Rose Cell Phone

Last night we rolled out our expanded Rose Art Museum cell phone, in conjunction with the opening of the Museum's new exhibition, showcasing works from the permanent collection. The exhibition celebrates the publication of the major new catalog, The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis (Abrams, 2009).

I'm very pleased with the work the students have done in scripting and recording the prompts. Mao Matsuda did a haunting prose poem, in English (35#) and Japanese (34#) on Adolph Gottlieb's powerful "Rising"-- meditating on the works apparent evocations of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. (Ryo Morimoto and I also explored the nuclear resonances of the painting in our commentaries in 19#, 34#, 35#.)

Many of the commentaries are serious and scholarly. Cultural Production grad students Brian Friedberg (28#, 29#) and Pennie Taylor (7#, 33#) , who both work at the Museum, crafted prompts that could appear in a museum catalog, while keeping the tone conversational and engaging.

Several commentators experimented with a playful and humorous approach Polin Abuaf (38#), for instance, cleverly engaged with Sam Francis' White Ring, a large blank canvas painted only around its edge; Polin ventriloquized the voice of the painting, reveling in preservation of its essential blankness. Inspired by Polin's posting, Ellen Schattschneider decided to record a segment(40#) for Richard Prince's Untitled (Cowboy), a large format photograph showing the Marlboro Man riding towards a cow in the snow. Ellen takes on the voice of the cow, in a hilarious feminist stream of consciousness sequence that incorporates Roland Barthes. Daniela Modiano and Jonathan Turbin, in turn, performed two witty skits inspired by Roy Lichenstein's pop masterpiece, "Forget it! Forget Me!," (30#), the work shown in the above photograph, with the former museum director, Michael Rush standing beside it; the students reenact possible dialogues between the two characters in the painting, leading to the same brooding male retort. (Jonathan also taped a more scholarly commentary, 31#, reflecting on critical feminist readings of the work.)

One of our challenges has been sorting out how to pose intellectually stimulating readings without boring our listeners. In his commentary on Jenny Holzer's 2008 installation work, Stave, (which incorporates redacted interrogation transcripts from Guantanamo Bay) Jonathan adopts a tongue in cheek tone, half parodying himself in his citing of Foucault. Andreas Teuber (22#), in his prompt on Warhol's Saturday Disaster refrains from offering scholarly commentary, but instead posts a series of challenging, thought provoking koan-like questions about the work. I should mention that so far, four other commentators have also tackled Andy Warhol's famous "Saturday Disaster" (14#, 15#, 16#, 22#, 24#) from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, philosophy and the visual arts. (The artist Steve Miller did a fascinating segment on the work, speaking from his perspective as one who has worked extensively in silk screening.) I'm delighted that Philosophy graduate student Wesley Mattingly did one of the Warhol segments, 22#, forcing us to look at precisely what we "don't see" in the image, leading us into a sophisticated "interrogation of the gaze" that asks us how the dead are revivified through the canvas.

Ji Yun Lee (25#) skilfully comments on Hannah Wilke's Needed-Erase-Her, leading her listeners towards a feminist phenomenological reading of the piece, through a series of questions. [Ji Yun also posted elegant segments on Yayoi Kusama's Blue Dress (29#) and Warhol's Saturday Disaster, 24#]

As a teacher, I'm fascinated by how the exercise of composing for a cell phone tour has impelled my students to engage so thoughtfully and rigorously with major art works: many spent extended periods looking at the works, until a light bulb, clicked as it were; in all cases they came up with original readings and figured out original ways to communicate their excitement to the listeners. The discipline of writing two minute segments for an audio tour, as opposed to writing conventional lengthy academic papers, encouraged the students to craft pithy and deeply insightful commentaries. The knowledge that they are responsible to a larger audience, far beyond the classroom, seems to have inspired them to produce academic work above and beyond the call of duty. Speaking for myself, in the various prompts I recorded, I found myself discovering new aspects of works that I had thought I knew well; like any faculty member, I found the challenge of limiting myself to two minutes to be painful, but it was also exciting to discover how much one can evoke in a brief passage. And I'm just delighted that our international students have found creative way to compose imaginative and critical segments in multiple languages, grappling with important problems in linguistic and cultural translation.

