CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Claire B. Potter
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
And Now, You Will Be Judged By History: Perry v. Schwarzenegger
On their way home from the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in San Diego, colleagues Nancy Cott and George Chauncey stopped off to give expert testimony on behalf of the litigants in Perry. A short account of their work yesterday can be found here.
Both scholars were among the authors of The Historian's Brief submitted in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas (2003). This was the Supreme Court decision that voided all laws prohibiting sodomy between consenting adults. Yesterday, Chauncey historicized the ways in which the law has persistently demonized queer people, while Cott gave the complex rendition of the history of marriage that one might expect and hope for from her. Perhaps because the right has finally ceded gay people's right to exist outside a prison cell but a smart woman is always annoying, several accounts of yesterday's proceedings suggest that Chauncey's testimony went relatively unchallenged and Cott bore the brunt of the defense's attack.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The American Historical Association Annual Meeting: To Boycott Or Not To Boycott?
As many of you are aware, in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8 in California, the decision to hold the Annual 2010 Meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) became controversial. This is because the meeting will be held at a hotel owned by someone who helped to finance the campaign to repeal reforms that had extended political marriage to same-sex couples (nothing required churches to perform those marriages.) Your favorite Radical is, as we speak, making final preparations to depart for South Africa, where such discrimination is viewed in the national constitution as the equivalent of racism and is banned. What I think is also important to note is that South Africa is reputedly still a very homophobic country where, if it were put to a vote, discrimination against GLBTI (the I stands for "intersex" and is always included by South African queer activists) would be perfectly legal, although the return of institutionalized racism would not be. One legacy of colonialism is the strong association among many black South Africans between homosexuality and the general deformation of indigenous societies by white European domination. And yet, according to the reading I have done to date, the political legacy of apartheid is such that human rights are not viewed as something one puts to a vote. The fact that the vast majority of South African citizens are deeply homophobic is not, according to the constitution, justification for enshrining it in law that would re-classify South Africans in invidious ways that their -- and our -- history has shown to be disastrous.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
In Search Of The History That Hasn't Happened: Caster Semenya, Gender Barriers And The Right To Compete
Several weeks ago, while watching some early round matches at the U.S. Open, a friend of mine and I were discussing how unbelievably homophobic the world of sports still is. Of course, you might point out that we were having this conversation at the National Tennis Center, which is named after a lesbian. Billie Jean King first fought sexism in the sport; was then forced out of the closet; and then, having lost all her sponsorships, competed as an out lesbian. Subsequently, Martina Navratilova came out, lost her sponsorships, competed as an out lesbian and -- also like King-- became a serious player in the political and legal struggle for civil equality.
But friends, this boundary in tennis was broken thirty years ago. Where is the history of queer athletes moving into the mainstream that should have followed? Can you name more than one or two openly queer tennis players who are active today? Are any of them men? Can you name any other active, queer professional athletes, men or women? Even though there must be hundreds -- thousands -- of them?
Monday, August 24, 2009
The Case Of The Scottish Pardon: Or, Extremism in Defense Of Liberty Is Becoming A Little Tiresome
Forty-five years ago this summer, while accepting the Republican party's presidential nomination at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Barry Goldwater thundered: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" The party's newly visible right wing exploded in cheers while liberal delegates headed for the nearest bar. Although Goldwater was soundly hammered that November by Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Goldwater campaign is considered by many historians to have been a turning point in the process of recrafting right-wing extremism in America as "the mainstream." Numerous regional conservatisms, organized around everything from white supremacy, to reversing progressive schooling trends, to opposing all forms of taxation, began to federate in a concerted, and ultimately successful, effort to take over the Republican party apparatus. As they did it, they altered the language of politics profoundly.
