https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/18306/archive/files/2381d1700ab89066a06d59988276faf2.pdf?Expires=1779926400&Signature=RRRnHEeQ%7Erucvi6SS4InUAhhBpZKcd3n%7EH-Jf6IpK0Obcey8h0DvrbaVYZlEHqO4K8WgrDK0TPvLT09cYVv%7EW8k1hY5miJ0jToTb7CMunuKhMb6CLEsr3J8%7EmLWCCub0crzr1sko3NTK3m2K9Y%7EH4sRhWBRdaA4Kh8BAqePyc9FsMmHCrtxoY2356jFW1OMHkDeHwAQOCtvMLQelvn6ZFKtkyRXBw150NIE4vbZrxOABOoLkI3UdddXOFMTP1f-qDUcz1xb8ZUDlrE5PO%7Erlg8kCTZAmHVtUMAprKMXAKmH96KK111J6l%7E1jQl7jDG6sbIEkZR7a5OwDdPZccrgaXA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 008f714b46357aaf5bfd8ae9f3e02f85 PDF Text Text ISSN 2573-1750 Watchung Review Volume 1 • April 2017 Migration and I d e n t i t y Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association i �Dedication Photo courtesy of the American Federation of Teachers New Jersey Dave McClure was a champion of his students. After, and while, teaching for decades in the public-school system, Dave began to teach Developmental and Freshman English classes at Union County College. He also began teaching in the Freshman Seminar program that began in the early 2000’s. Dave’s classes always filled due to his reputation as a dedicated teacher who was devoted to his students. As an adjunct professor he was not obligated to meet with his students outside of class time. However, McClure held office hours in the adjunct faculty office before, between, and after his classes. He would go over class work with the students until he was satisfied they knew the lesson. No student who came to Dave was denied the help and attention that they needed to succeed. Dave was a champion for the rights of adjunct faculty at the College. He became involved in the adjunct faculty union at the College, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), shortly after its inception in 2004, and eventually became 1st vice president and then co-president of the local union with Bill Lipkin. Along with other union leaders Bill and Dave spent countless hours dealing with the inequities and disrespect shown to adjunct faculty. They went to many conferences and workshops to keep up with pedagogical changes and the growing issues in Higher Education. Dave was a teacher, an advocate, a colleague, a listener, a creator, a tutor, a friend, and a role model for his students and his colleagues. He was honored posthumously by AFTNJ for his dedication as a union leader and innovator, and will always be remembered for his dedication to his work. He is sorely missed and is often referred to when things get tough and solutions are sought. 3 �Editor-in-Chief: Rachael Warmington, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Managing Editor: Robert McParland, Felician University Assistant Managing Editor: Jonathan D. Elmore, Savannah State University Copyeditor: Alexandra Lykissas, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Senior Editorial Assistant: Sheila Farr, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Editorial Assistant: James Cochran, Baylor University Advisory Board Philip Grayson, St John’s University Kevin Hawk, Redlands Community College Heather Ostman, SUNY Westchester Community College Phil Robinson-Self, University of York Kenneth Sherwood, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology Associate Editors Steve Bellin-Oka, Eastern New Mexico University Shilpa Bhat, Ahmedabad University Gabriela Cavalheiro, King’s College London Yasmeen Chism, New York University Carrie Jo Coaplen, University of the Virgin Islands Gita DasBender, Seton Hall University Dana Fasciano, Rutgers University Jonathan Farina, Seton Hall University Michelle Garcia, Independent Scholar Mara Grayson, Pace University Valerie Guyant, Montana State University Anna Krauthammer, Touro College Richard Marranca, Passaic County Community College Erica McCrystal, St. John’s University Sarah Nolan, University of Nevada Heather Ostman, SUNY Westchester Community College Maria L. Plochocki, Pace University Melissa R. Sande, Union County College Nick J. Sciullo, Illinois College Donovan Sherman, Seton Hall University Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology Natasa Thoudam, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Sarbani Vengadasalam, Rutgers University Angela Weisl, Seton Hall University Seretha Williams, Augusta University Lucas Wilson, Lipscomb University Website Designer: Rachael Warmington, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Graphic and Document Designer: Julia Grove, Indiana University of Pennsylvania 1 �Special Thanks Special thanks to Dr. Tanya Heflin, Assistant to the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Assistant Professor in the Department of English, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, for providing an overview and demonstration of the Omeka platform. Watchung Review would also like to thank the Omeka team for their technical support. 1 �Volume 1 • April 2017 Watchung Review M igration and I dentity 3 Immigrant Everyday Life: The Ordinary, the Ethnic, and the Artistic in Akhil Sharma’s Family Life Hager Ben Driss 14 Francis Emily Bright 15 Migrating Borders Nancy Ciccone 20 Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir: Narrative Strategies & Testimonial Purposes in Cuba: My Revolution and Vietnamerica Sandra M. Cox 39 Shadows and Prints Carol Erwin 48 Publicity of Private Performances Jenni G Halpin 57 "One Must Come 'West'": Caroline Kirkland’s Heterotopic Vision Heidi M. Hanrahan 67 The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker Cheryl R. Hopson 76 The Californian Exopolis: Hector Tobar’s and Tim Z. Hernandez’s Literary Interventions Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice 84 The (Un)Hero in the American West: Reexamining the Male/Female Binary of Nineteenth Century Travel Diaries Monica Reyes 93 Tagore and Yeats: Discourses in Gender and Nationalisms Arundhati Sanyal 2 �Hager Ben Driss Immigrant Everyday Life The Ordinary, the Ethnic, and the Artistic in Akhil Sharma’s Family Life I can say it enough but can I say it more than enough that the daily life is a daily life if at any moment of the daily life that daily life is all there is of life. (Gertrude Stein, Narration) I t took Akhil Sharma almost thirteen years to write a plotless story that captures the way an Indian immigrant practices everyday life in America. Family Life (2014) simply articulates Gertrude Stein's summation that "daily life is all there is of life" (10). During these years, Sharma "was concerned about the plotlessness problem" ("A Novel Like a rocket"): how to transform the boring and the mundane into a pleasurable experience of reading. Family Life is based on Sharma's own tragic family story. It charts the life of an immigrant Indian family and unfolds as a bildungsroman, tracing the moral and psychological growth of the eight-year old Ajay Mishra, the narrator. Two years after the family joins their father in America, the elder son, Birju, has an accident in the swimming pool. He hits his head on the bottom of the pool; he remains unconscious three minutes under water which irreversibly damaged his brain. The accident causes the collapse of the family: while the mother cultivates a compulsive delusion to cure her invalid son, the father starts sinking into alcoholism. Ajay has to elbow his way alone in a hostile environment and to negotiate his daily life as an immigrant child. Sharma's anxieties to alienate the reader with the pettiness of his everyday life have evaporated face to the immediate success of Family Life. Not only did it make the New York Times top Ten of 2014, the novel also won the 2015 Folio Prize. It was widely reviewed and praised for its economic and especially unsentimental style. Fellow Indian writer Kiran Desai describes Sharma as the "most unsentimental writer [who] leaves the reader, finally and surprisingly, moved." Within the same vein, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid believes that "Akhil Sharma's unsentimentality has the effect of making his writing uncommonly touching." The recent publication of the novel, however, may explain the lack of academic assessment of this text. Toral Gajarawala's short essay "A Minor Complaint", nevertheless, stands as a good beginning of the serious assessment that the novel deserves. Gajarawala highlights the domestic microcosm of the narrative and its depiction of small things. While she hails Sharma's sophisticated style and his "craft" in "turning prose into origami," she criticizes his claustrophobic-like narrative which "leaves out many things." This essay picks up where Gajarawala left off: an investigation of everyday life in Sharma's novel. It proposes to study the intersection between three pivotal issues in the narrative: immigration, everyday life, and artistic production. I argue that the domestic and the cultural are textually weaved within an artistic gesture that answers Henri Lefebvre's appeal: "Let everyday life become a work of art" (Everyday Life 204). Sharma's Family Life provides a pertinent example of immigration and narration, accommodating both immigration genre and generic immigration. The text also displays a terrain of negotiations wherein the boundaries of the ordinary are pressed towards the artistic. 3 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life Immigration Genre/Generic Immigration Genre, I'm arguing, is first of all an instrument of reading, not a formula for writing. As such, genre is what enables the reader to locate himself or herself before the text and thereby to have access to the possible meanings of the text. (Janet Warner Gunn, Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience) Akhil Sharma is adamant about distinguishing between an immigrant novelist and an immigrant novel. While he accepts, albeit with a caveat, a generic classification of his novel, he feels repulsion for an ethnic categorization of writers. "I mind the label," he states in an interview, "because there is the sense of ghettoization in the term. I don't want to be called an immigrant novelist" (Interview by John Wray). In the same interview, he accepts "the book being called an immigrant novel;" and yet, he shows resistance in other interviews to generic taxonomy. Mohsin Hamid's question "Do you expect the book to be called an immigrant novel?" is answered in a rather defensive way: "the problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides" (Interview by Mohsin Hamid). The critical conversation around the textual rendition of the immigration experience oscillates between sheer classification and strong resistance to generic nomenclature. Seyhan Azad, for instance, uses the label "immigrant writing" and refuses all types of categorization. She bases her argument on the diversity of this kind of writing, as the "act of abstraction and theorizing presupposes the loss of distinction and difference" (180). On the other far side of this critical dialogue, stands, for instance, Rosemary Marangoly George, who believes that "the contemporary literary writing in which the politics and experience of location (or rather 'dislocation') are the central narratives should be called the 'Immigration Genre'" (171). She explains her argument for a "distinct genre" with the fact that the category of writing known as 'postcolonial literature' has been critically overburdened (171). Despite Sharma's reluctance to have his novel categorized or ruled by a law of genre, Family Life does accommodate smoothly the immigrant genre. The immigrant novel follows a pattern or a narrative trajectory recurrent in this genre. William Q. Boelhower's "macro proposition" of the immigrant novel provides a clear map of this type of writing: An immigrant protagonist(s) representing an ethnic world view, comes to America with great expectations, and through a series of trials is led to reconsider them in terms of his final status. (5) Family Life falls within the parameters of this model based on three moments: "expectation," "contact," and "resolution" (5). The father's immigration to America is instigated by his great expectations of a better life. The beginning of the narrative records the father's dream of a "glamorous" life as "he believed that if he were somewhere else, especially somewhere where he earned in dollars and so was rich, he would be a different person" (13). Even though the mother does not show real interest in emigrating, being a high school teacher of economics, she ends up sharing her husband's expectations. "What's here?" She asks her mother. "Thieves? That Indira woman will eat us" (23). Ajay, eight years then, starts creating his own story of America while cultivating a growing feeling of superiority: "I learned that everybody in America has their own speedboat" (21), he tells his friends. 4 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life Once in America, the family has to adjust to a new culture. While life seems easier in terms of facilities, they can hardly claim themselves to be rich. The very small house they live in and the mother's need to work show that America is not an El Dorado-like place. They need to toil hard to have a decent life. Ajay finds many difficulties and his attempts at making friends are meted with rejection and scorn. The narrative ends with a fully assimilated young man, who manages to come to terms with his hyphenated identity. This brief outline of the novel shows that part of the narrative aligns to Boelhomer's model of the immigrant novel genre. The label 'immigrant’, however, functions on another level of generic lineage. The text crosses the frontiers of autobiography to poach the territory of the novel. Generic displacement in Family Life is in accordance with dislocation as a thematic paradigm of the immigrant novel. Sharma finds in the hybrid genre of semi-autobiography a comfortable terrain to fictionalize his life. In her study of the relationship between autobiographical writing and other genres, Sally Cline provides two motives behind semi-autobiographical novels. First, "to protect the privacy of friends, family, colleagues"; and second, "to achieve emotional distance from the subject" (75). Sharma's option for a fictional account of his own life combines these two motives. In his essay "A Novel Like a Rocket" (2014), he announces the autobiographical strain in his narrative: "The novel is called 'Family Life', and it is based on my own experience." The essay, which focuses on techniques of narration, does not dwell much on the reasons behind migrating from one genre to another. Many details, however, are disclosed in his numerous interviews. To the same recurrent question: 'why fiction and not a memoir?', he usually explains the personal and technical drives behind this generic mixture. "I think I can be braver and more honest when I can say that what I'm writing is a novel," he confesses in an interview. "If I had written a memoir, I would have felt as if my parents and everybody who makes up a part of the novel was standing around my desk as I was writing" (Foyles). His need to create a distance between himself and what he is writing about has also a narratological reason: For me, a memoir is non-fiction and non-fiction has to be absolutely true. I can't have composite characters. I can't attribute dialogue to someone based simply in my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken. I also need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. (Interview by Mohsin Hamid) While acknowledging the biographical basis of his narrative, Sharma stops at one single generic type: the novel. Nowhere in his interviews does he use any other genre to describe his amalgamation of fiction and autobiography. Similar to the label 'immigrant novel', such classifications as "autonarration"1 (Arnaud Schmitt), "autobiografiction"2 (Stephen Reynolds), or "autoficion"3 (Serge Doubrovsky) are likely to narrow down scopes of reading. Sharma's indisposition to generic cataloging is substituted by his willingness to indulge in a thematic description of his narrative. "A more accurate description" of the novel, he claims, "would probably be that it is a coming-of-age novel or an illness novel" (Interview by Wray). Discarding a generic straightjacket provides interesting and multiple avenues of reading. I propose in the following section to read Sharma's rendering of the everyday life of an immigrant family, for the book can also be accurately described as an everyday life novel. Negotiating the Ordinary: Performing Everyday Life To the ordinary man. To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life) 5 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life Theorizing everyday life and the daily mundane elements that generally do not call attention started long time ago. With Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), the term ‘everyday life’ entered the realm of scientific investigation. Freud brought everyday actions, like forgetting a person’s name or common slips of the tongue, into the field of psychoanalysis. This paved the way for what Clifford Geertz calls the urgency to “descend into details” (The Interpretation of Cultures 53). The minutiae of everyday life have become a major concern in sociological and anthropological studies. Henri Lefebvre links everyday life “to all activities” and relations: “friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play etc.” (Critique 97). Lefebvre’s preoccupation with an encompassing mode of everydayness informed subsequent studies. In “Everyday Speech” (1987), Maurice Blanchot, who acknowledges Lefebvre as a precursor in reflecting on everyday life, provides a similar definition: “the everyday is what we are first of all, and most often: at work, at leisure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily” (12). This focus on the habitual, the mundane, and the ordinary is also foregrounded in Rita Felski’s definition: “the everyday…epitomises both the comfort and boredom of the ordinary” (16). Sharma’s Family Life is anchored in the tedious condition of everyday life. His narrative exemplifies the practice of ordinariness as well as the theatrical impulse in people’s daily lives. Even though the practice of everyday life is gauged in the street, especially in the work of Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life), Sharma focuses on domestic activities mainly set at home. “Real life was occurring back in our apartment with Birju studying” (43), assures Ajay. It is probably more the parents’ perception of real life than that of their children for it is at home that Ajay and his brother are trained to assimilate. Both are forced to “watch the news every evening” (40) as their father believes it to be the best way to become familiar with the new culture. Within a similar domestic move, the mother takes her sons “for walks in grocery stores so that [they] could see things [they] had never seen before” (41). The parents, however, seem to believe that real integration can concretize only through education. The small space of the kitchen, where Birju studies very hard, becomes a transcultural site securing the passage to social and economic success. Narrating the daily anxieties over the education of Birju provides important information about the Indian community in America in the 1970s. Composed mainly of educated people, this first wave of immigrants perceived education not only as a way to infiltrate American culture, but also as a means to preserve cultural ties with their origins. Ajay’s parents’ concern with assimilation is enmeshed with their preoccupation in maintaining their high caste as Brahmins. Indeed, Birju’s success to get accepted into the Bronx High School of Science secures for the family the prestigious role of a model for the hitherto small Indian community. They start to be invited to people’s houses, where the mother “would sit quietly in peoples’ living rooms and look on proudly as Birju talked” (46). Real life happens in closed spaces; it takes shape in kitchens and living rooms where immigrants cling to their Indianness while grappling with an alien culture. Family Life is energized by the double concern of negotiation and retrieval that marks immigration novels. “One of the motivations for writing this book,” claims Sharma, resides in his belief that his “community is worth preserving” (Interview by Jyothi Natarayan). Religion and its attendant rituals, as well as festivities, are important elements in everyday Indian life and are smoothly inserted into the narrative. The young Ajay’s feeling of dislocation is accentuated on Diwali, a major festival in Hinduism celebrating the victory of light over darkness. As he cannot celebrate Diwali, feelings of foreignness and pain mingle in the heart of the child who feels wrenched from the joys of Indian life: “it was odd to go to school, odd and painful to stand outside the brown brick building waiting for its doors to open” (35). At that moment, Ajay records, “only life in India matters” (35); the glamorous life in America loses all importance. This scene of nostalgia, common to immigration 6 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life narratives, acquires its poignancy from its depiction of a disoriented child groping for collapsing cultural landmarks. The temple is one of these landmarks that Ajay needs to process and recuperate. His juxtaposition of the temples in India and the temple in Queens shows his attempt at preserving the memory of the original while coming to terms with the simulacrum. The act of recreating an Indian temple on American soil yields a distorted copy, lacking authenticity: “Here, along the smell of incense, there was only a faint odor of mildew. Because the temple smelled so simple, it seemed fake” (37). It is the same situation with Mr. Narayan, the pundit in Metuchen, where the family moves because “it was one of the few towns in New Jersey that had a temple” (75). Ajay’s contempt for the pundit stems from the fact that he “was not a real one” (77); Mr. Narayan is an engineer who volunteers at the temple. The imaginary homeland, “India of the mind” (Rushdie 10), keeps feeding the fabricated India on a foreign land. This is how the Indian community, including the Mishras, preserve their Indianness. It is in this “fake” temple that the family performs the ritual of ‘real’ life such as opening the envelope containing the results of Birju’s exam (45). Getting the blessing of Indian Idols to start an American life shows once more this negotiation between two cultures performed at the level of everyday practices. Birju’s tragic accident in the swimming pool places religion at the center of the Family Life. “The most important thing,” Ajay reports, “was to appeal to God” (57). As the home is transformed into a temple-like space, prayer becomes an everyday activity performed each morning. Before the accident, the family used to go to the temple on Fridays, as the mother believes this visit a propitious ritual to “begin the weekend with a clean mind” (37). For the mother, however, religion veers more towards obsession than spiritual relief. Clinging to the hope of seeing Birju recover, she starts confusing religion with superstition and even charlatanism. Several miracle workers are allowed to enter the house in an attempt to cure Birju. When Ajay asks her if she believes that Birju can get better, she answers: “God can do anything” (122). Her belief in miracles, not much different from the belief in magic, is an aspect of everyday life which is “defined by contradictions: illusions and truth, power and helplessness, the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control” (Lefebvre, Critique 21). It is within these dynamics of everyday life that Ajay invents his own God. The God he invokes “everyday, hour after hour, praying till [his] throat became raw and even [his] gums hurt” behaves like “the president, distant, busy, not interested in small things” (55). Consequently, Ajay constructs his God of everyday life, the ordinary, and the small. Ajay’s God, reverberating with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), is reminiscent of Marjani Satrapi’s God in Persepolis (2003). Marji’s God, who resembles Karl Marx, and Ajay’s God, who looks like Clark Kent, are everyday Gods attentive to two children’s petty anxieties. At the beginning, Ajay imagined a Krishna-like God, but he “felt foolish to discuss brain damage with someone who was blue and was holding a flute and had a peacock feather in his head” (59). Americanizing his god is Ajay’s way of bringing a comforting religion into a life that starts losing its comfortable ordinariness. While the narrative is steeped in everyday life, it also carries the burden of recouping one’s ordinariness. The Family Life, now exclusively revolving around Birju’s illness, has completely lost its grasp on a commonplace style of life. Instead of being invited to peoples’ houses to show a model of Indian success, they are now invited or visited as a model of “love of family, sacrificing for others” (81). In Ajay’s mind, real life is transferred from the kitchen, where Birju used to study, to his brother’s room, where the whole family is “suffering so intensely” (79). Interjections like “your story is like a fairy tale” (79), however flattering they might seem, transform their life into “something unreal” (79). Similar to his dislike for the fake temple, or his contempt for the unreal pundit, Ajay 7 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life finds this aura of unreality cloaking his family quite disturbing; it divests his life from the authenticity of the ordinary. The family, treated like they “were holy”, finds itself involved in extraordinary practices. The mother is daily asked to bless Indian children, while other people “would go into Birju’s room and touch his pale, swollen, inward-turned feet, as if the sacrifices being made for him had turned him into an idol” (140). Flooded by a daily crowd of curious Indians, Ajay’s house is no longer an ordinary home. Ajay’s feeling of a collapsing ordinary life is best illustrated in an episode showing him grappling with the simple ordinariness of childhood: I kept going to look at Birju, but I couldn’t get used to seeing him in an ordinary room in an ordinary house. Every time, I was startled.… At some point in the late afternoon, I decided to go outside and throw a ball. This seemed like something any ordinary boy might do.… I threw the ball over and over, sometimes with my left hand. When I did this, the ball went up at a slant. Throwing the ball, I didn’t feel any better. I kept seeing Birju lying on his bed, his head tilted up, the white curtain on the window beside him rising and falling. My tee shirt grew damp and stuck to my skin. Before long I want to go back inside, but to go inside felt like giving up. I stayed on the lawn and threw the ball. (119-120) Quoted at length, this episode exemplifies Sharma’s recurrent use of the term “ordinary.” His confession that he “didn’t know how to have an ordinary life” (Interview by Gary Wood) is recreated in the entire novel via a compulsive repetition of the word. In the first paragraph of the excerpt, the twice-repeated “ordinary” engages space as a defining agent of ordinariness. The presence of the inert brain-damaged brother divests the whole house from its domestic normalcy. The house is more like a hospital or a temple than a common home. The use of “ordinary” in the subsequent paragraph displays the term as a practice of everyday life. Throwing a ball is so petty and mundane that it hardly deserves mentioning in another type of narratives. Yet, this ordinary act embodies what Ajay yearns to perform. Because the ordinary is always accompanied with a feeling of guilt, it becomes “a type of anorexia,” Sharma explains, “you’re choosing not to consume things. You’re choosing not to consume happiness” (Interview by Wood). Ajay feels guilty, for instance, when he prays to get a good mark on the math test instead of praying for his brother. His mother’s often-repeated story about her prayer when her sister got sick, “God, let me fail as long as you make Kusum better” (58), stands as a deterrent to the ordinary. To be an ordinary child means to betray the ill Birju, who is unable to be ordinary. Sharma’s subtle way of expressing this feeling of guilt is carried through juxtaposing the movement of the ball and the rising and falling of curtains in the room of the inert brother. Later in the narrative, he describes “guilt and sadness” like “wearing clothes still damp from the wash” (134). The importance of this excerpt resides in the fact that it is the only time we see Ajay playing. His predilection with such an ordinary activity is displayed in the detailed description of the act of throwing and recuperating the ball. More significantly, the excerpt marks a moment of dissent. In resisting the impulse of going back inside, Ajay claims his right to ordinariness. To be an ordinary child is further complicated at school. It is in this public space that issues of everyday life and immigration interlace. While ordinariness is negotiated on a domestic level at home, it is contested on an ethnic one at school. The school epitomizes what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone” or “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (4). Ajay’s estrangement “among so many whites” who “all looked alike” (34) is exacerbated 8 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life by racial violence and xenophobia. “I was often bullied,” Ajay reports, “sometimes a little boy would come up to me and tell me that I smelled bad” (35). Even though bullying stops after his father complains to the school, Ajay’s loneliness and alienation persist. In order to break out of his isolation and find a friend, Ajay starts playing a new role at school: the role of the child matured by the illness of his brother. Lefebvre’s claim that “everyday life resembles theatre” (Critique 136) is fully developed by Erving Goffman’s theorization of everyday life as performance. His distinction between “front stage”, where behavior and language are controlled, and “back stage”, where these two elements are relaxed and less informal (78), offers an interesting venue to study Ajay’s performance of everyday life in a public space. Initially, Ajay keeps his brother’s illness to back stage. Being a domestic matter, it should be kept away from the public sphere of the school. As he yearns for attention and sympathy, he decides to bring his brother’s story to front stage. This performance first takes place in the classroom where Ajay whispers in one breath the whole story of his brain-damaged brother. “I said all this in a rush,” states Ajay, “feeling scared, feeling almost like I was watching myself from the outside” (100). Being aware that he is playing a role that “must be acted out until the end” (Lefebvre, Critique 130), Ajay is now obliged to fully (front) stage himself as well as his brother. Because he is unable to play with a friend, his play substitutes an everyday activity. Every day, Ajay brings Jeff new details about his brother’s illness. He opts for shocking details such as shaving Birju’s crotch so that his urinary catheter does not get caught in his pubic hair (108), or the acids in his brother’s shit which cut the skin if not cleaned immediately (109). As he brings these backstage details to the fore, Ajay feels “powerful” (109). And yet, the ‘dirty’ image of his invalid brother needs to be cleansed. That is why he concocts “an ideal brother” (103). Like his invented Superman God, Birju becomes a super hero, “a great basketball player” (103) or “a karate expert” (104). While acting is one characteristic regulating relationships in everyday life, Ajay’s inability to perceive the line separating the front stage from the back stage testifies to a child’s apprenticeship of everydayness. Called “a freak” (19) and beaten, his attempts at making friends is meted with utter rejection and scorn. Staging the self functions as a means of integration, a solution to loneliness and ethnic alienation. On a narratological level, it functions as a metafictional move, a way to gauge the readers’ ability to accept a narrative of the mundane. Ajay sees his fear of misunderstanding and indifference come true. Indeed, “what happened to Birju did not matter for most of the world” (99). Sharma also grapples with narrating illness and unhappiness while running the risk of warding off his readers. Storifying Everyday Life It might, however, be more exact to say that readers were suddenly made aware of everyday life through the medium of literature or the written word. (Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life) After twelve and a half years of writing and re-writing, the seven thousand pages written over this period were cut down to the two hundred and eighteen pages of the finalized Family Life. This long process, full of frustrations and pain, testify to the fact that writing about small things is a huge endeavor. Sharma had to grapple over those years with three “technical challenges” he describes in his essay “A Novel Like a Rocket.” First, how to handle a story narrated from a child’s point of view without ending up with “a flattened narrative” that feels like “you are on the surface of the events.” 9 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life Second, how to narrate “the physical horror of illness” without raising the readers’ resentment at an “unwanted education.” Third, and most importantly for him, how to transform the “plotlessness” of “real life” into an appealing story that reads fast while combining pain and humor. Opting for a bildungsroman genre, a novel of education and growth, allowed the writer to use the perspective of a child without flattening both language and narration. This strategy is announced at the opening of the novel through a domestic scene showing father and son joking, while the mother is complaining about the narrator’s frequent absences. The family tableau stops there and the whole narrative unfolds as scraps of remembrances and flashbacks narrating different episodes of the Family Life. Sharma makes it a point to sign a pact of narration with his readers. Because they know from the beginning that the narrating voice is a grown up, adult person, their reading proceeds in a smooth way without interrogating the reliability of the narrator or his sophisticated reflections. The second challenge is probably the hardest for the reader. Dwelling on the horrible side of illness is not an easy venture for the writer; however, it is not a pleasant experience for the reader, either. The most shocking details, as stated above, are those Ajay tells his American classmate to attract his attention. It is significant that these are reported details, taken outside the closed space of the house. The focus is more on the children’s reaction to illness rather than a deliberate dwelling on the repulsive aspects of ailment. The carelessness and cruel rejection of children functions as an alert to adult readers, who also have to confront their own reaction to a similar situation. The repugnant account of everyday grappling with malady is attenuated by humor. “If you sing a sad song sadly,” claims Sharma, “it becomes dolorous. It’s hard for an audience” (Interview by Natarajan). The scene describing the difficult task of bathing Birju, for instance, is rendered in a rather comic way. Lifting the heavy body of his invalid son, the father addresses Birju jokingly: “Why are you so heavy? are you getting at night and eating? You are, aren’t you? admit it. I see crumbs on your chin” (117). While the father’s words trigger Ajay’s laughter, they are meant to win the readers’ sympathetic smile. The father’s joke transforms the repulsive description of Birju “urinating, a thick, strongsmelling, yellow stream” (117) into an ordinary detail accepted both by the family and the reader. Sharma’s hardest task as a writer is to seize the tediousness of everyday life and transcribe it into an exhilarating text. “Everyday life becomes less and less interesting; yet the author manages to create an interest in this intolerable tediousness simply by telling, by writing, by literature” (Lefebvre, Everyday Life 11). Narrating dreariness, however, is not as simple as Lefebvre claims. Sharma was haunted by the anxiety that “the experience of reading books that replicate” the plotlessness of everyday life “can be irritating” (“A Novel”). This is why he stopped writing only when he believed that his book had achieved one major quality he wanted in fiction: “it was reading very, very fast” (Interview by Carroll). To achieve this quick pace, Sharma opts for an episodic strategy of narration. The narrative does not follow a traditional plot based on causation, climax, and denouement. It is divided into short, often disconnected, episodes imitating the fragmentariness of everyday life. The layout of the text is regulated by blank spaces separating one episode from another or announcing the beginning of a new chapter. While these blanks stand for deleted events or jumped over days, they endow the book with a strong visual quality: “it is as if the scenes are painted on paper and you can see the white beneath” explains Sharma (“A Novel”). While Sharma’s essays and interviews provide “paratextual scraps” of really “prime interest” (Genette 346), the metafictional impulse of the narrative also elucidates the process of storifying everyday life. In his essay “A Novel Like a Rocket”, Sharma records that he found the answers to his narratological anxieties in different literary works “that shared the same DNA” as his book. From Proust, he learns the art of ending a narrative; and from Chekov, he learns how to focus on the visual and avoid the sticky and lingering details related to sound and smell. In Family Life, however, 10 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life the narrator speaks only about Hemingway as a major source of inspiration. He first encounters Hemingway through his biography, a significant material showing that a writer’s life matters. He reads the biography “mostly at the kitchen table” (151), a symbolic space related earlier in the narrative to “real life.” This domestic space represents a terrain of negotiating the private (auto/ biography) and the artistic (the act of writing): “as I read”, Ajay announces, “I began wanting to be a writer” (151). Writing discloses an act anchored in the private as well as the daily. Indeed, the first lesson he learns from reading critical studies on Hemingway is to foreground the ordinary. Hemingway, he reads, acquired his fame from focusing on the exotic: “if he were to write about ordinary things in an ordinary way, he would be boring” (153). The young Ajay reverses the situation as he realizes that he “should push all the exotic things to the side as if they didn’t matter” (158) and focus on the mundane and the ordinary. As he progresses in his apprenticeship of the craft of writing, Ajay starts to pay attention to objects. His focus on small things strikingly reverberates with Lefebvre’s vision of writing everyday life: “If I want to write today - that is write fiction - I will start from an ordinary object, a mug, an orange, a fly of which I shall attempt a detailed description; never departing from the perceptible presented in the concrete” (Everyday Life 7). In a similar move, Ajay starts to see “things as material for writing”: “I began to feel as if I were walking through my life collecting things that could be used later: the sound of a ping-Pong ball was like a woman walking in high heels, the shower running was like television static” (160). Ajay’s interest in objects has a metafictional quality as Sharma literally translates this urge for small things by inserting a picture of a flashlight at the end of page 209. Sharma explains that the novel has two endings, the first one is “the scene with the flashlight” (Interview by Carroll). Ajay learns the technique of ending stories from Hemingway: “all I need to do was to attach something to the end of the story that was both unexpected and natural” (159). Sharma concretely attaches something: a picture. The flashlight, which belongs to the mother, is used to see their way in darkness after leaving their Indian friends’ house. Mother and son are invited for dinner to celebrate Ajay’s success on entering Princeton University. The mother, who has resented the Sethis’ denigrating behavior upon hearing about her husband’s alcoholism, leaves the dinner angrily. Ajay relates the flashlight to his memory of India and the frequent blackouts there. At that time, Birju “would walk ahead of us”, reminisces Ajay, “He would guide us” (109). Gajarwala reads the picture of the flashlight “as a sign of continuity, of sorts, across the great divide, between India and America. Despite all America’s privileges, the Mishras must still walk home in the dark” (“A Minor Complaint”). The metonymic quality of the flashlight as an Indian cultural artifact should be linked to the earlier episode of Diwali. Accordingly, my reading of this object stands on the opposite side of Gajarwala’s. Diwali, from Sanskrit dipavali, “means ‘row of lights’. The lamps stand for inner light and knowledge” (Murray 14). Ajay, now holding the flashlight, creates his own Diwali on American soil. The inner light he acquires from the act of writing is seconded by his admission at Princeton University. What is relevant to my argument in this essay, however, is that small, ordinary, and concrete objects acquire the power to energize the narrative. The cultural resonance of the flashlight relocates the narrative in its immigrant context. The section announcing the birth of a writer is significantly the longest section in the novel (150-60). The narrative here veers towards a kunstlerroman, literally ‘artist-novel.’ Sharma provides a portrait of an immigrant artist as a young man. Writing against the exotic allows him to narrate his own community. “I hadn’t known how to write about Indians,” Ajay declares. “How would I translate the various family relations, the difference between an uncle who is a father’s brother and an uncle who is a mother’s brother?” (158). Shuttling between two cultures, Ajay needs to find a 11 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life terrain of entente for his artistic production. Dwelling on too many details of the Indian culture would alienate the American reader; while stripping his stories from everything Indian would alienate him from his own community. He finds a solution in his own definition of exoticism: “this is how one used exoticism - by not bothering to explain” (158). In other words, while the immigrant writer is not supposed to be a cultural informant, the American reader has to make an effort to reach for other communities. In an interview by Rosie Huf, Sharma significantly states: “I don’t know if I have to be responsible for representing my community or representing the world. I have to be responsible for representing my talent.” Family Life offers an artistic rendition of an immigrant family wrestling with a domestic tragedy without falling in the trap of exoticism. Sharma manages to strike a balance between his Indianness and Americanness. This metafictional section of the narrative significantly ends with Ajay channeling ethnic alienation and racial violence into a work of art: “When a boy tried to start a fight by saying, ‘you’re vegetarian - does that mean you don’t eat pussy?’ I thought this would be something I could use in a story” (160). The novel celebrates artistic production as a mediator between cultures. Conclusion If Sharma resists classification as a writer, his narrative transgresses all taxonomic borders. The overlapping boundaries between autobiography and fiction offer a textual space accommodating different generic lineages. Sharma’s use of the novel as a generic receptacle for his autobiography may find explanation in the nature of this genre. From Latin novus (new), the novel acquires its essence from its perpetual change as it “sparks the renovation of all other genres, it inflects them with its spirit of process and inconclusiveness” (Bakhtin 7). Sharma’s description of his novel highlights its innovative side: “My sense is that this is something new: a rigorous modernist novel of the childhood self that deals specifically with the Indian immigrant experience” (Interview by Hamid). He locates the modernist impulse of his text mainly in its ending: “you end the novel and you suddenly think, now the real problem has occurred, has started” (Interview by Natarajan). Faithful to a Proustian ending, Family Life closes on a new beginning: “That was when I knew I had a problem” (218). While he builds on the narratives of European and American modern writers, Sharma strives for a creative emulation. And yet, when compared to other immigration novels, like those of Jhumpa Lahiri or Khaled Hosseini, Family Life veers more towards innovation than imitation. Not only is it free from a mystifying exoticism, it also provides a new account of immigration. The recurrent celebration of America as a savior, a surrogate motherland where all dreams come true is absent in the novel. Sharma provides an immigrant counter-narrative of the American dream. _____________________________ Notes 1 “Autonarration refers to a referential form of literature: “The autonarrative project is very realistic at the core: it proposes to talk about the self with a little confabulation” (26, Translation mine). (Arnaud Schmitt, “La perspective de l’autonarration.” Poetique, N0. 149, 2007). 2 “The phrase autobiographical fiction is mainly reserved to fiction with a good deal of the writer’s own life in it; or those lapses from fact which occur in most autobiographies. Hence the need for coining a rather dreadful portmanteau-word like autobiografiction in order to connote shortly a minor literary form which stands between those two extremes” (28). (Stephen Reynolds, “Autobiografiction.” The Speaker, New series N0. 366, 1906. 28-30). 3 The term “autofiction” is first coined by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his novel Fils (1977).   12 �Hager Ben Driss • Immigrant Everyday Life Works Cited Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Yale French Studies, no. 73, 1987, pp. 12-20. Boelhower, William Q. “The Immigrant Novel as a Genre.” MELUS, vol. 8. no. 1, 1981, pp. 3-13. Certeau de, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984. Cline, Sally, and Carole Angier. The Arvon Book of Life Writing: Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir, Methuen Drama, 2010. Desai, Kiran. “Praise for Family Life.” Family Life, Norton, 2015. Felski, Rita. “The Invention of Everyday Life.” New Formations, no. 39, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 1901, translated by Alan Tyson, Norton, 1965. Gajarawala, Toral. “A Minor Complaint.” The Nation, 5 Nov. 2014. www.thenation.com/article/minorcomplaint/ Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books, 1973. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge UP, 1997. Goffman, Erving. The Representation of Self in Everyday Life. U of Edinburgh, 1956. Hamid, Mohsin. “Praise for Family Life.” Family Life, Norton, 2015. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I: Introduction. Translated by J. Moore, Verso, 1991. ---. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by S. Rabinovitch. Transaction Publishers, 1984. Mangoly George, Rosemary. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-century Fiction. U of California P, 1999. Sharma, Akhil. Family Life. Norton, 2015. ---. “A Novel Like a Rocket.” The New Yorker, 7 Apr. 2014. www.newyork.com/books/page-turner/a-novel-likea-rocket ---. Interview by John Ray. Salon, 14 Apr. 2014. www.salon.com/2014/04/13/akhil_sharma_i_dont_want_to_be_ called_an_immigrant_novelist/ ---. Interview by Mohsin Hamid. Guernica, 21 Jan. 2014. www.guernicamag.com/daily/akhil-sharma-whendespair-and-tenderness-collide/ ---. Interview by Foyles. 23 Mar. 2015. www.foyles.co.uk/akhil-sharma ---. Interview by Jyothi Natarajan. The Margins, 11 Apr. 2014. aaww.org/akhil-sharma-swamp-of-this-moment/ ---. Interview by Gary Wood. Telegraph, 25 Mar. 2015. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ authorinterviews/11492671/Akhil-Sharma-I-didnt-know-how-to-have-an-ordinary-life.html Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Granta Books, 1992. Seyhan, Azad. “Ethnic Selves/Ethnic Signs: Inventions of Self, Space, and Genealogy in Immigrant Writing.” Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, edited by E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck, U of California P, 1996. Stein, Gertrude. Narration: Four Lectures. 1935, U of Chicago P, 2010. Warner Gunn, Janet. Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience. U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.   13 �Emily Bright Francis Accra, Ghana My housemate Francis got his visa, flew to join his wife in New York on the Fourth of July. He said, “Do you remember where to find the pharmacy?” He said the world connected, The week before he was to leave (before document in-hand so we did not say good-bye), but I knew back in America we’d live in different states, how, busy there, our teaching done, the phone calls we spent the evenings talking of America. Francis who bought fish and kenkey would subside. Friday he got his visa. He showed me how to make jolof, a great soup-pot-full. nearly every night, who said “You’re welcome,” when I got home, pointing at his plate. My first week, he showed me phone cards and where I could buy clean water in sealed half-liter sacks. He rode the tro-tro all the way to work with me that first day. So little time to give back what I knew. Credit systems. Health insurance. Bronx, be kind to him. I brought mangoes, he brought fish. I described job interviews, and fireworks, and maple syrup. 14 �Nancy Ciccone Migrating Borders A wall sat in the middle of Berlin separating the East and West sections of the city. One could see it, touch it, and die crossing it. Compared to most borders, it was an anomaly, a bit reminiscent of medieval cities, but misplaced because it did not surround a community but cut through it. The wall marked the end of a war and the beginning of a détente that transformed the lives of people on either side. Its very visibility reminded us that ideologies differentiated a population united by the same language. On the Western side, citizens noticeably prospered, and on the Eastern side, they clearly struggled. The solidity of the wall translated into tangible differences in jobs, food, and housing. All these changes came about not because people migrated. Rather, the border that marked the boundaries of their lives did. This essay traverses the borders of fiction and philosophy, region and nationality, race and ethnicity. I cross the boundaries of academic disciplines to explore some of the ways charted borders indicate the un-chartable ones in contexts that stem from history but touch on culture and sociology. The result is somewhat kaleidoscopic. I aim to dislocate binary paradigms of center and margin, of transgression and crossings. Of course, geography determines some boundaries, and treaties legislate others. Alterations in these visible and tangible markers, however, frequently reveal those more significant, unseen ones within individuals and communities. I contend that the un-chartable ones deserve attention because they highlight conflict. Unlike the refugees we see in camps, in boats, on dusty roads, the individuals who remain in their homes when maps are re-drawn do not figure in the migration statistics of human geography. Yet, these people also deserve attention because their situations provide another perspective on conceptions of communal identity. Their actuality also broadens self-designations such as metiza, which Gloria Anzaldúa notably uses to flag her competing identifications and subjectivities (79-80). Suggestive rather than exhaustive, the following examples touch on some of the historical ways borders change and the costs that result. War usually displaces people. To survive, some leave their homeland. They cross a border and perhaps find safety but also find a new set of challenges. Most leave things that identified them, and with which they identified. Many leave family members. Refugees undergo transformation. Relocation frequently breeds dislocation. What happens to individuals, however, when only the boundaries move, and the people remain in the homes they occupied before the maps changed? Once a region passes among political hands, institutions, such as government and commerce, demand adjustments. Yet official actions may not immediately translate into private ones. In Cosmopolitanism, the contemporary philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, treats the conquest of one nation by another in terms of ownership and displaced contexts for cultural artifacts. In one example, he quotes from Baden-Powell who boxed up museum quality objects from the African Kumasi to be shipped to England and so lost to the people whose ancestors created them (116). Here, the border likely remains the same, superseded by a new government. Regions in proximity to each other, however, offer a different set of challenges because the border moves as the region changes hands. Consider, for instance, the situation of migrating borders in the European area of Alsace-Lorraine. After the Treaty of Frankfurt (1871), it was Germany, returned to France with the Treaty of Versailles 15 �Nancy Ciccone • Migrating Borders (1919), Germany again after 1940, France in 1945. Interestingly, it is also one of the borders where the Germanic branch of language meets the Romance branch in the Indo-European family tree. The people in this area likely forge a dialect and probably comprehend each official language. The community shares a culture despite the re-mapping, partially due to the frequent re-mapping that has occurred there. They are not strangers to each other, but some become strangers to a different government. However horrendous the dislocation of objects from their contexts, the ownership of artifacts may matter less to these people than the language required for employment and for schooling. They continue to own their communal medium of communication. Unlike the refugee experience, the things that identify these people and with which they identify remain the same. To put it in concrete terms, even if artifacts leave the region, their household cooking utensils do not. The complexity and ironies spawned by borders has inspired fiction as well as philosophy. An insightful post-modern example is Miéville’s murder mystery, The City & the City (2010), which probes the significance of borders. The novel plays with the idea of seeing and ‘unseeing.’ The depressed city of Besźel intersects with the thriving city of Ul Quoma in two different countries. Unlike Berlin, no wall intersects them. The populations speak different languages. ‘Unseeing’ enforces the border. For Besź natives to see the Ul Quoma foreigners sharing the same sidewalk constitutes a ‘breach.’ Spotting a woman walking away from the crime scene, for example, the lead Besź detective realizes “with a start… that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that [he] should not have seen her” (12). “Crosshatches” mark the intersections between the cities and warrant crucial alertness when negotiating them. The building in one city may abut a building in the other, so that one of them necessitates ‘unseeing.’ To go from one city to the other requires permission and passport, even if the trip is next door. To phone across the street necessitates an international code, if in the other city. Violation of the border is a criminal act resulting in deportation for a foreigner and disappearance for a native. Government officials in the department of Breach surveils the citizens of Besźel and enforces the strictures of borders: “The powers of Breach are almost limitless. Frightening. What does limit Breach is solely that those powers are highly circumstantially specific” (68). In other words, the limitless power of Breach only extends to that of the breach, but a breach consists of simply seeing the forbidden. In effect, a patrolled, intangible border separates the people of Besźel and of Ul Quoma, a peoples thought to stem from one tribe. Even this brief description of Miéville’s thought-provoking murder mystery highlights two aspects of borders. First, each citizen internalizes it. The boundary between places parallels one within the individual subject to national laws, which may or may not permit travel to another country. Individuals need either self-regulate or risk criminality. The boundary entails acute awareness in order to regulate unawareness especially as the population circumnavigates ‘crosshatches.’ The second aspect of borders revolves around the displacement of truth. The detective in this novel, after all, must solve a crime. His truth rests in the determination of the culprit. Given a murder in one country, the victim’s body in another, and the limitations placed on seeing, the boundary disrupts and nearly eliminates the very possibility of solving the crime. However imaginative and diligent the characters are, the novel reveals the way empirical evidence can fall through the cracks known as the border. For when we say, “We see,” we mean we understand. It does not involve the physiology of our eyes but of consciousness. To ‘unsee’ is to miss the point, to fragment understanding as if a postmodern requirement for moving about in the world. Whereas the border in Miéville’s novel defeats understanding between the two cities, it paradoxically posits the acknowledgement of ‘unseeing’ as a necessary first step in the process of understanding. In other words, we need be aware of what we do not see, what we do not understand, in order to bridge the boundary between an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ Some borders, of course, are more visible than others. The ancient Romans likely would have welcomed a Berlin wall to clarify ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It would have relieved the vigilance of ‘un-seeing’ 16 �Nancy Ciccone • Migrating Borders for those in Besźel. Until they reached Scotland, however, the Romans had another solution to borders: they just moved them outward. However suspect in his claims, Livy (59 BCE-17 CE) describes a ritual for accomplishing expansion in the settling of Rome. In summary, a legate runs up to the boundary of Rome’s Latin neighbors and declares his state’s intentions. He addresses all the immortals, declares who sent him, and asks Jupiter to let him know if this idea is a bad one: “ʻIf I demand unduly and against religion that these men and these things be surrendered to me, then let me never enjoy my native land’” (Livy, 1:32.6-7). As he crosses the boundary, he repeats the message, with appropriate variations, to the first man he meets, when he enters the city gates, and in the market. At this point, I always wonder how many legates were necessary? Why not just capture him? Then again, maybe no one understood this crazy person running around, speaking gibberish. Perhaps, as Miéville’s novel imagines, the legate was unseen. If Rome’s demands go unmet within thirty-three days, the legate dutifully calls once again on all the immortals as witness and notifies them of his return to Rome for consultations. Notice that those who see this ritual are the virtually unseen, but acknowledged, immortals. The second part of the declaration begins when the legate reports to the pre-republican, Roman king. The king, in turn, consults the elders. If all agree to war for their reparations, a verbal ritual occurs whereby each member affirms his agreement with the others as witness. Then a priest carries a “cornet-wood spear, iron-pointed or hardened in the fire” to the boundary of the other nation (1:32.13). “In the presence of not less than three grown men,” he declares war, names those in agreement, and “hurls his spear into their territory” (1:32.14). Livy fails to explain how the legates knew that their first spear landed across the boundary. He refers to gated and walled cities, but as the original settlers reached east across Italy, most of the population were farmers who marked their adjoining lands with a rock, a terminus (e.g. Ovid, II. 641-42). Indeed, unlike East and West Berlin after the wall, many territories around the world look the same from each side. The desert, for example, looks the same from Mexico and from Arizona. How would one know what to ‘unsee’? The line is clear on a map; any internalization stays somewhat abstract until a fence interferes, a sign indicates difference. In contrast to look-alike-landscapes, the geography of rivers, oceans, and mountains sometimes make their own borders and thereby restrict seeing; dialects evolve, and can even birth a language incomprehensible to the inhabitants’ ancestors. Yet my own state of Colorado escaped a geographical divide; the Rockies cut through it. A cartographer’s pencil, as opposed to a pioneer’s wagon, determined its boundaries. Interestingly a Coloradan once told me that her family was Mexican. I asked how long they had been in Colorado. She replied that she and her family had lived here for generations: “the border moved; we didn’t.” She self-identified as neither American nor Coloradan under which laws she lived. She obeyed these laws and benefitted from public education and modern conveniences the United States offered. In effect, she was making a political statement, a statement of pride, a critique of the displacement of Native Americans who preceded the Mexicans. For this woman, ethnicity circumscribed historical fact. As with the characters in The City and the City, she internalized boundaries but only some, so as to deny others. I encountered a similar situation where ethnicity mattered to individuals near the Dolomites in Northeastern Italy. I chatted with an Italian colleague whose grandfather lived there during World War II. My colleague told me that her family sided with the Germans. Her grandfather’s brother was a commandant. They accepted Mussolini’s rules--not a partisan among them. They welcomed the Germans. They were not alone. Many families in the region felt and acted the same way. After all, they were Austrian-German. They had lived in the same area for generations. The borders moved; they did not. In effect, World War II ushered in a civil war in Italy’s northeast. The Brenner Pass provided a major route for the Nazis. It was a fast track between Munich and Rome for soldiers, for supplies, for prisoners. Dependent on ethnic affiliation and filiation, dependent on winners and losers, the war boiled just 17 �Nancy Ciccone • Migrating Borders under the social surface, generations after it ended, invisible to non-natives. The regions’ background likely contributed to the inhabitant’s sense of identity. The Veneto province joined the Italian kingdom as late as 1866. It had bounced around. After the Seven Weeks War and a Prussian victory, the Treaty of Vienna (1866) forced the Austrians to cede the region to a neutral France, which in turn gifted it to Italy. This event followed the Roman Republic declaration of 1849, which theoretically united Italy and which was the same year the Venetian Republic succumbed to Austria. Confused? Imagine living there. One morning, you look out the kitchen window you have looked out for the past twenty years, and the hill behind the house is no longer Austrian; today, it is Italian. The hill did not move. The river may have a new name but only in official documents. The street addresses cadge the same numbers, but in another country. Natives may walk the same streets and shop at the same grocer, but the people who ate ‘wurst’ for dinner, now order ‘salsiccia’. To paraphrase from Appiah, their conversation makes them used to each other (85), despite the changeability of maps. Then a war arrives and they distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’. Before the formation of the European Union, the Austrian in Veneto Province needed a passport to visit relatives in Austria. As the British might ask, who are they when they are at home? Some think that one driving force for Garibaldi’s military prowess resulted from the 1858 treaty between Napoléon and Cavour. At that meeting, Nice located north of the Alps was ceded to France. Nice was Garibaldi’s birthplace. So Italy’s hero was born in France, only it was Italy then. A hurled spear could no longer cross the Alps. However habitual the tolerance of pluralism, it failed in Sarajevo because a group of Serbs held on to who they are when they are at home. They threw their spear across a border of ethnicity. If “’Being home’ refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe protected boundaries,” what tectonic plates shifted for the Serbs?1 They literally occupied the same place. We need to know the self-designated borders of ‘home’ to circumvent the kind of ethnic atrocities that Sarajevo has come to represent (Siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1996). For the Coloradan native and for my Italian colleague, boundaries displaced nationalities leaving cultural identities, even if somewhat mythic, as intact as it did for those in Miéville’s fictional Besźel. Unlike cosmopolitans, the inhabitants stay where they have always lived but the province figuratively migrates to another government. When the United States disunited in civil war, the newly drawn border generally separated the north from the south. The difference it made on one individual life—that of Prince Rivers—defies imagination. He first appears in history as an enslaved coach driver and ends his life in the same profession, but as a freeman. In between those markers, Prince Rivers gained emancipation by escaping from his owner (1861); joined the Union army (1863) and served as a sergeant under Thomas Higginson2 at Port Royal, South Carolina, where Rivers was previously enslaved; escaped bounty put on his head by his previous owner; settled in Hamburg, South Carolina, where he rose to magistrate (1868) and then mayor (1871); endured newspaper revilement for his successes; and finally survived a white supremacist massacre at Hamburg (1876), only to face dismissal from his position and a frequently postponed lawsuit (1877).3 The man whom Higginson thought could be “‘King of South Carolina’” “had been politically guillotined long before his [legal] case was finally dismissed in 1885” (qtd. in Budiansky 52; 253). The end of the civil war in 1865 eliminated the border between North and South, but the repercussions of emancipation issued in the corruption known as reconstruction. Prince Rivers did not move from the South Carolina that initially enslaved him, but public events and racial prejudice repeatedly remapped his emotional geography. The land remained the same, but marauders destroyed his things: the tangibles that identified the freed Rivers. As visible as the Berlin wall, skin color distinguished an ‘us’ from a ‘them.’ One could see it, touch it, and die crossing the boundary. The ‘white’ side pretended to speak a language different from the other; Prince Rivers’s writing proves otherwise, but the boundaries were set. He must have forgotten to internalize the border others observed; he must have thought the post-war 18 �Nancy Ciccone • Migrating Borders elimination of the border indicated actuality. A group of Southerners replaced Roman legates in declaring their intention to claim what some thought they owned. Guns replaced the spear and established a racial boundary that muddied the ability to identify the culprits. Only skin color was seen, only the surface, so the person was unseen.4 Borders enable forms of identity and identification, and at the same time, obfuscate them. Crossing them generates meaning but also limits it. By mining historical examples in juxtaposition with Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism and Miéville’s The City & the The City, we cross the generic boundaries of philosophy and of fiction. However different the discourses, they articulate a similar concern with literal and figurative borders. The Besź citizens looking at those in Ul Quoma risk life, although the cities occupy the same geographical area. Laws keep one set of citizens from the other. In contrast to Miéville’s fictional treatment of borders, Appiah begins Cosmopolitanism with an image of a “shattered mirror” indicative of the perceptions of the world-traveling, “educated upper classes in late Victorian England”; “each shard of [the mirror] reflects one part of a complex truth from its own particular angle” (8). His image injects the significance of ‘class.’ Wealth, perhaps more so than education, enables the lucky few to cross national borders. But the “Victorian” travelers fail to see the native cultures they visit; they merely taste different aspects in their travels. They return home essentially unchanged. Whereas Miéville’s novel attends to the ridiculousness and momentousness of enforcing borders, Appiah notes their variations in the exchange of perceptions. This brief glance at ethnic, racial, political, geographic borders shatters even Appiah’s “shard.” The plethora of figurative and literal borders highlights the tremendous consequences entailed by them, but more importantly, it alludes to the continuing need to excavate them, to see what is unseen and move closer to understanding the humanity that binds us. _____________________________ Notes 1 Martin and Mahonty continue this quotation to define “’not being home’ as “a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of difference even within oneself (196). 2 Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) may be better known to some as Emily Dickinson’s correspondent rather than the commander of the first Union regiment of freed African American soldiers. 3 This timeline is gleaned from Budiansky’s Bloody Shirt. For contextual information, see Kevin Dougherty, The Port Royal Experiment (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2014) and Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction (Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). 4 In 2015, a lone shooter targeted the Emanuel African Methodist Church, near Charleston, South Carolina. Among the people murdered was a senator, symbolic of the political inheritance in the same area Prince Rivers had carved out. Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La frontera. Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism. Norton, 2006. Budiansky, Stephen. The Bloody Shirt. Viking, 2008. Livy. History of Rome. Loeb edition. Translated by E. O. Forster, Harvard UP, 1998. Martin, Biddy and Chandra Talpade Mahonty. “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, edited by Teresa de Lauretis, Indiana UP, 1986, pp. 191-212. Miéville, China. The City & the City. Ballantine, 2010. Ovid. Fasti. Loeb edition. Translated by James G. Frazer, Harvard UP, 1976. 19 �Sandra M. Cox Revolution & Relocation in Graphic TMemoir N S & P arrative trategies estimonial urposes in Cuba: My Revolution and Vietnamerica R ecent developments in mediated coverage of refugees seeking asylum point to an ever-expanding anxiety about the diasporic spaces that result from conflict-driven immigration. At the same time as traditional news media—in print and on-screen—frames refugees fleeing the developing Global South (often as a result of either the American War on Terror or of postcolonial discord and Western interventionism), a body of autobiographical comics by and about migrants who relocated during a period of violent revolution has grown. Looking more closely at these autobiographical comics provides a means to more fully understand how patterns of migration are reflected in the self-representation of identity. By conducting close readings of the intertextual conversations in two such comics, I hope to consider the varied socio-political pressures that prompt relocation and to offer an analysis of the lived experiences of asylum-seekers in the U.S. after American military occupations during the Cold War. While this context is radically different from the current crisis in Western Europe and in the United States after recent executive orders, the ways in which each graphic narrative considers how civil unrest and systemic violence prompt transnational migration and transcultural identification in ways that remain relevant to contemporary considerations of migrants and identities. My hope is that in examining how these narratives present records of asylum-seeking will better illuminate some of those contemporary issues that plague attempts to resettle migrants fleeing conflict zones. Both Cuba: My Revolution and Vietnamerica are part of a burgeoning genre of autography, or graphic memoir, which has particular didactic functions. The books actively participate in civic discourse about an ever-growing set of diasporic communities—migrants moving from the Global South to the Global North to flee armed conflicts in which the United States has intervened. G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica tracks one family’s migration from Vietnam to the U.S. during and after the Vietnam War, and Iverna Lockpez and Dean Haspiel’s Cuba: My Revolution follows a young woman from the July 26th Revolution in Cuba to her eventual migration to Florida after persecution by the Castro regime. Tran’s book is based upon the author’s life, as well as extensive interviews with his family members about their experiences during the War, which he both writes and illustrates. Cuba: My Revolution, on the other hand, is a sort of graphic roman à clef, based on Lockpez’s real-life experiences, which have been fictionalized and illustrated by Dean Haspiel, a frequent penciler and writer for DC Comics. Both books also represent a shift in mediated expression—from the textual genre of testimonio, endemic to Latin America and most often associated with the Central American Dirty Wars to the visual medium of comics. Understanding the ways that this shift reflects and reveals narratives about tranculturation and migration is significant and useful because the two markets in publishing that have continued to grow since Marshall McLuhan infamously declared that “print is dead” are illustrated texts and texts for adolescent and young adult audiences. For contemporary literary studies to demonstrate its relevance in a post-culture wars society, scholars may need to apply the analytical tools developed for understanding the textual pragmatics of identity politics to these burgeoning genres. In the present moment, when debates about migration and asylum are at their most heated and relevant, it is particularly appropriate to investigate the content of these two graphic narratives with the intention of allowing their 20 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir creators to bear witness to the experience of migration under the duress created by revolution and foreign occupation. The two comics were originally published by American presses, in English, and are rhetorically oriented on an audience of American readers, which suggests that the stories encourage a particular set of responses from that specific audience. Cuba: My Revolution and Vietnamerica are autographic works of testimonio, which is a genre of non-fiction narrative that bears witness to cultural trauma for radical political ends. The comics serve those ends in three ways as the visual texts work to implicitly persuade readers to: 1) re-examine mainstream historical and commercial narratives about the Cold War, 2) reflect upon the political, economic and human costs of American intervention in foreign governments, and 3) participate more actively in civil discourse concerning the fates of migrant populations fleeing armed conflict. In doing so, Tran, Lockpez, and Haspiel present inherently politicized narratives about the ethics of American military intervention in foreign revolutions. These narratives operate didactically to prompt readers to shift their understandings of the ways that war and revolution prompt relocation and transculturation. In spite of this politicization, both texts remain profoundly ambivalent about revolution and conflicted about the opportunities offered by relocation. Contradictions abound in the ideological fabric of both texts. Tran’s grandfather was a ranking official in the revolutionary army, who is remembered as a war hero in Vietnam. Tran’s father, was imprisoned by the Viet Minh and is therefore understandably critical of the communist regime. Tran’s father isn’t an American apologist, in spite of his vehement rejection of Ho Chi Minh’s reforms; he is equally critical of what Tran’s dialogue calls the “myopic contemporary Western filter” that he believes cloud’s his youngest son’s perspective on Vietnamese history (95). Similarly, Lockpez and Haspiel’s protagonist, Sonya, has no stable position on the political and economic spectrum that runs from totalitarian facism to complete laissez faire governance by the market. Sonya initially sympathizes with the Marxist revolution, in spite of her upper middle class upbringing, but is later victimized by the Castro’s secret police and is forced to flee to the U.S. Because both texts use multiple narrative perspectives to view the consequences of American imperialism and the troubles of the coupes d’etats that contextualize that intervention, the nuances of revolution and relocation are reproduced for the audience. This nuance produces a complex nexus of narrative levels, and attendant didactic purposes. Of Genre and Medium: Defining Testimonio and Narratological Readings of Autography In order to produce a unified theoretical foundation for interpreting these narrative levels and didactic purposes, two distinct bodies of scholarship—testimonio and narratology—are crucial to the theoretical intervention this article posits. The first of these is drawn from Hispanophone literary studies and considers how personal narrative functions as an act of witnessing. The word testimonio is often used to describe first-person accounts of atrocities committed against marginalized populations in crisis. Scholar John Beverley’s definition—“a literary simulacrum of an oral narrative. . .with a political purpose” (70-71)—suggests that the more immediate the experience of the writer, the more potent the testimonial literature is likely to be. The most famous example of writing in this genre, and the one Beverley draws upon most frequently in his work is I, Rigoberta Menchú, a narrative by the Nobel Prize winner that documents the atrocities visited upon indigenous Guatemalans that led to the narrator/protagonist’s immigration. While it cannot be argued that Tran, Haspiel and Lockpez’s work exactly approximate Menchú’s form, the connections between that testimonio and the autographic narratives do not stretch Beverley’s definitions overmuch. Beverley offers a definition of testimonio, as “a nonfictional, popular-democratic form of epic narrative” (33), which manifests as “a novel or novella-length narrative in book. . .told in the first 21 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or a significant life experience” (31). Tran’s Vietnamerica is organized through polyphonic stories—either the protagonist/ author/ illustrator GB’s own experiences or the oral narratives relayed to him by his living relatives. Although Haspiel and Lockpez manufacture the character of Sonya, the preface by Lockpez argues that the her own experiences primarily inform that characterization and that those events she did not personally witness were produced from shared memories that other survivors of Castro’s purges shared with her, producing exactly the sort of composite character that is central to testimonio—a narrator who is both an ‘I’ and a ‘we’. In collaborating with Haspiel to tell the story of the Cuban Revolution, Lockpez presents a cultural story rather than a personal one. In doing so, she chooses to speak in a kind of pluralistic narrative voice that documents the shared trauma of the revolution from the perspective of multiple Cuban nationals living under the regime. That relationship between Lockpez, as pluralized narrative center, and Haspiel, as a kind of collaborating adaptor who sets her narrative into comics form, is not without complications that related to testimonio as a genre. Beverley also argues that much of any testimonio’s protagonist’s story is filtered through the voice of an interlocutor, who will set the narrative into a context accessible to the dual audience. Beverley’s own work examines the ways in which Elizabeth Burgos-Dubray, the translator of the seminal piece of testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchú, worked to reshape the oral narrative that Menchú shared into a form that would be legible to the international readership Menchú hoped to persuade when she approached Burgos-Dubray about compiling the book (first in Spanish and then later in more than a dozen languages before becoming an international bestseller). Similarly, Haspiel’s expertise on the poetics of comics and Tran’s Americanized perspective on his family history serve as lenses through which non-immigrant readers might be better able to understand the ways in which immigration both broadens and distills national and ethnic identity. Additionally, Beverley notes that beyond simply identifying testimonio as a generic category, critics should attend to “precisely how testimonio puts into question the existing institution of literature as an ideological apparatus of alienation and domination at the same time that it constitutes itself as a new form of literature” (43). Beverley’s contention that testimonio is always necessarily located at the margin of literature—indeed, he calls it “a new postfictional form of literature” (43)—makes an analysis of how comics might bear witness to cultural experiences of oppression especially relevant to considerations of how textuality is permuted in the case of autoethnographic narratives, as the medium of comics and the genre of autography are both often marginalized in literary criticism. In examining how Beverley’s work might apply to fiction, Kimberley Nance has worked to categorize potential purposes for didactic literatures of witness. Nance argues that three functions shape the rhetoric of testimonio: first, forensic narratives work to inform readers who may be unfamiliar or misinformed about the narrated events. For instance, what most American readers know about the war in Vietnam comes from literary texts—like Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried—or commercial films—like Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Stone’s Platoon. These texts and films almost always take on the narrative position of the American soldier deployed abroad, and often exclude of the experiences of the civilians of the occupied nation. By revising that perspective through centering the story on family members who were allied with Ho Chi Minh’s revolution, or the USbacked army of North Vietnam, or the unallied civilian populations caught between those two forces, Tran works to multiply the contexts in which the conflict and the attendant refugee crisis might be understood. Likewise, Haspiel and Lockpez’s decision to depict Sonya as both a sympathizer with the Marxist revolution and a critic of the fascism of the Castro regime unsettles the dichotomy between Capitalist savior and Socialist oppressor that so many narratives about Cuba (like Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not or Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls, for instance) seem to build. 22 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Second, epideictic narratives both build community and call for readers to make judgments about the institutional and political factors that traumatize that community. For instance, Che Guevara’s autobiographical Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War works to situate Latin Americans, regardless of country of origin, language or race, in a pan-national ethnic community. After producing that sense of community, Guevara works to persuade readers to lay blame for economic exploitation at the feet of a colonialist Euro-American military industrial complex. While Vietnamerica and Cuba: My Revolution do not operate pan-nationally to construct the sort of culturally-derrived community that Guevara produces, both autographies make use of diasporic communities as third terms in the exclusionary construction of natives/immigrants that belies so much mediation of transnational migration. Because both GB and Sonya, as protagonists, feel equally estranged from their nation of origin and their new homes in the US, the ways in which community is built and maintained are always already at odds with the autographic call for epideictic analysis. Third, Nance suggests that deliberative narratives work to make readers reflect upon how they might unwittingly be complicit in the traumatization of the cultural group the writer speaks for, and, occasionally, to ask readers to undertake some action to assist that group, or mitigate the damage done to them. Again, a good example of this function is Menchú’s autobiography, in which readers in the Global North are called to intervene on behalf of indigenous Andeans persecuted by the ladino-controlled government of Guatemala. In addition to applying these evaluations of didactic purpose drawn from theories of testimonial fiction, a body of scholarship drawn from classic narrative theory has grown up around non-fiction comics. These narratological approaches to the mechanics of representation used in autobiographical graphic narratives illuminate formal features that lend credence to close readings of those testimonial functions. Comics theorist Hillary Chute has called the sort of personal narrative through the machinery of comics “autography”, and feminist literary critic Robyn Warhol has argued that autographic works might be better understood through Gérard Genette’s notions of diegesis. According to Warhol, every graphic memoir contains at least three diegetic levels—what she calls “story worlds”—that are produced by the perspectives on narrated events that audience are offered as they read the text and view the illustrations. These three diegetic levels are perhaps better observed than explained, as Fig. 1 and 2 demonstrate. The first of these levels is what narratologists have long called the intradiegetic—wherein the writer is a kind of “character” in dialogue with the other people involved in the events of the narrative. The second level, the extradiegetic, is the voice of the writer in retrospective first person, writing from the present as a narrator of those past events. Luckily, in comics (if not in textual memoir), it is relatively easy to separate the intradiegetic from the extradiegetic, as the form makes use of dialogue balloons for the former and narration that is either unattributed to a speaking character or presented outside the frame of each panel for the latter. In spite of this ease of identification, some slippage between the doubled image of the narrator as both actor in past events and organizer of present recollections often occurs. The forensic functions of both pieces of autography are often communicated by these two levels. The intradiegetic dialogue situates the reader in the time and place in which the cultural trauma occurs, and the extradiegetic narration provides analysis that works to push back against misconceptions or to contextualize the testimony provided by the intradiegetic level of narrative. In this way, Tran and Lockpez are able to integrate the voice of the witness/protagonist and the interlocutor who frames the story that witness/ protagonist shares. This is one way the medium of comics provides for a clearly formal framing of the didactic purposes of testimonio. 23 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir In addition to these two levels drawn directly from Genette, Warhol’s important contribution to understandings of narrative levels within autography is what she’s called the interdiegetic, which is a narrative level produced by the pictorial dimension of autography and any words or phrases that cannot be attributed to a single narrating voice. Sometimes pictures function intradiegetically—to illustrate the characters in dialogue—or extradiegetically—to depict the narrator in the literary present or to illustrate the events in the recalled past. However, occasionally an image corresponds to neither level, and serves to illustrate a space either between or outside those two perspectives. In these narrative spaces, those two other functions of testimonial literature are made particularly apparent to viewers. In Fig. 3, for instance, Vietnam is depicted as a kind of sinkhole, with displaced citizens being sucked down. This visual metaphor has an epideictic function, wherein the sunken subjects are portrayed as a community in crisis and viewers are implicitly asked to consider how these displaced populations should respond to the traumatic events by which they are trapped. The ways that content overlaps in Cuba: My Revolution and Vietnamerica point to shared forensic functions and diegetic levels of autographic narratives about transnational migration. Both autographies push back against some notions that their American audiences might have about the communist revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam. Rather than focusing on the costs of American intervention for Americans, the cost of these revolutions for the indigenous populations of the two nations is rendered in similar scenes of detention and torture. As can be seen in Fig. 4 and 5, both texts use the intradiegetic dialogue between detainee and interrogator to illustrate the subhuman conditions that both Sonya and Tri Huu were forced to endure when they came under suspicion by the party. Where the didactic functions of the novel diverge is in how they work epideictically. As Fig. 6 shows, Haspiel and Lockpez use a tri-color format and askew paneling to emphasize Sonya’s pain and degradation when her captors administer electroshocks during interrogation. Contrasting red and grey tones persuade readers to identify and sympathize with Sonya’s helplessness and to visually represent the physical pain and emotional confusion she experiences. The heightened contrast of the greyscale produces a kind of neutral background against which the red works to call attention to the visual representations of pain the torture produces in the protagonist. The use of red also evokes the connotative associations of anger that Haspiel’s art hopes the viewer will feel at this depiction of gross misuse of governmental authority. The characterization even becomes less detailed, so that rather than representing a specific person, drawings of Sonya are universalized, demonstrating how the character stands in for other young Cubans who are similarly brutalized. Tran, on the other hand, focuses on the way the time elapses during Tri Huu’s detention, as is evident in Fig. 7. The use of the mise en abyme effect in the lower left of this panel shows the repetition of this sequence of events as part of the external characterization in the extradiegetic pictorials. In the next few panels, However, Tran juxtaposes that with illustrations of the character’s memories, using intradiegesis to situate the earth-toned images of Tri’s isolation and starvation below the more brightly colored happier times in his life. Like a film montage, those memories proceed from the immediate past into the future, showing that Tri imagines his pregnant wife raising his children without him. The bars of his cell melt into the panel divisions—called “gutters” by comics artists—so that the form of comics become part of the extended time of the narrative. In manipulating time using visual redeployments of space, Tran makes a tacit comment about how lifespans and family trajectories are disrupted by regime change and American interventionism. While Haspiel and Lockpez portray pain as the major consequence of detention and torture, Tran works to show readers that the suspension in limbo—between a fascist state that oppresses its own population and sympathies with the state that seeks to ‘liberate’ that population without clear plans for regime change or population resettlement—is every bit as effecting as the sorts of electrocution and mortification of the body that readers may expect in narratives about torture. The clear connections between Tri Huu’s detention and the millions of refugees living in detention centers 24 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir and refugee camps are not obviously framed in the intradiegesis of Vietnamerica, but the interdiegetic combination of words, pictures and compositional layout helps to portray that endless waiting as a kind of torture that dehumanizes just as completely as violent attacks. Of Rhetoric and Audience: Intertextuality and Persuasive Objectives in Autography In order to build on Warhol’s notion of additional narrative levels in autography, I assert that there is a fourth diegetic level—the protodiegetic. This protodiegetic level works to fuse forensic functions with deliberative ones by implicitly asking readers to consider how the information provided by the forensic testimony might refer to the mainstream narratives and recognizable formal features. By using familiar visual cues in the interdiegetic level, the illustrators help readers to reframe their reflections about American ideological complicity in armed conflicts, which in turn causes readers to carefully consider their shared responsibility for the consequences portrayed by the epideictic sequences at the extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels. This works by directly referencing, often through illustrations rather than textual narratives, the contextual preconceptions that the audience brings to the text. The protodiegetic level is intertextual and often formalized, which limits the amount of intradiegetic text used for deliberative functions. When looking for the protodiegetic level, readers must interpret the style of the form, rather than the content it conveys, in order to see how these autographic works of testimonio function deliberatively. In Cuba: My Revolution, that context comes from an assumption that the reader will be familiar with mainstream superhero comics, which often feature anthropomorphized characters as larger than life heroes and villains. In the section of the text that follows the weeks of torture Sonya endures, Haspiel’s drawing literalize a metaphor from Lockpez’s diaries. Sonya is increasingly dehumanized and begins to think of herself as a caged panther, as is presented in Fig. 8. The pictorial levels of the narrative don’t choose to focus on the animalistic behaviors that Sonya literally displays—smearing her hirsute body with her own feces to deter the attention of guards—but instead depict a transformation from woman to jungle cat, reminiscent of Batman’s nemesis, Catwoman, or of Stan Lee’s hypersexualized shero Tigra, as can been seen in Fig. 9. The protodiegetic construction of this character calls for readers to consider how superhero comics—themselves a product of American Cold War propaganda—might desensitize American audiences to this sort of suffering, and to potentially reject those narratives about American exceptionalism that the mainstream uses of the medium contain. Rather than referencing mainstream comics, Tran takes on a differentiated visual history. The section breaks in Vietnamerica approximate propaganda posters from the CPV after the August revolution, an example of which is presented in Fig. 10. By reworking the aesthetics of these posters as formal markers of breaks in the narrative, Tran works to insert the disarticulated hand—first as savior, lifting his family above the conflict, and later as defender of the army of Vietnam, crushing the bombs dropped by Japan, France and the U.S.—into a particular narrative about specific asylum-seekers (see Fig. 11 and 12). In this way, Tran’s family is saved from the CPV’s troops, but the CPV’s intervention saves Vietnam from colonialist oppression, thereby complicating a seemingly simple narrative. Additionally, much of the interdiegetic content in Vietnamerica comes from hyperbolic renditions of photojournalism from the revolution, which further builds verisimilitude into the narrative (as can be noted in Fig. 13 and 14). By referencing real-events, Tran builds some sense of veracity into his narrative. Using illustration to exaggerate the chaos of those moments, he works to frame asylum seekers as a population under duress, simply seeking safety, rather than as traitors and turncoats or abject illiterates begging for handouts from international aid organizations. This humanizing impulse is intrinsically linked to the deliberative functions of the autography as well. 25 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir The sections of the graphic memoir depicting Tran’s own ambivalence about and alienation from his extended family and Vietnam are represented by protodiegetic references to mundane objects from idyllic American family life. In this depiction of a game of Scrabble (in Fig. 15) the word “home” is jumbled in unused tiles at the side of the game board, which shows Tran’s audience that the very concept has become irrelevant for second generation Vietnamese Americans. There is literally no place to lay the word on the board, because it is filled in with the faces of lost loved ones and memories of racial microaggressions. Readers are asked to consider how their assumptions about Vietnamese families might be challenged by these pictorial representations of transculturation and elided ethnic identity, which are long-term costs that extend well beyond periods of torture and civil unrest. Of Politics and Mass Production: Imagining Identity and Interrogating Consumerism in Autography Both pieces of autography call for readers to consider how the mainstream representations of American roles in the wars in Cuba and Vietnam worked to manufacture broad consent, by which military might was used to produce culturally specific shared traumas for Cuban and Vietnamese people. In calling attention to this American complicity in foreign atrocities, Tran, Lockpez and Haspiel call for an ideological shift in collective reasoning about how and when to become involved in regime change, as well as to remind readers of the costs—both personal and political—of these interventions. Given that broad political invective in each work, critics might well ask how any intervention in the intertextual conversation the two works stage might function, according to the ethics of reading. Indeed, Paolo Quattrone has taken up the question of the ethics of assigning the designation of testimonio to those productions that cannot be subjected to checks of veracity; “[t]he issue at this point becomes ethical and political for it relates to the need to speak for those who can no longer do it,” like the members of Tran’s family who do not survive the conflict in Viet Nam or the unnamed victims of the Castro regime’s various purges in post-revolutionary Cuba. This issue is, of course complicated by the need for “reflection on the possibility and consequences of speaking” or drawing, about politically suppressed atrocities. Quattrone goes on to argue that “where the absence of the unspeakable rather than the presence of the fact is the only possible object of investigation, there is a need to rethink the relations between the case [being presented in the testimonio] and the author and the theory” (148). By situating investigations of didactic discursive strategies alongside narrative techniques, an implicit theory of reading may emerge that marks both Vietnamerica and Cuba: My Revolution as transgeneric and transmedial constructions which owe their particular consideration of the fluidity of culture and identity in a diasporic space to the popular aesthetics they take from comics as a consumerist tradition. Jaqueline Loss, in considering how cinematic adaptations of textual testimonio may shape the questions of veracity that Quattrone raises, notes that Frederic Jameson’s arguments about the relationship between testimonio and cinéma vérité suggest that the two genres share “a set of aesthetic positions against stars and against traditional narratives and fixed scenes” (qtd. in Loss 330). Because the works by Tran, Haspiel and Lockpez also adapt a visual mechanism that makes apparent the intervention of the form—in this case comics, rather than film—in producing the verisimilitude of the narrative, that relationship seems appropriate. However, this argument about how the abandonment of a singularly textual narrative strategy might become grounds for questioning the validity of a translated or adapted visual narrative cannot be easily dismissed; Loss poses the primary question: “Whose cultural memory is privileged if [viewers] accept the rescue paradigm, and what aspects of consumerism lead us to buy into the narrative of rescue and demise that coincides with the market’s whims?” (331). Does the use of the poetics of comics undermine the politics of testimonio? How might the fact that Lockpez and Haspiel’s narrative visually replicates the narratives of superhero saviors, and, indeed, of American exceptionalism, complicate the testimonial rendering of a Cuban-American identity? Indeed, might those same narratives 26 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir strains overwhelm the purposes to which Tran revises his father’s narrative through the perspective that his father has called “myopic” and “Western”? While these questions are prescient, it might be argued that the tropes of popular culture in these two autographic works are actually connected to the rhetorical work they undertake. Comics are, of course, often viewed more as a commoditized mass culture than as exemplars of high culture (as literature or film may be considered by some), but perhaps that very extension of the popular into the political is grounds for reconsidering the testimonial purpose of these sorts of texts. In his defense of testimonio as an extra-literary genre, Beverley has noted that the commodification of cultural production through the operation of the market and the technologies of commercial mass culture can be a means of democratization and redistribution of cultural usevalues, allowing not only new modes of cultural consumption by also increased access to means of cultural production by subaltern subjects. (159) The very fact that these stories are proliferated through a mass cultural medium—comics—rather than sold as capital-L “Literature” may point to the truth of Beverley’s argument. George Yudice seems to concur with Beverley’s point here and to extend that endeavor by noting that authorizing the polemically situated narratives of the sorts of speaking subjects Beverley finds in testimonio: “Testimonial writing, as the word indicates, promotes expression of personal experience. That personal experience, of course, is the collective struggle against oppression from oligarchy, military, and transnational capital” (26). In their elevation of the personal to the political, Tran, Haspiel and Lockpez undertake a kind of democratization of narratives about systemic oppression that work to broaden and deepen the ways in which migration and national identity might be written, visualized and communicated across varied and complex forms. For this reason, attending to the political didacticism of each work of autography is, perhaps, among the best ways to locate both theory and practice of transnationalism in the increasingly mediated environments of a broad global culture. _____________________________ Works Cited Beverley, John. On Testimonio: The Politics of Truth. U of Minnesota P, 2004. ---. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, Duke UP, 1996. Chaney, Michael. Graphic Subjects: Essays on Autobiography in Graphic Novels. U of Wisconsin P, 2011. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. Garnder, Jared. “Autography's Biography, 1972-2007.” Biography, vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-33. 4 Sept. 2015. Jameson, Frederic. “On Literary and Cultural Import-Substitution in the Third World: The Case of Testimonio.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, Duke UP, 1996. Lockpez, Iverna, Dean Haspiel, and Jose Villarubia. Cuba: My Revolution. DC Comics, 2010. Loss, Jacqueline. “Global Arenas: Narrative and Filmic Translation of Identity.” Nepantla: Views from the South, vol. 4, no. 2, 2003, pp. 317-344, 2 May 2016. Nance, Kimberley. Can Literature Promote Justice? Vanderbilt UP, 2006. Quattrone, Paolo. “The Possibility of the Testimony: A Case for Case Study Research.” Organization, vol. 13, no.1, 2006, pp. 143-157. 2 May 2016. Tran, G. B. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. Villard, 2010. Warhol, Robyn. “The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” College Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1-20, 4 Sept. 2015. Yudice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 15-31, 22 April 2016. 27 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 1. An example of intrdiegetic narration from Tran’s Vietnamerica. Fig. 2. An example of extradiegetic narration from Tran’s Vietnamerica. Fig. 3. An example of intradiegetic narration from Tran’s Vietnamerica. 28 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 4. Detention scene in from Lockpez and Haspiel’s Cuba: My Revolution. 29 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 5. Detention scene in from Tran’s Vietnamerica. 30 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 6. Torture scene in tri-color format from Lockpez and Haspiel’s Cuba: My Revolution. 31 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 7. Torture scene with mise-en-abyme effect in from Tran’s Vietnamerica. 32 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 8. Panther panels from Lockpez and Haspiel’s Cuba: My Revolution. Fig. 9. Cover of Stan Lee’s Tigra. 33 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 10. “Fight to Win” poster produced by South Vietnam during the revolution. 34 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 11. Interstitial break from Tran’s Vietnamerica. 35 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 12. Interstitial break from Tran’s Vietnamerica. 36 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Fig. 13. AP Photo of the evacuation of Saigon. Fig. 14. Tran’s drawing of the evacuation of Saigon. 37 �Sandra M. Cox • Revolution & Relocation in Graphic Memoir Figure 15. Scrabble game board from Tran’s Vietnamerica 38 �Carol Erwin Shadows and Prints This naming of things is so crucial to possession – a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away – that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names. Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) E ven though they were both displaced from home, H. D., an expatriate poet in the early 1900s, and Jamaica Kincaid, a contemporary diasporic writer from Antigua, appear to have little in common. Yet both wrestle with their identity and memories of home and the dominant ideologies attached to that space by focusing on writing as a personal act of discovery as opposed to a political statement. Born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua in 1949, Kincaid grew up in a home with an abusive mother. Most of her works contain elements of her memories of that relationship. Beginning with A Small Place, Kincaid also began to address the nature of her homeland as colonized, conjoining previous depictions of dominating mother with mother country. Described by J. Brooks Bouson as a “memory-haunted woman who continually remembers and tries to make sense of her Caribbean upbringing on the island of Antigua” (1), Kincaid states her principal reason for writing as a means of self-discovery: “writing is like going to a psychiatrist. I just discover things about myself” (Perry 498). Born Hilda Doolittle, H. D. also used memory and writing as means of therapy and self-discovery. In fact, she spent a period of time in psychotherapy with Dr. Sigmund Freud and records part of these sessions in one of her more autobiographical works, Tribute to Freud. While H. D.’s poetry, especially her later work, more often employs symbols and stories from Greek mythology, she chooses these archetypes of quest because they represent “models of search,” and Susan Friedman proposes that her quest is strongly influenced by her experiences as an analysand with Freud (Psyche Reborn 4). This paper examines the techniques H. D. and Kincaid employ in creating symbols to rename and liberate feminine and diasporic identity. Both writers use flowers and gardens as symbols and spaces that are an amalgam of real and fictitious objects and experiences based on their loss of home. As Kincaid emphasizes, the act of naming is critical to possession. Therefore, in creating these hybrid symbols and transplanting them in a liminal space, each writer is able to rename objectified symbols—rose, garden, African, mother, love, sexuality, etc.—thus liberating themselves from oppressive ideology. Because the hybrid symbol is emotive and contradictory, however, the act of renaming and remaining in a liminal space is unstable. This instability—of holding together neither one nor the other, but both—highlights the ambivalence and slipperiness of language. As a result, H. D. and Kincaid are able to disrupt dominant narratives, creating a gap to write another chain of signification. In order to maintain a position within the contradictory space, the symbol projects or prints its own shadow in the liminal space. It is the shadow – a referential “you” that is both the writer and not the writer – that effectively speaks back to those forces that oppress or wound the writer. In order to speak back to oppressive forces, Kincaid and H. D. create landscape and flowers in an attempt to return to the past, both the immediate, personal past and a past in the larger, historical 39 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints context. While H. D. transforms misogynist myths by using the various symbols of goddesses or religious female icons, such as Helen and Mary, these acts of transformation are founded upon her loss of home. She reveals that her use of Greek mythology is, at least in some ways, a literary representation of her own childhood. In a letter written to Norman Holmes Pearson on December 12, 1937, H. D. discusses her poem, “Leda,” saying: It is nostalgia for a lost land. I call it Hellas. I might, psychologically just as well, have listed the Casco Bay islands off the coast of Maine but I called my islands, Rhodes, Samos and Cos. They are symbols. And symbolically the first island of memory was dredged away or lost, like a miniature Atlantis. It was a thickly wooded island in the Leigh river [in Pennsylvania]. (Hollenberg 9) Her comments throughout this letter expound upon her reasons for creating Greek symbols that contain the essence of childhood memories. She equates the “lost world of the classics” with “the world of childhood,” declaring her early works are fragments of inner conflict and “poems of escapism…of actual memory, repressed memory, desire to escape, desire to create (music), intellectual curiosity, a wish to make real to myself what is most real” (Hollenberg 10). Her early works specifically fuse childhood memories with hybrid flowers. In exploring the power of place for H. D., Annette Debo illustrates how memories of the American landscape surface in the sea-flowers in her first work, Sea Garden. For example, the sea poppy is a wildflower that grows on gravelly beaches in southern New England. The sea lily is actually an invertebrate marine animal with a body that resembles a land lily, the sea violet is violet coastal flower that grows in sandy soil on the beaches of Maine, and the seashore itself is based upon Casco Bay (9-10). Kincaid also mixes memories and symbols as a way of revisiting a home no longer available. Even her name is a symbol. While she explicitly invented Jamaica Kincaid to protect and disguise her from her mother, she also attaches personal meaning to the name, saying “It was a kind of invention: I wouldn’t go home to visit that part of the world, so I decided to recreate it. ‘Jamaica’ was symbolic of that place” (Cudjoe 220). As Bouson identifies, the chronological order of Kincaid’s texts coincides with the progressive story of self-discovery; and as her literary acts of remembering the past reach a state of maturation, she juxtaposes her domestic world of gardening in Vermont with her Antiguan past, creating both a sense of immediacy and remembrance. While she had written articles on gardening previously, My Garden (Book), written in 1999, directly expresses her connection among writing, gardening, hybridity, and conquest. In pondering why her garden in Vermont is shaped peculiarly, Kincaid concludes that “this must be why: the garden for me is so bound up with words about the garden, with words themselves” (7). As she deliberates over this relationship, she discovers the reason behind her odd shaped garden: it dawned on me that the garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it...I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings). (7-8) Thus, Kindcaid’s rumination on her own garden correlates with H. D.’s elucidation of nostalgia for her “miniature Atlantis.” In short, each writer uses liminal landscapes as a means self-discovery and empowerment. The chapter, “To Name is to Possess,” in My Garden (Book) illustrates the significance of creating hybrid symbols in liminal spaces. In this chapter, Kincaid explores the relationship between gardening and conquest, tracing the origins of the renamed dahlia, once called cocoxochitl before it was removed from Mexico, “hybridized,” and transplanted in European soil. The dislocated, hybrid plant is renamed by the Swedish botanist Andreas Dahl. Kincaid’s garden, therefore, becomes a reflection of the “(re) 40 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints naming and the very presence of flowers as symbols of possession and dislocation” (Bernard 114). The original flower is removed from its homeland, cross-bred and transplanted in foreign soil, and then, given a new name to denote the conqueror’s possession over it. As she contemplates this flower’s historical past, Kincaid considers the significance of naming and possession in a wider historical context: “This naming of things is so crucial to possession – a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away – that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names” (My Garden (Book) 120). This passage indicates an inseparable relationship between the act of naming and the ability to possess what one has named. Kincaid considers this act of possession a “display of entitlement” that is “symptomatic of the erasure and revision that informs the grand scheme of imperialism” and specifically proposes that Carl Linnaeus’s system of classification functions “as a means of placing order over chaos in an attempt to make sense of new and strange lands” (Bernard 114). Kincaid associates this act of naming and erasure through dislocation with murder. However, as Derek Walcott has so skillfully stated, the classic Kincaidian sentence “heads toward its own contradiction” (Garis). The first part of the sentence recognizes the power of conquest, stating that those renamed are imprisoned with the key irretrievably lost and thus murdered, but death isn’t necessarily the end, especially with the context of Kincaid’s garden in Vermont. According to Soto-Crespo, gardens, in connection with post-colonial theories of hybridity and as motifs and tropes of imperialism, are also places of resistance because of its association with mourning and death. Because it is liminal, death becomes a space that cannot be possessed or controlled by the conqueror. Therefore, the conquered—even though they are erased without a key to unlock their prison doors—can still gain freedom through the act of renaming after death. H. D.’s sea-flowers also illustrate the power of renaming. H. D.’s poems do not directly address the power of the dominator to name the flower, but it does hint at such an influence through landscape. Cassandra Laity identifies the images in Sea Garden as displaced flowers in sparse wind-tortured seascapes in contrast to the sheltered, over sweetened gardens (112-15). By placing her sea-flowers in an unstable space that noticeably contradicts the patriarchal association of garden with femininity, H. D. is able to create a new name for a feminine symbol – the rose. Her first poem, “Sea Rose,” obviously “interrogates literary representations of women through distorting conventional symbols of femininity and romance… cultural clichés and the treatment of women as delicate flowers are under attack” (Dowson 136). In other words, the iconoclastic ideals of the rose contradict the images, representations, and names in this new landscape. The title of the poem positions the traditional romantic symbol on a seascape instead of a cultivated garden. Its new location is quite significant. Eileen Gregory states “Sea/salt is the arcane alchemical substance linked to the mysterious bitterness and wisdom essential to spiritual life” (140). On the edge of the sea, the salt will transmute the rose into something new, a sea-rose that has different properties than the traditional one. This rose becomes a hybrid, both in location and in function. As with the history of flowers, when it is hybridized, it must be given a new name. In this “first act of liberation,” H. D. quickly renames her new hybrid in the very first line, “Rose, harsh rose.” She acknowledges its roots by first calling it by its traditional name, and then renames it as a hybrid in this alchemical seascape, giving it new signification that includes its past; while it is a “harsh rose,” it is still a rose. The alchemy here is a blending of femininity with a supposed opposite, harshness. This rose is “marred and with stint of petals, / meager flower, thin, / sparse of leaf” and “Stunted, with small leaf ” (lines 2-4, 9). In these imagistic lines, the sparse use of words accentuates the alterations to the domesticated flower; it is marred, meager, sparse, and stunted. Yet, because of its position near the sea, with its alchemical function, this harshness is “more precious” than the domestic rose. However, the overall poem is not meant to just create a new word, but also to serve as a rational re-definition through challenging the power of language itself. 41 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints Because it is imagistic, “Sea Rose” is “visual, not logical; and its image or metaphor is neither mere ornament nor analogy. It is instead an emotion or idea incarnate, subject and object fused in the image” (Friedman, Psyche Reborn 56). Because of this emotive quality in her poems, Friedman argues that H. D. is able to transform “the misogyny of patriarchal tradition” (230). She proposes that, in “Callypso Speaks,” H. D. “taps the vein of hidden anger [Adrienne] Rich believes essential to the birth of woman out of the ashes of patriarchal culture” (242). However, because of her use of Greek symbols, here the symbols being Odysseus and Callypso, the female realizes that anger in and of itself is a dead end. Friedman identifies this poem as a pivotal point between “Helen” and the Trilogy, her work that allows for transformation, “the dialectic that put new wine in old bottles…a process of purification” (244) in which she recovers and rectifies tradition. While Friedman focuses primarily on the later works, she acknowledges that H. D.’s “‘revolutionary’ re-vision of tradition did not spring into being fullgrown with the publication of the Trilogy. Instead, it was planted firmly in her imagist poetry” (232). H. D.’s sea-flowers, then, contain that “ur” matter of emotion, of anger that can lead to purification and transformation. H. D.’s exploration of emotions in her sea-flowers correlates with her recognition of the problems with language itself. Using Tribute to Angels, Heather Rosario Sievert demonstrates H. D.’s belief in the insufficiency of existing language. In poem XIII, the poet finds she is unable to use words that would express the color of the jewel. Hermes exhorts her to invent the name, but the poet declares that she does not want to name it, but instead experience it. Sievert conjoins this concept of naming the unnamable with the sea-flower poems in Sea Garden. She proposes that even in these earlier works, H. D. is attempting to communicate the “interiority of the object rather than name it” (51). This idea of an unnamable interiority is significant, for it demonstrates the possibility of naming the sea-rose in ways beyond language. In this context, H. D. not only renames her hybrid rose linguistically, but also fuses oppositional forces that transform it into the emotion or idea of a sea rose. In an alchemical seascape, then, the renaming of this symbol is not simply a new definition, a new word to add to our vocabulary; it is a hybrid between the dominator’s language and a raw emotion that disrupts signification by contradiction. Kincaid’s works also contain a strong sense of raw emotion—of anger—in connection to her selfdiscovery and transformation. In the interview with Perry, Kincaid explains her belief in expressing anger, specifically identifying it as a “badge of honor” (497). Linda Lang-Peralta addresses the writer’s expression and negotiation of this emotion through her gardening, stating that for Kincaid, “writing, even if it is in the colonizer’s language, is her only means of expressing anger” (43). Lang-Peralta’s conclusion identifies an intriguing feature of transformation through emotive energy within the act of naming, of using language to express that anger. While much of her writing before My Garden (Book) explicitly casts Kincaid or her main characters in the role of oppressed/conquered, her reflections on her Vermont garden mark a shift “to the other side of the binary” to the side of the colonizer/conquered (41). In a moment of contemplation, Kincaid confesses, “I have joined the conquering class: who else could afford this garden…My feet are (so to speak) in two worlds” (123). Yet, Lang-Peralta’s proposal is cast within the context of Bhabha’s theory on ambivalence, on contradictory feelings on repulsion and attraction in the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Perhaps Kincaid’s reflection on her double stance does not indicate an irreversible shift to the other side of a binary but instead delineates her embrace of language’s slipperiness and its subsequent instability. Lang-Peralta also explores how meaning is elusive and ambivalent. I propose that Kincaid’s garden illustrates her negotiation of contradictory spaces in order to remain in the locus of those opposing forces. In short, Kincaid not only disrupts dominant ideology through contradiction driven by a hybrid of raw emotion and language, she also seeks to remain within that contradictory, ambivalent space. 42 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints Remaining in the contradictory, ambivalent space requires the writer embrace homelessness. Perhaps H. D. and Kincaid are able to rename symbols because they are displaced. Critics such as Simmons and Lang-Peralta examine how Kincaid holds contradictions or tensions in a state of suspension through her status as a diasporic writer. Gerise Herndon specifically refers to it as “a state of liminality” exploring how Kincaid is “homeless, in between, neither here nor there” (1). In her work that explores both her mother and her mother country, The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid states that Xuela, the firstperson narrator, can be a metaphor for the African diaspora. In reference to this work, she remarked that “At the moment African people came into this world, Africa died for them…The birth of one is the death of the other” (Lee). Xuela’s account of her own birth and separation from mother illustrates Kincaid’s aptitude for holding contradictions in a state of suspension: In her reflection on her mother’s death, Xuela says, My mother died at the moment I was born, and for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity…I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized that I had less of some thing I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things that I had scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward. (Kincaid 3) Xuela’s narration throughout the book is consistent with this beginning reflection. She is caught in a liminal state, a place of contradiction where she can look one way and see one path and look the other way and see the opposite path. She examines many aspects of her life through this lens of contradiction. For example, she believes that love and hate wear the same face and love brings defeat (22, 29). She proposes that history is not the past, but it is the past and it is the present (139). In regard to her husband, she says, “You were not the great love of my life and so I understand you completely” (227). As with H. D.’s sea-flower poems, Xuela’s contradictions disrupt dominant narratives, thus enabling her to challenge normative thinking. For example, when we love another, we assume it comes from a place of seeing who that person really is, completely understanding him or her. Love is supposed to bring victory, not defeat. Yet, Xuela is not speaking these disruptive, contradictory statements completely from the side of the “other.” She is caught in this liminal space of neither one nor the other, of neither here nor there. She understands that these contradictions “wear the same face” because of her unique existence within an affective liminal space. In “Sea Rose,” H. D. creates another type of liminality: ocean and land; real flowers and landscapes, and an imaginary, pastoral fourth dimension (as defined by Friedman). Her use of liminality reveals the importance of voice in remaining in an ambivalent space in order to liberate one’s self through the act of renaming. In comparing Sea Garden with the Euripidean choruses that H. D. translated, Gregory proposes that the voice in most of these poems “is hermaphroditic, collective, and atemporal. The poem is, in a sense, a liminal state without ordinary determination of gender, person, or tense” (139). This androgynous nature of the poems, in juxtaposition with its hybridity and its liminality, is significant in H. D.’s ability to transform symbols. In all of the sea-flower poems, the regenerated symbol of femininity is not the speaker; it is not “I.” H. D. as a female poet has not necessarily directly transformed herself through writing. Instead, she has projected her ideal, re-envisioned image of femininity onto a separate object, a sea-flower that she addresses as “you.” This technique of transplanting symbols in a liminal space and then harkening that regenerated symbols as “you” allows H. D. to avoid a dialectic trap implicit in language and ideology. If she had simply created a “harsh rose” in a sheltered, nauseatingly sweet-smelling garden, she would be confined in patriarchal ideology; she could only be the “Other” to masculine identity. According to Gregory, the first three poems, “Sea Rose,” “The Helmsman,” and “The Shrine,” function as “initiatory poems that move us immediately and deeply into the mysteries of the sea garden” 43 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints (140). If we associate the “mysteries of the sea” with its liminal space, these three poems are a progression of entering a contradictory space in order to project the symbol, the referential “you,” to complete the process of renaming: the first act of liberation. Many of the first poems in the book embody emotive, aggressive, violent action pivotal in gaining the right to name one’s self. In “Sea Lily,” the violence against the flower increases from the initial harsh figure of “Sea-Rose.” H. D. does not even begin with a slight recognition of the commonly desired part of the flower, but brutally apostrophizes the flower by accentuating its stalk that is marred, beaten, and wounded by the sea: It is a “Reed, / slashed and torn” that is “shattered / in the wind” (lines 1-2, 6-7). Its “scales are dashed” and “the sand cuts your petal” (lines 10, 12). As Gregory posits, the beauty of this flower lies not is its innocent, sheltered existence, but in the presence of torture and annihilation (141). Once again, the sea salt fuses femininity with nontraditional images to create an image that opposes gentle, domesticated femininity, and H.D. triumphs in its brutal existence: “Yet, though the whole wind / slash at your bark, you are lifted up, aye – though it hiss / to cover you with froth” (lines 16-20). It is important to note, however, that although valued and somehow victorious, the sea-flower does not possess, control, or disperse the emotive energy disrupting dominant ideology; it is only the recipient of such violence. H. D.’s earlier sea-flowers correlate with Kincaid’s early writings, At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy. These works focus primarily on “the powerful ‘Jamaica Kincaid’ [identifying] with “her discarded, yet remembered self, the powerless and vulnerable and deeply shamed ‘Elaine Potter Richardson’” (Bouson 10). In these autobiographical-fictional narratives, the daughters emulate ambivalence toward mothers due, in large part, to the power and abuse inflicted upon them by the maternal figure. In her 1996 novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid both continues and departs from her previous autobiographical mode of self-discovery. On one level, Kincaid continues the mode of expressive anger toward mother by writing a vendetta against a “bad” mother. Yet, as Alison Donnell has observed, its form as an autobiography of Kincaid’s mother, and not herself, creates questions and paradoxes. How can Kincaid write an autobiography of her mother? Donnell demonstrates both the confusion of the speaker and the “slippage between mothers and daughters, mothers and mothers” (127). This altered autobiographical-fictional narrative tells a story of a mother, written in first person narrative by the literary persona Kincaid as daughter, which also includes family obeah stories passed down by Annie Drew, Kincaid’s real mother. For example, the story of the jablesse that took the form of a monkey and threw stones is a story that Annie actually told (Bousoun 115). The Autobiography of My Mother, in many ways, most explicitly illustrates the locus of contradiction in Kincaid’s most influential, dominating force: mother. Even Kincaid’s interviews on the book reveal the contradiction. In an interview with Thomas Brady in 2002, she affirms that his book is about her: “I am really always writing about myself. Especially when I write something as explicitly not about myself as The Autobiography of My Mother, which was not really about my mother but about a woman who could be my mother and so therefore could be me.” This text, then, marks a shift in representation of the speaker that lead to Kincaid’s later writings on gardening and her understanding of conquest, language, and liberation. The shift involves a combination of first person narrative—“I”—and a referential “you”— the domineering mother or motherland. In conjoining “I” and “you,” Xuela represents the combination of opposing forces, of mother and daughter, of subject and object, of conqueror and conquered. This hybrid narrator compares how a mother would watch a child grow to a flower, to a “new flower in bud” that begins to slowly loosen and unfurl. Xuela deems the mother in this action as the beholder, the observer who is connected to the beheld and observed by an invisible current, “which is in many ways a definition of love” (56). Yet, because this hybrid narrator exists in a constant space of contradiction, a liminal space due to the death of mother/motherland, she becomes her own possessor of that unseen power. She says, “No one 44 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me. I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else” (Kincaid 56-57). Xuela occupies her own space that is neither subject nor object, but both, resulting in the right to possess the key to the padlock of the oppressor. In other words, because of her disruption and continued existence in contradictory space, Xuela displays the unusual ability to avoid possession by the conqueror. In connecting this with flowers and gardens, the lack of possession means the conqueror cannot name and own her. While Xuela embodies and embraces numerous contradictory stances, the right to possess and name one’s self revolves around ideas of love and sexuality, thus hinting at patriarchal ideas of gender. Xuela refuses standard practices and ideas of love, and in doing so, refuses the possession that derives from it. She says, “I did not want to belong to anyone…since the one person I would have consented to own me had never lived to do so, I did not want to belong to anyone; I did not want anyone to belong to me” (Kincaid 104). Her act of self-possession is in direct connection to sexual acts. Her favorite form of sexuality is not heterosexuality or homosexuality. It is self-sexuality: masturbation. The “space between her legs” belongs to no one, but herself. One might argue against her power of self-sexuality since Xuela very actively engages in sexual acts with many males and even marries the English doctor. But even in these relationships, she refuses to play the role properly assigned, such as mother. Xuela refuses to possess a child, having a life that belongs to her, even if it means aborting that life, which also highlights contradiction since the very title of the book implies that Xuela gave birth to children. At the end of her life, Xuela reflects on her refusal to participate in patriarchy, saying “I refused to belong to a race, I refused to accept a nation” (226). The result, the refusal to participate, is a state of emptiness. She says, “I can hear the sound of much emptiness now…It holds no fear, only growing curiosity. I only wish to know it so that I may one day tell myself the story of my existence within it” (226). Xuela believes embracing the emptiness will allow her to tell her own story to herself within that liminal space. Kincaid’s book is the representation of that story, of an imaginative space of contradiction where the hybrid is neither subject nor object due to her refusal to participate in dominant ideology. Xuela, while not the direct representation of Kincaid’s own act of liberation, is a symbol that marks the catalyst for her own regeneration. Creating this hybrid obviously began Kincaid’s own process of liberation from mother, for after this book, Kincaid moves away from stories about mothers and daughters and onto her role as gardener in My Garden (Book). Yet, to understand why this hybridity was necessary for Kincaid’s self-empowerment, we must once again return to H. D. Most of H. D.’s poems in Sea Garden address the referential “you.” We have already explored how many of the first poems apostrophize the flowers as “you,” recording images of the violence and annihilation forced upon the flower in a liminal space, much like the abuse inflicted upon the daughters in Kincaid’s earlier stories. Like The Autobiography of My Mother, the poem, “Sheltered Garden,” marks a convergence in the use of “I” and “you” and thus a shift in possession. However, instead of love and sexuality, H.D. continues with the imagery of aggression and violence. The speaker begins by saying “I have had enough / I gasp for breath” (lines 1-2), but in the next stanza addresses her opposite, the “you” who “retraces your steps.” The speaker questions the actions of the other, the “you” who protects the fruit by smothering it in straw and picking it before it is ripe thus avoiding possible frost. The speaker deems these actions by “you” a “beauty without strength” that “chokes life” (lines 41-42). For the majority of the poem, “you” is the active, violent force, choking and smothering the life of the fruit in its sheltered garden. Yet, because this poem allows space for the “I” to speak to the “you,” we also see a shift in the possession of violence. In the last part of the poem, “I” speaks of her wish for the wind to dispense violence against those domesticated images of femininity. “I” desires the wind to break, scatter, snap, fling, and hurl those symbols until those images and ideas are blotted out, allowing a new 45 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints beauty to be discovered in “some terrible / wind-tortured place” (lines 56-57). The role of wind in this poem is quite significant. This wind, much like Xuela, cannot be possessed by any kind of ideology. It is invisible, yet we can feel its force, and it is this untouchable, invisible force that breaks the ideology of the domesticated flower that is so smothering and destructive. While this new kind of emotive beauty has been portrayed in earlier sea-flower poems, “Sheltered Garden” marks a shift in the symbol’s ability to act or speak against forces of annihilation. The three seaflowers that follow “Sheltered Garden” are not just recipients of violence; they act on the environment. In “Sea Poppies” the flower is no longer passive. In the third stanza, the speakers describes how its stalk has caught root among wet pebbles and drift flung by the sea and grated shells and split conch-shells (lines 8-12). The stalk acts on its environment among other objects of brokenness in this “wind-tortured,” liminal space. “Sea Violet” also emulates action and power and opposed to passivity. In this first stanza, H. D. contrasts the domesticated white violet to the sea-violet. Although the sea-violet is fragile, it fronts the wind among torn shells and it catches light. The last poem, “Sea Iris,” however, is most significant in combining many of the emotive features in the early flowers. This symbol is able to most fully project its image—to tell its own story like Xuela— within that liminal space. Like the initiatory poem, “Sea Rose,” H. D. returns to listing names: “Weed, moss-weed, / root tangled in sand, / sea-iris, brittle flower” (lines 1-3). This long list of undesirable qualities correlates with emotive images from the other sea-flower poems. Its root is tangled in the sand much like the sea-poppy’s root is caught on the pebbles. Its brittleness is comparable to the sea-violet’s fragility. It only has a broken petal, correlating with the sparse and stinted leaves of the sea-rose. As a result of this mixture of images and activity, the sea-iris is able to “print a shadow” (line 6). It is also able to emulate opposing senses and forces. It is both “scented and stinging” and “sweet and salt” (lines 9, 12). After this imagistic description, H. D. inserts a dash, signifying a moment of reflection. In that space of silence, the contradictory smells transform. The poet addresses it saying “you are wind/ in our nostrils” (lines 12-13). The flower transforms into wind, into a force that cannot be possessed due to intangibility in rational ways; its tangibility only exists in experience: in the fragrance of a hybrid—of “scented and stinging” smells in a liminal space. When Kincaid created Xuela as an emotive, autobiographical, hybrid character, she created her own shadow that functioned much like the wind in H. D.’s sea-flower poems. Both writers embrace and possess the very locus of contradiction through its experiential force. As wind, it cannot be possessed by others, but instead exists within those contradictions, within that experiential fragrance of sweetness and saltiness, of mothers and daughters, of conquerors and conquered. “Sheltered Garden” and The Autobiography of My Mother function as the turning point in a process of renaming a symbol by replanting it as a hybrid in a liminal space. Whether it is a domesticated flower conjoined with harsh, bitter forces or an abusive mother intertwined through the first-person narration of the diasporic daughter as a literary persona, the joining of the “I” and “you” in an imagined space allows the writer to speak back to dominating ideology. To avoid the trap of conqueror and conquered, the writer plants a hybrid in a liminal space. This hybrid projects a shadow: Xuela tells her own story within her own empty, childless existence and the sea-iris prints its shadow on the sand. In comparing H. D.’s sea-flowers to Jamaica Kincaid’s literary works, we see first the need to create a hybrid, an image that has its roots in a liminal space. However, this hybrid itself cannot truly conjoin 46 �Carol Erwin • Shadows and Prints oppositional forces. Instead, it must create its own image. Perhaps this printing of the shadow is the poetry and art created by marginalized, displaced voices. In creating poetry and art in this liminal space, the emotive experience is able to transform into wind, a force that cannot be possessed but instead releases the fragrance of opposition, allowing each writer to find new life in the wind. _____________________________ Works Cited Bernard, Louise. “Countermemory and Return: Reclamation of the (Postmodern) Self in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2002, pp. 11338, doi:10.1353/mfs.2002.0002. Accessed 25 July 2016. Bouson, J. Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to Mother. State U of New York P, 2005. Brady, Thomas. “Talking with Jamaica Kincaid: From Her Books comes the Story of Her Life.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 Nov. 1997, philly.com/packages/history/arts/literature/kincaid.aps. Accessed 25 July 2016. Cudjoe, Selwyn. “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview.” Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by SelwynCudjoe, Calaloux, 1990, pp. 215-32. Debo, Annette. “H.D.’s American Landscape: The Power and Permanence of Place.