March 13, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: My Panel on Nostalgia & the 50s

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

On three takeaways from Vaughn Joy’s excellent panel on “nostalgic extremism” on which I was lucky enough to speak.

1)      The Compelling Concept: I’ve thought a lot over the last decade or so about the role that nostalgia plays in contemporary political narratives like “I want my country back!” and “Make America Great Again,” and since my dissertation/first book my most defining overarching scholarly interest has been in our collective visions of the past. But there’s always more to think about and add into my sense of these topics, and Vaughn’s concept of nostalgic extremism represents a particularly well-developed and helpful perspective on those questions, especially when it comes to idealized visions of the 1950s specifically in late 20^th & early 21^st century American culture and society. I look forward to spending a lot more time diving into all the ways this concept can help illuminate both individual cultural works, broader social and political debates, and our overall narratives of past and present alike.

2)      My Complex Connection: For this panel, I applied that concept to an analysis of my favorite film, John Sayles’ masterpiece Lone Star (1996; SPOILERS in that hyperlinked post, as there were in my NeMLA talk as well). Most of the flashbacks at the heart of Sayles’ 1990s film focus on 1950s histories, and more exactly on an extremely nostalgically celebrated figure from that earlier era, Sheriff Buddy Deeds. But as I thought about what this new concept could help me analyze in this most-familiar film, I realized that (without getting into as many spoilers here) what its protagonist Sam Deeds learns about his father and the past both challenge some nostalgic myths yet also make the case for embracing others if they can help protect more vulnerable members of the community. Which is to say, I’d argue that there are distinct varieties of nostalgia, like patriotism, and that some are likewise more critical and constructive than others.

3)      Our Continuing Conversations: Besides Vaughn as chair and my talk, the panel also featured two other papers, William Magrino on the Back to the Future films and Eleanor Rambo on the 21^st century Russian musical (about a 1950s subculture) Stylyagi. Each offered a unique lens on the 50s, nostalgia, and late 20^th and early 21^st century cultural works, but what was most interesting to me was the way that all three of our papers, as well as Vaughn’s concept and introduction, intersected around questions of where and how we can trace as well as challenge idealized visions of the past, from a fictional suburban community like Hill Valley to the unique and striking Russian trend known as “bone records” to the connections between familial and civic myths in Sayles’ film. As I’ve thought about throughout my career, narratives of the past are created and challenged in specific cultural conversations, and this panel helped me and all of us think through particular versions of that trend.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?

March 12, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: NeMLA Reads Together

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

On two takeaways from the latest example of a wonderful communal endeavor.

Almost exactly four years ago, I wrote a NeMLA reflection post highlighting the first iteration of the organization’s then-newest conference idea, NeMLA Reads Together (which that year featured Andre Dubus III and his book Gone So Long). Before I say a couple things about this year’s Read and author, I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back.

Welcome back! This year’s NeMLA Reads Together book was Land of Love and Drowning (2014), the debut novel from our keynote address speaker Tiphanie Yanique. Land of Love and Drowning is a wonderful example of one of my very favorite genres: a multigenerational family novel, spanning decades in the lives of (in this case) a family on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Many of the novels I’ve read in that genre could be described as social realism, but while Yanique’s certainly includes those layers, it also features more supernatural elements in a prominent and particularly powerful role (putting in conversation with another great multigenerational Caribbean American novel from a now frustratingly fraught author, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [2008]). I’ll have to think more about how I’d analyze those supernatural elements, and look forward to the chance to do so while teaching Yanique’s novel at some point; but I know they added something striking and meaningful to her work in this familiar literary genre.

The most important benefit of the NeMLA Reads Together initiative is not just the chance to have and read this shared text ahead of the conference, wonderful as that opportunity is. It’s also and especially the opportunity to follow up that collective reading by hearing from the author at the conference, in this special keynote address. As illustrated by countless interviews like this one on Land of Love and Drowning with Noreen Tomassi of Brooklyn’s Center for Fiction, Yanique is a thoughtful and compelling voice far beyond her fiction, one who can connect her formal, stylistic, and genre choices to thematic questions of place and community, culture and heritage, the history of the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean, spirituality, and more. To hear directly from such a voice offers distinct yet complementary pleasures and inspirations to reading their work, and I came away from Yanique’s talk as moved and inspired as I’ve been from every NeMLA Reads Together author and work alike.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?

March 11, 2024: NeMLA Reflections: Opening Address

[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]

On three important layers to opening speaker Dr. Rickie Solinger’s public scholarly work.