Goldwater's speech terrified members of his own party into voting Democratic; it began the polarizing realignment that we are living with today, in which liberals have no home among Republicans and conservative Democrats play a decisive role in brokering policies advocated by the liberal wing of their own party. But this famous phrase, (branded political suicide at the time) was, as it turned out, a harbinger of a deft conservative strategy, forged in the white supremacist south, in Father Coughlin's New Deal demagoguery, in Joe McCarthy's hearing room, and in the pamphlets mailed by Richard Viguerie that promised the death of the American family itself. Extremism would, in the end, sell a range of policies and attitudes to a broader public over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Extremism, as it has become business as usual across the political spectrum, has also brought us to a point of absurdity in American history where we, the people, are being urged to cancel scheduled trips to Scotland and to boycott Scottish products (name three Scottish products that you consume regularly -- oops! time is up!) to protest the Scottish government's release of Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, convicted in 2001 as the Lockerbie Bomber. Two hundred seventy people were killed when Pan Am Flight 103 plunged into the town of Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21 1988 in one of the most deadly terrorist attacks in history.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Work That Euphemism Does: A Few Thoughts on the Recent History of Abortion
As I composed yesterday's immoderate post on abortion, one of the things on my mind was that the various factions that loosely make up what we call conservatism's "right wing" have won at least one battle in the culture war. Over the last twenty five years, anti-abortion lobbyists have succeeded in altering how we speak about abortion; in turn pro-abortion lobbyists have altered their political speech. Both strategies have had negative consequences for women's right to terminate a pregnancy and have shaped the history of abortion through language. For example, I favor, unequivocally, the right of all women to choose whether or not they wish to bring a fetus to term. And yet the ideological space, and the language to speak in that space, has become severely limited since Roe v. Wade voided state restrictions on abortion in 1973.
In cruising websites yesterday to write my post, I became specifically interested in the various derivations of the words "choice," "abortion," and "life" as they described political stances and strategies. The abuse, or misuse, of the word "life" receives the most attention from the left, particularly in the wake of tragedies like the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, although many in the pro-life camp have hastened to condemn the taking of all lives. But many who oppose abortion are single issue folks, who are enthusiastic about capital punishment, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so on. These people have been schooled to call themselves "pro-life": and yet, what they are is anti-abortion. Their politics do not encompass, as one of my faithful conservative readers, JackDanielsBlack noted in his dissent, an overall philosophy that supports all lives, unequivocally. "I think the real problem with many pro-lifers," Jack writes, "is that they fail to embrace the 'seamless garment' or 'consistent life' ethic expounded by the late Cardinal Bernardin -- if you're against abortion, you should also be against capital punishment, euthenasia, most (if not all) warfare, etc."
Monday, May 11, 2009
It's a Girl! A Recent And Partial History of the Nomination of Women To The Supreme Court
The aging Supreme Court was but one motivation for Democrats to unify behind Barack Obama last fall, but it was a big one. In the next eight years, barring an unexpected death or retirement, "Court watchers" (as those of us who care about such things are called in the media) expect up to three vacancies among the tightly divided Supremes. I'm not sure anyone was counting Associate Justice David Souter, 69, as one of the three potential vacancies. But he is setting a good example for the legal world (not to mention all of us in the academic world) by not hanging around until he has to be scraped off the floor to write an opinion.
And so, we await Barack's first nominee.
As during the last ideological upheaval in 1980, the Obama administration is hinting that the next Associate Justice will be a woman, and probably for the same reason: to firmly suture "women" (a majority of whom support abortion, aka, "the right to choose") to a liberal/moderate political agenda. Leading nominees are majority, but not entirely, female; several are of color. My current fave raves are Sonia Sotomayor, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit; Elena Kagan, Solicitor General, U.S. Justice Department; and Cass Sunstein. The Second is a strong route to the Court, so I would say Sotomayor is a leading contender; Kagan clerked for Thurgood Marshall and has just sailed through a confirmation hearing; and I love Cass Sunstein but -- aside from being a man which probably makes him a poor pick if you have already made gestures toward saying there should be more women on the court -- he is a liberal public intellectual, which means a nightmare confirmation hearing. There's nothing like having written a lot of smart books to get Jeff Sessions' back up (does anyone but me ever mistake the new ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee for Orrin Hatch? I find the resemblance uncanny.)
But let's get back to the nominating process itself, and the Ghosts of Conservatives Past which happen to be occupying my home office right now. Article Two of the Constitution (section 2, otherwise known as the "appointments clause" says that "The President may also appoint judges, ambassadors, consuls, ministers and other officers with the advice and consent of the Senate. By law, however, Congress may allow the President, heads of executive departments, or the courts to appoint inferior officials." If you are a conservative, you know where I'm heading, because you read the Constitution very carefully: but do the rest of you give up?
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Will Barack's Little Dog Bo Be Next? Annals of Tearoom Journalism
I was going to write about something completely different today. Then, when pulling together my URL's for that post, I ran into this commentary at Gawker headlined: "Bill O'Reilly Wonders Why Gay New York Times Reporter Acts So Gay."
