Cultural Productions

New blog: Cultural Environments

2011-09-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

Friends--With my move away from Brandeis University and the end of the Cultural Production graduate program, I've started a new blog, that will serve as a successor to "Cultural Productions." The new blog, called "Cultural Environments" is at:
http://culturalenvironments.blogspot.com/ is associated with Central Washington University's Museum of Culture and Environment, where I serve as director. Please subscribe to the new blog; I'd love to continue our conversations on all manner of art and cultural phenomena! I'll also continue to do some blogging on my book website,
http://theaccidentalslaveowner.com/
on matters related to the book and issues of slavery and remembrance.

Supporting Lynn Linnemeier's Art

2011-01-05T18:20:00.000-08:00

I’d like to urge the readers of this blog to consider a pledge of financial support, however modest or generous, to enable a really exciting public art project by Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier. Called "Unravelling Miss Kitty's Cloak: Quilting Community Memory", the project honors the memory of the enslaved woman known as Miss Kitty or Catherine Boyd (c. 1822-1851), the principal subject of my forthcoming book "The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of the American South" (University of Georgia Press).

Lynn’s project also commemorates broader stories of slavery and liberation in the Oxford/Covington, Georgia and Emory University communities.

Her striking fabric-based sculpture builds on the symbolism of Yoruba Egungun masquerades, incorporating photographs, documents and testimonies from Newton County community partners. I’m really impressed by the work Lynn has been doing with diverse folks in the County, including the Grace United Methodist congregation in Covington, which is hosting a special worship service on Sunday, Feb. 6 to welcome Miss Kitty’s descendants back to the county.

Lynn's project is sponsored by the Kickstarter Foundation, which means funding is contingent on reaching a pledge level of at least $2,000 by February 1, 2011.

You can make a pledge to the project and see a video by Lynn about her art work, at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lynnlinn/unraveling-miss-kittys-cloak-quilting-community-me

(Kickstarter will accept pledges from $1.00 on up.)

If sufficient funding is raised, Lynn's art installation will be unveiled on the final day of the conference, “Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies”, at the talking circle at Old Church in Oxford, Georgia, at 2:30 pm on Sunday, February 6.

Buffering the Dead

2010-12-08T05:10:00.000-08:00

Last night, Ellen and I attended a fascinating lecture by the always marvelous Ed Linenthal on War and Remembrance, taking place on the 69th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. Ed discussed, among many things, the transformations that the hexagonal Hall of Remembrance structure at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington D.C. underwent, from its original design by James Ingo Fried. The original design had envisioned a larger structure, encased in red brick, consistent with evocations of the Ghetto and with the red brick of the death camp evocations of the main building of the museum. This design was critiqued by the National Capital Planning Commission as too grim for a space fronting onto the National Mall; one commissioner even expressed a desire for a degree of "hope" emerging out of the Holocaust story. Thus, the Hall of Remembrance is smaller and in a lighter stone, more consistent with the alabaster tones of the nearby Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

As Ed spoke, an alternate reading of this design shift occurred to me. In addition to the avowed aim of integrating the museum into the larger American democratic narrative of redemption, progress and hope, might there have been a less conscious impulse at play? Might there have been a desire, in a sense, to protect the symbolic core of the nation from the profoundly disturbing and uncanny presence of the Dead, especially the millions of Holocaust Dead? I am reminded of the analysis of Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine by Klaus Antoni, who argues that the shrine does not simply honor or venerate the military war dead, but rather, in a profound if unarticulated sense, seeks to protect the nation of the living from the potentially wrathful influence of the unquiet, unsettled dead. Might something comparable be happening in and around the USHMM--are the Dead of the Shoah being honored, yet also be held at a safe distance, in a symbolic sense, from America's shores? Does the light-colored exterior of the Hall of Remembrance serve, in effect, as a protective buffer zone, guarding the shining City on the Hill from the darkening clouds of mass death and the Old World?

Ed also touched on the multiple iterations of the photographic image of Oklahoma City firefighter Chris Fields holding in his arms the dead or dying baby Baylee Almon, a young victim of the terrorist bombing of the Federal Building. In the weeks and months after the bombing many persons proposed memorial designs that incorporated in one way or another aspects of this endlessly reproduced image. The most intriguing and uncanny of these images Ed showed us was a sketch showing a skeleton kneeling before the fireman, arms raised as if taking the baby. In the image, if I saw it correctly, Fields is shown pushing back against the skeleton with one hand.

During the Q & A, we had a fascinating discussion of the image, which continued into the reception. My initial reading had been that drawing was a kind of raw and wounded expression of the terrifying presence of death, which was (as in the USHMM Hall of Remembrance) being buffered against-- but artist Steven Anstey thoughtfully noted that there was a quiet peacefulness to the image, that unlike the standard image of the Grim Reaper this was not an ominous rendition of death. Ellen suggested that the image paradoxically signals the ambiguous status of the baby, suspended somewhere between life and death, in a way that is reminiscent of Roland Barthes' mediation of a photograph of a condemned prisoner on the eve of his execution: "He is dead and he is going to die." Historian Roberta Wollons suggested that the image might show a sequence, first of Fields' tireless sruggling to save the baby and resist Death (pushing him away), and then the peaceful relinquishing of the baby into the domain of the Dead.

The image is rendered still more puzzling by the reported fact that the artist was filled with guilt and shame that his home state of Michigan had been a staging base for the attack. So perhaps his making of the drawing and sending it to Oklahoma City was meant as an act of expiation; this could be consistent with the readings of the image as a kind of ritual process of transformation, that the picture is a kind of sacred offering meant to ease the passage of the martyred baby from this world to the other world. I remain uncertain how to read the fact that the skeleton is shown kneeling in front of the standing fireman: is Death paying honor to the dead or dying infant and to the heroism of the Living?

Slavery and Academic Reparations

2010-09-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

In recent correspondence, Simon Lewis (until recently, the director of the program on the Carolina Lowcounty and the Atlantic World at the College of Charleston) made the fascinating suggestion that as a form of academic reparations "Historically White Colleges and Universities" (HWCUs) should participate in a massive initiative of genealogical research, helping constitute an enormous database that would aid African Americans seeking to trace their lineages back to sites of involuntary importation, and perhaps to Caribbean and African sites of origin. I suppose this could be linked to David Eltis' Trans Atlantic Slave Voyages Database, at http://www.slavevoyages.org/ and the emerging names listings in the database at: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/resources/slaves.faces

It occurs to me that this could be integrated with an idea that China Galland, author of "Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves" (HarperCollins, 2008) has been proposing: a national initiative to document and safeguard historic African American cemeteries. China has devoted years in partnership with community activists in East Texas to helping descendants secure access to one specific African American cemetery on private land; she is in the process of making a riveting film about this struggle, previewed at: http://www.chinagalland.com/

During a recent research visit to Augusta, Georgia, I was inspired by the activist research being done by Joyce Law, Travis Halloway and their colleagues in documenting and conserving the extraordinary cultural heritage site of Cedar Grove cemetery, an historic African American cemetery next to the better known Magnolia Cemetery (previously, the Augusta City Cemetery). The photograph above is of three United States Colored Troops graves at Cedar Grove, being documented by Joyce. A decade ago, my students and I at Emory's Oxford College did comparable work in the historic African American cemetery in Oxford, Georgia, described on our old website at: http://www.marial.emory.edu/exhibitions/cemetery/Home.html
Similar work is being done by scholars and community advocates around the nation, although often in ways that are rarely linked to one another.

My recently completed book manuscript (The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of the American South) attempts to integrate restorative cemetery work and genealogical research--in a way that is linked to a single institution of higher learning, Emory University. One of the "charter myths" of Emory is the story of its first president of the Board of Trustees, Bishop James Osgood Andrew, whose ownership of slaves led to the national schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844. For his white defenders, Bishop Andrew was a victim of northern intolerance and fanaticism; a great deal of sentimental white writing over the past 160 years has been devoting to his ostensibly benevolent care of one of his slaves, a woman known as Miss Kitty, who in 1841 is said to have refused manumission and colonization to Liberia out of loyalty to her white master and mistress. A memorial tablet erected to her in 1938, in the Oxford, Georgia cemetery, by a white segregationist remains an important site of local white sentimental memory. Local African Americans, not surprisingly, tell very different versions of her story and her relationship with the Bishop. [I explore some of this history and memory work in my on line essay

"The Other Side of Paradise: Glimpsing Slavery in the University's Utopian Landscapes" Southern Spaces (May 2010)
http://www.southernspaces.org/2010/other-side-paradise-glimpsing-slavery-universitys-utopian-landscapes

In the course of all this mythological narration, the actual names and historical experiences of all other enslaved persons owned by Bishop Andrew have been nearly forgotten. So in the book I felt it was ethically important to identify as many of these enslaved persons as possible and genealogically trace their descendants. I was able to identify about thirty five people held as slaves by Bishop Andrew during the course of his life, and was able to sketch out in most instances at least some of their descendants. Among other lines, I was able to locate and meet the descendants of Miss Kitty, who reside in the U.S. northeast; members of this family will be traveling to Emory University and Oxford, Georgia at some point next year, perhaps to the upcoming conference, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (Feb. 3-6, 2011) and our planned day of reflection and commemoration on Feb. 6. described at http://slavery-and-universities.wikispaces.com/Day_of_Reflection

I wonder if other colleges and universities historically linked to slavery and the slave trade might want to partner together with one another ( and perhaps with Historically Black Colleges and Universities & with the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society ) to develop some sort of systematic initiative around African American genealogy and African American cemeteries. Each school could start with research, perhaps in the context of academic classes, identifying enslaved persons associated with the school’s history in one way or another, and then work on tracing their ancestors and descendants. At the same time, these institutions of higher learning could partner with local congregations and other organizations to help document and preserve relevant cemeteries and burial grounds.

A good deal of such research is already being pursued by some institutions of higher learning, including the College of William & Mary through its Lemon Project (led by Robert Engs); and extensive research materials have been shared on line through Brown University's Commission on Slavery and Justice. I'm wondering what a national or international network of such research projects might look like, with an emphasis on making research materials easily available to the public.

Such an initiative would not ‘solve’ the larger conundrums over reparations by universities or by American society at large, but it might be an interesting place to start--engaging students, staff, faculty and community members in productive and thought provoking partnerships.

Slavery, Memory and Native American Histories

2010-05-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

My essay, "The Other Side of Paradise: Glimpsing Slavery in the University's Utopian Landscapes" was published yesterday in the journal Southern Spaces:

http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2010/auslander/1a.htm

I'm really delighted by the job the journal's staff has done, integrating the essay and the images. Southern Spaces is one of my favorite journals and I'm thrilled to have a piece published in it.

By coincidence, I was spending the day in Oxford, Georgia, the principal locale discussed in the paper. In the morning, I gave a talk on slavery and memory for the Emory University Transforming Community Project's annual seminar, and led the group on a tour of three sites mentioned in the piece, Old Church, Kitty's Cottage and the Oxford City Cemetery.

That afternoon I participated in a meeting with the Oxford Historical Shrine Society, doing some advance planning for what we hope will be the final day of the "Slavery and the University" conference (Sunday, February 6, 2011). Our hope for that day is to hold several events in Oxford/Covington, promoting dialogue among scholars and community members, including descendants of persons who were enslaved in Newton Family and descendants of those who were slaveholders. (In many cases, of course, living persons in Newton County can trace descent to both slaveowners and the enslaved.) The challenge is to develop a respectful and thought-provoking framework for difficult dialogues about accountability and memory work in the local community and in the extended Emory University community.

Over the course of the day I had the opportunity to chat a little with Professor Craig Womack, an Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee Native American literary scholar who is now on the Emory faculty. He noted that the year of Emory College's founding 1836, was also the year of the removal of the Creek nation from this land. He has a fascinating lecture (also on Southern Spaces) on the historical relationship between African Americans and the Creek Confederacy:

http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2007/womack/2a.htm

Over the course of the day, I found myself wondering more and more how we might best to honor and explore the Native American dimensions of the slavery-at-Emory story. To date, I've certainly given insufficient attention to these dynamics and legacies. We do know that some of the persons enslaved by Emory College faculty in antebellum Oxford were Native Americans: one of these was Cornelius Robinson (himself born around 1836) married to the African-American woman Ellen; both Cornelius and Ellen were owned by Alexander Means, who was for a time the College President. Cornelius is recalled as "full blooded Indian" by some of his descendants, though identified in the 1870 census (Oxford) as "black" and in the 1880 census (Covington) as "mulatto". Cornelius and Ellen were the maternal grand-parents of the College's chief janitor, Henry "Billy" Mitchell. In a more complex sense, how are to think about the fact that the land on which Emory College and the town of Oxford were laid out in the late 1830s had so recently been inhabited by Native Americans, by members of the Creek and Cherokee nations, who histories and presences were largely effaced from local landscapes? The Native American presence, in a rather macabre fashion, is most prominently marked in standard local memory through the name of the stream that meanders through Oxford and Covington, "Dried Indian Creek," said to refer to a local Creek or Cherokee leader who refused to be removed, who was lynched by white settlers, and whose body was tied to a tree to dry in the sun. His story (which I am eager to learn more about) and the process taking hold of the land by white settlers that the story exemplifies, would seem to be intimately related to the symbolic and practical processes through which chattel slavery was imposed on Newton County.

I'm also eager to learn more about the relations (including marriage) between the long-surviving Native American settlements along the Alcovy River area, east of Emory College, and African-Americans in Oxford/Covington, in slavery times and afterwards.

I do not know if any of the Creek or Cherokee removed from the area that is now Oxford, Georgia were themselves owners of African-American slaves; that history may not in fact be recoverable. But the complex inter-meshing of Native American and African American histories, of the stories of enslaved persons and of the recently disenfranchised freedpeople within the Creek confederacy, surely intersects with the histories of slavery at Emory College and in Oxford, in ways that deserve careful thought and investigation.

Altars to Women of Color in Harvard’s History?

2010-04-06T05:17:00.000-07:00

In a Skype conversation yesterday, artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeir had a fascinating proposal for students in my “Power and Aesthetics in Africa and the Diaspora" (AAAS 156) class at Harvard. The students have been trying to conceptualize an exhibition, performance piece and symposium honoring women of color associated with Harvard over the past three centuries, in slavery and freedom. Lynn suggested we center the project around three “personal altars” for the three 18th century women whom we are witnessing; all three women were, so far as we can tell, born in Africa, brought on slave ships to the Boston area, where they spent at least part of their lives in slavery. The six other women whom we are celebrating in the project (activists, artists, scholars) would be represented in some sort of dynamic relationship to these altars, situated in ‘conversation’ with their foremothers as it were. Our plan would be erect these altar like spaces at a performance/symposium event on Monday, April 19, described at:
http://slavery-and-universities.wikispaces.com/Harvard_April19_event

We would read the words of these women and perhaps perform evocative music, oriented towards the altar-like spaces. We might include them in the exhibition we are planning at Pusey library, next to cases showcasing relevant documents from the Harvard University Archives.

Lynn’s exciting idea has gotten me thinking about what goes into an altar, at the intersection of art and exhibition. Historian Stephen Bann reminds us that in the early modern period, cabinets of curiosity, the forerunners of modern museum displays, emerged in a curious fashion out of altars; they were, he convincingly demonstrates, developed in the context of nostalgic longing by early Protestant intellectuals for the reliquaries destroyed by Protestant reformers. It is fascinating to think that at the heart of the modern exhibitionary complex, usually thought of as such as secular undertaking, the numinous “aura” of altar spaces might still endure, in complex and subtle ways.

We are trying to think through the politics and ethics of any evocation of altar spaces; we are of course wary of anything that seem kitschy or disrespectful of Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions. Yet it does seem right and proper, as Lynn has emphasized, to foreground spiritual dimensions to the project along with an emphasis on educational achievement.

What precisely might such altars or altar like spaces look like? There is a vast proliferation of altar and shrine aesthetics in West/Central Africa and in the African Diaspora that might be drawn upon for inspiration. One of the woman, Belinda Royall, was captured by slave raiders from her home region, in what appears to have been an Ewe or Akan-speaking community in present day Eastern Ghana, along the River Volta. That might suggest an altar space incorporating rocks, branches, pans, ceramic bowls, white chalk, and cloth. Belinda in her 1782 petition makes a rather puzzling reference to the “Great Orisa who made all things”: was she in fact conversant with Yoruba religious elements or was her childhood faith more oriented towards Vodun we wonder?

We are still puzzled on the question of Phillis Wheatley’s origins. Most sources state she was born in the Gold Coast (present day Ghana) or the Senegambia, but the slave schooner on which she was transported in 1761 to Boston, The Phillis (for which she was named) according to slavevoyages.org embarked from the “Windward Coast” (present day Liberia, Sierra Leone and part of Guinea.) In his book on Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that the vessel gathered “slaves in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los, off the coast of Guinea,” and infers she was most likely a Wolof speaker. Whatever the spiritual traditions of her West African childhood, should the altar or sacred space also evoke the Christianity that she soon embraced in Boston?

The third enslaved woman, referred to only as a “Negro Wench” in Harvard President Benjamin Wadsworth’s 1726 diary. We know that she was purchased from Adino Bulfinch in Boston, and that Bulfinch was part owner of a vessel that brought slaves through Barbados, but we do not where in Africa she might have come from.

I am thinking perhaps that the most appropriate altar spaces might be centered on upright tree branches, with various offerings hanging from them. The tree has Christological as well as diverse African and Afro-Atlantic resonances, so might be an appropriately inclusive form. On Belinda's altar we would certainly include a copy of her famous 1782 petition, requesting financial support for the estate of her former owners, the Royall family of Medford. Phillis Wheatley's altar would certainly include her poem addressed to Harvard students, "The the University of Cambridge in New England." The altar for the unknown "negro wench" would include President Wadsworth's diary entry about purchasing her.

We’ll continue to talk this over in class, with Africanist scholars and community partners.

