Usable Past Research Articles

Lone Star Mind: Reimagining Texas History by Ty Cashion

Reviewed by: Lone Star Mind: Reimagining Texas History by Ty Cashion Elizabeth Hayes Turner Lone Star Mind: Reimagining Texas History. By Ty Cashion. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 296. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Neurological studies suggest that among the basic properties of the human mind is self-awareness, one of the most important human traits. Investigating the “mind” of a region, a nation, or a state necessarily includes explaining group self–awareness or collective memory. Thus, when W. J. Cash wrote The Mind of the South in 1941, he was among the first to address the subject of collective memory based on social conditions, culture, intellect, and history. Ty Cashion’s Lone Star Mind explores the nature and origins of a Texas collective memory, using it also to help explain the state’s historiography. He prominently features T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans (Macmillan), the 1968 publication that identified Texas as unique in its evolution from a northern province of Mexico into an independent republic in 1836 and annexation to the United States in 1845. According to Fehrenbach, Texans maintained their distinctive history—or mind—by perpetuating a concept of exceptionalism embodied by true Texans, who were (and are) almost entirely represented by Anglo men. Fehrenbach’s exclusionary view of the state’s history has found a receptive audience, but it has also served to justify Texas’s deeply ingrained racism and sexism. Cashion discusses both exceptionalism and true Texan-hood, but with a significantly different viewpoint from Fehrenbach’s. In one notable phrase Cashion states, “Figuratively, the white hats that true Texans wore in the nineteenth century too often come into focus as white hoods in the twentieth” (79). Cashion refutes the notion that Texas’s exceptionalism stems from its brief years as a republic and sites examples of other states’ origins, such as California, as independent republics. There was confusion, to be sure, over whether Texas belonged to the American West or to the South. That slavery flourished in its eastern counties suggests that Texans had reason to join the Confederacy, yet a seemingly wide-open West Texas beckoned settlers to appropriate land bordering on or intruding upon Native Americans, leading to frontier wars. Texas exceptionalism, it seems, was a state of mind formed by Anglos as they came to dominate not only the land but [End Page 111] also the history of heroism in the state. Violence, Cashion reflects, is part of that history, especially when recalling the Alamo, the Regulator-Moderator War in the republic’s infancy, or the Fort Griffin vigilante episode in the 1870s. Cashion finds that fiction also elucidates the mind of Texas as writers Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Edna Ferber describe the “Texan West” (121). Films such as Giant, which characterized Texas as a rugged proving ground, shaped American impressions throughout the 1950s. Film producer Daryl F. Zanuck noted that “If you go to Texas, go on a horse with a gun” (121). The western experience, Cashion opines, is also informed by Tejano and Mexican cultures, while African Texans and ethnic Europeans such as German Texans provided a counterpoint to the usual white stereotype. Finally, Cashion lays claim to the influence of social and cultural history in making the state’s mind in the late twentieth century “less western and more American” (127). In discussing who owns the “Texas Past” (128) and what Texas history will look like “On the Horizon” (154), Cashion is optimistic. He concludes that a new, progressive generation of historians will write new metanarratives that evaluate the work of twentieth-century historians while incorporating the work of “cultural constructionists and revisionists” (158). One hopes the subjects will include women, gender, sexuality, ethnic, cultural, economic, political, and urban studies. This is an erudite book that calls on students of history to reevaluate the state’s larger-than-life narratives. It draws on a surprising multiplicity of sources and invites writers who wish to create a usable past not only to scrutinize elite individuals but also to elucidate the histories of the many Texans who share in the state’s collective memory. Elizabeth Hayes Turner University of North Texas Copyright © 2019...

The Compromise of 1850 and the Search for a Usable Past

The Compromise of 1850 and the Search for a Usable Past

Denkyemmireku: A Usable Past for A New African State

In Ghana – The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1971), Nkrumah recounts the deliberations within the United Gold Coast Convention on J. B. Danquah’s proposal for adopting the Akan art motif Funtummireku Denkyemmireku (Denkyemmireku, for short), the proverbial two-headed crocodile, as emblem for the emerging nation of Ghana. Dismissing it as a “hideous monstrosity” that symbolizes selfishness, it was never adopted. Yet, the art motif, a kind of jeremiad that says pity that poor crocodile, whose two heads cannot stop fighting over food, even though they share one stomach, is a recognition of the dialectic of nature as one of unity in diversity, the very essence of the hallowed African monistic thesis of matter. This paper posits that Denkyemmireku embodies a potent philosophical and ideological symbol capable of serving as a usable past for a much-needed reconstruction of a more legitimate African state.
 
