Usable Past Research Articles

Historical Scholarship and the “Personal Guise”

Historical Scholarship and the “Personal Guise” Robert Fanuzzi In the middle of my very first job interview, I crossed a line demarcating the academic profession from my personal life. Actually, it was a post-interview “informal” discussion with the chair of an English department and three other job candidates who happened to be my closest graduate student friends, but it was a synecdochic distillation of the profession all the same. The department chair had called us together in that standard-issue mla hotel room to hear more about our scholarly progress and professional aspirations. All was going as you would expect until the chair interjected that his own area of scholarship was the folk culture of early-twentieth-century US immigrants. That is when memories of my Italian family history—half-remembered stories about huge feasts and sing-alongs in support of the Italian anarchists Saccho and Vanzetti in the 1920s, with a comical coda about the cherished records being used for target practice by destructive boys in 1950s coonskin caps—flashed before me. Here was a set of family stories, and distant historical moments, that suddenly made sense to me in the middle of the 1980s; seeing an opening, I “went there,” judging from my friends’ open mouths, and told the committee all about myself. I engage fully with the generous, illuminating spirit of Marion Rust’s essay “Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women Studies” and, in particular, her derivation of Ulrich’s second life as a personal essayist when I say that in joining together these two timelines, I found and adopted for the first time in that interview something I will call, adapting Rust’s title, “a personal guise.” If my experience in the formative experience of the academic job interview is any guide, the personal guise is not an abnegation of or flight from scholarly self-presentation but a critical counterpart to it. Indeed, I realized then and reaffirm now that what I uncovered in that interview was not really my own past but a usable past, uniquely suited to the travails and traditions of American literary scholarship.1 This past was rendered visible and legible precisely because of the scholarly training I had received for the professional occasion that demanded it and the comic dissonance of that past with the occasion. I credit Rust’s creative, close reading of the “I” within scholarly labor that Ulrich so expertly made visible for my argument that both the personal guise [End Page 181] and its modes of expression are heuristic, discoverable, and embedded within the depersonalized artifacts and pursuits of the academic profession; they are extensions and rewards of scholarly lives, not a priori conditions for them. Of course, this is precisely what has made women’s literary criticism and essayists such as Alice Walker and bell hooks such vital contributors to our academic inquiries into the nature of personhood. Ulrich modeled this tradition and capacity through a scholarly method that insisted upon an “empiric” reconstruction of Martha Ballard’s life, a posteriori (qtd. in Rust 156).2 Rust’s investigation of Ulrich’s identity follows suit by not stepping outside the evidence of her essays or Ulrich’s commentaries on the historical profession. Rust’s reading of Ulrich’s second self leaves us with a renewed appreciation of the extent to which Ulrich’s dialectical engagement with the scholarly guise of the male-dominated profession of history created both a personal space for Ulrich herself and a usable, Mormon feminist past that now, thanks to Rust’s rereading, enlivens and enriches our knowledge of the profession. I wish more scholars would follow the path laid open by Rust’s “empiric” reconstruction of Ulrich’s second self and excavate our usable pasts. But we should not treat that personal history as a historical artifact. Women’s literary studies did not introduce the destabilizing variable of personalizing the profession just so we can turn scholars’ lives into mummified objects. On the contrary, the methods we use to recognize and re-create our personal guises take inspiration from feminism; they ask us to come to terms with the present and...

The Roof of a Southern Home: A Reimagined and Usable South in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