Needless to say, I clicked, since it is part of my DNA to click on all things that promise gayness.
Apparently Jeff Zeleny, a New York Times reporter who is, in fact, gay, asked Barack Obama what has most "enchanted" him about being President in the first 100 days (along with what has surprised and humbled him.) Media Matters was the first to report what millions of Fox News viewers saw shortly afterwards, which was an exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Bernard Goldberg that you can view for yourself here, along with Zeleny's original remarks:
Goldberg went on at length about the lack of masculinity displayed by the reporter as O'Reilly chuckled in a particularly manly fashion. Goldberg then asserted that no one would have asked "John Wayne presidents like FDR, Truman or Eisenhower if they were 'enchanted.'"
I do beg to differ.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
All About Eve: Eve Sedgwick, May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009
As I am a historian and not a literary scholar, I don't have much of a claim to memorialize Eve Sedgwick, who died Sunday after a long and brave struggle with cancer. I didn't know her -- I knew of her, I read her, and our paths intersected here and there. And yet there are often certain figures present at the founding of a field who provide glimmers of insight and inspiration, lighting candles in corners of the intellectual world previously dark. They have a disproportionate effect on all scholarship, reaching far beyond their own discipline or specialty to alter the way we think.
Eve was one of these people, and historians have felt her influence in profound ways. While many scholars would look at Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet as Eve's most crucial contributions to queer studies, for me it was Tendencies, a group of essays that were like little diamonds strewn on the grass, gesturing at where the rest of us might go. All you had to do was pick them up and run with them. And we have.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Teach This Book! Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Part 3 Of A Blogfest)
Note: those of you who have not yet discovered this series may wish to begin with the post by Notorious, PH.D. (March 2), and proceed to Historiann's contribution (March 9).
OK, I admit it. I am one of those twentieth century feminist historians Judith Bennett is speaking to in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), historians who have given little thought to the practice of premodern history. No -- wait just a gol' durn minute. I have. Here goes.
My first response to Bennett's assertion "that feminist history should be more attentive to premodern eras" (3) is: right on. My second is that this intervention has implications for the writing and teaching of history more generally. I teach in a program and in a department, both of which assert the importance of the distant past to the not-so-distant past. You can look at the two core courses yourself, both of which I have taught, and both of which take me out of my comfort zone. One is AMST/LAST200, "Colonialism and Its Consequences in the Americas," for which I read and teach not only colonial North American history, but early modern European and colonial Latin American history (applause, por favor.) The other, which I haven't taught in a while, but helped to revise last year, is required for the history major, "Issues in Contemporary Historiography," usually referred to by its barracks name, "History 362."
Friday, January 23, 2009
Barack Is (Not) Responsible For Making All Things Good: The Radical Disputes The Proposal That There Is An "Obama Effect" On Education
Much as I would like Barack Obama to sprinkle magic dust all over the country, fixing racism, poverty, and absolutely everything we hated about the Bushies, each policy question will have to be tackled thoughtfully, one by one. Today's topic is the national education agenda.
A crucial issue here is the continuing mania for using public school children as a vast pool of customers for corporations specializing in both mass curriculum distribution and in the endless testing through which students -- on pain of humiliation, summer school, and being held back a grade -- are asked to regurgitate these educational products. (I use the phrase "educational products" consciously: currently, a standard curriculum in the United States is to education what Cheez Whiz is to cheese.) The sad backstory of test scores going up in any given school are the number of students who drop out, or are encouraged to drop out, because of their low test scores.
No Child Left Behind, built around a testing mandate, is a great example of "an expensive government program" (to use a distinction our new President made himself) that does not work and ought to be eliminated. While few federal tax dollars are spent directly on NCLB, its unfunded mandates put a huge financial burden on state and local education budgets. Under systems driven by high-stakes testing, students learn by rote, rather than becoming critical thinkers, many students drop out altogether rather than be left back a grade, and we are no closer to creating equal access to a good education than we were a decade ago. And yet, today's New York Times buries this issue with yet another assertion that the symbolism of an Obama presidency, rather than radical policy interventions, will fix what is broken in our nation by lifting up the self-esteem of African-American people. Our paper of record reports that education researchers tested a group of children before and after the presidential nomination. The test before the nomination demonstrated what is commonly called the "achievement gap" between African-American and white students. But in the test after the inauguration, presumably because their self-esteem was raised by watching an African -American man become president, the African-American students stepped up their game. On that second test, racial differences in the children's test scores were "statistically insignificant."