1)      Books: Like every scholarly keynote speaker I’ve ever encountered at NeMLA, Dr. Solinger brought a long and prolific publishing career with her to that podium. In this case, that career has centered on a range of different publications tracing the history and significance of reproductive politics in the United States, from monographs like Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (1992) and The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (2019) to textbooks like Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (2017, co-authored with Loretta Ross). We can’t talk about reproductive politics in our own moment without engaging with those multilayered histories and issues, and Dr. Solinger’s publications offer a great starting point for that work.

2)      Exhibitions: As I know everyone reading this blog would agree with, scholarly publications are far from the only way to get our voices and ideas to audiences and into our conversations, and in her work as a curator Dr. Solinger has also consistently done so through another medium: museum exhibitions, both installed and traveling. A great example is 2013’s Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States, a traveling exhibition which as that write-up describes featured five mixed-media installations that offered a variety of ways to present the voices, perspectives, identities, experiences, and communities of its focal women. I had the chance many years back to be part of a planned traveling exhibition for the then-in-development American Writers Museum, I can attest to the incredible work that curators as well as artists put into these exhibitions, making them very much a form of collaborative public scholarship.

3)      Engagement: As the NeMLA talk itself reflected of course, Dr. Solinger, like most of us interested in public scholarship, finds many opportunities to share her work beyond those more formal forms. That includes not only more familiar forms like this compelling NeMLA keynote address, but other and more unusual opportunities like the chance to talk with an adoption rights blogger, or a lunchtime conversation (alongside her co-author Loretta Ross) with a student group like UMass Students for Reproductive Justice. Every NeMLA keynote speaker I’ve seen has been distinct in important ways, but one linking thread has been their desire to connect with audiences, including but far beyond that conference community, and Dr. Solinger embodies that goal to be sure.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. If you were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations you’d highlight?

March 9-10, 2024: National Park Studying: National Historic Parks

[On March 3^rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ve celebrated Interior’s 175^th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to this post on National Historic Parks!]

On one particularly impressive thing each at three of America’s many wonderful National Historic Parks.

1)      Appomattox Court House: I visited Appomattox with my sons on a number of our annual Virginia trips, and each time I was struck by the same thing: the incredibly impressive short informational film at the visitors center. That might be a strange thing to highlight at a site surrounded by such history, but at the same time the informational film is a key part of any historic site visit and experience. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better one than Appomattox’s: in just a few minutes it manages to feature not only the specific military and diplomatic contexts of the Civil War’s closing moments, but also broader histories of the build-up to the war, the war overall, and (most importantly and impressively) the aftermaths of peace and abolition for African Americans and the nation as a whole. If you’re ever in the Lynchburg, Virginia area, I recommend Appomattox Court House National Historic Park for that wonderful film alone (and a lot more, but the film by itself is enough to get you there)!

2)      Lowell: I’ve been to the Lowell Mills National Historic Park a handful of times, including two wonderful visits with my sons’ respective 5^th grade class field trips. That has given me a unique appreciation for how the site teaches its histories and stories to elementary school kids, and I have nothing but great things to say about those educators and their tours and programs. But on those two visits, just as on my prior and subsequent ones, I was most struck by one particular exhibit: Mill Girls & Immigrants, an exhibit that makes perfect use of one of the mill’s early 19^th century boardinghouses. There’s a lot of great stuff in that exhibit, but it features perhaps my favorite single museum space: a recreated boardinghouse bedroom where, at the press of a button, the voices of a group of mill workers (quoting from actual letters and journals) emerge from different corners of the bedroom, overlapping and fading and reemerging in a combination of individual identities and communal experience. I can’t possibly do it justice, so if you’re ever in Lowell, be sure to visit the second floor of that Mill Girls & Immigrants exhibit and see and hear it for yourself!

3)      Minute Man: My sons’ other big 5^th grade field trips were to Concord’s Minute Man National Historic Park, but I didn’t get to tag along on those. I’ve been to Minute Man a few times, however, and have each time been particularly struck by one core element of the park. While the park features a visitors center and a number of individual sites, its main attraction is the long winding path on which visitors can follow the trail of the colonial Minute Men and the British Redcoats on that historic April 1775 day. While the highway is visible from certain spots along the path, from many others it’s not; and overall the path, the surrounding historic buildings, and even I believe the woods and other natural landmarks have largely been preserved as they were in 1775. The effect reflects the best kind of immersive experience that these National Historic Parks can create, a sense that we have truly entered into a historic world and are experiencing a partial but powerful version of that place and time.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks, Historic or otherwise, you’d highlight?

PPS. After scheduling this post, I published a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column inspired by our newest National Historic Site and looking at a range of others beyond these three!

