Activating Public Memory: Robyn Schroeder's Post

[Panel's overall statement: As a panel, we're interested in the many ways in which history and memory have influenced the construction, dissemination, and reception of racialized national mythologies. In each case, the central question revolves around how national mythologies and narratives at the core of an American collective memory have be activated to challenge, bolster, or erase certain issues concerning race and social justice.]

The time had come, according to Barack Obama in his Inaugural Address, for Americans to “choose [their] better history" (emphasis mine). The line was political memory at its finest, openly marrying selective memory to national destiny, the culminating gesture of a campaign in which exhortations to anticipate, recall, and enact history were de rigueur.

The use of historical memory by Obama’s 2008 political campaign provides a superb case study for an important question in memory studies: how do historians of memory adjudicate distinctions between “chosen”and “imposed” memories? I pick up on a point made by Michael Schudson about the vernacular burden of memory; writing about the ways in which readily available idioms, laws, and political conventions manifested themselves during the Iran-contra affair, Schudson argues, “People did not choose the Watergate frame. It chose them. It imposed itself.”[1]I argue that particular memories—specifically, of race baiting, U.S. political assassinations,and partisan animosities—“imposed themselves” in this way on the otherwise triumphalist, civil religious memories chosen by the Obama campaign. The sense of history which emerged joined anxious nostalgia to confident telos, positing the essential American identity as simultaneously master of destiny and victim of history. That tension in national memory has—at this point almost self-evidently—unsettled a segment of the cultural consciousness.

To wet our appetites for thinking about the historical gestures of Obama and what Barry Schwarz calls the “post-heroic” mode ofmemory, I invite readers of the blog to visit (or revisit) the will.i.am video which riffed on Obama’s speech on the occasion of losing the New Hampshireprimary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsV2O4fCgjk

This video, I think, might tell us a great deal about the intersection of chosen and imposed memories. What happens when the face of celebrity substitutes for the image of populism and collective action? How does the song’s mournful tone interact, in terms of political effectiveness, with Obama’s “American history”? If memory is a kind of “enchantment” (as Patrick Wright, in Living in An Old Country, suggests)—that is, memory is history plus certainty—then does this song enchantor disenchant the sphere of national memory?

[1] Michael Schudson, “Lives, Laws, and Language: Commemorative vs. Non-commemorative Forms of Effective Public Memory,” The Communication Review, Vol. 2 (1), 1997, p.13.

Robyn Schroeder, Brown University

The Maps of 66: How Road Maps Built an American Legend

Firstly, I would like to apologize for my late post as I am presenting as part of the West panel and should have gotten this up last week.  

My entry here was intended to be a teaser of the online exhibit I will be presenting in November, but due to technical issues, the website remains incomplete.  That being the case, here’s the textual preview:

Route 66 has become a deep-seated part of American pop-culture, even for those born after the road’s decommissioning. Generations of travelers, including many who have never traveled down its fabled pavement, have adopted it as the icon of the American road trip--a rite of passage that lives on today, even in the face of affordable flights, superhighways and skyrocketing gas prices.  

But how did this come to pass?  A certain amount of mythology can be attributed to figures like John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and Jack Kerouac, but there is another cultural avenue that deserves exploration for its role in the rise of popularity of Route 66.  

Road maps have done far more for popular culture than one would think, but because they were, for most of the twentieth century, the only way to navigate from one place to another they were a highly prominent part of American popular and vernacular culture.  What a road map’s publisher chose to feature was directly related to what was visited by travelers.  As a result, the now-iconic landmarks that lined Route 66 were there largely because someone decided that they deserved to make it--quite literally--onto the map.  

The allure of Route 66 did not come purely from the depictions of the road on maps--such a claim would be far too extreme to be accurate, but in order to understand the way in which the road’s popularity rose and fell in the mid-twentieth century, road maps must be taken into consideration as valuable pieces of ephemera that reveal far more than their authors likely imagined.  

I hope this peaks your interest and I look forward to sharing the full exhibit in November!     

Lucinda Hannington, University of Southern Maine

Whose National Myth?

