 Memory Day nominee: Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper who in her mid-40s became a Civil Rights activist, voting rights advocate, and one of America’s most inspiring and influential voices for social change and equality.

10/7 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two controversial and radical, angry and impassioned, and hugely important and inspiring American activists and artists, Joe Hill and Amiri Baraka.

October 5, 2012: Up in the Air, Part Five

[Just to prove that American Studies inspirations can and do come from everywhere, this week I’m going to feature five topics that I was prompted to think about by the US Airways Magazine on my flight down to Philly. Please share your responses to any of these topics, or other American Studies topics you’ve recently been inspired to think about!]

On one of the more emotionally appealing yet complex and problematic recurring American ideas.

The final magazine article that struck the AmericanStudier in me is in the “Adventure” section: titled “The Joy of Tranquility,” the article profiles the Bradford Camps in Maine’s North Woods. The lead-in paragraph makes the article’s argument quite clear: “A rustic camp in Maine that has hardly changed in over a century proves that the amenities of modern life aren’t, after all, so essential.” For the remainder of the article, its author, freelance outdoor and sports journalist Brion O’Connor, moves back and forth between an account of the camps’ extended history and the story of his own idyllic weekend on its grounds. As I read the story, I had two interconnected but interestingly layered responses: I was drawn into the setting and world of O’Connor’s weekend at the camps; but I was also strongly reminded of one of my favorite American essays, E.B. White’s seminal “Once More to the Lake” (unfortunately not available online, but that’s the first paragraph).

O’Connor’s and White’s essays differ in an important way (White is describing a return trip with his young son to the lake where he and his family went for many years when he was young; O’Connor has never been to the camps before this visit in adulthood), but they also share a couple of key and definitely appealing features. In each, the author makes a powerful connection to his familial past through his trip: White, in watching his son experience the world of the lake, connects to his own father’s perspective and identity as a result; O’Connor thinks continually of his maternal grandfather, who loved places like the camps and helped introduce O’Connor to his outdoorsy interests. Such familial bonds are of course universally poignant and compelling, and they also connect to an even broader emotion that the two essays consistently evoke: nostalgia. White does not ever say quite so explicitly what that opening paragraph of O’Connor’s (or perhaps his editor’s) argues, about the benefits of escaping the amenities of modern life; but he does for example note his happiness that a paved highway has not yet found its way to the lake, among other moments that reveal how much “rustic” and “hardly changed in over a century” are likewise important influences in his own perspective.

It’s hard to argue with such nostalgia, not least because who doesn’t long for something from our childhoods that seems simpler, easier, slower? But one problem with nostalgia, as with that question of mine, is that it presupposes that the experience being remembered is indeed a shared one, to which everyone can connect. And there’s one especially telling detail in O’Connor’s story: the Bradford Camps are currently owned by “Igor Sikorsky III, grandson of the helicopter magnate.” O’Connor never mentions how much a weekend at Bradford costs, but I would guess that, while not Sikorsky-level necessarily, it’s not too far removed. A trip to White’s unnamed lake likely wouldn’t cost nearly so much, but it would still require various luxuries—the time and ability to take off from work; money for the various supplies that camping requires; a vehicle with which you can drive from your home to its site—that are far from universally shared by all Americans. Moreover, it’s fair to ask whether the American narratives that privilege places like the camps and the lake aren’t themselves based on certain social or communal categories and identities and what they prioritize or have experienced; and whether nostalgic embraces of these places as more ideal don’t in fact extend those prioritizations and explicitly critique other possible places (like cities). I don’t have any definite answers to these questions, but I’d say they’re worth remembering, even as we feel the tug of O’Connor’s camps and White’s lake.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Places you’re nostalgic about? Takes on such nostalgia?

10/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Jonathan Edwards; and Louise Fitzhugh, who like Edwards is best known for one defining work but whose career is similarly much more diverse than that one impressive but singular text.

