The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century [1 ed.] 0299338800, 9780299338800

Citation preview

The Divided States

Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography William L. Andrews Series Editor

THE DIVIDED STATES Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century Edited by

Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky

The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press 728 State Street, Suite 443 Madison, Wisconsin 53706 uwpress.wisc.edu Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road London EC1R 5DB, United Kingdom eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2023 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise— or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected]. Printed in the United States of America This book may be available in a digital edition. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beard, Laura J., 1962– editor. | Chansky, Ricia Anne, editor. Title: The divided states : unraveling national identities in the twenty-first century / edited by Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky. Description: Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021061654 | ISBN 9780299338800 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: American prose literature—21st century—History and criticism. | Autobiography. | National characteristics, American. Classification: LCC PS366.A88 D58 2022 | DDC 818/.08—dc23/eng/20220809 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061654

Contents

vii

Acknowledgments Contested Lives, Contesting Lives

Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard

3

Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba’igaade Gichimookomaanakiing: Tied and Untied in America

27

Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women’s Diaries

38

“Strange Juxtapositions”: Elliott Erwitt’s Visual Diary of Cold War America

56

The Legacy of Conquest in Comics: Texas History Movies, Jack Jackson, and Revision

90

Margaret Noodin

Joycelyn K. Moody

Steven Hoelscher

Daniel Worden

We Have Never Been a Nation of Immigrants: Refugee Temporality as American Identity Elizabeth Rodrigues

v

116

vi

Contents

Archival Intervention: Surviving the “Savage Splintering” in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians

140

Juneteenth

156

Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

167

White Privilege and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Eleg y

194

Indians in Monumental Places: Heid Erdrich and Jeff Thomas

211

Getting Schooled: Responses to Education as Neoliberal Identity-Formation in US Life Narratives

236

Disabling Birth: Prognostic Certainty and the Gestating Citizen of the Contemporary Midwifery Movement

253

“A small flashlight in a great dark space”: Elizabeth Warren, Autobiography, and Populism

276

Autobiographical Reckonings in America’s Restless Twenty-First Century

296

Contributors Index

325 331

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

Angela Ards

Katie Hogan

Stephanie Li

Laura J. Beard

Megan Brown

Ally Day

Rachael McLennan

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Acknowledgments

The labor of constructing this book spanned two hurricanes, an earthquake swarm, a global pandemic, and more. We are very grateful to the outstanding scholars who have contributed to this volume and are especially thankful for their patience, unwavering enthusiasm, and all-around good cheer. Thank you to our anonymous peer reviewers for their generous reading of the manuscript; their incredibly positive and insightful feedback helped shape the final draft of this book. Bill Andrews and the University of Wisconsin Press extended generous support for this volume throughout the process, which we greatly appreciate. Laura would like to thank the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta for providing research assistant support that provided editorial assistance at critical stages of this volume, with special appreciation to Malou Brouwer and Jordan Ashworth for their excellent work at different stages of preparation. Laura thanks Ricia for her amazing energy, commitment, and knowledge of the field of life narratives that have guided this project throughout. She also gives particular thanks to Thomas T. Barker and Murray John Beard for their support of lives lived across borders, sometimes untied by distance and chaos, but always united by love. One night in Cyprus, Laura knocked on Ricia’s hotel room door and they had a good laugh over a hilarious typo (“Untied States”) and then sat down to map out a book about the intersections of auto/biographical narratives and American studies. And then there came a hurricane, and then an earthquake swarm, and then a global pandemic. What began as two friends working

vii

viii

Acknowledgments

together on a volume about contested identities in the twenty-first-century United States became a lifeline from stratified disasters to joy, laughter, and camaraderie. Ricia is very grateful to Laura for being a constant source of uplift throughout that period. As always, Ricia feels lucky to have a partner who is also first reader, most honest critic, and most enthusiastic supporter; thank you, Eric D. Lamore. Thank you also to her parents, Patricia and Howard. Ricia would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at York University where she is a research associate. This appointment has generously supported her research for years. As this book goes to press after the passing of Hurricanes Fiona and Ian, we note that our world continues to be divided into those safe states, communities, and countries that have reliable access to water, electricity, and other critical resources and those that do not.

The Divided States

Contested Lives, Contesting Lives Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard The notion that there is some cultural totality of American experience, whose origins could be traced and plotted, may prove in the end to be one of the most enduring of Americanists’ illusions. Paul John Eakin, American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect

T

his book was borne of error. While editing together a manuscript, we caught a finger slip that had the United States mislabeled as the Untied States. The incorrect nomenclature stayed with us, rattling around in our heads until we began to see it as an apt means of de­ scribing what we were observing in these early years of the twenty-first century: a disjuncture that emphasized interpersonal differences—historic and contemporary—as a means of undermining concepts of national belonging and creating multiple others positioned outside of the fabricated notion of a homogeneous US citizenry. We wanted to know just who counted as the “We the People” of our contemporary moment. Whose identities, lives, and life nar­ ratives are included in both the widely propagandized lore of the great Ameri­ can melting pot—and its incarnations as a mosaic or tapestry—and in the counternarratives to the national imaginary that circulate in numerous multi­ modal auto/biographical narratives and auto/biographical acts? Furthermore, we wished to interrogate where the dominant mythologies of a single story of US national identity intersect with the lived experiences of individuals and communities as chronicled in their life stories. Where do they diverge from the 3

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Chansky and Beard / Contested Lives, Contesting Lives

prescriptive national narrative, and how do those deviations complicate pro­ ductively our understandings of the landscapes of national belonging in the twenty-first century?1 In short, what divided the United States? The ideas for this project germinated under the last years of President Barack Obama’s administration as a means of parsing the growing backlash against legal and social gains made by multiple marginalized communities. We wanted to explore why immigration—both the idea of refugee resettlements and pathways toward citizenship for the children of people without such paperwork— struck such chords of unrest in a nation whose mythos emphasizes the immi­ grant narrative as one of the main threads purportedly woven into its ideologies of belonging. The two of us envisioned a space in which to grapple with the building surge of gendered rhetorics aimed at rolling back marriage equality, women’s rights over their own bodies, and protections for trans peoples that was developing alongside the reemergence of openly racialized divisions and persecutions that we had dared to hope were losing traction in the early years of the Obama administration. This volume also came into being at a time when Indigenous activists (and others) engaged in widely visible protests against an oil pipeline that cut across reservation lands, protests which underscored ad­ ditional divisions that can be traced back to how the country called the United States came into being as well as the broken treaties that remain as untied bonds and unkept promises on our lands. More and more people were unjustly persecuted by representatives of systems put in place to protect citizens, and we conceived of this project as part of the efforts to investigate and un­­dermine such antagonisms. As we witnessed innumerable attacks on the significant gains made under second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement, and other aggressions contributing to the growing unrest surrounding us, we wondered what a study of the texts of the current auto/biographical boom could tell us about this backlash of exceptionalism impacting interpretations of the US national story.2 Within this complex moment, however, we were also curious as to how new theoretical paradigms and methodological approaches to reading life narra­ tives could help us understand the strands of exceptionalism and its counter­ narratives interwoven into the history of the United States that have immense bearing on the many challenging issues that we face today. This work is predi­ cated on an understanding that the US national story has always erased the stories of the nations that predate the establishment of the country currently called the United States, the sovereign Indigenous nations whose histories, lan­ guages, and cultures remain a vibrant part of the stories told of and on these lands.

Chansky and Beard / Contested Lives, Contesting Lives

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This nation is not and has never been one nation but has always been a land of many nations, the Lakota Nation, the Navajo Nation, the Kiowa Na­ tion, and many, many more Indigenous sovereign nations. The story of settler colonialism has meant that first such colonizing powers as Spain, Portugal, France, and England, and then the United States and Canada claimed authority over the maps, the land, the peoples and “the commercial, economic, scientific, intellectual, political and legal relations that travel with human interactions” (75) on this land, as Lee Maracle notes in Memory Serves. But Maracle also re­ minds us that, for her Salish people, stories serve as reminders that “we are re­ sponsible for remembering from within our original context. Remembering is a process of being fed by the past, not just my past but my ancestral past, the earth’s past, and the past of other human beings. We are responsible for pulling the best threads of our past forward to re-weave our lives together” (14). Mara­ cle’s powerful invocation of how stories serve the Salish people and her Stó:loˉ nation encourages us to ask if others might learn from such a generous and generative notion of stories and whether the discussions of life stories in this collection might start urging us down such a pathway. Grappling with existing theoretical frameworks of the new American stud­ ies is a useful way to begin deconstructing what we are reading and seeing in nuanced and multifaceted identity performances. Auto/biographical narra­ tives are and have been an essential component of American studies and the various area studies that grew from a post–World War II dedication to analyz­ ing the United States and what it means to identify on individual and commu­ nity levels as a member of this nation.3 In 1977, Robert F. Sayre made the foundational argument that auto/biographical narratives are indispensable to American studies, as they “offer a broader and more direct contact with Ameri­ can experience than any other kind of writing” (“Proper Study” 241).4 Jay Pa­ rini has now famously referred to auto/biography as “a form of writing closely allied to our national self-consciousness” (11). Therefore, we take as a ground­ ing component of this collection an understanding that auto/biographical nar­ ratives and acts are an appropriate means of reading the state of the nation, with the understanding that “nation” for our purposes is indicative of the mul­ tiplicities of this geographic space that we now refer to as the United States. This recognition of the interrelationship between narration and nation­ hood, however, may be even more illuminating within the contours of the United States. “After all, the United States is the result of a radical speech act: a nation created by a declaration” (955), explains Anna Mae Duane. And this originary act of writing the nation into being through the Declaration of Inde­ pendence has left an irrefutable impression on the US imaginary.5 If a speech

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act can create a nation, what power is held by those who speak of the nation? The ongoing history of a nation space written (or otherwise narrated) into exis­ tence is both recorded in and emergent from the life stories of its peoples as auto/biographies become mechanisms essential to the incessant re/structuring of the national imaginary: sites in which to build, reinforce, wrestle with, and undermine concepts of belonging.6 Sayre refers to the “peculiarly linked” tra­ jectories of the United States and formalized ideas of self-narration in the West (“Autobiography” 147)—a connection that we in turn tie to the long and continu­ ous tradition of narrating the nation into being. In other words, the stories we tell contribute to making, sustaining, and remaking the nation, for good or ill.7 The speech act that rendered the nation, however, must also be read as an­ other aspect of the US creation story that erases the violence inherent within this inception. That originary declaration establishes a new nation that is forci­ bly superimposed over other preexisting sovereign nations at the expense of those nations and peoples. The Declaration of Independence is, therefore, an act of hostility that creates by destroying, erasing, and silencing. The work of this volume, then, is to parse radical acts of listening and witnessing as multiple narrative threads begin to be untangled and rewoven into a national story. What most interests us in this framework is the ways in which auto/biogra­ phers have the power to contribute to narrating the nation into being. What abilities do they hold to speak themselves into the weave of this nation? Life narratives can function as signifiers of belonging, or what Sidonie Smith de­ scribes as “occasion[s] for assembling and claiming identities” (565) on national levels. It becomes imperative, then, to understand who has the ability or oppor­ tunity to tell their stories and who does not, just as it is important to interrogate the circulation and promotion (or lack thereof) of certain life stories. Just what are we narrating into being in the United States and to what purpose? The new American studies is a helpful framework to consider as we begin to answer these questions. Scholars engaged in this discourse community strive to recognize intranational, transnational, and comparative components of national identity constructions that supersede the traditional boundaries of nationhood— geographic and imagined—for their potential to revise and destabilize the insu­ larities of exceptionalism.8 As John Carlos Rowe explains, the new Americanists’ objective must be to “construct . . . the terms of intracultural and intercultural affiliation by means of which we can transcend successfully the monolingual and monocultural myth of ‘America’ that is both a political and an intellectual anachronism” (New 4). In 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin expanded this line of in­ quiry with her query, “What would the field of American studies look like if the transnational rather than the national were at its center?” (“Crossroads” 23).9

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And, while we intend to bring into dialogue together the study of narrated lives in and related to the United States with elements of this new American studies, we recognize that aspects of this discourse are simultaneously vital to and un­ stable within the spaces of our uncertain geopolitical times.10 Complications with applying the theoretical contexts of the new American studies to a contemporary study of US auto/biographical narratives arise in the current institutional backlashes against the postnational turn that urge a return to identities that embrace notions of exceptionalism. In the early stages of our planning for The Divided States, we learned the results of the 2016 US presidential election in which a candidate won based on his rhetorical promo­ tions of exclusionary practices that seek to ostracize multiple marginalized oth­ ers. And, while the 2020 election ousted that populist politician and his administration, divisive Trumpian rhetoric malingers, perhaps the undermin­ ing of bodily autonomy and the right to privacy propagated by the US Supreme Court being one of the most tangible examples of this perpetuation. This col­ lection, then, has had to evolve as the national rhetoric encouraged by this pop­ ulism has likewise been transformed. The issues that were of concern to us as the repercussions from perceived revisions to the national narrative—moving toward a more multidimensional, inclusive story—have exploded into frequent instances of outright persecution. These occasions have often erupted in vio­ lent exchanges, such as the murder of George Floyd, culminating in the armed insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Our interests nec­ essarily widened from academic inquiry into the constitution of a dis/unifying national narrative to include a deeper understanding that the lives in life narra­ tives have active roles to play in molding this tempestuous era and how the na­ tion will emerge from this contemporary crisis, one made all the more volatile by a global pandemic left unchecked in the United States by the Trump admin­ istration.11 The essays included in this volume, then, are situated as an explora­ tion of self-narration in the United States that traces the interplay of the national narrative and the frequent departures from it in a time of backlash against pluralism and a concurrent rise of popularism, while pointing to some of the possible futures of auto/biography studies as they pertain to studying and even influencing identity constructions in the United States. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, among others, have pointed to the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of global democracies in the wake of the Cold War as the spark that ignited the postnational turn in American studies.12 This premise suggests that the reemergence of global Russian influence— including interference in the 2016 and 2020 US elections as well as the 2022 in­ vasion of Ukraine—would signal the beginning of a new chapter in American

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studies and the ways in which we engage with auto/biographies in and about the United States. It remains to be seen, though, at the time of writing this in­ troduction how these events will reshape American studies.13 What seems cer­ tain, however, is that these incidents will have a deep and sustained impact on how US national identities are performed and how we approach the life stories that explore such individual and communal identity constructions. It is clear that a paradigm shift is in order.14 While by no means exhaustive, this collection of essays functions as an entry point into discussions regarding US national identity formations in the twenty-first century as they are shaped by the hap­ penings of our contemporary moment and the manifestations of historical complexities in the dualities of acceptance and rejection faced by the multitu­ dinous peoples who compose the United States. Reading and rereading nar­ rated lives serves as our measure of difficult—and frequently conflicting—ideas of belonging in a nation marked by instability and mutability. National narratives are eternally fluctuating. There are events so momen­ tous that their influence alters ideations of appropriate performances of be­ longing: the perceived depth of the incident influencing the level at which it pervades and reforms interpretations of national identity, at times shifting irrev­ ocably concepts of belonging. In American Autobiography after 9/11, for example, Megan Brown comments on the “intense anxiety about identity” after the ter­ rorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as “Americans wondered who they were individually and collectively” (4).15 She ascribes the ubiquity of reality televi­ sion series, social media, and the publication and consumption of memoirs post-9/11 to the pressures to redetermine what it means to be American in an era of national insecurity. She suggests that these auto/biographical texts— with special attention to memoir—can be read as the record of the nation as “the genre addresses many and multiple aspects of identity . . . symptomizing contemporary US tensions about these same aspects of identity” (5). In other words, the trend in the US popular media is to focus on identities of belonging triggered by the collective trauma of undermined perceptions of exceptional­ ism enacted by the attacks against the nation on 9/11.16 Likewise, the election of an African American president in 2009 impacted dramatically interpretations of belonging in the United States; this event seemed to signal, at least for some observers, the dawning of an age of possibility in which inherited biases were slowly dissolving. In commentary on the shifting landscapes of opportunity, Robert Stepto wonders how our approaches to and reading contexts for African American literatures shifted “knowing . . . that an African American writer is our president” (3).17 We suggest that Stepto’s query

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has far broader implications. A rephrasing of his question might interrogate what Obama’s presidency means to re/reading a highly racialized, exclusion­ ary national narrative containing ideas of who is important within the compo­ sition of the United States, and how the election of a Black man to the highest office of the nation impacts these notions of who counts and who does not. The positive and negative reactions to President Obama’s tenure have con­ clusively affected the United States and forced—often contradictory—rewrites to the national narrative. And, while it is an exciting period in which to be edit­ ing a book situated at the intersections of auto/biography studies and Ameri­ can studies, there are certain challenges that emerge from this labor as the field of American studies and the nation it reflects are in states of ongoing fluctua­ tion. There have been other systematized attempts to understand contempo­ rary cultural production in the United States through the discourses of American studies in the “Age of Trump.”18 The Journal of Transnational American Studies, for example, published a special issue in 2017 on “Transnational Ameri­ can Studies in the ‘Age of Trump,’” in which the guest editors point out that “a central theme of Trump administration discourse is its strident defense of physical borders and its general attack on undocumented workers, immigrants, and refugees” (Kim and Robinson 2). This positionality stands in direct con­ frontation to the transnational turn and one that we see as reactionary to steps made toward inclusion and equity across borders. Fishkin reminds us that US literatures have always been and always will be in transit, ones perpetually moving back and forth across borders, no matter who sits in the White House (“Transnational” 483). As she states, the migratory nature of text is indisputable—more than ever in our digitally driven Web 2.0 world. However, of greater concern to this project is what diminished interpre­ tations of transnational and intranational selves might mean to the creation and consumption of auto/biographical texts. This apprehension grows in magnitude under our assertion that the textual transactions of life stories are one of the means through which the nation is narrated into being. What futures are possible under restrictions geared toward reifying assertions of a singular national narrative that privileges dominant Eurocentric models at the expense of the realities of an extremely diverse US population? How is the national narrative impacted by recognitions of conflicting and contested perspectives? If we begin to recognize the stratified impact that repercussions against in­ clusionary practices have on US identity constructions in this ongoing “Age of Trump”—both domestically and internationally—how do our strategies for reading auto/biographies need to change? How, for example, do we relate to

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the inherent promises of truth values in Philippe Lejeune’s influential theory of the autobiographical pact—and the many responses to the concept that both extend and contest his ideas—in a “postfactual” era, one in which, while Trump might be out of office, his ideals live on in numerous groups formed in support of nationalism, exceptionalism, and even domestic terrorism? Duane suggests that “Trumpism’s sustained attack on authority—in academia, in journalism, in government itself—has forced us all to reassess, if not realign, our own relationship to truth, and our own methodologies for excavating it” (954). Writers and scholars of life narratives may find reading auto/biographi­ cal narratives and acts particularly challenging during this “Age of Trump” in part because Trump himself, as Tim O’Brien points out, is “constantly narrat­ ing his own reality television series, and it now just happens to be the presi­ dency” (quoted in Parker and Costa). This former president, however, not only narrates his accounts of world events through his own heavily colored filters but revises and renarrates events to suit his whims. What futures are he and his followers talking into being as they narrate and renarrate the nation?19 Rowe encourages researchers to “consider our academic work as part of . . . a resistance” (“Trump” 17) against populism. “As rational, historically informed scholars,” he states, “we have an obligation to continue to teach and write the truth” (“Trump” 17). This assertion seems particularly apropos to the study of multiple and diverse life stories. In this fragile moment, reexamining whose sto­ ries, particularly whose life stories, we see, hear, read, and tell seems critically important, especially in light of the numerous catastrophes we have encoun­ tered in the twenty-first century. Cherokee scholar and author Daniel Heath Justice speaks of the importance of finding “the strength and the trust to tell different kinds of stories[.] Stories that are truthful about who we are, stories that connect us to the world, one another, and even ourselves” (4). For in the end, “stories govern us” (Maracle 35). We want to reflect on whose stories are gov­ erning us now and could more attention to a broader weave of life narratives, to the brilliant threads across these life stories, allow us to weave anew the com­ munities and the nations within the Divided States? It is vital to remember, however, that this too shall pass; that even the vitriol of the Trump presidency will ultimately transition into history. Perhaps more imperative and persistent than questions of how this presidential administra­ tion has impacted the production, consumption, and study of life narratives in and about the United States is a move toward understanding the repeating cy­ cles of history that allow for such a person to win an election. “It is tempting to read Trump as an anomaly,” Duane cautions. “But those of us charged with engaging and translating the past that Trumpists evoke with such unabated

Chansky and Beard / Contested Lives, Contesting Lives

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nostalgia find much that forces the painful realization that Trump’s rise, in a nation founded on bold declarations that obscure a host of truths, ‘makes sense’” (955). Any maneuvers that we might undertake to fix a static national identity are therefore unsustainable because what we define as the United States is itself unstable and vulnerable to cyclical changes. This mutability is perhaps the lasting area of investigation emergent from our collection. Rem­ nants of this populist insurgence will remain imbedded in the US collective psyche; just as other events of great magnitude have made their indelible mark. These remains will meet and mix with the periodic reappearances of exclu­ sionism and exceptionalism that historically arise during times of national inse­ curity, and they will likewise shadow the times that we move forward into spaces of inclusion and equity. Any study of US identity constructions, therefore, needs to be one that encompasses the duality of belonging and not belonging that is indicative of the trajectory of this place called united. We hope that future studies of the auto/biographical will benefit from our initial ventures into contending with these ideas of just who are counted as “We the People” in our contemporary moment as one that is inescapably shaped by competing histories of the United States. Regardless of the political era, how­ ever, we commit to this project about the diversity of life narratives in the coun­ try we are calling divided because we believe that life narratives matter within the fluctuations of national identity. Stories about lives matter. Justice writes el­ oquently that “diverse stories can strengthen, wound, or utterly erase our hu­ manity and connections, and how our stories are expressed or repressed, shared or isolated, recognized or dismissed” (xvii) always matters. Some of the contributors to this book engage directly with the complexities of reading auto/biographical narratives and acts in this unrelenting “Age of Trump,” while others comment on historic and contemporary cyclical recur­ rences of rejections from sites of national belonging that have in some way led to this era of exclusionary practices. Stephanie Li, for instance, situates her analysis of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy squarely within Trump’s exclusionary rhetoric implied by his “Make America Great” campaign slogan, while Steven Hoelscher’s chapter on photographer Elliott Erwitt examines visual traces of inclusion and exclusion born in the Cold War that signify recurring movements within US history. Our volume follows the model laid out in Eakin’s American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect in that it traces some of the historical underpinnings of the trends in life narratives on which we are commenting in order to both under­ stand this contemporary moment of conflicting national identity constructions and speculate on the futures of life stories and the lives they chronicle in the

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contested space known as the United States. In light of this approach, we have organized the essays to emphasize their interconnectedness in contemporary ways of reading narrated lives and new textual production in and about the United States as well as to encourage dialogue among the contributions. Readers will note that woven throughout the collection is sustained atten­ tion to cultural or human geography with a focus on the physical places and imagined spaces that narrators occupy and how that drives their interpreta­ tions of their selves as related to the United States. In their indispensable over­ view of the field, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and  Julia Watson build connections among place, space, and life narrative—including material surrounds, social spaces, geopolitical spaces, in­ teriority, and memory and spatialization (42–49)—as well as point to the inter­ sections of critical geographies and life narrative as an underexplored praxis that promises to yield fruitful study of the craft of self-representation (222). Pa­ mela Moss wonders if “autobiography inevitably brings with it notions of space and place. Perhaps space is already always present in autobiography” (194). These observations lead Moss to suggest that “a spatial understanding is fundamental to any social relation” (194). This point is apropos to our argu­ ments in that the physical and imagined relationships to the land of the United States—as well as the ideas and impressions of this geographic mass—figure heavily into the life stories studied in this volume. These collected essays on the means by which we create a contemporary awareness of belonging and not belonging to the nation are imbedded in understandings of situatedness that are tied to the landscapes of an imagined United States. Katie Hogan’s chapter on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, for example, contextualizes her analysis of this graphic memoir in rural queer studies to document how complex attachments to land, region, folkways, and nature become vital factors in LGBTQIA2S+ identity constructions; while Angela Ards situates her self-reflexive study of oral histories of Black migrations in the contexts of urban histories to deter­ mine the culturally specific ways residents occupied and produced space, a sense of home. Also built into the theoretical foundations of our collection is an under­ standing that the field of auto/biography studies is multimodal and interdisci­ plinary. The international field of auto/biography studies has a long history of recognizing the multimodality of life narratives, especially the need to compre­ hend the numerous and varied means by which subjects narrate their lives.20 Smith and Watson, among others, have long advocated for inclusionary theo­ retical frameworks that favor multigenre approaches, such as automediality; they maintain that “in approaching life storytelling in diverse visual and digital

Chansky and Beard / Contested Lives, Contesting Lives

13

media, we need to expand our conceptualization of the media in life writing” (168). “Through heterogeneous media,” they explain, “the archive of the self in time, in space, and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (190). In light of these acknowledgments and the countless other projects recog­ nizing the multimodality of life narratives, we have constructed this text with the assumption that it is now agreed on within the field that the auto/biograph­ ical is genre-breaking in that it spans any means by which a subject can selfnarrate, directly or referentially. Hertha D. Sweet Wong further asserts that “interart autobiography forms and creates a matrix of American identity in all its plurality, creativity, and messiness” (10). We would like to extend this com­ ment to suggest that the diversity of personhood in the United States is perhaps best represented through the dynamic interrelations of the many modes of selfexpression employed in narrating lives. In our collection, we have placed into conversation analyses of memoirs and other more traditional forms of auto/ biographical narration with essays that engage with visual culture, digital texts, graphic narratives, epistolary exchanges, diaries, oral histories, and self-reflexive manuals, among others. What is perhaps somewhat newer to the field is a recognition that as auto/ biography surpasses the borders of literary studies to include multiple other genres, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways of practicing biographical research likewise become crucial to the study of narrated lives, including the exchange, inclusion, and incorporation of various methodological approaches emergent from a host of discourse communities situated within and outside the humanities.21 Wong notes that, while the lines between areas of study have been historically rigid, “disciplinary borders and medium-specific art practices have become increasingly permeable,” which is reflected in the contemporary study of “hybrid forms of autobiography that blur disciplinary boundaries” (1–2). Alfred Hornung observes, “The increasing interest in the social sciences and the media in life writing has led to a number of innovative interdisciplinary approaches” (American x). He notes, as well, that “the United States of America seems to be at the forefront of such new interdisciplinary approaches to the subject of life” (xi). Again, we suggest that it is the plurality of US identity con­ structions and the rejection of notions of a fixed or static identity that lend themselves particularly well to transgressing the boundaries of disciplinary methodologies. A 2017 special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, “What’s Next? The Fu­ tures of Auto/Biography Studies,” coedited by Emily Hipchen and Ricia Anne Chansky, for example, includes contributions from anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, historians, an art historian, a sociologist, a geneticist, and an

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archaeologist as well as scholars located in departments of literature, educa­ tion, cultural studies, media studies, performance studies, and gender studies. Hipchen and Chansky emphasize in the introduction to this special issue that their objective is to encourage academic discourse to move toward a state of “radical inclusion” that engages multidisciplinary methodological approaches and multimodal understandings of the textualities and genres of narrated lives in tandem with scholarly interactions that emphasize inclusivity across geo­ graphic, cultural, linguistic, generational, and disciplinary boundaries (140–41). In our volume, we have committed to continue the work of constructing inter­ disciplinary engagements initiated in this special issue and several other collec­ tions with the added layer that we see this transmethodological approach as particularly pertinent to a study of the United States. This volume opens with Margaret Noodin’s work on naming and the ways in which learning a language—such as Anishinaabemowin—offers new ways of thinking about national identity. Her chapter, “Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba’igaade Gichimookomaanakiing: Tied and Untied in America,” traces the power of naming as a tool to make and unmake “federal laws and social norms that impact traditional relationships with water, land, and all life.” Ideas related to Duane’s assertion that the United States was talked and written into being emerge as Noodin traces some of the ways in which various Native lan­ guages name the United States: Gichimookomaanakiing (Land of the Long Knives), xwelitem (starving people), so:ya:po: (those of the “upside down face,” a reference to white men who had bald heads but wore beards). She asserts that “America is a name, a place, a constructed identity. Ideas about being Ameri­ can depend on diverse personal experiences and existential notions of geopo­ litical identity.” For Noodin, naming and renaming are practices that remake identities, and she asserts that “to imagine a future in America, we must exam­ ine accidental and intentional connections through recollection and reconcilia­ tion. We need to untie, or retie, ideas of identity, equity, and responsibility relative to place and time.” In the following chapter, “Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women’s Diaries,” Joycelyn K. Moody furthers the idea of develop­ ing languages of self-identification that resituate the self through the explora­ tion of the “social, psychic, and even physical sicknesses” plaguing African American women. Moody explains that “even when Black women write pre­ sumably for an audience of one—that is, themselves alone—they nonetheless demonstrate a commitment to ending national myths and replacing devastat­ ing stories with narratives to foster greater equity and peace across multiple communities.” Moody’s analysis encourages us to see the private space of the

