January 8, 2013: American Homes, Part Two

[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series will highlight some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. Add your responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas for the weekend post, please!]

On the utterly fictional, vaguely uncomfortable, and unquestionably compelling homes created by the father of American music.

I’m not sure how many 21^st century Americans know his name, but I’d guarantee that most of us can still sing (or at least hum) along to one or more of the melodies composed by Stephen Foster (1826-1864). Maybe the silly but mournful “Oh! Susanna” remains the most popular; perhaps it’s the upbeat excitement of “Camptown Races”; or the tender, idealized love of “Beautiful Dreamer.” It’s likely in any case that the specific contexts for these tunes have been almost entirely lost; I doubt many who sing the first two, for example, know that they began as minstrel songs, with their lyrics written in the dialect of African American slaves in the antebellum era (or at least Foster’s approximation of the same). And that same two-sided point, popularity on the one hand yet complex and uncomfortable contexts on the other, extends doubly to Foster’s two most formally sanctioned songs: “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night.”

I call those two songs formally sanctioned because each is still, more than 150 years after its composition, an official state song: “Old Folks,” with its nostalgic embrace of life upon Florida’s “Sewanee river,” has been Florida’s official state song since 1935; while “Kentucky,” obviously, serves as that state’s official state song. I call their contexts complex and uncomfortable partly because both were also composed as minstrel songs in slave dialect, with lyrics that have had to be revised in recent years in order to ameliorate controversy and protest: the African American speaker of “Old Folks” finds himself “still longing for de old plantation”; while the second line of “Kentucky” establishes our setting as “summer, [when] the darkies are gay.” But perhaps even more strange is that the nostalgia of each song is entirely fictional, both in their specifics and in their overarching preference for Southern life; Foster was born in Pennsylvania, lived in New York for most of his tragically brief life, and never set foot in either Kentucky or Florida (he only visited the South once, on a steamboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans).

In terms of American cultural and literary history, Foster’s nostalgic embrace of a South he had never known foreshadowed the local color movement known as the plantation tradition, many of the practitioners of which were likewise northerners. But I would also say that it’s worth engaging more broadly with this kind of communal, created nostalgia: a constructed yet still compelling embrace of homes that never actually existed yet that exercise a significant hold on our national imagination nonetheless. How much of what we mean by “America,” in our narratives and images and popular usage, depends on a similar kind of communal, created nostalgia? And while partly that idea can be a divisive one—connected for example to what the Tea Partiers mean by “I want my country back”—I believe that it’s also a unifying and shared concept, and that even recent immigrants can and do often embrace this kind of constructed image of our communal “home.” There’s nothing necessarily wrong that—not if it can help create a unified national community—but at the very least, it’s worth asking what about such constructed images of home appeals to us so much; wondering why, that is, we still sing along to those songs.

Next home connections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight?

January 7, 2013: American Homes, Part One

[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series will highlight some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. Add your responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas for the weekend post, please!]

On the promise and perils of returning home after many years away.

The romance of traveling abroad, and finding ourselves anew (or perhaps finding new selves) there, forms a common trope in our national narratives. That’s particularly true, I’d say, of our images of artists and authors, as exemplified by the Roaring ‘20s expatriates whose European journeys continue to fascinate us (see Woody Allen’s engagement with them in the recent Midnight in Paris). We tend to engae much less frequently, however, with the other side of that coin: with what it means when such travelers return to their American homes. Literary and cultural critic Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934) offers a particularly rich and complex examination of what that experience of return meant for those 20s expatriates, and more exactly of both the hopes and the fears that those Americans felt as they made their way back to their home.

Even more telling, and at the same time substantially stranger and more surprising, are James Fenimore Cooper’s contemporaneous, interconnected, yet dueling fictional representations of the same experience. In 1826, at the height of his first literary successes, Cooper took a job as a US consul and moved his family to France, where he remained, traveling through Europe and continuing to write, for the next seven years. When he and they returned to America, and to his childhood and lifelong home of Cooperstown, in 1833, he found the place after those years away at once familiar and yet changed, nostalgically comforting and yet threateningly foreign. Some of those shifts were in the community (Jacksonian Democracy was in full force, and the nation was indeed changing), while some were in Cooper himself (in his more mature and elite status, in his European-influence d perspective, and more). And as he did throughout his prolific career, Cooper responded to his experiences and the world around him by writing novels, in this case two that he published in the same year: Homeward Bound; or, The Chase: A Tale of the Sea (1838) and Home as Found (1838).