WILLIAM MURRAY University of Alabama The Roof of a Southern Home: A Reimagined and Usable South in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun WHILE MUCH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE DEPICTS THE SOUTH AS A source of terror or trepidation,1 Lorraine Hansberry, in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), gives readers a relatively positive regional perspective. She uses the Younger family’s Southern history (mainly accessed through Lena Younger or “Mama”) to provide her characters with a sense of grounded identity and pride that enables the family to move beyond the limitations of their current environment and into a more sustainable space.2 Both the small apartment in Chicago’s Southside and the mental environment of a Northern/national white culture work to limit and restrict the family’s ability to grow and develop, but through the process of adopting their mother’s attitude toward their shared Southern past, Mama’s children gain the confidence needed to face challenges obstructing their pursuit of a sustainable future. The concept of whites adopting an identity rooted in the Southern past is well established, but too often scholars seem to ignore the ways that African Americans have claimed and embraced forms of Southern identity. Despite the history of enslavement, lynching, and Jim Crow, African Americans have a history in the South that extends well beyond abuse and subjection, and Hansberry, in her canonical play, works to reclaim that history for the Younger family and, by extension, her audience. Understanding the way Hansberry constructs Southern history as a usable past in which to root the family’s identity is not only useful for those interested in Southern and African American literature, but also helps readers more fully 1 For an excellent study of this mode of representation, see Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason-Dixon Line (2009). 2 I mean space here both in the sense of a physical space in which the family members can spread out and maintain individuality as well as a mental environment in which they can ground their identity in a history that gives them pride and a sense of belonging in the United States. 278 William Murray comprehend the character of Mama, who has recently been categorized as narrow-minded or tyrannical.3 Reading Hansberry’s play as promoting a connection to a “Southern” history/heritage could understandably elicit some reservations, in that the very conception of the South as a discernable region is one that is fraught with complications and contentions. As recent work in Southern studies has fruitfully shown, the characterization of the region as distinct largely emanates from a long history of problematic myths and fantasies. Scholars, including Leigh Anne Duck, Michael Kreyling, and Jon Smith, have illustrated how such mythic constructions of the South lead to problematic conceptions of the region as exceptionally noble or degraded. Hansberry’s play, however, offers a version of Southern identity that steers away from reinforcing the existing and problematic understandings of the region that these scholars have identified and argued against. What this means for Southern studies is that the conception of the South, as a space of white romance or white degeneracy, must in some ways fundamentally change in order to incorporate African American voices. The inclusion of black voices as historically Southern should not be mistaken for an endorsement of the deeply problematic notion of “Southern heritage,” as it is commonly held, nor as a romanticization of the Jim Crow South such as Adolph Reed defines, but rather should be understood as work to understand the deeply conflicted sense of identity rooted in a place that has historically marginalized black identity, yet is an ancestral home. Houston A. Baker, Jr., explains this connection to the region in Turning South Again as “an indelible and shaping ambivalence,” and he goes on to point out that being Southern and black works as a complicated “badge of honor in regard to tight places of youth, tight places that were my testing ground, that are my legacy” (17-18). James Cobb, in his chapter “Blackness and Southerness,” further illustrates the multifaceted relationship many AfricanAmericanshavewiththeSouth,bothhistoricallyandcurrently,4 and he ultimately argues against the fallacy “that all southern blacks were...

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work, by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 243 pages. As our everyday attention grows saturated by media reports of bloodshed, massacre, and atrocity, this moment in twenty-first century presents us with challenges of literacy, epistemology, and ethical response. How can we resist consuming representations of mass and systemic violence as sensation and spectacle, and instead bear witness to suffering of disempowered? How do we dismantle forms of knowledge and affect that erase this pain or appropriate it into narratives designed to bolster dominant ideologies? And how might we create new epistemologies, new ways of feeling, that work toward repairing and averting such psychic and material ruptures? Cathy J. Schlund-Vials's War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work explores how Cambodian American writers and artists grapple with difficult task of giving shape and texture to a history that is searing and almost ungraspable. When tragedy assumes a massive scale, numbers and quantity paradoxically gesture toward what is immeasurable: Between 1975 and 1979, over course of three years, eight months, and twenty days, Khmer Rouge was responsible for deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians (21 to 25 percent of extant population) due to execution, torture, starvation, overwork, and disease (2). Loss of this magnitude feels beyond apprehension, but Schlund-Vials eloquently points out that emotional and material labor of Cambodian American artists in confronting their traumatic history provides necessary alternatives to official practices of selective and forestalled justice. This Cambodian American memory work helps to mitigate against what Schlund-Vials calls the Cambodian a recasting of Nixon's and Reagan's Syndrome. Conservative politicians and pundits believed that American military and moral superiority were undermined by an anti-interventionist domestic during era of Vietnam War (also known in Vietnam as American War). The Cambodian Syndrome, by contrast, comprises a useable past for a pro-intervention imperial politics. George W. Bush, for example, justified US military presence in Iraq and Middle East by portraying absence of American intervention during Khmer Rouge regime as true tragedy, a framing that erased role that US bombings of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 played in enabling rise of Khmer Rouge. Like American heads of state, government representatives in Cambodia likewise stage acts of selective remembering that entail strategic forgetting. Vietnamese occupiers in 1979-1989 era, invested in legitimating their rule of Cambodia, emphasized criminality of previous regime at expense of its victims' needs, while former Khmer Rouge members participating in current Cambodian government leadership call upon fellow citizens to bury past (175). It is this transnational set of amnesiac politics (13), argues Schlund-Vials, that 1.5-generation Cambodian American writers and artists work against. In suggesting how musical tones and samples disinter dead, or how trope of birds potently conveys embodied struggles of migration and dislocation, or how literary genres like autobiography become subject to judicial cross-examination, Schlund-Vials skillfully integrates aesthetic, political, historical, and juridical considerations into her assessment of diasporic cultural production. In absence of legal justice, she argues, remembrance activists stage alternative means to justice, healing, and reclamation, makeshift and grassroots practices of restoration designed to stand in when official reparations seem elusive (18). In thirty years between Khmer Rouge atrocities and her composition of book, only one official had been convicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. …