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 69, no.3, 2004, pp. 1-22. Donnell, Alison. “When Writing the Other is Being True to Self: Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.” Women’s Lives into Print: The Theory, Practice and Writing of Feminist Auto/Biography, edited by Pauline Polkey, St. Martin’s, 1999, pp. 123-36. Dowson, Jane. Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910-1939: Resisting Femininity. Ashgate, 2002. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Exile in the American Grain: H.D.’s Diaspora.” Women’s Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, U of North Carolina P, 1989, pp. 87-112. ---. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Indiana UP, 1981. Garis, Leslie. “Through West Indian Eyes.” New York Times, 7 Oct 1990, nytimes.com/1990/10/07/magazine/ through-west-indian-eyes.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 25 July 2016. Garner, Dwight. “Jamaica Kincaid: The Salon Interview.” Salon, 13 Jan. 1996, salon.com/1996/01/13/kincaid_2. Accessed 25 July 2016. Gregory, Eileen. “Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.’s Sea Garden.” Signets: Reading H.D., edited by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis, U of Wisconsin P, 1990, pp. 129-54. H.D. Sea Garden. 1916. St. James Press, 1975. Herndon, Gerise. “Returns to Native Lands, Reclaiming the Other’s Language: Kincaid and Danticat.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 3, no.1, 2001, pp. 1-9. vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/. Accessed 25 July 2016. Hollenberg, Donna Krolik, editor. Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson. U of Iowa P, 1997. Kincaid, Jamaica. My Garden (Book). Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. ---. The Autobiography of My Mother. Plume, 1996. Laity, Cassandra. “H.D.’s Romantic Landscape: The Sexual Politics of the Garden.” Signets: Reading H.D., edited by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis, U of Wisconsin P, 1990, pp. 110-28. Lang-Peralta, Linda. “’Smiling with my Mouth Turned Down’: Ambivalence in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and My Garden (Book).” Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings, edited by Linda Lang-Peralta. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2006, pp. 33-44. Lee, Felicia R. “At Home With: Jamaica Kincaid; Dark Words, Light Being.” The New York Times, 25 Jan. 1996, nytimes.com. Accessed 25 July 2016. Perry, Donna. “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Merdian-Penguin, 1990, pp. 492-509. Pondrom, Cyrena N. “H.D. and the Origins of Imagism.” Signets: Reading H.D., edited by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis, U of Wisconsin P, 1990, pp. 85-109. Sievert, Heather Rosario. “H.D.: A Symbolist Perspective.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 16, 1979, pp. 48-57. Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, edited by Frank Day, Twayne Publishers, 1994. Soto-Crespo, Ramon E. “Death and Diaspora Writer: Hybridity and Mourning in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 43, no. 2, 2002, pp. 342-76. doi:10.2307/1209076. Accessed 25 July 2016. 47 �Jenni G Halpin Publicity of Private Performances And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, They have their reward. But you, when you pray, enter into your room. And shutting your door, pray to your Father in secret; and your Father who sees in secret shall reward you openly. – Matthew 6:5-6, MKJV Elizabeth Cary, too, read her way towards Catholicism. – Frances E. Dolan, “Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies” 332 D uring the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, Elizabeth Cary conducted her life within an unstable social space which had formed around those English Catholics who did not convert (or reconvert) to obedience to the Church of England. Although there was, throughout the period, a “strong presence of both a residual and continuing Catholic culture,” the narratives presented until fairly recently by historians and by the biography of Elizabeth Cary (written by one of her daughters) have emphasized a fragility in the lived circumstances of English Catholicism (Corthell, et al. 2). The Lady Falkland, Her Life, inscribes the life of one woman traversing the edges of this space and suggests the vexed relation there among text, speech, and the performance of (re)conversion. Cary’s passages from Anglicanism toward, away from, and into Catholicism occurred within a social framework geared to a practice of Catholicism only within relative secrecy.1 This framework limited her possibilities for performative (and especially for effectively performative) speech and also caused her material resources to rise and to dwindle according to how those around her viewed her Catholicism. The result of her limitation was a life conforming to the bounds imposed upon her but, within those bounds, not only continuing in her Catholicism but also pursing further divergence from Anglicanism and promoting her children’s subsequent conversions to Catholicism. Four of Cary’s daughters not only became Catholic, but also entered a convent at Cambray; one of these daughters authored the biography (Weller and Ferguson 48). Her Life reveals the various attempts to curtail Cary’s practices as backfired strategies that lent additional force to Cary’s career of reading, writing, and translating.2 In Cary’s attempts to negotiate her loyalties to her church, king, husband, and children, she initially intended to remain in the position I will call hypo-recusance. Recognizing this desire, one can read Cary not only as a rebellious but also as a hyper-loyal subject. That is, hypo-recusance maps Catholic practice back onto the English political subject such that the hypo-recusancy expresses loyalty both to sincerity of worship and to a monarch whose authority over the state should not be muddied by attempted extensions of that authority to other (religious) areas. Margaret W. Ferguson identifies three groups of English “with regard to how their religion was perceived and judged by others: there were those who accepted the authority of the Church of England, those who merely pretended to accept it, and those who refused to conform and hence became recusants” (Dido’s 48 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances 267). Catholics, obviously would fall into two of these groups, but ‘recusant’ “does not simply denote those Catholics and dissenting Protestants who refused to attend their parish church”; it is, as Frances E. Dolan observes, a label applicable specifically to “those whose absence was observed and prosecuted, and who, in the face of accusation or conviction, refused to conform” (Ferguson, Dido’s 267; Dolan, Whores 19). Thus, Catholics could inhabit yet another, undesignated, position: neither pretending to accept the authority of the Church of England nor being recusants prosecuted for failure to maintain such pretense. This position would not have been stable, because such a stance remains conditional upon somebody (everybody) failing to make the accusation that would force such an undesignated Catholic into explicit recusancy. It would be impossible to designate a hypo-recusant, as such a labeling would thrust the accused into an explicit recusance. It is not only a hidden practice (as secret Catholicism) but also a practice from a position which is itself hidden.3 Hypo-recusants, then, lived under danger of a possible accusation which would force them into either formal recusancy from or hypocritical outward conformation to Protestant worship. Cary had planned to remain a hypo-recusant for some time, out of respect for her husband’s interests. However, Lady Denbigh publicly exposed Cary’s recusance (an exposure Cary’s daughter calls an “accident”) and Lord Falkland “was…angry with her for making such haste to publish…her being [a Catholic], which it was not her intention to have done (though she always joyed much to make profession of it), had not that that accident spoken of before done it for her” (Cary 210-11). The irony of this accusation is that we read it in a biography not published during Cary’s lifetime. Her biographerdaughter moves simultaneously to suggest Cary’s good will toward her husband and to imply that a sound Catholic would find it impossible to prevent publicity. The interruption, that Cary “always joyed much to make profession of” her Catholicism, is necessary to the refractory image her daughter paints of her: a woman who loved to profess her faith, who would have chosen not to profess her faith, and who professed her faith as a concession to its having been made public by another.4 In Cary’s play, The Tragedy of Mariam, “marriage is the battlefield” and Cary, like her heroine, “must come to terms with domestic and political tyranny” (Beilin 55; Fischer 227). Unlike many recusant women living with Protestant husbands, Cary enjoyed greater freedom and risked greater suspicion by being out from under her husband’s direct supervision. Because he remained in Ireland while Cary lived in England, his knowledge of her activities came through reports (false and true) made by various servants and soi disant friends.5 Ferguson notes that the religious differences between Cary and her husband created “an opportunity for mutual distrust between husband and wife. In domestic spaces as in the imperial nation at large, then, the distinction between friend and enemy, loyalist and traitor, could be extremely labile” (Dido’s 267). The sides and, also, the terms shifted in the battle between Cary and her husband. As their daughter relates, Cary’s husband, “his displeasure against his wife being much greater out of his taking himself to be much prejudiced by her turning and that she has by it disabled herself to advance his affairs…than for her only being a Catholic,” disapproved more of his own (potential) financial and political losses than of her disloyalty to the Church of England (Cary 210). He expressed his disapproval in “letters to the king disclaiming his wife” and also failed to provide her regularly with the £500 allowance adjudged her by the Privy Council (Fischer 227). Thus his efforts were to promote his own financial and political well-being rather than to prohibit her religious exercises, which intention suggests at least one reason for Cary to have sought hypo-recusancy despite her “jo[y]… to make profession of” her Catholicism (Cary 210, 211). Cary’s relations with her king were similar to those with her husband. Charles I, having confined Cary to her home for her faith for so long that he forgot about her, finally released her from her confinement simply because he was reminded to do so (Cary 205, 208). Cary may have submitted herself to the authority of the king, but this submission is one which called upon the queen (Henrietta Maria) to 49 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances receive her children so that they would (for a while) neither starve nor be taken from her (206-07). The Life portrays Cary as an endlessly patient woman who gives the outward appearance of submission while singlemindedly pursuing her children’s conversions.6 Charles I may have forgotten about Cary because Cary was so patient—that is, because she did not raise sufficient fuss to remind him of her— and Cary’s long confinement made it necessary for somebody to help in providing for her children. It is easy to suspect Cary had an ulterior motive for her patience (to insinuate her daughter Anne into Henrietta Maria’s court, thus promoting both Cary’s connection to the queen and Anne’s conversion under Henrietta Maria’s influence [206]). To read hypo-recusance as hyper-loyalty is to find loyalty not only in unwillingness to commit hypocritical acts of worship within the Church of England but also in resistance to renaming sincere worship as a history of treachery against the state. Loyalty to an older tradition, loyalty to a monarch as something other than a priest (perhaps as a secular authority not needing to be shored up by spiritual authority), and loyalty to one’s own decision regarding faith, along with an unwillingness to proclaim disloyalty to the misled monarch, family member(s), or countrymen (and –women), potentially describe a hyper-loyal logic of hypo-recusance.7 Here Cary’s situation mirrors but exceeds that of her heroine, Mariam. That is, Mariam negotiates her own articulation of loyalty primarily on political and domestic levels, whereas the religious dimension driving Cary’s recusance and loyalty “adds a persistent undertone of moral difference as well” (Fischer 232). Mariam’s loyalty is easier to recognize than Cary’s, but it was pursued against a simpler field than Cary’s as well. The more complicated alliances undertaken by a wife, mother, English subject, and Catholic may be mirrored and even may have been worked out in Mariam, but Mariam’s resolution could only be a limited representation of Cary’s loyalties. Recusing herself from the Church of England was part of Cary’s formation as a Catholic.8 As such, although this experience was open to interpretation as treachery (as indeed it was interpreted), as experience it should be considered “not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced” (Scott 26). That is, Cary’s experience of recusance should not be taken as evidence for treachery so much as it should be taken as a thing itself in need of explanatory evidence. The catechism is not “Is Cary a traitor? Yes, because she is recusant.” Instead it is “Is Cary recusant? Yes, because of what she read.” Joan W. Scott’s model of the relationship between experience and explanation serves well to describe Cary’s conversion process: she began by reading, “read her way towards Catholicism,” and maintained her faith on the practice of reading (Dolan, “Reading” 332). Her experience as a Catholic grew out of her reading and then her reading supported and explained her continuing experience. As Scott argues, “experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation;” Cary’s experience of Catholicism led her to read (and write) her way into a deeper understanding of what she had already read her way into (Scott 37). This need for interpretation is a point of insertion into a narrative of Catholic practice for a counter-narrative of treachery. Whereas the Catholic interprets her practice as religious fidelity, the counter-interpretation asserts that Catholics are not following Catholicism so much as opposing the Church of England and its head, the king. Cary’s Life, however, particularly by contrasting Cary with various less scrupulous persons, works to redeem Cary’s Catholicism from the charges laid against it: Treating the emergence of a new identity as a discursive event…is to refuse a separation between ‘experience’ and language and to insist instead on the productive quality of discourse.…Subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event…. Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the site of history’s enactment. Historical explanation cannot, therefore, separate the two. (Scott 34) 50 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances In this light, Cary’s daughter has produced the mother who led her into Catholicism, and both Cary’s own texts (The Tragedy of Mariam and others) and Cary’s daughter’s text engage in a discourse which underscores Cary’s loyalty to her daughters and the manner in which that loyalty led to the formation of Cary and of most of her children as Catholics. Not only hypo-recusants but also writers—given the broad range of intertextual possibility inherent in the parallels between Cary’s fiction and her life— “were well aware that they could look, to some of their countrymen and countrywomen, like potential traitors in league with foreigners” (Ferguson, Dido’s 269).9 Ferguson observes of Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam that “[s]he is clearly innocent of plotting to poison Herod….But Mariam has certainly wished for Herod’s death, so she is not innocent from a moral perspective” (Dido’s 270). Dramaticaly and ironically, Mariam’s wishes become performative, although she does not so intend them.10 Mariam’s wishes are ‘infelicitously’ performative, for she does not intend to speak them in a context in which they have effect. From the beginning, Mariam “recant[s]” her performative speech, saying, When Herod liv’d, that now is done to death, Oft have I wish’d that I from him were free: Oft have I wish’d that he might lose his breath, Oft have I wish’d his carcass dead to see. (I.i.5, 15-19) This recollection of now unhappily performative wishes only precedes Herod’s reappearance, which gives this speech, too, the appearance of a performance of the recantation she asserts.11 Although Mariam does not enter into a contract by expressing her wish, nor intend to undertake the means necessary to the execution of such a contract, insofar as her words have the appearance of performativity and, also, the force of performativity, they still fail as performatives because of the mismatch between Mariam’s stated words, her intention, and the result(s) following from them. Similarly, the potential treachery inherent in hypo-recusance and the actual illegality of separation from the Church of England nonetheless fail to perform disloyalty. In Cary’s case, one can discover, in her initial pursuit of hypo-recusance, a ‘recantation’ of any disloyal intent; out of loyalty to her husband, Cary would have foregone publishing her conversion had it been left in her control. A tension between statement and intention reflects a tension inherent in wives’ inability to sign legal documents (Ferguson, “Renaissance” 147-48). As J. L. Austin observes, written performative utterances indicate their agent by an appended signature (60). When this signature is missing, or when intention itself is obscured, performatives cannot be happy because they would lack an agent to enact the performance (Austin 60). The inability to sign would translate as an inability to perform. Although a performative utterance may be made in an inexplicit way, if it is not so made, “it will regularly be possible to take it in a non-performative way” (Austin 62). The distance thus placed between Cary and the power to enact performance allows Cary’s biographer to argue that her kidnapping of her sons is not performative, or, rather, not Cary’s performance alone. By making not only Patrick and Henry but also others of her children complicit, the biographer indicates that Cary has just a plan rather than a formal intention. However, when Cary is tried for the kidnapping, the trial is based on the presumption that the responsibility becomes hers alone, and Cary then resorts to equivocation.12 This equivocation is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for her removal of her sons to Paris and, in its necessity is a bears a peculiar relationship to performative speech. That is, Cary’s equivocation, an action of nonspeech, is nonetheless performative, at least insofar as it meets the partial qualification that it “be (or…be included as part of) the performance of an action” (Austin 60). In this marginal space between treachery and obedience, the Life rescinds Cary’s power to act to remove her sons while her trial grants her the power to speak in such a way as not to speak and thereby to not-speak (to equivocate) with the power to enable her sons’ removal from England. 51 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances As a spinner of words both in equivocation and in dramatization, Cary was ‘deviant’ not only in religious observation but also in politics. Language, according to Hobbes, has the power to lead people astray and also to inspire sedition.13 When Elizabeth Cary convinces her children to live with her, she does so on the promise “not to speak of religion to them till they should desire it; which they thought themselves sure they would never do” (Cary 223). They had come to live with her out of a belief in her fidelity which would include the belief that she would refrain from proselytizing (222). Both sides have an unspoken complement attached to ‘till they should choose it.’14 The children’s is ‘which they thought themselves sure they would never do’; Cary’s, however, based upon her belief that having them live with her will make them more likely to become Catholics, is “trusting wholly to God” (223). In this dual equivocation, Cary appears to succeed through capitalizing on a greater awareness of the ways in which her children equivocated than they had of her equivocal intention. “Equivocation in many of its forms,” writes Ferguson, “achieves its unsettling effects through positing competing systems of value at work in one place” (Dido’s 275). This understanding explicitly poses refractory points of view as reflections of one another: the two sides (Cary and her children) both have stubbornness and have other similarities: familial ties and the eventual conversion of all to Catholicism, to name two of the most significant. In support of her own equivocatory practice, Cary employs a further equivocation—to her confessor— and though he sees through her disguised request for permission partially to break the fasts, she further tangles her relationship to language “not thinking herself bound to take his word” despite seeking out his judgment on the more general case (223).15 Thus, even meat represents “competing systems of value” not only in Cary’s home, but also at the homes of friends whom she visits with her children. At least one of her children, while still a Protestant, paid more attention to the Catholic fasts than did the absent-minded Cary. This daughter did so with “no other end in it than to laugh when she [the daughter] had [reminded Cary of the fast], to see how suddenly she [Cary] had stopped [being about to put meat in her own mouth]” (224). While Cary loves the law (of the fast in this example), she also regularly forgets it; her daughter remembers the law only to mock both it and Cary. By mocking Cary in her Catholicism, Cary’s daughter serves to make Catholicism more regularly a part of Cary’s conversation with the children than it should have otherwise been (given Cary’s promise not to speak of her religion until the children asked). Cary’s daughter further excuses her parents’ evasions of the normal rules of speech when she describes Lord Falkland’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Speaking French to avoid being overheard on his deathbed, he sought an informal means of conversion when he learned that there was no priest available to make his conversion ‘legal.’ Cary’s daughter (through her description of Cary’s assistance in this conversion) defends Cary’s equivocatory response to her husband’s desire to convert. When a part of the public act (legalization by a priest) became impossible, Cary resorted to equivocation and, kneeling by his bed, told him the best she could how to dispose himself interiorly, not having exterior means; but she durst not propose to him the professing himself to have a desire to be a Catholic, before the standers-by, not thinking it to be necessary, and fearing he might be too loving a careful father, and not have the courage to do that, for fear of prejudicing his children towards [in the view of] their friends. (220)16 Just as equivocation considers the public presentation’s truth-value irrelevant so long as the interior (thought or prayed) statement is true, so Cary decided not to court the possibility of her husband reconsidering his decision to become a Catholic and did not ask him to enact his conversion by anything which could cause him to change his mind. The surgeons, on the other hand, “desired him to profess he died a Protestant” (221). Worried about appearances and apparently unable even to think that he actually could have converted, the surgeons seek to circumvent one public reporting (that he died a papist) by eliciting another (contrary) report.17 52 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances Because the fundamental basis for differentiating between a Catholic and a Protestant exists at the level of beliefs observable only via the mediation of individual actions (including actions of speech) which may or may not accurately reflect them (as, for example, in the church papists who, visibly attending the Church of England, were not publicly Catholics), hypo-recusants were particularly vulnerable to accusations of popery.18 The social significance of accusation (rather than actual conviction) is similar to the Jesuitical equivocator’s reliance upon the truth of the entire statement (not that of only the vocalized portion). The larger system of what one believes and what is believed of one is more important than whether or how one believes, just as the larger system of spoken word and silent emendations is more important to the equivocator than the apparent lie presented in speech alone. Further, if the burden of truth is upon the recipient of an equivocated statement, is an accusation of papacy (and therefore treason) an admission of treacherous designs?19 That is, does an accuser, by accusing, admit treachery against the one accused? Certainly, the accusation, the act by which hypo-recusance comes to judicial notice and becomes recusancy, is open to being read as a personal if not a political treachery. Further, even after Cary was openly recusant she was repeatedly betrayed by such servants as bore ill witness against her to her husband. She was not beyond betrayal even when she was no longer able to quietly remain hypo-recusant. In another mode of betrayal, Catholic wives of Protestants found themselves out from under the authority of their husbands. Priests officiating at household services exercised authority over these women within the house—authority which contests that of the husband—but also, because many such priests were “sheltered from the law” by the same women, were too much in their debt to contain their hostesses (Dolan, Whores 51). When women sheltered priests, they countered the performance of priestly authority by exercising the authority of a host.20 That is, although they accepted the authority of the priest by taking him in, because genuine performance entails that “it must remain in principle open for anyone to reject any procedure” the act of ‘sheltering priests from the law’ was simultaneously an inscription of the authority of the priest (as one who is to be served) and an erasure of that same authority (as one who becomes subject to the household and who cannot safely depart) (Austin 29). The relation between an authority other than the Monarch or a husband and an English woman would be suspect, if for no other reason that that such a relationship undermined the preexisting relationship between the subject and her monarch or the wife and her husband. This authority (the priest) becomes even more suspect when, as in Cary’s life, he is manipulated by a Catholic woman for her own ends. As Dolan writes, “whether the Roman Catholic church liked it or not, many English Catholic women were not clearly under either a husband’s or a priest’s spiritual guidance” (Whores 51). Cary not only treats priests’ judgments as firm only insofar as they agree with her own intentions (her decision to prepare meat for her children on fast days and her judgment that her husband need make no public declaration of his deathbed conversion are but two examples), but also treats the priests themselves as pawns in her pursuit of the conversion of her children (as, for example, when she sets them to debate Mr. Chillingworth for her children’s edification). This suspicion of the interactions between priestly authority and the authority of a wife who is also a protector is so great that “critics often depict Cary’s conversion in terms of loss—of money and male support” (Dolan, Whores 149). But this ‘loss’ presumes the “socially constructed notions of masculinity; [by which] authorship was redefined…to produce a culturally powerful notion of ‘men in print’” (Ferguson, “Renaissance” 145). Rather than assent to the masculine authority, Cary, “born through or in conjunction with reading,” reinscribes herself as a Catholic first rather than a wife first (Dolan, “Reading” 350). As a reader, as a writer, and as the written subject of The Lady Falkland, Her Life, Cary obtains money and female support which take on a textual value greater than that posed by the challenge of the voices of men and the retraction of male-controlled resources. While Cary’s biographer shows that Cary 53 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances “grew into much doubt of [Protestantism…initially from] reading a Protestant book,” the biographer also shows that reading “the Fathers, especially St Augustine…of the religion of the Church of Rome” developed in Cary a faith in Catholicism (190). Amid the disorganization of her house, to prove that this confusedness was forgetfulness and not want of good intentions, a paper or two <several papers> which were found of hers in <these times> this time did show, wherein she did make a disposition of the day for herself, designing to all her duties a due part, and expressly appointing to herself what prayers to say…and she always much esteemed and loved order <when she remembered there was such a thing>. (215-16) Here, and elsewhere in the biography, writing gives Cary the power to observe her Catholic obligation (of prayer in this case) and, also, shows her efforts to make herself appropriately observant (in that she takes steps to remember her prayers and not only her household duties). The Life portrays Cary as a performer as much as it portrays her as a retreatant. Despite her pursuit of solitude via reading, we read the Life in pursuit of Elizabeth Cary: a mother, a wife, a Catholic, and the author of The Tragedy of Mariam. Her connection to a larger Catholic community provided her with considerable resources to accomplish the goal at the core of Her Life: the conversion of her children to Catholicism. Her ‘private devotion’ and ‘self-definition’ become ‘a form of service’ not only to her daughter (who effectively credits her mother with the conversions of herself and her siblings) but also to her readers, and, ultimately, to herself.21 When she reads, she executes performatives only with herself: she signals her own authority to engage in these verbal contracts and affirms her right to compel her own obedience to herself: she offers herself service by seeking to define herself. And as the subject of a biography, Cary’s reading becomes a public event. Even as Cary reads herself into the world and into connection with a larger Catholic community as she prepares herself for theological discourse (in conversation, in translation, and in The Tragedy of Mariam), her daughter ‘reads’ her into a scatterbrained, faithful Catholic mother and into a seemingly tenuous social space within which she has nonetheless endured (by virtue of its and her preservation in text) within which we meet her. _____________________________ Notes 1 Karen L. Nelson, among others, signals the importance of situating Cary amid “an increasingly visible Catholic population in England” (149). Following the Life, although I recognize the dangers of a monolithic representation of English and Irish culture in Cary’s day, I foreground the dangers and estrangements, real or perceived, of English Catholic life of the mid-to-late-seventeenth century. 2 As an attempt at hagiography, the Life is not markedly successful. As Catherine Sanok has observed, in hagiographic texts such as the Lives of Women Saints of our Contrie of England “the female saint is presented as the exemplary basis for ethical and devotional behavior” (266). Cary’s biographer is too committed to representing an inconsistent figure, writing a rather questionable example at times. As Deana Rankin describes, the author of the Life “seeks to entwine hagiography with biography,” leading me to treat the Life as if it were a realistic biography despite its frequent hagiographic tendencies (Rankin 205). 3 With this label, I hope, further, to evoke elements of hypocrisy’s etymology: “a. Gr. ύpόkrisiς, the acting of a part on the stage, feigning, pretense, f. ύpόkrίnesθai to answer, to play a part, pretend, f. ύpό HYPO- + -ein to decide, determine, judge” (OED). Where Catholicism is unacceptable, either the Catholic or krin the Catholic’s audience engages in an hypocrisy about the hypo-recusant: to pretend to Anglicanism or to pretend not to see recusance. 4 The Life not only represents Cary as a refractory figure but also presents its own imagined and reflected figure of the author’s mother. 5 Consider, too, that the Lord Falkland’s agent, who “in his letters to her lord […] had always spoke of her with much respect and honour, and had never made those complaints which others falsely had (increasing by it her lord’s anger),” nonetheless “immediately stops her allowance” upon news that she had reconciled herself to the Catholic church (207, 206). 54 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances 6 This is, of course, one of the more obviously hagiographic moves of Cary’s biographer-daughter. 7 Frances Dolan observes that after Henry VII declared himself the head of the church “English subjects owed religious and political allegiance to their sovereign rather than dividing their allegiance, as they once had done, between sovereign and pope” (Whores 18). ‘Stubborn loyalty’ might be more accurate a description: Cary frequently appears to have dug in her heels and simply out-waited everybody, most notably Charles I. 8 As Joseph Puterbaugh writes, “[a]s early as the 1560s, recusancy became crucial in identity formation for Catholic subjects in their resistance to the Church of England, and attendance at Protestant church services was […] an explicit rejection of Catholic selfhood” (423). 9 The similarities between Cary’s Life and her play are suggestive. I do not intend to use the Life as a key to The Tragedy of Mariam but rather to use the play to expose the cruces in the Life. As Elaine Beilin writes, “in the case of the first English play known to be by a woman, playwright and play seem to have an unusually close relationship” (45). 10 J.L. Austin describes performative utterances as those “in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something” (12). 11 Austin evaluates performatives as either happy (felicitious) or unhappy (infelicitious) rather than as true or false. For example, when contractual performatives are happy, “statements typically of the form that I ought or ought not subsequently to do some particular thing are true” (53). 12 “If Cary had revealed their [her sons Patrick and Henry] location, she would have been off the hook; yet she would also have lost her chance to get them out of the country. By persisting in equivocation, she outlasted the Council’s interest and, with the help of a priest, got the boys to Paris” (Dolan, Whores 146). 13 “The association of equivocation with deviancy is dramatized in Hobbes’s Leviathan, in a passage that Steven Mullaney adduces as an ideological precursor to Johnson’s famous attack on Shakespeare. Hobbes likens ‘metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words’ to ‘ignes fatui’ among which the mental traveler wanders dangerously, with his (or her) ‘end’ being ‘contention, and sedition’” (Ferguson, Dido’s 274). 14 A key component of equivocation is the inclusion of unspoken modifiers which change or even reverse the force of the spoken words. 15 Cary asked her confessor, generically, whether a Catholic might prepare meat on fast days for Protestant members of the household, if doing so could tend to encourage their conversion. The confessor answers yes to the general case, but he also forbids her applying this answer to her particular case because he believes her children are not likely to convert. 16 Equivocation “also posits the political subject’s ability to split a ‘private’ act of discourse, made either in the mind or […] in writing, from a ‘public’ act usually conceived as a speech act directed to a disapproving audience with the power to punish the body as well as the mind” (Ferguson, Dido’s 276). 17 It is interesting to note that Protestantism, shored up by the authority of the crown, could be presumed to lapse without a verbal sign, whereas the practice of equivocation (making nugatory, or potentially nugatory, such verbal signs) is ascribed to the Jesuits. 18 I find it ironic that Protestant worship, with fewer sacraments and tending—throughout history—away from hierocracy, has less need of priests than has Catholicism and therefore that the mediation of priests between God and humanity, in Catholicism, invites betrayal more readily than would secret Protestant practices. 19 Could such burden be analogous to the accusation that obscenity is in the eye of the beholder? Ferguson finds in Robert Pearsons’ Treatise tending to Mitigation insistence “that it is not the producer of an utterance but rather the recipient, whether reader or auditor, who is ultimately responsible for making it conform to a ‘truth’ defined as inhering in the logical domain of common sense” (Dido’s 281). 20 Hospitality as a religious obligation suggests interesting nuances to the relationship between a woman who served as host (“a man who lodges and entertains another in his house: the correlative of guest” [host2, OED]) and the communion wafer—another host—consecrated by the authority vested in the priest. 21 But “when the biography discusses her reading it is not as a form of service but as a means of self-definition and a form of private devotion. Reading in the Life is a solitary, consoling, and wholly absorbing occupation; Cary reads for her own purposes, for herself (Dolan, “Reading” 354). Works Cited Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Shisà, Oxford UP, 1975. 55 �Jenni G Halpin • Publicity of Private Performances Beilin, Elaine. “Elizabeth Cary and The Tragedie of Mariam.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature, vol. 16, no. 1, 1980, pp. 45-64. Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, with The Lady Falkland: Her Life, by One of Her Daughters. Edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, U of California P, 1994, pp. 183-275. Corthell, Ronald, et al. Introduction. Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti, U of Notre Dame P, 2007, pp. 1-18. Dolan, Frances E. “Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies.” Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 6, Elizabeth Cary, edited by Karen Raber, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 195224. Originally published in English Literary Renaissance, vol. 33, no. 3, Autumn 2003, pp. 328-57. ---. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. Cornell UP, 1999. Ferguson, Margaret W. “Allegories of Imperial Subjection: Literacy as Equivocation in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam.” Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France, U of Chicago P, 2003, pp. 265-332. ---. “Renaissance concepts of the ‘woman writer.’” Women and Literature in Britain, 1500 – 1700, edited by Helen Wilcox, Cambridge UP, 1996, pp. 143-168. Fischer, Sandra K. “Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny, Domestic and Religious.” Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, edited by Margaret Patterson Hannay, Kent State UP, 1985, pp. 225-37. Nelson, Karen L. “‘To informe thee aright’: Translating Du Perron for English Religious Debates.” The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680, edited by Heather Wolfe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 147-63. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed, OED Online, 1989, dictionary.oed.com. Puterbaugh, Joseph. “‘Your selfe be judge and answer to your selfe’: Formation of Protestant Identity in A Conference Betwixt a Mother a Devout Recusant and Her Sonne a Zealous Protestant.” Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 31, no. 2, 2000, pp. 419-31. Rankin, Deana. “‘A More Worthy Patronesse’: Elizabeth Cary and Ireland.” The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680, edited by Heather Wolfe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 203-21. Sanok, Catherine. “The Lives of Women Saints of Our Countrie of England: Gender and Nationalism in Recusant Hagiography.” Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti, U of Notre Dame P, 2007, pp. 261-80. Scott, Joan W. “‘Experience.’” Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Routledge, 1992, pp. 22-40. Walker, Claire. “Spiritual Property: The English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and the Dispute over the Baker Manuscripts.” Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, edited by Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, and A. R. Buck, U of Toronto P, 2004, pp. 237-55. Weller, Barry, and Margaret W. Ferguson, editors. “Introduction.” The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, with The Lady Falkland: Her Life, by One of Her Daughters, U of California P, 1994, pp. 1-59. 56 �Heidi M. Hanrahan “One Must Come ‘West’” Caroline Kirkland’s Heterotopic Vision I n one of the most humorous episodes from Caroline Kirkland’s 1839 work A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, Mrs. Clavers, the narrator, relates the story of a neighbor whose own child is unable to nurse and wishes to “borrow” Mrs. Doubleday’s beloved baby. This section is memorable not only for its humor (punctuated by Mrs. Doubleday’s aghast response and her husband’s amused poetical waxing) but also for Clavers’s insightful reflective comment: “I could not help but think that one must come ‘west’ in order to learn a little of everything” (72). What at first might seem like a bemused throwaway comment is, in fact, representative of Kirkland’s idea of the West in her book. For the author, the frontier of Michigan is a space that, while distant and separate from “civilization,” offers invaluable lessons about and views of that society as reflected through those members who have set themselves apart in this dynamic “new home.” A New Home, Who’ll Follow? creates in both content and form a Foucauldian heterotopia. Both Montacute and the text Kirkland creates to describe it are sites in which differences and contradictions are not erased, but come to the forefront and coexist. For Kirkland, the frontier is a place that is both inside and outside of society, with people from the East and the West; where class and gender boundaries are complicated; and where, despite these differences, a community takes shape. As a woman writer of the frontier whose identity is in flux, Kirkland is, in fact, in the best position to recreate and represent this complex site. Additionally, the form of Kirkland’s text mirrors this heterotopian vision, as she mixes and blurs genres and literary forms, including advice writing, fiction, nonfiction, romance, sentimentalism, realism, regional sketch, and satire. The result is a new, hybrid, and, yet, cohesive whole that provides a more complete and polyphonic depiction of Montacute, the West, its citizens, and, significantly, the systems and constructions that underpin the “East” they have left behind. Moreover, in creating this new kind of frontier textual space—decades before the post-bellum Regionalist writers do something similar—A New Home provides an early model of how a book can challenge ideas about what a woman writer and a literary text can and should do. In order to understand how Kirkland’s role as a woman frontier writer enables her to portray a heterotopian vision of Montacute, and stylistically and structurally create a heterotopian text, we must first examine Michel Foucault’s formulation of the concept of heterotopia. In “Of Other Spaces” (1986), Foucault writes of Western society’s tendency to see both geographical and conceptual spaces as diametrically opposed to and separated from each other: “These are oppositions we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and the space of work” (23). In reality, these are constructed separations and the space we live in is always “heterogeneous” (23). Nevertheless, there are sites where the artificialities of such delineations are more apparent—sites which also “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Foucault identifies these spaces, which “are linked with all the others” and yet “contradict all the other sites,” as heterotopias. He explains that they “are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia” in regular spaces “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). Significantly, Foucault adds that the heterotopia is “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place 57 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25). Finally, he argues, “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (25). In short, a heterotopia functions as a unique space of contradiction and change: both open and closed, it has the potential to mirror the larger society, while also subverting it by revealing hidden inconsistencies and artificial constructions and bringing together diverse populations and ideas which would not ordinarily mix. Clearly, Kirkland’s Montacute is a physical heterotopia, existing as a dynamic frontier space. Additionally, readers can begin to see how her unique and hybrid book itself mirrors and creates a textual heterotopia. Although other critics have written about Kirkland’s innovative form and content, most do not engage in a full-scale examination of the work, concentrating instead on isolated incidents and techniques. Heterotopian ideas allow for a more complete explanation and treatment of the text’s multilayered polyphony, enabling us to talk about how Kirkland’s message and her medium work together, and providing a useful framework for discussing what she has created in A New Home. The Frontier as Heterotopia Critics have debated what Kirkland is saying about the frontier community that she so intricately depicts. Janet Floyd argues, “A New Home does not…embrace the democratic, communitarian forms that it is argued to celebrate” (129). Instead, she claims it “appears to be a narrative relatively unconcerned with the participation, much less the incorporation, of the narrator in the community she describes beyond the exigencies of practicality” (133). In sharp opposition, Sandra A. Zagarell feels that Kirkland’s literary topic is inherently social. “Community formation,” she writes, “is the real drama of western life” and is the primary topic of A New Home (xxvii-iii). Zagarell maintains that Montacute is “a site where culture must be created from…heterogeneous and often conflicting groups,” and, as the book traces “their slow and usually testy mutual accommodation…something new is born” (xxix). Kirkland, she posits, has given readers a “pluralistic, polyphonic culture that honors the original viewpoints and practices of each constituent group and may well represent the future of America itself” (xxxi). Yet, neither critic’s view of Montacute and Kirkland’s opinions toward it completely addresses the complexities of her attitudes and endeavors. Instead, it is more useful to consider the concept of the heterotopia, and see Kirkland’s community as a dynamic, hybridized, polyphonic site of possible subversion and change, but also an imperfect space in which the middle-class, educated, and refined narrator is never fully an insider nor outsider, but where, ultimately, white, middle-class values begin to dominate. Throughout A New Home, Kirkland portrays Montacute as a heterotopian space in which diverse groups come into contact outside of “civilization,” shedding light on the larger society through their interaction. Kirkland emphasizes the settlement’s heterogeneous population, remarking that the Western country is a place “where every element enters into the composition of that anomalous mass called society” (76). Additionally, she argues that rustic life in the West opens one’s eyes towards life back East, describing her new existence as “this simplification of life, this bringing down the transactions of daily intercourse to the original principles of society” (184). The frontier, then, reveals the intricacies and constructed performances of everyday life, culture, and class by stripping such artifices away. It is important to note that the frontier as Kirkland creates it is not simply a reflection of society, but a more complicated refiguring of it. While Scott Peeples argues that Kirkland depicts Western life “as a synecdoche for the whole of American experience” and a “microcosm of the United States” (307, 314), the actual relationship is more complex. Indeed, the frontier provides a sort of inverted mirror image, which calls attention to the original through inversions, absences and rejections. Living on the margins of society and united by what Zagarell calls an “ethics of interdependence” (xxxix), frontier settlers are forced to interact with each other, and, in doing so, reveal the contradictions and constructions upon 58 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” which life back East is built. Simply put, because these people must depend on each other in order to survive, distinctions based on class or even public and private come to the forefront, only to be deemed superfluous by both Kirkland and the community. For example, Kirkland shows us how the West most clearly unmasks wealth and class differences hidden or ignored back East. She writes that while class distinctions are present with the same frequency in the West as in the East, the differences stand out more on the frontier: The denizens of the crowded alleys and swarming lofts of our great cities see, it is true, the lofty mansions, the splendid equipages of the wealthy—but they are seldom or never brought into contact or collision with the owners of these glittering advantages…But in the ruder stages of society, where no one has yet begun to expend anything for show, the difference lies chiefly in the ordinary requisites of comfort; and this comes home at once ‘to men’s business and bosoms.’ (186) Thus, the new society is not without class distinction. Indeed, rather than being eliminated, such differences stand out to all and become possible sites for subversion, critique, or, on the other hand, reaffirmation. The importance here lies not so much with how the new society deals with these issues, but instead, that they take the time to consider and examine them at all. In addition to revealing and commenting on class distinction, life on the frontier also strips away distinctions between public and private. Indeed, traditional boundaries between what belongs to one person versus another are virtually eliminated, as the episode on borrowing indicates. Kirkland explains, “Wo [sic] to him that brings with him anything like the appearance of abundance, whether of money or mere household convenience. To have them, and not be willing to share them in some sort with the whole community, is an unpardonable crime” (67). Any attempts to impose clear delineations over “yours” versus “mine” are met with suspicion and resentment. She explains, “Whoever exhibits any desire for privacy is set down as ‘praoud,’ or something worse…and of all the places in the world in which to live on the shady side of public opinion, an American backwoods settlement is the very worst” (139). For better or worse, then, the heterogeneous community exerts a real and powerful force over the lives of the frontier settlers, making public those spaces and matters usually seen as private. Kirkland emphasizes how individual settlers respond to these unconventional ideas about wealth, class, and public and private chiefly through her narrator. Mary Clavers’ recounting of her experience explains her introduction to and gradual acceptance of life in the heterotopian frontier. From early on in the text, Clavers realizes the extraordinariness of her situation, as she finds herself dependent on others (including those of lower classes) for food, shelter, and survival. Furthermore, she is increasingly aware that those attributes which set her above and apart from others back East (education, manners, and material possessions) are actually weaknesses on the frontier (Gebhard 164). Indeed, Clavers explains that dependence on others quickly strips away most of the status that wealth and education might bring: “They [new settlers] soon find that there are places where the ‘almighty dollar’ is almost powerless; or rather, that powerful as it is, it meets with its conqueror in the jealous pride of those whose services must be had in order to live at all” (52). For Kirkland and her narrator, then, the frontier is a unique space in which class and wealth, traditional demarcations in society, are exposed and, at least initially, challenged and rejected in favor of survival and interdependence. Kirkland and Clavers’ somewhat less-than-enthusiastic embracing of the backwoods’ conceptions of class and wealth keeps readers from idealizing the frontier space. “It would be vain,” the narrator tells us, “to pretend that this state of society can ever be agreeable to those who have been accustomed to the more rational arrangements of the older world” (52). Indeed, some of the book’s best comedy comes from those moments in which egalitarianism is, in Zagarell’s words, “excessive” (xxxi). Clavers asserts, “Granting the correctness of the opinion which may be read in their countenances that they are ‘as 59 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” good as you are,’ I must insist, that a greasy cook-maid, or a redolent stable-boy, can never be, to my thinking, an agreeable table companion—putting pride, that most terrific bug-bear of the woods, out of the question” (52). While in the abstract sense, she remains devoted to the spirit of frontier cooperation, she cannot fully abandon all sense of life and propriety from back home in the East. Thus, the text refuses to be pinned down, and as Brigette Georgi-Findlay writes, it emerges “ambiguously positioned between cultural affirmation and cultural critique” (37). The heterotopia is not, therefore, a space where distinctions are completely erased and an ideal society takes its place. Rather, its uniqueness lies in its ability to bring such distinctions to the surface and make them matters of public (and disputed) knowledge. Nevertheless, despite their occasional clinging to middle-class prejudices, Clavers and her family also remain committed to Montacute’s success and hope to serve as models for those less refined members of this new society. She writes, “Neatness, propriety, and that delicate forbearance of the least encroachment upon the rights and enjoyments of others, which is the true elegance of manner, have only to be seen and understood to be admired and imitated” (53). Thus, Kirkland and her narrator endorse not a blatant or forceful “conversion” of those less refined, but rather see simple exposure to cultivated ways as the key to improving life on the frontier. Kirkland gives readers examples of this gentle method’s effectiveness in several places. For example, Clavers relates her neighbors’ gradual acceptance of carpets, which they initially saw as “introducing luxury” but now are embraced as essentials for “saving trouble”—that is, they are practical (145). Furthermore, she tells us with mock-seriousness, “Mrs. Micah Balwhidder only wanted a silver teapot, because, as all the world knows, tea tastes better out of silver; and Mrs. Primrose loved her crimson paduasoy, merely because her husband had happened to say it became her” (145). What we see is a sort of tongue-in-cheek compromise between the old and the new, between West and East, framed here in the sometimes convenient connection between practicality and luxury. Slowly but surely, then, Clavers exerts a real influence on her rustic neighbors, and one that she might not have effected if not for the close interaction that life in the heterotopia fosters. Exposure and influence, though, clearly go both ways, as the narrator is also changed by those around her. Indeed, after only fourteen days away from the city, she explains, “My ideas of comfort were by this time narrowed down to a well-swept room with a bed in one corner and a cooking apparatus in another” (44). Looking at all of her possessions and reflecting on her neighbors’ disdainful reactions to them, she adds, “I began to cast a disrespectful glance upon them myself, and forthwith ordered them upstairs, wondering in my own mind how I could have thought a loghouse would afford such superfluities” (43). By the time she attends a wedding with Mrs. Rivers, Clavers has begun to see herself as a “Mentor” to new settlers and “quite an old resident, and of right entitled to speak for the natives” (66). Mrs. Rivers, newly arrived from the East, does not enjoy the unfashionable backwoods affair, while Clavers is “delighted” by the outing and tries to convince her companion to “look on the rational side of things” (66). Here, then, Clavers identifies herself with the older settlers, and is infinitely more accepting of their ways than her new friend. Key to understanding Clavers’ gradual acceptance of and introduction to life on the frontier is her gendered position. Like all women living in heterotopian spaces, Clavers faces a shifting subjectivity as she finds her identity in flux. As Susan L. Roberson explains, women on the frontier experienced a simultaneous loss of and widening of the self: “extending spatial, territorial boundaries, going from ‘the states’ to the territories, the pioneer woman was opening up social and psychological spaces, new knowledge, powers, and discourses” (214-15). Similarly, Dawn E. Keetley writes of Kirkland’s liminality, calling her a “subject in transition…on the borders of selfhood” (18). She adds, “Literally between places, [pioneer women] were figuratively between the ‘locations’ and ‘locators’ of identity” (18). The frontier woman, literally and metaphorically in transition, acquires the power to examine, subvert, or reaffirm the patterns of life she has left behind back East. 60 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” Through their removal from the old world and exposure to new worlds, frontier women such as Kirkland and Clavers find themselves questioning what they previously and unquestioningly held to be true. Indeed, Keetley unconsciously echoes heterotopian ideas about disconsonant and diverse ideas coming together in the heterotopia, revealing certain gender and social constructions to be artificial rather than natural, when she adds, “traversing the borders of diverse and contradictory ideas of selfhood, the subject is produced in conflicting ways; thus it discloses those identities which otherwise seem ‘timeless’ or ‘obvious’ to be constructed, provisional, and contingent” (18). Similarly, Joyce W. Warren argues that Kirkland’s experience living away from Eastern expectations for middle-class women “enabled her to recognize that her society’s definitions of gender were neither natural nor essential” (9). As a location with “a new home” in the process of creation, not only does the frontier expose ideas about wealth and class, but also about women’s roles in society, including their place in the domestic, familial sphere. Thus, in the midst of discomfort and uncertain identity, new spaces are opened for women to exercise freedom and agency. Indeed, Kirkland seizes upon the concurrent suffering and freedom the frontier can offer, portraying such experiences as common bonds that all pioneer women share. She writes, “Women are the chief grumblers in Michigan, and they have some apology. Many of them have made sacrifices for which they were not at all prepared, and which detract largely from their everyday stores of comfort” (146-47). These mutual grievances unite the women of Montacute, giving them a starting point for community formation. Additionally, as Clavers realizes, women may also make the most of their unique situation and see the frontier as a place for individual expression and exercise of agency. After dutifully noting the disadvantages of frontier living, she nevertheless asserts, “it would scare be fair to pass without notice the compensating power of a feeling…which rejoices in that freedom from the restraints of pride and ceremony which is found only in a new country” (148). Clavers attributes this “natural and universal” “love of unbounded and unceremonious liberty” as much to her distance from civilization and its pressures as she does to nature’s influence. Freed (at least somewhat) from Eastern pressures to conform to pre-established roles, pioneer women can explore other frontiers in ways their sisters back home never or rarely could. As Floyd explains, “the figure of the emigrant woman could speak as much to debates about women, work, and the domestic as to issues about emigration and the West” (7). Thus, the women in Kirkland’s text are often nonconventional. Some are strong family leaders, always willing to speak their minds. Perhaps the most interesting and unconventional character of all is Mrs. Clavers herself: a mother, wife, gossip, worker, mentor, and self-proclaimed authority on frontier life. Consider for a moment the seemingly taboo topics she discusses in her text, including drunkenness, spousal abuse, and a botched abortion. The frontier is a place that provides Clavers with the opening to discuss such traditionally unfeminine topics. For Kirkland and her narrator, the frontier heterotopia is a success, especially for women, bringing together different people from different classes in the creation of a new society. By the book’s closing Clavers observes, “But I am now a denizen of the wild woods—in my view, ‘no mean city’ to own as one’s home; and I feel no ambition to aid in the formation of a Montacute aristocracy” (186). Here, interestingly, the narrator even expresses an endorsement of Montacute’s curious ideas about class and wealth with an apparent disavowal of the East’s class system. Although she always keeps one foothold in her life back East (most significantly through her rhetorical audience in the book—an imagined community of Eastern readers) and although she will contradict her assertion elsewhere in the text, she is also a self-proclaimed insider and member of this new society. Our final image of Clavers is of a welladjusted and happy woman thriving along with the little town, and enjoying the quirky and unique life on the frontier, a life which gives her, as a woman, freedoms she might never have realized had she not come to Michigan. 61 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” A New Home’s Heterotopian Form Because Kirkland is a woman writer on the heterotopian frontier, surrounded by various and distinct groups of people, with her own identity in flux and in a simultaneously liminal and powerful position, her text—her depiction of this new place and new people—almost has to be something just as unique and new. Traditional forms and genres alone—the novel, travel sketches, biography, sentimentalism, romanticism, realism—work for neither the author nor her subject. Turning our attention to A New Home and Kirkland as the creator of this heterotopian text, we begin to see how form masterfully mirrors content, creating a multi-voiced and multi-genred work that gives readers a more complete sense of life on the frontier than any one genre or convention could deliver on its own. A New Home’s unique form has baffled critics. As a result, until the last thirty years or so, Kirkland had fallen into relative obscurity, occasionally mentioned in discussions of frontier realism or travel writing. Henry Nash Smith’s assessment of Kirkland typifies these kinds of evaluations. In his classic text, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), he writes, “Her books were widely read, and deserved to be, for they have the merits of clear observation and lively reporting. They are also a valuable repository of upper-class Eastern attitudes toward the West” (225). Smith identifies any value that Kirkland’s texts might have as coming from their journalistic/historical offerings, and certainly not from their literary merit. Additionally, Smith does not know what to make of Kirkland’s use of form in A New Home, as he finally decides that “the contradictions between her high-flown theory [about the nobility of rustic settlers] and her instinctive revulsion from the crudity of backwoods Michigan are reflected in her vain struggle to find a satisfactory literary form” (226). On the surface, he argues, she has created a travel diary, “but she cannot be permanently content with so simple a literary form and tries valiantly to devise something more complicated” (226). She mixes genres and makes the unfortunate decision to try to “endow with plot” simple sketches best left untouched. Ultimately, he concludes, “despite the variety of these experiments in fiction, it cannot be said that Mrs. Kirkland succeeded in finding an adequate form for her Western materials…There is no progress toward overcoming the lack of coherence between materials and form that constitute her literary problem” (227). For Smith, then, Kirkland’s work is a failure. It is important to examine Smith’s comments at length because what he and so many others have dismissed as failures—Kirkland’s attempt to find a form to fit her subject—invites careful reassessment and consideration within the construct of the heterotopia. Indeed, Smith (and many critics before and after him) works under the flawed assumption, often applied to women writers, that the material controls the writer—that Kirkland is not in command of her own text and is simply unable to create a traditional book. Additionally, these critics assume that Kirkland tries or even wants to play by the rules of traditional fiction. Consequently, they fail to ask about A New Home’s internal ambitions and assess the text in those terms. Once we begin to look at A New Home on its own terms, disregarding our preconceived notions of what a long text should do, what we might initially view as the author’s inability to provide a reasonable structure and cohesion emerges instead as Kirkland’s deliberate decision to play with genre and form. We begin to see an author creating a multi-voiced, hybridized text truly representative of her own position as a writer of the heterotopian frontier. The resultant text, which refuses to meet our criteria for standard definitions, is instead radical and “Western,” and thereby skillfully mirrors its content. Indeed, Kirkland’s text is itself a kind of place, site, and location. Recent critics have argued such claims for women’s writing, including Roberson, who posits, “writing itself is a location, a site for the construction of further spaces of power and knowledge” (“Narratives” 7). Speaking of women’s frontier writing in general, she adds, “the text about location becomes itself a location, a space in which the author discovers and maps herself” (“With” 225). Similarly, Gebhard applies these ideas specifically to Kirkland arguing, “Writing itself provided her a ‘new home,’ a means to work through ‘uncomfortable 62 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” thoughts and feelings” in the safer realms of literary representation” (174). Thus, if we see A New Home as a location, specifically as a heterotopian space both inside and outside the conventions of literature, in which diversity and contradiction are brought together to both reflect and challenge these conventions, Kirkland’s choices in structuring her book move from failures to deliberate choices and innovative creations. A New Home, with its multiple genres and conventions, thus, emerges as a hybridized text, as do other frontier texts written by women. Floyd writes of how pioneer women writers represent and manipulate the conventions of domesticity and traditional female forms, explaining, “They embrace the tropes of nineteenth century writing…but in placing them in unfamiliar contexts, they…destabilize their meaning” (7). Nathaniel Lewis applies this destabilization to Kirkland specifically, claiming that she “did not break established forms of writing so much as quietly defamiliarize them. The result is an author who positions herself among a number of different discursive models, and a text that resists easy codification” (63). Kirkland accomplishes this defamiliarization and destabilization of genre and convention by sliding between realism and romanticism, between fact and fiction, from satire to advice writing and pastoral. She places her text both inside and outside mainstream literature, free yet marginalized in a heterotopian space. Kirkland’s craftiness and manipulation of genres reveals itself in the opening pages of A New Home, where she identifies her text as both realism and romance, fact and fiction. She writes, “I claim for these straggling and cloudy crayon-sketches of life and manners in the remoter parts of Michigan the merit of general truth of outline” (1). Although she originally calls her book a “veritable history” and an “unimpeachable transcript of reality,” she soon adds, “I must honestly confess that there be glosses, colourings, and lights, if not shadows, for which the author is alone accountable” (1). Right away, then, readers should be on notice that A New Home is no ordinary realist text or simple travel writing, and it is important to note that the author is consciously aware of this difference. To be sure, Kirkland assures us, there are facts and realism to be found in her text, but one must negotiate between them and her own touches of romance and fiction. The author therefore creates the need for a careful reader who must pay close attention to the text as a whole, finding truth in the spaces between and within conflicts and tensions. Readers must exercise this careful negotiation in Kirkland’s invocation of romanticism and sentimentalism, which she sometimes reaffirms and other times rebukes. For example, Clavers tells the story of Henry Beckworth and his thrice-married wife as a blatantly romantic tale, explaining, “I shall here recount what he [Beckworth] told me; and, as I cannot recollect his words, I must give this romance of rustic life in my own, taking a new chapter for it” (89). Thus she creates an almost standalone romance, set off from the rest of her work and comprising several chapters, complete with an appropriate epigraph from Byron (89). The amazing story of Beckworth’s eventual marriage to his beloved seems almost unbelievable, like most romances, yet Clavers assures us of its verity, writing, “Let no one imagine that this tale of man’s constancy must be the mere dream of my fancy. I acknowledge nothing but the prettiness” (98). What Kirkland has done here then, is, as Lewis explains, “play fiction against fact” and “authenticity against romance,” subverting the established hierarchy and “nearly eradicating the system” (68). In the heterotopian space where she can bring seemingly discordant forms together, she challenges easy identification and privileging of one genre over another, showing that in this case, romance, realism, fiction, and fact are all necessary to tell the Beckworths’ story. Interestingly, immediately after relating her hybridized romance, Kirkland introduces Eloise Fiddler and, along with her, a seeming critique of sentimentalism. Through her reproduction of Fiddler’s poetry, Kirkland creates a space for this type of melodramatic composition. She includes, for instance, Fiddler’s “Ballad,” which opens memorably: “With anguish in his haughty eye, the Moor Almanzor came; / He 63 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” prick’d his fiery courser on among the scatter’d dead, / Till he came at last to what he sought, a sever’d human head” (103). Kirkland’s tone is warmly satirical, as she invites readers to share a gentle laugh with her over the poet’s whims and fancies, adding that “young ladies like stories of love and murder, and Miss Fiddler’s tastes were particularly young lady-like” (103). The text does not let Fiddler remain in her deluded sentimental world for long, though, and her subsequent marriage to the rather ordinary Mr. Daker “fairly vanquishe[s] [her] romance” (106). Here, too, the text’s form mirrors its content, as Clavers’s practical, rather ordinary ending replaces the fanciful flights of Fiddler’s poems: “And at this present writing, I do not believe Eloise, with all her whims, would exchange her very nice Edkins for the proudest Dacre of the British Peerage” (107). Kirkland also invokes both romanticism and realism in order to question them in her telling of Cora and Everard Hastings’ tale. Clavers’s description of the pair, particularly Cora, recalls Eloise Fiddler. Cora is “deeply tinged with romance” and lives “entirely in an ideal world” (156). Just as she did with Henry Beckworth’s story, here Kirkland devotes several chapters to the young couple and their misfortunes after running off to get married. She quickly points out, “The world’s harshness soon cures romance” (166). Thus, romanticism and idealism are checked by the realism of life in the harsh world. Nowhere is this rebuking clearer than at the moment when Cora’s young baby lies near death and the mother’s suffering serves as atonement for her past foolishness: “The wretched mother cast one look at [the baby’s] altered countenance, and with a wild cry sunk senseless on the floor. Her punishment was fulfilled” (167). Nevertheless, Kirkland does not end the story here, with a dead child and broken, rebuked parents. Instead, the next chapter offers a decidedly sentimental ending, reuniting Cora with her forgiving parents and a recovered, healthy child: “Her mother, her own dear mother, laid [the baby] on her bosom without a word, but she saw that it breathed in a soft sleep, and tears relieved her bursting heart… And Cora was a new creature, a rational being, a mother, a matron, full of sorrow for the past and of sage plans for the future” (169). The tale, then, and its form, takes an unusual path—from romance to realism to sentimental resolution, each form playing an integral role in telling the couple’s story, and again challenging ideologies that view them as hierarchical, separate, and in opposition. Significantly, the Hastings’ story ends firmly in the heterotopian space, both geographically (the family has, after all, moved to Michigan) and formally (169). As it winds its way through its heterotopic space, A New Home finds room for realism, romance, sentimentalism, fiction, nonfiction, and even the occasional recipe for baking bread (Kirkland 33-34). Because of this hybridity, it is quite unlike any work before it and many after it. Kirkland is, of course, aware of this difference and, following the tradition of so many women writers before her, repeatedly “apologizes” for her unconventional subjects and form. At her book’s conclusion, she pronounces it a failure, writing: I have departed from all rule and precedent in these wandering sketches of mine…I think I have discovered that the bent of my genius is altogether towards digression. Association leads me like a Will-o’-the-wisp. I can no more resist following a new train of thought, than a coquette the encouraging of a new lover…This attempt to write one long coherent letter about Montacute, has at least been useful in convincing me that History is not my forte. I give up the account in despair. (177) Earlier she attributes her unusual style to her gender, writing, “I know this rambling gossiping style, this going back to take up dropped stitches, is not the orthodox way of telling one’s story; and if I thought I could do any better, I would certainly go back and begin again…but I feel conscious that the truly feminine sin of talking ‘about it and about it’…would cleave to me still” (82). Smith, it appears, takes Kirkland at her word here and dismisses her text as a self-acknowledged failure. Careful readers may 64 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” detect, however, some false modesty in these apologies. What Kirkland labels as “feminine sin” and failure are, in fact, what enable her to create this remarkable, polyphonous, multi-genred work. In this way, she takes what literary critics (both contemporary and modern) so often see as a symptom of poor women’s writing and turns it into an asset, as she leads readers on a twisty path through both her text and Montacute itself. In the end, we can see A New Home, Who’ll Follow? as a consciously created textual heterotopia, one that exists both inside and outside of conventional literature, bringing together various genres and forms to more completely and accurately tell the story of life on the frontier of Michigan. In a final gesture towards heterotopian possibilities for reinvention, resistance, and subversion, Kirkland’s book even avoids a conventional ending. As she closes her narrative, Mary Clavers asks, “And now, why do I linger?…I—conscious that I have said forth my little say, yet scarce knowing in what style best to take my parting reverence, have prolonged this closing chapter—a ‘conclusion wherein nothing is concluded’” (189). Kirkland’s heterotopic text, ultimately both closed and open, finished and unfinished, continues to serve as both a reflection of and challenge to our ideas about literary genres and forms. “To Learn a Little of Everything”: Conclusions Certainly, the society Kirkland depicts in A New Home, Who’ll Follow? is less than ideal. As numerous critics have pointed out, she and her narrator never really move beyond their position as white women, ignoring questions of race and virtually gliding over the very real, albeit vanishing, presence of Native Americans (Keetley 18; Merish 94). Additionally, by the book’s close, a dominant ideology—that of the middle class—comes slowly but surely to the forefront and, as Kirkland proudly points out, Montacute is on its way to becoming civilized. What we see here, is that the frontier heterotopia exists for only a brief period of time, as old constructions of class, race, gender, and wealth eventually begin to rebuild themselves. The frontier exists in all its newness, openness, and possibility for the most fleeting of moments. Kirkland’s textual heterotopia, though, is interestingly timeless, complete yet incomplete, finished yet perpetually unfinished, eternally existing as a site for readers to visit and revisit, challenging them to question their assumptions about texts and genres. Readers familiar with criticism of nineteenth-century American women’s writing can see how an examination of Kirkland’s heterotopic vision opens door to a discussion of other authors and movements. We may, for instance, read A New Home with an eye towards American women writers’ long utopian tradition. In imagining a new community with revised and alternative ideas about gender and class, Kirkland’s text aligns itself with later works, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Beyond the Gates (1883) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). Writing of various types of female utopias, Carol Farley Kessler includes those seen as “pioneering expedition[s] to a frontier” as well as “an author’s view of one’s own society” (xxi). We see, then, how Kirkland’s vision both fits and complicates these ideas, as the space she creates and describes is both old and new, inside of society and outside of it. Additionally, A New Home, which asks readers to examine the text and the author’s ambitions on their own terms (outside of masculine conceptions of form, genre, and aesthetics), provides a valuable model for consideration of other regionalist works and writers. Most clear, perhaps, are the parallels between critical assessments of A New Home and Sarah Orne Jewett’s works, specifically Deephaven (1877) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), two books that present unique challenges to readers because of their innovative forms and non-conventional subject matter. Marjorie Pryse envisions Jewett as a “border-crosser” whose “resistance to traditional categories produces a salutary crisis for critics” (57, 32). As we have seen, Kirkland is also just such a border-crosser, only much earlier, challenging our ideas about form and indeed what it means to be literary. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas L. Edwards, writing specifically of Jewett, advance an argument just as applicable to Kirkland: “What is at stake is the 65 �Heidi M. Hanrahan • “One Must Come ‘West’” power to name and configure the ‘literary’ itself, to determine whose stories (‘literary’ as well as ‘critical’) will continue to possess cultural authority” (16). Our readings of Kirkland, Jewett and other regionalist writers, including Mary Austin and Rose Terry Cooke, must be open to reconceptualizations of what a text can and should do. In short, we must be willing to investigate the possibilities the heterotopian text offers, realizing its potential to change the way we read and talk about literature. _____________________________ Works Cited Floyd, Janet. Writing the Pioneer Women, U of Missouri P, 2002. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 22-27. Gebhard, Caroline. “Comic Displacement: Caroline M. Kirkland’s Satire of Frontier Democracy in A New Home, Who’ll Follow?” Roberson, pp. 157-75. Georgi-Findlay, Brigette. The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. U of Arizona P, 1996. Keetley, Dawn E. “Unsettling the Frontier: Gender and Racial Identity in Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow?” Legacy, vol. 12, no. 1, 1995, pp. 17-37. Kilcup, Karen L., and Thomas S. Edwards. “Confronting Time and Change: Jewett, Her Contemporaries, and Her Critics.” Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, edited by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards, UP of Florida, 1999, pp. 1-27. Kirkland, Caroline. A New Home, Who’ll Follow? 1839, edited by Sandra A. Zagarell, Rutgers UP, 1999. Lewis, Nathaniel. “Penetrating the Interior: Recontextualizing Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow?” American Literary Realism, vol. 31, no. 2, 1999, pp. 63-71. Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Duke UP, 2000. Peeples, Scott. “‘The Servant Is as His Master’: Western Exceptionalism in Caroline Kirkland’s Short Fiction.” American Transcendental Quarterly, no. 13, no. 4, Dec. 1999, pp. 304-16. Pryse, Marjorie. “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis’: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity.” Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, edited by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. EdwardsU P of Florida, 1999, pp. 31-62. Roberson, Susan L. “Narratives of Relocation and Dislocation: An Introduction.” Roberson, 1-18. ---. “With the Wind Rocking the Wagon: Women’s Narratives of the Way West.” Roberson, 213-34. Roberson, Susan L, editor. Women, America and Movement: Narratives of Relocation. U of Missouri P, 1998. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1950, Harvard UP, 1978. Warren, Joyce W. “Performativity and the Repositioning of American Literary Realism.” Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, edited by Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie, U of Georgia P, 2000, pp. 3-25. Zagarell, Sandra A. Introduction. A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Rutgers UP, 1999, pp. xi-xlvi. 66 �Cheryl R. Hopson The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker I n the twenty-plus years since Rebecca Walker published her influential essay “Becoming the Third Wave” (1992) in Ms. magazine she has done well to establish herself as an important though at times contesting voice within contemporary U.S. feminism. In “Becoming the Third Wave,” Walker invoked as effectual a previous generations’ feminism; in her introduction to the anthology To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995), she challenged the perceived limitations of that feminism, and in her first memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001), she gave expression to deeply personal aspects of what is for her matrilineal family politics. This article is a critical close-reading of Third Wave feminist writer and cultural critic Rebecca Walker’s early, career-establishing works, specifically her groundbreaking essay “Becoming the Third Wave,” her introduction to the anthology To Be Real, and her memoir Black, White, and Jewish. I argue that these writings highlight a, by now, well-known breach in her relationship with her famous AfricanAmerican mother, Alice Walker. This psycho-emotional, physical, and ideological breach is influenced as much by differences of materiality, e.g. race/ethnicity, class, socio-historic location, between Walker and her iconic mother, as it is by differences of womanist (i.e., Alice Walker) and Third Wave feminist (i.e., Rebecca Walker) ideology. A continuation of my argument is that in the construction and articulation of her Third Wave feminist perspective, Walker, similar to her mother, centralizes the Black/Blackidentified mother/daughter relationship as it is embodied by herself and her mother. Walker suggests in her writing the momentous influence of this troubled womanist/feminist familial relationship on the construction of her feminist politics, as well as on her overall sense of womanism/feminism as they are forwarded by Alice Walker, and Alice Walker’s generation of feminist. I read Walker’s early writings through the lens of a Black feminist/Third Wave feminist theoretical perspective that understands the significance, as well as the shaping and delimiting influence of the mother/daughter relationship for Black and Black-identified feminists. My reading, then challenges the feminist theoretical perspective of Third Wave feminist scholar Astrid Henry’s, and, in particular, Henry’s assertion in her book Not My Mothers’ Sister (2004) that the mother/daughter relational model is an inadequate lens for understanding US feminist generations. As Henry sees it, such a model reduces generational feminist discourses, perhaps, in particular, Third Wave feminist discourse, to reactionary family politics. I argue that this critical framework, that of the Black (and Black-identified) feminist mother/daughter relationship is part and parcel to the Black feminist theoretical espoused by Walker, and certainly by her famous mother, and as such is the proper lens by which to access Walker’s politics, and to contextualize her ideas about feminism. It bears mentioning then that Henry, in the concluding chapter to Not My Mothers’ Sister, enlists Alice and Rebecca Walker’s mother/daughter relationship and uses it to her own purposes. Henry argues that while Alice Walker was a “token” Black feminist for white second-wavers, by contrast, and in naming herself the Third Wave as she did in “Becoming the ‘Third Wave,’” Walker centralizes women of color/Black women within Third Wave feminism. Second to this, by way of her book’s title, Henry signifies Alice Walker’s 1979 essay “One Child of One’s Own,” an essay in which Alice Walker famously writes her relationship with her daughter as a friendship-based, dialogic, and mutually supportive sisterly 67 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker relationship. As Henry sees it, Alice Walker’s idea is problematic because mothers and daughters, whether actual or figurative, do not beget sisters and to suggest otherwise is to supplant the role of the daughter. While I agree with Henry’s argument that there are very real material and psycho-emotional differences that exist between mothers and daughters that must be acknowledged in feminist analyses and constructions of the generational feminist mother/daughter relationship, I disagree with her reductive reading and placement of Alice Walker. My reading of Walker’s early writings then acknowledges the very real differences that exist between Walker and her mother, the influence of Walker’s personal relationship with her iconic mother on the making and shaping of her Third Wave feminist politics and praxis, and understands that a critical consideration of Walker’s early writings yields great insight into the making and shaping of her Third Wave feminist politics. It also suggests a direct link between Walker’s politics and her mother’s own. A Family Activism In 1967, Walker’s African-American mother and Irish-Jewish father defied national law, cultural custom, and family expectations to marry. That same year, the interracial, interfaith couple, following the exhortations of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., relocated from New York City to Jackson, Mississippi to work in the Civil Rights movement. On her parents and their unlawful marriage, Walker writes in Black, White, and Jewish, “when my parents break all the rules and marry against laws that say they can’t, they say an individual should not be bound to the wishes of their family, race, state, or country. They say that love is the tie that binds, and not blood” (23). Walker takes two fundamental lessons from her parents’ early idealism and self-asserting acts in the face of powerful resisting forces. The first is that it is her responsibility and prerogative to affirm and to assert all of who she is, and the second, that an individual’s desire to live as s/he deems appropriate and right supersedes the expectations of family, law, and culture. Walker was eight years old in 1976, the year her parents divorced. After the divorce, her mother relocated from New York to San Francisco, and her father remained on the east coast. Walker’s parents devised a plan whereby she would alternate every two years between their respective homes. The different racial, ethnic, class, social, cultural, and familial locations in which Walker found herself after her parents’ divorce demanded that she adopt different and often contradictory identities based on the expectations and desires of others, including her parents. In the predominantly white cultural and familial landscape of her father’s home and community, Walker felt “too Black,” and was considered intimidating and controlling by her Jewish and white female peers, was referred to as a “nigger” by friends of a white boyfriend, and was rendered suspect in her father’s all-white community of Larchmont, New York. In the predominantly Black cultural and familial landscape of her mother’s home and community, Walker felt “too white,” was hounded by “real Black girls,” beaten up, and charged with “acting white.” As early as nine or ten years old and while visiting the home of her Slavic great-grandmother, Walker was continuously confronted by the woman’s “angry silence” and felt, as a result, shut out and unrecognized as family (BWJ 36). At the age of eleven or twelve, and while visiting her mother’s family in Georgia, a favorite uncle commented on the “cracker” in Walker’s laugh, marking her as racially/ ethnically different from her maternal side, and making her explicitly aware of the ways in which she did not fit in with her African-American relatives. Even within the insular space of her parent’s respective homes, Walker admits to feeling isolated, unseen, and expected to shape-shift into her parents’ ideas of who she was, or into the person they needed her to be. For her mother she became, “bright Rebecca, cheery Rebecca, helpful and independent to fault” (BWJ 231). In her father’s home, she was primarily cared for and mothered by her stepmother Judy, 68 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker a Jewish woman she describes as a “Sephardic-looking” (BWJ 199). Walker admits to being frustrated by her stepmother’s inability to see her racial/ethnic difference as her stepchild, and by her father’s physical and psychological remoteness, as well as by her father’s lack of awareness with respect to her racial/ ethnic difference. Walker’s most pressing desire growing up, one she suggests goes unfulfilled, was to be recognized as family by her actual family. In a 2000 interview with Publishers Weekly, Walker stated that neither of her parents “actively addressed the issue” of her experience as a mixed-race girl, as to do so would have meant facing “the limitations of the culture that denounced their love and, finally, the limitations of themselves” (Fleming). In Walker’s remembering, Alice Walker and Melvyn Leventhal were oblivious to her needs and to the specific challenges that she faced as a biracial and bicoastal girl growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Scholar Ralina Joseph is critical of Walker’s self-portrayal in Black, White, and Jewish. In a review essay published in The Black Scholar, Joseph argues that Walker writes herself as “the innocent experiment/ victim” of her parent’s interracial union, and continues that “even the beneficial aspects of [Walker’s] childhood ‘shifting self’ are forever steeped in the United States legacy of slavery,” such that with the memoir “Walker illustrates the impossibility for a contemporary ‘mulatta’ to move beyond historically anti-black images.” Joseph adds that “even when [Walker] paints herself as the hopeful Movement Child, she ends up becoming ‘the tragic mulatta caught between both worlds like the proverbial deer in the headlights,’” (14). This is a critical and personal blind spot on Walker’s part, suggests Joseph, which is indicative of a limited consciousness, and perhaps even of Walker’s sense of entitlement as a girl and woman of privilege. Joseph continues that Walker writes herself as tragic in Black, White, and Jewish, and as being forever constrained by familial as well as cultural divides that predate but also forever mark her. However, Walker’s self-construction and self-conception is not unlike those of other biracial individuals, and, in particular, those of Black and white, mixed-race ancestry. Sociologist Kerry Ann Rockquemore aruges that “a major challenge faced by mixed-race people involves the struggle to define themselves racially within a society that conceptualizes race in a rigidly dichotomous manner and that attaches differential values to each of these dichotomies.” Rockquemore continues that “as a result, many mixed-race people routinely encounter social invalidation from others related to their chosen racial self-identification,” and this is especially so for “Black-White mixed-race people, whose relationships are defined against the historical backdrop of slavery, the legacy of the one-drop rule, and the politics of skin color stratification.” Still, Joseph reading of Walker’s memoir is not so much a misreading but it is rather incomplete. In Black, White, and Jewish Walker showcases the strengths, limitations, and challenges of growing up biracial and bicoastal during the 1970s and 1980s, and with two parents who were sometimes physically and psychologically remote. If Walker’s memoir reads as tragic then perhaps it is because there was something about Walker’s experience of growing up that was in fact tragic. “Becoming the ‘Third Wave’” Walker’s first publication, “Becoming the Third Wave,” was in part a response to the Anita Hill/ Clarence Thomas televised Senate hearings that took place in October 1991, and to Clarence Thomas’s subsequent confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hill, a Black female law professor, accused Thomas, a Black Supreme Court nominee, of repeated sexual harassment when he was her boss and the director of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission during the 1980s. Thomas denied the charges. Even more incendiary for Walker was the fact that the conservative Thomas replaced retired U.S. Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall argued the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation case and was a civil rights pioneer. Walker writes in “Becoming the ‘Third Wave’” that “To me the hearings were not about determining whether or not Clarence Thomas did in fact harass Anita Hill. They were 69 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker about checking and redefining the extent of women’s credibility and power” (41). At the end of the hearings, Thomas was confirmed by a 52-48 Senate vote. For Walker, the end-result of the hearings, overseen by an all-white male Senate Judiciary Committee, and Thomas’ confirmation, was a sanctioning of male power and authority, and a silencing and repudiation of Hill. A major thematic concern of “Becoming the Third Wave” is women’s silencing by men and, in particular, by male power and authority. Walker regards such silencing power as a privilege men have that is sanctioned by patriarchy. She situates her perspective within a U.S. feminist trajectory that includes the writing and activist efforts of her mother, but she also makes a distinction. Walker writes, “I am ready to decide, as my mother decided before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of women. Each of my choices will have to hold to my feminist standard of justice” (40, emphasis added). As Walker saw it, the hearings and the outcome served as an admonishment to Hill and women generally “to keep their experiences to themselves” (39). Walker continues in the essay that Hill’s silencing is indicative of “protected male privilege” that serves to minimize and thwart women’s ideas and influence. It is important to note that in “Becoming the ‘Third Wave’” Hill functions as synecdoche for women generally, and Black women specifically. To emphasize her ideas about protected male privilege, Walker provides two personal anecdotes involving Black males. The first involves a discussion on the hearings she has with a Black male intimate whom she perhaps sardonically refers to as a progressive. Walker writes that when she asks her friend for his opinion on “the whole mess” he responds that he is “primarily [concerned] with Thomas’s propensity to demolish civil rights and opportunities for people of color” (“Becoming” 39). Walker is disturbed by her friend’s response as for her it elides the issue of women’s rights and autonomy. She writes that she launches into a tirade, demanding of her friend, “[w]hen will progressive black men prioritize my rights and well-being? When will they stop talking so damn much about ‘the race’ as if it revolved exclusively around them?” Her friend responds that she wears her emotions on her sleeve, to which Walker responds, in a scream, “I need to know, are you with me or are you going to help them try to destroy me?” (39-40). There is clearly an “us vs. them,” in Walker’s retelling of this conversation, a side that sanctions male privilege and a side that champions gender equality. It seems the Black male progressive is on the wrong side of right. The second account provided by Walker in “Becoming the Third Wave” involves a heated discussion between Walker and a Black male stranger she meets on the train. Walker writes that while on a train in New York City, she sits reading Faulkner and directly across from her sits a beautiful brown girl and mother. The mother and daughter are dressed alike in green outfits, and the girl wears her hair in “tightly plaited braids.” The bright-eyed girl chatters happily as she looks out the window of the train (40). This rather serene scene is interrupted by two Black men who board the train and sit with a thud behind Walker. The men begin to talk about women in a vulgar manner and within earshot of the little girl. One says, “Man, I fucked that bitch all night and then I never called her again” (40). Walker writes that she buries her head in her book but soon realizes that the little girl, fallen silent, is listening to the men: “Looking at her small back I can see that she is listening.” The men, seemingly unaware of or unconcerned about the presence of the girl continue with their refrain of “bitches” “girlies,” and discarded “hoes,” and the cavalier quality of their boasts within earshot of the now-silent girl unnerves Walker. Walker writes that the girl’s mother moves in closer as if to protect her daughter, and Walker herself thinks about how she can transform the situation. She is of the opinion that the silence of the people in the car, including her own, makes them all complicit in the damage being done to the little Black girl. The men are soon joined by a third Black male, seemingly known to both, and the situation escalates. When this man confides that he is en-route to Philadelphia to visit his wife and child, Walker writes that 70 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker she is momentarily “suckered into thinking that he is different” (“Becoming” 40). But soon the man joins the others in their boasts, with “Man, there’s a ton of females in Philly, just waitin’ for you to give ‘em some.’” Fired up, Walker turns to face this man who has seated himself beside her. She writes, “I…allow the fire in my eyes to burn into him. He takes up two seats and has hands with huge swollen knuckles” (40). Walker imagines the man slamming “the gold rings on his fingers” into her face, and her violent imagining sets the stage for what is to come. Unfazed but drawn in by her fire, the man asks Walker: “What’s your name, sweetheart?” as his friends lean in. Walker lets loose an explosion of words: “I ain’t your sweetheart, I ain’t your bitch, I ain’t your baby. How dare you have the nerve to sit up here and talk about women that way, and then try to speak to me” (40). The mother of the little girl “chimes in to the beat with claps of sisterhood,” and the men are “momentarily stunned” (40). But once the shock of Walker’s torrent wears off, the man responds with, “Aw, bitch, don’t play that woman shit over here ‘cause that’s bullshit’” (40). Walker and the man begin a heated exchange until “instinct kicks in,” as she writes, and Walker removes herself to a different car (40). It is perhaps the very real possibility of the gold rings on the man’s fingers slamming into her face that gets Walker up and out of the path of the man’s wrath. Her wrath, however, will not die down. In days to come, Walker pushes herself “to figure out what it means to be a part of the Third Wave of feminism” (“Becoming” 40).1 She writes that she comes to the realization that Third Wave feminism means an indebtedness to herself, to the “little sister on the train [and] to all of the daughters yet to be born”; an indebtedness to translate her anger into action and an agenda (40). It means for her to connect to her own feelings of powerlessness and to forgo a desire, rooted in anger, for gender separatism and militancy. It also means a necessary self-transformation, and in community. As Walker writes, “I realize that I must undergo a transformation if I am truly committed to women’s empowerment. My involvement must reach beyond my voice in discussion, beyond voting, beyond reading feminist theory. My anger and awareness must translate into tangible action” (40). Thomas’ confirmation and Hill’s ostensible silencing coupled with Walker’s very own intimate and immediate experiences of sexism as a Blackidentified woman and at the hands of Black men compel her to formulate an agenda for Third Wave feminism. She begins by writing and publishing “Becoming the ‘Third Wave’,” which is in effect a plea to women of her generation to translate whatever certain anger they have at the status quo into action – that is into a sisterhood that is Third Wave feminism. In her now-famous closing to “Becoming the Third Wave” Walker writes, “I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.” Walker’s statement registers as a powerful, potent disavowal of postfeminism, and a declaration and embrace of a third wave of U.S. feminism.2 As I read Walker’s essay, in claiming and by naming a presumably new wave of U.S. feminism, Walker advances a feminist political perspective that is activist-driven, transracial, youth-directed, and informed but now wholly shaped by the feminist politics and activism of a previous generation (e.g. her mother’s feminist generation). To Be Real If with “Becoming the Third Wave” Walker helps to usher in a generationally-inflected new wave of U.S. feminism, it is with her 1995 edited anthology To Be Real, and, in particular, her introduction to the anthology entitled “Being Real,” that Walker attempts a further articulation and delineation of this new, Third Wave. Walker writes in the book’s introduction that To Be Real “upset[s] the boat a little” by attempting to reconcile the imbibed ideas and practices of a previous feminist generation with the “ideas and desires,” as well as lived realities of her own generation who have a distinctly different vantage point on the world (TBR xxxiv). In “Being Real,” Walker writes that her desire for To Be Real was that it contains within “what was most relevant” in the lives of young women and men, including her own. She wanted the book to be 71 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker a work that pulled her along a captivating and intriguing journey into third-wave feminism, a book she would want to read. As such, Walker felt To Be Real needed to be a work not of feminist social critique but rather one that recorded the “transformative journey” of young women and men who “push [for] new definitions and understandings of female empowerment and social change” (xxxvii). This, even as they attempt to situate themselves and their ideas within a legacy of feminism that “challenges the status quo, finds common ground while honoring difference, and develops the self-esteem and confidence it takes to live and theorize one’s own life” (TBR xxxv). These were women and men who came into adulthood in the 1990s after a decade of intense feminist backlash, political conservatism, and identity politics that they experienced as restrictive and extremist. They were women and men for whom feminism was a course of study in college, a living, breathing blueprint in their homes, and an ideology they experienced as being both contested and constructed by the media and popular culture. “Feminist Ghetto” Walker begins her introduction to To Be Real with a confession. She confesses that prior to beginning work on the anthology and following the publication of “Becoming the Third Wave,” she felt as though she were living in a “feminist ghetto,” which for her was a self-created and policed space of circumscription. She admits to self-censoring and to practicing deception, and she admits to compartmentalizing aspects of her identity that she felt others might find unacceptable or un-feminist. She writes that every decision she made, person she spent time with, or word she spoke “had to measure up to an image I had in my mind of what was morally and politically right according to my vision of female empowerment.” She continues that “Everything had a gendered explanation, and what didn’t fit into my concept of feminist was ‘bad, patriarchal, problematic’” (TBR xxix, emphasis added). This experience of living in what was in effect a self-created feminist ghetto was the opposite of what Walker had envisioned for herself in “Becoming the Third Wave.” In fact, it stood in direct contrast to her declaration, “I will not be silenced.” Walker could not anticipate that the silencing would be self-imposed and a result of her own misconstruing of feminism as a fixed set of beliefs. Walker believed then that to have curiosities about pornography, a capitalist bent, and love for nonfeminist leaning people was for her to exhibit contradictory and un-feminist behavior. And, so, to avoid being thought un-feminist, and in particular as the daughter and goddaughter of feminist icons,3 and as a woman who boldly stated “I am the Third Wave,” Walker writes in “Being Real” that she hid from family and from public view aspects of her identity that she felt were contradictory, antirevolutionary, and unfeminist. After all, just a few years earlier she had vowed to do as her mother did and to dedicate much of her “energy to the history, health, and healing of women” (“Becoming” 40). The contradictions of Walker’s life disrupted her ideas about what made one a “good feminist” and interfered with her “sense of how to make feminist revolution” (TBR xxx). Walker provides in “Being Real” that it is only when she communicates her thoughts and fears to her peers that she that comes to the understand that embracing the contradictions that come with living and theorizing feminism is what it means for her to make feminist revolution. The suggestion of “Being Real” is that this very realization allows Walker to liberate herself from her feminist ghetto.4 Walker makes a second confession in “Being Real.” It is that a significant part of her desire to be a “good” feminist, which for her means tapping into her artistic strength as a woman, belonging to and participating in a community of like-minded and supportive women, and holding “no dislike” or jealousy towards other women, was a very real desire to be “accepted, claimed, and loved by a feminist community” that included her mother (TBR xxx). Walker writes of her fear then that not measuring up to the imbibed beliefs and practices of her feminist family would mean losing the love, support, and acceptance of her mother, specifically. She writes of fearing that the moment she shared her newly 72 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker explored world and subsequent revelations about herself as a young feminist with her mother would be the moment of her outright rejection. And, so, for a while, as she writes, she believed that in order to maintain ties with her family she needed to “pass” as a “good feminist” and a “good daughter,” by mirroring the feminist beliefs and practices of her feminist family. It is significant that To Be Real was compiled and published during a time when Walker was attempting to assert herself both as an adult daughter and as a feminist writer and activist, both of which entailed for her a necessary individuation from the person and politics of her world famous mother. Walker has written that the years leading up to the publication of To Be Real were years she spent fretting about but taking “tentative steps out of [her] mother’s orbit” (“The Two of Us” 173). Walker’s Third Wave feminist identity then is linked up with her identity as the only child and daughter of a prominent Black feminist artist. To Be Real was published the year Walker turned twenty-five. That same year, in an Essence magazine article titled “The Two of Us,” co-authored with her mother, and commemorating Walker’s twenty-fifth birthday, Walker writes again of her fears, but also of her determination to “come full out” to her mother as the woman she is and was (“The Two of Us” 173, 254). And, again, she makes a confession: that she masqueraded as a good daughter and a good feminist who is a feminist daughter with unimpeachable values that mirrored and affirmed her mother’s own. Walker says that part of the reason for the masquerade was her desire to win favor with her mother, but also to guard against the possibility of maternal abandonment. Walker connects her fear of being abandoned by her mother to a moment when she was eight years old and asked by her mother to take dictation on her funeral arrangements. She writes that while her mother relayed the specifics on how she wanted her funeral to be handled, Walker, at eight years old, dutifully took notes and, like any good daughter, silenced her girlhood fears about losing her mother. Walker continues in “The Two of Us” that to avoid being abandoned, she arrived at the idea that she would be “too perfect to leave.” She continues that she instinctively made herself “into what I perceived to be ‘a good daughter’, often silencing or ignoring my own needs” (“The Two of Us” 254). By the time Walker conceptualizes To Be Real, however, she has come to understand that part of her desire in conceiving of and editing the book was to break free of the need to perform the linked roles of “good daughter” and “good feminist,” and to come out from behind the suffocating masks “good” feminist/ daughter. Black, White, and Jewish Walker’s introduction to the anthology To Be Real provided a general comment on her relationship to U.S. feminism, and in the context of her relationship to her mother and her mother’s politics, even as it detailed her frustrations with and desires for U.S. feminism. With her memoir, Black, White, and Jewish, Walker went deeper, and delved into the material and psycho-emotional dimensions of being her mother’s and her father’s daughter. She also and significantly wrote about her experience of growing up biracial, that is Black and Jewish, during the 1970s and 80s, and showcased the shaping and delimiting influence of family, culture, and society on her self-conception and personal politics. The suggestion of the memoir is that Walker removes the mask she donned for so many years, to reveal a secondgeneration feminist woman of color in flux. Through remembering and writing her shifting identity from “Movement Child” to “Tragic Mulatta” to Third Wave feminist,5 Walker shines a bright light on her conflicted relationship both with U.S. feminism, and she does so in the context of her relationship with her mother. A leading question of Black, White, and Jewish is “[w]hat do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural and personal narrative we’ve inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom?” (30).6 The suggestion of the memoir is that when 73 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker it is only when identities are consciously, deliberately made free of the burden of expectations that come with race, ethnicity, family, and politics, that there is the possibility of discovering, developing, and showcasing a self and a politics that are informed, though not wholly defined, by the surrounding culture. As the daughter of two prominent people who expended much time and energy working to put words and laws behind concepts such as equality, justice, and freedom, Walker admits to a powerful and informing family legacy. At the close of Black, White, and Jewish Walker writes, “I stand with those who stand with me.” She adds, “I’m tired of claiming for claiming’s sake, hiding behind masks of culture, creed, religion.” In these final culminating statements Walker dispels any belief that her allegiance is automatic and by virtue of blood (321-22).7 In a review of Walker’s memoir for the Village Voice, dream hampton writes that “there is no resolution, no declaration of a single, solid self: She [Walker] simply grows big enough to fit her disparate family history and her considerable experiences into her slight, yellow (light-skinned) frame” (20). hampton is fairly correct that there is no declaration of a single, solid self by the close of Walker’s memoir. There is, however, a self, albeit in flux, that is Black and Jewish, that is womanist and feminist, and that is and is not aligned with her famous African American mother. In her closing statement, then, Walker effectively breaks away from her mother, which is also to say her “Blackness,” and instead seems to embrace a racial fluidity in which she and her father, an Irish Jewish man, can coexist as loving and mutually affirming relations. This embrace of the father should not be read as a negation of the mother (and the womanism/feminism of the mother) but rather as Walker’s suggestion of the shaping and delimiting influence of racial/ethnic, class, generational, and ideological on the Black feminist familial mother/daughter, daughter/mother relationship. It is a relationship, suggests Walker with her memoir, with strengths and challenges, yes, but also with limitations. At the age of seventeen, Walker changed her name from Rebecca Grant Leventhal to Rebecca Leventhal Walker, in effect subordinating her whiteness/Jewishness and foregrounding her Blackness. In Black, White, and Jewish, she gives several reasons for doing so, the primary of which being a desire to establish a “tangible, irrefutable link” between herself and her mother. While this may very well be the case, it is no doubt that Walker, then a budding writer and bourgeoning feminist, must have known that a shift from “Leventhal” to “Walker” would all but guarantee her place within U.S. feminist discourses, as well as within American and African American literary canons. And this, even if the maternal abandonment she once feared would one day become a reality. _____________________________ Notes 1 The “wave” model as a metaphor for understanding U.S. feminism persists despite sustained criticism. In an essay titled “Response from a ‘Second Waver’ to Kimberly Springer’s ‘Third Wave Black Feminism?’” Beverly Guy-Sheftall provides an overview of U.S. feminist waves or, as she prefers, phases, that I find instructive. Guy-Sheftall writes that the “first phase” consist “primarily the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement, which had been spawned by the abolitionist movement.” Guy Sheftall continues that “the second phase being the modern women's movement, which began in the mid- 1960s and was catalyzed primarily by the Civil Rights movement; and the third wave, referring to a younger generation of women in the 1990s who were certainly influenced by their feminist foremothers but would define feminism differently and in some ways reject what they perceived to be the doctrinaire aspects of an ideology, mainstream feminism, that they both respect and find limiting” (1091). 2 A general consensus among feminist scholars and activists is that the term “postfeminist” contains within it both positive and negative configurations of/on feminism—this is inherent in the “post.” Scholar Astrid Henry writes that the term “postfeminist” is often used “to mark historical periods when feminism and women’s movement are in decline or abeyance…[and to] indicate a rejection of feminism.” This rejection of feminism, Henry continues, “serves as proof of the failure of feminism” (Henry 19). But, Henry continues, postfeminist can also be used to suggest that feminism has proven successful and is therefore no longer 74 �Cheryl R. Hopson • The Shifting Selves and Realities of Rebecca (nee Leventhal) Walker necessary. Scholar Sarah Gamble adds that postfeminism “is critical of any definition of woman as victims who are unable to control their own lives,” and adds that “postfeminist debate tends to crystallize around issues of victimization, autonomy and responsibility” (Gamble 43). 3 Rebecca Walker is the goddaughter of Gloria Steinem. 4 It is possible to glimpse early signs of Walker’s self-imposed “feminist ghetto” in “Becoming the Third Wave.” In the essay, Walker suggests that women should refuse to vote for, nurture, “break bread,” or have sex with men who do not “prioritize our freedom to control our bodies” (1992, 40). She pushes either/or dynamic on her Black male friend when she demands of him “are you with me or are you going to help them try to destroy me?” (39). The essay also possesses a tone which sometimes perilously borders on the self-righteous, as when Walker declares “I am not one of those people who sat transfixed before the television, watching the Senate hearings. I had classes to go to, papers to write” (39). These elements of “Becoming the Third Wave” could be read as early indicators of the kind of political/personal rigidity that would foster the psycho-social ghettoization Walker experiences and creates with her feminist ghetto. 5 For a sustained analysis of Walker’s use of the dual tropes of the “tragic mulatta” and the “Movement Child,” see scholar Ralina Joseph’s essay “Performing the Twenty-First Century Tragic Mulatto” in The Black Scholar, vol. 39, pp. 3-4, 2009. 6 In her introduction to To Be Real, Rebecca Walker writes of her wish to “hear the experiences of people attempting to live their lives envisioning or experiencing identities beyond those inscribed on them by the surrounding culture” (Walker xxxvii). She argued throughout the anthology’s introduction that in order for young feminists to embrace and to be all of who they are it is a necessity that they jettison imposed and or adopted norms—i.e. a perceived status quo with contemporary feminism—that deny their multifaceted and sometimes conflicting selves. 7 In her second memoir, 2007’s Baby Love, Walker modifies her statement on family writing that biology, especially in relation to one’s own child, trumps any and all other relationships. Works Cited Fleming, Robert. “PW Talks with Rebecca Walker.” Publishers Weekly, Nov. 2000, 78+. Frey, Jennifer. “Alice Walker’s Daughter Details Her ‘Shifting’ Childhood.” The Washington Post, Jan. 200l. Gilley, Jennifer. “Writings of the Third Wave: Young Feminists in Conversation.” References & User Services Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, Spring 2005, pp. 187-98. Gamble, Sarah. The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Routledge, 2000. hampton, dream. “All of the Above.” Village Voice, Feb. 2001, pp. 14-20. Henry, Astrid. Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism. Indiana UP, 2004. Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. University of Minnesota P, 1997. Iyer, Sangamithra. “Riding the Third Wave, The Satya Interview with Rebecca Walker.” Satya Magazine, Jan. 2005. Senna, Danzy. “To Be Real.” To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, edited by Rebecca Walker, Anchor Books, 1995. Siegel, Deborah L. “Reading between the Waves: Feminist Historiography in a ‘Postfeminist Moment.’” Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, edited by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, University of Minnesota P, 1997, pp. 55-82. Springer, Kimberly. “Third Wave Black Feminism?” Signs, vol. 27, no. 4, Summer 2002, pp. 1059-082. Walker, Rebecca. Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. Riverhead Books, 2007. ---. Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. Riverhead Books, 2001. ---. “Becoming the Third Wave.” Ms., Jan./Feb. 1992, pp. 39-41. ---. “Before Hip-Hop Was Hip-Hop.” Prentice Hall Literature Textbook (for 9th Graders), 2005. ---. “Changing the Face of Feminism.” Essence, Jan. 1996, p. 123. ---. “Foreword: We Are Using this Power to Resist.” The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism, edited by Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundry Martin, Anchor Books, 2004. ---. “The Two of Us,” Essence, May 1995, pp. 173, 254. ---, editor. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, Anchor Books, 1995. 75 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice The Californian’ Exopolis T ’ T Z. H L I Hector obar s and im ernandez s iterary nterventions Introduction: California as the Paradise That Never Was n the present essay, I focus on the literary portrayals of California’s underrepresented communities and the places their members inhabit and move through. These places are often zones of disruption of the historical and cultural discourses that traditionally portray California as a paradise and a migrant’s dream, even if increasingly so the dream proves compromised, if not corrupted. I offer a reading of Hector Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries (2011), and Tim Z. Hernandez’s Mañana Means Heaven (2013), two novels which in varying ways show spaces of resistance to the globalizing impulses. Tobar’s novel focuses on a migrant’s experience of a city’s labyrinth, providing an alternative reading of the cityscape; while Hernandez’s novel portrays the valley where constant vacillation across the border and between cultures is a crucial part of the field workers’ experience. Both novels complicate the possible triumphant reading of the land- and cityscape as an all-inclusive actualization of the multicultural dream, as they portray local cultures as being simultaneously shaped and occluded by the larger national and transnational forces. I see these novels as interventions in the discussion about the state’s past and its identity, as they give voice to the cultural and social agents who are traditionally silenced in the narratives of the state’s – and the nation’s – history. The narratives presented in Tobar’s and Hernandez’s novels can be read as signs of the processes that Edward W. Soja analyzes as the development of the “Exopolis.” It is a twofold process, simultaneously describing the emergence of “Outer Cities” and “Edge Cities” as well as other formations falling under the category of “the rather oxymoronic urbanization of suburbia”; and at the same time indicating a drastic restructuring of the Inner City happening under the influence of an outflow of the local populace and an inflow of the migrants from the “Third World” countries. Thus, Soja concludes, “The social and spatial organization of the postmetropolis seems as a result to be turning inside-out and outside-in at the same time, creating havoc with our traditional ways of defining what is urban, suburban, exurban, nor urban, etc.” (7). The two-way, or rather, multiple-way traffic changes not only the face of the urban landscape, but also our understanding of what “urban” might mean. Tobar’s and Hernandez’s novels both point in the direction of the renewed understanding of these spaces as they document the movement – and immobility – of the representatives of the communities whose emergence disrupts the easy binaries of the urban and the suburban. In my essay, I point to the subversive quality of the Exopolis that both analyzed novels expose, in a reference to what Soja specifies as the “provocative double meaning” of the term “exopolis”: “exo-referring both to the city growing ‘outside’ the traditional urban nucleus, and to the city ‘without’, the city that no longer conveys the traditional qualities of cityness” (8). It is precisely this challenging potential that The Barbarian Nurseries and Mañana Means Heaven display that I wish to explore in my essay. Both novels unavoidably hint at the traditional representation of California as paradise or the Garden of Eden, both also revisit the traditional narrative, in which California is first deemed to be the fulfilment of the promise of westward expansion and the ideals of freedom and unencumbered growth, only to be subsequently pronounced the ultimate disappointment of the corrupted ideal. I 76 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice • The Californian Exopolis The moment when California enters written history takes us back a long way: the name is first mentioned well before those parts of the world become known to the Europeans, in an early 16th century Spanish romance The Deeds of Esplandián, and the land itself, imagined as an island inhabited by valiant women warriors, is said to be rich in precious metal and full of wonders. Some elements of the myth proved extremely durable, but, as Joan Didion puts it, “a good deal of California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up” (19) – the Californian landscapes include not only the garden, but the desert; not just the beaches and the sea, but the mountains and snows; they remain a contradiction in and of themselves. The myth of California as the Garden of Eden functions within the parameters of what we may see as a nostalgic landscape: the term indirectly refers to John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s distinction between the “official” and the “vernacular” landscape. When discussing the latter type of landscape, Jackson tells us that “The commonplace aspects of the contemporary landscape, the streets and houses and fields and places of work, could teach us a great deal not only about American history and American society but also ourselves and how we relate to the world. It is a matter of learning how to see” (43). Thus, Jackson places didactic importance upon the landscape, at the same time reminding the viewers that what they look at is in a way a reflection of their character. The landscape they see is, in fact, themselves in relation to the world. Yet, the knowledge gained from the observation of the American landscape is by no means an easy task. It requires taking a step back and inquiring into our own involvement in the world. Thus, I would like to propose a reintroduction of the idea of California as the Garden of Eden, since it signals an importance placed on the landscape which emerges out of the interaction between various groups of humans, but also with the land itself (and the non-human animals inhabiting it). “Learning to see” California as an edenic landscape had the potential of an inclusive, heterogeneous vision for the state. Michael J. McDowell adds to Jackson’s landscapes “another more romantic official landscape,” gaining in popularity, which he describes as “a nostalgic landscape of national forests still filled with trees, undammed wild and scenic rivers, unplowed national grassland, and ungrazed and undrilled federal wildlife refuges, all of it nearly peopleless, as the majority of Americans have liked to think the land was before the Euro-American settlement” (382). McDowell’s nostalgic landscape can be seen as a much needed act of resistance to the binarism suggested by the distinction between the official versus the vernacular. In the Californian context, this nostalgic landscape takes on a local variation: even if not of forests, but a semi-arid desert, it is the landscape before highways and the omnipresent cement. As David Wyatt claims, “California has always been a place no sooner had than lost,” and he adds, “every family has its paved garden” (15). The suggestion that the Californian garden has been lost to paved roads is possibly a nostalgic expression of the fear that California has never been the paradise it was supposed to be; it is only the loss that is real. The Ethnic Garden and the Logic of Exclusion The nostalgic garden is the central image in Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries, where the conflict over one family’s piece of paradise and its loss motivate the narrative’s progression, which mirrors the central character’s movement through a variety of landscapes. These landscapes are organized along the axis of the garden and the desert, and the distinction between the two is reflected in a series of differentiating features, such as: the use of language, either Spanish or English; understanding art or disregard for it; and individualism or a collective spirit. These binarisms, however, are broken up by the ideas of movement and liminality, embodied by the character who is an agent of artistic dissent. The Barbarian Nurseries focuses on a family whose hyphenated last name suggests a mixed ethnic background, Maureen and Scott Thompson-Torres, and their Mexican maid, an illegal immigrant, Araceli. Undergoing financial difficulties, the family let the gardener go, which triggers the rapid deterioration 77 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice • The Californian Exopolis of their landscaped surroundings and is an apt reflection of the disruption in the family dynamics. Maureen’s decision to remove the tropical garden and install a desert landscape is extremely costly: in a subsequent squabble over financial matters, the couple decides to take some time off, neither bothering to inform the maid. Left to her resources and with food supplies running low, Araceli decides to take the two boys left in her care to their grandfather. Their trip from a gated Orange County hilltop community to the heart of Los Angeles, when seen from the perspective of one of the boys, a precocious, highly imaginative 11-year old Brandon, is presented in terms of a fabulous journey to the heart of darkness; and when represented in Araceli’s adult terms, it seems like the Grand Tour for an artist that the maid is. When the parents eventually return, they realize the boys and the maid are gone, and because of a lack of communication and misconstrued motifs, Araceli becomes a kidnapper on the run, hunted by the police, the social services, and the media alike. The parents are not willing to admit their guilt in abandoning their family, but eventually they come clean, which leads to Araceli’s release. The unfolding of the events gives Tobar an excuse to comment on the social mechanisms at play and to expose deep chasms in the bilingual, bi-ethnic Californian households, with the garden serving as a befitting metaphor for the many identities of California. This multiplicity is reflected in the naming: the Thompson-Torres call it “la petite rain forest” (11); this mixture of French and English signals their upper-class status and distances them from the Spanishspeaking people who actually take care of the garden’s maintenance. When they have to let the gardener Pepe go, Scott muses, “It seemed to him it would take a village of Mexicans to keep that thing alive, a platoon of men in straw hats, wading with bare feet into the faux stream that ran through the middle of it” (15). In fact, only one person was maintaining the place, so Scott’s musings are a fantasy of the superhuman strength and abilities that distinguish his gardener from himself. The conclusion shows the contrast starkly: “Pepe. . .was a village unto himself, apparently. Scott wasn’t a village” (15). A hint at the American individualism, this comment also serves to draw the line between the upper middle class employers and their Mexican working class employees, with the duality extending to the sense of communality versus individualism, regulated legal status versus unprotected illegal standing, down to the language they employ. Araceli, the maid, is the character straddling these oppositions, as she is a former art student in Mexico City, forced by economic circumstances to seek a job as a nanny on the other side of the border. In her memories, we are presented with yet another opposition influencing the characters’ sense of identity: she is a city dweller, navigating the crowded streets between art galleries and cafes, transplanted to the land of suburbs stretching to the horizon. The difference between these spaces is captured by Soja, who uses the term “postmetropolis” in order to “accentuate the differences between contemporary urban regions and those that consolidated in the middle decades of the twentieth century” (1). Araceli then is an agent moving not only between various modes of spatial organization and their social and cultural consequences, but it seems she also moves between temporal planes, equally influencing the identifications of the agents. Needless to say, among the important facets of identification is the language, and the Californian characters in Tobar’s novel are well aware of the different status of the two languages; as Araceli says, “it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight” (250). The grasp of a language proves important when Araceli is asked by her employer, Maureen, about her opinion on the reconstituted garden: “She really didn’t possess the words in English to communicate what the tropical garden and this new desert garden made her feel. How did you say in English that something was too still, that you preferred plants that you could feel breathing around you?” (106). The two languages parallel the approach to the two versions of the landscape, which in turn translates into differing ranks in the hierarchy of social standing and power of the Californian characters. The preference for the desert 78 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice • The Californian Exopolis garden might suggest ossified structures and stiff divisions in the strata of society; but a more optimistic reading might also hint at a turn to native plants and species as an attempt at a rehabilitation of a previous arrogant, exploitative treatment of the land. The character of Araceli displays a very different approach to the landscape. Her liminal position between the worlds of English and Spanish, between high art and middle-class mediocrity, and between city dwelling and the suburbs is represented in her response to the places Marc Augé calls non-places of supermodernity, the places of transit, rushed through, places of solitude. Araceli, a post-modern heir to flaneurs of the past, understands such spaces and appreciates them for what they are. Seen from a train, the railway tract seems oddly appealing: “There was a spare beauty to all this decay, it was the empty and harsh landscape of an unsettling dream; these were spaces you were not meant to see…. Her aesthetic lived in barren places like this, and she missed them. Here the wind, rain, and sun are free to shape and cook the steel and cement into sculptures that celebrate forgetfulness” (164). The dreamlike quality of California is mentioned here, but it is not the golden dream promoted by Hollywood; far from it. It is by no means a manicured lawn of the suburban variety, or a characterless city park. The landscape is recognized as a dynamic art form in itself. The celebration of forgetfulness, not of history or identity, is the central function of art here, which possibly signals an attempt to resist any curbing of artistic freedom and pinning down of a homogeneous identity. Araceli, the free agent, finds herself in non-places as she is forced by circumstance to flee the danger of deportation and prison. When she disregards the “No Trespassing” sign, she ventures into a place that resists definition: She was entering a kind of urban wilderness, a nursery of odd flora sprouting up through the mustard grass. A cypress tree, its canopy shaped like a large wing. Sickly rosebushes without buds. Strawberry plants clinging to a patch of loam. Bamboo grasses and a stunted palm with thin leaves that sprouted, fountainlike, from its trunk, and the wide, tall bouquet of a nopal cactus. She had stumbled into the back closet of California gardens, the place where seedlings of plants discarded and abandoned came to scratch their roots into the dry native soil. If she hadn’t been on the run, she might have stopped to admire this freakish landscape. (259) It takes an artist’s eye to transform the place into an object of contemplation; but the wild place on the borders between city and wilderness is represented as the originator of the carefully maintained middleclass yards and their nursery. The plants that survive in this marginal space later thrive in suburban gardens thanks to the work of those who remain as unacknowledged and as invisible as the liminal nursery. Araceli’s preference for the wild versus the cultivated is a sign of her cultural identification. In her vision of California there is a place for wildness and for art; it is an inclusive, multilingual, heterogeneous space of contact and interaction. Such a perception must be contrasted with that of her employers’. Their California is the place of the past that they are desperately trying to recreate: “California was a paradise of open land and sea breezes, the sliver of Eden between the desert and the sea” (304); it is a paradoxical place, at the same time elusive, yet with clearly demarcated borders. One character, a mouthpiece for xenophobic views, describes California of the past in terms of a “playground,” which suggests a controlled space with utilitarian function. The nostalgia for that place corresponds to a falsified vision of history that feeds the fearful xenophobia of the present. It is only with a realization of the need for a non-exclusive identification of California that the falsified vision may be dispelled. The ending of the novel presents such a recognition in the form of a self-imposed expulsion from paradise. Realizing her guilt, Maureen decides they will move to a smaller house: “They would leave their Eden, and that would be a fair punishment” (389). The expulsion means that the paradise must be 79 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice • The Californian Exopolis redefined, its borders expanded, and the sense of entitlement – re-visited. Yet for a white middle-class character such as Maureen the suburbs delimit her movements; in contrast, Araceli, the illegal Mexican worker and an artist, is the agent of dissent who leaves the suburbs and through her movement illustrates the possibility of the challenging potential of the Californian Exopolis. The City and the Return to the Ethnic Paradise Liminality and mobility are the twenty-first century possibilities for a non-white character; a Mexican artist figure, even though it remains a provocative proposal in today’s prose, half a century ago remained an oxymoron, with the distinction between a white artist and a Mexican laborer very much in place. The second text I discuss here, Tim Z. Hernandez’s 2013 novel Mañana Means Heaven, destabilizes this distinction and celebrates ethnic diversity, not allowing for identity appropriation by a white, mobile narrator. In Mañana Means Heaven, paradise is also part of the stock images to conceptualize California, but a much more prominent referent is Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road. One episode concerns Terry, a Mexican woman with whom Kerouac’s narrator has an intimate relationship; and it is this figure and the events centered around her that provide an impulse for Hernandez’s novel. In a mixture of fact and fiction, Hernandez recounts the story of romance with the young writer, Jack, from the perspective of the woman, Bea. California provides a vivid backdrop against which the events unfold, while also accounting for the characters’ motivation and explaining their perspective. The moments in history when the two novels were conceived represent two important points of reference in the history of California, as they exposed the social raft and unrest, violently erupting in the streets of the multiethnic metropolis. In the words of Edward Soja, “Between the Watts riots of 1965 and what are now called the Rodney King or Justice Riots of 1992, the urban region of Los Angeles experienced one of the most dramatic transformations of any comparable region of the world” (1). Thus, even though Kerouac and Hernandez both set their narratives in 1930s California, Kerouac’s text represents a very different Los Angeles and California than the one seen from the vantage point of a twenty-first century text, with a different understanding of the city’s dynamics which Soja calls “the socio-spatial dialectic” (2). The awareness of this difference is evidenced by Hernandez’s narrator’s words, “Strains of resentment were still crusted in the cracks of the sidewalks, from Watts all the way up to Santa Monica Boulevard, and there wasn’t enough rain in the entire Pacific Coast to wash it off of L.A. that easy. The blackouts too seemed like only yesterday. The whirring propellers of low-spying zeppelins, yesterday. The Zoot Suit beatings, yesterday” (37). For Kerouac’s narrator, Sal Paradise, California is devoid of the socio-political dimension in favor of the mythical; it is “the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America” (50), and it is there that he hears the Spanish word that he chooses not to translate: “It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard – mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven” (56). Sal uses a strategy here that various critics analyze under different names: Marianna Torgovnick describes it as “primitivism” and Graham Huggan deems “exoticising”; both mean a fascination with the Other to the point of appropriation and commodification, with no respect for the insiders’ perspective on the cultural issue that is being seized. Hernandez’s novel, written in the twenty first century, cannot afford Sal’s naivety. With an awareness of the past century’s conflicts and delicate and complex identity politics behind them, Hernandez’s text responds to the pronounced sentimentality of Kerouac’s narrator. In a remark about a singer who is passing for a Mexican, Bea (Kerouac’s “Mexican girl” Terry) says: “‘You actually buy all that Mañana, mañana junk? I mean, she ain’t even Mexican, and…oh, it just makes me sick” (122). The comment not only demystifies the romantic approach of On the Road; it also makes it clear that claiming Mexicanness and exoticizing it must not be taken lightly. Sal Paradise presents himself as one of the workers in 80 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice • The Californian Exopolis the Valley when he says, “They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am” (98), but such identification is conditioned upon his mobility and freedom to assume other cultural positions, whereas for his “Mexican girl” mobility and freedom of movement cannot be taken for granted. Their differing interpretations of the land they pass through or inhabit depend on their positioning as free or bound agents. When Augé reminds us that: “Travel…constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape” (69), we have to take his pronouncement to see Bea as unable to assume the relationship with the landscape equal to Sal’s, as she is conditioned by socio-economic factors beyond her control. Sal, however, is well aware of his relationship to the landscape: in a characteristically anti-intellectual gesture he reveals his awareness when he says, “I had a book with me I stole…but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along” (207). In Mañana Means Heaven we are presented with a rather clear-cut division between the two zones, the valley with punishing working conditions, and the city, an ambiguous and exciting space of artistic freedom, further divided by the availability of the city spaces to the agents of varying economic status. Bea, the primary focalizer in the story, presents the valley in terms of hard labor that it means for the menial workers; to her, “Returning to the great San Joaquin meant a backache” (23). When the couple decides to take the job picking grapes, she displays the practical knowledge that derives from years of experience. Bea assures Jack that “the body, no matter how many days or months or years, never gets used to fieldwork” (129). The damning effects of the hard work are most recognizable on the children who work in the fields: “Every last one of them wore a defeated mask” (142). Even though at one time Bea admits that living in the camp amounts to a simpler, healthier existence, reminiscent of camping as a form of leisure, it is Jack who holds romantic illusions about such a life. He expresses such views saying, “I know plenty of city folks who’d kill for a little bit of quiet like this. A little room to stretch your legs. Buy your own chunk of land, set things on fire when you want” (120). His fantasy of freedom and empty land evokes the Frontier Thesis and the ideals of Manifest Destiny, which only exposes Jack’s position as an outsider and a passer-by, unaffected by the landscape to which no communal value is attached. For Bea, the fantasy of freedom and unobstructed movement results in a sense of frustration: she feels “trapped in the campo” which prompts her to say, “This must be what purgatory is like” (183). Bea’s and Jack’s differing responses to the landscape in the valley parallel their economic position which conditions their mobility. Just as the valley with its camps of workers picking up fruit represents unchangeability and stagnation, the city lures with its dynamism: The soundscape was punctuated with raw music: the scream of an engine, the sizzle of hot grease from an open window, a fed-up neighbor threatening to call cops on the hoodlums who lurked in the alleyways. Across the street, a band was loading up a car with chrome and brass musical instruments, their shirttails untucked and hats cocked, faces ragged after an all-nighter. Cars hummed past, and the noon hour buzzed with working stiffs tending to the incessant nag of life. (37) The characters see themselves as momentarily released from the constraints of the mundane; the city invigorates them with its chaotic energy. It is the landscape that creates music out of chaos and that feeds their creative energies. The city unites the lovers and allows them to see themselves similarly freed by it. They create an enclave in the bustling chaos, with the two of them against the rest of the world: Off and on, maybe once an hour, or every other hour, they peeked out of the window, only to remind themselves that the world outside, the stiff and utterly square world, didn’t apply to them. Not its rules or contradictions, not its streetlights or crosswalks, not its arbitrary neighborhoods quartered off by highways and byways, bridges and barrios. Deep into the afternoon, at the pearl hour, buzzing with invincibility, Bea stuck her head out the window and spread her arms as if embracing the sky. She blurted out, ‘Goddamn you L.A.!’, A voice greeted her back, ‘Shut up!’ (53) 81 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice • The Californian Exopolis Just as for Bea, the valley is a landscape that she understands and is able to represent, the city, described as the “stiff and square world”, is represented from Jack’s perspective. When Bea makes the gesture trying to embrace the city, even as she simultaneously denounces it, the city rejects and silences her. Bea’s approach to the cityscape is dictated by her economic position. She contrasts the city where “there was a heap of money waiting to be made” with the valley, “that miserable campo, that sad den of discarded prayers” (72), yet in the end she must go back there. The novel presents a sense of reconciliation at the end, when Bea realizes her limited freedom which nevertheless rests on the liberty of choice: “It had nothing to do with leaving, and everything to do with returning” (214). In contrast, On the Road does not offer a similar resolution. Sal reminisces about his Mexican lover with a sense of regret: At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching,…feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough light….I wished I were a Denver Mexican,…anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley. (105) Sal’s musings, however, are played out against the backdrop of a cityscape in which he moves about freely, even as he mourns the lack of euphoric excess in his life. He presents his regret in racial and ethnic terms, and however naive to the point of recklessness his identifications are, they are nevertheless shaped by the landscapes he inhabits. Rachel Ligairi discusses the question of race in On the Road and, as she points to the wide range of critical assessment of Kerouac’s racial dynamics, from perceiving it as simple naivety to dismissing it as a sign of colonial domination, she concludes that Kerouac’s treatment of the issue is “a choice that suggests a larger Beat refusal to see racial Others as fellow questers rather than stepping stones toward the authentic” (153). Sal Paradise situates himself on the margin of social life, but he does it precisely because he can afford to do so, as a white man endowed with mobility. For Terry / Bea, as well as for her co-workers, mobility as an option may not present itself for many years to come. It is only for the character placed in a twenty-first-century context, such as Araceli, that mobility – moving through the landscape and reading it – becomes a real choice. Conclusion The idea presented at the beginning, the reading of the landscape as “a matter of learning how to see”, now becomes a political responsibility, and both The Barbarian Nurseries and Mañana Means Heaven undertake this responsibility with a reference to the traditional, idealized representation of California as an edenic space. The former novel presents the garden as a liminal space which disrupts an easy distinction between an urban and a suburban space, while simultaneously questioning the notion of the garden itself. In the latter novel, the garden is a purgatory rather than paradise, yet it plays an important function: that of epitomizing the experience of an undocumented laborer limited in her mobility. Set in different historical moments, the two novels display very different approaches to the landscape, yet both represent necessary interventions into a renewed comprehension of Californian spaces. In the words of Soja, “Understanding the postmetropolis requires a creative recombination of micro and macro perspectives, views from above and from below, a new critical synthesis that rejects the rigidities of either/or choices for the radical openness of the both/and also” (4). The Barbarian Nurseries and Mañana Means Heaven represent precisely this radicality of options. In the two novels, Californian landscapes are represented in a series of binaries, broken up and complicated by a free agent of dissent: in The Barbarian Nurseries, the division between the city and the suburb is challenged by the artist able to transform the refuse of the city into an object of contemplation, 82 �Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice • The Californian Exopolis at the same time showing the points of convergence between the seemingly irreconcilable, discordant zones and their interrelatedness. In Mañana Means Heaven, the distinction between the valley and the city is subverted through the intertextual play that suggests a different network of meanings attributed to places, resulting from the complex identifications of the dwellers, passers-by, and interpreters of these spaces. Finally, the two novels present California’s non-places reinvented, whose meanings, contextdependent and reliant on other vectors of cultural interpretation, are celebrated in their ambiguous and chaotic complexity. _____________________________ Works Cited Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. 1995. Verso, 2008. Didion, Joan. Where I Was From: A Memoir. Harper Perennial, 2003. Hernandez, Tim Z. Mañana Means Heaven. The U of Arizona P, 2013. Huggan, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. Yale U P, 1984. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. Penguin Modern Classics, 2005. Ligairi, Rachel. “When Mexico Looks like Mexico: The Hyperrealization of Race and the Pursuit of the Authentic.” What’s Your Road, Man?: Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, edited by Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton, Southern Illinois U P, 2009, pp. 139-154. McDowell, Michael J. “The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, The U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 371-391. Soja, Edward W. “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis.” www.opa-a2a.org/dissensus/wp-content/ uploads/2008/05/soja_edward_w_six_discourses_on_the_postmetropolis.pdf Tobar, Hector. The Barbarian Nurseries. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. The U of Chicago P, 1990. Wyatt, David. The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California. Cambridge UP, 1986. 83 �Monica Reyes The (Un)H/F Bin the American West ero R M N C T D eexamining the ale emale inary of ineteenth entury ravel iaries “Saturday, April 16th [1853] Camped last night three miles east of Chariton Point in the prairie. Made our beds down in the tent in the wet and mud. Bed clothes nearly spoiled. Cold and cloudy this morning, and every body out of humour. Seneca [son] is half sick. Plutarch [son] has broke his saddle girth. Husband is scolding and hurrying all hands (and the cook) and Almira [daughter] says she wished she was home, and I say ditto. ‘Home, Sweet Home.’” - Amelia Stewart Knight, Oregon Pioneer, 1853 “The mountains, whose stern features had lowered upon us with so gloomy and awful a frown, now seemed lighted up with a serene, benignant smile, and the green waving undulations of the plain were gladdened with the rich sunshine. Wet, ill, and wearied as I was, my spirit grew lighter at the view, and I drew from it an augury of good for my future prospects.” (158) - Francis Parkman Jr., The Oregon Trail I t is estimated that nearly half a million people ventured toward the American Pacific Coast within the period known as Great Westward Migration, which officially began in 1843. The typical traveler was destined to settle and farm, usually in California or Oregon, on land that was promised as free or inexpensive and incredibly fertile. Travelling the two-thousand-mile journey in large groups, most of the pioneers had sacrificed small luxuries to save money, parted with extended family and close communities, and sold most of their possessions to establish a new life in places they had, in all likelihood, never even visited. In other words, the journey, which could take as much as a year to complete, was costly in many ways. It was not unusual for these pioneers to record their experiences in a unique hybrid of autobiographical writing known as travel diaries, and these accounts have allowed historians as well as writing and literary scholars the ability to study the westering experience of men and women of the nineteenth century. Less than one percent of the scores of sojourners who travelled West in America during the 1800s are represented in self-writing that exists today, either through published pieces, archival material or within family collections (Faragher 11; Schlissel 11). The writing done on the frontier—complete with all its challenges and dangers—soon became synonymous with the American travelling experience. Its unique focus on spaces associated with uncharted territories, wilderness and the unknown delineated it from travel writing about European travel experiences, like the Grand Tour, common to wealthy young adults during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Unlike Grand Tour narratives,1 in which well-to-do young ladies and men viewed fine art, roamed classical ruins, and met with wealthy Europeans for pleasure and education, the frontier experience focused on romantic adventure and heroic identity in an effort to survive and thrive within nature. So, in an exciting way, the travel literature coming out of the American frontier offered fresh settings, plotlines and protagonists which nineteenth century readers thoroughly devoured. Also, travelling the American West were explorers, traders, politicians and tourists. Even if for a summer tour of the frontier, these privileged travelers wrote about their journeys and experiences, and 84 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West often their writing showcases patterns of an effort to replicate the pioneer and settler experience. I posit that the individuals who could afford to travel West for pleasure (tourists)2 sought to authenticate, in their own lives, an experience they had only read about in travel diaries and dramatic adventure novels, as the impressions, perceived experiences, expectations, hopes and fears of life on the trail of the frontier were, without question, influenced by the constructs set forth in previous travel narratives. Through their travel diaries, these tourists of the frontier obviously aimed to (re)create a Romantic identity and landscape, a luxury settlers could not afford. In the sections that follow, I offer first a theoretical framework that informs my thinking on identity constructs within travel literature of the American frontier. Next, I briefly examine Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (a memoir of the author’s 1846 trek across the American West) as a representative, yet brief, example of how travel-diarists of the American frontier are able to rhetorically construct a heroic identity within their diaries. I then turn to Susan Shelby Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico (the author’s edited 1846 travel diary while journeying the title’s namesake route) to closely examine how female writing of the frontier is able to breach the discourse considered stereotypically “male”. Ultimately, I use Magoffin’s narrative as evidence that quintessential American Western literary romances are mostly developed by writers, regardless of gender, who selectively purposed to travel as tourists and not settlers, as the purpose of travel often birthed the literary identity of the diarist. Writing Identities The act of keeping a diary shows the author’s belief that their experience is worth telling. Diary researcher Margo Culley describes how diaries “always [begin] with a sense of self-worth, a conviction that one’s individual experience is somehow remarkable,” (8) an idea prevalent during America's westward expansion, which significantly overlapped with the literary period of American Romanticism. Faragher describes how the unique experience of emigrating great distances across unsettled terrain prompted many men and women to write about it, even if diarists simply jotted down their daily tasks while in transit (4, 12). Moreover, keeping a written account during a travel experience seems natural, as journaling symbolizes a course of progress. For many, the start of the journey begins on page one, and the journal becomes intensely metaphoric. Bernard Rosenthal, in his introduction to Francis Parkman Jr.’s The Oregon Trail, comments that frontier travelers saw how “civilization would be renewed; here was the region where the faults of the Old World might be put aside and where a better civilization might emerge” (viii). For example, Magoffin, a newly-wed trader traveling the Sante Fe Trail in 1846, begins her diary with these thoughts: “My journal tells a story tonight different from what is has ever done before. The curtain raises now with a new scene. This book of travels is Act 2nd, litterally and truly. From the city of New York to the Plain of Mexico, is a stride that I myself can scarcely realize” (1). The newness of travel, journaling, and scenery combined to create a true frontier setting for nineteenth century readers and writers in which to play. Attempting to (re)create a type of “hero’s journey” western experience prompted many individuals to realize themselves as the protagonist of their own story in their travel diaries, and they did so by engaging in what Culley labels “double consciousness,” or even “constructing the self” (10). Culley determines that even in the most seemingly transparent writings, “all diarists are involved in a process, even if largely unconscious, of selecting details to create a persona” or an identity (12). In other words, the awareness of audience (real or imagined) has a profound influence over how diarists portray themselves in their writing, so understandably, diarists endlessly re-read and edited their own work. Critics like Fussell excuse how diarists construct their own “self” because if diarists do not “visit [their] narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it”; and certainly, many diarists understood this idea well (16). Moreover, Saunders understands that “demand” drove the fictionalization of travel 85 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West literature: “Driven to lie through prejudice-- religious, political, or racial--, quest for commercial gain, or to improve personal reputation, travel writers found a winning formula by stretching, moulding, or disguising the facts” (2). It is misleading, however, to generalize all American travel narratives as exaggerated or creatively manufactured exploits—the truth is, American female travel accounts of the nineteenth century were largely ignored until the 1970s as they are often characterized as dry, predictable accounts of daily chores. The hundreds of American nineteenth century female accounts that have been discovered record the routines of women who were settlers and not tourists, who had little choice but to follow their husbands and children across the U.S. Their writing usually portrays survival without idealization, perhaps because most women were too busy feeding their families to depict themselves as idealistic representations of the heroic trailblazer. In her book, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, Lillian Schlissel provides ample representative excerpts from womens’ (settlers’) accounts on the Overland Trail. Female accounts typically resemble Catherine Haun’s detailed entry about available groceries during her trek to California in 1849: “We also had the advantage of camping near farm-houses and the generous supply of bread, butter, eggs and poultry greatly facilitated the cooking. Eggs were 2 1/2 cents a dozen—at our journey’s end we paid $1 a piece, that is when we had the dollar” (170). In addition, Amelia Stewart Knight’s 1853 travel account en route to Oregon from Iowa is a perpetual cooking and washing log with lamentations about the hardships of her seven children along the way. Knight’s first encounter with native people is noteworthy in that it is told without fear or romanticized danger; instead, her encounter with Indians is a side note alongside a description of her chores for that day (203). It is important to emphasize that the frontier settler diary was first and foremost kept for utilitarian reasons, and most diaries would actually be sent back home for pleasure reading and/or news, or the diary would be used as a helpful guide for those families who would take the trek next. In fact, keeping a diary was part of the private duties of women, “a feminist practice” (Huff 6), that many men considered necessary for the family as a whole, similar to washing or cooking (Jameson 150). In contrast, male frontier writing is largely associated with “the story of the male innocent who escapes from civilization into the wilderness to become a man, free from the constraints of tradition and authority” (Georgi-Findlay 6), easily identified in works like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Mark Twain’s satire Roughing It, or The Journals of Lewis and Clark. In other words, the male in American frontier literature makes a conscious (and perceivably heroic) choice to venture out, decidedly not to settle, but to experience, much like a modern tourist, and this is the story that nineteenth century readers demanded. American frontier readers and writers craved more than the scientific discoveries of uncharted land commonly found in seventeenth century, Enlightenment accounts; they desired the hero’s journey meta-narrative that involved an inward and personal story alongside the outer journey. For example, Twain’s Roughing It comically exhibits the great desire for the adventure that arises from travel found in male accounts. In his description of his brother’s appointment as Secretary of Nevada Territory, Twain’s writing is overwhelmed with envy of the westering travel experience: “I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word ‘travel’ had a seductive charm for me” (49). In his humorous way, Twain is able to accurately describe the idealism of adventure travel in nineteenth century America: “[My brother] would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero” (49). Twain also recalls his awe at covered wagon travel: “Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and 86 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings” (75). Twain’s satirical optimism about the trail differs greatly from that of women who had no choice but to follow their husbands’ and fathers’ Westward dreams, and his work illustrates the romanticizing of a selective venture, a heroic vacation from the mundane responsibility of domestic life often lived by women. There is an obvious male/ female binary that travel writing scholars use to read these archival texts (Faragher; Jameson; Riley; Scharff; Schlissel); consequently, female frontier literature is mostly seen through the classification of “settler,” and male accounts are mostly perceived through the persona of “tourist.” However, I argue that such conflation of gender and travel identity is not always helpful in viewing the rhetoric and persona(s) of the American frontier story, as women and men travelled for varying purposes and rhetorically constructed various identities within their travel journeys, able to overlap gender norms. For modern readers, the various identities that nineteenth century travel writers construct often oppose their desired intention; in other words, even if an author sets out to prove their heroic character through their travel experience, the end result may read contrived and problematic. For example, in her landmark piece, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt understands how travel writers place themselves at the center of their saga and become a type of “unhero,” who only seek experience and not any deeper understanding or appreciation of the culture or native people they encounter; these protagonists simply actualize their experience as an “epic series of trials, challenges, and encounters with the unpredictable” (73). Similarly, Helmer and Mazzeo, in “Unraveling the Traveling Self,” describe the flâneur,3 an individual who is like Pratt’s “unhero” in many ways, but most importantly is “bourgeois, one who has the money, leisure, and class distinction to move freely within and across borders” (10). Like the “unhero,” the flâneur has a “desire for pleasure and experience” (Helmer and Mazzeo 10), but also possesses the monetary wealth to seek out-- through travel-- cultural wealth and heroic identity. Two American frontier travel-narratives, Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, suggest that wealth, power and choice helped shape writing identities perhaps as significantly as gender. The Rhetoric of the (Fe)Male “Unhero” of the American Frontier In March of 1846, Francis Parkman Jr., a wealthy, single, “gentleman” and Harvard graduate, decided to leave home and explore the American West. His goal was to write and publish a firsthand account of his fascinations-- native people and the untouched land of the U.S. The budding historian first travelled toward the Platte River and continued its path to Fort Laramie. Next he headed south where he spent time with affable Oglala Indians, whom Parkman discusses in depth. He continued south, first towards Bent’s Fort in Colorado, followed by the Santa Fe Trail, returning home to New England by September that same year. He first published about his adventures in an 1847 issue of Knickerbocker Magazine; and he eventually published four more revisions over the course of forty-five years. Each edition became increasingly more separated from personal opinion and instead became more of a collection of historical observations of the West. In some ways, his work can be considered a flawed ethnography, as even Parkman expresses his desire to become an “insider” with Native Americans for his purposes of study (15). The Oregon Trail was wildly successful (Rosenthal vii, xxiii), and multiple revisions allowed Parkman to clearly depict the romantic imagery of the Western frontier. Despite its commercial success, Parkman’s work is often criticized, in hindsight, as void of deep analytical insight, an observation that makes sense considering his touristic pursuit of quintessential frontier experiences (Rosenthal ix), marking him, in twenty-first century retrospect, a true “unhero”. Parkman opens his 1849 account with his admission that his purpose for travel is adventure and 87 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West experience, but most of all to spend time with the vanishing Indian —in other words, he is a sightseer (Parkman 14, 150). He also romanticizes the danger of his pursuit of the Indian: “to those who are unacquainted with Indians, it may seem strange that our chief apprehensions arose from the supposed proximity of the people we intended to visit” (167). And accurately, Rosenthal concludes that “Parkman in The Oregon Trail seems like a man far more concerned with watching a passing panorama than with trying to understand its meaning” (x). He, unlike the thousands in transit during the 1800s, was solely on this adventure for amusement. Rosenthal understands how Parkman “seeks experience rather than understanding” (x), and because Parkman’s purpose for travel is essentially entertainment, it is easy to identify the frontier as his “playground” (Rosenthal xv). Parkman’s romanticized frontier experience is centered primarily on spending time with native people, and his stereotypical perspective of natives is what marks him as a true “unhero.” While a discussion about Parkman’s questionable ethnography, racist commentary and appropriation of natives and foreigners merits its own discussion, it is my intention here to only use his xenophobia as a brief example of one of the many ways Parkman may be classified as “unhero.” For example, Parkman begins his journey by describing the excitement and archetypal picture of transit: “Parties of emigrants, with their tents and wagons, would be encamped on open spots near the bank, on their way to the common rendezvous at Independence… the scene was characteristic, for here were represented at one view the most remarkable features of this wild and enterprising region” (8). Additionally, he also observes in detail the “dark slavish-looking Spaniards gazing stupidly out from beneath their broad hats,” “a group of French hunters…with their long hair and buckskin dresses,” and “a group of Indians, belonging to a Mexican tribe” (8-9). Parkman’s description of the varied cultures teeming together with the common goal to relocate for adventure or economic opportunity certainly helps establish the thrilling picture of American Western movement. Like other travel narratives of this time, however, the varied individuals along Parkman’s path are sometimes valued only as novelties: “the Kanzas Indians, who, adorned with all their finery, were proceeding homeward at a round pace; and whatever they might have seemed on board the boat, they made a very striking and picturesque feature in the forest landscape” (9). For Parkman, the Indians are part of the Western landscape, essential only in their romantic associations with wilderness and adventure. For example, his perception of the Ogallala village solidifies readers’ expectations of what an Indian village should look like: Here were the heavy-laden pack-horses, some wretched old woman leading them, and two or three children clinging to their backs. Here were mules or ponies covered from head to tail with gaudy trappings and mounted by some gay young squaw, grinning bashfulness and pleasure as the Meneska looked at her. Boys with miniature bows and arrows were wandering over the plains, little naked children were running along on foot, and numberless dogs were scampering among the feet of the horses. The young braves, gaudy with paint and feathers, were riding in groups among the crows, and often galloping, two or three at once along the line, to try the speed of their horses… With the rough prairie and the broken hills for its back-ground, the restless scene was striking and picturesque beyond description. Days and weeks made me familiar with it, but never impaired its effect upon my fancy. (181) Parkman’s commentary on Indian culture shows how deeply he misunderstands Native Americans as objects of a romantic Western panorama, but his account effectively reminds readers of the culture out of which Parkman wrote. Additionally, in the spirit of the flâneur, Parkman puts emphasis on the “intense visual quality” of the landscape of the West (Helmer and Mazzeo 11), and offers no groundbreaking and egalitarian perspectives about native people, or even hints at a change in attitude that his tour should have provided for him. While many modern readers chastise Parkman for his openly violent and 88 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West hateful thoughts toward native people, his account is a sincere example of what many Americans were thinking in the 1800s. As Helmer and Mazzeo explain, “the flâneur’s acquisitive stance toward the world defines a type of travel writing in which people and things are appropriated for their exotic nature” (10), and Parkman’s travel account, and especially his exploitation of native people allows him to construct his heroic identity. Thompson describes how authors use people, places, foods, etc. in an effort to legitimize the self that they are attempting to create: “to this way of thinking, much travel writing entails the traveller achieving a symbolic or psychological mastery over the…places they describe” (119). In the end, Parkman’s wealth affords him a western adventure, complete with “insider” experiences with natives which allows him to construct his identity on the American frontier. Similar to Parkman, Susan Shelby Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, showcases the diarist as the “unhero” and the flâneur, yet her account is, of course, female. Her diary has been edited and memorialized for its connection to the Mexican-American War, an ideal space in which to set her Romantic account. Magoffin’s female perspective regarding the Santa Fe Trail is rare; the only edition of Magoffin’s journal that is published claims that she was in all probability the “first white woman ever to go over the rude trail of the Santa Fe traders” (Lamar ix). To mainstream readers, there is little of interest in Magoffin’s diary outside her involvement with the Mexican-American War. Describing the months Magoffin spent traveling through Mexico (June 1846–September 1847) as “historically valuable” is understatement. Magoffin’s journal begins the second week of June-1846, approximately three weeks after the U.S. declared war on Mexico, and five weeks before the Mexican congress responded with its own declaration on July 7. Magoffin is much different from the typical woman in transit to California or Oregon in nineteenth century America. For one, Susan’s wealth marks her dissimilarity from other traveling pioneer women. According to Schlissel, the typical American family may have sacrificially saved for months to fund their westward journey (23). Conversely, Magoffin’s expedition was comfortable to say the least. Howard R. Lamar notes in the journal’s foreword: “In addition to a small tent house, a private carriage, books, and notions, her indulgent husband provided her with a maid, a driver, and at least two servant boys” (xvii). Magoffin, of course, does not have the heavy responsibilities of the typical pioneer, as in cooking and washing. In this way Magoffin is similar to Catherine Haun, a wealthy newlywed, who in 1849 also travelled without the daily hardships that formed life in transit, and her diary records her idealism that exemplifies an American tourist: “Full of the energy and enthusiasm of youth, the prospects of so hazardous an undertaking had no terror for us, indeed, as we had been married but a few months, it appealed to us as a romantic wedding tour” (166). Magoffin’s wealth afforded her the most distinguishing privilege of her journey -- a choice between staying home in Missouri and traveling with her husband, as this adventure was not a permanent move (Magoffin 64). In light of her temporal excursion, it is no wonder that Magoffin begins by describing her journey as “wonderful” (1), “sweet,” “complete” (6), “fun” (29) and “romantic” (18); she looks upon traveling in a wagon “as one of the ‘varieties of life’ and as that is always ‘spice’ of course it must be enjoyed” (23). Additionally, she keeps a friendly distance, like Parkman, from the very frontier she seeks to experience: “It is the life of wandering princess, mine. When I do not wish to get out myself to pick flowers the Mexican servants riding on mules busy themselves picking them for me” (11-12). If Susan’s journey is unique, her optimism and carefree attitude is even rarer, but it one that reflects the selectivity of her travels. While Parkman appropriates native people to help craft his heroic identity, Magoffin aims to construct her heroic identity by proving her journey is as rough as a pioneer experience. In other words, she refers to the hardships of her own journey in an effort to make it more authentic. The initial part of Magoffin’s journey compares nicely with Twain’s tone in Roughing It, for example, because it is when Magoffin 89 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West most clearly communicates her romantic notions about frontier life and interprets her experience as “roughing it”: “and I can say what few women in civilized life ever could, that the first house of his own to which my husband took me after our marriage was a tent” (Magoffin 6); and later: “After dinner I layed down with mi alma [Samuel Magoffin] on a buffalo skin with the carriage seats for pillows and took what few ladies have done a siesta in the sun” (12); additionally, a few rainy days of a mud-filled tent motivate Magoffin to compare herself to an Oregon pioneer (23). Moreover, her description of her entry into Santa Fe argues her trailblazing identity: “I have entered [Santa Fe] in a year that will always be remembered by my countrymen; and under the ‘Star-spangled banner’ too, the first American lady, who has come under such auspices, and some of our company seem disposed to make me the first under any circumstances that ever crossed the plains” (102-03). Despite her upbeat tone, it is important to note that Magoffin did in fact face very real calamities during her travels: countless times Magoffin writes about rumors of impending attack from Mexican troops and the likelihood that she and her husband will be murdered; she braces herself for death on more than one occasion and loses two children during her journey; she comforts her husband as rumors of his brother’s being brutally murdered by Mexicans swirl around them; she hears the alarming and true reports of the overwhelming number of Mexican troops that threaten her own countrymen; her team is usually in close proximity to U.S. troops, multiplying its danger; she contracts malaria and yellow fever and cares for the sick; she is involved in two wagon accidents and a prairie fire; and the Magoffins’ goods are nearly stolen by Mexicans. If usually Overland travelers had intensely trying circumstances to face in their treks, their circumstances could not compare with the horrors of national war on the Santa Fe Trail. What is peculiar is Magoffin’s romantic tone in her telling of such events. In fact, Magoffin’s focus on romantic experience is evident when she writes about her most dangerous days on the trail with a tone of enthusiasm: This is truly exciting times! I doubt if my honored Grandmother ever saw or heard of more to excite, in the War she was in [War of 1812], than I have here. The Indians are all around us; coming into the soldiers’ camp and driving off their stock, and killing the men in attendance on them. The [Mexican army] are advancing on us as we hear today and have even had a battle with our troops only about eighty miles from us. (180) By referencing her hardships with a tone of zeal, Magoffin is essentially establishing an ethos of heroism in order to authenticate her Western experience. Similarly, Magoffin validates her frontier journey by alluding to Josiah Gregg’s experience on the Santa Fe Trail in his Commerce of the Prairies. Repeatedly, she mentions her life on the trail as they relate and solidify Gregg’s perceptions (Magoffin 35, 49, 50, 72-73, 197, 228). Besides alluding to literature, Magoffin also hints at her desire to produce her own romantic account of the frontier. General Kearney encourages her to visit California, and Magoffin writes how “there will be a little romance in that—and I think we might on the strength of it bring forth a novel, with Capt. Johnson, who they tell me is a good writer to handle the pen” (139). Magoffin understands that Captain Johnson’s male perspective is necessary to make her own journey appealing to her American audience. Perhaps Magoffin is rightly aware that her femaleness limited her writing to the arena of Romanticism during the nineteenth-century; and perhaps to Magoffin, she needed a male perspective in her writing because “women were not necessarily associated with truth or realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries” (Saunders 1). Magoffin’s fascination with the romantic and dangerous frontier adventure is quite rare for a female account, but it is common for an individual who has purposefully chosen the journey for the experience, as many males did. Additionally, Magoffin seems to, at times, exploit how “travel writing often reveals the lives of women at times of peculiar difficulty, danger, excitement, or achievement” (Mulligan 184). Much like Parkman, Magoffin’s pride in her frontier venture demonstrates her playing and esteeming the 90 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West role of pioneer adventurer, no doubt to prove her own heroism and pioneering. This attitude is cultivated through her experience as a tourist, a woman who elected this journey for the sole purpose of idealistic adventure. Within my analysis, I am powerfully aware that gender did play a vital role in how frontier travelers were allowed to construct their narratives and identities while on their journeys. I understand why scholars such as Wallace Stegner describe the American frontier narrative as opposed juxtapositions: a story of “male freedom and aspiration versus female domesticity, wilderness versus civilization, violence and danger versus the safe and tamed” (qtd. in Georgi-Findlay 6).4 To put it simply, women in nineteenth century America were with few choices in life, and “[t]hey went West because there was no way for them not to go once the decision was made” by the men in their lives (Schlissel). My argument that those who selectively travelled were afforded the opportunity to construct heroic identities takes into account how choice was influenced by power, and power was synonymous with gender in the 1800s. Yet, I ultimately argue that wealth often leveled the playing field, across gender lines, providing opportunities for women that otherwise would have eluded them. Power, wealth and choice are substantial issues to consider when reading the works of tourists like Magoffin and Parkman, as these concepts afforded travel writers the time, energy and audience necessary to construct a heroic identity that no doubt served to counter the touristic motivations which originally prompted their journeys West. _____________________________ Notes 1 Chloe Chard's Pleasure and Guilt On the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830 provides a wealth of information regarding the rhetoric of the Grand Tour experience, especially as it is viewed as a feminizing experience during the nineteenth century. 2 Carl Thompson provides a thorough background on the major debate within travel writing studies concerning terminology of the traveler in his work Travel Writing. See especially Chapter 2, "Defining the Genre". In my discussion of American frontier literature, I understand “settlers” as those leaving the Eastern United States and settling West, seeking to relocate for an extended period of time; Conversely, “tourists” are those selectively traveling, not for purposes of relocating, but “driven partly by a Romantic desire to ‘get off the beaten track’” (Thompson 54) in a pursuit to escape the monotony of daily life and experience noteworthy and exotic adventures. 3 The flâneur, as an archetype, was inspired by Charles Baudelaire in "The Painter of Modern Life". Translated as a traveler who is also an "idler," "stroller" or "lounger," the original concept developed by Baudelaire focused on the observer in the modern city, who hoped, through his wanderings and silent observations to achieve a meaningful transcendent experience within a busy urban space. I see the relationship between Pratt's "unhero" and Baudelaire's flâneur in that wealth affords the traveling individual an "unhero" experience. Also, both the "unhero" and the flâneur, seek out self-fulfillment as a spectator within a rich landscape. 4 In my article, "'Within the little circle of my vision': Domesticity as the Catalyst for Acculturation in Susan Shelby Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico," published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, I discuss at length the impact gender had on the American frontier travel diary, especially how domesticity allowed females to form meaningful, respectful relationships with those outside their race and ethnic groups. Works Cited Armitage, Susan, and Elizabeth Jameson, editors. The Women’s West. U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Chalfant, W.Y. Dangerous Passage: The Santa Fe Trail and the Mexican War. U of Oklahoma P, 1994. Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. Penguin, 1986. Culley, Margo. Introduction. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to Present, edited by Culley, Feminist Press, 1985, pp. 3-26. Devoto, Barnard. The Year of Decision: 1846. Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Faragher, John M. Women and Men on the Overland Trail. Yale UP, 1979. Fussel, Edwin. American Literature and the American West. Princeton UP, 1966. 91 �Monica Reyes • The (Un)Hero in the American West Georgi-Findlay, Brigette. The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. U of Arizona P, 1996. Haun, Catherine. “Catherine Haun.” Schlissel, pp. 165-85. Helmers, Marguerite, and Tilar Mazzeo. “Unraveling the Traveling Self.” The Traveling and the Writing Self, edited by Helmers and Mazzeo, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 1-18. Hoffman, Leonore, and Margo Culley, editors. Women’s Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy. MLA, 1985. Huff, Cynthia. “’That profoundly female, and feminist genre’: The diary as feminist practice.” Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 3-4, 1989, pp. 6-14. ProQuest. Jameson, Elizabeth. “Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West.” Armitage and Jameson, pp. 145-164. Knight, Amelia Stewart. “Amelia Stewart Knight.” Schlissel, pp. 199-216. Lamar, Howard R. Foreword. Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847, by Susan Shelby Magoffin, edited by Stella M. Drumm, Bison, 1962, pp. ix-xxxv. Lewis, Meriwether, and William Clark. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto, Houghton Mifflin, 1953. Magoffin, Susan Shelby. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, edited by Stella M. Drumm, Bison, 1962. ---. Susanita Magoffin. 1845? - 1847. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. JPEG file. Diary. Mulligan, Maureen. “Women Travel Writers and the Question of Veracity.” Saunders, pp. 171-84. Parkman, Francis, Jr. The Oregon Trail. Oxford UP, 1999. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Rosenthal, Bernard. Introduction. The Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, Jr., Oxford UP, 1996, pp. vii-xxii. Russell, Marian S. Land of Enchantment: Memoirs of Marian Russell along the Santa Fe Trail, as Dictated to Mrs. Hal Russell. U of New Mexico P, 1997. Saunders, Clare B., editor. Women, Travel Writing, and Truth. Routledge, 2014. Scharff, Virginia. Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West. U of California P, 2003. Schlissel, Lillian, editor. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. Schocken, 1982. Slotkin, Richard. Introduction. The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper. Penguin, 1986. pp. vii-xxii. Tate, Michael. Indians and Emigrants. U of Oklahoma P. 2006. Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing. London. 2011. Twain, Mark. Roughing It. Ed. Hamlin Hill. Penguin, 1987. 92 �Arundhati Sanyal Tagore and Yeats Discourses in Gender and Nationalisms T he trajectory of independence movements takes predictable paths in emergent post-colonial nations such as Ireland and India. Rabindranath Tagore as a major literary figure and political ethicist for the Indian liberation movement explores, questions, and problematizes conventions of nationalism in his novel, Home and the World (1916). In Ireland, the intellectual underpinnings of the nationalist movement devolve into a similar conversation between diverse voices that find expression in W. B. Yeats’ poem, “Easter, 1916.” The poem is a resounding response to the Irish uprising of the same year that was brutally quelled. The reader is given a glimpse of the many Irish nationalists of various political hues: Constance Markievicz; Patrick Pearse; Thomas MacDonagh; John Macbride. Noticeable is the shared ambivalence towards violent responses to British colonial occupation common to both poets. This response in both finds expression in personal and gendered characterizations in the works of both writers. So, there is both fascination and distrust in Yeats’ relationship with Maud Gonne, the love of his life but also a fiery nationalist whose zeal repelled him. This is comparable to Tagore’s treatment of a triangulation in his novels’ characters. An allegorical representation of the freedom movement, Tagore’s novel creates a love story between the characters Bimala, Nikhilesh, and Sandip, who each represent the citizen, the principle of nonviolence, and the spirit of armed resistance respectively. The dynamics of Tagore’s discussion reconceives gender in national politics in light of “accommodated” feminism in his novel. The discussion inevitably is framed in the broader examination of how each writer conceives of history and ethics in charting future progression of ideas and cultures based on the mediation and dialogism between the individual and society. To that end, I examine comparable contemporary historians who are spiritual collaborators of Tagore and Yeats, and are themselves influential in their times’ politics in accounting for both the presence and distrust of violent resistance. The metonymy of the individual story line in literature representing national political forces is common to both writers in the two works discussed here. In effect, this is a global conversation between the Tagore and Yeats that traverses thresholds of colonial experience, national aspirations, and a nascent internationalism that both are passionate about in their writings. Tagore’s novel is presented as a series of free indirect speeches that provide readers with an interiority vis a vis the three principal characters: Bimala, Nikhilesh, and then Sandip. The narrative structure allows for the novelist to present three sides to the same action, namely, the stepping out of the young wife Bimala from the limits of her home to the world beyond on the insistence of her enlightened husband Nikhilesh, which may be metonymically de-coded as the path of a nascent national consciousness that steps into the world stage to know, understand, and choose its precise identity, the key trope being that of “choice”. Within the narrative the immediate occasion for such a coming out is the arrival of Sandip, the fiery Swadeshi or freedom fighter who wishes to organize and raise money for the cause within the estate and village where Nikhilesh is landlord/zamindar. There is foreshadowing within the narrative of Bimala where we see her anticipating and encountering Sandip from within her veiled world prior to their actual meeting. The reader is prepared for what seems like an over-whelming fascination with the dramatic, passionate, and by default for Tagore) flawed presence of the nationalist (Swadeshi) 93 �Arundhati Sanyal • Tagore and Yeats spirit which instigates in Bimala the desire to not be just a participant, but a valued inspiration, the “queen bee” of the movement itself. Nikhilesh’s idealism has required him to anticipate this tension that he realizes Bimala has to experience, confront, and then pull back to return to her husband and his stable, syncretic version of a rational, historically-sanctioned, and assimilative nationalism that within the projected action of the novel devolves into an acceptance of her familial role within her home. His project of creating an experiential decision-making mechanism for Bimala is set up for failure as he himself has to confront the obvious agency of affinity that Bimala exhibits for Sandip and which the latter feeds off of for his political needs. Sandip’s perspective is not surprisingly the least attractive and most problematic as Tagore depicts the extreme nationalistic strain he recognizes as the bane of contemporary politics that in its opposition to western imperialism mimics its worst intransigence and hegemonic agenda. It is not surprising, then, that nation building and sexual politics become partners in this metonymic narrative structure. As Tagore explores the psychology of freedom movements or Swadeshi in terms of their genderbased political manifestations, research underscores that there is personal experience and familial consensus for such conceptions. Arundhati Banerjee points out comparisons between his elder brother Surendranath Tagore and Nikhilesh, the protagonist in the novel as both understand the need to bring education, modernity, and choice to their respective wives’ post-exposure to western education. The article details a letter written by Surendranath Tagore to his wife that is comparable to the novel: Do you not feel that our [Indian] women marry too early and at an age when they do not even comprehend the implication of marriage and that they cannot marry of their own free will…Prosperity and good fortune is divorced from those societies where women have no authority; where social norms, husband’s orders and other people’s dictums regulate and govern the lives of the women… We will not enter the conjugal relationship until you are mature, educated and have developed yourself in all respects. (qtd. in Deb 25) This is similar to the novel when Nikhilesh suggests that Bimala may step out into the world beyond the home and experience its complete essence through interaction with public life and the opinions and company of his friends like Sandip before stepping back to their secluded world, this time consciously choosing to be with him (Banerjee 208). I want to move beyond this to show how awareness of the world beyond, awareness of other choices and opinions is seen as essential by Tagore in developing a truly modern and vital conjugal relationship between husband and wife. Nikhilesh’s position is clearly the favored centrist one that Tagore himself prefers. His understanding of nationalism is assimilative, carefully weighed between western technology and indigenous culture, privileging the preparation of a stable self that eschews the temptation of crass domination and sense of superiority that seeks to name and subjugate the “other” in a futile mimicry of imperialism. But it is also connected to his giving up of masculine and proprietorial rights on his wife Bimala who is allowed by this centrist position to step into the freedom of the world beyond her home to make her own choice of the path to national identity. Nikhilesh appears to experience emasculation and articulates it: What is the use of straining to keep up my pride? What harm if I confess that I have something lacking in me? Possibly it is that unreasoning forcefulness which women love to find in men. But is strength a mere display of muscularity? Must strength have no scruples in treading the weak underfoot? I longed to find Bimala blossoming fully in all her truth and power. But the thing I forgot to calculate was, that one must give up all claims based on conventional rights, if one would find a person freely revealed in truth. (41) The action of the novel explores the responsibility that Nikhilesh bears as landlord of the village. It is a microcosmic portrayal of the cosmopolitan fabric of India itself as a Hindu hierarchy rules over 94 �Arundhati Sanyal • Tagore and Yeats a predominantly working class Muslim population. The predominantly Hindu Swadeshi movement with its destructive propensity to violently negate the sensibilities of the Muslim population by banning slaughter of cows along with British goods that are now intrinsically determinants of the Indian economy hurt the body politic of the microcosmic state and Nikhilesh has the unenviable task of opposing such mindless violence that adversely affects his people. In a famous line between Sandip and Nikhilesh, the unmistakable communal nature of the ultra-nationalist movement that is Swadeshi is laid bare as Nikhilesh affirms: “It is a historical reality that the Mussulman is as much Indian as the Hindu.” His tutor verbalizes Tagore’s own skepticism with the history of nationalist politics: “I tell you Nikhil, man’s history has to be built by the united effort of all the races in the world, and therefore this selling of conscience for political reasons – this making a fetish of one’s country, won’t do” (Tagore 166). Sandip fetishizes the nation and by default Bimala as the queen bee and the “robber queen” in her final role as the thief of her husband’s revenue coffers that have been kept in their bedroom for dissemination amongst the people. This is her final act of betrayal of both Nikhilesh and the nation to whose service Sandip has ostensibly drawn her. This act has brought with it a clear understanding of the narcissism of the Swadeshi movement for Bimala. Her eventual reconciliation with her husband follows her clarity about his intentions and understanding of nationalism, and her penitence. The emasculation of Nikhilesh is self-realized and searing in its self-scrutiny. Here is Nikhilesh responding to Bimala’s lapse as a wife and citizen: I did not realize all this while that it must have been this unconscious tyranny of mine which made us gradually drift apart. Bimala’s life, not finding its true level by reason of my pressure from above, has had to find an outlet by undermining its bank at the bottom. She has had to steal this 6000 rupees because she could not be open with me, because she felt that, in certain things, I despotically differed from her. (198) He belittles his decision to “impose” the world outside on Bimala treating her as his possession in the process. He blames the failure of his experiment on his own lack of restraint in the face of a temptation to be a despot: “It is our unyielding obstinacy, which drives even the simplest to tortuous ways. In trying to manufacture a helpmate, we spoil a wife” (Tagore 198). This acknowledgement of an accommodated and fallacious freedom without genuine agency for Bimala is one way for Tagore to critique his favored position. In solipsistic manner, then the narrator’s syncretic stance on nationalism results in his own exclusion from the triangulation Tagore conceives between nationalism, citizen-state, and jingoism. Within Yeats’ understanding of Irish nationalism we see a dualism where he seems to draw back from a direct, physical understanding of and participation in what is at times a violent political movement leading up to the Easter uprising of 1916. However, he seems to be drawn towards and espouses a strong cultural nationalism that is co-opted along with the political struggle at this time. In doing so he feels emasculated in comparable ways to Tagore’s Nikhilesh when Maud Gonne the love of his life recognizes the distinction between his political and cultural participation by urging him to stay with the latter as the former is not for him. Like Bimala in her attraction to the Swadeshi and Sandip’s activism, Maud Gonne is drawn to the active participants of the Irish political scene and much to the heartbreak of the poet refuses to forge romantic, sexual relations with him personally. So, there is clearly a parallel between the sexual and gendered formulations and the political activism or brand of national or ultranational politics that becomes a contentious subject for each of the writers in their respective nations. Yeats’ “Easter 1916” confronts its own historicity by framing in modernist terms a historical day within its human, nondescript, monotonous, and urban description of the passing on of a band of Irish patriots. The narrator testifies to the unalterable truth that he has known them in all of their distinctive yet bland entities as they emerge in that first stanza only to blend into the urban city scape. The cyclical 95 �Arundhati Sanyal • Tagore and Yeats path of historical events seem to overlap a recurring everyday life that the narrator has shared with those who have been martyred in the Easter uprising. The easy back and forth between everyday life and the historical moment in Yeats’ poem is comparable to the back and forth in the dual lives of Tagore’s characters between the humdrum reality of home and the world of momentous change outside. The indigenous lives of people in Ireland shape up almost miraculously through time and the progression of the verse into their martyrdom of the most supreme kind and so “a terrible beauty is born.” The paradox of the Romantic absolutes of Truth and Beauty that hold true for the early 19th century are re-formulated in stark terms as contradictions that alone can enact the violence and the sacrifice that kill lives and give birth to nationhood simultaneously. Yet, there is no attempt to idealize the historical personalities. So, all these historical figures are given realistic profile descriptions in the second stanza. No one is unscathed by life’s vicissitudes and everyday mediocrities even as they rise up to the supreme sacrifice. The description augments the perfection of the sacrifice, even as the transformation is absolute and unequivocal. The aftermath of their sacrifice is shown through the dynamic interaction of nature captured in a variety of movement and the center of it remaining still and unmoved as a stone. Indeed, here the center has held even as the everyday living nature has resumed its dynamism. Grief or national achievement, both get measured alike in terms of the activity of nature at the heart of which is the stone of grief and despair. Certainly, there is more transformation to come because in the final movement of the poem where the extent of this sacrifice pushes the limits of human endurance, through the finality of death, the deepening relation between country and martyr is established metaphorically as a mother naming her child. The final assertion of nationhood is in the honor roll of the lives lost. The shared ambivalence of such nationhood is indicated in the paradox of the refrain that announces the inordinate price paid for this second coming: “A terrible beauty is born.” Both Yeats and Tagore perceive history in cyclical rather than linear, teleological terms as is common to the western tradition. Historians and philosophers such as Frank E Manuel (Shapes of Philosophical History, 1965); Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return, 1965); Romilla Thapar (Time as a Metaphor of History: Early India, 1996) define a variety of cycloid and sinusoidal historical trajectory. The one that comes closest to the Yeatsian and Tagorean conception brings together an alternation of opposing impulses (such as romantic and classical; indigenous and foreign; homogeneous and multi-cultural, caste defined versus reform susceptible, for example) that become realities in the political and cultural psyche of a community and begin to define it. This is a movement away from the prescriptive “progressive” or linear understanding of history that assigns cause and blame to events, communities, groups, and religions for the rise or fall of a nation and hence bring in the pre-conception of superiority or otherwise that both writers see as a pre-condition for an imperialist agenda. The feature of cyclical history liberates both these thinkers/writers to think beyond time-bound issues. Thus, it does not follow that whatever is deemed “modern” is privileged as more valuable than that which is in the past. All ages within a given tradition are analogous in value and meaning irrespective of chronology. According to Yeats (writing in 1893), history is the endless alternation of a “falling…into division” when unity of mind “began to break into fragments,” and a “resurrection into unity” or into “Unity of Being” that was “perfectly proportioned” (A Vision; “Nationality and Literature” both qtd. in Williams 80, 91). Tagore reflects something similar in his essay “Sadhana” (1913) where he argues that perfection results when the “finite and infinite are not in conflict” but are “in harmony”, when “a union of two opposed elements” is created because in the mind of the Creator, “male and female principles are both present – how otherwise could creation arise from uniformity?” (qtd. in Williams 79). While the history and nature of imperialism in Ireland and India are quite different in many ways, the need to acknowledge complexities and polarities in nationalist ideas seem essential to both Yeats and Tagore. The inception of violence in nationalism is for each poet actually the refusal to see the ground realities of opposing impulses operating within community and 96 �Arundhati Sanyal • Tagore and Yeats state. This resonates in and complicates gender relations as well. Hence, both Yeats and Tagore are repelled by the crass violence of un-thinking nationalism that collapse discussions of state identity to the complete denial of rational universalism. Another interesting conundrum for the choices Nikhilesh and, by extension, Tagore accept in this dualism is that of a larger question: can those who are under imperial rule possess the option to eschew narrow nationalism for a generous, universalism? Are they not by default enjoined to find their national identities by fighting for them before any other options may present themselves? Related to this question is the discussion of what constitutes a historical awareness of nationhood as contrasted with a prehistorical notion of community or “Samaj”. To frame this conundrum, I look to Subaltern theorists such as Ranajit Guha who formulate the notion that a distinctly independent concept of history or “Itihaas” underlies the prose narratology of South-east Asian literature. In the 19th century, Hegel’s categorical statement that those societies that did not have a state in the modern sense, or those that hadn’t imagined that they could become nation-states, made Indians under British colonial rule people without history. In other words, India had literature, but no history in such a formulation. In Hegel’s vision then the notion of history is a gift from the colonizing European psyche to the emerging Indian intellectual sifting historical fact from the rich mythic narratives of its epic and puranic heritage. The not so surprising irony is the co-opting of European belittling of the “mythic” and “poetic” dimensions of Indian historical narratology. The general trend is to reject these registers as “unhistorical” and commit to staid, solid, analytical prose histories. Guha contends through an etymological analysis of the Sanskrit word for history “Itihaas” that it embraces two opposing paradigms of representing the past. On the one hand, there is the legacy of the European understanding of history as documented fact. On the other there is the pull of the mythic, emotive, culturally resonant tropes of a literary history. Guha emphasizes the importance of both and presents Tagore as an ideal purveyor of both these strains of history. Tagore’s narrative captures individual truth in the story in all its complexity and wonder: “It is only by confronting historiography with creativity, [Rabindranath] suggests that we can hope to grasp what historicality is about” (Guha 87). The understanding of an ethical self in relationship with and creation of a community or “Samaj” is an inevitable outcome of the cyclical and recursive historicity of Tagore and Yeats. In “Home and the World”, the fluidity between the world within of Bimala’s existence (Andarmahal) and the world or nation beyond her given role of wife to that of inspirer and nation builder enacts this possibility. Each character in their own way projects their self onto their understanding of nation-hood and any place that is in-between becomes plausible in much the same way it is possible for Tagore to be both cosmopolitan (of the world), a citizen of a colonized nation (stateless) , and yet able to see self “Atmasakti” beyond the ultra-nation to the self-created Samaj or community (Saha 18). Rebecca Walkowitz reiterates this when she points out “The self-styled cosmopolitanism of The Home and the World ultimately depends on the uneasy encounter between one invested place and another, between public and private, between a conventional England and an invented motherland…[It] is precisely that – the home, the world, the situation – which the narrative seeks to explore, in its plots of rising nationalism, modernization, and ethnic conflict” (227). That trajectory takes Nikhilesh and Bimala to their respective conclusion: death and widowhood, and an escapist’s route for Sandip. W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore discover a common affinity towards an assimilative nationalism that forecasts internationalism as the norm. Their work reflects in creative and exploratory ways a cultural understanding and recreation of contemporary nationalist history that situates understanding of contemporary events in light of an assimilative and cyclical history rather than a linear one. There is a layered approach to gender interwoven in such creative re-enactments of history. Emerging from autobiographical experiences, relation between genders is presented as metonymic enactments of 97 �Arundhati Sanyal • Tagore and Yeats characters’ power relations within political landscapes of nationalism, aggressive and confrontational on the one hand, and assimilative and reconciliatory, on the other. The occasional poem in Yeats’ rendering becomes a reminder of the larger dialogue about the futility of the tragic violent sacrifice of the Easter Uprising even as it lauds its patriotic sacrifice and heroic re-centering of Irish national pride. The poets knew themselves as aligned on the same end of the historical conversation as Yeats’ editing, translating, and introducing Tagore’s works to his western peers, remains an example of invaluable trans-national collaboration. _____________________________ Works Cited Banerjee, Arundhati. “The Indian Woman’s Dilemma: A Study of Formulations in Gender Construct Through Mediation of Western Culture in Tagore’s Ghare Baire and Ray’s Film Version.” Literary Studies East and West: Gender and Culture in Literature and Film East and West: Issues of Perception and Interpretation, vol. 9, edited by Nitaya Masavisut, George Simson, and Larry E. Smith, U. of Hawaii P, 1994, pp. 207-24. Deb, Chitra. Antahpurer Atmakatha (Autobiography of the Interior). Ananda Publishers, 1984. Guha, Ranajit. History at the Limit of World-History. Columbia UP, 2002. Saha, Poulomi. “Singing Bengal into a Nation: Tagore the Colonial Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 2, Winter 2013, pp. 1-24. Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World. Penguin, 1985. Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. U of California P, 2002. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. “Cosmopolitan Ethics: The Home and the World.” The Turn to Ethics, edited by Marjorie B. Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Routledge, 2000, pp. 221-30. Williams, Louis Blakeney. “Overcoming the ‘Contagion of Mimicry’: The Cosmopolitan Nationalism and Modernist History of Rabindranath Tagore and W.B. Yeats.” The American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 1, Feb 2007, pp. 69-100. Yeats, William Butler. The Poems. Macmillan, 1989. 98 �Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association � https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/18306/archive/files/066ef3838ca1a80c2d98b00d254ec80b.pdf?Expires=1779926400&Signature=MvD4UnYuBj%7E7fGorxtJpMSKqbgVtVh5cGU0H-Ga66Y4b19UoScaZxfv3tMnTBTXexWpXQCANLO53IFNbG2HMSg3AIvV-uzxPy4RrjaWz0XogyisB11K8I99qjKLb%7ESFEhkFzijFN5oo8fxVPsE8hvohXLG7g50f41F-UBNtTAhzPI40VmZ5HS8B45H6QpLLaGc0RkG4i3Vx1cqAhA5hC0SZ3OY6eN2T8xKlITicQKxcI-EiplGbZ3BIfErnja-T2L1mkD2NOY1rjnN2f29IjUPGQpGvxFPKRHIU-z7cqDOvwHSSm6HJNk16F7djw7WBJA75kY6veH83IHgtNp32Mcw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 235241529ef5679422a4c665583b37d1 PDF Text Text ISSN 2573-1750 Watchung Review Volume 2 • June 2018 Dismantling Inequality through Dialogues of Conscience Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association i �Editor-in-Chief: Rachael Warmington, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Co-Managing Editors: Robert McParland, Felician University Jonathan D. 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Sciullo, University of Central Florida Donovan Sherman, Seton Hall University Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology Ravindra Pratap Singh, University of Lucknow Natasa Thoudam, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Sarbani Vengadasalam, Rutgers University Angela Weisl, Seton Hall University Lucas Wilson, Florida Atlantic University Assistant Editor: Andrew Rimby, Stony Brook University Website Designer: Rachael Warmington, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Graphic and Document Designer: Julia Galm, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Cover image by Brandon Galm 1 �Volume 2 • June 2018 Watchung Review Dismantling Inequality through Dialogues of Conscience 2 “Eating Up” the Margins of Subversive Performance: Examining the Marginalization of Fat Drag Queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race Nathaniel Hagemaster 9 New Jersey College English Association Graduate Student Paper Award Winner Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion: Examining African-American Exclusion and Urban Language Issues in Higher Education Daniela Conte 16 New Jersey College English Association Graduate Student Paper Award Winner Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Rhetoric as Discursive Protext Stephen Florian 24 “Cheap and Contented Labor”: Sinclair Lewis, Irony, and the Marion Massacre A.G. Hughes 33 “Hoeism”: Integrating the Narratives of Sex, Social Media, and Femininity into the Postmodern Tech Ecosystem Lauren Liebow 41 Deadly Iniquities: Yiddish Writers Respond to the Treaty of Non-Aggression Between Germany and the USSR Michael T. Williamson 47 Review: Amanda Oaks's The River Is Everywhere and Wesley Scott McMasters's Trying to Be a Person AJ Schmitz 51 Butch Elizabeth Jaeger 55 Change Agent in the Chippewa Valley Patti See 60 Alla Bifora Jefferson Holdridge 61 Fragment of an Ode Jefferson Holdridge 62 Drought Bronwyn Mauldin 1 �Nathaniel Hagemaster "Eating Up" the Margins of Subversive Performance Examining the Marginalization of Fat Drag Queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race W hen RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) season three contestant Delta Work, inspired by Delta Burke, discusses how her lack of confidence from being overweight prevents her from going out to gay bars when she isn’t in drag, she describes how her friends attempt to build her confidence by inviting her to "Chubby Night" at one of these bars. This invitation to an event that deems people with more robust figures as sexually alternative prompts Work to reply, "No, I don’t want to go to freak show night." As Work insinuates, fatness is typically cast as a decidedly unattractive foil to conventionally attractive qualities that have been set for people’s bodies—thinness and musculature. Given society’s emphasis on lauding the thin and denigrating the fat, it should not come as a surprise that big girls on RPDR typically portray drag characters who make it apparent that they know they’re fat. After all, how dare they pretend to have acquired the thin status when their bodies betray the fact that they have not. On the "Snatch Game," a parody of the Match Game, big girl contestants typically choose to impersonate celebrities who are likewise overweight such as Mo’Nique, Aretha Franklin, Adele, Snooki, and Paula Deen. They are often shown eating, with a few even complaining about running out of food or cleverly making quips about why they are eating at an inappropriate time. In fact, what led to Work’s remark about being invited to "freak show night" was her expressed bitterness from her low evaluation for impersonating Cher on the "Snatch Game," while big girl Stacy Lane Mathews was praised for playing Mo’Nique while eating and referencing Precious (2009). Part of drag’s subversive appeal is rooted in the idea that drag queens flaunt a lack of heteronormative control by transgressing standards that have been set for how men ought to dress, an extremely intimate act that many can’t control for others. The flaunting of fat bodies by big girls adds another layer to that lack of normative control because it not only transgresses gendered standards, but bodily standards as well by showing an acceptance of fatness and presenting a fat, feminine body in ways that differ from fat women’s normative presentations of their bodies. Further, this transgressive flaunting of fatness disregards the normalized desire to lose or hide fatness, as most rhetoric about fatness implies, and instead advocates fat representation as something that doesn’t need to be controlled. Thus, performing fatness in drag, it can be argued, reclaims the fat effeminate body by flaunting a body type that is often rejected, thereby giving agency to the big girl. As José Esteban Muñoz theorizes, disidentification addresses how people who are part of the majority population, namely white heterosexuals, have so many options for figures in popular culture to identify with, they can easily access or avoid cultural labels to identify with, while minorities typically have to rely on co-cultural discourses to locate identities for themselves (5). Specifically, Muñoz argues that drag queens disidentify "with not only the ideal of woman but the a priori relationship of woman and femininity that is a tenet of gender-normative thinking" because a drag version of "woman" is not a direct articulation or imitation of what ‘female’ actually is, but more of an allusion to what is typically thought of as ‘woman’ (108). Therefore, big girls disidentify with standard drag by relying on the limited tropes for fat women that have been set by popular culture, while rejecting the assumption that fatness is a limitation or undesirable. Since the work that goes into most drag aesthetics present a heightened form of woman, perhaps fat drag queens present a heightened form of fat woman that embraces her larger physique instead of trying to tame it. However, this disidentification sets a standard that limits acceptable ways for how big girls ought to perform on RuPaul’s Drag Race. For example, in the first episode of RPDR’s second season, Mystique Summers Madison introduces herself to the other contestants by caressing each of her breasts and large belly one at a time and saying, "Cheeseburger, Taco Bell, and a Diet Coke on the side." Mystique also became known for the catchphrase that she is going to get a "two piece (of fried chicken) and a biscuit," which was heavily referenced in future seasons of the show. Her reference to her body being more robust than her fellow contestants’ not only addresses fat stereotypes that all heavier people eat fast food, but also the stereotype that African American people love fried chicken, which subversively highlights Mystique’s intersection of being both fat and Black. However, even though Mystique’s catchphrase is well-remembered, showing how big girls are often encouraged to perform their bodies in a particular way, the fact that she was eliminated so early in her season indicates how performing fatness is not as valued as other kinds of drag. 2 �Nathaniel Hagemaster • "Eating Up" the Margins Although these queens’ performances are effective for survival on RPDR, enacting characteristics of fatness merely based on how their bodies look pigeon-holes them and other big girls into one kind of performance. This narrow margin for big girls makes any deviations from fat performance unsuccessful on the competition reality show and makes these queens’ fatness the primary target of scrutiny in the show’s "reading" mini-challenges, where the contestants are invited to playfully insult each other in front of the rest of the cast. For example, in the third season’s reading challenge, Shangela’s featured read of Delta Work was to call her Mimi Imfurst. What gave this read its sting was the fact that Mimi was a campy contestant who Shangela had an infamous altercation with over how she and other contestants believed that Mimi’s look was unrefined. Since Delta’s aesthetic hasn’t been up for scrutiny, the only quality that Delta and Mimi shared was the fact that they were both big girls. Therefore, the idea that big girls have to perform their nonnormative bodies to be successful on RPDR emphasizes a narrow margin that is set for fat drag performers. So, to effectively examine the various intersections that are involved with fat drag, big girls will be situated in a third space between how masculinity and femininity relate to fatness. Then to contextualize the rhetorical nature of how fatness is performed by big girls, ideologies about fatness and fat character tropes in popular culture will be addressed. Fitting in the Third Space of Fat Masculinity and Fat Femininity: Locating "Big Girls" Between Fat Women and Fat Gay Men Considering the connotations of what fatness represents in terms of masculinity and femininity, big girls occupy a third space in between fat gay men and fat women because even though most big girls are fat gay men, their drag aesthetics typically resemble and allude to fat women. This line between fat masculinity and fat femininity that big girls straddle appears to emphasize how fatness is more complicated than merely being masculine or feminine because, depending on its context, fatness can be masculine and feminine. Since arguably anyone is capable of getting fat and certain levels of obesity on a man or a woman can appear generally the same, the fat body frame is almost genderless. Thus, by sticking what are known as "man boobs" into a bra and shaping a robust mid-section with a corset and hip pads, big girls are able to highlight how their fat male bodies that could be masculinized when they are out of drag, can also add to their femininity in drag. As Homi K. Bhabha theorizes, Third Space involves an understanding "that all cultural statements and systems [in the first and second spaces] are constructed" to be "contradictory and ambivalent" from one another (55), while cultures and people are actually fluid, rather than fixed. For example, common assumptions about gender are that male and female are fixed and definite categories of identity that exist in opposition with one another, while drag queens and trans individuals emphasize that gender is more fluid and gendered bodies are malleable. Thus, similar to how drag challenges the tradition that frames male and female in opposition to each other because it occupies a space between gendered polarities, big girls occupy a space in between masculine and feminine perceptions of fatness. Furthermore, big girls’ embodiments of both fat-feminine and fat-masculine identities seem about as culturally incongruent as what has become normative gendered connotations of fatness because while it is feminized in some contexts, it is considered masculine in other contexts. Since the fashion industry typically caters to thin women and emphasizes attributes like small waistlines as signs of femininity, women who do not fit the fashionable norm are often subjected to dressing plainer and covering their bodies. They are thus both defeminized and shamed. However, until fat gay men began reclaiming fatness as desirably rugged by attributing largeness with masculinity in bear culture, male fatness was typically feminized and shamed. For example, a heavy-set man’s breasts "man boobs" and large bellies likened to pregnant women’s. Jokes are also made that a fat man can’t see or reach his penis, which not only targets issues of weight, but emphasizes apparent failures in masculinity. These connotations also translate into male aging, not only in terms of impotence and erectile dysfunction, but the older man’s lack of testosterone, which decreases men’s ability to gain muscle and increases his body fat, as well as a reduced sex drive – all things that are attributed to femininity and women’s bodies. Although, the queering of normative fatness in the gay male community appears to subvert the incongruous gendered connotations of male fatness because, as largeness is often used to defeminize women, fat gay men trouble the normative concept that largeness equals masculine—in terms of tallness, broadness, muscle mass, etc.—by applying it to fatness as well. However, since big girls perform femininity, the gay male reclamation of fatness as masculine does not apply to them in the same way, which is why it is necessary to assess where fat drag queens fall between fat gay men and fat women. Regardless of gendered associations with obesity, fatness is typically framed as something that can and needs to be fixed, which implies that everybody who is considered fat is doing something wrong for their bodies to appear that way. Thus, being fat indicates a lack of bodily, as well as normative, control. In Michel Foucault’s discussion of how bodies 3 �Nathaniel Hagemaster • "Eating Up" the Margins are docile, in reference to his description of bodies that communicate "soldier" to citizens, he appears to frame the fat body as a foil to "the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces" (136). Foucault contends that "in every society, the body was in the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions, or obligations" (136) with the example of a soldier’s body—with his upright posture, pristine uniform, and powerful build—being an ultimate result of a body that is disciplined, weaponized, and made into government property. This sense of the soldier’s body as government property even goes as far as considering excessive weight gain as ‘damage’ to government property. Thus, even though the complicated nature of obesity can be viewed as docile and controlled to some extent—as a result of the excessive consumption of fast food and less physically active entertainment—the body that resembles a soldier’s symbolizes a controlled, therefore normative body, while the fat body appears to symbolize a lack of control or discipline. In their discussion about anti-fat rhetoric in advertisements for beauty, dietary, and fitness products, Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves address how these ads often disregard the many complex causes for obesity and articulate essentialist implications that everybody can and should fight their fatness to acquire a physique that fits normative standards of attractiveness. These authors claim that the vast majority of these advertisers ignore aspects of ability, genetic predispositions, and even legitimate health that may not appear aesthetically appealing, and "propose various solutions to fight fat" by implying "that the body is malleable and within an individual’s control" (Kwan and Graves 28). Kwan and Graves further state that fat individuals are always blameworthy for their appearance "whether it is the failure to practice self-restraint or to invest time, energy, or money in oneself" (28-29). Regardless of the potential genetic advantages and/or cosmetic surgeries that might help people achieve normative physiques, since the much desired "taut body" is presumably "the result of endless hours at the gym and dietary restrictions," it is considered "a reflection of moral fortitude, perseverance, and bodily mastery" (Kwan and Graves 28-29). Thus, when fatness is demonized from a Judeo-Christian moralistic standpoint, even though the bible does not explicitly demean fatness, three out of seven of the deadly sins—gluttony, greed, and sloth—contain traits that are typically attributed to fat people because they are often assumed to eat a lot, retain what they have (both physically and mentally), and be lazy. Therefore, it is considered normal to assume that people who are not normatively fit cannot control their bodies, unlike those who appear to be in shape, and they are being punished with obesity for losing this control, as well as breaking moral standards that have been set. In this sense, part of drag’s subversive appeal is rooted in the idea that drag queens flaunt a lack of heteronormative control by transgressing standards that have been set for how men ought to dress, an extremely intimate act that many cannot control for others. So, big girls’ flaunting of fat bodies appears to add another layer to that lack of normative control because it not only transgresses gendered standards, but bodily standards as well by showing an acceptance of fatness and presenting a fat, feminine body in ways that differ from fat women’s normative presentations of their bodies. Further, this transgressive flaunting of fatness disregards the normalized desire to lose or hide fatness, as most rhetoric about fatness implies, and instead advocates fat representation as something that does not need to be controlled. The assumption that fatness is a mark of deficient moral character and lack of self-control appears to have gendered associations because general standards for physical beauty are held to higher standards for women and, similar to the essentialist idea that everybody can avoid and/or prevent obesity, it is assumed that anyone can be physically beautiful if they try hard enough, which justifies the mistreatment of unattractive people, especially unattractive women. Therefore, by keeping obese people self-conscious and preventing them from thinking that it is acceptable to look the way they do, seems to be a way of controlling their nonnormative bodies because the acceptance and flaunting of fat bodies means that there is an acceptance of a deficient moral character, as well as there being no need for fat people to beat themselves up over attempting to change their bodies. In April Herndon’s discussion about the need for fat studies to merge with feminist and disability activism, she explains that like age and disability, most people are capable of gaining weight, which emphasizes an intrinsic fear of obesities’ contagious disease-like nature, thus making fatness something to be pathologized. Herndon claims that "fat tests the boundaries between individual desires for certain embodiments and larger feminist goals of resisting corporeal ultimatums precisely because so many women and/or feminists struggle with their own physical identities" (131-32). She further states that unlike the normative expectation that anybody can be fit and physically attractive, "the notion of fatness as fluid is dangerous and threatening because it serves as a reminder that our bodies are dynamic rather than fixed" (Herndon 132), which resembles a drag ideology that anybody can essentially be a blank canvas for makeup, wigs, and clothing. Herndon also addresses how, similar to ableism, fatphobia is extremely pervasive since "the boundaries of who is fat and who is not are recognized as contextual," so the power of derogatorily being called "fat" "is lodged in the fact that no standard definition exists," thus the recognition 4 �Nathaniel Hagemaster • "Eating Up" the Margins of this subjective "fluidity moves away from ideas of inherently flawed individuals and toward accounts of dynamically situated bodies and identities" (Herndon 132). Therefore, anyone can consider themselves or other people to be "fat" regardless of actual weight or body type because everybody has different aesthetic standards as to what thinness and fatness means. Even though hegemonic beliefs about desirable physiques affect both men and women, women typically experience fatphobia in worse ways since they are usually socialized into placing a lot of value into their physical appearance. Also, due to menstruation and pregnancy, as Herndon indicates, most women experience fatness and disability to some extent. Since fatness also appears to compromise normative femininity, female obesity also contrasts with male obesity because regardless of stigmas that are placed onto fat men, it is more common for men to reclaim their masculinity. This division between feminine and masculine associations of fatness, thus places big girls into an underrepresented category since even though some may be advocating for female reclamations of fat femininity, there does not seem to be much of this advocacy or a discourse for fat male femininity. As mentioned above, the queering of fatness in gay male culture seems to subvert the incongruous feminization of fat men because queer discourses typically have more of an acceptance of male femininity, as well as troubling normative concepts of how largeness relates to acceptable masculinity; however, an accepted combination of both fatness and effeminacy has not emerged for men. An example of this can be found in Jason Whitesel’s ethnography for a Girth & Mirth convention, a club for large gay men that disrupts "the categories of status and privilege based on body shape and size" because it provides a safe space for fat men to display their bodies and act out "sexuality that has come to be forbidden to big men" (59). Whitesel finds that this safe space utilizes "campy spectacle and joyous carnival," so that these men can "redefine themselves as sex objects: sexual beings who are motivated by the desire of other men" (60), which is a privilege that most conventionally attractive gay men appear to have on a regular basis while the Girth & Mirth men need a separate space to experience this. Thus, this convention for fat gay men appears to resemble what Delta Work refers to as "freak show night." Whitesel addresses the performative dynamic of the men at this convention by commenting on their attire that "shows a rebellious attitude and serves a political function" (82). He notes the "various tee slogans and evocative attire, these big men insinuate, tongue-in-cheek, that being big gives them bigger genitals, rendering their sexuality larger than life," as well as the choice of clothing that accentuate these men’s fat bodies instead of hiding them, as they are probably expected to do outside of this designated event, because "such exhibitionism is made possible by the carnival-like atmosphere, which gives [nonnormative] guests license to be sexy and desirable" (Whitesel 82). Aside from the Girth & Mirth guests’ clothing, Whitesel also describes a lot of sexually aggressive behavior between the guests, as well as food-related double entendres in the ways that they spoke with each other, which are enactments that are conventionally masculine. Even though such a space shows progress in terms of body image and fat acceptance, this kind of discourse is limited to fat gay men because of the acceptance of fat masculinity, the connection between queer culture and camp, and the cultural acceptance and expectation of gay male promiscuity. As expected, Whitesel identified only one effeminate guest who stood out from his masculine counterparts and did not seem very popular with the other guests when he participated in games and contests at the convention. Thus, this ethnography illustrates not only how there has to be a separate occasion that celebrates fat men and their sexuality because they aren’t accepted in regular discourses, but also how someone like Delta might be treated in this primarily masculine environment. Divine, probably the most popular fat drag queen in history, seems to be notorious for several aspects of her monstrous drag, —such as her makeup style that intersects punk with 50s pin-up, the over-the-top outlaw characters that she is known for in John Waters’ movies, etc.—but her fatness combined with other elements of her performance seems to have been the primary contribution to Divine’s monstrosity. Unlike many other drag queens who took pride in their cinched waists that made them appear more curvy and feminine, Divine never tried to conceal her pudginess with a corset and even flaunted it by wearing short, form-fitting, colorful garments that emphasized her large figure instead. In her discussion about how Divine’s performance in Hairspray served as a foil to white supremacy, Ragan Rhyne contends that Divine’s fatness combined with her actions portrayed a failure of whiteness, femininity, and class. She states that Divine’s character, Edna Turnblad, and Ricki Lake’s character, Tracy Turnblad, re-appropriate the body of white women to challenge white supremacy because since they are fat, brunette foils to the thin, blonde, racist characters, Velma and Amber Von Tussle, their bodies are immediately marked as lower-class and racialized (Rhyne 189). Rhyne further states that fatness, when used "as a class marker, comes to be a primary code through which Divine’s drag performance denaturalizes the whiteness implicit in normative femininity" because, as usual in John Waters films and camp media in general, Divine’s rhetoric involves "reassigning value to the valueless… through the performance of whiteness, or of ‘white trash’" (190). Therefore, like the Girth & Mirth men, Divine uses camp to 5 �Nathaniel Hagemaster • "Eating Up" the Margins perform and reclaim fatness as a superior marker of desirability and status even though many people don’t share that point of view. In fact, Divine and John Waters intentionally reassign value to things that are considered filthy or trashy as a way of ironically reifying classist assumptions about the lower classes, as well as creating absurdly fictional spaces that equalize members from all kinds of cultural groups. Because everyone produces filth regardless of where they come from or who they are, this emphasizes how the basis of prejudices are usually superfluous. Similar to Jack Halberstam’s "queer art of failure" that embraces the element of failure because it "allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development" (3) that Foucault addresses, fat drag not only celebrates the "failure" of heteronormative gender and sexuality, but also a failure of body type. Instead of being caught up in how their fat bodies fail to align with normative concepts of beauty, big girls use this perceived failure of body type to be transgressive by flaunting what society wants them to repress. With Divine as an example, big girl performance seems to ironically acknowledge that fatness isn’t widely accepted and probably can’t or shouldn’t be "fixed", so they perform their bodies in ways that acknowledge what the fatphobic public is presumably saying or thinking, but playfully ignore the criticism while articulating realities about fatness. Since big girls do not succeed as much on RPDR, perhaps the art of failure could be applied to this context of failure that seems to enforce a standardized form of drag. Situating Fat Performativity: Examining Fat Drag and Fatness in Drag As mentioned above, performing fatness often involves a campy reification of fat stereotypes, whether it is to subvert normative assumptions about fat people or exploit fatness by reinforcing fat phobia, that exist in media, which is what big girls use as a basis for their drag performances. For example, like the RPDR big girls, token fat characters in movies and TV shows often make fatness part of their identities by constantly eating (particularly sweets and other fatty foods); behaving obnoxiously towards thinner characters; and expressing some sort of displeasure with their weight, not to mention other characters’ displeasure toward overweight characters. These common tropes that are written for fat characters, and typically played by fat actors, have created a set standard for what is recognized as fat performance. Furthermore, fictive elements such as "fixing fat" narratives and Hollywood portrayals of fat stereotypes have become so common in movies that the idea of "fat drag," a performance of fatness by thin actors in fat suits, has become a recognizable trope. The fat drag medium lends itself to what I am referring to as "fixing fat" narratives because storylines that involve obese people losing an extreme amount of weight at some point during a film’s sequence requires the fast-and-easy body transformation technology of CGI and prosthetics. As mentioned about the weight loss rhetoric in advertisements for dietary and fitness products, fatness is often treated as a curable disease that requires much-needed prevention for those who are not fat and "fixing" for those who are, which caters to the idea that all fat people have to be in control of their bodies, as well as be self-conscious of their weight with hopes of losing their fat someday. Therefore, the transformative nature of "fixing fat" narratives and "fat drag" in popular movies cater to these fatphobic tropes unlike big girls, who technically count as "fatness in drag" since big girls put their own bodies in drag, even though they are expected to perform fatness as recognized in pop culture. In Kathleen LeBesco’s connection between fat suit performance with drag’s subversive playfulness and blackface’s racist mockery, she makes the case that the satirical distance between well-known thin actors and their over-the-top fat characters makes the real "threat" of drastic weight-gain seem comical, thus less threatening. Since everyone is capable of gaining weight and there is a prominent stigma surrounding fatness, gaining weight is often conceived of as a fear that everyone does or should have. LeBesco argues that since fat suit performances and weight gain/loss narratives "reassure audiences by showing us lean, conventionally attractive actors unencumbered by fatness outside of the film’s frames, there is ultimately little difference in threat levels" (236). In reference to the completely comical use of fatness in The Nutty Professor and the somewhat sad and heartfelt use of fatness in Shallow Hal, she explains the gender differences in these narratives by stating that since women are typically socialized toward dieting, they "do not require the crudeness or jokiness of the fat suit to feel more comfortable about their own bodies" the way that men do because women are more likely to identify with fat female characters, while fat male characters are usually made out to be more outrageous and spectacular (LeBesco 236). Thus, like in drag performance, fat drag addresses body politics in a humorous and campy style; however, the artifice of fat drag is also appropriative because it exploits fat people in ways that reflect the exploitation of black people in minstrel shows. Therefore, LeBesco contends that "the threat of black folks and freaks was a threat from without" because spectators of freak shows "wanted to see the genuine article, so different from them, while they simultaneously feared confrontation or attack," while the fear of fatness is a threat that is "perceived to be from within" because everyone has "the capacity to become fat" (238). LeBesco’s connection 6 �Nathaniel Hagemaster • "Eating Up" the Margins between racial and bodily spectacles that have been featured in entertainment addresses how nonnormative bodies are often portrayed as either horrific or monstrous, therefore something that needs to be defeated, or comedic and unthreatening in order to make bodily differences more laughable than scary. Ironically, Divine’s characters are often made to exemplify both kinds of spectacle; however, since her characters exist outside from heteronormative control, in the John Waters universe, she has more control over her use of spectacular status and her authentically fat body, which is a power that most drag queens hold. Katharina R. Mendoza takes LeBesco’s argument about "fixing fat" narratives in fat suit movies a step further by suggesting that these narratives with instantaneous transformations from extreme obesity to thinness not only reify assumptions that every fat person wants or needs to be thin, but imply that standards for intrinsic beauty are essentially as superficial as the standards for outer beauty. She states that "by looking at how the fat suit is deployed in the service of a narrative we can see how such films are just the latest manifestations of the ‘inside every fat person is a thin person’ trope so often found in weight loss discourse" because the presence of the fat body in these kinds of movies are "always contingent on and shaped by the presence of its corresponding thin body" (281). For example, in Shallow Hal, "the fat suit enables a disorienting representation" of Rosemarie who "simultaneously inhabits two bodies at opposite ends of the size spectrum," and in The Nutty Professor, Sherman "instantaneously morphs from one body into the other and then back again," which presents an unequal relationship between the fat and thin body, with the thin body being the dominant one (Mendoza 281). Rosemarie’s thin body dominates in Shallow Hal because actor, Gwyneth Paltrow, appears as her thin-self for most of the movie and is the primary love interest, while her fat-suited body only appears in brief scenes and is used for comic relief. Although Buddy Love, Sherman’s thin alter-ego, does not necessarily dominate screen time, Buddy’s main villainous objective in the movie is to take over Sherman’s body. Mendoza thus points out that "the composite body of actor and prosthetic costume represents the fat body in a way that exposes the interaction between desire and disgust while also driving home the point that only normative bodies are allowed to cross the boundary dividing fat and thin" (284), meaning that while fat characters can turn thin in these movies, thin characters can’t turn fat because the objective in these movies is always to attain a normative body. Furthermore, the messages in these movies indicate that the fat character’s superficial desires for thinness and attractiveness is the same thing as their "inner beauty," which contradicts the idea of inner beauty because it imposes fat phobic, therefore shallow, ideals onto a kind of beauty that is typically framed as more genuine and less superficial. Thus, the performance of fatness in fixing fat narratives appear to include assumptions about fat people wanting to be thin and normative, that it is appropriate to use fatness as a spectacle for laughs or fear of becoming obese, and that it is possible for fat people to change. These assumptions relate to Kwan’s and Graves’ point about how all bodies are expected to be equally as capable of control. With the standard fat tropes that exist in pop culture, the prominence of fat phobia in society, and drag rhetoric’s reliance on allusions to pop culture in the physical world, an attempt to separate big girls from the dominant expectations of fat performance seems as if it would be futile. Conclusion Since RuPaul’s Drag Race has established a standard form of drag, the big girls who compete on the show are expected to follow specific standards that have been set for them based on previous fat drag queens, cultural fat phobia, and fat tropes in popular culture. As seen in token fat characters and the big girls on RPDR, there appears to be a need for fat performers to display a sense of self-awareness of their bodies, presumably because it indicates a sense of control—either that they are being controlled with self-consciousness and a longing for weight loss to become "normal" or that the fat person is in control of their own body by showing that they accept it. Other tropes include a constant consumption of food, which when it is observed in the big girls’ performances, seems to indicate an ironic lack of self-control (as if they literally can’t stop eating) that simultaneously reinforces the control that they do have over their bodies since their eating becomes rhetorical to reify fat stereotypes, as well as emphasize that nobody can control their eating habits. These subversions in big girl performances appear to acknowledge the expectations that are placed onto people with similar figures, while challenging normative attempts to control them and their bodies. Although these subversions are entertaining to audiences and empowering to big girls, it makes attempts for these queens to break away from standard fat performance nearly impossible, thus obligating all big girls on RPDR to perform only what is expected of them without getting as far in the competition as thinner contestants. Since there are discourses acknowledging the acceptance of fat men, even though these discourses fetishize them, there needs to be more of a discourse that embraces fat effeminacy, one capable of overlapping with the embrace of fat femininity and the sexual inclusion of fat women. The connection between fatness and femininity should be further 7 �Nathaniel Hagemaster • "Eating Up" the Margins emphasized to make this embrace of fat femininity and effeminacy possible by showing how fatness can be desirable when observed on a feminine body. However, I realize that the masculinity of fatness is probably more accepted because masculinity in general is more accepted, which places a double jeopardy onto fat femininity. A solution to this masculine-feminine dichotomy can probably be found in the overt gender troublings that are found in big girl, as well as other kinds of drag performances because even though drag queens may appear completely hyper-feminine or drag kings hyper-masculine, they typically occupy spaces in between masculine and feminine since they make their natural and their performed bodies rhetorical. This rhetoricizing of the complicated drag body usually seems to emphasize the fact that no real-life person is completely masculine or feminine in the way that characters in pop culture are often portrayed. Therefore, big girls should use this troubling of masculinity and femininity to open up an accepted discourse of fat effeminacy, which can then trouble the idea of fat femininity in women, to complicate assumptions about fatness. In a way, by creating aesthetically pleasing and sexually suggestive drag looks on their fat bodies, big girls have already complicated linkages between body type and attractiveness, as well as how much "should be" revealed or concealed on the fat body; however, there has not been much of a bridge to connect what is found appealing in fat gay men that isn’t fully appreciated in fat women, which might be the key to this kind of discourse. _____________________________ Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Rutledge Classics, 1994. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage-Random House, 1975. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure, Duke UP, 2011. Herndon, April. "Disparate but Disabled: Fat Embodiment and Disability Studies." NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 131-32. Kwan, Samantha, and Jennifer Graves. Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture, Rutgers UP, 2013. LeBesco, Kathleen. "Situating Far Suits: Blackface, Drag, and the Politics of Performance." Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 15, no. 2, 2005, pp. 236-38. Mendoza, Katherina R. "Seeing Through the Layers: Fat Studies and Thin Bodies in The Nutty Professor and Shallow Hal." The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, NYU P, 2009, pp. 281-84. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of Minnesota P, 1999. Rhyne, Ragan. "Racializing White Drag. Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 46, no. ¾, 2004, pp. 189-90. Whitsel, Jason. Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma. NYU P, 2014. 8 �Daniela Conte Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion Examining African-American Exclusion and Urban Language Issues in Higher Education G loria Anzaludúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza describes the acculturation process as violent and cruel, effectively muting the voices of minority groups to keep them and their experiences marginalized. This description sparks many questions about the experience of minority groups in higher education, especially concerning language: are marginalized cultures able to keep their ethnic identities present in higher education composition? Furthermore, should there be space for cultural identity in academia? The poet Ernestine Johnson explained the notion of “talking white” in her spoken word poem, “The Average Black Girl” (2014). Johnson shares her experience of learning to “talk white” in order to succeed. Johnson’s poem portrays issues African-Americans experience in higher education, concerning their language and cultural identity. In 1996, the Oakland Ebonics Resolution caused controversy and debate over the legitimacy of Ebonics (Perry and Delpit xi). Despite the heated discussions, writing reform in urban English Language Arts classrooms does not reflect implications of the Oakland Ebonics Resolution. Why has the discussion over Ebonics ended? Considering Peter Elbow’s influential work in the field of composition, which contributed to the explosion of student-centered instruction, it seems troubling that a connection between cultural identity and writing voice has not been adequately addressed in the field of writing studies for urban education. A quick study of graduation statistics will reveal that not all ethnic groups are receiving equal opportunities; AfricanAmerican students from urban communities continue to drop out of higher education at a much higher rate than white students (“Fast Facts”). Horace Mann, the educational reformer, wrote in the 1800s about the power and duty of education: he stated, “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery” (16). If education is meant to be an equalizer, why are there still marginalized students in higher education? Furthermore, since this was the goal of education in the 1800s, why hasn’t there been more reform present in the twenty-first century? Progress has not been constant; the debates surrounding composition, writing voice, and cultural identity must be continued. This conversation should also be augmented with a focus on digital rhetoric to acknowledge shifting tides in composition, considering the technological advancements of our time. Examining the assumptions surrounding writing instruction and student voices in higher education ideally will create more value for all student writing voices, not just the ones who fit in the mold of traditional academic voice typically seen in higher education. Before arguing for change, we need a closer examination of writing composition over the years to chart the process, and lack of progress, in writing reform. In the introduction to Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing, Peter Elbow outlines three major debates in composition which continue to be unresolved: discourse as text versus discourse as voice, ethos as real virtue in the real person versus ethos as the appearance of virtue, and voice as self versus voice as role. For the purpose of this paper, the third debate, voice as self versus voice as role, will provide the strongest connection to the place of cultural identity in academia. The issue of voice in composition has been continuously discussed and debated; Elbow further explains, “Indeed with Derrida’s focus on what he called the metaphysics of voice and presence, this issue of voice/discourse/identity has become one of the main critical issues in all of English studies, cultural studies, and critical theory” (xix). Elbow distinguished the ongoing discussion surrounding voice and identity in written discourse to establish the longevity of this study. Throughout the decades of composition study, voice has taken on a godly stance, referring to some magical property in written discourse. This stance is problematic as it makes writing inaccessible by placing the issue of voice on a pedestal. Elbow acknowledges the metaphorical layers surrounding the term voice and attempts to clarify voice by establishing five features: audible voice, dramatic voice, recognizable voice, voice with authority, and resonant voice (xx). These five features clarify some of the mystique surrounding voice and provide specific measures of assessment. However, these five features are challenged and complicated through the inclusion of cultural identity. Would all cultures recognize the same voices as dramatic, resonant, or authoritative? In narrative, voice is clearly developed to represent a specific character. Of course, there is a difference between narrative writing and academic writing; however, narrative writing provides other methods of sharing knowledge outside of academic writing. Notably, qualitative research has contributed to a growth of personal narrative as a method of inquiry; Bud 9 �Daniela Conte • Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion Goodall is one such scholar who examines this development. Referencing philosopher Sara Worth and her work presented at a 2005 MIT conference, Goodall explains “the idea of narrative knowledge as a special form of reasoning” and connects this idea with recent changes in education (13). Goodall addresses the value of this new form of writing and maintains that it just as valuable as academic writing. Goodall argues, “The basic idea is that when we engage in writing or telling a story, we create alternative pathways to meaning that are imaginative and analytical … it alters the way we think about what we know and how we know it” (14). While Goodall goes on to provide advice for developing writers who want to attempt this new mode of writing, his original points reinforce the value of this type of writing, which could provide an alternative to traditional academic voice. This connection between narrative and voice in composition is further expanded by other scholars. In Walker Gibson’s article, he uses examples from literature to demonstrate that there are clear, distinct voices in narrative writing, yet this is not as apparent in academic writing. Gibson explains possible reasons for this by declaring, “The problem that all writers face is the loss of both voicebox and kinesics. The writer’s task is to so surround his words with other words on the page that readers may infer the quality of the desired speaking voice” (13). Narrative writing may be a tool for writers to successfully complete this task. Clearly, narrative writing is not meant to replace academic writing; however, it certainly can be an alternative for student writers as they develop their own unique writing voice. The call for alternative methods of writing in education is not a new one. Scholars of composition have continually examined shifts in composition and proposed changes for writing pedagogy to reflect these developments. In an article examining the true value of rhetoric, Edward P. J. Corbett explains the purpose of rhetoric as dynamic. Corbett begins by stating, “One of the things revealed by the history of the successive eras of rhetoric is the remarkable adaptability of this discipline to the changing spirit and needs of the times” (26). Rhetoric, then, continually adapts for the purposes of writers at different times. This declaration complicates pedagogy by raising questions about writing instruction. If rhetoric changes to better suit a changing society, surely then writing instruction must also adapt. This is a critical aspect of education; students must be proficient in rhetoric to be active members of a society. Corbett further explains that the study of rhetoric is “the discipline that can best equip our students to perform most of the social offices that devolve on them as citizens of the human community” (27). As communities evolve and change, rhetoric then must evolve and change, and therefore, writing pedagogy must as well. First, we must examine the scholarly conversation regarding the change in rhetoric; then, that examination must be analyzed in connection with pedagogical movements to determine if changes in rhetoric are being properly supported in classrooms. Elbow began this conversation regarding shifting attitudes of rhetoric and pedagogy in the 1990s with a public debate with another composition scholar, David Bartholomae (Bartholomae 62). These two scholars represent two different sides of a debate concerning the role of the writer in higher education. Essentially, Elbow argues that writing should belong to the writer from the start of the writing process, while Bartholomae counters that the writer needs to first gain the right to own their writing (Bartholomae 65). Although the debate has not been resolved, it has created new ideas and thoughts about writing pedagogy. In his article, “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process,” Elbow further explains this new way of thinking. As the title suggests, Elbow recognizes that the process of teaching writing is complicated by not only the process of teaching, but also the types of students. Elbow explains one of the key issues causing contraries: “We are invited to stay true to the inherent standards of what we teach, whether or not that stance fits the particular students before us” (“Embracing Contraries” 55). This statement evokes the difference in what should be valued in a classroom: the writers or the writing. For Elbow, his stance is clear; he believes that the student writers should be at the forefront of our pedagogical practices. Referencing the psychologist Jean Piaget’s influential theory, Elbow argues that writing instruction must involve “both assimilation and accommodation” (“Embracing Contraries” 58). If writing instruction involves both of these two methods, student writers will be the focus of instruction; however, it is important to note that Elbow is not arguing for a one-sided focus solely on student writers. As Elbow clarifies, “In short, there is obviously no one right way to teach, yet I argue that in order to teach well we must find some way to be loyal both to students and to knowledge or society” (“Embracing Contraries” 64). Elbow acknowledges that both these of aspects are important. Therefore, writing instruction must support and value students and their writing. In order for this to occur, Elbow’s method of pedagogy, which values the writer over the text, should be implemented. This is especially important for urban education, since the backgrounds of these students will have a heavy influence on their language. Although Elbow provides a generalized view of education, his ideas should be further applied to urban education to recognize and address the value of writing influenced by ethnic background. In the 1970s, Mina P. Shaughnessy took a stand for some students by addressing issues in basic writing courses that focus solely on the writing product and not the students. Since then, Elbow and other scholars have continued this 10 �Daniela Conte • Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion stance with their own work. Min-Zhan Lu is one such composition scholar who has connected Shaughnessy’s ideas to current issues within writing instruction in her article, “Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence.” Lu’s work is influential in understanding the dynamics behind language and the societal constructions which influence our instruction of writing. Lu studies a “politics of linguistic innocence: that is, a politics which preempts teachers’ attention from the political dimensions of the linguistic choices students make in their writing” (152). Aligning with Marxist and poststructuralist theories of language, Lu argues that “language is best understood not as a neutral vehicle of communication but as a site of struggle among competing discourses” (152). This further complicates ideas surrounding writing instruction because it connects to troubling issues of agency and voice for different ethnic groups. Lu states, “Because different discourses do not enjoy equal political power in currentday America, decisions on how to respond to such dissonance are never politically innocent” (153). As Elbow argues, student writers deserve support in the classroom, in order to feel that they have the freedom to experiment with writing techniques. Lu agrees with this statement, while also acknowledging the dire need for changes in thought regarding appropriate types of writing for this support to be true and just. As Lu explains, “Meaning is thus seen as a kind of essence which the writer carries in his or her mind prior to writing … Such a view of the relationship between words and meaning overlooks the possibility that different ways of using words- different discourses- might exercise different constraints on how one ‘crafts’ the meaning ‘one has in mind’” (154). Lu is challenging the notion that written discourse can be defined by one idea. If written discourse is valued as the only style acceptable in Bartholomae’s academic world where a writer has to work towards creating a discourse that fits into traditional academic discourse, how will different voices be heard? Furthermore, as Lu also questions, why are other types of discourse not as valued? In this type of situation, writing instruction then becomes not about the student writer, as Elbow envisioned, but more about molding a student to write in a traditional style, instead of allowing for different voices. Lu further explains the effect of this way of thinking by clarifying, “That is, it might teach students to ‘write something in formal English’ and ‘have something to say’ but can help students obtain only a very limited ‘freedom of deciding how and when and where’ to use which language” (154). This would mean that the purpose of writing pedagogy is not to inspire the development of students’ own voices; the purpose is to mold student writing in one, traditional method of writing. Lu further clarifies the dangers of this type of instruction by illuminating, “It may very well lead students to see the function and form of English as a timeless linguistic law which they must respect, adapt to, and perpetuate rather than as a specific existing circumstance resulting from the historically unequal distribution of social power, and as a condition which they must recognize but can also call into question and change” (159). Lu’s view inspires students to challenge educational structures which attempt to confine their voices in traditional writing styles. Traditional writing instruction ultimately fails students because it does not acknowledge and respect the variety of different discourses present in a society. Students come from different backgrounds and have different ideas about the development of their own writing voice and style. If writing instruction does not provide space for differing types of written discourse, the student writer is not given the chance to develop their own writing voice in academia. Disconnections between student writing voice and higher education are further examined in Gerald Graff’s article, “The Academic Language Gap.” Graff takes Lu’s ideas one step further by analyzing student reactions to the “rhetorical posture of argument-maker” (24). This rhetorical position is one often used in secondary and higher education as a type of writing assessment. Graff explains the gap created by students and higher education with this type of writing assessment with three reasons. He begins by arguing that the role of an argument-maker “rests on a conception of citizenship that has become increasingly unreal” (24). Graff argues that the diminished role of citizens in society causes students to feel as if their writing is “hollow” because it is likely that their written discourses will not have effects beyond the page. Although Graff does not address the role of audience in his argument; I would argue that this also connects to the function of audience. The article “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford analyzes the function and importance of audience in writing studies. Throughout their article, Ede and Lunsford argue that the role of audience is often overlooked in composition courses as a way to engage writers within the writing process. If students are to engage in genuine writing, audience must move beyond the teacher and classroom. Therefore, students will be more authentically engaged when writing. Ede and Lunsford explain the goal of addressing audience in composition, “A fully elaborated view of audience, then, must balance the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important, creativity of the reader. It must account for a wide and shifting range of roles for both addressed and invoked audiences” (169). Although the addressed audience might only be the professor teaching the course, if students are taught to consider the invoked audience, their written discourse will have a powerful focus; furthermore, invoked audiences will also provide opportunities for 11 �Daniela Conte • Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion “hollow” writing to become meaningful writing. Graff follows his argument about hollow writing by examining how an American mindset also negatively impacts students’ attitudes toward rhetoric; Graff describes this mindset as an “American suspicion of intellectualism, which is still often identified widely with aggression, aloofness, and a snobbish elitism” (24). Essentially, for student writers, the traditional language of rhetoric is distorted by a way of thinking which rebuffs a strict, formal discourse. If students were able to read and write in a discourse that does not evoke “aloofness and a snobbish elitism,” there would be the opportunity for students to truly engage in the writing process and create meaningful written discourse. Lastly, Graff attacks the issue of rhetoric itself as an alienating factor, “The academic obsession with problems and problematizing … appears strange and counterintuitive not just to students but to most nonacademics” (25). This issue relates to shifts in education which were caused by Peter Elbow’s work; a focus on developing student writing voice is now challenging previous ideas about what exactly comprises rhetoric. These challenges attempt to create a more equal balance of power in a writing classroom to allow space for different types of voices. While progress has been made, there are still changes that need to happen, especially regarding AfricanAmerican discourse. The unequal balance of power in regards to writing voice parallels the unequal balance of power in society. Although educational reform has attempted to make progressive changes, there are still “homogenized views of ‘the student’ that ignore cultural and cognitive differences” (Graff 28). As examined by Elbow, Graff, Shaughnessy, and Lu, written discourse is influenced by a variety of factors; I would argue that the most important factor which is overlooked in a classroom is ethnic background. Furthermore, I would also argue that marginalized ethnic groups are not valued as writers in academia unless they fulfill the traditional acceptable writing voice, even though this might not reflect their cultural identity and language. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will be on urban African-American identity in higher education and the muting of their cultural voices; however, I acknowledge that there are other cultural groups with the same struggle. In 1996, the Oakland Unified School District in California passed a resolution to recognize the legitimacy of Ebonics as a step towards improving the underachievement of African-American students enrolled throughout the district (Perry and Delpit xi). While the controversy and national debate that followed the resolution has been closely examined by many scholars, the background leading to the resolution is also worthy of mention in understanding the significance of this event. The Oakland Unified School District was facing a crisis; the average grade point average for AfricanAmerican students was 1.8, falling far behind the average 2.7 grade point average of white students. Furthermore, although the African-American students only comprised 53 percent of the student population, “they represented 80 percent of suspensions and 71 percent of students labeled as special needs” (Perry and Delpit xi). Faced with this disturbing rate of African-American student failure, Prescott Elementary School’s above-average performance offered a solution: the Standard English Proficiency program (SEP). This program aimed to improve African-American student growth by acknowledging that “the systemic, rule-governed nature of Black English” should be used “to help children learn to read and write in Standard English” (Perry and Delpit xi). Since Prescott Elementary School drastically improved after implementing SEP, the school board decided to pass an Ebonics resolution to improve the rest of the schools. This resolution sparked an “irrational and racist discourse” which prevented meaningful change for African-American education (Perry and Delpit xii). The Oakland resolution was a powerful change for African-American students because it legitimized their language. Voice and language are power, and the Oakland school district acknowledged the agency of African-Americans by maintaining that Ebonics was a language worthy enough to have a place in education, therefore extending and creating space for African-American identities within education as well. As Theresa Perry supports, “The board further maintained that Ebonics, the home/community language of African-American children, should not be stigmatized, and that this language should be affirmed, maintained, and used to help African-American children acquire fluency in the standard core” (3). This was the idealistic goal of the resolution that was distorted by a media backlash; “called lunatics, Afrocentrists, accused of giving up on Black kids, and of legitimizing slang- these were just some of the invectives hurled at the members of the Oakland school board” (Perry 5). It is important to note that the backlash was not only contained to a white audience; many prominent African-American figures, such as Jesse Jackson and Maya Angelou, also joined the voices protesting the resolution. Perry argues that African-Americans “missed the point” because “Black Language is largely an uncontested arena of Black shame” (6). The Oakland resolution could have been the first step in creating agency through Ebonics and removing the shame and stigma; however, the controversy following the resolution prevented the development of African-American voice in education. There is shame surrounding Ebonics, and I believe that shame stems from the marginalized place of AfricanAmericans in American society. Language is power, and if African-American students are taught that their language 12 �Daniela Conte • Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion has no place in the classroom, their agency will not develop and marginalization will continue. The worth of Ebonics is often hidden beneath more acceptable discourses of traditional academia; however, Ebonics is not a “poor sister to English but a language system with roots in West Africa. It is a language that evolved in struggle and under conditions of extreme oppression- a creative response to a slave society that did its best to erase African language and culture” (Perry and Delpit xiv). Although Ebonics may be shamed as “slang,” African-American students recognize Ebonics as their language, their voice, and a representation of their identity. As Delpit illustrates, “It is the language spoken by many of our African-American children. It is the language they heard as their mothers nursed them and changed their diapers and played peek-a-boo with them. It is the language through which they first encountered love, nurturance, and joy” (17). When African-American students enter the school system, they are taught their language is shameful; their voices are corrected and deemed lazy or stupid. The impact of this correction obviously has serious consequences in damaging the value African-American students place on their language. Furthermore, African-American students are not given the same opportunity to succeed if their voices are corrected since “forcing speakers to monitor their language typically produces silence” (Delpit 18). If classrooms only allow space for Standard English, African-American students do not have opportunities to gain agency for their own language and voice, which are influenced by Ebonics in urban communities. Therefore, African-American students will feel like they do not truly belong in academia, which I would argue is a contributing factor to the high drop-out rates and low college attendance among African-American students throughout America. However, if African-American students are given the space to speak in their language, influenced by Ebonics, the value of their identity will be reaffirmed and they will feel as if they do belong and have a place in academia. Furthermore, speaking in Ebonics will cause African-American students to gain agency, which is typically denied to them in their marginalized positions in society. When African-American students speak Ebonics, they “assert the power of the tradition in the quest to resolve the unfinished business of being African in America” (Smitherman 37). The Oakland resolution was a strong starting point for the African-American community; however, among the subsequent controversy, the resolution sputtered and died. It is vital to note that the purpose of the Oakland resolution was to utilize Ebonics to teach Standard English. Therefore, Ebonics was never meant to replace Standard English as an acceptable means of communication, but as a means to grant access to Standard English. While this was revolutionary at the time, the Oakland resolution failed to develop into a fight for African-American language and identity in the classroom because its goal still reinforced Ebonics as a marginalized language. The conversations following the Oakland resolution reflected many teachers’ concern about implementing the use of Ebonics in their classroom; Delpit further explains, “Most teachers of those African-American children who have been least well-served by educational systems believe that their students’ life chances will be further hampered if they do not learn Standard English” (17). Delpit recognizes the concerns caused by this resolution as valid, and it would be a blind mistake to assume that there is no truth to these concerns. However, I would argue that these concerns are no longer as pertinent in the twenty-first century, due to the many different forms of discourse caused by the digital revolution which now provides a space for all voices, including those influenced by Ebonics. It is important to recognize that although the Internet has provided a space, this does not guarantee that all voices are being heard, or that all voices carry the same weight and agency. The Digital Divide complicates how African-Americans (and other low-income groups) are able to access technology as a valuable and “transformative” tool (Banks 12). However, as the use of technology continues to expand as an essential skill for today’s society, educational systems are implementing programs to address the Digital Divide and provide access to low-income students. For African-American students, digital technology and rhetoric provide opportunities for African-American history and identity to flourish; this is vital for this community because “even within a definition of African-American rhetoric as being about the word, careful considerations of how current technologies can extend its study will provide a much richer body of work for rhetorical criticism and analysis” (Banks 25). A strong example of the power of digital technology to create agency for African-American students in their own language is eBlack, created by Abdul Alkalimat, an African-American Students director at the University of Toledo (Banks 22). Alkalimat, a vocal proponent for African-American involvement in technology to gain agency, created eBlack to generate, in his own words, a “virtualization of the Black experience.” As seen by the explosion of digital activism, digital rhetoric is a meaningful form of discourse, which has a real audience and purpose, while also creating a space for individual voice: the goals of composition theory discussed by Elbow. For African-American students, this new form of discourse creates not only a space for their voice, but also a method to cause change and to fight for agency. The digital revolution has allowed “African-American rhetorical scholars far richer analysis of those speeches and writings considered to be within the tradition, but can also open those traditions up beyond just the word and show it has always been multimedia, using all available means in resisting racism and pursuing justice and equal access on behalf of AfricanAmerican people” (Banks 38-39). 13 �Daniela Conte • Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion The multiple types of discourse available within digital rhetoric are varied and intricate, but for the purposes of this paper, the focus will be on the study of remix as a new form of discourse available through digital literacy which allows for a development of unique voices reflective of cultural identity and language. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber have argued that we currently write in a “remix culture,” which distorts previous notions regarding “plagiarism, originality, and assemblage” (375). The remix culture refers to different types of discourses, such as text, video, and audio, which change the purpose of writing to be more interactive and collaborative. Furthermore, the remix culture also demonstrates a deeper understanding of a text. Instead of asking students to just regurgitate sources in their own words to fit into traditional academic discourse, remix culture requires students to understand their sources by remixing to create meaning instead of restating sources to attempt a re-wording of ideas. Johnson-Eilola and Selber believe that remixing can exist in education as assemblages, which are texts “built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context” (381). Assemblages recognize that text should be created within pre-existing discourses. Furthermore, assemblages create communities of knowledge to share; this is especially present in online, digital communities. African-American writers of all types of texts would be able to utilize assemblages to create their own community to reflect their language and cultural identity. These communities reflect a much more democratic and interactive way of learning that should be mimicked in classrooms. Additionally, assemblages also encourage new types of text, such as media, which can create engaging instructional methods and assessments. There are changes which must happen for assemblages to succeed beyond academic structures; “Remixing as a form of composition inhibits a contested terrain of creativity, intellectual property, authorship, corporate ownership, and power” (Johnson-Eilola and Selber 392). However, this terrain provides a “new notion of creativity” that is more valuable for students and much more aligned with today’s digital society (Johnson-Eilola and Selber 400). Furthermore, remix provides African-American writers a method of expression in which “the mix delivers a message more powerfully than any original alone could, and certainly more than words alone could” (Lessig 71). The exchange of ideas and thoughts online is not limited by strict regulations of traditional academic discourse; remixes are one strong example of how the digital revolution is creating spaces for African-American discourse to fully develop and strengthen their language and cultural identities. The earlier movements in composition theory and writing pedagogy discussed at the start of this paper present the goals and views of writing instruction: the development of student voice, the role of audience, and authentic purpose. These scholarly conversations continued and progress was made; however, the digital revolution truly enabled these goals to be realized. This is especially important for African-American students since “in public education for children and youth as well as in higher education, social, cultural, linguistic, racial, class, and gender issues remain salient concerns of people of color” (Jackson and Jordán 2). These concerns have not been properly addressed since higher education still maintains a focus on the traditional academic voice of Bartholomae’s academic world. However, the digital revolution has now provided education with valuable resources to create spaces for all types of discourses. African-American students can utilize these types of discourses, such as remix, to develop writing voices which reflect their language, influenced by Ebonics as a reflection of their rich history and culture. _____________________________ Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. Bartholomae, David. “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” National Council of Teachers of English, vol. 46, issue 1, 1995, pp. 62-71. JSTOR. 5 Nov. 2015. Corbett, Edward P. J. “Rhetoric, the Enabling Discipline.” The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook, 4th edition, edited by Edward P. J. Corbett, Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 26-35. Delpit, Lisa. “What Should Teachers Do: Ebonics and Culturally Responsive Instruction.” The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children, edited by Lisa D. Delpit and Theresa Perry, Beacon, 1998, pp. 17-28. Delpit, Lia, D, and Theresa Perry. Preface. The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of AfricanAmerican Children, Beacon, 1998, pp. xi-xiv. Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook, 4th edition, edited by Edward P. J. Corbett, Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 320-34. 14 �Daniela Conte • Voice, Cultural Identity, and Inclusion Elbow, Peter. “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process.” The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook, 4th ed, edited by Edward P. J. Corbett, Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 54-65. Elbow, Peter, editor. Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. Hermagoras, 1994. “Fast Facts.” National Center for Education Statistics. US Department of Education, 2013, 15 Oct. 2015. Gibson, Walker. “The ‘Speaking Voice’ and the Teaching of Composition.” Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing, edited by Peter Elbow, Hermagoras, 1994, pp. 11-17. Goodall, H. L. Writing Qualitative Inquiry: Self, Stories, and Academic Life. Left Coast, 2008. Graff, Gerald. “The Academic Language Gap.” The Relevance of English: Teaching That Matters in Students' Lives, edited by Robert P. Yagelski and Scott A. Leonard, National Council of Teachers of English, 2002, pp. 23-35. Jackson, Sandra, and José Solís Jordán. “Being in Higher Education: Negotiating Identity and Place.” Introduction, I've Got a Story to Tell: Identity and Place in the Academy, P. Lang, 1999, pp. 1-7. Johnson, Ernestine. “Ernestine Johnson Performs ‘The Average Black Girl’ on Arsenio Hall Show.” YouTube, 14 April 2014, 1 Oct. 2015. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, and Stuart A. Selber. “Plagiarism, Originality, and Assemblage.” Computers and Composition, vol. 24, 2007, pp. 375-403. 1 Oct. 2015. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin, 2008. Lu, Min-Zhan. “Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence.” The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook, 4th ed, edited by Edward P. J. Corbett, Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 152-62. Mann, Horace. Lectures on Education. Arno, 1969. Perry, Theresa. “’I'on Know Why They Be Trippin’: Reflections on the Ebonics Debate.” The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children, edited by Lisa D. Delpit and Theresa Perry, Beacon, 1998, pp. 3-16. Smitherman, Geneva. “Black English/Ebonics: What It Be Like?” The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children, edited by Lisa D. Delpit and Theresa Perry, Beacon, 1998, pp. 29-37. 15 �Stephen Florian Colin Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric as Discursive Protext A s a composition instructor, I often think about the effectiveness of a standard written essay in my classroom. A prevailing fear is whether or not my students care about the topic: Is this idea compelling to them? Will the reading and response change them in a way that produces knowledge? Or am I effectively giving them narrow, prescriptive assignments to teach them all the elements of a well-constructed essay that do not offer them any sort of possibility for transformation in the process? In this essay, I am arguing for a composition class with a protest rhetoric component that is potentially meaningful to the student writer as a tool for engagement, as well as a vehicle for knowledge production. I will explore the possibility of protest rhetoric as a supplemental nontraditional text to facilitate a deeper engagement with the process of a first-year composition class. In the end, I will offer a possible assignment as a concrete example of what I mean by engaging with protest rhetoric as a culturally responsive pedagogy. In my composition class, I assign Garbology by Edward Humes because it exemplifies America’s unbridled propensity to create garbage. When students engage with this text, they are obliged to create an awareness about their own garbage production. Once we enter this segment of the class, they begin to experience some moral outrage around their relationship to garbage. Some of the students start to transform into fledgling pollution activists and it often motivates the work on their final research papers for the class. The in-class discussions often teeter on the edge of a protest around how everyone should reduce the amount of garbage they create. My desire is to expand on this level of engagement and to show students how their protestations can be not only the emergence of a text, but also a productive apparatus for academic inquiry. If students are given the agency to find issues that are personal to them (Sommers and Saltz 125; McCrary 6), issues that are worthy of protest, perhaps they will feel a deeper engagement with the productive aspects of the composition classroom through an embodied form of rhetoric and persuasion. If the student writing is personal and connected, the writer will have a clear understanding of their audience and their potential expectations, they will experiment with how to temper the Aristotelian triad of ethos, pathos, and logos in a more meaningful way, and their arguments may become more clearly focused because the issues relate to the student’s subjective worldview. To make this connection between protest and the classroom I will use Bruce McComiskey’s Teaching Composition as a Social Process to conceptualize a methodology for incorporating protest rhetoric into the composition classroom in concert with and exploration of Colin Kaepernick’s protest rhetoric. Because students are more likely to be engaged and learn if they care, it is important that they find something they can care about deeply and protest against—this will strengthen all related pedagogy. Kaepernick’s Protest Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick offers an interesting template for a more engaged student essay in the form of an embodied protest rhetoric. Kaepernick made national headlines in 2016 when he chose to sit and not stand for the national anthem. This act of resistance generated 16 �Stephen Florian • Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric a great deal of outrage, mostly because many people have interpreted his protest as a disrespectful gesture toward the American flag signifying an abject lack of patriotism. Post-gesture, Kaepernick informed his dissenters that, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color” (Wyche). Kaepernick’s noncompliance, his essential non-action of sitting is an encumbered textual gesture that sends a message that he is not only making an argument—he is also starting one. For Paulo Freire, oppression is a societal ill that must be elucidated by an active response paired with intellectual vigor: “This solution cannot be achieved in idealistic terms. In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (4). This gesture for Kaepernick is a transgressive act, an active claim that there are problems and issues that need to be addressed in a manner that requires the oppressor to desist and the oppressed to equally resist. But Kaepernick’s gesture is not enough: the gesture must be contextualized and generate a discourse that allows the marginalized some form of intermediary space to transform. This space can be created or appropriated by the oppressed joining the movement, much in the way the Occupy Wall Street movement controlled Zuccotti Park and other locations. For Freire the next ingredient for a successful outcome requires that the protester not denigrate the hegemony being resisted: to truly be liberated, freedom must be conferred. “To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity…the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle” (Freire 3). Kaepernick is careful in both his protest and his rhetoric that follows not to ascribe blame to a specific target, but rather to denounce an overarching ideology that enforces oppression, therefore reifying Freire’s admonition. Kaepernick’s peaceful protest seemed like a potentially divisive issue that would ignite a larger civic and societal discussion—or better yet—an actual argument that would open the door to nationwide conversation on race and class. It was presumed that many other professional athletes would join Kaepernick, but most left him to press forward on his own. The few that did join in, did so in a limited capacity. When the NFL season ended, Kaepernick exercised his option to walk away from his contract with his team, the San Francisco 49ers—saving the team close to 12 million dollars. Kaepernick then became a free agent but no other teams in the NFL would add him to their roster. He was labeled, classified, and categorized as a troublemaker. Many claimed that his presence would be a distraction to any team that would sign him. When a handful of NFL players decided to carry on Kaepernick’s method of protest in the 2017 NFL season, the person most outraged by their message was the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. His reaction to their protests and the likewise demonizing of other professional athletes who choose to exercise their right to free speech is not only beyond the scope of his duties but also sends a dangerous message. His immediate and unconsidered response was for the players to recognize their “privilege” as professional athlete and that if they don’t conform to his perceived view of patriotism, the punishment should be termination by the owners of their respective teams. NFL players and other professional athletes play sports because the free-market system enables them to sell their labor power in the market place at a price agreed upon by the player and the owner—not because it is a privilege. Kaepernick is functioning not merely as a dissenter but rather as “a politically engaged radical critic” (Gordon 194), to the degree that he is kneeling for those who are systematically marginalized by those controlling the ideology of society. The image of Kaepernick’s various protests are not original, they are intertextually connected to many other protests and perhaps most notably the 17 �Stephen Florian • Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kneeling in prayer and the black power protests of Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the medal ceremony of the two-hundred-meter track sprints at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. While the chronological distance between events is vast, the ideological space between these images is hinged by the mortise and tenon of the continued struggle of African Americans to have a voice in American society. The resistance toward Kaepernick began instantaneously because his actions subverted traditional cultural norms situated in patriotic acts. Bloomfield and Doolin note that, “When the body conforms to society’s expectations, the categories of the social order, and thereby the boundaries that help define them, are reaffirmed; conversely, departures from accepted norms threaten those boundaries and invite sanction or censorship” (507). It is noteworthy that Kaepernick initially presented his claim without saying or writing a word. Kaepernick’s sitting and later kneeling gesture sparked a dialogue that has been both punitive and progressive, mostly materializing in the form of newspapers, television, and social media. One of the purposes of teaching first-year composition is to help students find their voice. Kaepernick found his in a silent act. This begs the questions: how is this writing, and is it applicable to the composition classroom? Can protest rhetoric engage student writers in the composition classroom in a manner that is transformative? Protest Rhetoric To better understand, apprehend, and interact with Kaepernick’s argument it would be reasonable to view his actions through the lens of protest rhetoric. The problem with this avenue of inquiry is that much of what is written on protest rhetoric is from the 1970s and 1980s, while the scholarship trails off dramatically in the 1990s. The social unrest of the 1960s generated academic interest in studying the rhetoric of protests as well as creating a framework for studying the implications of social unrest on society. While some of these forms of protest materialized as written text, much of the protest studied was embodied action, “marches, concerts, riots, bombings, and sit-ins, to name a few…coded acts of non-verbal communication” (Jensen 28-29). According to Berlin, the writing classroom was vital in situating public as well as protest rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s (477). Protest rhetoric is in somewhat of a regressive phase for academia. What is compelling in the analysis of protest rhetoric is less whether the protest is relevant or has attracted a large audience, but rather, whether the protest is about the individual protesting, or about a larger societal issue? While both are valid forms of protest, the audience must be able to critically ascertain the nature and the scope of the issue and then respond accordingly. Explicating the nature of the protest from an academic purview is not meant to denigrate the protester, but rather to ensure that the protester and audience are not merely engaged in arguing semantics. Perhaps more importantly, is there is a more significant socially relevant issue that is evolving into a dialectic that precipitates change or even progress? If the audience of Kaepernick’s protest is critically engaged, they can decide if they wish not just to join Kaepernick, but also how they can expand the conversation and how they can defend or deflect the inevitable ad hominem attacks that are often meant to derail social protest and which undermine the hegemonic ideology of the culture being protested against. The picture of Kaepernick sitting or kneeling during the national anthem is a powerful image that has polarized many on the meaning or definition of oppression as well as patriotism. Visual rhetoric transmits graphic descriptions or signs to generate signifiers that facilitate the exchange of ideas (Bulmer and Buchanan‐Oliver 55). Because Kaepernick is abstaining from participation in a patriotic gesture, the negation of the act informs the protest, but it cannot define it. Kaepernick’s gesture is endowed with a plethora of implications and grievances. Semiotic richness is replete 18 �Stephen Florian • Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric with assorted meanings and possibilities (Kopper 445). It is incumbent upon Kaepernick to ascribe a purpose to the act but the audience will ultimately produce the meaning socially. This may be a troubling concept for protesters, especially if they desire to control the message of the protest. It would be acceptable if the protester were functioning from an egocentric position, but if the protest is a rhetorical strategy to promote dialogue, social justice, and transformation then the protester must be willing to allow the socially constructed meaning to generate the dialogue. Most college campuses in the United States are as diverse as they have ever been. Students of color, international students, and otherwise marginalized students must be deliberate and facile in deciphering the protest rhetoric of the opposition as well as being purposeful in generating a reasoned response to oppression. Mikhail Bakhtin notes that: “we act confidently only when we do so not as ourselves, but as those possessed by the imminent necessity of the meaning of some domain of culture” (21). Bringing protest rhetoric into the composition classroom is a relevant form of argument analysis that can be a tool for progress as well as a mechanism to defend against tyranny of any sort. Looking at this from a social constructivist lens, Kaepernick’s detractors as well as his proponents are creating the content of his composition by making meaning from his text. Kaepernick’s simple act of subversion has caused an avalanche of textual response. News articles or memetic protests not only write his text for each individual that encounters Kaepernick’s message, but in an act of intertextual fission, are writing their own protest message; the audience will have the final say on meaning that is particular to each reader’s subjective response. This interaction with audience, in relation to text and response, is really a distillation of the notion of joining in the academic conversation that is part of rhet/comp’s mission: engagement and conversation that elevates discourse. Recursive engagement is one of the many concepts that can be achieved through an engaged student writer. If we can encourage students to write about a topic they care deeply about, writing will become for them a gateway to knowledge production that is both practical and productive. There is always a class of critics that wish to disrupt, if not silence, any form of transgressive thought or protest that does not adhere to their subjective worldview. In Scott Richard Lyons’ book, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, he identifies this subset as “culture cops” or anyone whose mission it is to cement or fossilize the meaning of a particular culture (94). These culture cops are not relegated to nor do they necessarily exist outside of the repressed culture—often they reside within. There are certainly culture cops attempting to exact their views onto not only Kaepernick’s text but the ability to protest injustice in general. In his ESPN.com article, writer Nick Wagoner quotes a fan, who is also a Navy veteran, in response to Kaepernick’s protest: “…you don’t sit during the national anthem. That’s not the way you do it” (Wagoner). This notion demands that Kaepernick adhere to the fan’s version of the culture, whether it is the culture of the Navy, the NFL, the San Francisco Giants organization, or the conservative elements of the United States and their prescribed and unalienable views on patriotism. Kaepernick is enacting what bell hooks refers to as “transformative pedagogy” by inviting all concerned to participate in the conversation (39). Kaepernick is not prescribing rules or boundaries on the conversation in the way that many responding ideologues are attempting to conscript this conversation into a monological referendum on the tenets of patriotism. By Kaepernick’s limited responses he is letting this conversation develop organically, and by doing so has unearthed a multitude of responses of what people believe patriotism and protest should look and act like. His gesture of sitting or kneeling during the national anthem of an NFL football game has become the equivalent of holding a mirror up to the collective face of America and forcing them to confront their views on oppression and race. The result has been effective as well as provocative. 19 �Stephen Florian • Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric Location, Time, and Space Another area that is worthy of inquiry in order to comprehend fully the strategy employed by the protest rhetorician is location. Often locations of protest are strategically chosen to maximize effect and to deepen the encoding of the message. A rhetorically significant location becomes endowed with not only its original attraction but also with an entrenched connection to the rhetoric of the protest. The lasting effect or cultural meaning is made by the audience of the act, not the protester. If we examine the Mall in Washington D.C. and the multitude of protests that have occurred there, we, as the audience, will determine the coded identity of the location based on our subjective experience. The audience of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech will endow this location with an alternate significance than the audience of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March (Endres and SendaCook 257-258). A significantly coded location has the ability to maximize the willingness and the energy to fuel resistance beyond the immediate message and location. In Kaepernick’s case, his choice of the NFL stadium as a protest site is without precendent; it is an apolitical space that he has politicized, which may contribute to the extreme responses of his detractors. Embodied Text Kaepernick is composing texts with his body and mind that in turn have inspired almost instantaneous texts in response, as well as exploring the vital qualities of gestures as embodied texts. Kaepernick’s gesture is a protext: a text that precedes another text. In this case, the written text is the audience’s response. The protext manifests itself in sitting or kneeling during the National Anthem, then contextualizing the gesture afterward. Because Kaepernick’s form of protest begins with a silent gesture, it is certainly worth examining the motivating engine that is at work. If Kaepernick can create such an impassioned and heterogeneous response to his protest gesture, there must be an essence that not only inspired his embodied text but also that inspires response. While it is not possible for the audience to fully know what that essence is for Kaepernick, in the most general sense it is plausible to assume that Kaepernick has been wounded in regard to some societal inequity. When he does choose to speak he offers that it is not just about his subjective experience. In a New York Times article Kaepernick states, “I think having these conversations helps everybody have a better understanding of where everybody is coming from” (Witz). The healing or transformation is generated through a discursive process that involves not just the victims, but society as a whole. Phenomenology is ontologically rooted in essences and his understanding of essence can have weighted impact in the composition of student texts. Merleau-Ponty notes that, “Instead of providing a simple means of delimiting sensations, if we consider it in the experience itself which envinces it, it is as rich and mysterious as the object, or indeed the whole spectacle, perceived” (4). This idea opens the door to numerous ways to elucidate, perceive, and respond to the power inherent in the essence of the embodied gesture: it can be a portal to generate texts as well as explicate them. Protest Rhetoric in the Composition Classroom To explicate and respond to Kaepernick’s protest rhetoric through the composition classroom I look to McComiskey as a guidepost for transformative possibilities of apprehending this deeply coded act that demands a discursive connection and response. Kaepernick’s gesture is effectively what McComiskey refers to as a “position statement” that is a compositional tool—both for the writer and the responder—to disrupt the restrictive classification of “the binary logic of identity/difference oppositions in their critical writing about culture” (75). Because Kaepernick is an elite athlete he can assume the identity position in the identity/difference binary. This binary model for McComiskey is situated in whether or not the student relates to new concepts through the lens of a likeness of the 20 �Stephen Florian • Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric self, or a difference of the self as an identity marker. By taking on the problems that are enveloped in his protest of exclusion and oppression he is taking on the difference position in the binary model as well, thus nullifying the binary’s constrictive effect. Kaepernick is enacting what McComiskey believes the focus of cultural studies composition courses should be: “to teach students to change the cultures that affect them every day by deconstructing binary representations while constructing culturally humane and rhetorically effective subject positions in the aporia between identity and difference.” (83) This positioning by Kaepernick may be the strongest stance to take because he has experienced both sides of the binary—not of oppressor and oppressed, but rather, of the privileged and the disenfranchised. McComiskey has a stated goal to eradicate the binary logic of identity/difference for students that are writing critically about culture by adopting and enacting position statements. These position statements will materialize by the mediation of texts through learned active reading skills. McComiskey’s path to position statements is through an assignment protocol that asks students to explicate a text, by way of the student’s subjective worldview, using three specific tools: “[(a)] Accommodating and acknowledging good ideas (and explaining why they are good), [(b)] Resisting and rejecting bad ideas (and explaining why they are bad), and [(c)] Negotiating and revising ideas (and explaining how they might best be revised)” (76). For McComiskey, negotiating is the most valuable of the three because it, “requires us to establish our own position in the middle ground among competing texts” (76). This is not achieved through a cursory reading of texts but through a deep interaction and explication beyond surface level concerns. The advantage for the writer is the possibility of situating oneself in the rond-point of the multitude of texts that have been generated in connection with a particular text. How then would McComiskey’s three tools be an effective device for making meaning of protest rhetoric? I have imagined a possible assignment conceived through the lens of McComiskey’s Social Process. The success of this assignment from a social process purview relies on his tools of accommodating, resisting, and negotiating. The Protest Assignment The first step in this process is to designate McComiskey’s text as the reading that we will base the assignment on. After the reading, a full class discussion will help to situate and contextualize McComoskey’s concepts. Once the class has a grounding in the material, then the assignment will follow. Part 1: In groups, have students make a list of historical protests, research these protests and discuss them. Then, the group will choose a protest from their list and do a 15-minute presentation to the class outlining and situating the protest historically. The presentation will also include McComiskey’s triad of “Accommodating,” “Resisting,” and “Negotiating” this protest. The goal is to establish the group’s “position statement” in reference to this protest. By researching the cause and effects of the protest, along with a historical framework, the group should be able to transcend or subvert the identity/difference binary as a constricting framework and, per McComiskey’s ideal outcome, construct “culturally humane and rhetorically effective subject positions” in relation to the protest. Part 2: The group will create a protest of its own. Groups will discuss issues that are relevant to them, and then choose something that is connected to their own lives that is protest worthy. Ideally it should an aspect of the culture that needs to be changed. Students will then conceptualize, enact, 21 �Stephen Florian • Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric and reflect on their protest. Requirements: 1. Define the nature of your protest 2. Design the action of your protest 3. Conceptualize your rhetoric and your strategy 4. Create your “position statement” using McComiskey’s concepts 5. Conceptualize your desired outcome 6. Create a heuristic that is capable of examining your protest with a critical lens 7. Define and examine the location of the protest 8. Enact the protest 9. Post protest: examine, classify, and categorize the outcome of your protest 10. The group will write a collaborative three-part essay. Part one is the implementation or the planning of the protest. Part two is an analysis and description of the protest in action. Part three is a framing and situating of the protest. Students will make an analysis of whether or not their protest was successful, whether or not their protest has the potential to evolve, what if anything they would change, and how the protest changed them and the culture. This will result in a 10 to 12-page essay. This imagined assignment is not radical in its construct, but the component of enacted protest creates the possibility for emergent knowledge. The hope is that the agency granted to students in this assignment will generate interesting perspectives that were perhaps unforeseen and could effect real change in the culture. It offers the possibility of progress through praxis. Protests are risky and the outcome is never guaranteed, often because much is at stake. Rhetoric and composition is meant to address and challenge prescribed, traditional, normative behaviors that are meant as tools of control and repression. Kaepernick is asking for America to use the power of patriotism for good and not as a weapon to disenfranchise and dispossess—that it should exemplify American exceptionalism in an inclusive rhetoric and ideal rather than as a tool of exclusion. The argument that Kaepernick has introduced could not have come at a more poignant time. The addition of protest rhetoric to the composition classroom engenders McComiskey’s social process in a way that has the potential to not only be transformative, but essential in resisting tyranny in any form, large or small. The right to protest is one of our unalienable First Amendment rights as Americans and teaching our students to enact their rights is humanizing, if nothing else. _____________________________ Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. 1993, translated by Vadim Liapunov, edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 2010. Berlin, James. "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class." College English, vol. 50, no. 5,1988, pp. 477-94, JSTOR, www.jstor.org.libproxy.csun.edu/stable/377477?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Bloomfield, Brian P. and Bill Doolin. “Symbolic Communication in Public Protest over Genetic Modification: Visual Rhetoric, Symbolic Excess, and Social Mores.” Science Communication, 2012, doi:1075547012469116 Bulmer, Sandy, and Margo Buchanan-Oliver. “Visual Rhetoric and Global Advertising Imagery.” Journal of Marketing Communications, vol. 12, no. 1, 2006, pp. 49-61, doi:10.1080/13527260500289142 Endres, Danielle, and Samantha Senda-Cook. “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 97, no. 3, 2011, pp. 257-282, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.585167 Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970, Continuum, 2000. selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress. com/2011/08/freire_pedagogy_oppresed1.pdf. Gordon, Avery F. “The Bruise Blues.” Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Verso, 2017, pp. 195-205. 22 �Stephen Florian • Kaepernick's Protest Rhetoric hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 2014. Jensen, Richard J. “Evolving Protest Rhetoric: From the 1960s to the 1990s.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 20, no. 1/2, 2001, pp. 28-32, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/466132. Kopper, Akos. “Why Guernica Became a Globally Used Icon of Political Protest? Analysis of its Visual Rhetoric and Capacity to Link Distinct Events of Protests into a Grand Narrative.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 27, no. 4, 2014, pp. 443-57, doi:10.1007/s10767-014-9176-9 Lyons, Scott Richard. X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent. U of Minnesota P, 2010. McComiskey, Bruce. Teaching Composition as a Social Process. Utah State UP, 2000. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. The Humanities P, 1962. Sommers, Nancy, and Laura Saltz. "The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year." College Composition and Communication, 2004, pp.124-149, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4140684. Wagoner, Nick. “Colin Kaepernick Takes Knee for Anthem; Joined by Teammate Eric Reid.” ESPN.com, 2 Sept. 2016, www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/17444691/colin-kaepernick-san-francisco-49ers-sits-again-nationalanthem. Witz, Billy. “This Time, Colin Kaepernick Takes a Stand by Kneeling.” The New York Times, 1 Sept. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/sports/football/colin-kaepernick-kneels-national-anthem-protest.html. Wyche, Steve. “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat During National Anthem.” NFL.com, 27 Aug. 2016, www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000691077/article/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-during-nationalanthem. 23 �A.G. Hughes "Cheap and Contented Labor" Sinclair Lewis, Irony, and the Marion Massacre T he organized labor movement in 1934 featured workers from textile mills throughout the American South striking in the face of unbearable conditions and pay. A 1995 documentary film directed by Judith Helfand and George Stoney may have reinvigorated some interest in the movement, commonly referred to as "The Uprising of '34," and an article by Dana Cloud describes oppression of black workers who were relegated to a "rhetoric of silence" by textile mill labor practices during the strikes ("Null Persona" 178). While her suggestion that a "null persona" can be brought into being by such activities is an intriguing one, I am much more interested in the rhetorical strategies this movement used to gain momentum. Cloud later described how further analysis of such a labor movement will illuminate the concept of power in a modern economy ("Laboring Under"). With this essay, I hope to add to Cloud's work on the movement while simultaneously prompting future inquiry. While the Southern labor movements in textiles and other industries may at first seem to have dissipated as the twenty-first century approached, the opposition to workers unions persists. At a Volkswagen automobile manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, workers voted in February 2014 to reject unionization as members of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) organization. Some employees noted that they were happy with conditions and compensation and therefore forming a union would serve no purpose. Nevertheless, the strong criticism of unions from select Tennessee politicians—including the governor and a U.S. senator—harkened back to anti-union sentiments of the early twentieth-century American South (Greenhouse). The Southern labor movement is a broad one, tied to the geopolitical landscape of the nation and born from the post-Civil War reconstruction era. Contextually, the Great Depression's effect on the early twentieth century movement cannot be overlooked, nor can its placement between the world's two great wars. However, particularly important to the study of this labor movement is the year 1929, when many early strikes occurred in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina ("The 1929 Marion textile strike"). One such event, which ended with a sheriff and his deputies shooting strikers, was depicted in a pamphlet published in the same year by the United Textile Workers of America (UTW) and the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). Written by Sinclair Lewis, Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929 provides a more in-depth (and critical) recounting of the deadly 1929 strike at Marion Manufacturing, a textile mill in Marion, NC. Since Socrates's early use to critique the Sophists, irony has been tied to social critique and identification. Although the term becomes muddled with Aristotle's description of irony as for the ironist's amusement, and later use of the term to describe dramatic irony, its primary function is to act as a counter rhetoric which promotes an alternate perspective and critiques the status quo. This, I suggest, is a transhistorical definition for irony, digesting (and perhaps even supplanting) all ancient and modern theorizations. By using irony in his pamphlet, Lewis invites the reader to complete an enthymeme with a clause supportive of the strikers. Additionally, the pamphlet uses synecdoche to generalize from the Marion community to towns throughout the South. Finally, Lewis gives his own satirical analysis of a pamphlet issued by the Kiwanis Club of Marion. This tactic contrasts his earlier ironic description of Marion workers' 24 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" dismal existence with the town establishment's outreach to industry and illustrations of prosperity. In this essay, I describe how Lewis's use of irony helped develop the movement from an early event to the larger strike across the region. Put specifically, my paper refers to Wayne Booth's conceptualization of irony and the Augustan era ideas about praise and blame described by Norman Knox and Allan B. Karstetter to analyze how Lewis uses irony to critique the status quo in Marion and therefore inequality and abuse of labor in mill towns throughout the South. The Marion Massacre Marion, situated at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, still retains its distinctive small-town character in the 21st century. In his pamphlet, Lewis includes a vivid description of the Marion landscape in 1929: From the court house in which the Sheriff and his deputies were on trial there is a view which recalls Italy. If you disregard a few littered backyards in the foreground, you can lose yourself in that smiling vista of hills and valleys, with a distant group of houses that are obviously plaster Italian villas. Well, they aren't. They are houses in the East Marion mill village and seen closer, they are atrocious. (17) At this point in the union movement, many textile operations in the Northeastern U.S. had begun to move towards the South in search of "cheap and contented labor" (Young). The "New" South continued to evolve and industrialize, and the mountaineers and farmers of McDowell and surrounding counties began to seek work at textile mills. As Cloud described, racial tensions were still a significant issue around these communities ("Null Persona"). The New South was moving forward in terms of industrialization, but still tied to old perspectives on race (Garrett-Scott 141). Mill villages sprung up in towns with textile mills. These densely-populated communities stood in stark juxtaposition to the preceding farming societies spread out across counties. As Lewis notes, mill houses are not prime real estate. A short trip south on US-221 from Marion takes visitors by similar villages in Rutherford County and into South Carolina. Houses of these villages were regularly owned by the mill. Company stores within the communities deducted the cost of any purchases from workers' pay (Lawing; Strickland). Without being able to experience 1929 life in these villages, merely visiting the still-standing, post-outsourcing, neighborhood remnants elicits a sense of community life both at home and at the nearby mill. The act of unionization implies a we/us group that stands in opposition to the them. It takes little effort to see negotiations between union leaders and mill administration as the site of political struggle. A union serves to negotiate for the benefit of its working-class members, and as discussed above it seems many of the company tactics used to create a collective workforce (shared villages, stores, work) create bonds that can be utilized by workers when unionizing. When negotiations failed, unions resorted to labor strikes to pressure mill operators and owners to act. In response to poor working conditions and compensation, the Marion workers (guided by the UTW) unionized in May during meetings at the McDowell County courthouse. The larger Marion community was divided over the issue of union membership and tensions escalated between union members and mill administrators as the summer progressed. On October 2, after four months of strike activities, Sheriff Oscar Adkins, six of his deputies, and seven additional men deployed tear gas and shot into the crowd of around 600 picketers outside the mill. Six workers died as result of the violence, and the events garnered national media coverage ("The 1929 Marion textile strike"; Young). No church in town would host funerals for the dead, so these were held outside. The churches were an important institution which served the town's ruling gentry rather than the laborers, who had descended from the dispossessed mountain farming class. Many other union members lost their jobs and 25 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" were subsequently kicked out of mill village housing ("The 1929 Marion textile strike"; Young). Lewis's pamphlet solicited donations from Northerners for strike relief during this period. In his book on the massacre, Mike Lawing describes how a significant number of strikers later distanced themselves from the union. The massacre at Marion Manufacturing faded into history, forgotten by even the local people. Nearly a century later, Lewis's pamphlet stands as one of few reminders that these events took place. It consists of what he calls a "revision and extension" of six articles earlier written and published in the Scripps-Howard newspapers, alongside several black and white photos and a cover illustration. From the first few words of the introduction (and even the title), Lewis's use of irony is apparent: "This account of industrial justice in America today" (3). This rhetorical strategy appears throughout the pamphlet, but it is often complimented with sincere remarks on the social ills of Southern textile mill communities. Irony & Identification Before any further analysis of the pamphlet, a framework for understanding irony is necessary. For Plato, eiron was used as a "term of rebuke," referencing the "disassembler, [or] pretender" (Swearingen 73). Irony was then tied more to doxa, and other concepts such as poiesis (to make), pseudo (falseness), and apate (deception), than logos (Swearingen). As such, Plato uses the term pejoratively even though his Socrates appears as a type of ironist when he appropriates the Sophists' argument to demonstrate his superior wisdom. As Søren Kierkegaard (1841/1989) wrote, "the concept of irony makes its entry into the world through Socrates" (9). Alternatively, Aristotle finds irony convenient for talking to the ignorant and as a practice of understatement opposed to buffoonery and overstatement. In a discussion of jokes from his Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks, "Irony is a more suitable style for civilized people than clowning, since someone who is ironic is making the joke to his own standard, while someone who is clownish is making it to that of someone else" (283). Regardless of form, this endorsement deviates from Plato's consideration of the ironist: "morally and intellectually corrupt because of this infidelity to truth," according to C. Jan Swearingen (130). Swearingen describes modern understanding of irony ("sometimes verbal technique, sometimes an act of deceit, sometimes an effective strategy, and sometimes a situation in which an unnamed ‘fate' is the agent of reversal") as indebted to the writings attributed to Aristotle (Swearingen 130). Although Aristotle provides an aristocratic notion of irony and its use in rhetoric, he adds to the conceptualization of Plato's Socrates by describing a concealed humor provided by the use of irony as opposed to mere clownery. These classical conceptions imply an authorship at the core of irony, which defies contemporary use of the term as a synonym for coincidence, or to describe literary technique. In A Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth asserted that the concept can only be vaguely defined. This sentiment is also held by other modern scholars (Enright; Barbe), including D.C. Muecke who wrote, "The art of irony is the art of saying something without really saying it" (5). Booth suggested that despite others' claims, everything cannot be described as ironic because that would weaken the term's use in rhetorical criticism. What Booth referred to as "stable irony," or irony with a simple, single level of reconstruction and no further requirements for analysis by the reader, is the type of irony I will be discussing in this essay. Early in his book, Booth referenced Kenneth Burke's suggestion that "we cannot use language maturely until we are spontaneously at home in irony" (12). This notion suggests the ability to comprehend and produce irony is crucial to mastering language. Booth suggested four characteristics of stable ironies: (1) authorial intension, (2) concealment, (3) stability, and (4) finiteness. Regarding intent, he wrote "they are not mere openings, provided unconsciously, or accidental statements allowing the confirmed pursuer of ironies to read them as reflections against the author" (5). For Booth, the author is a key player in the formation of ironies, and a statement can only be ironic if the author intended it to be perceived as such. Additionally, the true 26 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" meaning of an irony is concealed beneath the literal surface of a statement (e.g. if one were to state, "it's so hot outside," during a January snowfall, the true meaning beneath such an overt statement is that it is in fact very cold out). Muecke describes the overt and covert meanings as layers of an irony in opposition with one another. Stable ironies are in fact "stable" according to Booth. Put another way, he claims that the meaning intended is fixed by the author and that any further unsolicited interpretation by the reader may cause the stable irony to become unstable. Finally, Booth suggested that the uncovered meanings of ironies are finite or related to the original literal statements. In addition to his description of these characteristics, Booth also described the reconstruction process that the auditor of ironies undergoes to discern the true meaning of such statements. It is important to note that he asserted we often misread irony, but the reconstruction process includes four stages: (1) rejection of the overt, (2) an examination of possible other explanations, (3) an assumption about the author, and (4) deciding on the new meaning (10-11). Such an intricate process implies that interaction between auditor and author is crucial to the success of irony. From its origins in the Socratic dialogues to current day actualizations in satirical news commentary, irony has had an interesting interaction with the concept of identification. This positive affect of irony has immense value when considering perhaps an argument for social change that would follow identification. David Kaufer notes that an author uses irony to create a relationship with an audience, and that use of irony can help in-groups reinforce their values and unite against a common foe. He writes, "those with whom he shares his irony are his confederates, those with whom he does not share it are his victims" (95). Booth also suggested that the successful interpretation of irony creates a unique relationship and contributes to identification: "The author I infer behind the false words is my kind of man, because he enjoys playing with irony, because he assumes my capacity with dealing with it, and—most important—because he grants me a kind of wisdom; he assumes that he does not have to spell out the shared and secret truths on which my reconstruction is to be built" (28). I find such "shared and secret truths" to be key elements in irony as a rhetorical strategy. Lewis the Social Critic Since Booth put so much emphasis on authorial intent and beliefs, some information on Lewis is necessary to arrive at an assumption about his views regarding capitalism and labor. By examining his use of irony here in a work of non-fiction, I suggest that Lewis used irony to fan the flame of a small-town massacre into the bonfire of a national labor uprising. Nearly a century later, it seems impossible on a contemporary level to grasp adequately the context of 1929 (Herbert Hoover, the stock market crash, the first Academy Awards, Prohibition, the end of the Roaring Twenties, and the start of the Great Depression) (Lawing). A satirist in his novels, Lewis appears the paragon of the social critique genre during this era, tackling the issues of small-town life, and at times concerned with economic injustice. In Main Street (originally published in 1920) Lewis focuses on tension between a progressive main character and the tradition-focused townsfolk she finds herself living amongst. For part of the novel's epigraph, Lewis writes, "The town is, in our tale, called ‘Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.' But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills" (6). As noted by Lawing, Lewis daftly critiqued American hypocrisy in this novel and the subsequent Babbitt, published in 1922. Because of this work, he became more popular than many other writers of the decade and he was the first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Knowing these details regarding Lewis's stance on the labor movement, a rhetorical analysis can successfully complete the ironic enthymemes throughout this short pamphlet. In fact, Marion becomes 27 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" a non-fiction analogue to those small towns characterized in Lewis's novels, and many of its residents the real versions of his regressive characters. Additionally, sincere statements throughout are easily discerned from the ironic and announce Lewis's true intentions. To provide this analysis with a level of hindsight, it is important to consider the final paragraph of the pamphlet: To such an open declaration by the Marion business men that they will assist Capital to choke Labor, can there, on the part of workers, be any conceivable answer save the most militant and universal and immediate organization of trade unions? Can there be any conceivable policy for neutrals save hearty assistance to that labor organization with sympathy, with pen, and with money? "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." (32) In this call to action, Lewis not only asks fellow Northerners to lend their support to the Southern union struggle but also makes a final connection between this movement and the values of President Abraham Lincoln, the last sentence a quote of the president as he referred to a divided United States before the Civil War. Lewis believed that a new type of slavery had arisen in the New South, but this abomination was not concerned with skin color as much as class. He was a literary activist concerned with rural America's discontents, and readers in 1929 would have been aware of this when reading the pamphlet. Praise Blame Richard Rorty juxtaposes a final vocabulary of society and a vocabulary to which the ironist aspires. He writes, "An ironist cannot get along without the contrast between the final vocabulary she inherited and the one she is trying to create for herself. Irony is, if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive. Ironists have to have something to have doubts about, something from which to be alienated" (88). Such description places the ironist in a position where she is always reacting and critiquing the external society. Irony sits opposite a certain status quo or "common sense" (Rorty 74). How does this critique function? Rorty notes a vocabulary is used to critique another vocabulary, as a culture is used to critique another culture (80). This tends to cause friction between the ironist and her victim. For example, in an early period of the women's rights movement, irony was used to convey a covert message that women are intelligent and able to reason via an overt vocabulary that may be interpreted as in support of the status quo. Elizabeth Galewski described how Judith Sargent Murray used irony in "On the Equality of the Sexes," claiming "the variety of fashions" and women's "talent for slander" implies woman's ability to reason. Clearly there are many other arguments for why women should be provided education, but these frivolous attributes are taken by Sargent Murray and made to serve a new purpose. She suggests the ability to reason would be better used by women if they are provided with an education. Knox describes how works of the Augustan era suggest how a rhetor may become an ironist either by overtly praising those she intends to covertly blame or by overtly blaming those she intends to covertly praise. This tactic, which functions by exaggerating the inappropriateness of the ironist's mismatched statement, appears to be useful in critical irony, where a judgment is to be made on the parties in question. Karstetter describes these two tactics as such: (1) "Praising something for what it isn't," and (2) "Praising the reprehensible for what it is" (168). For example, the clever ironist may stumble upon a situation where two business partners are having a dispute over profit share. One partner is greedy and contributes little to the business operations, while the other has previously given up earnings to the other and stays busy with day-to-day operations. Considering values of altruism (and being presented with only the narrative provided), the ironist arbitrator could offer her ruling on the dispute by praising the first partner's greed and small contributions, then blaming the second partner's willingness to compromise in the past and daily efforts in business operations. Such a gesture does not at first make overt sense and must be reconstructed to show the ironist's true intention to side with the second partner. With this framework in mind, I will now discuss several passages that blame to ironically praise the Marion labor. 28 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" Blaming Marion Labor Lewis begins his ironic blaming of labor in the introduction to the pamphlet: "Early in 1929 there was trouble at these mills. Three or four malicious workers said that wages just above the starving line were not enough" (5). The word "malicious" here stands out, because it makes this phrase ironic. Use of this adjective to describe the workers immediately after noting the "trouble" at the Marion mills suggests that the blame be placed on labor for the ensuing tragedy. Why? Because these "malicious" workers were not happy with wages that kept their bellies just full enough to work in the mill. From a brief description of Lewis's values, the reader can determine that in fact Lewis does not blame the worker and is instead critiquing those who have done so. This phrase therefore serves to praise labor. Another section works similarly: "Since the first strike at Marion, these six hundred are working only fifty-five hours a week, but in the good old days, before agitators came to disturb the peace of this idyllic village, they worked twelve hours a day or twelve hours a night, and had no time to think about such unAmerican ideas as how to get more than $13 a week" (17-18). This section swaps "malicious" with "unAmerican" and suggests that the unionizing worker is opposing nationalist sentiment in favor of personal gain. But by noting that the gain would be up from a measly $13 per week, Lewis guides the reader to a covert meaning: that uniting for better pay and working conditions are in fact NOT "un-American." The passage also suggests, like many others in the pamphlet, that outsiders were harming Marion by interrupting the "peace." Lewis was himself one of these outsiders, and he suggests in another section that the South must accept both foreign agitators along with foreign capital. The truth Lewis hopes to illuminate is that there was no "peace" before Marion workers formed a union, but merely oppression and poor working conditions. Additionally, the pamphlet is aimed at a Northern audience, and with the goal of raising donations, it would not be wise to make a statement criticizing the efforts of Northerners, unless it is an ironic one. This focus on the foreign "agitator" is a technique Lewis uses to address his audience. Lewis's concern with foreignness appears in another section as well, but it works ironically in a different way: "This man's name is Dan Elliott. I have already referred to him as one of the strike leaders who discovered striking even before the ‘foreign' agitators came in. I hope he will leave Marion immediately. Marion is not a very healthy place for men with such foreign and Bolshevik names as Dan Elliott" (16). Dan Elliott is one of the Marion workers Lewis describes as forming and leading the local union with support from the UTW. Here Lewis critiques Elliott for his foreignness and even makes use of quotation marks to denote the word "foreign" in his description of the man. By doing so, Lewis is making an attack at those who suggest it was not Marion workers who caused the conflict, but agents of organizations like the UTW. The covert meaning here is that Elliott is not a foreign name, nor a Bolshevik one, and that Dan Elliott is at home in Marion and a significant figure in the local union. Praising Mill Management and Capitalism In contrast to blaming labor, Lewis praises mill management throughout the pamphlet to expose and blame its hypocrisy. Writing of Tilden Lee Carver, one of the men wounded in the shootout who died in the hospital, Lewis takes on a dark tone: "He is dead now. He is one problem that we need not solve in Marion. Isn't it unfortunate that the nimble guns of the sheriff's deputies did not get all of those misplaced 600 who work for the Marion Manufacturing Co.! Then, like Mr. Carver, they would none of them have any more problems" (7). This dark irony overtly praises the actions of law enforcement and suggests death for the problems/workers of Marion, while covertly critiquing such ideas that favor capitalism. While Carver in death was indeed no longer concerned with the labor dispute, Lewis covertly laments the man's death. 29 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" Another example of blaming by praising can be found in his description of the Marion Manufacturing Co. mill: But, going out the two miles, you come to East Marion and to the mill of the Marion Manufacturing Co., which makes plain white cotton cloth, the sort of cloth that is used in cheap pillowcases. The mill is the centre of the village, and to its six hundred employees it is the most interesting thing to be seen. Its clamorous shuttles, its dirty floors, its roar and utter ghastly fatigue take the place, for some six hundred men, women and children, of the quiet mountain glens from which our civilization has rescued them. (17) This passage functions ironically in two ways. First, Lewis suggests that the toil of the Marion worker is merely for cheap pillowcases, and that the mill is loud, "dirty," and tiring. These all could be sincere statements by Lewis, but his suggestion that this life is a rescue for the workers (old and young) from peaceful mountain lives makes the section ironic. The covert meaning is the notion that life before in those mountain glens was much better than that experienced by the Marion workers in the mill. This section is a compact example of the larger pamphlet, which uses sincere and ironic phrases to complement one another and make strides towards Lewis's end goal. In addition, this section blames by praising not only mill management, but also the larger capitalist system that has overthrown the Southern rural agrarian lifestyle. Lewis notes his place as among the perpetrators of this degradation when he suggests "our civilization" is what caused the movement. His place as a member of the gentry allows him to critique his own destructive culture. Another section summarizing the living conditions in the East Marion mill village works towards the same point: "This packing box on stilts above a welter of red clay is the refuge, the castle, the whole home of most of these workmen at Marion. It is their reward for their work of ten or twelve hours a day. It is the way in which we teach them that in this country the results of honest labor are a splendor unlike that of the hovels of the Old World" (19). Here, the sincere statement made by Lewis is his metaphor used to describe the mill village house as a "packing box on stilts." This description interacts ironically with a description of such a building as a "refuge," "castle," or "whole home." Lewis then goes on to ascribe nationalist sentiment to harsh labor and the "splendor" of the mill house, just as an activist may suggest "it is American" to own guns. In conjunction with his harsh critique of the houses, this phrase becomes ironic. Again, Lewis notes that it is "we" that lead the worker into this role, critiquing not only mill management, but also the larger system in which he is implicated. Satirizing the Marion Kiwanis Pamphlet In the last section of his pamphlet, Lewis turns his attentions to a publication from the Marion Kiwanis club, which served to solicit investment from industry in McDowell County. Several passages from the publication did not frame the town to Lewis's standards and he gives some commentary. The first described here is a section that details the lives of children in Marion, with the Kiwanis statement in quotations and Lewis's critique in parentheses: "And for children, Marion is an ideal happy home town, with a fairyland around it in which they may frolic and grow sturdier through all seasons of the year." (Happy fairyland, where an eight-year-old girl frolics on bare sun-bitten red clay, after only seven or eight hours a day of washing, combing, feeding, quieting her four smaller brothers and sisters, with no older person there to help. Happy Kiwanians, dreamers and poets of the Vital Urge!). (30) Again, Lewis uses sincere phrases to add to an ironic statement, writing in parentheses of the true experience of a Marion youth in opposition with the Kiwanis vision. Lewis suggests a "Mud Fairyland," 30 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" which appears to be an oxymoronic and ironic phrase. The covert ridicule here is of the Kiwanis false depiction of Marion. In another significant critique, Lewis analyzes how the Kiwanis of Marion describe labor. This section is included with the Kiwanis statement in quotations and Lewis's emphasis added and critique in parentheses: "Labor in McDowell county is plentiful and willing, and of a most intelligent, loyal and desirable kind. Under no more than reasonably fair treatment of its help, every factory or branch of industry is certain to be able to secure adequate, satisfactory and contented labor." (Was there ever a more extraordinary expression of Marionian and Kiwanian ideals than that "no more than REASONABLY fair treatment"?) (31) Likely the genesis for Lewis's pamphlet title, this section of the Kiwanis publication is ostensibly aimed at industry representatives and their goals. Lewis deftly critiques the phrase "no more than reasonably fair treatment" as characteristic of the Marion establishment which seeks to invite foreign capital but not foreign "agitators." Such a statement is nearly treasonous to the people of McDowell County. Marion as an Example Finally, I wish to critique how Lewis uses Marion as an example for the labor struggle throughout not only the South, but the entire nation. He acknowledges a deficiency here, writing: There is one unfairness in this pamphlet—it too much emphasizes one town. Marion is as barbarous as I say, but there are scores of mill towns quite as bad, and not only in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama, but in virile Maine, pure Massachusetts, and the sacred Middle West. But in the South the misery is a little newer, less established, easier to attack. (3) Although Lewis suggests he focused a bit too much on Marion due to time limitations, he also implicates the town as representative of mill towns throughout the nation. Lewis uses Marion as an exaggerated characterization of the average mill town of the era. However, Marion would not have been known to him if it weren't for the violent shoot out. Lewis overgeneralizes to describe the conditions of other Southern textile mill towns as like Marion's, despite providing little evidence of similar "barbaric" events. Nevertheless, it works to Lewis's advantage to suggest that Marion is ordinary and like many other towns. This strategy works as a fear tactic, suggesting that Northern sympathizers should donate to stem the tide of abusive capitalism in American industry. Marion is simply the vicious example Lewis can present in aims of spurring action. Conclusion Early in this essay, I described my project as focused on Lewis's use of irony to critique the status quo in Marion and therefore inequality and abuse of labor in mill towns throughout the South. After analyzing his pamphlet, I suggest Lewis does so (1) through ironic identification, (2) by blaming labor and praising mill management and capitalism, (3) by pairing irony with sincerity, and (4) by using tragedy-stricken Marion as an example. After reading Lewis's detailed description of East Marion living conditions, I suggest future work on the Marion strike and surrounding events of the 1920s and 1930s may include a study of the mill village as a capitalist edifice created and controlled by management, but nevertheless the home of labor. This could provide insight into the privatization of public life, which occurs in online spaces of the 21st century (e.g. Facebook, Twitter). I suggest that Lewis's character and motives allow for readers to identify with his values and critiques. These values are apparent when Lewis pairs sincere statements with ironic ones. By sharing these ironies 31 �A.G. Hughes • "Cheap and Contented Labor" and "secret truths," Lewis makes his readers into confederates. Additionally, the praise by blame and blame by praise frameworks suggested by Karstetter are very helpful in this analysis, as nearly all of Lewis's ironies are directed at either the workers or industry. Furthermore, Marion is a prime site of critique by Lewis due to its recent tragedy and although his characterization of the town as normal is reprehensible, it serves well his purpose of eliciting donations for the UTW. Coming two centuries after Jonathan Swift's critique of 18th century inequality among the Irish in A Modest Proposal, Lewis's Cheap and Contented Labor demonstrates irony's lasting value in the rhetoric of social criticism. _____________________________ Works Cited Aristotle. "Rhetoric." Gorgias and Rhetoric. Translated by Joe Sachs, Focus, 2009. Barbe, Katharina. Irony in Context. John Benjamins, 1995. Booth, Wayne. A Rhetoric of Irony. U of Chicago P, 1974. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. U of California P, 1966. Cloud, Dana. "The Null Persona: Race and the Rhetoric of Silence in the Uprising of '34." Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 2, 1999, pp. 177-209. ---. "Laboring Under the Sign of the New: Cultural Studies, Organizational Communication, and the Fallacy of the New Economy." Management Communication Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 2001, pp. 268-78. Enright, D. J. The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony. Oxford UP, 1986. Galewski, Elizabeth. "The Strange Case for Women's Capacity to Reason: Judith Sargent Murray's Use of Irony in ‘On the Equality of the Sexes' (1790)." Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 93, no. 1, 2007, pp. 84-108. Garrett-Scott, Shennette. "‘The Hope of the South': The New Century Cotton Mill of Dallas, Texas, and the Business of Race in the New South, 1902–1907." Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 116, no. 2, 2012, pp. 138-66. Greenhouse, Steven. "Volkswagen Vote is Defeat for Labor in South." The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2014, www. nytimes.com/2014/02/15/business/volkswagen-workers-reject-forming-a-union.html. 16 Nov. 2017. Karstetter, Allan B. "Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Irony." Speech Monographs, vol. 31, no. 2, 1964, pp. 16278. Kaufer, David. "Irony and Rhetorical Strategy." Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 10, no. 2, 1977, pp. 90-110. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. 1841, Princeton UP, 1989. Knox, Norman. The Word Irony and Its Context, 1500-1755. Duke UP, 1961. Lawing, Mike. The Marion Massacre. Wasteland, 2004. Lewis, Sinclair. Cheap and Contented Labor; The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929. United Textile Workers of America, 1929. ---. Main Street. Signet Classics, 1961. The Uprising of '34. Directed by Judith Helfand and George Stoney. Independent Television Service, 1995. Muecke, D.C. The Compass of Irony. Methuen, 1969. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge UP, 1989. Strickland, J.L. "A Natural-Born Linthead." Southern Cultures, vol. 18, no. 4, 2012, pp. 96-106. Swearingen, C. Jan. Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies. Oxford UP, 1991. "The 1929 Marion Textile Strike." McDowell County Oral History, mcdowellhistory.com/2009/08/18/the-1929marion-textile-strike/. 16 Nov. 2017. Young, Perry Deane. "Reliving a Massacre: Remembering Our Ugly Labor History." Independent Weekly, 13 Apr. 2005, www.indyweek.com/indyweek/reliving-a-massacre/Content?oid=1194611. 16 Nov. 2017. 32 �Lauren Liebow "Hoeism" Integrating the Narratives of Sex, Social Media, and Femininity into the Postmodern Tech Ecosystem O riginally intended for status updates and content sharing, social media often transcends into the storytelling realm. Twitter witnessed a narrative phenomenon of “hoe stories,” featuring connected threads of tweets written by women, narrating outrageous stories about their own real-life sex scandals. In late 2015, Aziah King (Twitter handle @_zolarmoon) wrote 148 tweets in a sensational recount of her weekend exploits as a stripper. She spins a tall tale of prostitution, adventure, murder, attempted suicide, and broken friendship. The story hinges upon a chance meeting with another dancer at a Hooters restaurant, where she and another customer are “vibing over our hoeism or whatever,” hoeism acting as the catalyst to this modern fable (King). The Twitter thread gained momentum and became wildly popular. Hoe stories like King’s appear both on and off Twitter in various forms, and stories of a similar tenor echo the ones found on Twitter. Other women of color, such as Oloni, (Twitter handle @Oloni) post anonymous stories from their followers about blowjobs, car sex, and occasional incest. Women like Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj in the music industry also use sex to empower, rather than shame, other women. Commonly accepted prerequisites of hoe stories dictate that they must come from a woman, and they must be true. Hoe stories represent a generational and cultural shift away from archaic values of modesty and repressed sexuality, empowering women to express themselves as sexual and creative beings. People depend on these women to produce content, online artwork, and creative material that transforms the purpose of the internet from pure utility to an artistic expression. However, the tech industry relentlessly denies women access to roles that would allow them to gain a relevant voice in the medium upon which their artwork relies. Women striving to gain sexual authority through social media consistently find themselves subjected to systematic oppression by a patriarchal hegemony that limits the control they have over a creative medium in their art. To achieve equality in this regard, women must contribute as much as men to constructing the language of the internet and technology. Indeed, though women gain autonomy through self-imposed, social-mediated sexualization and produce significant creative content on the internet, masculinity exerts almost universal control by dominating its coding and management, leaving women far from achieving parity in the posthuman sexual narrative genre. Victorian literature transformed sex into a heavily guarded and cloistered topic. The era’s social energy condemned women to a crushing silence on all subjects regarding sex and promiscuity, insisting women turn “away from [their] bodies” (Greenblatt 5). A woman’s body represented sexuality by default. Worse, as Hélène Cixous notes, women were “shamefully taught to ignore [their bodies]… with that stupid sexual modesty” (Cixous 885). Although this social rigidity carried over multiple generations, a shift in cultural values recently allowed modern women on the internet to embrace and celebrate their sexuality. A product of the women’s liberation movement rooted in the sexual revolution of the early 1970s, modern modes of online femininity offer signs of an updated revolution for social power. A movement originally catalyzed by the birth control pill, women gained contraceptive autonomy in the bedroom and could privately moderate their own bodies via reproduction. That same social movement has transformed into a demand for social authority and the elimination of the uniquely feminine shame associated with sex. Women empower one another through this movement to reject the shame that an overbearing patriarchy imposes upon their bodies by publicly claiming, and even broadcasting, sex online. 33 �Lauren Liebow • "Hoeism" Through directly rejecting these Victorian norms of reserved femininity, hoe stories reverse the accepted roles of heteronormative sexual authority. These stories oppose the dominant and toxic sex culture created by and tailored to men. King’s hoe story documents her first-person recount of serendipitously meeting another stripper at Hooters, spontaneously going to Florida with her, entangling herself in a prostitution ring, and finally fleeing from a murder scene after she witnesses an attempted suicide. Openness about sex work and King’s willingness to claim her “hoeism” without a hint of inhibition or modesty characterize the narrative as a modern millennial oeuvre. Her openness recalls Cixous’s distaste for anything less than the unadulterated feminine narrative: “[c]ensor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard” (880). Cixous promotes this kind of openness and frank sexuality, often lauded in modern progressive feminism, yet not without particular retaliation from staunchly-third wave movements. The women who opposed the glass ceiling were not conscious of a need for the multiplicity currently afforded to women in social media spaces. Internet feminism leads and empowers the newest, fourth wave of feminism, pushing the boundaries of women-only spaces and the freedom to explore women-specific issues with one another and on the cusp of the rapidly evolving technological landscape. King’s hoe story is remarkable because her sexualized content not only narrates, but also provides a feminine space on Twitter for women to undermine traditional patriarchal systems. She deconstructs the preexisting structures in sexual narratives to achieve a cultural power shift between men and women. Historically, “female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters,” leading to a prevailing patriarchy in which women are a “prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies” (Irigaray 25). However, King does not ascribe to Luce Irigaray’s total rejection of heterosexual norms. Instead, she uses these structures to her advantage in an intentionally performative reversal of engendered sexual power. She recounts a certain technique she uses to get her boyfriend to do what she wants. He did not want her to go on the trip to Florida: “He was soooooo hurt… So I had to fuck him calm, & then I left” (King). King places her boyfriend’s masculine authority in question, undermining his assumed patriarchal privilege. She essentially claims absolute power over the situation, and asserts herself as a rediscovered and dominant sexual woman in spite of her inherent disadvantage in such a rigidly phallocentric society. The rest of King’s notorious hoe story especially opposes the archaic constructs of sexual reserve by further publicizing everything that the surrounding social norms deem unacceptable. She seems entirely comfortable with casually tweeting to her sizable audience, “Ima full nude typa bitch,” meaning that she prefers to dance at strip clubs entirely naked rather than inhibited by any clothing as certain strip clubs require (King). Rejecting the taboo against nudity, King shares this with her followers thereby implicitly proclaiming that the “personal is political” (Hanisch 1). Since sex work lends itself to a politicized vision of intimacy with the female body, King captures this skewed version of privacy in her welldocumented Twitter thread. Calling herself a bitch in her own writing eliminates any residual shyness in her particular form of femininity; she denies power to the word itself, and instead publicly reclaims her personal feminine power. The public nature of hoe stories invokes a shift in the patriarchal paradigm by politicizing the sexual experience from a decidedly female perspective. King’s refusal to shy away from the taboo parts of her story – and of her body – make her narrative particularly subversive to the dominant system. Critics of this modern sexual agency claim that women subject themselves to an objectified realm, incapable of escaping the sexual responsibility of their own bodies. Too often both men and women find the topic of Twitter hoe stories abrasive and gratuitously sexual in nature. Current debate on the topic question whether the sexual content in feminine liberation narratives are necessary at all; would it not be easier to advocate for equality without discussing sex? However, assuming that women bear the burden of sexual responsibility is a critical mistake. Objectification is often transactional, mimicking a two-way 34 �Lauren Liebow • "Hoeism" street. While the male gaze, as scholars like Laura Mulvey argue, traditionally views women as little more than mere images of ideation, sexual liberation and internet narratives give rise to a new feminine gaze, which deflects the unwanted attention of objectification back onto the oppressor. To access this empowered stance, women have taken charge and imposed their own feminine identities and sexual personhoods, bereft of the cumbersome sexual responsibility often attached to women by default. Hoe stories contribute to this discourse, acknowledge the nature of their oppression in order to exploit the system by which their narrators experience opposition. In particular, women of color face far more difficulties breaking their objectified status and their bodies’ subjugation to an oppositional male gaze. By reclaiming and owning their sexualized status in the context of the oppositional gaze, women earn a credible voice in their own narratives, a particular agency that affords them an authoritative perspective on their experience. Indeed, politicizing sex allows hoe stories to rewrite the traditional culture of shame surrounding sex. This flips our conventions of power and sex upside-down. It affords a newfound sense of sexual autonomy by dispelling old-fashioned values and eliminating the disadvantage women experience in this power structure. Although the theme of empowerment through sex manifests elsewhere in literature and film – from Madame Bovary and The Awakening to Thelma and Louise – Twitter breaks the mold by bringing the narrative one step closer to its audiences. Hoe stories are unique because of their proximity to reality and fewer levels of dissociation from their readers. The medium itself promotes interaction between reader and author, encouraging people to read and respond to narratives such as King’s. Unlike a published autobiography, Twitter allows anyone to share stories and ideas online; anyone from rap artists to Hooters employees can write a story compelling enough to raise awareness or make their voices heard. This unique interconnectivity in hoe stories normalizes discussions about sex and creates an open, online environment for common values and cultural identity to evolve and progress. In similar fashion to Cixous’s “woman for women” argument, Carol Hanisch’s “The Personal is Political” examines how individual, personal problems that women face are issues that other women share in common; women benefit from sharing and helping one another in these struggles. Many women behind Twitter’s hoe stories interact with and respond to an audience of followers, allowing their readers to share opinions and advice with one another, free of the oppressive masculine voice prevalent for so long in the feminine narrative. Hanisch calls this “the pro-woman line,” in which collaboration between women of any form assert power and establish a cohesive bond. Among women active on social media, this manifests in the form of trips to Florida and tweets that say “me too”. Moreover, Hanisch contends that personal problems for women are also political problems, identifying the benefits of women bonding together and politicizing their movement towards equality. She insists that, “[a]t this point, ‘personal problems’… are a form of political action,” and by dissolving this dichotomy, women can speak and collaborate freely amongst one another as companions rather than competitors under the patriarchal regime. Hoe stories actualize Hanisch’s ideal by bringing women together and politicizing their words in public tweets. In this respect, King’s audience is just as responsible as King is for politicizing her personal space. King’s narrative promotes the politically-charged, sexually-liberated heart of feminism. Although historical feminist movements failed in many ways to recognize true intersectionality in their social theories, women like King open the spirit of sexual liberation feminism to a broader population. Because “women do not constitute, strictly speaking, a class, and their dispersion among several classes makes their political struggle complex, their demands are sometimes contradictory” (Irigaray 32). Modern feminists are hyper-aware that women face different struggles depending on the identities to which they ascribe, a concept that eluded many first-wave feminists during the fight for suffrage, which required consolidation to gain political power in numbers. Feminism thereafter rapidly accelerated away from a 35 �Lauren Liebow • "Hoeism" dated model that only supported white women, and toward a forward-thinking digital age that promotes postmodern narrative structures, such as Twitter hoe stories. Brittney Cooper is a prominent voice in the modern feminist movement, who supports and empowers the unclaimed frustration – indicative of unspoken rage – within minority women (specifically black women). In her debut book, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower, Cooper points to Beyoncé as a steward of intersectionality in digital age feminism. She argues that, not only does her intrinsic rage deserve a voice and an outlet of expression, but also that Beyoncé transformed feminism into “no longer something reserved for Black girls with college degrees and Ph.D’s… Armed with the feminist narratives in the digital age, this Black girl [Beyoncé] who’d built a singing career instead of going to college could be a feminist, too” (Cooper 30). This broad brushstroke definition of feminism in the social media age relies upon sensationalism and digital marketing for the widespread success of the otherwise-longstanding movement. Cooper views the artist as a personal inspiration for her work in the field of feminism, and admires the effect that Beyoncé has had within, outside of, and around the feminist movement. Beyoncé opened the world of feminism to countless women, many of whom had little educational or formal training in the subject. Similarly, King sensationalizes and opens the boundaries of feminism in a very similar way as Cooper describes Beyoncé to have done. Just as Beyoncé widened the label of feminism to a wider woman audience, King expands sexually liberating hoe stories to each of her followers, and then to each of their followers, via retweet. There is immense and hitherto-untapped power in the internet, which allows women of all classes and races to have a voice and gain popularity and social value through direct appeals to rapidly expanding audiences. Social media brings an accessible mode of communication to a wider population than any other mode of publication. By opening the world to such communication, online feminism grows increasingly more intersectional. King’s story is far from glamorous; she writes as a black woman about being a stripper. Feminism in her story is not the same detached feminism used by white women, nor by the women in academia. It is a far more accessible, candid source of feminism for the masses. King uses Twitter to engage with an audience that can relate with her thoughts and actions. Twitter, as a medium for her storytelling, provides access to other women who understand and want to listen. With such a wide variety of newly emerging feminine identities, “[w]e need theory that will let us think in terms of pluralities and diversities rather than of unities and universals. We need theory that will break the conceptual hold, at least, of those long traditions of (Western) philosophy that have systematically and repeatedly construed the world hierarchically in terms of masculine universals and feminine specificities” (Scott 33). The future of online feminism would be remiss to ignore the narratives from Black, Latina, Asian, lesbian, and transgender feminine identities atypical of the cisgender, white trope so dominant in earlier waves of feminism. Of course, the intersectional and interactive aura of hoe stories is not unique to Twitter. Women across different social media platforms and in different forms of art have recently embraced a new sense of publicized liberty through sex. The scope of feminine public sexuality spans a variety of “specific ‘texts’ – not only books and documents but also utterances of any kind and in any medium, including cultural practices” (Scott 35). Evident from women in the rap industry to popular YouTube porn star vloggers, women explicitly and publicly write their bodies and bring women into the center of focus – transforming into the subject rather than merely an object. Minaj charges the cultural shift toward a sexually positive culture, empowering women for the natural state of their bodies rather than shaming them for their sexuality. Although the discourse on feminine nudity as an unnecessarily sexualized image empowers women to embrace their bodies as vehicles of mind and soul, rather than for their sexual value, sex-charged rap artist Minaj takes an essentially different approach. Women of color face far more difficulties in escaping the sexualized image imposed by the lingering male gaze. Non36 �Lauren Liebow • "Hoeism" white women suffer from an astounding lack of privilege, and therefore less autonomy to define their own bodies along their own terms. In retaliation, rap queens like Minaj take back their own image and transform the dialogue surrounding sex into a positive force of pleasure and freedom rather than a source of antiquated shame. Free to proclaim the wants and whims of her body, the liberated internet woman “will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her” (Cixous 886). Hoe stories and their music industry counterparts work together to reclaim the woman’s body for herself. As models of feminist theory, hoe stories and other feminine sex media serve an important function as cultural artifacts. King’s narrative went viral and exploded beyond the boundaries of Twitter within a matter of hours after she posted the first tweet. Spreading anything virally requires a catalyzing “share” button; as Marshall McLuhan asserts in the first chapters of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, the medium of the story is just as important as the story’s message and popularity. McLuhan repeats “[p]rinting, a ditto device” on two full-page spreads of The Medium is the Message, thereby speaking to and emphasizing the undeniable commodification of the standardizing modes of narrative and typographical production – which, from a structuralist perspective, merely exist as extensions of a particular idea – or referent. As if channeling Walter Benjamin, McLuhan attributes printing with “detachment, non-involvement.” Of course, when applied to the internet, the ditto device transforms into the “share” button available on nearly every social media post. Hence, the Twitter-specific equivalent is the re-tweet. These mechanisms are, in fact, selective ditto devices, designed to share, yet also to attach a persona with the content. Dittoing a work and sharing it with friends on social media involves a degree of attachment while encouraging discussion and interaction with the medium, itself. Hoe stories place the familiar form of narrative found in the novel under close scrutiny and deconstruct it with a postmodern renovation. They represent a new form of social media storytelling, and ultimately challenge the predominant methods and means in the existing medium of narration. However, the re-tweet function remains part of the stiflingly masculine Twitter structure. Although hoe stories afford women sexual agency, the four founders who ultimately created Twitter were all men. As the company expanded, Twitter represented the rest of the tech industry’s demographics: young men. They wrote the code, designed the application, and created the platform with very little input or authorship from women. While these superstructures affect the superficial interface and stylistic preferences, they simultaneously create a restricting sense of normativity within a binding system with which women must conform. Indeed, for the most part, too few women have a viable voice in the operating systems of the internet. Using a male-dominated medium reinforces societal implications that women must fit the roles that men prescribe for them, and that any deviation from this norm poses a threat to extant norms and values. Though many women tend to use social media to gain influence and popularity, it is far from the ideal medium for doing so. Although it represents a globalized space that allows women to share hoe stories, sex tapes, and music lyrics that afford sexual liberty and autonomy, only men develop the language and code that powers social media. In the bent language of Cixous, every woman must “[code] yourself. Your body must be heard. By [coding] her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her” (880). McLuhan notably insists that a message’s medium is as important, if not more important, than the message itself. Arguing from a decidedly posthuman position, McLuhan assesses the extension of self and the way people express themselves by manipulating media. According to him, the people who create the language used to describe a medium exercise power over it – and those who use it. Although King’s narrative fuels feminine sexual authority, Twitter itself is a decidedly patriarchal and misogynistic medium. The majority of Twitter employees and the leadership are almost all men. McLuhan’s examination of identity in such a manipulated space as the internet subsequently blurs lines 37 �Lauren Liebow • "Hoeism" between the personal and political spheres of feminine existence explored by Carol Hanisch. McLuhan examines the discord in the “Age of Anxiety” that conflicting agendas in the electric age caused. Many people, both men and women, consider such openly gendered writing about “private” sex lives on the internet entirely too explicit, thereby failing to see it as a means of reinstating feminine power over what has been, for far too long, a male-dominated and controlled narrative form. Consequently, despite their subversive characteristics, hoe stories will remain subject to patriarchal privilege so long as men control the medium. Indeed, as McLuhan insists, the medium is essential to the message; therefore, women will never exercise true control over their own online sexual narratives until they achieve more significant power in the tech industry and can control and create technology at the same rate as men. Despite the impulse to laud women for breaking into the masculine sphere of publicizing sex, masculine control still dominates and overwhelms the medium and, therefore, women remain far away from achieving parity in posthuman sexual narrative. David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network traced the origins of social media giant, Facebook, via Mark Zuckerberg’s rapid ascension into the tech industry’s league of untouchables. Hobson notes that the film notably portrays women as little more than a “muse” for the men who write the code of cutting-edge technology, or simply the target of “chauvinistic rage and embitterment” (Hobson 126). Zuckerberg’s character in the film (played by Jesse Eisenberg) as well as his current role in the tech industry, perpetuate a patriarchal standard of dominance. Facebook once started out as “Facesmash,” a way for men to objectively rate how attractive the women of Harvard’s undergraduate class appeared, based on stolen online photos. The dramatized origins story of “Facesmash” features “a world of Ivy League computer geeks that excludes women,” entirely indicative of the harsh reality in the tech industry. “The Social Network mobilized routine techno-cultural practices of linguistic and visual subjugation of women’s bodies to frame men’s innovative engagements with technology” (Hobson 126). The digital revolution is built upon the backs of women’s bodies; yet, women receive almost none of the credit or recognition for the work they contribute. Carolyn Cunningham, among other feminist technology theorists, identifies the root of the problem in the fact that “women continue to be consumers, rather than producers, of innovations that have the power to shape gender ideologies.” Unsurprisingly, a tech industry defined by passive misogyny will inevitably lead to an oppressively patriarchal posthuman society. However, hoe stories on Twitter and modes of feminine sexual autonomy via rap music and popular culture offer a unique form of resistance literature that capitalizes on feminine sexuality to reclaim freedom and establish a foothold in the masculine sphere of normalized public sexuality. Ana Donaldson’s study in the Journal of Visual Literacy offers an in-depth analysis of feminine identities in today’s increasingly technological society, and expands upon Cunningham’s observations of the tech world. Most importantly, she calls for an exclusively feminine computational language in the modern tech world. Donaldson identifies masculine dominance in all aspects of the tech industry, from corporate leadership to web developers and coders, and points out the flaws in permitting the industry to remain exclusively misogynistic. For women to express themselves completely, unadulterated by patriarchal dominance, women must write the code (as in computer code along with the implicit rules of social media) alongside men. Women should write the stories as well as control the medium of those stories. The male-crafted language of social media is exclusive, but emerging sexual womanhood and autonomy threatens to deconstruct this power structure. By politicizing hoe stories and shedding sexual shame, women successfully undermine patriarchal hegemony. However, women must also write the discourse and assert power over the medium of the internet to fully actualize this liberation movement. Along the same lines as Hanisch, Ti-Grace Atkinson addresses the personally political nature of radical feminism in a postmodern world. Concerning the future of women’s representation in marginalized 38 �Lauren Liebow • "Hoeism" spaces, she boldly declares: [h]ere are our options: (1) we can limit our goals to advance a FEW women up into whatever existing systems we happen to find ourselves in; or (2) we must understand and repare ourselves for not p only turning the world upside down but—more importantly—inside out. All social relations are at bottom political ones. They CAN be changed. But it will be much harder than the Women’s Movement of ANY ‘wave’ has indicated it appreciates. In this fashion, Atkinson highlights the tech industry’s current – and likely sustained – male dominance in a technologically dependent world. Ultimately, her research concludes, women will never achieve equality until women and men contribute equally to the language of the internet and technology. Women like Aziah King open the door to opportunities for other women. Whether by empowering selfhood and sexual identity, or indirectly attacking the misogynistic hold over the tech industry, women must assert their inherent feminine power. This power lies dormant within so many women across the world, often overlooked by the institutional patriarchy. Oscar-nominated movie director Ava DuVernay insists, “[t]here’s so much untapped talent in the hood.” This untapped talent suggests narratives of womanhood and sex reach beyond their feminist undertones. The intersectional nature of hoe stories’ version of internet feminism marks an important deviation from the heretofore (and increasingly) monotonous discourse of white women in the political and economic marketplace. Although far from achieving total parity, hoe stories and politicizing sexuality through culture bring all of us a step closer to a functional relationship with intersectional humanities and the budding technology industry. Hoe stories on Twitter offer just one example of many liberating institutions of femininity; they are the result of an underlying cultural shift away from the stiff intolerance of sex. The women behind this social energy shift are champions of equality and models of political sexuality. These hoe story writers are a menace to the patriarchal establishment under which we numbly operate. _____________________________ Works Cited Atkinson, Ti-Grace. "The Descent from Radical Feminism to Postmodernism." A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and the Early 1970s. Boston, 29 Mar. 2014. Web. 4 Apr. 2017. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-93, JSTOR. Cooper, Brittney C. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. St. Martin's Press, 2018. Cunningham, Carolyn M. “Men Are Like Bluetooth, Women Are Like Wi-Fi: What Feminist Technology Studies Can Add to the Study of Information and Communication Technologies.” Northwest Journal of Communication, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 7-21, EBSCOhost. Donaldson, J. Ana. “The Cyber-Goddess: Women and Technology.” Journal of Visual Literacy, vol. 20, no. 1, 2000, pp. 31-38, EBSCOhost. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Verso, 2015. Greenblatt, Stephen Jay. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. U of California P, 2006. Google Books. Hanisch, Carol. “The Personal Is Political: The Original Feminist Theory Paper at the Author's Web Site.” The Personal is Political: The Original Feminist Theory Paper at the Author's Web Site. Carolhanisch.org, 2009. Haynie, W. J., III. "Where the Woman Are: Research Findings on Gender Issues in Technology Education." Technology Teacher, vol. 64, no. 7, April 2005, pp. 12-14, EBSCOhost. Hobson, Janell. “Digital Divas Strike Back: Digital Cultures and Feminist Futures.” Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender. State U of New York P, 2012. Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which Is Not One. Cornell University, 1985. Kunsthallezurich.ch. King, Aziah. Imgur. Imgur, 28 Oct. 2015. McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium Is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, pp. 7-24, 1964. 39 �Lauren Liebow • "Hoeism" McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. Bantam, 1967. Archive.org. Scott, Joan W. “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1988, pp. 33-50. JSTOR. Smith, Rohan. “Huh. Turns out She Wasn't Lying after All.” NewsComAu. News.Com.Au, 5 Nov. 2015. 40 �Michael T. Williamson Deadly Iniquities Yiddish Writers Respond to the Treaty of Non-Aggression Between Germany and the USSR D uring times of occupation, citizenship and civic identity can vanish overnight. During the month of September in 1939, the citizens of western part of the nation of Poland suddenly became the slaves of their Nazi occupiers. The citizens of Poland east of the River Bug, on the other hand, became third class citizens of the Soviet Union. In this essay, I consider the ways in which the modernist interwar Soviet Yiddish poet Peretz Markish represents the responses of Polish Jews to these deadly inequalities after the 1939 partition of Poland into Nazi and Soviet occupied zones. As a writer whose earlier work sought to unite Jewish Poles as “equals” in an international citizenry under the umbrella of Soviet communism, Markish’s literary commentaries on the sudden loss of rights that Poles, especially Polish Jews, experienced after 1939 serve as an important and overlooked contribution to Holocaust literature. The Nazi-Soviet “non-aggression pact” was signed on the 23rd of August 1939 and the “treaty on borders and friendship,” which established trade relations and borders between Nazi and Soviet occupied Poland, was signed a month later, following the Nazi bombardment of Warsaw, the massacre of Polish refugees by Luftwaffe pilots, and the Soviet occupation of the eastern half of Poland. Peretz Markish, an anti-traditionalist modernist Yiddish poet who renounced his Polish citizenship and emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926, was positioned to respond to this partition in ways that other Yiddish writers in Europe and North America were not. Markish was a “partitioned” poet, more complexly divided between Polish Jewish and Soviet Yiddish literary cultures than his peers, who usually fell on one side or the other. Aesthetically, he was constantly moving between three literary sensibilities: European modernist, Soviet Yiddish modernist, and mystical Jewish. In his responses to the partition of Poland, he ranges across all three of these sensibilities in order to establish the aesthetic terms that might define a surviving remnant of Jewish literary culture in Eastern Europe before, during, and after the Holocaust. Markish left Moscow in 1921, when he was 26, and he applied for Polish citizenship that year. His birthplace, Volhinya, had been part of Russia before the Russian/Polish/Ukranian civil war, and was now within the borders of the new independent Poland. Once in Poland, Markish devoted himself to Western European modernist literary culture and strove to bring that culture to the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. As a map made by Aleksandra Geller shows, his fifty-one interwar lectures in Poland, sponsored by the Polish communist journal Literary Pages, circumnavigate the borders of interwar Poland. In these lectures, Markish argued the fairly conventional modernist communist line that the artist’s role in the “time of transition” was to draw the “flow of ideas” drawn away from tradition so that it might be recast into a “new substance” based on new “primitive principles” derived from the “chaos of the present” (Geller 93). This new world, he argued, would erase the inequalities of the past and would replace internalized Jewish self-doubt with a discourse of empowered resistance, inaugurating an “absolute cosmic culture” (Geller 97). Such discourses of empowerment, in fact, were a hallmark of Markish’s literary readings. He was a brilliantly unconventional speaker, with “the face of Adonis,” whose lectures fell on his listeners like “fiery waterfalls of speech” (Geller 90). Yet his version of modernism, which sounds much like Isaiah Berlin’s “unbridled romanticism,” in its “hysterical self-assertion” and its “nihilistic destruction of existing 41 �Michael T. Williamson • Deadly Iniquities institutions” (Berlin 145), could not compete with the attention that Hasidic mysticism received, not only from the Polish Jews of the shtetl (traditional Jewish communities) but also from Jewish intellectuals. Whereas Markish’s radical modernism sought to contract and erase the traces of Jewish tradition, or “Abraham’s idols,” in literature, Hasidic mysticism worked through a process of intensely inventive accretion – a prayer uttered in a field of grass might cause the listener to hear God’s voice singing in the grass, or to be absorbed into the roots of God through a tree, or both. The resistance Markish encountered to his conventional Soviet modernist communist message from both Hasidic and assimilated Jews led him to renounce his Polish citizenship and return to Moscow, where he could make a living as a writer. In Poland, he had been likened by the surrealist writer David Bergelson to a “broken clock that chimed endlessly and which, simply by chance, sometimes told the correct time. But no one noticed because no one was listening” (Geller 98). In Moscow, Markish was no longer so divided, and although he was occasionally criticized for “ideological deviations,” he was awarded the Order of Lenin and served as the head of the Yiddish section of the Soviet Writers Union from 1939 until 1943. He became conventionally Soviet and, surprisingly, conventionally Jewish as a writer. His published responses to the Second World War and the Holocaust, for example, follow the conventional pattern of Jewish responses to catastrophe that David Roskies describes in Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Roskies argues that Jewish writers represent disaster by drawing analogies between prior Biblical archetypes and present experience. In the gap between the horrors of the present and the normative liturgical stability of the past, the literature of destruction is formed. Although Markish draws from very different Biblical archetypes – for example, whereas many writers referred to Job, the sacrifice of Isaac, or God’s command to Abraham to “go forth from the land of your fathers,” in “To a Jewish Fighter” written in 1943, Markish urges Soviet Jewish soldiers to fall on their enemies like the sons of Jacob fell upon Shechem and his sons – his published writing follows an acceptable normative pattern of Jewish response to catastrophe that interestingly raised no objections from Soviet censors. His works that were refused by Soviet censors, on the other hand, tell a very different story. In his post-Holocaust novel, Footsteps of a Generation, completed in 1947 before the beginning of the Soviet Anti Cosmopolitan Campaign to erase signs of Jewish culture from the Soviet Union, Markish suggests that the partition of Poland, and not the Nazi invasion of Soviet-occupied Poland, marks the beginning of the Holocaust. At the beginning of the novel, three Jewish characters stand on the eastern banks of the River Bug, just outside the town of Brest-Litovsk, and contemplate a crossing over the frozen river, whose banks formed the dividing line between Nazi occupied Poland to the east and Soviet occupied Poland to the west. The date is January 1940, and the frozen ground on which they stand resonates for each of them with the echoes of past events, near and far. For Bernard Gross, a Polish Communist who had fought against the Nazi invasion of 1939 and who had escaped to the Soviet side of Poland, there is no question of crossing and leaving the Soviet Union: the river represents to him the border between a defeated, no longer viable Polish Jewish culture in Nazi occupied Poland and the promises of the Soviet Union, “a new world which at one go took into its hospitable expanse hundreds of thousands of homeless, fed them with bread, covered them with a roof, and protected them from death” (trot fun doyres 4). Bernard’s depiction of Soviet occupied Poland as an “hospitable expanse,” is only accurate, however, if we think in terms of the landscape itself, into which over 200,000 out of more than three million Polish Jews escaped, finding temporary refuge until the Nazi invasion of 1941. Officially, the Soviet policy was to refuse to accept Jews attempting to cross over the River Bug and to return them, if they managed to cross, back to Nazi-occupied Poland, where they were then sent to what later became the death camps. Markish thus has Bernard speak to a geographical truth that belies a political Soviet indifference to the 42 �Michael T. Williamson • Deadly Iniquities fate of the Jews. The River Bug becomes a physical boundary that enables Bernard to ignore the ways in which he and other Jews are bound by political history. To cross the river back into Poland from the Soviet Union would, for Bernard, be a crossing back into a permanently damaged culture for which there could be no future. Traditional Jewish culture, which for Markish means Polish Jewish culture, had let itself be betrayed by democratic nations, and the backwards “dreaming” of Polish life in the shtetl had insulated Jews from the realities of the progress of history. The River Bug is a protective barrier for Bernard, a sign signifying the remorselessness of modernity in its conflict with and ultimate triumph over tradition. Bernard’s companions, the recently married Vigda and Slavek, see matters differently, and for them the river is a source of continuity, since they feel they should return to Poland to rescue their shtetl parents and reunite the generations that have been severed by ideological upheaval and war. For them, modernity’s boundaries are porous – one can cross a river, return to the past and link traditional Jewish culture to its modern Soviet incarnation. The River Bug is for them one of many rivers of exile that must be crossed; it is an archetype of exile, like the Jordan river or the Rivers of Bablyon, that must be crossed if Jewish singing is to continue in the world. This displacement of the immediate history of Poland’s partition onto rivers and onto the landscape was essential to Markish’s wartime writing, especially because he was driven by both the constraints of Soviet censorship and by his own partitioned sensibility to represent Polish Jewry as a reactionary, primitive form of medieval culture. As David Schneer has pointed out, in Soviet Yiddish fiction “rivers became actors – sometimes victims, sometimes bystanders – in the human drama going on around them” (Schneer 148). The river is described by the narrator as a mystical presence, a surreal landscape of blowing snow and vanishing distances, a place that absorbs Bernard’s attempts to represent it as a conduit for the transformation of “moss covered religiously ecstatic” and “meek and fearful” Polish Jewry into hardened Soviet citizens cleansed of their “nationalistic” tendencies and their “misplaced lamenting mysticism” (Schneer 151). Indeed, by the end of the novel Bernard’s understanding of the line of partition along the River Bug as an ideological point of demarcation between “old” Polish Jews and “new” Soviet Jews is exposed retrospectively by another character as an act of complicity. She says, “we can see everywhere that we are different. Every threshold burns you with its inhospitality” (Redlich 418). The pretense that Soviet Jewish culture represents a superior version of a Polish Jewish culture that can be abandoned and replaced by a new Soviet culture becomes yet another phantasm produced by modernity’s nightmarish hostility to tradition. Markish’s attempt to narrate the events of World War Two from a Jewish perspective, far from preserving Polish Jewish culture after the war, became evidence supporting a series of false charges of espionage leveled against him and other Yiddish writers. He was criticized for his “nationalistic tendencies” and for the “misplaced lamenting mysticism” that underlay his otherwise acceptable representations of Soviet patriotism (Redlich 418). He was arrested in 1949 and shot, along with 13 other Jewish intellectuals, in 1952. Markish’s mysticism, as the remnant of murdered Eastern European Jewish culture in a supposedly utopian Soviet world, offers the world far more than the “misplaced lamenting” that was so scorned by his Soviet accusers. While every newly formed threshold between Poland, Germany, and the Soviet Union “burns [Jews] with inhospitality” in Footsteps of a Generation, Markish’s earlier poetry written immediately after the initial partition of Poland in 1939 suggests that he was already working on creating representations of Jewish literary creativity that would survive a time of lamenting that was fast approaching. If Jews could not cross physical boundaries in post partition Poland without being burned, perhaps a more mystical form of motion could be encoded within a figure of literary and cultural inheritance. Faced with the murderous inhospitality of two occupying forces, Markish looked inward to 43 �Michael T. Williamson • Deadly Iniquities create what Jacques Derrida, in one of his many plays on the dynamic interplay between hostility and hospitality, calls, “hostipitality.” For Derrida, hostipitality enables self-authorization within conditions of confinement and the activation of “a self with a rapport to itself” that produces a condition of “autoaffection, auto-motion, the fact of being able to move oneself, to be moved, and to affect oneself” (“Hostipitality” 420). Can we then, against this backdrop, say that Markish offers Yiddish writers around the world an aesthetic of hostipitality that might complicate the ways in which we understand Holocaust literary history? Perhaps we can, but certainly not in the terms that Derrida, whose misunderstandings of Jewish mysticism are as frequent as they are frustrating, suggests. In a poem composed immediately after the partition of Poland, “To a Jewish Dancer,” Markish draws from mystical Jewish traditions to create a complex literary figure for traditional Polish Jewish culture: the woman dancer whose feet carry her across the world in her exile. In a masterful mingling of the Arabic ode, Hebrew love poetry, and Hasidic storytelling, three literary forms whose confluence has been understudied in Yiddish literature, Markish represents the Jewish dancer as the figure of the beloved, a composite version of the self and its fantasies, its experiences with the sacred, and the sacred emanation of God on earth, the “shekinah” of Jewish mysticism. At first, she invokes awe. “To a Jewish Dancer” begins with the image of the dancer’s feet flashing like “sharp knives tossing about and colliding / their blades dazzling with suffering” (Inheritance (Yerushe) 6). The lines recall the cherubim and the “fiery ever turning sword” that guards the way to the tree of life at the end of Genesis 3. The poet yearns for the beloved dancer in her exile, wondering “how can one weave oneself into that radiant coil / Or unravel the beginning from the end” and lamenting his incapacitation in the face of her plenitude, “I cannot get an answer from your mouth / I cannot cross the divide between your lips” (12). His remembrance of her as the beloved, according to the conventions of the Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish love poetry that guide him, is full of mystery. He remembers and recalls, “my bewildered hands are still / Radiant from placing them on your body” and “from pressing with my mouth your golden hair / My mouth is rimmed with little golden dawns” (12). For much of the poem, the Jewish dancer is a figure for the experience of exile from the sacred, not from a specific lost home. Her feet flash across time and history; they propel her continually away from the garden of Eden and yet they guard her from death and protect the tree of life, which has over time become a mystical “tree not yet planted / But which yet bears the burden of blossoming and growing” and which the poet wishes to invoke through kabbalistic spells (the tree is the central figure of kabbalistic mysticism). But he does not trust spells and magic to counter the force of history, which drives the dancer onward in the form of a Golem that makes her wear a yellow patch and pay taxes even on the patch itself. As Markish follows the dancer from the gates of Eden and into Nazi Germany, he pauses at the River Bug, just as he did at the beginning of Footsteps of a Generation. In this earlier poem, written as history was unfolding, Markish represents Polish Jews as emanations from the dancer’s footsteps: Is their a road that has not felt your pain and grief? Brest-Litovsk was opened up like an ancient holy book And hordes come, laden with lament and sorrow. [….] Their parchment brows are strained with speculation (Inheritance 32) Brest-Litovsk, a Polish town annexed by the Soviet Union, becomes a holy book into which Polish Jewish refugees, themselves figured as books, enter. Yet though the poet asks his beloved, now not so much a dancing woman but rather a collective Polish Jewish culture shuffling between two colonial powers, “And when they left you by the Rhine in flames / Did not the Kremlin’s stars ascend for you?” he is not deluded, as Bernard is, by the false promises that the Central Communist Party held out to Jews. Appropriately, he looks to the River Bug and laments: 44 �Michael T. Williamson • Deadly Iniquities From the river Bug – an insane blizzard rages, With its whipping snow, it wipes out every footstep; And from the twisted menorahs of the Bailystok synagogues, They hung the goles [or exile], like some hanging fiddles. (34) Like Vigda and Slavek, Bernard’s companions in Footsteps of the Generations, the poet sees the river Bug on a continuum with the Jordan river and the rivers of Bablyon. But in a complex and barely veiled recognition of the Soviet deportation of thousands of Poles, with thousands of Polish Jews among them, to Siberia almost immediately after they crossed the River Bug, Markish recalls the desecration of Jewish synagogues on both sides of the Polish partition, the mangling of menorahs, the hanging of bodies, and the erasure of the source of Jewish song. The river Bug, with its “insane blizzard” that wipes out all of the footsteps of generations, becomes a portal to the “hospitable expanse” of Siberia. The poem concludes with a vision of an end to exile in an imaginary new land, where Hebrew, which had been banned in the Soviet Union for over a generation, is taught to Jewish children. “Here,” the poet says, “the earth to each and every one is faithful”: Here even the driest roots shall bloom anew, -Here the sapling tree will be kinsman to you, Here every grain of sand will be a mother to you. (44) The poet, after tracing the movement of the Jewish dancer, finds her on the shore of a mystical new world. Certainly, this “Here” is not the inhospitable Soviet Union. Given the poet’s distrust of host lands that become murderous, it might not be a territory at all. Rather, following a line of thought developed by the surrealist mystical Yiddish writer der Nister, who formed a strong friendship with Markish from the mid-1930s until they were both murdered by the Soviets, “here” might be more like a Derridean conception of hostipitality as “auto-affection, auto-motion, the fact of being able to move oneself, to be moved, and to affect oneself.” Or it might, more accurately, be a textual space created by Jewish mysticism, a heart of the world whose center was Poland. In this space, according to Der Nister in his 1939 novel anticipating the destruction of Polish Jewry in a pit of fire, The Family Mashber, sacred mystical texts ensure the continuation of Jewish language and life after the destruction. He writes: Everything that is touched on is a marvelously begun and incomplete tale and half tale, forming a fantastic arabesque of God’s name braided with flowers and with the dead, and those as yet unborn, the dead from whose bodies emanates a persistent odor that covers the world; and with the shades of those tormented souls who wander about unable to find a resting place; and with still other forms: shape shifters, ghosts, wandering spirits, plagues, demons, good and evil angels and various people who have been cursed. (Der Nister 274) This is the world of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once won international awards for keeping alive the traditions of Jewish mysticism from Polish Jewish culture. We once celebrated his works, despite their difficulty and their more than occasional incomprehensibility. Now we focus instead on postmodern representations of the Holocaust, steeped in history perhaps, but removed from the complex and diverse Jewish contexts that were part of interwar Jewish literary culture. Markish’s and Der Nister’s work is even more incomprehensible and difficult than Singer’s, especially when it is “in rapport” with its own mystical traditions and not divided into the “types” of Judaism advocated by the Soviet Central Committee. I suggest in closing that when we study the Holocaust, we take the time to read Yiddish writers, especially the eastern European Yiddish poets, and that we supplement the commemorative markers and monuments of historians with the more fluent, fluid, and hospitable texts of Jewish literary history. Perhaps, eager as we are to leap ahead to “representations of the Holocaust after 1975,” to quote 45 �Michael T. Williamson • Deadly Iniquities the title of a recent volume of modernism/modernity (Haig 1-13), we can slow down long enough to learn about Yiddish literature “written before, during, and after the Holocaust,” to quote from the subtitle of a recent translation of Der Nister’s stories published by Northwestern University Press (Der Nister, Regrowth). The full title of that book of stories is vidervuks, or “regeneration.” Perhaps it is time to think more carefully about that word, and about yerushe, “inheritance,” the title of Markish’s last book of poetry. In a post-Holocaust world, these words, even as they emerge from a portioned Soviet Yiddish literary culture, might resonate more strongly for us now, if only we would let them. _____________________________ Works Cited Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton UP, 1999. Der Nister. Regrowth: Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During, and After the Holocaust. Translated by Erik Butler. Northwestern UP, 2011. ---. The Family Mashber. Translated by Leonard Wolf. New York Review of Books, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. “Hostipitality.” Acts of Religion. Edited and translated by Gil Anidjar, Routledge, 2002. Estraikh, Gennady. “Anti-Nazi Rebellion in Peretz Markish’s Drama and Prose.” A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Works of Peretz Markish. Edited by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, and David Shneer, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2011, pp. 172-85. ---. Yiddish in the Cold War. Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008. ---. In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism. Syracuse UP, 2005. Geller, Aleksandra. “Peretz Markish and Literarishe Bleter (1924-1926).” A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Works of Peretz Markish. Edited by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, and David Shneer, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2011, pp. 88-102. Haig, Francesca. “Introduction: Holocaust Representations Since 1975.” modernism/modernity, vol. 20, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1-13. Markish, Peretz. Yerusche (Inheritance). Translated by Mary Schulman. TSAR Publications, 2007. ---. Trot fun doyres (Footsteps of a Generation). Soveitskii pisatel, 1966. Redlich, Shimon. War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documentary History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Routledge, 1995. Schneer, David. “The Holocaust and Jewish Vengeance.” A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Works of Peretz Markish. Edited by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, and David Shneer. Modern Humanities Research Association, 2011, pp. 139-56. ---. Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930. Cambridge UP, 2004 46 �AJ Schmitz Reviews Amanda Oaks's The River Is Everywhere. Red Flag Press, 2017. pp. 39. $7. Wesley Scott McMasters's Trying to Be a Person. Words Dance Publishing, 2016. pp. 47. $12. ISBN 978-0997940404 I f we have learned nothing from the 2016 General Election it is that rather large swaths of the real America feel disaffected and alienated. Some think that there is a monolithic anti-intellectualism running through the country, a unilateral bigotry, racism, sexism. David A. Graham noted in the March 2017 issue of The Atlantic that the “important lesson of last year’s presidential election” is that “the United States is coming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban.” Feelings of voicelessness have gripped sectors of the body politic and these feelings of disquiet have been exploited to divide the country. Many believe that real America, the Rust Belt being a prime example, is an area of backward-thought, or regionalism and parochialism. Many think this area is incapable of tolerance, of culture, or emotion and understanding. To those who ascribe to this monolith, I offer two collections of poems penned by the sons and daughters of this region whose voices work toward fighting this stereotype and illustrate voices which sound a clarion-call for a revised way of understanding those portrayed as the disaffected. Amanda Oaks's The River Is Everywhere is a majestic work of singular vision. The governing image of the river snaking its way through every one of the 23 poems of the collection offers both a divisive and unifying theme for her work. Many times the river is symbolic of grief, epitomized by its depiction in “This Poem was Written Inside The River.” It opens with the decisive statement that “I am not lying facedown at the bottom / with my lips stuck in the mud anymore”, a clear indication of the speaker's resolve to break the cycle of pain; however, this is short-lived: I mean, that's what I like to tell myself when I feel like I can't breathe, when I feel like I could fall in love with my own sadness The back-sliding speaker continues his or her justification by asserting “what I mean is—despair / looks good on me.” The river is poised to swallow the speaker in the mire of pain, and here she is making excuses for not moving on, for fighting to wear this grief as a beauty mark. We are all of us guilty of making such concessions; we are all of us aware of the effects our mourning has on those around us. If The River, capitalized as specific, runs through us all, there can be no division because while emotions may vote Red or Blue, they know no abstract boundaries—they are colorblind. The unifying symbol of The River plays out more often than not in this collection. Often considered a geographical feature of rural America, these poems illustrate the constancy of the river in us all. In “What Will The River Swallow Today?”, the poem which opens the collection, The River is an equal opportunity force of nature, taking in the bodies of women, cigarette boxes, empty beer bottles, a promise and a lie. In a stanza on par with Eliot's description of the Thames in The Wasteland, Oaks's speaker loads The River with the waste of society, or merely the leavings of a fine time on the banks of the Mississippi, or the Ohio, or the Rio Grande. It is filled with the traces of lives lived and lives lost, but what remains is The River winding its path through the interior of this country. In the final stanza the poet constructs vessels to navigate these teaming waters: 47 �AJ Schmitz • Reviews The fire canoe hearts of steamship queens are built to carry the heaviness of struggle— they will stay afloat long after the explosion; they will swallow as much water as they can hold until The River devours them whole. The lasting nature of The River endures, and while the vessels humanity constructs to survive upon these waters may brave a few squalls and attempt to subjugate the lasting power of The River, they are ultimately poisoned. The only constant is The River itself and the destruction it brings in its wake. The River can become home. It is human nature to cope with adversity, to defy it and appropriate it, to make it our own. Ego allows us to live comfortably in and around that which disturbs us. “When The River Asks Me To Describe My Grief” tackles this issue. The River of Grief has infiltrated our sanctuary, the “robber of breath” drowns us in a flood of emotions which feels like “thunderbolted knees / hitting the bathroom floor.” The sensation, as the speaker adjusts, felt more like tumbling down a staircase into the basement of a heart that no longer relays rhythm. In The Poetics of Place Gaston Bachelard discussed the essential nature of home as sanctuary. For many, Bachelard contends, it is the locus of all our comfort—our bedroom, the kitchen—as well as the wellspring of all our fears—the cellar. Oaks deftly plays with these essential aspects of human nature by allowing the destructive nature of The River to infiltrate the most sacred of places then doubles-down by including the entire edifice, upstairs and downstairs, as a site of pain, eliminating any semblance of secrecy, any place of self-reliance and self-preservation, putting us all at risk of succumbing to our own grief. The exoteric has thus become esoteric, dwelling within us all, leaving none of us safe. This is not to say that overwhelming grief is the de facto condition of the human spirit. There are memories and the ties that bind us to our pasts. In a collaboration with Wesley Scott McMasters, Oaks plays with the pleasure and pain of nostalgia in "The River Quietly Hums Along to Interstate Love Song." This piece originally performed at the monthly Lit Night held at the Artist's Hand Gallery in Indiana, PA, embraces the individuality of memory as well as shared experiences. “It always starts with the unlocking of fingers or splayed palms [...] so easy to bend hands, so easy to love hands, suddenly woken hands, hands in the morning holding the scent of night like a pair of hips or two over-filled communion cups.” It is the hand, what Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift describe as “pathways to understanding,” that provide the overarching theme of this text. The River sits back as the poets reminisce about the hands that grasped at them as they walked out the door and the hands that held them tight. It is the father's hands, “cracked & worn by the ice-cold night air & too many machines fixed before the sun came up on a December morning,” or the “Hands like bodies handing out of sunroofs, hands like highways, hands like merry mixer rides, hands well-versed in the language of taking stones out of shoes.” These hands are ideals, Roethke-like images we think back on, recast in our minds to produce memories we love from those we hate. These hands are conflicting ideologies which make a “living with a paper & pen & a good set of reading glasses” while still resembling those of their father. This piece staves off the unifying grief of The River and gives a respite from our own neuroses of basking in the beautiful thoughts of who we are and from whence we came. The closing lines of the poem, italicized for effect, beg an answer to the question: What do we do with the hands? The answer is unclear, but this moment of self-reflection acts as a Cougar dam, holding back the torrent of The River, if for only a brief moment. 48 �AJ Schmitz • Reviews Drafted and work-shopped by the two poets, “The River Quietly Hums...” offers a segue into McMasters's collection, Trying to Be a Person. From the same area of Western Pennsylvania as Oaks— nearly the same town—McMasters's work is a revelation in its ability to manifest a worldly intellect from a place traditionally thought to be peopled by those who scoff on such notions of leaving the place you are from. Many of the 18 poems are set wholly or partially outside of Western Pennsylvania though written in that very part of the world refuting the Wolfeian notion that you can never go home again. “Girls With Coins” is a perfect instance of this concept. It opens with the speaker articulating the different types of girls in the world: some girls drink whiskey for the taste or to say 'Manhattan' but you drink it to get fucked up like it was meant to be drunk Through a Bukowskiesque vision of the world, the sense of place is undeniable. “Manhattan” illustrates the conspicuous act of consumption of both substances and a feeling of self-worth tied to urbanity. The subject of this poem, however, is not like one of these girls. She is self-effacing, self destructive, and wholly unknowable. Memories of being “in a city I loved / standing with a girl I loved more / and I never understood” signal a transition in the speaker's understanding of his place in the world. The lack of punctuation and the loose structure of the poem mirrors his inability to fully understand or pin-down the object of his affection, likening her to “a child's furious wall scribble / passed off as modern art” and to a “painting misunderstood / and something / lost.” Situating the text in a city, in a cathedral of the urban, juxtaposes the speaker's upbringing with his desired future only to be ultimately lost on him. The text is purposefully disjointed, mimicking the pattern of thoughts as they enter the brain, though they all point to the misunderstanding between the Janus-Heads of rural and city life. “New Orleans Architecture” plays a similar role in the collection, illustrating the conflict between, much as Oaks's work describes, the rootedness of home and the insecurity of the beyond. The reader learns over the course of a ten-hour drive that “Maine interstates don't have billboards” and how “there's something beautiful about that / but I don't like pine trees,” a line reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's “Meditations in an Emergency.” The reader is taken on a tour through a tumultuous relationship moving through Maine, to Tampa, and then New Orleans. The spaces of possible connection presented by the speaker are not quite real. The Tampa airport is where the speaker was left by the girl who went home and found another. They never kissed under the gaslights of New Orleans. The gut-wrenching satori comes not in a city in the beyond, but in the realization that my fingers will never crawl up your side or learn the curve of your neck instead I'll become some artifact a pressed flower in a book that you forgot was there until you opened it up to your favorite passage The constant movement through space in the poem is offset by the emotional vulnerability exhibited when the speaker finds his roots—or lack thereof—with her. Movement is off-set by the image of the destruction and reclamation of nature by man-made structures. He will forever be a memory for her, 49 �AJ Schmitz • Reviews situated in a static location, unable to move until she allows it. The feeling of stasis, longing for flux, is a part of the human condition, and while the speaker romanticizes mobility it is only by staying in place that he becomes significant, much removed from Oaks's image of the River as a structure of constancy. Rootedness features prominently throughout this collection, and the feeling of home, of feeling inplace, is voiced in every selection. “For AJ; Or Why I Still Rock My Khakis with a Cuff and a Crease” uses the frame of describing out-of-stater who has come to Western Pennsylvania: “once you said / I am home- we live here” which focuses the speaker on the nature of home as the connection to people rather than merely places. I see you and me and everyone with arms spread out fingers apart like the roots of an oak tree [...] and these roots that spread out into the air around us hanging on desperately. People come and they go but are somehow entwined with the very soil of this place: “I reach out and my finger-roots breathe in the dirt-air / and I know that I am home.” The speaker realizes that while the soil is important, other elements render a place home. To the out-of-stater, he lovingly states: and you don't have finger-roots you are the tree and you hold those around you with Christmas lights. The feeling of home is the people who traipse in and out of our lives and brighten them place up, who bring together disparate personalities and ideologies, and celebrate them with “an airplane bottle of Canadian Club just in case it's a long night.” It is, and has always been, the people around us who make a place home, and the rootedness we feel relies upon them, whether they twinkle like lights or leave you at the Tampa airport, to make us feel a sense of belonging and comfort. The images and emotions brought up by these two volumes are inherently place-bound but translate well into the human vernacular. Their structures mimic everyday speech and thoughts and do so without a regional accent. They extend beyond the regions from which they were created and communicate objective truth. In a sense, they present a united voice from a place long-thought to be voiceless. We are all of us vulnerable, all of us capable of love and of pain. We are all of us searching for a route by which to escape and grasping for something that can root us in place. A rivers runs through all of our lives, connecting states, connecting coasts, intersecting voting blocks and demographics. We sometimes wish we could move beyond such divisive institutions and limitations, but what comes across in these two collections, again and again, is the idea that beyond all of the layers of constructs, all of these structures we surround ourselves with, we are all of us tied to our place in the world and to the world as a whole. We feel pain. We feel loss. We also feel compassion and understanding. Most of all, we feel connection. _____________________________ Works Cited Graham, David A. "Red State, Blue City." The Atlantic, Mar. 2017, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/ red-state-blue-city/513857/. Accessed 29 Apr. 2018. 