The latter novel was subtitled “Sequel to Homeward Bound,” and indeed the two works feature many of the same central characters. Yet on the other hand they feel hugely and interestingly distinct. Partly those are differences in genre and setting: the former is a seafaring adventure that takes its characters to multiple exotic destinations; the latter a comedy of manners set entirely in homes and social settings within New York York and Templeton (Cooper’s fictionalized Cooperstown). But the differences in tone go beyond those elements, and reflect some of the disappointment suggested by the phrase as Found, the gap between the idea of home (toward which the characters ostensibly move throughout Homeward Bound, although in reality they adventure around the world) and the reality of what is encountered when it is reached. That gap is perhaps inevitable for anyone returning home, especially after years away; but it’s also complex and troubling, given the importance that our homes hold in our identities and psyches throughout our lives. In any case, such experiences are likely universal, and Cooper’s novels, like Cowley’s book, can help us understand and engage with them in our own lives.

Next home connections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight?

January 5-6, 2013: Crowd-Sourcing our Biggest Issues

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ve highlighted four of the biggest and suggested a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Everybody was apparently still too hung over to add their crowd-sourced responses and thoughts, but I’m still gonna put this post up, and hope that you’ll share some of yours in the comments. Thanks in advance, and let’s make this a truly American, in the best senses, 2013!]

Next series begins Monday,

Ben

PS. What would you add to these thoughts?

January 4, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: Poverty

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the hugely difficult, and equally crucial, step we need to take if we are to address our most desperate American lives and circumstances.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have a hard time wrapping my own head around, much less writing about or teaching, the depths of poverty in which so many Americans have lived throughout our national existence and continue to live today. That difficulty is at least a bit ironic, since as a professor of (among other things) Ethnic American Literature I spend quite a bit of time teaching and writing about authors and communities whose American identities and experiences are, despite shared and core similarities for which I will argue until my last breath, quite distinct from my own in many ways. And yet while I would never claim to be able to speak for what a Frederick Douglass, a Sarah Winnemucca, a Gloria Anzaldúa experienced or lived, it is for whatever reason with significantly more hesitation still that I write about the identities and worlds of those (of any race or ethnicity, any gender, any community) in the American underclass.

Part of the reason, I think, is that it’s so hard, for those of us who have been fortunate enough not to experience poverty in our own lives and who likewise have not in our professional careers engaged in any specific or experiential way with these harshest economic realities, not to speak in abstractions or generalities, not to lapse into politics or sociology. There’s no one surefire way to counter that tendency, short of going to live for a month at a homeless shelter or the equivalent (and even then, it seems to me that living in poverty as an experiment is as different from living in it as a swimming pool is from the Pacific); but certainly it helps, from an AmericanStudies perspective at least, to turn to those American authors and artists and reformers who have worked to depict with particular sensitivity and accuracy these most desperate and difficult conditions and existences. And near the top of that list by any measure has to be the Danish American reformer, journalist, and photographer Jacob Riis (1849-1914), and most especially his complex but indispensable masterwork How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890).

Riis, who immigrated to the US at the age of 21 and worked for many years as a journeyman laborer, experiencing significant poverty in his own right, before making his way into the newspaper trade, is a worthy nominee for the Hall of American Inspiration for sure. He was a pioneer of the use of flash photography in America, was one of the first muckraking social journalists and a model for many Progressive writers of the next generation, and fought for poor and working Americans and for relevant necessary urban causes and reforms throughout his career and life. But even if he were only to be remembered for Other Half, it should be sufficient to ensure him a place in our national narratives and histories. The book is not without its flaws, most especially in its stereotyping portrayals of ethnic minorities such as the Chinese. But in its incredible depth and density of detail, its painstaking accuracy about places and living conditions (including extensive sketches and layouts produced on site by Riis), its use of photographs to ground that work in images as well as words more than in any prior American text, and, perhaps most impressively, in Riis’s ability to push past whatever generalities and images and narratives existed in his own head about these communities and lives and to engage with and represent the realities of their existences on their own terms (again, not for every community with equal success, but for most of those on which he focuses), the book stands alone, in its own era and in many ways into the century and a quarter that has followed.

