Family Lore Research Articles

Family Lore, a Variant of Uncertain Significance, andCADASIL.

An infant presents in extremis. After the medical team stabilizes him, the race is on to figure out why he got so sick in the first place. The consulting genetics team thinks that it is unlikely his problems are due to a genetic cause, but his extreme, confounding presentation is enough to justify trio exome sequencing. When the results reveal an unexpected, paternally inherited variant of uncertain significance (VUS) in NOTCH3, fresh questions arise. The infant's presenting symptoms and descriptive diagnoses, including hematemesis, epistaxis, and gastric ulcers, certainly do not fit the mold of CADASIL. However, closer inspection of his family history yields tantalizing clues: a father and paternal grandfather with seizures, and apaternal grandfather with unexplained mood disturbances in middle age. Combining details gleaned from the family history and medical literature, the clinical genetics and laboratory genetics team collaborated, reclassified the VUS as likely pathogenic, and offered a new unifying diagnosis to explain much of the family's lore.

Proximity, Family Lore, and False Claims to an Algonquin Identity

This article examines the type of family lore that leads white Canadians and Americans to claim Indigenous identities. Using a case-study approach, I demonstrate how 2000 descendants of a French-Canadian couple, born in the early 1800s near Montréal, joined one of the largest land claims in Canadian history as “Algonquins”. The tools of critical settler family history provide the necessary theoretical scaffolding to unpack how genealogical and geographical proximity to Indigenous people in the past are the bases for the family lore that propelled these individuals to become card-carrying, voting members of the land claim. Despite continued opposition to their inclusion by the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, the only federally recognized Algonquin community involved in the land claim, these fake Algonquins remained potential land claim beneficiaries for over two decades, until an independent tribunal finally removed them in 2023. Family lore resolves the crisis in the family: no longer the colonizers responsible for Indigenous displacement and dispossession, white pretendians become the victims of settler colonial violence.

EXPLORING THE CULINARY TRAIL OF OLD DELHI

Forget the tourist traps! This expedition dives deep into the labyrinthine heart of Old Delhi, where history whispers on every spice. Laden breeze. Our odyssey begins at Karim's, a legendary haunt were generations. Old recipes cast a spell with their melt in your mouth mutton curries.Next, we weave through the labyrinthine by lanes of Matia Mahal. Here, the air hangs heavy with the intoxicating aroma of sizzling kebabs at Quereshi Kabab, a secret haven for succulent skewers passed down through family lore. Paratha Wali Gali, a hidden lane teeming with life, beckons with its endless symphony of crispy, stuffed parathas – a testament to the city's mastery of flatbreads. But Old Delhi is more than just Savory delights. Padam Chaat Corner and Bishan Swaroop Chaat Bhandar are vibrant explosions of flavour, a kaleidoscope of textures and tangy chutneys that redefine Delhi's famed street food culture. Our journey wouldn't be complete without a sweet surrender. Chaina Ram Sindhi Halwai's legendary jalebis, their syrupy coils a fiery orange against the bustling backdrop, are pure indulgence. To cleanse the palate, Natraj Dahi Bhalla offers a symphony of creamy yogurt dumplings and tangy chutneys – a refreshing counterpoint. This exploration transcends mere taste buds. We peel back the layers of history, uncovering the stories woven into each dish. We will delve into the cultural influences that shaped Old Delhi's cuisine, the significance of each spice, and the generations old traditions that bind families and street vendors in a delicious communion. This paper isn't just a guide; it's an invitation. Join us on an immersive adventure, where every bite unravels the heart and soul of this historic city. Let Old Delhi whisper its secrets to you, one delicious morsel at a time. Key words: Old Delhi, cuisine, culinary tourism history, cultural tourism

Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis Robert D. Bland (bio) Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) Freedoms Gained and Lost enters a rich and robust public conversation over the current meaning of the Reconstruction era. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis, the collection of essays emerged from the 2018 Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World conference that commemorated the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s 1868 constitution—a powerful document that expressed a deep faith in the promise of multiracial democracy in the United States. Covering a wide geographical and chronological terrain, the essays in Freedoms Gained and Lost, read together, offer a shift away from the “splendid failure” narrative that has largely defined the field of Reconstruction studies for the last three decades. Far from a story of incremental progress or heroic struggle, Freedoms Gained and Lost highlights the “limits to [the] radical experiment” (2), as well as the “uniquely baleful influences” that doomed the effort (5). In the book’s introduction, Domby and Lewis see the uneven and harrowing nature of the road to freedom as the unifying theme of the Reconstruction era. “Focusing solely on the serial expansion of freedom obscures the way freedoms have been gained and lost repeatedly in American history—and the complex struggles [End Page 271] to maintain them,” they lament. The essays in this volume were written in the shadow of the 2015 Charleston Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting and the violent 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and a well-earned weariness permeates the collection and informs the skepticism toward the previous generation’s more hopeful historiographical synthesis. Speaking to both historiographical debates and Reconstruction’s place in U.S. public history, Bruce E. Baker’s thoughtful “Whom Is Reconstruction For?” seeks to tackle the longer history of Reconstruction’s usable past. “The emergence of a ‘Third Reconstruction’ can be seen as an abandonment of the hopes of the ‘Second Reconstruction,’” Baker argues, “but it is equally a hopeful marker of the beginning of something” (22). Reflecting on the polyphonic nature of Reconstruction’s memory and the varying interpretations in family lore, local communities, textbooks, digital history projects, and the elite press, the essay turns to the critical question: did any of these usable pasts have a stable center? Drawing from the work of southern labor historians, Baker suggests that Reconstruction’s usable past—especially in its “Second Reconstruction” and “Third Reconstruction” iterations—calls upon working-class people to work across barriers of race and age to build a better world. Most of the essays in the collection diverge from Baker’s hopeful synthesis and, when read in total, present the Reconstruction era as a moment of mixed promise and Pyrrhic victory. Hilary N. Green’s essay on Alabama’s postbellum education system dampens the usual optimism around the rise of Black schools in the South by highlighting the distance between imagined policy and the difficult work of implementation. Michael W. Fitzgerald’s essay on Black militias in Alabama’s western Black Belt finds a culture of Black armed resistance that bolstered local chapters of the Republican Party against recalcitrant Ku Klux Klan violence—albeit in a larger political landscape wherein the statewide Republican Party lost control of the statehouse. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s essay on northern-born soldiers serving in the United States Colored Troops demonstrates that, for many veterans, the homecoming experience was fraught with lingering trauma, discriminatory labor markets, and difficulty securing federal pensions at the same rates as their white peers. Examining postbellum infanticide cases in the North and the South, Felicity Turner finds a discriminatory and racist legal system, which demonstrated that the much-heralded new civil rights protections “proved messy and complicated for Black women across the nation” (137). In addition to shifting away from stories that champion the push for civil rights and the imaginative and flexible nature of grassroots democracy, [End Page 272] Freedoms Gained and Lost points to...

Burning the Breeze: Three Generations of Women in the American West

In Burning the Breeze, Lisa Hendrickson tells the stories of three women who came of age in the American West, from the first generation who followed the Overland Trail to the third-generation in twentieth-century Montana. They charted paths common to white women in the West, yet the author brings out their individuality through firsthand narratives, oral histories, family scrapbooks, and newspapers. What emerges, powerfully, are the ways individual successes were not accomplished alone. If a person fulfilled their ambition, it was because they recruited family members to their enterprise and asked for help from friends, neighbors, mentors, and benefactors. A dense web of family and social networks form the backdrop to the stories in this book.In 1863, the widow Lizzie Nave Martin headed West with a large wagon train. She fled both her late husband's debts and wartime violence in Missouri. Hendrickson dramatizes Lizzie's experience crossing the plains by using the diaries of women in similar circumstances, as well as family lore shared by fourth-generation daughter Sherry Stursberg. The author tracks Lizzie's progress from Missouri to Warm Springs Creek, in the Crow country. Like many women in settler colonial towns, Lizzie earned her keep cooking and sewing for lodgers. Her story demonstrates themes common to Rocky Mountain history: white encroachment on Indigenous lands, the grandeur of Montana landscapes, mineral booms and busts, and women's economic survival through the service industries.Lizzie Martin's daughter Lulu married a cattle rancher in Crow country, “Doc” Bembrick. Lulu's story speaks for many second-generation white settlers who took up agriculture on the plains. Doc and Lulu's Circle J provided a subsistence living, with its vegetable garden, plum orchard, livestock, and carp pond. Lulu worked as a co-provider with Doc, harvesting and processing the food, sewing clothes and linens, tending the animals, training horses, and welcoming visitors, including Indigenous people. The Bembricks shared meals with everyone who came by, a tradition of hospitality that presaged their daughter Julia's career as a dude ranch owner.Julia Bembrick Bennett, a third-generation daughter, brings readers into the mid-twentieth-century West. Raised on a ranch, she knew her way around horses, kitchens, and people. At age twenty-two, she married Anson Bennett and they took over management of the Circle J. But Anson disliked ranching. Instead, he started and failed at several businesses, as did Julia. Their checkered early careers echo the stories of many settlers in Montana who didn't make it in a difficult regional economy.The most interesting chapters explore Julia's life as a dude rancher in the 1930s and 1940s. By 1931, she had divorced Anson and hatched a plan to start a tourist ranch. Julia's audacity was striking: she went to New York City during the Great Depression to recruit wealthy clients, without sufficient money for lodging, food, or creditors back in Montana. Her pattern of moving forward with a plan despite insufficient funds would be repeated several times over, as she built the Diamond J in Montana and the Diamond W in Arizona. But Julia survived crushing debt by asking for and accepting help from family members, friends, and wealthy patrons. Her charm and skill as a dude ranch proprietor carried the day.Of special interest to historians are glimpses of the early tourist industry in Montana: the selling of the West to easterners, the roles of Indigenous people in promoting tourism, and the economic fragility of dude ranching. Also of interest to historians is evidence of the ranch ethos of stoicism. If it sustained people through hard times, it also sometimes crippled people emotionally. Julia's daughter committed suicide, and her son-in-law took refuge in alcohol. These tragedies, too, are part of the western landscape and are told here with compassion and restraint. An excellent read, well researched, this book will have broad appeal to academics and lay persons alike.

Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of the Mothertongue Project Eds. Alex Halligey and Sara Matchett

Reviewed by: Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of the Mothertongue Project ed. by Alex Halligey and Sara Matchett Loren Kruger Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of the Mothertongue Project EDS. ALEX HALLIGEY AND SARA MATCHETT Modjaji Books, 2021. 255 pp. ISBN 9781928433163 paper. Promulgated in 1996, South Africa's democratic constitution is distinguished by its inclusion of social rights, including housing, healthcare, and environmental protection—in sum, its defense of well-being—alongside individual rights to equality before the law, regardless of ethnic affiliation, gender, or sexual orientation. Less well-known, but also introduced in 1996, the first democratic White Paper on Arts and Culture extended the remit for well-being to include access to and participation in the arts as a fundamental prerequisite for democracy. Together, these documents have inspired a generation of practitioners who combine art and activism, care and creation, dramaturgy and democratic participation. They argue that this embodied synthesis of work and play has the power to sustain, heal, and delight South Africans, even under conditions of endemic poverty, violence against women, gender minorities, and children and economic and other forms of inequity. The Mothertongue Project (MTP) is not the only organization that has responded to the constitutional aspiration to well-being, but it is unusual in that it was founded by women. While MTP's current associates include men, it has consistently focused on the performance and representation—in social as well as artistic realms—of women, or womxn, which some collaborators prefer as a way to include gender-queer people who identify with women, and all who, despite the gender equity mandated by the constitution, remain subject to patriarchal violence. Despite having to tackle formidable obstacles, the MTP has much to celebrate after twenty-one years of working to knit together the frayed connections between performance art and social activism. True to the organization's practice across the divisions marked by the terms mentioned above, this book offers "collaborative conversations" that honor different kinds of formal and informal expertise and lived experience in embodied practices of creation and care [End Page 188] in what MTP cofounder Sara Matchett calls "curating care" (180). In the spirit of collaboration, each chapter begins with excerpts of conversations that took place during the workshops that shaped this book. They are accompanied by vivid color photographs of key performances, equally colorful drawings that represent work in progress, or key themes such as the practices of healing psychological and physical wounds. The first and last performances that receive detailed attention in the book are avowedly artistic pieces by MTP cofounder Rehane Abrahams, which have played at international festivals and speak to texts and themes familiar to readers around the world. In addition to training at the University of Cape Town, Abrahams draws on family history as the descendant in part of KhoeSan, the portmanteau name identifying South Africa's first peoples, and in part of South Asian Muslims enslaved by the Dutch East India Company. What the Water Gave Me (2000) explored the role of mothers as keepers of family lore as well as the feminine forces associated with water in India and Africa. Although the piece was initially called Mothertongue to acknowledge the loss of native languages suffered by enslaved people and their creation of new languages such as Afrikaans, Mothertongue later came to name the organization that emerged from this first of many collaborations. In her most recent work discussed in the book, Womb of Fire, created for the 2018 International Festival of Theatre in Kerala (South India), Abrahams wove family history into a reinterpretation of the womb of fire that birthed Draupadi in the North Indian epic Mahabharatha and, by extension of the violence that has accompanied black and brown women in South Africa, figured in performance by Groot Katrien, an enslaved woman brought to the Cape in the seventeenth century from Dutch "possession" Batavia. Although Abrahams and Matchett might have addressed the friction between this epic of North Indian dominance and stories such as the Ramayana that capture the South Indian and Indonesian origins of many enslaved people at the Cape, and speak to the context of performance in Kerala, their dialogue and accompanying...