Creating a Useable Past: Retelling Christian History for the Twenty-first Century

Creating a Useable Past: Retelling Christian History for the Twenty-first Century

Commemorating the “Living Torch of Freedom”: Searching for a Usable Past in Romas Kalanta’s 1972 Self-Immolation

SUMMARY: In 1972, nineteen-year-old Romas Kalanta set himself on fire in Soviet Lithuania leaving a note saying, “only the system is responsible for my death.” Kalanta’s “dead body” was employed by the Lithuanian popular front Sąjūdis in 1989 as a powerful symbol of the nation’s oppression and suffering under Soviet rule. Just over a decade later, however, Kalanta was no longer useful as a national symbol, primarily due to the manner of his death. By 2002, Kalanta’s act of suicide discouraged rather than encouraged identification with him, and the issue of mental illness continued to taint his potential as a national hero. Instead, emphasis shifted to the street demonstrations by young people that followed his funeral. In this case, the live bodies of young people engaged in popular protest became a more powerful symbol than Kalanta, as Lithuanians claimed the moral value of civil resistance and a “Sixties” youth culture with the West. В 1972 г. девятнадцатилетний Ромас Каланта, житель советской Лит-вы, совершил самосожжение. В оставленной им записке говорилось: “Только систему следует винить в моей смерти”. В 1989 г. литовский народный фронт “Саюдис” превратил “мертвое тело” Каланты в важ-ный символ национального притеснения и страданий при советской власти. Однако уже через десять лет фигура Каланты потеряла значи-мость национального символа. К 2002 г. факт самоубийства осложнял идентификацию с ним, а подозрения в психическом расстройстве Ка-ланты бросали пятно на его потенциал национального героя. Теперь акцент делался на уличных демонстрациях, организованных молодыми людьми после похорон Каланты. По мере того, как литовцы осозна-вали моральную ценность гражданского сопротивления и начинали ассоциировать молодежную культуру 1960-х с “Западом”, живые тела молодых людей, участвовавших в протестах, приобретали большую символическую значимость, чем мертвое тело Каланты.

New Tunisian cinema: allegories of resistance

PrefaceAcknowledgments1. Nation, the State, and the Cinema2. The freedom to be different, to choose your own life: Man of Ashes (Nouri Bouzid, 1986)3. Laughter in the Dark: Sexuality and the Police State in Halfaouine (F rid Boughedir, 1990)4. Sexual Allegories of National Identity: Bezness (Nouri Bouzid, 1992)5. Colonizer and the Colonized: Silences of the Palace (Moufida Tlatli, 1994)6. It takes two of us to discover truth: Essa da (Mohamed Zran, 1996)7. It takes a lot of unruly individuals to make a free people: Bedwin Hacker (Nadia El Fani, 2002)8. Inventing the Postcolonial Nation/Constructing a Usable Past: TV Is Coming (Moncef Dhouib, 2006)9. Destiny answers the people's call for life, darkness will be dispelled, and chains will breakNotesFilmographyGlossaryBibliographyIndex

