December 11, 2012: Fireside Reads, Part Two

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ll be highlighting authors and books that fit that bill. Add your own nominees for Fireside Reads for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post and help us all stay warm and cozy, won’t you?]

On an author and book that will introduce you to under-narrated American histories—and grab your heart in the process.

One of my bigger pet peeves in the dominant narratives of American history is the notion that multi-national and –ethnic immigration has been a relatively recent phenomenon, or at least that it has been most pronounced in the last few decades. It’s true that the 1965 Immigration Act, the first immigration law that opened up rather than closed down immigration for various groups and nationalities, led directly to certain significant waves, especially those from war-torn Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. And it is also true that certain ethnic groups represented particularly sizeable percentages of the immigrants in the last decades of the 20^th century: Asian Americans, again, and also Hispanic and West Indian immigrants. None of those facts are insignificant, and our understanding of America in the 1970s and 80s (for example) needs to include them in a prominent place. But my issue is with the very different notion that America prior to 1965 didn’t include immigrants from these nations (an idea advanced in its most overt form, for example, by Pat Buchanan in an editorial after the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, which he blamed on the shooter’s status as the son of South Korean immigrants).

Multicultural historian Ronald Takaki notes this belief in the introduction to his magisterial A Different Mirror, recounting a conversation when a cab-driver asks him how long he has been in the US, and he has to reply that his family has been here for over 100 years. While the most obvious and widespread problem with this belief is that it makes it much easier to define members of these groups as less American than others, I would argue that another very significant downside is that it enables us to more easily forget or ignore the stories of earlier such immigrants; that group would include Yung Wing, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (on whom see yesterday’s post), Sui Sin Far, and my focus for today, the Filipino-American novelist, poet, and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan came to the United States in 1930 at the age of 17 (or so, his birthdate is a bit fuzzy), and only lived another 26 years, but in that time he worked literally hundreds of different jobs up and down the West Coast, agitated on behalf of migrant and impoverished laborers and citizens during and after the Depression, published various poems and short stories (and wrote many others that remained unpublished upon his far too early death), and wrote the autobiographical, complex, and deeply moving novel, America is in the Heart (1946).

For the most part the book—which is certainly very autobiographical but apparently includes many fictionalized characters, hence my designation of it as a novel (in the vein of something like On the Road or The Bell-Jar)—paints an incredibly bleak picture of its multiple, interconnected worlds: of migrant laborers; of the lower and working classes in the Depression; and of Filipino-American immigrants. In the first two focal points, and especially in its tone, which mixes bleak psychological realism with strident social criticism, Bulosan’s book certainly echoes (or at least parallels, since it is difficult to know if Bulosan had read the earlier work) and importantly complements The Grapes of Wrath. But despite that tone, its ultimate trajectory is surprisingly and powerfully hopeful—that’s true partly because of the opening chapters, which are set in Bulosan’s native Philippines and make it much more difficult to see the book’s America as an entirely bleak place; but mostly because of the evocative concluding chapter, where Bulosan develops at length his title’s argument for the continuing and defining existence of a more ideal America, in the very hearts of all those seemingly least advantaged Americans on whom his book has focused. The idea might sound clichéd, but all I can say—and the echo of Reading Rainbow is conscious—is “Read the book”; it works, and works beautifully.

Next Winter Read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. You know what to do—nominations for Winter Reads, please!

12/11 Memory Day nominee: George Mason!

December 10, 2012: Fireside Reads, Part One

[Earlier this year, I featured a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. But winter calls for something different—longer, denser works with which you can settle in by the fire for the long winter’s night. So this week I’ll be highlighting authors and books that fit that bill. Add your own nominees for Fireside Reads for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post and help us all stay warm and cozy, won’t you?]

On two sprawling novels that’ll take you very far into other American settings—and our shared history.

Both Charlottesville, Virginia (where I spent my first 18 years of life) and the Northeast (where I’ve spent the subsequent 17) are, in their own ways, pretty diverse—Charlottesville first in its heavily bi-racial community and then second in all the communities and cultures that the University of Virginia brings to town (and third, more and more since I left, in all the refugee and migrant communities that have come as well); and the Northeast (Boston and Philly specifically) in most every way that big urban American centers are in this 21^st century moment. Yet for various but interconnected reasons, I would argue that both places allow their present inhabitants to imagine a relatively stable and static, Anglo-centric, English-speaking local and (at least implicitly) national starting point and past, and then to add other racial and ethnic groups and cultures onto that imagined point of origin: Virginia’s narrative begins with Jamestown and John Smith, Boston’s with the Puritans, Philly’s with William Penn and the Quakers, that sort of thing.

