1/28/16 1/28/16

5 Questions: Dr. Simone Browne, Associate Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies

Browne Picture Today we share with you an interview with Dr. Simone Browne, Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies department and affiliate faculty member of the American Studies department. Dr. Browne and American Studies senior Rebecca Bielamowicz discussed teaching in the public school system, black feminist thought, the politics of creative expression, and her new book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015). And, you're in luck: the conversation was so engaging that we expanded it beyond our usual five questions. Read on for a fascinating discussion! What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your teaching and research?Oh that’s a good question – nice – and I like that you put teaching first because that’s so important to me. So my scholarly background, I grew up in Toronto and I went to school at the University of Toronto for undergrad, master’s degree, and PhD. In between that I got a teaching degree, and so I actually have background teaching kindergarten and the second grade as well, too. And so one of the things that was important in my graduate studies was that in the program that – so I’m a sociologist, but the program that I was in was sociology and equity studies, and so it wasn’t like an add on, it was something that was really important to the department’s political project, and I think that comes in to how I think about how we can see the world sociologically, it’s also about equity as well, so I think that kind of influences my teaching.After I did the teaching degree, I wanted to go into a master’s in education in the field of education. I was interested in pursuing those issues around social justice and equity in the public school system and so – but when I went there, sometimes you get a little sidetracked with some things, and I was kind of interested in those same things but as well as a cultural studies approach to looking at sociology and so that’s how I ended up in more of the, I guess more of the academic track as opposed to public schooling.How was teaching the younger kids?It’s hard. That was the hardest job I’ve ever had. A different type of hard because you’re on every day, there’s so much prep work to do, of course there are always, and I’m sure it’s changed a lot now where it’s been ramped up, but there’s always these metrics and benchmarks and testing and everything that you have to do. There’s oftentimes that you have to create spaces for them to learn through play or other things, and so it was tough, I’ll tell you that. My mother was a teacher, so I have a great - she was actually teaching at the same school as me for one time - but it was a great appreciation for the labor that they do. It’s no joke. They are really putting it in and they’re often not given the respect they deserve and the schools are not given the money they need. It is the toughest job but so important. And they’re great – to see the students, some of them are finished with university now, you know, that was such a long time ago.What projects or people have inspired your work?In terms of projects, if we think of black feminist thought [such as bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, Katherine McKittrick and Ruth Wilson Gilmore] as a political project around intersectionality, around equity and centering the work of creative, academic, social, of black women and girls, I think that’s been a project that’s been inspiring to me in the kind of research that I try to do. And some of the other work that’s been inspiring to me within surveillance studies work, I really enjoy what David Lyon has brought and created in a field in that, and so for me to put those two things into conversation to each other, like what happens when we center the conditions of black women in the city when we want to think about surveillance, what kind of other questions does that lead us to? Maybe different types of answers. And so those are two things that have been inspiring to me and have been fruitful in my own writing and work.What was your favorite project to work on and why?I feel like I only have one project, actually. I enjoy doing dissertation work because there’s, well I had a guide on the side which was my dissertation supervisor Kari Dehli and that was really good because sometimes you don’t know if you’re doing things right, but that was a project that I had the time to work on and to do archival work or to do work with Access to Information, which is kind of like your Freedom of Information documents, and that was exciting to me. Coming to do a book project, which was not my dissertation, it was liberating because I didn’t have anybody to tell me what to do – what not and what to do – but in that sense sometimes you do need that kind of guidance but I was able to find an entire dissertation committee of like 100 people, from my colleagues to my students to help me get that together and so in that way, the work that I did towards that book was probably my most fun work in terms of research, at least.What was your dissertation/how did it differ from Dark Matters?My dissertation was looking at Canada-U.S. border security at the site of the permanent resident card, which is basically like a Green Card that you would have in the U.S., but it was the first card post-9/11 said to be the most secure card in the world, so it was chip ready, ready to secure our borders with fingerprints and whatnot. And so I looked at the way they rationalized this card through criminalizing immigrants as terrorist threats, as economic threats, as refugee threats, all of these types of things that built up around this immigrant body as bogeyman to rationalize a large securitization of a border. And so when I was doing that work and thinking about surveillance studies, I noticed that there was a long absence of how black people were surveilled and continue to be and so that was kind of an absented presence in the literature and so I wanted to make an intervention in that space, and so that’s how it was a bit different. It was not the same project but a lot of the questions and the skill sets that I got from the dissertation project allowed me to get this one going.How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?I probably shouldn’t say that – I don’t know if I’m that interested in academia to tell you the truth, but I guess you don’t write a book for one. What’s kind of interesting for me is there’s been a lot of take up of the book from the high school debating circuit. It sold out in like two weeks, and I think it has a lot to do with them. The theme this year is surveillance, and even before the book came out I had students emailing me if they could get a copy and I’m like I don’t even have a copy. And so to see that kind of excitement coming on a national level from high school students is amazing. And I get invitations to talk at different universities and whatever and people find the work exciting but what I really think is good is when people in the community who are outside of academia – I try to write in a way where the language was accessible to everyone, you don’t have to know about you know, epistemology or some word that people kind of throw around or use quite successfully and importantly, I don’t want to minimize why we have to have shorthand and big words in academia, but that people can find use for it in different kinds of spaces and communities, I think that’s been kind of exciting for me. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?There’s a lot of art in this building and in one of the classrooms downstairs there is a display of this woman [Jackie Ormes] who was the first black woman who was a comic book author in the U.S. and so I was kind of interested in her work because she was surveilled by the FBI, so I wrote to the FBI to get her, to do a FOIA request [Freedom of Information Act] to get her documents, but she wrote about domestic work, she wrote about the color line, and so I want to kind of look at those artistic works, creative works and production and think about that around surveillance at that time, and so that’s something that I’m excited about now. Now I’m also writing a short piece of work on this artist Zach Blas, I think we looked at some of his face cages, and so looking at some of the work that he’s done in a project called Face Cages on the biometric cage, and I’m kind of linking it to metals and aluminum, so you know in class we talked about metals in the slave trade – like chains, cuffs – and some of that kind of violence to link it to some of this violence around biometric technologies. So looking at the site of this material site, like aluminum or iron and these things, so that’s something that I really find artist’s work, creative practices, inspiring – because they’re doing the heavy lifting, really, for us, and so those two projects I’m excited about.In one sentence, what is American Studies to you?Oh, I should have planned that one… well, I’ll give you a story, and then I’ll have to think. So the American Studies students I work with are so smart, they are like human Wikipedia. They always have these long reading lists and they just know so much about the history of the country and the works that came out of it, written works that I really don’t know. But one thing about American Studies is it allows us to question empire in really critical and important ways and from their conferences to the department here, there’s a kind of critical generosity around how they critique America as an economic, and a social, and a political project and its practices, and so if I were to say what is American Studies in one sentence, it could be a discipline that is not disciplined but is kind of unbounded, and so it allows a kind of, it can allow for a kind of to think like what does Canada have to do with the American project, and I think that’s where my intervention in that is… And that’s American Studies - these people are a vast archive of the question of what is America.Tell us about your new book.I think the book is kind of like a mash up of a few things, but first it could be a love letter to surveillance studies but also putting it into conversation with some stuff around the Black Diaspora, around women and gender studies, and I think that’s what the book is. And so I look at various spaces and segments of time, so it could be, I look at the airport, or I could look at a runaway notice, or I could look at or I do look at post-9/11 or the American Revolution, so those different ways of thinking about space and time and asking what are the various ways in which black people were subject to surveillance, contended with it, resisted or just dealt with it. I wanted to make that archive available for people to think about so that we don’t see surveillance as something that only comes around with drones or Edward Snowden, that there were people resisting and theorizing surveillance long before September 11^,2001.So I think that’s what the book does and so I look at what happens when we think about the experiences of black women at the airport. I look at biometric technology, but earlier iterations of that within branding or so, and I look at the formation of the Canada-U.S. border at the site of this document called The Book of Negroes, and that was interesting archival work for me to do because it gets us to think maybe there’s another kind of genealogy of the Canadian passport or the Canada-U.S. border and what it means to cross the border.How did you get interested in archival work/where did you end up traveling?I think it was you just had to go where the archive was and a lot of it is online now. I went to London to the national archives there to look at The Book of Negroes. I went to New York City to this bar, but it was very important during the American Revolution, and so to see what it is now, it’s like a brewery/a restaurant/a pub, but a museum was still there. I did some archival work at the Beinecke Library at Yale, looking at documents of this diary of a planter in Jamaica, a planter is like I guess a code word for slave owner and plantation owner, and it was his diaries, and so I wanted to look at how he recorded a particular woman’s escape – she would continually run away even though she was so brutalized from him, but she still found her way, and I wanted to kind of tell us what was absent in discussions around surveillance. I thought I could find them in certain archives and in certain moments, and some of that was things online like that Mendi And Keith Obadike, their “Blackness for Sale” and looking at some of that or some people’s art – there’s Hank Willis Thomas.I think each chapter has some kind of expressive practice or creative work there or sometimes it was reality television, too. So I guess I went to a few different spaces but I find there’s like, you know there’s also – I was talking to a librarian in information sciences about security theater at the airport and earlier on in my talk I discussed going to the National Archives and how you have to put on gloves and you can only bring in pencils, not pens, and it’s a kind of performance, and she was like that’s a security theater too – like who does not feel a sense of belonging in those spaces of the archive? It was actually a really generative discussion – that concepts that we might use to think about an airport, a border, a street – that they can apply those things like security theater to academic spaces or to a national archive, so there’s a performance in that, too.