Forgeries and Their Social Circulation in the Context of Historical Culture: The Usable Past as a Resource for Social Advance in Early Modern Lemberg/Lviv

The main purpose of this paper is to put the charter – for a long time seen as simply forgery – into a wider context of historical culture of the epoch. It also aims to investigate motive, means, and opportunity, as used by the social actors – the forgers. The examination of the forgeries not only uncovers the historical imagination of their producers but also helps our better understanding of the historical culture of the epoch and its social circulation in a given society. The study of “Prince Fedor’s charter of 1062” examines how urban elites accepted the noblemen’s political and historical culture and used it for their own purposes. The author of the paper examines how the social aspirations and dominant cultural framework in the host society influenced the wealthy Armenian Diaspora to promote some possible options of the usable past and to abandon other ones. Finally, it shows how the elements of all these options were combined into a new narrative in the nineteenth century, in accordance with the historical culture of Romantic nationalism.

Susan Reynolds Williams. Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America.

To many scholars, Alice Morse Earle represents the “pots and pans” version of early twentieth-century social history, best left for antiquarians and antique collectors. In this compelling biographical study, Susan Reynolds Williams argues for Earle's significant place as a Progressive-era historian of American family and social history, “a voice that integrated the intimacy of domesticity with the scholarly objectivity required by the historical profession” (p. 15). While reports of a treasure trove of fifty boxes of Earle's research materials did not pan out, Williams focuses on Earle's published writings—some seventeen books and forty-two articles between 1890 and 1904—along with publishers' correspondence, family genealogy, and contemporary authors in material culture and American history. Williams presents Earle's various books in a roughly chronological fashion but more interestingly structures her study by emphasizing topics such as Earle and her New England family history, the study of material culture for understanding ordinary everyday life to genealogy, and early twentieth-century appeals to class supremacy. Threaded through all is critical attention to the making of a popular author and a professional historian. Earle's father migrated from northern New England to seek his fortune in industrializing villages of Massachusetts before marrying in the booming city of Worcester, where Alice was born in 1851. She attended Boston finishing school and married New York stockbroker Henry Earle; four children quickly followed and were raised in the family's Greek Revival town house in Brooklyn Heights. Williams discusses Earle's family photographs of her children in historical dress as an early example of Earle's budding interest in formulating connections to a usable past through use of historical prop and its expression of the colonial revival. Earle's activity in local social institutions such as the City History Club and national social clubs like the Daughters of the American Revolution becomes a way of understanding her growing commitment to social reform and the power of history as a civilizing agent. Through her social activities and writings, Earle looked to domesticity as a means of maintaining the social order, and Williams effectively contrasts that stance with the ideology of women's suffrage organizations, while comparing Earle's 1895 biography of Margaret Winthrop with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics (1898).

Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen by Greg Olson (review)

Reviewed by: Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen by Greg Olson Robert E. Walls Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen. By Greg Olson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2012. Greg Olson has given Americanists a unique biographical portrait of one of the first and most famous women folklorists, Mary Alicia Owen (1850–1935). An archivist at the Missouri State Archives, Olson clearly is a regionalist at heart, sensitive to the state’s continuing appreciation of Owen’s contributions as a strong-willed, intellectually inquisitive writer who lived her entire adult life in a St. Joseph home shared with her similarly unmarried sisters, equally devoted to artistic and scientific endeavors. However, Olson also illuminates the wider context of Owen’s life as a Vassar-educated, southern woman of the Gilded Age, raised in a slave-holding family and still racist in her sentiments, yet committed to producing literary representations of the multiethnic borderlands of early Missouri for the world. Owen is most recognized for her creative stories and descriptions of African American hoodoo practices and amateur salvage ethnography of local indigenous peoples. Mentored by fellow amateur folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, she conducted fieldwork with local Black conjurers by attending ceremonies, collecting charms and fetishes, and acting as a hoodoo apprentice. Her book, Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers (1893), established her as an international authority on these religious practices, and served to promote transatlantic intellectual fascination in “voodoo” and related African American traditions, even as her unpublished letters reveal contempt for her “superstitious” Black consultants, and acceptance of racial hierarchies and corresponding social practices of the times. Owen’s depictions of Native American history and culture were decidedly more sympathetic, if typical in their romantic characterizations. Here, too, she relied on fieldwork, routinely visiting Sac and Fox communities, soliciting stories and purchasing artifacts directly from Native consultants, culminating in Folk-Lore of the Musquakie Indians of North America (1904). Through this quasi-ethnographic monograph, and separate fictional [End Page 251] melodramas of forced removal and tragic mixed-race affairs, she crafted a regional version of noble savagery and the vanishing Indian—a usable past that continues to influence St. Joseph today, perpetuating white legends and promotional iconography of the area as a paradisiacal Indian burial ground while rendering invisible the persistence of Native people. One strength of this biography is the author’s description of Owen’s fictional oeuvre—usually published under a pseudonym in nationally prominent magazines—that served as an outlet for her unease with changing gender and social conventions. However, there is only faint attempt to configure her writing into a larger critical framework of how imperialist nostalgia works, or how the emergent professionalization of folklore struggled to confirm cultural differences but resist racial divides and primitivist preoccupations. Particularly glaring is the author’s missed opportunity to connect Owen to Zora Neale Hurston’s later efforts to reclaim a Black perspective on hoodoo from the white imaginary Owen helped create. Nevertheless, Olson’s biography is a noteworthy effort to limn the contributions of an early American folklorist to the history of race and region. Robert E. Walls University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Museums as spaces and times for learning and social participation