Meanwhile, we're learning about the challenges of guiding Museum visitors to try out the tour. We found last night that tiny labels only listing the prompt numbers, and not the actual phone number, just don't work. And we clearly need a big sign at the museum entrance, explaining the existence of the tour and how to access it. Dave Ashelm, the wonderful president of the company Guide by Cell, who was kindly walked us through this whole process, explains that the best way t to get visitors to use a tour is to have "teasers' printed out near the paintings, with questions like, "What is the couple arguing about?", "Why is there a clock in this painting", "Why is she floating in her living room?" So perhaps we'll experiment with signage along those lines.

It has just been great working with the Museum's full time staff, Roy Dawes and Valerie Wright, who have had to juggle so much in the past few months, but who have remained deeply generous and engaged with all our students. They've been very open to us trying out this experiment, which has been simply thrilling for me as a teacher.

I'm still trying to process the opening last night, which was attended by many hundreds. Some of my colleagues had argued for boycotting the event, which they likened to a "Potemkin Village," presenting the illusion that the Rose is a conventional, functioning entity, while the collection itself still remains under threat. For them, the Rose can be referred to "as the institution formerly known as the Rose Art Museum," but it is not a "museum" as they would define the term. It seemed to me important for us to demonstrate what a vital pedagogical resource the Rose remains for us at the University, though constant engagement at a number of levels, although I recognize that negotiating this ethical territory is quite tricky.

In any event, at the opening, scores of students, faculty, and community members wore "Save the Rose" buttons. This led to some impassioned conversation. For some, the Museum has been "saved," in the sense that the building will be remain open, with at least some of the permanent collection retained. For others, the continuing possibility that the key works of the collection--including the Motherwell, the DeKooning, the Gottlieb, the Lichtenstein, the Johns--might be auctioned off, means that the "Rose" as we have come to know it would no longer exist in any meaningful sense of the term.

This morning, though, all thoughts of the controversy faded away for a joyous event. We hosted over 35 adult students from the Waltham Family School, one of our most important community partners, at the Museum, in preparation for their phase of this project. The women, nearly all of them recent immigrants to the States, came up with marvelous original readings of many art works, which will be the basis of their recorded segments (in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Laotian and Cantonese). We had wonderful help from the Spanish language students of my colleague Scott Gravina and the Creole-speaking students of Jane Hale, along with wonderful interpreting work by Anthropology grad student Carlos Martinez Ruiz, so everyone was able to participate in the conversations. (One wonderful thing about working at the Rose is the way it engages people from across the entire community.) We still have to figure out precisely how the recording with the WFS students will work; we're not sure if they will script their commentaries or just speak extemporaneously into the microphone; in any event, we hope to have this multilingual community audio tour up by mid-November!

For anyone who wants to listen to the tour, just call

Details	last edit Today 3:14 am by eschatt - 49 revisions
Tags	edit Type a tag name. Press comma or enter to add another.	Cancel

(781) 253-3398 and then press the designated number followed by the pound (#) sign. There is a listing of the "prompts" (as these audio segments are called) at http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/Rose_Cell_Tour

We'd be extremely grateful for feedback and suggestions on improving the tour!

Reading Love Cemetery

This week I'm teaching China Galland's remarkable book, "Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves" (Harper, 2007) in my graduate seminar, "Making Culture: Theory and Practice." The book is manifestly an account of the author's attempts at collaborative community activism over the years to help restore and secure community access to a historic African-American cemetery in East Texas, in spite of extensive efforts by private and corporate (white dominated) interests that have closed it off to public access. The book is also, more subtly, an exploration of the author's own internal psychic landscape as she tries to breach the staggering, enduring racial divides in American society in the early 21st century. (I had the pleasure of working some years ago in working with China Galland on a quite different racial reconciliation project, around memories and photographs of lynching, and have followed her Keepers of Love project from a distance with great interest.)

The book's subtitle, which sounds like a publisher-imposed phrase, doesn't really do the text justice. As China herself notes early on, the term "slaves" itself is problematic as it limits the personhood of those who were enslaved to their legal status. And in any event the book doesn't have all that much to say about the historical experiences of enslaved persons in Harrison County, but is much more concerned with the experiences and legacies of Jim Crow in the region, and with "unburying" the unresolved psychic trauma of those enduring legacies of black and white Americans.