Shadow Work: Architecting While Black in British Guiana

My grandfather, Charles Eric Wilkinson, was a black architect-builder involved in major government-sponsored building and infrastructure projects in British Guiana from the 1930s to the 1970s. I place Wilkinson’s built work and its surviving archive of bookkeeping ledgers, letters, photographs, and architectural drawings in conversation with material from national archives in Guyana and England, adding oral histories from family members. White architects stationed in British Guiana and the Caribbean reported back to England about the “skilled craftsmen” (carpenters and building contractors) that they observed. Based on family lore and archives, I question the interactions between the supposed foreign “expert” architects and the local builders, seeking to document this period more accurately through architectural work that has remained in the shadows. The backdrop to my research is the rise of foreign-aided, self-help building schemes in British Guiana in 1954, the same year that Wilkinson endeavored to build a concrete house for his family. British and US architects were involved in British Guiana’s planning and housing development work. Howard Mackey, a Black American professor at Howard University, was on a team contributing to the self-help project. This period of Britain transitioning its so-called dependencies to self-sufficiencies provides an important context for understanding the role that black builders would play in shaping the built environment of the (independent) nation to come.

Relocating the future: biographical objects, aspiration, and repair in urban Taipei.

How might urban relocation unfold as a time of social reproduction? Taking the case of Zhongxin Village in Taipei, a military settlement that was relocated in 2016, I show in this article that while mainland Chinese veterans experienced the move with reluctance, their Taiwanese wives readily stepped up to bridge family histories. Offering new ethnography on 'family repair' and the arranging of ancestral altars, I suggest that loss is often not the only force at play when moving home. The Taiwanese wives of Zhongxin Village recount family stories that are elicited through their engagement with 'biographical objects'. They transmit family lore through daily acts of care even as they project aspirations for the futures of their descendants onto the furnishing of new flats. This marriage of materiality, aspiration, repair, and affect shows that relocation can encourage the social reproduction of the family and, for some, a move from remembrance to aspiration.

“What Really Happened?”: The Life and Death of Olivia Coombs

“What Really Happened?”: The Life and Death of Olivia Coombs

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

In The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature, Alison James reconsiders the history of French literature through the lens of the document. This critical and literary history of the document begins in naturalism, moving through André Gide’s journalistic and travel writing and surrealist and early ethnographic experiments. It concludes with postwar self-writing and testimonial fiction from World War II and the Rwandan genocide. Broadly construed, the “document” can evoke any textual, visual, or material object that is understood as evidence or index of the real, whether intentionally mobilized as a part of an archival record or retrospectively understood as a trace of the past. Theoretically, anything can be a “document,” a concept that has become popular in information science, as James notes. Functionally, James privileges certain forms, such as photography, fait divers, and other quasi-journalistic forms (notably Gide’s account of being a juror in the Souvenirs de la cour d’assises), as well as historical archives and oral history (like Marguerite Yourcenar’s investigation of regional archives and family lore). James claims that the documentary imagination in French literature is neglected, particularly with respect to analogous avant-garde movements or genres in other national literatures (think of early Anglo-American documentary or direct cinema). In her view, the French literary field “was singularly hostile” to documentation, particularly writers like Stéphane Mallarmé or Paul Valéry, whose claims to “pure literature” relied on a rejection of journalistic writing, or universel reportage (3). Unlike pure literature, the documentary impulse maintains the boundaries between fact and fiction, or real and imaginary, but points to their porousness, buttressing literature with material facts. If naturalist writers establish the model of the “human document” or documenting humanity and making use of humans as document, surrealists will draw on document as an antiliterary principle. While surrealists and Gide work in parallel to early ethnography, albeit in different ways, postwar writers like Yourcenar, Marguerite Duras, and Patrick Modiano are drawn to the archive as a depersonalized record the self.The book is itself a master exercise in documentation and abounds in archival gems, from unsettling material objects (think surrealist Jacques-André Boiffard’s enlarged photographs of toes) to the postwar magazine Esprit and early debates around documenting life in concentration camps. (The infamous case of Blanche Monnier, la séquestrée de Poitiers, whose story reverberates throughout the minds of Gide, Roland Barthes, and Nathalie Sarraute, is another good reminder that popular forms like the fait divers are not as distinct from high art or theory as we might imagine.) While James delves into understudied, secondary writings by major authors, she frequently rereads the canon, insisting that texts like Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, André Breton’s Nadja, or Duras’s La Douleur are not mere novels or autobiographies, but need a different generic label. A reader of the book may wonder why the documentary impulse had been whittled down to this particular, and somewhat unusual, corpus; James herself muses on the oddness of dedicating a whole chapter to Yourcenar, while only alluding to Barthes or Georges Perec. (Anne Brancky’s recent The Crimes of Marguerite Duras suggest that Duras merited her own chapter alongside Gide, given her mediatized persona and her interest in fait divers and other pop culture forms.) In the late twentieth century, one wonders if documentary fiction was not so much neglected as it went by different names or was attached to specific groups or mediums, such as ciné-réalité, ethnographic or cartographic fictions, or the field of everyday life studies, studied by Vincent Debaene and Michael Sheringham, among others. James’s assertion that documentary fiction is its own genre poses perennial questions about the nature of genre. Are generic categories broad frames that can be applied generously (Is the “novel” not an intentionally capacious category?), need they be modes of self-identification by writers or groups themselves (Would Gide or Yourcenar call themselves “documentarians”?), or are they explanatory categories forged from the outside, permitting a historical gaze (Should we differentiate self-writing from autofiction, from self-documentation?). If James purports, in part, to uncover an avant-garde tradition or impulse, the corpus is itself fairly canonical, or perhaps even conservative (Modiano, for instance, has been aggressively canonized in recent years). One could imagine including other forms of self-documentation, like Hervé Guibert’s filmic and literary testimony of his own death from AIDS-related illnesses or Jean-Jacques Schuhl’s cult classic Rose poussière, itself an archive of 1970s popular culture. Likewise, journalist-writers, like Olivier and Jean Rolin or François Bon, arguably dominate today’s French literary field and engage in experiments that echo those of André Gide. James mostly leaves behind her history as an Oulipo scholar, but one wonders if Oulipo might have made an appearance here. The book’s concluding glance at the literature of the Rwandan genocide was intriguing but brief—perhaps an indication of what James will be exploring in the future.