ContextualizationChildren and teenagers' school holidays are much larger than adults' holidays, raising difficulties for parents. Grandparents or other relatives are not always available to stay with them. Families have to find somewhere to leave them, especially during the summer. It is not just about occupying their time, but about promoting their development of abilities and competences, knowledge appropriation and literacy, particularly scientific literacy. That is why holiday programmes, offered by a variety of institutions, have emerged. Museums are aware of their publics' needs and aim to act towards promoting social development (Moutinho, 2007,2010; Santos 1996). They offer exhibitions and suggest diversified tasks through programmes especially designed for the school public, during the holidays.In Portugal the educational services of the museums, that design these programmes for target-publics, began in 1953 (Cavaco, 2002; Leal, 2007). In 1969 an innovative holiday programme was created, aimed at 14-20-year-old teenagers (Leal, 2007). Since then, the offers of museums have grown and diversified. The National Museum of Natural History and Science (Museu Nacional de Historia Natural e da Ciencia), where this study took place, created educational services in the early 1990s. The programme Holidays in the Museum began in 2002, when there were still two museums -- the Natural History Museum (Museu de Historia Natural) and the Science Museum (Museu da Ciencia) --, a situation that remained until recently, when these museums merged into one. These programmes have been very positively assessed by the public, for children and teenagers repeat the programme in consecutive years, and some participate in more than one week per year. This means that, to better respond to the target-public's needs, this programme suggests different tasks each week, thus allowing whoever repeats it to develop different activities. This diversity is considered an asset.Theoretical backgroundMuseums and literacyMuseums are institutions that keep, communicate and investigate collective memories and History. History provides access to representations of the past, that is, to interpretations about that past, by sharing collective memories (Wertsch, 2004). Through the choices they make regarding their organization and the collections made available, museums grant several entities and individuals a voice(s) (Wertsch, 1991). They enable dialogue between the collections and the public, choosing how this mediation maybe facilitated (Wertsch, 1985,2004).Collective memory illustrates the existence of different social and cultural groups (Wertsch, 2004; Wertsch, del Rio, & Alvarez, 1995). It tends to focus on the stability and continuity of a group, which often resists recognizing it has changed. Many times we forget that one of the features of human beings is that they adapt to new challenges. This illuminates the importance of social interactions with those who are different, who participate in other cultures (Cesar, 2013a, 2013b). Just like History, collective memory also changes over time. This change derives from the need to create a usable past, which varies with time and space, that is, just as in the case of learning, collective memory is a situated phenomenon (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1931/1985). What constitutes a usable past, in a given socio-cultural context, is different from whatever happens in another socio-cultural context (Wertsch, 2004).Through their collection, exhibitions and events, museums communicate with the surrounding population, promoting their development and their literacy. The museum is no longer directed only towards the school public, but to the general public, with its inherent diversity (Dodd, 1999). Using objects of the collections of museums is advantageous, facilitating the visitors motivation for non-formal learning. People are fascinated by instruments and artefacts (McRainey & Russick, 2010; Russick, 2010). …

Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory by Penny Lewis (review)

Reviewed by: Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory by Penny Lewis Richard L. Hughes HARDHATS, HIPPIES, AND HAWKS: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. By Penny Lewis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. In May 1970, construction workers in New York City clashed with antiwar protesters in an incident that quickly came to symbolize an apparent chasm between an antiwar movement dominated by privileged students and an American working class characterized as conservative supporters of the war in Vietnam. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, historical sociologist Penny Lewis constructs a powerful and “submerged counternarrative” that emphasizes a much more diverse working class that ultimately played a key role in opposing the war (7). Marshalling substantial social science data, Lewis argues that American workers, especially when one broadens the notion of the working class beyond union leadership and white males who worked in manufacturing, were consistently less supportive of the war than elites. Even numerous unions condemned the so-called “hardhat” demonstrations within weeks and, by 1971, the leadership of organized labor increasingly followed their rank and file members in opposing what one group identified as a “Rich Man’s War and a Poor Man’s Fight” (113). For Lewis, the antiwar movement became a multiclass and multiracial effort that included students, GIs, veterans, and civil rights activists from organizations such as SNCC and the Chicano Moratorium whose perceptions of the war stemmed, at least in part, from the varied perspectives of their working class communities. Using movement-relevant theory to place opponents of the war within their perceived social context, Lewis explores how many American workers experienced the antiwar movement from what Lewis calls the “borderline between feeling and protest” (14). Resisting caricatures of both antiwar hippies and “hardhat hawks,” most American workers shared the sentiments, if not many of the tactics and goals, of the antiwar movement while often distrusting its organizations and leadership (16). If images dominate our collective memory of the movement, Lewis offers provocative alternatives such as former SDS members providing food to striking General Electric workers in 1970, the varied resistance of antiwar soldiers in Southeast Asia, and the [End Page 105] efforts of predominantly working-class members of the Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) in the years after the largest antiwar rallies. Lewis concedes the role, both intentional and unintentional, of middle-class activists in limiting the growth and direction of the movement in its early years as well as the significant efforts of conservatives such as Richard Nixon in exploiting the image of the hardhat conservative. Consequently, the author aims to complicate rather than dismiss entirely the conventional narrative. Unfortunately, considering the centrality of masculinity in framing dominant yet increasingly contested assumptions about both work and military service in postwar America, the author also fails to explore the role of gender in shaping the popular narratives of the period or our subsequent collective memory. Regardless, Lewis, inspired as much by the recent Occupy Wall Street movement as opposition to the Vietnam War, succeeds in unearthing evidence of a usable past for today’s social activists—a vibrant and diverse American working class capable of solidarity and transcending both “organizational borders” and American political culture to challenge domestic and foreign policy (13). Richard L. Hughes Illinois State University Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Conservatives and Collective Memory: Cultivating a Repertoire of Politically Usable Past

The Conservatives and Collective Memory: Cultivating a Repertoire of Politically Usable Past

“Memorials of Exemplary Women Are Peculiarly Interesting”: Female Biography in Early National America