Having worked extensively on a different set of African-American cemetery restoration and reclamation projects (primarily in Georgia) reading the book was an exhilerating and at times deeply disturbing experience, bringing back powerful memories of joy, fulfillment, disappointment and anguish.

I love the framing moment early on: at the close of China’s first visit to the cemetery with two members of the descendant community, a large elm tree comes down with a crash. One of the African American women remarks, “That’s just the Ancestors lettin’ us know they seen us,” she said, “and that they’re happy we’re here." (p. 26)
 The remark puts me in mind of the deep significance attached to trees in African-American communities throughout the American South, as repositories of the spirit. (I discuss this symbolism in some detail in my recent article, "Going by the Trees: Death and Regeneration in Georgia's Haunted Landscapes' [Electronic Antiquity, 2009]) For the Kongo people of West-Central Africa, trees are explicitly the houses of the honored dead. In the rural South, in Georgia as well as in East Texas, there seem to be mere enigmatic associations among these elements. Trees are the signals of gravesites and mark the boundaries of graveyards; they span great gulfs of time between generations, between those who came before us and those who will come after. Their great reaches span the visible extent of branches and the hidden abyss of mysterious roots, allowing them in multiple imaginative registers to bridge visible and invisible, the conscious and the unconscious, the articulated and the unspeakable.

But if the dense space of the tree-covered African-American cemetery opens up possibilities of reconciliation with ancestors and with those across the color line, this mythic space also opens up potentially terrifying chasms of mis-recognition and painful misunderstanding. In the most startling and penetrating sections of her book, China unflichingly recounts her breach with her closest African-American community partner, Doris, who becomes for a time deeply disenchanted with her. China herself attributes their troubles to her own attempt to have Dorris and other community members sign a release to allow for a video documentary to be shot. As China notes, in Harrison County the scenario of a white person seeking signatures from black folks conjures up a painful history of land dispossession. Yet while I'm sure this was part of the story, more seems to have been going on: given the staggering burden of racialized history in the region, it seems inevitable that cross-racial attempts at reconciliation will face complex backlashes across racial lines, even among people of good will deeply committed to tolerance and mutual understanding. Doris at one point tells China, "We didn't need you," and ths seems to go to the heart of complex politics of dependency and independence in the ostensibly post-civil rights South. What does it mean for any white person to try to "help" in these contexts? Does aid always imply a relationship of power, a reduction of the person of color being aided to a structural position of dependence? How do we find a way back to a spirit of true collaboration and mutual liberation? And how do we really understand how things, so often, go wrong? As thoughtful as China's account of their break is, I found myself wishing for an Afterword by Doris herself, to understand her own perspective on this ruptured, if ultimately repaired, friendship.

If China gets herself into trouble through the prototypical 'white' ritual practice of seeking written signatures, it is surely appropriate that she is returned to grace and the beloved community through a very different ritual context, within the sacred confines of Afro-Baptist worship. After a long period of self-conscious critical examination, in which she finds herself repeatedly saying the wrong things (I must admit that I read these sections with a great deal of anxious and embarrassed recognition!) she finally surrenders herself to the flow and power of a call and response service, and in so surrendering, is in effect rescued by Doris. This remarkable scene is poignant testimony to the redemptive power of ritual to transcend the pitfalls of rational thought and to cross-cut conventional categorical oppositions.

This contrast, between text-based knowledge (exemplified by the written releases that nearly destroy the friendship between the two women) and a deeper form of knowledge embedded in the landscape itself, runs through the entire book. At a certain point, the author realizes that istory is not exhausted in the (white) textual legal records she is obsessively research ("Records are the victor's story,"she acknowledges). Rather History, in the form of historical consciousness, emerges through embodied performance, through shared physical labor in the cemetery, through worshipful song in sanctified spaces, through the quiet struggles to unlock a gate or figure out how to pour out a libation together. This form of Historicity is hardly a seemless narrative but is composed of stops and starts, abrupt reversals, misfires and miscues. And yet this kind of knowledge-in-becoming finally, improbably moves people forward in deepening relationships, in part because these relationships, which rest on mutual vulnerability, develop their own histories over time, histories that make possible a mutual recognition of History in its fullest forms.

