Race and Region in Currier and Ives

I'd like to start with a quick shout-out to my classmate (and fellow renter) Marieke Van Der Steenhoven and her epic week of homeownership and its discontents. In response to Marieke’s query concerning the future of renting and owning I’ll give a brief quotation from everyone’s favorite New England summer tourist Teddie Adorno:

“Whoever flees into genuine but purchased historical housing, embalms themselves alive.”

You're welcome, Marieke.

Although my own presentation is part of the “Arts and Identity” panel on Friday afternoon and has nothing to do with homeownership, it does concern the persistence of American identity narratives that inscribe and normalize rules of national belonging. As my co-presenter Bonnie Miller suggested in her post, the images circulating through public consciousness can give immediate and convincing testimony in favor of governmental policy, whether in the 19th or in the 21st century.

“A Staple Winter Article of Not the Usual Kind”: Currier and Ives’ Darktown in the Northern Winter” examines the relationship between two parallax views of New England in late 19th century visual culture, embodied in the familiar “Old New England” scenes and the once-popular Darktown series. The thought processes that makes these prints legible cannot be separated from policy making of the same period, the 1880s and 1890s, which includes Plessy v. Ferguson and the codification of Jim Crow laws.  Here you're looking at "The Road, Winter," based on a drawing of Nat Currier and his wife near their home in Amesbury, Massachussetts, and the Darktown "A Team Fast on the Snow."

The Darktown series catalogs a staggering number of African American failures at a wide range of activities from firefighting to picnicking. Illustrator Thomas Worth’s vociferous version of the racist comic idiom long used in genre paintings, minstrel shows and cartoons will make most contemporary viewers extremely uncomfortable.

This had not always been the case at Currier and Ives, where in 1872 the printers had expected to make a profit from the serious, respectful group portrait The First Colored Senator and Representatives, in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States. In a similar manner, the widely distributed lithograph of Mathew Brady's photograph of Hiram Revels, a Mississippi senator, offered Northern viewers a rhetorically powerful image of an African American politician. "Whatever may be the prejudices of those who may look upon it," wrote Frederick Douglass about this photograph, "they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi Senator is man."

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Rachel Miller, University of Southern Maine

Home Sings Me of Sweet Things

The issue of home, homeownership, popular culture, public policy, and the inextricable web they weave in our national narrative is fascinating… and I am pleased to be able to present my research and thoughts on the subject at the 2011 New England American Studies Association Conference in November. I hope you will join the “Places and Spaces” panel on Friday, November 4, 2011 at Plimoth Plantation.

In the mean time, I leave you with some of my favorite songs about home... and encourage you to share yours below. 

Little Boxes by Melvina Reynolds 

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one,


And they're all made out of ticky tacky


And they all look just the same.

(or the same song performed by the amazing Pete Seeger) 

This Must Be the Place by the Talking Heads

But I guess I'm already there

I come home –she lifted up her wings

Guess that this must be the place

I can't tell one from another

Did I find you, or you find me?

Home is Where the Heart Is by Elvis Presley

Home is where the heart is

And my heart is anywhere you are

Anywhere you are is home

I don't need a mansion on a hill

That overlooks the sea

Anywhere you're with me is home

I’m Going Back Home by Nina Simone

I'm going back home where I was born

First I planned to stay but I can't live this way

I'm going back home where I was born

Written by Marieke Van Der Steenhoven

University of Southern Maine, American and New England Studies 

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