50 �Elizabeth Jaeger Butch Y ou’ve asked me before when I first realized I was different, when I first knew I didn’t quite fit in. I answered honestly: “I don’t know.” However, there is a nagging voice, one which whispers in my mind at night or when I am alone. With its help I remember. And wonder, did I always know and just not recognize it as knowing? As a young elementary aged child, I sat outside the circle of other kids in the neighborhood. Looking out at them, at the world, I saw a division that didn’t make sense, one in which I’d never find my place. I’ve always gotten along better with boys – mostly. Never one to sit or enjoy sedentary activities, I took to sports at an extremely young age. During the summers of my late elementary school years, boys in the neighborhood would ring my bell early in the morning. They’d have bats, gloves, and balls. As soon as the bell rang, I grabbed my glove, kissed my mother good-bye, and ran out of the door. When we played, no one made any distinctions between them and me. We were simply a group of “guys” playing baseball. Around fourth grade, James, one of my classmates, invited me to his birthday party. There were no other girls on the guest list, and both his mother and my mother were concerned that I might feel uncomfortable or out of place. James insisted inviting me was the same as inviting his other friends, and I couldn’t understand why being a girl should matter. My mother, somewhat hesitantly, agreed to let me go. However, the morning of the party, she handed me a dress. In those days, kids dressed up for birthdays. I didn’t object to dressing nicely, only to the clothes which would make me stand out, the dress which would signify the fact that I was indeed different. How could I keep up with the boys in a game of tag wearing a pair of girls’ shiny black shoes? How could I roughhouse, when the rules for wearing a skirt differed greatly from the ones pertaining to pants? My clothes, not my sex, isolated me and impeded my ability to participate equally. Eddie was always the fastest kid in our grade, but we had only ever raced in gym class on the wooden floor. James argued the conditions outside were different, and would, therefore, yield different results. He challenged Eddie and everyone else to a race. We waited for traffic in the street to abate and then spread out behind an invisible line. Before James screamed “Go,” my eyes glanced down the row of kids. My feet — the only ones not in sneakers — stood out, marking me as “other.” Distracted, I started a beat after the boys, but it didn’t matter. The hard sole of my shoe slipped on the blacktop making me stumble. The shoes had no traction, and the backs of them dug into my Achilles’ tendons like pick axes. I finished last, and while the boys didn’t seem to notice or care, the loss still stings in my memory. Had I been dressed like them – rubber soles and long pants – I would have finished stronger; I wouldn’t have felt like a loser. By seventh grade, the gender lines became more severe. The girls in my class discovered make-up and mini-skirts, neither of which could be worn in the Catholic school we attended, but that didn’t matter. At lunch, the girls talked about them anyway. They talked about boys and who they wanted to kiss. Having no interest in any of the subjects dominating their conversations, I hid behind my homework. Something was wrong with me. Something inside of me was broken. 51 �Elizabeth Jaeger • Butch I still loved to play sports and wanted to run with the boys, but they started to shun me. They were too busy talking about girls — who they wanted to ask out and who looked the hottest. For me, these topics were considered unacceptable. Unable to participate in their conversations and lacking in feminine qualities to be an object of their young lust, I was left out. But unseen and ignored was sometimes better than standing out. One spring day when school was not in session, Jennifer, a girl in my class, invited me to join her and few other girls up at the playground on Myrtle Avenue. Having nothing else to do, and wanting desperately to belong somewhere, I went. Shortly after we arrived, Danny showed up dribbling a basketball. The entire school considered Danny to be the best basketball player in Sacred Heart, and on that day he challenged me to a game of one-on-one. Naively, I accepted. Always competitive and irritated that the kids in school regarded Danny as the best player without ever considering it might be me, I had no intention of letting him win. He started stronger. Scoring twice, he led the game 2-0 within the first few seconds. Then I scored, and with the game 2-1 he crashed into me, knocking me to the ground. I called an offensive foul, but the girls booed. Danny laughed and calculated the score - 3-1. Infuriated, I went on to tie the game, 3-3. Embarrassed and enraged, Danny ripped the ball from my hands and went home. The girls all followed. Before disappearing around a corner, Jennifer turned around and shouted, “You didn’t need to ruin the day, did you? Next time, just stay home.” Alone on the court, I cried. I had done something wrong, but what that something was, completely eluded me. A week later, Danny branded me for the first time: Butch! I didn’t know what it meant. But his tone, the way the girls giggled when he said it, and the way the boys repeated it, as if savoring a particularly sweet piece of candy, indicated the term was loathsome. Danny intended to cut me deeply by singling me out and hurling insults I didn’t fully grasp, insults that sliced into my already fragile self-esteem. He succeeded. At recess, if I got too close to any of my classmates, either boys or girls, someone would inevitably sneer, “What do you want, Butch?” After the first few times, I kept to myself. By the end of the year, feeling trampled and insignificant, I withdrew so deeply into myself I didn’t even want to raise my hand in class. I wanted to be invisible. My parents, aware of the name-calling, met with the principal, Sister Bea, and requested her to do something to stop the harassment. She refused. Without proof, she declared it would be unfair to punish Danny or anyone else. Without proof, the torment continued unabated. The following year, Danny branded me again. Lizzy the Lessy! I didn’t know what “Lessy" meant. I had no idea it was a derogatory abbreviation of lesbian. But, like “Butch,” the word sounded so abhorrent. When he put his lips close to my ear and hissed the phrase I wanted to distance myself as much as possible from it. Whatever a “Lessy" was, I didn’t want to be it. When Danny saw me wince, he shouted the phrase across the classroom. Our classmates picked it up, each of them now wielding a knife of their own. And still my teachers said nothing. I grew to hate school more than ever. Walking out my door in the morning filled me with dread and my footsteps, trudging to school, were heavy on the pavement. My parents, however, only knew the kids called me “Butch” and that the word made me feel like an outcast. My tongue refused to wrap itself around the phrase Lizzy the Lessy. So I buried it, a weight pressing down on my chest, making movement difficult. Then one fall day at dismissal — the scent of rain mixing with the pungent odor of decaying leaves — Danny leaned in particularly close as we stepped outside. His breath burned my face as he snarled, “You’re a girl, why don’t you act like one?” I had no answer. I only wanted him away from me. And when his lips started to curl around another syllable, I pushed him, not hard, just hard enough so he’d leave me alone. Wanting to be as far from school as possible, I picked up my pace, but as I turned the corner of the building, Danny rammed his body into me. The force of his momentum shoved my head into the orange bricks of the building. Instantly, an intense bolt of pain splintered through my skull. 52 �Elizabeth Jaeger • Butch Something inside of me snapped. All the pain and anger that had accumulated through the years erupted out of me. Wanting to inflict as much pain as possible, I threw my very first punch, but he dodged and it landed on his shoulder. He grabbed my arms and tried to wrestle me to the ground. Pulling one arm free, I meant to hit him again, but one of the third-grade teachers interceded. She grabbed my hair and his arm and dragged us into the principal’s office. When I tried to break away, her wrist twisted and pulled at my hair so violently that pain surged through my scalp prompting me to shriek in agony. In Sister Bea’s office, she shoved both of us into separate chairs, told the principal what she saw and then left, slamming the door closed behind her. I glared at Sister Bea and Danny, my eyes shifting between them. An intense feeling of loathing rose up inside me. In religion class, year after year, my teachers told me to turn the other cheek. But I was fed up with them. I didn’t want to be a good girl. I wanted the taunting to stop. “Attacking your classmate is a sin.” Sister Bea sat behind her desk, her voice barely rising above a whisper. “And what do you call what he’s been doing to me since last year? What do you call the name calling? And what do you call this?” I touched my eye where my head had smashed into the bricks. Pulling my hand away, I noticed the blood. Sister said nothing, ignoring my wound completely. “That is a different matter.” “No, it’s not.” Anger shoved aside every other emotion. How dare she accuse me? I asked only to be left alone. Why was that such an awful, impossible request? “There is never a good reason for a young lady to strike a young man.” She stared at me, her eyes narrowed to pinholes through her thick glasses. “But it’s okay for him to do this?” I stood up, pointing again to my head. “You pushed me first.” Sitting perfectly straight in his chair, his hands folded as if in prayer, Danny smiled innocently. I wanted to punch him and knock out every single one of his perfectly white straight teeth. I wanted him dead. “You were making fun of me.” “I just asked you a question.” “One that was –” A loud booming noise interrupted me. I turned toward the door and saw it vibrate under the strain of a pounding fist. Sister ignored it, or tried to, but the banging grew louder, more insistent. “Let me in now!” My mother’s voice ripped through the door. Unbeknownst to me, my younger brother had witnessed the entire scene outside and had raced home to tell my mother. Reluctantly, Sister Bea stood up and opened the door. My mother — her face red, her eyes on fire — launched into an offensive. “For two years,” she wildly gestured with her hands, “we’ve asked you to do something about the name calling. We’ve begged you to intervene. But you refused to do anything until you had proof. Well, now you have it. I expect Danny to be punished.” Sister would not be swayed. Her eyes locked with my mother’s as she responded, “But they were both fighting. If I punish him, I must punish her as well.” For a brief moment, I thought my mother might pummel the principal. Instead, she squinted her eyes, and with a voice that sliced through Sister’s serenity, she said, “May God forgive you.” Then turning her back on the nun, she grabbed my elbow and escorted me home. No price would be paid for the blood that had been shed. Danny had scored a resounding victory, and in the days that followed he grew more brazen. Taking their cue from him, the other boys showed no mercy. I lost my name and became “Butch” or “Lizzy the Lessy.” At times, feeling tears rise up into my eyes, I’d raise my hand and plead to go to the bathroom. Sometimes the teachers granted me this little reprieve. When they did, I locked myself in a stall and cried until the pain subsided. However, the 53 �Elizabeth Jaeger • Butch teachers were often complicit with the cruelty and wouldn’t let me leave. On those occasions, I stared out the window, tuning out the lesson along with the taunting. My gym teacher, a faceless body standing in the shadows of the gym, was the worst. When a teacher has a student who is an outcast, one who has been ridiculed and emotionally tortured, it should be obvious that playing dodge ball with six balls is a bad idea. During the game, the gym had been transformed into a mass of chaos. Twenty-two students ran around completely unrestrained, scooping up balls and flinging them at each other. I don’t know if the effort was agreed upon or if it arose spontaneously, but six boys, led by Danny, held onto the balls as they pressed me into a corner. Reading the intent in their eyes, I fell to my knees. Before I could cover my head with my arms, they hurled the balls at point blank range, nailing me in the face, back, and belly. One ball bounced off my ear so hard that when I sat up I couldn’t hear out of it. The laughter and the torrent of “Butches” that poured down on me were muffled. For twenty-four hours, I lost hearing in that ear, but the doctor assured me there was no damage. He was wrong. My hearing returned, but the thought of going back to gym terrified me. One last time, my parents appealed to the principal. First, one boy had assaulted me and then six. What would be next? Sister Bea remained obstinate. She could not comprehend my pain, the agony of feeling isolated and alone. But I absolutely refused to return to gym class if the boys were there, and so she excused me from gym for the rest of the year. The boys had attacked me, and yet, because I was different, because I was afraid of them, afraid of what they might say or do next, I was the one who suffered suspension. One day while the class was at gym, I sat reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde outside the principal’s office, and I started to cry. I tried to stifle my sobs but couldn’t silence them completely. Sister Bea heard me and stepped out into the hall. “What’s wrong?” She asked. “It’s not fair,” I protested. “I never did anything wrong.” “If you never did anything wrong, you wouldn’t be here.” And before I could argue, she retreated into her office and shut the door. Staring blankly at the book in my hands I wondered if it were true. Was it my fault for being different, for being unable to change? At that moment, I hated myself more than I had ever hated Danny or any of the other boys. Now we have an answer. Now you know when I first realized I was different, only back then I equated different with bad. Because I couldn’t fit in, because the principal punished me for it, there was obviously something seriously wrong with me. I learned no matter what I did, unless I could cut out the rotten part, I would always be unworthy of happiness and friendship. Yes, that’s the lesson I learned in middle school — that there was something wrong with me because I was different. And more than two decades later, despite no longer caring about what people think of me, I still carry the scars of youth. The word “Butch” still rankles me, more so than “Lessy,” though I honestly can’t say why. Whenever I hear it, I’m back in middle school, and the boys’ taunts are as loud as ever. But after years of running and hiding from myself, I finally realized that the problem wasn’t me. It was the school, the teachers, society, even Catholicism. I wish I could go back and tell that to my thirteen-year-old self. Maybe then I wouldn’t have spent my high school and college years feeling confused or suffering bouts of self loathing, but I can’t. The best I can do is relate my story in hopes that it reaches other kids, so that they know what I didn’t, that just because they’re different doesn’t mean they’re wrong. That just because they don’t fit in, doesn’t mean they necessarily need to change. 54 �Patti See Change Agent in the Chippewa Valley I ’m at the front of the pack in this bonding exercise, “Move Forward, Move Back.” To start, all of us lined up along the hallway, shoulder to shoulder as equals. Our group is made up of a bank president, an elementary school teacher, a county board member, a small business owner, a community activist, two college students, three university professors and one staff member. I predicted I might end up in the middle, since I was a working-class kid and a first-generation college student. Another white woman is at the front with me. I see her take the same baby steps as I do in response to questions like the following: • If you expect or have received an inheritance from a family member... [I take one step forward.] • If you often see people of your race or ethnic group playing heroes or heroines on TV or in movies... [I take another step forward.] • If most of your teachers were from the same racial or ethnic background as you, take one step forward... [I take another.] • If you were ever called names because of your race or ethnic culture, take one step back. [I stand still.] • If your parents spoke English as a first language… If you see people from your racial or ethnic group as CEOs in most of the Fortune 500 companies.... If your school textbooks strongly reflected your racial or ethnic group... [I take three more steps forward.] • If you come from racial groups that have ever been considered by scientists as “inferior”... If you believe you have been harassed by the police because of your skin color... If you, or a relative, have been questioned or detained since the September 11th attacks, take one step back. [I don’t move.] I can’t see who stepped back, but I can hear the shuffle of feet on marble floors. This is a physical embodiment of privilege. Many of us are born with benefits we did not ask for, which is why, on this Saturday morning, anyway, I am ahead of my peers. The word “privilege” makes many white folks like me recoil defensively. A student once asked me, “If I don’t have to think about something, is that a privilege?” This is a simplistic explanation for a complex topic, I know, but it’s a description that works. Can you walk alone at night? Wear your hood up? Rent an apartment or buy a home wherever you want? Qualify for a home loan? If you’ve never had to consider any of these, then you have advantages other groups do not. Institutional racism is rooted in history, laws, and cultures, in fear and hate. All of us are biased because we live in a racist society. Today those in the back—two people of color from our community—watch the rest of our group members step forward and back and forward and forward again, a metaphor on the state of our unequal country. This is hardly a surprise to these two, or the myriad of others they may represent. But for me (whose privilege didn’t always feel like much) this is nothing short of a revelation. I have another epiphany: those of us at the front rarely look back. 55 �Patti See • Change Agent in the Chippewa Valley This is our third Saturday morning together in our Circles of Change group. Before our first session, I found myself wondering how a white girl from white bread Chippewa Falls ends up in a conference room talking about race. Honestly, I think I’ve got nothing to contribute. What am I? Third generation mostly German-American. Culturally: White Trash. I often say this as a joke, but looking back even one generation the phrase wasn’t so funny to my mother and her fourteen siblings working the family farm. I tell everyone at our first meeting that I learned about race from 1970’s TV. Good Times taught me that families are much the same: argue with your siblings and share a bed. All in the Family brought racism and sexism into everyone’s living room. I tell these strangers, “I knew I had to decide if I wanted to be ignorant like Archie Bunker or progressive like Gloria and Mike. I sided with the Meathead.” The one woman of color says she’s here because she wants the world to be better for her biracial kids, who haven’t had to endure the type of hurtful questions she did as a child. As a Californianborn, Filipino-American she often heard: “What are you, anyway?” That first session, we had concerns. For many of us, front and center was our whiteness. One participant said, “I’ve never experienced what it’s like to be followed around a store.” A student asked, “We’re young, so will our ideas be brushed off?” A fifty-something responded, “The longer you live, the less you know.” Will our message permeate the targeted audience? And just who is that? Our friends, families, and neighbors? Racism is not just burning-crosses-in-yards, but more nuanced: a distrustful glance, a singling out. We have ground rules we all agree upon. Be respectful. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Speak for yourself, not others. Agree to disagree. If we realize we have said something inappropriate we can say “oops” as an apology. If we are offended by something a group member says we can say “ouch” and explain why. Expect and accept non-closure. Recognize that discomfort often leads to growth. What happens in the group stays in the group. I teach a class on “men and film,” and sometimes I can’t turn off the movie references in my brain. All I can think is, “The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.” Circles of Change is more like a “Peace Club.” Just a few months past the 2016 presidential election, we’re trying to convince ourselves there doesn’t have to be an “us and them,” that if people are authentic and come together in a safe place then the irresistible force of change will take over. Small steps may lead to impactful results. The first day, we end our session by sharing common themes and one-word descriptions of the session. Eye-opening. Hopeful. Unifying. Humbling. Exciting. After two hours together on a cold February morning, eleven strangers have bonded. When our co-facilitators lead us in a de-briefing of “Move Forward, Move Back,”i we stand in our places scattered along this hallway, another white teacher and I at the front. Two college students and two community members are a step or two behind. Two more participants are many steps behind. Our co-facilitators coax us into talking about some uncomfortable questions: How does it feel to see our peers step forward or back? What does this say about our country? What might this mean for our community? If our goal is to transform institutions, we must face behaviors, our own and others’. This benefits everyone, not just people of color in our community. 56 �Patti See • Change Agent in the Chippewa Valley One student tells us that his friends often pine for the experiences featured in movies about the Civil Rights Movement. His response: “You’re alive now. What are you doing?” ••••• “What you don’t do can be a destructive force.” —Eleanor Roosevelt Two Circles of Change pilot groups launched in the spring of 2017 and included people from throughout the Chippewa Valley—from the cities of Eau Claire, Altoona and Chippewa Falls and the Village of Lake Hallie—which has a total population of about 98,000 mostly white-Christians. The nearest “big city,” Minneapolis-St. Paul, is ninety minutes away. Our Saturday morning group was an odd mix. Two people of color raising biracial children, one person of mixed race, and eight white people. We were mostly Wisconsinites with some transplants who chose to move here. Two 19-year-olds along with 30, 40, 50, and 60-somethings. Mormon and Catholic and nondenominational. Singles and married people—with two participants married to each other. These seven women and four men likely would not have crossed paths except for Circles of Change. We met for six two-hour sessions—each one growing more complex—based on a guidebook adapted from Everyday Democracy, a Connecticut-based organization whose mission is to help groups create dialogues which build communities that work for everyone. These are discussions that people like me rarely have: Making Connections, Our Ethnic Backgrounds and Racism, Our Unique Nation, Why Do Inequalities Exist, and Looking at Our Community. Finally, the two pilot groups gathered for a final “action forum” to decide upon what we will do to make the Chippewa Valley a safer, more welcoming environment for people of color. Our first two projects included “Humans of the Chippewa Valley: Expanding our Narrative One Story at a Time,” a webpage featuring photos and oral histories from diverse people, and “Family Conversation Kits,” available at schools and from public libraries with age-appropriate books and a guide to discussion starters about diversity. In early 2017, Barbara Yasui from Everyday Democracy trained facilitators—school board and city council members, principals and other educators, and business owners—who will pair up to lead ten Circles of Change groups. Each group will work through a guidebook and gather information and local statistics. Together the groups will create more action plans for implementation. Yasui acknowledged, “There is a deep division around race. We need to come together and be able to talk about these issues. People often are afraid they will say the wrong thing. We need to help them to talk about it so they become more comfortable.” This initiative came out of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Implementation Team at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, which identified “specific” ways to meet the needs of diverse members of the campus and larger community. Sweat equity for Circles of Change came from two key players: Dr. Audrey Robinson, Director of the Academic Skills Center, and Mike Huggins, a retired Eau Claire city manager who teaches Honors courses. Both are beyond passionate about this project, and they hope for its effects to ripple out across the Chippewa Valley for years to come. “We all live in our community so we are affected by what happens there, whether it’s at our bank, our grocery store or the YMCA,” Robinson says. “We need as many voices as possible to make this work.” ••••• “Yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” —Rumi 57 �Patti See • Change Agent in the Chippewa Valley The week before my first Circles of Change discussion, I was detained in the El Paso International Airport for thirty minutes—one of those travelers having her bag searched and contents swabbed. I tested positive for something. Explosives? “I don’t even set off fireworks,” I want to tease as two agents whisk me to a table. Each question I ask is met with a terse, “Step away from me, ma’am. Don’t touch anything.” My carry on, briefcase, coat, laptop, shoes, wallet and belt are taken from me. I follow in silence. My heart pounds as I watch the agents rummage through my perfectly rolled clothes and shake out my dirty underwear. They swab my shoes and toothbrush handle, then peer into my mouth guard container. I have nothing to hide; still, I sweat through my clean t-shirt. “We’re going to have to search your body in a private room,” one says to me. “But why?” I try to control the anger and fear in my voice. Should I say that I’m just a Wisconsin gal coming home from visiting her son, who works in federal law enforcement? Do you get a phone call when you’re a security risk? Do I even have his work number? I follow the two agents to an area the size of a department store fitting room. When I hear the door lock behind me, a little voice says, “You may never get out of here.” I’m traveling alone. No one will miss me for eight hours. Irrational, I know, but these agents speak a language other than my own; they look different than me. A female agent explains how she’s going to use the back of her hand to pat my breasts and groin and the front of her hand for the rest. “Just do it,” I say. She touches each humiliated inch of me, and then methodically moves her gloved fingers through my tangled hair. Finally, she says, “You’re free to go.” I nearly cry. Only when I get to my gate do I contemplate how I experienced something that people of color go through on a daily basis. White, middle class people like me don’t have to think about privilege or race unless we choose to. People of color or other marginalized groups live it every moment of every day. Historically, power structures are based on who tells the story and how it’s told. For years, voices from people of color have been silenced or overlooked. As the Chippewa Valley becomes more diverse, our story is changing. At a Circles of Change meeting a white participant says, “Most of us don’t know what we don’t know.” ••••• “All I can offer in the face of uncertainty are my attempts to pay attention, to resist complacency, and to find ways to give more and love better.” —Krista Bremer, “American Winter” Something phenomenal is happening on these Saturday mornings. Strangers come together to talk about how to make the Chippewa Valley more accepting to everyone. Strangers become friends. When I carry materials back to my office, I watch a few of our members out the window as they walk together to their vehicles. Even on these twelve degree winter mornings, a small group stops near their cars to talk a little longer. Our group is moving towards action. We make lists: What’s working in our community? What is not? We vote on areas to target and decide upon Criminal justice/ law enforcement, Employment, Media, Housing. Our mantra is “Start Small, Think Big.” Our goal is institutional change, but in order to accomplish that, we realize we have to affect people’s hearts and minds. We start with our own group. One week our “homework” is to bring in an object that tells the story of our personal history. Members display them in the center of our conference table. A family Bible. A carved Last Supper. A beer stein. A washtub. A flute in its black case. A Hershey’s bar. 58 �Patti See • Change Agent in the Chippewa Valley Really, chocolate? I’m judging a little bit. I can’t wait to hear about that. We each have exactly sixty seconds to tell our story. “You can’t make a S’more without a Hershey Bar,” says the young woman whose family runs a resort in northern Minnesota. “What smells like home to me is a campfire.” I tear up. The same is true for me. We hear that many traditional Filipino households have an ornately carved Last Supper and an oversized wooden fork and spoon on their dining-room wall. And that this stein represents Friday nights at an uncle’s, when everyone gathers with a pony keg of beer to play Euchre or Sheephead. The flute player comes from a family of musicians going back generations. One participant offers a video about her Minnesota culture. “Not too good is worse than pretty good,” she says in a lilting accent. Another participant tells us about how her German great-grandfather was persecuted for his Mormon faith, and his Bible—along with a hand-written family history—has survived more than a century. I tear up again. Our histories define us, no matter how distant. My relic is a steel Wheeling washtub my grandparents bought in 1920 for their rented farm in northwest Wisconsin. When I brought it home from my 91-year-old dad’s garage and scrubbed it on top of my hot tub, I couldn’t help but say out loud, “Adults bathed here.” I soak in a 103 degree spa for fun, and my grandparents and parents survived with no indoor plumbing and bathed in a tub smaller than a beer cooler. Unfolding before us are common themes among these strangers’ histories: family, food, religion, survival. Imagine if we did this adult “show and share” at board meetings or orientations—how much we’d learn about each other. Today, only the professor forgot to do his homework, an irony which makes the two students smile. He tells us he would have brought corn, since you can’t make a Mexican meal without it, going back to pre-Columbian times. When he moved to the Chippewa Valley he told himself, “As long as I can find corn tortillas in the supermarket, I’ll be fine.” The goals of Circles of Change are many, but at its heart is helping all of us in the Chippewa Valley find our version of those corn tortillas. _____________________________ Notes i “Move Forward, Move Back” is adapted from exercises developed by Paul Kivel, Martin Cano, and Jona Olsson. 59 �Jefferson Holdridge Alla Bifora Sparrows are both friendly and secretive. In Venice, however, pigeons are more famous. For they fill the Piazza and the campos, Soiling the place and suddenly taking flight. You wondered where the sparrows nest and live. In hidden gardens, we thought, anonymous Behind high walls, on which the wisteria grows. Just as plates are cleared they quietly alight And soon the noisy, sloppy pigeons come. She felt sorry when a pigeon was torn apart By a seagull with a killer’s evil eye Nature has no conscience or it’s dumb. Sparrows are as cruel as brave and shy. Humans no more moral than their art. 60 �Jefferson Holdridge Fragment of an Ode Catullus wished he were the sparrow Lesbia kept near her breast. Such a thought comes like an arrow And leaves no rest. Here, each of us inhabits The lover Catullus For time is the sparrow And Lesbia the space To which the sparrow flits. And both quickly forget us Like Venice, her breast and her face. 61 �Bronwyn Mauldin Drought We licked dawn dew from spider webs, picked wild sorrel from the side of the road. The green tang made our mouths water. It did not taste like rain. We plucked musk sage leaves, stuffed them in warm crevices to mask our stink. We reaped golden grains of dying greengrass grown shoulder-high, roasted them in a cast iron skillet until they popped like corn. They tasted of summer wildfire. We followed our cats to find the coolest place in the house where we lay on taut backs and searched the smoke-stained ceiling for signs. It revealed only faint silhouettes of our own hands. We drank beer and drifted through bent streets, squatted and pissed in dead ends where parched gray mule deer flicked indifference to our fear with ears like darkened sails. We collected coyote scat, dried it in sunlight, gathered the fur it left behind – jackrabbits, mice, a feral kitten – wove it into the linings of our shirts and dreamed of deluge. 62 �Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association � https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/18306/archive/files/4dae3be76c9af3e09a89d6523795fe17.pdf?Expires=1779926400&Signature=ew%7EE%7Emjfbkz48GejezAuC2LAs0fCYCdCXwiiP0f4-ROvff77DeYjgxzWbnNQjj2Yv%7EDhPJ%7ECd98-z67g8sc4GV24sGLT-Ak6LuA754FdT%7E5omxYPuPyb9rMZ4WNLvuNWWuBBYjBW0qBBWJ94OodQRhd0m0pON9nUJjMn44MHg-j4MmTi%7Elz5i33F9HToNDUqSmJzZVv9rhkH4SXMaiaFLm2FBO-zcfuEbGFnYiVd0mysgfWPYGdD7n-dWufij-3xq9Sp4WjQDelmA8TpH2gYSULKx%7EBFSOc0Bzyco7h1oxNZvGyICcrCWyf1XpE0X4Y8jR1yoq5Sug8Y9vSa52faTg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 38944b0aebd695308ad233c59ae22096 PDF Text Text ISSN 2573-1750 W a t ch u n g R e v i e w Volume 3 • August 2019 Contemporary Humanities Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association i �Editor-in-Chief: Rachael Warmington, Seton Hall University Co-Managing Editors: Jonathan D. Elmore, Savannah State University Robert McParland, Felician University Assistant Managing Editor: Seretha Williams, Augusta University Copyeditor: Alexandra Lykissas, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Senior Editorial Assistant: Sheila Farr, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Editorial Assistant: James Cochran, Baylor University Advisory Board Philip Grayson, St John’s University Kevin Hawk, Redlands Community College Heather Ostman, SUNY Westchester Community College Phil Robinson-Self, University of York Kenneth Sherwood, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology Associate Editors Rebekah Bale, Institute for Tourism Studies Steve Bellin-Oka, Eastern New Mexico University Shilpa Bhat, Ahmedabad University Anindita Bhattacharya, Dublin City University Gabriela Cavalheiro, King’s College London Yasmeen Chism, New York University Carrie Jo Coaplen, University of the Virgin Islands Dana Fasciano, Rutgers University Jonathan Farina, Seton Hall University John T. Gagnon, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Michelle Garcia, Independent Scholar Charity Gibson, Independent Scholar Mara Grayson, Pace University Samira Grayson, Wells College Valerie Guyant, Montana State University Anna Krauthammer, Touro College Richard Marranca, Passaic County Community College Erica McCrystal, St. John’s University Sarah Nolan, University of Nevada Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah, University of Ilorin Heather Ostman, SUNY Westchester Community College Maria L. Plochocki, Pace University Melissa R. Sande, Union County College AJ Schmitz, Indiana University South Bend and Holy Cross College Nick J. Sciullo, Texas A&M University, Kingsville Donovan Sherman, Seton Hall University Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology Ravindra Pratap Singh, University of Lucknow Natasa Thoudam, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Sarbani Vengadasalam, Rutgers University Angela Weisl, Seton Hall University Lucas Wilson, Florida Atlantic University Assistant Editor: Andrew Rimby, Stony Brook University Website Designer: Rachael Warmington, Seton Hall University Graphic and Document Designer: Julia Galm, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown Cover image by Brandon Galm ii 1 �Volume 3 • August 2019 W a t ch u n g R e v i e w Contemporary Humanities 2 Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses: The Role of the Humanities in the Redemption of Modernity Maximilian Gindorf 9 New Jersey College English Association Graduate Student Paper Award Winner Present Company Excluded: Early Popular Representation in New Amsterdam Sean McSpadden 15 The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro: Recovering Africa(ns) in the Victorian Literature Survey Course Angela F. Jacobs 24 “Fuck Tha Police”: The Poetry and Politics of N.W.A. Sandra Young 32 Aventure: Throwing the Gauntlet in University Humanities Courses Sandy Feinstein with Bryan Wang and Jannah Martin 37 “True to How the Real World Would Operate”: Incorporating Narrative Practices into a Service-Learning-Based Professional Writing Course Colleen Coyne 42 The Power of a Story Julie O'Connell 44 For Katie Adam Hansen 45 Adjunct Ana M. Fores Tamayo 46 The Grad Student Ana M. Fores Tamayo 1 �Maximilian Gindorf Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses The Role of the Humanities in the Redemption of Modernity Introduction – The Constant Crisis of the Humanities hat is the crisis of the humanities? Have we, as Benjamin Schmidt suggested recently in his article The Humanities Are in Crisis published by The Atlantic in August 2018, forgotten to see the real crisis “because we’ve been crying wolf for so long” (Schmidt)? In the same article, Schmidt predicts that the humanities will certainly survive and suggests that to “admit that the humanities are in crisis doesn’t mean conceding that they are being driven extinct. It means instead, that their place is diminishing.” Does this sound like a consolation? The last words from a discipline on its deathbed? The last words of someone not dying but merely forgotten and hidden out of sight? To say that the humanities’ place is diminishing (where or what is the end of that diminution?), is to say that their significance for modern society is diminishing. Does that mean, modern society is possibly conceivable without the humanities? This paper argues for the opposite: the humanities are an essential part of modern society because they emerge in the process of modernization as a response to the rise of the natural sciences. I will try to revive some ideas first developed by the German philosopher Joachim Ritter (1903-1974) in his studies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Aristotle. Investigating the foundations of modernity, he determined modernity’s essential characteristic as a “diremption” (“Entzweiung”) between the universal concept of freedom and the always particular history of the individual. This paper will look at what is overlooked or ignored by writers on the crisis in the humanities: their genesis in modern society. If we clarify the emergence of the humanities, their history within European society, we can determine their function and therefore if they are in a state of crisis or not. Thus, we reverse the question: We do not ask what the humanities can do for modern society, but for what reason modernity established the humanities in the first place. If these reasons are still present, the humanities have a future. At first, we need to reconstruct the beginning of modernity by retracing the rise of the natural sciences, because these provided man with the methods and means to build a new society. This development reached its climax during the Enlightenment. The French Revolution has been the greatest political result of this development as an experiment to realize universal freedom in a particular world; however, this turned into a trial of terror. Nonetheless, this experiment reflects the continuing process of modernity, the development of an industrial society in which the humanities were also established. In this third step, it will be shown that the humanities rise directly from the industrial society and that they function as a compensation for the loss of history, caused by the success of the natural sciences and the concept of absolute, natural freedom promulgated by the French Revolutionists. This role of the humanities as necessary equivalent to the natural sciences is still current today, since the process of modernization is ongoing. If that is true, then the disruption of modern society must be interpreted anew. This split would not impede the solving of the world’s problems, as C. P. Snow suggested, but rather be the condition of modernity per se. W The Rise of the Natural Sciences – Experience and Exclusion The central event in the process of building modern society is the rise of the natural sciences with all its impacts, and which creates the ground for the emergence of the humanities. We must examine now how this has happened. The idea of academic education unifies two contradicting notions: on the one side, it is imagined as free and not object-bound science, but on the other side that means it will perform a necessary rising above the practical life, above the essential necessities of the present reality (Ritter “Aufgabe” 109). However, both aspects are two sides of one ideal, the ideal of science as established by the Greeks, especially Aristotle who calls it the theoretical science. “That we call him a free man who exists for his own sake, and not for the sake of another, so this alone among the sciences is liberal: for this alone subsists for its own sake” (Aristotle 982 b27). This theoretical science establishes itself historically after the practical arts; these practical arts are, even for Aristotle, the only existing sciences (Ritter “Aristoteles” 13, 22.). “All other sciences therefore are more necessary, but no one is better than this.” (Aristotle 983 a9-10). The theoretical science is essentially useless; therefore, it requires a justification. 2 �Maximilian Gindorf • Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses The theoretical science helps to memorize what is necessarily forgotten by the practical arts (Ritter “Die Aufgabe” 111). The point is that this relation of theory to practice is a positive, complementary one; the theoretical science actualizes what the practice needs to forget by describing the world from a different perspective; the question of the theoretical science is directed towards Being as Being. However, modern science does not reside in the Polis anymore; on the contrary, its modernity is founded in its emancipation from the philosophical theoria. This emancipation takes place in the modern era, exemplarily incarnated in the work of René Descartes (in his Discours from 1637), and meant at first the independence from any metaphysical, theological or historical questions. Typically for this new way of philosophy is the emancipation from its own heritage; Descartes says: For conversing with those of another age is more or less the same thing as travelling. It is good to know something of the customs of different peoples in order to be able to judge our own more securely, and to prevent ourselves from thinking that everything not in accordance with our own customs is ridiculous and irrational, as those who have seen nothing of the world are in the habit of doing. On the other hand, when we spend too much time travelling, we end up becoming strangers in our own country; and when we immerse ourselves too deeply in the practices of bygone ages, we usually remain woefully ignorant of the practices of our own time. (8) Descartes infers from his insight, the uselessness of all past inquiries of knowledge: “I abandoned altogether the study of letters. And having decided to pursue only that knowledge which I might find in myself or in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling, visiting courts“ (Descartes 10). The modern scientific subject needs to doubt scientifically, methodically and indeed, this methodical doubt secures the success of the modern sciences; the scientific subject does not want to know the miracle of the appearances but only the appearances, as Kant puts it. The modern sciences rely on a waiver declaration; that is the sense of the Kantian idea of limitation. Science needs to limit itself, limiting its field to the appearances of objects, because only these are objects of possible experience. Immanuel Kant shows that knowledge beyond any possible experience is impossible, hence that metaphysics as science is impossible (Kant A xii). If knowledge is identified with experience and experience defined as scientific experience (experiment), then science provides us with knowledge, independent from any metaphysics (or religion). By conceding every claim to know the things in themselves, science becomes successful and autonomous. Logic, says Kant, is certain only because of its limitation (“Eingeschränktheit”), that reason only encounters itself (Kant B ix). For Kant, the idea that knowledge is active; “that reason apprehends only what it has created…and that reason has to force nature to answer our questions” (Kant B xiii), is the revolution of thought. “This is how natural science was first brought to the secure course of a science after groping about for so many centuries” (Kant B xiv). This methodical safety net is the difference between the modern sciences and former ways of explaining the world. However, its gain is also a loss, namely the loss of metaphysical and theological questions. Metaphysical questions (“Are we free or causally determined?”, “Is the soul immortal?” etc.) cannot even be raised scientifically because science works in (is limited to) the realm of experience, but metaphysics transcends any experience: meta-physics. Kant’s Critique aimed at science which tried to answer metaphysical questions in the realm of pure reason (his question was: how is metaphysics as science possible?). That means, science has to abstain from any such questions; hence, metaphysics (and theology) are excluded from the realm of “knowledge” (Kant B xvi.). Where are they going now? Are they leaving a void behind? And is there a replacement? In fact, that is what has happened, at least in the philosophical movement of positivism. Auguste Comte formulated in his law of three stages that human evolution had moved from the theological, to the metaphysical and finally to the positive stage. Comte’s philosophy as a philosophy of history proclaims progress, the ruling of reality, therefore the unity of science. However, Comte misinterpreted this unity, or its security, as founded on facts, whereas it relied on its methodological certainty. That is the reason why Comte is constructing a theory of evolution, a philosophy of history. Comte could not destroy metaphysics without compensating for its decay, by an explication of its sense (Habermas 95). The method internalized by the scientific subject, and the knowledge of Comte’s laws secure not only seeing, but foreseeing: “Ainsi, le veritable esprit positif consiste surtout à voir pour prévoir, à étudier ce qui est afin d’en conclure ce qui sera, d’après le dogme général de l’invariabilité des lois naturelles” (Comte 34). Scientific progress requires the exclusion of non-scientific questions; it leads to the demarcation problem. Because metaphysical or theological questions cannot be answered rationally, they are suspected of being senseless. Positivism does not deal with metaphysics, positivism silences it; metaphysical sentences are senseless (Habermas 105). The relentless refusal of metaphysics shows why the legitimate practical definition of science excludes even the possibility that the sciences could be taken to be meaningful in addition to their application (Ritter “Die Aufgabe” 115). 3 �Maximilian Gindorf • Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses The result is, as already mentioned, a loss of question competence; nature is given by the natural sciences, history is given by historical sciences. The relation between practice and theory in Aristotle is now reversed: theory, not practice, makes the world. But Ritter (“Landschaft” 141-164) emphasizes that, e.g. nature is also given as environment (Umwelt) or as landscape. When the natural sciences began to treat nature as an object, aesthetics began to see nature as landscape, creating landscape paintings. Equally, history can be seen as an actual tradition which affects us, instead of a stream of facts in time. If problems of the lifeworld, to use that heavily loaded term, are declared as non-existent by ontological criteria, there will be a gap; the humanities are filling this gap regarding history as aesthetics has filled it regarding nature. The positive stage in Comte’s history of evolution cannot be the last stage since the humanities emerge after the natural sciences (see Marquard 98-116). Insofar as they appear after the practical sciences, which fulfill their social function through their practical applicability, they are similar to the Aristotelian theoretical sciences: they are, in this sense, useless. However, they are specific modern sciences, because even they exclude any theological or metaphysical questions out of their field of possible questions. Nonetheless, their approach cannot be reduced to the natural scientific method. The humanities have their origin in the historical-critical, the hermeneutic method of the nineteenth century; their origin is the effect of the rise of the natural sciences: the industrial society. The Diremption of the Humanities – Compensating Losses This context requires an explanation because it would stay incomprehensible if it is stated that the historical sense emerges in the age of the industrial society next to the natural sciences out of nowhere (Ritter “Die Aufgabe” 128). The genesis of the humanities could only be comprehensible, if it is seen “as part of the real process, in which the modern society in Europe, and nowadays in the whole world, is constituted in the form of an emancipation from its own historical origins.” (Ritter “Die Aufgabe” 128-129) The process of modernization revolves every social order and value, which have seemed to be stable and eternal; the modern era is shaking. The modern world is determined by an essential diremption, “Entzweiung” (Ritter “Die Aufgabe” 129). The term “diremption“ (“Entzweiung”) was introduced first by Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right to describe the structure of the modern civil society; he calls it the “difference” (“Differenz”): “The civil society is the difference” (Hegel 182) However, this difference is not what Marx would call “alienation.” In the difference both sides refer to each other: “Particularity and universality are, by falling apart in the civic society, still bound and conditioned reciprocally” (Hegel 184). Following Hegel, modern society suffers from abstractedness, namely from man’s abstract nature of need, which befalls and breaks with the historical world because its constitution is the discontinuation of its own origin (Ritter “Aufgabe” 129). Consequently, the diremption consists of the continuing drifting apart between origin (tradition) and progress, past and future. But this drift is positive in so far as human beings as human beings could be subjects of the constitutional state only with this reduction to their abstractedness. Man is equal among equals; Hegel formulates it this way: “that I am taken as universal person, wherein everybody is identical. Man counts, because he is human, not because he is Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian and so on” (Hegel 209). This describes the political realization of freedom during the French Revolution and, following Ritter (“Hegel und die Französische Revolution” 183-233), Hegel is the philosopher of the Revolution. Freedom appeared as an inalienable right of all human beings, as natural right; therefore, all other rights have been dismissed, because they have been justified by historical circumstances, metaphysics, religion or social standing. Every characteristic of the individual, which is given by its historical origin, is superseded. Everything which determined the individual in its idiosyncrasy, whether it be family origin, affiliation to a certain country etc., appears to be negligible for the revolutionary notion of freedom. Indeed, this development is positive; but it is a process of violent destruction, which is apparent at the end of the French Revolution. The Revolution tries to cut off the historical background of the individual, which is required by the universal notion of freedom as the only characteristic of being human; only an abstract right can include every human being. However, this radicalization, this negative-emancipatory concept of freedom excludes all the factors which are necessary for a political realization (in fact, this idea of freedom has its origins in history, namely in the Greek polis and in the Protestant idea of Christian freedom). The Revolution proclaimed to be the end of history, whereas in fact it was the continuation of history. The condition for this absolute freedom and equality is the diremption, which cuts the person off from its historical origin; society’s real lack of history (“reale Geschichtslosigkeit der Gesellschaft”), as Ritter (“Aufgabe” 130-131) puts it, becomes visible. Society can turn its citizens into free subjects of right and law only by unhinging them from their 4 �Maximilian Gindorf • Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses history, because these personal (life-) stories distinguish humans, and therefore limit their freedom. Thus, this is the time and place where subjectivity emerges. As a reaction to the lack of history, Kant creates the subjectivity, the inwardness. In fact, Kant expresses that in his famous words at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill my mind with always new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and prolonging thinking deals with these: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (33-36). That means, for Kant, the moral law correlates somehow with the starry heavens, and both cause admiration and awe, but not with what is in between; in fact, the moral law, or the civil morality, always demonstrates its own impotence in its worthiness. In addition, even worse, the realization of that morality is not even strived for, because it is seen as impossible. The nobility of the moral law within me is its ideality, impossibility; the will alone is free but helpless. That is Hegel’s fundamental critique of Kant’s concept of morality (“Sittlichkeit”). Subjectivity, “the ground of freedom” (Hegel 106) must realize itself to become free. This is “the viewpoint of difference” (Hegel 108); the infinite will to act morally on the one side, finitude (of the body, social/economic conditions) on the other. The life of modern human beings falls into two parts: the private sphere of personal and historical ties and the public sphere with the world of economy, work and business. However, the private sphere, as a correlate to universal freedom, is necessarily free; only a society which allows the individual to plan their own life, according to their own desires and historical particularities, can be a liberal society. The French Revolution is the place where absolute freedom (universality) and the individual encounter each other and fall apart; absolute freedom turns into terror. The civic society is the “system of needs” (Hegel 189) the expression of man’s unbounded ruling over nature; every human being is equal according to nature; society should satisfy the natural needs of its citizens. Man’s historical background is unnecessary in this process. In the disenchantment („Entzauberung“) of the cosmos, the holy grove (“Hain”) becomes the piece of wood (“Hölzer”) which can be burned and commercialized (Hegel 289). When the gods die, their temples are turned to stone; and history is put into the museum. In this time, the humanities develop and, if we follow Ritter (“Aufgabe” 131), the reason is that the humanities compensate for the lack of history; like the Aristotelian theoria, they keep the historical world open and present for modern citizens of the state. The historical sense, which is the foundation of the humanities, wants to conserve everything, not only that with a direct relation to the present. The historian does not destroy the temples of foreign cultures in order to use its stone as construction material; they are declared being a cultural heritage. Society creates the humanities as an organ to compensate the process of dehistoricization. If human products are no longer practically useful, they become objects of free understanding and cognition; they are reintegrated into the context of society. The ambivalence of the relation to history is the main problem of all philological or historical work. A text in question is familiar and foreign at the same time. It enforces one’s claim, demands a respond, but lost its natural givenness. A scholar discovers an old text in his own language (familiarity) but is unable to understand it immediately; interpretation/translation is needed (maybe context knowledge). Equally in the case of a text in a foreign language; it is already understood to some extent. E.g. a shopping list in French: without speaking French, it is clearly to see that it is a shopping list (however, it could also turn out to be a secret code). And this is not limited to texts: the Parthenon in Athens might enclose its sense to its spectator, but it is clear to see that is has been built by human beings etc.; there is some continuity, but it is broken. If there were no relation, there would not be any will to comprehend, if there were no disconnectedness, there would not be any will to comprehend either. The factum of the disruption together with the continuation of history, the characteristics of modernity, are the main aspects of all hermeneutic work. Continuity and disruption are the condition of all interpretive work and of the humanities (Gründer 74-88) and that means that the humanities do not only administrate a forlorn past but reflect the present; the compensating function of the humanities does not exclude critical reflection but fosters it. However, it is a different kind of critique. It is not epistemological critique in relation to objects and nature; it is historical life that implements itself as critique. It performs the always new separation of present and past, memorization and parting, admission and rejection. Gründer (83) says the humanities receive their liability not by objectivity, but by intimacy. Humanities Today – A Conclusion With or Without Snow Thus, to summarize the main point and defend Ritter against the accusation of being a hopeless traditionalist: the humanities shall not save the traditions; on the contrary, that is impossible since their condition of existence was the diremption of society from its traditions. The diremption, as Ritter establishes it, is irreversible but in itself positive. The humanities have the function to keep other dimensions of sense (art, history, language, politics etc.) open, those that 5 �Maximilian Gindorf • Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses would necessarily be excluded by the natural sciences. These dimensions are not smuggled into the present by the humanities, they have always been there, in form of people’s life-stories, histories, objects, places etc.; but they are in danger of being overlooked, ignored or neglected. What does that mean for the humanities today? In a time of proclaimed austerity and economizing, especially in the academic fields, a time in which the call for the negligibility of the humanities is sounding even more seductively, what does that tell us about the future of the humanities? Maybe we could say that the two cultures identified by Snow in the 1950s are still present today. Nevertheless, what Snow’s analysis lacked was a retracing of the origins of this diremption. Although Snow indicated that the reasons might lie in the great change of the industrial revolution, he ignored the emergence of the humanities. Snow focused, dependent on his own biography, on the gap between natural sciences and writers, or as he calls them: “natural Luddites”. His examples here are “Ruskin and William Morris and Thoreau and Emerson and Lawrence” and their reaction to industrialization: It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. (Snow 13) It is paradoxical: as a writer and scientist, Snow appears to be representative of both sides, and he is indeed, but these are not the sides which are in question. How many writers work in the humanities department? Snow’s argument seems to be a malicious strategy ad hominem. Isn’t that the old attitude of the Anglo-American academic world against some parts of the humanities? This old quarrel is most alive in the existing gap, even today, between analytical and continental philosophy, the latter accused of being unscientific, and the former of no longer being philosophy. Snow’s selection and description of the gap, maybe not creates, but extends it; in his view, the struggle is not between natural sciences and humanities but between (problem-solving) science and literature; or to put it another way: for Snow, humanities are literature. That is the reason why Snow ignores the whole history of the humanities. He intensifies the gap between these two cultures by following his model of rigorous science. For Snow, the history of modern science is a history of “problem solving” and he evaluates the humanities according to this idea. Snow’s idea of science is much closer to the concept of a unified science (Vienna Circle) than he might think himself. He does not see that it is not the function of the humanities to “solve problems”; these problems only exist from the perspective of the natural sciences and they alone can solve them. Instead of showing their common ground, he provokes their difference. That is why he states: “There seems then to be no place where the cultures meet.” (Snow 9) Of course, there cannot be any meeting space, if the problem is formulated in that way. However, we have re-evaluated the contexts and processes, which lie in the background of the appearance of such a thing as science, either as natural science or as part of the humanities. The historical analysis showed that the humanities appeared after the natural sciences, as an answer to the social status which was caused by the impact of the natural sciences and industrialization. Thus, there is a gap between natural sciences and humanities, but this gap is not the loss of a former possessed and unified culture; it was and is the condition of modernity’s existence. The humanities compensate for what the natural sciences need to lay aside. The gap was not a gap between two methods, two sciences, two cultures but inside of the scientific worldview as such (to which the human sciences, economics and social science count as well), say its objectivity, and the thereby created subjectivity of human existence or history; the diremption is the signature of modernity. However, it is a diremption in which both sides are related to each other: the humanities are an answer to the question of the scientific progress; they do not just exist next to the natural sciences but are intertwined with them. To Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode (1637) belongs Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1725), to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) belongs Wilhelm Dilthey’s project of a “critique of the historical reason” (18331911). If we reinterpret Snow’s gap between these two cultures in terms of a diremption in Ritter’s sense, we can not only reevaluate the difference between both sides of the academic world, but we can also state that as long as the modern world stays modern and pursues the project of modernity, it will need the humanities even more. Why? If the progress of the modern world means the progress of the natural sciences, it would result in more expulsion of history, more expulsion of the past in favor of the future. And if the humanities have the function to compensate for these losses, they will be needed today more than ever. The discovered diremption between natural sciences and humanities, as Snow indicates, is one of the determining states of the modern world but it is also the indication for their relatedness. 6 �Maximilian Gindorf • Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses _____________________________ Notes 1 A useful introduction to Ritter’s theory of the modern world is given by Schweda (2013) 2 This will be the function of the humanities in the modern world; however, the parallelization of theoretical science and humanities should not be taken as a one-to-one rebirth. The natural sciences have their roots in the theoretical science of the Greek as well as the humanities do, but both sides inherited different aspects (besides that, the natural sciences have more similarities with the practical, technical arts of the Greek). 3 That does not mean that these questions are not asked anymore, but they are asked in a certain way. Of course, Descartes’ topic is the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, but he solves these with his new method, the scientific method (or Descartes’ version of it). 4 The same is true for theology. Kant is highly concerned with the refutation of any possible proof of God’s existence, that means any possible try to proof God’s existence by reason (Kant A 592, B 620.) 5 The original German quotes have been provided below: “warum die als solche für ihren Bereich legitime praktische Definition der Wissenschaft hier grundsätzlich und von vornherein die Möglichkeit ausschließt, auch nur in Erwägung zu ziehen, ob die Wissenschaften daneben auch in der Bestimmung der Theorie und unabhängig von ihrer Anwendbarkeit für die Gesellschaft Bedeutung haben könnten” (Ritter “Die Aufgabe“ 115). 6 “zu dem realen Prozess gehört, in dem sich die moderne Gesellschaft in Europa, jetzt überall auf der Erde in der Emanzipation aus dem ihr vorgegebenen geschichtlichen Herkunftswelten konstituiert” (Ritter “Die Aufgabe“ 128-129). 7 “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft ist die Differenz” (Hegel 182). 8 “Indem in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft Besonderheit und Allgemeinheit auseinandergefallen sind, sind sie dennoch beide wechselseitig gebunden und bedingt” (Hegel 184). 9 “dass Ich als allgemeine Person aufgefasst werde, worin Alle identisch sind. Der Mensch gilt so, weil er Mensch ist, nicht weil er Jude, Katholik, Protestant, Deutscher, Italiener usf. Ist” (Hegel 209). 10 See for this criticism of a compensation theory of the humanities: Mittelstraß (2003, 35-50.) and Böhme (1989). 11 The term “humanities” means in German “Geisteswissenschaft”. The term “Wissenschaft” means “science” and is intentionally omitted in the word “humanities.” But this term, in some sense misleading and probably a mistranslation from Mills “human sciences,” points nonetheless to the fact that natural sciences and humanities are both typically modern and therefore share a common ground. Works Cited Aristotle, et al. The Metaphysics of Aristotle. Printed for the Author, by Davis, Wilks, and Taylor, 1801. Böhme, Hartmut. Über das gegenwärtige Selbstbewusstsein der Geisteswissenschaften. University Lectures in Oldenburg No. 22, 1989. Comte, Auguste. Discours sur l’Esprit Positif/Rede über den Geist des Positivismus. Edited and translated by Iring Fetscher, Felix Meiner, 1956. Descartes, René. A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conduction One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Ian Maclean. Oxford UP, 2006. Gründer, Karlfried, ed. “Hermeneutik und Wissenschaftstheorie.” Reflexion der Kontinuitäten. Zum Geschichtsdenken der letzten Jahrzehnte. Göttingen (Germany), Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, pp. 74-88. Habermas, Jürgen. Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1973. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1986. ---. Jenaer Schriften 1801-1807. Werke 2 (TWA II). Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1970. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg, Meiner, 1956. Marquard, Odo. Über die Unvermeidlichkeit der Geisteswissenschaften, in Apologie des Zufälligen. Philosophische Studien. Reclam, 1986, pp. 98-116. Mittelstraß, Jürgen. “Glanz und Elend der Geisteswissenschaften.” Kultur verstehen. Geschichte und Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Gudrun Kühne Bertram Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, pp. 35-50. Ritter, Joachim, ed. “Die Aufgabe der Geisteswissenschaften in der modernen Gesellschaft (1963).” Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1974, pp. 105-40. 7 �Maximilian Gindorf • Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses ---. Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der Theorie bei Aristoteles (1953). Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zur Aristoteles und Hegel. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1969, pp. 9-34. ---. “Hegel und die Französische Revolution (1956).“ Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1969, pp. 183-233. ---. “Landschaft (1963).“ Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1974, pp. 141-164. Schmidt, Benjamin. “The Humanities Are in Crisis.” The Atlantic, 23 Aug. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisofconfidence/567565/ Schweda, Mark. Entzweiung und Kompensation. Joachim Ritters philosophische Theorie der modernen Welt. Freiburg/München, Alber, 2013. Snow, Charles Percy. The Rede Lecture. Cambridge UP, 1959. 8 �Sean McSpadden Present Company Excluded Early Popular Representation in New Amsterdam M anhattan Island, now the location of New York City’s most famous borough, was initially settled by the West India Company to create a central trading hub. This Dutch company monopolized both land and trade in the geographical area that would become New Netherland. Its central settlement, New Amsterdam (later renamed New York by the English), experienced a series of growing pains while under control of the Company. Although certainly not the republic exemplified by the United States more than a century later, New Amsterdam’s shift towards popular participation stemmed from the West India Company’s inability to fulfill its role as a sovereign political entity. Citizens of New Amsterdam viewed their relationship to the government as quid pro quo. They would accept the Company’s authority and its commissions so long as it provided them with safety, proper amenities, and a sense (whether true or not) that they had voice and power in the decisions of the director-general of the West India Company. As New Amsterdam dealt with war, growth concerns and the need for new economic strategies, the citizens became more and more disillusioned with the Company’s director-general William Kieft. Although difficult to prove that the early negotiations occurring in Company territory directly affected later American ideals of popular representation, the small shifts from authoritarian to republican power structures in the settlement opened the door for popular participation in New Amsterdam. At its outset, the West India Company had an authoritarian structure, with its director-general acting as monocrat in the local community. The director-general was only beholden to the authorities financing and providing supplies in the Netherlands. According to Joyce Goodfriend, the Company’s supervisory structure’s contribution to “molding life in New Amsterdam is incontrovertible” because its “omnipresent hand” controlled all “parameters of legitimate activity” (Goodfriend 8). Goodfriend points to how the Company controlled their interests via “economic regulation” while imposing a “centralized form of government that was authoritarian in nature” (Goodfriend 9). Every decision of note was “handed down by the colony’s director-general” including trade and military actions (Goodfriend 9). The directorgeneral of New Amsterdam needed to negotiate between his obligations to the West India Company—the entity that gave him his wealth, power and lifestyle—and the citizens of New Amsterdam who enabled him to acquire the goods necessary to keep superiors in the Netherlands satisfied. The West India Company’s struggles with New Amsterdam residents were sown at the founding of the settlement. The Company struggled with its identity: would it focus solely on trade and keep its overhead low? or did colonization best forward its interests in the New World? The men in the Netherlands were “split between two factions, one in favor of trade and the other of colonization” (Klooster 67). Those in favor of a commercial focus “opposed private enterprise” and wanted to keep all trade and land in company hands (Klooster 67). They argued that the Company should limit itself to “what was strictly necessary to gain wealth in order to curtail the Company’s spending on defense and the supply of provisions” (Klooster 67). By keeping their footprint in the New World to a minimum, the Company could operate solely as a trading enterprise. On the other side, proponents of colonization “emphasized the positive longterm effects of investments in agriculture and settlement,” suggesting that stabilization provided the most potential for Company growth while offering a more stable form of income (Klooster 67). Colonization required a higher investment, particularly on the front end, when returns were not guaranteed and losses were probable. The Company tried to employ both strategies at once to maximize profits and its failure in strategy led to problems with local residents. At first, the West India Company tried to keep expenses low by focusing on the fur trade and by maintaining a monopoly on both goods and land. As the Company spent more time and resources in New Amsterdam, permanent settlement of the Manhattan area became an inevitability. Because the residents focused on settlement, population growth, and stabilization, the Company and the people carried almost mutually exclusive motivations. Residents “saw that building up a society complete with a range of economic choices and social and political statuses, as opposed to a trading post under company control, would be to their benefit” (Kross 12). With this foundational conflict between New Amsterdammers and the Company, a political struggle between the director-general and the locals led to constant renegotiation that eventually unraveled the company’s hegemony. 9 �Sean McSpadden • Present Company Excluded The Company found itself in a no man’s land between trade and colonization. In order to grow the fur trade that it maintained a monopoly over, the Company recruited more merchants from the Netherlands. Considering that the Netherlands was not struggling economically, it became very difficult to convince people to emigrate away from an established, thriving country. Thanks to little motivation “to emigrate from the relatively prosperous home country,” the Company had a hard sell to local Dutch (“Atlantic”). The Company’s profits “depended upon a settled population,” but the Dutch did not want to “leave their secure and prosperous homeland” for a life of hardship, instability and danger (Kross 12). Eventually, the Company came to grips with the fact that it needed to offer a carrot to potential immigrants. The West India Company made promises to Europeans that conflicted with the reality in New Amsterdam. The Company tried to convince potential immigrants that their life in the colonies would be prosperous. Sure, good money might exist there. But on the ground, the colonial merchants did not have access to the non-monetary necessities to make this money worth much. A large portion of the real assets remained with the Company. In early New Amsterdam, “no horses, cows or laborers” could be “obtained…for money” leaving everyone “short in these particulars” (Michaelius 130). The daily lifestyle also lacked the luxury available in Europe. No matter how rich a man might be, the houses and infrastructure did not reflect a rich lifestyle. Most of the homes in New Amsterdam were constructed from “boards and thatched” with “no mason work except the chimneys” (Jogues 262). During the harsh winters, money did not equate to a guarantee of warmth or comfort. Even if a Dutch immigrant became a successful merchant, he still lacked the access to goods and amenities that these riches offered him in the Netherlands. The lack of goods, supplies and labor led the population to want more from their Company supervisors. Because of the “materialistic orientation of the town dwellers,” the locals had a general idea of the wealth of New Amsterdam and where this wealth was being directed (Goodfriend 12). In the “Representation of New Netherland,” a piece largely complaining about the shortfalls of the West India Company, New Amsterdam is portrayed as mismanaged, with the director-general Willem Kieft out of touch with the wants of his citizens. The writer suggests that if the “same money (had) been used in bringing people and importing cattle” rather than focusing on short term gains like the fur trade, then the “country would now have been of great value” (“Representation 321). The piece continues with complaints about how “there should be a public school” to ensure prosperity and order in future generations (Representation 353). In addition, few Company actions had been taken on behalf of “the poor [and] the orphans” or taken “to improve schools” and “support the Reformed church” (Maika 101). The West India Company was spread thin and often failed to provide for its citizens in the same way a formal government could. After early failures to foster Dutch immigration to the island, the Company made potential visitors a series of promises that changed its relationship with New Amsterdammers at a foundational level. In 1639, the Company renounced its monopoly on both land and trade and accidentally gave immigrants an independence and autonomy that would ultimately conflict with the Company’s authoritarian structure (Kross 12). In terms of trade, non-Company merchants wanted unrestricted access to Native American commodities—a right the West India Company held exclusively. Written in 1647, the “Journal of New Netherland” describes how the land “never began to be settled until every one had liberty to trade with the Indians” because this type of trade offered the most profit and intrigue to merchants (“Journal” 271). Once the West India Company revoked its right of exclusivity, “non-Company colonists gained the right to trade along the entire eastern seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida, while metropolitan merchants could freely dispatch their goods to New Amsterdam” (Klooster 68). By allowing open competition, the Company hoped to attract more residents to the island of Manhattan. As mentioned, the West India Company eventually revoked their land monopoly. It created a patroon system to try to grow the population and establish new towns in the area. Dutchmen who could settle “fifty colonists in New Netherland” received “extensive tracts of land, powers of local government, and some participation in the fur trade,” offering these men an opportunity for wealth and autonomy (“Patroon System”). In Nicolas Van Wassenaer’s description of New Netherland, he relates how those in power from the Netherlands granted “Priveleges, Freedoms and Exemptions to all patroons, masters or individuals who should plant any colonies and cattle in New Netherland” (Wassenaer 89). If a patroon founded “one or more towns” in the New World, he received the “power and authority to establish officers and magistrates there,” making him the center of political power in his township (Wassenaer 91). On top of this, residents (not just the patroon himself) would be “free from customs, tolls, excise, imposts or any other contributions for the space of ten years” (Wassenaer 94). Because the Company had to court new residents, it could not treat them as employees and operate with totalitarian authority. Unsatisfied colonists would simply return to the Netherlands. Keeping a citizen-friendly structure was a great marketing tool for attracting new residents. In the “Journal of New Netherland,” many of the settlers immigrated to the area based on their desire to “escape from the 10 �Sean McSpadden • Present Company Excluded insupportable government of New England” (“Journal” 313). Of course, this movement could easily work in reverse. Keeping populations high improved survival rates and commercial production in these small settlements so people became a necessity to protect the area and increase trade. Due to the dangerous environment of the New World and wars with the Native Americans that the West India Company had to contend with, it failed to fulfill its role as sovereign protector of New Amsterdam and the nearby area. The Company contended with “both hostile New Englanders and hostile natives” who encroached on its land, occasionally stole the land outright, or hurt and murdered the residents in the area (Kross 11). With each Company failure to protect its citizens, the citizens in turn became more self-reliant and put less trust in its ability to protect them. Thanks to “the large number and widespread dispersal of homesteads” the Western India Company simply did not have the man power or resources to make “adequate defense” possible, leading to a breakdown in “societal cohesion” (Kross 13). Once the Company finally managed to attract new residents, it quickly became apparent it did not have the military to keep its expanding borders safe. Battles against the Native Americans eroded the local trust of the Company’s ability to protect Dutch immigrants. In fact, director-general Willem Kieft’s actions occasionally put residents into greater danger thanks to his desire to serve justice to Native Americans based on real or perceived transgressions. In David Pietersz De Vries account of his time in New Amsterdam during Kieft’s war against the Native Americans, his writing consistently returns to the Company’s ineptitude. De Vries, a patroon, knew a great deal about the military actions of Kieft because of his own duty to protect the Dutch in his township. In one story, De Vries discusses how the “trifling actions” of a commander led to the slayings of his people at the hands of angered Native Americans (De Vries 214). When De Vries requested additional soldiers from Director Kieft, he told De Vries that “he had no soldiers” to assist him (De Vries 226). The Company, stretched extremely thin and lacking support from the Netherlands, did not have weapons or people to adequately defend the rapidly expanding area. Despite this fact, Kieft pursued a revenge-based war against the local Native Americans that led to high casualties in the region. De Vries recounts how Kieft “had a mind to wipe the mouths of the savages” (De Vries 226), but how De Vries knew that initiating such a war “will murder [the] nation…[his] dwelling [his] people, cattle, corn and tobacco” (De Vries 227). Even after hearing De Vries’ protests, Kieft assured him that “there would be no danger” (De Vries 227). De Vries worries that the “inhabitants in open lands” would have to “take care of himself against the retaliation of the savages” because Kieft “could not kill all the Indians” (De Vries 227). De Vries turned out to be correct and when “the savages understood that the Swannekens (Dutch) had so treated them, all the men whom they could surprise on the farm-lands, they killed” (Vries 229). Although the Company could operate as a military force and win single battles against the Native Americans, it did not have adequate man power to protect every home in the area. The Company could protect its own interests but it failed to protect against the consistent guerrilla warfare that the Native Americans utilized. During Isaac Jogues stay in the area “in the year 1643,” some “two score Hollanders” were killed and the same number of “house and barns full of wheat” were also burned by Native Americans (Jogues 260). After each violent event, the towns of the greater New Netherlands lost trust in the Company’s ability to act as military protector. The people would hold the Company accountable: each time it failed to protect them, they were less willing to accept its authoritarian structure and methods. The West India Company also failed to establish protected borders against English and Swedish squatting practices. De Vries recounts how the Dutch discovered some English towns encroaching on territory claimed by the West India Company. He debates with an English official over the English right to the land: When sitting at the table, I told him it was wrong to take by force the Company’s land, which it had bought and paid for. [The Englishman] answered that the lands were lying idle; that, though we had been there many years, we had done scarcely anything; that it was a sin to let such rich land, which produced such fine corn, lie uncultivated; and that they had already built three towns upon this river, in a fine country. (De Vries 203) In the “Representation of New Netherland,” the writer also expresses how the English took advantage of the West India Company’s inability to defend its land. He writes that the “English intend to build a village and trading house there” and how the Dutch could do little to repel them (“Representation” 315). The piece describes how “nobody in this country” (that being the country under Dutch control) had the forces to “prevent them” (the English) from simply building a town without punishment (“Representation 316). Already spread thin, the Company did not have enough of a military presence to dissuade English encroachment or start a war with them as punishment for their theft. In a similar situation, some Swedish colonists began to build a fort in New Netherland. When Willem Kieft heard about the intrusion, he “protested against it, but in vain” (“Representation” 315). Despite being the most powerful 11 �Sean McSpadden • Present Company Excluded Dutchman in the region, Kieft did not have a military force to do anything other than protest the Swedish fort. These types of international embarrassments negatively impacted the morale of New Amsterdam citizens. If the Company could not even protect its own interests in the region, how could it be expected to also protect its citizens’ interests? With each incursion, whether from Native Americans or Europeans, trust in the Company eroded. Without this trust, each town became far more self-reliant. With this self-reliance came an impatience to remain underneath the sovereignty of the West India Company. These types of fights “on the broadest level…provided a climate wherein the various weak threads of New Netherlands’ political and social structure could unravel” (Kross 15). At the very least, residents wanted far more say in the daily happenings of the Company’s political struggles. Local politics, for them, would be best handled by locals because they knew invaluable ground-level information that the director-general did not. Due to the low number of people in these communities, their isolation from each other, their constant focus on survival, and the access that citizens had to the director-general (in comparison to Dutch access to its monarch), the West India Company had to maintain open dialogues with its communities. In each airing of displeasure, written petition, and negotiation, the New Amsterdam settlers asserted their right to speak in the political arena and pushed the Company to accept more and more popular opinion into its decision-making process. Part of the residents’ assumption that their voice mattered came from their Dutch origins. Most of the day to day power in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century rested at the municipal level. Those with the most “political authority in the Netherlands” were “at the local level” (Maika 96). Higher authority acted as a review of local politics, rather than its principle actor—with silence as approbation and veto power reserved if necessary. Many of the Dutch followed the “’custom’ of being a responsible community member” in exchange for “certain priveleges in return for supporting government” (Maika 97). In contrast, the director-general in New Netherland had power over every decision large and small, creating a high number of places for potential conflict. At first, the Company used popular voice as a method for validating actions it planned on taking anyways. Occasionally, “citizen advisory groups were created to bolster the government’s authority at critical junctures” to give the general populous an impression that the Company did listen to public input (Goodfriend 9). Despite the fact that these “advisory bodies had no regular status in governmental hierarchy,” these groups carried enough local influence that Willem Kieft had to at least engage with them before making major decisions. The “Twelve Men, Eight Men, (and) Nine Men” were men selected to speak for the general population (the commonalty) and air potential concerns and grievances. When Director Kieft searched for popular approval of his war against the Native Americans, he allowed a council to form to discuss the matter. Unfortunately for Kieft, the council did not approve of his war. By engaging with the populous on the matter, he established a precedence where he checked in with the people before taking action. Once the council was created, it pushed for increased say in daily affairs. The twelve men, “having failed to give the endorsement it was assembled to provide, then took it upon itself to begin advising the director on other matters” (Shorto). With a taste of political power, the councilors pushed for “certain rights for individuals…or some like body, to become a permanent representative assembly, as existed in even the smallest villages in the United Provinces” (Shorto). By offering local residents a taste of republican representation, those on the council battled with the director-general on almost every decision in an effort to increase their control of the political process in New Amsterdam. David Pietersz De Vries, for one, believed his role as a patroon and the twelve men’s role as an advisory board gave both parties the right to question the director-general. When Kieft started his fights against the Native Americans, De Vries appeals to his own authority as “the first patroon,” who “risked so many thousands, and also his person” to live on Manhattan Island (De Vries 226). The director-general did not have the right to take action “without (De Vrie’s) assent” or “the approbation of the Twelve Men” (De Vries 226). Despite this appeal, Kieft went ahead with his attack— but by operating as sole authority, he increased local tensions and questions about his right to control such impactful decisions. Kieft’s eventual removal, though not fixing the situation, showed the Company’s awareness that the people’s approval in local politics mattered. Many of the locals, whether true or not, believed that the director-general only cared for the West India Company and his position in it. As mentioned, “The Representation of New Netherland” is a laundry list of complaints about the Company’s failures. Although written with a clear motivation and/or bias depending on a person’s outlook, this piece still accurately displays how one segment of New Amsterdam viewed the director-general. “The Representation” suggests that the director-generals always “conducted themselves just as if they were sovereigns of the country” and only focused on “their good will and pleasure” (“Representation 324). When advisory committees like the Twelve Men tried to offer input to the director-general, “they received no consideration and were little respected if they opposed at all the views of the Director” because it was “in his power to do or refuse to do anything” (Representation 333). At 12 �Sean McSpadden • Present Company Excluded moments when these committees did not feel like their voice was heard, they utilized democratic methods to try to sway public opinion and force the director-general’s hand in their favor. After each attempt to consult with the committees like the nine, eight, and twelve men, these groups earned more right to speak and more right to impact Company decisions. Even though “the functions of the Nine Men were limited,” their advisory role eventually “constituted a permanent element in the governmental system” (Jameson 287). Because these types of councils never organized when the populace was satisfied with the director-general’s decisions, it became an inevitability that “sooner or later they should become the mouthpiece of popular discontent,” for the commonalty living “under the unprosperous condition of the province and the burdensome taxes, customs and other restrictions imposed upon its economic life” (Jameson 287). As the council’s role as “speaker for the discontent” grew, its relationship with the director-general became strained. Director Kieft “perceived that the Nine Men would not communicate with him or follow his directions in anything pertaining” to their disagreements, leading him to have to continually assert his sole authority over New Amsterdam (“Representation” 350). Each time Kieft acted unilaterally, the people in turn pushed for increased representation in the political process. The commonalty did not let their advisory boards do all the fighting for them. A pattern emerged where the commonalty would petition the director-general for action and if denied, took action anyways. After a perceived Native American affront, the commonalty “put their request in writing which was done by three in the name of them all by a petition to be allowed to attack those of Hackingsack” (“Journal” 277). When Willem Kieft did not act on their petition, a few renegades “slew those who lay a small league from the fort” (Journal 277). When these Dutch criminals were apprehended and arrested by the Company, the commonalty “collected before the Director, riotously demanding the prisoner; they were answered that their request should be presented in order and in writing; which about 25 men did; they therein asked the Director to pardon the criminal” (“Journal” 278). Petitions became an integral method in airing displeasure towards the inaction of the director-general. On Long Island, the settlers “requested by petition to be allowed to attack and slay the Indians thereabout” (“Journal” 277). When they were denied, a few “Christians attempted secretly with two wagons to steal maize from these Indians” (“Journal” 277). These transgressions of the director-general’s authority gave political groups like the eight, nine and twelve men the leverage they needed to assert their right to get involved in the director-general’s affairs. In a similar situation recounted in the “Journal of New Netherland,” the populace wanted to start a war with the Native Americans in retribution for a murder committed by a Native American prisoner. The people tried to sway the mind of Kieft by organizing committees and writing petitions. The commonalty, “displeased with the Director,” argued that inaction would “sell Christian blood” (“Journal 276). They elected “twelve men from among them” who “resolved at once on war should the murderer be refused” (“Journal 275”). They went as far as to threaten to disregard the Kieft’s authority by suggesting that “in case he would not avenge blood they would do it themselves” (“Journal” 276). Ultimately, the New Amsterdammers forwarded an official remonstrance to Dutch authorities behind Kieft’s back, asking for his removal in light of his incompetence. In this remonstrance, local residents provided a “theory of government” very similar to “the social contract,” that “articulated a set of beliefs about the responsibilities of both government and the governed” (Kross 16). In this document, they listed a series of grievances they experienced under the director-general. They tried to suggest that the Company was an “arbitrary government” (Kross 16), that the “government offered no protections” from Native Americans, that officers “were appointed without the nomination or consent of the people,” and that they passed laws without regard to the populous (Kross 17). The Remonstrance led to the Company removing Kieft as its director-general and signaled a move towards allowing popular voice to definitively impact those in power. Even after Kieft’s replacement, the Company’s relationship could not rebound from the permanent change in the New Amsterdam mindset. Cornelis Van Tienhoven, one of the men who decided to replace Kieft, attributed the “colonists’ pain” not “to lack of popular representation” but to “a governor who didn’t understand the use of force” (Shorto). In his rebuttal to the “Representation of New Netherland,” he suggests that the residents “would like to live without being subject to any one’s censure or discipline, which, however, they stand doubly in need of” (Tienhoven 360). The Company chose Peter Stuyvesant as its next director-general. He inherited a broken system, with unruly residents trying to upend it. Although his appointment helped delay New Amsterdam’s break from the West India Company, he did little to alter its inevitability. By 1652, New Amsterdam residents controlled “sufficient economic and political strength to win from the Dutch West Indian Company a grant of incorporation,” allowing them to control all aspects of the municipal government (Archdeacon 35). Thanks to actions taken over a series of decades between the commonalty and the director-general, New Amsterdam residents (or its elite at the very least) gained the autonomy and control over the political system they had hoped for. 13 �Sean McSpadden • Present Company Excluded Despite the fact that the Company replaced Kieft with a director-general who viewed his sovereignty as a given, the battles between the commonalty and Kieft started a movement towards popular representation that not even Peter Stuyvesant could forestall. The West India Company’s inability to tease out its role as a commercial enterprise and its role as a sovereign political entity led to the gray area that allowed for New Amsterdammers to take an increased role in the political process. Although the local residents certainly did not have the type of representation that the United States would later champion, these negotiations did help contribute (and maybe initiate) a trend towards a government operated by its people, rather than by a singular, authoritarian figure. _____________________________ Works Cited Archdeacon, Thomas J. New York City, 1664-1710: Conquest and Change. Cornell UP, 1976. “The Atlantic World: The Dutch in America, 1609-1664.” The Atlantic World, Library of Congress, international.loc. gov/intldl/awkbhtml/kb-1/kb-1.html#track1. Accessed 9 Nov. 2017. De Vries, David Pietersz. “Korte Historiael ende Journaels Aenteyckeninge.” Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 180-234. Goodfriend, Joyce D. Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1644-1730. Princeton UP, 1992. Jameson, J. Franklin, editor. Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909. Jogues, Issac. “Novum Belgium.” Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 235-54. “Journal of New Netherland.” Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 265-84. Klooster, Wim. “The Place of New Netherland in the West India Company’s Grand Scheme.” Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America, edited by Joyce D. Goodfriend, Pennsylvania UP, 2011, pp. 205-42. EbscoHost. Accessed 9 Nov. 2017. Kross, Jessica. The Evolution of an American Town: Newtown, New York, 1642-1775. Temple UP, 1983. Maika, Dennis J. “Securing the Burgher Right in New Amsterdam: The Struggle for Municipal Citizenship in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World.” Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America, edited by Joyce D. Goodfriend, Pennsylvania UP, 2011, pp. 205-242. EbscoHost. Accessed 9 Nov. 2017. Michaelius, Jonas. “Letter of Reverend Jonas Michaelius, 1628.” Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 117-34. “The Patroon System.” The Atlantic World, Library of Congress, international.loc.gov/intldl/awkbhtml/kb-1/kb-1. html#track1. Accessed 9 Nov. 2017. “The Representation of New Netherland.” Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 285-354. Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World. Vintage, 2010. Van Tienhoven, Cornelis. “Answer to the Representation of New Netherland.” Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 355-78. Van Wassenaer, Nicolaes. “Historisch Verhael.” Narratives of New Netherland:1609-1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 67-96. 14 �Angela F. Jacobs The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro Recovering Africa(ns) in the Victorian Literature Survey Course T he Victorian Era is one of the most interesting and important eras of British literature, especially considering its eventual influence on succeeding literary eras, both in Britain and the United States. Though typically lambasted, there is no doubt that the Victorian Era has a richness, complexity, and diversity that represented the multitude of experiences marking the lives of Victorian peoples. Whether fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama, Victorian Literature offers a wide variety of texts for study. Previous amalgamations of the Victorian literature survey course typically resided firmly within the tried-and-true Victorian canon, relying heavily upon the works of Tennyson, Stevenson, Arnold, Browning, and few other, mostly male, writers, thus presenting limited points of view and perspectives which often resulted in the students of Victorian lit survey courses developing a limited sense of what constitutes Victorian literature, namely that Victorian England was white and patriarchal, despite England having a queen at its helm and not a king. However, this perspective is entirely false. Much work has been done in the field of Victorian literature to be more inclusive of the various voices found within Victorian literature, which in turn, has revitalized the field and its accompanying survey course. By far one of the greatest shifts within Victorian literature is the inclusion of women writers, such as the Brontës, Christina Rosetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, to name a few. A Victorian literature course that doesn’t at least attempt to address “The Woman Question” would be deemed untenable in the twenty-first century.1 Gender within Victorian literature is now considered essential to the foundation of the course itself. Likewise, no discussion of Victorian literature would be complete without understanding how the British understood their place in the world and their influence abroad, especially as it concerned their African and Caribbean colonies. Due to the ever-expanding nature of the British Empire, the British hungered for justification for their dominance. In this regard, several authors, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, Joseph Chamberlain, and James Anthony Froude, address the prevailing attitudes towards British imperialism in their various works. In conjunction with these authors are authors who wrote on racial science, such as Robert Knox (The Races of Man, 1850), Josiah Nott and George Gliddon (Types of Mankind, 1854), and Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (Inequality of Human Races, 1855). What these authors reveal is the importance of race and racial difference within Victorian England. Highlighting these authors matters because it shows the rather unfortunate gap within the foundation of the Victorian literature course. The fact that there are several works on race demonstrates how important race was in Victorian England. Despite ending the slave trade by the 1830s, Britain was still firmly entrenched in its colonial identity and relied heavily upon its relation to the Other (of non-Western heritage/perspective) in order to fully understand itself. As Edward Said states, “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism” (xiii). With this stated, what texts teachers select in Victorian literature survey courses is a form of narration and creates the type of “micro-culture” within the course itself whereby only select voices and perspectives are intrinsically deemed valuable. Because of this influence, it is imperative that the voices and narratives of people of color, in particular of African descent, are included within the Victorian literature survey course, especially considering the immense influence Africa and her people had on the cultural and material world of Britain. As the British Empire grew and matured, defining national identity became more important to the British, increasing their hunger for the Other as a means of understanding their own dominance. One such Other were the people of African descent from the various British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as from their former colony, the United States. Although the Indian colonial experience is a popular choice for understanding British imperialism and representation, Britain’s African and Caribbean colonies provide untapped potential to truly understand how the British viewed themselves and their colonial subjects, especially within Britain itself. 15 �Angela F. Jacobs • The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro However, this desire for the Other, especially the African Other, did not begin with the Victorians, but rather demonstrates the shifting nature of representation in Britain, at first exclusive to the wealthy and learned, then mass produced until blackness and black bodies became nothing more than representations and not actual realities. This distance between black bodies and represented blackness may have contributed to how and why black Victorians are practically unrepresented in Victorian literature anthologies, possibly symbolizing how the Victorians devoured their black populations out of social and overt cultural existence. Despite Britain being a major player in the slave trade, it is not commonly known that any Africans set foot on British soil before the twentieth century. As Edward Scobie notes, some historians trace an African presence in the tenth century, though there are no skeletal remains as evidence. However, “[I]t is possible to go further back than the middle of the sixteenth century and find historical documents to prove that even as early as 1501 there were blacks at court in Scotland” (Scobie 8). Regarding the visibility of London’s black population, Gretchen Gerzina notes, “They were as familiar a sight to Shakespeare as they were to Garrick [the famous actor and theatre-manager] and almost as familiar to both as they are to Londoners today” (2). Several works throughout Britain’s long history with Africa demonstrate their complicated and intertwined relationship, works a Victorian literature professor can potentially use as roadmaps for understanding the importance of Africa and her people to the British. The eighteenth century is rife with these works, as slavery was still well in effect, though, unknown to the British, waning in public and legal support. The theatre was a popular place for portraying racial differences, especially in drumming up sympathy on the plight of African peoples, such as the play The Slave by Thomas Morton (1787), Henry Bates’ The Black-a-moor Wash’d White (1776) and Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Padlock (1768). The Georgians had complex views of race and race relations as slavery painted peoples of African descent as being sympathetic characters on the stage and within the British psyche. With the advent and popularity of a new genre, the novel, Georgian Britons found another way to devour Africa and her peoples, in particular, slaves, but only if they were wrongfully enslaved, as the British had a complex relationship to the slave trade. They loved the new products and delights this industry brought, but also felt sympathy towards enslaved Africans. As Scobie notes, This English love of the “Noble Savage,” the black man of talent and accomplishment, has never failed to excite wonder and bewilderment; for, while the English will put up all sorts of social and constitutional barriers in order to prevent black people from entering and living in Britain, they will, at the same time, sing the praises of black writers, poets, singers, musicians, cricketers, athletes, or boxers. (87) Though the Victorians’ attitudes towards their black population was not as seemingly friendly as in the Georgian Era, with less exploitation of the actual black body in lieu of exploitation of representations of the black body, especially on stage and in caricatures, throughout the Victorian era, images and representations of African peoples were still in high demand. As Gerzina writes, “Victorian England drew upon its slaving past and colonial present to visualize people of African heritage” (“Black Victorians” 4). Though less about actual blackness and more about whiteness, these representations and exaggerations were commonplace throughout Victorian England, aiding the foundation-building of British national identity. “The ubiquitous “blackness” that David Dabydeen2 has described in the eighteenth century, when the Black British population was at a peak unequaled until the post-World War II immigration, was transformed by the Victorians into a sense that they had defined, had described, and knew black people” (“Black Victorians” 5). This hunger for black representation by the Victorians continued well towards the end of the Victorian Age, with Gerzina noting, “At the end of the nineteenth century there was a surge in the importation of African material culture into museums and other public and private collections” (“Black Victorians” 4). The Victorians regularly satiated their hunger for black representations via exhibitions, such as those at the Crystal Palace, circuses, and pantomimes at Astley’s Royal Theatre. Outside of these exhibitions, black musicians and singers entertained a rapt audience in music halls, such as the compositions of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. However, this adoration came with a caveat. “It is not only that the English refused to treat blacks with any semblance of equality in the years before the turn of the twentieth century. To them blacks were also objects of fun. That elegant, Edwardian man-of-letters Max Beerbohm in writing of the 1880s, said that on the evidence of the music hall and comic papers the English populace thought blacks ‘mirth-provoking’” (Scobie 119). The Victorians were also not immune to the pleasures of entertainment, consuming large quantities, with music and theatre being heavy favorites. “At the end of the nineteenth century there was a surge in the importation of African material culture into museums and other public and private collections” (“Black Victorians” 4). 16 �Angela F. Jacobs • The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro Oddly enough, it was the popular American novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, a staple of American nineteenth-century literary survey courses, that best demonstrates the Victorian lust for black representation. Though often played by white actors, this novel was recreated heavily, with several amalgamations created that reflected, not so much the American landscape to which it belonged, but the various landscapes familiar to Victorian Britons. Uncle Tom is sometimes featured surrounded by palm trees, or characters rode on Arabian steeds. Oftentimes, the Black slave dialect was replaced by a combination of a Scottish, Irish, or Cockney accent (Gerzina, “Black Victorians”, 4-6). Through this consumption, Victorian Britons not only consumed the American slave conceit, but also devoured the landscapes and peoples from the various British colonies. In exploring the depths of the Victorian voracity towards representations of blackness, it is important to understand how blackness was constructed by actual black people. As Paul Gilroy notes, “Striving to be both European and black requires more specific forms of double consciousness” (1). In other words, black Britons had to navigate a world that was not their own, a world in which their representation was more important than their reality. In exploring the concept of the black Atlantic identity, how blackness was constructed throughout the various colonies and former colonies of the British Empire, the United States included, Gilroy writes, “these ideas about nationality, ethnicity, authenticity and cultural integrity [...] crystallized with the revolutionary transformations of the West at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries” (2). Needless to say, these very ideas greatly impacted Britain’s black population, especially in the Victorian Age as their images became commodified and consumed to the point of near erasure of the black community as a distinctive community. Like their American counterparts, the Black Victorians were living illustrations of Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence, in which he states, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (126). For the Victorian Black British, what this ultimately led to was this: the greater British culture assimilated aspects of the African culture while denying the social integration of African peoples. As stated earlier, Victorians, in general, looked upon their black population as being for entertainment and the Victorians devoured entertainment voraciously, with the theatre providing the primary means by which Victorians could mimic Africa and her peoples while remaining ambivalent about the true lived lives of literal Africa and her peoples. However, this mimicry did afford opportunities for peoples of the African diaspora, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the pride of Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville created in 1866. Their choir was well-known to Victorian audiences, both in America and in Britain. Other notable connections include Ida B. Wells, an African American abolitionist, who found a warm reception in Britain from 1893 and 1894 in creating sympathy and support for the anti-lynching movement. Her work, “A Colored Woman in Another Country Pleading for Justice in Her Own,” and overall message, was well-received by the Victorian British audience who saw her “as both representative and exemplar of the black race” (qtd in Gerzin “Black Victorians” 89). As explored above, the Victorians were especially fond of the representations of Africa and her peoples, though not necessarily the actual realities of those peoples. Although several popular works of the time integrated attitudes towards black people and colonies within their narratives, in her examination of the required anthology for a Victorian literature survey course, Fisch writes that though anthologies aren’t known for staying abreast of cutting edge scholarship, the fact remains that “[t]he problem is that my students’ only exposure to the Victorian period comes from a survey of the Romantic/Victorian period...Since many of my students are going on to teach secondary and elementary school, mostly in urban environments, the political ramifications of the Norton’s omissions are troubling” (354). In fact, though Fisch was teaching from the seventh edition (2000), the ninth edition (2012) also has the same discrepancy. Although, it now has a section entitled “Empire and National Identity,” Africa appears to still be conspicuously left out. (Side note: the anthology for The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century contains selections regarding slavery, despite slavery still being an issue into the early nineteenth century.) As Antoinette Burton writes, in quoting Gayatri Spivak, “It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English” (61). In her examination of the colonial implications within Jane Eyre, Burton notes the dis-ease with which the colonies are addressed. She writes, “Jane’s self-formation occurs in the midst of a variety of colonial matrices and is finally, if not fully, contingent on them. Mr. Rochester’s fortunes are embedded in West Indian intrigues (his marriage to Bertha, his financial investments), and so are Jane’s- both by heritage (her uncle in Madeira) and, towards the end of the novel, by moral conviction and emotional attraction” (61). 17 �Angela F. Jacobs • The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro It is impossible to understand the foundation of this novel without exploring the colonial implications, in particular the dichotomy of Jane versus Bertha. Even more blatantly, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair also treats its black character, Miss Swartz, in a questionable, even disrespectful, fashion, which provides an opportunity for discussing Victorian colonialism and representations of blackness. Scobie writes, “It was perhaps in Vanity Fair that Thackeray showed the clearest insight into attitudes of the middle and upper classes in the early years of the nineteenth century. It is the younger generation rather than the older in Vanity Fair which is conscious of race and color as marks of social inferiority” (123). Although it has been argued that the scorn Miss Swartz endures within the novel is Thackaray’s attempt at satirizing the exclusivity of English society3, the fact remains that is portrayed in a very unflattering light. She pays twice the tuition at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy because she is mulatto; her clothes are often mocked; and George Osborne’s makes crude references towards her color, calling her a “Hottentot Venus,” a reference to Sarah Baartman4. What these texts, and a cursory glance at some of the poetry selections from the Norton ninth edition to the Victorian Era, show (such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and Robert Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos”) is the amount of work still needed to show the literature and the people of the Victorian Era as they represented their world. As much as the British reveled in the African representation, they even more so revered reinforcing their own representation that was contingent upon their relationship to others. When it comes to presenting Victorian Literature to students, there lies both the difficulty of selecting seminal texts and the importance of presenting Victorian England as it would have been for the Victorians themselves. Any literature instructor can attest to the difficulty of whittling down a century’s worth of texts for a semester-long course. Because of this difficulty, it is little wonder that anthologies provide thematic guides an instructor can use in order to touch upon several of the most important issues in the Victorian Era, such as gender, science, class, and national identity. However, it is also equally as important to introduce race relations into Victorian literature survey courses, especially considering that so much of what built British industry and imperialism relied upon British juxtaposing with the world around them, and not just with other European powers. Much like Burton’s analysis of Jane Eyre exposes how the characters’ fortunes depended upon colonial and imperial pursuits, so did Britain’s. According to Gerzina, “The English only began to see themselves as ‘white’ when they discovered ‘black’ people” (“Black London” 5). Questions such as ““What does it mean to be English?” and “What does it mean to be British?” greatly plagued the Victorians, especially as their world became more international through the various colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, India, and the South Pacific. There are several strategies an instructor can employ in order to introduce race relations into Victorian literature, any of which depend upon the course description, instructor preference, or even student feedback. When it comes to course design, it is imperative to understand the scope of the course before proceeding to alter it, which may include understanding the purpose of the course and its alignment with other courses. For the Victorian Literature survey course, students typically are English or Literature majors who may or may not have taken Romantic Literature previously or, if they have, this course may also be lacking in readings on race relations in British society. Whatever the case, the strategies presented below may prove to be a helpful means by which to include readings on race, especially as it pertains to Africa, into a Victorian Literature survey course. One of the easiest strategies for exploring race relations in Victorian literature is by first assessing the texts already included. As noted above, both Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair offer opportunities to explore race relations in Victorian Britain and are rather popular texts in this course. Another rather popular text is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). As Patrick Brantlinger states, “[...] Heart of Darkness, I believe, offers a powerful critique of at least certain manifestations of imperialism and racism, at the same time that it presents that critique in ways which can only be characterized as both imperialist and racist” (365). Though not without its controversy, Heart of Darkness does allow for students to explore how the Victorians viewed Africans and the African continent, while also exploring how the British saw their version of imperialism as opposed to that of another country (the Congo was the property of King Leopold II of Belgium). As Harry Shaw states, one of the defining features of the historical novel is its fictional probability: “A novel’s power to illuminate life and its intrinsic beauty as a formed work of art depend in large measure to its probability in both [the way it fits the world it imitates and the way its parts fit together to produce a unified whole]” (21). What these popular novels reveal is how race and national identity were narrativized for Victorian readers, who were voracious readers. The novel both reflected and directed how they understood their very existence. For those courses where an anthology is used, another strategy for exploring race relations for Victorian literature is utilizing and supplementing that selected anthology. As Fisch notes above, anthologies are not known for staying abreast of the latest trends; therefore, it is up to the instructor, or even English or literature department, to do so. Though 18 �Angela F. Jacobs • The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro many anthologies may lack in comprehensive coverage of race relations in Victorian Britain, they oftentimes provide adequate context for introducing race into the curriculum, namely by their thematic sections on Empire, Imperialism, or even National Identity. For example, The Norton Anthology on English Literature, The Victorian Age, Vol. E (2012) has such a thematic section entitled, “Empire and National Identity.” Although the emphasis is broadly on British viewpoints on empire, there are a few selections that can serve as segues into addressing African people, in particular, such as James Anthony Froude’s The English in the West Indies (1888). Though not about Africa per se, the people of the West Indies are of African descent (It is important to note that any discussion of Africa and African people must also include the Caribbean due to the relocation of millions of African people during the slave trade). Though seemingly unrelated, within this same anthology lies the works of Charles Darwin and his publications The Origins of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Though his views were lambasted by the religious community, in particular, they do provide a rather interesting thematic segue into how the Victorians understood their dominance in scientific ways. The primary argument against Darwin stems from The Descent of Man where he claims a common ancestor between humans and other mammals. This connection caused discord, which can be further explored in other scientific works that sought to utilize science as a means of explaining dominance. These works include Robert Knox’s The Races of Man (1850), Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854), and Joseph Arthur de Gubineau’s Inequality of Human Races (1855). What these works represent is how the Victorians came to understand their right to rule. Beyond the Norton anthology are other anthologies that more specifically include sections regarding race and empire, such as The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2B “The Victorian Age,” 4th ed which includes a section entitled, “PERSPECTIVES: Travel and Empire” that includes Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s “Through the Dark Continent” and Mary Kingsley’s “Travels in West Africa,” along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (the same as the Norton guide). In The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 5: The Victorian Era – Second Edition there is a section entitled “CONTEXTS: BRITAIN, EMPIRE, AND A WIDER WORLD” in which there are quite a number of works focusing on Africa, such as excerpts from Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine (1849) in conjunction with an excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s “The Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine (1850) and Charles Dickens’ “The Noble Savage,” Household Words (1853) with an excerpt from Thackeray’s Letters to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, as well as Mary Kingsley's work “Travels in West Africa” and another Stanley work, entitled In Darkest Africa. Though by no means an endorsement, as stated previously, though anthologies can be lacking in adequate material involving Victorian race relations, there are works which can serve as jumping off points by which to delve into the subject. For those instructors seeking to add new works into their Victorian literature courses, whether or not due to adequate segues already in place, there are quite a number of interesting texts to consider, an interesting selection includes Allan Quatermain (1885) by H. Rider Haggard and is a fictionalized adventure tale set in various African locales. Like many adventure tales featuring a white male protagonist in a foreign location, Haggard’s tale includes tropes students will likely be familiar with, such as the native sidekick who provides social commentary and a protagonist who tires of the civilized world, preferring the ‘wildness’ of foreign lands. A nonfiction companion to this work may include David and Charles Livingstone’s Narrative of An Expedition to The Zambesi and Its Tributaries: And of The Discovery of The Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864 (1866), which is now in public domain and can be accessed for free online. David Livingstone was a well-known Scottish missionary and served as a British emissary to parts of Africa. Other interesting pieces to include, though perhaps not without difficulty, are periodicals, which are often excluded in literature courses. Children’s journals, like The Child’s Companion, mostly propagated by Christian organizations, were not shy in addressing the issue of race and racial relations in Victorian England and her colonies. Satirical periodicals, such as Punch, would also sometimes address the racial tensions within Victorian England. The importance of including these types of texts in a literature course serves two primary functions: a) expose students to texts that are considered “low brow” in order to illustrate the various texts Victorian readers enjoyed and thus b) expand their concept of what constitutes ‘literature,’ as it is easy for those studying literature to discount those works that are not deemed ‘scholarly,’ no matter their cultural significance. However the above works may be sufficient starting points for addressing what can be called “The Race Question” or even “The Negro Problem” (in reference to John Stuart Mill mentioned above), no unit on race in Victorian Britain would be adequate without utilizing the works by actual people of African descent. Although, in parroting Toni Morrison, Timothy K. Nixon notes that, “White writers’ development of black characters reveals much about the authors’ worldviews by nature of the purpose or the function for which such literary characters are created” (938), 19 �Angela F. Jacobs • The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro solely addressing issues of race in Victorian literature via the lens of white authors is insufficient. Just as it is not enough to simply include texts with women characters, it is not enough to simply include texts with characters of African descent. Merely reading novels or works about women will not suffice to claim the inclusion of the female voice within Victorian literature. The same is argued for black voices. So, while the mentioned texts include African characters, as they are not written by authors of African descent, they are not enough to qualify as being truly adequate to understanding the lives and materiality of black British people. One of the richest sources of works written by African people stems from Britain’s Caribbean colonies, one of the greatest sources of wealth for the British empire. One such work is The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), written by Mary Seacole herself, who was also a well-respected British-Jamaican business woman and became famous due to her work in the Crimean War. Her work is particularly important in that, unlike her British counterpart, Florence Nightingale, who was heralded as a heroic nurse during the Crimean War, Seacole had to tell her own story of heroism. (There is even an interesting poem about Seacole’s plight after the Crimean War (1853) that appeared in Punch Magazine (6th December 1856) along with an accompanying illustration.). What is particularly unique about Seacole’s narrative lies in the hybridity of her identity as both English and Jamaican, or even Creole, Seacole’s narrative demonstrates the double consciousness outlined by Gilroy above. Seacole’s narrative demonstrates Seacole’s understanding of her Victorian audience and their relative unfamiliarity with mixed-race persons. In fact, interestingly enough, as Howell notes, Seacole put especial emphasis “that the white subjects in her books feel familiar and comfortable with her” (109). Although written largely to de-emphasize race and highlight her public works, Seacole is keenly aware of the racial prejudices of the Victorian reader. Although Seacole’s novel is a compelling example of a work by a person of African descent about a person of African descent, careful research will attest that it is the most utilized text for discussing race relations between the white British and their black subjects. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though not less unfortunate, it appears to be the text written by a Black British Victorian subject currently known. One plausible reason for this discrepancy may lie in Britain’s past. While the eighteenth century contains multiple published works by people of African descent, the Victorian Age does not. Through a careful analysis of the popular eighteenth century works by African people, it immediately becomes apparent that slave narratives were immensely possible. Could it be that, in the absence of slavery, Victorian Brits soured on their African population? Interestingly enough, one group of writers of African descent who did gain popularity in the Victorian Era was the African American abolitionist, such as Ida B. Wells, as previously mentioned (“A Colored Woman in Another Country Pleading for Justice in Her Own”). Wells, along with her contemporary, such as Frederick Douglass, engaged in speaking tours to attain support for their anti-lynching campaigns in the United States. In fact, Wells assisted in coediting several anti-racist journals, such as Catherine Impey’s Anti-caste. By the same token, including Douglass’ “Farewell Speech to the British People, at London Tavern, London, England, March 30, 1847,” where he states, “I will tell my colored brethren how Englishmen feel for their miseries. It will be grateful to their hearts to know that while they are toiling on in chains and degradation, there are in England hearts leaping with indignation at the wrongs inflicted upon them,” both of these works highlight the dichotomy of how Victorian England treated its own African subjects versus its former African American subjects, an interesting look into how Britain positioned itself on the world stage. By no longer engaging the slave trade, the British posited themselves as being superior to their American counterparts and were a willing and apt audience to receive the supplications of the embattled African American and African slave in America. What these works, and others like it, allow is for Victorian literature students to begin understanding the transnationalism intrinsic within race relations between the British and their African, and former African, subjects, a transnationalism that allowed the Victorian British to perpetuate the image of their racial superiority and false sense of benevolence. Although most of the works mentioned above are primary texts from the Victorian era, because of the dearth of works by actual Black British writers from this era, it is important to supplement these texts with contemporary online works that can provide much-needed context, for both students and instructors. For example, The Guardian has some articles on its website that address the Black British, especially during the Victorian Age. One notable article, “Hidden Histories: The First Black People Photographed in Britain – In Pictures” (2011) provides visuals by which students are able to see what the actual people of Victorian England looked like, an important aspect of providing proof of the existence of black people in England. Monique Todd’s CNN article, “Striking Photos Reveal Hidden History of Black Britons in the Victorian Era” (2015) likewise provides photographic evidence, thus further providing a means to uncover this often overlooked aspect of Victorian history. 20 �Angela F. Jacobs • The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro While the resources above are primarily aimed for students, it is also important to provide resources specifically for instructors, as it is difficult to teach something that is not understood. While the beginning and middle of this article can serve as a resource for understanding the basis for the presence of people of African descent in Britain, it is by no means exhaustive. While there is a dearth of scholarship regarding the black British before the twentieth century, especially once slavery is abolished, there are scholars and works that seek to illuminate this hidden history. Some of these texts include: Gerzina’s Black Victorians/Black Victoriana (2003), Scobie’s Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (1972), Jan Marsh’s Black Victorians: Black People in British Art: 1800-1900 (2005), and The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), to name a few. Though not exhaustive, what these works provide is a window into the world of black Victorians in Britain, a community so important to Victorian life, their invisibility is certainly unfortunate. Despite the current dearth of knowledge regarding blacks in Victorian England, the Victorians themselves were ravenous for all things representing Africa and African-descended peoples, although the actual people were oftentimes treated scornfully, especially once slavery was abolished (1807; Slavery Abolition Act (1833)) and the plight and bodies of black peoples could no longer be commodified for personal wealth. From their images and representations, whether in theatres, music halls, or exhibition halls, the Victorians found a way to satiate an appetite for blackness that had engulfed the British peoples hundreds of years prior to Queen Victoria’s reign. Sadly, the black Victorians themselves became almost quite literally swallowed up by the British poor, having continuously been denied adequate opportunities to advance in British society. In the end, it appears that the Victorian appetite proved too great and the black British community, once a distinctive community of its own, all but faded from the collective British history. Although there is some scholarship regarding blacks in Victorian England, this scholarship and, thus, this knowledge is seemingly never presented to current Victorian literature students, who deserve to become fully engrossed in the materiality of the Victorian Era. These students represent the future, especially those who become future educators, and the future is looking ever more diverse. As calls for diversity increase, the Victorian literature course must answer this call or become stagnant. Much like the field of Victorian studies and pedagogy opened its arms to the works of women authors, so must the field open its arms to the works and lives of the Victorian Black British. Hopefully, this addition will lead the way for further inclusion and diversity. _____________________________ Notes 1 See Stacey Floyd, “Getting More Bang for Your Buck: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Literature and Gender in a Survey Course,” Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to Pedagogy, edited by Jen Cadwallader and Laurence W. Mazzeno, 2017, pp. 111-23. 2 Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art, 1987. 3 Phillips George Davies, “The Miscegenation Theme in the Works of Thackeray” [Modern Language Notes, vol. 76, no. 4, Apr. 1961, pp. 326-331. 4 Baartman was paraded around London and Paris as part of “freak shows,” where her body, especially her behind became the object of exploitation. After her death in 1815, her skeleton and a plaster cast of her body was also kept on display and exploited, first in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle d’Angers in France until they were moved to the Musée de l’Homme in 1937 in Paris, until 1974 and 1976, respectively. Her remains were eventually buried in her homeland in 2002. See “The Significance of Sarah Baartman” (Justin Parkinson, BBC News Magazine, 7 January 2016) for recent controversy regarding Baartman’s legacy and contemporary exploitation. Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October, vol. 28, 1984, pp. 125– 33. Black, Joseph, et al. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 5: The Victorian Era, 2nd ed. Broadview P, 2012. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?" Criticism, vol. 27, no. 4, 1985, pp. 363-385. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23110450 Burton, Antoinette. “Recapturing Jane Eyre: Reflections on Historicizing the Colonial Encounter in Victorian Britain.” Radical History Review, vol. 1996, no. 64, 1996, pp. 59–72. 21 �Angela F. Jacobs • The Canon Takes No Notice of the Negro Damrosch, David, et al. Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2B, The: The Victorian Age, 4th ed., Pearson, 2010. Douglass, Frederick. “Farewell Speech to the British People, at London Tavern, London, England, March 30, 1847.” Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip S. Foner, Lawrence Hill, 2000, pp. 70. Fisch, Audrey. “Black British Studies in the Victorian Period.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 1, 2002, pp. 353–64., doi:10.1017/S1060150302301189. Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Black London Life before Emancipation. Rutgers UP, 1995. ---. Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. Rutgers UO, 2003. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Howell, Jessica. “Mrs. Seacole Prescribes Hybridity: Constitutional and Maternal Rhetoric in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 38, no. 1, 2010, pp. 107–25. Nixon, Timothy K. “Same Path, Different Purpose: Chopin’s La Folle and Welty's Phoenix Jackson.” Women's Studies, vol. 32, no. 8, 2003, pp. 937–56. Robson, Catherine and Carol T. Christ. The Norton Anthology on English Literature, The Victorian Age, Vol. E. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, W.W. Norton, 2012. Said, Edward. Introduction. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1993. pp. xi-xxviii. Scobie, Edward. Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain. Johnson Pub. 1972. Shaw, Harry E. “An Approach to the Historical Novel.” The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and his Successors. Cornell UP, pp. 20-50. Todd, Monique. “Striking Photos Reveal Hidden History of Black Britons in the Victorian era.” CNN: Style: Arts. CNN, 30 June 2015. Accessed 9 Apr. 2018. 