It is hard not to think, in this context, of Baby Suggs' sermon in the Clearing, in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Against the long history of white-dominated textual history, Baby Suggs insists that true knowledge of past and future are to be grounded in the land and embodied into flesh: "Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And oh my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up."

In this beautiful book, it seems to me, China Galland is trying to conjure up for us a reconstructed collective body, in the figure of Love Cemetery as a shared object of adoration and struggle. This long-neglected burial ground becomes, through this honest and painful retelling, a historical body of land and love -- one that we can all put a hand to and all hold up.

• To see a preview of the video being made about Love Cemetery (the project for which those troublesome releases were signed!) go to http://chinagalland.blip.tv/#170807
  

Walking as Cultural Production

This week in my graduate seminar we are reading Rebecca Solnit's intriguing book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000). Solnit argues that while walking has been practiced by our species for untold millenia, walking as a specific cultural practice, engaged in for the sake of walking (as opposed to simply a means of getting somewhere) is only a few centuries old. (She especially associates the practice's emergence with Rousseau's walks, as archived in Reveries of the Solitary Walker and the Confessions. Living as we do in Concord, Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau took so many of the walks immortalized in his essay Walking (1862), it is hard not to ponder the ways in which our experiences of walking have been shaped and structured by the great local walkers of the region's past.

Yesterday, as my wife Ellen Schattschneider and I took one of our favorite walks, along the "Battle Road" trail of the Minute Man National Historic Park in Concord, I found myself wondering about the extent to which walking can be understood not only as a historically and culturally-constituted practice but also as a site of cultural production, through which socially-salient meanings, and even new forms of inter-subjectivity can be generated.

Our walk began by crossing the small wooden footbridge near Merriam's Corner, where on April 19, 1775, the first day of the Revolutionary War, intense fighting had taken place between British regular and the colonial Minutemen. A National Park Service interpretive plaque summarizes the fighting along the battle road that day and declares that the fighting was foundational in forging "American identity." In this sense, the five mile trail can be understood as a nationalist site, designed for inculcating a set of patriotic sensibilities in those who hike it. I must admit that given how beautiful the trail is, and how low key the NPS signage is, I tend to resist this reading, at least emotionally. Yet during this, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the park, it is certainly worth reflecting on the ideological climate in 1959 that led Congress to establish the park, and that led subsequently to the trail being surveyed and preserved.

As we crossed the footbridge, we found ourselves thinking of a very different walk and of a very different kind of produced intersubjective awareness. During her ethnographic fieldwork at Akakura Mountain Shrine in northeastern Japan, Ellen would routinely cross over a footbridge in the early hours of the morning to begin a ritualized ascetic climb up the sacred mountain. She discusses this ascetic walk in great detail in Chapter Five ("My mother's garden: ascetic discipline on the mountain") of her book Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Sacred Japanese Mountain (Duke University Press, 2003) Worshippers residing at the shrine, nearly all of the women, are expected to climb one of the mountain's pathways each morning, praying and undergoing various forms of ascetic purification as they do so. The walks, Ellen argues, are not only socially organized, they are also productive of new forms of consciousness. In traversing a rugged landscape intimately associated with their foremothers, who have repeatedly moved across this territory, worshippers enter into intimate relationship with their antecedents. They are opened up to the possibility of dream-visions on the mountain, which they are expected to narrate to their fellow worshippers each evening back in the shrine, and which they immortalize through painting votive images, which are hung about in the shrine's inner sanctum or Shinden. A climbing ascetic might at the mountain's sacred waterfal, for instance behold a vision of the mountain's great avatar, Akakura Daigongen, manifesting himself as a pair of green male and female dragons, and later paint that vision as a form of offering back to the mountain divinities (kami). Subsequently, that particular site on the mountain will be known to worshippers, in part, through that remembered vision. In this way, each ascetic walk up the mountain is partly conditioned by the pre-existing established subculture of the shrine, and also potentially transformative of that subculture.