Holly Genovese 4/21/15 Holly Genovese 4/21/15

5 Questions with Dr. Lauren Gutterman

The Department of American Studies is very pleased to announce that Dr. Lauren Gutterman will be joining our faculty in the fall of 2015. Dr. Gutterman comes to us from the University of Michigan, where she is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Society of Fellows. She holds a PhD in History from New York University, and has published in Gender & History and The Journal of Social History. Her current book manuscript, developed out of her dissertation, focuses on lived experiences of mid-20th century married women who desired other women. We spoke with Dr. Gutterman earlier this month, in advance of her arrival in Austin this August.UT AMS: What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your teaching and research?Dr. Gutterman: I received my PhD in History at New York University, and I’m currently a postdoctoral scholar in Women’s Studies and the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. But my academic career really began as an undergraduate at Northwestern University where I double majored in American Studies and Gender Studies. Part of me will always be chasing the feelings I experienced as an undergrad as I learned to look at things—especially with regard to gender and sexuality—in an entirely new way. It just felt like the world was opening up, changing before my eyes, all these things that sound so trite but were completely true. As an undergrad I also discovered my love of history. I wrote a senior thesis about the New England Watch and Ward Society’s anti-burlesque campaign in the 1930s and that was my first experience with archival research. It was so exciting for me to read and touch things written so long ago, to try to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I discovered the depth of my nerdiness.As a teacher and a researcher, I’m most passionate about understanding how what we think of as normal and natural in terms of gender and sexuality has changed over time. My classes (like my research) combine a study of politics and popular culture in American history. In the fall I’ll be offering a course called “Sexuality, Reproduction, and American Social Movements,” which I’ve taught twice before at the University of Michigan. One of the things I enjoy most about this course is challenging students’ belief that women’s reproductive rights keep improving steadily with time. So, for example, we read about how abortion was unstigmatized, legal, and often easily accessible for most of the 19th century. There’s an oral history interview I use on History Matters with a working-class immigrant woman who got twelve abortions at the turn of the twentieth century in New York City safely, and without thinking anything of it; this is completely shocking for students.In addition, one of my major goals as a scholar has been to try to speak to a broad audience, to engage those beyond the academic world in the history of sexuality. I’ve tried to do this in multiple ways, through my work with the history of sexuality websites OutHistory.org and Notches, the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. One of my proudest moments was discovering that artist Elvis Bakaitis had cited my work in a zine about 1950s queer history.What projects or people have inspired your work?Like many historians of homosexuality, George Chauncey's Gay New York is probably the one book that has had the greatest impact on my work. I first read it as an undergraduate and I remember being awed both by the extent and details of the queer world he uncovered, and by the simple fact that it was possible to do this kind of history.My current project, which examines the lives of wives who desired women since the postwar period, is in some ways a response to Chauncey's book which focuses primarily on men and on the public sphere. I don't believe that lesbians have ever had the same claims to public space that gay or queer men have had (even today there are far fewer lesbian bars), but this has not prevented women from engaging in sexual relationships with each other. My book project argues, in part, that the nuclear family household has functioned as a lesbian or queer space for married women; the women in my study typically engaged in same-sex affairs with other wives and mothers they met in the course of their daily lives, within their own homes.What was your favorite project to work on and why?I'm still working on revising my first book manuscript Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire within Marriage, which is based on my dissertation, so it is hard to talk about having a "favorite" project, since I don't have many to choose from!I can, however, speak to a favorite moment in researching this project, which occurred when I first went to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco to look at the papers of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. Martin and Lyon were long-time lesbian activists who helped found the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the nation's first lesbian rights group in 1955. When I first set out on this project, I imagined that I would focus on the lives of three women, one of whom was Del Martin. When I got to the GLBT Historical Society the materials I'd hoped would be there--about her personal life while she was married--were not, but I did discover dozens and dozens of letters that married women had written to the DOB and to Martin and Lyon stretching from the 1950s to the 1980s. Discovering those letters changed the entire frame of my project, because I realized I could write a social history (rather than a group biography) about these women, which I had not imagined before. I joked at the time it was like a finding a dissertation in a box.How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?Well, I'll start with academia because that's easier...One of the things I am trying to do as a scholar is to draw attention to the ways that the history of homosexuality is primarily based on men's experiences. This problem cannot be addressed simply by taking our current model of gay history and "adding" women. I believe that focusing on women's lives can change our understanding of the history of homosexuality as a whole. For example (as I alluded to above), as long as the history of homosexuality focuses on the public sphere--on bars and public sex, and even government policing--women will inevitably play a lesser role within it. To make women more central to the history of homosexuality requires that we pay much more attention to the