Art, Music and Remembering Slavery in Universities

2010-03-15T05:26:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted that we have now circulated the Call for Papers/Proposals for the conference, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies", to be held at Emory University, Feb. 3-5, 2011. The CFP is posted on our slavery & universities wiki at
http://slavery-and-universities.wikispaces.com/Conference2011

One conceptual challenge were are mulling over in planning the conference is the place of the visual arts and the performing arts in these observances. This is the kind of challenge many of us I think face in our teaching. For instance, the class I'm teaching at Harvard this semester has been fascinated by Wadsworth House (seen above), where President Benjamin Wadsworth resided from 1726 with his wife and at least two enslaved persons, the "mulatto Titus" and a woman identified in his diary only as a "Negro Wench." We have been assuming that the enslaved woman labored, among other places, in the kitchen, but had been unsure where precisely the kitchen was located. On Monday we were shown a closet in structure where the old bric kwall of the hearth appears to be visible; we will be looking at the excavation records for the house later this week and may get a better sense of the 18th century layout of the house.

In any event, this led us into wondering what kinds of digital projections might work on the outside of Wadsworth, or perhaps a more centrally located structure on the Harvard Yard, such as Massachusetts Hall. What kinds of images, incorporated 18th century engravings, passages from relevant diaries, or Phyllis Wheatley's poem to the Harvard students, could be developed as a projection works, to play on the walls of these structures at night? In turn, what might an appropriate soundscape consist of for such an installation? Is there evidence of, say, Senegambian drumming in 18th century Cambridge? Were sorrow songs or spirituals performed here during the period of New England slavery?

For the conference at Emory in February 2011 we are expecting that we will solicit a wide array of artistic work, in multiple genres. I would be most interested in seeing some sort of artistic work directly set up in the conference space, so that presenters would be encouraged to engage with it directly. We did this some years ago at a conference on the Mysteries, in which the artist Kevin Sipp created a latter day bottle tree incorporated elements drawn from the ancient mysteries and African-American bottle trees; that made for fascinating dialogue between scholars and artists. It would be exciting to do something comparable at the slavery and universities conference.

Facebook Memorials Revisited

2010-02-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

In a brilliant essay in this week's The New York Review of Books, "In the World of Facebook,"

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23651

Charles Peterson considers the class dimension of Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. He charts the increasing "suburbanization" of Facebook, which began as an on line micro gated community in a Harvard dorm room and which has retained qualities akin to a standardized, highly regulated middle class suburban housing development, characterized by regularized layout, predictable presentations of self, a repressed sense of alienation from one's interlocutors, and multiple forms of soft surveillance. This he contrasts to MySpace's "more permissive atmosphere and working class aesthetic." Peterson characterizes Facebook's founder, Zuckerberg, as "the Robert Moses of the Internet, bring severe order to a chaotic millieu."

Although Petersen doesn't discuss memorial sites on Facebook, or Foucault for that matter, his insights could presumably be extended to the subtle disciplining of mourning and memorialization on line. My graduate student Alicia Watkins has written insightfully on how Facebook manages memorial pages for its dead members. They tend to be strictly regulated, limited to those who were already "friends" at the time of the person's death. Building on Petersen's landscape analogy, one might view these sites as akin to well manicured suburban cemetery plots, in which all signs of irregular memorial action (overly large bouquets or handmade signs) are quickly removed.

A puzzling exception (that might "prove the rule) would seem to be the Facebook profile page on ten year old Holocaust victim Henio Zytomirski, (born 1933l died in Majdanek) in which the dead child had been "friended" by thousands of well wishers. Since my January 23 post about this page, the AP ran an excellent news story (by MONIKA SCISLOWSKA and VANESSA GERA) on the site, in which several scholars, including me, are quoted:

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20100204/NEWS04/100209796/-1/NEWS09

The story seem to been picked up by scores of news sites around the world. Within hours of the story's posting on February 4, however, the Henio Facebook site disappeared. One presumes it was taken down by Facebook, since, strictly speaking the policy holds that dead persons cannot have active profiles. (They can however have "fan" pages or memorialized pages). Yet by February 6 Henio's Facebook page was once again active. As of this morning Henio has 4,985 "friends". The postings on the wall once again mix the kitschy, the banal, and the moving, many of them in accordance with Facebook's pre-selected options: He has been "hit with delicious chocolate pudding" and invited to throw the food back, and sent Valentine's Gifts. (Another "friend" cautions those who would sent Valentine's gifts to first read the wikipedia account of the Strasbourg pogrom on Feb 14, 1349, in which hundreds of Jews were killed.) [I should note the insightful point by anthropologist Joy Sather-Wagstaff, quoted in the AP story, that these gifts are comparable to offerings left by the bereaved at gravesites or memorials.] Another friend posts, "Little Henio, I hope there is an afterlife where you get to enjoy all the things the rest of us take for granted."

The earlier history of Henio's wall, prior to the February 6 reappearance, appears to have been deleted.

I am unsure of the 'back story' behind the temporary disappearance and reinstitution of the Henio profile page. Was there a popular groundswell by Henio's supporters, pressuring Facebook to restore the site? Or did the page's organizers themselves temporarily remove it following the AP story's publicity, and then restore it?

Such are the mysteries of memorialization on line. I'm not sure if this recent history is entirely consistent with Petersen's model of Facebook as consistent with top-down disciplinary urban/suburban planning. It would seem that memorial on line spaces to some extent open up breaches in the conventional order of things, perhaps allowing for a healthy re-invigoration of chaos, imagination, and cultural creativity.

Phillis Wheatley and Augmented Reality

2010-02-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

In the course I'm teaching this term at Harvard, my students and I are still trying to conceptualize how we might organize various materials on slavery associated with history of the university in a visually stimulating way, in an exhibition in Pusey library cases as well as, perhaps, through some sort of Augmented Reality (AR) smart phone interface (along the lines discussed in my previous post). The students are especially eager to explore the experiences of enslaved women associated with the early years of the history of Harvard College.

We've been puzzling over ways in which to include literary materials. The other day as gathered in the Archives, we pondered Phillis Wheatly's famous poem, "To the University of Cambridge in New-England" (1773), reproduced at:

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/pwheatley/bl-pwheatley-totheuniv.htm

A scanned version of the first edition is at:

http://libraryasp.tamu.edu/cushing/wheatley/exhibit08.htm

We couldn't help but notice that the poem was published in the same year, 1773, that Harvard students debated the ethics of African Slavery at Commencement. (The frontespiece of the book in which the poem appers, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, is reproduced above)

It is a complex poem, in which the poet simultaneously engages in self-abnegation while presuming to preach to the privileged Harvard students about the dangers of sin and the necessity of living up to the privilege they have been given to "scan the heights/Above, to traverse the ethereal space.'" The poem nicely encapsulates a problem that seems to run through the foundations of the early modern university, that it on the one hand is a tangible manifestation of the Celestial Kingdom (a point made manifest in the soaring spires of the campus) yet rests upon all to human foundations of exploited labor. By "sin, that baneful evil to the soul" Wheatley may not specifically have meant the slave trade and slavery, but a retrospective reading might be developed along those lines. She seems to constitute the unseen body of fellow enslaved Africans as moral witnesses to the hypocrisy of White Christendom; the enslaved simultaneously gaze through the gates of the university at those who gaze upon the mysteries of the universe, yet the enslaved themselves sternly look upon those who sit in privilege.

How might one capture these ambiguities and ironies in a mobile AR multimedia installation? Walking across the Harvard Yale might one, upon gazing at Massachusetts Hall or another early College building through the viewfinder of an iphone, see a floating icon of Wheatley, and then click on it to read and hear her poem, read by a student? Might there then be ways to access student critical commentaries on the poem, or perhaps for the visitor to contribute her or his own readings?

Update: Plans are coming together for the conference, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (Feb. 3-6, 2011) to be hosted by Emory University. We had a very productive planning meeting at Emory a couple of weeks ago, and the Call for Papers should be out soon. We had many exciting discussions during the day about ambiguous university responses to the problem of slavery in their past. I was fascinated to learn of the controversial portrait of Yale's initial donor, Elihu Yale, which depicts him being served by an enslaved youth. The University has removed the portrait from the room in which the Trustees meet:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03E5DC153EF93BA25751C0A9619C8B63

Yet it doesn't appear that there has been a full public discussion of the meaning and power of the image. [By the way, I am struck by the constant insistence by those involved in the case that Elihu Yale was neither a slave owner nor directly involved in the slave trade; the matter is presumably worth investigating carefully.]

Augmented Reality and Cultural Heritage

2010-02-14T04:21:00.000-08:00

I've just downloaded the Augumented Reality (AR) iphone app, "Wikitude" and am pondering the implications of this technology for the interpretation of cultural heritage. The app allows the user to view, either in Google Map form or through the camera viewfinder, icons linking to wikipedia entries for all points of interest in a specified radius of where the user is located. So from our place in West Concord, I can look towards the village center through the viewfinder and seeing a floating icon that I may click on, to access the wikipedia page about West Concord, listing its population and so forth. One may choose from a menu which 'worlds' one wants to see icons of (for instance, all Starbucks or Walmarts in the area, or all YouTube videos or Flikr photostreams associated with a given locale.) A comparable AR iphone app, "Nearest New York Subway" lets a person walking in NYC hold up their iphone and through the camera viewfinder see floating icons guiding them towards various subway stations. (so you would not need to consult a map, simply follow the icons to the station, assuming you didn't get run over crossing a street!) Other AR apps let one walk through a city street and through the camera viewfinder see icons leading you to restaurants, bars, night clubs, etc.

Note that this technology requires a smartphone etc that has an internal compass and GPS. This form of GPS only seems accurate within about twenty or thirty feet, so wouldn't be useful for navigation within a museum to specific exhibition cases, say, unless each case had embedded within it an identifying chip.

In any event, in Concord, one could imagine an Augmented Reality tour of particular historical points of interest. Approaching the Old North Bridge, one could look through the viewfinder to see floating icons linking to various websites of interest, giving historical information on the battle of April 19, 1775; images of historical engravings; the text of Emerson's "Concord Hymn"; the text (or a recorded audio version) of the relevant passage of Longfellow's Midnight Ride of Paul Revere "It was two by the village clock/When he came to the bridge in Concord town" (with perhaps another icon providing the footnote that Revere never made it quite that far!) ; photographs or videos of costumed reenactors; audio of the kind of fife and drums that might have been played at the battle, and so forth.

This would seem to solve one of the problems with outdoor cell phone based walking tour, that require the placement of signage listing the phone number to call, as well as listing which prompt to press ("Press 45# to hear Emerson's Concord Hymn"). Signs can disappear, and every time a new segment or prompt is recorded one would need to put up a new sign. Even if one has a printed brochure with a map and the telephone number and point of interest prompt numbers, that requires more concentration and initiative than many visitors are willing to invest. And a new pamphlet has to be produced each time a new segment is recorded for the tour.

But using AR all the user has to do is stand by the Old North Bridge, looking through the iphone or Android viewfinder and click on an icon to access the poem in written or aural form. The cell phone tour option could still exist, of course: I suppose that for smart phones one could simply have a floating icon of the cell tour telephone number to click on, and the phone would dial the number for you.

One problem would be filtering out all the internet noise, so that only historically credible assets would pop up on the screen. How would the user not be bombarded by all the misinformation on wikipedia, Flikr, YouTube, etc? Would this work by some sort of dedicated subscription service? There would need to be some way to geo-tag data bundles - so that when one looked west from the bridge towards the ride, one coud see a floating icon linking to information/images on where the Minuteman were advancing from.

Depending on how good the Image Search Function is, perhaps one could aim the viewfinder at the Obelisk (pictured above) and the system would identify it, and let one access historical information about it. This might include a selection, say, from Edward Linenthal's "Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields" on how the 1825 obelisk was later criticized for being on the wrong side (ie the British side) of the river, and that later on, in 1875, the Daniel Chester French statue of the Minuteman was therefore installed on the correct (ie. American) side of the river.

As always with mobile technologies, the challenge would be limiting the amount of text one needs to scroll through,and giving options for aural or video streaming that wasn't too long.

In any event, the possibilities do seem exciting for developing stimulating and informative outdoor historical and cultural tours through AR.

Slavery and Universities:Update

2010-01-23T08:14:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted that plans are moving forward for holding a conference on "Slavery and Universities", most likely in early 2011 at Emory University in Atlanta. We keep on learning of scholars and students working on various aspects of this fascinating topic, and it will be exciting to bring so many of us together. To help with this process, I've created a wiki at:

http://slavery-and-universities.wikispaces.com/

As I start teaching a course this semester as a visiting faculty member at Harvard, I've been learning more about the complex historical status of slavery in Harvard's early history. I've been fascinated by the work historian Sven Beckert and his sudents have done over the past several years in a research seminar on the topic, including the enslaved persons owned by College President Wadsworth; the founding of the first chair of law at Harvard, endowed out of the slave-based fortune of Isaac Royall; a debate between over African slavery at Harvard's 1773 Commencement; enslaved persons brough north as servants by antebellum Harvard, and the story of the Soledad sugar plan plantation in southern Cuba, in which Harvard was seriously involved until the Cuban Revolution. I'm equally intrigued by the ideological implications (pro-slavery and anti-slavery) of scientific work by Harvard antebelluem faculty, including the well known daguereotypes of enslaved persons in Columbia, South Carolina, commissioned by naturalist Louis Agassiz, now held at the Peabody Museum. ( I share some sources on these topics at: http://slavery-and-universities.wikispaces.com/Harvard

I would love to know if there are any traces of interaction between enslaved servants on the antebellum Harvard campus and the College's free African-American employees during this period.

More broadly. I'm curious if there are substantial literary references, in fiction or poetry, to the presence or legacies of enslavement on college campuses. A colleague has mentioned an intriguing passage in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; the president of the historically black college, Dr. Bledsoe. keeps a leg shackle from slavery times, as a "symbol of our progress", which he produces during his confrontation with the Narrator. Are there other such literary moment, in which memories or traces of slavery times unexpectedly erupt into a narrative set in the groves of academe? I suspect, however, that the more common trope may be radical opposition between slavery times and the world of higher education; for example, late in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Denver announces to Paul D. her intention to attend Oberlin College, which seems to signal her ultimate detachment from the slavery-haunted world of her mother and house #124.

Facebook Holocaust Memorials

2010-01-23T03:00:00.000-08:00

At the recent 'unconference' at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum some of us had a fascinating conversation on the phenomenon of a Facebook site erected as a virtual memorial to the child Henio Żytomirski, born 1933, who died in the Majdanek death camp:

http://www.facebook.com/henio.zytomirski?ref=ts#/henio.zytomirski?v=info&ref=ts

The case has been widely discussed on line, including this blog entry
http://judaism.about.com/b/2009/11/19/holocaust-victim-has-1700-friends-on-facebook.htm

The site emerged out of a series of commemorative projects in Poland, including initiatives in which schoolchildren and passersby were encouraged to write letters to the long dead child. (For background see:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/971597.html

Those posting on the site (especially on its "Wall" ) at times speak in the voice of the dead person, in the first person, recounting the victim's hopes and dreams, and sometimes the circumstances of his or her death. The issue of web based memorials has been of particular concern to the museum staff given that at times photographs of the dead (gleaned from the Museum's own website or on line database) have been appropriated for use on line without permission or proper attribution. There are also frequent concerns voiced that such sites trivialize the Holocaust, disrespect those whose lives were taken from them, or, because they blur the conventional lines between historical fact and creative fiction, unintentionally undercut the larger project of Holocaust historical documentation.

The postings on the Wall of the "Henio" site engage in some striking shifts in voice, as in this simultaneous implication of first person plural and first person singular positioning in a January 10, 2010 posting:

Henio was a real child.

Henio was an eyewitness and a victim to the Nazis' actions. Because he was murdered, he could never provide his testimony. We try to reconstruct his life in the ghetto from survivors' testimonies, from documents, from knowing the history of Lublin during the Nazi occupation...

By:Henio Zytomirski

(The longer version of this posting, in English and Hebrew, is signed by "Neta Zytomirski Avidar," thus adding another authorial voice into the mix.)

In other cases, purported quotes by Henio are presented, describing events he would have witnesssed.

As of today (January 23, 2010, "Henio" has 2,888 Facebook friends. Some of the postings on the wall are the kind of saccharine kitsch generally facilitated by Facebook ("I just sent you a smile...send me one back," accompanied by a photo of a puppy), some flagrantly commerical ("Free Neiman Marcus cookie recipe"), some are oddly disturbing (a photograph of a child with arms outstretched on a cliff edge with the caption, "no other way now-Just Fly"). So far as I can tell no postings have been made by Holocaust deniers (or at least none of currently evident on the Wall.) A visitor submitting a request to become Henio's Facebook "friend" views the somewhat odd statement on his or her Facebook interface (seen in the screen shot above): "Henio Zytomirski. Awaiting Friend Confirmation."

The ethics and implications of this kind of site are complex, and well worth contemplating. For the moment, though, I'd like to note that many of the debated features of the site are not especially novel in memorialization. Indeed, for countless generations, human memorial practices have engaged in constant shifting between multiple discursive frames and points of view, speaking simultaneously for the living and for the dead, and oscilalating among multiple temporal positions. Consider the Massachusetts headstone pictured at,
http://vastpublicindifference.blogspot.com/2009/10/first-person-gravestone.html
which bears the inscription:

Rachel Cotton
d. 1808
Plymouth, MA

I
am erected
by
Josiah Cotton Esqr
in remembrance
of Rachel
his pious and Virtuous
Wife,
who died Januy 17th 1808
aged 50 years.

In belief of Christianity I lived,
In hope of a glorious Resurrection I died.

Note that the stone first itself takes on the first person position, then the principal referent, in third person, is that of the bereaved husband (whose authorship of the entire text is thus inferred), and then in the final couplet the primary first person voice is attributed to the deceased. As Roland Barthes notes in Camera Lucida, such paradoxical forays into time-bending are especially associated with photography of the dead. Barthes presents a photograph of a condemned criminal on the eve of his execution with the caption, "He is dead and he is going to die." (Many of the postings on Henio's Wall specifically comment on his face in a photograph: that he looks like the writer's son, or seems beautiful, or sad; as in Barthes' example, the tense of these postings moves between past, present and future, anticipating his approaching demise.)