March 8, 2024: National Park Studying: Acadia

[On March 3^rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ll celebrate Interior’s 175^th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to a post on National Historical Parks!]

On a few telling moments in the strikingly French history of the Maine National Park.

French explorer Samuel de Champlain named Maine’s Mount Desert Island when he sailed past it on his second voyage to the Americas, in September 1604; Champlain noted that “the tops of [the island’s mountains] are bare of trees, because there is nothing there but rocks,” and so Mount Desert it was. Nine years later, in 1613, the Jesuit priest Father Pierre Biard and forty settlers established the first French missionary colony on the island, in the area of Southwest Harbor; but later that same year, the English Captain Samuel Argall sailed north from Jamestown and destroyed the settlement, taking two priests back to Jamestown as prisoners. As that last hyperlinked article illustrates, the early 17^th century was full of such back and forth conflicts between the French and English up and down the Eastern seaboard, and the earliest history of what would become Acadia was defined largely by those shifting European American winds (while the region’s Wabanaki people were of course an established part of that history as well and remained a vital part of it through each evolution).

The island changed hands between the two nations at least a few more times over the next century and a half, but a late 18^th century moment reflects a very different international relationship as of the period of the American Revolution. Mount Desert Island had been under the control of the English Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Sir Francis Bernard, since 1760, and in 1780 the newly independent state of Massachusetts granted the western half of the island to (or, I suppose, kept it in the possession of) Bernard’s son John. But the eastern half was granted instead to Marie Therese de Gregoire, a Frenchwoman and granddaughter of the French explorer and island’s 17^th century titleholder Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Both John Bernard and Marie de Gregoire were of course the descendants of elite families, reflecting a continuation of landed gentry roles even in Revolutionary and post-Revolution America. But at the same time, this joint US and French ownership of the island was from what I can tell a first in its history, and illustrates both France’s vital role in the American Revolution and the ongoing relationship between the two nations (one that, of course, would be severely tested before the end of the 18^th century).

When much of Mount Desert Island was first preserved by the federal government in the early 20^th century, the two initial such efforts overtly honored these Franco-American histories. In July 1916 President Woodrow Wilson established Sieur de Monts National Monument, naming it after an early French explorer and compatriot of Champlain’s (Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons). Three years later, when the area was upgraded to full National Park status, it was named Lafayette National Park in honor of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette. Even Acadia, the name given to the park instead in 1929, is a tribute to the French legacy in the area, as Acadia was a French colony in northeastern North America that included Maine. But Sieur de Monts and Lafayette more directly highlight and embody those Franco-American figures and stories, and better remembering them as part of the establishment and development of Acadia National Park helps us keep those contested, conflicted, crucial Maine and American histories in our collective memories.

National Historical Parks this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

March 7, 2024: National Park Studying: Mesa Verde

[On March 3^rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ll celebrate Interior’s 175^th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to a post on National Historical Parks!]

On two distinct but complementary effects to a foundational AmericanStudier moment.

When I was in 7^th grade, my family and I took a trip out West to visit a number of Southwestern National Parks. We saw Zion, Bryce, Four Corners, and the Grand Motherfucking Canyon (pardon my French, but I’m pretty sure that’s the full official name), and even checked out a bit of Las Vegas when we flew in and out of the city. But there’s no doubt at all that it was Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park that most affected this 12 year old AmericanStudier. There were lots of spaces and moments in Mesa Verde that hit me, but by far the most moving was a post-sunset encounter with a coyote as we explored an aboveground (ie, not a cliff dwelling) Pueblo ruin in the park. Probably didn’t hurt that I had been reading a bunch of Tony Hillerman mysteries on the trip, as the moment felt right out of such evocative Southwestern thrillers (although luckily we didn’t stumble upon a dead body or awaken an ancient curse or the like). But I would say that the moment affected me, and indeed was foundational for my lifelong AmericanStudying, in a couple key ways that go well beyond Leaphorn & Chee mysteries and that also reflect essential elements to a site like Mesa Verde.

For one thing, the moment made crystal clear something that a know-it-all 12 year old (or 46 year old…) can sometimes have difficulties remembering: just how much I didn’t and don’t know. As I wrote in that same blog post on Hillerman, Mesa Verde has long been defined by a couple central mysteries of its own: the question of why the Anasazi people abandoned their cliff dwellings, and what happened to them after they left. It appears that some significant recent progress has been made in answering those questions, which of course is part of the historical and cultural process as well. But in truth, the mystery of Mesa Verde is just a more extreme version of a fundamental but all too easily forgotten fact about all historical knowledge—there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we’ll ever know, and most of the things we do know we only kinda know (to get all Rumsfeldian on ya). And that’s never more true than when it comes to the simple but crucial question of what it meant, or really what it felt like, to live in these historical periods and places. I love the interpretations of the past at places like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, but that’s all they are, interpretations; we’ll never really know what life was like for those folks in those worlds, and I felt that divide, acutely and potently, as I stood atop that darkened Mesa Verde ruin.