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 1 Some aspects of this article have been previously published in the Journal of Black Studies by the author. See, Kwasi Boadi, “The Ontology of Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism and the Democratic Theory and Practice in Africa – A Diopian Perspective.” Journal of Black Studies, Volume 30, Number 4 / March 2000, 475–501.

“I Come in Here So I Don’t Have to Hate Her”

Singing a barroom weeper is like writing a haiku about cherry blossoms or a Western about a laconic hero who cleans up a violent town. You’re under significant pressure to nail the obligatory elements of the form but you also have an opportunity to make fresh meanings by rearranging its familiar

Feverish fictions: William T. Vollmann and American literary history after postmodernism

ABSTRACTThe rise of the New Sincerity in contemporary American fiction has largely been read on terms provided by a handful of early proponents. This article contends that more complex formulations of the notion are necessary if it is to remain useful as a descriptor for important qualities of recent texts. Among issues in need of greater attention are the implications of the New Sincerity for historical awareness, a topic I pursue via consideration of William T. Vollmann’s grappling with literary history. I argue that Vollmann’s works offer more than the pastiche that allegedly defined historical consciousness in postmodernist fiction. His intertextual engagements with Edgar Allan Poe are especially valuable for modelling some of the ways recent fictions bypass postmodernist ahistoricism in favour of connections to a usable past, and, especially, a usable literary tradition. Readings of Vollmann’s ‘The Grave of Lost Stories’ (in several editions) and ‘The Cemetery of the World’ show how he employs research in the textual archive as a figuration of relations to the past that can serve the ends of renewal and recovery.

Photographs of Child Victims in Propaganda Posters of the Spanish Civil War

This article examines propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War that used photographs of child victims in an attempt to galvanise support for the Republican war effort. Rather than discus the efficacy of these posters as persuasive tools, this analysis focuses on their suitability to support propagandistic narratives of the Civil War, which would form and support ‘usable pasts’ for collectives – understandings of the past that serve a function in the present – such as identity claims, or the basis of demands for justice. In this instance the photographic discourses of these posters supported broader narratives of the Civil War. The use of child subjects afforded narrative flexibility to the photographs employed in these posters, and this was combined with the supposed veracity of the photographic medium, and the ingrained norms of familial photography – that taken of and by family members – to construct narratives with propagandistic value. Please note: This article contains graphic images of child death.

Historicising geographies of solidarity

AbstractThis article evaluates two of the most productive recent areas of research in the historical geographies of solidarity: first, work relating to class and the labour movement; and second, debates clustered around race and colonialism. The two are, of course, not entirely distinct, and there has been much useful thinking at their intersections. I suggest that questions of mobility have been crucial in thinking about the formation of diverse solidarities across geographical and social boundaries. The article looks at how relationships can both be developed across differences of gender, race, and sexuality and how solidarities can be used to entrench forms of oppression and inequities of power. Thinking about this issue through the concept of intersectionality, I argue, would be a useful way of engaging with such questions. I suggest three areas which could be developed further. First, there is potential for a greater engagement with theoretical debates around the nature of solidarity itself. Second, historical geographers could pay more attention to the role of memory and “usable pasts.” Finally, I argue that more ambitious historical narratives, framed within wider social processes, would allow us to make broader arguments about how solidarity develops over time.