22 �Sandra Young “Fuck Tha Police” The Poetry and Politics of N.W.A. N o one withdrew after syllabus day. In the semester I piloted a first-year seminar course, the “Rhetoric of Protest Songs,” on the first day of class, I introduced the topic of the class and myself. However, before I gave students the syllabi, I confessed that I knew little about music. I told them I Googled and YouTubed, and read our text to gain knowledge about protest songs. I told them the “Rhetoric of Protest Songs” was a writing class, and rhetoric means persuasion. “In this class, you’ll write academic essays about protest songs. And we’ll listen to some music.” What are protest songs? Thanks to the internet and YouTube this is the music of political activism and it’s more inyour-face-no-holds-barred-tell-it-like-it-is-speak-truth-to-motherfuckin’-power-defiant than ever. Especially in Trump’s America. It is music that shines a glaring light on abuses of power and demands change. Protest music is also poetry and a new generation is discovering the multimodal ways to blend poetry and politics into protest songs. The first few semesters I taught this class my focus was twentieth and twenty-first century protest songs of all kinds. I gave students the freedom to choose their protest songs, hoping they wouldn’t get lost in the sometimes profane and defiant lyrics. I wondered if the mostly white students from the suburbs attending a private Catholic university would be ready to delve into both the poetry and the politics of protest songs. But I was encouraged by their response. They met protest songs head on. They researched and wrote argumentative essays about the poetry and politics of songs that spoke of war (The Vietnam War, from Country Joe and the Fish, 1968, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag,” and Afghanistan and Iraq, from Green Day, 2004, “American Idiot”), poverty (Prince, 2004, “United States of Division”), police killings (Bruce Springsteen, 2014, “American Skin”), the environment, (Joni Mitchell, 1967-1968, “Big Yellow Taxi”), LGBT rights and pride (The Village People, 1978, “Y.M.C.A.,” and Lady Gaga, 2011,“Born This Way”), and women’s issues (Beyoncé, 2011, “Run the World (Girls)”), among other topics. We debated, argued, challenged assumptions and stereotypes, and when discussions got dicey, especially relating to songs about domestic violence, like Tracy Chapman’s 1988 “Behind the Wall,” the class would get quiet for a few moments, and then loud as each side reinforced perspectives and prejudices. As I watched my students work to find common ground and right themselves, I reminded myself that students need to learn how to confront differing opinions and discover that heated discussions can produce cool compromises. Throughout that first semester, most students focused on the songs’ words, as they connected the words to issues, and rendered conclusions about the effectiveness of the songs in changing minds. Then, after a few semesters, I felt confident that students could tackle social justice issues, so I narrowed my focus for the next semester. That class would choose songs, from the 1960s to now, by hip hop and rap artists that addressed issues confronting some members of a specific group – people of color. This paper discusses my plan for the semester, and specifically on two of the three essay assignments, “Protest song lyrics as poetry,” and “Protest song lyrics as politics.” In this paper, I argue that two white male teens, John and Evan (their aliases), demonstrated that their generation was prepared to tackle social justice issues – even issues that sometimes only tangentially touched them. Both John and Evan wrote about N.W.A.’s 1988 ground-breaking song, “Fuck Tha Police,” but from different perspectives: John dealt with the lyrics as poetry; Evan, the lyrics as politics. First, some backstory about the first-year seminar, a required course that replaced Academic Writing, is required. In this course, faculty across the Arts and Sciences curricula adhered to the seminar’s learning objective about teaching writing skills but taught the seminar from whatever angle they think would appeal to students. In developing the “Rhetoric of Protest Songs,” I choose protest songs because their issues, passionate, personal, polemic, and political, chronicle social justice issues. Writing about social justice issues is a form of activism. Throughout my career, my pedagogy has sought to disrupt and confound students’ comfort levels. I agree with the positions of Dennis A. Lynch, Diana George, and Marilyn M. Cooper in their article, “Moments of Arguments: Agonistic inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation,” in which they state that “reconceiving argument that includes both confrontational and cooperative perspectives, [is] a multifaceted process that includes moments of conflict and 23 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” agonistic positioning as well as moments of understanding and communication” (63). In researching and writing about protest songs, I hoped my students would begin to understand their places in the web of social, cultural, civic, political, and racial matters. I hoped they would take transformative steps and link their own writing about social justice issues to what happens in their real-world everyday lives. The text I used for my first few classes was Dorian Lynskey’s 2011, 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day. He defines a protest song as a “political issue … which aligns itself with the underdog” and says the “point of protest music, or indeed any art with a political dimension, is not to shift the world on its axis but to change opinions and perspectives, to say something about the times in which you live” (xiv-xv). Most of my students embraced Lynskey’s definition, and some chose songs listed in his text, though many others found their own songs online. Protest songs are also poems. In fact, Marlene K. Sokolon defines protest poetry in her article, “The Iliad: A Song of Political Protest,” as poetry that, “celebrates a voice on behalf of victims of injustice, the poor, the oppressed” (49). In the wake of recent protest demonstrations, growing crowds vocalized the line, “Fuck Tha Police,” as both poetic tributes to lives lost and political statements of continued unrest. Often, chants of “Hands up, don’t shoot” or “I can’t breathe,” morphed into “Fuck the police.” In 1988, when the lyrics, “Fuck Tha Police” permeated white communities and entranced white teens, the question was why? The simple answer: the song made their parents nuts. If parents hated a song, then it must be good as a typical teen attitude. This was a song that described an alien world of drugs, violence, sex, and danger. When Ice Cube rapped that the “police think they have the authority to kill a minority,” some teen boys heard him rapping to a different kind of “minority” – them – and they raced to buy Straight Outta Compton. In 1992, Alan Light’s “Rappers Sounded Warning,” in the Rolling Stone, writes that Ice-T, who was also no fan of the police, recognized that there’s a “new generation of white teens listening to rap and being exposed to a minority perspective for the first time.” Ice-T says: “They’re saying … ‘these rappers are talking to me, and it’s making me understand. Why did John Wayne always win? Weren’t we taking that land from the Indians? Haven’t we been kind of fucked-up to people?’ They’re starting to figure it out.” Ice-T was referring to white teens, and two of them, John and Evan, answered his questions. In 2008, Marcus Reeves wrote Somebody Scream! Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power. In the chapter about N.W.A., “Niggas Selling Attitude: N.W.A,” Reeves reminds us that the record industry is in the business of making money. He says that “gangstafied rap was as much a verbal response to demoralizing social and economic conditions as it was an innovative way to sell records” (105). Reeves, quoting the owner of Priority Records, Bryan Turner, credits white teens for pushing the sale of Straight Outta Compton into the millions. “White teens in the Valley picked it up,” he said, “and they decided they wanted to live vicariously through this music.’” Not much has changed today. Living vicariously through music. It’s what many of us do. Music is connotative. Students (people) of all stripes are challenged to make their own meanings and find their own values in the music. The connotative nature of music proves that music is inherently rhetorical – it persuasively grabs us and demands attention. We interpret lyrics and construct our own meanings. What meanings could suburban white teens take from N.W.A.? The song “Fuck Tha Police” flashed a strobe light on the lives of O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube), Eric Wright (Easy E), Lorenzo Patterson (MC Ren), Antoine Carraby (DJ Yella), and Andre Young (Dr. Dre). It reported on their lives lived in survival mode on the sub-standard streets of Compton. Their song, not meant as a social or political commentary, was the authentic, lived experiences of these young men. It was treatise on lives lived in poverty because of economic inequality. Of homes in the inner city – a coded term for the ghetto – where danger and violence pervaded all aspects of life. The ghetto, where poorly educated boys became thugs in gangs, and then committed crimes. The ghetto, where girls became mothers too young, and then went on welfare. A place where drugs were available on every street corner. The men of N.W.A. rapped the powerful truth of their dehumanizing encounters with police profiling and brutality. Then, on that Syllabus Day, in that class focused on protest songs about issues concerning some people of color, I fired-up the computer and began with a montage of YouTube clips of protest songs starting in the 1960s. So, as I began my history lesson, I turned to my notes, research, music lyrics, and as much jive as a middle-aged white woman can summon. “Are you ready?” I asked. 24 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” “‘Are you ready niggas? You’ve got to be ready,’” asks three black poet/musicians, the Last Poets (a name for several groups of artists), when they take the stage in Harlem in 1968. Ready for the revolution. Called the “forefathers of rap,” in Sheila Rule’s 1994 New York Times article, “Generation Rap,” she says that they “welded revolutionary politics, incendiary street language and jazzy musical accompaniment into a polyrhythmic wake-up call to America.” Specifically, Black America. I explained that the “revolution” the Last Poets spoke of was often associated with the 1960-1970s Black Power movement that demanded the continuation of civil rights for African Americans. Broadly defined, the revolution is about economic, political, social, housing, and educational empowerment, with an emphasis on black identity and pride. Its artistic component, the Black Arts Movement, included musicians, poets, novelists, playwrights, and fine artists. The revolution, both political and artistic, rejected the dominant values of white American mainstream, and sought to define and establish its own framework of ideologies. I paused. They’re listening. I continued. Two years later, in 1970, the Last Poets thought that maybe Black America wasn’t ready for the revolution. Their spoken word, hip-hop song, “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” spoke a frank reality: Niggers are scared of revolution But niggers shouldn’t be scared of revolution Because revolution is nothing but change And all niggers do is change. Soon after that declaration, their song, “Wake Up, Niggers,” was an unsubtle call to wake up. However, with the salvo, “When the Revolution Comes,” they seem to have given up. They rap: When the revolution comes When the revolution comes When the revolution comes some of us will probably catch it on TV, with chicken hanging from our mouths. Then in the final lyrics of this song from the Last Poets, they gave their black audiences a bit of a poetic and political back-hand when they rapped: “But until then you know and I know niggers will party and / bullshit and party and bullshit and party / and bullshit and party and bullshit and party...” That damning declaration from the Last Poets, I told my students, was about the lack of motivation of their own people. Their cause was taken up by Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” I continued. Scott-Heron’s 1970 reminder was squarely directed at black audiences. Called the “Godfather of Rap” and the “People’s Poet,” he offered a spoken soulful matter-of-fact prediction: You will not be able to stay home, brother You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out You will not be able to lose yourself on skag And skip out for beer during commercials. Because, “The revolution will be live.” Pay attention, Scott-Heron seemed to allude. By 1971, I told my students, the revolution was getting a bit hotter, though to some, it’s still a bit confusing. Sly and the Family Stone’s funk/soul “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” started with a call for action, “Mayday, mayday there’s a riot going down”; it explains where and what’s happening, but yet, the song ends when the “YOUTH” asks: “What the fuck is going on? / What the fuck is going on? / Can I get a straight answer?” The revolution, I said, had stalled. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, seemed fed up and was giving up. In his 1971 album, 40th Anniversary Collection, the song, “There It Is, Pts. 1 & 2,” he hesitated about joining in the revolution, and said let’s just have fun, though there’s a small understated warning. Listen for it: Wipe the sweat Going to have some fun Time’s getting short we got to move But in the meantime Mama, we got to groove. So, bring on the groove. Stevie Wonder’s soul/pop, “Living for the City,” in 1973, seemed hopeful and optimistic because, “His parents give him love and affection / to keep him strong moving in the right direction.” So, he kept 25 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” going. But, like James Brown, there was a limit to what he could take in the current political environment, when he admonished his black audience in the last verse: I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow This place is cruel no where could be much colder If we don’t change the world will soon be over. Yet, Stevie Wonder, too, seemed to give up. By 1975, Curtis Mayfield’s album, There’s No Place Like America Today, continued the pessimistic black dystopic vision of Sly when he sings in “Hard Times,” that he’s fearful of white America. “Cold, cold eyes on me they stare / People all around me and they’re all in fear / They don’t seem to want me but they won’t admit.” As the song continues, the character sings that he’ll “play the part I feel they want of me”; and finally From my body house I see like me another Familiar face of creed and a brother But to my surprise I found another man corrupt Although he be my brother he wants to hold me up. Mayfield’s lyrics seemed to describe 1982 New York, a hotbed of hot-button issues like crime, unemployment, and growing poverty. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, combined the angst of the 1970s and the negativism of the early 1980s with their blast of despair, “The Message.” Grandmaster Flash’s Melle Mel gave hip hop voice and political perception to what’s going on with these lyrics: “It's like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” They rapped about “broken glass,” “people pissing on the stairs,” “rats,” and “junkies.” He says that he’s “Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice.” And, like other poet/musicians, there was a warning, a petition, a plea, that repeated throughout: “Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge / I'm trying not to lose my head.” Melle Mel continued: I can't walk through the park, 'cause it's crazy after the dark Keep my hand on the gun, 'cause they got me on the run … You grow in the ghetto, living second rate And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate The place that you play and where you stay Looks like one great big alley way… And It was plain to see that your life was lost You was cold and your body swung back and forth But now your eyes sing the sad, sad song Of how you lived so fast and died so young. Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” detailed the inventory of social ills in New York, but in Los Angeles a different genre of rappers was gearing up to blow the lid off the world of hip hop. My students listened. Nodded. The lid began to blow in the 1987 rap hit, “6 ‘n the Mornin’,” when Ice-T brags: 6 in the morning, police at my door Fresh Adidas squeak across the bathroom floor Out my back window I make a escape … And the streets to a player is the place to be... Gold on my neck, my pistols close at hand I'm a self-made monster of the city streets Remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats But just living in the city is a serious task Didn't know what the cops wanted, didn't have time to ask. Channeling the Last Poets, Ice-T seemed to be ready. Two years later, Schoolly D’s 1987 taunted, “Am I Black Enough for Ya,” and claimed that “All I need is, my blackness,” and that he was “just rough and tough, and takin’ no stuff.” He swaggered that he’s “too damn powerful / I’m still a bad boy.” And he finally declared: “My name Schoolly D, I'm never alone.” So, there, he seemed to say. 26 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” While Ice-T and Schoolly D got street cred for beginning the subgenre of hip hop called “gangsta rap,” violently cock-sure musicians who associated with the gangster or “gangsta” lifestyle, still they didn’t push the envelope with their music. Then, in 1988, that envelope was not only pushed, but ripped wide open. One group crashed into the gangster rap scene and would dare to say the unsayable. I paused. Scanned my audience. “Are you ready? Do you know what’s coming next?” Some smiled. I continued. Dr. Dre announced: “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” He and Easy E, MC Ren, DJ Yella, and Ice Cube are Niggaz Wit Attitude (N.W.A.). The song responsible for the lid-blowing is “Straight Outta Compton,” the title tract of the album of the same name, and the set-up for the song that would cement their legacy. In “Fuck Tha Police,” they used their “street knowledge” to say the unsayable: “Fuck the police coming straight from the underground.” “Fuck tha,” I said. “T-h-a, not t-h-e. Tha. Fuck Tha Police.” They looked at me. I continued. “Do you recall that the Last Poets chanted this challenge to Black America in 1968: “‘Are you ready niggas? You’ve got to be ready.’” I take a long look at my students. “Are you ready?” N.W.A. was ready. Twenty years after the Last Poets, “Fuck Tha Police” blasted another rhythmic shockwave into the sensibilities of America. This time into White America. This was the song that launched a thousand controversies, diatribes, and extreme over-reactions, I told my students. This was the song that triggered N.W.A. to promote themselves as “The World’s Most Dangerous Group.” This was the song that got no radio play, but managed to irritate the LAPD and the FBI sent N.W.A. an intimidating letter. This song got white America parents alarmed, got white teens tantalized, and got millions of records sold. I stopped and looked at my students. “Are you ready?” They were. The day after syllabus day, I went into the details of the syllabus, and the three assignments. Here, briefly, are two of the assignments. Essay #1 – Protest song lyrics as poetry: Protest songs are poems. In this first essay of about 500 words, choose 1 song from any hip hop group from any decade and examine it as a poem that deals with a social/cultural/political issue/ problem/event. Identify the issue of the song. For this essay, you’ll use 1 literary focus area (plot, character, symbol, setting) to interpret, analyze, evaluate the poetry (lyrics) of the song, and argue how/why it resonated with audiences. The evaluation and interpretation of this song is entirely your own opinion. Essay #2 – Protest song lyrics as politics: Protest song lyrics are political. For this second essay of about 750 words, you’ll examine any 1 song from any hip hop group from any decade that deals with a social/cultural/political issue/ problem/event as a political statement. Don’t use the same issue or song from Essay #1. Use 2 secondary research sources about the song’s issue. Your argument will concern whether the song’s issue/problem/event at the time of the song resonates today. Do not research the lyrics of the song. In-text citations and works cited page. I reminded students of my acronym W. A. S. & P., which is W: writer. You. A: audience. In college, your professor and classmates. S: situation. The situation is your writing assignment’s specific details. P: purpose. The purpose of the assignment is what your professor wants you to do – inform or argue or persuade or explain. Throughout the course, I slyly inserted rhetorical strategies and techniques, such as Toulmin’s concept of warrants and claims, methods for finding and evaluating research. For kicks, I introduced deductive reasoning. My hope was that the issues in their chosen protest songs would trigger engagement and produce aha moments of social awareness in my students. My pedagogical hope was to convert high school writers into college writers. I don’t give trigger warnings. In my classroom, all issues are on the table, and none are censored if students are respectful of others’ opinions. This fact alone surprised many students, because protest song lyrics can be offensive. Students chose the songs, studied their lyrics, and researched and wrote. Many students found their voices, let the artists and songs speak to them, and connected current hot issues with those of the past. In doing so, students realized the relevancy of the issues. We are experiencing a zeitgeist moment for protest music. Many of my students took ownership of their positions about political issues in their writing. My students, John and Evan, had their own zeitgeist moments, and “Fuck Tha Police” led the way. Each choose N.W.A.’s principal song for one of their essays. For John, it was Essay #1 – Protest song lyrics as poetry. Evan used the song for his Essay #2 – Protest song lyrics as politics. In John’s essay, he critically analyzed, evaluated, interpreted, and argued the song’s lyrics about police brutality; Evan’s essay focused on profiling, he added research and used lyrics to support his position. I quote from their essays. 27 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” To be honest, I was a bit surprised that my class would embrace writing about protest songs concerning issues of some people of color. I wondered why these suburban white teens, whose lives were seemingly free of the kind of conflict rapped by protest song artists, were attracted to the music’s issues. These students had probably never experienced the situations, terrors, and unrest described in these songs. Especially, I was intrigued by what John and Evan might learn from “Fuck Tha Police.” For John and Evan, “Fuck Tha Police” worked to shake them out of their semi-protected shells. Perhaps the song produced nascent activism in John and Evan. In doing so, they may have become just a little more aware. A little less comfortable. A little more “woke.” Living vicariously through music. It’s what many of us do. Music is connotative. Students (people) of all stripes are challenged to make their own meanings and find their own values in the music. The connotative nature of music proves that music is inherently rhetorical – it persuasively grabs us and demands attention. We interpret lyrics and construct our own meanings. But what meanings could suburban white teens take from N.W.A.? The song “Fuck Tha Police” flashed a strobe light on the lives of O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube), Eric Wright (Easy E), Lorenzo Patterson (MC Ren), Antoine Carraby (DJ Yella), and Andre Young (Dr. Dre). It reported on their lives lived in survival mode on the sub-standard streets of Compton. Their song, not meant as a social or political commentary, was the authentic, lived experiences of these young men. It was treatise on lives lived in poverty because of economic inequality. Of homes in the inner city – a coded term for the ghetto – where danger and violence pervaded all aspects of life. The ghetto, where poorly educated boys became thugs in gangs, and then committed crimes. The ghetto, where girls became mothers too young, and then went on welfare. A place where drugs were available on every street corner. The men of N.W.A. rapped the powerful truth of their dehumanizing encounters with police profiling and brutality. How did my students fit into this scenario? Were my students living vicariously the lives of N.W.A.? When Ice Cube declared, “We can go toe to toe in the middle of a cell / Fucking with me cause I’m a teenager,” did John and Evan see themselves? Or were they indulging in teenage bravado? Were they re-casting the established stereotypes of blacks in jail cells? Did they have any idea what the song was truly about? Did they grasp the irony of white teens glomming onto a song directed at black audiences? Did they even know what “white privilege” meant? “White privilege” – that term itself freighted with controversy. I would find out. In his Essay #1: Protest song lyrics as poetry about “Fuck Tha Police,” John (white, 18, upper middle class) was up-front in recognizing his white privilege. His familiarity with Macklemore’s 2005 song “White Privilege” propelled us into a 30-minute (almost half the class) discussion. When I asked the class to define “white privilege,” it was a long few seconds before someone spoke up. In that conversation, a few eyebrows arched, one or two voices shrilled, but no chairs were tossed. And maybe for some of my students, there were tacit insights into understanding white privilege and its place in their lives. In Essay #1, the point of this short first essay allowed students to familiarize themselves with the processes of college writing and workshopping. In all of their essays, I stressed that student opinions are important as long as they don’t contradict facts, and that their interpretations and analyses of their songs must be entirely their own points of view. I hoped that when students opined about their songs and connected the lyrics to issues, conversations would lead students to see how hot political issues of the past are still relevant today. For Essay #2, I introduced research. Though I continued to encourage my students to find their voices and express their own opinions, they also critically examined other opinions from their research. Even though this was a firstyear writing course, and even though I don’t require deep dives into research, I did expect due diligence when they researched their protest songs’ political issues. I allotted a significant part of class time for researching, questioning, and drafting. Remember, I gave my students lots of freedom in choosing their songs. So, I figured they owed it to me to stay focused. For John, the issue for Essay #1 (protest song lyrics as poetry) of “Fuck Tha Police,” was easy – police brutality. Yet in his pre-writing phase, he dug into why he was moved by the song. In a workshop discussion about his draft, he pulled up Macklemore’s “White Privilege,” on his laptop and pointed to these lines: “Hip-hop started off in a block that I’ve never been to / To counter act a struggle that I’ve never even been through.” And: So here comes history and the cultural appropriation White teens with do rags trying to practice their accents From the suburbs to the upperclass mastering a language But hip hop is not just memorizing words 28 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” It’s rooted in authenticity something you literally can’t learn But I’m gonna be me so please be who you are. John followed Macklemore’s advice. John said that he wanted his essay to show how rebellion was in the “eye of the beholder,” and that his rebellion – a tattoo – was how he was, like Macklemore insisted, “gonna be me.” So, this 18-year-old did get into the poetry of “Fuck Tha Police” by interpreting the character of MC Ren. John said that when MC Ren took the stand in N.W.A.’s pseudocourtroom drama of mocking the police, he explained how and why he made decisions, and how MC Ren asserted his right to be who he is. John wrote that when the cops pulled over MC Ren, when “‘Lights start flashing behind me,’” he said, “‘that shit don’t work, I just laugh / because it gives em a hint, not to step in my path / For police, I’m saying, ‘Fuck you punk!’” John said that “MC Ren makes a decision to laugh at the cops because they’re ‘scared of a nigga’, and that ‘Taking out tha police, would make my day.’” John wrote: “I’m not a gangsta, but I can rebel. I’m not going to really laugh at a cop that pulls me over, but later I might.” When John related the character of MC Ren in “Fuck Tha Police,” he discovered he had an unlikely kinship with the rapper. John recognized another teenager in the rapper, and he didn’t let his white privilege get in the way of his empathy. What I learned is how John understood the lyrics as powerful tools for sociopolitical change. In John’s writing I saw the onset or maybe continuation of activism when he debated with his class about white privilege. He linked the political power – the “authority” – of the police over MC Ren because “the niggas on the street is a minority.” And he analyzed the character of the rapper (now a middle-aged man), he saw a teen rebel, like himself. Although, as John admits, he’s not about to go gangster. Let’s also remember that the line, “Fuck the police coming straight from the underground,” isn’t the first line of the song. In the opening, N.W.A. set up their own courtroom drama in which we witnessed a rapping script complete with speaking parts for the rappers and a cop: “[MC Ren as Court Officer]” says: Right about now, N.W.A. court is in full effect Judge Dre presiding In the case of N.W.A. vs. the Police Department prosecuting attorneys are MC Ren, Ice Cube and Eazy-motherfucking E. In creating their own bizzaro episode of “Law and Order,” the rappers sought a reversal of that classic paradigm. They put the cops on trial in a kangaroo courtroom fantasy. What John taught me, a middle-aged, white woman, was to move past the shock of the profanity-laced, explicitly violent lyrics of “Fuck Tha Police,” and focus on the rappers as characters in the song, and how they used language. Then, in my research, when Geoffrey Baker suggest in his 2011, “Preachers, Gangsters, Pranksters: MC Solaar and Hip-Hop as Overt and Covert Revolt,” I listened again to the song, and I heard the rappers testify. I heard them use their “street knowledge” to tell their stories of daily abuses, and become masters of their “imagined domain” (237), the courtroom fantasy, which is, as Baker says, is the “end-point of every narrative” (237). John had moved past the lyrics to envision himself on trial and defending his right to be himself. Looking past the jarring lyrics, I also saw N.W.A. as hyperbolic humorists who wrote playful poetry. In writing “Fuck Tha Police,” N.W.A. accomplished what Baker asserts is the “most graphic violence…violence that is performed graphically: in writing, in language” (238). Furthermore, by setting the song in a courtroom, the rappers used parody in a mocking re-enactment of real trials, says Bryan McCann, in his 2012 article, “Contesting the Mark of Criminality: Race, Place, and the Prerogative of Violence in N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton.” By making fun of the LAPD, the rappers cast off the stereotyped “mark of criminology” seared on them by white America, and became tongue-in-cheek tricksters having a bloody good time while the authorities – politicians, cops, and parents – heard their figurative language and wordplay as literal threats. Evan, another 18-year-old, began his Essay #2 (protest song lyrics as politics) about “Fuck Tha Police”: There will always be a problem in the world of politics.…In the 1970s and 1980s…law enforcement was not serving justice to every citizen. They targeted African Americans, mainly young black men because they believed they were involved in drugs, robbery, or murder. Protesting against police brutality…artists creating music to help speak out…[the] N.W.A. wrote ‘Fuck Tha Police’…to show how the neighborhood of Compton, California was affecting them, but then they had an effect right back on them with these lyrics, ‘Smoke any motherfucker that sweats me // or any asshole, that threatens me // I’m a sniper with a hell of a scope // Taking out a cop or two, they can’t cope with me.’ 29 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” He found research from Billboard, in Alex Gale’s “Ice Cube: ‘Police Have Become Our Worst Bullies.’” Evan writes: Ice Cube, a member of N.W.A., spoke … about the politics he faced during the times he was creating music. Gale had interviewed Ice Cube, who states, ‘We wanted to show that when we did a song like ‘Fuck Tha Police’ that it wasn’t just about us…It was more of an anthem for people to be able to fight back and to have a song they can all rally around…We wanted to show that our music had an impact on the community as a whole.’ Then, Evan added his considered opinion: N.W.A. was trying to warn people about what was going on politically…Ice Cube believes that their song’s significance is that it shows the problem that the police are trained to win no matter what and that they are not held accountable for their actions even if it’s killing an innocent kid. He also believes that politicians…try to discredit rappers who speak out about political issues. Recall during our earlier debate about white privilege, that John referred to Macklemore’s 2005 song, “White Privilege.” Then, Evan countered John with Macklemore’s 2016 “White Privilege II.” His favorite parts of the song, he told the class, were when Macklemore (and Ryan Lewis) introduced other voices and opinions, like N.W.A. did in “Fuck Tha Police.” In his essay, John wrote that, “…like the cops in ‘Fuck Tha Police,’ these other voices/opinions didn’t seem to see what was happening around them, nor did they understand the irony like in ‘White Privilege II.’ When Macklemore raps, ‘It seems like we’re more concerned with being called racist / Than we actually are with racism…” Evan, like John, seemed to connect the dots from Eazy E’s raps questioning cops’ motivations, when he quoted “They put out my picture with silence // Cause my identity by itself causes violence” to Macklemore’s raps about questioning his own motivations: “If I’m aware of my privilege and do nothing at all, I don’t know…So what the fuck has happened to my voice if I stay silent when black people are dying.” In writing about “Fuck Tha Police,” John wrote about the lyrics as poetry and Evan about lyrics as politics, they seemed to be “checking their white privilege.” Were John’s and Evan’s arguments about police and profiling forms of activism? Had John and Evan earned their “‘woke badges’”? These are some of the questions that Amanda Hess posits in her 2016 New York Times Magazine article, “Earning the ‘Woke’ Badge.” To be considered “woke” Hess says, is “a back-pat from the left,” an acknowledgement that you grasp the historic struggle against prejudice and racial injustice. “‘Woke,’” Hess notes, “denotes awareness,” but also “connotes blackness. It suggests to white allies that if they walk the walk, they get to talk the talk.” But Hess and others cautioned that if whites appropriated a black culture then they must be willing to confront other whites. John and Evan endorsed Hess’ call to action when they both discussed Macklemore. At the end of his “White Privilege II,” Macklemore raps: The best thing white people can do is talk to each other And having those very difficult, very painful conversations… I think one of the critical questions for white people in this society is what are you willing to risk What are you willing to sacrifice to create a more just society? Yet, if whites risk over-playing the “stay woke” mantra, they might wind up like the cop on trial in “Fuck Tha Police,” when Dr. Dre proclaims, “The jury has found you guilty of being a redneck/white bread, chickenshit motherfucker.” In that class focused on issues concerning some people of color, my students studied song lyrics that ran the gamut of current political talking points: police brutality, domestic violence, profiling, Black Lives Matter, gun violence, and civil rights. They formulated positions, debated, and argued. They shared opinions, outrage, and sometimes optimism. By specifically writing about the poetry and the politics of N.W.A.’s 1988 song, “Fuck Tha Police,” John and Evan helped their classmates realize that police brutality and profiling has never really stopped. Now, when students hear the names Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and too many others, they may connect N.W.A.’s song to the demonstrations and protests happening now. In fact, in Chris Moore’s 2015 Mass Appeal article, “‘Fuck Tha Police’: N.W.A.’s Most Courageous Song is Still Relevant as Ever,” Ice Cube states, “‘Fuck Tha Police’ was four hundred years in the making. And it’s still just as relevant as it was before it was made.” In a world of 24/7 social media and cell phone videos, students can see what’s happening around the country. My students may not have known that when they researched and wrote about protest songs they were entering an ongoing conversations about the role of social justice activism. They do now. The next semester, on syllabus day, students knew what to expect. No one withdrew from that class, either. 30 �Sandra Young • “Fuck Tha Police” _____________________________ Works Cited Baker, Geoffrey. “Preachers, Gangsters, Pranksters: MC Solaar and Hip-Hop as Overt and Covert Revolt.” Journal of Popular Culture vol. 44, no. 2. 2011. pp. 233-255. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00830.x Hess, Amanda. “Earning the ‘Woke’ Badge.” New York Times Magazine, 19 Apr. 2019. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/04/24/magazine/earning-the-woke-badge.html hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 1994. Light, Alan. “Rappers Sounded Warning.” Rolling Stone, 9 July 1992, pp. 15-7. Lynch, Dennis A., et al. “Moments of Argument: Agonistic Inquiry and Confrontational Cooperation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 48, no. 1, 1997, pp. 61–85. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/358771. Lynskey, Dorian. 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day. HarperCollins, 2011. McCann, Bryan J. “Contesting the Mark of Criminality: Race, Place, and the Prerogative of Violence in N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 29, no. 5. 2012, pp. 367-386. doi/abs/1 0.1080/15295036.2012.676194 Moore, Chris. “‘Fuck Tha Police’: N.W.A.’s Most Courageous Song is Still Relevant as Ever.” Mass Appeal, 14 Aug. 2015. https://actipedia.org/project/fuck-tha-police-nwas-most-courageous-song-still-relevant-ever Reeves, Marcus. Somebody Scream! Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Rule, Sheila. “Generation Rap.” New York Times, 3 Apr. 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/03/magazine/ generation-rap.html Sokolon, Marlene K. “The Iliad: A song of Political Protest.” New Political Science, vol. 30, no. 1, 2008. https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07393140701877692 31 �Sandy Feinstein with Bryan Wang and Jannah Martin Aventure Throwing the Gauntlet in University Humanities Courses A venture is what knights on quests did: they set off on aventure, sometimes having an explicit goal in mind—the Grail, to become a knight, to rescue maidens, the queen, fellow knights, kings, even an entire people. They expected to meet challenges along the way: recreant knights, perhaps dragons, inevitably wonders. They put themselves at risk; they could lose their horse, their love or squire, their life, their honor. Though the knights set out into the unknown on quests that had no guarantee of success, their authors, led by the conventions of the genre and their imagination, knew where they wanted them to go, how they would get there or if they would get there, what their challenges would be, and how each test would be met. In our modern world of rapid communication, of MapQuest and Google Maps, and very different expectations for human beings and fictional characters, aventure might not seem an ideal model on which to structure an education, even an honors education. Though the first word defining Chaucer’s Knight, “honour,” preceding “trouthe, fredom, and courtesie,” has been appropriated by academic programs, and the second word appears in the mission statements of many honors programs, few (any?) advertise the importance of taking risks, of failing or losing one’s way. Losing one’s way as a medieval knight is not correlated to reputation or rank: good and bad romance knights get lost in the vague landscapes of aventure. Knightly achievement is not quantitatively measured any more than the distance from one tournament to another where he, or she, may excel or fail. Being lost, or not having a clear plan, never mind actively seeking an ill-defined quest or one-to-be-identified only after it is accepted, is not part of the imaginative landscape, or programs, of higher education. My efforts to teach critical thinking and creative problem solving repudiate the conventional wisdom in education that insists on a clear mapping of the route, a word ominously close to “rote.” In the humanities, as in the lives and conditions represented by its disciplines, the route is not clear; it is not learned by rote. A clear set of directions may be important to develop a foundation: medieval knights in training learned how to ride, tilt, and joust, among other things, before they represented the causes of the court or entered tournaments. To become knights in the Middle Ages—in reality or romance—required learning at court and in the field, alone and with others, by example and experience. But their education was no guarantee of their future success at court or in the field, or even of survival, no matter how much they excelled at each skill. Rhetorical skills mattered, too: they might keep one in good stead or have a deleterious effect. If only Chrétien’s Lancelot had tried to explain to Guinevere his two-step hesitation in mounting the cart of shame or she had explained why she was mad at him before rejecting his homage, he might not have attempted to kill himself and her beauty might not have withered (however temporarily) when she heard the news. What can we assume students know, or should know, before setting out on their varied modern quests in education or career? Do very different kinds of demands, expectations, and contingencies—being able to choose a career but not knowing if it will still exist in a world where developing technologies increasingly replace human labor—require more structure, or less, in one’s education? Can there be a prescribed path for teaching originality, critical thinking, creative problem solving, and effective communication? The syllabus and assignments I post may seem vague to anyone used to a page or more of instructions for papers, lab reports, or team projects. My reasons for privileging aventure, whether by providing syllabi that cover only the first three or four weeks of a course or by omitting details that provide explicit directions for completing assignments, extend beyond the stated course objectives duly included and beyond transparent pedagogic ones, that is, beyond what students likely registered for to fulfill a requirement. I want writing and literature courses to be more than a hoop to jump through that results in a degree and a dive into the job market because the humanities could well prepare students for the life they didn’t expect, for what cannot be anticipated, whether “good” or “bad.” One of my aims, omitted from the goals and objectives dutifully listed on the syllabus, is to prepare students for the unexpected in their academic lives and beyond. That may sound presumptuous for someone who, besides composition, teaches Medievalism, The Quest, Arthurian Legend, and, most recently, a team-taught cross-disciplinary 32 �Sandy Feinstein with Bryan Wang and Jannah Martin • Aventure course, “From Beast Books to Resurrecting Dinosaurs.” Knowing there are few who would, or could, choose my area of study or career path—majoring in English isn’t even possible where I teach—has made me wary of assumptions about the future and, in turn, committed to arming students for unexpected, inevitable change. Perhaps there are students who will become exactly what their first composition for me, a statement of purpose, claims: journalists, despite the ever shrinking paid prospects; accountants, despite the increasing presence of programs to do the math and much more; teachers, despite the shrinking dollars for education and increasing reliance on remote education; computer programmers, despite the unexpected moral and political challenges becoming ubiquitous; engineers, despite the unexpected changes in applications, design, methodologies, and labor needs. As an English professor now for nearly forty years, aventure has taken me to Tennessee, California, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Syria; in each of these places I learned to adapt to new academic environments and unfamiliar cultures, where students studied English for a variety of reasons: in Syria, because they hadn’t passed the qualifying test for engineering or medicine but wanted a university education, and English was the only field they qualified for; in Bulgaria, because developing sophisticated language skills could, they hoped, improve their qualifications for scholarships to study in the United States and other English language countries. Despite these kinds of differences, though, students’ quests were otherwise remarkably similar: interchangeable career goals (or lack thereof), hopes, dreams. I learned variability in goals and motivation was more a matter of personality and perceived ability than of circumstances or cultural imperatives. The desire was to succeed, to DO something, to get away, to make one’s family proud, to avoid yielding to fear and desperation, which not all managed to do. The majority of students majored in what would accomplish those goals, no matter their personal predilections or strengths. Some had the good fortune to have parents who saw them as successful no matter their major or chosen career. Unfortunately, this kind of acceptance was rare at the colleges and universities where I’ve taught. The question, then, is how to prepare for what one cannot anticipate? What can students do when their best laid plans are foiled, whether they do not succeed in their chosen major or they do? How are they to respond to unanticipated economic contingencies: shrinking job markets or radically changed ones; technologies making once guaranteed areas of employment obsolete; diminished job mobility; a major or a job not being what was expected, hoped, or desired? Aventure is both what is found along the way and how the challenges faced are addressed. Engaging aventure in a safe place with others, in a classroom, may prepare students to adapt to what cannot be controlled. What does aventure look like in a college class? It is not haphazard. There is, for one, a syllabus. In this plan for a semester of writing or reading, risks are acknowledged, but “failure” is made to be, like a hero’s setbacks, a temporary condition. Papers may receive “no grade,” require rethinking, rewriting, and resubmitting, not just once but numerous times until students arrive at their goal, whether a particular grade or an essay suitable for submission to a conference or competition. By taking on the challenge, whether of submitting assignments early for pre-grade comments or doing optional rewriting, students individually determine their commitment to the endeavor. Grades are both the guerdon and the obstacle, for some motivating, for others anxiety producing. In either case, neither the topic nor the number of required sources may seem enough of an informational guide. The expectation for an organizational strategy, sufficient development, and appropriate style may not be considered adequate direction without each one being explicitly parsed into an iron clad rubric: the kinds of transitions (for 1, 2, or 3 points added), the number of grammatical errors (for 1, 2, 3 deleted), how many examples to support how many ideas (for 10, 20, 30 points). I’m not sure it’s possible or desirable to explain everything a course will cover from the outset. Aventure allows for changes in the direction of a course, which responses to assignments can help determine. When I develop a course or create an assignment I have definite ideas of what I want to accomplish and what I should cover. Similarly, when writing a paper, I think I know what I will argue, but new research, dissatisfaction with the idea or structure as I work, impulse or inspiration, and talking with others—whether friends or editors—may prompt a shift in direction. Though changing course can feel disorienting, the sense of discovery also makes it exciting. To constrain ideas and how to represent them by delineating each element of assignments to be graded according to a rubric can take away one of the pleasures of thinking and writing: experimenting with something new, taking risks. Rubrics challenge teachers to quantify what is not uniform, to perpetrate illusions of what cannot be simply defined and accurately measured: originality, organizational strategy, sense of an audience, substantive development, rhetorical sophistication. The only components easily quantifiable are surface errors, the least important of all, pedagogically speaking. Lacking models, students may, however, propose an original idea rather than imitate what has been provided. I try to model what I teach. I do each assignment, so I’ll have an example in case the class seems too lost or anxious to be productive without one. When I team teach, I do the assignments created by my colleagues, partly to 33 �Sandy Feinstein with Bryan Wang and Jannah Martin • Aventure learn and partly to get a sense of the difficulty of what we are expecting of our students. Most recently, in the teamtaught interdisciplinary course, “From Beast Books to Resurrecting Dinosaurs,” I worried about embarrassing myself with my pathetic responses to assignments designed by my co-teacher, a molecular biologist (whose major did not exist when I was in college). While I nervously threw out idea after idea until finally coming up with one classifying dragons and, another, creating a model university metaphorically structured by DNA, the students confidently offered up their remarkable representations of classification and models with far less anxiety and frustration than I did. For the assignment on models, one student produced two. With this contrast in attitude, understanding, and productivity in mind, I asked that student, Jannah, if she would reflect on her experience, which she has below: When looking at a rubric as a sort of “model” for an assignment, it’s easy to see, at least as a student, where the traditional method of assessment and instruction can fall short: mandate a detailed, restrictive model, and any assignment or paper based off of it becomes explicit and unimaginative. There’s typically very little wiggle room for originality, let alone experimentation or anything that goes beyond the bounds of the prompt. However, without this prescriptive model, I had the freedom to draw, develop, and explain my own connections to the prompt, and, as a result, the ability to create my own conclusions. This freedom allowed me to “play in the space” and experiment with visuals, concepts, and formats whenever whim or academic aventure compelled me. For the model notebook assignment, I decided to mesh two of my interests, theology and geography, into a set of models that I then used to describe the progression of evolutionary understanding over time and how cultural beliefs have affected our understanding of science. The assignment called for a written description along with the model itself, which gave me the opportunity to defend and explain my interpretation of the odd collection of models I used. Jannah also recalls how her classmates responded to another of our assignments, for which they were given still less guidance, which means I must have originally designed it. As she says, The ‘Zoo View,’ a semester-long assignment for which our class was told only to ‘assemble images of creatures,’ then curate them ‘according to different schemes used throughout history,’ produced an incredibly wide assortment of presentations, each reflecting part of our bespoke area of interest in the course or in our majors. From the same prompt came musical compositions, taxonomic trees based off of pets and encountered wildlife, algorithmic search queries, and MLB team classifications, all of which were considered ‘correct’ within the generous parameters of the prompt. It was my colleague who imposed a modicum of order with the verb “curate.” But rather than speak for this colleague in science I still can’t believe agreed to teach with me after fair warning, I asked him to define his own context for understanding and engaging aventure. Here is his response: My pedagogical training is recent, during this era of detailed learning objectives, rubrics, and assignment descriptions, and in a field—molecular biology—that typically provides undergraduates a highly structured educational experience. In teaching with Professor Feinstein, however, I discovered the spirit of aventure alongside the students. I learned to open in my own assignments adequate territory for students to interpret, lose themselves, experiment, fail, and pursue what they could not have initially imagined. The experience was freeing; it was exhilarating. Spurred by the unanticipated delight that attends setting students upon the quest, I offered, in a molecular genetics course for graduating seniors in biochemistry, a project in which students defined the what, how, why, and to whom of a final presentation of their semester’s laboratory work. Although initially disorienting for some of the young scientists, the project kept at bay all traces of senioritis: ultimately, students appreciated the encouragement to take ownership of their learning experience and the opportunity to exercise their creativity—and their work was enthusiastically presented and received at an event for the college’s science division during finals week. Bryan and I were both anxious about engaging each other’s disciplines and pedagogies but excited about learning together. According to Bryan, those oriented to the sciences expect explicit steps, or, in his words, “detailed instructions, at least in their early undergraduate years.” As he explains, There are formulae in math and chemistry; there are protocols in the laboratory. Science is orderly. It’s later, such as when they apprentice themselves to working scientists, that students discover the incompleteness of textbooks and the value of synthesis, application, divergent thinking, and interdisciplinarity. Then they relate to science no longer as a collection of facts and a defined method, but as a creative act. Bryan’s is the point of view of a scientist, which, while I came to appreciate and learn from, may account for why I didn’t major in any science, despite ornithology being my favorite college course. I attended college twenty years 34 �Sandy Feinstein with Bryan Wang and Jannah Martin • Aventure before he did, in the early seventies, when students were pushing against restraints, demanding change, which may be partly why it’s so hard for me to fathom the reascendance of what seems such an old-fashioned way to approach any subject. In today’s pedagogies, whether in science or humanities, order and explanation are foregrounded, made explicit, based on a model of deduction. The method of aventure, by contrast, takes a more circuitous route to its objective. It lacks a clearly marked path or a set of instructions to discover one. The grail is to be found somewhere, the right question will eventually be posed, and the imprisoned Lancelot will be rescued, all by seeming accident in Chrétien, Malory, and von Eschenbach. But there is purpose all the same. Purpose informs everything in aventure, in romance and the classroom, even from the very first action taken. In the course Bryan and I taught together, for example, I created the initial journal assignments with the intention of focusing students on readings that would also begin their preparation for a unit test on key words and a paper on how the meanings of words change. After having read selections from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, students were asked to “Create an etymology of your own name and draw conclusions about your lineage, behaviors, and appearance. Compare to others of your kind in word and image.” That’s all. Unsurprisingly, most students Googled their names and, without attribution or identifying sources, summarized what they found. The majority did not create an original etymology: they located one, which they then appropriated; and, consequently, they had difficulty transferring what they learned about their names to themselves. Making comparisons also proved challenging. While most students did not use the classical and early medieval readings to model how they might create a personal etymology, Jannah did, noting, as she explains, Included in the prompt itself was the word ‘create,’ which, combined with the class discussion that came along with the reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the far-fetched inferences of Pliny, Isidore, and Aristotle, gave me the idea to include not just previously existing etymologies, but also original and technically inaccurate ones. While I did do some research into the linguistic background behind my own name, most of my energy and focus went towards establishing connections and tailoring those comparisons into some sort of coherent, personalized etymology. When the strict definition of my name didn’t line up with what I wanted to communicate, I chose to interpret in the same way that Isidore did, more or less eschewing official etymologies and creating new ones that better fit the narrative I was trying to develop. Jannah extrapolated from class readings and discussions, and, like Isidore, from what she knew about languages, while also providing authorities for her claims and making up original ones. The readings were intended as models to replace a set of directions dictating where the etymology should be found or from what it should be constructed (Historical records? Dictionaries? Parents or family friends? Fiction?), or how many—if any—sources should be used and attributed. The syllabus noted that journal responses submitted 24 hours before the deadline would receive feedback students could use to revise their submissions before turning them in for a grade by the due date. This was an early assignment, the first-to-be-graded journal, that would reveal what students knew how to do and what some would need to be guided to learn how to do. While the journal may have been the first of its kind for a majority of the students, Jannah was among those who had prior exposure to not being told what to do or how to do it. She recalls her initial reaction to assignments in her first course with me: This lack of concrete direction in my first semester English class with Professor Feinstein initially promised to be the source of constant frustration and stress. Coming from high school courses, both honors and otherwise, where the expectations were clearly laid out, the prospect of writing a paper without any sort of rubric was akin to driving blindfolded. Saying that there wasn’t any concrete direction is a bit unfair. I had direction: a prompt, related assigned readings, multiple professor and classmate conference sessions. What I actually wanted, and discovered was missing, was a sort of ultimatum, one that would explicitly dictate what I was supposed to produce and the route I was supposed to take to get there. My initial papers and journals, the first few tentative forays into uncharted waters, reflected my continued adhesion to the aforementioned assessment vehicle even in its absence. It would take the entirety of my first English course, and perhaps most of the second, for me to view the prompt not as a blueprint for the end product, but as rather a starting point for me to branch off of as I saw fit. When I stopped being forced to think about papers as mindless, transactional assignments, my writing methods and projects also began to diverge from traditional papers and journals. Assignments that, in a standard course, could have been endlessly boring, rote affairs became opportunities for me to research and read more about things that I was interested in, and to present them in ways that reflected whatever major I was pursuing at the time. Student writers need guidance at different times and in different areas, or when even the same area, they require 35 �Sandy Feinstein with Bryan Wang and Jannah Martin • Aventure different kinds of guidance. That guidance may be individual or part of a classroom lesson for all, depending on the responses. Students need to develop individual interpretive skills, too. But how to do that with a model predicated on onesize-fits-all? If writing is individual and interpretation subjective, then addressing each student’s efforts benefits from being individualized as well. A partial syllabus is easier to revise and reorient than one marching relentlessly through a semester toward goals that might not be achievable unless adapted to students’ abilities as teachers gradually discover them. What’s missing is allowing for aventure. Romances are episodic and repetitive: knights face conventional challenges over and over again; the enemies vary little. Losing a horse, being unexpectedly unseated, does not mean a forever after on unyielding, cold ground. In Chrétien, even Lancelot is unhorsed and for reasons undergraduates may well relate to: daydreaming while on his quest, about his love, no less. Getting back on the horse and into battle for a student may just mean learning to move on from a disappointing test or rejection letter from a job or graduate school. Being willing to take on the seemingly impossible has its advantages and fewer consequences than students expect. Sir Kay, whose ambitions in Chrétien’s Knight of the Cart resulted in his being wounded but also in Lancelot’s coming to his and the Queen’s rescue, is a reminder that a knight may overreach and fail, gain a reputation as a fool, but still stay undaunted, still be beloved by the King and the court. Unlike in medieval romance, however, where characters do not “develop,” in the humanities classroom we expect students to learn and be able to transfer skills and understanding, to grow as scholars and as human beings, too. In an education designed as aventure, the ideal is to learn critical thinking and creative problem solving because without those skills, students and graduates may be stymied by what they face. In short, their quests may be stopped in their tracks for lack of being able to adapt to what isn’t mapped. In engaging the unfamiliar and seemingly open-ended, the unexpected and, perhaps, feared, whether reading an alien language like Middle English or learning to write for a range of audiences, students may develop ideas they didn’t know they had, ideas that could be groundbreaking in their chosen fields as well as in the humanities. Fears of the unknown future, then, despite the ominous signs, could be allayed with lessons learned by aventure. In the Middle Ages, you had to have faith, to believe. Now, we have to work at it. It may look like an impractical medieval romance to accept a quest that lacks for details, as Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan complained, but even that can-do American, finding himself in Camelot, learned that progress, profit, and even love can result from the unlikeliest of unexpected journeys. 36 �Colleen Coyne “True to How the Real World WN ould Operate” I P ncorporating arrative ractices into a Service-Learning-Based Professional Writing Course As many students turn away from humanities fields toward more “practical” majors—business administration, accounting, computer science—English, history, and other humanities departments are left to make the case that a humanities degree is still useful (Schmidt). However, it is not a difficult case to make: one key job of the humanities is to help students cultivate both critical thinking skills and the ability to empathize with diverse human experiences in order to engage meaningfully in the world. In fact, many of the most sought-after skills of new hires—written and oral communication, interpersonal skills, creative problem-solving, analytic thinking (see, e.g., Ahmad and Pesch; Camacho; Kohn; Ortiz et al.; Zartner et al.)—in a variety of industries are developed by studying fields such as literature and other humanities subjects. Along with a general push toward “professionalization” in the fields of technical and business communication, there has been a movement toward splitting off from the “home” English department, further separating the “literary” from the “professional.” However, like Patrick Moore, I urge colleagues on both sides of the literature–professional communication divide to recognize the mutually beneficial partnership between the seemingly disparate fields –for faculty and students alike. Specifically, I would like to offer professional writing – an umbrella term for an array of documents, texts, and approaches one might encounter in the workplace (however broadly defined) – as a vital site of humanistic inquiry, as much as literature or creative writing is, and emphasize the essential relationship between the two. Professional writers think creatively, analytically, and rhetorically, asking important questions, foregrounding awareness of others, and building relationships. One feature of professional communication—storytelling—is particularly fruitful for forging connections across disciplines and cultures, a truly humanistic aim. (Although it is worth considering the distinctions between story and narrative, here I will use the terms interchangeably, as others such as Richard; Dalpiaz and DiStefano; and Hansen have done). Narrative—as an element of both process and product—is an integral pedagogical tool that allows students to consider the ethical implications of their writing and their identities as citizens of the world, especially important as students prepare to enter their first “real world” jobs. Telling Professional Stories According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “narrate” comes from the Latin narrāre, to relate or recount, as well as gnārus, for knowing, skilled (by contrast, we might consider its relationship to “ignore” or “ignorant”). Following Hayden White and others, including Roland Barthes, for whom narrative “ceaselessly substitutes meaning for the straightforward copy of the events recounted” (119), we can identify narrative as a key element of documents that shape perceptions, persuade readers to action, and help forge relationships within and among people and organizations. Peggy J. Miller has presented narrative as a relational practice—that is, one in which the self is constructed in relation to other people. Listeners and readers—our audience—inform and influence how we present ourselves, particularly through story. Therefore, we can conceive of narrative as an opportunity to consider audience and relate our story— and create a relatable story—and as an opportunity to connect to others by sharing what we know. This way of thinking about narrative has definite implications for building community both within and beyond the classroom. Narrative usually takes different forms in the literary and professional worlds, and storytelling as an act asks different things of literary and professional writers. I appreciate the definitions offered by Kendall Haven, who construes story as “a detailed, character-based narration of a character’s struggles to overcome obstacles and reach an important goal” (79), and by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, who delineate story as “a fact, wrapped in an emotion that compels us to take an action that transforms our world” (5). With these definitions in mind, we can think of stories as being rooted in truth and lived experience and—perhaps most importantly—as tools for enacting a change in perception or process. Stories ask listeners to make connections to new ways of being in the world, and thereby compel listeners to become agents for change. In the business world, problems need solutions—and in successful endeavors, problems get solved—and stories are a main way of communicating both a premise and a resolution. 37 �Colleen Coyne • “True to How the Real World Would Operate” Many forms that might find their way into the professional writing classroom are conducive to narrative, including performance reviews, progress reports, portfolios, cover letters, résumés, and even the elevator pitch. In a servicelearning-based professional writing course in particular, narrative practices enable student-writers to engage with the broader community through projects in which they use the knowledge and skills developed in the classroom to produce important work for partner organizations. Narrative and Community Engagement In “Treating Professional Writing as Social Praxis,” Thomas P. Miller advocates for stressing the “social and ethical dimensions” (57) of professional writing. If we consider professional writing as praxis, we open up the possibilities for it shaping, and being shaped by, the public context in which it lives. As such, professional writing courses are often good matches for service-learning (Mahin and Kruggel 324), which asks students to contribute their knowledge and skills to a partner organization, which in turn offers students coveted “real world” experience that translates not only to the nonprofit sector, but also to the private sector, with its increasing focus on corporate social responsibility (Bowers 69). To be sure, this experience is often seen as having the practical purpose of filling out a résumé, or of getting a foot in the door for a future career. Service-learning experiences can also help “close the gap between educational writing and workplace writing” (Kohn 180). Perhaps more importantly, though, many have observed that service-learning deepens community engagement, and I argue that narrative is the vital link between the two. Narrative processes and practices are what allow for a meaningful and lasting engagement. This also becomes a more ethical engagement—one rooted in genuine connection to and care for others (see Stephens and Kanov). When a professional writing course incorporates service-learning, it is crucial that narrative be a part of the curriculum—and I would encourage instructors of professional writing to consider integrating the essential functions and purposes of narrative into their broader pedagogical philosophies. In teaching key elements of professional writing, such as reader-centeredness and persuasion, I present these concepts through stakeholder theory (Kimme Hea and Shah). When writers think of their audience as stakeholders, a new kind of ethical relationship develops. Writers must think about audience needs and desires, about how their writing—and by extension the actual impact of their documents (whether notifying their audience of a policy change, new leadership, or a product or service for sale)—affects real people. If we look at this through a narrative frame, we might ask: Who is our audience? What do they want, and why? What is their story? How can we connect with our audience to both fulfill their needs and achieve our own goals? This is ethical work, in the sense that it allows student-writers to develop ways of understanding themselves as citizens of communities both local and global, to see themselves as entering into relationships with other people. In doing so, they realize that they have a real impact on the world, hopefully for the better. Michael Pennell and Libby Miles identify service-learning as a site for problem-based learning, which by its nature is messy, complicated, and dynamic, and we might recognize these features of problem-based learning in both scholarship and the “real world.” Pennell and Miles note the capacity for both service-learning and problembased learning as fertile ground for ethical development. By extension, the work that students do in service-learning projects cultivates inquiry and lays an ethical foundation for their work after college, regardless of the fields they will enter. The relationships they build during service-learning, too, can be instrumental in their professional lives, and are foundational to their self-conception as community members who make productive contributions to society. Narrative plays an essential role in this identity construction. Narrating Community-Based Learning in Business Writing A few examples from my own pedagogy may be useful for illustrating what I have just described. At Framingham State University, Business Writing is an upper-level professional writing course into which I have incorporated a significant service-learning component—specifically, a type of service-learning known as community-based, projectbased learning. This course’s particular version of service-learning, then, entails an ongoing relationship with a community partner wherein students work on a series of projects for the organization. Over the course of several semesters, the class has partnered with Downtown Framingham, Inc. (DFI), a nonprofit organization committed to the revitalization of downtown Framingham through its cultural and economic development. Because each semester’s projects are developed in consultation with our community partner, we do not initially have a clear set of requirements, assignments, and deadlines to follow, and we have to work with our partner to establish them, and to re-assess them as the semester goes on. Understandably, for many students – and for their professor – this 38 �Colleen Coyne • “True to How the Real World Would Operate” uncertainty can be stressful. However, in the “real world,” employees may have to grapple with changing deadlines and priorities, and other situations that require flexibility and adaptability; learning how to navigate these potentially messy situations in the classroom is just as valuable as learning how to write a proposal. (Here, too, I am reminded of connections to literature and creative writing, where productive ambiguity is a desirable quality). Ultimately, we wind up with a specific set of projects to work on, all of which are meant to be public-facing, including blog posts about community policing and sampling Guatemalan baked goods, press releases about the 6 Mile Moment during the Boston Marathon, and business profiles of restaurants and media companies, among others. Here are excerpts from three such projects: Neca’s Bakery: Your Next Sweet-Tooth Craving: “In the midst of me learning about the cookies, she started to tell me about her children and how now that they are older they love to visit Guatemala. She was smiling when she explained how they have a whole new appreciation for their culture, in particular the food. Within only a few short minutes, a bakery that had felt intimidating and new felt comforting and familiar.” (Student A) Pho Dakao: East Meets West on Concord Street: “I met with Dang [the restaurant owner] in the dining room, a quaint and traditional—though decidedly modernized—space, to discuss his aspirations for his growing business, as well as his connection to Framingham, including his quest to bring a new Eastern-flavored option to the Western palate. Over the course of our talk, I noticed just how frequently the terms ‘opportunity’ and ‘initiative’ came to my mind as such a young entrepreneur explained his quick rise to success.” (Student B) Making Strides Toward a Safer Community: “Historically, the walking beat is not a new concept, but it is regaining momentum after motorized vehicles reshaped patrol work. Downtown Framingham has had two full-time officers on foot patrol for three years. After speaking with  two of these officers, I see how their presence is making a valuable difference.” (Student C) While Students A and B are focused on specific businesses, Student C addresses common safety concerns about downtown Framingham. These are different aims, but in each of these projects, students describe interactions with business owners and other community stakeholders (people from diverse backgrounds that represent the downtown Framingham population), telling their stories and also telling the students’ own stories of acquiring new knowledge and changing perceptions—and ultimately communicating these transformative moments to a wider audience. Another aspect of the course has been especially conducive to narrative practices: the reflection journal. Although reflective writing generally is not a standard part of many professional writing courses, it is becoming more common in the workplace (Lawrence), and it is an integral part of any service-leaning-based class. In service-learning, there is an ethical component of reflection at work, and reflection is what lives in that hyphenated space between “service” and “learning.” Many studies tout the benefits of reflective writing for professional development and communication. It allows writers, as Holly Lawrence puts it, to “see the personal in business writing . . . [to be] more accountable to themselves and others” (203). This accountability is also noted by Kathleen Blake Yancey, who recognizes that reflection requires us to “circle back, return to earlier notes, to earlier understandings and observations . . . [and] asks that we explain to others . . . so that in explaining to others we explain to ourselves. We begin to re-understand” (24). In the context of reflective journals, writers craft narratives of exploration, discovery, and transformation; they tell stories of being challenged in unexpected ways, of growing into new ways of thinking, and of realizing connections to others that they may not have been aware of before. In my Business Writing course, although some students are excited and confident from the beginning, many of them begin the semester hesitant about the safety of downtown Framingham—which has an arguably undeserved reputation among FSU students for being dangerous—and concerned about their level of preparedness and how far out of their social and academic comfort zones this project will take them. Students’ initial impressions, as narrated in their first reflection journals, include being afraid of communicating with business owners and making mistakes; lacking the experience and confidence they perceive necessary for working in this new context; feeling apprehensive about having enough resources to be successful in their projects; and being both excited about getting hands-on experience and nervous about venturing downtown. These same students ended the semester with a new appreciation for the diversity of cultural experiences found in downtown Framingham, which they acquire through talking to business owners, artists, immigrant entrepreneurs, town officials, and residents. In these interactions, they exchange stories, and they complete their course projects by listening, reflecting on, and then re-telling that story in a new form that considers DFI’s audience and goals. In doing 39 �Colleen Coyne • “True to How the Real World Would Operate” so, they develop their own stories about gaining “real world” experience and making new and unexpected discoveries in Framingham. In their final journal entries, students have expressed pride in the work they’d created, excitement at having found new eateries and other destinations downtown (with one student expressing regret that they hadn’t done so sooner), and enthusiasm for supporting the work of a nonprofit organization; many students noted that the projects helped them become more patient, flexible, and adaptable. And in the anonymous feedback forms I collect at the semester’s end—another opportunity for reflection—one student noted that “this experience…feels very true to how the real world would operate. Everything does not always go as planned... However, finding ways to work around potential setbacks that may slow us down is crucial.” This kind of community engagement helps students articulate their own personal and professional development, which in turn can help them more effectively create employment materials (e.g., résumés, cover letters, portfolios), engage in professional conversations (e.g., networking, elevator pitches, interviews), and even develop crosscultural communication skills, which are important in an increasingly global workplace (Barker and Gower 305). The community-based learning component of Business Writing offers its own unique set of challenges—including occasional communication issues with the community partner, and varied degrees of student buy-in (specifically related to perceived relevance to their expected career paths and typical group work hurdles). But ultimately, it offers students a transformational learning experience and opportunities to see their work have a life beyond the classroom. Working with a community partner has opened up so many possibilities for the Business Writing course, at the same time as it provides value to the community partner and contributes to the relationship between the university and the surrounding area. Professional Writing and/in the Humanities: Synthesis & Synergy Despite my support for narrative’s place in professional writing, I am not advocating that we implement a onesize-fits-all approach to teaching narrative. Certainly, it has different functions in a professional writing course, a fiction or creative nonfiction workshop, or a literature course. These fields all have their own relationships to and with narrative. But offering students a business perspective on narrative—and explicitly acknowledging how we can better forge connections among professional writing, creative writing, and literary studies—reminds students, teachers, and administrators of the work of the humanities. What I am advocating is a kind of paradigm shift, one in which it would not be unusual to find a literary text prompting discussion in a business writing class, or a literature class asking students to produce business documents as a means of analyzing literary texts. Additionally, as I have noted, offering servicelearning opportunities, and incorporating narrative practices into those experiences, are ways of cultivating empathy and deepening students’ connections to the world around them—also common goals of humanistic study. It is imperative that we keep these potential synergies in mind as we continue to narrate the role of the humanities and humanistic inquiry at our institutions, within the English discipline, and to society at large. Reading and writing are and should be recognized as creative acts, and at the same time they are and should be practical instruments for realizing professional goals. Students should not feel that the passion to study short stories and the need to write a résumé are fundamentally at odds, or that there are irreconcilable differences between what they want to do and what they are “supposed to” do. Granted, this may seem idealistic. But if we do not find hope in the possibilities of humanistic study, where can we find it? Professors and students alike can be some of the best advocates for the humanities, and we must see it as our mission to realize and articulate the connections between these genres and practices as we continue to narrate our own personal and professional stories. _____________________________ Works Cited Ahmad, Sohel, and Michael Pesch. “Essential Work Skills and Readiness: Perceptions of Employers, MBA Students and Undergraduates.” Academy of Educational Leadership Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 2017, p. B1+. Barker, Randolph T., and Kim Gower. “Strategic Application of Storytelling in Organizations: Toward Effective Communication in a Diverse World.” Journal of Business Communication, vol. 47, no. 3, 2010, pp. 295–312. Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” Image, Music, Text. Hill & Wang, 1977. Bowers, Tom. “Constructing the Organization: Engaging Students in the Public Role of Contemporary Corporations.” Business Communication Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 1, Mar. 2010, pp. 68–79. Camacho, Leticia. “The Communication Skills Accounting Firms Desire in New Hires.” Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship, vol. 20, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 318–29. 40 �Colleen Coyne • “True to How the Real World Would Operate” Dalpiaz, Elena, and Giada Di Stefano. “A Universe of Stories: Mobilizing Narrative Practices during Transformative Change.” Strategic Management Journal, vol. 39, no. 3, Mar. 2018, pp. 664–96. Haven, Kendall F. Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story. Libraries Unlimited, 2007. Hansen, Anne V. “What Stories Unfold: Empirically Grasping Value Co-Creation.” European Business Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2017, pp. 2–14. Kimme Hea, Amy C., and Rachael Wendler Shah. “Silent Partners: Developing a Critical Understanding of Community Partners in Technical Communication Service-Learning Pedagogies.” Technical Communication Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, pp. 48–66. Kohn, Liberty. “How Professional Writing Pedagogy and University–Workplace Partnerships Can Shape the Mentoring of Workplace Writing.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, vol. 45, no. 2, 2015, pp. 166–188. Lawrence, Holly. “Personal, Reflective Writing: A Pedagogical Strategy for Teaching Business Students to Write.” Business Communication Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 192–206. Mahin, Linda, and Thomas G. Kruggel. “Facilitation and Assessment of Student Learning in Business Communication.” Business Communication Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3, Sept. 2006, pp. 323–327. Maxwell, Richard, and Robert Dickman. The Elements of Persuasion: Using Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster, and Win More Business. Harper Collins, 2009. Miller, Peggy J. “Narrative Practices: Their Role in Socialization and Self-Construction,” The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, edited by Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush, Cambridge UP, 1994, 158–179. Miller, Thomas P. “Treating Professional Writing as Social ‘Praxis.’” Journal of Advanced Composition, vol. 11, no. 1, Winter 1991, pp. 57–72. Moore, Patrick. “Legitimizing Technical Communication in English Departments: Carolyn Miller’s ‘Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.’” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, vol. 36, no. 2, 2006, pp. 167–182. “Narrate, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/125144. Accessed 1 Jun. 2019. Ortiz, Lorelei A., et al. “Employer Perceptions of Oral Communication Competencies Most Valued in New Hires as a Factor in Company Success.” Business & Professional Communication Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3, Sept. 2016, pp. 317–330. Pennell, Michael, and Libby Miles. “‘It Actually Made Me Think’: Problem-Based Learning in the Business Communications Classroom.” Business Communication Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 377–394. Richmond, Heather J. “Learners’ Lives: A Narrative Analysis.” The Qualitative Report, vol. 7, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1-14. Schmidt, Benjamin. “The Humanities Are in Crisis.” The Atlantic, 23 August 2018, theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2018. Stephens, John, and Jason Kanov. “Stories as Artworks: Giving Form to Felt Dignity in Connections at Work.” Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 144, no. 2, Aug. 2017, pp. 235–49. White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, 1980, pp. 5–27. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Utah State UP, 1998. Zartner, Dana, et al. “Knowledge, Skills, and Preparing for the Future: Best Practices to Educate International Studies Majors for Life after College.” International Studies Perspectives, vol. 19, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 148–69. 41 �Julie O'Connell The Power of a Story I have long believed that stories have the power to mirror our experiences and provide us with objectivity and perspective to examine ourselves more clearly. Stories are our lifeblood, our means of discourse, and the fundamental reason why the humanities are so attractive to us. As writer Patrick Hicks eloquently states, “Stories offer us identity and hope. Stories help us to remember the past and imagine new futures. Stories make us human. Stories give us meaning.” Throughout time and literature, the story has had a predictable arch. I can look for that pattern in any story, and usually, I can find it. It does not matter what kind of story I’m dealing with: a movie, a graphic novel, or even a computer game. Good stories like To Kill a Mockingbird move from stasis to crisis to climax to resolution. This is how it is for us, again and again, and so we read these stories, again and again, or witness the events being told and retold under the guise of new names, new settings, and new configurations. The stories we read not only reflect our lives, but they also shape them in terms of the choices we make. Now more than ever, I see how essential it is to pay attention to which stories get told and why. It may seem like an obvious point, but my experiences have shown me that dominant narratives marginalize and even silence important stories. What I have come to realize is that we tell stories to ourselves and to others in order to justify our preconceived notions and manipulate what others think about us. Since every story is real to each of us, no singular story is real, which is why there is danger in a singular narrative because it creates stereotypes that are incomplete narratives (Adichie). It all goes back to Plato’s cave, where we learned that empirical evidence (what we perceive from our senses) cannot be taken at face value because it may be shadows, and we may, indeed, be trapped in the cave of our own limitations and misunderstandings. Our preconceptions can also shape our perceptions to the extent that what we believe becomes what is real. Now more than ever, we need to recognize which stories are being told because their misuse and distortion is marring the fabric of American culture. As Roy Greenslade recently said in The Guardian, “We are living in a post-truth society where it is extraordinarily difficult to correct falsehoods passed on so swiftly and indiscriminately.” I would add that in the post-truth world, we are fed dualistic narratives that force us to choose. For instance, in the Republican narrative, we hear a story of competition for limited resources and a fearsome opponent (such as an immigrant) trying to take those resources and inflict harm on us. In contrast, the Democratic narrative is often defined as the move to reach across differences, cooperate, and create prosperity for everyone. Author Amy Jo Kim points out that these two stories reflect the two types of games people like to play: zero-sum games, where opponents compete to win, and non-zero-sum games, where individuals partner to collaborate and increase resources for everyone. Some narratives bifurcate us in that the stories we hear contradict the stories we once knew. Take the story of America as it is told through the symbol of the Statue of Liberty and contrast it with the daily doses of xenophobia and the tribalism which characterize the current political climate. Paradoxically, Americans seem to be drawn toward and retreating from these stories. No doubt, the stories of communities and cultures have the power to shape our perspectives of truth. Language, with all of its possibilities and limitations, has been used to construct stories about the world. One might argue that all stories are valid within the contexts in which they emerge, but in today’s world, narratives are being misused to speak to and for entire groups, and stories are being employed to pose as factual accounts with the aim of influencing or even controlling individuals and the choices they make. For instance, throughout the 2016 Untied States Presidential Election, Russian agents used sites such as Facebook to tell false stories and illegally influence election results. Evidently, narratives can be weaponized to harm large systems once thought sacrosanct. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that confronts all of us now more than ever. America’s deepest cultural and political divisions are being propagated by stories. Is President Trump a dangerous manipulator, an uncensored change agent, or one of myriad of other narrative constructions in between? It depends on whose story you believe (and, of course, there are many more than we can ever even imagine). There are stories “he” tells, stories he tells his people to tell, alternative facts, “fake news,” factual reports about “fake news,” propagandized “fake news” stories 42 �Julie O'Connell • The Power of a Story planted to counter facts and spread more seeds of untruth, and even the story I am telling here about this storytelling machine, just to name a few. It is wearying to keep up with all of the stories. They are lies, half-truths, and optical illusions: images we see in our own way to tell ourselves the story that is obvious to us. In all cases, our story is not the entire story, and yet that is the very thing that we, in our self-centered realities, fail to remember. The obvious danger of our lack of awareness is that the stories we believe in not only divert us from what is real, but they also make us speak and behave in certain ways (as voters, consumers, etc.). All of this happens in the context of our social media platforms, where technology affords us the opportunity to construct stories about ourselves and others to look cool or professional or intellectual. Who am I? Am I the same person I claim to be in my Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn profiles? Is this who I really am or just a string of narratives I tell about myself? Perhaps I look good, but do I have substance? Am I solid Godiva or a hollow chocolate bunny? Today, our technological devices deliver a daily bombardment of stories made possible by countless arms of the media and by our social media manipulations. It makes me long for the pause, in that sometimes, stories deserve greater time and attention, and often, the most important part of the story is what we do not immediately understand. In Star Wars, as Luke hangs into the abyss, he says, “My father is going to get you,” to which Darth Vader replies, “I am your father.” Luke understood Darth Vader in a particular way based on what he knew, but that was not the whole story. Similarly, in The Wizard of Oz, what Dorothy believes about Oz is not the whole story, but neither is what we believe about Dorothy since we find out in the end that it is all just a dream. Sometimes we think we know the story and then it turns out to be entirely different than what we thought. What about the meta- and micro-narrative aspects of stories? Sometimes, I am inside of a smaller story, and I cannot see the larger story behind it that connects all the smaller narratives around me. I think of Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884) wherein there are many smaller stories within the bigger picture. Seurat’s masterpiece includes a wide range of narratives involving mothers and children, a monkey, dogs, boaters, soldiers, and the elderly. There is a man leaning on his elbow and a girl playing in the field. The larger view is the riverbank—and larger still is the canvas—and even larger is the realization that everyone’s stories and lives are connected by the same things (in Seurat’s case, by purposefully painted dots). Up close, we see the dots, but from a distance, we see everything. Ultimately, these multiple perspectives serve to unite, not divide, us. In her celebrated TED talk, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie explains that stories make us who we are “but to insist on only…negative stories is to flatten…[our] experience[s] and to overlook the many other stories that formed…[us].” In an America where division reigns, war looms, the Paris Accords have been abandoned, extreme weather events persist, Civil Rights are under siege, refugees are imprisoned, immigrants are demonized, and equal protections are threatened, we must look past narratives of division and remember the larger story we share and the only one worth telling: the one we tell together. As musician Bob Weir recently said on the subject of storytelling, “I get to step aside, I get to be somebody else and that somebody else is –all of us. It’s a shared experience.” Stories “have been used to dispossess and malign” (Adichie), but they also empower us, humanize us, and bind us together as one. _____________________________ Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Ted, Ted, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_ the_danger_of_a_singlestoory Greenslade, Roy. “Here's the Truth: 'Fake News' Is Not Social Media's Fault.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Nov. 2016, www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/nov/23/heres-the-truth-fake-news-is-not- social-medias-fault Hicks, Patrick. “Why the Humanities? Hardwired for Story.” 18 July 2018, patrickhicks.org/humanities-hardwiredstory/ Kim, Amy Jo. “The Power of a Non-Zero Narrative.” Amy Jo Kim, 3 Aug. 2016, amyjokim.com/blog/2016/07/31/gametheory-politics-power-non-zero-narrative/ Martin, Brett. “The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir Will Not Rest.” GQ, GQ, 24 May 2019, www.gq.com/story/bob-weirgrateful-dead-profile?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=gq Plato. “The Republic.” The Internet Classics Archive: The Republic by Plato, classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html Seurat, Georges. “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884.” The Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas, www.artic. edu/artworks/27992/a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884 “Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 21 May 1980, www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/ 43 �Adam Hansen For Katie St. Mary’s, 27/3/18 The lighthouse carpark’s almost empty but for a couple older than us now with a woman older than them behind, and the skylark’s fretwork flow from the fields soaking the headland in careful grace-notes marking time and space for those like us now watching wild ponies, while waves’ low chords swell to banked-up sky-shapes over us now and water-coloured spires, schools, arcades, flats – and one fret more means all that is resolves to this, a trick of the light and pitch, a switch in keys of something and nothing, then in us now. 44 �Ana M. Fores Tamayo Adjunct I am nobody. Walking through the false tears Of sand, I bristle at the thorns Of moon. I am nothing. I come and go dreaming big dreams of empire Yet sawdust falls around me Covering my nestled spine in leprosy. I used to hover orchids purpled in oblivion. I would linger softly with loving touch over a book, rustling its Poems, savoring its letters, its text. But no longer do they speak to me. No books no writing no words no people. All have left me. And so I stand alone, thinking myself empty Visible to none, a shattered vessel Ruined by a broken pen. 45 �Ana M. Fores Tamayo The Grad Student The professor's witch-haired smile shakes grayly in the tepid air. His goat feet tooth responses with inequities transcending. Absurdity masks his eyes, while her own face traces naiveté with treason, and inanities wryly print her shrouded gestures even as the night descends on the instructor's droning voice. The tired student listens closely, playing doodles to the chalkboard of technology, yet Descartes mathematically concludes that all is doubt but doubt itself. I think therefore I am but not because her mind's not thinking: far away from blackboards and from schoolbooks and eclipsing shadows, the meandering poet cannot sing. So she smiles unthinking at the crumpled tie who's mouthing words on the power of existence, and she dreams on to a future where the poet will stand tall, while writing love songs and wild sonnets to pursuing destinies with persevering hope. 46 �Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association � https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/18306/archive/files/9aab1177929c744cc6d1456634c66816.pdf?Expires=1779926400&Signature=Llx-otPUqDQ6QYUT%7EILUOXfzWDvHR1OYqTBwEf1Ow5glXaD9LhnAYnCrQvWncnljufpCuiy3G1a6xG8wGuydOuDf3MVmbUkVZo4JuP9083VYpcfDE1ib93y1FXEfk0gQte0gZqf4CpqBS17C-KhtZLMtsV-WjpdxWj-r69b0wJLhQmGLEs5OFPQZ4rEuCU7LlX%7EcVc84FljdOfR7mkp7baUuVFWnqnBIEu%7EAcUSv3qk1BrC6qlyckok2aVoVwOeAUI5fJBYff0MZJ2iLqbUFQzY51bcmVGLH9UrCeHkc0cJfw-xy9dFMewI0fYA-xNdZTA9pSH2NA7kxyEM9roHF0w__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM c2b68b7067ce8aa867eb648e073bd5bb PDF Text Text ISSN 2573-1750 Watchung Review Volume 4 • July 2021 Other Voices Redefining the Humanities Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association i ��Editor-in-Chief: Rachael Warmington, Seton Hall University Co-Managing Editors: Jonathan D. Elmore, Savannah State University Robert McParland, Felician University Assistant Managing Editor: Lisa Sisler, Kean University Copyeditor: Alexandra Lykissas, Seminole State College of Florida Assistant Copyeditor: Robyn Lemanski, Seton Hall University Advisory Board Philip Grayson, St John’s University Kevin Hawk, Redlands Community College Heather Ostman, SUNY Westchester Community College Phil Robinson-Self, University of York Kenneth Sherwood, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology Associate Editors Rebekah Bale, Institute for Tourism Studies Steve Bellin-Oka, Eastern New Mexico University Shilpa Bhat, Ahmedabad University Anindita Bhattacharya, Dublin City University Gabriela Cavalheiro, King’s College London Yasmeen Chism, New York University Carrie Jo Coaplen, University of the Virgin Islands Sheila Farr, Thiel College Dana Fasciano, Rutgers University Jonathan Farina, Seton Hall University John T. Gagnon, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Michelle Garcia, Independent Scholar Charity Gibson, Independent Scholar Mara Grayson, California State University-Dominguez Hill Samira Grayson, Wells College Valerie Guyant, Montana State University Anna Krauthammer, Touro College Richard Marranca, Passaic County Community College Erica McCrystal, St. John’s University Sarah Nolan, University of Colorado Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah, University of Ilorin Heather Ostman, SUNY Westchester Community College Maria L. Plochocki, Pace University Andrew Rimby, Stony Brook University Melissa R. Sande, Union County College AJ Schmitz, Indiana University South Bend and Holy Cross College Nick J. Sciullo, Texas A&M University, Kingsville Donovan Sherman, Seton Hall University Catherine Siemann, New Jersey Institute of Technology Ravindra Pratap Singh, University of Lucknow Natasa Thoudam, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur Kaitlin Tonti, Seton Hall University Sarbani Vengadasalam, Rutgers University Angela Weisl, Seton Hall University Lucas Wilson, Florida Atlantic University Website Designer: Rachael Warmington, Seton Hall University Graphic and Document Designer: Julia Galm, Cloud County Community College Cover image by Brandon Galm 1 ��Volume 4 • July 2021 Watchung Review Other Voices Redefining the Humanities 2 Drawn From and Against Islamophobia: Transformative Visual Rhetoric about National Identity in Three Post-9/11 Nonfiction Comics Sandra Cox 13 “Prof, You Be Illin’”: Mental Illness Inside the College Classroom Farrah Goff 17 A Way Forward: The Humanities and the University in the 21st Century Arleen Ionescu 27 “The New Criticism?” Again? Gloria McMillan 37 New Jersey College English Association Graduate Student Paper Award Winner The Liminal Nature of Diaspora: Family, Home, and Identity in Mia Alvar’s “The Kontrabida” Patrick Joseph Caoile 43 Review: Reese, Sam V. S., Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Louisiana State UP, 2019. Dr. Christina Tourino 46 Review: Grayson, Mara Lee. Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices for Critical Writing, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, 149pp, ISBN: 1475836619. Kristina Fennelly 49 Review: Dean, James W., Jr., and Deborah Y. Clarke, The Insider’s Guide to Working with Universities: Practical Insights for Board Members, Businesspeople, Entrepreneurs, Philanthropists, Alumni, Parents, and Administrators. U of North Carolina P, 2019. Marguerite Mayhall 51 Review: Hediger, Ryan. Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, U of Minnesota P, 2019.. Dr. Barbara Mossberg 55 Review: Sen Vengadasalam, Sarbani. New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays, Cambridge Scholars, 2019. Arundhati Sanyal 58 Review: Reese, Sam V. S., Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Louisiana State UP, 2019. Julie O'Connell 61 There Might Be Weasels in the Chicken House Ben Fine 66 Motifs Gary Beck 67 New Jersey College English Association Graduate Student Creative Writing Award Winner Piss Eric Scholz 1 �Sandra Cox Drawn From and A gainst Islamophobia T V R N ransformative isual hetoric about ational Identity in Three Post-9/11 Nonfiction Comics You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness But still, like air, I’ll rise. — Maya Angelou R epresentative Ilhan Omar posted these four lines from Maya Angelou to her Twitter account in July of 2019, the day after attendees at a rally for President Donald J. Trump chanted “send her back” as a response to his critique of her publicly stated positions about increasingly draconian immigration enforcement policies. The tweet, and the incident it responds to, make for an object lesson in the ways that the boundaries between rhetoric, poetics, and politics have become increasingly permeable in contemporary narratives about nationality, ethnicity, and cultural belonging in the United States. Representative Omar, a Somali-American woman and a practicing Muslim, makes use of the work of a former American poet laureate as a means of yoking identity politics in the present to recent literary history. The eloquence of her quotation of Angelou sits in stark contrast to the vitriol and implicit Islamophobia of the crowd’s sentiments about her, and by extension her legal naturalization as a citizen of the United States. Implicit in the chanted utterance is not just a critique of Representative Omar’s national origins, but also the deeply ingrained postulation of Muslim as Other, which has become increasingly normative in the United States. What this microcosmic dialogue between Omar and Trump illustrates is that the ways in which narratives about religious and ethnic difference in the present moment are fraught, intertextual, and decidedly polarizing in the decades since the beginning of the War on Terror. For students of narrative historiography, this observation is anything but news. In the late nineteenth century, historiographer Frederick Jackson Turner noted that “Each age writes the history of the past with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time. When history is written down, the mode of that writing is always shaped by the present conditions into which the historian writes it” (qtd in Meinig 312). Certainly, many narrative histories of the United States in the early twentieth century have been written since 9/11, and those narratives might be used to trace how Islamophobia became the ground upon which the figure of the American nation after 9/11 can be drawn. The Twitter feeds of congressional representatives and the current president are but two of those narrative media. I use this particular incident to introduce this article as a means of pointing out that public discourse about Muslim identity is often veiled by concerns about border security or Muslim infiltration of U.S. politics. This discourse is also to be found in news media, narrative television and cinema, popular fiction, and the visual arts. An analysis of nearly any mediated representation of 9/11 and the War on Terror may find that the Islamophobic sentiments that become so pronounced after September 11, 2001, shape and reflect the tone and timbre of the ideological problems that American national identity faces in this present moment. What makes nonfiction comics about those events and sentiments useful, as grounds for analyzing the formation of American national identity, is that the narrative mechanisms by which non-fiction comics operate allows for a multimodal analysis of the textual and pictorial maneuvers made by popular historiographers. This work has been done productively by scholars such as Lucas Wilde, who in a recent issue of ImageText included in his broadly focused parsing of the ways in which pictorial media literally illustrates how narrative media reenacts historical events to persuade viewers to assign particular significance to the story of the 9/11 attacks. Wilde argues compellingly that “[o]ne of the recurring discourses surrounding 9/11 was [. . .] a profound irritation between fact and fiction on the one hand, and between representation and the represented on the other” through historical reenactment as a specific “transmedial documentary practice that often goes unnoticed” (1-2). Wilde sees the pictorially mimetic work of the drawn images of the towers of the World Trade Center, in particular, as one means of establishing geographical verisimilitude to produce a sense of accuracy or authenticity. I’ll argue that those claims about the setting of the attack can be fruitfully 2 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia extrapolated from in order to examine the visual characterization of Muslims, Arabs, and people from the Middle East as the cartoonists depict them. The historiographic content of those visual characterizations is a means by which the mutual exclusivity of American patriotism and Muslim identity are perpetuated and maintained in the American imagination. Wilde, of course, is not the only scholar to make such a contention. Bob Britten’s analysis of visual and verbal rhetoric of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (2006), the comic adaptation of the Warren Commission report on 9/11, drawn and written in 2006 by Ernie Colón and Sid Jacobson, notes that the comic is “intriguing first for what it tells us about the worldview of the authors and the 9/11 commissioners” even if “the text and image language systems that work in concert in a comic text rely on different rules, conventions and assumptions” (368). Britten reminds readers that the form of each visual narrative shapes how readers respond to the content of the historiographic narrative. Kent Worcester, who undertook a specific examination in depictions of New York in comics about 9/11 in a 2011 article for Radical History Review also argued that the ideological underpinnings of cartoonists shaped their rhetoric: “Liberal creators used the moment to call for dialogue, while conservative ones shook their symbolic fists. Some radical illustrators used the occasion to flag larger discussions about foreign policy, the national interest and the rhetoric of consensus” (152). One mode of praxis in this article that draws from these parts of the existing conversation is the focus here on the ways that particular visual and textual tropes are used in one comic from each of those ideological perspectives. By including comics, like Colón and Jacobson’s, that center a conservative perspective next to one that is liberal and another that is radical works to broaden the focus from setting and theme to the use of visual characterization in the service of imaging the implicit understandings of “national interest” in each historiographic comic. Following the examination of Colón and Jacobson’s adaptation of The 9/11 Report, will be a close look at transtextual and didactic features of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) and Toufic El Rassi’s Arab in America (2007). Because the three comics selected here portray characters who are “Muslim terrorists,” Arabs, and people of Middle Eastern heritage in order to make use of visual rhetoric to contain their nationalizing narratives, attending to the formal features that shape visual characterizations in the comics is particularly illuminating for three reasons. First, as comics theorists Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven note, [T]he graphic narrative differs from [prose]…because its spatializing of narrative is part of a hybrid project…[T]his hybridity [is] a challenge to the structure of binary classification that opposes a set of terms, privileging one . . . . The medium of comics is cross-discursive because it is composed of verbal and visual narratives that do not simply blend together, creating a unified whole, but rather remain distinct. (767) Because of that hybridity, comics works as a formal system that disrupts binary thinking, and the ideological questioning of mutually exclusive classes—like citizen and alien, or patriot and terrorist—has productive potential for highlighting how historiography reveals and constructs national identity. Furthermore, the multiplicity of discourses within and between these three graphic narratives on the subject makes non-fiction comics useful in terms of delineating the variety of didactic purposes at play in cross-discursive historiographies. These tacit moments of persuasion, embedded into popular media like comics, are the means by which nations are narrated into being. If the project of resisting Islamophobic visual and textual rhetoric is to be undertaken, then moving beyond the problematic dialectic of American/Muslim is essential to the ability of American historiographic depictions and the interpretation thereof to reveal, confront, and reduce implicit bias against Muslims in the United States. Finally, the accessibility of comics, as a medium that works to invite readerly interrogation of implicit ideology through both visual and textual registers of narrative, is perhaps an indicator of the potential of the medium to participate in extratextual movements for social justice. These three points may help to translate the theoretical interventions of the formal features of historiographic comics proposed by Chute and DeKoven into praxis through an analysis of the narrative strategies used in non-fiction comics about 9/11. To that end, examining the rhetoric and formal choices in Jacobson’s and Ernie Colón’s The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and El Rassi’s Arab in America may allow for a better understanding about how historiographic comics produce, reflect, or disrupt the imaginative construction of Islam in American culture since the War on Terror. While The 9/11 Report builds a sense of neutrality into its textual components, the visual presentations of people of Middle Eastern heritage work to reify the ideology of Islamophobia by collapsing complex identities into an amalgamated Other against which American identity can be produced and maintained. In the Shadow of No Towers does more reflective work, showing how the transgeneric features of comics as a medium work to reveal the conflicts in American identity as resistant to or complicit in Islamophobic discourses within both images and text. Arab in America works overtly to disrupt the ideology of Islamophobia by unpacking a 3 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia complex identity through text and countering or critiquing the reductive imagery often used in visual media to denigrate Muslims and Arabs. Read together, these comics demonstrate the wide range of aesthetic and political choices that graphic storytelling can accommodate, which allows readers to examine three distinct choices about the visual rhetoric and cultural politics surrounding American Islamophobia. American Sentiments about Islam and Terrorism After 9/11 The conditions uppermost in the cartoonists’ times are not difficult to discern. Under the Trump administration, systemic Islamophobia has come to be among the defining qualities of the United States as a nation, and this narrative is reproduced across media. In Arab in America, El Rassi draws himself telling his readers that “racism against Arabs is one of the few prejudices that is not only tolerated but sometimes actively encouraged” (29). This sentiment can be confirmed through the analysis of many kinds of narrative—from stump speeches to editorial cartoons—wherein patriotism is situated against the specter of “Muslim terrorism,” which has become the principal villain in nationalizing narratives through which American community is imagined after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In fact, the rhetoric surrounding immigrant detention and the travel ban on majority Muslim countries serve as excellent examples of this, even nearly twenty-years after 9/11. I do not make this claim lightly, and I do not seek to minimize the many counter-narratives that push back against the inscription of Islamophobia as a national value. In fact, I see parts of Spiegelman’s and El Rassi’s work as two of those counter-narratives. In spite of that important mediated work, however, predictions and observations pointing toward increasing institutional Islamophobia—particularly the uptick of hate crimes against people of Middle-Eastern heritage, and the possibility of a national registry under the Trump administration with the support of the conservative majority of congress at the time of this composition—are becoming more proliferate in American public discourse and therefore ever more central to national identity (Aydin 260; Aziz 833; Ciftci 295-8; Goldstein 560). There has been a great deal of discourse, in popular cultural studies and media studies, that works to debunk that false dichotomy, but it persists because the way a nation is imagined is perhaps more important, in terms of identity politics that can be read through comics, than the actual threats to national boundaries. For this reason, Benedict Anderson’s definition of nation as an imagined community rather than a geographical space or a political body is particularly useful for analyzing the visual rhetoric of graphic narratives about 9/11. Anderson argues that nations are imagined rather than experienced directly; identity lives “in the minds” of citizens as an “image of communion. . . .to be distinguished, not by falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which [that community is] imagined” (6). Whether or not the average American citizen harbors a fear or hatred for Arabic or Muslim people, the nationalizing force of xenophobic mediated representations of Islam and the Middle East at large, which is visible in all three comics, may give form to a set of representational visual and linguistic styles. The style through which the American community is imagined in opposition to “Muslim Terrorism,” which is itself a fiction produced by the process of reimagining American national identity, shapes the received meanings of mediated imagery and acculturating narratives work to produce an image of communion that Anderson describes. Fear of Islam thus becomes connected to how American citizens understand their “deeply horizontal comradeship” as “patriotic” xenophobia. The conduit for imagining communion and comradeship in this way is always narrative, which Anderson calls “the cultural root of nationalism” (5-7). The binary pairing that marks Muslims as always outside the boundaries of American national identity is one example of how nationalism persists in the ways Americans imagine a single historical incident like 9/11. In her 2007 article on Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Chute makes note of how “the traumatic temporality Spiegelman experienced after 9/11, in which a normative, ongoing sense of time stopped or shattered” (230) serves to introduce the ways in which seriality in peritextual framing controls both narrative time and readers’ perceptions of trauma—both personal for Spiegelman, and national for his American readers. Chute claims that temporality, trauma, and national identity are interwoven through the narrative conventions of comics. Her argument may be useful to understanding narrative time in El Rassi’s, and Jacobson’s and Colón’s comics as well. Like Spiegelman, El Rassi collapses the personal and the cultural in crafting an autographic narrative, and Jacobson and Colón render the timeline of events in the planning, execution, and investigation of the attacks as the plotting device for their visual organization of the commission’s data. Chute’s interpretation of Spiegelman’s choices to make use of “rows of sequential windows” that visually “recuperates the trauma of 9/11—re-building the shattered pieces through comics” in a model for “how history can become livable, and even productive” seems to presuppose the claims made by Britten and Wilde about the didactic nature of nonfiction comics that deal in narratives of nation and self. 4 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia One means of imagining the limits of both the self and one’s nation, then, is to clearly mark those outside that community, and to reinforce those limits through storytelling. Historical evidence seems to reveal that American national identity is often formed in opposition to the image of a threatening foreign enemy—from Revolutionary imaginings of the British foot soldier as imperial oppressor to the Cold War’s reframing of “Red Spread” as an act of Soviet world domination. “Islamic fundamentalists” and “Muslim Terrorists” are perhaps the most prominent of recent iterations of this imagined enemy. However, this cultural phenomenon is different from the red-coated Englishman and the jack-booted Russian. The “Jihadi” (as a monolithic construction of Muslims in the American popular imagination, a collectively held caricature of Middle Eastern people) is less produced by opposition between states and more by the reification of racism and religious intolerance that draws citizens into a shared conflict. As can be seen in the examples of that discourse from the three comics that follow, the barriers constructed to the American nation are imagined as a fundamental distinction in ideology of cultural essentialism in the service of nation building. National Identity and Graphic Adaptation: Jacobson and Colón’s The 9/11 Report Jacobson and Colón’s The 9/11 Report adapts the 9/11 commission report made to the outgoing Bush administration into a graphic narrative. The text borrows its visual aesthetics from superhero comics. Both Jacobson and Colón previously worked at mass market companies like Marvel, DC, and Harvey and are therefore well-versed in those visual vocabularies. Character design within the genre must be simple enough to print quickly and cheaply and be recognizably formulaic and archetypal. In the graphic adaptation, the iconography of mainstream comics serves two goals. The first goal is for Jacobson and Colón to “tell the story of 9/11 in a way that the American people could read and understand” (ix), as Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who served on the commission, indicate in their foreword to the comic. In that respect, the simplicity and ubiquity of the style is serviceable. “Good guys” are immediately identifiable through their costuming, posture, shading, and physical features, as are “bad guys.” The rendering of Jihadis as universally swarthyskinned, typically squinty-eyed, and often be-turbaned is one apt example of Colón’s illustrative choices. The features he selects highlight the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as aligned with the norms of racialized phenotype and modes of traditional dress in the Arabic world (even those aforementioned turbans, which are cultural, rather than religious head coverings). If Colon’s illustrations eschewed phenotype and culturally specific garb, with only the assault rifles slung across some of the Jihadis’ backs to mark them as “enemies,” then the implication may be that the will to enact violence, rather than the ethnicity of the fighters, was the salient feature. Because of the use of those cultural markers, collapsed into a single visual image repeated across characters in the comic, the Islamophobic symbolism in the visual narrative is perhaps less plausibly deniable. The implicit rhetoric in representing Jihadis, Muslims, Arabs, and other people indigenous to Afghanistan as of-a-piece is especially evident when contrasted with the varied images of griefstricken New York firefighters that appears in the title block of the book’s cover and throughout the first chapter. Even though the regalia of the firefighter is ubiquitous, a wide array of postures, facial features, skin tones, and body postures are used. While Jihadis are practically interchangeable, first-responders are specific and differentiated. Neither set of characters plays a significant enough role in the narrative to be named individually, but as they are presented to viewers the Otherness of Jihadis, Muslims, and Arabs, as a composite group, is codified into the character designs. To be fair, Colón does opt for a more neutral depiction of headshots of the attackers, which were published or broadcast by almost all news media following the attack, on the fourth page of the book. In that illustration, the hijackers are individuated; however, Jacobson’s textual narration on the facing page identifies these men not as terrorists, Jihadis or even Muslim radicals but as “Arab nationals,” a descriptor that reduces people from the region into the same category regardless of pronounced ethnic and religious differences and dissimilar national origins. That rhetorical gesture collapses some categorical identities neatly through the hybrid register of the form of comics in ways that text might not be able to accomplish so neatly. In a single pair of facing pages, the cartoonists implicitly assert the synonymic connotations of “terrorist,” “hijacker” and “Jihadi” with “Muslim” and “Muslim” with “Arab,” when those terms are denotatively distinct from one another, as the original textual report from the Warren commission explains in section 2.2. The absence of ethnically or nationally specific descriptors is not only inaccurate, it is also an important adaptive choice to attend to in Jacobson and Colón’s work. Each of the nineteen hijackers was affiliated with al-Qaeda, which is definitely a terrorist organization with political aims that espouses a religious charge. However, the percentage of Muslims affiliated with al-Qaeda at the time of the attacks in September of 2001 is, by most researchers’ accounts, an infinitesimally small minority of those people living in the Middle East and practicing Islam (Aydin 250). The majority of the hijackers, fifteen of the nineteen, were citizens of Saudi Arabia, and two others were from the United Arab Emirates; it is perhaps notable that neither Saudi 5 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia citizens nor Emiratis were subject to the travel restrictions imposed by the first executive order issued by President Trump. The remaining pair of hijackers, who were born in the travel-restricted countries of Lebanon and Egypt, could not accurately be described as ethnically Arabic, although they were Muslims (Beydoun 601). By reducing the complex intersections of national origins, religious beliefs, cultural values and motivations to act against the United States, The 9/11 Report sets readers up to understand the Islamic World as a kind of oppositional force working against the imagined community of the United States. This fact is particularly problematic when one considers that the U.S. maintains normal diplomatic and foreign relations with the government of Saudi Arabia. As noted in a comprehensive analysis of the intent and effect of Executive Order 13769, more colloquially called the Muslim Ban, published in The Michigan Journal of Race and Law, Although the stereotypes that direct the Muslim Ban imagine Muslims as a monolith, the global and U.S. population reveals that it is anything but. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, outpacing every other faith group in the U.S. in terms of membership. Muslim Americans are more commonly Black than they are Arab, and at 25%, they comprise the biggest plurality of the Muslim American population. Moreover, despite being caricatured as an immigrant-dominated faith group, the Muslim American community is overwhelmingly composed of American citizens. In addition, 45% of Muslim American households earn an annual income that is below, at, or dangerously close to the legal poverty line, demystifying the trope that Muslims are an overwhelmingly affluent and upwardly mobile demographic. Therefore, when the Muslim Ban was enacted, it had disparate effects on different segments of the Muslim population, and furthermore, compounded the threat to and injury on subsets of the faith group that are racially and socioeconomically marginalized. (Ayoub and Beydoun 233-4) In short, the collapsing of categorical differences between terrorists, Muslims, and Arabs allows refugees from Sudan, Yemen, and Syria to be denied asylum by the State Department, in spite of the fact that the correlation between national origin and acts of terror is imagined rather than factual, and in such correlation would point to the countries that are notably absent from the list of nations whose citizens are barred from migrating to or visiting the United States. Additionally, the hardships built into the Islamophobic policies are likeliest to impact citizens who are low-income and from historically marginalized racial groups. This would seem to be evidence that the narrative and rhetorical representations of collapsed categories is based in Islamophobic sentiments rather than hard data that pertains to national security. This does not, of course, prove any one-to-one causation between the sort of visual rhetoric that the comic traffics in and this specific use of executive authority, but perhaps this close reading of The 9/11 Report does demonstrate the ways in which public consent for the War on Terror is manufactured in American media. In Britten’s and Wilde’s examination of the adapted comic, the analysis of how truth is produced and communicated through illustration is productively explored. It might be generally agreed that the confluence of Colón’s drawings and Jacobson’s narration contributes directly to the reification of a monolithic image of Muslims as always already outside the boundaries of the American nation. This extension of those earlier articles’ analyses is to point out that by visually and textually marking those boundaries, the cartoonists produce for their readers the rhetorical fulcrum upon which Islamophobia is fostered through the act of imagining nationhood after collective trauma. Every Muslim depicted in the text, even informants passing on intelligence to American forces, is drawn and described as decidedly villainous in the ways described above. In contrast, Americans, particularly those in uniform, are typically characterized as victims or heroes. This plays out in the depictions of Jihadis throughout the book, wherein civilians and terrorists are impossible to discern from one another, which comes, in the report from which the comic is adapted, to be used as a justification for sweeping action and policy change that while begun with the Patriot Act, continues to constrain the rights of Muslim people living in the U.S. in the present. This is one reason that the best-seller status of Norton’s publication of the textual report as a mass market paperback was seen as an important cultural moment. In an interview with Booksellers This Week, an industry newsletter, Norton’s President Drake McFeely acknowledged that he was “absolutely surprised” that, after two print-runs totaling 800,000 copies, it nearly sold out within a week of release for sale (Grogan). The rapid proliferation of the data in the report had both a clear link to the shifting zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century and became an impetus to capitalize on the sentiments the text espouses. Because the Warren Commission’s report is often used to justify infringements upon civil rights in the service of national security (Beydoun 595), the adaptation of the report is culpable for intensifying the Islamophobic rhetoric that pervades that debate decades later. In an interview with the Neal Conan broadcast on National Public Radio in 2006, Jacobson suggested that one goal of making the adaptation was to further proliferate the report and render its contents easier to understand, but that the adaptors also hoped to spur legislative action based on the report’s findings: 6 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia as big a seller as the book was, it was very difficult to follow and to understand. And I’m sure that most people who did read it—I mean, this was written as a Congressional report—and I’m not sure how many Congressmen [sic] fully understood because they haven’t done much about it. And I think we felt it was important that this be translated for the adult, for the child, for anyone to understand. That assumption—that the onslaught of legislative attempts to bolster national security as the solution to the threat of “Muslim Terrorists” that political scientists, juris doctorates and cultural historians have documented (Aydin 250; Aziz 779; Beydoun 600; Ciftci 295-8; Goldstein 558)—is “not much,” as Jacobson claimed, is one of the reasons that critiquing a more accessible and reductive version of the report is particularly important. According to its preface, the second goal of The 9/11 Report is to support the recommendations of the original report for improving national security. As they adapt the report of the Warren Commission, the cartoonists employ the visual aesthetics of the superhero comic, which are fused in with expository prose that is often abbreviated from the nearly 600-page commission’s report. One reason for the oversimplification of character types may be that Colón’s and Jacobson’s adaptation comes in at a scant 130 pages. Much of the descriptive content of the original report is radically condensed into extradiegesis, wherein the narrative is told through a third-person voice rather than shown through direct illustration or communicated through quoted dialogue. The reliance on extradiegetic narration makes for an exceptionally text-laden comic, which is unusual in the medium, where running narration is typically scant and intradiegetic, and readers are typically shown the narrative more directly in a visually driven mode of storytelling (McCloud 138-50). Most text in comics is largely intradiegetic, composed of dialogue between characters, typically contained in speech balloons. Most of the text in The 9/11 Report is externalized third-person narration, which works to dissent against what the commission and the adapting writer see as a lack of governmental vigilance. The book makes a tacit argument for a greater policing of national borders and for more restrictions on Muslims, Arabs, and other Middle Easterners entering the U.S. There is an effect of authority implicit in the formal choices that Jacobson and Colón make. By framing the information through a narrator rather than showing the information with less text or through more direct quotation, say of the commissioners themselves, The 9/11 Report tacitly grants the analytical points said commissioners make without the untidy and complex analyses of the data the commission perused. This closes off any potential for epideictic readings of the text that might situate readers as adjudicators who are led to draw conclusions based upon findings, and that epideixis is perhaps one of the virtues of Norton’s textual publication of the report. Not all comics work to do this sort of reductive work that removes nuance, nor to suggest that the medium is unsuited for nuanced considerations of national identity; to do so would be to overlook the transformative potential of other uses of transtextuality and visual characterization in graphic historiography. Diegetic Narrative and Transtextual Graphic History: Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers is one example of the ways that tensions between textual and pictorial narratives can actually function as a means to invite careful consideration of the arguments for and against the War on Terror and the Islamophobic sentiments that undergird rationales for increased securitization. Perhaps because the cartoonist makes no clear statement of intent in interviews, the didactic purposes of In the Shadow of No Towers are harder to pin down. Spiegelman is perhaps most famous for his autobiographical comic Maus (1991), which documents his discussions with his father, an immigrant and Holocaust survivor in ways that interweave familial and global history. The combination of a personal memoir and an ethnography in Maus extends into Spiegelman’s examination of the complexities of being a New Yorker in the moments of and months after the attacks on the World Trade Center. In this book, Spiegelman begins by setting the American government alongside Al Qaeda, rather than in opposition to the threat of “Muslim terrorism,” as the cartoonist is just as critical of the Bush Administration as he is of the hijackers. For instance, in one panel on the second page of the comic, Spiegelman draws the sitting American President, grinning sadistically and armed with a flag and a handgun, in mid face-off with a sinister caricature of Osama bin Laden, who is gleefully brandishing a scimitar. The sword functions here as the turban did in The 9/11 Report, as another specific reference to American Orientalism that has no religious significance in Islam. The face-off occurs over the body of a sleeping cartoonist with a mouse’s head. The textbox set into the panel reads “equally terrorized by AlQaeda and his own government, our hero looks over some ancient comics pages instead of working. He dozes off and relives his ringside seat to that day’s disaster, yet again, trying to figure out what he actually saw” (2). Equating the two dangers to American democracy posed by terrorist networks and governmental overreach seems especially powerful as a conceit, particularly as this image introduces the intertextual dimensions of the book, which make use of stylistic innovations of early 20th century comics as a means of considering how the medium has shaped reading practices and 7 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia images of national identity. Those visual allusions ask readers to question the very directive nature of an intradiegetic medium that operates through visual synecdoche, which relies upon the very epideictic critical response to comics that The 9/11 Report seems to eschew. In spite of those intertextual features, at its heart, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers is a survivor’s memoir very much in the same milieu as Maus. There are some renderings that have undeniable and palpable pathos: Spiegelman’s horror as he watches Manhattan burn through his studio window; his terror and impotence when he is initially unable to find his daughter, whose school was very close to Ground Zero; his fury at the cartoonish Islamophobic discourse that marks news coverage. However, rather than rendering the narrative bias as a limitation on the comic’s ability to craft an effective analysis of the impact of the events depicted, the very personal nature of the work emphasizes the subjective quality of storytelling through comics, so the memoir further serves an epideictic purpose. This representational strategy asks readers to assign blame and give praise, rather than to accept those assignments as made by a narrating voice. As Chute points out, Spiegelman’s “trauma takes the form of innovative representation and expression in serialized comics” that somehow render the experience of that trauma and its ability to alter worldview and identity as “both ephemeral and destructible” (242). The impermanence of the formal interventions in graphic storytelling in In the Shadow of No Towers may be part of the means by which the threats to Americanness, as an imagined communion with other New Yorkers or other cartoonists or other Americans, work to cement senses of nation in opposition to both the perpetrators of the attack on 9/11 and the untenable executive response to that attack. Additionally, Spiegelman’s intertextual narrative is polystylistic, borrowing from newspaper strips like Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, began in 1918 and still in syndication, and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1927). In the Shadow of No Towers is also oddly self-referential. Spiegelman is an intradiegetic character and the extradiegetic narrator. He challenges his viewers to follow the many inter- and paratextual references to American comics and print media. Form is content for Spiegelman. In the Shadow of No Towers is by turns rife with sincere, deeply-felt anguish and is all-too-glib and smugly self-satisfied in its framing of the attacks. On the fourth page of the book, Spiegelman includes a series of askew panels, like snapshots lying on a newsprint photo of the flaming towers. Those snapshots tell the story of a terrified Spiegelman looking for his daughter, Nadja. Above those snapshots is a panel that depicts the two towers of the World Trade Center as bizarre riffs on Rudolph Dirk’s Katzenjammer Kids. Each “Tower Twin” wears a kind of headpiece designed to look like a besieged building. Spiegelman draws a paparazzo taking their photo as they burst into flames, just before Uncle Screwloose, sporting a long white beard and a starred and striped Uncle Sam costume, appears on the next page to douse them with crude oil, poison them with hornet spray, and leave their corpses behind to pursue an “Iraknid”—a creature with a roach’s body and the face of Saddam Hussein (5-6). The juxtaposition of his actual experiences looking for Nadja and this madcap indictment of the media and federal government’s response to the attacks allows Spiegelman to craft a tension in two narrative tracks, one of which seems to satirize the nationalist dichotomy that Jacobson and Colón tacitly endorse in The 9/11 Report. Spiegelman’s readers are called to negotiate between those perspectives—one shown via intradiegesis in the maniacal intertextual evocations of earlier comics and the other told via extradiegesis in the voice of a traumatized parent, artist, and citizen. In the latter portion of the narration, readers are asked to examine the assumptions that imagine opposition between American identity and terrorism, and, in so doing, Spiegelman takes care to disrupt the collapsing of identities. The juxtaposition of caricatures of prominent people—bin Laden, Bush, and Hussein—and imagined figures of national identity—Uncle Screwloose and the Tower Twins—encourages a differentiation between the collective and the individual. The intertextual narrative in In the Shadow of No Towers works to expose the stylistic means by which Anderson’s “image of communion” is discursively manufactured through media and popular culture. Because the narrating voice in the former narrative is often first-person, rather than exclusively third-person (as is the case in The 9/11 Report), the tension between diegetic registers seems to produce an individuated narrative rather than a nationalized one. In those sincere and personal moments in the text, Spiegelman is less interested in imagining nation or building community and perhaps more invested in compelling sympathy or identification. There are moments, however, when the cartoonist chooses to narrate his own story in an extradiegetic third person voice. For instance, on the seventh page of In the Shadow of No Towers, six small panels cross the top of the doublepage spread. The first two panels depict a trio of red, pointillist images of one upper story corner of one of the World Trade Center Towers, and superimposed over those images in blue-lettering is this third person narration describing Spiegelman’s state of mind: “He’s starting to get nostalgic about his near-death experience back in September’01. Nothin’ like the end of the world to help bring folks together” (7). In the next two panels, the blue-lettered narration continues, but the pictorial register inserts Spiegelman into the intradiegesis, first through presenting the cartoonist as a 8 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia character in the comic and second, by crafting the running narration as internal dialogue portrayed in thought bubbles. The pointillist perspective on the tower pulls out, revealing that the image is the stripes on an abstracted American flag, which covers the background of the middle panel; in the foreground at the lower left of that panel, Spiegelman’s face looms, his glasses obscured by tight red spirals. The narration continues, “But why did those provincial American flags have to sprout out of the embers of Ground Zero?” The fourth panel’s blue narration asks “Why not . . . a globe?” as the panicked character of the cartoonist flees from the flag background into an orange space, which is labeled with the text of Homeland Security’s Orange Alert Advisory. In the penultimate panel, the character’s running turns to leaping and the background shows red, signifying the elevation of the Orange Alert to a Red Alert, warning of increasing likelihood of terrorist attacks. In the last panel, the cartoonist hides his head beneath a flag in the interior of his home and the decidedly intradiegetic thought balloon floating over his backside reads “I should feel safer under here, but -damn it- I can’t see a thing!” and the Homeland Security Advisory label reads “Red, white and blue alert! Virtual certitude of terrorist attack.” The shifting from an external narrating voice to an internal monologue, especially presented alongside the iconographic shifts from phantom building to draped flags, works to tacitly question the assumption of the mutual exclusivity of terrorism and patriotism. In the last of the six panels, the character is most clearly unprotected and obviously presented as an externalization of the cartoonist’s fear, not just of terrorist violence, but also of the fervor of anti-Islamic sentiments that have justified the curtailing of personal freedoms and access to unbiased information. The use of the “red, white and blue alert,” in particular, seems to show the ways in which the mediated narrative about American identity has become sutured to Islamophobia through the emergent narrative about the opposition between American and Muslim identities. The metatexuality that dissolves the boundaries between narrating voice and cartoonist-as-character in In the Shadow of No Towers is perhaps specific to visual storytelling, as it would be difficult to craft a textual narrative that so seamlessly intertwines those shifting points of readerly identification. The authoritative tone of the third-person narrator is implicitly questioned by the ridiculous image of the cowering character that also speaks from the same subject position, as both extra- and intradiegetic voices are Spiegelman’s. These moments seem to invite readers to consider the ways that international coalition-building is deferred in favor of imagining communities through the use of exclusionary rhetoric. By presenting that set of claims through epideictic means in both the visual and textual narratives in the same comic, Spiegelman situates his readers as necessary participants in that decision calculus about national values and the fallibility of the assumed choice between security and liberty, and, in doing so, calls out the reductive nature of the mediated narratives he critiques in his intertextual content in this piece of graphic historiography. Deliberative Narrative and Atemporal Autography: El Rassi’s Arab in America Like Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, El Rassi’s Arab in America is a memoir. Just as Spiegelman begins with a consideration of individual experiences as a New Yorker on 9/11, El Rassi draws upon the experiences of a Lebanese immigrant living in the United States after 9/11. In crafting a personal story that enfolds a cultural one, the cartoonist uses an autoethnographic mode of first-person narration to problematize the easy dichotomy of victimized citizen and victimizing “Muslim Terrorist” that is so central to Spiegelman’s and Colón and Jacobson’s comics. One thing that differentiates El Rassi’s work from Spiegelman’s and Colón and Jacobson’s is that Arab in America demonstrates the potential of sequential art to abjure, rather than endorse or question, exclusionary conceptualizations of national identity in favor of inclusive, transnational ones. Unlike the commercially recognizable tropes of The 9/11 Report or the pastiche of meta-textually appropriated aesthetics in In the Shadow of No Towers, the images and lettering in Arab in America are decidedly handmade, and sometimes the inconsistent scaling of scenery, the skewing of perspective, and the disregard for realistic proportions in characters work to make the comic feel like an authentic and earnest rendering of the cartoonist/narrator’s life rather than a stylistically perfected and overpolished production of the didactic purpose that the comic might otherwise present to readers. This indie aesthetic, coupled with El Rassi’s choice to collapse his intra- and extra-diegetic voices by using both the first and second person, produces an intimacy between reader and writer. Rather than trying to fit his experiences into a larger cultural narrative that considers what 9/11 means for “mainstream” (read: white, middle-class) Americans, El Rassi, who holds graduate degrees in both Art and History, draws Arab in America to invite identification as part of a call to action, challenging readers to reconsider dominant perceptions of Islam in the American imagination in the service of a deliberative narrative. In his monograph Serial Selves, comics scholar Frederik Køhlert noted that one of the intriguing choices that El Rassi as a cartoonist creating an autographic memoir is to portray himself in a manner similar to how Arabs, Muslims 9 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia and Terrorists are penciled by Colón and Speigelman. Because Køhlert’s subject is autobiographical comics, the separation of the narrating voice in the extradiegesis and the character’s functions in the intradiegesis has emerged as a typical strategy to show the growth in character, which is usually manifest is physical changes as visual markers of the passage of time. For instance, in the sequence on DHS Security alerts in In the Shadow of No Towers, viewers can see the shift from running narration to spoken dialogue to thought bubble mirrored in the increasingly erratic and haggard appearance of the figure Spiegelman draws to represent himself. Køhlert notes that “Where the other artists discussed in [Serial Selves] often insist on portraying themselves as unruly and multiple, in strategies that allow them to challenge or elude hegemonic notions of identity and insist on being seen by the reader on their own terms, El Rassi’s self-portrait instead opts for identification with a stereotype that has often been used to marginalize or exclude him” (158). Arab in America documents the microaggressions El Rassi faced as a boy in middle school and rather than drawing himself as an awkward pre-teen character in that scene, El Rassi remains the adult man, of medium build with a stubbly beard and a sad expression. While Køhlert argues that “El Rassi’s repetitive insistence upon portraying himself as a distinctly Arab stereotype illustrates both how he is seen by others (and perhaps has come to see himself) and how easily individual specificity is turned into general stereotype in comics art” (157), the choice to reiterate those visual stereotypes may be one means of destabilizing the visual narrative for readers. If Spiegelman writes and draws out of confusion and consternation by widening the gap between Americans and Muslims (and wedging a mistrust of government and media into it), then El Rassi works to bridge that gap by demanding that his readers identify with a character rendered only through those visual tropes that have been used to frame Arabic and Muslim identities in a nationalizing narrative. The didactic purpose of the autographic comic oscillates between trying to understand the fear and hatred that he is victimized by and asking readers to reconsider their own complicity in that fear and hatred. Like Colón and Jacobson, he draws a grid of portraits of the 9/11 attackers, but he puts his own face in their midst. The text that accompanies this act of self-representation is spoken directly to the reader, like extradiegetic narration, but enclosed in a speech balloon-like dialogue. That text reads: “Could the average American distinguish me from a Muslim terrorist? I saw the photos of the hijackers and the fact is . . . they looked like me, and the images appeared everywhere” (19). The relationship of image and text in this moment in Arab in America directly contests notions of racial difference and membership in the shared comradeship of nation. Here, El Rassi seems to respond almost directly to the representational choices of other mediated images—perhaps even including those crafted by Jacobson and Colón—by calling for a more nuanced interpretation of the distinctions between Muslims, Arabs, Jihadis, and terrorists. El Rassi follows up this rhetorical question with a meta-textual history lesson that discusses the distinction between ethnic, national and religious identities. He draws himself before a written on blackboard and pull-down map as he explains how the phrase, “The Muslim World” should actually refer to the entire globe, as there are very few geographical spaces in which Islam has never been practiced, even noting that the largest concentration of self-identified Muslims is to be found in Southeast Asia rather than North Africa (28). In this lesson, the cartoonist accomplishes the accessibility that Jacobson reports to aim for without the sort of broad characterization that Colón’s drawings often rely upon. El Rassi even discloses some personal struggles with faith and ongoing discomfort with transculturation as he frames his familial relationships in Arab in America, so that the subtext of the graphic memoir works to ask questions about how second-generation immigrants relate to their parents’ countries and cultures of origin while the main text works to provide clear definitions of the distinctions between geographic, cultural, and religious markers of personal identity. The formal unity of those two narratives, arrayed in tension with one another, works to build complexity into relatively simple renderings, which, in turn, disrupts the image of communion as anchored in race, religion, or national origin. El Rassi follows up this formal unity with additional narratives about experiences with truly terrorizing acts of violence he faces as an Arab living in the U.S. after 9/11, including being accosted and chased down the street by drunken racists, as well as a series of microaggressions, like being at the same party as a white man dressed as a Jihadi for Halloween. In these graphic anecdotes, El Rassi clearly displays his own unease with his identity as an ArabAmerican. In doing so, he shuts down any debate about the veracity or bias of his narrative by presenting himself as an individual narrating subject writing and drawing forthrightly about his first-person experiences. In this way, the same epidiectic potential noted in Spiegelman’s personal stories in In the Shadow of No Towers is wrought in Arab in America. Once again, readers are invited to assign blame and praise to the characters with whom El Rassi interacts as a character in the graphic memoir. By withholding overt judgment—the character even asks himself, in a thought balloon over his head at the Halloween party, “Does this costume really hurt anyone? Why am I so angry and ashamed?” (41)— the cartoonist calls on readers to work through the ways that personal safety might mirror the issues of national security, and how notions of liberty can be both individually relevant and politically significant. 