Having spent almost all of my life in those places, it has thus come as a particularly significant and much-appreciated shock when I have traveled to places where it is literally impossible not to recognize a much more multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and even multi-lingual American past and point of origin. No place in our country forces that recognition more than New Orleans, but I think the whole Southwest is similarly impossible to narrate without locating Mexican and Native Americans alongside European/Anglo ones at every moment. And it’s thus no coincidence that two of the most multi-lingual and –vocal American novels center on precisely those two settings, although it is at least somewhat coincidental that they were published within only a few years of one another: George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1881) and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885). Cable’s multi-generational novel of New Orleans in the years after the Louisiana Purchase features almost as many languages and dialects as it does main characters; for example, its central perspective character is a German-American immigrant who befriends a white New Orleans doctor, a Creole street artist, and a mixed-race businessman within the first few chapters, and then falls in love with a French Creole girl who is lifelong friends with an African American slave (I could go on, but you get the idea). Burton’s novel focuses in a bit more specifically, on a couple of families (one Mexican-American, one Anglo-American) in a California dealing with (among other things) the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, gradual annexation into the United States, and continued battles between Mexican-American landowners, Anglo-American arrivals, the US army, and Native Americans over the region’s land; despite the somewhat shorter list of main characters, that plethora of contexts forces Burton to include a wide range of voices, including ones that speak English, Spanish, a mixture of both, and a number of Native languages (all, as with Cable, partly translated and partly reproduced in various dialect forms).

Both novels are huge and far from perfect in structure or style—both rely heavily on love triangles and sentimental romance, for example, to drive their plots and bring their culturally and linguistically divided and even opposed characters and communities together. And we’re talking 19^th-century love triangles and romance; which is to say, neither book would qualify for the Beach Read series. But the things that make them difficult and long-winded also make them so American and so great, and at the top of that list would be their very multi-vocality, their inclusion of so many languages and voices and stories and perspectives to construct these communities (past and present) that are at the heart of our national identity. Both do so in part to force their audiences to engage with some of the darkest realities of America’s history: “the shadow of the African,” as one of Cable’s mixed-race characters defines it; the legacy of land theft and cultural discrimination and abuse; and many others. Yet both also believe in and embody the ways in which listening to each other’s voices and stories, languages and experiences, can precisely connect across our divided communities and cultures, and create more truly United States as a result.

Next Winter Reads tomorrow,

Ben

PS. You know what to do—nominations for Winter Reads, please!

12/10 Memory Day nominee: Emily Dickinson!

December 8-9, 2012: Lincoln, Culture, and History

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ve been blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues), which led up to Friday’s Pearl Harbor-centered post. I’d still love any and all responses to those posts or any related themes, but wanted to share as well my thoughts on the current film that has prompted many parallel discussions in the last few weeks.]

My take on the film that has every AmericanStudier talking.

I can’t say that I have a ton to add to the interesting and evolving conversations about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. For one thing, some of our most talented and compelling public scholars and historians have already weighed in: see for this example the exchanges compiled by Ta-Nehisi Coates here; or the many posts and responses on Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory blog. I can’t recommend strongly enough that anyone interested in the film and in the questions of how it represents Lincoln, the Civil War, African Americans, and history check out those conversations, and the many spaces and voices to which they link. And to be honest, whatever my own merits as a public AmericanStudier, I have in this case one glaring flaw compared to all those voices: I haven’t seen the film yet!

So I can’t—or at least shouldn’t, because god knows us academics are more than capable of analyzing things we haven’t actually seen but should try to resist that urge whenever possible—speak to the film’s specific choices and details. I can say that I was very excited to learn that Ely Parker shows up, played by a first-time Native American actor; but subsequently disappointed to find out that he apparently has no lines and only stands behind Ulysses S. Grant in a few scenes. I suppose that detail could be said to represent in miniature the critique of the film articulated most famously by historian Kate Masur, both in New York Times op-eds and on Coates’ blog: that it includes minority characters (specifically African Americans in her critique) but does so more as background than in the leading roles they often took in the era’s social and political movements and progress. Obviously no film can do or include everything, but just as Masur wishes for even individual lines or details that could point to such active roles for characters already present in the film (like Mrs. Lincoln’s attendant Elizabeth Keckley), so too would I love the thought of Ely Parker having even a couple lines through which to represent his amazing American life and perspective.