The Boarding School as Metaphor

37 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 The Boarding School as Metaphor Brenda J. Child For many in our society, the role of parenting was halted by boarding schools. Our great-­ grandparents were prevented from being parents. Both my grandmother and my grandfather were sent away. Then their kids were brought up in a regimented, abusive system of boarding schools. What that system has done to our grandparents, our parents, and then to us and our children is put holes in the fabric of our society. —­ Ingrid Washinawatok-­ El Issa, Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimony of Native American Women Over the years, thousands of Native children have learned the message that is implicit in boarding school education: that Native people are children of the devil who are condemned by God. This sense of worthlessness, of evil, of unlovability because they were Native was turned inward, internalized, becoming the root for some of the profound dysfunction later in life. —­ Diane Wilson, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life They are something tangible—­ mnemonic benchmarks—­ that, as with sites of Australian Aboriginal mytho-­ geography, one can point to and say “it happened there.” A visit to the school can provide a trigger or cue that takes one back to the past almost as if there again—­ a redemptive pilgrimage to an Aboriginal Auschwitz. Perhaps is it all a bit too easy. —­ Michael G. Kenny, “A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History” The JAIE editors appreciate the opportunity to reprint Brenda Child’s groundbreaking book chapter “The Boarding School as Metaphor” to anchor this special issue. The chapter has had a profound impact on the field of boarding school history. Child proposes that boarding school has become “a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor for . . . American colonialism at its most genocidal.” In her research, including members of her own Red Lake Ojibwe family who attended boarding schools, Child 38 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 was struck by the strength and resilience of Native students and alumni. Stories of homesickness, mistreatment, and abuse were mixed with stories of appreciation, enjoyment, and resistance. Child, like other authors in this special issue, grapples with how to honor that diversity of student experience in the boarding schools while critically engaging with the profound harms done within the schools in the name of so-­ called civilization . She develops a nuanced and respectful analysis that honors the range of alumni perspectives as well as the central position of boarding schools in ongoing debates about historical trauma and its impacts on Native people and communities. The boarding school experience remains a burning historical memory for American Indian people in the United States. This despite the fact that most federal Indian boarding schools closed in the 1930s, or had by then adopted policies that rejected assimilation and were more in tune with contemporary ideas about race and progressive education. While scholarly studies have espoused resistance and resilience in the historical record of students who survived an assimilationist education, boarding school is increasingly conceptualized by many American Indians as a uniquely Native usable past that links tribal people of diverse backgrounds today to a devastating common history, one that must be evoked, many argue, to understand our present conditions and social problems. Boarding school is now the ancestor in a direct genealogical line of terrible offspring—­ alcohol abuse, family and sexual violence, and other social dysfunction. It is not necessarily the job of the historian to explain how Indian people today remember the past. But the intensity with which Indian people in the present day explain and respond to the role of boarding school in the broader history of their families and communities suggests that for many, boarding school is also a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor...

Asian American History and the Perils of a Usable Past

Asian American History and the Perils of a Usable Past

Betty Putnam: An Unpublished One-Act Play by William Carlos Williams

ABSTRACT Betty Putnam is a short play by William Carlos Williams set during the Salem witch trials. Known chiefly as a poet, Williams once thought he would make his name as a playwright. Between 1909 and 1912, he composed several plays based on early American history, which show he was already considering the usable American past that he would later construct in In the American Grain (1925). Betty Putnam was his first literary exploration of Salem, and Williams dealt with the subject twice more, in In the American Grain and in Tituba's Children (1950). By tracing Williams's engagement with Salem and how it changed from the Progressive Era to the Cold War, one sees that it mirrors that of American culture generally. The Progressive Era Betty Putnam, with its happy ending and assertive new woman, seems far removed from the dread and violence of the McCarthy period writings.

Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era eds. by Carol Emberton and Bruce E. Baker