domestic sphere, as I do in my book. But this is just one of the ways that I think gay history might change by centering women's lives.Beyond the academic world, my work obviously relates to the broader conversation about gay marriage. My work shows that legally defining marriage as "between one man and one woman" cannot, and has not, ensured marriage’s straightness. Even in the postwar period--when American marriages were more widespread and longer-lasting than ever before--wives who desired women found myriad ways to balance marriage with lesbian affairs. Often these women did so by engaging in same-sex affairs in secret, but many women did not hide their affairs from their husbands entirely, and many husbands were willing to turn a blind eye to their wives' special friendships, and just wait for them to pass. In this way, my work shows that the histories of marriage and of homosexuality have long been intertwined, and that, in a way, marriage has been queer for much longer than we’d like to think.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?Over the last year or so, with the help of two incredible undergraduate research assistants at the University of Michigan, I've begun researching and writing about the case of Jeannace June Freeman, the first woman sentenced to death in Oregon in 1961. Freeman was a white, working-class, butch lesbian and she and her lover, Gertrude Nunez Jackson, together murdered Jackson's two young children in an incredibly brutal way. Based on everything we know about stereotypes about violent, mannish lesbians from the work of Lisa Duggan among other scholars, and about the discrimination homosexuals faced in the middle of the twentieth century, the fact that Freeman was sentenced to death is not at all surprising. What is surprising, however, (and this is what has fascinated me about this very disturbing case), is that Freeman became the major symbol of the movement to abolish capital punishment in Oregon, and many Oregonians came to see her as sympathetic. Ultimately, in large part because of her case, voters repealed the death penalty in Oregon in 1964 by referendum, and the governor commuted Freeman's sentence to life in prison. So the question that has been guiding this project is, why and how did Oregonians come to see a butch, lesbian, child-killer as deserving of mercy?At the meta level, though, this project is also about resisting the pressures that historians of homosexuality face to do history that is always somehow “good” for LGBT politics. Obviously, the field of sexuality history is fundamentally linked to the emergence of the gay liberation and women's liberation movements of the 1970s. And my own commitment to researching and writing the history of homosexuality is shaped by my political concerns, my desire to show that this history matters. But at the same time, I don't think it is good or honest to neglect those parts of the gay past we'd prefer to keep hidden. Jeannace June Freeman's case certainly lent credence to the worst stereotypes about lesbians at midcentury, but when we ignore her story—or those of other "bad queers"—we lose opportunities for historical insight and we surrender our ability as scholars to help contextualize some of the ugliest parts of the queer past. I don't think we can overcome homophobic stereotypes by tiptoeing around them.Bonus question – in one sentence, what is American Studies to you?To me, American Studies is the study of what it means and what it has meant to be American. Who gets to choose? Who gets excluded? What cultural and political mechanisms enable those exclusions? And how have they changed over time? In addition, for me American Studies is as much about the research method as the object; it's about a commitment to interdisciplinary work, however complicated or difficult that may be.

Holly Genovese 3/12/15 Holly Genovese 3/12/15

5 Questions with Dr. Stephen Marshall

We return on the eve of Spring Break by publishing one of our classic features. Here's an absolutely fascinating conversation between Ph.D. student Christine Capetola and Dr. Stephen Marshall, associate professor of American Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies.CC: What’s your favorite project to work on and why? In the past or maybe right now, whichever…SM: Well… I’m having a lot of fun with my research right now. I don’t feel nearly the same amount of pressure that I felt trying to get first book done. The first book, actually, was not connected with my dissertation. The dissertation was an entirely different study that was probably too large an undertaking for someone in that stage of their career. The kind of question I was pursuing in the dissertation was not only a huge question but one that became really politically salient as I was attempting to revise. The dissertation was on the problem of evil as a political problem, the political as particular kind of interpretation and engagement with evil. I looked at Hannah Arendt, St. Augustine, and James Baldwin as thinkers who in different ways understand the political in these terms. So I’m writing about evil and, as it turns out, September 11th happens and everybody and their mother begin to talk about evil. I find myself responding to everybody and I realize that I could probably spend another three, four years working on this project to do it right. So after three years on it, I turned to a smaller project that I had been kicking around for a little while and that turned into my first book.But of course after spinning my wheels on the problem of evil for two, three years, I was under a lot of pressure to get this book done in time to get tenure. So, that wasn’t a lot of fun. There’s a chapter in my first book where I write about James Baldwin and I really did feel like I was inspired when I wrote that. I mean, I actually wrote it out by hand. I was smoking cigarettes at the time so I sat right out there (points to outdoor space at Flight Path) and Shirley [Thompson] and Solomon, my son, were out of town and over a two day period I just basically wrote out a large part of that chapter. Those moments of inspiration are rare and special but I can’t say that… I don’t claim that as fun. Fun is something like I used to experience when I was a graduate student. After I completed my coursework and before I began writing my dissertation, I was reading everything that I wanted to read at my own pace. That’s kind of where I’m at right now, pursuing the questions that I’m interested in, engaging authors that I want to engage. I’m certainly feeling there’s a time constraint, that I need to get