The labor of memorializing the dead, paradoxically, often requires that the bereaved ventriloquizes them or embody them, while also, subtly, gradually distancing oneself from them. In many African socities, the honored ancestral dead are held to be immanent in carved wooden masks which most be worn by living dancers--who during the performance embody the dead in the most intimate way possible yet who must come of this state if normal life is to continue. In a famous ethnographic example, analyzed by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, during Fox Indian funeral games, the dead were embodied by a "team" played by living persons, who were allowed to triumph over the team played by the living-- precisely in order to convince or trick the dead of the manifest fiction that it is better to be dead than alive. In some diverse instances, human mourners struggle to create ritual spaces and times in which the frontiers between the domains of the living and the dead are porous, precisely so that equilibrium between these states may be restored, in the interest of the ultimate regeneration of life. In his magesterial study, "Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition" (Stanford University Press, 1998): Armando Petrucci documents how classical inscriptions on monuments and tombs were widely understood as messages conveyed to the gods or the Divine, across the fragile borderlands of life and death.

It would seem that something comparable is going on in the case of Henio's Facebook Wall. Thousands of people log on in order to enter in to some sort of symbolic exchange with the Dead, to engage in an act of nurturing directed towards the other world. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Jean Baudrillard famously argues that modernity is characterized by a progressive loss of capcity to engage in symbolic exchange with the dead, that conventional death has been gradually disenchanted and neutralized in sterile and secular biomedical settins. Only in the case of horrific mass violence, Baudrillard maintains, do modern persons as it were recover a sense of the energies once believed to circulate between the living and the no-longer-alive. The Henio Facebook site would seem to be consistent with Baudrillard's characterization: a victim of unspeakable mass, systematic violence Henio invites complex acts of symbolic reciprocity and voicing, as the ethereal medium of cyberspace is popularly appropriated to serve as a tangible arena for the intangible frontier between the worlds of Life and Death.

Rose Cell Phone

2009-10-29T15:01:00.001-07:00

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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 (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

2009-10-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-09-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-17T05:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-17T04:14:00.001-07:00

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.

Community History Internship update

2009-06-19T03:10:00.001-07:00

This week, from up here in Concord, Massachusetts, I've continued to 'co-supervise' at long distance the six community history interns down in Covington, Georgia, while Forrest Sawyer has been doing the on-site supervision. I'm really pleased at how quickly the interns have learned their way around the wiki of the African American Historical Association of Newton County--they've been updating news links and putting in historical materials on sports (including African-American women's sports in the county history). Guided by Mr. Bob Halcums and Ms. Jane Williams at the Newton County Public Library, they've been pursuing genealogical research on their own kin in the County. Yesterday, they mapped out the gravesites in the historically African-American section of the Covington City Cemetery, which date back to the late 1800s; they evidently uncovered one Masonic headstone, marked with the distinctive Masonic chains. Today, the plan is for them to map the more recent Westside cemetery on the other side of Covington.

Ellen and I are driving down to Georgia this weekend and I'll get a chance to start working with the youth on Monday. I'm pretty sure we'll concentrate on video and multimedia projects. We'll start on brief YouTube videos on the two Covington cemeteries, and perhaps include the Oxford cemetery as well. Ideally, older community members will be able to take some walks through the cemteries sharing their memories of those who are laid to rest there, and reflecting on the history of segregation in these sites. I expect the interns will video some walks with civil rights movement veterans through the Covington square, as they recall the days of struggle.

We'll also try to do some digitial slide shows on local family history, incorporating old family photographs and archival documents to tell various kinds of stories about local history and memory. We might pay a visit to Monroe and the Moore's Ford bridge site to document some of the forms of continuing 'memory work' in reference to the July 1946 mass lynching, in which four persons were killed.

Community History Interns in Georgia: African American Public History

2009-06-16T11:10:00.001-07:00

This week, we've started up a new Community History Internship program in Newton County, Georgia. This is a partnership between the African-American Historical Association of Newton County and the Washington Street Community Center in Covington, Georgia. The program is supported by Federal stimulus funds. Six African-American teens in Newton County are employed this summer as community history interns; they've just made "Self-Introduction" pages on the wiki.

The interns are being supervised by me, Deacon Forrest Sawyer, Jr (president of the Historical Association) and Mr. Flemmie Pitts, a civic leader active in the Community Center. Emogene Williams( a retired educator who is one of the local community's leading historians) and Pastor Avis Williams are also advising and helping out in various ways.

Throughout the summer the teens will be enhancing and expanding the Association's wiki, developing links to news story on African-American heritage as well as its various sections on slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movements, and African-American artistic, musical and cultural accomplishments. We're very pleased that thanks to Covington Mayor Kim Carter several important deed books of the Covington African-American cemeteries, dating back to the 1890s, have just come to light: the young people will be mapping and documenting the cemeteries (in the Covington City Cemetery and the Westside cemetery) and tracing the stories of those who are buried there. Perhaps we'll be able to develop a brochure walking guide to the two cemeteries. There's also interest in documenting the early history of African-American schools in the area, including Washington Street School (The photograph above shows third grade teachers Ms. Eva Wright and Ms. Sarah Hardeman with their students, along with Professor Nathaniel Mitchell.)

We'll have to see what ideas the interns have for upcoming projects. It would be interesting to develop some sort of children's book on local African-American history for instance. Perhaps we'll do some sort of multimedia project, involving our new YouTube channel, documenting historical story-telling in the County.

At this point, I've only met the young people over the telephone; they sound terrific. I really look forward to meeting them in person next week when I visit Covington and we can begin the oral history, video, and archival components of the project.

Reflections on Michael Rush: "Balance and Power"

2009-05-11T17:55:00.000-07:00

During this curious week, perhaps the last week in which the Rose Art Museum will exist as a fully functioning public art museum, I've been reflecting on the many academic partnerships that Cultural Production faculty and staff had with the museum's director, Michael Rush. Our first such partnership emerged when Michael brought to campus the remarkable exhibition, "Balance and Power", on video surveillance in contemporary art, which he had organized the year before at the Krannert (University of Illinois). Michael encourage me and my colleague Andreas Teuber (Philosophy) to develop an academic symposium in conversation with the exhibition. Inspired by the happy coincidence that Justice Louis Brandeis, for whom this university is named, had invented the right to privacy in 1890, we called the conference, "Privacy Rites: Space, Surveillance and Power in Historical Perspective." Our colleagues' musings ranged across the toilets of Pompeii, the dynamics of subjection and surveillance in Elizabethan poetics, and post modern and post panoptic regimes of marketing and contemporary art practice. We concluded with a performance in the Rose of Dmitri Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony, evoking the terrifying knocks on the door of NKVD and its regime of constant surveillance.

In the Foster wing, Michael had curated a dizzying labriynth of video screens, juxtaposed at angles, displaying an array of contemporary video artists' engagement with the problem of surveillance.

As an anthropologist, I found his linked installations led me to new insights on my own research in rural southern Africa, on a topic seemingly remote from contemporary video art. In the late 1980s, I spent about a year following a mass witchfinding movement as it made its way across the impoverished rural communities of eastern Zambia. As had been the case with previous popular movements in southern and central Africa aimed at detecting and neutralizing suspected witches, spirit-possessed diviners held large ceremonies in which they directed small hand mirrors at each every villager, one at a time. The mirrors, which were frequently compared to “cameras” and “X-ray machines,“ were said to reveal to the witchfinder the otherwise secret amount of “witchcraft substance” inside each man and woman. Those accused hardly ever protested their innocence, and often stood by meekly as their house walls, roofs and personal possessions were ransacked by the youthful witchfinders seeking incriminating witchcraft horns, which were widely held to be definitive proof of mystical malfeasance.

When I asked the leading witchfinder, “Doctor Moses” why hardly anyone resisted these interrogations, he explained,

"When they stand in front of the mirror, they can’t resist, they can’t run away… It is like when somebody is in front of a television camera. They just want to be seen. Even if they have a secret they want to hide, they can’t resist the camera. They just want to be on the screen, they can’t say no... That is how we trap them, here in the Circle of Truth. No one can turn his face away from the camera, as much as might want to!"

Two decades later, encountering Michael Rush's exhibition, I began to understand how deeply prescient Doctor Moses’ words were. Surveillance is ever-more extensive, and yet, as suggested by the works of art in Balance and Power, as well as the ever growing popularity of American Idol and Reality TV, the lure of the camera is ever more irresistible.

The all-seeing camera, we are repeatedly told by those in authority has the capacity to safeguard the body politic of all that afflicts us, even as it renders us paralyzed in a stupefying hall of mirrors. For months even years after each witchfinding rite, communities were caught up in complex, painful debates over degrees of complicity in the violence of the ceremony, which caused them in various way to see themselves as the embodying both the gaze of the righteous as well as the subject and object of voyeuristic, licentious gazes.

Our title, “Privacy Rites” evoked these and many other ironies, so reminiscent of the core paradoxes at the heart of any ritual process: we are deeply attracted and flattered by the camera and the screen, even as we seek to flee or evade them. Yet privacy in its modern forms is not itself a ritual process as such, but rather seems born of the interruption of earlier ritual sequences, especially those oriented around the domestic realm. Consider for example the mythic crisis which supposedly gave birth to the modern “right to privacy”, as formulated in Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ famous 1890 law review article. They were, it is said, inspired to write the essay due to the violation by a news photographer of the wedding breakfast party of Samuel Warren’s daughter.

Why was this so terribly heinous? After all, a picture of the bride and groom taken that afternoon after the wedding ceremony would presumably have been viewed as an entirely appropriate addition to the Society page. During an afternoon visit to Balance and Power, looking at the various filmic penetrations of bodily space and ostensibly "private: domains it occured to me that the key violation in the Warren case seems to lie in the (premature) interruption of the processual structure of the wedding rite. As anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner note, rites of passage are structured in three phases: (a) separation of the principals from everyday life,(b) the liminal or "betwixt and between" phase, in which the principals stand outside of conventional categories and experiential coordinates, and (c) re-integration or re-aggregation, in which the principals re-enter ordinary life, usually at a higher or altered social level or status. At the Warren breakfast wedding party, the photographer seems to have invaded the first phase, of separation, from which even the groom would have been excluded, as the bride's immediate family celebrate their solidarity with one another through commonsality just as they are about suffer their impending partial dissolutoin, that is to say the 'loss' of their daughter. The unauthorized photograph in this sense punctures the restricted ritual domain of the separation phase, thus imperiling the overall logic of the entire wedding ceremony, the quintessential rite of bourgeois social reproduction that celebrates the birth of the ethereal transcendental adult selfhood. The modern concept of “privacy”, in other words, is born of a truncated or perverted ritual process.

This theme, of a captivating violation of ritual, a rupture that is itself constitutive of new modes of personhood, ran through the many presentations we heard at the Privacy Rites symposium, as well as the many works of art displayed in Balance and Power. Tim Hyde’s Untitled Bus allowed the viewer to partake of a dreamscape of nocturnal travel, the reverie of the mind’s blankness on the ride home at day’s end, which only bursts when a passenger spies the camera and in turn locks our gaze in his gaze. We were propelled into a sudden awareness of of private space only at the moment when the normally secure wall of the screen has been punctured. In Jill Magid’s Lobby the artist’s willfull violation of conventional bodily and public/private boundaries, hijacking a public video screen to reveal her bodily orifices while standing in full and open sight of passers by, inspired multiple reflections by viewers of the nature of voyeurism: we are not only taken on a microcosmic fantastic journey though under her clothes but also, from the commanding heights of the lobby atrium, gaze upon the faces of astonished onlookers, whose public privacy we now violate. In turn, in Mirror Site, Kevin Hamilton skillfully presented us with a fractured vision of contemporary media-mediated public space. We are strangely exposed on screen, even more so than we are in normal public space, precisely because conventional relations of self-other are inverted and subverted in such puzzling ways.

There is thus, I gradually realized, a thread of continuity across twelve decades from Warren and Brandeis’ wall climbing photographer to these recent works of video art, each of which, paradoxically, helps birth a new awareness of the private through acts of rupture, violation and transgression.

More subtle violated boundaries characterized Jim Cambell’s Library (2004) in which the shadows move in and out of of the New York Public Library. Libraries are, in the best sense of the term, deeply haunted places, in which the presences of those who have come (and left) before us are continuously sensed if not quite immediately graspable. The monochramatic schema of the piece nicely evokes the black and white textual media through which, in effect, the living and the dead encounter one another in the library. His evocation of photogravure also moves us back and forth across generational time: are we seeing the library staircase as it was yesterday, last year, or a century ago? Are all the city's dwellers, the living and the dead, passing by one another in a great, shadowy parade? Might we sense a mournful, elegiac tone that obliquely references the losses and the legacies of September 11, 2001? (And might we also read the work as a commentary on the Patriot Act and the increasingly routine surveillance of libraries and their patrons that has followed in the wake of that tragic day?)

As I hope this example suggests, Michael's exhibitions, substantial works of scholarship in and of themsleves, have stimulated and propelled further works of scholarly reflection and critique. I've loved that his shows push us to see the political and the aesthetic in new, unexpected ways that they simultaneously engage our intellectual and artistic faculties, that they are conversation with classical and contemporary works of scholarship and encourage us to re-read these works with new eyes. Michael's relentless curiosity, his rigorous standards for analysis and presentation, have constantly pushed me as a scholar of ritual to rediscover the enigmatic dynamics of symbolic action lodged in the interstices of late capitalist social worlds. For that, I remain deeply grateful.

Waterfall projection project...moves indoors!

2009-05-04T01:45:00.001-07:00

Since rain was predicted for over the weekend, we reluctantly decided to move the waterfall projection project ("My hands were busy/my mind could wander: Creative Economies on the Charles River") indoors, as our contribution to the 10th Boston CyberArts Festival. So Sunday night (May 3) we gathered in the main hall of the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, and projected the eight minute video loop on the redbrick interior wall of the hall, immediately down river from the waterfall itself. Bryce Peake, the class TA, and I were assisted in this by Howard Phillips, Associate Director and video instructor at the Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Art (CDIA), his student Mike, a film and video student at CDIA and Elln Hagney, the Museum's Director of Education and Development. The video work itself was developed by students in the Museums and Public Memory (Anth 159a) course--Casey Golomski, Jesse Cates, Theresa Barbaro, Mao Matsuda, and Shai Dobrusin--along with Bryce Peake and our undergraduate Community Engaged Fellow, Anna-Lisa Macon.

Earlier in the day Bryce realized that if we were going to move to within the Museum space, it made sense to re-edit the audio of the piece, taking out the industrial machinery noise, and putting in background audio of the Moody Street waterall. Bryce also effectively superimposed the video on a background of the moving water of the waterfall, so that the viewer had some sense of what the piece would look like projected on the falls. (Bryce's intention was that we would some of the Museum's machinery in the background during the screening; as it happened, we found the actual machinery noises made it difficult to make out the recorded audio, so in the end we ran the work without live machine sound.)

We had been toying with projecting the work straight upwards, onto a fabric scrim that we would trig between the upper gallery and the large boiler, but as we looked around the space, we realized it would be a shame to enclose the marvelous open gallery of the main exhibition hall, with its evocative, looming machinery and distant vaulted ceiling. Howard kindly brought over a couple of CDIA video projectors and a splitter. (In theory, this should have allowed us to project the video work through three different projectors, but for some reason we were only able to get this work through two projectors). We aimed one projector at the great red brick upper wall of the gallery; we mounted a second projector on a music stand and tited it downward so that it would project onto gallery's main floor. This would have been a really interesting effect, but for some reason, after a minute or so the tilted projector begin to project a strange "spiderweb" effect, which made it very difficult to discern the actual video work. (We realized later in thee evening that we could have overcome the effect of tilting by using a mirror system to angle the projected image downwards...which we might try next time.)

In any event, we ended up projecting the second image straight out, on the far right brick wall of the gallery, as a kind of elongated, fainter echo of the first image.

We were quite pleased with the overall effect of the installation. With the lights lowered, the marvelous machinery assembled within the museum took on uncanny qualities, a little reminiscent of the gaslight or oil lamps that might once have illuminated the Victorian interior. Although we lost a good deal of resolution in the projected moving images, the redbrick background, in between the grand arcing windows of the gallery, did summon up the sense of a portal into the past--the very effect we had been hoping from the waterfall projection. Even the reduced color saturation and resolution of the elongated far left projection (near the looming shadowy, massive hulk of the old boiler and heating ventwork) worked nicely, summoning up associations with the early days of black and white film, fading back, as the eye continued left, to an evocation of the magic lantern era that preceded film itself.

As the piece looped for the next 90 minutes or so, I found myself discovering new aspects of the video work in this particular environment. Lined up between the grand interior windows on the main hall's inner wall, the three frames of the video's triptych manifested themselves as a line of windows, opening up to different moments in the city's industrial and post-industrial history. The Francis Cabot Lowell factory buildings had initially depended on the energies of the Charles River, channelled through sluices, turbines and conveyor belts, and it was marvelous to view the video montage of the legacies of those translated energies (of mechanical and human labor) surrounded by the mechanical looms and converyor belts of the early industrial revolution. The central segment with Barbara Zeles (from which the work takes its title) worked especially well within the industrial hall; her work with yarn and fabric seemed a kind of living memorial to the generations of women who labored in this space, between flowing water and pounding machinery, to transform fibers into fabric. Even the soundtrack, building towards a cacophny of voices and water power, took on evocative effects within the factory hall, summoning up, to my mind at least, spectres of the workers and machinery that had for so long labored and cycled inside this cavernous space.

I found myself thinking that taken as a whole, the installation in this particular site also summoned up a anticipatory sense of the cyborg, the enigmatic bio-mechanical figure that functions as a kind of totemic emblem of our era (yet another Terminator film is set to be released this summer.) As Anselm Rabinbach argues in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity, a defining obsession of the 19th century was the tableau of the human body as a complex mechanical engine, simultaneously liberated and enslaved by the mechanical devices fashioned by its own hands. Watching the varied hands projected on the factory's interior brick walls, engaged in diverse forms of mechanically-mediated labor (from setting linotype to bicycle-making) I had a visceral sense of what the transitional moments to industrial labor just might have been like, as human creative energies were simultaneously magnified and alienated, intensified and dissipated, liberated and re-imprisoned.