Unfinished Painting

Unfinished Painting

When Tía Ate the Telegram

This essay applies Ren Ellis Neyra’s concepts of defiance, solidarity, and mulitpoetic sensorial listening from The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) to the author’s own family story about how her great-aunt ate the telegram announcing her brother’s death in the Korean War. Through interpreting the story with multipoetic sensorial listening as a potential methodology, the author uncovers how this brief act so ingrained in her family lore might serve as a form of defiance against colonialism and militarization in Puerto Rico. The essay also questions what it means to have a productive form of defiance and protest. Overall, the author uses the story of her aunt eating the telegram to demonstrate how Ellis Neyra’s multipoetic sensorial listening could excavate alternative archives and ways of knowing left out of Western modernity.

In This Issue

In the opening essay of this edition of Utah Historical Quarterly, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich casts a critical eye on the memories handed down about the 1862 murder of Olivia Coombs in Beaver, Utah. Rather than dwell on the man who committed the crime, George Wood, Ulrich seeks to understand the episode through historical fragments and family stories. What emerges is a portrait of not only Olivia but also of her descendants, who struggled to remember and tell the unspeakable tale. Opening with Juanita Brooks's brief if incomplete reference to the murder in The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950), Ulrich masterfully interrogates snippets of tangled family lore and relationships, the connection between memory and storyteller, and the circumstances that motivate the retelling of stories such as the Coombs murder.The second essay introduces readers to Mabel Frazer and a sexual misconduct case directed against her male colleague in the University of Utah's Art Department. Based on information that her own students had confided in her, Mabel Frazer approached university president George Thomas in 1937 with claims that A. B. Wright had engaged in improper sexual conduct toward women students. Emily Larsen and Heather Belnap carefully walk readers through the context and contours of the claims, including the gender power dynamics that then privileged—and continue to privilege—Wright's version of events over Frazer's. The authors also document the negative repercussions that Frazer faced after filing the complaint with the university president.A caution to readers that these two articles may contain content disturbing to some readers—the first for depictions of murder, in this case of a sexual nature, and the second for descriptions of sexual misconduct and reproductions of nude artwork.The next two essays make varying associations between history and place. Brenda Scheer, a scholar of urban design and planning, contributes to the ongoing conversation in the pages of this journal about the configuration of Salt Lake City. Rather than look solely at the design and original layout, Scheer introduces readers to on-the-ground alterations within the city center. Based on the methods of urban morphology, which look at the elements of urban form and their changes over time, this piece provides compelling insights into what may be seen as disjuncture between original design and practical adaptations in Utah's capital city.In a somewhat like manner, James Swensen reflects on whether place names—in this case, biblical and LDS religious names—conformed to the realities and character of their associated towns or landforms. Swensen's subject is Daniel George's photographic documentary series God to Go West. Through the marriage of names, landscapes, and history, with Swensen as guide, readers will come away with deeply incised impressions of the “Mormon Landscape.”

Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross

Reviewed by: Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross Cara Rock-Singer Rachel B. Gross, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Rachel B. Gross’s Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice is a crucial intervention into what can best be described as doggedly normative narratives of religious authenticity that have dominated the scholarship, and popular understandings, of American Jewish religion. Within religious studies and Jewish studies, the problematic fit of Judaism into the white, Protestant-inflected category of religion is well-established. Historians of American religion have drawn out the extent to which narratives of religious declension are predicated on androcentric and racialized assumptions about what religion is and where, how, and by whom it is practiced. Nevertheless, in American Jewish studies, these narratives persist. Beyond the Synagogue draws on lived religion methodology to rethink the divide between Jewish religion and culture as well as history and memory. Gross defines religion “as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships,” adapting Robert Orsi’s and Kathryn Lofton’s emphases on “relationships and structures” that bind people to kin and community, both living and ancestral (6). In turn, Gross sets her sights on “the mundane practices” and seemingly secular institutions engaged in “buying and selling certain items [that] connect[] people to religious networks through [End Page 138] affective norms” (7). The book argues that practices of “nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish pasts function[] as a mitzvah (literally, commandment),” a term she uses expansively to reflect the way the category is invoked in Jewish law (halakha) as well as colloquially to refer to “good deed[s]” (7–8). Based on ethnographic participant-observation, interviews, and close readings of material culture and digital media, Gross tells a new story of American Judaism as it has developed from the 1970s to the present that privileges emotional rather than textual claims to Jewish authenticity. In doing so, Gross paints a more inclusive picture of the landscape of American Jewish religion. The first chapter positions American Jewish religion within twentieth- and twenty-first-century social scientific and historical narratives about the decline of religious institutions, rise of the “nones,” and secularism and assimilation. Gross also historicizes nostalgia within modern gendered histories of Protestant piety, the white ethnic revivals of the 1960s, and US public history’s increasingly affective engagement with the past. She identifies the 1970s as a period of transformation in “how [American Jewish nostalgia] has been organized and standardized and how it has become a central way of being Jewish” (32). After laying out her methodological intervention and theorizing the category of nostalgia, the book proceeds through a series of four chronologically organized and thematically overlapping case studies. Chapter two examines Jewish participation in a popular American pastime, family genealogical research. Gross’s analysis reveals how the “shared religious framework of intimate and authoritative nostalgia,” whether drawn from family lore, ship manifests, or DNA evidence, is interpellated into Jewish “memorial activities, literary forms, and historical accounts” (43). In chapter three, Gross moves beyond the synagogue as such to examine synagogue restoration projects that gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter argues that heritage spaces are carefully curated to produce ambivalent “elegiac nostalgia” that celebrates financial progress out of poverty as it romanticizes spiritually rich bygone eras. At synagogues-turned-museums, which are haunted by ghosts of the past, docents, tourists, and attendees of prayer quorums negotiate knowledge, meaning, and proper practice. Chapters four and five focus on children’s material culture and Ashkenazi foodways, respectively. Though nostalgia is “often assumed to be a condition of aging,” Gross shows how in the first decades of the twenty-first century children and parents used books and dolls, especially those distributed and produced by PJ Library and American Girl, to form intimate, affectionate relationships to ancestors and their stories. Chapter five examines the twenty-first-century Jewish food revival, focusing on how restaurateurs have improvised on Jewish Deli cuisine. The “playful and campy nostalgia” (161) of culinary revivals centers the gut—the belly laugh or the full belly—as the way to the...

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Aunting as Family Shadow-Work

Women have long been known as family kin-keepers, sources of knowledge about family histories. Yet little has been written on the role of aunts within families, and more specifically on aunts’ domain over sensitive or secret family information. This paper develops the concept of family shadow-work to analyse labours that are unseen yet essential to family life. To do this it explores aunting practices around family secrets using ‘facet methodology’ applied to qualitative research. This analysis highlights aunts’ efforts to manage and transmit information while navigating the politics of family secrecy. While such acts of diagonal transmission may be less recognised as reproductive of family, they are crucial in creating a continuity of family lore, structure, and identity.

Review: The “Other” Dixwells: Commerce and Conscience in an American Family, by Thomas N. Layton