October 4, 2012: Up in the Air, Part Four

[Just to prove that American Studies inspirations can and do come from everywhere, this week I’m going to feature five topics that I was prompted to think about by the US Airways Magazine on my flight down to Philly. Please share your responses to any of these topics, or other American Studies topics you’ve recently been inspired to think about!]

On the pristine and threatened island that reflects some of the worst and the best of contemporary American identity.

Elsewhere in this issue of the magazine there’s a travel-guide style piece for trips to “America’s 51^st state,” Puerto Rico. Much of the article focuses on San Juan, the island’s capital and largest city; it’s also the site of November’s American Studies Association conference, the first which I’ll be attending in many years (as a particularly grueling part of my Encyclopedia of American Studies editorial board duties). But while I could dedicate this post to my travel plans, I thought that perhaps a second inspiration, one provided by the first site detailed in the article—the small neighboring island of Vieques—might be of broader interest to readers and fellow American Studiers. (Although if you’re going to be at ASA, let me know here or at brailton@fitchburgstate.edu and we can have an AmericanStudier meet-up!)

The Vieques section of the article begins with a pretty egregious sentence: “It could be said that bombs saved Vieques.” I get the author’s point—the U.S. military’s multi-decade use of much of the island for live-fire training exercises means that it has been significantly less touristed than much of the rest of the Caribbean—but it not only rings utterly false to what bombs do to any place where they fall, but also elides the very controversial history surrounding that military practice. For one thing, as detailed at that link above, the military also used Vieques as a dumping site for various dangerous and toxic wastes and chemicals; such abuses have been far more destructive to the affected parts of the island than even the worst tourists could ever have been. For another, the military continued its live-fire exercises for many years after they began to receive extended and vocal pushback and resistance, demands from both Puerto Ricans and other concerned Americans that these practices cease. At their broadest level, these histories and abuses parallel much of the worst of how the U.S. government and military has engaged with the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere over the 20^th century.

Yet the island can also be connected to some of the most ideal aspects of contemporary American community and identity. For example, those protests eventually but importantly succeeded—in 2003 the military changed its policies and stopped using Vieques for those different but equally damaging purposes, one of the 21^st century’s clearest victories to date for social and political activism. Moreover, that section of the island was converted into a National Wildlife Refuge, a wonderful way to keep it from being immediately overrun by those aforementioned tourists and to honor the conservationist legacy of one of America’s most famous visitors to Puerto Rico, Teddy Roosevelt. And finally, I would argue that remembering America’s complex relationship to Vieques would force us to engage with the island’s history as part of America, both legally (as of course all of Puerto Rico has been for more than a century) and thematically (as, I have argued in this space, all of the Caribbean can be seen as intimately interconnected with the United States, and vice versa). All good reasons to visit Vieques, and not just for the pristine beaches!

Finally air-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Perspectives on Vieques, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, or related places and themes?

10/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Frederic Remington, the talented artist and illustrator who is worth remembering as much for his connections to American legends and myths as for his own impressive career; and Buster Keaton, the pioneering comedian and filmmaker whose most famous work likewise engages directly with questions of American history and mythology.

October 3, 2012: Up in the Air, Part Three

[Just to prove that American Studies inspirations can and do come from everywhere, this week I’m going to feature five topics that I was prompted to think about by the US Airways Magazine on my flight down to Philly. Please share your responses to any of these topics, or other American Studies topics you’ve recently been inspired to think about!]

On the largely, ironically forgotten author who deserves to be remembered and read.

Just after the feature article on Charlotte, the magazine includes a briefer piece on various historic sites elsewhere in North Carolina. A few of them are connected to Asheville, the Western North Carolina, mountain city that has provided hotel stays and getaways for many prominent Americans (including multiple presidents at George Vanderbilt’s enormous Biltmore House) over the last century and more. Unmentioned among those references, however, is the modernist American novelist who grew up in Asheville and whose mother made her living in the city’s booming early 20^th century real estate and boarding businesses: Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe’s absence from the article is unsurprising, as he has I would argue largely been forgotten in the 65 years since his tragic early death; but it’s also both ironic and unfortunate.