In 1811, Susanna Rowson published A Present for Young Ladies, compilation of essays, poems, and educational materials, including section on female biography. According to Rowson, study of worthy women from past encouraged a noble emulation to equal those who have gone before us; to young females, memorials of women are (84). A Present to Young Ladies included accounts of several exemplary women across time and space--from Italian scholars to British noble-women--to inspire generation of early American women attending female academies, such as one founded by Rowson. As an educator, Rowson focused on instructive qualities of biography, arguing that is equally authentic, equally instructive, and in general, more interesting than (83). A Present for Young Ladies was part of peculiarly literary trend in early national America: publication of various works of female biography. Through collective biographies as well as memoirs of individual women, authors celebrated lives and works of accomplished women. In particular, these accounts offer important insights into how early national Americans envisioned place of educated women in their new nation. Yet many of these works--and women they venerated--were subsequently relegated to proverbial dustbin of history and remain relatively underrepresented in traditional historical and literary studies of early national era. As Theresa Strouth Gaul notes, there is still much recovery work to be done to uncover the range of productions published by and about women from this era (264). The work of recovery that has inspired new generation of scholarship on literary women also thrived in early national period. By providing biographical sketches of women from history, writers such as Rowson sought to create what we might call usable past of female accomplishment. Every page of history abounds with accounts that do honour to sex, she noted. It is in our power to rise into consequence, and make ourselves venerated. Others have done so, why may not we? (119-22). Rowson's promotion of female biography is significant not only because it represented challenge to conventional notions of great biography but also because it reflected her aspirations for educated women. Rowson's optimistic faith in enlightening and liberating effects of education was symptomatic of new era. As early national women gained access to more educational opportunities, proponents of women's education emphasized their potential to achieve intellectual equality with men. The education of women thus raised fundamental questions about whether certain traits were result of innate sexual difference or due to cultural constraints. As Rowson confidently asserted: It would be absurd to imagine that talents or virtue were confined to sex or station. The human mind, whether possessed by man or woman, is capable of highest refinement, and brilliant acquirements (88). Educated women had important roles to play in new nation, and works of female biography helped to illustrate their talent and potential. Such veneration of women was ambitious but also ambiguous. To be worthy of commendation, woman needed to maintain her identity as respectable, whatever her accomplishments or deeds. Thus, despite her ardent praise of women's potential, Rowson ultimately stressed their inherent femininity. In her various examples from past--including Queen Elizabeth and Catherine Great--she celebrated women's successful embodiment of what she called the union of masculine virtues, feminine softness, and Christian meekness as most worthy [of] imitation (105). Along with her bold assertions of women's intellectual equality, then, Rowson emphasized notions of sexual difference. As Marion Rust, among others, has argued, Rowson carefully constructed this model of womanhood to negotiate legal, economic, and social limitations that women faced in early republic. …

Sounds of war: music in the United States during World War II

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: We, as Musicians, are Soldiers, too... Musicians in Uniform Performing for Victory Composition in the Effort Cultural Mediators and Educators Chapter 2: Shaping Music for Total War Music in the Service of Propaganda: Office of Information Crossing Borders: Music, Diplomacy, and the State Department Singing Army: Uplift and Education for a Nation Music Therapy and the Reconditioning of Soldiers Chapter 3: I Hear America Singing... Sounds of a Usable Past Salutes to American Folk Song Voicing Opera in America Chapter 4: The Great Invasion Exile Experiences French Connections, Czech Identities Refugees from Axis Nations Chapter 5: Hail Muse Americana! Commemoration and Patriotic Celebration Celebrating the American Way New World Symphonies Works Cited

Playing Jane

By reenacting the “[auto]biography” of the celebrated nineteenth- century black Mormon woman Jane Manning James, twenty-first-century black Mormons hope to explain to their audiences and to themselves why they joined or choose to stay in a religious community that, for much of its history, excluded people of African descent from full church membership. With respect to this history of exclusion, I interpret the performance of reenacting James's autobiography as a means of creating a usable past for present-day black Mormons, one that connects them to the Mormon origin mythos. These reenactments also serve as implicit critiques of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' (LDS) hierarchy: the Mormon Church's official history and theology makers have yet to fully recognize black Mormons' contribution to early Mormon history, and likewise have yet to fully recognize the important role Mormons of African descent play in the modern LDS Church.

On Applied Archaeology, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Usable Past

Several recent discussions within archaeology refocus attention on the relationship between western knowledge and “indigenous knowledge”: one arising from the question of local ownership of land, technologies, and archaeological materials; another responding to the continued interest within development, conservation, and ecology in the potential efficacy and sustainability of local resource-use strategies; and a third that explores the possibility of producing archaeological interpretations that incorporate local conceptions of the past. In addition to an interest in indigenous knowledge (whether technical or conceptual), these various lines of inquiry are related by the desire to give due respect to local beliefs, practices, and property, and by the ambition to define ways in which archaeological research can provide benefits to society in general or, more specifically, to the communities that play host to archaeological field projects. These shared goals account for the fact that these discussions are sometimes conflated, but they can nevertheless be separated into distinct projects by examining the criteria by which their proponents are likely to judge success. Doing so permits an assessment of the feasibility of these approaches, referred to here as applied archaeology, hybrid archaeologies, and the production of a “usable past.”