In 1984, San Jose State archaeologist Thomas Layton and his team combed through a site near Point Cabrillo, north of Mendocino, for remains of a Pomo Indian village. Uncovering shards of porcelain led Layton to the wreckage of a New England-China trading vessel, The Frolic. A book series ensued: The Voyage of the Frolic (1997), Gifts from the Celestial Kingdom (2002), and now, The “Other” Dixwells,. In this final addition to the series, Layton turns to a subject near and dear to my heart: family history.To be clear, The “Other” Dixwells is not a monograph. It is a fictionalized intergenerational account of George Basil Dixwell, a China trader employed by Augustine Heard & Co., his wife Hu Ts’ai-shun, and their son T’ien-sheng/Charles Sargent Dixwell. The story of this family is fascinating. Jacques Downs’s canonical look at the pre-1842 U.S.-China trade, The Golden Ghetto, mentions several American merchants who formed relationships with Tanka women and had children abroad. But with the exception of Emma Teng’s Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943, scholars have spent little concentrated attention on these families. Given the immense research evident in the more than one-hundred pages of endnotes and appendices, The “Other” Dixwells is a noteworthy contribution to the field.The story thus starts in 1806 at the Sargent residence on Boston’s Newbury Street with a question of conscience. George’s aunt, Henrietta Sargent, was an ardent abolitionist, and her aunt was proto-feminist writer Judith Sargent Murray. By Chapter 3, in 1841, George departed for China to partake in the world of commerce and, as Layton notes, the traffic in opium. He came under fire (figuratively) from Aunt Henrietta and (literally) during the Opium War. George left Augustine Heard & Co. in 1847, traveled to Boston and New York where he faced a failed courtship, to California, and back to China in 1857. While his domestic investments with friend James Dorr failed, George’s interest in engineering and invention solidified. Sometime between 1867 and early 1868, while working in Shanghai, Dixwell married Hu Ts’ai-shun, a woman of Manchu birth. It is in these final four chapters that the focus turns to these “‘other’ Dixwells.”Poignant details emerge directly from the archival record, from Hu’s adoption of another son after she returns to China to Charles’s reclamation of his father’s name, Dixwell, in 1889, to his switch of birthplace on his passport from Shanghai to Nagasaki in 1901. The pilot’s license for Bazil Dixwell, Charlie’s son, offers tangible evidence of the genealogical line’s triumph. But the bulk of the text is rooted in Layton’s embrace of “the techniques of the novelist.” The narrative recounts what could have happened. Chapters are composed of vignettes of imagined conversations. Endnotes buttress the plausibility of the vignettes with extensive sources and consultations with field experts. Boxes of text at points within chapters reveal a metahistory of personal anecdotes of how Layton discovered particular sources, visits to relevant sites, and connections with modern kin. My personal favorite: each chapter culminates in images of paintings, photographs, and objects that help readers visualize the history.Thus, is this book of interest to readers of the Pacific Historical Review? I argue yes. The endnotes are rife with documentation. Sources range from archival and genealogical records, oral histories of family lore, paintings and photographs as well as images of germane material culture. As long as the reader’s expectations are clear, enjoy.

John C. Swanson. Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.

John C. Swanson. <i>Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.</i>

Brother's Keeper: Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures

1Brother's Keeper:Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures Suzaan Boettger (bio) The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth. Genesis 4:10 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Pietro Lorenzetti, (Italian, active Siena 1320–44), The Crucifixion, 1340s, tempera and gold leaf on wood, overall 16 1/2 x 12 1/2 in. (41.9 x 31.8 cm); painted surface 14 1/8 x 10 1/8 in. (35.9 x 25.7 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift and Gwynne Andrews Fund. New York City, NY, 2002. [End Page 559] Visual representations of death rarely show corporeal agonies. Even in its most plentiful rendering in Western art history, those of Jesus' crucifixion, as seen in the small devotional picture by the fourteenth-century Sienese Pietro Lorenzetti, His unblemished torso spews a single stream of blood. Depiction of the sight of Jesus' corpse is common, of the strife of ceasing to live, not so. In the modern period, viewing photographs of bloated torsos splayed on the Gettysburg battleground or of an emaciated body early in the AIDS epidemic offers perverse scrutiny of cadaverous degradation. But formal postmortem portraits customarily idealize inert mortality as "resting in peace." Or, as in John Sloan's early-twentieth-century portrait of Isaac L. Rice commissioned by his bereaved widow, death is denied by its title: Silence. That is, "Shush! He's sleeping." Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. John Sloan, Silence, 1915, etching, 9 7/8 × 11 15/16 in. (25.1 × 30.4 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, 1926, Courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Soothing bereft mourners, the mood is honorific, the intention elegiac, a genre that literary critic Tammy Clewell aptly encapsulated as offering "consoling substitutes to heal the wounds of loss" (2004, p. 48). [End Page 560] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Robert Smithson, Christ Series: Christ Carrying the Cross, 1960, ink and gouache on paper, 18 × 18 1/8 in. (45.7 × 46 cm), photographer: Paul Hester, Courtesy Menil Collection, Houston © Holt/Smithson Foundation / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Robert Smithson's brash paintings of the Christian Savior in his death throes upturn all that.2 Expressionistically depicting a bloody process of dying, the imagery on canvas or paper is horrific, the mood vitriolic. Made in the early 1960s, Smithson declared of his work, "These paintings are not for arty chatter but for the lacerated soul" (1961b, p. 4). In spirit, they illustrate Melanie Klein's and John Bowlby's insights that mourning can include regressive feelings of anger and aggression, a process of ambivalent grieving. Applying and extending these, literary scholar Jahan Ramazani found "a resonant yet credible vocabulary for grief in our time—elegies that erupt with all the violence and irresolution, all the guilt and ambivalence of modern mourning" (1994, p. ix). [End Page 561] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Robert Smithson, Jesus Mocked, 1961, oil/paper, 37-1/2 x 35 in. (95.3 x 88.9 cm.) © Holt/Smithson Foundation / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Smithson's renderings of Christ's death exemplify what Ramazani terms the "anti-elegiac" (p. xi). The designation particularly applies to Smithson's evident ambivalences in his representation of the pictorial surrogate for the sibling whose death prompted his own birth—the predecessor whose sacrifice gave him his life but who in family lore becomes an obtrusive prototype. Smithson (1938-1973) is renowned as a distinctive American artist especially lauded for: • An innovative art form, "earthworks," consisting of huge mounds, trenches and marks carved in raw earth in remote expanses in the western United States. These were spatially environmental, but not politically environmentalist.3 [End Page 562] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Alice Neel, Robert Smithson, 1962, o/canvas, 40 x 24 1/4 in (101.6 x 61.6 cm). The Locks Foundation, Philadelphia, © The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner. • Mordant and fantastical essays on the art of...