I can’t pretend to know much of what it means to be part of the “other half” in 2013, but I can do the best I can to remember and understand and (ideally and crucially) empathize with those lives; and Riis remains a very meaningful voice in that process.

Ben

PS. Crowd-sourced post this weekend, so one more time: what do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?

January 3, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: Education Reform

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the two simple and crucial truths about education that AmericanStudying can help us remember.

As anyone who has read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011) can attest, the policies of accountability, testing, and school choice—cornerstones of educational reform for the last decade plus—have largely failed. It’s not quite as straightforward as that, of course; but Ravitch, herself one of the chief architects of those policies before extensive experience and evidence convinced her of their problems and limitations, dismantles No Child Left Behind and its many corollary concepts pretty thoroughly. To my mind, the much more difficult question is where we go from there, how education reform can move away from those models and toward something new and hopefully better. Ravitch has some ideas, of course; President Obama’s Race to the Top program represents some other possibilities; and the coming years will see many more suggestions, I’m sure.

I don’t pretend to be equipped to argue educational policy, although I would always come back to something I’ve addressed in this space on multiple occasions: universal preschool. But beyond the specific and evolving questions of policy lie some basic truths about education that I feel sometimes get lost in the shuffle, and there I believe AmericanStudying can help remind us of what’s most important. For one thing, some of the most compelling American memoirs include passages that highlight the immense and inspiring power of education, its ability to offer hope in even the most desperate and difficult circumstances. From Frederick Douglass secretly learning to read and write as a slave on the streets of Baltimore to Richard Wright forging a library card and checking out classics from a Mississippi library, Mary Antin feeling like an American for the first time in her elementary school classes to Richard Rodriguez challenging his parents on the importance of learning English, and so many similar moments, these American lives were profoundly changed by the chance to become a student in the fundamental and significant sense. Remembering that basic and crucial fact, of the shared promise of education for all American children, itself becomes an argument for universal preschool, for focusing on improving the conditions and possibilities in every classroom and for every student, for keeping students (not institutions, not accountability, not outcomes) at the heart of every policy choice.

There are various ways we can keep our focus on students, but I would argue that the most effective entails remembering and supporting the other most important part of every educational moment: the teacher. AmericanStudying reminds us that behind many of the most influential and inspiring Americans we can find the contributions of an impressive teacher: Annie Sullivan, the “Miracle Worker” who taught Helen Keller; William James, whose Harvard mentorship helped W.E.B. Du Bois achieve his full potential; Ella Baker, who mentored many of the Civil Rights movement’s leaders and activists; and so many other American educators and mentors, including those in my own AmericanStudying life (and, I’m quite sure, yours). Far from worrying so much about holding public educators “accountable,” much less critiquing them as so many of our current narratives do, it seems to me we should focus on empowering them as best we can to do their crucial job, and then getting out of their way. Who knows where the next Sullivan, James, or Baker is working with her or his Keller, Du Bois, or Martin Luther King, Jr.—and where some extra funding for resources, some professional training, some parental input and support, some communal encouragement could provide these inspiring teachers and students with the push they need?

Next big issue tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?

January 2, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: The Debt

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how AmericanStudying can help us understand the importance of responding to the dominant narratives about our current fiscal bogeyman.

I’m deeply sympathetic to those who argue that the national debt is significantly less of a problem, particularly in a time of economic downturn, than our current narratives indicate. Besides my own perspective, that opinion is shared by multiple voices I trust in our current political and social climate: smart and rational bloggers like Digby and David Atkins; influential and brilliant economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich; and even the American Studies Association, whose 2013 annual conference’s main theme will focus on ways to move “Beyond the Logic of Debt.” Again, I share that perspective in many ways—but as someone with a strong interest in the history of national narratives, I have to admit that I’m pretty uneasy about deploying a narrative that was expressed most succinctly and overtly by none other than Dick Cheney: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”

Moreover, even if I were comfortable sharing the same spectrum—or universe—of thought with Dick, AmericanStudying reminds me of a crucial reason to engage more fully with our collective concerns about the debt: a desire to take care of future generations, to leave them with a world better and stronger than our own. Such a desire is perhaps the most consistent and core element of the American Dream, and illustrates why a tragedy like the Newtown elementary school shooting resonantes with all Americans more deeply than any other parallel such event (horrific as they have always been). Even more signficantly, many of our most inspiring and influential advocates and campaigns for social change and progress have depended precisely on appeal to that shared and collective desire—as exemplified most poignantly by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a better future for his and all American children. To downplay these concerns about the world we leave subsequent generations is thus to deny core aspects of what has both defined America and helped us move toward our ideals.

