Announcement: Dr. Caleb Smith Lectures on Law and Literature
Join us this Friday for a lecture by Dr. Caleb Smith (English and American Studies, Yale), "Crime Scenes: Fictions of Security and Jurisprudence." The talk will take place in Parlin Hall 203 at 3:30pm.In this lecture, Dr. Smith will discuss his recent work on law and literature, focusing especially on the popular literature that emerged from the struggle over Cherokee "removal" between the 1830s and 1850s; the minister Samuel Worcester's letters from a Georgia prison; the lawyer-novelist William Gilmore Simms's "border romances"; and the Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge's Joaquín Murieta, sometimes known as the "first Native American novel."
Dr. Caleb Smith is the author of The Oracle and the Curse (2013) and The Prison and the American Imagination (2009). He is working on an edition of "The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict," an 1858 narrative by Austin Reed, an African-American inmate of New York¹s Auburn State Prison, which will be published by Random House in 2016.Presented by the departments of English and American Studies.
5 Questions with AMS Afficilate Faculty Member Dr. Jim Cox
Today we are pleased to bring back a favorite feature here at AMS::ATX----5 Questions! Today's interview introduces you to Dr. James H. Cox, AMS affiliate faculty member in English and author of the forthcoming book, The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico.
What has been your favorite project to work on and why?My most recent project was on American Indian writers who traveled to Mexico and wrote about it and its indigenous population. This was an exciting project because I was thinking about comparative indigeneities, about the way indigeneity is experienced in the United States and Mexico, and how it’s experienced when people are crossing the border as well. I enjoyed it because I was writing about a time period in American Indian writing that has been largely neglected by literature scholars, and overlooked by historians, too. This period falls between the progressive and civil rights eras – it looks like an empty four decades, but the period is actually full of manuscripts and published works that only a few people have studied in depth. The genre diversity within the project is fun as well – I worked with detective novels, worked with plays, which I had never done before, and nonfiction. I was going outside of the more conventional literary genres, reading biographies and memoirs and histories by Native authors.Additionally, I’ve just started a new project that I’m really stoked about. One of the writers in the American Indians in Mexico project is Lynn Riggs, a Cherokee dramatist who published between 15-20 plays, a book of cowboy songs, and a book of poetry during his life. He wrote about 10 other plays that went unproduced and unpublished. In 1931, he also made an experimental film with a director named James Hughes and with guidance from several fairly well known cinematographers from Hollywood, including Henwar Rodakiewicz. It is a 15 minute film of a day in Santa Fe. When the film was complete, he showed it first to the literary crowd--Alice Corbin Henderson, Spud Johnson--in Santa Fe at that time. It’s a silent movie, and he interspersed it with a poem of his called “Santo Domingo Corn Dance.” There are two dominant images in the film. One is of a huge cross outside a church in Santa Fe, and then there’s a dance by local indigenous people. So I’m going to Santa Fe and the New Mexico historical archives. In particular, I want to know who the dancers are. If the dance in the film is actually the corn dance, then Riggs violated a prohibition against filming it. I suspect it wasn’t, but, if so, I’d like to know how and why Riggs staged it the way he did for the film. I’m also interested in his multicultural conception of Santa Fe at the time: there are Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Anglos, interspersed throughout the entire film; and I’m interested in the images too of the cross and the corn dance and how he’s playing with both of them to convey a sense of the religious identity of this place.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy or contemporary society?Obviously I find it very easy to talk to people in American Studies and history, and people with interdisciplinary backgrounds in Native American and indigenous studies. My work is also political in the way I’m interested in foregrounding native voices and native material culture. In that regard, it connects directly to public issues such as the debate over Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry. The Chief of the Cherokee Nation just protested Scott Brown’s staff mocking Warren by doing the tomahawk chop and war whoops and that sort of thing. So when I see something like that, it’s directly related to my work and I’ll talk about that in class. It comes down to issues of representation, but representation as it is deeply entangled in public policy and as it shapes the lives of Native people.What projects, people, and /or things have inspired your work?The fiction writers that I read are the first inspiration. When I was a graduate student and I read Sherman Alexie and Thomas King for the first time; I thought it was the most compelling and provocative literature I had ever read. It had a sense of urgency that I liked, a sense of urgency that showed how much storytelling and literature matter in our lives. King’s novel Green Grass Running Water is just a brilliant