Archiving the Future: The Uneasy Relationship between Individual Memory and Communal Artifacts in Station Eleven

Archiving the Future:The Uneasy Relationship between Individual Memory and Communal Artifacts in Station Eleven Lourdes Arciniega In Emily St. John Mandel's dystopian novel Station Eleven (2014), memory is a commodity that is traded, bartered, hoarded, and curated as both an amulet and a shield for survivors of the Georgia flu pandemic. Mandel employs a circular, and often circuitous, narrative arc to tell her story, thus mirroring the haphazard lives led by the protagonists whose control over their destinies unravels in the wake of the pandemic. The survivors' stories are told through their relationship to artifacts, and in particular to the graphic novel Dr. Eleven, whose first volume, Station Eleven, shares its title with Mandel's novel, thus creating multiple layers of textual intersection. This collaborative and relational exploration of people and objects offers an opportunity for new readings into the use of trauma, performance, and memory in dystopian fiction. Survivors in Mandel's world give value to objects based on individual emotional attachments. Mandel asks her readers to question the worth we attach to found objects in a post-pandemic world not driven by consumerism and currency. She proposes that the desirability of an object lies not in the artifact itself, but in the creative effort and application of knowledge that went into producing it. A play, a photograph, a newspaper, a book, a graphic novel, and a museum collection become vessels through which Mandel's pandemic survivors redefine themselves and the world around them. As Joanne Freed argues in her text on haunting encounters: "if fiction is to inspire new and more ethical relationships across boundaries of difference, it must first allow readers to come into contact with others through the work of the literary imagination" (31). Artifacts then become points of connection that trigger memories that haunt the survivors. These manmade pieces produce "metaphorical hauntings" that tease readers with their elusiveness (Freed 32). Moreover, cultural artifacts that link main characters' storylines occupy the middle of multiple Venn diagrams that shift and sort themselves into different images as Mandel unfolds [End Page 296] her narrative like a kaleidoscope, where the pieces share the same space but can be rearranged to form different representations. Beyond the basic necessities for survival such as water, food, and shelter, Mandel's characters crave and hoard memories of a shared culture. Her novel-a cultural artifact in itself-becomes a defence of art as an essential building block and cornerstone of all civilizations, and never more so in societies in flux, such as her post-pandemic world. In his study of trauma and witnessing, Björn Krondorfer calls attention to the importance of this authorial positioning as a starting point where "acknowledging that our roots are found in a shared historical and geographical space-a space filled with hurt betrayal and losses-we begin to bond to each other" (138). He notes the importance of artifacts in this process as societies transform "the cultural messages we have received from our familial and social networks into material representations [….] We collected, assembled, and arranged scraps of memory in response to discomfiting details of family lore and history" (132). As readers, we journey with Mandel's survivors and are witnesses to their physical and emotional reassembling of their world that arises from their restless scavenging of lost artifacts. From the opening pages of the novel, Mandel signals the importance of recurring encounters between characters and cultural objects. She begins her novel with a dramatization of King Lear and the onstage death of Arthur Leander, who plays Lear. The stage is the Venn diagram, the point of convergence where Jeevan, a paparazzo turned EMT, breaks the fourth wall to assist Arthur, while Kirsten, a child actor playing the ghost of one of Lear's daughters, witnesses the onstage death. Arthur's passing is also a knell that signals the deaths of unnamed and countless others who will disappear with the onset of a pandemic called the Georgian flu. As the flu ravages the world, Mandel calls attention to the slow fading of a society dependent on electricity for survival and communication: "Toronto was falling silent. Every morning the quiet was deeper, the perpetual hum of the...