Back on the Battle Road trail, we found ourselves surrounded in a meadow of tall sunflowers, some of them five or six feet tall. I had been only dimly aware of the sunflowers a few weeks ago, when we last walked on the trail, but they had rocketed upwards since then, and the meadow was a blaze of yellows in the stunning sunlight of an autumn late afternoon. We found ourselves pondering the various directions the of the flower petals were facing: in the open-most part of the meadow most were facing in the direction of the morning sun, although some smaller plants, whose access to the eastern sun had blocked by the higher stalks, had turned their faces towards the western sun. As the trail turned to run alongside the woods to our right, we saw that the sunflowers to our left had turned their faces away from the woods, towards the more open spaces to the north-west. Peering into the faces of the flowers, we saw bees nestled into the interior, evidently hunkering down in the cold.

Along the trail in the midst of the meadow another National Park Service interpretive plaque recounted details of the running battle, including the fact that the effective range of a musket was roughly the distance from the sign to Route 2a, about seventy-five yards away. Yet in this blaze of autumnal color it was hard to imagine many walkers stopping to read the sign; the consciousness being imposed on the walker was more one exultation, perhaps tinged by awareness of the coming of winter, a sense intensified by the darkening reds of the foliage and the slight chill in the air. Indeed, a few minutes later, as we emerged from the woods onto the next open meadow, we came across an older woman, her face turned upwards to the sun. Seeing us, she smiled and held open arms. "Glorious!" she said, "isn't it glorious?" Ellen agreed: "I just wish it could stay like this forever." The woman nodded and smiled, "Forever!" So, for a moment at least, we had an instant of the making of something, if not quite of culture, then of a shared frame of intersubjective awareness, a celebration of life in face of its antithesis.

Later on the walk, walking across one of the boardwalks that crosses the open marshlands, filled with riotous purple loosestrife (an invader, Ellen tells me) and framed by the distant flash of swamp maples, all ablaze with color, we overheard another reminder of how the Autumn beauty of the walk seems to inspire meditations on mortality. A spry elderly gentleman talking on his cell phone passed us. "I'm so old, " he declared cheerfully into the phone, "I can't believe I'm so f***ing old!" A moment later, he caught Ellen's eye and they both laughed delightedly.

So it is a curious paradox of walks out in "nature", that we are simultaneously encouraged to enter into solitary reveries and yet find ourselves, from time to time, caught up in moments of intense "communitas," in Victor Turner's sense, in which we sense ourselves deeply linked to the strangers who pass us by. Perhaps these are not quite instances of culture-making, of the sort found on the rocky paths of Mount Akakura, but they are at least the foundational frames of intersubjective awareness, expanding our horizons beyond our private interior thoughts into possibilities of imaginative social exchange.

First Weekend of Nantucket Research

We're on the ferry now heading back from Nantucket to the mainland (or to "America" as some islanders call it) after a wonderful initial weekend of research on the island's African-American oral history. We were warmly welcomed by many of the island's specialists in African-American history, and very well looked after by our hosts Renee and Bill Oliver of the African Meeting House/Museum of African-American History. It had been great getting to know members of the small but deeply committed multicultural network of Nantucketers committed to researching and celebrating the island’s African-American history as well as that of other communities of color on the island. It has also been delightful getting to know my grad students Mengqing, Shasha and Yaxin, who are skilled, energetic and imaginative researchers.

On Saturday we worked primarily in the Oliver's living room, recording key community historians. The interviews were rich and fascinating, but at the same time reminded us how difficult it is to elicit usable footage for an audio walking tour (accessible via cell phone) through unscripted interviews, especially if the recordings aren't being done in situ. The problem is compounded when gathering accounts of historical events that took place well over a century ago; inevitably, interiews qualify their remarks with "I seem to recall, " or "check this, but I think...", all of which is entirely understandable when they are away from their books, but which won't quite work for a cell phone tour. We'll clearly need to work much more carefully with our community partners and historians in scripting specific segments, which can be read aloud by local people.

The richest footage, we found, were unexpected 'experience near' moments. Frank Spriggs described a potent memory from the late 1940s, when he was the only student of color in Nantucket's public school system. He got to play Santa Claus in the Holiday pageant. At the time, he experienced this as a welcoming and inclusive act, but only decades did it occur to him how telling it was that in playing the role he was required to wear long white gloves and white-face makeup. For white folks, after all, Santa Claus was, unquestionably, white. The memory, which he describes beautifully, should make for an evocative segment on the tour. (We're not quite sure where to place it geographically: perhaps near the high school complex as part of a series of memories on race and the school system?)