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diary as a record of internal struggles to resituate identity within the scope of “US national unremitting racialized violence, its white supremacy and hetero­ normative patriarchal threat to embodied Blackness and Black intersectional experience.” In his chapter, “‘Strange Juxtapositions’: Elliott Erwitt’s Visual Diary of Cold War America,” Steven Hoelscher interweaves several examples of photo­ graphs from Erwitt’s postwar oeuvre—images of Jim Crow, the Rosenberg ex­ ecutions, ecological destruction, among others—to argue that the discerning eye of the photographer captures a starker reality behind the glossy façade of US harmony and prosperity during the Cold War era. “Overt politics are oc­ casionally highlighted,” explains Hoelscher, “but more often, a recognition of social fractures, economic inequality, and uneven geographic development hide just beneath the surface, informing the photographic depiction of sur­ faces.” Hoelscher argues that the experiential situatedness of Erwitt as a refu­ gee and the only child of displaced Jewish Russians who immigrated to the United States in 1939 honed his focus on “dislocation and outsider identities.” As Hoelscher maintains, Erwitt’s visual diary, constructed from his unique per­ spective, “documents a splintering world, where dreams of an idyllic, postwar America are shown to be wishful thinking.” Underground comix artist Jack Jackson is the focus of Daniel Worden’s chapter, “The Legacy of Conquest in Comics: Texas History Movies,  Jack  Jack­ son, and Revision.” Worden situates Texas History Movies—a comic strip pub­ lished in the Dallas Morning News in the 1920s and then republished as a book for the public schools of Texas from 1928 to 1961—as a comic dedicated to “cham­ pioning the commercial development accomplished in Texas by Anglo set­ tlers.” Assigned to read Texas History Movies as a child,  Jackson “writes back” to this decidedly one-sided text in his own biographical comix that “detail the lives of Anglos, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Chicanos in Texas as in­ volved in an uneven, violent process of colonization.” Retelling histories in and across this genre, argues Worden, encourages readers to think “of history as a progressive story . . . in which individuals figure only fleetingly,” which allows Jackson (and others) to contest and complicate the hegemonic conceptions of settler colonialism and imperial violence. Sparked by Barack Obama’s 2014 missive that “we are and always will be a nation of immigrants,” Elizabeth Rodrigues interrogates the historic trajectory of immigration and assimilation contrasted against contemporary waves of refugees seeking asylum in her chapter, “We Have Never Been a Nation of Im­ migrants: Refugee Temporality as American Identity.” Critiquing the over­ coming narrative in which “the United States is always . . . the physical and

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metaphysical end to the refugee’s flight rather than the scene of its continua­ tion,” Rodrigues suggests that the “geographic and temporal cropping of the immigrant narrative frame acts to obscure the role that the United States has played in both the violent beginnings of many migrant subjects’ movements toward the United States and their ongoing captivity.” Rodrigues concludes that “it is not the crossing of a national border or a period of itinerancy that defines the subject of refugee temporality. It is the disinvestment from a narra­ tive that portrays movement across and within the US border as a telos of agential self-betterment.” “Place, especially in Indigenous contexts, is wed to time,” explains Hertha D. Sweet Wong in her chapter, “Archival Intervention: Surviving the ‘Savage Splin­ tering’ in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians.” Wong clarifies that “to know a place, to belong to a place, to be defined by a place, one has to know its history, the stories that arise from it, the lived experience in it.” Using the larger story of Na­­ tive American peoples in California to parse through her own family history, Miranda’s visual-verbal memoir “critique[s] photographic and ethnographic documentation of Indigenous people . . . [in order] to claim a contemporary In­­ digenous subjectivity, while acknowledging the impossible history it survived.” Perhaps the larger issue at stake in Wong’s chapter, is, as she articulates, the fact that in Bad Indians, Miranda lays bare Indigenous counternarratives that, though they have always existed, were (temporarily) suppressed by settler-colonial sto­ ries of entitlement and exceptionalism. Miranda, then, helps dismantle the mas­ ter narratives of the nation, highlighting how the United States has always been divided—a collection of competing, violently suppressed stories—of In­ digeneity, enslavement, and violence against women. Angela Ards’s autoethnographic chapter on the Black neighborhood of Hamilton Park, Texas, “Juneteenth,” interweaves cultural geography and oral history “to consider how residents defined themselves and their community through ritual and tradition.” Resisting a “scholarly focus on moving popula­ tions” that “has obscured the everyday lived experiences of Black Americans who never left the US South,” Ards instead choses to focus on a story of “lived Black history transforming the South.” Her homecoming and participation in the annual Juneteenth parade—particularly meaningful in Texas—is a cause to reflect on the cross-generational signifiers of national identities constructed in this “close-knit community of 750 families in the heart of Dallas . . . the first planned enclave for Black Americans in the city.” Her work demonstrates the urgency of a roof of one’s own—a committed space of belonging—especially within the contested spaces and places of American idealism tied to the neighborhood.

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Drawing from a framework of rural queer studies, Katie Hogan incorpo­ rates cultural geography into her complication of the implied binaries of space and place in her chapter, “Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Arguing that “numerous texts and images in the memoir reveal how the life-changing impact of rural and metropolitan queer cultures on Alison and her father . . . suggest spatial interconnections—instead of fixed borders,” Hogan asserts that “Fun Home’s hybrid spatial imaginary and contem­ porary rural-based activism” in the Trump era suggest “how the rural-andurban divide that continues to animate the current political environment is rooted in the same dangerous dualities that Bechdel . . . and other scholars try to dis­ mantle.” Beyond political rhetorics that might build sweeping generalizations regarding the impact of space and place on identity constructions, however, Hogan’s work reminds us of the dangers of collapsing individuals into region­ alized oversimplifications. In her contribution, “White Privilege and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy,” Stephanie Li argues that Vance “seeks to chronicle a population in decline, victim not only of deindustrialization and shifts in globalized economies but also of a pervasive and most often self-induced isolation. This isolation is em­ blematic of certain racial assumptions and desires that maintain the tacit enti­ tlements of whiteness.” While Li acknowledges the cycles of poverty, substance abuse, abandonment, and displacement that Vance situates as roadblocks in his overcoming narrative—positioned within the context of Trumpian rhetoric that suggests making America great “again” is a means of resituating the crafted exceptionalism of white men—she concludes that “despite his best ef­ forts to avoid or dismiss the role of race in his life, Vance remains a white man in a white man’s world” suggesting that “to confront and reverse the crisis he observes, Vance and others need to first acknowledge how the value and nature of whiteness has changed in the United States.” Understanding the ways in which contemporary self-narration can make, unmake, and remake established ideas of national belonging is paramount to Laura J. Beard’s contribution, “Indians in Monumental Places: Heid Erdrich and Jeff Thomas.” Calling on recent movements to reimagine national monuments— and the resistance to doing so under the Trump administration—Beard posits that these locations “were increasingly recognized as sites for public reckoning with present and past injustices.” Studying Heid Erdrich’s poetry in National Monuments and the photography of Jeff Thomas, she explores the role of public memorials in upholding the “false narratives that we perpetuate at the basis of our nation’s formation.” Positioning the US Capitol building as a monument in her conclusion, Beard situates the storming of the Capitol by an insurrectionist

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mob—“carrying Confederate flags and raising other alternative (Trumpian) flags”—as exemplative of the conflicting relationships to monuments that “un­ derscore . . . the divisive nature that national monuments, symbols, and naming practices have always held in the United States.” Three memoirs—Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Kiese Lay­ mon’s Heavy, and Tara Westover’s Educated—inform Megan Brown’s analysis in her chapter, “Getting Schooled: Responses to Education as Neoliberal IdentityFormation in US Life Narratives,” in which she argues that contemporary neo­ liberal focus on the overcoming narrative is tied to the myth that formalized postsecondary education automatically equates a form of institutionalized suc­ cess. “In the United States,” Brown reminds readers, “the dominant discourses about, and structures of, education (from preschool to graduate and profes­ sional programs) perpetuate neoliberal ideologies by inculcating these same values” and insist that “society is a meritocracy: that hard work will bring de­ served rewards.” Interrogating these elements interwoven in the American Dream provide “a necessary and productive challenge to even the most cher­ ished ideals” of education being a great equalizer that automatically resituates the circumstances of those accepted to institutions of higher education and those who have graduated from them. Suggesting that each of the narrators in each of the memoirs with which she engages collectively undermine the single story of an overcoming narrative pinned to a college education, Brown ulti­ mately proposes that “we can celebrate what education can do for individuals and communities but also criticize pedagogies and structures which, in their adherence to neoliberal principles, perpetuate systemic inequalities.” Reading through a disability studies theoretical lens, Ally Day examines auto/biographical texts in the midwifery movement—including her own selfreflexive narrative of her experiences with the curriculum for the ToLabor doula certification network—in her chapter, “Disabling Birth: Prognostic Cer­ tainty and the Gestating Citizen of the Contemporary Midwifery Movement.” Day’s analysis “explore[s] how birth narratives function as a means for promot­ ing a particular kind of citizen-body based on an ideology of prognostic cer­ tainty” that monitors—and excludes based on—the potential for physical and mental ability. Proponents of both natural and medical birth, she argues, em­ ploy rhetoric of the need to produce able-bodied citizens as a means of nation building, each eschewing the other for its disabling potential. “Disability,” Day concludes, “plays an important role in the pedagogical materials and underly­ ing philosophy of the contemporary midwife movement.” Encouraging readers to think through the tension between populism and pluralism, Rachael McLennan explores the ways in which these terms and the

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ideologies they represent are manipulated within political rhetorics in her essay, “‘A small flashlight in a great dark space’: Elizabeth Warren, Autobiography, and Populism.” Suggesting that this quotation from Warren’s autobiographical narrative and political manifesto, This Fight Is Our Fight, positions the United States as the great dark space and the senator as the one who is able to shine the light into it, McLennan posits that the life narrator’s “depiction of herself wielding the flashlight in the ‘great dark space’ aligns herself with the people, on whose behalf she is trying to uncover operations of power working against their interests and to show how their lives have been affected.” This foray into populism, however, is convoluted, clarifies McLennan, as Warren continually balances her “alignment with the people” with her role as a member of the political elite. Situating her as an extremely knowledgeable writer who meticu­ lously crafts her narrative for public consumption in the United States, McLennan surmises that “it would be a grave mistake to think that Warren is not extremely sophisticated in her employment of her own life story and her manipulation of some of the features of autobiography, particularly in its American forms,” to si­­t­ uate herself as a member of the populace, eager to lead on their behalf. This is more of an observation of a particularity of US dualities, though, than a criti­ cism of the senator as duplicitous. This volume concludes with a contribution from Sidonie Smith and  Julia Watson focused on the futures of auto/biographical narratives in and about the United States, “Autobiographical Reckonings in America’s Restless TwentyFirst Century.” Broken into six categories—pandemic precarity; Black Lives Matter revaluations; ecocrisis, environmental justice, and survival; the plight of migrants and refugees; feminisms at the suffrage centennial; and new-model addictions and recoveries—Smith and Watson reflect on expected and neces­ sary avenues of inquiry that will occupy auto/biographical consumption and the study of auto/biographical narratives in the coming years, warning that this moment is without parallel, “a turning point of as-yet unclear forks in the con­ tested paths of American democracy.” In light of this, they attest that “not only are different kinds of stories being narrated; a new paradigm of investigation may be required to listen to and assess them.” Reading the essays in this volume underscores that the United States is not only a divided nation in this specific moment of the early twenty-first century but is, rather, a nation that has always been defined by multiplicity. Perhaps the only constant, then, is the instability of a national narrative that vacillates be­ tween movements tied to inclusion and exclusion, belonging and not belong­ ing, thus making the search for a static, singular story of unified identity an exercise in futility. And, if we peel back this carefully crafted and highly

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propagandized story of assimilation and its fabricated and enforced cohesion, what remains? How do enduring questions regarding how the nation is made, unmade, and remade over time persist when we understand the United States as always comprising an infinite range of experiences, knowledges, ways of being, and narratives and never a homogeneous sameness? The armed insurrection at the United States Capitol in 2021 was a manifes­ tation of Donald Trump’s inflammatory slogans urging followers to “Make America Great” and then make it great “again,” which encouraged people to actively and violently fight for a past that never existed. Failure to teach and dis­ seminate the innumerable different but intersecting life stories that talk the na­ tion into being—in often competing, challenging, and even confrontational ways—is in part to blame for this and other such eruptions in which those who believe that their exclusive right to a singular national identity is at peril. The editors of this volume are therefore not interrogating how we do the work of reweaving the unraveling mythos of homogeneity in the United States but rather seeking to resituate ideations of the nation to one composed of multiple lives and life stories. The continuing work needed at the crossroads of life nar­ rative and American studies, then, if we hope to continue this experiment known as democracy, is to consider how we move forward together at the points of intersection, not uniformity. What we next talk into being for the nation has to be a recognition of how—historically and in this contemporary moment— difference defines us. And with this acknowledgment comes a necessary reck­ oning with how we still choose to be connected, responsibly and reciprocally, across these distinctions.

Notes 1. Our own positionalities as editors of this collection influence how we engage with this material. While we both lived and completed our academic training within the con­ tinental United States, we now are positioned as both inside and outside the United States to various degrees. Ricia is currently located at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, where she is directing a large-scale public humanities project, “Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane,” which employs oral history and other biographical methodologies to narrate stories of Hurricane María and its aftermaths amid the failure of government relief efforts. Laura is a settler scholar living and working at the Univer­ sity of Alberta on Treaty Six and Métis territory. These locations position us geographi­ cally and politically in other kinds of relationships to, and other kinds of daily discus­ sions about, the nation called the United States. We bring our own lived experiences to this work, but we are aware that the lived experiences of others would create disparate

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approaches to this volume. To point to one example, Laura highlights the short essay by Deanna Reder, a Cree-Métis scholar in Canada, “Awina Maga Kiya (Who is it that you really are)? Cree and Métis Autobiographical Writing,” in which Reder notes that she no longer uses postcolonial or other Western academic paradigms to discuss Cree and Métis autobiographical writings but tries always to be guided by Cree paradigms and Cree values. 2. Certainly, there were limitations and disappointments with both second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement; however, a number of legal gains were made that are under direct attack in this backlash. 3. From his vantage point in the late 1970s,  James Olney commented that autobiog­ raphy has a significant and sustained relationship with area studies as a “focalizing liter­ ature” (“Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” 13). 4. Rachael McLennan (among others) notes a strange gap in approaches to the study of US auto/biographies, with several critics endeavoring to address patterns within the entirety of the oeuvre in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s but none attempt­ ing to do so again until the 2010s. McLennan points to this break as indicative of diffi­ culties associated with defining auto/biography in the United States and as particularly “American” as well as with the rise in favor of anti-essentialist texts that read US identi­ ties under specific group markers (18). She further points to those earlier works as both “provocative . . . and problematic” (19). While we agree with this assessment, we also find it useful to turn to some of these earlier analyses of US life narratives for founda­ tional ideas in the hopes of building bridges between valuable aspects of these argu­ ments that remain beneficial and relevant in our contemporary contexts. At the same time, it is necessary to clarify that we reject canonicity on the basis of its functionality as exclusionary practice, promotions of essentialism, and the troubling exceptionalist idea that the auto/biographical is somehow particularly “American” or specifically emergent from the United States. Instead, we suggest that the relationship to the auto/biographi­ cal in the United States has important roles and specific functions for meaning making particular to the trajectory of this nation space that was written and continues to be written into being. 5. One can also argue that the United States came into being as a contractual agree­ ment. The nation was not formed from any particularly organic ties. The thirteen colo­ nies in rebellion did not share a common history, language, religion, or ethnicity. The colonists were occupying the lands of Indigenous peoples, but they themselves had not been on the continent long enough to feel it was their homeland. Nor did they yet have a shared story of who they were. We have since gone back and created a mythic story of who they were and what they believed in order to justify our own occupation of these lands and to create our own “American” identity. 6. James M. Cox notes that the term autobiography entered the English lexicon within the timeframe of the Revolutionary War and points to ideations of selfhood tied to this specific type of recognition and visibility of “self-life-writing” as inextricable from the trajectory of the nation (255–56).

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7. Sayre, adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald, suggests that the United States is an idea and that auto/biographers both reflect and shape the idea(s) of the nation (“Autobiography,” 156). Countless Americanists also suggest that the myths of America need continually to be talked into existence.  Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera’s discussion in his 2018 book, After American Studies, is one of the more recent examples of this perspective. He states in his introduc­ tion that “the myths that uphold the image of figures like [George] Washington are a language. They must be repeated through various media so that they exist” (3). 8. The New Americanists book series published by Duke University Press includes a volume on American literatures—National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, edited by Donald E. Pease (1994)—which, surprisingly, does not include sustained attention to auto/biographical narratives in its treatment of literature as a key component of US identity constructs. 9. Herlihy-Mera productively critiques transnational American studies as a theoret­ ical framework that can be indicative of dominant cultural norms crossing geographic and cultural borders to enter other arenas with aspects of exceptionalist perspectives in hand, such as monolingual publications in English without regard to relevant commu­ nal language practices and preferences (2). In other words, the work of transnational American studies scholars must be undertaken in recognition of and resistance to incli­ nations to map the self onto the experience of others while working to undermine aca­ demic norms that historically situate scholarly articulations and modes of dissemination within select structures of exclusivity. 10. There have certainly been forays into the crossroads between the new American studies and auto/biography studies, and new American studies has likewise impacted the study of auto/biographies when explicit connections have not been made. Paul John Eakin’s 1991 book, American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, and  James Robert Payne’s 1992 book, Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives, anticipate comparatist American studies and its intranational aspects as they interrelate with life narratives. Eakin pro­ poses that “the true history of American autobiography and the culture in which it is produced and consumed may turn out to be the history of identifiable groups within the culture and of the network of relations among them” (12). Positioning her work as a re­ sponse to Paul Lauter and other Americanists, Begoña Simal states that her 2011 collec­ tion, Selves in Dialogue, “owes much to the pressing need for a comparative approach to US literatures” (10). Alfred Hornung has done exceptional work on the intersections of life narrative and American studies over the course of a long career that elegantly spans both disciplines. In the preface to the 2013 encyclopedic American Lives, he reaffirms that the study of narrated lives in the United States needs to forefront the cyclical patterns of migration that forged and continue to mold it (ix). Situated within the British Associa­ tion for American Studies series, Rachael McLennan’s 2013 book, American Autobiography, is informed by several points emergent from new American studies. “Ideologies of American exceptionalism have . . . limited the critical study of autobiography,” con­ tends McLennan, an oversight that she proposes to rectify by “foreground[ing] an un­ derstanding of America and autobiography as transnational” (10).

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11. Commenting on the purposefulness of her work as a climate activist, Greta Thunberg, for example, includes the personal aspect of her self-identification as neuro divergent. She tweeted that before climate activism became a central component of her identity construction, “I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder,” but since “school striking” she has “found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.” She now believes that her Asperger’s is equivalent to having a “super-power” that allows her to focus her energies (@GretaThunberg, August 31, 2019). Comments from readers would suggest that the personal aspects of Thunberg’s tweets build connectivity to the issue at hand and incite further activism. One Twitter follower writes in her reply to Thunberg that “my daughter is an aspie girl. . . . You’re a wonderful role model to her” (@jadehawk15, September 2, 2019). 12. See, for example, the introduction to The Futures of American Studies by Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. 13. In his first thirty days in office, President Biden and his administration took sig­ nificant steps to curb the Russian global presence—including action in Ukraine, Crimea, and Syria—as well as motions toward holding Russia accountable for interference in the 2016 and 2020 US elections, the massive SolarWinds hack, the reported bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, and the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny. At the time of writing this introduction, though, Russia has mounted a violent invasion of Ukraine in an ap­ parent attempt to assert a new global dominance. Biden’s administration has worked diligently to rebuild NATO and present a united front against such aggressions that is being fought on economic and digital fronts as well as on the ground. US foreign policy post-Trump, however, is unfolding before our eyes, and it remains to be seen how USRussian relations will take shape after this event and when and if Vladimir Putin is re­ moved from office. What is a given, though, is that this new era of international rela­ tions will impact our understandings of ourselves both within and outside the boundaries and ideas of the United States. 14. In a 2017 essay, John Carlos Rowe asserts that “national borders are obviously fictions, sustained by complex ideological and cultural narratives that invent and rein­ vent notions of America and Americans. Understood in this way, Comparative Ameri­ can Studies [is] by no means diminished by isolationist policies and jingoist slogans, such as ‘Make America Great Again,’ but provides instead useful terms and methods for un­ derstanding such political phenomena while avoiding their provincialism” (“Trump Today,” 19). While we agree that the frameworks of new American studies are still ex­ tremely relevant, we do find that these ideas must evolve and expand to keep pace with this change in leadership and the rejections of pluralism that impact the ways in which we engage life narratives in the United States. 15. Brown’s analysis is prompted by Tom Junod’s study of the painstaking quest to find the identity of people photographed falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11—and the reactions to both the photos and the subsequent search for names and stories—in his article “The Falling Man.”

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16. It remains to be seen whether the armed insurrection at the US Capitol in early 2021 will become such a national narrative-changing event, although it seems poised to do just that especially in light of information related to Putin’s potential involvement in the Trump administration. 17. Eric D. Lamore amends this question to acknowledge that Obama is “an African American life writer” (3). 18. Kim and Robinson clarify that “multiple Americanists have referred to [this era], and not in overly positive fashion, as the ‘Age of Trump’” (2). 19. The loss of Trump’s Twitter privileges and his own failed social media app, Truth Social, seem to have only nominally slowed him down as the Conservative Politi­ cal Action Conference (CPAC) and other ultraconservative political organizations reach out to him to articulate their missives of populism and privilege. 20. For instance, Timothy Dow Adams, Linda Haverty Rugg, Marianne Hirsch, and Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith have established photography as an elemental aspect in and as auto/biography; Gillian Whitlock,  Julia Watson, Hillary Chute, and Michael A. Chaney have done the same for graphic lives; Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Françoise Lionnet, and Sarah Brophy establish multiple genres of selfportraiture and self-referential art-making processes as sites of auto/biographical narra­ tives and acts; Susanna Egan,  Jim Lane, and William H. Epstein have likewise done this work for lives documented on film; and  John David Zuern,  Julie Rak, Anna Poletti, and Paul Longley Arthur have contributed to making digital lives a focal point within our discourse community. 21. To clarify, it is perhaps the acceptance and internalization of auto/biographical studies as an interdisciplinary field that has been harder won than the recognition or naming of it as such. For example, in 1981, Albert E. Stone argued that the auto/biogra­ phy is “a naturally interdisciplinary subject” (2); however, conferences, books, and spe­ cial issues of journals have yet to incorporate fully this missive. Western academic disci­ plinary norms that emphasize specialization to the point of exclusion undermine—on administrative and other levels—inclinations towards multi-, trans-, and interdisciplin­ ary academic work.

Works Cited Brown, Megan. American Autobiography after 9/11. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. Cox,  James M. “Autobiography and America.” Virginia Quarterly Review 47, no. 2 (1971): 252–77. Duane, Anna Mae. “Early American Studies in the Age of Trump.” Early American Literature 53, no. 3 (2018): 953–60. Eakin, Paul  John, ed. American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

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Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” Irish Journal of American Studies 13/14 (2004/2005): 19–63. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Transnational American Literary Studies in the Time of Trump.” College English 44, no. 4 (2017): 483–90. Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. “Introduction: A Critique of Transnational Approaches to Com­ munity.” In After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism, edited by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, 1–19. New York: Routledge, 2018. Hipchen, Emily, and Ricia Anne Chansky. “Looking Forward: The Futures of Auto/ Biography Studies.” In “What’s Next? The Futures of Auto/Biography Studies.” Special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 2 (2017): 139–57. Hornung, Alfred, ed. American Lives. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013. Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, September 2003, 176–199. Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018. Kim, Sabine, and Greg Robinson, eds. “Transnational American Studies in the ‘Age of Trump.’” Journal of Transnational American Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 1–14. Lamore, Eric D., ed. Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. Lejeune, Phillipe. On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press, 1989. Maracle, Lee. Memory Serves: Oratories. Edited by Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Ne­ West Press, 2015. McLennan, Rachael. American Autobiography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Moss, Pamela. Placing Autobiography in Geography. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Olney, James. “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction.” In Olney, Autobiography, 3–27. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Parini, Jay, ed. The Norton Book of American Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Parker, Ashley, and Robert Costa. “The Narrator in Chief: Trump Opines on the 2020 Democrats—and So Much More.” Washington Post, May 20, 2019. Payne, James Robert, ed. Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Pease, Donald E., ed. National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Pease, Donald E., and Robyn Wiegman, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Reder, Deanna. “Awina Maga Kiya (Who is it that you really are)? Cree and Métis Autobiographical Writing.” Canadian Literature 204 (Spring 2010): 131–34. Rowe, John Carlos. The New American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Rowe, John Carlos. “Trump Today.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 15, no. 1–2 (2017): 16–20.

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Sayre, Robert F. “Autobiography and the Making of America.” In Olney, Autobiography, 146–68. Sayre, Robert F. “The Proper Study: Autobiographies in American Studies.” American Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1977): 241–62. Simal, Begoña. Selves in Dialogue: A Transethnic Approach to American Life Writing. Amster­ dam: Editions Rodolpi, 2011. Smith, Sidonie. “Presidential Address 2011: Narrating Lives and Contemporary Imagi­ naries.” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 564–74. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Stepto, Robert B. A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Stone, Albert E. “Introduction: American Autobiographies as Individual Stories and Cultural Narratives.” In The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed­ ited by Albert E. Stone, 1–10. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba’igaade Gichimookomaanakiing Tied and Untied in America Margaret Noodin Omaa Gichimookomaanakiing anishinaabewiyang gaye naabishkaageyang wiikwaji’oyang gaye odaapinigaazoyang mookimaazoyang endaso mooka’ang. [Here in America we are first people and settlers free selves and taken slaves voices rising new with each dawn.]

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merica is a name, a place, a constructed identity. Ideas about being American depend on diverse personal experiences and existential notions of geopolitical identity. In the center of the North America, where the Great Lakes are tied together by rivers, basins, and currents, there is a place known as both Anishinaabewakiing and Gichimookomaanakiing. The first name means “land of the lowered beings” because Indigenous stories tell of an origin in the sky, while the second name means “land of the long knives” 27

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because colonizing soldiers carried guns made longer by knives. Speakers of Anishinaabemowin who live in this space remember ancient mound builders, six-foot beavers, and warnings that everything will change. Speakers of English believed once in manifest destiny and have a range of names for the young nation they still want to be united. This is the space where I teach and write poetry in Anishinaabemowin, which is an act of resilience and resistance intended to complicate the identity of the United States. Anishinaabe stories tell of dark winters, spring floods, fires of renewal, times of change, and sudden extinctions (Noodin, Baldwin, and Perley). As a diaspora diminished but not removed, the Anishinaabeg have survived the creation of the United States of America, and their oral and written histories are evidence of the ways they remain citizens of both Anishinaabewakiing and Gichimookomaanakiing. American stories tell of discovery, pilgrimage, and pioneering spirits. The names chosen and given in this place reveal histories of first nations, settlers, slaves, and people seeking freedom. In this natural and manufactured landscape, naming has been tied to federal laws and social norms that impact traditional relationships with water, land, and all life. To imagine a future in America, we must examine accidental and intentional connections through recollection and reconciliation. We need to untie, or retie, ideas of identity, equity, and responsibility relative to place and time. Stories in multiple languages must become unbound and be unraveled to winnow meaning from the chaff, to find song in the heartbeat, to speak with the stones born of centuries of nonhuman memory. What follows is an exploration of naming based in place, politics, misunderstanding, and righted relations. It serves as a starting point for acknowledging old ideas identity. Using a metaphor familiar to the location, this inquiry into names and naming suggests there is a way to share one dish with one spoon while recognizing all of our many names.1

Aki’endamo: Geo-logisms Ge-mooka’am giizis babasikaweyang mashkiigong mooshka’agwiinjiseg mii mashkawaandeg anishinaabe babaapagidanaamod zaaga’iganing. [As the sun rises we toss bones into the swamp solid land emerges and the first being breathes by the lake.]

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The Americas are a conjoined set of continents that take up 8 percent of the earth’s surface. They are descendants of the supercontinent Pangea located between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The distant time when they were formed 135 million years ago is described by science and story in the same way: plates crashed, volcanoes erupted, cataclysmic change led to new life in old spaces. In the upper mideast region of North America, an ice age carved the Great Lakes basin 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The foundation for that basin was set three billion years ago during the Precambrian era (Fuller, Shear, and Wittig 11). Whether we speak of the Laurentian Plateau, Turtle Island, or the land formed by Nanaboozhoo and the animals after one of several floods, we are referring to the vast expanse of granite, sedimentary rock, limestone, shale, sandstone, halite, and gypsum; interspersed with coal, oil, gas, uranium, zinc, copper, iron, nickel, gold, and silver, which literally holds the earth together in space. According to stories collected by Sac and Fox linguist William Jones (  Jones and Michelson 158–59), after creation of the continent, Nanaboozhoo declared: “Mii sa i’iw indawaa enigokwakamigaag o’o aki,” ogii-inaan. Miidash,“Mii maawiin maajiiwaaboode,” gii-ikidod. “Indawaa ji-gozigwang ninga-anjitoon wiikaa biinjibide’gaazonak.” [“That then, no doubt, will be the extent of this earth,” he said to the (animal-folk). And now, “I fear that this will float away,” he said. “Therefore, in order that it may be heavy will I make it so that it shall never be moved.”]