To our delight, at least forty-five community members, a number of them digital artists associated with the Boston CyberArts festival, attended the production. We had a range of fascinating conversations, and were left excited at the prospect of future collaborations down the road, including in the next CyberArts festival in 2011. I should mention that the other new media works in the museum, including installations by Claudia Bucher, Chris Abrahms, Tim Hickey's students, and others, looked great, and it was fun to see our work, in effect, in conversation, in conversation with theirs.

We're still eager to project the work on the Moody Street waterfall, and may try to do this for the upcoming Charles River festival in June or Historic Waltham days in July, and perhaps once school is back in session in September. But for now we're delighted with this chance to collaborate with Elln Hagney and the CMRI, in their continuing explorations of the shadowlands between the mechanical and the digital--and between, to paraphrase Barbara Zeles, the labor of human hands and the labor of the human imagination.

By any other name exhibition

2009-04-25T01:45:00.000-07:00

I was delighted Thursday evening by the opening of the exhibition, "By any other name: A social and cultural history of the Rose Art Museum," organized by eight of my students in the Museums and Public Memory class (Anth 159a). The show, tracing the history of the Museum from 1961 to the present moment, is cleverly organized around a large graph of the Dow Jones Industrial average, showing its upticks and downticks over nearly five decades. Interspersed along the way are documentary materials and commentaries on the museum's successive directors, exhibitions, and moments of triumph and peril. In contrast to the common tendency in the art world to relegate matters of finance to the shadowy background, this show puts economic matters front and center; when the market was bullish, we see, art prices were elevated and accession funds soared; in turn, in bear markets university administrations have looked covetously at their collections and pursued, with various degrees of success, deaccession policies. The Museum lent the students catalogues of diverse Museum shows over the decades, which hover above and below the stock market graph line.

Drawing on their archival research, the organizers frame this timeline in terms of student protests: the October 1961 opening of the Rose Museum building, they show, was occassioned by student complaints that the funds expended on it could better have been spent on scholarships or faculty salaries; in the past three months of course the campus has seen multiple student protests calling for the preservation of the museum in the face of administration attempts to close it. A monitor plays looped videos of protests by students, faculty, staff and others calling for the museum's preservation. The red line of the stock market culminates in a splotch of red splashed across a "Save the Rose" T-shirt.

At the opening reception, Cultural Production grad student Claire Mauro provocatively suggested that the red line of the Dow Jones could be read as a "blood line," tracing out the varied forms of symbolic kinship and descent associated with the museum, from the founding bequest by Edward and Bertha Rose, to the labor of successive directors, curators, artists, donors, and art lovers over these many years. I was put in mind of Francis Perket's extraordinary commentary at the recent Museum symposium, "Preserving Trust: Art and the Art Museum amidst Financial Crisis." Francis, a Rose family member, noted that Edward and Bertha did not have children of their own, that the paintings were in a sense their offspring and that each moment of artistic revelation within the museum could be understood as their "Jahrzeit" celebrating Kaddish, a prayer of life. [Her commentary is available on YouTube.] Claire's reading perhaps helps account for the deep sense of anguish felt by so many in face of the Museum's current predicament; the Museum is more than the sum of the contents of its extraordinary collection; it has emerged as the embodiment of a vast extended family, and its current crisis can be interpreted as a life or death struggle for lineage and for its posterity. (One student compared the jagged ups and downs of the red stock market line to the sputtering EKG lines of a patient on life support.)

The show is also framed by students' artistic responses to the current crisis, including a large painting by graduating senior Danielle Friedman based on multiple iterations of the word "Rose." Students energetically mined, as well, the university archives and the public record to chronicle, in displayed materials, the twists and turns of the Museum's fate over the years, with particular attention to media coverage since January 26 of this year.

The exhibition concludes with a lovely children's book, "Beatrice visits the Rose Art Museum," created by Gail Goldspiel in happier times, when she took Robin Dash's course, "Looking with the Learner." The book chronicles the visit to the Rose by Stanley School elementary school students in the company of Brandeis undergraduates, pondering contemporary art and engaging in art making of their own. (One of the joys of the Rose under Michael Rush's leadership has been the Museum's willingness to allow visitors of all ages, on special occassions to make art in the Foster wing and the Museum's stairwell.) The children are accompanied by "Beatrice the Butterfly" who delicately floats above the proceedings and tries her hand (wings?) at making art as well. I was put in mind of the daemons in Phillip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the animal avatars of the human characters, who embody their human's dreams and anxieties; Beatrice registers the children's excitement and fear over engaging with the art and in that respects is a stand in for the children themselves; but I also read the butterfly as an embodiment of the museum itself which similarly seems to float and flitter delicately over the campus: beautiful, playful, intensely curious, and terribly vulnerable.

Exhibition organizers: Ronya Gordon, Yarden Abukasis. Brian Friedberg, Emily Leifer, Sarah Stephenson. Penelope Taylor, Igor Zhukovsky, Will Burnett/

The exhibition is in the Shapiro campus center student art gallery (third floor) through Wednesday, April 28 I believe.

Please share your comments in the space below, and please follow the exhibition Twitter at http://twitter.com/_byanyothername

Slavery and Universities: Possible Conference?

2009-04-16T03:58:00.000-07:00

We had a fascinating roundtable panel at the Organization of American Historians annual meetings in Seattle on March 28 on legacies of slavery and the slave trade at American universities.

Jim Campbell (Stanford) discussed the project he'd headed at Brown University, exploring the university's complex historical relationship to the trans Atlantic slave trade. See his presentation on line on the History News Network at:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71802.html

nb. The Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which Jim chaired, has a fascinating website at:
http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/

Al Brophy (UNC) talked about the historical role of American colleges and universities in providing intellectual legtimation for slavery, especially in law and theology, with particular reference to the University of Alabama case. See his videoed presentation:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71801.html

Leslie Harris (Emory) discussed the Transforming Community Project, a multiyear project of racial, ethnic and class based initiative of reconciliation at Emory, which emerged largely in response to a disturbinging racial incident at Emory several years ago. See her presentation at:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71806.html

My presentation, on the work my students and I did "excavating" memories and histories of slavery at Emory University, primarily in Oxford, Georgia(the original site of Emory College) is also on line on the History News Network at:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71803.html
Among other things, I talked about the obelisk (pictured above) in the Oxford, GA City Cemetery to Bishop James O. Andrew (first president of the Emory College Board of Trustees) whose slaveowning status in 1844 catalyzed the great national schism in the Methodist Church; and about my students' work developing exhibitions on slavery in Emory's history.

We then moved into a lively discussion with audience members about the many tangled ways in which the historical legacies of enslavement continute to structure (or perhaps haunt) the "buried lives" of American institutions of higher education. The conversation among other things touched on:

Dr. Felix Armfield (Buffalo State College) mentioned his work with colleagues on a "slaves on campus" project, tracing the experiences of enslaved persons brought as "servants" to American colleges and universities by slaveowning students: what impact did the experience of being on college campuses have on these enslaved individuals?
Possible forms of restorative justice being explored by some schools; about the impact of such projects of historical research and reflection on faculty, students, staff and community members;
ways of sharing documentary histories of slavery and the slave trade (something the Brown University Committee in particular has done on its repository website);
the at times banal nature of non-specific blanket apologies for slavery(as at the University of Viriginia and the University of Alabama several years ago); the politics of apology is the topic of a recent book by Melissa Nobles, one of the roundtable's organizers.
the challenges of integrating materials on on-campus slavery into the curriculum
Jim Crow era loyal slave memorials
the difficult cultural politics of "postcolonial" monuments and memorials around slavery and Jim Crow on campus.

Of course, numerous colleagues elsewhere have worked with their students to unearth histories of slavery at their respective institutions. This semester, for instance, Ira Berlin and his students have worked to document slaveowning patterns among founding figures in the history of the University of Maryland. Julie Richter has done comparable work with her students on slavery in the history the College of William and Mary. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Library in 2005 developed on exhibition on the roles of enslaved persons in the making of the school.
We're interested in learning of the many other teaching and research projects along these lines that are surely going on.

It has occured to us that it would be worthwhile holding an academic conference on the topic of slavery and universities. (As Jim notes, this wouldn't necessarily be limited to the United States.) One of the many fascinating problems to explore is the way in which universities have so long been imagined as utopian spaces, yet these spaces (like many other institutions and discursive undertakings associated with early modern, Enlightenment, and Romantic progressivist thought) rested in so many respects upon the structurally invisible labor of the enslaved and the vast profits of the global slave trade.

We're not sure yet who might host the conference. It would be interesting to bring together a wide range of participants, including faculty, students, and college staff members, as well as community partners and family members (descended both from slaveowners and enslaved persons) for critical conversations about research strategies, community engaged learning, and restorative justice on a great range of campuses as we all grapple with the legacies of enslavement, the slave trade, and related forms of racial injustice.

If you have ideas about the conference, or care to share reports on work that has been done at other schools around remembering enslavement on campus, please post a comment in the space below!

Twilight:The enigmatic Native American presence

2009-03-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

I've just seen the film "Twilight," which I know Rhonda Hammer and her students at UCLA have been contemplating for some time. I'm especially intrigued by the ways in which the film is framed in terms of an imputed Native American presence. The father-son pair of Quileute indians, Billy and Jacob Black, in their relatively brief appearances, seem to mediate the Anglo-American characters' relations with nature and with the supernatural, and to function as largely invisible protectors for the white heroine. (I understand thes themes are more extensively develop in the book/movie's sequel, New Moon).

In the film, the Quileuete are presented as descendants of wolves (with the hint that they may still be able to transmogrify into wolves). In a scene on a reservation beach (itself an interstitital space) Jacob tells the white heroine Bella that his people know the secret of the Cullen clan (the non-blood-drinking vampires) who have agreed to stay off of their land for generations, ever since they were discovered (evidently feasting on the blood of a deer they had run to ground). Towards the film's end, Jacob is sent by his father Billy to warn Bella of her romance with the vampire hero and to let her know that the Quileute will be watching her (evidently watching over her protectively).

All of these motifis are consistent with Renee Bergland's analysis in the The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (2000); as Native American communities were violently annihilated and displaced they were refigured in white literary imaginations as numinous guardian presences for the colonizing Anglo-American majority, ambiguously moving across the shadowlands between conventional and alternate realities. As Twilight suggests, this 19th century mythography has endured as a persistent white fantasy, that Native Americans, in spite of white America's long genocidal history, will still benevolently look over Anglo-Americans, as living guardian spirits intimately linked to the land.

I wonder if in this respect Twilight can be read as a new kind of American nationalist post-9/11 text; threatened by the chilling dangers of a rogue terrorist cell-like coven of al-Queda style "bad" vampires, the white American young heroine is protected by an alliance of Native Americans and "good" vampires (the latter perhaps stand-ins for the extraordinary violence and torture unleashed by U.S. intelligence services in the "War on Terror".)

Twitter, Museums, and the "Unthinking Television" conference

2009-03-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

In my Museums and Public Memory class this morning, we talked over why our class experiments with YouTube this semester have been running kind of stale. ( See some of the student class postings at:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MuseumsPublicMemory&view=favorites

Students mentioned that producing YouTube is labor intensive and demands access to technology, which is a hassle, especially to make the work look good. Bryce was a little skeptical about this; he noted that some of the most successful vlogging is done in a very informal mode with decidely low production values. Looking at some recent popular YouTube posts, we wondered why it has been hard for students to "punch up" their YouTube postings with humor? Are museums and exhibitions as cultural sites particularly resistant to humor, perhaps? Or is it that the whole campus has been so exhausted by our ongoing financial crisis and the Rose controversy that a sense of humor has been hard to muster?

In any event, the students expressed a great deal more energetic excitment over the possibilities of Twitter, for rapidfire communication and exchange of ideas (each text message limited to 140 characters). So we decided that I would, right there in class, create a Twitter account (the students patiently walked me through how to do this) and that the students would 'follow' my brand new Twitter micro-blog, "MuseumMark" which is at:

http://twitter.com/MuseumMark

I promised to twitter from the "Unthinking Television" conference on Thursday at George Mason University, at which Bryce and I are presenting on our class experiment with YouTube. The students will twitter back to us, so we can at least all be linked together, in effect, during the conference. I'm curious what kind of conversation will ensue.

In class, we noticed the rather dynamic twitter sites for MOMA

http://twitter.com/MuseumModernArt

and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://twitter.com/metmuseum

and speculated about what kind of cultural (and economic) work these micro-blogs are doing. The consensus was that they probably aren't attracting first time visitors to the museums. Perhaps they getting infrequent visitors to return to the museum more often, by letting them know about interesting exhibitions, highlighted 'art works of the day' and lectures. And perhaps the twitter links help to build a kind of personal relationship with the institution, which might translates into a greater likelihood of membership.

We speculated as well about the interactive possibilities of Twitter in museum and gallery contexts. Is Twitter only a good way to push content out to museum patrons, as a form of "outreach." Alternately, could twitter afford a good way for museum-goers to 'talk back' to the curators, to artists, and to one another about their reflections on art installations, as they roam through art spaces? Is this sort of thing already going on at some museums, I wonder?

The Rose Museum and the Souls of the Dead

2009-03-23T02:46:00.001-07:00

At the recent symposium at the Rose Art Museum, "Preserving Trust: Art and the Art Museum amidst Financial Crisis," (March 16, 2009) I was moved and surprised that repeated references were made to the souls of the dead. Poet-laureate Robert Pinsky introduced the theme in his allusions to Keat's poem on the nightingale: only we, who are born to death (that is to say, to the knowledge of our deaths) are compelled to engage in creative aesthetic practice. We do not simply repeat the songs which have been handed down from previous generations, we are compelled to seek forms of symbolic immortality through innovation, through rupture, through alteration. This impulse is embedded in the practices of contemporary art and celebrated in the contemporary art museum as an institution. Paradoxically, in entering into a contemporary art museum such as the Rose, we simultaneously celebrate novelty and the past, the promise of new life amidst reverence for those who have come before us and who are no longer present.

We deny the lingering presence of the dead at our peril. Graduate student Brian Friedberg argued in his commentary that if those of us in the university community do not attend to our responsibilities vis a vis the museum, the building will be "haunted" by the uncanny presences of those who have been neglected, be they benefactors or artists.

This theme was developed in a most remarkable way by Ms. Joyce Perkin, a great-niece of Edward and Bertha Rose about what the Rose Museum has meant to her. She noted that Edward and Bertha did not leave children behind, and thus there were none to see Kaddish, the prayer of life, for them. Yet she has felt that each time a visitor to the museum engages with a great work of art, that is a meaningful act of Kaddish, a prayer of life, a kind of Yahrzeit (annual memorial for the dead.) See her remarkable two and a half minute commentary at the start of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqaUjcPnJO0

followed a little later by an exploration of this theme by Robert Pinsky.

It occurs to me that these dynamics of ancestral presence (and absence) are especially true for an institution such as the Rose, which emerges primarily out of Jewish collections in the postwar period. Inevitably, such collections are assembled in the shadow of the Holocaust and memories of the violent expropriation of Jewish art collections in Nazi-occupied Europe. To be sure, contemporary art is not an exclusively Jewish phenomenon, but one can argue that Jews, as collectors, dealers and artists have played a profound (perhaps even leading) role in the history of contemporary art. This particular art collection is thus, for many, a kind of enduring memorial to the survival of Jewish philanthropy and Jewish aesthetic impulses. Hence, in part, the intense physical and spiritual anguish experienced by many as they ponder the impending close of the institution as a public art museum and the threatened sale of its major works.

Lynching Reenactments and Passion Plays?

2009-03-23T02:17:00.000-07:00

I recently spoke at Boston University's Department of African-American Studies, on my research on an annual multiracial lynching reenactment near Monroe, Georgia. (The talk, "We come back to life: Regeneration and Traumatic Memory in a Multiracial Lynching Reenactment," was broadcast on WBUR and can be accessed on line at: http://www.buworldofideas.org/shows/2009/03/508/ ) I touched on an idea suggested to me by Robert Weiss, at University of Massachusetts-Boston: the intriguing parallels between the reenactment and late medieval passion plays. Both involve amateur actors who reenact a dreadful martyrdom out of a sense of moral or spiritual duty and a desire to engage in transformative public pedagogy. The day-long lynching reenactment moves across a local landscape, compressing the events of several weeks into the space of a half day, in a manner that recalls earlier passages along "stations of the cross." I still need to think more, however, about the parallels and discontinuities between the two cases. The organizers of the lynching reenactment, for instance, seem to resist redemptive narrative closure of their mise en scene: there is no mimetic enactment of rebirth and ascension at its conclusion (although, as seen in the photograph above, a local church choir member does sing over the prone bodies of those playing the victims.) And, while passion plays tended to involve whole communities, the reenactment remains controversial, with few local whites attending (although many local whites have watched, at a distance, over television.)

I am uncertain how to conceptualize these evident paralllels. I don't see evidence that the organizers knew of passion plays as such, although they are all deeply familiar with Gospels. Is the Passion Play a cultural form that, in effect, reproduces itself as a kind of meme or symbolic paradigm over time, emerging in new forms, genres and guises from time to time? I remain grateful, in any event, to Robert Weiss for his rich and intriguing suggestion, which I continue to ponder.

Daniel Perlin's Visuals for the band Nettle

2009-03-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

The marvelous "geography-defying" band Nettle, which draws on North African, European and U.S.-based musical histories and sensibiliites, has just completed a three day residency (Nettle: Music for a Nu World) at Brandeis, culminating last night in their first concert in the United States. I've been especially fascinated by the group's partnership with the New York-based visual artist Daniel Perlin, who has developed elaborate visual projection works integrated into the musical performances. These are not entirely pre-scripted: the artist manipulates a configuration of pre-sets as the music and the spirit moves him. (The band's founder and organizer, DJ Rupture, refers to artist as an integral member of the group: "Daniel Perlin on visuals"!)

