Grad and Faculty Research: UT AMS at ASA!
It's that time of year again--time for the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, which will be held from November 6-9 in Los Angeles. This year's theme is “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century," and the program features a number of UT AMS folks. Here's a snapshot of what grad students and faculty from UT American Studies will be presenting at this year's conference:THURSDAY, November 6Anne Gessler, "Second Lines, Creative Economies, and Gentrification: Music Cooperatives in Post-Katrina New Orleans" (Thu. Nov. 6, 4:00-5:45pm, San Pedro). Part of a panel called, "Alternative Economies of Pleasure in Contemporary Southern Working-Class Cultures." Gessler's paper examines the ways in which New Orleans’ black, working-class participatory culture uses music and performance as tools of social critique: second lines parades, for example, have become forums for protesting gentrification of black residents' communities. Specifically, she will argue that contemporary cooperatives have used their city’s long tradition of innovative, egalitarian cultural production to empower working-class New Orleans citizens to alleviate the effects of structural inequality and poverty.FRIDAY, November 7Julia Mickenberg, "Child Savers and Child Saviors: Horror, Hope, and the Russian Famine of 1921" (Fri. Nov. 7, 8:00-9:45am, Santa Anita). Part of a panel called, "Other World(s): Childhood, Nation, and the Price of Feeling Good." Dr. Mickenberg's paper considers the way in which the Russian child became a focal point for humanitarian relief efforts (typically gendered as feminine) and thus offered a socially acceptable vehicle for American women to enter Soviet Russia, through agencies like the American Friends Service Committee. Alongside widely disseminated images of starving Russian children were tales of rosy-cheeked, self-governing, artistic, and socially engaged children to whom the Soviet Union's bright future belonged; "child savers" in Russia were thus, in part, motivated by the notion that the Russian child rescued from starvation might go on to become a child savior.Jennifer Kelly, "Blueprinting Post-Return: Tourism, Pedagogy, and the Work of Imagination in Palestine" (Fri. Nov. 7, 2:00-3:45pm, San Anita). Part of a panel called, "Political Imaginings of Palestine Beyond the Here and Now." Kelly will explore the collaboration between the Israeli organization Zochrot and the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, a Palestinian organization in the West Bank, as they respectively and collectively use tourism to expose Israel’s displacement of Palestinians and imagine futures of decolonized space in Israel/Palestine.Andrew Hamsher, "Controlling Fantasyland: Surveilance and Freedom in Transmedia Storyworlds" (Fri. Nov. 7, 4:00-5:45pm, Santa Monica B). Part of a panel called "We’re Listening: Surveillance Technologies and Non-Private Publics." Hamsher's paper explores how entertainment conglomerates are seeking to exploit the proliferation of branded storyworlds to dramatically expand and normalize datavalliance practices. He focuses on Disney World's new billion-dollar MyMagic+ initiative.SATURDAY, November 8Elizabeth Engelhardt, "Appalachian Food Studies: A Tale of Belgian Waffles and Cast Iron Fried Chicken" (Sat. Nov. 8, 8:00-9:45am, San Gabriel). Part of a panel called, "The Invention of Authenticity: Troubling Narratives of the “Real” Southern Foodways." Dr. Engelhardt will discuss the impossibility of "Appalachian Chicken and Waffles" as well as the usefulness of such an impossible term.Kerry Knerr, "Institutionalizing the Bon Vivant: Reading Empire through Jerry Thomas’s Cocktails" (Sat. Nov. 8, 10:00-11:45am, San Gabriel). Part of a panel called, "Commerce of Pleasure." Knerr will consider early cocktails, mainly punch, as a form that moves through various European colonial contexts. In her paper, she offers a close reading of a particular punch from Jerry Thomas's How To Mix Drinks: Or, The Bon Vivant's Companion (1862) to demonstrate its imperial inheritance through to the American context.Elissa Underwood, "Food" (Sat. Nov. 8, 2:00-3:45pm, Beaudry A). Part of a Critical Prison Studies Caucus panel called "Keywords in Critical Prison Studies I." Using a lively format of words and visuals, the panelists will explore sixteen terms – some ordinary, some unexpected - related to critical prison studies.
Undergraduate Research: A Collaborative "Howl" in the 21st Century
This dispatch comes from Dr. Randy Lewis, whose upper-division American Studies course, "Main Currents in U.S. Culture Since 1865," participated in an experimental poetic exercise during class yesterday that yielded fascinating results:
I was teaching Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" yesterday and asked 60 undergrads to write one line each for 'their generation's Howl' on a card, which my TA Carrie Andersen rapidly assembled into a rough order that I read to the class 20 minutes after they scribbled their thoughts. No one knew what anyone else was writing, but the results are somehow coherent. So here is our instant crowd-sourced poem, a collective howl of twenty-somethings thinking creatively about their world. I found it to be really heartening.
The as-yet untitled poem is reprinted in its entirety below.
Fishes above water pretending they don’t have gillsspewing “passion” without a thought on every corner of the airwaveslife’s mystery is our best bet, our only truth, the answers are all around uspromiscuously dancing with beliefsimpulsive chaotic limitlessdefying the conventionalembracing life’s challengesbe the person you hide from the world.be fearlessupstairs and downstairs in the bathroom Brittany’s hair is impossible to groomin front of the mirror she trembles with fear her braid resembles a broom.running away from fearrandom acts of horrorthe future is terrifyinglike a llama in outer spacea golden trumpet farts into the voidburning pyre of insanityorganized chaos intensity haunted raving weirdwords carry SO MUCH WEIGHT.people wandering the streets at night like so many fireflies looking to be the sun.free, confused, and lonely at the same timea whole generation joined in watching their fathers ruin their home.Struggle to sleep sitting in darknessclicking clicking refreshBuzzfeed. Sleep.instant communication (gossip)numb shallow detached disconnected complacentDISTRACTIONSfor the subversive scholar using CIA sabotage to create the tension for revolutionfailure is the only way to succeed.tech zombieswho stared into the faces of their iPhones more than each others’who preferred to view the world through an artificial screenShame! Shame to the hate we show each other. Differences, similarities, color, gender, age, class, sexuality, all people at the core to fight this life together, but so far apart in our minds.perpetual rat racemass cyclingmass psych-ling. To gain.Kanye! Down with Yeezus, we want College Dropout.Verbiage notwithstanding, you is cray.Those that are shackled by neoliberalism, screamingBreak free, break free!positivity and negativitythere is no final judgment.