The irony of Wolfe’s elision, both from our collective memories and from an article on North Carolina, is that he was, as much as any American author, deeply concerned with the question of how and whether an artist—or anyone—can both remain part of and escape from his home and past. The original subtitle of his novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) was A Story of the Buried Life, and the novel begins with a fragmented quote that includes the lines “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language” and “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Throughout, Wolfe’s hugely autobiographical novel engages both backwards—into his own, his family’s, his city’s, and the national pasts—and forwards, wondering whether its protagonist can unearth those pasts, will become himself buried in the process, should instead move on into a more separate future, and so on. Five years later, Wolfe would explore those same themes again, from some of the same yet also very distinct angles, in You Can’t Go Home Again (1934). For this author to be absent from most of our national narratives of modernist writers, American literature, or even his home state is, again, powerfully ironic.

But it’s more than that: it’s a shame. Even in his own lifetime, Wolfe struggled with his editors over his sprawling and difficult style, and found limited (or at least more limited than he otherwise might have) audiences and successes as a result. Yet it seems to me that Wolfe’s style is as entirely interconnected with his content and themes as were those of his fellow modernists Hemingway and Faulkner; while it’s fair to say that Wolfe’s was not as influential as either of theirs, I would also argue that the experience of reading his can be just as rewarding and meaningful on its own terms. Moreover, while some of Hemingway’s characters and stories feel more focused on European experiences and some of Faulkner’s more specific to the South, Wolfe’s works are, to my mind, profoundly representative of shared American (and perhaps human) questions, both from that early twentieth century moment and from across all our generations and communities. Time to put him back on the map, I’d say.

Next air-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on Wolfe? Other authors or artists we should better remember?

10/3 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Thomas Wolfe, whose flawed but powerful novels have a great deal to tell us about his own life, his home state, and turn of the 20^th century America; and John Ross, whose lengthy and often tragic leadership of the Cherokee Nation reflects some of America’s darkest as well as its most inspiring histories and moments.

October 2, 2012: Up in the Air, Part Two

[Just to prove that American Studies inspirations can and do come from everywhere, this week I’m going to feature five topics that I was prompted to think about by the US Airways Magazine on my flight down to Philly. Please share your responses to any of these topics, or other American Studies topics you’ve recently been inspired to think about!]

On the country music star who exemplifies two important and impressive current trends.

In another article, this issue of the magazine profiles Zac Brown, the country singer/songwriter who, with his Zac Brown Band, has released a couple of big-selling and Grammy-winning albums in the last few years (with a third, Uncaged, recently released as well). There are few American Studies topics on which I’m less qualified to pontificate than contemporary country music, so I won’t pretend to have a great deal to say about what Brown means in that world; the current album does seem impressively mixed and diverse in its influences and styles, not in an artificial “crossover” kind of way (ie, someone trying to be a pop star for its own sake) but because he and his band found inspiration in all these different modes. But in reading the profile, I was particularly struck by two non-musical sides to Brown’s identity and career, both of which I’d connect to other important contemporary themes.

Before his band made it big Brown was best known, at least in his home area of Georgia, as a chef and the proprietor of the restaurant Zac’s Place. Although he’s mostly had to pass those duties on to others over the last few years, he’s continued to emphasize regional food and cooking in a variety of ways; including, most impressively to me, his use while on tour of the tractor-trailer he calls “Cookie.” That kitchen-on-wheels enables Brown to serve the band and many lucky fans home-cooked (well, trailer-cooked) meals featuring his own recipes and other regional favorites. There’s a lot to like about that custom, but to me it’s particularly interesting as a complement to the slow-food movement of the last couple decades. Obviously Brown isn’t, most of the time, serving his foods within close proximity to their points of origin—one of the main goals of the movement—but you could say he’s trying to bring his version of slow food with him wherever he goes, and to allow fans everywhere to experience the joys of such regional culinary traditions.