I love the way that Perlin, like the musicians of the group, moves so skillfully between the nettlesome, that which gets under our skin, and the compassionate, between the provocative and the nurturing, between sensory assaults and an imagery of hope. For one complex, variegated song, Perlin starts us off with an array of audio speakers, on which which green flickering images are glimpsed; these transmogrify in time into the angular rhythmic zig zag lines of the oscilliscope, which in turn expand into pulsating, three-dimensional angular mountainscapes. Yet, quite beautifully, the edgy mountainscape is then graced by white birds in flight, back and forth across the screen. I am reminded by the classical motif of the bird in flight in Islamic poetry, a metaphor for the soul straining towards the Divine (echoed in Rumi's Sufi celebation of the time of love as the moment when the "soul of the bird may rise in flight"). All this complements the progressions in the musical piece, in which out of seeming cacaphony one comes to discern the rising, clear tones of the stringed instruments, granting us unexpected moments of reprieve.

A comparable integration of aural and musical progression informs the song Tabla (named for one of DJ Rupture's old presets). Perlin starts us off with a shot from above of Chinese calisthenics, each figure moving gracefully in perfect (if, to many western eyes, somewhat disturbing) parallelism. He then reduplicates the scene into more and more boxes so that hundred, perhaps thousands, of coordinated exercisers seem to fil our view. As the music itself intensifies and discordant tones are introduced, the boxes themselves begin to distort and unravel, with different segments of the visual field errupting and going them own way across the screen in unxpected trajectories. By the end, we are left with a series of singular, geometric shadow boxes, each of them unique and arresting in their own way.

I found myself thinking of the memorable scene in Werner Herzog's Antarctic documentary "Encounters at the End of the World," in which he mischeviously takes apart "The March of the Penguins" and its collectivist (and pro-natalist) celebration of an entire species moving in lockstep towards ever more perfect Darwinian inclusive fitness. In "March," all the penguins travel and breed together in perfect coordination. In contrast, Herzog loves the rare, eccentric penguins that inexplicably break off from the March of Reproduction and waddle off, with irrespressible tragicomic determination, away from the pack of breeders towards the distant mountains, towards their doom and, Herzog suggets, towards a measure of freedom.

At the same time, I read this sequence (in a way that Daniel Perlin might not quite share) as a celebration of the imaginative possibilities inherent in ascetic discipline. This is derived in particular from having been present during my wife Ellen Schattschneider's fieldwork in northeastern Japan on women's ascetic discipline (shugyo) and her book, "Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain" (Duke, 2003). Ellen argues that asceticism at Akakura Mountain Shrine (and many other places in Asia) is not exhausted in the seemingly coercive rhythms of collective movement; rather, ascetic discipline is the ground that nurtures the spontaneous emergence of creative insight and novel explorations of the self and its entanglements. These explorations, in turn, are exemplified by new individual spiritual dreams and visions, which the worshipper seeks to capture through creating votive paintings that are supreme offerings to the divinities. Something similar seems to be happening in Perlin's singular vision in this piece, which is grounded in the highly choreographed movements of collective calisthenics, which give birth to an entirely novel, idiosyncratic series of shapes.

Perlin's visuals deftly intensify the meanings of another number, the band's version of a beloved Morrocan song. The lyrics, I understand, convey the sentiment that cities may crumble, finery fade away, but what remains of value is guarding and nurturing our children. Perlin starts us with somewhat abstracted shadowed forms that recall sand dunes. Out of the dunes emerge spiraling white shapes (evoking the sands of time, perhaps) creating an ever-shifting geometric interior space. The immediate sense conveyed, in keeping with lyrics and the music, is one of calm and protectedness. In time, as the varied strands of the music intertwine, the white shapes shifting into intense blue, evoking, to my eyes at least, the life-giving waters of an oasis. The entre field of vision then begins to shimmer, like a desert mirage, a transitory vision of an earthly paradise. In the final images, a circle of delicate black shapes surrounds the dunes, as they themselves dissolve into pixilation. What is left behind, as even the physical dunes and oasis fade away, is a circle of loving, inward looking care.

An oasis of purity and quiet and care endures, even as the mirage of the physical oasis itself shimmers and passes away. Such, in Perlin's video art, is the gift of Nettle and its singular music, which ruptures and integrates, collides and colludes, in a way that leads us, at the end of each work, to hear silence itself in an entirely new way.

"Wearing our Culture" project with the Waltham Family School

2009-03-22T04:51:00.000-07:00

This semester my Engaged Anthropology course has been partnering with the Waltham Family School (WFS) in a project we are provisionally calling, "Wearing our Culture, Wearing Ourselves." The Waltham Family School is a family literacy initiative funded through the EvenStart program; about 35 new immigrant adult women, and at least one of their pre-K children are in school together, four mornings a week. (Three mornings a week they are in separate classes, and then on Fridays they come together for interactive literacy). We've worked with the WFS students and teachers in the past on various small projects, but this time around we decided to try something a little more ambitious. Inspired in part by Terry Turner's classic essay, "The Social Skin," we are working with the women as they document their memories of clothing items and as they expore the imaginative possibilities of clothing symbolism as they reflect on their hopes for themselves and their families.

This past Tuesday we met with the women and their teaches at the Rose Art Musem, to view and discuss contemporary art works in which clothing imagery is prominent. Among the works we discussed:

Chie Fueki's lovely "The Nature of How We See", based on an imaginary "super-hero" soccer uniform she made for herself (emerging out of her girlhood in Brazil, when she was not allowed to play soccer). [I have posted a video commentary on the painting, which is visible at the start of this post.]
Florine Stettheimer's elegiac "Music" (1920) featuring four stylishly dressed women grouped around a piano.
Yayoi Kusama, Blue Coat, 1965; a three dimensional work reportedly inspired by the artist's hallucinatory visions.

We heard wonderful readings of the paintings. One woman suggested that the four women in the Stettheimer were in fact one person, since hearing music calls forth multiple aspects of onself.

We then shared children's book in which clothing objects feature prominently and talked about short stories we might write.

At the end of the morning visit, we gathered on the staircase and made pastel drawings inspired by what we had seen. One women drew the dress her grandmother had drawn the day she died; these colors to this day always remind her of her beloved grandmother.

We're feeling our way forward with the women to see how this project will develop. Tenatively, we forsee a collaboratively authored book featuring art and text by the women (and perhaps the Brandeis students) exploring memories associated with garments as well as imaginary clothing, as well as short stories on clothing themes. We'll report on the project at our upcoming symposium on the Pedagogy of the Imagination to be held on April 1 at the Rose.

Student Art Protest Project at the Rose Art Museum

2009-02-11T13:14:00.001-08:00

I continue to be impressed by the creative work of the Cultural Production graduate students around the continuing Rose Art Museum crisis. Over the past week, they've partnered with undergraduates and the New York-based artist Steve Miller (who had a solo show at the Rose in Fall 2007) to develop an imaginative "art action" protesting the plan to sell off works in the Rose collection. They playfully incorporated the idea of an ATM, parodying the tendency of administrators to view the museum as a giant cash machine. Guided by Steve at long distance, the students worked to develop a banner reading "ATM", which was hung across the museum's entrance, and created small signs, reading "ATM inside," scattered across the campus. Steve donated the banner to the Museum, which prepared a lovely little official label for the work, entitled "ATM: Art Trumps Money," crediting all the students who worked on the project. It has been remarkable watching this group engaging in respectful consensus decision making while all the while thinking carefully about the university's long term financial challenges.

The students have documented their creative process at:

http://speakclearlyrose.blogspot.com/

The work was unveiled just before last night's town meeting at the Rose, attended by about 300 people (and viewed though internet streaming by about 250 more). The CP students also recorded the proceedings and uploaded them to YouTube. See:

http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/RoseTownMeeting

I've been pondering some of the enigmatic, paradoxical entailments of art and money foregrounded by the ATM project. "Art" as we know in the modern world is largely constituted through the logic of capitalist exchange and capitalist markets; the very concept of "art for art's sake" depends on the bourgeois liberation of aesthetic production from the strictures of aristocratic patronage. Yet great art, which is so highly evaluated in monetary terms in the art market, makes claims to transcending the pricing system in which it is embedded: it is "invaluable, "priceless," "beyond measure." To treat art merely in reductionist terms as a commodity is widely understood as unspeakably vulgar. Hence, the satirical bite in the artistic intervention, rendering the entire museum as a giant ATM. This vignette seems ludicrous to so many, since art is so often elevated above mere filthy lucre. Yet at the same time, we are partially aware that the sacredness with with great art is embued is inextricably bound up with the sacrality of capital itself (which is always hedged about with the mystery of just where value under capitalism comes from.)

One wonders if the ATM banner could, under certain circumstances, itself be transmuted into a valuable work of art. Let us suppose that the students succeed in rescuing the Rose as a public art collection and the banner becomes recognized as having played a critical role in this redemption. Might the banner circulate through major contemporary art museums on a triumphant royal progress, and in this way acrue value over time. If this happened, would the work in fact illustrate the principle that 'art trumps money,' or would it demonstrate that, at the end of the day, money still conditions our experience and knowledge of art?

More student responses to the Rose

2009-01-31T18:18:00.000-08:00

Today was quite remarkable at the Rose Art Museum. I had never seen it so full of people, except at an opening. This is the first weekend since the announced closing of the museum, and the word had certainly gotten out. Most of the visitors I talked to had never been to the Rose before, and many had never been in a contemporary art museum, but they figured this was one of their last chances to see the museum. Some drove for hours to get here.

The front windows of the museum still are decorated with the protest signs students made at the "sit in" on Thursday.

Joe Wardwell, a colleague in Fine Arts, who had curated the Master of Reality exhibition, gave a moving testimonial to the importance of a great art museum in studio education.

I posted a vlog entry on YouTube about our student responses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZd4HkZnBTg

Rose Art Museum Closing: Student Art Responses

2009-01-30T01:56:00.001-08:00

I suppose all of us involved in the arts at Brandeis are still in a state of shock over the announced closing of the Rose Art Museum and the planned sale of its extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art. There is much to say about this, but for the moment, I'd like to concentrate on how Brandeis students, especially those in the Cultural Production program, have been creatively responding to this crisis. Last night, graduate students and faculty in the program gathered for a "teach in" on the situation. We discussed, among other things, the fiscal calculations that apparently underlay the Board of Trustees' decision; the faculty resolution passed earlier that day calling for the Senate to set up committee to explore the future of the museum; how the decision is being discursively framed in various quarters; and what impact the Rose closing is likely to have on the professional plans of the Cultural Production students, many of whom are embarking on careers in museums and public art. There was some eloquent dismissal of the claim made by some (for instance on the general faculty ListServ) that the Rose, and art more broadly, are somehow distinct from the 'core mission' of a university. As my colleague Dirck Roosevelt put it (and here I paraphrase), so much of our lives, especially in this era, is banal and predictable; but art is anything but predictable; it disrupts, disturbs, compells us into directions we never would have expected. And a great museum of contemporary art such as the Rose does this in especially provocative and profound ways. In that sense, the Rose has been central to the real mission of this educational institution, to generate new ways of seeing the world and to disrupt conventional habits of thought.

To my mind, the most exciting and thought provoking parts of our discussion revolved around how students are themselves deploying art in response to the news, as a form of dissent and disquiet, and as celebrations of life and hope in the face of this cultural tragedy. Some of my colleagues wondered aloud: will protest-inspired art show up in unexpected places, in classrooms for instance? Will there be popular community theater responses or performance pieces, perhaps even coming into classroom sessions?

That afternoon, over 100 undergraduates and graduate students had gathered for a sit-in at the Rose, to make protest art and talk at the mic about their reactions. The protest is chronicled in an interesting YouTube video by CP student Brian Friedberg, who visually links the Rose sit-in to a recent protest march he attended in downtown Boston protesting the recent Israeli military actions in Gaza:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPO2rxM9-7o&feature=channel_page

The Rose closing is also commented upon by video posts by CP student Sarah Stephenson
and undergraduate Emily Leifer, who like Brian are in my Museums and Public Memory class this semester. In turn, another grad student in the class, Noam, has suggested a YouTube challenge for video postings on Rose situation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqkijkQT8Ys&feature=channel_page

Claire Mauro and Brian Friedberg have made a striking collaborative YouTube video denouncing the "Looting of the Rose", sampling the Nuremberg Rally scene of The Lion King:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v29DJL9TMPU&feature=channel

Tonight (Friday, January 30) from 6:00-8:00 p.m. the Cultural Production students are organizing an interesting art/protest happening in the Shapiro Campus Center, "ComeSeeArt". This event is described in the Boston online art journal Big, Red and Shiny at:

http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/ourdailyred.cgi?f=2009-01-29-204828-0126688

The happening will, I understand, include a really interesting work of projected art as well.

In her posting Emily touches on a theme that also occupied us during last night's teach in, a student plan next Thursday to hold some kind of funerary march through campus to mourn the passing of the Rose. Like a number of faculty and students, Emily is conflicted on this action. To what extent, some wonder, might a symbolic funeral march be read as acquiescing to the death of the museum? My own sense is that funerary symbolism is sufficiently complex that if handled right, such a march could be a powerful polyvalent form of signifying practice that would far transcend the limited frame of 'acceptance' or 'acquiescence.' Funeral marches after all move us into liminal space/time that is often enigmatically generative, allowing for subtle meta-commentaries on conventional categories of experience. I can't help but think of the famous case in April 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, in which hundreds of newly liberated African-Americans marched in mourning attire through the city streets bearing an enormous coffin on which was written the word "Slavery." They weren't bewailing the passage of slavery of course; rather they needed to perform its death, on their own terms, to make it real and in effect free themselves from its continuing specter. To be sure, a symbolic funeral march for the Rose would be quite different, but the point is that one can't easily tell just how mortuary symbolism will play out in such performances.

But I'm very curious to hear others' thoughts on this, and eager to see how this and other artistic engagements with the crisis will develop.

Household Space and the Uncanny in a Carbon Footprint Ad

2008-12-27T18:42:00.000-08:00

There's a very clever, subtle PSA promoting awareness of our carbon footprints, developed by the British agency AMV BBDO (the makers of the "Stop the Bullets" PSA mentioned in my last blog post). The new ad, Footprints, shows a series of scenes in which each person leaves behind gooey footprints of dark petroleum. The ad ends with a child's voiceover, "You have a carbon footprint which contributes to climate change. To discover yours and how to reduce it visit direct.gov. uk/ACTonCO2"

I'm especially interested in how the ad makes use of interior, domestic space. The opening shot is of an outdoor lamp illuminating a jovial party scene on a patio; a man leaves his affectionate companions and walks indoors, leaving the dark footprints behind him; a mother does laundry walking past her baby on the floor; a mother and daughter leave their car in the garage as they enter the house; children race around, leaving video games on an unattended computer monitor; a man gets out of a bathtub; friends lounge around a refrigerator's open door. So here, in contrast to most representations, carbon footprints are not presented as the products of vast factories or machines, but rather of individual persons, pointedly emphasizing individual responsibility at the level of the household.

This emphasis on domestic space is reinforced by the soundtrack, the opening lyrics of the 1969 song,"Shangri-la," by Ray Davies of the Kinks: "Now that you've find you've found your paradise/This is your kingdom to command/Your can go outside a polish your car/or sit by your fire in your Shangri-la..." The lyrics are loosely keyed to the images on screen ("polish your car" is tied to the scene of a mother and daughter getting out of a car; "sit by the fire" is linked to the scene of a lit computer screen, the modern equivalent of the fireplace)

The later lyrics of the original song (not in the ad) are considerably darker than the opening, indicating that the protagonist Arthur is trappped in a deeply alienating existence, with no way out. So inasmuch as memories of the original song might linger on among some of the audience, might the ad be read as an implicit critique of the bourgeois sensibility?

Watching the ad, I find myself thinking of Freud's famous observation that there is nothing more uncanny (Unheimliche, un-home-like) than the Home-like (Das Heimliche). In the seemingly familiar, comfortable environment of their home, there lurks a disturbing trace of the repressed, of all that which we would prefer to forget.

Guns Aestheticized: Reading an anti-gun PSA through Doug Kellner

2008-12-27T05:37:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Douglas Kellner's fascinating book on mass-mediated gun culture in the United States, "Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shooting from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre." (Paradigm, 2008) The book is causing me to think carefully about the profound aestheticization of guns and gun-related violence in contemporary American and global culture. There is a nearly sacramental status afforded to guns and bullets, as prosthetic extensions of the masculine ego, in innumerable mass media images.

Reading Kellner, it occurs to me that this sensibility even informs works of media culture that are self-consciously opposed to gun violence. I find myself rethinking, for example, the well known British public service announcement, “Stop the Bullets, Kill the Gun." For more than a year, Choice FM’s anti-gun violence ad (produced by the London-based AMV BBDO) has been making the rounds on line, reproduced on YouTube and in other venues:

(See production credits at http://adsoftheworld.com/media/tv/choice_fm_choice_kill_the_gun )

Produced as part of the London radio station’s campaign against urban youth violence, especially "black-on-black" violence, the ad features slow-motion shots of a bullet exploding, in turn, an egg, a glass of milk, an apple, a bottle of tomato ketchup, a bottle of water, and a watermelon. The final screen is of the face of black youth; the bullet flying towards his head stops just before impact and turns into the words, “Stop the bullets. Kill the guns.”

The sequence of destroyed objects is presumably carefully chosen to build up towards the invisible spectacle of a human cranium being destroyed by a bullet. The final explosion, of the red fruit of the watermelon, foreshadows the (unseen) explosion of blood that would follow the bullet strike on the head of the black child.

I've been intrigued by the ad because of its allusions to high art, including contemporary stop-motion art photography and classical opera, but not quite sure what to make of these echoes. Kellner's analysis of the grand "Spectacle" of gun-related violence in modern society has encouraged me to thinking more carefully about why such high aesthetic values are brought to bear on the subject of gun violence in the ad.

I am not entirely sure of the precise artistic lineage of the image of the bullet strike. Perhaps, one of the sources here is the famous 1961-1963 series of “shooting pictures,” by the French contemporary artist Niki de Saint Phalle, in which a fired bullet exploded concealed paint containers.

The more proximate inspiration is presumably the work of the scientist and photographer Harold E. Edgerton, whose 1964 still shots, “Shooting the Apple” (also called “.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple”) and “Bullet Through Jack”, capture, through use of stroboscopy, a bullet passing through the objects.