Any of us can easily recall numerous examples of the appropriation or reinterpretation of the mythic narratives and characters of the Old West by creative artists and writers from outside America—particularly in film, we think of Akira Kurasawa’s Seven  Samurai, Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti  Westerns” in the 1950s and 1960s or even more recently Willem Dafoe’s “le cowboy” character who arrives to console a grieving Parisian mother in Nobuhiro Suwa’s contribution to Paris, Je t’aime! (2006)  The appeal of the Old West myth with its larger-than-life characters and spaces seems to be global, rather than national.  But what can these reinterpretations of the Old West by creative artists from outside the US tell us about the cultural values that motivate them?  Are the elements of the Old West myths so universal that they can fit into any cultural context with a consistent meaning?  

My approach takes an intentional transatlantic context by comparing examples from 20^th century American and European, particularly German, interpretations of the Old West and its characters.  Through this approach I hope to show that the myth of the Old West is infused with values that reflect ideas and attitudes which are more indicative of European rather than American concerns.

Although his writings are hardly known in North America, the novels of the Wild West by the late 19^th century German author Karl May have exerted an influence on the national psyche of Germany for over a century, forming a fixed image of the American West for several generations of Germans that simply cannot be supplanted by the more recent imaginary visions of TV and film Westerns or by any actual first-hand experience of the American West.  In contrast to the North American stereotypes of Western characters, in May’s Western novels the Native American is the “good guy”, the hero, rather than the Cowboy.  May’s admiration for the Native American follows the European tradition of the “noble savage”, but May develops this stereotype even further as he imbues his fictional Western characters, the Apache Winnetou and his white (German) companion Old Shatterhand with personal credos and world views that reflect the author’s own commitment to the principles of the late 19^th century International Peace Movement.

Separated from May by two World Wars and much of Germany’s terrible recent history, in his famous 1974 performance piece, I like America and America likes Me, German artist Joseph Beuys revives the concept of the encounter with an essential spirit of the American West that can catapult modern man into a new ideal relationship with his surroundings.  Winnetou’s murder at the end of May’s trilogy signals the end of this noble race and Beuys begins his encounter at this tragic moment: “I believe I made contact with the psychological trauma point of the United States’ energy constellation: the whole American trauma with the Indian, the Red Man.”  Just as May’s vision of the American West was infused with the philosophical ideals of the International Peace Movement, Beuys too filters his conception of the American West through a philosophical system: the philosophy of spiritual freedom found in the writings of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy.

Finally, the films of German director Wim Wenders present a much less utopian view of the American West.  From Paris, Texas (1984), his first collaboration with Sam Shepard, through Land of Plenty (2004) and Don’t Come Knocking (2006), his most recent collaboration with Shepard, Wenders examines the legacy of the Old West in the increasingly desperate lives of modern Westerners as they struggle with the loss of that legacy in the face of the social, psychological and political realities of the contemporary America.

What I hope to suggest is that the meaning of the Old West for an entire European nation over several generations can be vastly different from the meanings that our American culture imbues in this national myth.  This can have a significant impact on international understanding and particularly on the practice of and on the premises and purposes of American Studies in the US in comparison with our academic counterparts Europe.

Steven Bradley, Colorado Mesa University

The Mobilizing Power of Endangered Femininity

The Black Legend Effect: Images of Mexicans, Cubans, and Spaniards in 19^th Century American Visual Culture, 1848 to 1898

I am pleased to introduce the topic I will be presenting on at the upcoming NEASA conference, on the panel “Visual Arts and Identity.” 

When I saw on CNN reports of the Taliban’s mistreatment of Afghan women in the buildup to the recent U.S. invasion, I thought to myself, here we go again.  There may be some truth to that claim, but it certainly was not driving American military policy.  This type of charge is recurrent in the making of domestic and foreign enemy images throughout American history, and it provides policymakers or propagandists with a rationale for war that upholds the nation's moral mission while eliding the actual strategic gains of such actions.  Just how many times is this country going to justify aggression in the name of protecting women?  My talk isn’t going to answer this question comprehensively, but it will demonstrate the salience of this narrative in the propaganda of two nineteenth century wars.  This theme of endangered femininity has proven effective because it turns action into manly heroism and inaction into selfish negligence.  It also enables media makers to infuse elements of sensation and drama into these political scenarios, amplifying their commercial appeal. By making explicit the formulaic nature of these rallying cries, perhaps we can help make future generations less susceptible to their mobilizing power.