10 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia In a portent of things to come, at the close of the book, El Rassi makes a trip to Lebanon to visit his extended family. For the plane ride to Beirut, he dons a “Viva Mexico” t-shirt, explaining that he hopes to both avoid attracting undue attention from the TSA and his fellow passengers. For the trip back, after reflecting on the ways he may have internalized the Islamophobic sentiments of his adopted country, he elects to not only forego the ethnic legerdemain, but also to engage with the customs agent who stops him. In the “Outro,” El Rassi crafts a set of paired panels that occupy the same temporal space in the narrative, one labeled “What I wanted to say” and the other labeled “What I actually said.” In that set of panels, El Rassi identifies some strategies that in-group and out-group readers might deploy to respond to these situations. For readers who are Arab or Muslim, and are all too aware of what it is like to travel under similar conditions, El Rassi’s narrative works to build community through the representation of shared experiences and the vocalization of often inexpressible frustrations. It facilitates collective discourse that responds to institutional oppression by speaking about the structural difficulties of speaking out in this particular context. The outro also works to demonstrate to non-Arab and non-Muslim readers how the imagined threat of the Jihadi divides rather than solidifies any American communion or comradeship. First, El Rassi’s parallel panels contextualize the degree to which civil discourse becomes a mandate for people with visible markers of Middle Eastern identity who are traveling internationally. This reveals the often private struggles of that population to readers who may be unaware because of their own privilege, which, in turn, may provide a mechanism for building coalitions through shared experiences and operates as a kind of implicit call-to-action to disrupt those microaggressions when possible. This sort of subtext adds to the diegetic multiplicity found in Spiegelman’s comics and contradicts the polarizing narrative of Jacobson and Colón’s adaptation, so that the formal features of Arab in America are able to actively disrupt the mediated imagination of opposition between “Muslim Terrorist” and American. Viewed together, each of these three narratives works to call attention to the ways in which discourse about September 11th and the need to secure borders to American geographic spaces and imagined communities reflects the nuances of national identity. If readers and cultural critics are to respond to the Islamophobic policies and the heightened tensions that mitigate the successful inclusion of Muslims into the shared comradeship that is American national identity, we could do worse than to look to the comics written by El Rassi, Spiegelman, Jacobson and Colón as primers for gauging the impact of our public discourse and historical narratives upon the success of that endeavor. Of course, cartoonists cannot be solely responsible for drawing Islamophobia out of representations of American identity, and a pair of autographic texts is perhaps the smallest of bulwarks against the shifting social mores of contemporary American media. It is to be hoped, however, that by paying additional critical attention to ways the Islamophobia is discursively resisted in historiographic comics, that the issues foremost in our time may become less oppressive and divisive and that our imagined community can become more varied and inclusive. _____________________________ Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Ed., Verso, 1991. Ayoub, Abed, and Khaled Beydoun. “Executive Disorder: The Muslim Ban, Emergency Advocacy, and the Fires Next Time.” Michigan Journal of Race and Law, vol. 21, no. 5, 2017, pp. 215-41. Aydin, Yusuf Nebhan. “Muslims as Victims of Security Dilemma in the West.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 37, no. 3, 2017, pp. 245-266. Aziz, Sahar F. “A Muslim Registry: The Precursor to Internment?” Brigham Young University Law Review, vol. 58, no. 4, 2017, pp. 779-838. Beiner, Ronald, ed. Theorizing Nationalism. State U of New York P, 1999. Benner, Erica. Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995. Beydoun, Khaled. “Fifteen Years After 9/11: Where We Were and Where We Are.” Tennessee Law Review, vol. 599, 2016, pp. 599-603.  Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. Sage, 1995. Britten, Bob. “Picturing Terror: Visual and Verbal Rhetoric in The 9/11 Report Graphic Adaptation.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 355-69. Chaney, Michael. Graphic Subjects: Essays on Autobiography in Graphic Novels. U Wisconsin P, 2011. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form. Harvard UP, 2016. ---. “Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.” American Periodicals, vol. 17, no. 2, 2007, pp. 228-44. 11 �Sandra Cox • Drawn From and Against Islamophobia Cifti, Sabri. “Islamophobia and Threat Perceptions: Explaining Anti-Muslim Sentiment.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 32, no. 3, 2012, 293–309. Conan, Neal. “An Interview with Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón: The Sept. 11 Commission Report as Graphic Novel.” National Public Radio, 22 Aug. 2006, www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=5690970. Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse P, 1985. El Rassi, Toufic. Arab in America. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2007. Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, 1972-2007.” Biography, vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-33. Goldstein, Jared. “Unfit for the Constitution: Nativism and the Constitution from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump.” Journal of Constitutional Law, vol. 20, no. 3, 2018, 489-560. Grogan, David. “Success of 9/11 Commission Report Surprises.” Booksellers this Week, 28 July 2004, www. bookweb.org/news/success-911-commission-report-surprises. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005. Hausmann, Dan. “Artist Challenges Post-9/11 Consensus.” The Easton Express-Times, 29 Aug. 2005. Jacobson, Sid, and Ernie Colón. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. Rutgers UP, 2019. Liptak, Kevin, and Westwood, Sarah. “Trump Claims to Disavow Racist Chant after Pressure from Allies.” CNN Politics, 18 July 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/07/18/politics/trump-disavows-ilhan-omar-send-her-back-chant/ index.html. McCarthy, Andrew C. “No One Really Wants to ‘Send Her Back.’” The National Review, 20 July 2019, www. nationalreview.com/2019/07/no-one-really-wants-to-send-her-back. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Harper, 1994. Meinig, Donald, ed. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. Oxford UP,1979. Nance, Kimberley. Can Literature Promote Justice? Vanderbilt UP, 2006. Orbán, Katalin. “Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.” Representations, vol. 97, no. 1, 2007, pp. 57-89. Rosenwald, Michael S., and Woodson, Cleve R. “‘Send her Back!’: Trump, Ilhan Omar and the Complicated History of Back to Africa.” The Washington Post, 20 July 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/20/send-herback-trump-ilhan-omar-complicated-history-back-africa/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.572ff224f730. Shaddad, Lobna. “Arabophobia in Toufic El Rassi’s Graphic Novel Arab in America.” The International Journal of Literary Humanities, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1-8, doi:10.18848/2327-7912/CGP/v13i02/43924 Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. Pantheon Books, 2004. Stamant, Nicole. “Collections of ‘Old Comic Strips’ in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers” South Central Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 2015, 70–87. Versluys, Kristiaan. “Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers: 9-11 and the Representation of Trauma.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 4, 2006, pp. 980-1003, doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2007.0011, Accessed 16 Jul 2020. Warhol, Robyn. “The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” College Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1-20. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Wilde, Lukas R. A. “9/11, Comics, and the Threatened Orders of Pictorial Media: Non-Fictional Comics as Historical Re-Enactment.” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, n. pag., imagetext.english.ufl. edu/archives/v11_1/wilde/ Worcester, Kent. “New York City, 9/11, and Comics.” Radical History Review, vol. 111, no. 1, 2011, 139-54. 12 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Farrah Goff “Prof, You Be Illin’” Mental Illness Inside the College Classroom A fter conversations in a teaching practicum course related to responding to Margaret Price’s Mad at School, I noted that there was a consuming desire for a conversation revolving around how to be a Professor and a disabled body. For this paper, I explore an important part of disability conversations, not merely related to academia, but to societal ideologies related to ability, access, and accommodations (as it seems many of the classroom discussions often do) and their treatment of both visible and invisible illnesses. This paper seeks to exclusively explore the experience of mental disability and mental illness in professors. Inadvertently, an important aspect that becomes all too apparent as one engages in this conversation is greater discussions regarding the systematic stigmatization of mentally ill persons. Ultimately, the paper suggests that while there is no perfect way to address the issues of mental illness in the classroom, specifically when the instructor is the person who has a mental illness, overall work towards de-stigmatization and open classroom plans can be implemented to create better systems to intervene in times of emotional crises. Additionally, the implementations of these systems can allow for the ultimate goals of a positive and more supportive instructor and student experience to be met, while also assisting in the students receiving the education they are requesting. One avenue of exploration related to tracing the relationship of mental illness in professors is to first account for what makes up a large demographic of this population. More specifically, if this paper works to make an intervention related to the presence of mental illness in instructors, and subsequently offer a way to best bring helpful discussions related to the de-stigmatization of mental illness (while simultaneously striving to overthrow negative or unhelpful systems currently in place that are influenced by these current stigmas and societal beliefs), it must take into account who this intervention is geared towards. While ultimately working with the discussions that are significant to all persons, it would be negligent to overlook the composition of the instructional population of most universities on a basic level. In order to explore the relationship between mental illness and academia, one must also consider the large prevalence of graduate students as professors. One 2007 study reported that 16.2% of classes were taught by graduate students and adjunct faculty (Spalter-Roth 7). In accounting for such a high percentage of graduate students teaching undergraduate classes, it is helpful to consider the mental health of said population. It seems that more and more studies are cropping up addressing the “mental health crisis in graduate schools” (Evans). I focus on the mental health experiences of graduate students specifically as these are the people who are most often expected to live in this dual role. A 2018 study worked to establish that of the graduate students they surveyed, 39% reported moderate to severe depression and levels of anxiety (Evans). It is necessary to point out that this study only accounted for depression and anxiety. This does not account for graduate students and graduate labor that may be suffering from a variety of other mental illness. If over 35% of the graduate student body is suffering from depression or anxiety and over 15% of the faculty is comprised of said graduate students, the conclusion that can be made is that there is a large portion of the teaching staff at colleges all throughout the country who are affected with varying mental illnesses. So, how do we support those professors while simultaneously offering students the best educational opportunities possible? Margaret Price attempts to tackle many of the difficult elements that come with incorporating mental illness (or perhaps a better, more nuanced term, “mental divergence”) into the classroom in Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. While the discussion of mentally divergent instructors and individuals is startlingly absent, many of Price’s discussions are applicable to this paper’s exploration of de-stigmatization of neuro-divergence. Early on, Price emphasizes how psychiatric discourse effects pedagogical practices in the sense that it creates a “system through which human minds may be reliably measured as ‘crazy’ or ‘normal’” (33). Price takes issue with this, and I do as well. The desire to categorize people, and thereby people’s brains, in a neat orderly system where everyone fits into one of two boxes (crazy or normal) is normal, but it is neither sustainable nor helpful. Instead of working within these constructs and categorizations to which we are inclined and simultaneously encouraged by institutional agendas, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, one simple way to move away from or beyond these 13 �Farrah Goff • “Prof, You Be Illin’” biases and tendencies is to change the language that is used in these discussions. Had Price, going forward, moved away from verbiage of “ill”, “mad”, or “crazy” and instead incorporated “divergent” or “atypical” into her analysis, she would have made a step towards pushing back on these constructs. Instead, Price maintains her reference choices and continues to state refer to her subjects as “mental disabled” or the “mad subject” (Price 44, 56). Price does bring up the treatment of instructors at one early moment in her piece. She breaks down the current means of dealing with mentally divergent individuals in the classroom; “where ‘crazy’ students are quickly referred out of the classroom to the school counseling center, and where ‘unstable’ or ‘difficult’ teachers are triaged out by means of the tenure and promotion system” (33). However, there are many issues with Price’s statement. First, Price unintentionally creates a situation of mutual exclusivity that is not always the case. She offers that one is either the “crazy student” or the “difficult teacher”, but what if one is in the position of both student and instructor? As I have asserted earlier, it is clearly not an intuitive assumption that a person with mental illness would occupy solely one of these roles, and in fact quite possible and likely that a person could exist as both student and teacher. Second, Price assumes that mental divergence presents itself in identifiable and disruptive ways. The assumption that mental divergence in a teacher would necessarily take the form as instability or difficulty and the societally proscribed treatment would be to remove said individual through the form of other jobs is neither exclusively true nor always possible. While yes, this is one possible embodiment of mental divergence in an instructor within the classroom (I’m sure most people can relate to that one professor who just should not have been teaching any longer) and yes, tenure and removal of teaching responsibilities is one possible course of action and treatment to remedy the situation, this is an over generalization rife with stereotypes. Stereotyping that all difficult or unstable instructors are that way due to mental divergence is falling into these earlier preconceived beliefs regarding “crazy” and “normal”. Some instructors are simply poor instructors due to no other reason than their personality or lack of training. Conversely, instructors with mental divergence are not always difficult or unstable, and in fact it is entirely possible to have mental divergence and be quite accomplished at one’s job. Instead, I offer the depressed and anxious graduate student, fulfilling the necessary responsibilities to both their academic course load and their teaching obligations. While said individual may be meeting expectations, there are ways as both a student and an instructor their experiences could be normalized and made easier. One possible way to support both graduate students and instructors is through the counseling center. Most colleges now offer some sort of free mental health counseling to their students. An easy way to help graduate students would be for all instructors of graduate courses to simply have the counseling center’s website on their syllabus (as most instructors of first year writing at Queens College are encouraged to do for their own students). Simply, raising awareness of the availability of this resource could be helpful. While, accessibility and availability are very important, most colleges that have large populations of both graduate and undergraduate students have one counseling center for the entire student body. If there was a specific portion of a counseling center that was dedicated solely to graduate students, it is possible that graduate students would make more use out of the services that are offered there. Currently, it may feel embarrassing or unprofessional for a graduate student who is also a college instructor to go to the same counseling center and risk the possibility of running into their students waiting on similar services. Alternatively, a way to bypass the initial intake process or waiting room could increase likelihood of using these services. Allowing graduate students to set up appointments via email could be helpful in streamlining the process and cutting down on the possible risk of running into a student when the graduate student and instructor themselves is seeking help. Some colleges already do offer this option; however, it would be helpful if it was more wildly available at universities in the United States. While a larger goal is that seeking help for mental health issues should not be a problem or cause for concern, in so far as people should not feel embarrassed about reaching out for assistance, as it stands, the risk of a student knowing their instructor’s mental divergence may prevent the instructor from taking advantage of these services. Another possible way to support graduate students and instructors would be through the use of graduate specific support groups. “Groups help students increase their self-awareness” and groups help encourage feelings of togetherness and fight narratives that would lead to feelings of being “alone” (Harpine 66). Not only is there value in not feeling alone when facing difficult problems, but an instructor specific support group would be valuable as part of the “learning to teach” process. Queens College is unique in the sense that it offers a teaching practicum. As I have personally seen, throughout the course of the semester the practicum has functioned not only as a means to teach the teachers, but also as a place where issues throughout the semester are addressed. If more colleges were to offer an instructor specific support group, it could operate as a place where instructors (both new and old) who were experiencing issues both in and out of the classroom could come together and discuss how to continue teaching to the best of their abilities. 14 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Farrah Goff • “Prof, You Be Illin’” Additionally, this would serve as outside support and assistance with problems instructors may not be equipped to face. These support groups would not have to be limited to people who are mentally divergent, but they would exist as spaces of additional support for instructors who are. In a more focused discussion regarding the practice of teaching writing, Price offers a quote from Berlin’s New Rhetorical approach: “in teaching writing… we are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it” (38). Price takes issue with this quote in the sense that she argues that the theory relies heavily on the assumption that one has the ability to order and make sense of his or her world. She writes, “He misses the fact that those with mental disabilities are always already defined as non-human, by dint of their failure to make sense. In other words, [Berlin] has not considered the possibility that some subjects lack rhetoricity” (39). However, what Price overlooks is the possible attraction to not only learning how to make some sense and order one’s world, especially if one does not already possess the ability to do so. She also fails to recognize the freedom that writing presents as a way to exist outside of this imposed societal order. In fact, Price does not even consider the idea that perhaps someone with mental divergence already possesses the ability to order one’s world but utilizes writing as a means to be free from this expected order or as a means of basic expression. If writing instructors look at their role instead of as a means to achieve sameness and order, but rather as a way to teach communication, an idea that should be at the core of writing instruction, than the significance of the course becomes two-fold. For one, the neuro-divergent student who may desire but does not already possess this means of communication gains the opportunity to achieve this written form of communication. Secondly, the mentally divergent instructor can utilize the class as a way to further encourage these divergences rather than stifle them. Instructors of first-year writing, a mandatory course found in almost all American universities, and frequently taught by graduate students, could employ assignments that focus on this inherent need to communicate and be understood through writing. One possible method to achieve this emphasis could be through the use of free writing activities that would be designed to allow students to explore any topic or emotion of their choosing, while putting into effect the most recently taught skill or approach to formal writing. A hypothetical assignment could be: “Describe how you experienced waking up this morning, but be sure to use proper transitional phrases to articulate your meaning and engage with the paragraph structural outline we discussed in class last week.” Although this may seem to be not entirely topic based, it would allow for practice with the emphasized and taught forms while also moving away from the rigidity of certain paper and essay topical expectations and alternatively emphasizing a communication of personal and individual experiences. Testing first-year writing courses as a space in which communication, through writing of course, functions as a way to discuss individual experiences, including but not limited to those of mental divergence, is another way to work against societal stigmas of mental illness and improve the experiences of non-neurotypical students. The fact that first-year writing is often taken during the first year of the undergraduate experience is simply an additional bonus and incentive to incorporating such practices. Moving beyond the practice of writing, Price discusses another important aspect of communication, listening, when she asks, “if a student (or teacher) lacks rhetoricity, what happens to this vaunted process of listening? Is it possible to listen to the mad subject” (Price 42). Price mentions the strategy of listening in a discussion of her own previous point that the “mad subject” lacks the ability to speak or be understood. Again, Price is founding her discussions on these incorrect assumptions that a person who is neuro-divergent lacks the ability to communicate in a way that they can be understood. While it is possible that there may be a difficulty in communication or understanding, there are ways to encourage students (both neuro-typical and neuro-divergent) to understand someone or something, which at first, may not be easy to understand. One way is through the process of peer review. While Price argues that peer review is useless to the individual who cannot be understood, what she is actually doing is diminishing the ability of peers to understand. More specifically, if one is not being understood, peer review can be a lower stakes opportunity for a fellow student to assist in helping their classmate gain understanding. Concurrently, promoting the ability to communicate effectively in individuals who are struggling to be understood is also important, if not necessary work. Using Intro to Writing courses as a space to teach people to both be understood and to understand is not only beneficial, but also possible with small changes and steps. It has been said, “everyone is a little crazy, some people are just better at hiding it” (Hodkin). Instead of ascribing people who are different with the label as crazy and forcing them to mold to societal preconceptions about what is right and wrong, society should move away from words like “crazy,” “mentally ill,” or “mad” and work towards destigmatizing mental divergence. Rather than forcing one to “hide it” work needs to be done both inside and outside of the classroom that demonstrates mental divergence not as a negative, but rather as an extremely typical part of the human experience. Through working to understand both the presence and experience of mental divergence inside the 15 �Farrah Goff • “Prof, You Be Illin’” classroom in both students and their instructors, the goal is to employ techniques both at the university level and at the classroom level that work to achieve several goals. The first and foremost goal is to work to fight the stigmas surrounding mental illness. Secondly, the aim is to provide better support for individuals in all levels of the university structure who experience mental divergence. Finally, the hope is to open up the classroom so that the different experiences of mentally divergent persons is not just pushed to fit within accepted guidelines and structures, and instead encouraged as a means for more valuable learning. _____________________ Notes 1 Similar authors who address this issue of mental illness in graduate students include Chris Woolston and Colleen Flaherty. 2 If I were to explore this further, a more interesting and perhaps more valuable study that could be conducted would take a survey of all instructional staff at universities who report experiencing some type of mental divergence. Additionally, the survey would ask for reports of the position of the instructor (although the survey could remain anonymous), so that more accurate data could pinpoint how many instructors suffer from any type of mental divergence, and if there are any correlations between rates of mental illnesses and the teaching responsibilities of the individual. 3 In an extended version of this paper, I would consider the other key factors that are contributing to mental illness rates in Graduate Students, such as poverty level wages, demanding teaching and course loads, and more. 4 A slight digression here, but worthy of note; Price also considers the teacher here and founds an argument around the idea that a teacher who is “mad” lacks the ability to speak or listen (or both). Earlier discussion in this paper has demonstrated that an individual who is neuro-divergent can still make a good teacher, thus disproving the assumption that they lack the ability to be understood. Similarly, the neuro-divergent instructor may actually be the one who possesses better communication abilities (both listening and speaking) because they have previously had to learn to accomplish both more effectively. 5 On one level, striving to understand that which is not easily understood is already the practice through the assignment of higher-level academic texts. Works Cited Flaherty, Colleen. New Research on Graduate Student Mental Well-Being Says Departments Have Important Roles to Play in Fostering Healthy Environments, 6 Dec. 2018, www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/06/newresearch-graduate-student-mental-well-being-says-departments-have-important. Harpine, Elaine Clanton. After-School Prevention Programs for At-Risk Students: Promoting Engagement and Academic Success. Springer, 2013. Hodkin, Michelle. The Retribution of Mara Dyer. Simon & Schuster BFYR, 2015. Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. U of Michigan P, 2014. Spalter-Roth, Roberta, and Janine Scelze. “What’s Happening in Your Department: Who’s Teaching and How Much?” American Sociological Association, Mar. 2009 Evans, Teresa M., Lindsay Bira, Jazmin Beltran Gastelum, L. Todd Weiss, and Nathan L. Vanderford. “Evidence for a Mental Health Crisis in Graduate Education.” Nature Biotechnology, vol. 36, no. 3, 2018, pp. 282–84. Woolston, Chris. Nature, 18 Aug. 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02439-6. 16 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Arleen Ionescu A WayU Forward 21 C The Humanities and the niversity in the st entury1 A s a former European (now based in Asia) academic laboring under the most inauspicious pedagogical and intellectual conditions for many years, I have kept my strong belief that the Humanities do matter in the twentyfirst century world. Recalling Jacques Derrida’s thinking on the New Humanities as well as Bernard Stiegler’s theoretical views on the educational system in the age of technology, the first part of this article is meant to contextualize why academia has changed so profoundly in relation to broad cultural, social, and economic currents. This part is conceived as a short history of the university, counterpointed by my own narrative as an academic who endeavors to analyze what happened, without lamenting over the crisis in the Humanities, since this would mean inability “to break free of a nineteenth-century vision of education that sees the humanities in narrow terms as an escape from the world of business and science” (Jay 30). As Stiegler asserted in States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century, irrespective of the historical period, the university has a unique vocation: forming “a type of attention:” logos, or “reason” in the Enlightenment period (7). The model of the first ideal university was defined by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and implemented by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the eponymous Berlin university (1810) before being imported to Johns Hopkins University (1876). Its purpose was to serve the needs of emerging nation states in contrast with the medieval model that served the church. The Humboldtian model had two primary functions: to educate the future state bureaucrats and to conduct research with the purpose of producing new knowledge. Following Kant’s idea, its architecture privileged the Humanities, especially the Faculty of Philosophy. However, it is essential to note that Kant did not have only theoretical interests, but he also insisted on “practical interests that have concrete implications for daily life in the real world” (Taylor 49). The first revolution that changed the world was in the industrialized nineteenth century; the second in the first half of the twentieth century, when electricity, petroleum and the automobile made the world progress; followed in the 1990s by the “third industrial Revolution”, when cyberspace, micro-computing and robotics appeared (Rikfin, The Third Industrial Revolution 9-73). Coincidentally, I became an academic by the time universities entered this era of telecommunication, where technology is driven by market-oriented forces, becoming a “sector of knowledge” prioritizing an “elite of entrepreneurs, scientists, technicians, computer programmers, professional educators, and consultants” (Rifkin, The End of Work xvii). According to Derrida’s “The Future of the Profession or the University Without Conditions,” mutations in the Humanities were a consequence of “techno-science, with the worldwide-izing virtualization and delocalization of tele-work” (47). Derrida was writing at a time when the technological era was not yet in full bloom, before LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other networks, including academic ones, were invented. This is why he was not skeptical about the modern university’s freedom “to question and to assert, or even, going still further” and “the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth” (24). For Derrida, the “university without condition” had to promote “an unlimited commitment to the truth” (24); it had the “right to say everything” (26), a condition that still linked the Humanities to the Enlightenment. In the twenty-first century, logos became technologos and could no longer function “outside of the industrial system, in a society where the economy occupies a position that demands incessant critique” (Stiegler 206), imposing itself on our lives brutally and changing “the very conditions of education and research, as well as the relations between educational institutions and universities on the one hand, and what lies outside them on the other hand” (7). Universities faced what Stiegler called “a technological shock strategy” (7), a “global war”, “a kind of dis-integration of knowledge itself” or “anti-knowledge” (168), because, unlike the capitalist industry, the university did not take advantage of the positivity of the pharmakon. Today, nobody can deny that research is under the pressure of industrial criteria, and “subjected to the shortest-term efficiency possible” (which is sadly inefficiency in the long run), and education is oriented more towards “the criteria of so-called employability, which has nothing whatsoever to do with professionalization” (Stiegler 169). Thus, Derrida’s very notion of “the university without condition” became an impossible ideal, since “there is no university without condition – academic freedom is always a conditional freedom” 17 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward (Stiegler 170), and these conditions are always extra-academic. Even the opinions of Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, who in 2015 pointed out that the belief in the crisis of the Humanities had become “orthodoxy”, seem dated now, when for instance, major enrollment in English or in History have been halved in the US since the Great Recession of 2008 and many Humanities sections in European universities were closed down. Such conditions made us, academics, feel that we are under an assault, just to paraphrase the title of Michael Bailey and Des Freedman’s edited book The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance; we often felt that we were forced to become “microentrepreneurs of the self,” as Gary Hall put it in his The Uberfication of the University (30). In 2020, starting from their book, Bailey and Freedman launched a petition in UK, The New Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance in Covid Times which announces, among other bad news that taking advantage of the pandemic, employers institutionalize “a form of ‘shock higher education’ where online delivery becomes standard, where surveillance becomes routine, where precarity becomes acceptable, where the right to a pension becomes obsolete and where funding becomes ever more tied to employability.” My own history as an academic started only two years before Derrida’s plea for the “university without condition” was published in French, when I became a member of a Humanities department in a Romanian university in 1998. At that time Romania was still outside the European Union, but they eventually joined in 2007. A contextual parenthesis on how the Romanian educational system developed after the country got rid of communism in December 1989 is needed before presenting a usual day in my former office. In the 1990s, Romania was still striving to learn what democracy meant, and, hence, it also had a lesson to learn in matters of education and research. Since December 1989, Romania has had as many as 23 ministers of education (plus 3 interim ministers), and the denominations and structures of the ministries have changed constantly. Only two ministers really reformed education and research: Mircea Miclea (29 Dec. 2004 – 9 Nov. 2005) and Daniel Funeriu (23 Dec. 2009 – 9 Feb. 2012). Funeriu’s name is linked to the first national law of education, Law no. 1/ 2011 (also known as “Funeriu law”), that had a proper scientific basis and was aligned to other European Union states’ education laws (Pantazi). In 2011, Funeriu also conducted the first and, to date, only proper evaluation of universities despite huge opposition coming from many universities interested in maintaining their status quo. Universities were classified as follows: 12 universities of advanced research and education; 30 universities of research (or artistic creation) and education; and 48 educationcentered universities. In 2011, it looked like Romanian education and research were for the first time going in the right direction. However, the government where Funeriu was the Minister of Education had to resign in September 2012 after a vote of no-confidence. On the very hour the new government was installed, the first changes that appeared in its official publication were to Funeriu’s Law. Romania has been, and unfortunately still is, the country where many politicians boasting academic titles have been exposed as plagiarists (see the infamous case of the former PM, Victor Ponta, in Schiermeier; Maci’s book, an excellent analysis of Romania’s academic system; Şercan’s book that details many cases of Romanian politicians’ academic imposture; Tismăneanu’s considerations on why Ponta refused to admit his fraud in Ionescu, “Apologia de mediocritate” 83; and Ionescu, “Umanioarele în epoca tehnologiei”). In September 2012, Romania lost not only the best Minister of Education it has ever had but also the best education law; the law was gradually changed in order to accommodate politicians’ desires. At the time when the Romanian educational system seemed to be travelling down the right path, in April 2012, I became the Vice-Dean of Research of the Faculty of Letters and Sciences. I had high hopes that Romanian universities would soon manage to obtain better positions in world rankings.2 In 2016, I became Dean of the faculty and in 2018, I decided to leave my native country once I painfully felt that I no longer belonged in the university I had been working at for twenty years. It had become a rather business-like, interest-driven workplace or even some sort of factory where one’s productivity was on an assembly line. I joined the same kind of school, the School of Foreign Languages, as a regular tenured professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The ongoing trend for a few years in my country of birth has been to judge curriculum and research quality pragmatically. Since we faced escalating financial problems, caused by the very poor national budget for education, everything had to be “costed” and “priced”. If there were not enough students enrolled in a program, we had to apply crude economic criteria when vetting programs because one section might have been potentially disruptive to the efficient running of the whole factory. Such crude economics did not assess the intellectual and pedagogical merits of our degrees and courses, but simply set those off against overheads and running costs: staff on payroll, electricity, gas and water bills, and room and equipment maintenance, with accreditation costs. On a state-to-state basis within the United States and the European Union, the rampant corporatization of universities can often be on a par with chronic underfunding and the increasing disengagement of governments from public spending in education, and the first casualties in line of sight are the Humanities as opposed to the STEM subjects. Yet, as Thomas Docherty showed, to 18 Wa tchung Review • Volume 4 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward have a future, education “is not a business, certainly not a commercial activity, nor is it even remotely ‘like’ one, nor should it be reduced to being the condition of a transactional medium responding to private avarice” (For the University 164). Romania followed the international trend of investing money almost entirely in “transformational sciences and technologies” (Dupuy and Roure, my translation). These tendencies gradually turned the members of my former university board of directors, Consiliul de Administraţie [The Administrative Council] into corporate executives and stubborn academic administrators who almost lost sight of the university’s dual core mission. In 2017, in order to survive, the board members at my former university started to exhaustively analyze our programs’ cost efficiency: how much money the Ministry of Education allocates per student capita, how much money comes from research projects, how much money is spent on staff’s salaries, utility bills and accreditation and how much the university earns in the end. I unsuccessfully attempted to make my colleagues aware that in our official positions, surrounded exclusively by figures and charts, we lost touch with our students. Additionally, we, who were to inform students on how to resist oversimplification, practiced it on a daily basis in our documents written in the best langue de bois, borrowed from the discourses of managerialism, based on a culture of auditing. We had gradually become “service providers”, our students “customers” or “clients”, who, when enrolling in a program, signed a contract each academic year during the whole duration of study. We strove to support “quality enhancement”, and many potential employers worked as external assessors who constantly checked on our internally robust “quality culture”, implemented by academics whose main goal was to develop effective institutional assessment strategies; we needed to implement a rolling program of “annual reviews” of our offerings to examine their “sustainability”. At my former school, I saw first-hand what Docherty describes generally: how quality insurance approaches drive us slowly towards mediocrity, since “teaching is not a commodity transaction or transparent dealing in information” but “a collaborative activity that leads to the expansion of imagination and discoveries on all sides” (“The Unseen Academy” 40-41). Every document we generated was marketized: at the beginning of the academic year, we produced lengthy handbooks, manuals, circulars, with objectives, targets, risks, and at its end, we measured whether our targets had been met. In what fast became a kind of academic panopticon, we evaluated ourselves and our colleagues’ courses, students provided course feedback; more often than not, we paid lip service to relying on such evaluations because we needed to be attentive to students’ “satisfaction rate”, which is now being recorded in yearly updated national student surveys in some countries. Last, but not least, we shared “best practice” in the implementation of internal quality systems. In many European countries, for more than twenty years, the university agenda and curriculum have been dictated by stakeholders, the political powers-that-be, the main economic players and the employers in the market economy. We therefore needed to facilitate stakeholders’ participation in our decisions, to hold annual meetings with them, and to change our Curriculum Plan so as to match the range of entrepreneurial skills they want our students to acquire, of the kind that squares uneasily with, or transfers uneasily from, more humanistic pursuits. In order to keep up student recruitment, our website had to demonstrate our “excellence” on all fronts, a label first bandied about in the 1990s’ neoliberal spirit – and savagely criticized by Bill Readings’ famous The University in Ruins then – and enjoying a renewed lease on life in spite of Readings’ earlier deconstructive effort. Despite being overwhelmed all over Europe by so much (occasionally self-proclaimed) excellence – which once prompted Docherty’s ironic remark that, since in the United Kingdom some twenty-five universities regularly claimed to be among the top ten, one may legitimately wonder whether they had a department of mathematics or even logic (“The Unseen Academy” 38) – I sometimes wondered if effective learning, teaching, and research still actually exist, and can still flourish, beyond all these (self-)assessment protocols. After the Bologna declaration was signed by the ministers of education from twenty-nine European countries in 1999, a professor from a Bologna university had to fill in grids (on aims, methods, objectives, and outcomes) and monitoring forms, he/she had to not only complete the marking but to also complete the supporting paperwork after the marking, without having to deliver proper teaching and to make sure that students could formulate a position and think critically. This should be the challenge of teaching, as Mark Taylor rightly has observed: “not merely to convey information but also to encourage students to ask questions they never imagined asking”, which means that they start to think critically and are capable of learning “how to formulate a position and develop thoughtful arguments to defend it” (48). Today, many European academics live in a research culture in which, prior to sending an article for evaluation, they often look at the rating of a periodical or check which databases index the journal, since these are likely to inflect the impact factor of their work. This happens, unless, under pressure of their national research assessments, academics in the Humanities are sacrificing a book and prefer to write individual articles in journals ranked as A, since the latter 19 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward matter more than one whole monograph (Williams and Galleron; Bonaccorsi). Moreover, if someone’s “cutting-edge” research is on an unpopular or niche topic hardly represented in a major indexed journal, the resulting article is likely to be sunk without a trace in compliance with the laws of the academic market and regardless of its intrinsic value. Under such circumstances, we may wonder whether and how we “do research” – a term too often used and misused to refer to any form of publication. ••••• The next part of this article will be the narration of “a usual day in the office” at my former university, with an emphasis on how extra-academic factors may influence the decisions of a university board. Although referring to the past, this part is narrated in the eternal Present of the corporate university where I worked for twenty years. At 10 am, I attend the de-rigueur, usually open-ended meeting of the Administrative Council in which for the third time running those in attendance (with a few notable exceptions) bicker about closing down underperforming, inefficient programs, most of which are in my faculty.3 I, the representative of liberal arts, do not seem to be able to dispel the growing skepticism of colleagues in engineering and economics about the worth of “my Humanities inefficient programs.” I have often heard questions like: “What do you, the humanists, produce?” with the already-known implied answer “You are basically incapable of productive innovation.” “What advantages can we have from your pondering over past historical events or literature?” I have also witnessed one of my leader’s “objective” assessments of humanists: “In your classes you do nothing. You just waffle about ‘-isms.’” It is clear to me that some of my colleagues think that we indulge in obscure critical inquiry which they see as neither constructive nor practical but effectively solipsistic. I regard myself as a scholar who neither believes in nor supports the idea that the Humanities matter in our multicultural and global society only for acquiring a literary, cultural or theoretical knowledge for its own sake, and I always attempt to articulate the practical value of an education in the Humanities obtained by our students. I am one of only two members of the Administrative Council who obstinately put forward arguments against regarding our university as a de facto business corporation. Today, as in other previous meetings, I am trying to explain that we cannot simply measure everything in utilitarian terms, and we should not close down BA and MA programs only because we are missing a few students in order for the programs to be cost-effective. I can see my colleagues’ patent general distrust. It resembles the distrust of the early twentieth-century American capitalists that Frank Donoghue analyzes concluding that they “were motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line”; their distrust simply meant that “if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts” (3). I do not share Donoghue’s defense of the capitalists. However, I can hear my colleagues invoking “ethical reasons.” The dean of a technical faculty came up with a magic formula to reduce costs. Another presents an Excel table with formulas that I, with my own limitations, just cannot comprehend. What my humanist mind figures out on the spot is that the mathematization of our efficiency might cost some of my colleagues their jobs in the Humanities in the future. We close the meeting without reaching any sort of conclusion, let alone consensus. I am kindly asked to make more calculations about the cost efficiency of the programs. We will resume our discussion next Monday because the prospects are gloomy: last week a new government ordinance cut all our costs by 10% for the next academic year even though inflation is rampant in a supposedly buoyant economy. I return to my office in low spirits at almost 5 pm. We had two 10-minute breaks in seven hours. “Critique” is the word that comes to mind. “Critique”, not calculations, certainly not symbols and formulas that show how ill-adapted to the new world I am. “Critique”, Jay wrote, is “at the very heart of the humanist enterprise. It involves the kind of abstract, systematic thinking we associate with Kant’s theory of the aesthetic, Hegel’s dialectic, Marx’s analysis of the class structure or the operations of ideology, Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God, or Freud’s work on the unconscious, or his great work, Civilization and Its Discontents (27). However, my critique, or, in other words, my evaluation of my colleagues’ evaluation of my faculty, would not impress financially efficient minds. Sigh. The clerk from the Registry hands my secretary official papers we received from the Ministry of Education. I look for the essential words “Deadline: next week.” “Have you eaten?” Sigh. My secretary knows the answer, so she brings me a slice of a delicious chocolate cake she made at home. Feeling empathy is just what I need to become more optimistic, so I open the new evaluation grids on how well we perform in research as a faculty. The Ministry of Education distributes an allocation (the budget) to our university taking into account the numbers of students we have enrolled. However, we can obtain supplementary funds of 20% if we 20 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward produce good research. The evaluation grids refer to research only. Teaching does not matter, since it cannot be quantified. That matters only internally. I try not to think that a teacher in the Humanities is at a disadvantage here as well. For example, a teacher who is in charge of a course on Writing can have over one hundred papers to assess during a semester. However, assessments do not take into account the many hours spent on students’ drafts and revisions requiring extensive and individual feedback. And when it comes to assessing the course, students will often say that the course on Writing was “hard.” I return to my grids where only figures are important. Nobody reads our research items. Our performative efficiency is assessed with a single aim in mind: quantifying quality, a tendency that became obvious through the Bologna system and Global Rankings and Quality Assurance that exponentially increased their relevance in determining the value of Higher Education Institutions in EU and worldwide. The grids contain figures in an Excel table. Our names do not appear in that table, but rather, as in the famous 1960s American series The Prisoner, we have become numbers. The data we need to collect is: each member of staff needs to make a table with the Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate) articles they have written with their impact factor. There are around 1,800 AHCI journals, and more than 8,500 SCI. Unlike SCI and SSCI, AHCI do not record impact factors. Thus, in our table we have no option but to return a value of 0 for impact factor, no matter how prestigious the journal we published in is. According to these criteria, an excellent humanist already matters less than an average engineer who co-wrote an article with six to seven colleagues with an impact factor larger than ‘0’. Neither books nor book chapters count, even though humanists have repeatedly explained how valuable monographs are for literature, history, theology, and philosophy. We also need to provide our assessors with a print screen of our Hirsch index – an author-level metric, based on a set of a scholar’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications – that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of said scholar. While any average professor in engineering can easily notch up over 20 for their h-index owing to the way citation operates in their fields, a professor of comparable status in the Humanities scores 5-6 on average. According to an ironically bitter pamphlet written by a reputed Romanian professor of English literature, Umberto Eco’s Hirsch index was a mere 2 (at that time Eco was still alive; his books were not taken into account for the calculation of the index) and the eminent linguist Geoffrey Leech had 1 (Papahagi). I have often criticized reducing facts ad absurdum by using figures only. Nevertheless, only a mere look at an article on scientometrics shows that only 32 of the 100 most heavily cited authors in the humanities were born in the twentieth century (Nederhof, Luwel, and Moed). Evidence is hard to find, as not many people write about these discrepancies that remain a taboo subject even in scientometrics journals. The most recent data I found was for 2004 when every week about 17,000 new articles and 300,000 new citations were added to the SCI database, 2800 articles and 50,000 citations to SSCI, but only 2200 articles and about 15,000 citations to AHCI (Leydesdorff; facts are confirmed also by Archambault and Gagné; Dassa, Kosmopoulos and Pumain; and in the more recent article of Leydesdorff and Salah, 39 that explains “the slower pace of ‘progress’ in the humanities.”) For the evaluation I need to work on the following week, we also have to fill in a file with items to prove that we fulfill the criteria for our positions: excellence in research and international visibility. For international visibility, we need to append the list of citations and indicate which libraries worldwide include our works in their collections. In reality, therefore, only a few of these criteria say something relevant about the humanists’ value, a basic point which I have repeatedly been attempting to evidence in numerous meetings of the National Council for Research, at the National Council for the Financing of Higher Education and through various petitions addressed to the Ministry of Research, all to no avail. The last one I initiated with four Romanian humanist colleagues in order to convince the minister of research to also appoint representatives of our disciplines in the Research Committee from which he excluded all humanists in 2017; it gathered 1578 signatures, received wonderful comments from great humanists in the country and abroad, yet no answer whatsoever from the minister (Petiție în sprijinul științelor umaniste din România). The next document on my table that requires my attention and an urgent reply hails from another official institution, which kindly asks me to fill in a 20-page questionnaire... with several questions repeated ad nauseam: how many classes of computer science are taught to students in letters, how many computer skills they develop, how many classes of entrepreneurship are taught, how many entrepreneurial skills do students receive. At the end of this usual day in the office, after spending another eight hours doing nothing but administration with no intellectual result whatsoever (and certainly no research done, yet said research needs to be as “excellent” as possible for the national assessment exercise), I might feel tempted to ask whether the Humanities are indeed in a crisis. Yet I dismiss such thoughts. 21 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward I do believe that humanists ultimately do themselves a disservice in lamenting about being regarded as “secondclass” citizens in their contribution to society. I believe that to maintain the idea that the Humanities are in a crisis is a mistake. It is 7 pm. I can finally have some time for myself to read my own evaluations for the MA course on Critical Theory I teach. The synthesis made by the university managers (containing the grades I received from 1 to 5) landed on my desk to be signed hours ago. The evaluation form also includes students’ opinions on the course bibliography: “Rate from 1 to 5 how recent the bibliography for the course was.” I have provided my students with a Reader and very recent articles/ book chapters, some of which I discussed with my students (with the authors’ permission) even before publication, thus practically, bringing them a bibliography from the future. Yet it seems I have managed to garner some “2-s”. I “need to be more careful when compiling a bibliography in the future”, the section of conclusions says. I can consider myself “lucky” that I did not score “2-s” for my pedagogical methods, otherwise I would have had to be retrained in pedagogy by the Department of Educational Sciences, as some feedback to the students’ evaluation requires. Knowing that some of my MA students for whose program I have fought for hours today were unsatisfied with the most updated bibliography I have ever produced, maybe it is time to go home. Or to leave the country. ••••• In the concluding movement of this article, I will endeavor to come up with a response to this kind of state of affairs that is both hopeful and constructive, engaging once more with some of the ideas of the theorists whose works I used in the first part: Derrida’s thinking of the role of the Humanities in the twenty-first century, Stiegler’s sevenpoint “program”, based on a contemporary adaptation of the Platonic model, and Jay’s conclusions in The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies. According to Derrida, the New Humanities have to go on focusing on treating “the history of man, the idea, the figure, and the notion of ‘what is proper to man’” (“The Future of the Profession” 50-51). The history of literature should keep the same desiderata as in the past, since the literary canons remain “traditional and indisputable objects of the classical Humanities”, as strong as “the history of the concept of literature” and that of the institution of literature, “which allows one to say everything in every way” (Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature” 36). I began this essay with Stiegler’s views on “the global war” affecting the university that has not chosen to develop the positive side of the pharmakon. Even after the philosopher’s premature death in August 2020, Stiegler’s pharmacological critique will remain the necessary prelude to a cure that would harness the benefits of technology while eradicating its negative effects. Stiegler’s seven-point “program”, based on a contemporary adaptation of the Platonic model, provides a general blueprint for the “university with conditions” of the future that will no longer work like a corporation but will “put organological” (by “organology” he designated a way of thinking the co-individuation of human organs, technical organs and social organizations) and “pharmacological questions at the heart of its work” and make “tertiary retention not only an object of study, but an object of practice;” with these two objectives in mind, the university should become “a new integrated system of primary, secondary and tertiary education” and academics’ goals should be the transformation of “public space, public time and the public thing”, while they should remain aware of “the new publication system generated by digitalization” (171). The two projects initiated by Stiegler, the political and cultural group Ars Industrialis (2005) and his own philosophy school (pharmakon.fr, 2010) in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, with courses running for high school students and a doctoral program, started from his “insistence on the need to create new forms of spirit in the contemporary digital age under new media conditions” (Milesi 136). Some of Jay’s conclusions in The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies are worth pursuing as well: on the one hand, the critique against humanists who do a disservice to the Humanities; on the other hand, the emphasis on the practical values of the humanities. Jay is right to oppose Lisa Ruddick who asserts that professionalization was the “near enemy” of the Humanities, and that critical theory as well as methodology made humanists step into nihilism. He is also right to disagree with Geoffrey Galt Harpham, the promoter of an education for the postgraduates that should open them to the experience of literature instead of involving them in research (101). To Jay’s list, historian Nigel A. Raab can be added, for his non-constructive criticism of theory in historical studies that he characterizes as “an Ikea instructional booklet that demonstrates step-by-step how to build a bunk bed (or to interpret a given set of historical data)” (11). Such attitudes are also disapproved with in Stefan Herbrechter’s “Review” (intentional deletion) of Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt’s edited book Hacking the Academy. Herbrechter thinks that “the best service one might do to the humanities is to save them from themselves” (203). 22 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward Reiterating Jay’s conclusion that the Humanities “do teach practical, transferable skills” (30) is important to make students enrolling in the Humanities aware that they can contribute to the understanding of crucial contemporary issues such as migration, economic or pandemic crises (and we are experiencing such a crisis now). The assumption that young people opting for a career in the Humanities have no “practical” utility in a society that decided that STEM subjects are more robust and future-proof disciplines has been proven wrong numerous times. Jay’s truth is validated by at least two facts: the extension being able to learn is critical thinking, as the world changes and business are obliged to follow suit, a fact validated during the current crisis; Humanities graduates are employed by corporate leaders because they possess communication skills and critical thinking so much needed in our contemporary world. From many examples, I will use Marissa Mayer’s report (2011) that revealed Google’s interest in hiring about 6,000 people, from whom probably 4,000–5,000 were with a Humanities or liberal arts background (Jay 12; Reisz) and Lesa Sawahata’s interview (2018) with Susanne Folkerts, a Project Manager from Starbucks, who admits that the value added to her company by employing International Studies and Humanities students consists in “research data, market specific insights, and lots of great energy.” These facts are proven by Koendjbiharie’s case study on the learning practice of student consultancy and Madsbjerg’s Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, that insists on a return to training business leaders in the SSH, since the rise of algorithmic intelligence comes with the business leaders’ inability to produce contextual analyses and their lack of “analytical empathy” (116). An example of successful graduates of a technical field who felt the need to enroll in a Humanities program can be also revealing: Damon Horowitz, director of Engineering at Google, returned to Stanford to pursue a PhD in philosophy, explaining that he believed there was “no surer path to leaping dramatically forward in your career than to earn a PhD in the humanities” (qtd. in Jay 14). Moreover, as Maximilian Gindorf claims, “the humanities are an essential part of modern society because they emerge in the process of modernization as a response to the rise of the natural sciences” (2). Unlike scientists, humanists are not focused primarily on “quantification, measurement, calculation, and formulas” but rather on “affect, interpretation, ethical and moral thinking, dramatic representation, and the kinds of emotional and intellectual experiences they shape”, producing “an intersection…between the emotions and the intellect” (Jay 14). Being interested not only in meaning as scientists but also in its nature and its production, humanists are more capable of “operating as global citizens in a transnational marketplace” and of facing “the challenges of the twenty-first-century workplace” (Jay 28, 13). Recently some universities gradually realized that investing only in the STEM disciplines is a mistake. Some UK Schools of Humanities have published disclaimers on their sites that contradict Humanities graduates’ unemployability (see School of Humanities, Dundee University; School of Humanities, University of Southampton). A striking example of opening towards the Humanities in our age is Tsinghua University, the most prestigious Chinese university in QS 2021, ranking 15 (see QS World University Rankings, 2021), part of the C9 group (Chinese Ivy League), traditionally a stronghold for the sciences, which strengthened considerably its Humanities programs recently. Tsinghua follows a different education principle from other universities, “that brings out graduates with a superior mastery of Chinese and foreign culture and history.” (Tsinghua School of Humanities website) In 2014, Xinya College, a residential liberal arts college, modelled after universities in the United States and Europe, was established at Tsinghua as a pilot project to reform undergraduate education (Xinya College website). Tsinghua’s expenditures in 2016 were 13.7-billion-yuan, making it the top-spending university in China (Wenyu).  The remedies proposed here, and the strong belief into the practical values of the Humanities and the critique of anti-humanist positions (often, sadly, coming from humanists themselves), I hope, must become the profession of any humanist facing the changes of our contemporary society. They will help the institution called university remain the school of thought that made us, the humanists, reflect skeptically about received truths which are far from reality. _____________________ Notes 1 Acknowledgment: Research by Arleen Ionescu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, supported by The Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning. 2 In 2021, there were only two universities from Romania in QS (Quacquarelli Symonds), Babes-Bolyai University and University of Bucharest, 801-1000 – see QS World University Rankings, 2021; and the same BabesBolyai University, 701-800 in ARWU – see Academic Ranking of World Universities 2020. In QS 2022, both universities had even lower scores. 23 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward 3 'Faculty' here refers not to academic staff who teach courses as in a US context, but to academic schools/ departments from a European perspective. Some European universities use the term 'faculty' instead of the AngloAmerican term 'School'; thus, the School of Arts and Science would be the Faculty of Arts and Science. Works Cited Academic Ranking of World Universities, 2020. www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2020.html Archambault, Éric and Étienne Vignola Gagné. Science Metrix - Final Report: The Use of Bibliometrics in the Social Sciences and Humanities, Montreal, 2004. Bailey, Michael and Des Freedman. The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance. Pluto Press, 2011. ---. The New Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance in Covid Times, 2020. www.plutobooks.com/blog/anew-assault-on-universities/. 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Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, and Françoise Roure. Les Nanotechnologies. Éthique et prospective industrielle [Nanotechnologies: Ethics and Industrial Prospective]. La Documentation Française, 2004. Gindorf, Maximilian. “Gaining Progress, Compensating Losses: The Role of the Humanities in the Redemption of Modernity.” Watchung Review: The Journal of the New Jersey College English Association, vol. 3, 2019, pp. 2-8. Hall, Gary. The Uberfication of the University. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. The Humanities and the Dream of America. U of Chicago P, 2011. Herbrechter, Stefan. “The Nonhumanities, or, Ceci N’est Pas Une Critique: Review of Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities, eds. Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt.” Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, vol. 10, 2020, pp. 191-204. Ionescu, Arleen. “Apologia de Mediocritate: Dialogue(s) with Alexander Baumgarten, Dragoş Ciuparu, Daniel Funeriu, Petre T. Frangopol, Vladimir Tismăneanu.” Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013, pp. 65-86. ---. “Umanioarele în epoca tehnologiei.” [The Humanities in the Technological Era]. Filosofia în universitatea contemporană [Philosophy in the Contemporary University], edited by Claudiu Mesaroş, Editura Universităţii de Vest, 2017, pp. 138-55. Jay, Paul. The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Koendjbiharie, Sarita R. “The distinct Value of Humanities Students to Employers in Student Consultancy Projects.” Industry and Higher Education, vol. 34, no. 4, 2020, pp. 247-62. Leydesdorff, Loet. “Can Networks of Journal-Journal Citation Be Used as Indicators of Change in the Social Sciences?” Journal of Documentation, vol. 59, no. 1, 2003, pp. 84-104. ---. and Alkim Almila Akdag Salah. “Maps on the Basis of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: The Journals Leonardo and Art Journal versus ‘Digital Humanities’ as a Topic.” Journal of the Association for the Information Science and Technology, forthcoming, pp. 1-39. www.leydesdorff.net/ahci/ahci.pdf. 24 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward Maci, Mihai. Anatomia unei imposturi. O școală incapabilă să învețe [The Anatomy of Imposture: A School that is Incapable of Teaching], Preface H.-R. Patapievici. Editura Trei, 2016. Madsbjerg, Christian. Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm. Hachette Books, 2017. Mandler, Peter. “Rise of the Humanities.” Aeon, 17 December 2015. aeon.co/essays/the-humanities-are-boomingonly-the-professors-can-t-see-it. Milesi, Laurent. “The Remediation of (Post-)Humanities.” Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, vol. 10, 2020, pp. 126-42. Nederhof A. J., M. Luwel, and H. F. Moed. “Assessing the Quality of Scholarly Journals in Linguistics: An Alternative to Citation-Based Journal Impact Factors.” Scientometrics, vol. 51, no. 1, 2001, pp. 241-65. Pantazi, Raluca. “Mircea Miclea, despre reformele în educație acuzate de Iohannis că apar peste noapte: La dânsul, noaptea a ținut 4 ani și nu a făcut niciun document” [Mircea Miclea on the Reforms of Education That Iohannis Accuses for Having Appeared Overnight: In His Case, the Night Lasted 4 Years and He Did Not Write Any Document], Hotnews, 10 Sept. 2018. www.hotnews.ro/stiri-educatie-22694726- mircea-miclea-desprereformele-educa-acuzate-iohannis-apar-peste-noapte-nsul-noaptea-inut-4-ani-nu-cut-niciun-document.htm. Papahagi, Adrian. “Tăiați-i salariul lui Umberto Eco! (Despre aberația Hirsch în universitatea românească).” [Cut Umberto’s Eco’s Salary: About the Hirsch Index Nonsense in Romanian Academia], Contributors, 17 March 2015. www.contributors.ro/reactie-rapida/taia%C8%9Bi-i-salariul-lui-umberto-eco-despre- abera%C8%9Bia-hirsch-in-universitatea-romaneasca/. Petiție în sprijinul științelor umaniste din România [Petition for the Humanities in Romania], initiated by: Alexander Baumgarten, Cristian Ciocan, Arleen Ionescu, Bogdan Murgescu, and Flavius Solomon. www.petitieonline.com/ petiie_in_sprijinul_tiinelor_umaniste_din_romania. QS World University Rankings, 2021. www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2021. Raab, Nigel A. The Crisis from Within: Historians, Theory, and the Humanities. Brill, 2015. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Harvard UP, 1996. Reisz, Matthew. “Google Leads Search for Humanities PhD Graduates.” The Times Higher Education, 19 May 2011. goo.gl/WV2mC. Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn if the Post-Market Era. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995. ---. The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. Palgrave, 2013. Ruddick, Lisa. “The Near Enemy of the Humanities Is Professionalization.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 March 2001. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993. Sawahata, Lesa. “Q&A Starbucks: What Makes PRINS So Valuable for Your Organisation?” 2018. www. universiteitleiden.nl/en/internationalstudies/news/newsletter/qawith-starbucks-what-makes-prins-so-valuable-foryour-organisation. School of Humanities, Dundee University. www.dundee.ac.uk/humanities/undergraduatestudy/ employabilityinhumanities/. School of Humanities, University of Southampton. www.southampton.ac.uk/humanities/undergraduate/careers/facts_ and_figures.page. Schiermeier, Quirin. “Conflicting Verdicts on Romanian Prime Minister’s Plagiarism: Victor Ponta Cleared of Misconduct by Government Ethics Board, but Charges Reaffirmed by University.” Nature, 20 July 2012, www.nature.com/ news/conflicting-verdicts-on-romanian-prime-minister-s-plagiarism-1.11047. ---. “Romanian Prime Minister Accused of Plagiarism: Allegations Prompt Questions about Government’s Ability to Tackle Misconduct in Academia.” Nature, 18 June 2012. www.nature.com/news/romanian-prime-ministeraccused-of-plagiarism-1.10845. Stiegler, Bernard. States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Daniel Ross, Polity, 2015. Şercan, Emilia. Fabrica de doctorate. Sau cum se surpă fundamentele unei naţii [The Factory of Doctoral Degrees: Or as the Fundamentals of a Nation Are Undermined]. Humanitas, 2017. Taylor, Mark C. Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities. Knopf, 2010. 25 �Arleen Ionescu • A Way Forward Williams, Geoffrey, and Ioana Galleron. “Bottom Up from the Bottom: A New Outlook on Research Evaluation for the SSH in France”. Research Assessment in the Humanities: Towards Criteria and Procedures, edited by M. Ochsner et al. Springer, 2016, pp. 181-98. Tsinghua School of Humanities. www.rwxy.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/shssen/1976/index.html Xinya College. www.xyc.tsinghua.edu.cn/#. Wenyu, Sun, “Tsinghua Top Chinese University in Terms of Spending and Alumni Giving.” En.people.cn, 10 Aug. 2017. en.people.cn/n3/2017/0810/c90000-9253818.html. 26 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Gloria McMillan “The New Criticism?” Again? T his essay shows parallels between the DBAE (Discipline-based Art Education) method of art education to the literary analysis method of The New Criticism or the related critical discourse of Formalism. We have the experience of “The New Criticism” method as articulated by John Crowe Ransom in his 1941 text of that name, as our guide from the familiar textual analysis into uncharted realms of visual art education. Art history and literary history researchers detect elements in and about visual and verbal texts. What comes to mind when somebody becomes an “art detective?” Usually the activity involves a skilled estimator trying to prove the worth of an artwork as a commodity, the end product (or some would argue by-product) of a lifelong way of viewing reality and transforming it into visual values. But here a new art detective is doing something a bit different. In this essay, I will look at some important and neglected aspects of world of art itself, how art works, and how art is taught. Discipline-based Art Education and Its Discontents Sandra Münster’s recent research in learning styles at Oxford University tells us that most of us are rather more open to taking in new knowledge visually than via any other sense (“Visual Side”). I will show by a graphic how the new regime of DBAE (“Discipline-based Art Education”) disseminated by the John Paul Getty Foundation is shaping the way K-12 art teachers are trained. Now keep in mind that the public schools have fewer and fewer funds for full-time Art Specialists. I am one. I am certified to teach K-12 art by the State of Arizona. My training occurred just as DBAE was taking hold at the University of Arizona due to a large (for art) grant from The Getty Foundation to Dr. Grant1. Dr. Grant and others teach our K-12 art teachers the methods that they will use to teach art in our schools. What do art theorists mean by their “discipline?” Here is a critique of the DBAE approach to art history from a student writer in UK Essays: Art history is studying the artistic accomplishments based on culture and history. Students educated through DBAE instruction begin with observing exemplars. The choices of exemplars have received the most criticisms because of the lack of representation in different societies, gender, and minorities. The section of curriculum devoted to art history has roots with Perennialism qualities. From a Perennialist perspective the exemplars are mainly chosen from Western European artists; predominately individuals who are white and male. The program meritoriously excluded other genres and narrowed student’s ability to think critically by telling them the exemplars were the only necessary or worthy pieces of work to study. (“Discipline-based”) “Perennialist” means that nothing changes and that art standards are “eternal,” an illogical statement on the face of it. Van Gogh’s paintings were deemed of poor quality by a majority of the public and professional audiences in his lifetime. If art standards were, in fact, “perennial,” then van Gogh’s paintings would still be viewed as lacking artistic value. The unnamed student writer at the British Art Curriculum site continues that Unfortunately, the designers of the DBAE rely heavily on the “great works” specifically within Western European art history, in essence taking the status quo route of it was good for previous generations, so it must be good for the next generation. The Perennialist teacher is supposed to focus on personal development, but it appears that the art history framers of the DBAE approach are interested in developing one point of view, one level of emotion, and providing one genre of “great work. (“Discipline-based”) The DBAE “Selection Effect” The “exemplars” in the online DBAE Guidebook seem stilted and prone to stereotypical views, as is shown by one of the few representations of African American life: African American painter Henry O. Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson. For "exemplars" without images, please refer to the hypertext links in Works Cited. Tanner is an established or “canonical” painter, who lived from June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937. He was prominent and one of the first African American painters to reach international acclaim, but hardly cutting edge for today’s students. The next painting used as an exemplar in the DBAE Sampler online is of a black-face minstrel. This minstrel is placed in comparison to Tanner’s The Banjo 27 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? Lesson, presumably to start a conversation about authenticity in representing African Americans, as well as analysis of formal values. I might add that “The Banjo Lesson” is an odd choice, selected perhaps because it is “picturesque,” or “historically rustic” unlike paintings that might relate more directly to students’ lives as minorities in an urban setting, by beginning with some of the Harlem Renaissance painters instead. Reading The Banjo Lesson in its historical context, we have somebody perhaps during the time of slavery teaching a small child, maybe a relative, how to play a banjo. The year The Banjo Lesson was created, 1893, saw classical composer Antonin Dvořak (Symphony #9, From the New World) in New York at the National Conservatory of Music, working with the African- American composer and arranger Henry Thacker Burliegh to introduce to the classical music world some examples of “plantation melodies” or, as we call them now, Spirituals. Statistics from the University of Missouri’s Law School show that 1893 also marked one of the peak years for lynching in the post-Reconstruction south (“Famous”). In its day, The Banjo Lesson might have been a progressive image. But the outside chance that any of this will come up in a class in which 90% of the time is devoted to those New Critical principles of visual elements of a painting is remote at best. Tanner’s painting may be viewed as a testament to the family or powers of creativity under slave conditions, but the image holds the ambiguous position of setting limits and looking only at the past as its perennialist rhetorical argument. One painting that might serve to contrast with The Banjo Lesson, which hearkens to the past and which feeds off the Perennialist theme, is Aspiration by the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas, who lived from 1899 to 1979. The few representations of African Americans in the online DBAE Guide’s pages show masks and tribal gear, a past-facing “Banjo Lesson” and National Geographic-like photo of a “Yoruba Nigerian woman in her tribal dress.” But Aspiration specifically denies power to the Perennialist dogma and aims African Americans into a future of better lives, lives that make use of all that African Americans have to offer. Not merely one talent is shown but a rainbow of abilities and a star sending out warmly radiant light, as figures rise up from chained arms at the base of the painting, holding tools of professions. Since these images are part of a sample and teachers may select their own “masterpieces” by “great” artists, I might take the position that no harm is done here and that teachers may choose as I just did. Any culture needs to look both to the past and to the future. To clarify, I am making no judgment on the formal values in these two paintings, but an analysis of the two paintings’ rhetorical arguments. I am not attempting to prove one painting is stylistically “better” than the other. They are apples and oranges in terms of style. The Banjo Lesson makes its case for values and tradition that can easily be fit into the Perennialist position that life is an unchanging continuum. A person or group was held in one demoralizing position in the past, but this need not be challenged, according to the rhetorical argument of this painting. Aspiration makes a different sort of rhetorical case: the past may always be with us, but we have also a future and we are capable of so much more. The painting Aspiration is something that students from various backgrounds can connect with in their everyday lives, as Vincent Lanier advises as a benefit for the use of “topical” art in “The Teaching of Art as Social Revolution.” The rhetorical statement any painting makes may be shown overtly as in Aspiration above. The rhetorical meaning of The Banjo Lesson is inferred. Teachers may choose one or another of an artist’s works that give a more easily digestible view of the world. This kind of invisible or “behind the scenes” selecting out of uncomfortable content may give an unwarranted impression that all “great” art has nothing to do with social issues, as will be seen below in the selection of a Picasso painting or a Kollwitz graphic. These visual texts, paintings and graphics, selected by the DBAE Sampler show a tendency to avoid issues of society. Even when an artist is featured known to be very concerned with social issues, instead the DBAE Sampler writers show works of these artists that are more easily rendered only in formal visual values, rather than as a rhetorical narrative combined with formal visual values. When controversial artists are shown in the “Discipline-based Art Education Curriculum,” these painters’ least engaging and blandest works are chosen. The German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s selection is not her stark works from devasted post-World War I Berlin, protesting the futility and horror of war (after her son was blown apart in a trench), paintings of starving mothers shielding babies and asking for bread, but an anonymous woman with her eyes shut. Instead of this widely recognized and reproduced image by Kollwitz, the online writer of the DBAE chose an intriguing but vague earlier work called “The Waiting” (“Das Warten”) from 1914. Looking at the link to this lithograph in the Works Cited, we can see that there is no narrative in “The Waiting” except whatever can be gleaned from a generic mood. Reader Response Theory, and our reading repertoire tells us that readers and viewers usually appreciate paintings via prior experience and world views. Obviously the uncomfortable nature of much of Kollwitz’s graphics caused the DBAE Sampler writers to choose rhetorically unchallenging visual texts (McCormick 22). 28 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? The still-controversial painter Pablo Picasso is represented in the online “Discipline-based Art Education Curriculum,” by his early and lesser-known blue period painting from 1903, The Tragedy, rather than his world-famous and viscerally emotive 1937 Guernica. Guernica uses the schematized imagery of the lamp-holding man thrusting his head out a window, the screaming woman and dead baby, bodies lying on the ground, and the bellowing bull. By contrast The Tragedy shows three figures apparently in mourning over something, standing motionless. The Tragedy is so “universal” in its simple theme and ambiguities that Picasso’s early work The Tragedy shows itself as another perennialist artwork selected in the DBAE Sampler. That is, any tragedy equals any other with something for everybody (and therefore, very little for anybody). Guernica speaks in a heightened rhetorical register of a singular event that rocked the twentieth century, the first aerial carpet bombing of civilians in a city. By now, Guernica, too, has a broader resonance with inhumanity after the title’s event. The difference is in professional risk-taking. When Picasso painted this Guernica, the painting of civilians being bombed by one side in a war, his artwork offended some of its contemporary audience. The Tragedy is safe and offends no one then or now. Arguments about audience that focus on children in grade school through high school needing to be “protected” by such skewed choices of art show little awareness of what students see outside the classroom in media. My understanding of the DBAE principles and their overvaluing of form over narrative is that The Tragedy will suit anybody and will be easier to reduce to shapes, tones, and colors on a surface via the DBAE system than will Guernica, where the narrative story of Picasso’s painting demands attention. Students might ask what is going on in the shockingly anguished figures in Guernica. They will not ask much about The Tragedy. The Tragedy’s title says it all. A DBAE instructor might note, in keeping with such a simplified approach to art that “Picasso was sad when he painted The Tragedy in his Blue Period, students.” A calm “appreciation” of art in suitably “decorous surroundings” is precisely what Vincent Lanier was speaking of in his essay cited in the next section Rock and Feather: DBAE on Form and Content. DBAE’s goal is to nudge the student toward becoming a spectator “self” who is capable of separating life from art and appreciating “art” as only— exclusively—formal values in 2- or 3-dimensions, largely devoid of narrative content except what may be lengthy narratives about form. Rock and Feather: DBAE on Form and Content The unequal weight given to formal values and issues of content or narrative by these categories outlined in the Getty Foundation’s DBAE program is a matter of concern. Using a scale as my image of this methodological inequality, I would represent the weight difference this way as seen in Figure 1: Figure 1. Discipline-based Art Education’s emphasis of form over content. While we were told in art education seminars that a painting or other artwork’s narrative (“story”) would be part of the analysis of that artifact, we spent up to 90% of time on formal values alone. Too much narrative will “break out of our disciplinary boundaries into illustrating an external-to-artwork point” was one of my art education professor’s explanations. We were not forbidden outright from considering “content” in our Art Education certification classes, but the weight in art analysis is all on the plastic or formal values. The higher the “MQ” (Masterpiece Quotient) the less 29 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? attention to “content issues.” The epitome is abstract expressionism, which by design has no narrative and only formal values. What is the cost-benefit ratio of Abstract Expressionism’s refusal of content? Who benefits most? I could be flippant and say multinational corporations benefit the most from the prevalence of Abstract Expressionism because this form of art is perhaps most often found in their global offices. Abstract Expressionism challenges nothing in the external world. Abstract paintings remain fully encased in their world of line, shape, hue, tone, perspective, vanishing point, color saturated field, and negative space. Ironically the largest of these negative spaces is the ability to comment upon society in abstract paintings. That is, such a painting may take up an entire wall yet have nothing to say about any doings in the corporate board room it occupies, the city, the country, the planet, the cosmos. Just one example of this “wall treatment” is Wrapped Studios’ Convene, a wall-sized painting of mostly red strokes that bleeds along walls on ceilings and down halls (“Wrapped”). Exclusively used formal values do say something. These formal values infer endorsement of those who own these art works, the way they have engineered the social relationships and strata of the society. By restricting art to a catalogue of formal values, nothing need be different outside in society, and the voice of the artist is largely stilled. Though he may not be remembered as broadly as other art theorists, Lanier’s influence on movements like Visual Culture has been noted by researchers such as Sarah Moore at the University of Arizona (“Interview”). Jan Jagodzinski says of Lanier that he was “one of the first generation of post-WW II art educators, who had an influence on the field of art education that remains with us to this day” (338). Lanier condemns art education that gives undue weight solely to formalism because of how this emphasis harms the creativity of poor children in his essay “Art as Social Revolution” (Phi Delta Kappan journal Feb. 1969), saying that What art must do and can do is to help the poor—particularly the children of the poor confront and explore their own problems. This cannot be done by conceiving of art as the central behavior of society or or of the individual. It is not. This cannot be done by seduction into the dream world of Pied Piperism. The hunger of the belly or the spirit is very real. (314) Lanier goes on to address the cognitive creative “Process” movement then sweeping across pedagogy in the art and writing educational quarter. He continues that we must understand and catalogue the “process of creating and appreciating” art in all students, but this slow research on the teaching of the young to better assess their visual surroundings is not helpful unless this pedagogy intersects the students’ own lives and lives of the people surrounding them. Lanier challenges the educators’ claim that the poor are a sensorially-deficient population group, arguing instead that “What will we then do for the disadvantaged? First of all, stop thinking of them as disadvantaged and accept as valid the arts and art experiences they enjoy and approach critically” (“Teaching”). The main problem of the teaching of art may well be economic self-segregation. The cadre of teaching professionals do not share the surroundings of their students, so tend to operate in pedagogical methods that penalize the young students for not being themselves—clones of the teachers—and of the social classes above the teachers. Lanier continues Secondly, we must understand by continual exposure, the lifestyles, the cultural patterns, of the poor, so that these will neither surprise nor shock us when we meet these patterns as teachers in the classroom. Third, we must find the means—in this case the art class by which the children of the poor can solve their own life problems and develop alternatives to alienation, frustration, and irrational violence. Psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl’s study of World War II Nazi concentration camp prisoners The Search for Meaning revealed that human beings need meaning as much as food and water. Lanier pleads for a similar understanding for students because “the dispossessed of our society want dignity even more than good jobs and suburban homes.” Both Frankl and Lanier knew that people in desperate circumstances have a powerful need to make sense of life. This need may mean little to those in comfortable circumstances where art is one of the leisure activities that shows we have “culture,” Vincent Lanier was one of the first art education researchers to challenge art as a field totally boxed in by formal values alone. Narrative Art and the DBAE Scale of Balance The Getty Foundation’s DBAE pedagogy of “masterpieces” and “great works” exemplars operates upon assumptions and goals that run counter to what Lanier is proposing in his essay. In the DBAE, the job is all that of the children from less-affluent environments to change themselves in order to please. No movement at all is required on the part of those in power in society. Their standards must be the one and universal standard for all. In terms of rhetorical style, the DBAE Guide disguises its points in terms of “helping” students to “grow” and “see” new vistas. But these vistas are those already known to those in charge. DBAE is a closed system and a system with movement only in one direction, 30 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? with little outreach from the teachers into the here and now of everyday life of students in lower socio-economic urban or rural environments. The teachers using DBAE seldom “learn” anything from their students; instead they use the old empty pitcher model of education because they depend upon “great” art and masterpieces so heavily. In “How Can Art Educators Promote A Choice-Based-Program While Supporting And Maintaining Standards-Based Instruction And Assessment,” Jessica Frisco explains her experiences with DBAE While this traditional approach is historically referred to as Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE), my experience at my undergraduate institution was constructivist in nature. It felt like a strange mixture. The philosophy of constructivism, which emphasizes learning through experimentation and reflection and the traditionally prescribed nature of the DBAE pedagogy did not feel like they melded together naturally, especially in the world of teaching students how to be innovative thinkers. (9) A major reason for the emphasis upon formal values and art history is that they are more amenable to standardized grading and create respectability for art education and its practitioners. The value of art amid all the academic subjects was and is a topic of debate. Teachers pour knowledge into the empty heads of their pupils. The pitcher model and the perennialist frame of time are two major weak areas in extremely formal, value-weighted methods such DBAE, according to many critics, including Vincent Lanier. Figure 2. George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art under construction in Los Angeles, CA. This museum will address the form, content balance, and meaning outside “formal values,” although those are fully covered. However, there is a counterpoint on the horizon, The George Lucas (director of Star Wars) Museum of Narrative Art is under construction in Los Angeles, as seen in Figure 2. This Museum will directly challenge the rigid formalism of the DBAE, including the hierarchical value placed upon art that can only be judged by formal values rather than telling a story. Narratives may take many forms, including social critique or discussing a visual text's formal values. The Getty Foundation’s DBAE program’s status-conscious system has kept socially-aware art at a disadvantage. DBAEtrained teachers use methods that discourage any voice in the artist, so how can the student artists know that there may be more to art than what teacher says? Science fiction readers are sensitive to the pressure of imposed hierarchical framing of art into an ideology because they model alternate ways of thinking, alternate futures, and aspects of technological change. These readers in my experience have often told of feeling unchallenged where art history and models from the past are held in absolute esteem based upon shaky standards of unchanging “excellence” in the arts. Art has been used as “crowd control,” in fact (Arnold). Matthew Arnold felt that the working-class flooding Manchester and London needed something to keep them in line and, if religion would not do the job, then culture could. Culture could dazzle and replace the awe of religion with an awe of power via art. He called this winning the “masses” (a non-existent designation but useful to those in power) via “sweetness and light.” Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater! - the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a 31 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so ‘neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible. (Arnold, “Sweetness”) As if in a prophetic trance, Arnold saw the future genre of science fiction and fantasy into to which the uncouth “masses” might flee from the regimentation of DBAE, saying It must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and political organisations give an example of this way of working on the masses. ( “Sweetness”) The grandfather of DBAE and the original formulator of “Perennialism” to keep people in line, Arnold concludes that It [Culture] seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, -nourished, and not bound by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time. (“Sweetness”) To give Arnold a bit of slack, he wrote without the benefit of seeing how his ideas would be enacted. He actually meant well in a time when textile factory workers in Manchester, England, were thought of as little more than cattle or slaves. Now the Getty Foundation is again raising the banner of this “great men of culture” idea and making some headway, although the number of students fleeing the “great art” ideology into various pop and media genres must be worrying to the DBAE adherents. This is not either-or, but both as a desirable goal, both what has been called fine art and also what is called narrative art. Van Gogh Becomes a Narrative Artist You’ll probably find the interior the ugliest, an empty bedroom with a wooden bed and two chairs – and yet I’ve painted it twice on a large scale. I wanted to arrive at an effect of simplicity as described in Felix Holt. In telling you this you’ll perhaps understand the painting quickly, but it’s likely that it will remain ridiculous for others, not forewarned. To make simplicity with bright colours isn’t easy though, and I find that it can be useful to show that one can be simple with something other than grey, white, black and brown. That is the raison d’être for that study. (Van Gogh, “Letter 21 to Willemien van Gogh, Oct. 1889”) Figure 3. Van Gogh’s The Bedroom [De Slaapkamer]. The Art Institute of Chicago. 32 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? The “formalism only” forerunners of the DBAE method of seeing paintings accounts for why Vincent van Gogh’s period of living among the miners in Le Borinage was so undervalued until a few shows quite recently, the latest at London’s Tate Gallery. That Tate show that ran from the March 27 to Aug. 11, 2019, dealt with van Gogh’s activism in his paintings done in London, how Charles Dickens’s and the rebellious George Eliot’s novels, such as Felix Holt the Radica, inspired some of his art, including The Art Institute of Chicago’s Bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles, see Figure 3. Because of training the overall importance of formal values, curators and critics alike ignored the artist’s own statements to his mother and sister in a letter that Bedroom was painted to recreate the surrounding of the proponent of voting rights and “Chartism,” Felix Holt the Radical, the protagonist of George Eliot’s novel of the same name. This letter was cited in Kathryn Hughes’ April 2, 2019 review of the van Gogh 2019 exhibit at the Tate Gallery. Some people were thunderstruck by the sudden re-classification from “fine” art to narrative art of Van Gogh’s famed Bedroom. How can such—we’ll give this a kindly explanation—“omissions” occur? Why did the curators “not notice” what van Gogh was plainly saying? The most obvious theory I can posit here is because acknowledging what van Gogh said about Bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles did not suit the framework of formalism. Admitting that Bedroom is a narrative painting and not pure “Fine” Art lowers the painting in the system. This meaning of Bedroom opens the door to social critique being prominent in van Gogh’s thinking in ways that have not been discussed in biographies because this is new research on recently translated letters and, especially, exhibit catalogues. His Borinage paintings of miners are seldom on tour. Another theory as to how this meaning was never acknowledged in one of van Gogh’s most famous paintings may have to do with demographics and who becomes a curator in the first place. The DBAE operates from a closed system that what is known is “all” there is to know. There is little room for divergence and surprise. Below is a summative statement from the British Art Curriculum essay site on what students “take away” from the Getty Foundation’s Discipline-based Art Education (DBAE), which in the 1990s was crossing the United States due to Getty Foundation grants: The teacher deposits the notion that “exemplary x” IS a piece of great work and the student accepts and memorizes it and later regurgitates it back to the teacher. There is a complete lack of variety [in] opinions given toward the exemplars. Freire (2003) believes [that in the ‘empty pitcher’ or ‘banking system’] the students have to work at storing the deposits delivered to them not to develop an awareness which may result in transforming the opinion. Certainly, the teacher engages students in a dialogue, but the conversation revolves around what the teacher believes is important and offers no other alternatives. (“Discipline-based” UK Essays) Pierre Bourdieu and “The Hardening of the Categories” in the Arts Sociological research done in France by Pierre Bourdieu some decades ago suggests that we not only harden the arteries leading to our hearts by eating fatty foods and not exercising, but we also harden our hearts by forming categories in our minds. One of the most persistent myths I encounter is that “the arts” are the personal property of the economically comfortable in society. When they attend an art event, this shows their “taste” in the arts, a problematic assumption, leading to entitlement of the consumer over the producer of art. Bourdieu created an exhaustive catalogue of the taste of the mid-twentieth century French public in his lengthy text Distinction. Industrialists and major employers tended to like Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Jackson Pollock in art, while manual workers liked Petula Clark and nice landscapes. Note that this record of “taste in society” emphasizes the viewer, listener, reader as a consumer, but more importantly (and invisibly) grants diminished importance to the player, visual art maker, and creator of drama and film. If we analyze our role as consumers of the arts according to Aristotle’s tripart model speech, speaker, audience, we see in Figure 4 how exaggerated is the importance of the audience. AUDIENCE musician/artist/writer music/art/literary text Figure 4. Aristotle’s Model applied by Pierre Bourdieu to a study of “taste” or “cultural capital” in society. Something that goes largely unmentioned in the continuous drone on cultural media broadcasts that bathe the listeners in praise for their “taste” in supporting “the arts” is that this ballooning of attention to the reception of culture diminishes attention to and freedom of the artists themselves. 33 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? BANNED! Figure 5. Self-censorship is as effective as public censorship . Taste is the gatekeeper. Taste is self-censorship in the creative process. Just because “taste” happens in ways more subtle than outright censorship does not mean that this process is not equally deadening to “the arts,” which many people claim to love. In addition, the process of making the arts a commissioned commodity for the public who support the arts financially leaves little space for experiment and failure, two essential ingredients for any science or art not simply set in amber and “rotten with perfection.” Cultural and rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, in his Language as Symbolic Action, refers to Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, which states that we seek to reach the perfection of our kind. We are rotten with perfection (18). So in his little way, the French cultural theorist Bourdieu, while studying “taste” also added some heavy fat in the diet of intellectuals and hardened their categorical arteries. Bourdieu’s effect on the intellectual class around the world might be likened to the effect of a chocolate mousse on a person who needs to eat a low sugar and fat diet. Before we will meet a person, we can judge by income (largely) what “level of culture” or Bourdieu’s term “cultural capital” that a person can be said to possess. Bourdieu may have unwittingly hardened the categories he was “only” trying to measure. That shimmering object called “art” about which we hover in order to study may relate to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. This physical science Uncertainty Principle says that we cannot measure or act upon something without in some way altering that target of our investigative attention. Pierre Bourdieu may well have caused a ripple of rich chocolate mousse to flow down the whole stream of intellectual discourse with his well-meant categorizing of who is who and what is what about culture, class, and the arts. In terms of the most basic statistical principle of research validity, we can also ask whether Bourdieu really studied “taste” or something else. Sometimes educational theorists think they are studying learning disabilities when it turns out they have been tracking a different quality, say, linguistic competence of English-as-second-language learners. One of my professors in the certification classes for teaching Visual Art in grades K- through-12 in the State of Arizona told me that he hoped one of the main things we would leave his class with was a proper respect for the inertial drag on art of “hardening of the categories.” While seeming to challenge and interrogate a number of aspects of social behavior, I have always kept those words in my mind. Hardening of the categories makes us unable to see the walls we have built in our minds. Argument Via Analogy People operate on the basis of analogies to prevent novel connections from forming among their synapses. The historical analogy is a great favorite of those who are afraid a new idea may take up neurobiological space in their minds. It goes like this, as voiced by an anxious “supporter of the arts” I know who argues that “unless a critic can surpass the artist under discussion,” then nothing but uncritical adulation is needed. Toulouse Lautrec in the enlightening and visually lovely 1950 biographical film Moulin Rouge makes the point about hardened categories quite well. Wealthy Toulouse was treating some friends to cognac outside a Parisian café. One of Lautrec’s drunken artist friends breaks into ecstatic admiration of the Mona Lisa, sighing, “Ah, the Mona Lisa! She ‘smiles with her soul!’” To which Lautrec answers pungently, “I don’t care if she ‘smiles with’ her navel! The only reason you admire the painting is that little brass plate that says ‘da Vinci’ underneath.” Who is the defender of the arts actually defending? Musicians such as Mozart? Painters such as Da Vinci? Playwrights such as Shakespeare? Hardly! The answer is none of the three but rather the self-image of the culturally-anxious speaker. Bourdieu would agree that this person is merely taking out a mental wallet and waving a bunch of high denomination “cultural capital” bills under our noses. Who counts? I count. My “taste” justifies all my decision-making well beyond the arts and my place, my rank. Flaws From Analogies to the Past People like to use historical analogy to predict the future, because cheaper than going to a palm reader, I suppose. However, life’s rearview mirror, the historical analogy, only shows similarities and ignores differences. No current rhetorical situation is identical to the past. Analogies are one of the easiest baubles to dangle in front of audiences. They shine and shimmer with the promise of solving a perplexing current problem. Our fear-filled cultural aficionado 34 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? proposes that “In the past Neanderthal people did A—and what happened to them? Don’t do A. I have spoken. End of thinking now ensues on this topic I have solved.” This example may be a bit straw—a straw person logical fallacy—but fear and closed systems go together. The gaudier the patter, the murkier the logic, to paraphrase Sam Spade the fictional detective. In a recent meeting with some Arizona art museum officials, we tossed around some of these ideas like hot potatoes on a ping pong table. There are those things we would do if we could in cultural institutions, but there are many constraints in working in a large arts institution in society. In the current political climate, there is little hope for any public funding. This museum is not unique in having such problems of dealing with “hardening of the categories.” The way our system is set up, I would probably be doing much the same in a position of institutional authority. But standing outside this structure a bit, I can offer some insights that museum officials may not see. For instance, the people who are both economically comfortable and who may not like government contributing to the arts (preferring to give out charity that puts their name in lights), may also miss the cutting off the poor from art by having hefty entrance fees for museums. For much of my life in Chicago, Chicago’s cultural and scientific museums were free of charge. What is the difference if they charge now? In a recent phone call, my mother commented that we rarely could have attended the Chicago Art Institute, Museum of Science and Industry, Field Museum, and other institutions if they had the entry fees that they have now. We went almost every week or two. Many of my classmates in my public school in an industrial suburb had never even been to Chicago’s Loop and looked blankly when I mentioned the Loop and its cultural institutions. The Loop is just a 40-minute bus ride away from this suburb. What could I have learned in a quick visit every two or three years (or never?) to the Art Institute or the Field Museum? Free wandering through a museum can be liberating, allowing the student to think of connections from one visual text to another without being drilled. Formulations of “taste” that limit opportunities for some may happen invisibly while society-at-large may not know or care why economic barriers matter. Taking away what used to be public spaces might be not optimal for the growth of culture. Bourdieu’s “taste” is largely based upon income and who likes what because of who they are or can afford to buy. Artists think differently than art collectors. I have personally heard artists agonize over questions such as this: “Should I try to anticipate what my art will “taste” like to you before I paint? I try to locate my market in advance.” Such internal censoring is a major source of creative block for those teaching and those studying the arts. But artists like to do what they like to do because they are exploring all kinds of tangential neural connections, as explored in Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman. Kaufman pioneered research on “mind wandering” in the artistic process (33). Waiting for a green light to compose music, paint, write or create in other ways is very slow. Often what the cultural leadership find valuable later in history is (how could it be otherwise) invisible to those with the most “taste” in any period and rhetorical situation. Hopefully, this essay has begun to show why. There is much more involved in art than formal values and “taste,” but limiting the spotlight to formal values and “taste” shows how the influence of Bourdieu’s theories of “taste” and “distinction” may be a factor in hardening of categories. DBAE, with its “great masterpieces” emphasis, stifles creativity in ways previously mentioned. In addition, the rigid insistence upon artistic formal standards and the accompanying devaluing of student life experience do not conform well to neurobiological findings on how human beings think and create. In future, Perhaps an arts radio or television show can explore the effect on culture of “taste” and of “hardened categories” with respect to how they influence both those teaching and those being taught. _____________________ Notes 1 This is a pseudonym. Works Cited Alexander, Key, and Michael Day, editors. Discipline-based Art Education: A Curriculum Sampler. d2aohiyo3d3idm. cloudfront.net/publications/virtuallibrary/0892361719.pdf/. Accessed 12 Dec. 2019. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge UP, 1960. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. 11th ed. Harvard UP, 2002. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. U of California P, 1968. “Discipline-based Art Education Curriculum.” Student essay. Online. UK Essays. Accessed 13 Dec 2019. Douglas, Aaron. Aspiration. 1936. Oil on canvas. 59 x 59 in. De Young Museum, San Francisco. deyoung.famsf.org/deyoung/collections/multimedia/collection-icons-aspiration-aaron-douglas/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. 35 �Gloria McMillan • “The New Criticism?” Again? “Famous American Trials.” U of Missouri Law School.law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/shipp.html. Accessed 11 Nov 2020. Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon P, 2006. Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary ed. Continuum International, 2003. Frisco, Jessica. “How Can Art Educators Promote a Choice-Based Program While Supporting and Maintaining Standards-Based Instruction and Assessment?” Digital Commons at Hamline University. Dec 2017. digitalcommons.hamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=hse_cp/. Accessed 11 Nov 2020. Hughes, Kathryn. “How Dickens, Brontë and Eliot influenced Vincent van Gogh.” The Guardian, 2 Apr 2019. www. theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/05/how-dickens-bronte-and-eliot-influenced-vincent-van-gogh/. Jagodzinski, Jan. “Beyond Aesthetics; Returning Force and Truth to Art Education.” Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, vol. 50, no. 2, 2009, p. 338. Accessed 13 Nov 2020. Kaufman, Scott Barry. Wired to Create. Tarcher/Perigee, 2016. Kollwitz, Käthe. “The Wait” (“Das Warten.)” Lithograph on woven paper, 1914, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.33383.html/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. ---. “Never again War!” (“Nie Wieder Krieg!)” 1924. Lithograph, 37 3/16 in. x 28 1/8 in., National gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.74770.html/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. Lanier, Vincent. “The Teaching of Art as Social Revolution.” The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 50, no. 6, Feb 1969, pp. 314-19. MAD Architects (Ma Yansong Team.) The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Building. Artist’s concept design rendering, lucasmuseum.org/img/media-room/LMNA-LA-170510-1.jpg/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. McCormick, Kathleen, Gary Walker, and Linda Flower. Reading Texts: Reading, Responding, Writing. D.C. Heath, 1987. Moore, Sarah. Interview via email with the writer. Nov. 2018. Moulin Rouge. Huston, John, dir. Perf. José Ferrer. 1952. Romulus Films, dist. United Artists. Münster, Sandra, and Melissa Terras, “The Visual Side of Digital humanities: a Survey on Topics, Researchers, and Epistemic Cultures.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 35, no. 2, June 2020, pp. 366–389, doi. org/10.1093/llc/fqz022/. Accessed 10 Nov 2020. Picasso, Pablo. Guernica. 1937. Oil on canvas. Museo Reina Sofia. Madrid, Spain. www.museoreinasofia.es/en/ collection/room/room-206. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. ---. The Tragedy. 1903. Oil on wood. National Gallery, Washington D. C. www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/pablopicasso-the-tragedy.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New Directions, 1941. Tanner, Henry Ozawa. The Banjo Lesson. 1893, Oil on canvas. 39 x 45 ½ in, The Hampton University Art Museum, Hampton, VA, smarthistory.org/tanner-banjo/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. Van Gogh, Vincent. “Letter to Willemien van Gogh.” Online. Van Gogh Letters Organization. Accessed 14 Dec. 2019. ---. The Bedroom. (De Slaapkamer.) 1889. Oil on canvas. 29 × 36 5/8 in., The Art Institute of Chicago, Accessed 31 Jan. 2020. Wrapped Studios. Convene. 15 Oct 2018, wrappedla.com/project/projects-convene/. Accessed 11 Nov 2020. 36 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Patrick Joseph Caoile The Liminal Nature of Diaspora Family, Home, and Identity in Mia Alvar’s “The Kontrabida” P art of the challenge of the humanities today is in reconciling the Anglo-American tradition with “other voices” that have yet to be heard. Stories of diaspora particularly capture the tensions and conflicts between Western hegemony and marginalized, minority voices. A critical exploration of contemporary diasporic literature, as is the work of this paper, can pave the way for those voices, especially in academic spaces where they have been largely excluded. In In the Country, Filipino American writer Mia Alvar presents a collection of stories about Filipinos scattered throughout the world, those abroad and those returning to the Philippines. Her short story “The Kontrabida” follows Steve, a Filipino American pharmacist who returns to his homeland to smuggle painkillers for his bedridden father, despite the abuse and suffering he has inflicted on his seemingly innocent mother. After his father’s death, Steve suspects his mother to have played a role in his accidental overdose. Regardless, Steve quickly disregards his suspicions, vowing to bring his mother back to the United States. The borders are blurred, much like the identities and moralities of the story’s characters. Alvar’s story addresses the clash of generations and cultures, and in between these conflicts—in the liminal spaces between the Philippines and the United States, Steve’s mother and father, and even Alvar’s text and our reality—the potential for identity formation and expression emerges. As such, the turn towards diasporic literature is a direct answer to the call for other voices in the humanities. Diasporic identity, like literature, is open to interpretation and conceived by imagination. Definitions of Diaspora and the Role of Imagi(nation): A Review of Literature Though definitions of diaspora have changed in the latter half of the twentieth century and continue to be contested among scholars in the field of diaspora studies, common definitions remain true to the word’s origins. As the editors of Theorizing Diaspora note, the Greek term diasperien translates to “to sow or scatter seeds,” therefore diaspora “can perhaps be seen as a naming of the other which has historically referred to displaced communities of people who have been dislocated from their native homeland through the movements of migration, immigration, or exile” (1). In “Diasporas and the Nation-State,” Robin Cohen explains how the term has been traditionally associated with the Jewish diaspora and their historic plight of “afflictions, isolation, and insecurity of living in a foreign place…cut off from their roots and their sense of identity” (508). Since the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile in the late sixth century, the Jewish people were forced out of “the land ‘promised’ by God” and “were depicted as pathological halfpersons destined never to realize themselves or to attain completeness, tranquility or happiness so long as they were in exile” (Cohen, “Diasporas and the Nation-State” 508-09). The term was later associated with the analogous cases of groups who “experienced traumatic interludes in their histories which led to their dispersion or further dispersion”— Africans under slavery, the Irish after the famine, Armenians after the genocide under Ottoman Turks, and Palestinians after the formation of Israel (Cohen, “Diasporas and the Nation-State” 512-513). Today, as William Safran explains in “Diasporas in Modern Societies,” diaspora has taken on more “metaphoric designations for several categories of people—expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities tout court” (83). Safran goes on to articulate a diaspora’s idealized concept of homeland, much like the return to Jerusalem for which the Jewish people have longed: “they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return” (83). While this may be true for some who represent the traditional definition of diaspora—those who have been forced out of their places of origin—this return to the mythic homeland is either less or not at all a priority for those seeking permanent settlement outside their birthplaces. Regardless, while the term has widened to include separate and various groups, diaspora remains a term that indicates the outward movement of peoples from their homeland. The reconsideration of diaspora with “metaphoric designations” coincides with the rise of globalization in the modern age. In addition to definitions concerning the historical displacement of peoples, scholars today often draw on Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities. As Anderson himself notes, the concepts of “nationality… nation-ness, as well as nationalism [are] capable of being transplanted” (4). In Imagined Communities: Reflections 37 �Patrick Joseph Caoile • The Liminal Nature of Diaspora on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Anderson argues that one’s ties to a nation, and the concept of nation itself, is pathological and imaginary: “[Nation] is an imagined political community” (6). In contrast to the kinship of tribes and smaller communities where one creates direct associations through face-to-face, in-person, and immediate acknowledgement of other members of the group, in a nation one imagines these associations—however loose—with other members. Applying Anderson’s nation-as-imagined-community to diasporas, Stuart Hall writes, “At all events, the question of diaspora is posed here primarily because of the light that it throws on the complexities not simply of building, but of imagining…nationhood and identity in an era of intensifying globalization” (208). In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai emphasizes the “work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (3). He argues modernity as a compounding of both the rise of mass electronic media and the rise of mass migrations. At this intersection, “[D]iasporas bring the force of the imagination, as both memory and desire, into the lives of many ordinary people…. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space” (Appadurai 6). This paper is concerned with the implications of these definitions on one’s identity, as diaspora often indicates a liminality between a homeland and a host land. Because this sense of belonging to one’s nation, homeland and/or host land, is imaginary—unstable, mutable, and susceptible to constant reimagining—so too is identity formed and reformed through imaginary constructs and associations. As Hall continues in “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad,” “[A] closed conception of ‘tribe,’ diaspora, and homeland…is, of course, a myth—with all the real power that our governing myths carry to shape our imaginaries, influence our actions, give meaning to our lives, and make sense of our history” (209). Appadurai, too, recognizes the ‘real power’ of myth: [As] anthropologists have learned to regard collective representations as social facts—that is, to see them as transcending individual volition, as weighted with the force of social morality, and as objective social realities… [w]hat I wish to suggest is that there has been a shift in recent decades, building on technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds. (5) By extension, the imagination then becomes a tool one uses to construct facts about oneself, both as an individual and as part of a collective. The ambiguities and conflicts inherent in identity are only further complicated by movement, displacement, and dislocation. “This hybridity,” as Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur introduce in Theorizing Diaspora, “opens diasporic subjectivity to a liminal, dialogic space where identity is negotiated” (5). Family, Home, and Identity in “The Kontrabida” The protagonist of “The Kontrabida” finds himself in this liminal space of identity; however, unlike the traditional concept of diaspora where one longs to return and belong to the homeland, Steve is disillusioned in his own homeland rather than in his host land. It has been ten years since he left Manila and his parents for New York. Now a balikbayan, a returning Filipino, Steve feels like a foreigner. As a motif, temperature reveals Steve’s discomfort with being back home. “I was no longer used to the Manila heat,” he admits (Alvar 11); “I craved the cold rush” of the air conditioner (17). When his relatives interrogate him about life in America, he refuses to admit how he “loved the snow, was built for the American cold, and felt, upon entering [his] first job in a thermostat-controlled pharmacy, that [he’d] come home” (12). Furthermore, when he offers to help his mother operate their family-owned store, he fails to understand the customers. He tries to serve Sarsi cola to a teenage girl, who responds with “plastik” before taking it (10). However, instead of pouring cola into a plastic bag with a straw—a traditional way to drink sodas in the streets of the Philippines—he depends on his mother to translate what she means. “How had I forgotten?” Steve asks himself, “I’d drunk sodas from plastic sleeves up until the age of twenty-five. And yet the liquid bag I handed over made me think not of my childhood but of some dark, alien version of the waste pouches and IV fluids I’d see at the hospital” (10). While Steve is only starting to become self-aware of this “alien version” of himself, others around him clearly recognize it. When Steve is out with his mother buying flowers for his father’s wake, a seller tries to bargain with him. Steve refuses all the seller’s offers, “simply [because he] wanted every peddler in the city to know he didn’t stand a chance against [him].