At the same time, such narratives of debt and the future provide an opportunity to talk about our communal priorities, and on this note too AmericanStudying can provide inspiring examples. Whatever your political position on Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, it’s hard to disagree that they were developed, at a time of economic crisis and fear, in response to precisely such questions of priorities: the programs demonstrate an explicit emphasis on the public arts, on infrastructure and energy, on providing steady and constructive jobs to as many Americans as possible and rebuilding national spaces in the process. On the other hand, we can look to more recent history, and specifically to how the George W. Bush administration entered office with a substantial surplus and quickly spent it all on the largest tax cut in national history, to illustrate the pursuit of a very different set of priorities in response to federal and governmental economic circumstances. Each case, like every other and like our own moment, is specific and demands its own analysis—but what they reveal in sum is the significance of making overt our conversations about our communal priorities, and about how we respond to federal debt and surplus, deficit and boom, through their lens.

Next big issue tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?

January 1, 2013: AmericanStudying our Biggest Issues: Climate Change

[As this new year gets underway, America and the world are confronted by some pretty huge ongoing issues and crises. One reason I want to be a public AmericanStudies scholar is that I believe AmericanStudying can help us understand and engage with precisely such contemporary questions. So this week, I’ll be highlighting four of the biggest and suggesting a few ways AmericanStudies can help us deal with them. Your thoughts, on these issues and on any others, will be very welcome for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how a few important and inspiring AmericanStudiers would suggest we respond to the most long-term yet most pressing world crisis.

“Simplify, simplify.” Those words and that message are at the heart of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)—of Chapter 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”; and of the purpose and message of Thoreau’s time at the pond and book about the experience. It’s true that Thoreau wasn’t nearly as alone in his cabin as his book sometimes suggests—that he went to town and received visitors from there, that he depended on some help from his parents, that he was social as well as solitary during his Transcendental sojourn. But far from making Thoreau or the book hypocritical, as has sometimes been suggested, those facts make him and it more human and genuine and inspiring—represent his lived experience and demonstrate his attempt to wed that experience to ideals of simplicity and reconnection with the natural world. If we’re going to change the way we live in this 21^st century moment, Thoreau would argue, it’s going to have to start with simplifying and reconnecting for sure.

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” So pioneering naturalist, conservationist, and author John Muir once noted in his journals (collected in this wonderful 1938 book, John of the Mountains). Muir is often described as a founding father of the National Park movement—or at least as sharing that honor with Teddy Roosevelt, since Muir died before the National Park Service was created—and there’s a good deal of truth to that designation. But even truer would be the recognition that for Muir, there’s no meaningful individual life, no communal American identity, and perhaps no world period that doesn’t include engagement with, respect for, and preservation of our natural spaces. Preserving, appreciating, and venturing into the wilderness isn’t, by itself, nearly enough to reverse or even impact climate change, of course. But the more we move into the wilderness in our individual lives—and the more we allow it to move into all of our perspectives—the more, Muir would argue, we can connect to the most universal and crucial human questions.

“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.” So wrote environmental activist, scientist, and author Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), one of the 20^th century’s and America’s most prescient and salient works. Carson’s specific attention to the dangers of pesticides, and similar environmental hazards, had in her era and have continued to have significant, lasting, and very beneficial effects. But when it comes to her most overarching message, her concerns over the path of progress and where it is taking us, we have been far less able to hear and respond. Doing so won’t be easy, not only because of inertia and momentum, but also because progress and development most certainly have their own positive and beneficial impacts on the world and those who live in it. But at the very least, Carson would insist, we must examine every aspect of our world, and recognize that in a significant number of cases we will have to move away from easy or attractive ideas (see: fracking) in order to travel on the harder but more sustainable road.

All voices we must hear, it seems to me. Next big issue tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?