This project grew out of the book I recently completed, which traces patterns of visual representation in a range of cultural forms during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and its imperial aftermath.  It is titled From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and is forthcoming this October from the University of Massachusetts Press.  I realized that cartoonists, filmmakers, playwrights, and other cultural producers often reshaped existing narratives in order to convey the politics of war and empire in simple, compelling ways.  This inspired me to explore the roots of this iconography in earlier conflicts, and I began with the media campaigns of the Mexican-American War.

Media makers predominantly represented the stakes of these international conflicts as sexual melodrama, with the American male hero coming to the rescue of the imperiled Mexican or Cuban woman.  Image makers depicted the Mexicans (and later the Spanish) as a lecherous breed that preys upon women.  Propagandists heightened the enemy threat by drawing upon a set of stereotypes that had existed in Western culture since the sixteenth century – the Black Legend.  When the Spanish empire was at the height of its power, its Northern European rivals branded Spain as exceptionally barbaric and fanatical based on the alleged brutalities of colonialism and the Spanish Inquisition.  Although the Black Legend had originally targeted Spain, media makers in the 1840s fused Spanish and Mexican peoples under the category of the “Latin” race.  They claimed that Spain’s prolonged imperial rule in Latin America and the high incidence of miscegenation between Spanish and native peoples caused Mexico to internalize the characteristics of the Black Legend.  The Black Legend furnished media makers with a shared language to dehumanize the Spanish and Mexicans in 1846 and 1898 in order to rally the nation for war.  The prevailing images of the dark, evil Spanish bandit and the sexualized Latina set important precedents for the representation of Latin American peoples inside and outside American borders in American popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Bonnie Miller, University of Massachusetts Boston

The American Home in the Post-WWII Era

1940 marks a pivotal moment on the U.S. Homeownership Rate graph: looking to a post-war America, architects, designers, and planners saw home as the foundation to national growth and betterment. 

The Veterans Administration Mortgage Program guaranteed low down payments and an increased loan-to-mortgage ratio to returning soldiers, which accounted for significant bump in homeownership during the decades following World War II. 

In addition to this amendment of the G.I. Bill, homeownership grew rapidly in the post-WWII era due to the increase in incomes caused by the strong expansion of the U.S. economy and the new institution of affordable, long-term, fixed-rate, self-amortizing mortgages.^[i] 

The subsidy of homeownership at the end of World War II reaffirmed American rights to those who had fought for the ideals of freedom and liberty and the country transformed from a nation of urban renters to suburban homeowners.

Serving as a testament to this is the 1948 film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

In this film, starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, a man and his wife decide they can afford to have a house in the country built to their specifications… though it turns out to be a lot more trouble than they think.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream Home appeared in Life Magazine in April 1946 after which it was published as a novel and then adapted for the screen.

As a promotion for the film, the studio built 73 “dream houses” in various locations in the United States, most of which were equipped with General Electric appliances.[ii]

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House  (besides being a highly entertaining movie) engages in a fascinating discourse that encompasses issues of homeownership, national identity, consumerism, popular culture, postwar planning (or reconversion), and so much more…

Written by Marieke Van Der Steenhoven

University of Southern Maine, American and New England Studies

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[i] Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter, “The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 97.

[ii] “General Electric has made your Dream House come true!” (advertisement), Life Magazine 24, no. 26 (June 28, 1948): 78.

Stelios Christodoulou's (Pop Culture and Identity) Post

When Rocky was first released in November 1976 many commentators and reviewers quickly noted the racist overtones in the white hero’s struggle to defeat Apollo Creed, the arrogant black champion cast in the unmistakable mould of Muhammad Ali. Andrew Sarris described the film in The Village Voice as “the most romanticized Great White Hope in screen history.” In the real-life world of boxing, similar hopes for the rise of a white heavyweight champion date back to the time of Jack Johnson, the African American title holder from 1908 to 1915.  Johnson managed to defend his title against a series of white opponents and scandalized Jim Crow America with his sexual relationships with white women. At the time, author and amateur boxer Jack London led the campaign for the discovery a great white hope. In 1910, Jim Jeffries returned from a six year retirement to give Johnson a taste of Anglo-Saxon manhood, but ended up a “betrayer of his race” (click here for footage from the fight).