this second book finished fairly soon but not feeling like my livelihood or the livelihood of my family depends on me getting this thing done tomorrow.So what are some of those questions that you’re thinking about right now?So there are a couple of things. The general problematic is this question about the afterlife of slavery; that is, the problem of slavery as an ongoing reality of American culture and politics. However, what I am interested in is turning from prevailing investigations which track this reality on and within black life to an investigation that thinks this problem through the problem of mastery- the political constitution of mastery as a legitimate but threatened practice that must remain silent yet always in need of special forms of protection. So, I’m thinking about the political legacies of this problem; where within American culture and politics one finds traces, and in fact, actual reconstitutions of it.I’ve been recently looking very closely at Du Bois’s arguments about the way the post-Reconstruction consolidation of capital incorporates the ethos and management techniques of the plantation- spiritual commitments to and practical experience with dominating nature that were part and parcel of the southern slaveholding experience but foreign to northern capitalistic practices among smaller property owners. So I’m thinking about the skills and expertise of the plantation finding their way into corporate practices. And, also with the way in which the reconstitution of unfree black labor in the south occurs alongside the imperial constitution of virtual slavery in other parts of the world facilitate the emergence of what DuBois describes as the unprecedented power of the super corporation.There’s another piece to this as well which is trying to figure out how it is that other practices of mastery show up in more mundane and quotidian practices, some of which become central to African American life. So, how is it that Americans from all walks of life come to adopt commitments and practices that were originally rooted in the exercise of mastery? What does this mean for a cultural and political community which claims to have abolished slavery? What does it mean for a counter-tradition and political culture which has historically understood itself as organized around the quest for freedom? Does it mean that when we take the full measure of the problem of mastery we must come to see freedom as always that something which stands outside the law and all the authoritative normativities which prevail in the U.S? Is freedom always fugitive?As per [Fred] Moten...Moten, exactly. Moten famously claims that fugitivity is expressly anti-political. Not simply apolitical but actually anti-political. According to him, you have to guard against the development of political interests because these interests implicitly connect you to institutionalized forms of race governance and state normativity. So the experience of fugitivity, the experience of always being one step removed from the law means this refusal to stake a claim in yourself as an interlocutor with these logics.I’m not totally comfortable with that. At the same time, I’m not comfortable with other interpretations of black fugitivity which claim that the experience is sedimented in the radicality of those slave narratives which pushed the American regime to incorporate blackness and black folk within its conception and practice of liberty. This view seems to flatten out the centrality of the fugitive’s experience of flight, evasion, and discipline to remain undetected by the law. So, I think there is real work to be done around identifying the distinctive politics that flow from the experience of fugitivity. What are fugitivity’s conditions of possibility? What kinds of supports does it require and how does it exist in relationship to countervailing forces? If it seeks to reproduce itself what must be done now and in the future to maintain and/or defend itself? This is a political problematic that seems to me unavoidable for those of us interested in recommending fugitivity as an exemplary practice of freedom. So, it is in light of these concerns that I’ve been drawn more and more to literary figures, Toni Morrison in particular. So I’m having a lot of fun with this, reading widely in history and philosophy and putting this into conversation with political philosophers and literary artists has been a blast.So what are some connections that come to mind for you between these questions and things going on both in academia and in the world outside of that?One of the most exciting developments in my field and one of the most exciting things at the University of Texas is the emergence of black political thought as a recognized intellectual paradigm. For political science, actually political theory, to finally acknowledge the authority and wisdom of these texts pushes the margins of the canon and the field. To be forced to reckon with the philosophical autonomy of these texts even as we acknowledge their engagement with central questions of the canon and discipline means recognition of the need for a kind of specialized engagement with these texts. And, to reckon with the concerns of this literature that go beyond the traditional canon means the possibility that the entire enterprise of political theory may be undergoing important change.The University of Texas was founded as an institution to carry out the project of reconstituting the nation along lines imagined by nostalgic former confederates. One important founder was a large plantation owner from Mississippi who moved to Texas, and decided to invest in the mission of cultivating white manhood for a new south. Since then, there’s been a slow and uneven opening to blackness at this university- first, with the admission of a small number of students and then with the hiring of a small number of black faculty. Today, we have this major opening where permanent institutions devoted to scholarly engagement with blackness have been created to serve the interests of the entire university. This is a pretty dramatic transformation and wonderful opportunity. I think the acknowledgement of black political thought and black studies have been really important interventions.You know this question of mastery is for me at the heart of the crisis of black vulnerability in our present moment. The racialization of crime and the criminalization of blackness are obvious and well documented examples of the afterlife of slavery. The recent spate of indefensible killings of young black men under suspicion of criminality by law enforcement