Frank also shared some fascinating memories of the seasonal community of African-American domestic servants during the 1940s and 1950s; during the summer the island's population of color would swell from under ten to several hundreds. On their 'free days' (Thursday and half Sunday) these men and women (employed by wealthy summering employers as chauffers, maids, cooks and so forth) would congregate on Main Street and on one particular beach. We'd love to collect more of their stories and include them in the audio tour.

Through a lucky break, on our very first moment on the island we met, on the dock, Mr. Michael Miller, a long time member of the island's African-American community. He directs the Nantucket Martial Arts Academy and is a Master teacher of Tae Kwon Do. He invited us to his Dojon (training center) and we did a great interview with him about his work with young people on the island. We are thinking that this might be one of the final segments of the tour, since it exemplifies a long term narrative on the island, of the creative synthesis of cultures, including East/West and trans-Atlantic exchanges.

Sunday was an extraordinary beautiful, windy early fall New England day; we attended worship service with the Olivers at the First Congregational Chuch, which is featured in Moby Dick (although it is not clear that Melville had actually been on Nantucket when we wrote the novel!). At the front door we were greeted by a woman in the congregation wearing colonial garh, as had her mother and grand-mother before her. (She's pictured above with Mengqing, Yaxin and Shasha).

Mengqing, Yaxin and Sharsha continue to be fascinated by the tragic story of Quak Te, a servant from China who was in effect marooned on Nantucket in 1807 and who committed suicide in 1809. He had been left behind by his employer, the merchant from Canton identified as “Punqua Wingchong” (my students tell me this is an improbable name) . We hope to work more on untangling his story and developing an effective way of including the narrative in the audio tour.

Starting the Nantucket Audio Tour Project!

I'm blogging this onboard the "slow" ferry to Nantucket, with three of our grad students, as we head out to start our community history project with the African-American community on the island this weekend. Renee at the African American Meeting house/Museum of African American History Museum has kindly set up about five interviews for us over the course of the weekend, which is exciting. I'm really pleased that we'll get to meet members of the Jamaican-American community on the island, whom we are hoping to learn about. We've been reading the fascinating studies of the island's African-American history in Robert Johnson's excellent edited volume. Since this group of grad students (Shasha, Yaxin and Meqging) are all from China, we're also very interested in the accounts we've read of Chinese on the island during the Nineteenth century; we wonder if we'll find a way to include some of their stories on the tour.

One thing we are already wondering about is how best to incorporate music and environmental sound into the audio tour. Isabel Kalenback-Montemayor's fascinating essay in the Johnson volume gives some lines of a ballad composed in honor of Absalom Boston, the African-American captain of the 1832 all-black crew of the whaling ship Industry. We're hoping we can find some singers willing to perform the ballad, set to a plausible tune. We're also hoping to record appropriate maritime sounds, of seabirds, surf and wind to edit into various audio segments.

Thoughts on outdoor Cell Phone Audio Tours

We're currently exploring a Fall semester project partnering with the Museum of African American History's campus on the island of Nantucket. This will be based in my graduate seminar, "Making Culture: Theory and Practice" (CP 201), in which we continue to explore new uses of social media technologies in the building of community, at local and regional levels.

The museum already puts on a wonderful historic walking tour along its Black Heritage Trail, which includes its two remarkable properties, the African Meeting House and the Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House. Our current plan is to help the Museum develop a digital audio walking tour, along the lines of the podcasted community history project we did several years ago in West Medford, Massachusetts, with the West Medford Afro-American Remembrance Committee. We'll also build on some of the approaches we explored in our on line oral history project in the Mississippi Delta, "Wade in the Water," several years ago, in which we tied oral history segments to a schematized map of several communities.

This time around we are hoping to make use of new telephone based technologies, perhaps working with a third party vendor, to make the tour accessible through cell phone to walkers. As with the West Medford project, we'd Like to avoid monologues or singular narration, but rather record multiple voices from the community, especially elders sharing their memories and stories that have passed down through the generations. We're also hoping to edit in local music and environmental sounds of the land and sea, and perhaps promote some forms of inter-generational dialogues through the audio tracks.