One thinks as well of AP photographer Eddie Adams's famous 1968 image of South Vietnam's national police chief executing an alleged Vietcong insurgent. There must be innumerable other photographic and cinematic images of human heads exploding as bullets pass through them, that in one way or another inform the ad. It is even possible that among the iconographic inspirations are the famous photographs of Flight 77 (“the second plane”) passing through the second World Trade Center tower on September 11, 2001.

Equally intriguing is the ad’s use as background music of the Bellini’s aria “Casta Diva” from Norma, perhaps best known Bel Canto aria of the 19th century. Was the selection chosen only because of its beauty and its fame, and to highlight the Edgerton-inspired aestheticization of the bullet strike? The music and moving image are carefully calibrated, so that the soprano sings the first word just as the bullet hits the first object.

Is there, as well, a clever deployment of the opera’s lyrics lurking in the background? The soundtrack plays the first three lines of the aria, in which Norma invokes the pure and chaste goddess of the moon:

Casta Diva, che inargenti
queste sacre antiche piante,
a noi volgi il bel sembiante

Translated by the Opera Guide:

"Chaste goddess, who dost bathe in silver light
These ancient, hallowed trees,
Turn thy fair face upon us."

Is the implication that the gun and the bullet are, in the current moment, our own sacred divinities? The unexpected slow motion beauty of the bullet strike gives a glimpse of eternal mystery, an effect heightened by the sublime music.

I can't help but wonder if it is entirely coincidence that final sung word in the ad is "sembiante" (appearance, semblance, face) just as our eye lingers on the face of the boy, suspended somewhere between life and death. In this sense, the ad might call to mind Roland Barthes' famous observation in Camera Lucida, when gazing at the photograph of the condemned criminal on the eve of his execution, "He is dead. And he is going to die." Photographs so often take us into strange temporal interzones, suspended between past, present and possible futures, and this ad would seem to exemplify and play upon those affordances. Perhaps the Bellini aria, with its stately rythmns, enforces an awareness of temporal sequence that intensifies the effects of the slow motion shots of the Phantom camera (capturing motion at 10,000 frames per second).

As in so many skillfully crafted PSAs the question of effectiveness is inevitably raised. Does the ad’s beauty simply heighten our contemporary cultural fixation with bullets and guns, as manifestations of the sacred? Or does the ad significantly undercut the great aesthetic value accorded to gun-related violence on television and in film? Reading Doug Kellner's important study, I'm inclined to think that the ad, despite the best of intentions, is so enmeshed with a hegemonic aesthetic that rends the speeding bullet sublime that it is unlikely to deter anyone from participating in gun violence...

Art and Evolution: Kiki Smith's Lucy's Daughters

2008-12-25T03:27:00.000-08:00

I've just posted a video essay on Kiki Smith's wonderful silk screened art work, "Lucy's Daughters" (1990), which I first saw in a show curated by Margarite Evangeline at the Rose Art Museum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AJY0twpKIc&feature=channel_page

I'm especially struck by how the piece contrasts with the standard graphic framing of evolution in the popular imagination, typified by the unlinear "parade of man" visual trope, of the sort ridiculed by Stephen Jay Gould in his book "Wonderful Life.

Our hope is to get a kind of video dialogue going in advance of the symposium on art and evolution we're planning for "Darwin Day", the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12, 2009. I'd love to view some specific video responses to my video essay, as well as other commentaries about: (1)how artists have responded to evolutionary ideas, and (2) how, in turn, visual and other representational genres have helped to shape popular (and scientific) understandings of evolutionary processes.

I'm excited about YouTube's potentional for promoting stimulating video dialogues about problems in cultural theory and the interpretation of art, now that it is so easy for so many people to post video responses to videos that they encounter on line. I'm wondering how this kind of visual correspondence might itself evolve of over time. To be sure, quick video responses and counter-responses many not always encourage thoughtful reflection, but the medium does seem to have interesting "affordances" for the building of communities devoted to collaborative cultural analysis outside the bounds of the academy in a formal, institutional sense.

Beyond the general educational value of video essays themselves, I'm intrigued by the pedagogic possibilities of YouTube in the courses that I teach. Would it be a good idea to encourage or require students to post video responses to one another, perhaps pondering a specfic image, work of art, or other cultural phenomena? In small classes at least, one could initially limit the video dialogues to a closed group (the YouTube upper limit for closed access is 25 viewers) and then later go public with the video dialogue, I suppose, once we decided as a class that the video threads were ready to be shared with the wider universe. I still would want students to post carefully thought out written responses on line, but it does seem to me that the discipline of composing video essays (in which image, text and voice are thoughfully integrated) is a very useful one, especially if students were responsible to one another for crafting videos that responded to their peers' videos.

Interpreting a Gravestone in Greene County, Georgia

2008-12-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

I've just posted a video essay on our new Cultural Production "video channel" about an enigmatic gravestone in the city cemetery of Greensboro, Georgia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCbXMnvfA4g

I came across the marker while doing research in cemetery for my book on slavery and memory in Georgia. At this point, I know nothing about the woman the marker commemorates, a Mary Irving who evidently passed away in 1828, other than what is inscribed on the slab. I'm fascinated that the details of her death (evidently from a venomous snake) are diagramed out on the slab. The visible slab, I should note, appears to be a recent reproduction, perhaps placed over the original slab after it faded due to the passage of time; I don't know how similar the modern images are to the ones made in the 1820s.

I'm curious about the potential use of i-movies as instructional devices, a usage that has been especially popularized by the wonderful scholar Shigehisa Kuriyama at Harvard. See a report at:

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.07/21-kuriyama.html

What does this genre let us do that conventional illustrated essays can't quite do? What are the pros and cons of intentionally directing the viewer's gaze through the so-called "Ken Burns effect?" Should we be encouraging our students, in the interest of developing their oral expression and visual literacy to produce and submit these kinds of video essays in the context of academic courses?

Flags over Guantanamo Bay

2008-12-19T16:07:00.000-08:00

In my first experimental "webisode" for our emerging Cultural Production "video channel" I reflect on a striking image from the entrance of "Camp Justice," the notorious detention camp on the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Please watch the video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZaVFJg0QsI

Comments and suggestions would be most welcome.

Webisodes on Critical Media Analysis: "Whopper Virgins"

2008-12-18T17:40:00.000-08:00

We have been thinking, in Cultural Production, about ways to develop short “webisodes” (on line video segments) that would showcase and promote productive conversations in critical media analysis. Our initial idea has been to make short segments analyzing new television and print advertisements, integrating grad students and faculty in conversation with sampled footage of the ads themselves. We’ll see how this works out.

We’ll start with Burger King’s much-discussed, “Whopper Virgins” campaign, an ethnographic-style documentary chronicling the supposed journey of taste-testers to the the distant corners of the earth, exposing Greenland Inuit and Romanian and Thai villagers (supposedly new to Burger King or McDonald advertisements) to hamburgers. These various exotics, usually attired in traditional costume, then judge between the Whopper and the Big Mac. The short television ads, now running, are drawn from a skillfully produced larger eight minute “documentary’ on line at:

http://www.whoppervirgins.com/

The ads proclaim such phrases as "See what people thought, when nobody told them what to think," or "Unbiased. Unbelievable. Undeniable."

The blog buzz on the campaign, curiously, largely buys into the hype about Burger King reaching communities as yet ignorant of fast food: what right, some bloggers ask, does the corporation have to push unhealthy foods into new markets? Yet, at least for us in Cultural Production, our primary questions have centered on the ideological and affective dimensions on the campaign. At one level, the ad can be read as a rather standard exercise in American cultural imperialism, a latter day civilizing mission recruiting communities from the global antipodes into the tastes and sensibilities of Pax Americana, epitomized by the hamburger. Yet we also sense a curious wistfulness in the campaign, a joy by the American protagonists at being welcomed (and ultimately fed) by the rest of the world. Does this signal a post-post 9/11 desire (epitomized by the recent celebration over Obama’s election) by Americans to be welcomed once more back into the global fold? (To be sure, this reveujenated internationalism remains predicated on the sure assumption that deep down the rest of the world just wants to reconnect with its inner American essence, realized through the sacrament of the hamburger!)

We are puzzling over the best way to frame these kinds of conversation on line through web-based video: through our own talking heads, through sample ad footage with voiceover student and faculty commentary, through some of of interactive slide show? How do we promote critical readings of these media forms, without foreclosing important lines of conversation and interpretation that we may not have anticipated? Suggestions are most welcome...As we work on all of this, please stay tuned!

Projections on a Waterfall?

2008-12-17T04:53:00.000-08:00

In a recent conversation with Ellen Hagney at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation we discussed the possibility of my Museums and Public Memory class (Brandeis University) in Spring 2009 doing some sort of multimedia installation around the museum and the site of old mills along the river. We are already planning a digital audio walking tour along the river banks, in which walkers would be able to call in via cell phones to hear edited recordings of community members sharing their memories of the river over the years, supplemented by recorded soundscapes of the river and perhaps electro acoustical music inspired by the river.

The idea that has especially intrigued us is developing some sort of video projection installation, perhaps in conjunction with the 2009 Boston CyberArts festival, projecting a video montage directly onto the Moody Street waterfall. (See our proposal on line.) This drop in the river in effect powered the initial creation of the American industrial revolution, providing the energy for the turbines of Francis Cabot Lowell's 1814 textile mill. The surface of the waterfall (and the water vapor generated by the churning waters) might provide an effective “portal” into the city’s history, perhaps going back to precolonial Native American timescapes through histories of colonization, industrialization and the demographic transformations of the community.

At this point, we are imagining some sort of creative compilation of old family and archival photographs of the river, art works inspired by the Charles perhaps videoed interviews of community members reminiscing about the river over time. This might be done in collaboration with some students in Ellen Schattschneider's Visuality and Culture course. Although the actual multimedia projector would be a relatively new piece of technology, the act of projection would hearken back to 19th century visual technologies, including magic lantern projection, such as the Haliotype of the 1850s. (We’d be interested in learning when magic lanterns projections first came to Waltham and what the subjects of this early displays were.)

More broadly, I hope our class learns more about the historical relationships between technologies of optical projection and emerging concepts of psychological projection. William James, for instance, uses the term “projection” extensively in reference both to external projection (in the sense of displacement) of interior psychological states upon an outer object, and internal projection on a kind of mental screen in the case of introspection. Was James specifically inspired by magic lantern displays? Visual projection dates back to at least the mid-17th century: to what extent were emerging modern conceptions of mind and interiority conditioned by these technologies?

In turn, is is interesting to ponder the increasing use of water vapor projection screens in many venues around the world: what precisely is the pleasure of these sorts of ephemeral surfaces? If the reigning experience of modernity is, in Marx’s terms (made famous by Marshall Berman) that “All that is Solid Melts into Air,” then are projections on vapor the purest expression of a modern, or postmodern, sensibility? At the same time, does the impulse to see into a wall of water evoke a primal desire to return to a uterine space, powered by what Freud long ago termed the "Oceanic feeling"?

In any event, we are eager to elicit thoughts from local community members on what might be imaged and imagined through projection installations on and around the waterfall.

Soundscapes and Bodies

2008-12-14T09:21:00.000-08:00

In a recent poster session at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco, Cultural Production graduate student Bryce Peake presented his research on “soundscapes” in and around restaurants on the Maltese island of Goza in the southern Mediterranean. (Bryce is pictured to the left of his poster, explaining his research).

Like the term “landscape,” the concept of “soundscape” implies both a state of being and active process: we creatively “landscape” and “soundscape” our environs, even though certain features of landscapes/soundscapes (in their nominative senses) are relatively impervious or resistant to human intervention. How do we conceptualize, then, the relationship between landscapes and soundscapes? One way of approaching this problem is to consider an intriguing observation by the South African cultural theorist David Bunn, “there are no landscapes without bodies.” By this Bunn refers not simply to the standard practice in European painting of placing bodily figures in the middle foreground of a landscape but to the often implicit presence of embodied forms in landscape imagery as well as to the sensuous promise of bodily engagement in landscape contours and features offered to the viewer. In what respects, then, are bodies figured, overtly or implicitly, in a soundscape or acoustic ecology, provisionally defined as the sum total of all audio waveforms discernible in a given environmental niche? In the case of Bryce’s research, there would seem to be a prominent body politics embedded the Goizetan soundcapes: the habitus and dispositions of the bodies of both tourist and native are enacted and disciplined through the repetitive structuring of recorded and live sound.

Recalling my own research on mass witchfinding in Eastern Zambia, I am struck that a highly organized soundscape is carefully orchestrated for the collective disciplining of human bodies. As each villager enters the “circle of truth” interrogation space in the village center, a collective hush falls as the spirit-possessed diviner utters, in a high, reedy voice, the numerical “read-out” of the subject’s degree of witchcraft substance. To announce the presence of an accused witch in the circle, the witchfinder and his disciples will burst into Zionist hymns, as the crowd roars in anticipation. When witchfinder climbs the roof of a house to disclose a hidden witchcraft horn, the whole assemblage may emit cascading waves of laughter or rage, all skillfully “conducted’ by the witchfinder. The retreat of a disgraced accused person (upon whose skin the witchfinder has tangibly written his or her witchcraft quotient) is in turn usually accompanied by the shocked silence of the crowd. The noise of mass witchfinding is at times audible from several miles away, and one has the sense of a kind of audible thunderstorm proceeding across the landscape, cleansing (or terrorizing) communities and bodies in successive waves of righteous anger.

Looted Gardens: Shubha Mudgal and Reconstructed Memory

2008-12-14T06:07:00.000-08:00

In mid October 2008, the great Indian classic and popular vocalist and peace activist Shubha Mudgal held an extraordinary MusicUnitesUs residency at Brandeis University (organized by Professors Judy Eissenberg and Harleen Singh, who both serve on the Cultural Production faculty committee.) Shubha held a series of remarkable workshops on topics ranging from gender, music and the sacred to the cultural politics of Bollywood music.

One of her first events (on Wednesday, October 15, 2008) was a dazzling session on women and art at the Women’s Study Research Center, which may be viewed on the WGBH website at:
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=4154

or heard via MP3 audio at:
http://forum.wgbh.org/content/forum/4154-2008_10_15.mp3

After a brief introduction, the session begins with Shubha giving a painfully beautiful performance of a song composed during the colonial period by a woman singer, responding to Gandhi’s request for women to create and perform liberation songs throughout India. If I heard the translation correctly, the lyrics state: “Strip the gardens of India of every flower that they contain, you can loot as much as you like, it doesn't concern us, since in this land of abundance, we will always have enough, and we will lay down our lives for our freedom”

I take the gendered wording of the song to be highly suggestive. Women, custodians of flowers and gardens, offer up these charges in the struggle against British colonialism. Is the implication that the mothers of India are, by metaphorical extension, also offering up their biological children in the struggle? Is there even as sense here in which the landscape of India is being figured as a feminine, abundant maternal body, committed to enduring the ravages of the occupying colonial power? Does the female singer in effect offer up her own (stigmatized) body as well as Mother India in the struggle?

The current performance of the song emerges out a process of cultural excavation and re-imagining. As Shubha explains, no written score of the original work exists; Anish, a member of her troupe, thus reconstructed the song from fragments and composed a new score for it. More than six decades after India’s independence, what does it now mean to reconstruct and re-perform this song? Given Shubha Mudgal’s deep commitment to transcending conventional national political boundaries--through intimate, artistic connections among all the women of Indus valley civilizations--the present-day performance of the song would seem to summon up the collective body of South Asian women and all their gardens. (This is presumably intensified by the song’s integrative use of many languages of the region, including Urdu.) Though "looted" through decades of communalism and war, this collective trans-national South Asian body ephemerally manifests itself in musical form, as a tangible reminder of a lost unity, for all of those separated by the chasms of class, gender, nation and cycles of violence.

Later in the recorded session, Ulka Anjaria (also a Cultural Production faculty member) briefly returns the conversation to the song, which she reads as a deeply subversive articulation of the Nation from its most stigmatized margins. She suggests that rather than conform to Gandhi’s call for women courtesans to return to the “respectable” fold, the voice of the singer adamantly maintains its marginal gendered position, while daring to characterize the entire nation.

MusicUnitesUs will continue these conversations in Spring 2009 through a series of video conferences between Brandeis clases and Shubha Mudghal in India. For updates, see the MusicUnitesUs website.

I do hope we’ll have a a chance, among many other things, to discuss further this remarkable reconstructed song of looted gardens and ever-abundant flowers.

Generational Inversions in Battlestar Galactica (Season 4.5)

2008-12-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

In her perceptive introduction to the Battlestar Galactica issue on Flow TV, Lynne Joyrich notes that the central problem on BG is the problem of reproduction: of humans, cyborgs and hybrids (not to mention the reproduction of violence and the reproduction of the earlier television series itself!) In the mid-season finale of season four, “Revelations,” the standard generational relationship of reproductive sequencing (always ambiguous in the show) is dramatically inverted. Admiral Adama’s son Apollo is temporarily elevated to the presidency and is for a time his father's superior. As Apollo awaits word of whether his father alive is dead, Kara tells him what the Admiral once told her, “Children are born to replace their parents; for children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die “ The admiral returns from seeming death, only to break down upon learning of his Executive Officer’s betrayal. Apollo plays the parental role and comforts him. The Admiral does return, more or less, to full patriarchal confident status by the end of the episode. But, we are left wondering, to what end? The goal of the entire series narrative, reaching Earth seems to be achieved, but Earth, if it is indeed Earth, is a desolate post-apocalyptic, radioactive wasteland. Unclear as of yet if this is set in “our” ancient past or distant future. As the thirteenth colony, Earth could be thought of as the offspring of the twelve colonies. Yet in another respect, Earth could also be conceived as the parent of all humanity; does the parental planet thus have to die, in order for humanity (and its Cylon brood) to reach their full potential?

Arboreal Symbolism in Post-Conflict African/Diaspora Art

2008-12-12T10:09:00.000-08:00

I've long been fascinated by creative deployments of tree symbolism among contemporary African and African Diaspora artists. Trees are often deployed to re-root persons and communities in the wake of dislocation and violent conflict, in the interest of bodily, spiritual and collective healing. Trees, which are like and unlike human beings in such dramatic ways, often enable alternate imaginings of personhood, in ways that important link different temporal epochs and spatial locations.

