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.

Departmental Theme: Marxism in the U.S. and the Insecurity of “Progress”

Today, we are happy to feature some thoughts on the departmental theme, Security/insecurity, from one of our American Studies instructors, Sean Cashbaugh, who is currently teaching a course on Marxism in American Culture.In the first section of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously explore the historical emergence of capitalism via the rise of the bourgeoisie, the class that wrestled the western European world away from feudalism and built it anew in capitalist terms. Upon reading it, one gets the sense that Marx and Engels were in awe of the bourgeoisie, impressed with their historical accomplishments, but also utterly terrified, as they were roundly critical of the incredible costs of their incessant drive for profits, and their drive for new means of generating them. In a famous passage, they write:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.  All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.  All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

I’ve always read this passage as a description of what life under capitalism feels like. It’s a commentary on the profound sense of insecurity economic “development” and “progress” generate, on the sense of disorientation and uncertainty felt by those subjected to and exploited by the whirlwind of capitalism’s expansion. Though Marx and Engels wrote of the tumultuous world of 1840s Europe, it’s not hard to think of life in twenty-first century America in these terms: when information travels at light speed, when economic forecasts seem dismal, and when there’s no foreseeable end to U.S. led military conflicts, it’s difficult to imagine anything “solid” at all. I suspect it’s a feeling that resonates with the youth of today, especially when secure images of the future seem difficult to sustain in light of the aforementioned pressures.Since its emergence, Marxism has grappled with these processes, and Marxists have attempted to understand and change such conditions. Marxism has a long history in the United States – it is difficult to imagine the twentieth century looking as it did without it – but it’s a history that many have ignored, suppressed, or dismissed as irrelevant or downright dangerous, a threat to national security. In Marxism and American Culture, we engage with this history in America, exploring the writings of Marx, as well as their reception, circulation, and transformation in the United States. Ideologies of race, gender, and nationality shape this history. To explore it in all its complexity, students in my class read diverse works of Marxist theory from throughout the American twentieth century, such as the writings of C. L. R. James and Subcommandante Marcos.  We read novels that draw upon, expand, and critique Marxist themes like Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties. I also push them to think through Marxism: they examine popular cultural texts like Jaws and we consider what Marxists have argued about such texts. In the end, it is a course that seeks to explore and complicate the relationship between two things: this “thing” called “Marxism” and this “thing” called “American Culture.” As my students have said, those “things” resist any certain definition, and the relationship between them is less stable, less secure than you would expect.

Faculty Research: Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller on "15 Minute History"

Want to learn something fascinating about the history of popular music? Kick your weekend off with one of our favorite podcasts: the UT History Department's "15 Minute History" has released a quick interview with our own Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller about his book, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow.The podcast is available here, and a quick excerpt from the chat is below:

I find three groups are essential to this book and three groups of players or people really started interacting in new ways at this period. Those groups are musicians in the south, who have been there all along of course, a record industry that is new, recordings really started taking off around 1905-1906 and they spread across the north and south and the globe, in fact. And this is a completely fresh and novel way of making music, listening to music, and buying music. It’s this moment where music actually gets separated from the musician for the first time. That has dramatic effects on the way people conceive of the identity of the music as separate from the identity of the musician, because there had never been an opportunity to contemplate that before.So musicians, music industry, and I also think academics at the time, particularly folklorists were instrumental in this shift. At the same time that record companies were distributing this technology and new records across the south, folklorists were moving into the south looking for particular kinds of music and not others. It is at this moment when records, musicians, are permeating the south that folklorists begin talking about the south as a repository of older styles of music, more authentic, more true, more genuine styles of music as a way of distinguishing them from these commercial ditties that they didn’t like very much.

Departmental Theme: The American Superhero and American (In)Security

Today we’re very pleased to share with you this reflection from Andrew Friedenthal, one of our Assistant Instructors here in AMS, about integrating the 2013-2014 departmental theme, SECURITY/INSECURITY, into his teaching this semester:In my class, The Myth & History of the American Superhero, the departmental theme of security/insecurity is inherently a part of the course material. The history of the superhero in America is inextricably linked to a history of feeling insecure, from two young Jewish men creating Superman in response to Nazi aggression overseas to a renaissance in superhero films in the years following the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Superheroes are often called our "modern myths," but what they actually are is simpler than that - they are symbols of our hopes and fears, our highs and our lows, our feelings of safety and apprehensions about infringements on that safety. In a sense, they embody our feelings of security and insecurity about yesterday, today, and tomorrow.As a class, we watch the 2012 blockbuster film THE AVENGERS and then spend a significant amount of time teasing out its political implications.  A movie that features shadowy government organizations, the wide-scale destruction of Manhattan, and a man wrapped in the American flag cannot help but be rife with echoes of our contemporary struggle with issues of security in a post-9/11 world.