… They can read balikbayan written on [his] forehead” (21). Like any tourist city, Manila has its own con artists heckling Americans. When he cannot hide his American-ness, Steve lies. Instead of admitting that he spends most of his free time alone at the gym or cleaning his apartment, Steve convinces his relatives that he eats Filipino dishes like lumpia (eggrolls) with other Filipino nurses, and that he even “tag[s] along to Sunday Mass” (12). Faith and food are hallmarks of Filipino culture, both of which Steve rejects in his life in New York. The Philippines is not the “true, ideal home” of diaspora that Safran articulates (83). For Steve, there is no mythic homeland, no desire of returning. 38 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Patrick Joseph Caoile • The Liminal Nature of Diaspora Hall asserts, “In the diasporic situation, identities become multiple” (207). Borrowing W.E.B. Du Bois’s term, Hall describes a “double consciousness” that results from diasporic identity (212). Here, Steve is torn between being Filipino and being American. He wholeheartedly embraces the United States, yet he does not entirely reject the Philippines since he is so willing to return. Though he has lost taste for Filipino food and fallen out of Catholicism, what ultimately ties him back to his homeland is his family, most importantly, his mother. “As is common to most transnational communities,” Hall continues, “the extended family—as network and site of memory—is the critical conduit between the two locations” (207). When his mother picks him up from the airport, Steve “only half-embraced her, afraid she might break if [he] held too tight” (Alvar 3). His mother is the “half” that he “embraces,” the part of his Filipino-ness he is careful not to forget nor destroy. Notably, Stuart calls one’s ties to the homeland a kind of “umbilical cord” which symbolizes “a cultural identity…primordially in touch with an unchanging essential core” (209). Though this essential core is imaginary, as previously articulated, Steve still clings to his mother. The ‘umbilical cord’ between mother and son is reinscribed as Steve’s connection to the Philippines. This metonymic relationship between parent and homeland is further emphasized in the Sandovals’ family dynamics, particularly in how gender informs their relationships. The conflict between Steve’s parents is a continuation of the family drama from his childhood. Esteban, Steve’s father, is an abusive, controlling husband, taking steps to limit his wife’s socio-economic freedoms. “Years ago my father had forbidden her to drive,” Steve narrates, “my mother had been a nurse before he banned her from working outside the house altogether” (Alvar 3). Even when he “slid[es]…down a spiral of unrelated jobs” (3), either through petty theft or a result of his alcoholic tendencies, Steve’s father is reluctant to let his wife work, let alone leave the house. He deliberately confines his wife to domesticity, not as an overprotective husband; rather, he knows that letting his wife work would threaten his own sense of power as breadwinner and provider—whether or not he is, in fact, providing. Even when he finds out about the cancer in his liver, Steve’s father retains his hubris: “I saw my father shrug or grunt each time the doctor addressed him, as proud and stubbornly tongue-tied as he always became around people with titles and offices” (6). He calls himself an “import-export businessman” whenever Steve asks about his work, but the phrase is vague and, contrary to the doctors of “titles and offices,” points toward a lack of job stability, responsibility, and position (3). As much as he desperately wants to be the patriarch of the family, his hubris and alcoholism ultimately prevent him from becoming the ideal figurehead of masculinity. Instead of seeking power in the socio-economic, public realm, Steve’s father turns to his own physical prowess. In his narration, Steve often emphasizes his father’s physical descriptions, “the short boxer’s physique, a bullish muscularity” (4). Paired with his alcoholism, Steve’s father uses his body to his advantage, abusing his wife both physically and sexually. Before Steve “learned much about sex,” he—still a child—walks in on his father “Naked, but hidden from the waist down by [his] mother” who is most likely performing fellatio. When his father sees him, Steve runs out to the yard knowing his father would “punish her for every second of [his] presence there” (11-12). Afterwards, as a sign of “contrition that followed nights of drinking,” his father would bring home flowers for his wife, “the swooping, romantic gestures that came after he’d blackened an eye or broken a bone” (20). If he cannot earn his dominance by way of title or office, he willfully claims it through brute force. He may not earn the same notoriety and prestige, but his strength and control over his wife becomes widespread in family discussions: “Esteban has got some heavy hands, the family always said. Loretta is a saint” (7). Steve presents his father as the definitive villain of the story—the kontrabida. His lust for power, alcohol, and violence exposes him not as a successful patriarch, but a corrupt tyrant. Even when his father is dead and buried, Steve finds no redeeming qualities in him. Later revelations about his mother, however, complicate Steve’s notions of hero and villain. While his father is characterized through his hubris and physicality, Steve’s mother is characterized through her servitude and frailty. In contrast to his father’s muscular physique, Steve’s mother is “more frail; more tired; softerspoken” (3). As a child, Steve remembers his mother as “the kind of woman who waited on even the people she’d paid to serve us, back when we could afford them: the laundress, the gardener, the yaya who watched me before I started school” (14). Even though she employs them, Steve’s mother still expresses an obligation to serve them. Her kindness and hospitality is perhaps an extension of her inherent trait of willingness to help people, evident in her previous occupation as a nurse. In addition, this reveals her loneliness and desire for social interaction and companionship. Confined indoors by her abusive husband, Steve’s mother seeks community among the hired help of the household. While she submits herself to her husband’s dominance, she also avails herself as an example of Christian humility. “Loretta is a saint,” the family refers to her, acknowledging her portrayal of a suffering servant (7). As she welcomes Steve upon returning home, Steve’s mother makes it clear: “You don’t know my strength!” (3). Whereas his father finds strength in his explicit acts of oppression and aggression, his mother finds strength implicitly through not only weathering abuse, but also in her servitude and humility. Opposing the villain of Steve’s father is the hero—the bida— 39 �Patrick Joseph Caoile • The Liminal Nature of Diaspora in his mother. The conclusion of Alvar’s story, however, reveals that it is unwise to underestimate her strength and that she might not be the hero Steve assumes. When Steve returns to the Philippines as an adult, smuggling opioid patches for his bedridden father, one would expect an inversion of the power dynamics between his father and mother. In the years since Steve left for New York, his parents have built a sari-sari extension from their home; as Steve narrates: “Sari-sari meant ‘assorted’ or ‘sundry’, and so they smelled: like a heady mix of bubble gum and vinegar, salt and soap, floor wax and cologne” (7). It is in this store that Steve’s mother claims domain, ever since his father was diagnosed with cancer. The sari-sari used to be their backyard, where Steve would retreat from his parents’ quarrels. Now, the space has become his mother’s refuge. Unlike Steve’s father, a self-proclaimed businessman with no work or profit to show for it, Steve’s mother successfully keeps the sari-sari in business: [She] had no trouble hearing her customers. No sooner had a face appeared at the wicket than she was reaching for the shoe polish or cooking oil. Her right hand could pop open a bottle cap while her left tore a foil packet from the shampoo reel. To the voice of a young boy, so small I couldn’t see him through the wicket, she sold three sheets, for ten centavos apiece, of the grainy, wide-ruled paper on which I’d learned to spell in grade school. It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next. (10-11) Her ability to be personable, to know the wants and needs of the people in her community, is an advantage. Not only is she able to express her prowess as a businesswoman in the success of the store, but she also experiences the social interaction she so desperately yearned for when her husband was well. For all her husband’s efforts to confine and restrict her, Steve’s mother becomes what his father had failed to do. While this may seem to be a complete subversion of his mother’s status from when he was a child, Steve notices that this is not the case. Indeed, the sari-sari is an opportunity for his mother to take on financial responsibility and to interact with others, but the store is still an extension of the house. She does not even need to step outside to go between the house and the store; she has not fully escaped her forced domesticity and her husband. While his father’s debilitated health may seem to elevate his mother’s status in the power dynamic, it proves only to strengthen the status quo: “Even bedridden and in pain, my father had managed to preserve their old arrangement: when he called, she was there to wait on him” (5). His mother once again dons the role of a nurse, not as a public servant, but a servant to her husband. Steve’s father remains the oppressive patriarch of the Sandoval household. Much like the cancer in his liver, the only way to get rid of this oppression is to either cut it out or destroy it. Both Steve and his mother know this, and it is this morbid truth that propels the family drama into more complicated implications. As a story about a father’s death and a son’s longing to be with his mother, “The Kontrabida” lends itself to a psychoanalytic reading. The fact that Steve finds himself in the middle of this conflict of power between his mother and father evokes Freud’s Oedipus complex, as Freud describes, “Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses” (278). The mere presence of a scene in which Steve, still a child, walks in on his mother performing fellatio on his father encourages such a reading. Throughout “The Kontrabida,” Steve mentions his desire to kill his father and save his mother, especially after witnessing his father abuse her. “For all the years I’d spent wishing him dead,” Steve narrates, “it was my mother’s role in the family drama…to suffer” (Alvar 7). When Steve would retreat into the yard as a child, he would climb a tree and “sling a branch onto [his] shoulder, aiming sniper-style at [his] father…Another time [he] stabbed a fallen twig into the grass and twisted it, imagining his [father’s] blood” (26). His father has always been the kontrabida, the villain; in turn, Steve desires to play the bida, the hero, who saves his mother from his torture and tyranny. The text leans into the oedipal, so much so that it foreshadows the very ending: [The] family had switched…to a Tagalog movie…observing the rules of every melodrama I’d grown up watching: a bida, or hero, fought a kontrabida, or villain, for the love of a beautiful woman. The oldest films would even cast a pale, fair-haired American as the bida and a dusky, slick-mustachioed Spaniard as the kontrabida. Between them, the woman spent her time batting her eyelashes or being swept off her feet; peeking out from behind lace fans; fainting or weeping; clutching a handkerchief to her heart or dangling it from the window as a signal; being abducted at night, or rescued from a tower, or carried away on a horse….When, at last, the bida won the woman, we cheered and whistled, again not out of joy so much as a malicious sort of triumph. The script had succumbed, in the end, to our demands. (16-17) The morning of his father’s death, the doctor states that he had died “peacefully…in his sleep” (18); yet, when Steve checks the deficiency in the Succorol supply, he questions whether or not his mother had a hand in his death. “How many would it take to finish off a dying man?” he questions, “I must have known a drug so powerful could end his life. 40 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Patrick Joseph Caoile • The Liminal Nature of Diaspora So what? Didn’t I want him gone, hadn’t I always? My mother was better off” (24). Contrary to the figure of Christian servitude and humility, his mother indeed has the capacity for evil and violence, to be just like the villain in his father. Yet, knowing this, Steve is quick to disregard this morbid truth; instead, he confesses: “I would take her with me to New York. I would never leave her again” (25). Steve, at the conclusion of the story, fulfills this “divine will” and “the fate of all of us” as Freud writes of the Oedipus complex (279-80). “Character and destiny,” Steve concludes, “I believe in all of that, I guess” (Alvar 26). While this oedipal, familial conflict takes place in the microcosm of the story, on a more macrocosmic level, “The Kontrabida” presents a conflict between homeland conceptions. Myth, such as that of Oedipus, is integral to diaspora and diasporic identity making. As Appadurai observes, diasporas—as products of mass migration and shaped by mass media—bring new “mythographies different from the disciplines of myth and ritual of the classic sort” (6). For example, Steve’s understanding of the Tagalog movie demonstrates how “images, scripts, models, and narratives that come through mass mediation [contribute to the] imaginary that frequently transcends national space” (Appadurai 6). Not only is the global conflict explicit in the American hero’s and Spanish villain’s rivalry over the damsel-indistress, the Philippines personified, but Steve also views the film as a reflection of his own familial conflict. If the film represents the Philippines’ history under centuries of colonialism and imperialism—a myth in itself that reproduces Western dominance—this new myth conflates the Oedipus myth with the mythical homeland and redefines what the Philippines means for Steve. As Robin Cohen writes, Often, there is a complex interplay between the feminine and masculine versions of homeland. In the feminine rendition, the motherland is seen as a warm, cornucopian breast from which the people collectively suck their nourishment…. In other interpretations, the nurturing white milk of the motherland is replaced by the blood of soldiers gallantly defending their fatherland. Their blood nourishes the soil, the soil defines their ethnogenesis. (“Solid, Ductile, and Liquid” 5) Steve’s father is representative of this militaristic, violent, and grotesque notion of the fatherland. Steve emphasizes his brute physicality, embodying the physical land of the Philippines. It is fitting that the father is buried, returning to the land that claims him. On the other hand, Steve’s mother—initially—represents the warmness and nourishment of the motherland. Yet, she proves to be just as capable of taking “blood” as providing “milk.” Since the nation is imaginary, it can also be said that the nation is mythical. Stuart Hall writes, “The narrative structure of myths is cyclical. But within history, their meaning is often transformed” (210). The history of the Philippines is characterized by these conflicting notions of fatherland and motherland—of resistance, like Steve’s father who repudiates others’ titles, offices, and authorities; or of submission, like Steve’s mother, always ready to serve and embody humility. Under past colonial-imperial rule from Spain, Japan, and the United States, the Philippines has barely practiced nationhood in the past century. And yet, Steve finds his nation, his homeland, and his Filipino-ness in his mother Loretta, whom he chooses to bring with him to the United States. She withstands her husband’s abuse in order to protect her son. Yet, when she has the opportunity, she is willing to sacrifice her morality to join him in America. She is not a clear-cut hero nor a villain; in fact, the word kontrabida itself loses meaning entirely without its root bida—hero and villain simultaneously. Steve, the protagonist, would not exist without his Filipino roots, nor would he exist without both his mother and father, despite his efforts to cut them off. All these conflicts—historical, moral, familial, mythical—do not necessarily need resolution. It is through ongoing myths and stories that people continually define themselves. Such is the nature of diaspora, a liminal state of vacillating borders and constant redefinition of identity through the use of imagination. Conclusion “The Kontrabida” presents a conception of homeland that is neither fatherland nor motherland; its story does not propose a conquering of the father and seduction of the mother in a simple Freudian sense, nor does it tell a straightforward story of hero defeating villain. Instead, the story depicts how one’s identity is formed and reformed by nation and family. Homeland, much like its diaspora, must also be a malleable conception. Cohen writes, “diasporas can be constituted by acts of the imagination...transnational bonds no longer have to be cemented by migration or by exclusive territorial claims” (“Diasporas and the Nation-State” 516). For those who do not have the opportunity to return to their homeland, or if circumstances exclude the possibility entirely, the imagination—and in turn, fiction—is an opportunity not only to reaffirm identity, but to redefine it in terms of the various aspects that constitute it. In this way, as Cohen continues, diasporas can transcend “the victim tradition” (“Diasporas and the Nation-State” 513) inherent in traditional definitions of diaspora; rather than be defined by the plight of displacement, diasporas can find agency in their movement. Diasporic writers especially play a crucial role in defining diaspora in the age of globalization: 41 �Patrick Joseph Caoile • The Liminal Nature of Diaspora “An identification with a diaspora serves to bridge the gap between the local and the global, even if the outcome is a cultural artefact rather than a political project” (Cohen, “Diasporas and the Nation-State” 516). Fiction, and more broadly, literature, “are resources for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all sorts of persons”— this, as Arjun Appadurai articulates, is the work of imagination (3). Questions of who we are and where we come from are not answered with simple, one-word responses; they are questions answered in multifaceted, imagined stories. Such is the advantage of telling diverse literatures, especially from writers like Mia Alvar who find themselves in states of liminality. If the role of the humanities is to interrogate the human condition in all its aspects, then a reorientation towards this diversity can not only pave the way for more voices through inclusivity but can also better achieve the humanities’ holistic aims. _____________________ Works Cited Alvar, Mia. “The Kontrabida.” In the Country, Vintage Books, 2016, pp. 3-27. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. U of Minnesota P, 2005. Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur. “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, Blackwell, 2003, pp. 1-22. Cohen, Robin. “Diasporas and the Nation-State: From Victims to Challengers.” International Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, 1996, pp. 507-20, www.jstor.org/stable/2625554. ---. “Solid, Ductile and Liquid: Changing Notions of Homeland and Home in Diaspora Studies.” QEH Working Paper Series, Oct. 2007, pp. 1-17, www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/sites/www.odid.ox.ac.uk/files/www3_docs/qehwps156.pdf. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Stratchey, Basic Books, 2010. Hall, Stuart. “Thinking Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad.” Essential Essays Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora, edited by David Morley, Duke, 2019, pp. 206-26. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1991, pp. 83-99, muse.jhu.edu/article/443574. 42 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Dr. Christina Tourino Review Reese, Sam V. S., Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Louisiana State UP, 2019. I n Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Sam Reese looks at writers who recruit jazz in order to talk about loneliness. His thesis, that these writings, collectively, help us reimagine loneliness as something positive, is welcome news at a historical moment when we seem lonelier than ever. Current social science commentators have worried that loneliness—and the poor mental and physical health that go with it—has gone viral, a state of affairs only intensified by COVID 19. Reese sets out to show us how jazz and writing, as solo artistic forms, can help us reimagine loneliness as an affirmation of the singular held in tension with a system of others. As Reese puts is, loneliness, “however painful and isolating, can also create beauty, empathy, and understanding” (3). In pursuing this line, Reese sorts the cultural meanings at work in the nexus of music and literature in an original way. Further, he evidences his argument through careful and imaginative close readings of an impressively wide range of texts, readings buttressed by the complex historical tangle of race and jazz in America. Reese begins his work with a study of loneliness. With reference to psychology and sociology, he establishes the fact that while loneliness afflicts humans nearly universally, it varies according to the stories we tell ourselves about what it means. Loneliness is also deeply social: our experience of loneliness can only be understood in relationship to the attachments we are missing. Jazz, Reese claims, matters for authors who explore loneliness, in part, because of the common belief that jazz is mostly sad music, and that jazz musicians are isolated. The importance of the solo in jazz underscores this. The soloist steps away from the group, seems even to reject it, to assert his or her voice alone. At the same time, Reese contends, jazz links with loneliness beyond stereotype and myth. Jazz originates in black alienation from the white mainstream dating back to slavery and its legacy of racial oppression. The sense of exclusion in jazz comes in part from the cultural and economic marginalization of these musicians. The jazz solo perfectly connotes this estrangement, and the emergence of bebop in 1940 exaggerates this effect. Here, black musicians reject the commercially successful big band and swing with a “counterdiscourse” that resists appropriation by white bandleaders and jazz critics. If loneliness is relational, then writing about loneliness means writing about the relationship of the individual to the group. In order to describe how writers of jazz literature do this (and only after spotlighting what I might call the ur jazz text, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, about which much more momentarily), Reese very smartly recruits composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and his theory of jazz improvisation he called “harmolodics.” Coleman is wellknown for writing and playing in a style called “free jazz,” which eschews conventional harmony, rhythm, and form. Musicians bend pitches to the point of imprecision. With more pulse than meter, and no piano comping, solos are organized around melody instead of chord changes. Free jazz offers more room for individual expression within the context of the group than other jazz forms. “Harmolodics” as a principle of improvisation opens the music to multiple, particular voices in conversation without driving toward closure or harmony. If this feels linguistic, it certainly could be: As Reese notes, Coleman emphasized the linguistic connection in an interview with Derrida. Reese describes Coleman’s hope that harmolodics as a concept could “communicate abstract musical ideas through concrete linguistic ones” (128). According to Reese, Coleman’s “harmolodics” perfectly describes jazz writing about loneliness. In a series of beautifully-observed close readings, Reese shows us why. In his first chapter, Reese reads the giants of the “jazz story”—Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, and Julio Cortázar—and demonstrates how each revises the convention of the lonely jazz musician and considers the ways in which their singular brilliance actually occurs through connection to a larger community. In the final action of the Hughes and Baldwin stories, an improvised performance transforms the fundamentally painful experience of being alone into one of communion and harmony. Welty and Cortázar, instead, complain about white audiences and critics who misunderstand and exploit Black geniuses (Fats Waller, Charlie Parker) and invite the reader to reject this racist view and empathize with the individual musicians. Sometimes, though, the "jazz story" stages a failed effort to connect. In one of my favorite beats of the book, Reese concludes his first chapter with a fresh and compelling reading of Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful. Dyer’s accessible and 43 �Dr. Christina Tourino • Review: Blue Notes popular book blends fact and fiction in narrating eight jazz musicians in a series of what Reese understands as "jazz story" fragments (54) whose form Dyer explicitly likens to the performance of a jazz improvisation. Some criticized Dyer for following the commodifiable “jazz-as-destruction-and-redemption” convention (56). But Reese argues that Dyer’s book instead dramatizes the problematic nature of the convention itself. For example, Dyer writes of one of his musicians that he “was being thrown out of his own life for not sounding enough like himself” (7). Indeed, Dyer thinks the musicians’ popular appeal works against them. Reese asks: In a discourse as well-established as jazz, whose audiences have a clear idea of what to expect, how can the individual, the idiosyncratic, be registered? Writers, musicians, can only express something personal within a conversation of established standards. Reese convincingly shows that Dyer’s book does not rehearse social expectations, then, but instead critiques the ways in which social expectations fail to capture the music of the individual: Summarizing Dyer, Reese writes, “we all lose something of ourselves in the patterns of life, and in doing so, lose our connection to others” (63). In his defense of Dyer, Reese showcases his talent for carefully evidenced, evocative readings of even popular literature, as well as his respect for its insights. In reading jazz writing by women in Chapter 2, Reese finds that, given the gendered restrictions of jazz, for women, jazz is more a source of loneliness than its solution. Further, the limitations of commodified romantic tropes of jazz, so harmful to male musicians’ individual expression, hurt women even more. Reese reads Zadie Smith’s “Crazy They Call Me” (about Billy Holiday), Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Gayle Jones’s Corregidora, and Candace Allen’s Valaida (about Valaida Snow). In all these pieces, in spite of the clear constraints jazz imposes on women, Reese argues that it also, as a form of social resistance, gives female characters a way to imagine value in their individuality and the possibility of their independence. In Chapter 3, Reese argues that jazz, since it comes out of a politics of positive difference, perfectly figures the sense of simultaneous isolation and collectivity of marginalized groups. Reese features four “out-narratives” here: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (about Buddy Bolden), Phil Kawana’s Dead Jazz Guys, Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi, and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. These writers consider jazz characters who are black, Maori, Anishinaabe, half-caste, and even “part of no group” (120), and they include a parade of hoodlums, orphans, lepers, and homeless. Jazz, according to Reese, doesn’t just reverse hierarchies in these narratives; it upsets the logic of domination entirely, and helps those in similar outsider predicaments find one another and move from subordination to “resistance, and cultural autonomy” (118). In Chapter 4, Reese turns the tables and studies musicians who have written autobiographies. Writing allows musicians to say something about loneliness that their music alone cannot. Further, in writing, musicians can subvert the jazz industry’s narrative about them. In an effort they overtly frame in the jazz aesthetic terms of improvisation and performance, both Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus narrate selves that are multiple, plastic, and provisional. This complicates an easy communion with the reader. Mingus, for example, sees in jazz its limitations, its ego, its failure to connect. In one passage, he admires the total unity of a string quartet, something he knows jazz cannot do. In braiding jazz, literature, and loneliness, Reese pursues the sort of synthetic project that is after my own heart. Blue Notes’ reach allows Reese to give our understanding of loneliness nuance, depth, and amplitude. However, with this ambition come some limitations. One bugaboo is a certain equivocation around the relationship between novelistic and jazz forms. Reese respects this difficulty: “I am wary of simply reading loose analogies between literary structures and musical ones” (136; he also states this on 117). Instead, he claims to explore only what the writers themselves say about the relationship of their writing to music. Still, this is a fine line, and there are moments where Reese cheats it. Five times Reese draws the kind of analogy between literature and music that he promises to avoid. For example, Reese claims that the short story naturally invites jazz writing because both are “rebellious” in their way (the jazzer is “rebellious” and the short story is a “minor form” in comparison with the novel (32, 37)). Similarly, when Cortázar’s character Johnny criticizes his biographer because “there are things missing,” Reese compares this line to a solo in jazz (52). Reese also argues that Morrison’s text, because it demands an active reader who can piece fragments together, mirrors jazz in its form (74-5). Again, of Coming Through Slaughter, Reese says “[it] draws on jazz as . . . a counter narrative structure that helps circumvent the expectations of conveniently linear narrative fiction” (102). Most obviously, Reese banks on Coleman’s theory of “harmolodics,” which expressly tries to codify music in linguistic terms. It is hard to stay mad at Reese for these indiscretions, though, because finding these sorts of equivalent terms is notoriously fun, and because Reese has the chops to make it worth our while. A related and probably more serious concern is the way Reese selects his texts. Reese chooses texts that present images of jazz in fiction with a common thread of loneliness. While this has what I take to be the advantage of nicely 44 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Dr. Christina Tourino • Review: Blue Notes avoiding categories like nation, race, class, gender, and even restrictions of genre, at times, however, this wide scope puts Reese’s project in jeopardy of wobbling off its jazz-in-literature axis. Reese is everywhere: He looks at texts about particular musicians; he looks at texts about fictional musicians; and he looks at texts that are not about any particular musician at all. He reads short stories, novels, and autobiographies. He reads the high-brow and the best-seller, the experimental and the conventional, the “minor” forms and the canonical, the resolved and the fragmented. Some texts are more about blues than jazz, or they are about bebop, or they are about early jazz, (in fact, given Reese’s latitude, I was surprised not to see James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man among his offerings). Sometimes I think I see beads of sweat break out as Reese muscles the material into orbit. Still, most of the time, when I feel him spinning out to distant stars, he provides a really convincing detail, and I can see why his temptation to include this or that text is just too strong to resist. Finally, while Reese’s readings are generally sensitive and keen, I would like to complicate his explication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This reading deserves careful attention because it is Reese’s first, it comes in his introduction, and like Coleman’s “harmolodics,” it sets the stage for the rest of Reese’s study. Reese argues that the Invisible Man’s solitude, as Ellison narrates it, is a positive, protective thing, associated as it is with Louis Armstrong. This solitude breaks down in only one scene, the focus of Reese's attention: when the Invisible Man, who is black, tries to seduce Sybil, a white woman, in order to collect information. Sybil proves to be not only a worthless political informant, but she also scoops the Invisible Man with her own demands: she asks him to comply with what is clearly a racist rape fantasy. Luckily for him, she passes out. When she comes to, he lies that he did, in fact, rape her, to her delight and gratitude. Reese reads this as a moment where mutual recognition, in the form of conspiracy in the same narrative, shows the Invisible Man the possibility of shared experience. This provocative reading supports Reese’s larger claims about the positive valences of loneliness in jazz writing. However, I want to contest this reading by dwelling for a moment on the sexism in the scene, which goes largely unremarked. The Invisible Man, in trying to understand why Sybil would beg him to rape her, does acknowledge that white women are taught to worship power, and to think that black men entertain. But he still also thinks “maybe a great number [of white women] secretly want it” (520). Sybil herself says “Men have repressed us too much,” but the only liberation she seeks is through sexual self-expression. If the narrator is a racist projection of Sybil’s, Sybil is also a sexist projection of the narrator, but without the sympathetic analysis. Perhaps, though, this is on Ellison as much or more than it is on his eponymous character. As Ellison writes her, Sybil “needs” to be raped (518). Sybil is a hateful, sexist cartoon, stranded in this scene, without any reference to or objections about the forces that have produced her. She is merely damning evidence of the triviality of the “Woman Question.” Ellison repeats this lapse in two other earlier scenes that narrate sexually accommodating women; the nameless, bored white seductress who supposedly takes erotic advantage of the narrator, and the young, black Matty Lou Trueblood, who, as her father tells it, willingly, and with desire, cooperates in her own incestuous rape. All this leaves me less optimistic than Reese about the possibility that Sybil and the narrator make a connection in their solitude. They both seem isolated beyond saving by projections of white patriarchy. Reese conscientiously unpacks the limitations that patriarchy imposes on women in his second chapter, including a thoughtful treatment of gendered violence. He also unflaggingly excavates many characters and writers who are so buried by stereotype and prejudice that we struggle to see them in their particularity. If Reese were to lavish this kind of attention on Sybil as well, he might conclude that what we see in this jazz narrative is more solitude than togetherness. My grousing aside, Reese ably and admirably introduces a substantive discussion of loneliness into scholarship about jazz and literature with his book. In doing so, he moves our thinking at the junction of jazz and fiction into richer territory. What is more, he consoles us at a moment when we may be lonelier than ever: “Writers,” Reese concludes, “draw on jazz to reimagine loneliness as an experience that can be shared with others” (171). _____________________ Works Cited Dyer, Geoff. But Beautiful. Canongate, 2012. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York, Vintage Books, 1989. Reese, Sam V. S., Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Louisiana State UP, 2019. 45 �Kristina Fennelly Review Grayson, Mara Lee. Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices for Critical Writing, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, 149pp, ISBN: 1475836619. T aking as her starting point a First-Year Composition course at a public community college in New York City, Mara Lee Grayson’s Teaching Racial Literacy (2018) charts her embrace of narrative song lyrics to teach the fundamentals of literary analysis, while also tapping into her students’ interests in race, ethnicity, and class issues. Her subsequent teaching centers around this question: “Could this curriculum help improve not only student engagement in the classroom but also their understanding of social (in)justice? If so, what other curricula could engage young people in such critical discussions?” (xiii). Situated within the recent and salient context of the Black Lives Matter movement, police violence and racial profiling, and a polarized political climate, Grayson effectively establishes a significant need and demand for racial literacy (xiii). Defined as “a collection of skills and behaviors that allow individuals to ‘probe the existence of racism and examine the effects of race and institutionalized systems on their experiences and representation in US society,’” racial literacy functions as a “framework” to actively “read individual situations for the ways in which they represent, reinforce, or resist systemic injustice” (xv). With this social, political, and cultural context, Grayson effectively guides readers over the course of nine chapters through understanding what racial literacy means, how it can be used in the classroom, and how it can promote civic engagement. The subjects of racial tension, inequity, and social media converge in meaningful ways to illustrate the significance and potential of a racial literacy framework. At the time of composing this review, we see headlines speaking to racial tensions and persistent inequities: “Tim Scott Speech Triggers Radical Reaction from Liberal Media Mob” from Fox News; “Debate Erupts at N.J. Law School After White Student Quotes Racial Slur” from The New York Times; “Examining the Police Shootings of Black Americans and How Leadership Plays a Role” from PBS News Hour. These stories and others illustrate the urgency and timeliness of Grayson’s text. Her research equips and empowers instructors on how to “introduce to students to the tools of racial literacy with the goals of increasing student engagement, developing awareness of structural inequity and discursive modes with which to respond to social injustice, and improving student writing” (xv). Grayson is keenly aware that attention to such content should not take priority over the development of writing skills but should work to inform those skills as noted here: “In addition to making space to interrogate race and racism, a racial literacy curriculum can introduce students to foundational concepts of literacy and rhetoric, such as authorial positionality, language choice, representation, critical media literacy, textual analysis, and audience” (xv). By grounding the book in a three-year ethnographic teacher research project, Grayson successfully and thoroughly achieves the aims outlined in her book, making a lasting and invaluable contribution not only to the field of rhetoric and composition, but also to the broader fields associated with the humanities. Chapter 1: “Racial Literacy and the College Composition Classroom” begins with a refrain we often hear in the year 2021: “‘I’m sick of talking about race!’” (1). Grayson engages directly with this lament by noting the pedagogical value of voice in our classrooms: “The truth is that race talk is difficult.…Attempting to facilitate conversations around race and racism without a plan or framework can be met with awkwardness, negativity, or even silence” (5). Her claim gestures to the importance of voice as a heuristic teaching method. Within feminist pedagogy, voice has been an important heuristic as a means of consciousness raising and identifying oneself as separate and distinct from patriarchy (Fulkerson 666). As Catherine Lamb further explains in “Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition,” “Current discussion of feminist approaches to teaching composition emphasizes the writer’s ability to find her own voice through open-ended, exploratory, often autobiographical, writing in which she assumes a sympathetic audience” (11). Expressive voice additionally concerns itself with cultivating the “‘writer’s presence,’” with voice functioning as a kind of ethos (Fulkerson 668). Developing a voice is also seen as deeply connected to discovering oneself via writing (Fulkerson 668). Within a cultural studies framework, expressive voice seeks to reclaim or recoup marginalized voices of minority groups previously eclipsed by a hegemonic voice (hooks 16). Thus, the development of, identification with, and reclamation of voice has occupied a culturally necessary and theoretically sound means of supporting goals within personal writing and process pedagogy. Grayson’s well-crafted and nuanced racial literacy framework guides instructors and students alike in harnessing voice as an agent of rhetorical and practical change. 46 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Kristina Fennelly • Review: Teaching Racial Literacy In line with expressivist and feminist pedagogies, a racial literacy framework seeks to center individual identity in students’ writing while also taking into account the nuances and complexities of intersectional identity: “Identity development in the racial literacy classroom maintains this emphasis on positive racial identity but is intersectional, taking into account factors that, along with race, contribute to one’s sense of identity as an individual and a social being” (Grayson 7). Grayson’s work is additionally helpful in speaking to issues of white identity: “A critical analysis of the cultural value of Whiteness and the resulting privileges is an integral component of the racial literacy curriculum” (9). Thus, Grayson effectively reminds her readers to be cognizant of the intellectual and material work for which white students and instructors must assume responsibility, instead of looking to their black peers “for their own educational benefit” (9). With these historical and theoretical underpinnings in mind, Grayson concludes her opening chapter by highlighting four keys to communication in the racial literacy classroom: “students must learn interpersonal skills of sharing, inquiring, listening, acknowledging, and responding respectfully” (9). Grayson’s remaining chapters outline ways that effectively speak to how instructors can foster such skills and how students can benefit and learn from developing them. Chapters 2 through 5 outline tangible ways to incorporate these racial literacy skills in the classroom. Topics include developing curricula, selecting texts, using text-based approaches via narrative song lyrics, and feeling and experiencing emotions within a racial literacy framework. Of paramount importance in this part of Grayson’s book is recognizing the significant power of social media. At the start of the crucial chapter 3, Grayson urges us to consider “song lyrics, films, television episodes, YouTube videos, tweets, and other digital and social media” as nontraditional texts that invite real rhetorical participation and deliberation (33). As Grayson explains: “Social media today represents a primary site of social engagement and political resistance” (43). Indeed, one might imagine the prescience Grayson possessed at the time of writing this book, which now serves a readership that has witnessed and continues to witness the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as ongoing activist efforts by the Black Lives Matter movement. Grayson cites YouTube as an example of how instructors and students can hone their skills in racial literacy: “Social media venues already function as an outlet for individual citizens to share their views; on YouTube, for example, some users distribute directly or indirectly racist videos under the guise of free speech. Without the provision of formal concepts or language with which to discuss these videos, viewers may overlook the ways in which such videos not only reinforce stereotypes but also propagate the message that such views are acceptable in online forums” (43). In this vein, Grayson’s racial literacy framework intersects well with previous work by composition scholars such as Brian Jackson and Jon Wallin, who expertly focus on digital deliberation in their article “Rediscovering the ‘Back-and-Forthness’ of Rhetoric in the Age of YouTube.” Certainly, as Grayson’s research shows, the kinds of conversations students are enacting in these public domains of the World Wide Web reflect intertextuality, argument, and deliberation. As Grayson notes: “Scholars have suggested that, in the racial literacy classroom, reading such comments [on social media sites] could ‘facilitate discussion about how oppression can be reproduced even when resisting racism’” (43). In an age where adversarial argument remains a problematic, yet dominant, approach, instructors and students would be served well to follow Grayson’s lead and interrogate social media forums as sites of deliberation and argument. Chapter 4: “Narrative Song Lyrics” invites us to consider how music ranging from Bruce Springsteen to hip-hop affords educators and students the opportunity to critically consider audience, word choice, syntax, dialect, and authorial choice. Reflection and inquiry are crucial components to Grayson’s assignments when analyzing narrative song lyric (NSL) texts, which “resemble short stories and utilize traditional techniques like plot, character, setting, and conflict” (50). Thus, narrative song lyric texts in the racial literacy classroom invite students to “read texts through rhetorical and critical lenses. In other words, they should look at the author, implied audience, and contextual factors surrounding the production and reception of the text, as well as who is (or who is not) represented in the text—and how those individuals and groups are represented” (Grayson 50). In this way, Grayson’s NSL text assignments focus on an oft-overlooked rhetorical act: listening. Grayson speaks to this point when she explains how “Social justice educators have suggested that, because ‘listening to music is an emotional and educational experience that potentially shapes an individual’s values, actions, and worldview,’ songs of all genres can be used…to expose students to different cultures and encourage cross-cultural communication and understanding” (47-8). Chapters 6 through 9 showcase strategies to apply the skills learned in the racial literacy classroom to our local communities and broader interactions with the world, inviting instructors to tailor their instruction around current events that connect to the material conditions of their students’ lives. Asking students to interrogate “how we know what we know” translates to racial literacy as a form of civic engagement by which students use language as part of real-world activism rather than mere perfunctory prose. Just as Grayson explores the primacy of voice, identity, 47 �Kristina Fennelly • Review: Teaching Racial Literacy and listening in her previous chapters, she also focuses on the rhetorical power of silence in Chapter 6: “Personal Writing and Positionality” and in Chapter 7: “Controversial Conversations: What We (Don’t) Say.” Both chapters encourage students and instructors to resist essentialist understandings of racial identities while interrogating myths and assumptions surrounding popular criticisms of and within academia: political correctness, trigger warnings, free speech, critical race theory, and safe spaces (82-4, 106-07). These chapters’ exploration of marginalized voices, white fragility, and even “the N-word” demand not only that silent students learn how, when, and why to speak up, but also that instructors know how to identify, decode, and dismantle racist discourse. Grayson also serves her readers well by devoting Chapter 9 to ways in which secondary English education can benefit from a racial literacy framework, most importantly with administrative and parental support. Above all, Grayson concludes her seminal work by reminding instructors that “racial literacy is a journey rather than an end point” (125). Here, Grayson’s recommended assignments range from building a classroom cultural literacy dictionary to problem-solving-based group projects that invite students to craft proposal arguments and conduct research in the vein of Ken Macrorie’s I-Search paper. Throughout her book, Grayson features specific assignments, instructional strategies, and students’ experiences to show the purpose and value of a racial literacy framework in the composition classroom. One of the most memorable can be found in Chapter 8: “Racial Literacy as Civic Engagement,” in which she shares the experience of Brice, a writing instructor for juniors and seniors in a racially diverse private university: “In Brice’s class, interviewing individuals in different lines of work not only helped students learn more about their intended fields of work or study, but it also helped to humanize each profession…. Moreover, because students used their own language to share those individuals’ stories, they had to consider questions of representation” (125). Now more than ever, those questions of representation must be asked and answered as we grapple with national and local issues of identity and responsibility. We must answer what Grayson describes as a “calling” (135), one in which we must reconcile within ourselves how “Racism is in fact a defining characteristic of the institutions that uphold our way of life in the United States” (136). While Grayson makes no claim that racial literacy is the only way to “learn what it means to be citizens,” she definitively shows how racial literacy is a way for students to “learn more about their classmates…and to learn more about themselves” (136). By citing the 1972 resolution on “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” as issued by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Grayson reminds instructors of academia’s historical attempts at equity in composition instruction—equity which sought to eradicate such violence that nevertheless persists as a material reality for our students and faculty alike today. Increased attention and focus on social justice urge us now in ways that this resolution urged educators nearly 50 years ago: to adopt a racial literacy framework as a means of developing curricula and introducing students “both to the social functions of race and the ways in which language can serve to maintain or reshape racial ideologies” (Grayson 5). _____________________ Works Cited Fulkerson, Richard. “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 56, no. 4, 2005, pp. 654-687. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End P, 1989. Jackson, Brian, and Jon Wallin. “Rediscovering the Back and Forthness of Rhetoric in the Age of YouTube.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, pp. 374-96. Lamb, Catherine E. “Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 42, no. 1, 1991, pp. 11-24. Macrorie, Ken. The I-Search Paper. Boynton/Cook, 1988. 48 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Marguerite Mayhall Review Dean, James W., Jr., and Deborah Y. Clarke, The Insider’s Guide to Working with Universities: Practical Insights for Board Members, Businesspeople, Entrepreneurs, Philanthropists, Alumni, Parents, and Administrators. U of North Carolina P, 2019. B ecause The Insider’s Guide to Working with Universities was published in the fall of 2019, its picture of higher education is/was fairly up-to-date. The COVID-19 pandemic happened right after its publication, however, and it is hard to read the book now except as, perhaps, a historic document. The pandemic and its economic, cultural, and social repercussions and reactions to anti-racist protest movements, as well as even larger political events, are already changing major aspects of higher education. I found myself wondering which parts of the colleges and universities I know will still look the same as described here, and which will be changed, perhaps forever. As the title demonstrates, the book was conceived as a primer for the various constituencies listed therein. Although the authors state that their book is targeted at other audiences beyond prospective members of boards of trustees, all of them are assumed to come from the business world, whether as board members, candidates for administrative roles, donors, teachers, legislators, or industries tied to education like online education groups and various consulting groups. They therefore take as their organizing principle the distinction between “business” and non-profit higher education as a way to describe the academic enterprise to outsiders looking to interact with it in some fashion, and the book’s length is closer to approximating an executive summary. Chapters are short and concise, sometimes too short (in my opinion as a faculty insider), because the purpose of informing the reader (who presumably only wants to know “the facts”) about the basics of colleges and universities is the primary purpose, as the authors state in the Introduction, “. . . we decided to write a book that explains to these important individuals how colleges and universities work so they can make these institutions better” (5). The brevity means that on many occasions needed nuance is lacking, and the ostensible neutrality of providing just “the facts” is at times belied by little telling asides. For example, the tone throughout assumes these various groups of people come to work with colleges and universities with the best of intentions (as well as with gaps in their knowledge about the special enterprise that is the academy), and omits mention of the more controversial or politically motivated goals of some of these groups; it also takes a light-hearted but critical attitude toward faculty that comes off as condescending at times, perhaps as a play toward common stereotypes of faculty as pretentious and out of touch with non-academic concerns. Lastly, the authors omit (as they admit) discussion of a very large sector of the public higher ed market – community colleges and unranked regional comprehensive universities, schools that educate the majority of students in higher ed in the United States and which intersect with each other in significant ways. Some of the colleges and universities described here as short case studies include large state schools like University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, the United States Air Force Academy, and private schools such as Carnegie Mellon University, Gonzaga University, and Pomona College. The book’s introduction lays out some of the common misconceptions businesspeople may have of higher education, depending on their relationship(s) to it, ending with the statement that academic institutions need business leaders (serving as board members or other leaders) to help them solve problems. That is the driver of the book – to explain higher education to businesspeople because colleges and universities need their help, and it may explain some of the omissions as well as the somewhat defensive tone employed in parts of the book. The best sentence in the entire introduction, in my opinion, is the authors’ advice to businesspeople to think of academic institutions “as if they were in a different industry in a different country” (8), because it is not defensive, but, rather, a real attempt to describe, in impartial terms, how far apart the business and university worlds really are. The first chapter does just that, in laying out first, the differences between businesses and universities, and then, their similarities. University insiders will find no surprises here – the authors mention universities’ pursuit of reputation, uninterest in profit, less definitive chains of command, relative lack of a sense of urgency, faculty placement of affiliation in disciplines rather than institutions, faculty work processes and how that work is judged, as well as attitudes toward growth, as major differences. Similarities are fewer: they both need to make operational decisions, are on the hunt for talent, address a multitude of different “stakeholders,” engage in competition on a variety of levels, and face challenges in limited resources and ways to achieve their priorities. Interestingly, professional service firms like law firms appear most similar to universities, according to the authors, for a variety of reasons, such as professional standards and the 49 �Marguerite Mayhall • Review: Working with Universities notion of colleagueship. I’m not that old, but I remember when professors were included alongside doctors and lawyers as members of the professional class as a matter of course. To have to state it in a book aimed at people looking to work with and in universities demonstrates how much has changed in the public’s perception of universities in the last fifty years. Chapter 3 describes the types of units, both academic and administrative, found in colleges and universities, and the place of curricula and new teaching practices such as the flipped classroom, service learning, makerspaces, and online learning. Chapter 4 describes outside influencers on higher ed like federal and state regulations and accrediting bodies, while chapter 5 focuses on faculty members and their education, the tenure process and its relation to academic freedom, adjunct and contingent faculty, and their dual loyalties to discipline and institution. Chapter 6 deals with how universities are organized and how influence is wielded within them, with sample organizational charts and descriptions of administrative roles from the president to the provost, down through the dean and department head. As an example of the snarky asides at faculty expense I mentioned above, the authors describe the “faculty-centric” university as faculty members’ “unabashed” belief that faculty do the most important work in a university with some incredulity. They end the chapter with an example of how they addressed implementing a mandated Title IX training with medical faculty and then humanities faculty. The former, “accustomed to rules (such as HIPAA) and a more hierarchical approach. . .” were easier to deal with than the latter, who were described as having “a lot of time on their hands and they write really well” (109). Faculty in all disciplines have administrative laws like FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) they must follow, so this is a gratuitous swipe at humanities faculty. Chapter 7 discusses academic research – what it is, what drives faculty members to do it, how it is funded, and how it is published, evaluated, and, in some cases, commercialized, which is a nice segue to the next chapter on college and university funding, focused on its sources and where the funding goes. The book ends with the authors’ recommendations for collaborations between business and higher ed. The few reviewers of this book on Amazon (it’s new!) commend it for its comprehensive scope and neutral tone. It is certainly comprehensive in scope if not in detail, and the tone would not strike a non-academic as biased; admittedly, my own prickliness about the authors’ exasperation at faculty attitudes comes from my own position as faculty. I wonder, though, if the lack of context will make it more difficult for the various audiences this book addresses to understand the major catastrophes facing higher education now and in the near future as a consequence of the pandemic: the bypassing of faculty governance in universities’ layoffs, program eliminations, and mandates for face to face teaching, and the influence of state and local politics on these administrative decisions; the surveillance and data tracking of students made even more possible by the almost complete transition to online/remote learning; the loss of revenue to residential campuses with this transition and the possible movement toward community colleges and comprehensive universities as students look to pay less for their educations; the narrowing of access to higher ed for lower income students as a result of the move to online/remote learning; the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement on university and college curricula and faculty hires (when it becomes possible again); and, perhaps, most importantly, the acceleration of the winnowing process colleges and universities have been undergoing since 2008. According to Scott Galloway, professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, the pandemic and universities’ response to it will result in many, many more schools shutting down at much higher rates than previously seen (“USS University”). Some pundits have prophesied the melding of higher ed with Facebook or Google and the consolidation of marketable disciplines over all else as a result of this process (Kroger). Historic, indeed. This book just may describe a vanished world. _____________________ Works Cited Dean, James W., Jr., and Deborah Y. Clarke. The Insider’s Guide to Working with Universities: Practical Insights for Board Members, Businesspeople, Entrepreneurs, Philanthropists, Alumni, Parents, and Administrators. U of North Carolina P, 2019. Galloway, Scott. “USS University.” No Mercy / No Malice, 17 Jul. 2020, www.profgalloway.com/uss-university/. Kroger, John. “10 Predictions for Higher Education’s Future.” Inside Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, 26 May 2020, insidehighered.com/blogs/leadership-higher-education/10-predictions-higher-education%E2%80%99s-future. 50 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Dr. Barbara Mossberg Review Hediger, Ryan. Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, U of Minnesota P, 2019. W hat does it say about us that a book entitled Homesickness gathers us round? Or is our resonance to this book in the subtitle, longing? Is the complicated feeling about “home,” the intersection of longing and belonging, whether our own place, or earth itself, an inextricable part of our human psyche no matter where or how or when we live? Now that we are asking, is existential loneliness particular to humans? Does the act of longing characterize human identity?  And how does climate change impact our sense of home? Such are the questions and thoughts invoked by Ryan Hediger’s philosophical tour de force, Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment. It is as a professor that Ryan Hediger constructs this engaging performative work that blends creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and cultural scholarship in a synthesis of trans-eco-theory. If there is such a thing as posthumanities, as the book has us consider, Hediger’s title alone captures what might be called the Ground Zero of humanities, its Big Bang: the quality of complicated consciousness in a term like “longing.” Home is a place we long for. We do not belong where we are. In such paradox we can wonder if it has always been thus: is Hediger’s meditation on the trauma of being itself a finger on the pulse of humanity from our beginnings? Is it a magic mirror of today’s Anthropocene awareness? Or does he define “posthumanities” based on a connection of our acute consciousness of suffering in these fraught days of earthly unrest in war, pandemic, migration, and climate change with age-old human concerns? That there can be so many “perhaps” and buts” in a description of Hediger’s framework suggests this professorial work as an extended, lively, seminar designed to raise questions and keep them aloft. The book’s Introduction assembles questions that must be asked in response to present circumstances and explores ways to answer them, from cultural history to contemporary thought in emergent fields. Hediger considers such philosophical questions in the realm of “eco” scholarship. His book posits that we are profoundly destabilized today because of climate change. The works and theories he summons in his book provide a way to reconcile his thesis, as he has us reflect that we have always contended with a changing environment: perhaps we never have felt “at home.” He reasons that our feelings about home in this day and age are so complicated they make us feel ill. Perhaps we never can feel at home, and are not meant to. Perhaps our human common ground is alienation. Professor Hediger fuses human dislocation and alienation, the Biblical notion of being “strangers in a strange land,” with “changing environment,” and thus connects an age-old human fear of change itself, and our own complicity in these changes in our technological and environmental developments. And yet, finally, Hediger suggests hope in a common longing to connect with our place on this earth, to recognize this planet—ever changing—as ours.  This insightful and innovative book, organized by chapters based on literary works that provide evidence of humanity beset with environmental change, provides creative scholarly leadership in methodology for the Anthropocene. Engaging the reader professorially in the traditional format of criticism through the lens of literary texts, he uses a poet’s rhetorical fervor and neophilosopher’s bold wordsmithing to illuminate our current cultural landscape in terms of transdisciplinary analysis. The result of his synthesis of cultural theory, literary criticism, and philosophy is as emergent as the new fields of eco philosophy and cutting-edge international philosophy. His rhetorical command and nuanced treatment of multiple parallel theoretical and radical critical movements will inspire the next wave of transdisciplinary eco graduate studies across and through disciplines. In one sense, his reading of texts recalls old-school scholarship reshaping American Studies as a field in the late 1950s, the creating of new common ground weaving history, sociology, literature, landscape architecture, psychology, political science, economics, and popular culture theories and texts to tell a story about how surface culture contains the psychology and identity of a people. In another sense, he forges new ground as a literary scholar, bringing new ideas from ecological, economic, philosophical, feminist, and critical race theories to traditional close textual readings of literature of trauma and violence, and in the process, extracts from these works a wisdom he integrates into “post” understandings and awareness. Structurally, Hediger’s work takes the central theme of homesickness—a literal idea of illness that reverberates with headlines of immigration and migration, exile and homelessness, and articulates it as a synonym of today’s climate change crisis. Certainly, from the beginning of recorded history, whether in stone or scratched into clay or 51 �Dr. Barbara Mossberg • Review: Homesickness etched on leaves or bark, the human plot has seemed to be the crisis of exile and—an important word for Hediger— dislocation. We are ever strangers in a strange land. One can reflect on literary stories, beginning with  Gilgamesh, whose protagonist leaves home to wander earth in tragic tears (having caused an ecological trauma, clear-cutting the cedar forests), continuing through Homer (again the ecological trauma of how we use and misuse the land and its inhabitants), the Bible, Dante, Cervantes, Voltaire, Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot, Chekov, Joyce, Synge, Proust, and the whole of American literature. This trauma of homesickness is explored in Hediger‘s study through the lens of selected literary works in linked essays dedicated to their treatment of the theme of the trauma caused by life in a changing environment. Hediger’s essays probe and survey the age-old wisdom of modern writers observing human nature; in the process, he reveals the extent to which concern for earth, and trauma at earth changes, both natural and human-caused, is on the minds of people we may associate with a café or bull-ring like Ernest Hemingway, or street or porch of Billie Letts, big store like Natalie Portman’s Wal-Mart, backyards of John Updike, fields of Thoreau, or killing fields of Tim O’Brien. Just as he traverses human nature expressed in contemporary literature and culture, Hediger reflects on persistent headlines of the homelessness and dislocation of migration and immigration on domestic and global scales. In this context, as a book both of eco criticism and eco literary criticism, Hediger sees war as “a distinctly agrilogistical or anthropocenic homesickness.” Thus, the essays identify and interpret contemporary cultural critical, creative, and current events’ movements. Following the introduction of his thesis and the vocabulary of eco suffering on which his meditation is grounded, Hediger begins with a chapter about a central theme in his own scholarship, Annie Proulx’s work in terms of “suffering in our animal skins” and “uncanny embodiment” in one’s mortal human fate. In this chapter, Hediger develops his analytical framework combining cultural and literary theory and philosophy. The essay’s epigraph is by Novalis, quoted in Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” and with this reference, Hediger lays a postmodern theoretical foundation to the field of cultural and American Studies and their diagnosis and analysis of contemporary social problems of homelessness and in this case, “rootlessness.” Social studies of contemporary life are defined by Hediger as a feeling of “dislocation from one’s culture, identity, and geography, and the desire to better belong, to be more at home in the world.” Intertwined in his analysis are works, for example, of sociology (Peter K. Kilborn’s Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s New Rootless Professional Class), iconic American Studies (Leo Marx), psychology (Clay Routledge’s Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource), environmental humanities (Ursula K. Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global and what she argues is “eco-cosmopolitanism”), ecology (Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence), poetry (Goethe), and philosophy (Kant). Hediger is bringing to light the desire to be home, feel at home, not just go home, as a driving human impulse that also identifies a primal alienation with where one is. Hediger discusses this estrangement in postcolonialist criticism, citing Cary Wolfe’s understanding of “Posthumanism.” Such an interdisciplinary frame which Hediger calls “the method of homesickness” and his “posthumanist reading” ground Hediger’s first chapter focus on Annie Proulx’s literature, and later chapters on Marilyn Robinson, Peter Hedges, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Each chapter’s thematic focus expands the authors and topics Hediger considers. Thus, writers, philosophers, historians, and scholars are interwoven with critical reading that illuminates Hediger’s home in literary studies. Focusing on the “dynamics of identity and home in a place” in post-World War II writers, Hediger’s examination of Annie Proulx’s works conjures “suffering in our animal skins.” Her chronicle of what she calls a half-skinned steer is explored as an “icon of homesickness.” Hediger is an enthusiastic literary critic, finding Proulx’s story “The HalfSkinned Steer,” for example, to be “stunning.” Hediger takes us through the story with a polished and generous literary joyousness in her use of language; he is an appreciative and keen-eyed reader at home in close-textual reading. Such textual exegesis allows him to bring the reader to his consideration of the work in terms of eco criticism, for which “wilderness and wildness” are problematic ideas in which to understand a work. He makes a complicated but important argument that the tradition of writing about wilderness and wildness can be aligned “with ideas of hyperobjects, with uncanny matter, with radical rethinking of human selfhood.” In this examination of Proulx’s work, Hediger connects civil rights crises in the U.S. with the idea he is developing that home is “stranger than we commonly recognize.” This idea is applied to Ernest Hemingway in an original way, looking at his experience in Africa and return to the U.S. as a way of “killing” his “homesickness for Africa.” Hediger sets out to explore a contemporary critical thinking of Hemingway as a representative of white privilege, especially privileged travel that can be both dangerous and destructive. He asks his readers to consider the question of the extent to which Hemingway is usefully seen as an “American writer,” as opposed to a “postnational” or even “eco52 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Dr. Barbara Mossberg • Review: Homesickness cosmopolitan.” Hemingway’s first major trauma noted in this study is his injury in Italy working for the Red Cross. In Hediger’s words, Hemingway offers a “proto-ecological perspective on human life.” The worlds of traditional literary criticism and ecological studies are brought together in an original re-interpretation of Hemingway that brings him up to date and makes the case for his relevance in contemporary scholarship and teaching in today’s changing curricular and pedagogical climate. Indeed, Hediger proceeds in his analysis of literature to see Toni Morrison in this larger pattern. Popular culture, including shopping and football, becomes part of this overall analysis as Hediger explores ecocosmopolitanism as a way of a global and historical analysis of creative cultural and civic responses to changing environments. Fittingly, Hediger’s conclusion brings in Henry David Thoreau’s vision of living “deliberately” as describing the driving forces of the Anthropocene, including the dynamics of change and mobility of all kinds. Having described American surface culture, such as “Wall-Mart in South Park,” in which he conceives a “critique with irony and entertainment,” as “international restructurings,” in the context of Billie Letts’ Where the Heart Is, Hediger invokes Thoreau for his own argument of dark ecology’s advice for how we can more productively live our lives today, rethinking how we inhabit space and time. Citing scholars of the Anthropocene, Hediger defines trauma to society in terms of racism, imperialism, colonialism, eugenics, ecological damage, and war, challenging ideas about change and “progress.” In a book that is at once as compellingly contemporary as headline news, and a meditation on age-old human existence, Hediger asks us to slow down and consider our next steps, or steps at all, taking our time to figure out how to recognize and inhabit our world. Its existence—and our own—are at stake.   While the narrative flows gracefully in its arc of purpose in sequential case studies, the rigorous scholarship underlying the concept of homesickness as a critical human feature is evidenced in the book’s substantive thirty-six pages of Notes, comprehensive Index, and Acknowledgements. This scholarly apparatus makes the literal framework of the book a fascinating state-of-the-art of the fields of study that are being integrated here: psychology in the concept of homesickness, mental injury and health, and resilience and trauma, eco-literature in the theme of “longing for place,” and environmental studies, specifically, climate change. Critics across the disciplines are cited for their contributions to the topic as Hediger pulls together these fields into especially human and emotional terms (what is more emotional than longing?). This point of the book’s explicit emotional appeal is worth emphasizing because the book is framed by a philosophical critical history of alienated thought, beginning with the epigraph from Jacques Derrida. The choice of Derrida to introduce Hediger’s meditation indicates the philosophical context for literary and eco studies. Derrida is a cosmopolitan French philosopher famous in the late 1960s for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, developed in the context of phenomenology.   Concepts of mobility, for example in the migration of peoples and creatures, are interrogated in terms of their possible collateral damage. Is progress progress? Recent sophisticated graduate and scholarly studies inform Hediger’s discussion of his authorial purpose: postcolonialism, posthumanism, poststructuralism, and other kinds of “post” tropes, are incorporated into contemporary ecological and environmental studies, including deep and “dark” ecology, and “cosmopolitanism,” to underscore what Hediger defines as the overarching issue: the fear of what it is in our age now that may make what we know of earth itself as “post.”   The  Index of Homesickness shows the range of intellectual resources that inform Hediger’s meditation, from contemporary and modern writers across genres, from Bobbie Ann Mason, John Updike, Marilyn Robinson, Bill McKibben, Tim O’Brien, Billie Letts, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, to icons of ecological literary focus such as Emerson, Thoreau, Leo Marx, Gary Snyder, Timothy Morton, and contemporary eco-literary critics such as Louise Westling, William Rasch, Robert Marzec, Christine Marran, and others, in the context of such figures as novelist Charlotte Bronte and essay pioneer Michel de Montaigne.  In his integration of scholarship on ecology, literature, cultural studies, and philosophy, Professor Hediger draws upon his own work on human-animal cultural studies. He brings readers of literary criticism to theories of “the unhomely,” and homelessness. He defines his stance: “Despite contemporary highbrow derision of homesickness, this book demonstrates that the feeling remains powerful and is visible everywhere in culture.” Hediger sees himself as “exploring this abjected terrain,” advocating for a “critical cosmopolitanism.” Identifying the “dislocating traumas of colonialism, war, and anthropocentric global warming” as the factors that show the centrality of homesickness to the human psyche, Hediger cites Donna Haraway to expand and ground this alienation on scales from the microbial soil and body bacteria and city rats, elements of “ordinary truths” that make our lives seem strange. Hediger is broadly an interpretive writer of our world. His topic of homelessness is as old as the hills, and current as a New York Times headline or a Lasse Hallstrom film. His evident facility with literary theory and language of complex, urgent, and profound contemporary responses to global environmental crises, enabling him to demonstrate how environmental crises demand new thought from scholars, and new understanding from modern texts, will weight 53 �Dr. Barbara Mossberg • Review: Homesickness this book as a valuable reference and model for how multiple cultural studies fields are synthesized and put into context of the Anthropocene. As a useful interpretive framework, Homesickness enables readers to apply this idea of complicated connection to a changing earth to examples in their own fields. In this reviewer’s own practice, numerous examples come to mind. In Emily Dickinson’s “A little madness in the spring,” Dickinson contrasts a king’s and “Clown’s” experience of “this whole Experiment in Green:” not the legal “owner” of the land, but the Clown, an artist figure, who ponders earth “as if it were his own.” Eco writer Scott Sanders reflects on such thinking in Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. If the world itself is restless and changing, how are we to belong? Reading Hediger’s Homesickness is to put oneself not only in a meditative state of profound questions but to engage with and recall the broad swath of writers of fiction, philosophers, and theorists he invokes who ponder them, as well: how do we belong to each other and this earth? Is it even in our human nature to feel at home with where we are? How can we feel at home in a place that is characterized by accelerating and possibly dangerous changes? And finally, what is at stake for our survival and earth itself in our struggle to feel at home? Although not brought into the book’s discussion, figures such as Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Linda Hogan, Rebecca Solnit, Daniel Quinn, Terry Tempest Williams, Scott Sanders, and other icons of contemporary eco literature and critique of policies that erode both the land and our connections to it, can be understood in the context of Hediger’s work, urgently arguing the stakes of eco-consciousness. Readers of Homesickness are left not only with a mirror held up to themselves revealing our human experience with earth, but with a sense of hope: if we long for something we feel we have forfeited, by not treating earth and each other with appropriate reverence, perhaps this very longing and tragic estrangement is a sign of hope. Just in writing the book, Hediger shows we have not given up longing to belong. We can try to act now in a way that will connect us powerfully and vitally to earth, an “eco-cosmopolitan perspective” advocated by Gary Snyder in “The Practice of the Wild”—as Hediger sees it, the best practice for being home wherever one is, whatever home is, in the elephant in this book’s room—the suffering and teaching heart. For all its complicated and dazzling theoretical-technics, this is profoundly a heart-felt book. _____________________ Works Cited Dickinson, Emily. “A little madness in the spring.” www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/a-little- madness-in-thespring-1356/. Hediger, Ryan. Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, U of Minnesota P, 2019.   54 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Arundhati Sanyal Review Sen Vengadasalam, Sarbani. New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays, Cambridge Scholars, 2019. S arbani Sen Vengadasalam re-visits post-colonial historical approach to the phenomenon of colonial occupation and its impact on the creation and re-creation of literature by the educated generations of the colonized in reaction and interaction to the colonial decimation and denigration of the indigenous population and cultural legacy. In her book, New Postcolonial Dialectics, Vengadasalam presents a study of the literature of Nigeria and India as instances of an involved, protracted, and complex interaction between the colonizer’s intentioned policies of systematic control and manipulation of the occupied country and its educated youth which, paradoxically, experiences closest interaction with western education and culture. Chapter 1 lays out in close detail the clearly-thought-out intentionality of the colonial move which is single-minded in its objective to maximize the profit principle by absolute control over the material resources of the country being colonized as well as creating simultaneously an ever-present market for the finished product that the industrialized colonizing power sends its finished products to. In Chapters 2 and 3, she focuses on the work of Wole Soyinka (The Lion and the Jewel) and Rabindranath Tagore (Red Oleanders) respectively to analyze and present as examples and outcomes of such interaction. Chapters 4 and 5 take the discussion to the Indian playwright Badal Sircar’s dramaturgy as reflected in Procession and Wole Soyinka’s work The Road to bring the discussion to more contemporary times. The work is meant for students of global multi-cultural studies with specific interests in post-colonial experiences and parallel encounters in literature and drama. Each of the chapters from 2 to 5 has been laid out schematically with a description and definition of “Interculturalism”; the “Philosophy and Dramaturgy” of the specific author being dealt with; and finally, an “Intercultural Analysis” of the specific work from the author. This schema allows the reader an easy access to the parallels between the three authors/personalities and their over-arching commonalities in negotiating between their indigenous colonized tradition and the internationalism that each reveal various syncretic moves within each work. Using the examples of Tagore, Soyinka, and Badal Sircar, Vengadasalam presents a nuanced examination of responses to colonial cultural intrusions that result in seminal works of literature that become part of the national canon in India and Nigeria respectively. The colonial cultural “interaction” is driven by the political and economic desire to gain absolute control over the subjugated country. The author is most effective in detailing the decision-making that goes into subjugating, discounting, supplanting the host nations’ culture, literature, norms. Western education and religion is presented as the better and only option for the upcoming generation. The emergent population that is exposed to the colonizer’s culture shows a range and variety of responses from abject imitation to internalization of colonizers’ principles, to the rebelling against it, and eventually to syncretic assimilation of western and native traditions. These representative authors also reveal a way out from the excessive dichotomized universe imposed by the colonizers’ policies. The resulting works become texts that negotiate and reflect the multi-phonal possibilities of responding to the colonizer’s heritage, appreciating anew the native culture, creation of a syncretic work that re-visits the ancient with new approaches made possible by western exposure. In engaging with Tagore’s work in Chapter 3, Vengadasalam analyzes his magnum opus, Raktakarabi or Red Oleanders in terms of an allegory where each aspect of the freedom movement of India, and its intricate involvement with the colonizer, its native sympathisers, and its strident anti-colonialists of varying ilk are represented by the characters of the play. This analysis of Tagore’s play reveals his intentions as beyond strident nationalism. Tagore, according to Vengadasalam, concludes beyond predictable adversarial relationships between the colonizer and colonized, and the varying shades of allegiances in between to a place of reconciliation that is supported by India’s ancient cultural heritage of naturalism and universality. In Chapter 3, in the corresponding analysis of Nigerian experience with colonization, she brings us a nuanced analysis of Negritude, its emergence, its particular role in combating the aftermath of colonial appropriation, and its distinct limitations that are understood by Soyinka who creates a kind of “neo-negritude”. This draws deeply from the 55 �Arundhati Sanyal • Review: New Postcolonial Dialectics emotionalism of Yoruban traditions without neglecting his western understanding of rhetoric, but rather synthesizes and brings this ancient culture to the fore of his artistic creation. In the words of Vengadasalam, Like Tagore his [Soyinka] holistic approach empowered him to look at the past, present, and future in one stream. Though Soyinka saw the relevance of the Yoruban world in spite of his colonial ‘inheritance and at a time when the African mind was encumbered by Western culture,’ he felt it incumbent upon him to not merely ‘articulate African concepts, but to also make them intelligible to those whose world view has been conditioned by the west. (112-13, quoting Wilfred Feuser in “Wole Soyinka: The Problem of Authenticity”) The analysis of Tagore and Soyinka’s theatrical rhetoric develops through negotiations between colonizer and colonized and is shown as comparable through close textual analysis as well as over-arching broad sweeps of analysis of political, social, and cultural interaction at multiple levels. That lends credence to the overall project as laid out in the introductory chapter by Vengadasalam. In Chapter 4, the author discusses a dramatist and theater personality of post-independent India, Badal Sircar, whose early career and education reveal how the post-colonial intellectual learns from an eclectic experience that cuts across international borders and cultures. Vengadasalam traces the early influences of Sircar’s exposure to indigenous Indian theater, Nigerian, East European, American theatrical repertoires and workshops as the basis out of which is born a theater that cuts across binaries of urban/rural, national/international, colonial/post-colonial, and critiques the neo-colonial imperialist forces working within the socio-economic fabric of the emergent nation coming to terms with its political and economic independence and birth pangs. In critiquing Sircar’s play Procession, Vengadasalam shows how different traditions of world theater forms merge in the play in order to create a genre that functions beyond the proscenium stage into the “liberated” stage or “Muktamancha”. Here, the hierarchies that separate the audience from the actors on stage are deleted to create an experience where the audience is participatory. The play’s principal character represents the everyman figure who experiences the cynicism, corruption, anonymizing effect of a materialistic, industrial society that rises out of the colonial rule into a freedom compromised by confusion, chaos, and disruption. The post-colonial intellectual has his work cut out after the emergence of ostensibly “free” nations. He has to assemble his literary influences through language and art to critique the dehumanization of the individual in a neo-colonial environment. In Chapter 5, Vengadasalam shows a similar, parallel experience within the Nigerian post-colonial society, where a neo-colonial, conservative, Nigerian ruling class seem to take up exactly where the European powers had left off. The resultant turmoil and civil strife in the country makes it imperative for the Nigerian intellectual and man of letters, such as Wole Soyinka to marshal his syncretic learnings from a variety of traditions, native Nigerian, tribal, western European, even Asian. In the words of Vengadasalam, “While Soyinka had used Nigerian metaphors, idioms, and proverbs in past works, he now began to include, integrate, and utilize the entire spectrum of the West African linguistic world. The language and dialects he used in his plays ranged from Yoruba to the Queen’s English, and from pidgin to bookish English, with any number of shades in between” (179). This chapter goes on to interpret Soyinka’s 1965 play The Road as an example of the imaginative amalgam of ritual, practical reality of Yoruban contemporary life, satire, and symbol of the violence and civil strife in the country as Procession does for the Indian context. The style adopted in the entire work is based on a comparative analysis of the respective set of plays by the three dramatists chosen from two continents. The research is key in establishing the veracity of a rather large set of claims made in the work, namely, that the post-colonial intellectual from erstwhile colonies re-creates an imaginative space based on his syncretic education and understanding of nationalism, internationalism, native language and traditions, as well as multi-phonal linguistics as demonstrated in his art. The style is inherent in the clarity her organization brings to the analysis. Consistency within the analysis in all of the respective authors and their works allows the reader to perceive the commonalities of experience as they follow the condition of the nation’s post-colonial experience; the unique educational, cultural, political biography of the individual author; the interpretive analysis of the individual work by each author that shows this background context yielding innovations in style, form, and content of each work. Such confluent analysis of two colonial experiences in Asia and Africa as expressed in the dramatic works of Tagore, Sircar, and Soyinka is an effective exercise as it puts to the test the post-colonial lens that historicizes and re-examines the cross currents of intentions, readings, counter-readings, and such-like between colonizer nations and those cultures which were affected at the colonized end. The close analysis of plays by stalwarts of Indian theater such as Badal Sircar, Tagore, and Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka further eke out the ideas mentioned in the introductory chapters of the book as the collusion of political and cultural conquest that colonizing nations adopt towards their total dominance. The unique contribution of this work is to show a clear connection between post-colonial national crises, the unique preparation 56 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Arundhati Sanyal • Review: New Postcolonial Dialectics of the writer who wields his pen for multi-pronged purposes, and clear connections to the genre innovations of form, content, rhetoric that are undertaken usually to defy the binaries that seem to separate the socio-cultural fabric of the nascent nation. The post-colonial intellectual emerges as a primary agent of reconstruction in the post-colonial reality. _____________________ Works Cited Sen Vengadasalam, Sarbani. New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian English Plays, Cambridge Scholars, 2019. 57 �Julie O’Connell Review Reese, Sam V. H. Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Louisiana State UP, 2019. O ne of jazz music’s central paradoxes is how it is both an individual expression of improvisation and a traditional and historically rooted call and response between group members. Another inherent duality is the notion that jazz is joyous and uplifting (think of the great Louis Armstrong, the Swing music of Count Basie, or the compositions of Duke Ellington) and also lonely (as in the mournful strains Billie Holliday, the mysticism of John Coltrane, or the deep and abstracted chord dives that made Charlie Parker a genius). All of it is jazz: musicians alone and together creating an effusive spell of joy and pain that is distinctly American. While Sam V.H. Reese’s Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, & Loneliness navigates these dichotomies (the individual and the group; joy and sorrow), his critical tour de force does much more. By examining literal and structural appropriations of jazz in works of fiction and autobiography, Reese considers a multitude: short stories, novels, the autobiographies of Ellington and Charles Mingus, and works by contemporary writers like Toni Morrison and Zadie Smith, all in an effort to understand how the reciprocal conversation that is jazz is revealed in the literary psyche to communicate a connected theme of loneliness. An expert in mid-20th century countercultural literary forms, Reese takes on complexities within complexities. For instance, it is not just jazz music and literature that are complicated, but loneliness itself. He writes, “Loneliness…is not singular; it can be used to describe a range of states of isolation and solitude” (12). To that point, the author closely analyzes literary works to see how jazz reveals itself in them and how the presence of jazz expresses jazz’s unique and multi-varied manifestation of loneliness. On the surface, jazz is a participatory form of storytelling by the group, but when the soloist steps out to improvise, she or he is at once an individual who can be lonely and also part of a collective expression of loneliness made manifest by the music and, by extension, the literary works that use the images and structures of jazz. Reese writes, “Jazz has the ability to recreate experiences for the audience, as they listen, through an act of improvisation that mirrors the affective turn of the spoken narrative” (20). Thus, the music and the literary works are interlaced as if they are infinity mirrors reflecting upon each other and on the audiences who encounter them. Palpably, Reese’s project is highly ambitious, perhaps in large part because understanding jazz is such a complex (and at the same time, simple and readily available) process: alas, more contradictions. For instance, we know that jazz changed and that it changes from its ancestries in the “recognizable New Orleans style…that was largely improvised, polyphonic music rooted in the tonality of the blues” (Reese 17). The mellifluent panorama Reese plays for us takes us from Congo Square and brass band parades, to big band swing, to the bebop melodies of Miles Davis, to the counterculture expressions of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, to bossa nova and fusion from other countries, to now. Even this discussion is a huge oversimplification, all of which is to say that talking about jazz is complex and comparing it to literature even more so. Through it all, Reese claims that expressions of jazz in literature become increasingly lonelier as we move out of what F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the Jazz Age (the 1920s and 30s) and into more abstract expressionist variations of the form, when jazz increasingly lost its popularity and became more subculture than mainstream. Just as young people were making a move toward rock and roll, jazz was moving in on itself and isolating in complex and unconventional spaces, after which it moved overseas and continued to morph into long stretches of escape and retrospection. Reese organizes his chapters by looking at important literary motifs: the jazz short story, the way masculinity and femininity are depicted, the lonely jazz performer, and the inward glance of the jazz musician on him or herself. In pursuing this framework, Reese’s readers encounter familiar works of literature by Fitzgerald, Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston, and less familiar ones (such as Eudora Welty’s “Powerhouse”). We discover writers who used jazz to “capture the effect of improvisation through storytelling” (45) and others who help us experience the isolation and sadness of the blues. Reese cites jazz literature scholar A. Yemisi Jimoh’s distinction between the two: they are “differentiated by the number of voices. Blues focuses on a single voice: jazz is polyphonic” (qtd. in Reese 85). For example, in James Baldwin’s exemplary jazz short story “Sonny’s Blues,” we meet Sonny, whom we learn faces the struggles of Charlie 58 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Julie O’Connell • Review: Blue Notes Parker, Miles Davis, and Billie Holliday rolled into one, and this leads us to consider how the individual, the soloist, the one who is different and lonely, emerges from the crowd in the face of heroin addiction and poverty. Isolated and trapped inside of himself, Sonny’s pain serves as a fountain from which he draws when he plays music with others in the story. It is also a place we can draw from to relieve our own discomfort. Simply stated, Sonny gets out of his isolation when he plays with other musicians. Baldwin writes, “The dry, low, black man said something awful of the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, and Creole answered, commenting now and then” (862). Likewise, Reese explains that in The Invisible Man, we are told that Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator spans historical expressions of the loneliness of jazz in that he likes the “poetry” (23) of Louis Armstrong but also listens to and synthesizes music much as a bebop improviser does. Interestingly, Reese notes Ellison’s disdain for bebop by pointing out the fundamental difference between Ellison’s narrator and the bebop musician: the invisible man does not know he is invisible, while the bepop artist self-consciously and solipsistically does. In a chapter entitled “Lonely Women,” Reese unpacks the overwhelmingly masculine aesthetic model of jazz and the expression of female agency and loneliness in the face of institutionalized patriarchal and racial oppression, and he does this, in part, by looking at female authors, female characters within jazz literature, and female jazz musicians. Not only does Reese raise issues with regards to the gendered constraints of the musical form, but he also describes the limits of the romanticized white experience of jazz as it is revealed in Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me.” He spends time examining Toni Morrison’s Jazz and not only discusses how Morrison’s reader is invited to listen in and engage with the narrative much in the same way that the jazz audience member communally listens but also describes the problem this creates for Morrison and his use of her for his larger discussion: “by emphasizing community, it neglects the loneliness and isolation that is at the heart of Jazz” (76). Generally speaking, Reese does not describe loneliness as an isolating experience as much as an expansion on the part of the listener who experiences jazz (and jazz literature, for that matter) alone. We see this ‘opening out’ (my words) in the autobiographies of Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, the latter of whom composed melodies right up until his death. When autobiography is interpreted in terms of loneliness, it becomes easier to confront one’s own loneliness in the same way that reading helps the reader encounter solitude. “We read to know that we are not alone,” often attributed to C.S. Lewis, but actually said by the character of C.S. Lewis in the William Nicholson madefor-TV film Shadowlands. One can reflect on the loneliness Duke Ellington felt as he traveled the American landscape speaking the “language…[that] expresses more than just sound” (Reese 141), chasing after work, and then internalizing the collective nature of this loneliness, as jazz lost its popularity over the course of the 20th century and more and more musicians were forced to find audiences across the country and abroad. We feel the loneliness of Louis Armstrong singing “Hello, Dolly” and other songs the public wanted to hear, putting on a happy face (and some say a minstrel show) in the process. We find loneliness in Reese’s discussion of the fragments and unfinished pieces of Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, itself a “poetic meditation on pioneering jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden” (101), his novel breaking conventions in the same manner that Bolden’s Avant Garde music did. The interesting turn that Reese makes toward the end of his book is to consider how musicians like Ellington used literary forms (such as a fairy tale) in their retelling of the narrative of what jazz meant to them. He even goes as far as to connect narrative, loneliness, jazz autobiography, and auto-fiction, the latter of which serves to blur the lines between autobiography and fiction. In a sense, these personal histories perform much in the same way that jazz musicians do: creating and recreating the identities of the musicians themselves. Reese charts a similar course with Mingus by explaining the parallels between his autobiography and hyperbolic fantasy. Reese concludes his book by reflecting on how “jazz works not simply as cultural resource, but as a literary technique for writers to at once expand and complicate narratives of loneliness” (162), and it was at this point that I began to appreciate how his book is, in fact, his own jazz composition. His narrative moves away from literature that appropriates jazz to jazz musicians who appropriate literary devices and genres to communicate their messages. So many notes and ideas here; such a range of melody inspiring this reader to riff and recreate something well beyond a traditional scholarly review. Overall, this is a great book for modernists, short story and fiction aficionados, jazz fans (especially those who can delineate the music in all of its many subgenres), and those interested in the gendered, racialized, and psychological embeddings in jazz and in the literature that depicts it. Like jazz, loneliness itself is contradictory: it is collective (everyone feels it) and unique (each in her own way). To that end, Reese’s book helps all of us think about how jazz and literature symbiotically reveal loneliness, and the depth of meaning continues to expand “like gold to airy thinness beat” (Donne line 24). 59 �Julie O’Connell • Review: Blue Notes _____________________ Notes 1 In the spirit and freedom of jazz, I hope you will condone this (sentence) 'fragment.' Works Cited Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” James Baldwin: Early Novels and Short Stories, edited by Toni Morrison, Library of America, 1998, pp. 831-65. Donne, John. “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” Gleeditions, Gleeditions, LLC, 17 Apr. 2011, www.gleeditions. com. Nicholson, William. Shadowlands, BBC Wales, 1985. Reese, Sam V. H. Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, Louisiana State UP, 2019. 60 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Ben Fine THERE MIGHT BE WEASELS IN THE CHICKEN HOUSE 1. COUSIN MORRIS’S STEADY HAND “Benjie, I’m seventy-five years old. Want to see how steady my hand still is?” Morris asked me. “Sure” I answered and he opened the jacket of his fancy blue suit and drew a revolver from a shoulder holster. Then to demonstrate his steady hand he pointed the pistol and held it. I looked at the gun and told him how amazingly steady I thought his hand was but what I was really amazed at was that he was carrying a gun under his jacket like the tough guys in the movies. I was eight-years old and Morris was Morris Eisenstein, my grandfather’s first cousin, and the oldest of the Lebeaux and Eisenstein clan. At least once a month, usually on a Sunday afternoon, Morris came from his chicken farm in Vineland, New Jersey, to have dinner in Brighton. Morris and his wife Henrietta drove up in a big black Cadillac, the top-of-the-line model, and parked in front of our small bungalow. As they got out of their car, they were greeted like visiting royalty. As a young boy, I found Morris to be the most impressive man I’d ever seen. He was tall by LeBeaux standards, about five-ten or so, broad shouldered and muscular. He had long wavy silver gray hair that had once been jet black and he dressed like a movie star. Even as a youngster, I thought it odd that a chicken farmer drove a big Cadillac and always wore a fancy suit. In school, we were reading the Dick and Jane books and in them Farmer Brown always wore overalls. Morris though, came in a classy blue suit, always with a red rose in his lapel, nicer than anything my grandfather ever wore. His wife Henrietta had a fancy fur stole and glistening jewelry. They definitely fit with the Cadillac but not with the chicken farm. I asked my mother “Why does Cousin Morris dress like a millionaire?” She shrugged and answered, “He and Henrietta just like to dress well.” “But he’s a farmer, isn’t he?” I pressed her. “Farmers can dress well, can’t they? Besides he used to be a businessman in New York City” and with that she dismissed me. However, I also wondered why Cousin Morris, a chicken farmer, carried a gun under his suit jacket. My mother wouldn’t answer that, so when Cousin Morris left, after showing me his steady hand, I had to ask my grandfather. “Papa George, how come Cousin Morris carries a gun?” My grandfather, always cagey, knew how much an eight-year old needed to know and answered. “You know there might be weasels in the chicken house. You never know when he has to shoot something.” That was good enough for me at the time. As I got older, and Morris kept visiting I wondered more and more about the weasels he was shooting. 2. YOU HELP ME AND I’LL HELP YOU “Hey Moe, how are you?” Morris put down the heavy box he was carrying and looked at the three men standing by the rear door of Davidoff’s Dresses. “Hello, Mr. Buchalter” he answered and nodded at the man standing in the middle of the three. He was dressed in a starched short sleeve, white shirt and was wearing a tie. The man was slender and had the look of a bookkeeper or an accountant except for the outsized muscular arms that looked better fitted to a construction worker. He was flanked by the two others and Morris recognized one of them as Jake Shapiro. Everyone called Jake, Gurrah, since he growled when he spoke. “Mr. Buchalter? Come on Morris,” the man said, “we’ve been friends for years. Please, to you, it’s still Lepke.” Morris wiped sweat off his forehead and shook his head, “You’re a big shot now with the union Lep. You’re in white shirt and I’m still here schlepping boxes.” 61 �Ben Fine • There Might Be Weasels “I have a proposition to get you out of all this.” Lepke said and then walked closer and spoke so that only Morris could hear. “I know you have a bit of money out on the street. I want you to do that for me. You’ll be your own shy, but I help you out and you help me out.” Lepke extended his hand, actually a big paw, towards Morris. Morris tilted his head and shook the hand. It was 1923 and Morris “Moe” Eisenstein became a player in the loan shark world of New York. He was protected by Lepke Buchalter, one of the top mobsters in the city. There were fifteen children in the LeBeaux and Eisenstein families and Morris was the oldest of all. In Bucharest the two families had lived together and my grandfather, ten years his junior, idolized Morris. Morris was bigger than all the Lebeaux men of his generation except for George’s younger brother Lee, who was the odd-sized family giant; Morris was muscular and broad shouldered like all the boys, with a thick head of wavy black hair. He came to the U.S. in 1902, sometime ahead of my grandfather, and rather than going through Boston and settling down in New England like the first wave of LeBeaux’s, he took the more traditional route through Ellis Island. Living on the Lower East Side with few real skills, he first worked as a laborer in the garment industry, which at that time was mostly composed of sweatshops in the southern part of Manhattan. He was tough and ambitious as well as business savvy and started earning a decent side living as a loan shark. Then, allied with his friend from the garment trades, Louis Buchalter, known by his Yiddish nickname Lepke, he purchased a dry-cleaning shop in Brooklyn and moved to East New York, a neighborhood in the eastern part of Brooklyn. By the mid-twenties he had expanded both the shark business and the dry cleaning. He now owned a string of dry cleaner shops, throughout Brooklyn, and was one of top “shy’s” around. Shylock, shy, or shark, were the common street expressions for a loan shark. 3. BROWNSVILLE COWBOYS Morris walked out of his dry-cleaning shop on Pitkin Avenue and immediately heard the annoying voice. “Hey, Eisenstein I have a message for you.” It was Shoe Schwartz, a scrawny, acne-scarred runner for the Abe Rellis mob. Shoe was one of the hundreds of secondary characters and hangers on that were attached to organized crime in the nineteen thirties. They did little jobs for little money. Shoe continued “Abe don’t like it, you layin’ out so much cash in dis neighborhood. He wants a cut, fashaysht?” “Hey Shoe,” Morris answered. “Why don’t you get a job up to your intelligence – like cleaning toilets with your tongue.” “Ha, Ha, Eisenstein, you think you’re funny. What do I tell Abe?” “You tell Abe, I’m just a businessman. I have no fight with him or the Ambergs or the Shapiros. I work with Lepke and I put cash wherever I want. If he doesn’t like it he can talk to Lepke. I’m sure Abe doesn’t want a fight with Lep or Lucky or Meyer.” Brownsville and East New York of the twenties and thirties were akin to the old Wild West, with many gangs jockeying for racketeering positions. Abe Rellis headed a gang out of Rose’s Midnight Café in Brownsville that became the nucleus of Murder Incorporated. They fought for the top spot in the underworld of Eastern Brooklyn with the Ambergs and the Shapiros in almost constant gangland warfare, involving shootings and kidnappings. Morris, although a tough shark, was more businessman than thug. He maintained his independence and perhaps his life, through his friendship with Lepke, a mob boss that the other Brownsville cowboys were afraid to anger. Moe Eisenstein with the dry cleaners and loan sharking made a ton of money in the twenties and moved to a mansion in Far Rockaway, a quiet Long Island suburb. My grandfather and his brother-in-law Misha Seltzer had both done well in the booming economic environment of the twenties and both owned nice small homes in Brooklyn. However, neither house compared to Morris's manse which had two stories and a large stone staircase in the front leading to a double door entryway. In the late twenties, every other Sunday, the LeBeaux’s from Brighton and the Seltzers from Prospect Park, would drive, in Misha’s car, out to Far Rockaway to have dinner with Cousin Morris and his family. The Far Rockaway house had a large circular driveway and after driving up to the front door, one of Morris’s “associates” would take your car. If the associate didn’t know you, he might pat you down. 62 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Ben Fine • There Might Be Weasels 4. I’D RATHER BE POOR BUT HONEST During the twenties, my grandfather Papa George had moved from milk truck driver to shop steward and dues collector for the milk driver’s union, a precursor to the teamsters’ union. With a bigger salary from the union, he managed to save enough to open a small breakfast and lunch counter-type restaurant on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, across from Macy’s. For several years he was riding high, but then, like for most of the country, the bottom fell out. He lost the restaurant and there was no work to go back to. Reduced to fishing in nearby Sheepshead Bay for dinners, and picking up whatever odd jobs he could find, he was desperate. “Ray,” he told my grandmother. “I have to go to Morris.” My grandma loved Morris personally but was wary of getting involved with anything illegal. “Georgie, you know how I feel about that. What about Misha? He’s still afloat.” Misha Seltzer was married to George’s younger sister Mary. He was a big Russian with a big smile who in his older years morphed into Maurice Chevalier’s long lost twin brother. Misha’s business, selling sundries drugstore to drugstore, was surviving the Depression. “I can’t ask Misha for more, Ray. He’s given too much already. Besides us he paid the taxes for Lee and Alex and the farm in Massachusetts. I have to ask Morris.” “Do what you have to do.” Ray finally told him reluctantly. George arranged to meet Morris at his main dry-cleaning shop on Pitkin Avenue. Although it was only fifteen miles from Brighton Beach to Brownsville, without a car it required a subway ride and then two buses and took over an hour. George was hot and exhausted when he finally got to Pitkin Avenue. He fought his way through the crowds of shoppers looking at the sidewalk clothing displays and at the pushcarts and made it to Morris's store. He stepped inside. Morris hugged him and led him to the back office. Morris, always what my grandfather called a “spiffy dresser” took off his sport jacket and hung it on a coat rack. He then removed a shoulder holster with a revolver and hung these next to the jacket. George looked knowingly at the pistol. Having t was part of Morris’s work. “Morris did I ever show you the pearl handled revolver I used to carry on union collections?” “No, but I know all about it,” Morris answered. “I’ve heard the story of you saving Misha – hiding behind the curtain.” Morris and George then shared a short laugh. “So, Georgie what can I do for you that you had to come all the way out here without a car?” Morris asked. George at first avoided looking directly at his cousin and looked down at his own feet but then looked up at Morris and answered: “I’m desperate. You know I haven’t had steady work in three years. I already lost my three rental properties and Misha had to pay my taxes last year. He doesn’t have it to help me this year and if I don’t pay, I’m going to lose my own house.” Morris shook his head and held out his hand to start to talk. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner. You know I wouldn’t let you lose your house.” “I couldn’t come before. This is tough for me, Morris – I’m a proud man. It was hard enough asking Misha. Misha by the way also paid the taxes for Alex and Lee out on the farm.” Morris sat down at his desk. He pulled out a small iron box. “I told you, Georgie. I won’t let you lose your house. How much do you need?” “Five hundred dollars.” Morris opened the box and took out a large wad of cash. He then counted out five hundred dollars in mostly twenties and handed it to George. George again looked down at the floor as he put the money in his wallet. Five years earlier, George thought, five hundred dollars was easy money; now, he had to scrounge for it just to save his home. Morris again shook his head. George looked crestfallen so Morris said to his cousin. “Look, Georgie, don’t feel bad – it’s not your fault. I’m happy I can help.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Georgie, why don’t you come to work for me? You’ll do the same thing you did for the Driver’s Union, collect money.” “I don’t know, Morris, I’ll have to talk to Ray. You know how she feels about anything that might get me in trouble.” “Talk to her then, the offer is real. Georgie, we’re family. Even if you don’t work for me, I’ll still help you out. Just ask me.” It was an appealing offer for someone who hadn’t worked in some time. My grandmother Ray was adamant though about George not working for Morris. “Georgie, I love Morris, but I’d rather be poor but honest.” My grandfather never worked for his adored older cousin but somehow managed to survive the depression as an honest man. He eventually found work as a technician for Primo Drugs in the late thirties. 63 �Ben Fine • There Might Be Weasels 5. VINELAND, NEW JERSEY? “A chicken farm, Morris? What the hell do you know about chicken farming?” My grandfather asked. Morris had shown up unexpectedly in Brighton Beach on a Saturday afternoon in 1941. George invited him inside for coffee, but Morris said that they had to talk privately so they went to the backyard of the bungalow and sat underneath the grape arbor. “That’s why there’s hired help,” Morris answered. “I sold all the cleaning shops and I’m moving there. This fekokteh (screwed-up) thing with Dewey is out of control and this is a good time for me to change addresses. That momser (bastard) Dewey is an anti-Semite. See how he’s going after Lepke. I tell you Georgie its killing all of us.” “But Vineland, New Jersey? Where the hell is that? I never even heard of it.” George asked him. “It’s south Jersey maybe only a hundred miles from here. I bought a big farm and it would surprise you but there’s a lot of lantzmen (Jews) down there. The fresh air is good and I’ve been in the city too long.” Morris shrugged his shoulders in a sign of exhaustion. George shook his head, not believing what he was hearing. “Morris, you’ve been in the city your whole life, even in Bucharest. You don’t know anything about farming.” “That’s why I’m here Georgie. I want you to come also – you know farming. I’ll pay you well, you know that.” Georgie thought for a moment but then shook his head. “Morris, I’d love to help you, but I can’t leave here. Ray would never move. We have Jeff and Sonny and Ray’s cousins and friends. She just wouldn’t go. Besides I’m starting a business with Misha.” George diplomatically left out any of his wife’s reservations about Morris's less than legal activities. “What kind of business?” “I’m making witch hazel and hair tonic in the back garage. Misha is going to sell it to his druggists.” “You need a still for witch hazel. You have a still here, Georgie?” Morris asked. “I set one up, right in the back garage.” He pointed to his left just beyond the end of the last grape vine. Morris flicked his head and winked. “If you had that still fifteen-years ago, we could have cleaned up during Prohibition. Oh well. I’d wish you’d reconsider about my farm, but either way I’m off to Vineland. Don’t forget we’re still family George.” He got up and hugged his cousin and then left. Loan sharks handle economic downturns very well; people still gamble and people still need to borrow money. For Morris, no matter how his dry-cleaning shops were doing, throughout the depression he was making money and living well. Then, Tom Dewey entered the picture with his stated goal of cleaning up New York City. Dewey, starting in the mid thirties as a federal prosecutor and then as the New York district attorney, was a staunch establishment Protestant, who in his words, was protecting New York from the crime wave perpetrated by the Italians and Jews. Most of the major mob leaders were indicted and convicted. Lucky Luciano went to prison on a trumped-up prostitution charge. Abe Rellis turned state’s evidence against Lepke and the rest of Murder Incorporated and Lepke became the last major mob leader to go to the electric chair. Rellis never got to testify. Under police protection in the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, he managed to “commit suicide” by jumping out of the window. Dewey used his notoriety as a gangbuster to become governor of New York and then have two failed presidential campaigns. Whether Morris was indicted or not was never clear or at least never spoken about within my family. However, in the midst of the Dewey rampage, Morris suddenly left the dry-cleaning business to become a chicken farmer in Vineland, New Jersey where he stayed the rest of his life. 6. POOR BUT HONEST REDUX I learned about Morris's true profession when I was 12, about a year or so after Castro revealed himself as a Communist and the press began berating those who had supported the anti-Batista revolution. The revelations about Morris came in a sort of round about fashion. Political discussions were commonplace at our small kitchen dinner table, but always from a left-leaning perspective. My mother’s maternal grandfather had been a fiery Socialist in Russia and then a major unionist once in New York. He worked with the beginnings of the Clothing Workers Unions, and he influenced both his daughter and my mother who became an active young Socialist in the thirties. My Papa George was a union man through and through. In our kitchen, on a summer night in 1960, a radio program blared against the leftist fools who had supported Castro. My mother, anger and annoyance in her voice, spoke out. 64 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Ben Fine • There Might Be Weasels “We’re getting what we deserve with Castro. We supported all those tin pot fascists like Batista and Franco and Trujillo. Castro is our payback” my mother asserted. To her, her opinions were correct, and there was no other position that could possibly be correct. “You’re right about the Fascists, Sonny,” Papa George countered to my mother, “but in Cuba, Batista was only a puppet. Lansky ran Cuba. He had the girls and the gambling. He owned the hotels and he had Batista in his pocket. Everybody knew that.” Then, my grandma chimed in and threw Cousin Morris right out into the open. “They ran Lansky out of Cuba. Like I told you so many times Georgie, it’s better to be poor but honest. Look at Lepke. He went to the electric chair, and they sent Luciano back to Italy and now Lansky is out of Cuba. Look at poor Morris stuck all these years down in Vineland.” During these discussions, mostly I just listened. However, Morris's name made me enter the fray and ask: “Cousin Morris? He’s just a farmer. Right?” My grandfather, maybe not thinking, or maybe thinking that now I was old enough to understand, answered: “Well way back when, before he was a farmer, he was a loan shark. He was a partner of Lepke.” Once the truth was out, and there was nothing to hide, bit by bit, I heard all the Morris stories: the string of dry cleaners, the loan sharking, the meeting and partnership with Lepke, the fights with Rellis and the big house on Long Island. Did this knowledge shock me or make me think less of Cousin Morris? Not really. It was somewhat exciting having a family member connected with organized crime and by age 12 I knew quite a bit about wise guys. Brighton Beach in the fifties was at a crossroads of American Jewish gangster history. It was far away from the ghetto poverty of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, where the fine line between street criminality, gambling, gangs and extortion, wasn’t that distinct from just ordinary daily living, but Brighton wasn’t the suburbs either. It was far closer in character to the Brownsville of the thirties, where Murder Incorporated held sway, than to Great Neck, Long Island, or to Scarsdale, New York. There were bookies, sharks and wise guys around, and these characters and their businesses were just a part of life. A group of gamblers and bookies hung out each morning in front of the Forty Thieves, a candy store on Brighton Beach Avenue underneath the elevated trains. In the evenings this group went together to the Club Twenty Eight, a night club on Ocean Parkway, where my grandfather was the bartender. There was another bookie who conducted his business at the Fifth Street Pool Parlor, an unsavory looking pool hall on the corner of Brighton Fifth Street and Brighton Beach Avenue. A separate collection of Italian and Irish wise guys congregated at the Coney Island Social Club on Neptune Avenue, around the corner from our bungalow. On a larger frame, I knew the names Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and especially Lepke Buchalter, not as movie characters, but as men that my grandfather, in his union work, ran into and rubbed shoulders with. Actually, my mother and father had dinner with Meyer Lansky in Cuba in 1950, but that’s part of an entirely different story. So, despite all the new knowledge, Cousin Morris was as impressive to me as ever. 7. COINS, LEGACY AND MORRIS'S GUN During the years that Morris lived in Vineland, he and my grandfather remained close. At least once a month, Morris and Henrietta drove from New Jersey to have dinner at our house in Brighton Beach. They came in his big Cadillac – he in his fancy suit, his red rose, and his gun, and Henrietta in her fur and jewels. Cousin Morris discovered that I was a coin collector and we bonded over this. Each Sunday that he came, he handed me two or three Indian Head pennies. This became our little connection. After one Sunday dinner he said to me, “Benjie, I have a bunch of complete sets of coins. I have a nice complete collection of Liberty Silver dollars – you can have them – I’ll bring them sometime.” I was ecstatic both for the promise of getting a complete set of silver dollars and for the fact that it came from impressive Cousin Morris. Cousin Morris died when I was fifteen, in his eighties of natural causes, and I lost out on his silver dollar collection. When he passed away, Henrietta said to my mother, “Sonny, Morris had a nice coin collection that he wanted Benjie to have. They’re too heavy for me, but when Benjie starts to drive have him come down to Vineland and pick them up.” Unfortunately, Henrietta passed away soon afterwards and before I could drive. My mother mentioned the coin collection to their son Bernie, who said, no way, the coin collection was too valuable. So, Bernie kept the coins and my legacy from Cousin Morris was just the stories. However, now I realize why Cousin Morris carried a gun. 65 �Gary Beck Motifs Fractured America We elected a President, a minority, who persuaded coal miners jobs would come back. They were desperate, believed a liar who seemed convincing. Others fell for his lies and still believe him despite broken promises. His corrupt cohorts elected and appointed, too ignorant to know the science of climate change, economics and do not care the gifts to the rich are thefts from the poor and undermine democracy. Our once promising country once known to the world as the land of opportunity, now beset on all sides by an army of enemies foreign and domestic, assaulting our security. Our leaders elected and appointed let hatred fester at home, dissension provoke danger abroad. The servants of power are generously rewarded for betraying the people while the lords of profit feast on our abundance while the rest of us fear for the future of our children. 66 Wa tchung Review • Volume 4 �Eric Scholz Piss W hen the temperature stays below freezing, Piss is better off getting herself arrested than spending the night outdoors. She knows she shouldn’t steal. Stealing sets a bad example for the baby. She wonders where she left the baby. She hopes she’ll get the nice cop, the one who used to load her bags into the trunk of his car, careful not to damage the books or jewelry she collects for the baby. So gentle, Piss would say, as the cop helped her into the backseat and reached around her body to buckle her in. Such a gentleman. Nights when the shelter was full, he drove her to the hospital and used her name at check-in. The nurses would wash her hair and cut her nails. Sometimes, a nurse helped Piss look for the baby and sat with her, folding shiny applesauce lids into bows and rings. Piss stops in front of Good-Fortune Liquors and looks inside. Her breath fogs the window. The store looks empty; the shop owner must be in the bathroom. Enough time to steal a beer before getting caught stealing a beer. Wind blows through a hole near the armpit of Piss’s coat. She makes for the door, but it catches the corner of her walker. She almost goes down on her back, like one of those last tortoises she’s seen on the animal channel, too bigbodied to flip itself right. A tote bag with one stapled-on handle falls to the ground, sprouting a meadow of flowery scrubs across the sidewalk. She squats to pick them up. Her bad foot throbs. She tries again for the door. The air is warm inside the store. Piss checks down the first aisle, then the second, and pulls a big blue can from the fridge and stashes it in her bag. She pulls a second and cracks it open. “Yoo-hoo!” The bathroom door creaks open and then slams. “No no no. You do not come in here.” The shopkeeper charges toward Piss, his finger raised like a sword. He waves it in her face. “I told you, do not come in here.” Piss bats the finger from her face, spilling beer on the floor. “You cannot have that unless you have money,” the shopkeeper says. “I have money,” Piss says. “I have lots of money, but it’s for the baby, for college, and you can’t have it.” “Do not start with that,” the shop owner says, adjusting his agal. “If you have no money then get out.” “I’ll die out there,” Piss says. “Then go to the shelter.” “I can’t go there,” Piss says. “It’s full’a crazies.” She hobbles toward the bathroom. “They steal your shoes.” The shopkeeper looks down at the plastic contraptions velcroed to Piss’s feet. His glasses slide down his nose. “Nobody will want those ugly things.” Piss pushes her walker into the shopkeeper’s knees and drinks from the can. The shopkeeper grabs at the can, but Piss swats away his hand, spilling beer on the floor. “Have you seen my baby?” “You have no baby.” Piss charges toward the bathroom, splashing beer with each hobble. “Are you hiding her in there?” The shopkeeper stands between Piss and the door. “Get out,” he says. “You are not a customer. You are not welcome in this store.” The wind howls. “Call the cops,” she says. “Have me arrested.” “If you stop stealing my liquor, maybe they’ll let you in the shelter.” Piss ploughs past the shop owner, knocking bottles from the shelf. “Go bother somebody else,” the shopkeeper says, snatching the open can from Piss’s hand. Piss stumbles. Her bad foot falls in a puddle of beer, and her legs fly out from under her. The shop owner reaches to catch her, but the back of her head slams on the floor. ••••• 67 �Eric Scholz • Piss Piss wakes up in a hospital bed. A tube clipped to her nose blows cold oxygen. She pushes the nurse-call button. Nothing. She pushes the button again and shouts until a nurse appears in the doorway. The nurse’s sleeves are pushed up under her scrubs, exposing the uncolored koi tattoos on her forearms. She ducks her head out of the room. “The dump-off’s awake.” The tattooed nurse shoves a wheelchair to the side of Piss’s bed. “Get in,” she says. “You’re fine, but the doctor wants you washed up.” “My head hurts,” Piss says. The nurse unclips the oxygen tube. “There’s no concussion, and we gave you pain killers. Do you remember we gave you painkillers?” Piss smiles. “Who are you?” The nurse mumbles, “Jesus.” “Good to meet you, Nurse Christ.” Piss rolls out of the bed and onto the wheelchair. “What about the diabetes?” “You already had your insulin. Do you remember fighting the orderlies?” Piss is quiet. The nurse looks at her cell phone, bumping Piss against the walls as she wheels her through the hallway. They pass through a coffee lounge where sad, busy people sit by themselves on loveseats. “I’m thirsty,” Piss says. “You’re fine,” the nurse says. She looks up from her phone and at the back of Piss’s head. “You can have something later.” “What about the baby?” Piss says. The nurse either doesn’t hear or chooses to ignore the question. They reach the showers. The nurse looks for shampoo behind a stacked row of bar soaps. “Have you seen my baby?” The nurse groans. “This again?” Her phone buzzes. “So popular,” Piss says. The nurse sighs. “My friend’s trying to bring her shithead boyfriend on our girls’ trip.” “Just shoot the shit,” Piss says. The nurse looks. Piss points her finger like a gun. “I mean get to know him.” The nurse’s phone vibrates. “Hello?” A man passes by the door to the hallway. “Sir,” Piss hisses. “Sir.” The nurse pats down a stack of towels and shakes her head. “Of course, he cheated on you. He’s a shithead.” Piss stands, toddles into the hallway. “Yap, yap, yap.” Without the walker, she lands hard on her toes, radiating pain through her shins. Stepping with her heels eases the pain from the toe-stubs. The hallway is quiet. The nurse-station at the end of the hall is abandoned. Piss crosses the hall and finds an old woman sleeping upright with an IV drip in her arm. “Ma’am,” Piss says. “Excuse me, Ma’am.” The woman opens an eye and closes it. Piss steps forward. “Excuse me.” She spreads her legs wide like she’s about to underhand a bowling ball and ducks her head below her knees to look under the bed. Her hair stays greased to her face and the sides of her neck. The old woman opens her eyes. Piss straightens. “Have you seen my baby?” The woman’s mouth hangs open. Her eyes close. Piss turns around and peeks her head back into the hallway. A nurse has taken her post at the nurse station, but she’s typing at a computer. Piss limps through the hall away from the nurse station and ducks into a room with a cracked-open door. The room is filled with hot machines. Piss hears the nurse swearing on the other side of the door. “Where the fuck did you go?” Piss watches through the cracked door as the nurse walks the wrong way down the hallway. 68 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �Eric Scholz • Piss With the nurse gone, Piss can finally find her baby. She shuffles across the hall and enters a room with a sleeping old man. Like the woman in the other room, he is upright. Like the woman, he has an IV drip. Piss looks under his bed and limps toward the back of his room, past a curtain that has been hung to turn a single room into a double. On the other side of the curtain is another bed, with another upright man, this one awake. “Sir,” Piss says. “Sir. Have you seen my baby?” The man sits up straighter in his bed. “I don’t know anything about your baby.” He hangs his feet over the edge of the bed. “Do you need help finding your room?” “I’m looking for my baby,” Piss says. “The bastards, the dirty motherfuckers, are hiding her.” The man puts his hand on Piss’s shoulder. Piss charges forward into the man. Both fall to the floor. The bed slams into one of the poles holding up the curtain. The curtain lands on the bed with the sleeping man. A nurse appears at the door, followed by a security guard who stands outside the door yelling into his walkie talkie. The tattooed nurse reappears, holding a little bottle of shampoo. She pushes the guard aside and frees the old man from under the curtain. She wheels his bed out of the room. Piss’s hands find a bedpan and throw it across the room. “They’re hiding my baby,” she says, her voice a shriek. The bedpan clatters on the floor. More security guards appear and push the tattooed nurse aside. None of the guards will make the first move. Piss is a biter. The tattooed nurse pushes back through the security guards. She kneels on the floor with Piss. “It’s okay,” she says. “Let’s get up and get you washed.” “Not without the baby,” Piss says. The nurse stands. An older doctor in a white coat enters the room. “If you don’t get up, we’ll have to call the police,” he says. “Call them,” Piss says. “Call them, and I’ll have you all arrested for kidnapping.” Saliva drips from her chin. She grabs the nurse around the knees and pulls her to the floor. Three security guards rush in and pin Piss’s arms and legs to the floor, but Piss sinks her teeth into the nurse’s arm on the way down, reddening the koi tattoos. The nurse shouts. The guards twist Piss’s arms behind her back and drag her through the halls and out the back door. “Nurse Christ!” she screams. The guards restrain Piss until she stops struggling. “Get outta here,” they say. “You’re not in the system.” ••••• The afternoon air is not as cold as the night before. Piss walks through the park and notices a group of twentysomethings smoking outside the Orville Café. The one in the baseball cap will usually give her loose cigarettes. In front of the group, Piss leans into her walker and drops her bags. Baseball Cap turns toward her. “Piss,” he says. “How the fuck have you been?” “I’m gonna wash my hair,” she says. After Piss was expelled from the hospital, the tattooed nurse found her wandering around the parking lot and returned the walker and bags. Piss apologized to the nurse for biting, and the nurse offered her the little bottle of shampoo. The girls in the group laugh. Another guy takes a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and holds one out in Piss’s direction. “Glad to hear it, Piss. Wanna bum a stoge?” Piss takes the cigarette and holds it to her lips with both hands. One of the girls hands her a white lighter. Piss’s hands shake as she thumbs at the flint wheel. She drops the lighter and picks it back up. “Careful, Piss,” a different girl says. “White lighters are bad luck.” Piss screams like a person doing an impression of a screaming person and drops the lighter a second time. She stomps at the lighter and falls. She catches her walker and hangs by the armpits. Laughter erupts from the smokers, and the group heads inside. Piss teeters back to her feet and follows them in. Inside, the café is warm but drafty with a front door that has never quite closed right. A small fishbowl sits atop the milk bar a few feet from the drafty door. The smokers have settled into a cluster of frumpy sofas at the back of the café. One of the guys is showing two of the girls how to roll a cigarette. Two baristas are standing behind the bar. One 69 �Eric Scholz • Piss curly-haired, the other in tight jeans. “Excuse me,” Piss says. “Has anyone seen my baby?” Curly-Hair runs to the bathroom and locks himself inside. Once Piss gets in there, she’s impossible to get out. Tight Jeans swings her legs over the counter. “Ma’am, are you okay?” The smokers laugh. A customer gets up from his table and leaves. Piss points at her foot. “My diabetes.” “Why don’t you sit down? Is there someone I can call for you?” Piss’s eyes wander across the room. “I’m looking for my baby. Have you seen my baby?” The first cigarette guy says, “Don’t bother. She’s fucking bonkers.” “Well, what are we supposed to do?” the barista asks. “I don’t know. People usually just call the cops.” “But what do they do with her?” Piss grabs a customer by the sleeve. “Excuse me, sir. Have you seen my baby?” The customer brushes the hand away and leaves the shop. Piss grabs at another customer. Tight Jeans asks Piss, “What’s your baby’s name?” Piss lets go of the customer. “Julie,” she answers. “Julie? That’s such a pretty name.” “Julie is so pretty,” Piss says. “Such a pretty baby.” “You know, this little girl needs a name,” Tight Jeans says, gesturing to the goldfish on the milk bar. “Can we call her Julie?” Piss says. “I think Julie would be a beautiful name for her.” Piss knocks over a bottle of honey as she presses her face against the top of the fishbowl. “She’s so pretty,” Piss says. Tight Jeans agrees. “Julie’s hungry,” Piss says rummaging through her bag. She finds the broken cigarette under an empty blue can. Tight Jeans watches as Piss holds the cigarette over the fishbowl and shakes. Bits of tobacco fall and float at the top of the water. The fish flicks its tail and takes a piece of tobacco into its mouth. The fish stills for a moment and the tobacco flake shoots out of its mouth. The fish flicks its tail and takes the tobacco flake into its mouth, stills, and spits it back out, flicks its tail and takes the tobacco flake into its mouth, stills, and spits it back out, flicks its tail and takes the tobacco flake into its mouth, stills, spits, and flicks. 70 Watchung Review • Volume 4 �71 �Watchung Review is supported by the New Jersey College English Association � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Previous Volumes