5 Questions with Affiliate Faculty Member Dr. Coleman Hutchison
Happy Monday! Today we bring you an interview with associate professor of English Coleman Hutchison, an affiliate faculty member of the American Studies department.
What has been your favorite project to work on and why?I have a healthy dose of the presentist in me: I really like whatever I'm working on right now. For instance, I'm really excited about a collection I’m pulling together for Cambridge University Press, the first omnibus history of American Civil War literature. As editor I've been able to draw on a number of disciplines—literary studies, yes, but also, history, cultural studies, musicology, art and art history—and draw together a truly international roster of scholars. Together we’ll be addressing a literature that emerges in response to a very specific historical drama and then continues to develop across both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Needless to say, this is a much more collaborative project than my first book, and it’s been hugely gratifying.Of course intellectual pleasure can also come from unexpected and somewhat awkward sources. My first book offered a literary history of the Confederate States of America. It may have been about the "bad guys," but there was immense pleasure in getting to work with archival material that people either didn't know existed or didn't want to deal with. The extraordinary historical interest and extraordinary political problems of that material were really exciting and daunting and uncomfortable for me. That project pushed me to the edge of my comfort zone, the edge of what I thought I could do as a responsible critic. There was, then, a strange intellectual pleasure in that sort of “recovery work.”How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within academia or within society as a whole?Because I'm a first-generation college student—because this life was never a given for me—it’s always been important for me to make my writing and research available to as many people as possible. Part of that has to do with style—with writing in a clear, cogent, and concise way that doesn't involve a lot of jargon. The work may be theoretically rich and complex, but it is, I hope, delivered in a way that’s accessible. I think that scholarly knowledge production is increasingly important in a moment of intense information overload. Just because everyone has a blog or a Tumblr or a Twitter feed doesn't mean that the knowledge we produce in the academy is less necessary, less urgent. The glacial pace of academic publishing and knowledge production is in some ways an advantage, because we can take a more considered, more careful argumentative tacks and engage in longer, older, maybe even slower critical conversations. This is not to say that we should return to a closed circuit wherein academics produce work only for other academics, but we should continue to do what we do best, which is produce careful, well-researched critiques, and then put those critiques into new and interesting forms. For instance, I've done a good bit of work for Southern Spaces online, and I love the idea that careful, considered scholarship can engage a broader, open source community.What projects or people have inspired your work?I take a somewhat longue durée approach to criticism. Some of the foundational works in American Studies remain ever present in my thinking and writing—people like F. O. Matthiessen and Vernon Parrington, for instance. I was sort of a theory-head in graduate school, and that was also immensely important to me. I still teach a great deal of theory, though I now marshal less of it in my writing. (I think I've now digested the stuff a bit better?) Foucault was foundational for me, Derrida was foundational for me…..I continue to read a lot of criticism—maybe too much criticism—both new and old; as a result, there are fewer individual figures that loom large for me, but there are certainly critical conversations that have helped to inspire my work. I return again and again to old school back-and-forths like the Douglas-Tompkins debates about domestic fiction, as well as to latter day interlocutors like the late, great Lora Romero. I like to think generationally about issues like women's agency, politics, and genre; I'm interested in intellectual debates that spread not over years but decades.What is your background as a scholar and how does it inform and motivate your current teaching and research?I think the biggest influence has been my personal background—my dad was on food stamps when I applied to college, I was never supposed to be an academic, &c. &c.. It wasn't until my senior year at Vanderbilt (where I was an education major who planned to teach high school) that I had a couple of professors who, intervention-style, said, "Why don't you go to graduate school, where you can teach and also have some of the policy and social justice stuff be more explicitly part of your work." I said, "That sounds great…How does one do that?" My professors’ encouragement really helped me to imagine another, alternative route for my life. I then went to Northwestern for my M.A. and Ph.D., where I planned to work with Betsy Erkkilä on Walt Whitman. Betsy is also a first-generation college student, and she helped me to imagine a life in this profession that was both fulfilling and of use, a life where I was not merely enjoying the benefits of “summers off” and tenure but also getting to do something with my criticism and teaching that was socially-engaged.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?Two projects—the first of which is a clear response to having spent several years reading really bad Confederate poetry. I'm working on a small book on the relationship between race and place in American poetry. It begins in 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation, and goes up to 2009, with Elizabeth Alexander reading "Praise Song for the Day" at the inauguration for President Obama. The project puts poets in conversation around the specific locations where race takes place, where race happens. The theoretical framework is broad: it brings together work from cultural sociology and critical geography to tell a story about a red thread in American poetry that people haven't spent a lot of time talking about. Selfishly, it also finds me writing about people like Natasha Trethewey, Li-Young Lee, Garret Hongo, C. S. Giscombe, Effie Waller Smith, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Lee Masters—folks that I really admire and whose work I find endlessly compelling. (That’s not something I can say about the Confederate poets.)The second project is a cultural biography of Dixie. Here I’ll tell a broad story about both the nineteenth-century song and what happens to the word “Dixie” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the past couple of years I've gotten really interested in naming, in particular how place-names work. I've also begun collecting the innumerable products that the word “Dixie” helps to sell—everything from baby bonnets to mortuary services, from botanicals to beer. It's an immensely promiscuous word, and I think it does some important and problematic work in defining the South both to itself and to other regions. So I will deal with the Dixie Cup and the Dixie Chicks, the Dixiecrats and the Dixie Highway, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “If Heaven Ain't’Ain't a Lot Like Dixie.” I suppose it's a classic American Studies project—big and messy and protean, just like American Studies itself.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?One of the things I love about American Studies is its relentless self-interrogation: this is a discipline that is always, for better or worse, re-imagining its objects of study and methodologies with a critical eye toward telling better, more effective stories about this extraordinary and extraordinarily complex country.