Sarris’s italicized Great White Hope refers to the eponymous 1970 film, adapted from a successful stage play based on Johnson’s life (watch the trailer here). Outwardly, the film seems to criticize the ideology represented in its title, making it blatantly clear that the white establishment had railroaded Johnson’s eventual defeat in the ring. Yet, The Great White Hope does not entirely escape the noble savage paradigm, turning Johnson into a misunderstood hero. As Pauline Kael wrote for The New Yorker, the movie “is so afraid of letting its hero antagonize the audience that instead of having a blonde tucked under each arm, [Johnson] is allowed only one dowdy brunette.”

Six years later, in the immediate post-Civil Rights period and coinciding with the nation’s Bicentennial, a much clearer version of the great white hope returned to the big screen. Rocky topped the box office by refashioning the American dream in a white man’s rags-to-riches story. While Rocky pursues his goal with honesty and hard work, the profit-seeking Apollo Creed stands for the evils of corporatism and a misguided sense of black empowerment. Apollo conceives of the fight as a Bicentennial media spectacle and stages his memorable entry into the ring as a parody of American history. Rocky, however, manages both to go the distance and to teach his black brother a lesson in good sportsmanship, redeeming him of his post-materialist excesses.

Rocky’s nostalgic resurrection of the American dream stands in sharp contrast to the actual Bicentennial celebrations. In the middle of an economic crisis, before the dust of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal had settled, the nation’s anniversary offered as much a chance for celebrating America as for de-mythologizing it. The New York Times described the celebrations as a mixture of “self-doubt, hope and pride,” noting “an undercurrent of uncertainty about what succeeding Fourths of July hold for future generations of Americans.” If we consider how bluntly Rocky presents its racial binaries and how overtly it links them to the Bicentennial, it is indeed hard to disagree with the description of the film as a romanticized great white hope.

With this background in mind, my paper for the conference will attempt to reconsider Rocky’s Bicentennial myth, not so much to refute the prevailing interpretation, but to problematize its obviousness and to explore some the contextual discourses that underpin it. I will consider such questions as the differences between white backlash and white victimization in the mid-70s, the relevance of Stallone’s star persona (it can be difficult to imagine today that he was once hailed as the new Marlon Brando), and the subtle differences between Apollo Creed and Muhammad Ali (watch here a comic exchange between Ali and Stallone at the 1977 Academy Awards, with the former claiming to be the real Apollo Creed). 

For some of the answers I will be looking at the 70s ethnic revival movement. Sarris alludes to the significance of Rocky’s Italian American ethnicity, describing the film’s version of the American dream as “Horatio Algerino style.” I want to propose the argument that the film invests in the cultural cachet of white ethnicity, not only to bring the American dream up to date, but also to render its racial politics more palatable. As an Italian American, Rocky stands for what Jacobson calls a whiteness of a different color, which allows him to believably combine a 70s sense of white victimization with an old-fashioned model of American manhood. 

Stelios Christodoulou, University of Kent.

Dani Abulhawa's (Pop Culture and Identity) Post

In a broad sense, my area of research for the conference is in looking at how specific topographical features and landscapes produce and are visible within cultural narratives. More specifically, I’m using skateboarding and it’s origins within the physical landscape of 1960s LA as my example.

The cultural myth at the centre of my research is the documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). You can have a look at the trailer for the film here: 'Dogtown and Z-Boys' trailer on YouTube

In the documentary, the origins of contemporary skateboarding begin not, as you might expect, with the production of the skateboard, neither with the Z-Boys themselves – this comes a little later. Rather, it begins with a place, ‘Dogtown’, which is defined as an area within Los Angeles county consisting of three beach communities: South Santa Monica, Venice and Ocean Park. 

When I began analysing the documentary, as a sub-cultural creation myth, I expected to discover inherent codes of behaviour and attitude, which corroborated the range of existing research into skateboarders and skateboarding and my own experiences as a British skateboarder. Things such as, rebellion against a perceived mainstream, the rewriting of dilapidated or ‘edgeland’ (Shoard 2002) urban locations as productive play spaces, participant control (Beal 1996) and supportive/competitive homosocial group dynamics (Borden 2001). I also expected to learn more about the relationship between skateboarding and surfing, since what marked the Zephyr team as different from mainstream skateboarding in the 1960s, was their crouching, gliding and generally surf-inspired approach to movement.