piece of writing – an extraordinary work, a classic of literature in English. In terms of scholarship – you know, I think that I’m inspired by people who do what I want to do better than I could ever do it – particularly literature scholars who work really well with history and culture more broadly speaking. Recent books that come to mind like this are Phillip Round’s Removable Type, which is a study of early American Indian print culture, or Lisa Brooks’ The Common Pot, which is a study of early American Indian writing in the northeast – both of those are two scholars who, because I’m a literature scholar and the text matters to me a little more than everything else, I admire the way that they combine their analyses of texts with discussions of really broad and deep contexts.Also when I was a graduate student, New Historicism was a new and influential critical practice. It approached texts as objects that circulate throughout a culture in all kinds of fascinating and wonderful ways, a culture that also informs their production and consumption – that was really influential. I remember the most significant critical collection for me as a graduate student was Aram Veeser’s The New Historicism. I never approached books as a critic as if they were isolated from the real world -- from economics and race and sexuality and so on -- so the approach agreed with me.What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?I always knew this is what I wanted to do. I always thought of myself as someone who studied literature – maybe not a lit scholar but someone who studied literature. My training is primarily in American and British literature and both American and European history – that’s the basis. Even as a graduate student, I didn’t limit myself to one period or one genre or one century. I spent much of my time in the Renaissance, and I took classes in Greek mythology and the history of Western literary criticism and so on. I had classic liberal arts training. So as a Master’s student I was very much a generalist, and I applied to grad school as a Renaissance scholar. It didn’t take me long to decide that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.I hope that I’m one of the last people who wanted to study native literature but had to do it without ever taking a class in it. I had one independent study with a professor at Nebraska, but otherwise, there was a lot of self-training and working with my peers in the graduate program who wanted to do the same thing. We sought people out and asked them what to read, and we went to conferences, and every time a scholar was quoted we wrote her name down, and then we went home and read her book. We did that for years. Eventually that’s what I decided to do. And even after I graduated the training continued – I was probably 6 or 7 years out when I thought I finally could call myself a Native Americanist. I had refrained from doing so because I just didn’t think that I knew enough. But by that point I had enough guidance from mentors, I’d read enough books, went to conferences that focused on Native literature, and I thought, okay, I can speak comfortably in this field now.What projects would you like to work on in the future?Well, I’m thinking about a project on American Indian-published periodicals since they reached a broader audience than most of the literary works that I study. They have a kind of political and historical immediacy that I’m interested in – I’m talking about weeklies and monthlies. This summer I spent a week at the Native Press Archives at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and read the National Indian Youth Council’s Americans Before Columbus, for one example. I’ve read some of Rupert Costo’s San Francisco-based Indian Historical Society journal the Indian Historian as well. And Akwesasne Notes, which in its original form was produced by somebody on the Mohawk reservation sitting in his house stapling articles about political events into a new publication – he would staple them all together and then send them out to subscribers. Eventually they hired their own writers and were able to put together their own publication with original writing, but to me it’s an almost heroic endeavor for somebody who felt so strongly about people knowing what was happening at the time.But I’d also like to take my training in Native American and indigenous studies and look at celebrated non-Native authors such as Philip Roth and Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. Roth, for example, is thinking about the status of immigrant Jewish families in The Plot Against America at a time during which federal Indian policy was about to swing back towards assimilation after a brief period of reform. In that novel he imagines an alternative history of removal and relocation for Jewish families immediately prior to an actual period of relocation for Native people. Tennessee Williams incorporates native characters into some of his plays in very strange ways, and I hope to work with a colleague on an article about that.As far as teaching goes, I just started a Hemingway course, which I taught for the first time this summer. I grew up reading Hemingway, so it has been fun to return to him. I would very much like to do a graduate course in native American and Mexican American indigeneity to expand the scope of what I teach and build from what I’m already doing in my research.If you could describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?American Studies is the Antiques Roadshow of the liberal arts.
Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis discusses new book, 'Navajo Talking Picture'
This past July, Dr. Randy Lewis published his third book, Navajo Talking Picture (University of Nebraska Press). I sat down with Randy to discuss the conception of the book, its challenges, its delights, and how the narrative he tells engages with broader conversations within American Studies and beyond.
Where did the idea for this book come from? How did the film [Navajo Talking Picture] and the filmmaker [Arlene Bowman] come onto your radar screen initially?Probably about ten years ago, I realized that there wasn’t much scholarly literature in film studies and none in American Studies on Native American cinema or indigenous media in a global sense. I started thinking about how to remedy that. I began collecting texts to consider and got deep into Alanis Obomsawin’s work, which I thought was just going to be a chapter of a book that would look at some of the major figures in Native American cinema who had been neglected. It just kept going into a book. It’s hard to imagine this, but it was the first one devoted to a Native filmmaker. This says something about how much “Native art” is narrowly associated with traditional art forms in opposition to modern, technologically-dependent art forms, as well as how rarely Native people have been able to get their points of view on screen, even as they are obsessively represented by outsiders like John Ford.While I was writing the Obomsawin book that came out in 2006, I was aware that I had these other things that I was really interested in. Part of it stemmed from writing in the southwest at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe for a year. I was really close to Navajo Nation, and I was coming across a lot of amazing Navajo artists and getting a sense that not only were they doing a lot with Navajo-language radio on the reservation, but there were a lot of Navajo media professionals doing all kinds of projects that were not on the film studies or American Studies radar. And I learned that there was a Navajo filmmaker named Arlene Bowman, who was really early in this story of Native filmmaking, who seemed to interest and dismay audiences equally. I wanted to see this film she made as a graduate student that had made a little splash in the 1980s when it came out, at a time when she was the first Native woman in film school at UCLA or probably anywhere else.
So I watched the film called Navajo Talking Picture, and I found it kind of confusing and unfamiliar. Then I’d show it to other people, to friends and students. What got me really hooked on it was that I had never seen something upset people and divide audiences so much. Apparently back in the 1980s when she screened it at festivals, Bowman said, there were these camps that were set up. Some people said, “You have the right to make this film, and you have a right to put your traditional grandmother on film even if she appears unwilling.” And other people would say, “This is an example of everything that you should not do in documentary.”As I started to register the depth of the divide and the racially-infused animosity, I became interested in the film itself as a cultural object, as a kind of wound, as I write in the book. I’m probably more interested in this question of wounding – or, let’s use the metaphor of a rock and ripples, because I have to have my eccentric metaphors. The rock is the text under consideration, and it drops into the pond of the culture, and it creates ripples. The ripples are the things that really fascinated me: why there were so many strange responses and strange resonances to this very small film.