In a forthcoming article in Electronic Antiquity, I discuss the work of the Atlanta-based African-American artist Kevin Sipp, who has produced a series of remarkable tree sculptures incorporating diverse elements, including sound system components. In his "Strange Fruit" tree-inspired works (one of them seen above) Sipp creates sculptural forms based in part on Kongo nkisi, that serve as alternate homes for the unquiet souls of those killed in lynching, interrupting cycles of violence, pain and retribution. He understands his work as ministering in particular to urban young gang members, the reborn souls of of lynching victims, who through trees and the haunting music broadcast from them, may yet a place of re-membering, re-collection, and spiritual solace.

Mozambican artists have comparably worked with the detritus of violent conflict in the "Transforming Arms Into Ploughshares" project, fusing the broken down elements of automatic weapons into a great Tree of Life. See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNmuKN46AgM

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1ezDK7SN7I

In this instance, the breaking down of the guns not only ensures that the "guns will never kill again," but also, it would appear, in Boas and Levi-Strauss' sense, helps reduce prior histories to minute, recombinable elements, so that the mythic bricoleur may fashion, "New worlds from fragments." Equally important is the collective, collaborative process at the heart of this project, in which a group of artists joins together out of their individuated histories of pain and loss, to forge an integrated tangible image of new vitality, transforming histories of death into the regeneration of life.

A fascinating new variation of this theme is seen in the recent sculptural work (Untitled, 2008) of Dinka artist Atem Aleu, a graduate student in the Cultural Production program; Aleu developed the work in the sculpture class of Cultural Production faculty member Tory Fair. (In the above photograph, Atem is seen to the left of his sculpture; Mangok Bol, the administrator of the Cultural Production program, is seen to the right). The metal form calls to mind a missile or bomb casing, of that sort that still dot the scarred landscape of Sudan in the wake of the recent conflict. Yet the curled metal sheets also evoke the trunk of great tree, displaying in soldered relief forms images evoking the genocidal violence of the second Southern Sudanese Civil War. The great roots of the tree shows traces of the desperate long marches of the refugees through desert and jungle, journeys along which many perished in agonizing ways. A truncated arm of the tree evokes the ubiquitous spectacle of amputees; our view into the tree’s interior, significantly, is blocked: as the artist explains, in a similar fashion the voices of may of the war’s victims were blocked from external interlocutors. Yet towards the summit of the tree one glimpses the possibility of redemption, in the shape of ancestral faces that in effect flower out of the tree. Once again, swords are turned into plougshares and legacies of horror are transmuted through art into the possibilities of collective rebirth.

Atem Aleu’s exhibition of sculpture, painting and lithograph will open on February 10, 2009 in the Schwartz Gallery at Brandeis University.

Critical Media Pedagogy for All Ages

2008-12-12T06:39:00.000-08:00

Many of us wrestle with effective strategies for teaching critical media literacy. How do we teach our students ways to take apart the ideological dimensions of mainstream and independent mass media, while also helping them develop analytic models that help account for the profoundly (often seductive) mass appeal of these cultural forms?

I’ve been deeply impressed by the work being done by the critical media feminist scholar Rhonda Hammer at UCLA, as she trains her students in media analysis. Her students have produced an extraordinary series of videos, posted on line, exploring a range of mass media imagery, in ways that are smart, incisive and often funny. See:

http://www.womensstudies.ucla.edu/u_spotlight.html

I like the way many of these pieces creatively move back and forth between media imagery and carefully edited interviews (sometimes on the street) with ordinary consumers of media, across lines of gender, race and class. The net effect of the strongest of these works is not simply to portray audiences as passive consumers of media hegemonies, but rather to emphasize the creative and thoughtful agency of audiences, as they actively struggle to position themselves in reference to these powerful and seductive images. Taken as a whole, these imaginative critical videos take media seriously, while also taking seriously (and not simply stereotyping) media consumers, honoring their intelligence and critical self-consciousness.

Here on the “other coast”, many of our graduate students in the M.A. Program in Cultural Production at Brandeis are especially interested in developing critical media capacities among children and adolescents, especially those from historically excluded communities. They know that simply lecturing to youth---about the gendered, racist, classist and homophobic subtexts of the popular music, film and television in which they are deeply invested-- is an ineffective pedagogic strategy. What are productive alternatives? Often we’ve found the best approach is to have young people develop their own imaginative media products, in ways that cause them to reflect upon the political construction of mainstream media--while still honoring their delight in the dynamic energy of the media that they regularly consume.

For instance, Cathy Draine has done highly creative work at Freedom House in Dorchester with urban teens in her program, as they develop snappy PSAs on school avoidance. Brian Friedberg, in turn, has sought to engage the musical and media-savvy imagination of adolescent young women living in the Prospect Hill Terrace public housing development by having them develop a “mockumentary”, in which they script and play the roles of members of girl band undergoing a break up. Last year, this same group of young women, when performing at the Brandeis campus, only wanted to lip sync songs by current pop idols. But this year, working with Brian, the young women are composing their own music and writing their own lyrics, as they also develop the characters they are playing. Along the way, Brian engages them in thought-provoking conversations about mass media literacy but this isn’t the foregrounded focus of their sessions. Meanwhile, in the same Prospect Hill community center, Nadia Hemady engages a broader group of teens and tweens in conversation about media by exposing them to media forms, primarily Japanese anime, with which they are not all that familiar. In watching and discussing in anime in Japanese (with English subtitles) the young people’s experiences of mass media is to some extent ‘de-naturalized,” and they develop on their own interesting and creative takes on cinema and television more broadly.

Other Cultural Production students are deploying ethnographic research techniques to develop nuanced senses of how audiences creatively re-appropriate mass media forms. Bryce Peake, for instance, has been doing fascinating fieldwork on urban “Zombie Walks,” in which hundreds of people, usually in their twenties, dress up as Zombies, largely modeled on the undead creatures in George Romero’s films, and lurch through city neighborhoods. Becky Lennon, in turn, is critically analyzing children’s “educational television,” including the popular show “Dora the Explorer,” with an eye to unpacking the subtle transpositions between the Dora character and the “imagined community” of the children’s television audience. Although each episode of the show is formally framed in terms of interactive problem solving, Becky argues persuasively that the shows offer a kind of pre-fabricated simulacrum of problem solving, while captivating children who in a curious sense continuously give life to the Dora character. Later this year, Becky may be developing creative media projects with children, as they explore and comment upon these kinds of educational TV shows.

Theorizing Race and Slavery in HBO's "True Blood"

2008-12-11T17:49:00.000-08:00

A good deal of the blogsphere’s discussion of the first season of HBO’s “True Blood” has swirled around the puzzling representations of race on the show. What are we to make of the rapid images of civil rights sit-ins and black church worship, intercut with shots of the Klan, in the dazzling opening montage? How are we to interpret the suggested analogy between the struggle for vampire equality and the civil rights and gay rights movements (the latter signaled in the opening sequence’s roadside sign, “God Hates Fangs”, only one letter removed from a homophobic slur)? What is the status of the various cross-racial and cross-species liaisons and romances in the show? Is the “blood” in the show’s title an alibi for American racism’s obsession with the supposed “truth” of blood and bloodlines?

Considerable discussion centers on the African-American characters played by the remarkable Nelsan Ellis (Lafayette) and Rutina Wesley (Tara): are they stereotypical sidekick characters rendered as secondary to the white protagonists or do they in fact dominate the dramatic crux of the show?

For examples of the blogged conversations on race in the show, see:

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/09/24/true-blood-tired-stereotypes/

and a response:

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/10/13/scattered-thoughts-on-true-blood/

Among the comments to the latter post is a mini-debate over the “good” vampire character Bill’s lack of apology for his father’s slave-owning, a brief moment as the former confederate soldier speaks to a nearly all white crowd of southern Civil War enthusiasts. Yet, I wonder if the problem of slavery and its legacies, rather than only a passing concern, is in fact at the center of the entire series. Tara rages against her mother for having named her for Margaret Mitchell’s mythical plantation, the summation of white cultural denial of the horrors of slavery. What precisely is being exorcised from Tara and from her mother? Might it be, among other things, the enduring violent echoes of enslavement?

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to untangle the shifting master/slave dynamics embedded in the show’s mortal/vampire relationships. In a manifest sense the vampires, campaigning for equal rights, are equated to the descendants of slaves struggling for full inclusion in civil society. But in the show’s tangled underworld, vampires themselves are generally figured as masters, “glamming” their susceptible, frail human subjects and draining the life force out their subordinated mortal “pets.” In turn, Jason and his dangerous girlfriend Amy attempt to enslave the nascent vampire Eddie as a permanent source of intoxicating vampire blood. In some respects, Jason himself is enslaved, to Amy, his libido, and his addictions, even at the moment when he longs for a degree of reciprocal equality with the temporarily enslaved Eddie. The African-American gay man Lafayette (named for the anti-slavery foreign hero of the American Revolution) subordinates and subjects himself in prostitution and yet maintains that only he is truly free.

Presumably, the impossibility of determining the precise analogues of slave-owner and slave in "True Blood" is precisely the point. Claude Levi-Strauss, whose birthday anthropologists and students of culture around the world celebrated last week, has long argued that myth is not so much the fixed statement of a solution as it is the dynamic, shifting articulation of an insolvable problem. Polynesian mythology, for instance, centers on the vital (if irresolvable) cultural problem of determining how the relationship between brother and sister is like and unlike the relationship between husband and wife. If “True Blood” is a contemporary American exercise in mythology, is it a comparably dynamic, unstable exploration of the core American cultural conundrums: Who is truly enslaved and who is truly free? Can Master and Slave every exist without one another? And are there mysterious traces of the Free and the Unfree in each and every one of us?

Amos Russell's Juke House

2008-12-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

This delightful piece is one of a series of dioramic "Jukes" by the African-American self-taught artist Amos Russell, whose work is sold through Cathead Delta Blues and Folk Art in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I love the way the work draws the viewer into the sparse interior, with its unadorned white-washed plank walls, the simple door, and the tiny pile of firewood beside the wood burning stove. Most of the dancing and music-playing small figures have their feet lifted off the floor or an arms upraised, conveying a sense of the foot-stomping music and uncontainable vibrant energy of a Saturday night. (No one's sitting at the tables or at the bar; the music has evidently drawn everyone onto the dance floor.) Although the interior is relatively spacious, the fact that only four couples are dancing evokes the tight quarters of the classic cramped juke joint, which often could only accomodate a few dancers at a time. Russell deftly evokes, as well, the adorment of the rural work force that frequented the jukes, including the women's head ties and the men's caps and work hats.

See my reflections on co-teaching a travel course in the Mississippi Delta with my colleague David Cunningham, when our class was hosted by Dr. Luther Brown and his Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University:
http://www.brandeis.edu/community-engaged/faculty/auslanderSoc156a.html

And see our class preliminary website on oral history from Clarksdale and Greenwood, a partnership we did with the Delta Blues Museum:

http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/deltamemory/Clarksdale.htm

Cultural Production Center in Southern Sudan

2008-12-10T13:59:00.000-08:00

The M.A. Program in Cultural Production is developing a partnership with the planned Jonglei State Cultural Production Center in Bor town, Jonglei state, Southern Sudan. The Center is directed by Cultural Production graduate student Atem Aleu, who is an accomplished visual artist and cultural performer

The Cultural Production Center in Bor will be devoted to celebrating, supporting and documenting the rich cultures of the Southern Sudan, with a special emphasis on the regions of Jonglei State. The Center seeks to train a new generation of artists, musicians, writers and dramatists committed to the artistic and cultural vitality of New Sudan. The Center will encourage traditional and modern arts, including painting, poetry, music, song, dance, video-making and digital arts. Their first goal is to build a physical Center for the Arts and Culture in Bor town. Their training and cultural enrichment programs will be open to young men and women from 16 to 30 years old. Most of their instruction will be in English. Atem plans to return to Bor in Summer 2009 to hold more community arts worskhops and plan for the construction of the Center.

We are exploring the possibility of graduate students in the Cultural Production Master's program at Brandeis undertaking practicums and internships at the new Center, working with young people in traditional and pop music, Hip Hop, video production, creative writing, creative non-fiction, choreography, digital arts, and community-building. Atem is eager to train local young people to be cultural interpreters, archivists, and documenters of the dynamic cultural scene in the region.

In the meantime, we are working closely with Atem as he develops his overall conception of the Center and its programming. I'm especially fascinated by Atem's commitment to bringing together former adversaries, across lines of ethnicity and religion, to work together to develop the artistic and cultural resources of the region.

The photograph above shows Atem's student Samuel Ajok applying primer to a painting, in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya in 2005. Samuel is currently living in Bor, Sudan.

---
Those interested in efforts by the "Lost Boys" to do reconstruction and development work in Sudan should be sure to see (and support) Jen Marlowe's remarkable, nearly completed film, "Rebuilding Hope."

Dinka Men Sing Three Hymns

2008-12-09T11:14:00.000-08:00

On November 3, 2008, Mangok Bol (Administrator of the Cultural Production program), Atem Aleu (a first year graduate student in the program) and William Malwuil (the "cultural ambassador" of the Southern Sudanese community of Massachusetts) performed three Dinka hymns, in the Lee Gallery of the Rose Art Museum at the Cultural Production/Global Studies open house at Brandeis University.

The three hymns are primarily in Dinka; they were composed by young people during the Sudanese civil war, in some instances in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya.

The first song is visible below, and on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocs3TiLhFGw

Title: Absent Friends

"We greet you all, children of God,/We greet you in the name of the Trinity/We hope you are doing well/In the power of Jesus Christ Amen."

The second song is visible below and on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zZEX6TdQTE

The song welcomes people in the Dinka language ("Kudual duan" "Greeting to all of you"), Nuer language ("Malemegua, Malmedit") and Murle language ("Abona Juru, Abona Labon")

The final song, visible below and on YouTube at,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fNmpy9gCJk

is titled, "Thiei de wel (Spread the Word).

Verse 1: I'm telling you to prepare yourself. The day of His coming, I'm telling you. (REPEAT)

CHORUS: "The church was blessed (before us)/Jesus is our Savior/Let's come quickly and bow/I'm telling you of the day Jesus will come".

Verse 2: Eat your food but remember Him. The day of His coming, I'm telling you.
Verse 3: Wear your clothes, but remember Him. The day of His coming, I'm telling you.
Verse 4: Drink you wine, but remember Him. The day of His coming, I'm telling you.
Verse 5: Play your music, but remember Him. The day of His coming, I'm telling you.
Verse 6: Pray to any god, but remember Him. The day of His coming, I'm telling you.

William plays a thom, an instrument he has constructed; these instruments, at times made out of frying pans, are common in Southern Sudanese refugee communities. Atem Aleu's drawing of a thom-player, incorrectly attributed to a different artist, is visible on the web, at
http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/sudan_center/kakuma_exhibit/untitled2.html

The South Sudanese Cultural Documentation Center at Brandeis University is a collaborative effort between the M.A. Program in Cultural Production (Brandeis University) and the Sudanese Education Fund.

Cultural Production students at Prospect Hill Terrace

2008-12-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

Over the past two years, Cultural Production graduate students and faculty have partnered with the tenants association at Prospect Hill Terrace, Waltham’s largest public housing development, to develop cultural enrichment programs for children, teens and adults. During the Fall 2008 semester, for instance, Nadia Hemady has concentrated on adolescent programming, including engaging teens in reading and rehearsing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. She's also engaged the teens in her love of Japanese popular culture, exposing them to trends in manga and anime. Cathy Draine designed a lesson plan process for our various initiatives. Amanda Sobel Driver organized an arts enrichment workshop for children, culminating in a visit to the Surrealism exhibition at the Rose Art Museum. Bryce Peake has led a workshop on percussion and improvisation, emphasizing music making with found objects. Brian Friedberg leads a workshop on popular music for teenage young women, structured around a “mockumentary” about the breakup of a girl band. A group of grad students and undergrads also worked with children in studying and making African-style masks, and telling stories about the power of the masks. Brian and other students, as well as Professor Ellen Schattschneider, have worked with the adult tenants to develop local vegetable and flower gardens, and explore sustainable food initiatives. Inspired by Professor Jane Hale's work on family literacy, a number of students and faculty have worked on reading issues with family members of all ages. Atem Aleu has done workshops on water color painting with children.

The Community Center is in a transitional period, as students and tenants work together to plan a sustainable trajectory during a time of limited financial resources. But Cultural Production students remain active partners at Prospect Hill, and we look forward to an exciting spring semester of artistic, cultural and empowerment initiatives.

Artist Atem Aleu on the "Origin of Death"

2008-12-08T21:53:00.001-08:00

In his 2005 painting, “The Dinka Say that Woman is the Origin of Death,” Cultural Production graduate student Atem Aleu revisits the well known Dinka myth of the coming of death in the world. In the early days of the world, a rope linked earth and sky: thus, anyone who died one earth could ascend the rope and be reborn in heaven. A woman pounding became angry at birds eating the spilled grain and thus killed a baby bird with her pounding stick. In retaliation the mother bird cut the rope, condemning all of humanity to enduring death.

See the painting in detail at:

http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/sudan_center/kakuma_exhibit/rope.html

and hear an audio commentary. (The entire website

http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/sudan_center/kakuma_exhibit/

was developed by Cultural Production student Nadia Hemady, in collaboration with other students in my Museums and Public Memory class in Fall 2006.)

Among the many fascinating features of the painting is the upper left section, in which in scroll like fashion the surface of the canvas appears to have been rolled back to reveal the consequences of the coming of death, including a women mourning as she holds a hoe, and a small figure (presumably a child) chased up a tree by lions. I have read these scenes as referencing the long trek in the mid 1980s by the “Lost Boys and Girls” from southern Sudan to the refugee camps in the Ethiopian highlands, when many children were stalked by carnivores. (I should note, however, that the artist insists that his reference is only to the mythical time in which the ancient story is set. ) In any event, my sense is that the images “behind” the lifted up sections of the painting are those that span temporal epochs: on the left, we see the mythic horror of death’s beginning, reiterated in the recent history of genocide; on the right we see the bird that is both the mythic bringer of death, and also a modern signifier of peace, heralding the signing the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the world’s longest running civil war. The text like quality of this section of the painting is appropriate for prophetic discourse, in which past and present are encompassed within enigmatic imagery.