What came as a surprise was a particular strand of the narrative that suggests the major significance of simulations of topographical features and landscape to the progression of skateboarding, and an inescapable sense of ‘flow’ as a defining characteristic of the subculture.

As someone whose first-hand experience of skateboarding is based entirely in the UK, when analysing Dogtown and Z-Boys, I couldn’t help but feel like somewhere between LA and the UK, this particular narrative strand had become transformed.

This has led me to consider a number of questions, which I’m hoping to explore in more detail in preparation for my paper in November. These questions are quite broad; I was hoping that perhaps people reading this might have ideas about some of these questions and examples they could raise either inside or outside of a skateboarding context:

ª      How might place contribute to the development of cultural identity?

ª      How might the topographical features and landscape of a place appear within cultural narratives?

ª      If specific cultures are closely linked to landscape, what happens when these cultural narratives are adopted in other places?

Also, because I’m thinking about how place relates to cultural narratives and identity, It’s tricky for me to think about the larger scope of national narratives, since nations consist of such a diversity of places and landscapes.

These are the main questions and concerns I’m working around at the moment, and I’m really keen to hear any perspectives.

Dani Abulhawa, University of Chester

Anne Berke: A Companion Piece to "Nips the Nips"

Herr Meets Hare (1945)

Some issues and questions to consider when watching this cartoon include:

• How have the writers and animators of this cartoon produced a work that speaks to both adults and children?
• How does the stereotyped comedy about Germans differ from that of Japanese in "Nips the Nips"? ("Herr Meets Hare," incidentally, was also unofficially banned from television, but not nearly as stringently as "Nips the Nips.")
• On the subject of banned materials, does the circulation of cartoons like these do more harm or good?

Anne Berke: Sketching out the War Effort: On Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944)

            In 1944, Warner Brothers released Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, a cartoon featuring the title hero defeating not one, but a score of Japanese soldiers while stranded on an unnamed island in the Pacific. Nips the Nips became a target of controversy in the past twenty years for its anti-Japanese slurs and its violence against a series of Japanese caricatures.  This cartoon, recalled from stores for its racist content in 1995, can be found on various internet sites (including the homepage for men’s television channel, Spike.com), but has received no scholarly treatment beyond being deemed hateful war propaganda. Susan Elizabeth Dalton writes in her article “Bugs and Daffy Go to War,” that these “therapeutic cartoons began… with a resurgence of patriotism” (Dalton 159), but she dismisses Nips the Nips as an exhibit of “the awful extent to which cartoons would go in order to bolster American morale through a long and terrible war” (161). Though the cartoon served, in large part, to “bolster morale,” Dalton fails to explore in depth how this was achieved specifically through the cartoon medium.

            In this paper, I will analyze how Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips recreates two national mythologies – the resourceful, smart and individualist American (Bugs Bunny) and the treacherous, conformist Other (the “Nips”).  First, I will examine how the cartoon medium can communicate, visually and narratively, racist attitudes toward the Japanese and the problem of showing violence against the enemy within an animated universe. Second, the cartoon will be placed in the context of the “film bill” – what newsreels and features were these cartoons being shown alongside? – raising questions of authorship and audience. FFFFinally, Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips launches Bugs Bunny into the dual roles of Hollywood star, with the cartoon’s metanarrative discourses, and spokesman for American mythologies.

Eric Smoodin, in his book Animating Culture (1993), writes that the cartoon shares with the feature and not with the newsreel “a fictional narrative, depend[ing] upon a star system as a means of luring an audience, and ma[king] constant use of both comedy and performance” (Smoodin 45). The personality that is Bugs Bunny and the impalpable (yet indispensable) spirit of the nation at war are reinforcing, reciprocal narratives. As Bugs Bunny lends his irreverent, if sadistic, spirit to the war effort, so wartime national patriotism and its attendant xenophobia contribute to the cartoon hero’s emerging status as an American icon.

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<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->Watch "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips" (1944)

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Anne Berke has an MA in Film Studies from Columbia University and is currently at work on a PhD in American Studies/Film Studies at Yale University.