Monday, January 5, 2009
Hello, American Historical Association: My Name Is The Tenured Radical And I Am Here To Recruit You
So today I am home from the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, and instead of re-reading job candidate files, I am thinking about transgender activist Sylvia Rae Rivera, who is pictured on the left (as she always was.) I am thinking about San Francisco organizer Harvey Milk, pictured below, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office and the person from whom I have ripped off my title. As those who have seen the new Gus Van Sant movie Milk or read Randy Shilts's book The Mayor of Castro Street know, the signature opening line of Harvey's political speeches played on the stereotype of predatory criminal queers obsessed with "recruiting" the young into their "lifestyle." He would hop up on whatever platform was available and screech, "My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!"
Thanks to a commenter, one of my first reads today (after the New York Times) was this post by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed, reporting on the failed resolution at the AHA business meeting that sought to move next year's conference from the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego. The hotel is owned by Doug Manchester, a financial backer of the Proposition Eight campaign that successfully (for now) ended gay marriage in the state of California. Instead, a compromise resolution was passed that would create programming to address the issues at stake in Prop 8, averting the financial disaster that moving the conference would be. Note to allies who see this as a spineless outcome: the Organization of American Historians is still paying for a similar, politically well-intentioned and financially disastrous, decision in 2005.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Letter to Barack: Five Things A New President Could Do To Create Change -- And Change History
Dear Barack,
You've sent me so many emails for the past year that I feel like I know you. Things are looking good, aren't they? So let's take a few minutes and plan for the first Hundred Days. As a scholar of the New Deal, I think I am the perfect person to help you establish an agenda. But first some background from a more recent history.
Back in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, what we now call the conservative "base" hoped that Reagan would act by presidential decree to address pressing issues that conservatives, many of whom were activist Christian evangelicals, called a "family values" agenda. This included critical constitutional issues like banning abortion, making school prayer legal, ending desegregation (otherwise known by segregationists as "forced busing"), and making flag desecration a criminal offense. It's probably worth noting that, since we can all probably acknowledge that the Reagan revolution was a turning point in the history of the United States, Reagan did not use his power this way, and that this agenda was never moved forward in the absolute way conservatives wanted. In fact, Reagan did little for the first Hundred Days, and for a number of days thereafter.
Friday, August 29, 2008
What Would Eleanor Roosevelt Do?
Last night, after a week of watching the Democratic Party proudly raise its liberal banner years after George H.W. Bush operatives tagged the Dukakis campaign with "the L word," I am happy to say that, whatever happens in this election, the spirits of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey once again walk the land. And in a black man's body, no less. The Democratic party is reclaiming its commitment to working people, to the frail among us, and to the rule of law.
I had many thoughts, but prominent among them was: "That I should live to see this day."
While some may not have felt Obama brought anything more specific to his acceptance speech than he has to any speech, I disagree. What use has it ever been to hear that a president will spend eight billion dollars on this problem, and three trillion on that? When has money been more critical to an historical outcome than a sense of mission? Obama committed to guaranteed health insurance; ending the war in Iraq; saving social security; quality public education; reforming the tax code to stop the flow of money to the wealthy. He committed to addressing the great national shame of foreclosure and poverty; to the future of military veterans who currently return from combat and are cut loose as quickly as possible to fend for themselves in confusion and pain.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Remembering Del Martin, 1921-2008
I would say that I am saddened to hear of the death of activist Del Martin, except that she was 87, had been ill for some time, and lived an extraordinary and accomplished life, so I find just thinking about her uplifting. Plaintiffs in the California marriage case, (Martin is on the left with life partner Phyllis Lyon, in the above photo taken in 1972), the couple was first in line to get married when that case was successfully concluded earlier this year. Like many queer people who add constantly to kin networks soldered together with love and political commitment, I don't think that Phyllis will be alone. Furthermore, I would say that since Del Martin is an excellent example of a woman who left no unfinished business, we might even want to pause for a celebration.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
G-L-O-R-I-A! Gloria!
When I was at at history camp a few weeks back, about six or seven people asked me if I had read Amy Erdman Farrell's fabulous book Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). And after a while I just said yes -- why? Because a) Amy was actually at history camp, and I was afraid she would find out; and b) it was clear by the third time I said "no" that I should have read it ten years ago when it first came out; that it was a problem that could be easily corrected when no one was looking; and that having not read it portrayed me (falsely) as a profoundly ignorant person.