Stories vary, but the central message that land and life emerged from water is the same. The mixing of minerals in fertile swamps will lead to the first breath on the shore. There is no way to know the exact words used by the first people who lived with the lakes, but one name for this freshwater system is Gichigaming (Noodin, “Ganawendamaw,” 251). In Anishinaabemowin, this translates to “the Great Sea.” With 163 Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations all using languages they identify as Anishinaabe, it is one of the most common languages of the region (Noodin, “North American Great Lakes”). The term for the land is aki, and when it is compounded by adding Anishinaabe to create the word Anishinaabewakiing, it can reference either Indigenous land in general or the particular network of individuals and communities located in and around the Great Lakes of North

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America. When students learn this term, they are asked to connect identity with geology and astrophysics. The morphemes—onizhishin (it is good), naabe (human being), nisaa (to lower) and abi (to be seated)—can imply galactic origins of matter, energy, and biologic beginnings (Noodin, Bawaajimo). In this landscape, species, classes, biomes, and air masses are tied to one another by fractals of clan and kinship. Every life is related to the layer immediately preceding and can be traced through pathways of connections preserved at a cellular self-conceptual level and an expansive communal level through complex origin stories. Images carved in stone or written on rock faces record early human and nonhuman alliances. The Hegman Lake Pictographs, Sanilac Petroglyphs, and Agawa Rock Pictographs are records of knowledge and scientific observation across many centuries in Anishinaabewakiing.2 They are semiotic messages that precede the modern industrial moment. Alter-American identity is tied to the past through these lines, and their extralinguistic gestures offer a means of becoming untied to the present. Knowing one’s place in the universe was to know one’s name and claim an identity with temporal and phys­ ical dimensions.

Aanjitoojig: Agents of Change Gimookojigemin giizhigag mookodamang mazinikojiganag mookozhangwaa mooka’asanjigoyang gijichaaginaanan. [We have all been part of the carving we cut away the days sculpting the shape of spirits to uncover the cache of our souls.]

Anishinaabewakiing is a name used by one group of people for the place they call home. When others enter this space, they bring into it new names and identities. In 1507 German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller shifted the identity of the continent by mapping the visit of Italian merchant and mariner Amerigo Vespucci. A few earlier maps charted the same region, but Waldseemüller was the first to illustrate the separation between continents and outline a landmass clearly called America.3 His work was part of the claiming by naming which took place as new words were chosen to mark men’s attempts to build ties to their holy and unholy fathers in distant cities of origin.

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Many decades and voyages later, America became the scene of epic battles of both blood and rhetoric. In 1775 Thomas Paine, now viewed as a “founding father,” wrote about “America” as a place where the “original Indians” were acknowledged as first inhabitants, ancestral scientists, and inventors (Paine, Writings, 17). However, Paine also wrote of the wigwam as a diminished form of shelter and set forth the concept of property extending to the center of the earth (Paine, Writings, 23). Paine’s rhetoric was powerful. His uncommon pamphlet Common Sense, America’s first best-selling print publication, arguably fueled the American Revolution, and in it he coined the term “United States of America” (Ferguson). Filled with contradiction, his essay speaks of a “glorious union of all things” while calling for military uprising (Paine, Common, 48). It is most ironic that he states, “Man will not be brought up with the savage idea of considering his species as enemies, because the accident of birth gave the individuals existence in countries distinguished by different names” (Paine, Common, 200). Throughout the text it is clear he does not view Indigenous people and their nations as equals or even as belonging to the same species and has no time to learn the names by which they call themselves. In July 1776, when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he referred to “free and independent states” and “merciless Indian savages.” In rhetoric and praxis, the Indigenous people of many nations were viewed as less than enemies and were not identified as allies despite a dozen treaties signed between 1722 and 1774 and the service of many Indigenous troops who assisted the colonies during the revolution (  Justice). Only one identity mattered to those who were striving to form a nation. As the commander in chief of the Continental army, George Washington, prepared for the Battle of Long Island, he told his soldiers on January 2, 1776: The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. . . . We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die. (Washington)

Soldiers were asked to give their lives defending the United States of America, but it would be many years before all who lived within its boundaries were counted as citizens with equal rights. Citizenship for most American Indians came in 1924 and was followed in 1934 by the Indian Reorganization Act, which granted each Indigenous nation the opportunity to form its own democracy.

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This history is relevant because when the children of Anishinaabewakiing ask the name of the nation that surrounds their own nations, the answer is Gichimookomaanakiing, the Land of the Long Knives, which recalls the bayonets used to win the American Revolution. So often, the modern struggle for identity depends on knowledge of this old colonial history. The term Gichimookomaanakiing is not the name the people who carried guns with long knives gave to themselves, but it is the name earned by a small number of them. Returning to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, we find the statement that “men do not change from enemies to friends by the alteration of a name” (95). He may have been speaking of those who change their political identity, but his words remind us that it is not the names but the stories tied to them that reflect levels of misunderstanding or opportunities for reconciliation. By tying the present to the past, we can better understand the clash of cultures and identity that must be addressed as we name ourselves and others.

Dibaajimowinan Aaba’bii’iganan mii Niibidoonan: Stories Unraveled and Rewound Ganabaj gimookawaadamin ezhi-anjidimaajimowaad mii miinwaa gaa-mooka’amang da-bagidenindamang. [Maybe we cry as the stories change and what we uncover needs a proper burial.]

America, as a location and political identity, represents continual negotiation. The people of 573 separate sovereign nations are recognized as dual citizens by the United States of America.4 Some trace their political identity to treaties of the 1700s, and others’ rights were defined during westward expansion as the thirteen colonies became fifty states, one federal district, and sixteen territories. Each place now a part of the relatively young nation has a history unlike the others and a memory of the time before America. In many parts of the United States, individuals and communities are working to move beyond racist erasure.

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Working for many years with children and adults learning Anishinaabemowin to better understand their own identity, the most common question I am asked by beginning students is whether the term of greeting boozhoo is connected to the French bonjour. This is never a question about etymology as much as it is about adaptation, assimilation, and identity. I was taught that boozhoo is a reference to the cultural hero wenaboozhoo, who has the ability to shift shapes, to become the other. By using boozhoo as a greeting, we test a listener’s cultural competency. We implicitly ask, “Do you know winter stories of Gichigaming?” Sharing stories is central to survival and connected to the ways understand ourselves and one another. The words we use and the names we accept shape our ways of being and knowing in a world that can sometimes seem to be coming apart at the seams. As the next generation strives to create a just and sustainable future, names matter. Nations are reshaping their collective identity by taking back their original names and by asking others to respect their language and history. In Anishinaabewakiing, many nations retain the legal term “Chippewa” as a part of state and federal legal communications, but the use of “Anishinaabe” and the concept of a confederated diaspora, which includes the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, has increased in recent decades. In the same region the Winnebago and Menominee, whose names reflect descriptions given by neighboring Ojibwe, are taking back their original names. The Ho-Chunk, once referred to as “Winnebago” because their Ojibwe knew them as the people who lived near the dark waters of a large lake, have taken back their original name, which means “the people of the big or sacred voice.”5 The Menominee, named by the Ojibwe for the wild rice abundant in the lakes where they lived, now state, “We are Kiash Matchitiwuk, the Ancient Ones.”6 Some observers call this work “decolonization” or “reconciliation”; others might refer to it as evolutionary ethical adjustment. This brings us back to Gichimookomaanakiing, the United States of America, Land of the Long Knives. Although deeply rooted in lived experience and real history, does use of this Anishinaabe name perpetuate memories of war or serve as a reminder against it? Has the time come for speakers of Anishinaabemowin to follow the example of the Haudenosaunee, whose political traditions include the burial of a weapon beneath a tree of peace? To discern whether other nations might have a suggestion, I asked teachers of several Indigenous languages how to say “America” and “American” in the language of their nation. Dr. Dylan Robinson, assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University, explained:

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Stó:loˉ probably wouldn’t distinguish between American and Canadian settlers, and use the Halq’emeylem word “xwelitem” which means “starving person.” The reason being that the major influx of settlers into our territory took place during the gold rush. They arrived with gold fever, but also literally starving for food. Obviously, this settler hunger for resources hasn’t abated, so we still use the word today.7

Beth Piatote, associate professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, replied: To answer your question about “Americans,” I think that the only word we use is so:ya:po:, which is kind of a generic “white man.” It has the suffix (po: or pu:) for people. The word for the English language is so:ya:po:timt (white man’s language). So:ya:po: designates “American” more than British types who are “kinco:c” or King George/Canadians;?allayma is “Frenchman” or “by the river person.” . . . A few years ago there was a colorful conversation on the Nez Perce listserv about the meaning of the word so:ya:po:, because the translation isn’t quite known. Some say it was a loan word of the French “chapeau,” but my favorite explanation (what I want to be true) is the idea that it came from a Salish term meaning “upside down face,” because white men were bald on their heads but had beards on their faces.8

Obviously calling Americans “starving people” or “upside down faces” based on a simple description is similar to calling them “long knives” and based on a phys­ ical description, not a qualitative assessment. Americans believe they stand for freedom, equality, and shared governance, not full bellies, hairy chins, and musket tips. As languages and cultures are revitalized, Indigenous confederacies and cross-cultural alliances must also be reconstructed or built from the ground and water up to new aspirational heights.

Maawanjiwakiing ani Mookibiiwakiing: Relation States and a Rising Nation Geyabi mookiingweniyang mangodaasiyang asabaatigoog aawiyang asabikeyang awang. [Still we appear bravely centered we are shuttles making nets in the fog.]

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During a recent visit to Canada, two young people were asked to introduce themselves. One identifies as Anishinaabe and American, the other is the descendant of Irish American immigrants. Both thought it made no sense to identify as people from Gichimookomaanakiing, but they needed a way to say they were from the large nation to the south. They asked the Anishinaabeg elders seated around them and came up with the name Maawanjiwakiing, which could be translated as “the Unified Land,” something close to the United States. Neologisms are based on shared linguistic rules and life experiences. New words arise and either disappear or become a part of the vernacular. Maawanjiwakiing is an excellent option that may well become popular. However, for now, despite its fraught origin, Gichimookomaanakiing is the common term for America. In time new terms may arise based on more political inclusion and more use of Anishinaabemowin. One option might be to deconstruct the sound and meaning of mookomaan, the carving knife. Rather than entirely cast away the history and original etymology, a new word might attempt to move beyond the two verbs at the core of the image: mookodan, to carve something, and mookozh, to carve someone. To the English speaker’s ear, the idea of carving someone is unfamiliar, even horrific, but from an Anishinaabe view, it would be strange not to mention both when discussing definitions. All Anishinaabe nouns fall into two classes, and verbs are learned as balanced categories. With algebraic precision, the most fluent speakers can move along a spectrum of four verb types, always balancing the speaker’s relationship to the listener and the world around them. The word for carving is related to words for emergence and revelation: mooka’ (to uncover), mooka’am (the sun rises), mookamanji’o (to sense a change in health), mookawaakii (to cry of desire to accompany others), mookibiise (rise up out of the water). Unraveling the string of related meanings, perhaps there is a way to combine the past identity with a future potential. America might become Mookibiiwakiing, the “Land of Emergence.” Rather than viewing the land as a place carved by weapons, it might be considered instead, a land of relationships changing . . . between groups of people and between the people and the earth. It is not a definition that would distinguish it from other continents, but it would signify a place of duality, of land and water, of motion and durability. Mookibiiwakiing miikawaadad waa-wiikwaji’oyang ingoding: America the beautiful where one day we may all be free. Strategic plans for survival need to be written into society. Elders must speak to children of something practical and perceptible. An identity that continues is one that is tied tightly to tradition but is also able to untie itself in order to expand and evolve. Tracing the history of identity in this place sheds light on the web that has been woven on the continent and

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allows us to connect to other networks of identity, which can carry us back into the past and lead us into the future. Notes 1. For more about the “Dish with One Spoon,” see Victor Lytwyn’s historical analysis of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee wampum belt with the image of the dish that many understand to be an example of legal precedent outlining communication between sovereign nations. 2. The Hegman Lake Pictographs are located within the Kawishiwi Ranger District of the Superior National Forest in Ely, Minnesota. The Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic State Park is in Cass City, Michigan. Agawa Rock is found within Lake Superior Provincial Park in Algoma, Ontario. 3. A copy of the map was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003 (see Waldseemüller; Library of Congress). 4. At the time this essay was written in September 2019, there were 573 sovereign nations federally recognized by the United States. 5. The Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin is working to ensure that the Hooca˛k language continues to be a living language through a variety of community efforts (Hooca˛k Waaziija Haci Language Division). 6. The Menominee are preserving their ancestral language through a variety of efforts (Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin). 7. Dylan Robinson, email to the author, September 9, 2018. 8. Beth Piatote, email to the author, September 5, 2018.

Works Cited Ferguson, Robert A. “The Commonalities of Common Sense.” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2000): 465–504. Fuller, Kent, Harvey Shear, and Jennifer Wittig. The Great Lakes: An Environments Atlas and Resource Book. Chicago: United States Environmental Protection Agency; Toronto: Environment Canada, 1995. Hooca˛k Waaziija Haci Language Division. “Our Mission.” Accessed February 2, 2022. https://www.hoocak.org/. Jones, William, and Truman Michelson. Ojibwa Texts: Volume VII, Part 1. Publications of the American Ethnological Society, edited by Franz Boas. New York: G. E. Stechert, 1917. Justice, Daniel Heath. “Rhetorics of Recognition: On Indigenous Nationhood, Literature, and the Paracolonial Perils of the Nation-State.” Kenyon Review 32, no. 1 (2010): 236.

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Library of Congress. “Library of Congress Completes Purchase of Waldseemüller Map.” News release,  June 1, 2003. https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-03-110/. Lytwyn, Victor P. “A Dish with One Spoon: The Shared Hunting Grounds Agreements in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley Region.” In Papers of the Twenty-eighth Algonquian Conference, edited by David H. Pentland, 210–28. Ottawa: Carleton University, 1996. Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. “Who We Are.” Accessed February 2, 2022. https://www.menominee-nsn.gov/CulturePages/AboutUs.aspx. Noodin, Margaret. Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Noodin, Margaret. “Ganawendamaw: Anishinaabe Concepts of Sustainability.” In Narratives of Educating   for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments: An Edited Collection, edited by  Jane Halady and Scott Hicks, 245–60. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017. Noodin, Margaret. “Minowakiing: The Good Land.” Filmed December 13, 2017, at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. TED video, 14:03. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=ddyFh1Rdho4. Noodin, Margaret. “North American Great Lakes Indigenous Research Possibilities.” In Reimagining Water: Linking Sustainable Urban Water Systems in the Great Lakes Basin, 132–35. Proceedings of an NSF Sustainable Urban Systems Workshop held at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, July 25–27, 2019. Noodin, Margaret, Daryl Baldwin, and Bernard Perley. “Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World.” In After Extinction, edited by Richard Grusin, 201–33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Philadelphia: W. and T. Bradford, 1776. Paine, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Paine. Collected and edited by Moncure Daniel Conway. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894. Waldseemüller, Martin. “Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes,” 1507. One map on 12 sheets, made from original woodcut. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/waldexh.html. Washington, George. “Address to the Continental Army before the Battle of Long Island” [ January 2, 1776]. In The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008. https://rotunda.upress.virginia .edu/founders/GEWN-03-05-02-0117.

Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women’s Diaries Joycelyn K. Moody Grandfather dead died of pneumonia brought on by exposure as he slept around in the woods, fields fleeing from the Ku Klux Klan. He sought to stand up for his citizenship—the masters shot—grandfather saved by a tree—the master wanted to keep wife and children on the farm. The Diary of Lillian B. Horace, ca. 1940

sometimes she would almost pulverize her day, but usually something remained undone. something stayed unraveling. her spirit saved her from the death of finishing. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill

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cross the centuries, the private diary has served as a space of intersectional self-constitution and African American female identity formation. The genre enables the (ir)regular chronicle of grief, glory, agony, community, and healing. The diaries this chapter reads reveal both the expansiveness of the psyche, morality, ordinariness, and personality of private United States Black women and what their diaries disclose about an individual diarist’s relationship to nation and to freedom. Collectively, African American diarists represent diverse ideologies, regions of the country and the Americas, sexual 38

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identities, socioeconomic classes, intellectual and educational groups, and relations to other African American women. Ultimately, this chapter examines the relationship “between the illness in the diaries and the illness in our national narratives and structures, the white heteropatriarchal supremacy, that imposes pain and illness on bodies differentially.”1 “Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women’s Diaries” contributes to the project that the volume editors Laura Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky have established for The Divided States by surveying African American women diarists’ representations of the false narratives undergirding American ideals—myths that uphold social, psychic, and even physical sicknesses. Overall, they concur with the editors’ exigent call to action: “until we stop telling those stories, we can’t open up the spaces for other stories, other bodies, other ways of being and knowing, and being without that pain.” Even when Black women write presumably for an audience of one—that is, themselves alone—they nonetheless demonstrate a commitment to ending national myths and replacing devastating stories with narratives to foster greater equity and peace across multiple communities. It is as if writing for themselves, to themselves, they construct just, inclusive ideals of citizenship toward which they devote themselves in their public lives. In diaries intended for publication, the diarists simulate this same disposition: writing to themselves in the process of developing a theory of citizenship to enact, embody, and decree. As Elizabeth Podnieks observes, for Alice Dunbar-Nelson and other expert (African American) (women) writers, “the diary serve[s] as a mean of situating one’s self within cultures and communities, a therapeutic outlet, and a testament to their lives” (274–75). Such communal and collective positioning has for centuries been inscribed by African American women diarists, including  Jarena Lee, whose livelihood depended on the sale of her itinerant minister’s diary, Re­­ ligious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel (1849). Before publishing Religious Experience and  Journal of Mrs.  Jarena Lee, in 1836 Lee published a more conventional spiritual autobiography as Life and Religious Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee.2 Both were influenced by Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835), a collection of the author’s lectures interlaced with “Prayers” and fourteen numbered “Meditations” that read as previously private devotions reminiscent of diaries. For example, Stewart writes in the undated “Meditation VIII”: “Another year is past and gone forever. Have been deeply impressed on account of past sins and ingratitude. But methinks I hear a voice which says,—Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Methinks I hear a voice which says,—Daughter, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. Consoling thought!” (36). More than one hundred years later,

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Marcia Ann Gillespie would begin her diary on her twelfth birthday situating herself in home, nation, family, and culture: Dear Diary: . . . I live at 91 Banks Avenue in Rockville Centre, Long Island New York in the United States of America. I live with my mother and father. Her name is Ethel. His name is Charles. And my big sister is Charlene. We live in a house next to Shiloh Baptist Church. My nana, my two aunts, my uncle and two cousins live down at the other end of the block. My mama was born here; my father is from North Caroline. Most all the old people are from the south. . . . (14)

These extant texts are among dozens in the public domain that challenge notions of a mythic marginalized community that adheres to current United States dominant national narratives, including an assortment of fallacious ideas wreaking devastation across already disenfranchised populations. African American women’s diaries document harmful and clashing narratives of various instantiations of misogynoir: mythic Black women’s indolence, gluttony, hypersexuality, insularity, encroachment, and so on, with which they must regularly contend. These formerly private—some of them purposely published— writings are available because they have been restored by or received attention through intersectionality and additional Black feminist theories, critical race testimony, and related methodologies committed to recovering and publishing Black women’s literary history. Especially pertinent is Denise Taliaferro Baszile’s “theorizing critical race testimony,” which she describes as emerging from the personal and institutional narratives of and among oppressed groups (254). In “Beyond All Reason Indeed: The Pedagogical Promise of Critical Race Testimony,” Baszile cogently argues, “Certainly, story—as history or mythology— has played a most significant role in developing our sense of ourselves as individuals, groups and nations. Within the context of western domination which is structured by racism, sexism, classism, and other oppressions, official or major­ itarian stories function to maintain domination by distorting and silencing the experiences of people of color” (253). Thus, people of color necessarily create counternarratives, stories that “bear witness to the [trauma-inducing] ways in which racism is inflicted on and inflected in one’s life experiences” (254). Baszile locates critical race testimony within the historically expansive “Black autobiographical tradition, and most notably within the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, who insinuated throughout his body of work that a ‘purely’ rational approach to race was an incomplete and thus to some extent ineffective approach to redressing notions of race and practices of racism” (254). Further-

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more, African American women’s diaries document (sometimes tacitly, some­ times overtly) the impact of the white supremacist project of the United States and its correlative heteronormativity on Black women’s embodied and public well-being, inspiring their reflection on their own and other disenfranchised cit­ izens’ physical and or psychological health. Gillespie offers another example from her 1956 diary, a recording of her triumph over a “white man in a blue Pontiac [who] pulled up beside me as I walked from Marjorie’s house this afternoon.” Taking advantage of her momentary isolation, “He said, ‘I’ve got a big white dick, you’ll like it. Get in the car I’ll give you some money’” (15). Young Gillespie runs, then also yields to an instinct to scream. When her screams drive the “cruise[r]” off, the twelve-year-old diarist marvels at her nana’s wisdom: she “was right you can shame the devil” (15). In other words, Black women’s diaries report both white nationalist assaults and the genealogical resistance strategies deployed to thwart that violence. In this way, the “dangerous activity” of Black women’s personal writing, as Patricia Bell-Scott describes it, names and defies the cultural stereotypes imposed on Black women: “it allows us the freedom to define everything on our own terms” (Bell-Scott 18, original emphasis). Diaries define and document daily life, and they specify or intimate the diarist’s attitudes about her life as a citizen. Regardless of their race, ordinary women’s diaries are generally expected to document—with only the diarist herself as her reader—merely quotidian, tedious, mundane events and household activities and maybe expenditures, recipes, births and lives of children or pets, social or necessary visits with other women, love affairs, menstrual cycles, and perhaps religious devotions.3 Such focus on minutiae of a private life has led to women’s diaries having been “consigned—literally and figuratively—to the dustbin of history” (Carter 40). Until recently, scholars and readers have generally not expected women’s diaries to chronicle their participation in political events or to record their own political opinions.4 We have not expected them or read them for what they reveal about ideas of national belonging, citizenship, and so on. In “The American Civil War: Confederate Women’s Diaries” (2020), Kimberly Harrison notes exceptions to this hasty generalization about the casual, apolitical nature of women’s diaries. Harrison argues for the “contributions to literary, rhetorical, and social history” of Southern women’s chronicles, kept as “an effort to support the Confederacy, whether posited at times as a patriotic act in itself, as a record to account for the diarist’s contributions to the war effort, or as an aid to foster identification with their new nation” (299, 300). However, examining African American women’s diaries, racism and misogynoir render unsurprising Black women’s counterhegemonic political

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dimensions, more so than, say, tacit ideology in Annie Ray’s Diary, itself a rare Dakota woman’s diary of the 1880s edited by her writer descendant Jennifer Sinor.5 As Kathryn Carter reminds us, Mary Helen Washington ties diaries to significant historical archives in Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860– 1960 (1987). Washington aligns Black women’s private writing with sociopolitical information and cultural evaluation by demonstrating that African American women’s recovered private writing “provides evidence of the rich cultural history that is to be found in non-traditional sources” (xxvi). To be sure, African American women’s diaries we can access, whether originally designed for publication (e.g., Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals [1979]) or kept privately in more conventional ways (e.g., Emilie Frances Davis’s Civil War pocket diaries [1863–65]), do chronicle the diarists’ political and cultural activities (e.g., Angela Nissel’s secular, hilarious The Broke Diaries [2001]). Moreover, even when they do not speak explicitly to issues of citizenship or national identity, we can infer these diarists’ values and attitudes regarding these concerns. By and large, African American women’s diaries express outrage, sadness, and sometimes pride or illness regarding their lives as US citizens and fugitivity. Here, I use fugitivity as I have elsewhere, in reference to the “modest and radical shifts [that] remain black women’s most effective navigations against white patriarchal imperialism everywhere.” Furthermore, “Anti-blackness everywhere has always required black women to construct a fugitive selfhood that exploits and subverts the very invisibility that white patriarchal imperialism imposes on them. . . . [For, by] constructing an autobiographical subjectivity to re-member shifts in spatial coordinates and ideological and psychological positions, black women identify fugitivity as integral to their life writing production” (Moody, “Fugitivity,” 636–37). Or, in poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s more succinct identification, the diary is one form in which Black women have “made and broke narrative” (xii). Whereas fugitivity is vital to the well-being of women of African descent, as their myriad life writings attest, Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, coeditors of Revelations: Diaries of Women, generally deride the diary as “an analogue to their [women’s] lives: emotional, fragmentary, interrupted, modest, not to be taken seriously, private, restricted, daily, trivial, formless, concerned with self, as endless as their tasks” (5). Implying the racial signifier white, however, rather than asserting explicitly they attended almost exclusively to Western white women, Moffat and Painter disparage the diary’s unfinished nature, especially as a feature of mid-twentieth-century white women’s private life writing forms. For Gumbs and African American women diarists, generally speaking, the

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search for wholeness is deliberately constant, persistent, better left incomplete. As Gumbs expresses, “her lists,” “and the word paper written on paper” (ll. 1, 2) provide “salvation” from “the/ death of finishing” (ll. 5, 8–9).

Diaries and Privacy Kathleen Collins’s diary entries and personal correspondence appear expurgated as published by her daughter Nina Lorez Collins.6 Among the 1970s and 1980s film and fiction writer’s recently recovered writings, collected as Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019), are entry-anecdotes that suggest the private diary has long provided African American women with a space for serial, secretive, secret-full, random, unmediated, impromptu, presumably unedited and unexpurgated self-expression. Consequently, Collins’s daughter’s apparent intervention in the process of publishing her writer-mother’s diary renders the entries tentative at best. Indeed, Lorez Collins’s editing of Kathleen Collins’s extant diaries reminds one of Gloria T. Hull’s revelation of restraints placed on her by Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s socially conservative descendants as she prepared the publication of the fin de siècle writer’s diary.7 Ironically, one of Kathleen Collins’s posthumously published writings in Notes is a nearly finished screenplay centered on a fictional diary, titled “A Summer Diary.” Besides the playwright’s private diary entries, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary also contains Collins’s films and plays exploring such themes as loneliness, trauma, starvation, intelligence, and determination. New Yorker critic Vinson Cunningham has described Collins and her project, asserting, “The writer and filmmaker’s subtle, harrowing unproduced plays deal with doubt, domestic confusion, and the persistent encroachments of color and of the spirit.” After an investigation of the diary genre, most pertinent here are “encroachments” of Blackness into the dia­ ries and her narratives of trauma, transnationalism, and (the pursuit of  ) self-actualization.