and their auxiliaries are too easily regarded as a break from or malfunction of the regime of American liberalism. And what this view does is displace victims and families of victims as the center of moral concern and focus attention on the frailties of ostensibly just American institutions. And of course, this focus obscures how black vulnerability to surveillance, interdiction, and incarceration is and always has been constitutive of our politics. So what I’m asking is what if what we’re really wrestling with when thinking about these killings is the normal operations of post-slavery liberalism? What if that’s the regime that we live in? American liberalism and various projects of attempting to master blackness go hand in hand.I started thinking about the problem of mastery long before the vulnerability of black men to executions became topical. It actually came to me as I was thinking about this dispute between Du Bois and Douglass about the survival of the power and spirit of the confederacy. But as I began to think about it, it began to illuminate for me the continuities between a number of unpleasant political moments. I think a number of people are increasingly coming to believe that while we have this extraordinary array of theoretical formulations to make sense of the political past, we don’t really know the fundamental character of the regime we inhabit right now. We don’t know where we are. And I suspect part of this has to do, as George Shulman says in American Prophecy…, this is because we orient ourselves in light of models which presuppose the political experiences of Europe rather than the experiences of new-world political modernity. We need to devise the theoretical tools and frameworks that actually engage our experience and history to describe where we’re at right now.So in thinking about these questions and more specifically about these frameworks, who are some people or projects that you find inspiring? And the people could be people of the past or contemporary scholars or different kinds of thinkers and activists…I’m really intrigued by Moten. I think that among many of the contemporary writers I’m engaged with, he has a lot of wisdom. But I don’t think he’s fully fleshed out the all of the political assumptions and implications of this wisdom. So much of the power of his ideas comes flow from provocation and performance.He’s a very performative writer. And poetic. A lot of it comes out through the poetry.That’s right. But… I think the implications of his ideas need to be fleshed out. Because I think he has uncovered some really powerful and inspiring principles. What I love about Moten’s work is that as dark as the work gets in its engagement with black abjection and black vulnerability, unlike self-described Afro-pessimists who say, “This is cause for despair, wrath, and the end of the world,” Moten says there’s absolutely nothing wrong with black folk as they are. Let’s engage the darkness but acknowledge and celebrate the life within the darkness. I love that, I love that project. For me, it accords with the best of the African American political tradition but also with the democratic project of the great tragic poets like Sophocles and Euripides. It also accords with the project of the great prophetic writers of the ancient Hebrew tradition like Amos, Jeremiah, and Isaiah. And, with Marx. There’s something like this in Marx.But with respect to figures that I derive sustenance from… More than anyone else right now, Toni Morrison for me is the most visionary intellectual regarding blackness and freedom. Her writings about slavery, to me, continue to be the most penetrating, the most complex, and the most rich. I’m talking about reading Beloved. With every read you walk away with something else to think about. Of course when I read Home I see Morrison wrestling with many of these same problems, only, in this instance, formulated in terms of the post-emancipation problem of home, escape, mourning, and solace. I think she has this profound historical grasp, an amazing sensitivity to the continuities between a variety of crisis points that are constitutive of American life in general but black life in particular. And I also think she’s the most sober visionary… I think that she imagines an alternative future. But I think she’s sober, visionary, and deeply humane. And radical.Do you think utopic could be the word, maybe in a way that’s not naive?What I love about Morrison, is that her work is surprising and visionary, but not utopian. Utopia in its classic sense refers to nowhere. It literally means nowhere. But it’s also a genre of literature that posits an ideal place from which one can engage in the kind of critique that one cannot find evidence for anywhere in the world. It’s an ideal city created in speech that affords you with critical tools.However, I think Morrison is in the world and she’s saying that we have to open our eyes to the existence of certain practices of community, certain commitments to particular purposes—and certain kinds of mature sacrifice in the service of these purposes and communities. These constitute a radical alternative that already exists but we can’t think it because we’re so habituated to seeing the inferior status of the persons who engage in these ideas and have been engaged in them for a long time. To engage the brilliance and wisdom of these persons and practices means that we have to dislodge so much of what we’re invested in, so much of what we think the world and the good life consists of. We would have to dispense with so much of what we think a properly political life looks like, so much of what we think an intelligent life looks like, in the end it’s not clear that what Morrison offers is any less difficult to achieve than the achievement of a perfectly just society. But her worldly vision can guide our thinking in a way similar to the way utopias can.As very in your current project as you are, have you had a lot of time to think about future projects that you would like to do?You know what, I have, actually. And the thing about talking about this is in the same way that the evil project didn’t get done, this little project here may get done before that. Ultimately, I want to write that book about evil and I think I’m in a much better position to write it after I finish the book on mastery.But before I write the book on evil, I want to write a book about basketball, about American basketball—and freedom. I want to write something both philosophical and historical. I want to talk about the development of the game within black communities as a pedagogy