But at the same time, I felt something else, something I’d call not contradictory so much as complementary: I wanted to bridge that divide. I wanted to learn as much as I could about periods and places and peoples, really all of ‘em but most especially all those that felt most distinct from me and mine. I wanted to read about them and talk about them and, perhaps most of all, write about them, help create stories that could, not exactly bring them back to life of course, but make them a part of our own moment and world as fully as those unavoidable gaps would allow. I don’t think that was the first time I felt that desire so acutely (I’m sure I did on my Camp Virginia trips, for example), but it was one of the strongest such moments, and it has stuck with me to be sure. I’ve visited and been inspired by a lot of cultural and historic sites in the decades since, including a number of federal National Historic Parks, and will write about some of my favorites in that latter category in the weekend post. But Mesa Verde remains striking and perhaps singular in that regard, a place and moment with which I was confronted with especial force with both the challenges and the call of all that I’ve tried to spend my career doing. So, y’know, it’s well worth a visit if you’re out that way!

Last Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

March 6, 2024: National Park Studying: Everglades

[On March 3^rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ll celebrate Interior’s 175^th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to a post on National Historical Parks!]

On the very American story of the woman who helped save the Everglades.

Since 2018, the name Marjory Stoneman Douglas has likely and tragically become synonymous with the Parkland, Florida mass shooting in February at the high school named for her. But while of course we can and should continue remembering the Douglas High shooting (and celebrating the amazing group of Parkland students who have turned that tragedy into an occasion for activism), Marjory Stoneman Douglas deserves separate and full commemoration as well. In a 108-year life that spanned nearly all of the 20^th century (she was born in April 1890 and passed away in May 1998), Marjory Stoneman experienced a number of striking and very telling moments, including many by the time she turned 25: from watching her mother, concert violinist Florence Lillian Trefethen, get committed to a mental hospital in Providence for being “high-strung” to attending Wellesley College and helping form its first suffrage club; from a brief marriage to charming con artist Kenneth Douglas (who was already married at the time and subsequently attempted to defraud Marjory’s father) to a groundbreaking 1915 divorce and move to Miami (then a small town of less than 5000) to rejoin her father and join the staff of his decade-old newspaper The Miami Herald.

For the next few decades, Douglas (she continued to go by her married name for the rest of her life) made quite a name for herself as a South Florida (and national) journalist and literary figure. (After serving in both the navy and the Red Cross during World War I.) Besides her work for the Herald, which included long stints as Book Review Editor and Assistant Editor, she also worked extensively as a freelance and creative writer; she published forty stories in the Saturday Evening Post, for example, and also wrote a number of one-act plays for the Miami Theater as well as the foreword to the WPA’s 1941 guide to Miami. Around that same time, however, Douglas became involved with the cause that would define her second half-century of life, and all of America, very fully. The publisher Farrar & Rinehart approached her to write a book on the Miami River for their new Rivers of America series; as she began her research Douglas found herself unimpressed by the river but profoundly moved by the Everglades, and convinced F&R to let her research and write a book on them instead. She spent five years researching and writing, working closely with geologist Garald Parker, and the result was The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a monumental achievement that sold out its initial printing in a month and remains one of the most significant and influential works of American naturalism.

River of Grass was just the beginning, however (and not even that, as Douglas had been fighting for local environmental causes for decades by that time). Over the next half-century, Douglas would more than earn her nickname “Grande Dame of Everglades,” waging continual war to protect and preserve the wetlands from developers, politicians, corporations, sport hunters and fishermen, and just about every other adversary one could imagine. Douglas titled the last chapter of River of Grass “The Eleventh Hour,” warning that the region was on the brink of destruction; but in December of that same year Everglades National Park was dedicated, and thanks to those federal protections and Douglas’s lifelong efforts, the area instead has become the largest tropical wilderness in the US and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi. No individual can achieve such milestones single-handedly, of course; but at the same time, American history reminds us time and again of the power a determined and impressive individual can have to help shape the future. Marjory Stoneman Douglas most definitely did so for the Everglades and South Florida—and having had the good fortune to visit the Glades a few times as a kid (my maternal grandparents had retired to South Florida), I can testify that she helped preserve a truly unique and amazing American space.

Next Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?