Narrating Patriotism In The Practice of Citizenship (2019), Derrick R. Spires links African American notions of citizenship to Black print culture; for him, they are interwoven, interdependent. Examining especially the nineteenth century United States context, Spires contends, “black writers often found useful models for civic practices in unlikely places, such as the early American backcountry, picture galleries, parlors, or in abstract constructs such as the republic of letters” (6). Among the

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“unlikely,” even eccentric print spaces for the constitution of a US Black national identity are women’s private diaries. Here, they recorded counternarratives not only describing what they considered responsible citizenship but also insinuating how they imagined and lived patriotism. Thus, they “untied” national myths of a homogenous national identity. For example, reflecting on The Diary of Lillian B. Horace in 2007, Veronica Watson states, “At the time I read it I was struck by the free-ranging intellect evidenced in the pages. If it was a topic of interest and conversation in the 1940s, Lillian Bertha Jones Horace was thinking and writing about it in her diary: the future of African American citizenship, wars in which the US had engaged, World War II and the scapegoating and persecution of Jewish people, US politics and political personalities, Black Boy by Richard Wright.” Further striking, as Watson notes, is Horace’s bold, sardonic diary declaration: “The Negro is determined to make democracy safe for America” (Horace 69). Horace’s pithy inscription articulates an important and complex truth. The sentence’s subject might morph rapidly from a noble, moral Black commitment to preserving American democracy to the role African Americans must play in preserving democracy for their own protection within its borders. We might also read Horace as remarking on the United States’ long expectation of women of African descent to preserve the fallacies of the founding documents, to defend its myths, from the US Constitution’s “We hold these truths” to President Donald Trump’s exploitation of photographs of himself kissing small Black girls on the 2016 and 2020 election trails, presumably to depict him as endorsing multiculturalism.8 African American women are unrelentingly conceptualized as the embodied salvation of national political parties, most predominantly in Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his vice president during the 2020 US presidential campaign season. However, innumerable examples of Black women serving white America writ large exist from the advent of the transatlantic slave trade—in enslavement, in the military or its stateside war plants, as nurses and prostitutes, as “welfare queens” and schoolteachers, as models of folk wisdom (e.g., Sojourner Truth) and integrity (e.g., Coretta Scott King), and grit (e.g., Stacey Abrams) and recalcitrance (e.g., Sandra Bland). The conceptualization of Black women as servants of all people (save, perhaps, themselves) has been internalized by African American women themselves to the point of morbidity, especially through the trope of the Strong Black Woman.9 The need to untie the threads holding these lethal lies together is obvious and inarguable. Virtually all African American women’s extant and published diaries assert their deepest feelings about the United States and its treatment of Black citizens, its failure to provide or protect Black civil and human rights. In texts we

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can assume written exclusively for themselves, Black women seek “both light and containment,” as Rita Dove poetically extolled private writing, even despite “the brutal reminder[s] that the culture I was feeding on had no interest in nourishing me” (173, 168). Whatever “youthful social activities” might have filled the pages of their lock-and-key-type diaries as girls, the adult diarists generally report what Shamara Shantu Riley remarks in “A Sistah Outsider”: “But as I grew older and more politically conscious, social issues became infused in my journals” (92). Yet, their maturation into an astute awareness of the “interlocking systems of oppression” (whether or not they invoke this legendary phrase from the Combahee River Collective), generates a complex, ambiguous attitude about a unified national identity. Fugitivity reigns, rather, in their putatively private accounts of the pursuit of an intentional, intersectional citizen identity on their own terms. Regarding published diaries, African American women’s texts take both conventional and experimental forms. Notably, some diarists explicitly state they began their texts with the intention to publish; these include Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks (1997) and Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (2014). Others were secret records, unintended for others’ eyes; among those extant from the nineteenth century are the highly regarded Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (1988), edited by Brenda Stevenson, and what Miriam DeCosta-Willis has edited as The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995). In unpacking the complex interweaving of the personal and political, Sergio da Silva Barcellos’s “Personal Writings and the Quest for National Identity in Brazil” is instructive. Barcellos examines the meaning of intimacy with respect to published versus private diaries and their relationships to diarists’ reflections on national identity. Specifically, observing the literariness of published diaries, he contends that “it is generally the promise of unveiling the intimate space of the subject that has so strongly contaminated the genre and contributed to the fiction of a secret space where the subject can present herself unadorned” (127–28).10 Barcellos’s theorization holds with respect to US Black women’s diaries as spaces for constituting the private or public, social and political self—the self as citizen. For him and for them, diary writing serves as “a source for investigating identity constitution . . . because the forces of the subject and the other, of the intimate and private, are amalgamated there” (128). When the diarist goes public, so to speak, she moves from articulating for herself alone “this is who I am,” in Barcellos’s deductions, to opening the private space of the diary to a space beyond. This expansion is Barcellos’s “contamination” of the private space while the diarist seeks to maintain the fiction of the “space where the subject [presents] herself unadorned” (128). In diaries,

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private or published, the reconstituted self joins with an Other, in amalgam­ ation, in Barcellos’s term. Hence, the diary reveals who and how its author conceptualizes herself as a member of a nation. Nina Lorez Collins’s edition of her mother’s private diary entries in Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary illustrate Barcellos’s point. The elder Collins kept presumably private diaries in the post–civil rights movement era; her daughter Nina published excerpts from them in 2019. This mother-daughter relationship alone makes Collins’s diaries worth studying. In addition, the excerpts merit attention for what they reveal about the two women’s national identities, for the prolific and privileged Kathleen Collins sought rigorously to avoid racial themes and tropes of US Blackness in her writings, notwithstanding hers was the era of “the African American women literary renaissance,”11 and her only daughter lived periodically for years in Europe.12 In short, each woman’s intersectional identities are complex—and complicated further by their relationship to each other and to their US country of origin. Lorez Collins has said, “it [race] was not something she talked about at home, or something we felt traumatised by. I never felt complicated about race” (quoted in Kellaway). Yet the daughter’s fugitivity arguably emanates from the very reasons her mother sought to make race less than central in her 1970s–1980s films, fiction, and personal writings. Put another way, Blackness and colonization always matter, and whether or not a US Black diarist overtly inscribes (her) racial identity in her private papers, the shift from her fictively intimate, private diary space to public, fugitive exposure of the unadorned recorded chronicle illuminates the amalgamated self Barcellos attributes to the subjugated subject’s constitution of national identity.13 The title of the 448-page collection of Kathleen Collins’s selected works misleads: the text comprises only thirteen pages of diary entries—all lyrical, elliptical, apparently expurgated—and praised by New Yorker film critic Richard Brody as “multilayered and polyphonic.” That is, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary contains one extant diary entry, dated December 27, 1975. However, that entry contains thirty excerpts, presumably cited that December by Kathleen Collins from her earlier diaries and published by her daughter in 2019 in the order the diarist wrote them. Only the entry immediately following the first heading (December 27, 1975) is dated: November 17, 1972. The remaining entries consist of diary excerpts the diarist presumably rereads in earlier material volumes, reassembles, and re-records three years later on December 27, 1975. She contemplates what might amount to “a bad habit I picked up from some indolent soul with time to spare” (Notes 41). The entry contains another November entry but without a signifying year (44) and a third dated November 19 (45).

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Lorez Collins selects for inclusion also several September entries: consecutive excerpts dated the 9th and the 16th (44); then the 21st (52), the 24th, the 27th, and the 28th (53). However, Lorez Collins does not clarify whether these September entries were first written in turn, sequentially, or if they represent multiple years, sequentially or not. Separating each entry is a passage forming the author’s reflections on December 27, 1975; the last entry alone references the day of the week: Sunday, August 24. In the United States, August 24 did fall on a Sunday in the year 1975, so it is possible the diary entries Lorez Collins selected end with an entry written approximately four months before the framing December date. Significant, in any case, are the daughter’s decisions about which diary excerpts of her mother’s to publish and in what order, what details to provide for readers. The questions surrounding Kathleen Collins’s posthumously published diaries fascinate in part for her daughter’s editorial choices. Farah  Jasmine Griffin in the Nation has proclaimed Kathleen Collins a “remarkable writer” who “could have joined an emerging group of black women writers in the 1970s and ’80s that included Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison.” The entries exhibit what Griffin describes as the “brilliance of Collins’s work in all of its quietude: its turn within, its placement of the interior and subjective in the context of the social and political.” Put another way, Collins’s posthumously published diary entries fascinate for their portrayal of the author’s intersectional identity as an African American woman. Lorez Collins in a 2016 Vogue article describes her mother as an “incessant” writer whose “multiple creative ventures” included “constant jottings in her journal.” The daughter provides a diary excerpt, dated April 11, in which her mother reflects on having rejected the 1970s’ “racial affirmation” aesthetic and ideology: diverging from the most resolute African American nomenclature of the period, Kathleen the diarist names herself a “colored lady” (Notes, 48). The label seems meant, not quite playfully, as self-critique or disparagement, given that the succeeding entry, dated a July 19 of an unspecified year before 1976, applies more progressive terminology: “There is no such thing as a helpless black woman” (49). Continuing to describe the racial makeup—and racialized precarity—of her economically privileged family, the diarist writes skirting pathos: “My father died a somewhat broken colored death. My mother ended it all at my birth. And my second mother practiced a far too studied gentility” (48). Thus, Kathleen Collins records her immediate progenitors’ socioeconomic class aspirations and their respectability politics—gently satirizing them in process, as cogently noted by Danille Evans, author of the foreword to Lorez Collins’s edition of her mother’s selected writings (ix). Actually, in the private space of

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her 1979 diary, Kathleen Collins portrays herself as eager to explore life through a racial lens; almost postracially, for she seems to want race not to matter, to control it so it does not engulf her writing ethos, especially the subjectivity at the heart of her diary, despite her characterizations of her parents and aunt as systemically raced and racially subjugated (49). Where numerous US Black women’s diaries rage against antiblackness and gendered misogynoir, the diarist proclaims, “I don’t cater to any pampered image of myself as a too sensitive soul for whom the world is too much and the diary her only friend. I am neither too fragile nor too sensitive. . . . I don’t write to hide from the world” (49). The assertion resounds with irony, given her Black heritage and choice to apply her extraordinary talents to the production of fiction and films by, for, and about African Americans of the 1970s—and featuring Black actors. While the December 27, 1975, diary entry does not indicate when Kathleen Collins began maintaining a diary, it does express a passion for autobiography and life writing. The diarist speculates on the origins of her interest in diaries in particular, asking herself that December, “Where did this note-keeping habit come from? I have always liked to read memoirs, autobiographies, biographies; always been interested in the inner life” (42). One wonders which life writing in particular arrested her attention, especially considering African Americans’ preference for autobiography among all the literary genres. Lorez Collins’s reprint of her mother’s December 27, 1975, diary entry both proclaims and disdains race, rarely mentions Blackness. The diary entry indirectly refuses to explicate racism; it disavows any importance of a Black subjectivity. However, it makes plain the predominance of race as an identity category through Kathleen Collins’s efforts to erase race and its taints from her life and creative output. In other words, the few mentions of Black racial identity in the text inscribe a counternarrative to the text’s metanarrative, which insists something like race does not matter to me; the Blackness of my life does (not) matter as it threatens to decenter my more predominant interests: intellectuality, creativity, love. Black women’s diaries document ways political pressures affect Black Americans’ intersectionality. In her introduction to Diary as Literature: Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America, Angela R. Hooks outlines the academic essays she has collected, denoting in part some as studies of multiracial or multiethnic diarists and others as texts that “[expand] the historically marginalized voice” (ix). Hooks asserts: “The mix of diary voices, side by side, document and demonstrate how social pressures and literary practices affect people despite race, culture, creed, or pedigree” (ix). Defining the multiculturalism of her title, Hooks pinpoints the concept’s correlation within US national identity, conceptualizing “multiculturalism . . . as the sociocultural experiences of underrepresented

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groups who fall outside the mainstream of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and language” (xi). One segment of the myriad underrepresented and marginalized populations Diary as Literature foregrounds is US women of African descent whose private writings intimate or externalize their complex, often conflicted thoughts about the privileges and limitations of US citizenship and national identity. Regarding the relationships of understudied serial life writers to the United States’ disregard of its minoritized populations, Hooks contends, “The diary has become a dialogue with history and that history has been reconstructed within the pages of the journal written in the first person with chronological entries and dated pages” (xiii). In particular, many African American women’s diaries are spaces for reflection on politically and historically significant moments in the diarists’ own inner and public lives, wherein their constructed selves constitute one half of a “dialogue with history” (Hooks xiii). An account might be insignificant in the grand scale of US history but nonetheless monumental to the diarist, as she uses the space of the diary in both unconventional and conventional ways: to reconstitute her subjectivity, to contemplate political and social incidents, to chronicle a humble or grand event, reflect on it, rail against or talk back to it, to or otherwise acknowledge other involved persons.14

Recording Illness, Racism, Resistance Evidence of national belonging and citizenship issues in Black women’s diaries might be connected to military wars (as in Charlotte Forten Grimké’s Journals) or to metaphorical wars for health and life (as in Lorde’s The Cancer Journals). Of course, war is a topic familiar in men’s diaries over time; Corey Greathouse suggests, for example, that military service occasioned such African American men’s private diaries as William B. Gould’s, which would be published by his greatgrandson William B. Gould IV as Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (2002).15 As Stephen E. Kagle has noted, “War has been the impetus for many American diaries, yet none of the best are by active combatants” (113). Writing primarily about diaries by men, Kagle prematurely concludes, “Diaries of illness, works whose unifying subject is sickness, were rare until the last [twentieth] century because serious medical conditions usually interfered with diary keeping. Many early diaries mention illness but only briefly” (114). Notably, Black women’s private writing proffers illness as a recurring theme. The extant documents reveal that Black women who are likely to record their private experiences for only themselves as diaries or for an intimate other in personal letters often contemplate misogynoir politics and social contexts. That

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contemplation leads them to document in turn their personal experiences of illness or their witness of other African Americans’ afflictions, arising from heinous acts of white supremacy, domestic terrorism, and state-sanctioned antiBlack violence. Ultimately, the diarists insinuate a corollary between private life writing, Black woman identity, and national environments including ecologies, ethos, politics, organic nature—that is, an injurious and toxic “climate.” For example, Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks began as private recollections that she shared with her mother (the writer Antonia Baquet), then revised for publication (22). Derricotte explores white supremacy, interracial relations, racialized intimacy, intraracial relations, and the fallacy of racial differences. Ultimately, both her private meditations—especially her reflections during the months she inscribes the diary—and her public experiences make her sick; Derricotte writes: “We carry the unfinished business of the past forward. We are compelled to resolve, not only our personal wounds, but the wounds of our ancestors. . . . We feel the painful wounds of history in our parents’ bed” (21). Invoking Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, Derricotte describes the sickness of internalized racism throughout a life spent “watching the world as if I were looking through the eyes of the most vicious racist,” as well as through others’ hostile or familial eyes, each pair those of a demanding, internal critic (20). As the author struggles toward freedom and resolution, illness permeates the published version of the diary and leaves the reader sick, too, and also awestruck by Derricotte’s poetic gifts. Significantly, Derricotte positions the reader as an eavesdropper on her sensational life. Reading most private diaries, those texts by definition not intended for publication, as interlopers, we confront the author’s experiences of anguish and rage. Derricotte nationalizes her rage by rendering her private and public experiences as uniquely American forms of racism, trauma, and misogynoir, readers. Thus nationalized, her rage is a response to a specifically American experience.

Conclusion The content of most modern diaries is meant for their authors only, as a record for growth, reflection, escape; for venting and inventing, dreaming, daring, sorting, screaming, releasing, reconstituting. Most diaries have virtually always contained private expression; they might be shared within families, within intimate friendships or between members of diverse groups. Private diaries might be considered too personal to risk sharing, even with the most intimate of others. Or once shared, readers might challenge a diary’s truths, the diarist’s vulnerability too embarrassing or their own mores too staid, the content too

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strange to engage. Extant available diaries authored by US Black women— both posthumously published private diaries and personal chronicles written for publication—invariably document unremitting racialized violence, its white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchal threat to embodied Blackness and Black intersectional experience. They document disease and resistance. Their recovery and publication are inestimable treasures, for they illustrate the legal and institutional legacies binding and restricting large numbers of US citizens and denizens. US Black women’s diaries reveal profound comprehension of the ways historical, political, national domination continues to jeopardize not only the home of many brave persons but also ways white supremacy might well be rooted out if ending white supremacist patriarchal nationalism were actually, earnestly, a common ideal.

Notes 1. Laura Beard, email to the author, November 11, 2020. 2. One notable subgenre of the diary as both a private and public document is the minister’s diary. For example, the Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel (1849) includes long passages written in typical itinerant preacher diary format. An African Methodist Episcopal exhorter in the antebellum mid-Atlantic United States, Lee documented: “I went to a place called Beaver Dams and spoke there; left there for Hillsborough, and spoke there to a large congregation; from there to Greensborough, and preached in white Methodist Church. The visit was not so prosperous; from there to Boomsborough. We were much favoured and approbated by the people, and blessed with the presence of the Lord in power. I then preached at Cecil Cross roads in an old meeting house, almost down, to a large congregation and it was warm” (40). See also Moody, Sentimental Confessions. 3. See scholarship by, e.g., Andreá N. Williams and Desirée Henderson. 4. In her analysis of nineteenth-century rhetoric books and instruction manuals for teaching the conventions of letter and personal correspondence composition, VanHaitsma observes that the kind of attention Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus paid to racial politics was not modeled in literacy education tools. VanHaitsma writes of Brown’s and Primus’s exchange: “Their letters demonstrate a familiarity with genre conventions which they certainly use. But they repurpose the romantic letter genre to compose their same-sex relationship, to write about erotic relations with others, and to comment on racial politics—none of which were modeled by manuals. In addition, the pace of their letters is more urgent than advised, and they negotiate forms of epistolary address that cross the categories of gender and relationship taught by manuals” (20–21). In other words, Black women’s private writing frequently breaks with expected genre norms as it configures the intersectional needs of the authors.

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5. Moya Bailey, who coined the term misogynoir, states: “For me, naming misogynoir was about noting both an historical anti-Black misogyny and a problematic intraracial gender dynamic that had wider implications in popular culture” (762). 6. Stallings offers an alternate reading of Lorez Collins’s treatment of her mother’s literary estate. Stallings praises Lorez Collins, writing, “[Kathleen] Collins’s unpublished and unproduced short stories, screenplays, theatrical plays, letters, and journals have been preserved and cared for by her daughter, Nina Collins, in ways that exceed collective Black cultural memory and traditional archival functions” (vii). Moreover, Stallings reports that Lorez Collins “has donated valuable materials to the Schomburg Center for Black Culture so that others might produce new studies of her mother’s work” (177). The archive housed in the Schomburg may include more of Kathleen Collins’s unpublished diaries. 7. See Thomas. The posthumous recovery and publication of the ambitious writermother’s private texts by her daughter, who elsewhere describes her “abandonment” by maternal neglect and her parents’ divorce, complicate a reading of the diary entries. See Lorez Collins. 8. For an account of Trump’s kisses, often unwelcome and nonconsensual, see Sommerfeldt. 9. See Stephanie Y. Evans for a discussion of the Strong Black Woman type. 10. The diary in the era of Jean-Jacques Rousseau issued in, as Barcellos writes, the “notion of singularity of the subject” (128) and “textual practices designated as selfwritings or personal writings” (127). See Cobb for an analysis of nineteenth-century diaries that functioned as communal texts, taking such forms as friendship albums to be exchanged and family diaries carrying news from one household to another. 11. See McDowell on the late twentieth-century African American women’s literary renaissance. 12. See Price. 13. Stallings’s Afro-futurist reading of Collins’s race aesthetic is especially useful. For example, “Chapter 1 [of The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins] makes evident that, in working on her first script, Collins was able to locate a cosmology that would become the basis of her artistic identity and a method in which writing and filmmaking served as embodied erotic practice that would motivate her to keep writing even when she was not being recognized as a Black woman writer at work in Hollywood” (90). 14. On Black women’s tradition of myriad forms of talking back, see bell hooks. On the use of sass in African American women’s autobiographies and other life writings, see Braxton. 15. See Greathouse.

Works Cited Bailey, Moya, and Trudy. “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism.” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 762–68.

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Barcellos, Sergio da Silva. “Personal Writings and the Quest for National Identity in Brazil.” In Ben-Amos and Ben-Amos, The Diary, 126–43. Baszile, Denise Taliaferro. “Beyond All Reason Indeed: The Pedagogical Promise of Critical Race Testimony.” Race Ethnicity and Education 11, no. 3 (2008): 251–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613320802291140. Bell-Scott, Patricia. Introduction to Life Notes, 17–26. Bell-Scott, Patricia, ed. Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Ben-Amos, Batsheva, and Dan Ben-Amos. The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Brody, Richard. “Kathleen Collins’s ‘Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary’ Contains an Extraordinary Unmade Movie.” New Yorker, February 2, 2019. Carter, Kathryn. “Feminist Interpretations of the Diary.” In Ben-Amos and Ben-Amos, The Diary, 39–57. Cobb, Jasmine Nichole. “‘Forget Me Not’: Free Black Women and Sentimentality.” MELUS 40, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 28–46. Collins, Kathleen, and Nina Lorez Collins, eds. Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins. New York: Ecco, 2019. Cunningham, Vinson. “Kathleen Collins’s Otherworldly Women.” New Yorker, April 20, 2020. Derricotte, Toi. The Black Notebooks. New York: Norton, 1997. Dove, Rita. “The House That Jill Built.” In Bell-Scott, Life Notes, 160–74. Evans, Danille. Foreword to Collins and Lorez Collins, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, vii–xi. Evans, Stephanie Y. Black Women’s Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2021. Gillespie, Marcia Ann. Foreword to Bell-Scott, Life Notes, 13–16. Greathouse, Corey D. “Using Personal Diaries as a Site for Reconstructing African American History.” In Hooks, Diary as Literatures, 3–13. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Remaking the Everyday: The Interior Worlds of Kathleen Collins’s Fiction and Film.” Nation, July 15, 2009. Grimké, Charlotte Forten. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké. Edited by Brenda Stevenson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Harrison, Kimberly. “The American Civil War: Confederate Women’s Diaries.” In Ben-Amos and Ben-Amos, The Diary, 299–316. Henderson, Desirée. How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers. London: Routledge, 2019. Hooks, Angela R., ed. Diary as Literature: Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2020. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.

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Horace, Lillian B. The Diary of Lillian B. Horace. Edited by Karen Kossie-Chernyshev. Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2007. Houchins, Sue E., ed. Spiritual Narratives. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982. Kagle, Stephen E. “The American Diary Canon.” In Ben-Amos and Ben-Amos, The Diary, 105–25. Kellaway, Kate. “‘Much of My Adult Pain Came from My Mother’s Betrayal.’” The Guardian, February 5, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/05 /nina-collins-kathleen-collins-bad-decision-mothers-part-interracial-love. Lee,  Jarena. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee [1836]. In Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Edited by William L. Andrews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Lee,  Jarena. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel [1849]. In Houchins, Spiritual Narratives, 1–97. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Edited by Tracy K. Smith. New York: Penguin, 2020. Lorez Collins, Nina. “How Kathleen Collins’s Daughter Kept Her Late Mother’s Career Alive.” Vogue, September 5, 2016. McDowell, Deborah E. “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Moffat, Mary Jane, and Charlotte Painter. Revelations: Diaries of Women. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Moody, Joycelyn K. “Fugitivity in African American Women’s Migration Narratives.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 45, no. 4 (December 2018): 636–38. https://doi.org/10.1353/crc.2018.0065. Moody, Joycelyn K. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Mullen, Harryette. Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2013. Nissel, Angela. The Broke Diaries: The Completely True and Hilarious Misadventures of a Good Girl Gone Broke. New York: Villard Books, 2001. Podnieks, Elizabeth. “The Literary Author as Diarist.” In Ben Amos and Ben-Amos, The Diary, 274–95. Price, Yasmine. “Preserving Kathleen Collins’ Legacy: An Interview with Nina Lorez Collins.” Black Women Radicals, March 20, 2022. https://www.blackwomenradicals .com/blog-feed/ninalorezcollins Riley, Shamara Shantu. “A Sistah Outsider.” In Bell-Scott, Life Notes, 92–109. Sinor, Jennifer. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Sommerfeldt, Chris. “Donald Trump Kisses Girl during Wisconsin Rally: ‘Bring Her, She’s So Beautiful.’” New York Daily News, October 18, 2016. https://www.nydaily news.com/news/politics/donald-trump-kisses-underage-girl-wisconsin-rally-article -1.2834472.

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Spires, Derrick R. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Stallings, L. H. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life. Bloomington: Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2021. Stewart, Maria W. Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart [1836]. In Houchins, Spiritual Nar­ ratives, 1–85. Thomas, June. “Public-Private Diary: Finding Black Women’s History.” Off Our Backs 15, no. 5 (May 31, 1985): 20. VanHaitsma, Pamela. “Queering the Language of the Heart: Romantic Letters, Genre Instruction, and Rhetorical Practice.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 1 (February 2014): 6–24. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960. New York: Anchor, 1987. Watson, Veronica. “Lillian B. Horace and the Literature of White Estrangement: Rediscovering an African American Intellectual of the Jim Crow Era.” Mississippi Quarterly 64, no. 1–2 (2011): 3–24. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Edited by Miriam DeCostaWillis. Black Women Writers Series. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Whitehead, Karsonya Wise, ed. Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. Williams, Andreá N. “African American Life Writing, 1865–1900.” In A History of African American Autobiography, edited by Joycelyn K. Moody, 85–100. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“Strange Juxtapositions” Elliott Erwitt’s Visual Diary of Cold War America Steven Hoelscher

Introduction: “The Picture Reminds Me of Me” In the fall of 1954, a twenty-six-year-old photographer headed to Wyoming in search of a “ranch boy” to photograph for Holiday magazine. One year earlier, Elliott Erwitt had been discharged from the US Army and joined Magnum Photos, the pioneering photojournalism agency led by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.1 On this, his first assignment after becoming a full member of Magnum, Erwitt was part of an ambitious group project to document the lives of young people around the world, the postwar youth, who, as Capa put it, “has as its main problem ‘going to war or not’” (quoted in Whelan 278; see also Ulrich 5). Holiday promised its readers “an intimate study of the activities, triumphs, and problems of widely assorted members of our contemporary world” but warned that “there are few idylls in this series . . . since sentimentality is the greatest single obstacle to the understanding of children” (Angell 105). Erwitt took Holiday at its word and spent several days with Jack Elton Brow of Douglas, Wyoming. He diligently took copious notes on the living conditions, home life, school, recreation, culture, aspirations, and political views of the ten-year-old boy, following the detailed, twelve-page questionnaire provided by editors at Holiday.2 Some Holiday questions teetered on the silly—such 56

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Figure 1.  Elliott Erwitt, Wyoming, 1954. Image Reference ERE1954XXXW01079/24 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

as the boy’s view of communism (answer: “Communists are the ones who fight against us non-communists. They are kind of mean”)—but most focused on daily life. Jackie, whose parents had separated when he was six, lived in town with his grandmother during schooltime, and on the ranch, thirty miles away, with his father on weekends and during the summer. Erwitt found Jackie to be “tough-minded, self-sufficient, and independent,” though the boy did not particularly like living in town and was always relieved when school was out so that he could be with his father. Erwitt photographed Jackie in both settings, but the twelve rolls of black-and-white and five rolls of color film focused more on the daily life at the ranch than in town.3 Looking over the photographs thirty-four years later, as he prepared for a major exhibition, Erwitt chose one picture as especially meaningful (Figure 1): The very emotional photograph of the young boy hanging onto his father at the dinner table was done on assignment, but rejected. The client wanted cheerful pictures of happy children. I had to go back and find a happy cowboy kid. My reaction is purely personal, I guess. The picture reminds me of me. The boy lived with his grandparents and his father visited for Sunday dinner. As everyone was talking, the boy reached over and held onto his father. Look at the man’s eyes when that happened. They speak. (Personal Exposures 30)

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The photograph and the entire shoot were, indeed, rejected by Holiday magazine. Despite its public statement to the contrary, the picture magazine was more interested in expressions of sentimentality than “what is really there.” The picture was also, the photographer believed, “evocative of the true feelings of the day,” filled with emotion from people who were taught from an early age to be stoic (Callahan and Erwitt 29). But what does not conform to the needs of an editor can often speak to the interests of an artist. Since its initial rejection, Erwitt has repurposed the picture countless times for photography exhibitions and major retrospectives.4 And for Erwitt—an immigrant long familiar with dislocation and familial separation, especially throughout his early years—the photograph seemed uncannily autobiographical.

Erwitt’s Autobiographical Window on the World: “There Are the Pictures, Looking Like a Diary” Erwitt’s “autobiographical” photograph of Jackie Brow serves as a useful point of departure for this chapter, which examines the relationship between photography and auto/biographical narratives, especially as that relationship intersects with questions of national identity. As Timothy Dow Adams has argued, this relationship is far from straightforward but inextricably entwined by their complicated, fraught association with notions of fact and verity: “The fact that life writing and photography, both by definition and common perception, have a strong felt relationship to the world, a relationship which upon examination seems to disappear, is paradoxically what gives both forms of narration their unusual strength” (15). Adams, along with Marianne Hirsch, Linda Rugg, and, more recently, Lee-Von Kim, is interested in the way that photographs— especially family photographs and portraits—frame people’s understandings and presentations of themselves. Archivists such as Shannon Hodge and historians such as Martha Sandweiss extend this argument by arguing for the value of treating photography as primary source material and not just figures to illustrate already completed biographical writing. Much of that scholarship has focused on authors such as Roland Barthes, who not only wrote about photography but whose autobiographical work conveyed a distinctly photographic consciousness. More recently, that attention has expanded to encompass writers such as Frederick Douglass, who are not traditionally associated with the medium but who well understood the evocative power of photographs to construct an autobiographical image.5

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My approach turns the site of analysis around and examines the person making the picture. Many photographers, like Stephen Shore, think about their photographic archive as a kind of visual diary, one that functions as a personal record of both their work and their perspectives on the world. Reflecting on his Uncommon Places project from the 1970s, Shore told one interviewer that the photographs from it are “in this funny position of being a diary. But it’s a diary of a life geared to making photographs. It’s a diary of a photographic trip. . . . What [Uncommon Places] is really about is my explorations, my travels, through looking” (quoted in Schuman 79). Such an intimately personal understanding of one’s photographs—especially by a photographer whose work has long been characterized as “formal, clin­ ical, objective, impersonal, or dispassionate”—may seem surprising (Schu­ man 79). But, as John Szarkowski argued in a landmark 1978 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), photographers like Shore, who came to artistic maturity and public recognition in the 1950s and 1960s, increasingly pursued highly personal visions of the world. To substantiate this claim, Szarkowski develops a useful analytic model to describe this turn toward personal, auto­ biographical expression. Some photographers created what Szarkowski understood to be mirrors—“romantic expressions of the photographer’s sensibility as it projects itself on the things and sights of this world,” while others made photographs that functioned as windows—“through which the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality” (2). This binary is not meant to be absolute, but it does suggest that even the photographers most closely associated with the documentary tradition had, by the 1950s, begun to find personal expression in their work. Elliott Erwitt, one of the photographers in the 1978 MoMA show, certainly sees his photographic archive this way. “I’ve always carried a camera with me,” he says, “and so there are the pictures, looking like a diary.” In reviewing his pictures, he says that “much of my life is there. I was reminded of many things, some pleasant and a lot unpleasant . . . mistakes, and things I could have done better, and the loss of friends who are dead and gone” (Personal Exposures 30). The bittersweet tone of Erwitt’s reflection also runs through his visual diary, but so too does a sense of irony and humor, one that consistently and poetically captures life’s comic parade. “You can find pictures everywhere,” he says. “It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy. People who don’t are interested in nothing” (quoted in Eastman Kodak 25).