We'll spend a good deal of time listening to existing cell phone-accessible audio tours (for museum, zoos, and outdoor heritage sites) and discussing effective strategies. [A good resource is the comprehensive list of cell phone tours hosted by "Guide by Cell", one of leading providers in the field.]

In the class, we'll be reading Thoreau's classic essay on walking, as well as Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. One of the issues we'll be grappling with is how to promote the kinds of meditative "ruminating" called for by Thoreau in the context of cell phone-mediated audio tour. Most of the time, I realize, our ever-growing addiction to cell phones and mobile communication devices is probably eroding our contemplative and observant faculties; we engage in a great deal of largely extraneous chatter as a way of not really being any place at on time, but rather suspended between fluidly shifting virtual locations, so as to never face the weight of being truly alone with our thoughts. But might there be a way to re-capture, through these same technologies, the conversational or dialogic qualities of a great walk with a friend, or to inspire the walker, after hearing a good story or a well-edited melange of audio, to walk on a bit and think new thoughts to himself or herself? Can we encourage, even inspire, listeners not just to consume information passively but to observe their surroundings, to switch off external digital stimuli, and develop new connections themselves between what they've learned and what they are observing? [It seems to me that the most skillfully designed art museum cell phone tours do this, posing intriguing questions about a work of art in ways that encourage the visitor to linger and really look at the piece, or discover something new for himself or herself.]

A related challenge we'll grapple with in engineering the audio tour, beyond transmitting vital factual information about African-American history on the island, will be how to convey or evoke, more subtly perhaps, the rich texture of community historical experience across the decades and century. This would include experiences of slavery and emancipation, 19th century struggle of school desegregation, 19th whaling trips, and the nature of women's work on the island. Will we be able to integrate sounds of labor, protest, music-makingn and of the sea itself effectively into the presentations, in ways that enhance, rather than detract from, the stories and voices of community members? As always, we'll need to think about whether or not there is a recognizable recurrent narrator to the tour, or if there are many voices moving in and out of the tour without a specific identifiable 'guide.' Presumably, we'll have a 'core' set of factual segments, with options to listen to the more evocative or aesthetically rich segments to deepen or extend the audio experience.

We'll be conscious of the need to keep running our draft audio segments past our partners, at the Museum and in the wider community, and to modify the audio tour accordingly. We'll also need to think carefully about forms of evaluation and assessment, to get a sense of how well the tour is reaching our 'target audiences,' once it is on line and accessible by cell phone.

Community History Intern Project: Summer 2009

This summer Ellen and I spent about four weeks working with a group of low-income minority teenagers in a community history project in Covington, Georgia. This stimulus-funded project was a collaborative partnership between the Washington Street Community Center and the African-American Historical Association of Newton County, on whose board of directors I serve.

The first week, my involvement with the project was at a distance, and the six young people were directly supervised by local activists Forrest Sawyer, Jr. and Flemmie Pitts, who are civil rights activists with long standing interesting in community history and youth empowerment in Newton County. The teens concentrated on building up the Association's wiki, researching local African-American church histories and sport histories as well as their own family histories. Carlus for instance explored the fascinating history of the Goss Family, researching its roots in nearby Walton County. In this work, the teens received a great deal of help from staff and volunteers at the Newton County Public Library in Covington, and began to learn how to use the wonderful resources in the library's Georgia History room.

When Ellen and I arrived, we introduced the young people to video shooting and editing techniques, and helped them set up and administer a YouTube channel for the African-American Historical Association. We had a great session in Covington's two major African American cemeteries (Westview and the city cemetery) with Ms. Emogene Williams, one of the leading community historians. (The above photograph shows us in the City Cemetery with Ms. Williams, near the grave of Rev. Toney Baker, one of Ms. Williams' ancestors.) Carlus took us to meet her wonderful grandmother, Ms. Bertha Goss, the founder of a noted local beauty salon; the group made their first YouTube video about this visit.