Reviewed by: Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era eds. by Carol Emberton and Bruce E. Baker Paul A. Cimbala Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era. Edited by Carol Emberton and Bruce E. Baker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8071-6602-4. 296 pp., cloth, $45.00. Americans, influenced by race, region, politics, and time, have developed a problematic, sometimes unmindful, but enduring relationship with Reconstruction. Indeed, even as the nation moves through the era's sesquicentennial years, Reconstruction's memories arguably have a greater influence over a wider stretch of American life than do the more dramatic events of the preceding Civil War years. Scratch the surface of controversies over modern voter identification laws or the removal [End Page 105] of a New Orleans monument erected in 1891 to commemorate an earlier street battle, and the lingering impact of Reconstruction, with its contested memories, becomes apparent. It has been so since the 1870s, as the essays in Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era, edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce Baker, prove. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes in his introduction, the essays in this volume support the idea that ultimately, despite the efforts of Union veterans, African Americans, and their allies, sectional reconciliation meant conceding to a historical memory of Reconstruction constructed by white southerners. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brundage explains, interpretations of Reconstruction influenced the answers to important questions about "the rights of citizens, the measure of patriotism, and the appropriate exercise of national power in the century after Appomattox" (5). For example, K. Stephen Prince's exploration of white supremacy and the rise of Jim Crow describes how deftly and shamelessly southerners used Reconstruction memories to restrict black citizenship. Jason Morgan Ward examines how disenfranchisement supported by the poll tax, a bulwark of white supremacy, failed to yield to the circumstances produced by World War II. Recalling carpetbaggers and nineteenth-century civil rights legislation, the possibility of outside interference proved as frightening to white southerners as a black man holding a ballot during the Reconstruction era. Both authors show how white southerners used what they consider to have been misguided northern efforts to intervene in their post–Civil War affairs to derail subsequent federal efforts to protect the rights of black Americans. It appears that no area of policy could escape the influence of Reconstruction's memory. Mark Elliot explores how white understanding of the era spilled over into debates concerning Native Americans and imperialism during the 1890s. In the process, he adds an interesting point about the nature of Progressive Era gradualism in matters of race advancement. "If Reconstruction and black suffrage were not entirely right," Elliot notes white reasoning, "perhaps slavery was not entirely wrong" (159). Shortly thereafter, in the early twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson's approach to the peace issues of the Great War, as Samuel L. Schaffer explains, meant having a southern born-and-bred historian attempting to influence the Allies' handling of victory, defeat, and European reconstruction. As Schaffer rightly notes, Wilson had complex views of the issue, but he also "held true to his belief that a punitive peace was detrimental to a lasting peace" (211). Reconstruction taught many Americans such a lesson. Americans settled on a peculiarly white southern memory of Reconstruction, but the editors have not failed to include efforts to construct an alternative useable past. Shawn Leigh Alexander's work on T. Thomas Fortune and Justin Behrend's [End Page 106] study of John R. Lynch, for example, examine the efforts of African Americans to further a different interpretation of Reconstruction. Carole Emberton's contribution, dealing with the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives, adds the perspective of what not too long ago would have been an unheard voice. In the process, she shows that an unreliable narrator—in this case, an elderly black woman who contributed her memories to the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives—left behind a valuable record of the black sense of Reconstruction, even if the details she recalled "do not always conform to historians' expectations" (132). Elaine Parson...

ЕГЭ по истории как инструмент формирования репертуара актуализированного прошлого

The article analyzes the role of the Unified State Exam in History in forming the repertoire of the usable past, which determines the content of the national identity. The analysis of the examination tasks has revealed different commemorative density of the periods of Russian history. The author states that the exam is integrated into the official narrative of the millennial past and can serve as a tool for constructing the historical views of younger Russian citizens. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17072/2218-1067-2018-1-108-121

The Molnár Debate of 1950: Hungarian Communist Historical Politics and the Problem of the Soviet Model

By tracing the developments that led to a historical debate in 1950, this article questions some assumptions concerning the Stalinization of Hungarian history writing, in particular the notion of a predetermined continuity between the national-communist line followed by Hungarian communists before and after 1949. Contrary to the understanding of the Sovietization of historiography in Hungary as a straightforward process, guided by a firmly-established ideological line, this article shows that the period between early 1949 and 1950 was characterized by a certain level of uncertainty, caused, on the one hand, by the ideological and institutional changes brought about by Sovietization, and, on the other, by a temporary lack of firm interpretative guidance from the Party leadership. A closer look into the efforts to elaborate a new periodization of Hungarian history reveals not only the existence of competing Marxist interpretations (a “national” state-oriented and an “internationalist” one with a focus on socioeconomic phenomena), but also that for a while it was unclear which of them would emerge as the basis of the Stalinist canon. Although the question was ultimately settled by a political intervention in favor of the more national line, the Hungarian case shows that it was far from evident what the Soviet model was supposed to mean when transferred to local contexts—and that adaptation depended on numerous factors, the ambitions of the interpreters being one of them. This contingency, and the relative plurality of “useable pasts”—which is also reflected in the lack of uniformity in the ways Soviet Bloc regimes treated their respective national histories—cautions against treating the historical representations these regimes produced as self-explanatory outcomes of Stalinization: the examination of the dilemmas that marked the process of creating these canons should be given just as much consideration as the analysis of the end products themselves.

The Pageant of Father Kino

A review of the changing representation of the historical figure Padre Eusebio Kino over the course of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries illustrates the way public memory is reshaped in the search for a usable past. The study calls for considering this tendency of public memory in constructing more complex transnational histories.