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Erwitt has noticed things about the world and organized them into pictures for seven decades. With a visual sensibility that finds and then frames the ironic and uncanny in the most unlikely of places, Erwitt’s unique way of seeing spans the second half of the twentieth century. His formative years coincided with the rise of the mass-circulation picture magazines in the decades following World War II, a time when these publications—with their glossy pages, appealing photographs, attention-grabbing stories, and enormous audiences—were the primary medium for conveying visual information about the world. Erwitt’s photographs began appearing in illustrated periodicals in the late 1940s, and since then they have been published in Life, Look, Holiday, Fortune, Newsweek, Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Colliers, and the New York Times Magazine— to name just a few of the American titles. Magazines around the world have continued to seek out Erwitt for high-profile editorial and commercial projects well into this century.6 Cartier-Bresson found it something of a “miracle” that his young colleague could work “on a chain gang of commercial campaigns and still offer a bouquet of stolen photographs with a flavor, a smile from his deeper self ” (Callahan and Erwitt 49). The smile identified by Cartier-Bresson has often led reviewers to underestimate Erwitt and to emphasize the pretty views seen from his photographic window. Murray Sayle, for example, describes Erwitt’s photographs as showing “a kindly, optimistic, even an old-fashioned world. There’s no violence, no war, no cruelty or pain; no slums, and only a few mansions.” With words that would seem to describe stereotypical views of the 1950s, when Erwitt was getting his start, Sayle sees “a world of many bright beginnings, and even a few happy endings” (n.p.). Looking deeper into Erwitt’s visual diary reveals a more interesting window into the world; it shows a structure of feeling charged with the voltage of the pressing issues of the day. “My pictures are political in a way,” Erwitt says, “They are intended to be a comment on the human comedy and isn’t that politics?” (Personal Exposures 22). Overt politics are occasionally highlighted, but more often, a recognition of social fractures, economic inequality, and uneven geographic development hide just beneath the surface, informing the photographic depiction of surfaces, which Erwitt claims as his domain. How Erwitt sees and pictures the world is shaped by his experience as a refugee.7 He was born in Paris in 1928, the only child of displaced  Jewish Russians. After then spending his first years in Milan, Italy, Erwitt fled Europe as war approached and, in 1939, emigrated to the United States, living first in New York and later in Los Angeles. Before then, his parents had separated, and by the age of sixteen he was living on his own, having to make mortgage pay-

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ments on the Los Angeles home his father had abandoned.8 Living alone and with no parental supervision, a young Erwitt regularly welcomed art students and drifters to live in what he describes as a commune. “Something of a stray himself,” Jessica McDonald observes, at a young age Erwitt “developed a habit of welcoming outsiders and sympathizing with the uprooted” (12). Around this time, he took up photography, using his home’s laundry room as a darkroom, and has never stopped taking pictures. In what follows, I examine one small slice of Erwitt’s oeuvre, when he was first developing his photographic window on the world. With the Cold War as an ever-present backdrop, Erwitt’s visual diary explored marginalized communities both while on assignment and as personal photography. The young, displaced photographer traveled through a rapidly changing United States and eventually the larger, transnational world affected by American global power. Although seemingly a moment of unified consensus and national unity, the United States unraveled during this time, exposing fault lines of social and political unease. Erwitt, an outsider who easily navigated these disjunctures, was well attuned to the divided nature of his new home. He brought a perspective that focused on outsiders to many locations, but three that this chapter explores include Pittsburgh, where city residents struggled with the effects of massive urban renewal; the American South, where the codes of Jim Crow racism defined everyday life; and Hiroshima, Japan, where the aftermath of atomic warfare left behind scarred families. Each foregrounds a particular aspect of Erwitt’s interaction with the world and provides insight into one person’s interaction with a changing American political and social landscape.

Pittsburgh: “Pictures from the Periphery” After relocating from Los Angeles to New York in 1948, Erwitt sought out every opportunity to practice photography. He wandered the streets taking pictures with his square-format twin-lens Rolleiflex camera, and eventually a 35 mm rangefinder Leica, but the bills were mostly paid by making portraits of authors, including H. L. Mencken, William Carlos Williams, and Jack Kerouac (McDonald 16). He dabbled in filmmaking, sitting in on courses at the New School for Social Research, and learned about fashion photography from his friend Robert Frank. After a couple of itinerant years, traveling between the United States and Europe, and scraping by, Erwitt landed what he calls his “first grown-up job.”9 The assignment was rather straightforward: to photograph the operations of Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon), including its

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Bayway oil refinery of Linden, New Jersey, and scenes from the New York harbor.10 During several weeks in early 1950, Erwitt did his work well, documenting not only the massive oil complex but also the people who worked in it and were affected by it. The work earned Erwitt his first advance on a photographic commission—one hundred dollars, which, at the time, seemed extraordinarily generous. Even more important, it earned him a follow-up assignment in Pittsburgh.11 The person who gave Erwitt that hundred dollars, taken directly out of his wallet, and who brought him to Pittsburgh was Roy Stryker. One of the towering figures in twentieth-century documentary photography, Stryker directed the photography division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information from 1935 to 1943, before turning his attention to Standard Oil and then to Pittsburgh. Erwitt found himself as the junior member of Stryker’s photographic team commissioned by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD) to create a “photographic library” that would provide local and national press with “intelligent pictorial information” about Pittsburgh (quoted in Thomas 5). Pittsburgh was a city undergoing enormous socioeconomic and physical change in the name of urban renewal. The ACCD envisioned a radically transformed city, one barely recognizable as the steel manufacturing center “of perpetual smoke” that had long defined its public identity (Madrigal). In its place would emerge a postindustrial city of higher education, financial sectors, cultural amenities, and open space. The economic elites that comprised the ACCD well understood that changing “a smoky, dismal city, at her best” into “America’s Renaissance City” would require urban transformation at a tremendous scale and come with a substantial public cost. Hence the importance of a public-facing media campaign to show the emergence of a new Pittsburgh, “as a dynamic city with an implemented plan for the future,” rising from the ashes of the old (quoted in Thomas 5; see also Vitale; Grantmyre). Photography was central to that public relations campaign. Altogether, the twenty-one-year-old Erwitt spent four months in Pittsburgh during fall 1950 before receiving his draft notice from the US Army. Unlike the other, more experienced photographers, who were given “shooting scripts” with specific instructions about what to document, Erwitt was allowed effective carte blanche to photograph what he found interesting, with little supervision or oversight.12 “I had no responsibilities,” he recalls. “I was sort of taken on as an apprentice and I could just wander the city and take pictures.”13 To be sure, he understood the project’s commission, and he dutifully documented workers on demolition projects and new construction on the P&LE railroad. 14 Many

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Figure 2.  Elliott Erwitt, Gateway Center Demolition Area, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1950. Image Reference ERE1950101W00917/13 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

more pictures—the vast majority, in fact—would seem to have nothing to do with the demands of upbeat publicity that ACCD requested of his photographers. They show, instead, the acute observations of a young photographer reacting to “the visual atmosphere” of a place that was new to him. And what he noticed was interesting: individuals grappling with social and physical impediments; landscapes and groups of people composed with geometric lines as the guiding principle; some people utterly at home in a range of environments, while others struggled in an atmosphere of unease. Even pictures of construction sites reveal as much about Erwitt’s curiosity with his surroundings and outsider view of the world as they do about the transforming city itself. See, for example, a photograph he took of the Gateway Center demolition area (Figure 2). On the one hand, it’s a document of a city in transition, showing a wrecking crane and the demolished ruins of a brick building being torn down. But on the other hand, it’s an enigmatic picture, one bordering on the surreal. With his back to the camera, an older man in dark, baggy clothes nearly blends into a wall of doors that he peers behind and that reveal the old city crumbling before his eyes. He is juxtaposed with a fast-moving, business-suited man, pictured in midstride and slightly blurry, who emerged

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Figure 3.  Elliott Erwitt with Children on Beelen Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1950. Photo attributed to Clyde Hare. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Magnum Photos Collection, Harry Ransom Center.

from the dusty chaos. The words that he walks toward—on posters advertising two recently released films—help give the picture a sense of mystery: Is Pittsburgh the “sleeping city,” snoozing while power brokers transform neighborhoods into real estate? Is there really “no way out” from the ruins of ur­­ban wreckage? Erwitt took this picture as part of a daily routine that, for four months, was simple: “I’d get up in the morning, take pictures, and go to bed at night.”15 Although he pictured a wide range of places in the city, he also slowed down long enough to get to know many of the people he photographed. He was especially adept at working with children, such as the ones shown with the photographer on Beelen Street, part of the predominantly African American Hill District that was slated for redevelopment (Figure 3). The informality and playfulness of the scene depicted here is striking. A multiracial tableau in a city well known for its hardened racial divisions, the snapshot suggests something of Erwitt’s informal interaction with people he photographs. Not far removed from displacement himself, Erwitt strongly identified with children whose backgrounds

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placed them outside societal expectations. This was not the sitcom land of Ozzie and Harriet, but a historic, largely African American neighborhood on the verge of displacing more than eight thousand residents for the sake of urban renewal (Lubove 131–41). Along the way to the neighborhoods, downtown streets, and people that became his photographic subjects, Erwitt would stop at the Photographic Library office in the University of Pittsburgh campus to pick up film, have finished rolls developed, and, in the evenings, review his daily contact sheets with Roy Stryker and the other photographers. Much as he did with his FSA photographers, Stryker ran the Pittsburgh evening contact sheet sessions “more like a seminar in an educational institution than a government agency,” where photographers shared their opinions about which pictures were deemed strongest. They also critiqued the ones that fell outside accepted documentary norms, of which the young photographer had plenty (Rothstein 20). Erwitt recalls being “roundly criticized for being a kind of maverick . . . and for making funny pictures,” but also learning a great deal about matters of style and perspective from the experienced professionals Stryker had brought to Pittsburgh.16 In the end, Stryker had the final say about what would be included in the project and which would be eliminated by displacing them to the archive’s “killed files” (Bensen; Wallace). For Erwitt, more difficult than Stryker “killing” some of his pictures was the fact that the Pittsburgh Photographic Library would claim nearly all his work as its own. This was a taken-for-granted aspect of commissioned documentary work at the time, and Erwitt understood that: “Nobody, really, in those days thought of owning their negatives. Nobody expected photography to be particularly valuable.”17 But to the young photographer, value lay in the personal expression of his emerging art form. “In my experience,” he recalled many years later, “good pictures don’t come from assignments, or if they do it’s from the periphery and not directly related to what you are assigned to do” (quoted in Boot 138). This is an important point and the beginning of Erwitt’s career-long practice of separating his assignment work from the photographs that he personally valued—the ones that demonstrated his personal window on the world. At night, after Stryker had left the photo lab, Erwitt would then print, for his own personal collection, the pictures from the assignment’s periphery: those photographs that “I thought were useful from my point of view, not from anybody else’s.”18 One of his younger colleagues, Clyde Hare, frequently joined him for late-night printing and described the photographs that Erwitt valued as containing “strange juxtapositions” (quoted in Thomas 177). Sometimes visual contradictions occur between images on a contact sheet, such as the contrast

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Figure 4.  Elliott Erwitt, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1950. Image Reference ERE1950101 W00001/25 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

between well-heeled shoppers outside modish dress shops and luxury jewelers, in one photograph, and street beggars who go largely unnoticed, in another. At other times, Erwitt juxtaposes elements within a single photographic frame to create images that carry emotional weight—sometimes humorous, sometimes bittersweet, and sometimes haunting, but always visually arresting. One such photograph, taken from the periphery of his Pittsburgh assignment, depicts one of the Beelen Street kids. Pictured on the far right of the group portrait (Figure 3) is a young boy, kneeling next to Erwitt and pointing a toy gun at the camera. A contact sheet from this day reveals that Erwitt spent considerable time with the boy and the other children, taking ten photographs of him, sometimes with a friend and sometimes alone, sometimes sitting and sometimes standing. In six of the frames, the boy points the gun at his own head, and, in the one that Erwitt chose to print, his smile is widest, creating an unsettling and haunting photograph (Figure 4). At the time, it did not seem that way to Erwitt, who describes the boy as yet another kid goofing around, playing cowboy.19 Since then, however, haunting has become the picture’s principle affective register, beginning with Life magazine, which wrenched the picture out of context.

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It was used to illustrate existentialist philosophy and set against a headline that read, “It finds an eternal absurdity in death” (Kappler 91). For his part, Erwitt prefers not to describe the picture in a way that constricts its multiple meanings. It’s suggestive of something that is a mixture of frightening and disturbing, to be sure, but the picture is also something much more personal and enigmatic: “It’s a picture that I keep coming back to more and more,” he says, “which has a lot to do with me and my attitude and my point of view” (quoted in Harris 26). The strange juxtaposition of the wide smile, the gun, and the pretend act of self-inflicted violence make the image more mysterious and ironic—indeed, more absurd—than the rough-and-tumble, in-your-face scenes of William Klein’s boys playing with guns.20 From this early work, we see Erwitt’s photographic window opening to a world marked by mystery, irony, and absurdity. The “smile from his deeper self ”—that is, Erwitt’s visual diary—displayed in these photographs comes from a place well aware of the hardships wrought by dislocation and outsider identities. His Pittsburgh photographs might not be protesting the massive displacement that accompanied “community development.” But, by emphasizing the cracks in the façade of urban renewal—by exposing the cynical irony of the ACCD public relations machine—he showed a place where experience was divided from upbeat slogans of American urban progress.

The American South: “Beneath the Mask of Nice Manners” Even before his first “grown-up job” brought him to the New York harbor and then to Pittsburgh, Erwitt was noticing things about America and organizing those observations into pictures. One of his earliest and most frequently photographed destinations was the American South. Reflecting years later on these travels, Erwitt put it this way: I have a strong attraction to the American South. People there have this marvelous exterior—wonderful manners, warm friendliness—until you touch on things you’re not supposed to touch on. Then you see the hardness beneath the mask of nice manners. But I love that surface because, being a photographer, I deal with surfaces more than anything else. What appears to be is what I deal with. (Personal Exposures 19)

Not surprisingly, some of Erwitt’s most memorable photographs come from these travels, where the interplay between masks and surface, reflections and appearance, consistently presented visually intriguing territory. He may have

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Figure 5.  Elliott Erwitt, Georgia, 1954. Image Reference ERE1954000W00425/29 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

dealt with surfaces, but, for Erwitt, those surfaces inevitably bore the fissures and cracks of a shattering national identity. In 1954, one year after joining Magnum, the photo agency distributed his first packaged “story,” called “The South.”21 Some of the pictures depict historic homes, some show musicians, while others highlight such events as African American and white church services, football games, beauty contests, and Confederate Memorial Day Services. Most captions to these photographs are rather brief—“public drinking fountains in Wilmington, North Carolina”— but some provide textual detail about why “outdoor barbecues and picnics play an important part in the community of the South.” The only remotely provocative caption from this story describes the picture this way: “Friendly relations exist between many white Southerners and Negroes, but there are always reminders of the segregation of the races, as on this freight-loading platform.”22 Taken in Georgia during Erwitt’s extensive 1954 travels through the South while on assignment for Holiday magazine, this photograph shows two men— one white, one Black—who appear to be having the sort of informal conversations that friends, or at least friendly coworkers, invariably do (Figure 5). There’s nothing strained about the interaction, and it’s not clear—by posture, deport-

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ment, or clothing—whether one claims a higher social position. Were it not for the horizontal line separating the men or the writing on the background wall, the picture would be mundane and hardly worth a contemporary viewer’s attention. And, this, exactly, is how the scene must have looked to most white southerners: commonplace to the point of erasure. The background sign indicating the existence of segregated restrooms was a type pervasive throughout the Jim Crow South. Seared into our national cultural memory of the century between the end of slavery and the civil rights movement, signs of segregated facilities were everywhere on the landscape—but not in the photographic record. One of the remarkable findings of Elizabeth Abel’s comprehensive study of Jim Crow–era photographs is how underdocumented such facilities were, with fewer than two hundred such images in historical collections in the South. Too ordinary to capture the camera’s attention, “segregation signs seem to have been about as worthy of documentation as telephone poles or traffic signs” (105). Those who noticed segregation signs enough to photograph them tended to be outsiders, like Elliott Erwitt.23 Beginning with his first New Orleans trip to visit his father, who had relocated there in 1949, Erwitt began consistently documenting the surfaces of racial oppression in the American South. In New Orleans that year, he photographed hotels bearing signs “Rooms for Whites,” and people, cast in dark shadows, as they approached the “Colored Entrance” to St. Philip Beer Parlor. In 1954 Mississippi, he pictured another “Colored Entrance,” this one to a park immediately in front of a poster of an evil-eyed monkey. In South Carolina that same year, he documented a fierce-looking president of the Confederate Memorial Association addressing a crowd of supporters. In 1956 Texas, he photographed a White Citizens’ Council meeting with delegates bearing signs proclaiming that “those that endorse integration either do not know that the NAACP drive for integration is controlled by the communist party or they are for communism.” Even after segregation officially ended, the underlying racism in the South did not, and Erwitt continued to document it, as in 1976 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the image of a loving white mother holding her baby is visually counterpoised by the fact that the child is clad in a KKK robe and the two are pictured adjacent to a sign reading “Welcome All Klansmen Friends & True White Patriots.” One of the most impactful photographs came very early in his career, during a spring 1950 visit to a friend living in Wilmington, North Carolina. Erwitt recalls simply responding to what he was observing in a new geography. “My camera was like part of my body,” he said recently. “I always had it with me and was reacting to what I was seeing.”24 One contact sheet from North Carolina

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Figure 6.  Elliott Erwitt, Contact Sheet, Minus 76, detail, Wilmington, North Carolina, 1950, Elliott Erwitt Studio. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

shows this working method of his visual diary in some detail (Figure 6).25 At this early stage in his career, Erwitt worked in a fast, intuitive manner that composed things in the frame quickly, not stopping at any one scene for too long, before moving on to another. Occasionally, as we see in frames 33 through 36, he slowed down and, after several attempts, pictured a visually striking scene that bears the mark of Erwitt’s future mentor, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Such a “decisive moment” captures an event that is spontaneous and ephemeral, and the image itself carries the meaning of the encounter—in this case, frame 36, the surreal encounter between an armless store mannequin and a passerby. More often, however, are the one or two snapshots of a particular scene: friends in a coffee shop, the interior of a restaurant, and an elderly man by an abandoned automobile, a billboard, a shopper leaving a drugstore, a work crew. Among the scenes that caught Erwitt’s eye—the exact location is impossible to detect—is an interior space showing two water fountains. The first photograph shows a man leaning over to drink from one of the fountains (frame 26), and

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the second (frame 27) is a near duplicate image of the same scene, but without the man. This strange juxtaposition, presented in near abstract form, is strikingly sociological and shrewdly political. The photographs are notable for their effective distillation of the essential parameters of Jim Crow–era segregation (Figure 7). The false promise of “separate but equal” public facilities—connected, as they are, in one system—is laid bare by the visual difference between the heavily used “colored” water basin and the “white” refrigerated water fountain. The photographs’ minimal, nondescriptive captions—today, Magnum’s caption reads simply “North Carolina, 1950”—mirrors the pictures’ formal simplicity. With no additional visual information, the photographs lean toward abstraction and stand as intimate documents from another era. Unlike the more overtly political photographs of the civil rights movement a decade later, which frequently depicted scenes of white violence and Black protest, Erwitt’s water fountain pictures are neither dramatic nor sensational (Berger). Their quiet, snapshot aesthetic—note the slightly blurred quality of the image with the man at the water fountain—documents injustice as a matter-of-fact quality of American life. There is no evidence that the photographs were published during this early Magnum distribution, although that was soon to change. One of the first came

Figure 7.  Elliott Erwitt, Wilmington, North Carolina, 1950. Image Reference ERE195 0001W00N76/26 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

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Figure 8.  From Ebony Magazine, August 1962, page 104. Johnson Publishing Company Archive, Smithsonian Institution. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Elliott Erwitt Master Print Collection, Harry Ransom Center.

in 1962, when Ebony magazine’s eleven-issue series on the history of African Americans featured Erwitt’s 1950 picture of the two contrasting water fountains to lead its story on “The Birth of Jim Crow” (Figure 8). From this beginning point, the photographs have achieved iconic status, having been “widely reproduced in print, electronic, and digital media, making them widely recog-

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nized and remembered” (Hariman and Lucaites 27).26 Between 2003 and 2014 alone, Magnum Photos received nearly 150 requests for reproduction in K-12 and university textbooks, documentary films, newspapers, magazines, art dealerships, public television programs, and scholarly books, making the water fountain picture with solitary man the most sought-after image of its extensive civil rights archive.27 Sometimes, as when the Terrence Higgins Trust in the United Kingdom deployed the photograph as part of its campaign to end discrimination against people with HIV, the image is used to illustrate a broader theme of prejudice and community divisions.28 In most cases, however, the image is firmly anchored to the American civil rights movement. But, here too, as with all iconic images, the photograph’s specificity is less important than its ability to evoke generalizable, social concepts. The name of the photographer, the town, the state, and the date fade from view as the clearly demarcated visual language of racial injustice takes center stage. Occasionally that stage is literal. Take the example of museums, in this case the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), in Birmingham, Alabama. As part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the BCRI features a four-part permanent exhibition that “promotes a comprehensive understanding of the significance of civil rights developments in Birmingham” (Birmingham Civil Rights Institute). After watching an introductory video, that journey begins when a large screen is raised to the first part of the permanent exhibition, the “Barriers Gallery.” There, replicated in three-dimensional form and at full scale, is Erwitt’s photograph, complete with descriptive caption but without credit (Figure 9). The decision to re-create the photograph is interesting.29 Birmingham, after all, was a critically important, extremely well-documented site of the civil rights movement.30 Erwitt’s photograph, despite being taken in North Carolina, nevertheless proved better than any other at showcasing a cruel fact in American life: the white supremacist project of delineating racial hierarchy required a unifying infrastructure. In its sparse simplicity and as it evokes generic structures of racism, rather than the specific details of any one place, the photograph has become a fundamental marker of cultural memory. As a site of memory, the re-creation is an imperfect replica of a key entry in Erwitt’s visual diary, something that he detected immediately. The first thing that the photographer noticed when I showed him a picture of the display is that “it’s missing the pipe that connects the water fountains.” He then shrewdly asked, “Isn’t that the whole point, that segregation was part of one, connected system?”31

Figure 9.  Entrance to the Barriers Exhibit at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, Alabama, 2010. Photograph by Carol Highsmith. Courtesy of The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-highsm05068.

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Hiroshima, Japan: On the Way to “A Perfectly Innocent Assignment” The 1950s proved to be a remarkably productive decade for the young photographer. Thanks, in part, to Magnum’s robust relationship with a wide range of clients, Erwitt found himself in New York, photographing Marilyn Monroe during the filming of The Seven Year Itch; in Des Moines, documenting the Iowa State Fair; and in Los Angeles, working on a story for Life magazine called “People in Love.” He traveled to New Hampshire to photograph students at Exeter Academy, to Arkansas for a beauty pageant, and to the Las Vegas strip. He also headed to Washington, DC, to cover the heated protests surrounding the executions of Ethel and  Julius Rosenberg, who had been convicted and sentenced to death for spying for the Soviet Union. A key episode of the Second Red Scare, when paranoia and fearful suspicion of a communist infiltration dominated American life, the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs galvanized and split the nation. Protestors on both sides—those seeking to extend the stay of execution and those insisting on its immediate implementation—descended on the capital on  June 19, 1953. Erwitt’s contact sheets document the range of opinions on the issue, but one stands out (Figure 10).32 The contrast between the cold-blooded words on the middle-aged man’s handwritten sign—“Kill Traitors”—and his self-satisfied grin makes for a chilling scene. Photographs like this one, though taken on assignment, were not published at the time. Erwitt’s visual diary is filled with such moments of strange juxtapositions that expose a divided nation. They demonstrated as much about Erwitt’s growing artistic sensibility and his personal interpretation of the Cold War’s cruelty and absurdity as they do about a current event. Erwitt’s breaking news coverage of the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1957 cemented his status as an international photojournalist (Hoelscher, “Cold Wars,” 97–98). Coming on the heels of the Soviet Union’s successful October 4 launching of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial earth satellite, the event seemed to announce, in truly dramatic fashion, that America’s communist adversaries were winning the space race—and worst of all, that the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack was real. The “shock of the century” appeared to foreshadow an age of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads vast distances.33 The Sputnik crisis heightened fears not only of wholesale global destruction but also of the second great danger of the atomic age: the health threats of nuclear fallout. Well into the mid-1950s, the association between nuclear

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Figure 10.  Elliott Erwitt, Demonstrator during the trial of Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, the first US civilians to be executed for espionage. Washington, DC., 1953. Image Reference ERE1953 XXXW00191/32 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

radiation, pollution, and illness was not something political leaders wanted to acknowledge. Spencer Weart, for example, describes the mood after a series of bomb tests in Nevada that raised local concerns about the risks, but still, “month after month, the American government issued no more than scraps of ambiguous information mixed with reassurances. The fact that hydrogen bomb

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fallout could dangerously pollute entire territories was treated as a military secret, for it undercut the prevailing strategy for nuclear war and civil defense” (98, 112). Supporting this position, the mass-circulation press during the mid1950s ran countless articles insisting that there was “not a word of truth in scare stories” about the deleterious effects of nuclear fallout. By the end of the decade that had begun to change, the “breakthrough [coming] during November 1957 in response to the shock of Sputnik” (Weart 139). With the recognition that nuclear war could now be delivered at great distances, Sputnik helped trigger anxiety over fallout. The most characteristic place where those fears had been translated into lived experiences was Hiroshima, Japan. In April 1958, on the way to Tokyo to photograph the city’s thriving burlesque scene, Erwitt traveled to Hiroshima to witness those lived experiences. As he put it years later, “I would go on a perfectly innocent assignment, say, for Holiday magazine, some touristic thing, and stay out for some event that was going on.”34 And what was going on in Hiroshima, a city increasingly in the news after a significant rally on the tenth anniversary of the bombing, caught his, and the world’s, attention. There, he met an “excellent interpreter” who introduced him to dozens of people affected in various ways by the 1945 bombing. The project was challenging for, as Erwitt noted at the time, “this kind of story is difficult,” in part because “the subject of continued ill-effects from the atomic blast is a very emotional one, which also has a lot to do with local politics and the politics of institutions—Japanese and American—who work in in Hiroshima.”35 In this lengthy, handwritten letter to the New York Magnum office, Erwitt puts in words what his visual diary showed: a photographer who, despite his growing professional acclaim, continued to identify with the marginalized, the people on the periphery of power but who are unwittingly affected by forces beyond their control. Erwitt began his Hiroshima work with several of the “Hiroshima Maidens”—a group of twenty-five Japanese women, who, as young girls, were seriously injured by the 1945 explosion and who then traveled to the United States in 1955 for a highly publicized effort to receive reconstructive surgery. 36 Perhaps because the Hiroshima Maidens’ story had become so well known, a number of these women were accustomed to the presence of a photographer and welcomed Erwitt into their homes. In other instances, however, Erwitt found that “most victims are hard to seek out. They don’t want to be photographed. They shy away from public places of all kinds.”37 Here, Erwitt reflected on the intense challenges faced by the survivors of the atomic bomb and, just as important, by their children:

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Generally speaking the new generation of atomic survivors and their offspring live in fear that ill effects will strike them down sometime without warning, as they have many others. Common diseases which may be well due to the ABomb are lukemia [sic], anemia and some bone diseases, skin cancer, lymphatic glad [sic] disorders, and most terrifying of all to the affected women, the chance that their children will be born defective. For this reason “A-Bomb Survivors” have an extremely difficult time getting married, even the ones who are not disfigured by wounds. Not only that, but they find that getting decent jobs is almost as impossible . . . even department stores wouldn’t hire them. Isolation is one of their saddest realities.38

Today, the intense discrimination against the “A-Bomb Survivors,” or hibakusha in Japanese, is well known, but in 1958 Erwitt encountered a story still unfolding.39 Although they allowed him access into their homes and lives, well into the mid-1950s, most hibakusha were haunted by a sense of shameful contamination and were not predisposed to public attention. The photographs that Erwitt took in Hiroshima are nuanced, disquieting, and respectful of the people he worked with. Like Domon Ken, the Japanese photographer whose 1958 book Hiroshima became, for many Japanese, the bestknown visual account of the bombing’s afterlife, Erwitt documented a wide range of situations. Erwitt photographed two young teachers who described their strained social relations. Others at the school told him that “atomic survivors are considered bad health risks and live in fear that their children may turn out defective.”40 He visited several public institutions: a hospital dedicated to treating the hibakusha; the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which “is always crowded on holidays . . . and included terrifying photographs and documentation”; and a souvenir shop run by a survivor who appears cautiously behind a half-opened door (Figure 11). 41 One photograph shows a middle school with many children who were being carried by their mothers during the blast: the ones with raised hand admitted to being directly affected by radiation. Shortly before leaving Hiroshima, he visited the home of the grieving family of Hideko Hirata, a “Hiroshima Maiden” who had died the day before. Among the thirteen rolls of 35 mm film that Erwitt shot in Hiroshima, one contact sheet vividly demonstrates his approach.42 Here, we see no attempt to photograph “decisive moments”—those quickly framed pictures, taken on the fly, that suggest spontaneity and serendipity, and for which Erwitt has become famous (Figure 12). Instead, Erwitt’s visual diary shows him working with his photographic subjects, as a collaborator, trying to find a balance between their concerns of self-representation and his interest in telling their stories with a

Figure 11.  Elliott Erwitt, Hiroshima, Japan, 1958. Image Reference ERE1958006 W00009/03 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

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Figure 12.  Elliott Erwitt, Contact Sheet 58–6–8,  from Hiroshima, Japan, 1958, Binder 29, Elliott Erwitt Studio. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

camera. In the first eight frames of the contact sheet, Erwitt photographed Tsukasa Nitoguri, chairman of the City Council in Hiroshima, at both distance and, especially in frame 5 (the selected portrait), close up. In response to a recent statement by Harry Truman justifying Hiroshima’s destruction, city leaders drafted a resolution condemning the former president’s callousness; they called out Truman for having “no compunction whatsoever” and that the threat to use atomic warfare again “is a gross defilement committed on the people of Hiroshima and their fallen victims.” Truman’s letter of response— which Nitoguri holds—took the Japanese City Council through a patronizing history lesson, concluding that it was the Americans “who had been shot in the back at Pearl Harbor” (Truman and Nitoguri 1, 4). As he holds Truman’s letter like a mirror to the American nation, Nitoguri’s defiant refusal to let power off the hook found an ideal representation in Erwitt’s photographs: he seems to be asking Americans to look at themselves and decide whether theirs is the kind of country that willingly performs unspeakable violence on Others.