Five Questions with Dr. Phillip Barrish
Today we continue our ever-popular series, 5 Questions, where we sit down with American Studies faculty and affiliate faculty members to chat about their research and teaching. Today we bring you an interview with Dr. Phillip Barrish, Professor of English and author of The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge UP, 2011).What has been your favorite project to work on and why?Luckily for me, my favorite project is the one I am working on right now, which has to do with the medical humanities. More specifically, I'm interested in what I'm calling the Healthcare Policy Humanities, or the Healthcare Humanities. A lot of work by literature scholars in the medical humanities has focused on representations of doctors, patients, and the illness experience, as well as on narrative medicine, which has to do with the stories patients tell doctors and the stories doctors tell patients—that is, the patient-doctor interface. I'm really interested in how literature and narrative relate to what could be called the political economy of healthcare, that is, for example the kinds of issues we are grappling with now around Obamacare and the healthcare crisis in our country. How has literature reflected, directly or indirectly, on questions such as who pays for healthcare, who has access to what kinds of healthcare, what is the role of government in providing healthcare? What role do stories, language, and metaphor play in the dynamics of how institutions, individuals, practices, and professional modes messily intersect to produce a healthcare system.There are plenty of excellent books by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists about the historical evolution and current state of the U.S. healthcare system, but I want to look at those issues through a literary lens. (I’m an Americanist so it’s the U.S. context that most interests me, at least for now.) For example, I have an article in the most recent issue of the journal American Literature called “The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism: Robert Herrick’s The Web of Life and the Political Economy of Healthcare at the Turn of the Century.” I’m currently in the early stages of researching an article/book chapter provisionally called "Healthcare Policy and Dystopian Fiction." Here I’m less interested in dystopian works that extrapolate from the often disturbing implications of cutting-edge developments in medical technology, many of which have to do with reproduction: genetic engineering, cloning, surrogate pregnancy, but also such things as new organ-transplant technology. As fascinating and disturbing as such literature often is, I want to focus on a related but different aspect of dystopian medical imagining—dystopian literature and films that focus at least as much on the seemingly more quotidian issues of healthcare access, distribution, and funding. Two great recent examples are the 2013 movie Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, and Chang-Rae Lee’s 2014 novel, On Such a Full Sea. If anyone reading this interview has additional ideas for texts, I’d love to hear them!How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within and outside of academia?Throughout my career, I’ve tried to be conscious of how my scholarly work might speak to issues, tensions, and problems that are important to us today. I think this dialogue is clearest in my current project, because the question of healthcare’s political economy is one that obviously a lot of people are thinking about and debating. Indeed, elections may turn on it.What kinds of projects or people have inspired your work?I went to graduate school in the early 1980s at Cornell, which was known for having a theory-heavy English department. I was fascinated by post-structuralism and by the emphasis placed by post-structuralist literary critics on close reading, which I had come to from a more old-fashioned training in college in formalist close reading. Some of the early people who inspired me in graduate school would be Barbara Johnson at Harvard, who died tragically several years ago from cancer, and Jonathan Culler and Mark Seltzer at Cornell. Since then I've not gone against my training, because post-structuralism still informs my own thinking and reading practices, often in subtle ways, but I've extended my graduate student training into looking at literature in its relation to other discourses and practices in our society. Among American Studies scholars, for example, I love the work of Janice Radway, whom I was able to take classes with as an undergraduate. Not untypically for scholars of my and subsequent generations, I’ve been inspired by feminism, critical race studies, new historicism, cultural studies, queer studies, and affect studies.What is your scholarly background and how does that background motivate your teaching and research now?I grew up in a New York City, middle class, third generation Jewish immigrant family. When I was in college and even my first couple years of graduate school, a lot of my favorite texts were British. For a long time I thought about working in nineteenth-century British literature. But I had a feeling then that I wanted to be able to address the kinds of issues and problems American writers were dealing with in the U.S. context. Ultimately, I went into academia because I felt I was better at it than I was at some other things. I thought I'd go to graduate school for a few years and see if I liked it. I did like it, and here I am.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?It's always hard for me to think beyond my current project, especially when I'm still in the early stages. My mind is so full of different directions in which I might take my current work. So I'm going to have to defer answering that question. Ask me in a couple of years.In one sentence, what is American Studies to you?American Studies means, to me, mutually stimulating disciplinary approaches to issues and histories I care about.
Phillip Barrish is the author of American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995 (Cambridge UP, 2001), White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism (Ohio State UP, 2005), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge UP, 2011). His current research explores fictional representations of health-care systems in the United States from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Announcement: Reading Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"
On Wednesday, October 29, AMS core faculty Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernandez and Dr. Mark Smith are participating in a round table of historians and literary scholars celebrating the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath by reflecting "on the context and controversies surrounding the book’s representation of poverty and dispossession in the United States during the Dust Bowl Era." The event is at 3:30 PM in Garfield 4.100. We hope to see you there.