Making usable pasts: Collaboration, labour and activism in the archive

The precarious labour geography of shaping political left histories is raised in this paper to engage with and deepen accounts of the archive within geography and beyond. The focus of the paper is on the provision of radical history in Glasgow through two archive collections within the city. The analysis raises the politics of archival research practices and is positioned within a context of increasingly difficult economic circumstances for libraries, archives and museums. The insights emerging from interviews with archive representatives reveal multiple issues relating to the provision of usable pasts and asserts the continued importance of archives within places such as Glasgow. In this regard, the archive is positioned as a place of collaboration, labour and activism to suggest an alternative understanding of archival practice.

Black Suffering for/from Anti-trafficking Advocacy

This article analyses the images that Antislavery Usable Past creates to promote its cause of ‘making the antislavery past usable for contemporary abolition’. Drawing on collective memory studies, I discuss the political implications of how pasts are used for present issues. I argue that Antislavery Usable Past appropriates black suffering by reducing the memory and imagery of slavery to objects that are compatible with the anti-trafficking narrative, without regard for the ongoing black liberation struggle. I conclude by discussing the troubling trend of incorporating anti-trafficking exhibitions into institutions that preserve the history of slavery and abolition. Such inclusions redirect the history lessons of slavery away from understanding and addressing anti-blackness in the present and towards supporting advocacy campaigns articulated in the logics that underpinned racial chattel slavery in the first place.

‘I Wonder What Became of Me’: Chris Connor and the closet of cool

ABSTRACT​ ​Obituaries were the first public acknowledgement that renowned jazz singer Chris Connor (1927–2009) had been a lesbian. This article investigates the significance of this posthumous revelation, positioning Connor as a point of entry to a queered useable past, and argues that a combination of factors in her biography and performance style offers audiences a unique way of reading and interpreting performativity and celebrity in relation to queer lives. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorisation of the closet as a framework for enabling or contravening ways of knowing, I analyse coolness, both as a singing style and as a mode of social performance, as a form of closetedness that enabled Connor’s successful career, but required equivocation and diminished agency. I contend that coolness/closetedness as modelled by Connor was a negotiation between convention and subversion, with historical evidence indicating that she had special significance for queer audiences of the past. Moreover, I argue that she continues to have importance for queer listeners, not only for her music, but precisely because her relative obscurity and the lack of details in her biography offer an open-endedness that make her a more adaptable ‘stand-in’ for understanding the lives of queer forebears forgotten by history.