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If Erwitt’s portraits of Nitoguri sit squarely in the documentary mode of expression, his pictures of Nobuyo Otsuka are more intimate and show a wider array of emotions. The four-year-old daughter of an atomic bomb survivor, Nobuyo was born blind in one eye. Her mother, Hideko Otsuka, had been “extremely weak” during the pregnancy, suffering from long-term anemia and hair loss. Two of Nobuyo’s three older sisters have had some aliments, though she is the only one with such a visible disorder. Erwitt photographed Nobuyo both with her mother and sisters close at hand and standing apart; sometimes she is looking at the camera and other times she looks in the distance. The picture that he selected (frame 34) is a masterful portrait of a loving family (Figure 13). It’s a window into a scarred world, but one that is attuned to power of support that Erwitt, himself a refugee, has often recognized in his photographic work. Reflecting on how he approaches portraiture, especially photographs of people in difficult situations, Erwitt returns to his own experiences, saying, “It seems to me that you should always let people be themselves” (Callahan and Erwitt 74). With focus and lighting directly on Nobuyo and her doll, the young girl captures the attention—both ours and that of the blurred sister to the right. Unlike the photographs where Nobuyo looks directly at the camera, in this one the disfigurement of her eye is least visible, rendering the scene poignant but hopeful.

Figure 13.  Elliott Erwitt, Hiroshima, Japan, 1958. Image Reference ERE1958006W00008/34 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

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Figure 14.  Map of Elliott Erwitt’s Photographic Travels, 1958–1959. Source: Erwitt Story Lists, Magnum Photos, Inc., New York City Bureau.

The self-assigned story that resulted is an important one that shows a vital side of Erwitt’s photographic window on the world, where politics, tragedy, and absurdity collide. More than any other story, his Hiroshima pictures are the product of the concerned, critically engaged reportage that confronted social problems. His raw and emotionally charged photographs of dozens of people affected in various ways by nuclear fallout were clearly intended for American viewers. Magnum distributed them to multiple picture magazines, including Life, but they apparently never found a welcoming editor.43 Most media outlets in the United States continued to follow the advice of the American occupation authorities and had little to say about pollution from nuclear fallout, choosing instead to promote the country’s unwavering strength and superiority in Cold War politics. The Hiroshima photographs have remained largely unpublished until now. As Erwitt’s professional reputation grew, so too did the opportunities for an even greater range of commercial and editorial assignments. Hopping from one project to the next, Erwitt traveled throughout the United States, and eventually around the globe, at a dizzying pace. In 1958, for example, in just a matter of weeks, Erwitt found himself on assignment in Paris for Vogue; Pakistan for Esquire; Vienna for MGM Studios; Reno, Nevada, for Holiday; and Egypt for Paris Match magazines.44 One editor, from Esquire, commented how “at the time of this writing we can’t find him, Magnum can’t find him, no one can find him. Elliott Erwitt, where are you?” (“Backstage” 16). Erwitt’s globetrotting continued in 1959 as well, creating a loopy spiderweb when plotted on a map (Figure 14).

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Conclusion Elliott Erwitt may be best known for his off beat sense of humor, but his visual diary also documents a splintering world, where dreams of an idyllic, postwar America are shown to be wishful thinking, both at home and abroad. Some photographs, taken while visiting friends, uncannily expose the parameters of white supremacy and achieve iconic status, while others, made on the way to an assignment but never published, show the lingering effects of the American war effort. For this image maker, the human comedy is not always funny but sometimes marked by fear-based hatreds, loneliness, and banality. What emerges from his visual diary is a complicated world where the ordinary and absurd reside side by side. America itself is something of a strange juxtaposition, where ideals of urban progress, good manners, and wartime victory are contradicted by the realities of displacement, racism, and toxic environments. At a time when photographers seemingly had to make a choice between personal work and commercial photography, Erwitt was able to navigate the worlds of both. With the visceral rage against conformity that accompanied the Beat Generation, Erwitt’s friend Robert Frank threw down the gauntlet, insisting that photographers guard against selling out to the commercial world (Greenough).45 Erwitt not only survived but thrived amid these tensions, at least in part because he found an outlet to express his own worldview through the photo-making process. That worldview was profoundly shaped by his biography. “Immigrants are different,” he says. “If you’ve had to change countries and languages a number of times, as I have, you get toughened up” (Personal Exposures 12). His visual diary shows a photographer deeply connected to the conflicts and anxieties of Cold War America, toughened up by the experiences that shaped his early life, which in turn gave visual expression to a divided national identity. But it also shows something more. The bifurcation that Erwitt experienced early in life, split as he was between conflicting family members, repeatedly changing countries and languages, provided the basis to create a visual diary that goes much deeper than his claim to deal merely with surfaces would suggest. His photographs dig deep and reveal an America, and a photographer, where contradictions are the norm and juxtapositions are always strange.

Notes 1. An international consortium of photojournalists committed to the notion of preserving independence from commercial magazines by retaining copyright over their

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images, Magnum photographers frequently dovetailed their commissioned assignments with personal projects (Bair; Hoelscher, Reading Magnum). Erwitt not only benefited from this unique arrangement but also eventually became one of Magnum’s most prominent members. 2. Elliott Erwitt, “Ranch Boy Answers to ‘Children’s Questionnaire,’” 1956, manuscript, Erwitt Caption Notebook, Magnum Photos Bureau Archives, New York City. 3. Elliott Erwitt, Contact Sheets 1079–1091, from Douglas, Wyoming, 1954, Binder 16, Elliott Erwitt Studio, New York City. 4. Three important examples include Erwitt Personal Exposures, Snaps, and Personal Best. Erwitt returned the following year to the West, this time to Colorado, and found “a happy boy” in Gary Carlstrom (Angell). For more on that story, see Alexander; the original story eventually found a publisher (“Luckiest Boy”). 5. The most frequently photographed American of the nineteenth century, the exslave turned leading abolitionist strategically deployed photographs of himself to counter claims of racial inferiority and to assert Black humanity. As a portrait subject and intellectual who wrote extensively about photography, Douglass grappled with this then-new visual medium to challenge racist, national narratives about Black life (Stauffer, Trod, and Bernier). 6. More on these stories, and Erwitt’s work as a photojournalist, may be found in Hoelscher, “Cold Wars and Hot Stories: Elliott Erwitt’s Photojournalism.” 7. Erwitt’s experience as a white, European immigrant naturally provided him different opportunities than those arriving from Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, an important point set forth in Lisa Lowe’s now classic Immigrant Acts. Among those opportunities, the most important was surely membership in Magnum Photos, the distinguished photo agency where Erwitt built his career and whose early members were uniformly white (Bair 22). 8. Elliott Erwitt, interview by the author, Erwitt Studio, New York City, November 19, 2014. 9. Elliott Erwitt, interview by the author, Erwitt Studio, New York City, August 20, 2014. 10. Listing of Erwitt images in the Standard Oil of New Jersey Collection, Roy Stryker Papers, University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections. See also Plattner. 11. Elliott Erwitt, interview by the author, Erwitt Studio, New York City, May 14, 2013. 12. Erwitt, interview, May 14, 2013. See also Alexander 69; Wallace 138. 13. Elliott Erwitt, interview by Steven W. Plattner, April 21, 1985, typescript, in possession of author. 14. My observations about Erwitt’s 1950 Pittsburgh photographs come from three sources, most important of which is his notebook of Contact Sheets from Pittsburgh. Also useful are the digitized contact sheets recently supplied from the Pennsylvania Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Many of these photographs have been re-

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cently unearthed from the Carnegie Library by Vaughn Wallace and published in Erwitt, Pittsburgh 1950. 15. Erwitt, interview, May 14, 2013. 16. Erwitt, interview, April 21, 1985. Esther Bubley, Harold Corsini, Sol Libsohn, and Russell Lee were several of the other photographers Stryker brought to Pittsburgh (Wallace 137; a complete list may be found in Thomas 163–73). 17. Erwitt, interview, November 19, 2014. 18. Erwitt, interview, November 19, 2014. 19. Erwitt, interview, May 14, 2013; Elliott Erwitt, Contact Sheets from Pittsburgh, 1950, Binder 23A, Elliott Erwitt Studio. 20. When reflecting on his own pictures of kids playing with guns that he documented in his Life Is Good and Good for You in New York (1956), William Klein describes a similar ubiquity that Erwitt found in Pittsburgh. What differs is their photographic approach (“William Klein: In Pictures”). 21. For more on the concept of the “story,” as developed by Magnum photographers, see Boot. 22. Elliott Erwitt, “The South, Photographs by Elliott Erwitt,” 1956, manuscript, Erwitt Caption Notebook, Magnum Photos Bureau Archives. 23. Another was Esther Bubley, who photographed the segregated Memphis, Tennessee, Greyhound bus station in 1943 and who describes being shocked by what she saw: “It was never put to me that I should look out for segregation signs. But I was free to take what impressed me as odd, interesting, horrifying. I was twenty-one at that time, I had grown up in an area where very few blacks lived. Those segregation signs were awful. I don’t know how anyone could overlook them” (quoted in Abel 108–9). 24. Erwitt interview, August 20, 2014. 25. Elliott Erwitt, Contact Sheet 76,  from Wilmington, NC, 1950, Binder 5, Elliott Erwitt Studio. 26. This is a viewpoint shared by Abel, who has called the first image “the iconic Jim Crow photograph, the counterpart for the deep structure of racial inequality to Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ for the Depression . . . [or] Nick Ut’s ‘Terror of War’ [the photograph of the napalmed girl] for Vietnam” (118). 27. “Document History Report for Story Number ERE1950001, Picture Number W00N76/26, 2003–2014,” 2014, Magnum Photos Bureau Archives. I thank Michael Shulman, director of Publishing, Broadcasting and Film at Magnum Photos, for his helpful research into the question of Magnum’s distribution of this photograph. A sampling of the enormous Magnum archive devoted to the civil rights movement—which features the work of Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Leonard Freed, and Eve Arnold, among others—may be found at Magnum Photos, “The Civil Rights Movement.” 28. The poster is part of the AIDS Education Poster Collection at the Special Collections Library at the University of Rochester and may be viewed online at https:// aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/45278.

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29. Kendall R. Chew, department assistant of education at the BCRI, confirms that, when the museum was created, it sought to replicate Erwitt’s photograph for this display (email to the author). 30. Raiford has even argued that “for many viewers today, almost the entirety of the civil rights movement is captured, quite literally, in the photographs of Birmingham 1963” (2). 31. Erwitt interview, August 20, 2014. 32. Elliott Erwitt, Contact Sheet 191, from Rosenberg Protest, Washington, D.C., 1953, Binder 8, Elliott Erwitt Studio. 33. Erwitt’s photographs from the fortieth anniversary celebration were published in the New York Times Magazine, Jours de France, and Life magazine, among others. 34. Elliott Erwitt, interview by Russell Miller, March 1, 1996, M0104 typescript, Magnum Photos Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. See also Erwitt, “Notes on Tokyo Burlesque,” 1958, Story Number 58–6, Erwitt Caption Notebooks, Magnum Photos Bureau Archives. 35. Elliott Erwitt, “Hiroshima Letter to Magnum Bureau,” April 9, 1958, Story Number 58–6, Erwitt Caption Notebooks, Magnum Photos Bureau Archives. 36. One media source to cover the visit was the Canadian Broadcasting Company, which aired the story in on August 8, 1957 (The Hiroshima Maidens). See also Barker. 37. Erwitt, “Hiroshima Letter.” 38. Erwitt, “Hiroshima Letter.” The discrimination that Erwitt observed was by that point well documented in the historical record (see United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs). 39. In his oral history of World War II, Studs Terkel put it this way: “There is considerable discrimination in Japan against the hibakusha. It is frequently extended toward their children as well: socially as well as economically. ‘Not only hibakusha, but their children, are refused employment,’ says Mr. Kito. ‘There are many among them who do not want it known that they are hibakusha’” (542; see also Southard). 40. Erwitt, “Hiroshima Letter.” 41. Elliott Erwitt, “Hiroshima Visit Captions, story 58–6,” April 9, 1958, Erwitt Caption Notebook, Magnum Photos Bureau Archives. 42. Elliott Erwitt, Contact Sheet 58–6–8,  from Hiroshima, Japan, 1958, Binder 29, Elliott Erwitt Studio. 43. Elliott Erwitt, “Hiroshima, Japan Distro,” April 14, 1958, Story Number 58–6, Erwitt Caption Notebook, Magnum Photos Bureau Archives. Erwitt returned to Japan for the twenty-fifth anniversary of bomb, and this time his photograph of Hiroshima, which “bore few visible scars,” made the front page of the August 6, 1970, edition of the New York Times. 44. “Erwitt Story Lists for Magnum Photos,” Magnum Photos Bureau Archives. 45. Two further examples demonstrate this point. Some of Erwitt’s peers, such as Louis Faurer, “paid a heavy price for their desires to function successfully both as wellpaid magazine photographers and as experimental artists,” eventually leaving photog-

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raphy altogether (Livingston 301). Others, such as Gjon Mili, successfully worked as a staff photographer at Life but found his personal work thoroughly absorbed by the publishing giant (Erwitt, interview, November 19, 2014).

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth. Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Alexander, Stuart. “Early Erwitt.” In McDonald, Elliott Erwitt, 63–78. Angell, Roger. “Children’s World.” Holiday Magazine, December 1955, 105. “Backstage with Esquire: The Logical and the Lost.” Esquire 50, no. 1 (  July 1958): 16. Bair, Nadya. The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. Barker, Rodney. The Hiroshima Maidens: A Story of Courage, Compassion, and Survival. Toronto: CNIB, 2011. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bensen, Allen. “Killed Negatives: The Unseen Photographic Archives.” Archivaria 68 (Fall 2009): 1–37. Berger, Maurice. For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. “About BCRI.” https://www.bcri.org/about-bcri/. Boot, Chris. Magnum Stories. London: Phaidon, 2004. Callahan, Sean, and Elliott Erwitt. The Private Experience, Elliott Erwitt. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1974. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment. Göttingen: Steidl, 2014. Facsimile of the 1952 first edition. Eastman Kodak. More Joy of Photography. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981. Erwitt, Elliott. Personal Best. Kempen: TeNeues, 2009. Erwitt, Elliott. Personal Exposures. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Erwitt, Elliott. Pittsburgh 1950. London: GOST Books, 2017. Erwitt, Elliott. Snaps. London: Phaidon, 2003. Grantmyre, Laura. “Selling Pittsburgh as America’s Renaissance City.” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 1 (  January 2015): 5–13. Greenough, Sarah. Looking In: Robert Frank’s the Americans. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009. Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Harris, Mark. “The Wit and Wisdom of Elliott Erwitt.” Camera and Darkroom, April 1992, 22–33. The Hiroshima Maidens. August 8, 1957. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Radio broadcast, CBC Caffeine Player audio, 7:54. https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry /the-hiroshima-maidens.

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Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hodge, Shannon. “A Life Captured: Photography in Biographical Study.” Canadian Jewish Studies 20, no. 1 (2012): 195–203. Hoelscher, Steven. “Cold Wars and Hot Stories: Elliott Erwitt’s Photojournalism.” In McDonald, Elliott Erwitt, 96–109. Hoelscher, Steven, ed. Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Kappler, Frank. “Sartre and Existentialism.” Life Magazine, November 6, 1964, 86–96. Ken, Domon. Hiroshima. Tokyo: Kenko-sha, 1958. Kim, Lee-Von. “Autobiographical Revisions: Photography in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Claude Cahun’s Disavowals.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 29, no. 1 (2014): 107–26. Klein, William. Life Is Good and Good for You in New York. New York: Errata Editions, 2010. Reproduction of entire 1956 original, with additional new essay and notes about creation of the original and the artists it presents. Livingston, Jane. The New York School: Photographs, 1936–1963. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1992. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Lubove, Roy. Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. “Luckiest Boy.” Pageant 12, no. 10 (April 1957): 16–17. Madrigal, Alexis. “Aghast Over Beijing’s Air Pollution? This Was Pittsburgh Not That Long Ago.” The Atlantic, January 16, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/technol ogy/archive/2013/01/aghast-over-beijings-air-pollution-this-was-pittsburgh-not -that-long-ago/267237/. Magnum Photos. “The Civil Rights Movement.” https://www.magnumphotos.com /newsroom/magnum-photographers-the-civil-rights-movement/. McDonald, Jessica S. “Elliott Erwitt: Home around the World.” In McDonald, Elliott Erwitt, 11–47. McDonald, Jessica S., ed. Elliott Erwitt: Home around the World. New York: Aperture, 2016. Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). “Major Exhibition of Recent American Photography at MOMA.” Press release no. 56, July 26, 1978, announcing forthcoming exhibit Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, July 28–October 2, 1978. https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327154.pdf. Plattner, Steven W. Roy Stryker, U.S.A., 1943–1950: The Standard Oil (New Jersey) Photography Project. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Raiford, Leigh. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Rothstein, Arthur. “Interview: Arthur Rothstein Talks with Richard Doud.” Archives of American Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1977): 19–23. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Sandweiss, Martha. “Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age.” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (2007): 193–202.

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Sayle, Murray. “The World and Elliott Erwitt.” Introduction to Erwitt, Snaps, n.p. Schuman, Aaron. “An Autobiography of Seeing.” Modern Painters, Spring 2004, 76–79. Southard, Susan. Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War. New York: Penguin Books, 2016. Stauffer, John, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, eds. Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American. New York: Liveright, 2015. Szarkowski, John. Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the Museum of Modern Art,  July 28–October 2, 1978. Terkel, Studs. “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Thomas, Clarke M. Witness to the Fifties: The Pittsburgh Photographic Library, 1950–1953. Edited by Constance B. Schulz and Steven W. Plattner. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Truman, Harry S., and Tsukasa Nitoguri. “Correspondence between Tsukasa Nitoguri and Harry S. Truman.” March 12, 1958. The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb Research File, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. https://www.truman library.gov/library/research-files/correspondence-between-tsukasa-nitoguri-and -harry-s-truman. Ulrich, John. “Generation X: A (Sub)Cultural Genealogy.” In GenXegesis: Essays on Al­ ternative Youth (sub)culture, edited by John McAllister Ulrich and Andrea L. Harris, 3–37. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs. “Atomic Bomb Survivors (Hibakusha) Present Their Personal Stories on Humanitarian Impact of the Use of Nuclear Weapons.” https://www.un.org/disarmament/update/20130510/. Vitale, Patrick. “Decline Is Renewal.” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 1 (  January 2015): 34–39. Wallace, Vaughn. “Conjuring Pittsburgh.” In Erwitt, Pittsburgh 1950, 137–39. Weart, Spencer R. The Rise of Nuclear Fear. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Whelan, Richard. Robert Capa: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1985. “William Klein: In Pictures.” Tate YouTube, October 18, 2012. Video, 10:29. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g9IksGqiUM.

The Legacy of Conquest in Comics Texas History Movies, Jack Jackson, and Revision Daniel Worden

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n her landmark study The Legacy of Conquest (1987), historian Patricia Nelson Limerick recovers the history of US colonialism from its often clichéd place in US national consciousness. As Limerick notes, “in the popular imagination, the reality of conquest dissolved into stereotypes of noble savages and noble pioneers struggling quaintly in the wilderness” (Limerick 19). These frontier stereotypes emerge in popular literature in the nineteenth century, alongside and often in romanticized support of conflicts such as the Mexican-American War (1846–48) and the Great Sioux War of 1876. Yet as Limerick notes, these romances persist even today, well past a time when their messages “seemed to have no bearing on the complex realities of twentieth-century America. In Western paintings, novels, movies, and television shows, those stereotypes were valued precisely because they offered an escape from modern troubles” (19). Limerick’s list of popular media does not include comic books, but they were nonetheless a prominent medium through which narratives of American identity were articulated through Western genre tropes. For example, in Avon Periodicals’ 1951 Davy Crockett comic, the iconic Western hero’s life is narrated as a series of “daring exploits and battles” (1), concluding with his death at the Alamo.1 At the Alamo (see Figure 1), Crockett tries 90

Figure 1.  The Battle of the Alamo in Davy Crockett, Avon Periodicals, 1951. Digital Comics Museum.

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to repel the Mexican forces, who are “as thick as flies” (21). In his final act of heroism, Crockett attempts to light a barrel of gunpowder, so that the battle can “end in a blaze of glory” (21). Yet, Crockett is shot in the back before he can ignite the gunpowder. In the story’s final panel, Crockett’s body lies next to the flaming candle he was carrying to the powder keg, visually reinforcing what the narrative text describes as his legendary, enduring status in American history: “Thus ended the life of Davy Crockett and the defense of the Alamo. No American lived to tell of that day. His heroism will never be forgotten and has already become part of the great American legend. Davy Crockett and the men of the Alamo will live forever” (21). It is notable that in many of the panels depicting the battle of the Alamo in Davy Crockett, the Mexican soldiers’ faces are not visible, with the sole exception of the solider who shoots Crockett in the back. Instead, they are merely figures wearing sombreros, while the Texan soldiers and Crockett are facing the viewer, in heroic combat. Swarming the Alamo “as thick as flies” and shooting the heroic Crockett in the back, the Mexican army is portrayed as faceless and treacherous, in stark opposition to the sacrifices and heroic struggles of Crockett and the other Anglo settlers. This typical mid-twentieth-century Western comic tells a familiar story of conquest, one that enshrines a myth rather than explicates a historical reality. While popular Western comics of the mid-twentieth century often celebrate frontier heroism in conventional patterns, the comics that would be singled out for academic study in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries eschew genre conventions for autobiography and history. One of the groundbreaking scholarly accounts of comics, Joseph Witek’s Comic Books as History (1989), influenced not just the kinds of comics that scholars would focus on in the following decades but also the questions we would ask of those comics. Witek’s study charts how a selection of comics artists have used intensive historical research and the dynamic storytelling capabilities of the medium to represent history in complex ways. These comics—by now canonical figures such as Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar—complicate our received narratives of the past and reorient us to history as the immediate context of our lived experience. Yet as Witek notes, the kinds of comics that are “vehicles for scrupulously accurate history and realistic fiction and for politically committed narratives which make overt their ideological dimensions . . . have had to be written outside the mainstream of comic book publishing” (44). That is, the kinds of comics that demonstrate a complex and, indeed, literary approach to history are today more likely to be found in book-length volumes, published not by mainstream comic book companies but by either independent comics or trade book publishers. Today, it is clear that Witek’s study was

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visionary as the genre of “comics journalism” has flourished in the works of such artists as Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, and Guy Delisle, and as a variety of sophisticated documentary comics have been crafted over recent years, including Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree (2013–16) and Lauren Redniss’s Thunder and Lightning (2015), not to mention the prominence of the comics memoir, from such works as Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017), Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning (2016), and Tillie Walden’s Spinning (2017), to even fictional works that use the structure of nonfiction comics, such as Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015). Witek’s framework pointed toward the emergence of comics studies and a whole field of nonfiction comics that would make it clear that true stories can be told in gripping, complicated ways in the medium and that comic books were not “perforce for children—and only for children” (44). If Witek’s 1989 study served as a kind of inauguration of comics studies in higher education, comics scholar Hillary Chute’s 2016 book Disaster Drawn serves as a confirmation of comics studies’ place in academia. Pursuing questions similar to Witek’s, Chute places documentary comics in a longer fine arts tradition, linking works by Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco to etchings by Francisco de Goya. Indeed, Chute links comics to fine arts traditions to make a claim for the comics medium’s specificity: “The comics medium has evolved as an instrument for commenting on and re-visioning experience and history. Drawing today still enters the public sphere as a form of witness that takes shape as marks and lines because no other technology could record what it depicts” (265). Separated by almost thirty years, Witek’s and Chute’s works serve as bookends to the development of comics studies, from a presentation of comics as a serious medium to the elaboration of comics as a part of modern art and literature more broadly. One effect of this framing of comics art in relation to history, memoir, and nonfiction has been an implicit comparison of comics to the more traditional documentary medium of photography. For example, in her essay about Nakazawa’s comics about the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Laura Wexler analyzes how the subgenre of nonfiction comics “both highlights and deconstructs official viewpoints” that were propagated through the documentary evidence of the photographic image (57). Drawing on the work of Chute and John Berger, Wexler positions drawing against photography: “A photograph commonly records things that are not yet fully observed and even makes an impression of things that have never yet been seen. . . . But this is not true of drawing . . . Nakazawa’s drawing of the photographic record shows Hiroshima being-looked-at by a self that is crossing over by looking at the photograph” (77). In the postwar era, this dichotomy between photography as direct evidence, in the service of

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official narratives, and drawing, as embodied and reflective experience, seems applicable to a broad swath of artistic practice, from nonfiction comics artists who often redraw photographs, to even photographers who restage moments to produce reflexive works about actuality. Chute has noted, too, how the comics medium is uniquely suited to “express life stories, especially traumatic ones, powerfully because [comics] makes literal the presence of the past by disrupting spatial and temporal conventions to overlay or palimpsest past and present” (“Comics Form,” 109). In these accounts of comics as both documentary and life story, the medium registers as a way of representing history. Indeed, comics creators have not just recently turned to history as comics have gained more prestige in art and literary cultures. In the United States, comics have represented and written US history in newspaper comic strips, as well as in book-length works, in sometimes surprisingly institutionalized ways. As in Avon’s Davy Crockett comic book from 1951, the act of drawing is not necessarily a reflexive, nuanced approach to reality that counters a more conventional narrative. The cultural roles of comics are less determined by the medium itself than by the context in which comics are produced and circulated.2

Comic Book History Even before the comic book emerged on 1930s newsstands, comics were engaged in narrating history and identity, and they did so in official and statesponsored venues. One early example of this is Texas History Movies, a comic strip about Texas history written by John Rosenfield Jr. and drawn by Jack Patton. The original Texas History Movies comic strip was initially published in the Dallas Morning News from 1926 to 1928, where Rosenfield worked as a cultural reporter and Patton as an editorial cartoonist. The strip was then republished as both a hardback collection and a paperback book for distribution to public school students in Texas.3 As noted by Mike Zambrano Jr., at the time the strip was created, comic strips were sometimes referred to as “movies in print,” thus explaining the use of the word movies in a title that would go on to confuse future generations of readers expecting a book on motion pictures about Texas history. The paperback version of Texas History Movies was sponsored by the Magnolia Petroleum Company, eventually consolidated into the Mobil Oil Company, and it was published and distributed to Texas public school students from 1928 to 1961.4 One of the Magnolia Petroleum Company editions of Texas History Movies (1935, unpaginated) begins with a conventional account of Anglo frontier settlement:

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Texas—your state and ours—is at once a land of romance and of realization; of romance because of those sturdy pioneers who more than a century ago left the older sections of America to come into a new land, to brave the terrors and the dangers of a frontier to carve out of an uncharted wilderness the splendid empire we know as Texas today; of realization because of the vast progress that has been made since those first pioneers came, the natural resources that have been developed, the homes erected, the farms tilled, the factories built, the accumulation of the vast wealth of this state—the accomplishment of no less than a commercial miracle.