We also worked closely with Deacon Richard Johnson, who had been a prominent activist in the County during the Civil Rights movement. The students shot and edited a brief video of him sharing memories of the movement standing in Covington square, where the local desegregation struggle had culminated in the spring of 1970. In this and the videos that followed, the young people edited in some music, sung by themselves and their friends at the Washington Street Community Center,and recorded themselves doing introductions and wrap up clips. They also did several fascinating video sessions inside the old County jail, videoing former SCLC activist Tyrone Brooks (now a George State Representative) and Deacon Johnson, sharing their memories of incarceration during the Freedom Struggle.

The young men interns, who were fascinated by local sports history, also did an interview with Deacon Sawyer on his season as quarterback with the Wolverines Football Team during the 1967 season. (The young women had a good deal of fun with their friends organizing and recording football cheers for this segment) The group later shot another video at the site of R.L. Cousins high school, where the Wolverines won an outstanding victory. In addtion to the video footage shot in the field, the group conceived of the idea of creating a YouTube TV studio at the Washington Street Community Center, which they termed the "Washington Street Community History Network," inviting community members to be interviewed about various aspects of community history. The young men interviewed such prominent figures as Mr. J.P. Godfrey, Jr. about his experiences in the Armed Forces and his memories of Jim Crow in and out of the service.

The young woman, in turn, concentrated on video documentation of African-American women leaders in the county. These included:

• Ms. Lottie B. Johnson, the first African-American extension agent in Newton County;
• well-known educator and activist Ms. Louise B. Adams;
  
• educator and Covington City Council member Ms. Hawnethia Williams;
• Pastor Clara Lett of the Rainbow Covenant Church in Portderdale.
  

We also did work with slavery-related records in the county's Judicial Center, concentrating on the records in Probate Court and in real estate deeds. Carlus became fascinated with the story of an enslaved group of people owned by Benjamin Overby and sold apart from one another after his death. Jasmine and Michah were especially intrigued by the story of a free woman of color known as Susan Ivey, who in December 1863 petitioned the Inferior Court for the right to be made a slave, designating the white woman she wished to be her mistress and owner. We were, with help from Walton County activist Bobby Howard, able to locate and interview Susan Ivey's living descendants, who were able to fill in some of the gaps in the historical documentary record. Working with the extraordinary local storyteller and performer Andy Irwin, the thre young woman scripted and workshopped a play about Susan Ivey, in which they speculated on the series of events that led her to take this unusual step. They did several wonderful workshop performances of the play in Covington, including a memorable one at Bethlehem Baptist Church (the County's oldest African American house of worship). We hope they'll be able to do a full performance for the community at some point this Fall.

The young women interns decided to name themselves "The I.N.D.E.P.E.N.D.E.N.T 3" and created a wrap up video about their summer experiences on the project.

Along the way, the interns also developed concepts for Historic Markers throughout the County, marking significant sites in local African-American history, including church history and the Freedom Struggle.

We received an enormous amount of help from community members during the summer. We are grateful in particular for support from Ms. Cherly Delk, Special Projects Coordinator for the county, who made it possible for the young people to use excellent video and recording equipment; to Ms. Bea Jackson, the Director of the Washington Street Community Center; which generously hosted the project, Bob Fernard, who instructed the young people in video shooting and editing; Betsy Morehouse (who kindly hosted our visit to historic Burge Plantation); Bobby Howard and Waymand Mundy (Moore's Ford Memorial Committee), who took us around historic sites in Walton County; Rev. Avis Williams, the artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier; and to many, many others.

We're still assessing the strengths and limitations of the program, and thinking about how to make the program better the next time around. There's no question that we need to do a better job of direct, hands on supervision. There were times when many of the interns, most of whom had not held regular jobs before, felt they were at loose ends at times. Sometimes the level of "creative chaos" in the project, especially in the video studio, got a little too intense for productive work (although at times, the informal give and take yielded wonderful results.) In some cases, there simply wasn't time to follow through on many of the interns' excellent ideas, including their desire to present their proposals for inclusive Historic Markers to the County Board of Commissioners. But all in all I remain deeply grateful to the young people who worked so hard, and to the many volunteers who gave some generously of their time during the summer.

I'm eager to bring some of my Cultural Production graduate students, as well as my undergraduate students from Brandeis, back to Covington at some point to continue this collaborative work in public history.