The fact that it’s a film almost became incidental. I became fascinated by what you could learn about the way different audiences responded. About why some viewers had such strong expectations about what Native artists, or Native women, were “supposed to do.” About what was “authentic” and “appropriate” for Native artists, things we rarely ask about non-native artists, you know? I ended up writing some of the first pieces about the reception and intentionality involved in the reception of native art. Why do we want it to be this way and not that way? Why do we think it was meant to do x and not y? And who is the “we”? These are revealing questions in terms of race, power, and gender.I’ve done a little bit of reception work, and I took a course in reception studies, and I’m always fascinated by how hard it is. Were there any challenges that you confronted in taking that approach? Was there anything particularly difficult about the process as a whole, if you’d like to broaden it out? It was just one chapter that focused literally on reception of audiences, and the other chapters are addressing larger kinds of ripples and resonances having to do with our ideas about the southwest, ideas about Indian art and earlier kinds of novels about Navajos, family portrait cinema, cultural nationalism, etc. But reception is about the hardest thing you can work on. It’s a maddeningly challenging proposition to try to figure out what audiences are really making of a particular text, based on all the psychological variations and cultural factors that are operating.The best you can do – well, I don’t know if it’s the best you can do – but what I did was I’d watch people watching. Talk to them. Have conversations with them for an hour or so about the screening experience. Collect their Rorschach comments anonymously and wade through them. Like I said before, I realized that people had a lot of assumptions about what a Native American artist, and in particular a Native American woman, “should be doing” and “should not be doing.” That fascinated me. I wanted to really dig at these assumptions and all the baggage that audiences bring to this film.Was there any one aspect of the whole process that you found most fulfilling?I’m embarrassed that I’m going to use another metaphor. But there’s a way in which, for people who really love writing, that it’s almost like ironing out wrinkles at a certain point. When you have something that’s drafted pretty well, and you’re really smoothing it so that the prose is very fluid and the ideas are really clear, that’s kind of a joyful experience for me. I love doing that. I know that’s maybe kind of weird, because I do hate literally ironing. But they always say that writing is rewriting. The rewriting, if you feel like it’s close to what you want it to be, is really pleasurable and satisfying.What’s not satisfying is when you’re mystified, wondering, “Why is this not working?” and then you realize that you need to cut that whole page or you don’t have a leg to stand on with what you’re saying somewhere down in the conceptual basement. I think one thing that I really appreciated about the last project was that I gave myself the space to make those pivots, some with humility, some rather boldly I think, where you are moving around a lot, weighing everything that comes into view in this fantastically wide open space of American studies. I feel like there was a kind of poetry and judiciousness simultaneously at work in that process. That was the first time that I let myself do that fully in a book project, I think.I want to ask about how the book is in dialogue with what there is in American Studies. If there isn’t much in the genre itself, what kind of gaps do you see it filling? Is it in conversation with any particular books or scholarly trajectories that you were explicit about?That’s a hard question. There are probably ways that it could have been more explicitly in dialogue with certain texts in American Studies now. But when I started working on Native film, I felt so disappointed by what American Studies had to say about this phenomenon generally that I would have had to stretch to accommodate too much to what was out there. I didn’t want to plug into the normative circuitry. I wanted to do something else, something that came organically out of me and the subject equally.The people who I was in more genuine, organic engagement with - many of them were in Anthropology, English departments, and Native American Studies, and especially Native scholars such as Craig Womack, who wrote Red on Red to get into the vagaries and challenges of tribal centrism and who has a right to speak about native art. Did I have a right to say anything about this? Did Arlene have a right to speak about her more traditional grandmother? These are the questions that Womack and other native literary critics have explored. And the cultural nationalism question afloat in Native American Studies was much more powerful and relevant than anything in “American Studies” broadly. Some of those scholars consider themselves also American Studies as well, of course, but their interests weren’t widely shared in ASA as I saw it five or ten years ago.Can I add one meta-comment about American Studies at a national level? There are certain aporias and also odd emphases in American Studies as a field at any given moment and I feel them quite acutely in recent years. ASA is shifting, and it’s not what it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago even, at least as the field is represented in American Quarterly and ASA as a convention. You go to that conference and it feels like there are some things that are really in motion but that motion is also weirdly static. Like there are a thousand gerbils in a thousand wheels running as fast as they can in the same direction. Yes, of course, there’s a lot of intellectual energy and a lot of brilliant people doing extremely interesting things. But when you step back from it, you realize they’re really running in the same direction, channeling the same energies, the same theories, the same methods.I’m always interested in the people who are running in other directions, fleeing from orthodoxy (or somehow productively unaware of it). The people who don’t fit at ASA but who have a lot to say about the state of this country. You realize that professional conferences like ASA don’t cover 90% of what’s happening in the culture. What’s happening in the streets and in the minds of most Americans is often unaddressed at ASA. I say that with sadness and also a recognition that ASA does provide a great deal of heat and light in its own way. I’m glad it’s there, but it’s not what makes me tick. I suppose it has become narrowed in a way that the interdisciplinary space of American Studies in its ideal form would not be for me. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and probably won’t stay that way. It’s like they say about the weather back in Oklahoma. “If you don’t like it, stick around ‘cuz it’ll change.”