The introductory note goes on to explain that the book has been “prepared and printed for distribution to the schools of Texas,” and that it was “prompted by a desire to be of service to the pupils of the public schools of Texas.” Following this introduction championing the commercial development accomplished in Texas by Anglo settlers, a black-and-white reproduction of William Henry Huddle’s 1886 painting Santa Anna Surrenders to Houston serves as a frontispiece to the comic strip itself (Figure 2). The comic begins in 1530, as Francisco de Coronado “hears tales of wealth in the New World” (Texas History Movies 3).

Figure 2.  William Henry Huddle, Santa Anna Surrenders to Houston, 1886. Photographed by Carol M. Highsmith, 2014. The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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While the book’s introductory note celebrates Texas history as a “romance . . . of those sturdy pioneers who more than century ago left the older sections of America to come to a new land,” the book’s frontispiece and initial narrative involve not Anglo settlement but Texas’s war of independence with Mexico and the longer history of Spanish exploration. As Jesse Alemán has demonstrated, an integral component of the romance attached to Anglo settler colonialism in the American West concerns war with Mexico, symbolized in the complex figure of the “American-made” Santa Anna, through whom Mexican military conflicts were ideologically and symbolically “manufactured in the US but made to appear naturally Mexican” (177–78). The Huddle painting, representing General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s surrender to General Samuel Houston as both men are compromised—Santa Anna wearing the uniform of a private, disguised to flee the Texan forces, and Houston lying down as a result of a leg injury—captures a formative moment in Anglo Texas history, as authority is ceded to Houston. Huddle’s painting, significantly, hangs in the Texas state capitol in Austin, a symbol of frontier romance, of heroic sacrifice and triumph. In Texas History Movies, this scene is replicated visually, with word balloons that emphasize both Santa Anna’s hubris—“You have captured the Napoleon of the West!”—and his immediate surrender and cooperation with the Anglo Texans, as he denies responsibility for the killing of Texan troops at Goliad and orders the departure of Mexican forces (Figure 3). And although Huddle’s painting serves as a pivot from a Mexican Texas to an Anglo, or even an “American,” Texas in the imaginary of Texas History Movies,

Figure 3.  Jack Patton and John Rosenfield Jr., “The captured Santa Anna was taken before Houston and Secretary Rusk beneath Houston’s outdoor headquarters, the Live Oak tree,” Texas History Movies. Texas State Historical Association edition, 1986, page 49. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

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the comic must nevertheless begin centuries before this surrender of authority. The first comic strips in Texas History Movies represent Spanish and French exploration of Texas, through the figures of Coronado, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis, positioning the moment of Anglo conquest as a triumph of will and ingenuity in comparison with the failed efforts of European and, later, Mexican powers. Texas History Movies represented a complex historical narrative in four-panel comic strips, reducing yearslong conflicts to mere moments and embedding simple dialogue to stand in for complex negotiations. Moreover, the comic relied on caricatures to represent Native American, Mexican, and African American figures. Some of these caricatures did not even make it into the 1935 paperback version of the comic strip; the 1928 hardback collection is larger and features strips about slavery and Indian wars that were cut from later editions. In 1961, the copyright of Texas History Movies was given to the Texas State Historical Association by Mobil Oil. In 1974, when the association was asked to reprint Texas History Movies as part of the Houston Chronicle’s educational program, “an advisory board with Hispanic and black members” was assembled to revise “anything that was found to be offensive in the drawings or text” (Ward 4). These changes included an expanded opening sequence from the original comic strip, but removed from the paperback edition, that begins with Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, along with redrawn panels that remove particularly racist representations of non-Anglo figures. Yet, even the various revised versions of Texas History Movies are very much histories written from the perspective of Anglo Texans. French and Spanish explorers and colonialists are represented as the distant past of the state, Native Americans are either comedic foils or savages, Mexicans are pawns of would-be dictators, and African Americans are grateful servants. In the 1928 collected edition of Texas History Movies, African American Texans are represented in minstrel caricature and play no major role in the narrative. Figure 4, for example, demonstrates the paternalistic whitewashing that defines this work’s treatment of Texan slavery, which it aims to cast as less cruel than its Southern equivalent. Many pages later, when the comic addresses the Civil War, only secession and not slavery is mentioned as a rationale for the formation of the Confederacy. African Americans are acknowledged only as a kind of social background to the more heroic and storied exploits of Anglo Texans such as Jim Bowie, whose introduction immediately follows the 1928 edition of Texas History Movies’ apology for slavery. Embracing the image of Bowie as a hero with the text caption, “Bowie was six feet tall, with fierce blue eyes and war-like expression,” this section includes an illustration of Bowie

Figure 4.  Jack Patton and John Rosenfield Jr., “Texas was a slave state in the Civil War . . .,” Texas History Movies, PJM Publishers, 1970. A facsimile edition of the original 1928 collection. Page 100. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

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Figure 5.  Jack Patton and John Rosenfield Jr., “Bowie was a strong man . . .,” Texas History Movies, PJM Publishers, 1970. A facsimile edition of the original 1928 collection. Page 101. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

riding an alligator (Figure 5). Whereas African American Texans are represented as a type, without notable individuals, Anglo Texans like Bowie are singled out and given mythological status. In Figures 4 and 5, posture and figure drawing emphasize the roles these two types play in the narrative—the African American figures slouch and stare, while the Anglo figures conquer and cheer. Similarly, Mexican and Native American subjects are portrayed in caricature. In Figure 6, the Mexican guide is represented in stereotypical form, with a large sombrero covering the figure’s face. As made explicit in Figure 7, the Anglo settlers’ genocidal violence against Native Americans is celebrated and glorified in the series, in exaggerated caricature. What is notable about all these representations is the way that they play into Texas History Movies’s larger narrative of Texan progress. The comic concludes with the end of the American Civil War and the establishment of a Texas state constitution by which “the foundations were laid for peace and prosperity” (216). Texas becomes modern and peaceful because of the efforts

Figure 6.  Jack Patton and John Rosenfield Jr., “On the trip they met two Comanche Indians and a Mexican captive,” Texas History Movies, PJM Publishers, 1970. A facsimile edition of the original 1928 collection. Page 102. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

Figure 7.  Jack Patton and John Rosenfield  Jr., “There were many bloody Indian fights,” Texas History Movies, PJM Publishers, 1970. A facsimile edition of the original 1928 collection. Page 207. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

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Figure 8.  Jack Patton and John Rosenfield Jr., “And Texas has reached the estate of 1928,” Texas History Movies, PJM Publishers, 1970. A facsimile edition of the original 1928 collection. Page 217. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

of Anglo settlers, who make the frontier available as a site for American (coded as Anglo) dominance. This allows the frontier to give way to modernity, the “estate of 1928” pictured in Texas History Movies’s final panel (Figure 8). In the 1935 school paperback edition of Texas History Movies, this moment is followed by a section featuring highlights from “The Industrial Development of Texas,” covering topics from transportation and refrigeration to pipelines and natural gas. The narrative of progress is indubitable and transparent.

Jack Jackson’s Alternative Histories of Texas Born and raised in Texas, the artist and historian Jack Jackson read Texas History Movies as a child. That experience would prove formative for him, as his own comics would revise and make more complex the narratives around Texas and the American West disseminated in the comics medium. Jackson was an

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underground comics pioneer—his 1964 comic God Nose is often cited as among the first underground comics, published and distributed outside traditional newsstand networks and directed at a countercultural readership. Jackson, who published under the name “Jaxon” in underground comics, created the raunchy and satirical comics typical of the early years of the underground, yet would also create long-form works about Texas history that revise standard, triumphalist accounts of the West, or, as Jackson would describe it in the introduction to his collection God’s Bosom and Other Stories, “the romantic bullshit about the Winning of the West” (7). As Witek notes in Comic Books as History, “an alternative writing of American history demands an alternative narrative medium,” and Jackson’s comics about “the suppressed stories of minority figures such as Quanah Parker and Juan Seguin find an appropriate home in the culturally marginalized form of comic books” (Witek 92). While Jackson’s roots in underground comics mean that his early works were positioned on the margins of mainstream culture, Jackson’s long-form works were, by his own account, responses to Texas History Movies, as much as they are influenced by underground aesthetics. As Jackson noted, “When I first read Texas History Movies in school I was a budding artist and the booklet was a great inspiration to me. It told me about events that had happened long ago and stimulated an interest in our historical heritage as Texans. . . . In time I decided to draw my own version of these events in a more realistic style” (New Texas History Movies 48). Jackson’s comics revise this early comic and a wide swath of Western genre comics, and through that revision, Jackson’s comics present new formal possibilities for the telling of “Texas History.” In such works as Los Tejanos, Lost Cause, Comanche Moon, and his final published work, the revisionist New Texas History Movies, Jackson’s long-form comics detail the lives of Anglos, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Chicanos in Texas as involved in an uneven, violent process of colonization. His work takes up multiple perspectives of the legacy and process of conquest in Texas, devoting works to, for example, Texas revolutionary Juan Seguín’s decision to fight alongside Anglo Texans, only to be viewed as a traitor after Texas independence, and the motives that led the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin to resist Reconstruction and act violently against those he viewed as colonizers after the Civil War. Scholars such as Michael Chaney, Hillary Chute, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, and Kate Polak, among many others, have written extensively about how comics can convey a layered sense of historical time, autobiographical nuance, and personal trauma. Jackson’s comics depart somewhat from such frameworks, depicting history as a series of structural conflicts, conflicts that his comics represent through historical accounts of state violence, structural inequalities, and institutionalized racism.5 In Jackson’s work, the

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Figure 9.  Jack Jackson, New Texas History Movies, Texas State Historical Association, 2007. Page 43. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

confessional style associated with underground comics gives way to deep biographical and historical research, making it apparent how the “legacy of conquest” produces unexpected and shocking allegiances, life stories, and commitments. Western comics have been a prominent part of comics culture throughout the medium’s history, and in Jack Jackson’s, history subsumes individual choice and character into structures that produce violence and inequality. The personal voice is so commonly embodied on the page in celebrated nonfiction comics by artists such as Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, R. Crumb, and Art Spiegleman, all known for drawing themselves in their narratives. Jack Jackson only appears in the text narration of his nonfiction comics, distancing the reader from a narrative that in turn emphasizes the cruel irony of structural injustice, when visualized in relation to histories that privilege “great men.” Jackson’s narration is often ironic, sometime subtly so, as in his account of the Texas State Capitol building in Austin that concludes New Texas History Movies. In Figure 9, the text reads, “Another asset—public land—provided the money for a beautiful new state capitol building, the same we use today” (  Jackson, New Texas History Movies, 43). The same, or a very similar, illustration is used in a 1983 comic Jackson titled “The Rise and Rapid Decline of Austin Tacious” about the real estate market in Austin. In Figure 10, the text plays on the word ostentatious, accounting for how Austin “grew into the gem of a city we all know and love—Austin, Tacious!” (  Jackson, God’s Bosom, 121). The “beautiful state capitol building” statement in New Texas History Movies is, then, ironic, less a sign

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Figure 10.  Jack Jackson, “The Rise and Rapid Decline of Austin Tacious,” in God’s Bosom and Other Stories, Fantagraphics Books, 1995. Page 121. Copyright © Sam Jackson. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantagraphics.com).

of Texas’s ascension than its pending decline attributable to real estate developers and large-scale corporate interests. Jackson’s revisionist New Texas History Movies was published posthumously by the Texas State Historical Association in 2007. On the surface, Jackson’s revision resembles the original Texas History Movies a great deal. Both are penand-ink, with expressive linework. Both engage in interesting temporal rhythms, devoting multiple panels or pages to particular events, while moving through other periods of time quite rapidly in single panels. Texas history, then, is punctuated by particular figures and stories, including the Battle of the Alamo. Jackson’s meticulously drawn panels strive to represent fine historical details, whereas the earlier Texas History Movies relies on a looser caricature style. Moreover, Texas History Movies often relies on word balloons for humor, punctuating the historical narrative told in text boxes with comedic phrasings. Jackson’s word balloons serve as a supplement in a very different way, often giving voice to those who are marginalized in standard histories. For example, in Figure 11, Juan Seguín yells “Recuerden el Alamo!”—echoing the standard “Remember the Alamo!” in the previous panel. The Seguín panel makes apparent the presence and language of Tejanos, many of whom fought against Mexico for Texas independence. In a sequence of three panels, Cynthia Lee Parker is abducted by Cherokees, and her speech provides a glimpse into her personality— her persistence and realism. This is emphasized again when she reappears as

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Figure 11.  Jack Jackson, New Texas History Movies, Texas State Historical Association, 2007. Page 23. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

Figure 12.  Jack Jackson, New Texas History Movies, Texas State Historical Association, 2007. Page 36. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

an adult, in Figure 12, unwillingly returned to Anglo society and longing to rejoin the Cherokee. Unlike the representation of Native American abduction in a film such as John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), which concludes with the triumphant return of the abductee to Anglo society, Jackson’s history refuses to present Anglo society as inherently desirable. Parker longs to return to her life as a Cherokee—history proceeds unevenly and does not conclude with the triumph of Anglo colonialism. The way Jackson represents history emphasizes continuous, overlapping struggles. In his treatment of the Battle of the Alamo, one of the most storied

Figure 13.  Jack Jackson, New Texas History Movies, Texas State Historical Association, 2007. Page 22. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

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events in Texas history and one often used to dramatize Anglo sacrifice as a kind of founding gesture for the nation-state, Jackson both details the standard deaths recounted in history books and puts the Alamo into a larger context. On the page devoted to the Battle of the Alamo, Santa Anna’s Mexican Army overtakes the Alamo Mission held by Texan forces rebelling against Mexican control (Figure 13). In small panels, the deaths of notable Anglo Texans are represented, while the larger panels next to those fabled deaths represent the larger scope of the conflict. Offset by these larger panels, the singular sacrifices are not neglected but instead put in context, emphasizing in page layout the process of selection that underpins conventional Texas history as it singles out and mythologizes these particular martyrs amongst a larger tapestry of violence. While the original Texas History Movies emphasizes Santa Anna’s cruelty during the Battle of the Alamo, thus implying the difficulty the Mexican Army had in taking the mission and the comparative bravery of the Texan soldiers, Jackson depicts the Alamo as a kind of self-styled sacrifice, one that Jackson does not dwell on but instead contextualizes as part of a longer narrative about the many battles of the Texas Revolution (Figure 14). Less a singular event than part of a continuous struggle around control of Texas, the Alamo does not resonate with sovereign meaning in Jackson’s account. Even in its reduction to “Remember the Alamo!” Jackson finds occasion to emphasize how the battle was mobilized in two languages. This approach carries over into Jackson’s 1981 work on the Texas Revolutionary figure Juan Seguín, Los Tejanos. In Los Tejanos, Jackson gestures to the ways in which the Alamo story becomes a kind of myth. In one panel, a man notes that Seguín was at the Alamo. His younger son asks, “Then how come he ain’t dead, Pa?” (  Jackson, Los Tejanos, 126). The common Alamo narrative details the deaths of the Texan forces. Jackson’s work strives to counter, in this sense, what Scott McCloud has argued to be a chief function of comics form: closure. In Understanding Comics, McCloud outlines six types of “closure” in comics, yet none of these seem to quite capture the structural simultaneity, intersectionality, and synchronous power relations made visible in Jackson’s revisionist histories (Figure 15). Fittingly, Seguín is mentioned in the original Texas History Movies in one panel, with an urn, noting that “Colonel Juan N. Seguin, Texan who escaped massacre, claims to have collected remains of Texans in an urn and buried them in a corner of San Fernando Chapel” (Patton and Rosenfield 174). Jackson’s Los Tejanos takes that mention, and the historical closure symbolized by the urn, and transforms it into a sprawling life story, charting how Seguín supports Texas in­ dependence, sides with Mexico against the landgrabs of Anglo colonialists,

Figure 14.  Jack Patton and John Rosenfield Jr., “At daybreak, March 6, 1836, Santa Anna ordered the assault on the Alamo,” Texas History Movies, PJM Publishers, 1970. A facsimile edition of the original 1928 collection. Page 173. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

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Figure 15.  From Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Copyright © 1993, 1994 by Scott McCloud. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

and eventually figures as a kind of traitor to both Texas and Mexico. Seguín’s legacy, as  Jackson envisions it, is not singular but multiple. The final page of Los Tejanos depicts as much, with its presentation of Texas as an ethnically divided yet nonetheless unified space (Figure 16). Jackson’s final page in New Texas History Movies argues for historical complexity. In Figure 17, three horizontal panels represent the long history of Texas, from Indigenous nomadism to the Renaissance Revival capitol building. On the one hand, these three panels can be read as proceeding down the page chronologically. In this sense, they conform to the standard history of the frontier, as represented horizontally in John Gast’s American Progress, a popular painting often reproduced as a lithograph in the nineteenth century. In American Progress,

Figure 16.  Jack Jackson, Los Tejanos, Fantagraphics Books, 2012. Page 129. Copyright © Sam Jackson. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantagraphics.com).

Figure 17.  Jack Jackson, New Texas History Movies, Texas State Historical Association, 2007. Page 43. Courtesy of the Texas State Historical Association.

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as in Jackson’s conclusion to New Texas History Movies, Native Americans give way to the railroad, which makes the frontier available for modernity. Yet on the other hand, the three panels on this page exist not in chronological sequence but in spatial juxtaposition. The narration in the text boxes tells not a story reaching back to the early days of what would become Texas to its present day but instead a continuation of the history from the previous page. The top panel of Comanches represents the 1874 campaign against them, and the state capitol building is begun in 1882. So, this is no tale of prehistory giving way to history. Instead, these histories are nearly simultaneous. Jackson’s final page offers not closure but continued tensions around land rights, extractive industries, and colonial legacy shifting to national sovereignty. Similarly, R. Crumb’s well-known Short History of America, initially published in a 1979 issue of the Co-Evolution Quarterly and now widely anthologized and circulated as a print, proceeds chronologically. Yet, this sequence of twelve panels also makes evident the spatial simultaneity of our understandings of history, and the illusion of progress often attached to that spatial simultaneity. The “What Next?!!” at the end of Crumb’s sequence of panels casts doubt on whether this sequence should be called progress and makes it clear that the final panel offers not closure but continued tension. The first panel remains visible in the last panel, as a kind of spectral background. As in Crumb’s Short History, Jackson’s Texas history is both diachronic and synchronic. In the original Texas History Movies, closure occurs often, and in its final pages, Texas history is recapped in seven panels. Jackson’s final page in New Texas History Movies serves as a rejoinder to thinking of history as a progressive story. Rather than present history as complete, Jackson presents history as overlapping structures of power, in which individuals figure only fleetingly. Comics for Jackson seems to be both the way history has thought itself and a tool for making visible the lack of closure occasioned by settler colonialism and capitalist development. Recent works in the comics medium continue to offer nuanced, complicated portrayals of Texas history. Contemporary comics artist Dave Ortega’s 2019 comic River tells a condensed version of his grandmother’s life “where Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico meet” (Ortega). An artist working in an era of increasing border security and inhumane detention, Ortega expresses through his grandmother’s story a sense of wonder at the idea of a previously open border. This personal and political vision is evident on the closing page of River, with its longing for a bridge rather than a wall (Figure 18). As Ortega narrates, “my heart aches.” River’s historically nuanced and deeply personal account of the region currently known as “the State of Texas” differs substantially from the frontier romances often associated with official narratives of the state’s

Figure 18.  Dave Ortega, River, 2019. Courtesy of Dave Ortega (www.daveortegadraws .com).

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history. In the 1971 classic How to Read Donald Duck, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart analyze how Disney comics reinforce American hegemony. In the Donald Duck comics, they argue, one can detect “the manner in which the US dreams and redeems itself, and then imposes that dream upon others for their salvation” (Dorfman and Mattelart 142). Comics like Jack Jackson’s and Dave Ortega’s use the comics medium to contest and complicate how comics have “dreamed and redeemed” settler colonialism. Notes 1. Like many comics from this era, Avon’s 1951 Davy Crockett comic book is a collection of short comics stories, packaged together into a thirty-six-page periodical. The comic book’s first three stories feature Davy Crockett, and the last two stories are fictional works about “Dead-Eye Dude” and “Rex Foster, Government Agent.” Page numbers cited parenthetically in text refer to this comic book. According to the Grand Comics Database (GCD), the creators of the comic book remain unknown. For bibliographic details for Davy Crockett (Avon Periodicals, 1951), see the GCD entry at https://www .comics.org/issue/262454/. A digital scan of the Library of Congress’s copy of the comic book is available via the Digital Comics Museum, https://digitalcomicmuseum .com/index.php?dlid=22153. 2. It is significant that the comics artist that this essay will focus on, Jack Jackson, wrote extensively on early mapmaking and Texas history. Drawing was, for Jackson, both an imperialist and a potentially progressive act. See Jackson, Weddle, and De Ville. 3. For an account of the importance of maps and visual culture to US culture and education that provides some historical context for these kinds of materials, see Bruckner; Graham. 4. For a more detailed history of Texas History Movies, see Ward; Zambrano. 5. Along with Witek’s Comic Book as History, there are a handful of scholarly works about Jack Jackson. Several essays have been invaluable to my thinking in this chapter, and they each deal with Jackson’s 1979 work Comanche Moon, as well as his other underground comics: see Barbour; Kopin; Sandweiss.

Works Cited Alemán, Jesse. “The Ethnic in the Canon; or, On Finding Santa Anna’s Wooden Leg.” MELUS 29, no. 3–4 (September 2004): 165–82. Barbour, Chad A. “Jack Jackson, Native Representation, and Underground Comix.” In Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 27–52. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Bruckner, Martin. The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

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Chaney, Michael, ed. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Chute, Hillary. “Comics Form and Narrating Lives.” Profession (2011): 107–17. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Translated by David Kunzle. New York: OR, 2018. Graham, Richard L. Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s–2000s. New York: Abrams, 2011. Jackson, Jack. God’s Bosom and Other Stories: The Historical Strips of Jack Jackson. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1995. Jackson, Jack. Los Tejanos and Lost Cause. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012. Jackson, Jack. New Texas History Movies. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2007. Jackson, Jack, Robert S. Weddle, and Winston De Ville. Mapping Texas and the Gulf Coast: The Contributions of Saint-Denis, Oliván, and Le Maire. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. Kopin, Joshua Abraham. “‘With Apologies to the Old Masters’: Jack Jackson’s Citational Practice and the History of Comic Book History.” Inks 3, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 27–47. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994. Ortega, Dave. “River.” Dave Ortega (website). Accessed February 13, 2022. https:// www.daveortegadraws.com/. Patton, Jack, and John Rosenfield Jr. Texas History Movies. Dallas: PJM, 1970. Facsimile edition of the original 1928 comic strip collection. Polak, Kate. Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Sandweiss, Martha A. “Redrawing the West: Jack Jackson’s Comanche Moon.” In The Graphic Novel, edited by Jan Baetens, 115–30. Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2001. Texas History Movies. Dallas: Turner Company, 1935. Ward, George B. Introduction to Texas History Movies, 3–4. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1986. Wexler, Laura. “I Saw It! The Photographic Witness of Barefoot Gen.” In Representing Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture after 1945, edited by Sara Blair, Joseph B. Entin, and Franny Nudelman, 55–82. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Zambrano, Mike Jr. “Texas History Movies.” Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. Updated July 27, 2020. https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online /articles/edtyk.

We Have Never Been a Nation of Immigrants Refugee Temporality as American Identity Elizabeth Rodrigues

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e are and always will be a nation of immigrants,” Barack    Obama proclaimed in his Address to the Nation on Immigration in 2014, a nation in which citizenship is ostensibly constituted by a “shared commitment to an ideal—that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.” His statement is but one of plentiful reiterations of the immigrant narrative of arrival, struggle, and achievement as one of the central mythologies of US identity. In this figuration, the immigrant’s movement is always geographically and temporally directional: it is a journey to the United States, to a better life, to citizenship and relative material security. Episodes of pain resulting from marginalization, material deprivation, physical injury sustained during precarious travel or contingent labor, and separation from family become legible primarily as milestones on a journey toward that destination. “Immigrant” in this mythology becomes a mutable signifier eliding uneven histories of migration and political difference under a narrative arc of citizenship granted and personhood subsequently secured. Lisa Lowe observes in her foundational study of the Asian American immigrant in US culture: “The concept of ‘immigrant’ in American sociology and public policy has historically signified ‘European immigrants,’ seeking to universalize the temporality of assimilation attributed to Irish Americans and Italian Americans to the ethnic minority groups from the ‘third world,’” 116

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erasing “the heterogeneities and hierarchies within the ‘immigrant’ category and obscur[ing] the process of racialization that the immigration process instantiates” (177n6). Immigrant narrative thus uses directional temporality to perform a crucial political alchemy: in time, immigrants become Americans,1 and therefore in time, any injustice they face en route is redeemed. Ra Pronh, a Cambodian refugee who has lived in the Bronx since 1986, tells her story differently. Pronh is the central subject of sociologist Eric Tang’s 2014 monograph Unsettled, an ethnographic study of Cambodian refugees in New York City. Tang is struck by the way in which Pronh tells the story of what he imagines as her escape from the Khmer Rouge. He writes, “[Ra] was a superb storyteller, yet her narrative became remarkably devoid of detail when she approached the scenes in which she finally shed her Khmer Rouge captors and crossed the border. I invited Ra to say more about these moments, to provide me with a fuller account of the difference that crossing made, but she demurred” (44). His initial impulse is to understand her journey in the directional framework of the immigrant narrative, as series of border crossings making decisive breaks with the past and progressively bringing her closer to freedom. After Pronh’s repeated refusal to tell her story in this way, he realizes, instead, “that these apparent gaps in my pursuit of narrative completion were in fact indicators of continuity” (44). From Cambodia to Thailand, from Thailand to a United Nations refugee camp, to a processing center in the Philippines, to the Bronx in New York City, each of Pronh’s border crossings failed to transform her basic captivity. In each place, she and her children continued to face physical peril, lack of adequate food and shelter, and the need to appease arbitrary bureaucratic bodies with no option for redress and seemingly no recognition of basic personhood. The United States was no exception; Tang describes her life in New York as her “Bronx unsettlement” (51), and it includes forced moves to a series of government-subsidized apartments that are rodent-infested, unheated, and located in neighborhoods plagued by violence; incarceration after attempting to physically defend her daughter from an older man’s unwanted advances; losing custody of a child; hustling to do under-the-table piecework from her home to supplement the meager wages she earns from the factory work she is required to do in order to receive welfare benefits; and becoming permanently disabled after an accident while being bussed to one of those factory jobs. Tang finds these experiences remarkable, sadly, not because they are uniquely harsh but because they are so widely shared among the Cambodian refugee population and yet have had so little impact on the mainstream imagination of refugees or their life chances in the United States.