5 Questions with Dr. Cary Cordova
We return today to one of our favorite blog series: 5 questions with members of the American Studies core and affiliate faculties. Below, we feature a conversation with Dr. Cary Cordova, assistant professor of American Studies and graduate of our program (Ph.D. 2005).What has been your favorite project to work on and why?I would turn to the projects that have helped me work with people, the projects in which I am engaging with others, whether it is students or other colleagues or professionals out in the world; these projects have probably netted me the most personal satisfaction. Specifically, i am drawn to doing oral history. When I initially approached oral history, I viewed it as a way to source information, as a way to get data that otherwise wasn't available. But then in doing interviews, I learned a lot more about myself and about other people, and oral history became a significant amplification of my education, it became a way of expanding my universe well beyond the world that I thought I was in. For instance, one of the artists I interviewed passed away, and I went to his funeral, and it was striking to see the numbers of people that were there. And I did not expect this, but his family had decided to play the interview that I had recorded with him there at the funeral for everyone to hear, and it was so moving and so powerful to suddenly have everyone in that room listening to an interview that had just been me and him, and it helped me see the ways in which the work I was doing had a greater relevance than just me and him sitting in that room.How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and contemporary society?Academically, it's pretty easy to see where I have come to be, because it has been pretty consistent. I have always been trying to negotiate this world between American Studies and Latino Studies, and I came to graduate school specifically to study Latina literature. I didn't end up focusing on Latina literature, but disciplinarily that has been a continuous framework. Then through graduate school and a lot of other things I came to realize I was doing a lot with Art History and with Urban Studies, but those are just the disciplines, and per my previous answer, my academic engagement has always been tied to thinking about others and thinking about my community and thinking about people that make the world matter to me.What people, projects, art, etc. have inspired your work the most?How long a list can I give you? It's a really hard question, because there are so many people that have inspired me and have trained me to think about the world. The way I work and the way I do my writing is a product of my education, and for me education does not happen simply in a classroom, it has come from a lot of the people I have come into contact with who I didn't even know were educating me at the time. I was raised in San Francisco and there's no way on earth I would have predicted I would be writing about the history of San Francisco and the way Latino artists produced their art in San Francisco at the time when I was a kid. And yet I know that I study it because somehow over the process of living there a lot of that art and a lot of those people reached out to me, maybe not directly, but it was there, and it had a dramatic impact. For example, I just came back from San Francisco and attended an event that was really one of the more powerful events in my life. It was a fundraiser for Yolanda Lopez and René Yañez who are being evicted from their home. They are two artists I have written about and who I think have done amazing work. Of course it’s this incredibly bittersweet event to see so many people coming together in the community, performing, from Cherríe Moraga, to Culture Clash, to Marga Gomez, all these different performers and speakers, all of them there because they care so much about these two people who are part of a larger problem of evictions in San Francisco. And Yolanda Lopez, someone I consider my mentor and who has been so meaningful to me in terms of the way she thinks, the way she creates art, told me that this is my family too, and that blew my mind, having these incredibly strong women, who in spite of their own struggles, have reached out to help me.Why are these evictions taking place?It's a difficult answer and it's not. Property values have been escalating to such a degree that it has propelled the use of an ordinance called the Ellis Act, which landlords are using to evict a lot of people that have been in rent-controlled situations. So what we are seeing is unprecedented numbers of people being evicted from their homes, especially in the area that I study, the Mission, because it has become such a bohemian enclave, owing largely to the work of the artists that are there.What is your background as a scholar and how does that motivate your current research and teaching?My background as a scholar is that I never thought I could be a scholar. My background as a scholar is that it is not a world that I ever could have imagined myself to inhabit as a kid or even as a young teenager. I really only attended graduate school because a couple of professors reached out to me at the very end of my undergraduate career, and that information has helped me register the enormous power that professors can have in their students lives, both good and bad, and made me very sensitive to the ways my words can have more meaning than I can dream. It also helped me recognize that many of my students may not know their own capacity for what they can accomplish, and that unless you help them see that, they may not ever be able to tap that capacity.