OK -- so I just finished reading Yours In Sisterhood. And you should read it too if you haven't, if only because you will teach second wave feminism better -- whether in a whole course or in a single lecture -- if you do. By focusing on Ms., Farrell is able to address the apparent "fragmentation" of feminism in the 1970's as an effect of its success; as well as an effect of the difficulty of creating a distinctively "feminist" media presence in a patriarchal commercial environment. Farrell helped me, in particular, figure out why it might be OK to jettison all the labels that describe different strands of the movement in the 1970's, and look instead at what people did on the ground, as opposed to what they claimed as their theory or ideology. As she shows, not only did multiple feminist constituencies discover "feminisms" that were useful to them, they were able to debate them with each other -- and with dominant voices in the movement, in the pages of Ms. As Farrell shows, the magazine became an arena for conflict, as well as for imaginative identification, among feminists -- and she does it without being too heavy-handed with her theoretical framework (this is a compliment that becomes significant later in the post.)
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Until Florida Is Free, None Of Us Is Free
One of the workshops at History Camp featured three wonderful young southern historians who are writing about late twentieth-century political mobilizations in the former Confederacy. A conversation which I love to have, with colleagues and with students, is: does the South still cohere as a region? If so, what is "regional" about it and -- given the vast emigration of black and white southerners to northern and western industrial cities in the twentieth century, what characteristics of the "south" are shared by other places? And to what extent does the contemporary South draw on its past for distinctiveness?
I thought of our conversation when I saw this story on the Associated Press wire, which describes an attack last night on city-owned vehicles in Orlando, Florida. Cars were sprayed with anti-Obama slogans such as "Obama smokes crack" and what the AP reporter described as "a racial epithet."
Funny the reporter did not consider "Obama smokes crack" to be a racial epithet.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do? A Few Meditations on Women's History and Women in History
How might Natalie Davis have responded to the recent flap-a-roonie sparked by an obscure English blogger? With dignity, humor and razor sharp intelligence, that's how.
Here at Cliopatria, Ralph Luker has chided said blogger for ducking in and out of a fight he started. Speaking from experience, I would say that new bloggers do make mistakes, although I'm not sure that Rusticus would agree he made one. He may be uncertain, though. The posts and the blog itself go down periodically, only to reappear with the same ideas, sometimes framed differently, but sometimes not. For a brief period Mercurius Rusticus was up but closed to all but invited guests, perhaps because a group of female Picts waving scythes and staves (and I might add, only recently have Picts, male or female, been welcome in the profession at all because they are prone to such behavior) had gathered outside his office. With this I sympathize: I had a Pict problem myself a while back, and it took months to untangle.
Luker, my colleague and fellow Cliopatrician, notes that this discussion is:
a missed opportunity, because underlying MR's bitterness and snark were some issues that ought be discussed: 1) in what ways, if any, has the growth of women's history broadened and deepened our understanding of history? 2) has its growth drained resources from other fields of historical inquiry and negatively affected the careers of male historians? and 3) person for person, have female historians been as productive as their male counterparts? (I have heard the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese make the argument that they have not.)
I might add to Ralph's observation that Betsy, as her intimates called this intelligent, accomplished and hard-edged scholar, also lost a lot of friends (men and women) not because she became a neocon in her final years (which she did) but because such opinions had little basis in fact and seemed only designed for self-promotion. But Ralph's point about a missed opportunity echoes a question, asked by a certain Mouse: "would you consider doing a post on some of what you consider to be the highlights of achievements by women historians, and/or in gender history, in the past few years? Why does the Berkshire conference matter?"
Well, it would take too long to really do it right, but let me give it a shot.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Day 1 at the Berks: Let the Receptions Begin
Today was reception after reception after reception, since most of the action doesn't start until tomorrow. We were received at 4:00 by Feminist Studies, where longtime editor Claire Moses stood up on a table and recounted for all of us the history of the journal and the history of the journal's presence at the Berkshire Conference: it went on for a while, and occasionally the babble of the crowd would get too loud and someone would tell everyone to hush so we could listen to Claire's speech. Part of what was being said on my side of the room was several of us realizing that we had had our first articles published in FS. So lost was I in that nostalgic moment that I admit I didn't hear much of the rest, except that the editors have very beautiful notebooks with designs from old FS issues on them that they are selling at the conference. They are also making the entire run of FS available on the internet, which is very fabulous. Part of the talking problem is that Thursday evening at the Berks is always more or less where people find each other, confirm dates for later in the weekend, say hello, exchange information about their vital signs, how many parents they have left and whether they got tenure/a job/married/pregnant/a book contract.