of freedom that democratized the experience of freedom that begins when kids in cities across the United States decide they’re going to refuse menial jobs and work on their craft on the court as a profound act of freedom. And over time, when these kids who manage to achieve a kind of virtuosity within the game, both in terms of their physicality but also in terms of their artistry, they vividly dramatize an experience of freedom. People are doing things with their bodies on the courts and in public view that, in fact, transmit an experience of what it means to defy time honored conventions and what passes for laws of nature. They enact for public view what it means to prevail against prevailing constraints as a result of practice, creativity, and self discipline, not force.In a way that’s not abstract at all.Nooo, not at all, exactly.But something happens in the 90s. There’s this kind of explosion of big data in sports. There’s a whole industry called basketball analytics where they develop quantitative metrics to access the efficiency of different shots on the floor, norm the kind of physiques and skills that one needs to get to these positions. And, you get, beginning in the 90s, these super athletes who are also really amazing players. Michael Jordan, my God. Kobe Bryant, my God. LeBron James. These guys are just… well they’re just extraordinary. But it’s not clear this is freedom anymore, though. And it’s weird to watch some of these guys play as if they are overpowering… like they have somehow mastered the game. So I want to wrestle with that. I love that; I’m a basketball junkie.Is there a team or teams you’re partial to?Yeah. I’m a Laker fan, University of Louisville fan. So Rick Pitino is the coach of the Cardinals now. But he was hired in the early 90s to coach our ancient rivals at the University of Kentucky. So he, when he was hired at Kentucky, reoriented the culture and tradition of the program away from its segregationist-basketball past. For those of us from Louisville, especially black folk, it was an article of faith—my family’s from Louisville, Kentucky—that you hated the University of Kentucky. Just hate them with a passion. And I used to unreflectively hate them. But since Pitino has reoriented the tradition, I now also root for the University of Kentucky.My son is nine years old and a really good basketball player. He’s really good. And one of the things that’s been just wonderful is to be in a position to kind of use the game to teach him life lessons, lessons about freedom, practice, self-discipline, concentration, execution and things like that. In addition to all this, it’s also been really wonderful to become a part of the amateur athletics scene here in Austin. Every weekend there will be one or two gyms specifically designed to accommodate youth basketball. You have hundreds of people who come out to watch kids play. And it’s a really fascinating assortment of people—a multi-racial, class-diverse space. Families as well. And thinking about this kind of amateur sports as a manifestation of American civil society, whether it’s simply a reflection of the dominant commitments in American civil society or a kind of counter-public if you will is interesting. But it’s also a nice break from the academy. It’s a really nice break from work. Shirley says that she feels like she’s under siege by meatheads in our household. But she never misses a game. She’s always out there.Alright, one more question—and it’s a pretty straight forward one. In one sentence, what is American studies to you? Or maybe a few sentence if you can’t do just one.Never trained in an American studies department. I have no idea what American studies is. My hunch is that American studies is the interdisciplinary investigation of the life of anything that could be connected with America. Notice I said life because here because I’m trying to say that cultural practices, intellectual currents, spiritual investments, political institutions that are constitutive of life. And these are just a few of the ways in which one could fill out “the life.”I think one of the most difficult things about American studies is actually just keeping track, making sense of America. What does America mean to American studies people? Everything. A lot. Which is great, just great. Most of the people I know who are doing American studies are cultural historians. However, there’s a smaller group of people I know who are doing American political development and American political thought. I think George Schulman is one of these people. And so while I think this may be a small piece of Americans studies it is one that my friends who do cultural history insist is becoming more important. So that’s a horrible answer.I think it gets at the complexity of it.I hope that this answer doesn’t show up on the blog. People are going to be like, “My goodness…”

Holly Genovese 2/3/15 Holly Genovese 2/3/15

5 Questions with Dr. Mark Smith

Today we are pleased to present the next in our series of interviews with American Studies faculty and affiliate faculty members: 5 Questions. We recently sat down with Dr. Mark Smith, whose research interests include the history of social science and the cultural history of alcohol and drugs.1. What was your favorite project to work on and why?I’m sure my answer’s going to be a little bit different from the other people who I think would talk about their research projects, but I think I’d really like to talk about the teaching that I’ve done around the issue of alcohol and drugs, which is something I just chanced into. In fact, I started working at a drug and alcohol treatment center, and I realized that there was a lack of historical and sociological background to see where that stood, particularly where it stood in the issue of cultural history. And what I’ve done is I’ve been able to give a series of classes to different people that deal with the issue of drugs in various permutations. Someone once told me that in scholarship, the question is whether you do more and more about less and less, that is, your focus becomes wider and wider; or whether you do more about less and less. The second is clearly what you do when you write books. Teaching gives the opportunity to do the former. I’ve taught three classes. I taught the original class, a seminar in the American cultural history of alcohol and drugs, and I’ve taught that primarily as an upper division undergraduate class. And I’ve also taught an upper division class for Plan 2 which treats the issue from a public policy standpoint, and now I’m teaching an undergraduate class on