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?I have a project that I'm trying to figure out on Latino landmarks in the United States. What are the physical places where Latinos appear in the nation and what kind of public image does this create or not create. I am especially interested in the ways that Latinos are portrayed politically, so I am thinking about issues of conservative Latinos versus radical Latinos, thinking about the Latino vote which is so incredibly emphasized but which never actually seems to recognize the heterogeneity of the population. So I'm toying with this notion of Latino landmarks.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?I tend to look at American Studies as looking at the world with a kaleidoscope and embracing the different representations of the image that can appear through that kaleidoscope, but then being very careful not to say that all perspectives are equal.
5 Questions with AMS Affiliate Faculty Member Dr. Eric Tang
Today we are thrilled to feature an interview with affiliate faculty member Dr. Eric Tang, Assistant Professor in African and African Diaspora Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies and Associate Director of the UT Community Engagement Center.
1. What has been your favorite project to work on and why?I'm not sure that I have a favorite project. I have different projects that each offer moments of profound reward. I guess, then, I have favorite moments. And those moments are when the exceptions prove the rule: when seemingly unlikely racial alliances explain a community's resilience; when what seems like social disorganization and disjuncture is in fact the generative force of political movements; when what is misunderstood as hopelessness, despair and ambivalence among oppressed peoples is rather an expression of a profound political critique.
My work looks at the poetics of displacement--from third world refugees to the African American communities throughout Austin. Why poetics? Because the violence of displacement necessarily produces among the displaced a specific way of knowing the world--a theory and a form. Some scholars refer to this as a methodology of the oppressed. My goal as a scholar is to ensure that contemporary society does not squander their vision/theory/method.3. What projects, people, and/or things have inspired your work?Far too many to name. Historian Robin Kelley was my dissertation chair and my mentor since undergrad days, so his influence is evident in my work. But it depends on what I'm working on. If it's the question of justice and its limits, then I'll be reading Sadiya Hartman. If it's New Orleans we're talking about, then it's the dearly departed Clyde Woods. If it's 1980s New York City, then I am turning straight to the lyrics of Public Enemy. If I'm focusing on Austin's genteel apartheid, then it's the generation of black residents I've recently interviewed who recall the city's unmistakable history of Jim Crow (alive and well today, they insist).
You mean in addition to being one of the founding members of the Frankfurt school? (insert emoticon here). I actually come out of community organizing. At least that's my genealogy as a scholar and teacher. I spent the late-1990s through early 2000s organizing in refugee communities of the Bronx. How does that influence my work? It taught me to rethink everything I thought I knew about how refugees understood justice, healing and redemption. I'm not trying to sound cliche or maudlin, but I learned from correcting my original mis-recognitions, from failures. It's am interesting thing -- I often get asked to talk and write about my activism and organizing days. I'm asked to elaborate on how we organized this action or that campaign. Sure, these are valuable experiences to share, but I'd much rather talk and write about what I didn't do. You know, the things I missed and then had to go back and find. This isn't false humility, I just believe that these are the more valuable lessons to share. In recent years I've written about and summed up those lessons in a manuscript entitled "Unsettled."5. What projects would you like to work on in the future?A project that looks at racial violence in New York City in the 1980s. If you want to know how NYC became what it is today -- how it went from ethnoracial working class neighborhoods to playgrounds for the wealthy and so-called creative class-- then you need to look at the battles that gave way to this moment. The 1980s was the turning point: Bernard Goetz, Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, Central Park Jogger, Crown Heights, boycotts -- all of this begot "Giuliani time."
I think Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz summed it up in the essay "American Studies as Accompaniment" in the latest edition of American Quarterly, a great read. Check it out here.
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.