See the Waltham Daily Tribune's recent article about Atem Aleu, at:

http://www.dailynewstribune.com/news/x804155832/A-Lost-Boys-brush-with-tragedy

We look forward to the February 2009 exhibition by Atem Aleu of his new work, which engages with memories of genocide in Southern Sudan and Darfur through lithographs and oil paintings.

NOTE: The South Sudanese Cultural Documentation Center at Brandeis University is a collaborative effort between the M.A. Program in Cultural Production (Brandeis University) and the Sudanese Education Fund.

Marking a Slave Market in Washington, Georgia

2008-12-08T10:50:00.001-08:00

Here’s a sign on a wall by the town square in Washington, Georgia, pointing to the “Site of Lewis Prudhomme’s Slave Market, 1795-1808.” My understanding is that Prudhomme came to Washington, along with other Santo Domingo planters (and some of their slaves) in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, and that he ran a profitable slave trading business, based in the town’s west square.

Beyond the historical specifics (which I haven’t seriously researched yet) I’m fascinated by the wall itself: the juxtaposition of the historical markers about the slave market and about “Lindsay Chevrolet Company, 1930-1985), above the larger “Parking” sign. The square itself is heavily narrativized with extensive historical signage, since it was the last location of an official meeting the Confederate government, on May 4, 1865, shortly before Jefferson Davis was captured by Union troops. A large stone tablet, an several other memorials, records that story, along with a state historical sign about Jefferson Davis. But the slave market itself, associated with years of unfathomable human suffering, only has this tiny sign. (To be sure, even that sign constitutes a more thorough marking than most slave markets in the American South.) The Georgia state historic marker of course has no mention of slavery, only noting that with Jefferson Davis's capture, "his hopes for a new nation in which easth could exercise without interference its cherished constitutional rights [were] forever dead."

What might an appropriate memorial at the site of the old slave market in Washington, Georgia look like? The adjacent court house's probate and deeds offices are filled with old documents
listing the names of enslaved person in Wilkes County (I'm drawing on these for a book I'm writing on narratives of slavery in the region). One could probably determine with confidence the names of persons sold in the market. Would a simple tablet of names suffice, along with an inscription honoring all those whose names are unknown? Or would this site call for a more complex work of public art, developed through a process that actively engaged the descendants of enslaved persons and slave owners alike?

The Ancestral "Garden" of Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier (Visual Artist

2008-12-07T16:34:00.000-08:00

Atlanta-based visual artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier at times speaks of the “garden” of her imagination, deeply embedded in family histories, to which she returns again and again.
I’m especially interested at Linnemeier’s deployments and interrogations of photographic media, often in conversation with painting, collage, and textured surfaces, in the making and exploration of this garden of the imagination. The garden image is a deeply resonant one: so often, gardens have subtle histories that span the generations, linking grandmothers, daughters and grand-daughters through common purpose, labor and aesthetic decision-making, in ways that may scarcely need to be spoken of but which are profoundly meaningful. Many of the photographs out of which Linnemeier plants and harvests her garden are mined and appropriated out of painful, violent histories: these include racist or lurid stereoscopic images produced by white photographers. Linnemeier is committed to rediscovering in these colonial images dimensions of beauty, dignity and spirituality that had long seemed entirely obscure. In images of the southern black “Mammy” for instance, she finds echoes of the sacred Afro-Atlantic priestess, the “Mambo.” She speaks of her work as a “great altar” that binds different different sites and moments in space and time. This too seems akin to the work of the gardener, who may juxtapose a wide range of plants and flowers from near and wide, nurturing them all in a productive tangle. I am reminded that among the Achuar, an indigenous people of the Upper Amazon, women speak of the plants in their gardens as their “other children,” whom they must sing into life, just as they sing to nurture their human offspring. Linnemeier’s garden of the imagination is filled with comparable sacred charges, whom she sings into being with her remarkable incantations.

She takes us into this dynamic memoryscape in her short video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G4MYnK7Zbo

One of her most interesting installations, Miss Sisi's box, moves from a Mississipi plantation to the magical summoning up of Chiaka, the eldest African female elder in the New World. Lynn's mytho-documentary takes off from this sculptural work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d4QhcC3H1w

The first elder wrestles with the predicament of never having been initiated, of having been cut of from the songlines of the ancestors. The work of the artist, it would appear, is to help reconstitute these long ruptured lines of continuity, to once again link distant ancester, near ancestor, past and present, self and posterity in dynamic, productive associations. The boxes of the installation open their doors, and through these opens we are invited into what the artist terms "fissures in time" through which we and the ancestors are mutually enlivened. Like a vibrant garden, the installation is a "heterotopia" that cannot be grasped from a single vantage point, but which must be walked through, peered into, settled into, and nurtured again and again.

See Lynn's blog at: http://stereopropaganda.blogspot.com/

Paul Stopforth's new Robben Island series

2008-12-07T09:05:00.001-08:00

Many of us in the Cultural Production program have long been fascinated by the art of the South African-U.S. artist Paul Stopforth, whose works are featured on our program website and brochure. Since 2003, his series on Robben Island series (the notorious former political prison off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa) has brilliantly encapsulated so many of the problems and challenges that are key to our interdisciplinary program: the fragile and contested status of memory work, the capacity of visual practices to help excavate our “buried lives,” the relentless interrogation of the material forms through which human consciousness is constituted, and the healing power of art and aesthetics in the wake of collective tragedy and human rights atrocities.

I’ve been intrigued to see since 2005 the increasing use of vibrant color in Stopforth’s work:

http://paulstopforth.com/america/index.html

As he reworks and develops motifs from his work as artist in residence on Robben Island, Stopforth seems to have moved away from the milkwash-based near monochrome palate of his early “Island” series, visible at:

http://paulstopforth.com/america/am03-05.html

Or rather he has returned to the more chromatic palette (as well as the forays into pointilism) that we associate with his earlier work.

In addition to the formal technical motivations for this post 2005 shift (the new works do look wonderful!) the deepening use of color in exploring the Robben Island imagery seems to track with Stopforth moving beyond the artifactual detritus of the island’s human-built interiors towards engaging more and more with the broader maritime ecology of the island and its environs. Perhaps this shift is correlated with a kind of cultural “settling” that has take place on and around Robben Island, as the immediate wounds of Apartheid, while not forgotten, are to some extent subsumed in subsequent histories and as some of the scars are eased (if never fully effaced) by the passage of time and the healing encroachment of nature.

This shift to more color and wider environmental imagery seems to be associated with Stopforth’s move to diptychs and the complex forms of mirroring (visual and conceptual) that this binary format permits. In the right panel “Another Country” (2007):

http://paulstopforth.com/america/another_country.html

for instance, the stark inset of the cell block, guard tower and inner courtyard is encased within life-giving evocations of sea scape and brilliant sunset, which seem to move into the frame of the inset itself, implying perhaps that nature is beginning to reclaim the island’s human-built carcereal spaces. In turn on the work’s left panel, we glimpse in a car’s side mirror the same prison courtyard (inverted) up against a rock pile, surrounded by a comparable evocation of seascape and landscape.

In contrast to the other works in the series, the remarkable Gate diptych of mirrored trees has no immediate signs of human-made artifacts:

http://paulstopforth.com/america/gate.html

It would appear to frame the entire series, which is appropriate inasmuch as the long-lived tree, although battered by the maritime elements, has seen and lived through the island’s Apartheid and post-Apartheid histories. Can one read the endlessly proliferating branches of the tree as allegories for the intricate sinuous channels of memory itself, as inverted roots that link past, present and future on the island (and in South Africa more broadly) in ever-more mysterious ways?

Cuture Combat! grad student conference

2008-12-06T15:18:00.000-08:00

We've been having quite an interesting conversation on line about the title of the upcoming Cultural Production graduate student conference, scheduled for March 14, 2009: "Culture Combat: Provoking the Social Imaginary." Some CP-ers are a bit concerned over the militarist-sounding word, "Combat." Especially given the extensive militarization of language and culture in our recent history, what precisely does it mean to deploy this term so "provocatively"? (It certainly has a more edgy in-your-face quality than, say, "Culture as Contest" or "Culture Conflicts" would have had.) Are there some echoes of the Bismarkian "Kultur Kampf" (Culture Struggle) as well as the video game "Mortal Kombat" in the phrase?

In any event, there seems to be unanimous excitement over Cp graduate student Bryce Peake's poster design ( see above) which recasts the Boston skyline in urban gritty wall art mode, with the energy of a sunburst playfully radiating out of the hard core city. And much anticipation over the keynote address by Wayne Marshall (ethnomusicologist and DJ extraordinaire):

http://wayneandwax.com/

Learn more about the conference at:

http://provocative.hopto.org

Submissions are most welcome!

Steve Miler's Health of the Planet project

2008-12-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

I’m fascinated by artist Steve Miller’s recent project “Health of The Planet,” in which he X-rays diverse Amazonian flora, giving the Brazilian rain forest, and by extension our entire planet, a medical checkup. In Miller's words, "The Patient is the Planet." See:

http://www.healthoftheplanet.com/

For Michel Foucault the “gaze” of western clinical biomedicine (which preceded the actual emergence of X-ray technology) presupposed the privileged power/knowledge of the physician, who possessed unique capabilities for interior-directed expert looking into the body of the patient. Miller in this series, however, seems to be liberating the X-ray from its standard position as a technology of expert power/knowledge, by rendering these images in forms that are accessible to a worldwide lay audience.

How are we to understand the seductiveness of these images, deftly fabricated so as to evoke a sense of spiritual wonder in the viewer? (Consider, for instance, the print #3, "Roots,: in which the right-most tendril reaches out towards the light; or the delicate progression upwards of the elements in print #7, Solo Saco Velho; or the playful fairy like beings atop #14, "Night Orchard") My guess is that these motifs of yearning tends to evoke a sense of common destiny among all who view the images. I'm struck as well by the repeated hints of human form in these shadow works. The net effect is continuous transpositions between the natural world and the human body. A poignant example is #6, "Jaca" (reproduced above) which could be read as a parent nurturing a child. So, although Miller proclaims that the "patient is the planet", his patient would equally appear to be all of humanity itself.

As we enter 2009, the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origins of Species, and approach Charles Darwin's 200th birthday on February 12, Miller's project is an exquisite, if painful, exploration of the glories of biodiversity and the looming cataclysm of mass species extinction.

Slavery, Monuments and Universities

2008-12-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

What sorts of monuments should colleges and universities erect to encourage reflection about their slavery-intertwined pasts? The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus has a small monument on its campus (the "Unsung Founders Memorial" by the contemporary Korean artist Do-Ho Suh) that in part commemorates the enslaved. This low-to-the-ground modest monument consists of a disk held up by scores of African-American figures in relief; the inscribed words note that the "Class of 2002 honors the university's unsung founders...the people of color, bond and free, who held build the Carolina we cherish today." The monument is shaped liked a table and is surrounded by four stones which serve a rough-hewn chairs. The assemblage stands just next to the university's better-known, and much taller, monument to students who served as Confederate soldiers.

It is a fine little memorial, and I like its emphasis on the dignity of ordinary working persons. Yet at the same time it throws into relief some of the challenges of honoring those whose histories have been largely obliterated from the historical record. No persons are honored by name; the men of women and color in question are represented only by unnamed figures who, like Atlas, labor together to hold up the sky. Would it have been so difficult (from university and legal records) to identify by name at least some of the African-Americans who labored, in slavery and freedom, on the university’s original structures? The word “slavery” is conspicuously absent from the assemblage. One wonders about the negotiations and decision-making processes that resulted in these omissions.

Names matter. As Thomas Lacquer reminds us in his paper, “Memory and Naming in the Great War.” an important series of political and cultural transformations underpinned the historic shift in naming practices associated with military memorials from the early modern period (in which only generals and senior officers by and large were named) to World War I memorials, in which in principle all the fallen were honored.

At Emory University in 2000-2001, my students and I developed a series of exhibitions to honor enslaved persons whose labor helped to build the Emory College in its early years. See:

http://www.marial.emory.edu/exhibitions/dream/intro.html

It seemed important to us, and to the African-American descendant families with whom we partnered, to identify as many enslaved people as we could. We established the names of about 50 people who were held as slaves in ante-bellum Oxford, Georgia, and in a few cases were definitively able to demonstrate that specific enslaved persons labored for the College. We first drew up a single document listing all these names to hang in the exhibition, until some students and community members pointed out that this looked too much like slave manifests. The class then made specific and discrete framed documents for each enslaved person, to hang on a wall of the exhibition.

The exhibitions and associated public programs were powerful indeed. But there is no permanent memorial to these enslaved persons on Emory’s campuses. In recent years, a number of northern universities that were financially embedded in the profits of the Atlantic slave trade have engaged in thoughtful reviews of this fraught history. Have these efforts led to physical memorials? I’m curious how many campuses across the country have such monuments?

See the UNC library's on line exhibition on slavery in the university's history:

http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/exhibits/slavery/index.html

which includes a downloadable student-written "Slavery walking tour" of the university, and a page on the Unsung Founders memorial:

http://museum.unc.edu/exhibits/slavery/do-ho-suh-unsung-founders-bond-and-free-mccorkle-p/

The "Bench by the Side of the Road" Project

2008-12-06T04:33:00.001-08:00

This past August, Ellen and I visited Charleston, SC, and went out to see the recently dedicated bench on Sullivan's Island, the first of many benches to be placed by the Toni Morrison Society. (See the official page on this at: http://www.tonimorrisonsociety.org/bench.html )
The accompanying plaque declares that Sullivan's Islands was a major point of transhipment during the Atlantic Slave Trade; and the "nearly half" of all African-Americans are descended from enslaved persons who first were brought through the island.

The bench project is inspired by Toni Morrison's famous comment in an interview some years ago about the lack of monumental markings of the victims of slavery, the slave trade and Jim Crow in this country, reproduced in the plaque shown above" "There's no 300 foot tower. There's no small bench by the side of the road."

Any project marking these unacknowledged histories is of course laudable, yet in a couple of respects this intial instance does seem to be a bit flawed:

1. To begin with, the bench itself is banal. A simple black metal bench of the sort that might be found, as an artist friend sadly remarked, in any Home Depot. Why couldn't the bench be designed, or least painted, by a creative artist, celebrating in effect the brilliant artistic and cultural legacies that flourish in the Afro-Atlantic world amidst the enduring legacies of the slave trade? I appreciate that there are often virtues in simplicity and under-statement. Yet in this instance couldn't the Toni Morrison Society find a way to support the work of visual artists (especially artists of color). One is certainly struck by the irony of a "respectable" monument to the slave trade, that politely blends into its surroundings; no one passing by the bench would notice it, unless they were looking for it (Ellen and I spent about twenty minutes searching for it.) We had just seen the extraordinary urban slave quarters at the Aiken-Rhett mansion in Charleston and wondered at the vivid brilliant colors still visible on the internal walls, which so destablize the usual assumptions about the white-washed or monochrome interiors of slaves' domestic spaces; wouldn't it be something to have some defiant color animating the bench?

2. The plaque's assertion that "nearly half of all African Americans have ancestors who passed through Sullivan's Island" is an often-repeated one, but would be appear to be without historical foundation. My understanding is that there are only scattered references to a "pest house" in late 18th century Sullivan's Island, and that the vast majority by enslaved persons were brought directly in the Charleston port itself. As much as one appreciates the desire for an equivalent site to Ellis Island (a site itself deeply embedded in mythos), surely on matters as vitally important as the slave trade, there's an imperative to strive for as much fidelity as possible to unassailable historical documentation (granted, of course, that the historical record of slavery and the slave trade is often incomplete and corrupted by various interested parties!)

Having said all this, it is certainly a moving thing to see the bench, and we are all surely grateful to the National Park Service for in effect hosting this site. Sitting upon it and gazing out into the water, it a beautiful place to contemplate Morrison's magnificent ouevre as well as the many thousands gone. In the shadow of Jim Crow, in which benches were highly politicized spaces from which so many were excluded, there's an undeniable genius in dedicating benches upon which all are welcome.

Yet, I can't help but hope that the next benches dedicated by the TMS will be a little more provocative, a little more celebratory of the power of art (especially African-American art) and a little more careful with the (always contested and contestible) historical record.

Standing or not Standing at Handel's Messiah

2008-12-06T03:27:00.000-08:00

I was struck last night at the marvelous performance of Handel's Messiah at Symphony Hall in Boston that many, perhaps most of the audience in the Orchestra seats did not stand at the Hallelujah chorus. (Looking around it appeared that the majority of those in balcony seats were standing.) So far as I can recall, at every performance of Messiah I've previously attended nearly everyone stood for the chorus. So I'm curious if there is generally less willingness to stand in Boston than elsewhere, or if there's more diversity on this matter than I've realized. The program of the Handel and Haydn society devotes a page to the question, in carefully neutral terms, suggesting that audiences probably did not stand for the first 40 years of Messiah performances, indicating that there is no evidence that George II really stood at any early performance, and noting that conductors Robert Shaw and Christopher Hogwood oppose standing as it distracts "from Handel's powerful opening of the chorus"). The program text politely concludes that "both practices" [to stand or to sit] "remain very common among Boston's music lovers."

This had led me to ponder what the pleasure is in standing for the chorus, for me and perhaps for many others. It is a miniature ritual, of course, and thus part of the pleasure lies in submitting oneself to a greater structure that transcends the self and any given moment in time. I think I've always felt the pleasure of partaking in Durkheimian collective effervesence while participating in the audience standing en masse. This pleasure was a bit diminished seeing so many people seated last night, although I suppose one could take greater pleasure in being part of the restricted group that chooses to stand. There is a populist edge to the practice, and the fact that some conductors complain about it perhaps makes it even more desirable?

I see that there's a certain amoung on line about the to stand vs. not to stand debate, including:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3441-2004Dec15.html

My limited observations from last night suggested that the further back away from the stage audience members were sitting, the more likely they were to stand (in the first 15 rows or so, I could see only a single solitary woman standing). So presumably we were seeing an instance of small group social dynamics; perhaps most of those inclined to stand were unwilling to take the plunge without accompanying persons standing in front or beside them?

I'd be most interested if others have insight into this minor ritual phenomenon?