Brown’s other most unique project (in the making) is also by far his most inspiring. As a young man, Brown worked at a couple of local summer camps that brought together typical kids and those with special needs, and the experience has clearly stuck with him; he has purchased a large tract of land and developed his own camp, Camp Southern Ground, which has already begun operation, is scheduled to open in full in the summer of 2014, and will likewise offer options for special needs kids (especially those with neurobehavioral disorders such as Asperger’s and Tourette’s) as well as for typical summer campers. Again, there’s a lot that’s great about this project, but I would link it some prominent and important current efforts to move away from a purely medicating approach to childhood disorders, and to consider instead how social and emotional treatments and responses can often help kids struggling with such disorders at least as much as any medication. These are of course very complex and evolving questions, but at the very least Brown’s camp represents an exemplary attempt to treat the whole kid, and to bring special needs kids into full contact with their peers at the same time.

Important and inspiring work on many fronts, I’d say! Next air-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring work, by celebrities or anybody else, you’d highlight?

10/2 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Nat Turner, the Virginia slave and preacher who led one of the most violent, successful, and significant slave revolts, and whose voice continues to echo long beyond that moment; and Wallace Stevens,  the lawyer and insurance salesman who also wrote some of the most dense, complex, erudite, and evocative 20^th century American poetry.

October 1, 2012: Up in the Air, Part One

[Just to prove that American Studies inspirations can and do come from everywhere, this week I’m going to feature five topics that I was prompted to think about by the US Airways Magazine on my flight down to Philly. Please share your responses to any of these topics, or other American Studies topics you’ve recently been inspired to think about!]

On the Museum that’s helping redefine what such institutions and spaces can include and do.

The feature story in this edition of the magazine was on Charlotte, North Carolina; a US Airways hub and the host city for the recent Democratic National Convention, Charlotte is also, as the article argued, one of the more on-the-rise American cities. There are various reasons for that trend, but I would argue that many of the most compelling reflect impressive combinations of longstanding historical and distinctly 21^st century American elements: the bike-sharing program that allows riders to wind through the city’s historic sites on the Mecklenburg County Greenway; the demographic diversity (“minorities” represent the majority of the city’s population) that includes centuries-old communities (such as African Americans) and much more recent arrivals (Asian American immigrants). And no Charlotte attraction better weds history to 21^st century trends than the Levine Museum of the New South.

I’ve written before in this space about how difficult it can be to create historic sites or museums to remember our most complex and (often) dark histories, with the longstanding but still-unrealized idea of a museum of American slavery as exhibit A for that argument. Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of the American Indian could certainly be highlighted as an exemplary such engagement—while the NMAI does focus on many more informative and inspiring themes (presenting the identities and customs of different cultures and tribes, for example), it most definitely also engages with the darker histories to which Native Americans have so long been linked. Yet I would argue that creating a museum for the post-bellum American South—a period that has been called the nadir of African American life, and that was centrally defined by histories of segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and more—, constructing a space that remembers and engages with such histories as part of a complex whole, represents an even more significant challenge.

I haven’t visited the Levine Museum yet (and if you have, I’d love to hear your takes in the comments!), so I can’t analyze in any in-depth way how it responds to that challenging and important task. I’ll admit that my extremely positive first take on the Museum is due in significant measure to seeing that it’s hosting the Without Sanctuary lynching exhibition this fall; I know of no exhibition that more fully and powerfully engages with a dark history than that one. But from what I can tell, including from the magazine’s own write-up, the Museum’s own exhibits are similarly willing to engage in compelling and complex terms with other regional histories, from sharecropping and segregation to the challenges and triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. I’m sure that it also includes more celebratory exhibits; but even there—if the central permanent exhibit, Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers, is any indication—the Museum works to include divisive and tragic histories alongside the more positive or unifying ones, and asks its visitors to consider how all of those disparate but interconnected stories come together to form this one community. The more museums that can offer that to Americans, the better!

Next magazine-inspired story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Takes on the Levine Museum? Other impressive museums you’d highlight?  

10/1 Memory Day nominee: Daniel Boorstin, the towering historian and Librarian of Congress whose pioneering and influential scholarly works include The Americans trilogy and three comprehensive volumes of world historical writing.