The trouble with unifying Narratives: African Americans and the civil Rights movement in U.S. history content Standards

This textual analysis is a collective case study of K-12 United States History content standards in light of how they represent the historical experiences of African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. The study uses a multi-perspective critical conceptual framework to evaluate the standards for nine state-level polities on both the quality of treatment and the orientation of how African Americans are depicted in the standards. Analysis revealed that the reviewed standards tend to discourage rigorous historical thinking in favor of non-conflictual narrative perspectives that accentuate the historical contributions of African Americans within a framework of linear social progress. This curricular approach is ultimately problematic because it encourages teachers and students to rely on convenient historical archetypes to construct a usable past, rather than problematizing the past and present experiences of African Americans.

A terrible beauty: settler sovereignty and the state of exception in Home Box Office's Deadwood

The Western has long been understood as a mythic genre that utilizes historical representation in service of presentist allegories that address the sovereignty of the settler nation-state. While many have lauded the Home Box Office program Deadwood for presenting a more realistic – and thus less generic – vision of US territorial expansion, this article argues that Deadwood rather effectively embraces the Western genre?s tendency to refract frontier history into a usable past. We contend that Deadwood amplifies the anxieties expressed in Cold War Westerns about the relationship between extralegal violence and the liberal nation-state by representing the sovereign order of the Deadwood isopolity as authoritarian rather than democratic. In a reading that addresses both Deadwood's revisionist visual aesthetics and its narrative representations of settler violence, we argue that the series, like many Westerns before it, neglects the representation of the violence of settler colonial invasion in favor of representing violence within the settler isopolity in order to allegorize the extralegal modes of violence utilized by the USA during the early phases of the War on Terror. By interpolating frontier violence within the familiar tradition of the Western genre, Deadwood bridges the gap between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century ideologies of American imperialism by reproducing the trope of ‘the vanishing Indian’ and dramatizing the violence that structures the mythology of settler independence and nationhood in the American West.

Retracing Nelson Mandela through the Lineage of Black Political Thought

South Africa’s transition to democracy still inspires the imagination of people all over the world, especially those in search of what too often seems like an elusive peace. Even when he lies sick in hospital Nelson Mandela remains the iconic embodiment of that historical transformation, and will remain so for decades to come. South Africans invoke his memory to protest the depredations of his successors, from Thabo Mbeki’s dalliance with HIV/AIDS denialists to the halo of corruption around Jacob Zuma’s head. Compounding the country’s challenges are unacceptably high levels of unemployment, poverty, and inequality and a failing school system. To overcome these challenges and return to the high road of Nelson Mandela and his generation, the country needs much more than technocratic policy solutions. It needs a self-awareness that can only come from a new public narrative that puts present and future generations back on Mandela’s path. The path itself was never straightforward but winding—and winding with too many proverbial forks in the road. The debates were oftentimes clamorous, but they also became the basis for political creativity against daunting odds. However, instead of using the lessons of that journey to create what van Wyck Brooks called a “usable past,” the country’s current leaders have done nothing to teach the present generation about the past except in their own image. Like Chacko’s twins in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, South Africans are, as a result, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints

Being a Sibiriak in Contemporary Siberia: Imagined Geography and Vocabularies of Identity in Regional Writing Culture

This article examines the articulation of sibiriak identity in the early 21st century. This time is particularly important because the current Russian government has made a point of curtailing the regional autonomy of the Yeltsin years. Drawing on regional news sources, Internet blogs, and writings by prominent Siberian public intellectuals, this article delineates a number of specifically Siberian voices and the concerns they discuss in the public sphere. It argues that contemporary Siberian identity differs significantly from stereotypical European Russian constructions of Siberian identity that equate simple goodness and honesty with the broad Siberian terrain. This material shows a diverse range of opinions and attitudes, a concerted effort to keep the Siberian heritage before the public eye, and a sustained discussion about the usable past. Focusing particularly on Evgenii Grishkovets’s autobiographical novella, Rivers (Reki, 2005), this article examines the emergence of a post-Soviet discourse that reaches beyond Siberian stereotypes and openly expresses social and cultural problems encountered by Siberians.