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2016

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources — 2020 Brittany Hirth (bio) The following is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2020 including books, book chapters, and journal and magazine articles. Individual essays included in books not solely centered on Roth are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. The final section lists a few notable essays. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing, but they can be easily accessed online. Brittany Hirth Brittany Hirth is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Arts and Letters at Dickinson State University, where she teaches twentieth century and contemporary American literature. She has published articles on Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Anthony Swofford. BOOKS O’Brien, Dan. Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O’Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature. Syracuse UP, 2020. Google Scholar Taylor, Benjamin. My Friendship with Philip Roth. Penguin, 2020. Google Scholar BOOK CHAPTERS Baumgarten, Murray. “Philip Roth, Jewish Identity, and the Satire of Modern Success.” History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, edited by William Cutter and David C. Jacobson, Brown Judaic Studies, 2020, pp. 289–300. Google Scholar Brauner, David. “‘Being Jewish’: Philip Roth, Antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Howard Jacobson, Manchester UP, 2020, pp. 141–97. Google Scholar Coste, Jacques-Henri. “Revisiting Business History through Capitalist Fiction: The Glove-Making Industry in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.” The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel, edited by Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 297–317. Google Scholar D’Alfonso, Francesca. “Philip Roth e la fenomenologia della paura: per una lettura del romanzo Nemesis.” Oltre la pandemia: Società, salute, economia e regole nell’era post Covid-19, vol. 1, edited by Gianmaria Palmieri, Editoriale Scientifica, 2020, pp. 781–91. Google Scholar Eaton, Mark. “Secular Theodicy: Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow, and Philip Roth.” Religion and American Literature since 1950, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 161–99. Google Scholar Hadar, David. “Negotiating Continuity: Writing about Philip Roth in Israel.” Affiliated Identities in Jewish American Literature, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 127–41. Google Scholar Kellman, Steven G. “Four Score and Philip Roth.” Rambling Prose: Essays, Trinity UP, 2020, pp. 126–33. Google Scholar Kirsh, Adam. “Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth.” The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century, Norton, 2020, pp. 112–22. Google Scholar Lambert, Josh, Rachel Gordan, Benjamin Schreier, Bettina Hoffman, and Julian Levinson. “Four Approaches to Teaching Goodbye, Columbus.” Teaching Jewish American Literature, edited by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein, MLA, 2020, pp. 317–27. Google Scholar Maxey, Ruth. “Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction.” 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past, edited by Ruth Maxey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 149–69. Google Scholar Mitchell, Kaye. “The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism.” Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect, edited by Kaye Mitchell, Edinburgh UP, 2020, pp. 199–244. Google Scholar Nell, Werner. “Überschaubare Nachbarschaft? Religion, Macht und Sexualität in der Kleinstadt: Eine Adoleszenz-Erzählung von Heinrich Böll mit einem Blick auf Philip Roth.” Kleinstadtliteratur: Erkundungen eines Imaginationsraums ungleichzeitiger Moderne, edited by Werner Nell and Marc Weiland, transcript, 2020, pp. 347–72. Google Scholar Peleg, Yaron. “Writing New Kinds of Jews: A Course in Literary Genetics and Masculinity.” Teaching Jewish American Literature, edited by Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein, MLA, 2020, pp. 183–89. Google Scholar Schreier, Benjamin. “Introduction: What’s the ‘History’ in ‘Jewish American Literary History’ the History Of?” The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity, U of Pennsylvania P, 2020, pp. 1–36. Google Scholar Shostak, Debra. “The Father in the Apocalyptic Imagination — Part Two: Politics and 9/11.” Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 171–96. Google Scholar ———. “Middle-Class America at Mid-Century.” Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 51–92. Google Scholar Wasserman, Sarah. “Counterhistory, Counterfact, Counterobject: Philip K...

Three waves of gay male athlete coming out narratives

ABSTRACTRecent announcements by Michael Sam, Jason Collins, Robbie Rogers, and others belong to a longer tradition that I label the gay male athlete coming out narrative. I chart this rhetorical genre in three waves, corresponding to the historical moment in which each narrative was published and the rhetorical tactics that each set of authors use to reconcile their identities as gay athletes and argue for the existence and suitability of gay men in professional sports. Of particular note are contemporary third-wave narratives which introduce the actively out, visible, gay male body becoming aware of his place in history as a rhetorical opportunity for social intervention. Even as I recognize the limits of athletes’ ability to represent the diversity of interests, values, and politics of the broader LGBTQ movement, I argue that these narratives should become part of what Charles E. Morris III calls “the diverse domain of the usable past.” These narratives indicate the importance of understanding genre evolution alongside individual biography, historical context, and shifting values within broader attempts at social transformation.

The Black Church: A Tree with Many Branches

“The Black Church” is a popular phrase, often uttered with little consideration of the historical dissonances that make up Black Christianity. Despite the ways Black Christianity has shared in the common aim of dignity, humanity, and freedom asserted throughout the broader history of Black religion, there has never been one monolithic Black Church. However, when viewed as a “tree with many branches,” to borrow Christopher Small’s terminology for describing the tradition of Black music making, the Black Church represents a tradition with multiple performance practices and politics that have changed throughout history. Today, many young Black activists have turned to the Black church for political support only to find most clergy unwilling to make the kind of bold gestures of resistance seen in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Also, younger Black activists have found the current church particularly hostile toward queer identities. The church they face, however, is not the sum total of the Black Church as a tradition. This essay is a mediation in and meditation on the Black Church’s interaction with contemporary Black activism and the tradition of Black working-class church activism as a “usable past,” a spiritual resource for the current crossroads in Black citizenship. I speak of Black working-class churches as a descriptive frame rather than in the exclusively demographic sense. Black working-class communities brought Black labor activism into churches, but further investigation is needed to adequately describe the membership of congregations discussed here. As an alternative to traditional Black Church historiography, viewing some of the connections among class, culture, and queerness can reveal how Black spirituality thrives beyond the view of the church from the top down, but it also demonstrates how and why this version of the Black church had to be sacrificed in the onslaught of neoliberalism.