But if we leave aside questions of what the film does and doesn’t include (on which, again, I defer in any case to those who have seen it—if you have, add your take below, please!), these conversations have also raised for me a broader issue that I wanted to highlight and on which I would also love to hear your takes, fellow AmericanStudiers. That question, which Coates himself raises in the above-linked post with which he concludes the week’s roundtable, has to do with the effects and influences of a historical film like Lincoln. Coates argues briefly for (or at least wonders aloud about) one possibility, a positive end of the spectrum, in which a film like this prompts further conversation, additional films, new voices and emphases, ongoing investigations and researches, and so on. Since such further response is one of the central goals of my own public AmericanStudying, I certainly love that idea. But I also worry about the opposite end of the spectrum—that a successful and impressive work such as Spielberg’s film can become a main source of interpretation and thus ultimately of history for many Americans, shutting down more than (or at least as much as) it opens up in our narratives and understandings of our history and identity. It’s not either-or, but these are two hugely distinct, and in many ways opposed, effects that a towering historical work can produce—and obviously each would mean very different things in terms of the exclusions or absences that worry historians such as Masur.

So what do you think? What’s your take on the film, specifically, in terms of these broader questions of effect and influence, or on any other level? Would love to hear ‘em!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

12/8 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two unique, witty, and very talented 20^th century cultural figures, James Thurber and Sammy Davis, Jr.

12/9 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Emmett Kelly, perhaps America’s most famous clown and one of the only ones to wed that art to social commentary; and John Cassavetes, one of the godfathers of independent cinema and a truly original American artist.

December 7, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Five

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ve been blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That has led up to this Pearl Harbor-centered post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.

Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7^th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.”  We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pear Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11^th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.

In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian and educator Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11^th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, the Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). The White House statement hyperlinked at “National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day” in the intro section above illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So last chance—what do you think? Thoughts on these issues and questions, on any of the week’s posts, or on any related themes for that crowd-sourced post?

12/7 Memory Day nominee: Willa Cather, for her Nebraska trilogy to be sure, but for a career’s worth of equally unique, impressive, and enduring American stories.

December 6, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Four

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

On a childhood building models, and what they can help us understand.

I’m not sure exactly when it started, but by the time I was in middle school I was seriously into model-building. I know that I constructed some trucks, a few planes, maybe the occasional car, but the vast majority of the models I built were of naval ships. I distinctly remember a box in our upstairs bathroom full of those completed steel-gray models—battleships, cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, PT boats, troop carriers and amphibious landers, you name it and I had at least a few in my assembled fleet. The hobby hasn’t continued into my adult years (although I look forward to making some models with my boys, and especially my very careful and mechanically minded older son), but I’m sure that the skills it helped me hone—reading and following directions, precision, patience—have come with me into lots of other aspects of my life and identity.

Yet as I think back on those model ships, I have to admit that I don’t know that they communicated much at all about the complex realities of their uses, their histories, the battles and conflicts in which they participated. Obviously they weren’t necessarily designed to do so—or at least I’ve never encountered a plastic model that comes with any way to represent the effects of explosions, of aeriel bombardment or ship-to-ship combat, or the like—and there’s no reason why they would have to; there are plenty of other ways for interested young people to learn about war, after all. But you could make the case, and I think I might be inclined to agree, that in the absence of any such contexts and complications, military models can help convey ideals of war as a purely exciting and noble pursuit, something that every young person can imagine participating in heroically. For one of the most clear and compelling accounts of such youthful ideals and what they can produce, I can’t recommend strongly enough Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976).

I remember one model that was very different, though. That was a model of the beachhead at Tarawa (that’s not the one I had, but it’s not dissimilar), the Pacific Island which became the site of one of World War II’s most horrific and destructive battles. The model of course couldn’t convey every detail of the battle, but it did a couple of things that were distinct from the ships: it forced me to consider the experiences and lives (and deaths) of the individual soldiers I was putting down on the beachhead; and it inspired me to investigate the battle I was assembling, and so to learn about the U.S. casualties, the Japanese defenders who literally fought to the last man to hold the island, and so on. Doing so didn’t stop me from working on those other kinds of models, but it did make it much harder for me to entirely ignore or elide the contexts—or, more exactly, the defining realities—of the Pacific Theater, of World War II, and of war in general. That’s a perspective worth modeling, I’d say.

Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on modeling or other connectinos to war, or on any related themes for the weekend post?

12/6 Memory Day nominee: Ira Gershwin, who with his brother and partner George contributed some of America’s most memorable and enduring songs and musicals.

December 5, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Three

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded World War II films.

Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more in common than just their Pacific Theater settings. Or at least they have one pretty obvious and striking thing in common: each uses a huge and star-studded cast to capture a wide range of soldier and officer experiences within its focal battle. Midway features Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Erik Estrada (among others!); Line includes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing of the equally big-name actors, such as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by Malick during editing). When it comes to cast size and scope, the two films are similarly old-school epics to be sure.

The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see: long, long shots of waving grass and the like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in which the films were made and the distinct genres in which they could be classified. For example, Midway makes significant use of stock footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial battles and from numerous other films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film features no such footage. That’s partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footage was still somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they experience those events; whereas in Line individual characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be quickly shown before we get back to the characters.

To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films break down along the “period fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I delineated in this post. As I noted there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual works—it would be silly to claim that Midway could be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one important way or another; and some of Line’s key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind about its star-studded cast, and the individual characters they create and interactions they portray; while Line’s famously haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees those individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While that distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex and interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching both provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray war.

Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on either or both of these films, or on any related themes for the weekend post?

12/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two titanic 20^th century cultural icons and influences, Walt Disney and Little Richard.

December 4, 2012: AmericanStudying the Pacific, Part Two

[In this week that culminates in National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I’ll be blogging about different aspects of how we remember World War II’s Pacific Theater (and related issues). That’ll lead up to a Pearl Harbor-centered Friday post. Please share your thoughts on these topics, World War II, memories of war, or any related themes for the weekend post!]

Trying to make sense of the two very different, and even opposed, public roles served by San Diego’s most unique historic site.

Floating in San Diego’s harbor, just a few hundred yards away from the city’s downtown, is a hugely singular and compelling public space: the U.S.S. Midway, a formerly operational aircraft carrier that has (since 2004) served as a naval and aviation museum. The museum offers visitors at least three distinct visions into the lives of naval sailors and aviators: on the flight deck, a number of actual planes and helicopters, many of which the visitors can sit in; in the hangar beneath (alongside a few more planes), flight simulators and other re-creations of piloting and wartime experiences; and below-decks, an elaborately preserved and re-created vision of everyday life aboard the carrier for its officers, aviators, and sailors. My boys were particularly struck by the laundry room, with loads of fake clothes tumbling in the giant washers and dryers, and detailed depictions of the sailors whose job it was to carry the hundred-pound bags of laundry around the ship.

That laundry room illustrates what is to my mind the most significant and inspiring public role of the Midway museum: to help 21^st century visitors understand the experiences and identities of those men and women who served aboard the carrier and its many sister ships, at all times but most especially during times of war. As I wrote in my first Veteran’s Day post (in analysis of the post-World War II film The Best Years of Our Lives), when it comes to American Studiers and our connections to the American past, there are few acts of empathy more important than such understandings of what the experiences of war and military service have entailed; obviously such experiences are hugely varied, both in different periods/wars and for different individuals, but nonetheless a museum like the Midway offers a very striking and effective means to create those connections with past servicemen and women. I’ve visited a number of battlefields and other wartime historic sites, and would rank the Midway (and particularly its below-decks exhibits) among the most effective such connection-creators I’ve encountered.

There’s another side to that connection, though, and it’s one that is to my mind much less historical and more propagandistic. On the Midway I found it illustrated most succinctly by the placard in front of one of the flight deck planes; the placard was describing the plane’s role during the Vietnam War, and noted that it was frequently used for “close-in bombing” in the war’s later stages. Which is to say, although the placard was careful not to say this: these bombers almost certainly participated in President Nixon’s often secret, likely illegal, and thoroughly despicable carpet-bombing campaigns of Cambodia and Laos; even if they didn’t, they most likely dropped napalm and other weapons of mass deconstruction indiscriminately on North Vietnamese villages. Such bombings are quite possibly, as I wrote in my post on Dresden, an inevitable part of war; but that inevitability does not in any way elide their horrific brutality, and it most definitely did not make me view the plane being connected to such bombings with anything other than horror. But in the context of the Midway, with its stated motto of “Live the Adventure, Honor the Legend,” Vietnam and its bombing raids are folded into that adventurous, honorable, legendary history—which is perhaps just as disturbing as the bombings themselves.

A multifaceted, complex, and vital American Studies, public historic site for sure! Next Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on the Midway, on historic sites, or on any related themes for the weekend post?

12/4 Memory Day nominee: Cornell Woolrich, the crime and suspense novelist known as the father of noir, not only for his books but for the many influential films that came from them.