Claire was still up on the table when I left. I was more than anxious as to how she would get down, because I know I wouldn't be able to get down from a high table with my knees in the shape they are, so I beetled off to the Town Hall Beer garden with my entourage instead and left the worrying to others.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Where Are the Historians on the Social Science Research Network?
When I saw the headline for this story in today's New York Times ("Now Professors Get Their Star Rankings Too"), I immediately assumed it was another article about my least favorite marketing tool disguised as a consumer advocate for students. But no: it was about the Social Science Research Network, a site that can be joined for free and where research -- refereed and self-published -- is distributed. According to author Noam Cohen, SSRN has been around since 1994, and the downloadable documents "include pensees, abstracts, informal arguments, rough drafts and working papers, up to the finished products you might find in academic journals." There is also a page that lists the site's top authors, although the owners say that producing stars is not one of their main objectives. Yet rankings there are, and we bloggers do particularly well, shamelessly self-promoting individuals as we tend to be, since we helpfully provide links to our work whenever possible.
But where are the historians at SSRN?
Friday, May 2, 2008
Charles Tilly, May 20, 1929 – April 29, 2008
As Ralph Luker noted yesterday, historian and sociologist Charles Tilly died on April 29, 2008, of lymphoma. He was 78 years old and will be greatly missed by the many students and colleagues he touched over the years.
Chuck was one of the great intellects of our time: as importantly, he was endlessly excited about ideas, a scholar who was an indefatigable teacher, a man who not only taught you how to do history, but encouraged you to find your own new ways to do it. While I wouldn't call him a radical (because it is too reductive -- he was so much more than that), he was the exact opposite of a conservative, an interdisciplinary thinker who believed that knowledge production could evolve as fast as the human mind could accomodate new paradigms and new ideas. He encouraged his students to find new things to think about, but more importantly, to find new ways to think. As a teacher he was generous to a fault, and he had a quiet but firm disdain for academic pettiness and cruelty, that rarely manifested itself in open conflict with a scholar behaving badly, but rather in redressing the wrong done by showering kindness, and whatever resources he had available, on those who had been subjected to the most common forms of departmental and institutional abuse.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Feminism and the History of Everyday Rage: A Review
A Vietnam-era suburban housewife is standing in front of a kitchen counter. She stares calmly and without expression into the camera, as if she is the star of her own cooking show. “Knife,” she intones, displaying a knife in her right hand. With short, violent strokes she stabs the cutting board in front of her. She puts the knife aside. “Measuring cup,” she intones, and begins to flip an invisible liquid into the face of an invisible person. “Nutcracker,” she says, holding up the new implement and snapping it together sharply three or four times before setting it down.
Ouch. “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975), one of five short performance pieces produced and filmed by Lynda Begler, shows how ordinary kitchen implements express a woman’s rage, or what Betty Friedan famously called “the problem that has no name.” But Friedan – and other feminist writers – are considerably better known than the many female visual artists who worked for women’s liberation from 1965 on. If you are interested in an understudied, and dramatic, cultural history of second wave feminism, run – do not walk – to see “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” an exhibit at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Thinking War, Thinking History: A Short Review Essay
Perhaps it is an effect of the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, or perhaps it is the impending retirement of my American Studies colleague Richard Slotkin, but I seem to be reading more about war and violence this year than I have in the last decade.
Following on William A. Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), a book that sought to understand how the project of democracy could be simultaneously well intentioned and destructive, a few scholars of the United States – Slotkin among them -- proposed that the history of violence was central to the formation of an “American” identity. Critical to this was a re-examination of the intellectual relationship between American democracy and the frontier, articulated originally by Frederick Jackson Turner (1893). Slotkin, for example, argued over the course of three volumes that it was not the frontier itself, but rather the naturalization of violence particular to the “frontier” -- on the Great Plains, in southeast Asia, or wherever Euro-Americans encountered racial “others” -- that shaped and re-shaped American culture and politics. His most recent book, The Lost Battalion: the Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (2005) explores another, paradoxical, feature of this history of national violence: the exclusion of African Americans from democratic rights in 1919, despite black soldiers’ hopes that participation in World War I might result in full citizenship.
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