alcohol and drugs from an international standpoint, pointing out the fact that alcohol has been handled differently in places like Sweden and Finland and Africa.2. How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?You know, if you asked me ten years ago, I’d have a very clear answer for that. I deal in cultural history; I believe that I was the second person who taught both parts of the cultural history survey. My perspective is always to provide a general overview on the issues involved. I’ve always done that, that’s always been my interest. I was one of the first people to teach Introduction to American Studies. But my feeling is not to plunge myself into a topic- and maybe not even come out- my interest is providing a background so that people in important contemporary fields like Gender Studies or Queer Studies can have background and context. To that extent, I think I’m very much rooted not only in these issues that are coming up today, but those issues that have come up in the past and hopefully the future as well.3. What projects or people have inspired your work?Within alcohol studies, probably the best books that I know are W. J. Rorabaugh's The Alcoholic Republic, and then recently, on Prohibition, Daniel Okrent came up with a book called The Last Call. I think those have really been useful. Clearly, Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, about Vietnam, and Frances FitzGerald’s book Fire in the Lake have been books that really had a lot to do with my understanding of the kind of world that I had grown up in. More recently, George Chauncey's Gay New York, a work that you might think would be narrowly focused but instead tells you a lot more than you think it ever could. There are many amazing works on slavery, but the one that first opened my eyes at a very unprogressive time was Kenneth Stampp's Peculiar Institution. And then sometimes there are books where you think you’re not going to be interested in the topic at all and you're surprised. There’s a man who died much too young by the name of Roland Marchand who wrote a book called Advertising the American Dream. This is one of the big books, ambitious books, books that you just look at and go, “Wow, this is amazing!” and you’re reading them and you’re taking notes and you do that for two whole days. I think that’s why a lot of graduate students have a “fear and loathing," to use Hunter Thompson, in reference to the whole concept of the comprehensive exam fields. And to me, maybe that was my greatest scholarly experience in a way. Not only because you have a sense of accomplishment, but because you wind up reading books that you would never read. If you were just interested in alcohol and drugs, you would never read Marchand’s book. And that’s just a sampling of the books that have influenced me.4. What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your teaching and research?As an undergraduate, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I’d major in English or History and the initial line for History was a lot shorter and that was the only reason I signed up for that. I think I took more classes in English than I did in History – I also took a lot of Political Science classes and Sociology classes and when I was a Sophomore, one of my friends said, “You know, you’re really doing American Studies.” I had never even heard of American Studies, and my school did not have an American Studies program. So I finished my degree in History but I continued to take all those things, and while it was exciting to put all of these things together, I didn’t feel that I was finished yet, which led me to the University of Texas as an American Studies graduate student. And at least for the first year or two, I still didn’t know what American Studies was, but I continued to follow this path. I came down here thinking I was going to work on the novels of the Gilded Age, which strikes me as the most boring thing that I’ve ever heard of today. So as I was trying to find something that was new and hadn’t been done, I wrote my Master’s thesis and dissertation on the history of social science because that was interesting to me and it was a gap in the scholarship. In my post-graduate years, I taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio for four years - and even when I was teaching Introductory History, which is required in Texas, I taught from a cultural history standpoint, and I was trying to talk about how one has to look at history from the position of what people think and how they then act, or how people think and how they consequently behave. I think that’s really important to me - that is the most important question for me - which is the concept of behavior and probably even more of people’s intellectual constructs. That’s been the most important thing for my own work and also for the kind of work that I try to teach on both an undergraduate and graduate level.5. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?I’ve got this book that I have been fussing with - and really that’s the word, fussing with it - I haven’t made the progress that I’ve wanted to but I feel that I’ve cleared my path so that I can work on it. It’s a comparative public policy study of the United States and Finland, because they are the only two countries that have ever had national prohibition in the Western world - in the Middle East, of course, it’s different. But they occurred at the same time- Finland started a year earlier and quit a year earlier than the United States. There’s a lot of similarities between the propaganda that was sent to Finland from the United States, and I think it’s very interesting - there’s a lot of similarities, but there’s a lot of differences, too. The gangsters are all the same and that type of stuff. So I’ve been working on this and my problem has been that I don’t read Finnish and I haven’t been able to find someone who’s willing to do that type of work for me, although I think I’ve come up with someone recently. So that is the project that I’m really looking forward to. What I may do is to point out another society which, at the same time, went a completely different way, a way that Finland would later copy completely and the United States would copy to a certain degree, and that’s Sweden, which took a regulatory model rather than one of coercion - “you just can’t do it” in legalese. That’s the project I would like to do and hopefully will be able to start in the Spring.Bonus question - in one sentence, what is American Studies to you?What people think and how they act; how they act, and consequently what they think.