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Given these experiences, it is perhaps unsurprising that Ra, despite Tang’s prodding, withholds the anticipated, ameliorative ending to her story. Tang comes to understand her narrative practice of irresolution as “refugee temporality”: a naming of “the refugee’s knowledge” that “power of their past captivities remains in the present—in the supposed land of salvation that promised them safety and freedom” (173). The power is that of the nation-state as the center of contemporary geopolitical life, with the effective ability to assign life and death arbitrarily, to label one a legitimate or illegitimate refugee, to enforce or not enforce a law designed to protect your life or livelihood. Captivity at the hands of this power is the ongoing circumscription of the self in multiple dimensions: economic agency, social belonging, and access to redress for injustice caused by government in/action. Refugee temporality refutes the beginning–middle–end structure underlying immigrant narrative as it “challenges those who insist on the transfigurative power of crossing the border” where “the refugee was once subjected to certain death, [and] is now officially granted the ascension to life—both literal and biopolitical” (Tang 50) and challenges the recruitment of the refugee into an immigrant narrative affirming US exceptionalism. In terms of the immigrant narrative, the United States is always the implied end to a story, the physical and metaphysical end to the refugee’s flight rather than the scene of its continuation. The geographic and temporal cropping of the immigrant narrative frame acts to obscure the role that the United States has played in both the violent beginnings of many migrant subjects’ movements toward the United States and their ongoing captivity. To say, for example, that Pronh and others’ Cambodian refugee narratives begin with escape from the Khmer Rouge is to crop US military incursion in Vietnam and its collateral empowerment of Pol Pot out of the causational picture (see Tang 30–33). It also removes the refugee’s uncertain present from the frame: as a recent push to deport Cambodian Americans who were brought to the country as children but do not have formal citizenship proves, the refugee’s rescue is revocable.2 This is but one of the myriad histories of global displacement, including the transatlantic slave trade and colonial enterprises in the Pacific, in which the United States has played and continues to play a role. These roles most often go unacknowledged in American identity discourse, of which the immigrant narrative mythology of overcoming is a part. Such an immigrant narrative, with its projected endings of citizenship and economic opportunity, plays an active role in avoiding that acknowledgment through its suggestion that US residence is fair compensation for displacement. Refugee temporality counters

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this narrative framing by insisting that the story is unfinished because the histories underlying the terms of a refugee’s arrival are ongoing. Refugee temporality thus offers a critical recasting of the immigrant narrative as it is used as the basis of theorizing American identity. In this chapter, I use theories emergent from the work of Tang and others to argue for refugee temporality as a critical lens upon US life writing. This lens brings into view a network of lives and texts that demand a practice of what Lê Espiritu has called “‘critical juxtaposing’: the bringing together of seemingly different and disconnected events, communities, histories, and spaces in order to illustrate what would otherwise not be visible about the contours, contents, and afterlives of war and empire” (Body Counts, 21). Specifically, I argue that the confluences between the life narratives of Pronh, Richard Wright, and Carlos Bulosan suggest refugee temporality as a structuring feature of US American identity. My purpose in performing these critical juxtapositions is to interrogate the relationship between self, nation, and time that US life writing projects through its narrative forms. This grouping is driven not by formal refugee status but by the engagement of refugee temporality as a critical vantage on US identity.3 As Tang stresses, refugee temporality is not produced by exclusion from an otherwise desirable progress narrative and is not simply the result of trauma and displacement. It is a form of knowledge through which the refugee refutes the nation-state’s claim of redemption (159–60). Its thematics can be productively read across generic and historical borders in an effort to hear, and ultimately respond to, the story of US life as these narrators tell it. Taken together, these autobiographical narratives argue for recognition of refugee temporality as a foundational dynamic of US identity. Reading for refugee temporality brings together narratives of American selfhood constituted through displacement, not in spite of it. These narratives challenge familiar forms of US life narrative, such as the immigrant narrative and the bildungs­ roman, the progressive developmental narrative that Joseph Slaughter has identified as the primary cultural marker of the rights-bearing individual. Through the lens of refugee temporality, we see that the immigrant narrative of overcoming features not only a homogeneity of selfhood—the industrious, rights-bearing, and ultimately triumphant individual—but also relies on a homogeneity of temporality. Equating the passage of time with the expansion of state-administered justice, state-enabled prosperity, and state-recognized personhood, such narratives clip out the dissident knowledge of refugee temporality as it attests to the uneven delivery of liberal capitalist democracy’s liberties and securities. By refusing to recuperate the numerous, tragic plot points of the

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long-standing national failure in a narrative of citizenship gained, refugee temporality rearticulates imperialism, militarism, racism, and displacement. In Wright, we see in the white supremacist structures of South and North the continuing ramifications of transatlantic slave trade; in Bulosan, the occluded history of US encroachment on the Philippines; and in Pronh, the collateral damage of a US-led war. For none of these narrators has departure and arrival resulted in the “supposed restoration of legal personhood that finally grants refuge and resettlement” (Tang 94). Their movements trace not so much the lifelines that the United States has cast out as the fault lines it has created. Before proceeding, I want to address the seeming formal incongruity between these works and, by some definitions, between these works and autobiography. Tang’s report and analysis of Pronh’s telling of her life story is not autobiography in the sense of a book-length, self-authored document, but it can be seen as participating in the tradition of the as-told-to autobiography and constitutes an autobiographical document to which we can fruitfully bring methods of autobiographical tracing, “considering the implications of images, documents, and practices that may be read as autobiographical” (Perreault and Kadar 1). Tang frequently quotes Pronh directly. As well, he carefully charts her historical experience. Perhaps most important, he demonstrates that he is willing to hear her corrections to his understanding, suggesting that he has at least attempted not to filter what he has heard to fit a single narrative. For these reasons, I believe that a compelling and valuable autobiographical representation emerges from Tang’s ethnographic work. Without the formal and market pressure of producing a book-length narrative, Pronh’s rejection of progressive narrative can surface even more clearly and its fragmentary nature can become more widely resonant insofar as its potential meaning is not exhaustively elaborated in the text itself. Helen Buss, in her recent work on the vignette as a form of refugee memory, suggests that in compressed, fragmentary forms of the autobiographical, “it is left to the reader, as often it is in the briefness of anecdote or the economy of poetry, to connect past and present and the manner in which present trauma seeks past trauma as guide” (5–6). What we receive of Pronh’s life narrative is indeed fragmentary, but it is also clearly autobiographical. The book-length works considered also have a critical history of being challenged as autobiographies because they contain fictionalized episodes.4 Further critical discussion, though, has highlighted that applying a strict definition of autobiographical fact as a litmus test for these works’ formal status overlooks their potential for collective representation through the incorporation of experiences of others in the marginalized group of which they are a member and which they in part seek to represent.5 I suggest, along with these critics, that we

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register their incongruencies with the autobiography of the bounded, autonomous Western subject as part of their formal challenge to typical narratives of US identity. Thematically and formally, Pronh’s as-told-to life narrative as unfolded in Tang’s ethnography, Wright’s American Hunger, and Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart underscore each other’s critical recastings of time as progressive for US selves and the nation at large. While the specifics of their historical positions as a Cambodian refugee,6 African American, and Filipino national diverge, each arises from “the historic or contemporary movement of peoples to, in, and from the Americas—forced or chosen,” demonstrating how movement “underlies the ways in which identity is constructed in this contested space” (Chansky 7). Their narrative forms converge as they refuse to contain these movements within an immigrant narrative of overcoming and instead represent them as unfinished refugee sojourn.

Refugee Temporality as Challenge to Immigrant Narrative There are multiple and conflicting definitions of immigrant narrative. Across disciplines and contexts, though, these definitions tend to project progress toward citizenship, either attained, critiqued, or fundamentally revised by the immigrant’s new claim to it. Tang summarizes: “Most sociological accounts of immigration depict a transition timeline from immigrant to permanent resident to citizen, with each phase supposedly bringing greater stability” (4). Literary scholars have moved toward a more critical understanding at the same time as continuing to note the popularity of the form.7 Recently, Irene Mata has asserted, “As a tool of analysis, the traditional narrative of immigration is no longer a useful framework for tracing the ventures of modern immigrants, nor for determining the differences that exist among immigrant populations. Instead, the schema becomes useful in a project of deconstruction and creation of alternative narratives” (5). I refer to “immigrant narrative” in the sense that Mata suggests: as a narrative schema of transnational migration leading to assimilation/acculturation that functions primarily as a field of ideological containment and discursively moves to elide diverse histories of arrival to recuperate the exceptionality of the United States as benevolent military and colonial power. Pronh’s assertion of refugee temporality as the appropriate framework for her life narrative rebukes the immigrant narrative in both form and content. It is intrinsically unaligned with the central tropes of the immigrant narrative, for as T. Minh-Ha Trinh argues, “refugeeism differs from voluntary immigration

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in that it does not have a future orientation—the utopia of material, social or religious betterment  ” (47, italics in original). In the immigrant narrative, “betterment” is often synonymous with pursuit of the American Dream—glossed as the attainment of formal citizenship, relative economic security, and a sense of individual opportunity and liberty. The framing of the immigrant as American thus typically implies assent to an underlying set of material terms: the acceptance of US territorial claims, the embrace of a rubric of possessive individualism, and a relinquishing of the search to have state-sponsored violence adjudicated. Refusing to orient one’s life to this future amounts to a questioning of the present. By holding open the narrative of her own displacement, Pronh refuses to name a break between the past and the present and thus refuses the claims of redemption made by the US state on her and other refugees’ behalf. In representing her captivity as ongoing, she calls attention to what Avery Gordon calls “endings that are not over” (195) and by doing so reminds us of the political implications of narrative form. Tang suggests that Pronh’s narrative practice of irresolution exemplifies a strategy of seeking what Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, writing about the transatlantic slave trade, have called “fugitive justice.” Fugitive justice cannot be narrated in the traditional sense because it is not an ending that will be achieved. Rather, it is a question that must be asked even as it can never be answered: “How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?” (2). Like fugitive justice, refugee temporality exchanges time as progress for time as “the interval between the no longer and the not yet, between the destruction of the old world and the awaited hour of deliverance” (3). Withholding an end to the story of her captivity, Pronh makes justice legible as an unfinished and unfinishable project. If departure and arrival are the terms used to mark the beginning and ending of the immigrant narrative, then movement and temporality are closely linked. Refusing to label any movement as a definitive departure or arrival demonstrates “the refugee’s knowledge that state-mediated resettlement is a false proposition; it is the disavowal of resolution, an unclosed refugee sojourn” (Tang 159). Structuring her life narrative through repeated movement rather than arrival, Pronh enacts a withholding of arrival that amounts to a critical shift in temporality, understood as the imagined relationship between past(s), present(s), and future(s). This shift in temporality is similar to that which has been modeled by recent scholarship of slavery and Black experience Best and Hartman’s previously described “fugitive justice” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work” are two such projects. Sharpe’s wake work positions the critic “in

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the wake” of the slave trade’s disruptive violence to “occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (13–14). In the wake, we are positioned to perceive that Black captivity did not end with the outlaw of slavery, that in the United States, Black people are “still surrounded . . . by those who fought, and fight still, to extend that state of capture and subjection in as many legal and extralegal ways as possible” (12). The activists of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, call attention to the legal impunity with which Black people are killed by police and white civilians with the protection of “Stand Your Ground” laws, and frequently these activists must do this work facing officers heavily armed with surplus militarygrade equipment (see Apuzzo). Like Pronh, these scholars see not turning points and transformations but reiterations. Refugee temporality joins the critical projects of fugitive justice and wake work to argue that we must train critical lenses calibrated to catch continuities of US militarism and imperialism, histories that underwrite not only the lives of the displaced who have crossed the border but the lives of those who see themselves securely in place between those borders. The captivities that Pronh, Wright, and Bulosan name speak to the premature endings imposed on such histories. In the readings that follow, I focus on the narrators’ construction of refugee temporality through their representation of movement as a strategy “to resist final captivity” (Tang 14) and as part of their narrative practice of irresolution. Movement undoes the implied ending of arrival at US citizenship when it recasts a journey toward some-other-where as continued displacement everywhere. It is not movement or itinerancy in and of itself that generates refugee temporality, it is the disinvestment from the narrative of arrival at American identity as a structuring explanation and compensation for displacement. This movement, as Tang theorizes it via Pronh’s life narrative, is neither fully agential nor strictly coerced, neither positive nor negative. It is survival through the seizing of narrow and contingent affordances in the small spaces allotted, materially and otherwise, to refugee narrators. Pronh’s movements include, for example, “housing displacements, navigation of the welfare state, homeworking, motherhood, and factory work” (160). None of these movements are liberatory, but it is through her telling of these movements that she refuses a resolution to her story of displacement. Wright also describes such a middle ground between agency and coercion in relation to his own need to “make some move”: “Many times I grew weary of the secret burden I carried and longed to cast it down, either in action or in resignation. But I was not made to be a resigned man and I had only a limited choice of actions, and I was afraid of all of them” (200). Either action or resignation would be something other, and something easier,

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than the constant struggle of negotiating affordances in the world as it is. The narrator of refugee temporality lives in the “loophole of hope and resignation” (Best and Hartman 3) rather than exiting to resolution.

“Time was not on my side”: The Refugee Temporalities of Black Boy Tang’s account of urging Pronh to punctuate her story with transformative border crossings uncannily recalls the publication history of another US life story of movement and unsettlement: Richard Wright’s Black Boy. The editorial negotiations behind the publication of Black Boy as a Book of the Month Club (BOMC) selection in 1945 are similar to Tang’s attempted coaxing of a story of arrival in a new place as deliverance from captivity.8 When publisher Harper & Brothers sent BOMC the galleys for consideration, the manuscript was titled American Hunger and had two sections. Part 1, entitled “Southern Night,” spanned Wright’s early childhood to his departure, along with this mother and aunt, for Chicago. Part 2, though, reveals that Wright’s crossing from the US South to the North is not a deliverance from but a continuation of the interlocking threats of poverty, hunger, and physical violence that enforce white supremacy as a social and economic system. Wright still finds himself subjected to cripplingly limited opportunities for work and housing, and he still finds himself both physically and spiritually hungry. The BOMC returned word that it was interested in the manuscript with a new title and a change in scope: the story had to end with Wright’s departure for Chicago, the promise of deliverance from the Jim Crow South full before him. Wright agreed to both changes and sent a revised version of the final pages. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, cofounder of and selection judge for the BOMC, pressed Wright to go further with his revision of the ending. She asks for more hope and more specific rooting of that hope to a transcendent set of American ideals and the white Americans who “have done what they could to lighten this dark stain of racial discrimination in our nation” (cited by Rowley 288). Surely, she argues, the fact that Wright had any sense of possibility at all in the face of such brutal racism is evidence that American ideals are genuine and consequential and that racial discrimination is an aberration, not the norm. Canfield Fisher asks him to make his narrative of state failure to protect the rights of African Americans into a national affirmation in which she and other white readers of the book could identify themselves as saviors, and she asks him to do this by radically shrinking its geographic and temporal scope. Through this cropping of the frame, the North is to become the scene of Wright’s

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overcoming of challenges attributed not to the United States as a whole but to the aberrant South. Arrival in the North is to serve a similar discursive function as the Cambodian refugee’s arrival in the United States, as a disavowal of any continuity between “there” (whether it be a Cambodia suffering collateral damage from the US military action in Vietnam or the US South) and “here” (the true America, benevolent in its welcome of the displaced), and the price of entry into the marketplace is acceptance of that disavowal. If Canfield Fisher’s suggestions seek to draw the anger and artistry of Wright’s autobiographical work back into the narrative of the nation, Wright’s response places himself firmly outside of it and its assumption of progressive temporality. “The negro who flees the south is really a refugee,” he writes back to her, “so pinched and straitened in his environment that his leaving is more an avoidance than an embrace” (cited by Rowley 288). Writing in 1944, Wright applies this term to himself in the context of daily news concerning Jewish flight from Europe.9 Although Wright has not, in 1944, physically left the country of his birth, he is nonetheless outside it. As he describes, “the Negro was the most cast-out of all outcast people in America” (Black Boy 298). Wright’s use of the term “refugee” in relation to himself is not a literal application but a critical contention, and a contention that is consonant with what scholars of Southeast Asian lives and literatures have framed as “critical refugee studies.” As Lê Espiritu describes, critical refugee studies “conceptualizes ‘the refugee’ not as an object of investigation but rather as a paradigm ‘whose function is to establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems’” (Body Counts, 10, citing Agamben). Framing himself as a refugee, Wright asks us to identify his narrative practice of irresolution as calling attention to the problem of white supremacy. It is important to keep in mind that refugee temporality is a lens that the refugee holds up to the world, not one through which we are invited to peer down on them. This directionality is crucial in considering Wright’s use of the word in relation to himself as a Black person in the United States. When journalists and politicians referred to survivors of Hurricane Katrina as refugees, they were quickly, and correctly, excoriated by Black leaders. As Leigh Gilmore notes, “In this context, the assignation of ‘refugee’ to Black citizens expresses a sentiment of exclusion and, through reference to the innocent visual domain, enacts a critical reversal of status within the historical context of slavery” (“Refugee/Citizen,” 676). When Wright uses the term, though, he figures the self as refugee to call upon the “critical space outside of the nation” (Lê Espiritu, Body Counts, 23) that the refugee embodies. Creating such a space from within the nation asks us to consider refugee temporality as an inherently US American temporality.

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With his experiences in Chicago cropped from the narrative, white readers were free to have their assumptions that racism was primarily the South’s problem confirmed. Yet despite this geographic and temporal cropping, Wright’s text demonstrates the insufficiency of any movement to escape captivity and its simultaneous effectiveness as a strategy of physical and emotional survival. Wright opens his autobiography by literally burning down his house—willfully, if not intentionally, unsettling himself. Such unsettling is crucial, for as he reflects in the ending material added to the 1945 conclusion, “The white South said that I had a ‘place’ in life” while his “deepest instincts had always made me reject the ‘place’ to which the white South had assigned me” (414). The meaning of place is inextricably dual, both geographic and social. He must constantly relocate himself to avoid being held in designated “place.” It is movement that sustains hope. Wright portrays childhood conversations among Black boys centering around the promise of flight. An exchange between unnamed boys becomes a litany of conjecture and aspiration. As he overhears one boy proclaiming, “‘Shucks, man. I’m going north when I get grown’” (80), Wright recognizes a ritual of “Rebelling against futile hope and embracing flight” (80). Even as children, he and his peers cannot imagine a future without movement. Wright likens these repeated conversations to a kind of movement in themselves, as “the talk would weave, roll, surge, spurt, veer, swell, having no specific aim or direction” (81), suggesting that these spaces of communal exchange nurture a mental mobility that creates space for future movement. As an adolescent, Wright finds that he “dreamed of going north” while realizing that his idea of the North “had no relation whatever to what actually existed” (80). The crucial role of the North is as an elsewhere to be imagined, and it is by this imagination that he “kept hope alive in me” (80). Wright’s imaginative movements allow him to sustain his refusal of staying in place. Wright represents his childhood self learning early not to equate movement with deliverance. In the episode immediately following his home arson, he recalls, “One day my mother told me that we were going to Memphis on a boat . . . and my eagerness thereafter made the days seem endless. Each night I went to bed hoping that the next morning would be the day of departure” (9). The mere suggestion of leaving, of living elsewhere transforms his experience of time. When the day of departure arrives, though, he faces the shabbiness of the “tiny, dirty boat that was not at all like the boat I had imagined” (9). The family arrives to a “one-story brick tenement” where the “stone buildings and concrete pavements looked bleak and hostile” (10). The reality of arrival is incommensurate with the dream of movement, a realization that will be frequently reaffirmed as Richard and his family are forced to move again and

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again. In one particularly brutal passage, they move three times in as many paragraphs: “Inability to pay rent forced us to move into a house . . . in a section of the town where flood waters came”; “Again paying rent became a problem and we moved”; “Yet again we moved, this time to the outskirts of town” (84). Just as Pronh and her children find themselves moved from one substandard apartment to another (see Tang 66–73), Wright and his family find no progress toward stability or belonging in the passage of time. Rather than seeing these disparate histories as disconnected, the lens of refugee temporality suggests that we see them as part of a recurring pattern of racialization in which the displacement of people and groups incited by traumatic histories that are in fact integral to US economic and geopolitical power is perpetuated rather than resolved by their seeming welcome into the United States. Wright’s departure for Chicago encapsulates refugee temporality’s challenge to the temporal projections of American capitalism. At the beginning of the final chapter of Part 1, Wright, his mother, his brother, and his Aunt Maggie attempt to pool their resources to plan a move to Chicago. They “held long conferences, speculating on the prospects of jobs and the cost of apartments” (254). The attempt to plan, though, only results in their staying in place: “every time we conferred, we defeated ourselves. It was impossible . . . we did not have enough money” (254). They ultimately conclude that if they wait for their migration to be economically legitimate in the terms of individual self-sufficiency, they would die in place. The math of savings over time cannot work in their favor for “if we waited until we were prepared to go, we would never leave, we would never amass enough money to see us through” (254). They offer an alternative calculus of liberation to that inaugurated by Olaudah Equiano in his Interesting Nar­rative, where he posits that the self rightly converted to labor secures profit and therefore liberty (Baker 37). Refusing to wait, they challenge the economic precondition of “enough money” as a qualification for who gets to make a choice regarding their life and who does not. At the same time, their departure demonstrates how little choice factors into their leaving. They will not have their choice of departure date, apartment, or food budget. They have only the choice to move or stay in place. Their story cannot resolve through movement, but it can continue. The restoration of Part 2 to Wright’s autobiographical text, “The Horror and the Glory,” makes the repetition rather than resolution of movement even plainer.10 It rejects the framework of white liberal rescue as it reveals the continuity of captivity through Wright’s repeated struggles to secure employment, food, housing, and human community in the North. While his family continues to be forced to move from one inadequate apartment to the next, Wright

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attempts to find space as a creative and political agent in the Communist Party, only to be told that its rigid political project has no berth for his ideas. He finds it ironic that “I had spent a third of my life traveling from the place of my birth to the North just to talk freely, to escape the pressure of fear” only to find himself “facing fear again” and ultimately embroiled in a confrontation with the party that he characterizes as having “all the violence of the assault I had sustained” (344) when challenging white supremacy in a Mississippi workplace by simply engaging in on-the-job training. His time in Chicago prompts his full disinvestment from the material promises of US identity because it demonstrates that no amount of departure will allow for him to arrive at the promises of liberal citizenship. When he loses out on a job at the US Post Office because he is underweight, he recognizes the absurdity as a natural extension of “that queer, American way of living that computed everything in terms of the concrete: weight, color, race, fur coats, radios, electric refrigerators, cars, money” (281). The list he rattles off suggests that the investment in classifying individuals as material (“weight, color, race”—an eerie echo of the vital statistics used to quantify the value of enslaved people) is paired with the investment in obtaining the presumed prizes of the American life as a marker of status (“fur coats, radios, electric refrigerators, cars, money”). Wright reflects, “I simply could not fit into a materialistic life” (281). Wright is not just pointing out that his desires seem not to run to the materialistic. His very being is incompatible with the equation of self with material because equating selves with material historically created the ongoing structure of his captivity. The ending of the restored version of Black Boy/American Hunger is the opening of an undefined interval of time in which no secure narrative can be projected. Its closing passages present Wright’s desire to write as a mode of bringing a future into being. This is a modest and contingent vision. Writing almost entirely in the subjunctive mode, Wright makes declarations not of what he “will” do but what he “would” do. Particularly, he determines “I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say” (383). He approaches writing “humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity” (383–84). He imagines his future as a writer not as a line of action and achievement but as a halting, relational project: “I would hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words” (384). Like Pronh, he has refused to tell his story in the way his audience expected to hear it. He keeps speaking as he keeps waiting, his words becoming a way of occupying the interval of “not yet” (Best and Hartman 3).

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“I have been on the move since I was a little kid”: Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart E. San Juan Jr. has described Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart as “a classic text of vagrancy and failure” (Bulosan and San Juan, Becoming, 16). In the paradigm of US national identity, the two descriptive terms are nearly equivalent, for a vagrant’s movement is a sign of homelessness and joblessness, conditions that an immigrant’s landing on US soil is supposed to ultimately remedy. Bulosan’s life narrative text instead is “fixated on movement” (Keith 32), marking his formulation of refugee temporality from the position of the Filipino national. As Mae Ngai notes, under the terms of annexation, “[Filipino] Nationals did have one important right: freedom of movement within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States” (100). Itinerancy is thus partially a carving out of a slim legal affordance through which to resist both racializing and assimilating frameworks of US identity. Like Pronh and Wright, he keeps moving rather than accepting the starkly limited terms of existence offered by any one geographic or social place within the United States. Marked by continual, directionless movement, his life narrative becomes a refutation of any telos of arrival. Bulosan’s movements begin with his childhood in the Philippines, in which his family’s poverty propels the sons away from home in search of work. Part 1 of America sets up the thematic of flight through its representation of Carlos’s economic migration resulting from the protracted loss of his father’s small landholdings.11 Rather than attributing his departure from the Philippines to a decisive crisis, he portrays a generalized instability attributable to US military incursion and imperialism.12 This imperialism is shown to operate on both a cultural and political level. The thwarting of nationalist and peasant movements results in the exacerbation of the effects of absentee landlordism, government corruption, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small elite. Families who have farmed and foraged for generations find themselves struggling and forced to seek new sources of income. At the same time as the economics of land ownership are becoming more tenuous, cultural pressure to pursue education at great personal cost is growing. Bulosan explains, “When the free education that the United States had introduced spread throughout the islands, every family who had a son pooled its resources and sent him to school” (14). His parents’ decision to mortgage their subsistence farm signifies an ultimately ill-fated investment in the narrative of opportunity the United States

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projects through its sponsorship of Western education. Despite their consistent sacrifice and his brother’s ultimate attainment of a teaching position, the loans can never be repaid. With no stable home or livelihood, Carlos becomes “restless and fearful of the uncertainty that pervaded our household” (America, 63) and “felt like running away—anywhere.” He begins to move, from village to town to the capital city of Manila, in each location confronting the lack of a viable future save through continued movement. His decision to travel to the United States is not driven by desire but is instead represented as just one more option to be exhausted, given that “the opening of the United States was to [young men] one of the gratifying provisions of the peace treaty that culminated the Spanish-American War” (4). The United States is not an exceptionally desirable destination; it is simply an available one. By undermining the exceptionality of the United States as a destination for migrants, he undermines typical US immigration narratives of overcoming and instead portrays his migration as part of an ongoing colonial relationship. Carlos’s movements are only accelerated upon his arrival in the United States. He emerges from the steerage level of the vessel that has carried him across the Pacific to the streets of Seattle’s Chinatown only to find himself trafficked into forced labor in Alaska when he is unable to pay his first night’s hotel bill. This, Carlos observes, “was the beginning of my life in America, the beginning of a long flight” (101). “Beginning” and “flight” are in tension, as the former suggests a directionality that the latter denies. After completing his term of bonded labor, he is transported back to Seattle, where he begins a period of relentless itinerancy, moving in a circle up and down the West Coast. His life is a story that cannot seem to begin, formally marked by the accumulation of beginnings that do not lead to middles. Chapter 24 opens, for example: “I went to bed resolved to change the whole course of my life forever. Where was I to begin? Where did rootless men begin their lives?” (181). His longing to “change the whole course of my life forever” and “begin” suggests his longing for a progres­ sive narrative framework for his life story, and his first version of the question— “Where was I   to begin?” (emphasis mine)—indicates, as the immigrant narrative suggests, that adopting this framework and achieving its promises is priprimarily a matter of individual agency. His second version of the question, though, moves from the individual to the collective framework, grouping himself as one of the “rootless men” forced to search for a beginning. He sees life narratives as a potential resource in this search, continuing, “Who were the men that contributed something positive to society? Show me the books about them! I would read them all! I would educate myself to be like them!” (181). Despite the urgency of his search, such a narrative framework proves elusive as

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he rapidly cycles from epiphany to disillusionment, elation to despair, resolution to irresolution. He wakes the morning following this vow to “begin” the story of his life feeling like “a new man” (181), but what he believes is a starting out is actually a return to a place he has already been, and on his previous visit, he had been driven from it at gunpoint. It is now the home of a socialist newspaper, for which he begins to write. By the start of the next chapter, though, the editor and fund-raiser for this publication has died, prompting another departure and beginning. As for Wright and Pronh, the repetition of departure and arrival blurs into an ongoing state of vulnerability to poverty, violence, and despair. As Michael Denning describes, “every turning point and intellectual awakening is followed by a retreat into despair and aimless movement; every moment of political struggle is juxtaposed with incidents of petty crime and brutal violence” (274). The text is regularly marked by departures that are seen as new beginnings but that rapidly reveal that nothing has changed. In an episode shortly after returning from peonage in Alaska, Carlos and a fellow migrant are forced to flee in the night at gunpoint. As they pause before hopping a train, his companion tells him, “‘This is the beginning of your life in America. . . . We’ll take a freight train from Sunnyside and go to nowhere” (111). The very idea of “nowhere” as an affirmative destination ironizes the notion of the immigrant’s journey and once again demonstrates that its narrative arc of overcoming is far from a universal or natural outcome. Nowhere is exactly where Carlos seems to go. The repetition of departure and arrival, beginning and rebeginning, negates any sense of progressive temporality. As San Juan has noted, “the generic norms of memoir and confession, with their penchant for chronological verisimilitude and linear plotting” are “eroded by a subterranean comic rhythm of repetition” (Bulosan and San Juan, Becoming, 13). Roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, Carlos is again in Seattle and finds himself taken aback by the stasis that his ceaseless movement actually signifies. He “suddenly [discovers] that I was sitting in the same corner where I had sat years before. The place was unchanged. There was even my name and the date of my arrival in the United States where I had carved it on the table” (222). Calling attention to the stasis at the heart of movement, he refuses to erase his ongoing legal exception from citizenship and refuses to perform the developmental framework of immigration. Carlos finds that his relationship to time, and therefore his relationship to self, is permanently altered; he can no longer project himself into the narrative selfhood he has so fervently imagined. In the midst of his cyclical journeys up and down the US West Coast, he relates: “It was a planless life, hopeless, and

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without direction. I was merely living from day to day: yesterday seemed long ago and tomorrow was too far away. It was today that I lived for aimlessly, this hour, this moment. It gave me an acute sense of time that has remained with me” (169, italics in original). “Planlessness” functions as an ironic reference to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for moral perfection, with its rigorous progress toward a future self, famously included in the posthumously published autobiographical writings that are often referred to as the archetypal American autobiography. Thus, the capacity to format one’s life according to a plan of self-improvement is equated not only with American identity but also with moral worth. Bulosan’s equation of “planless” with “hopeless” signals the traumatic disconnect between a narrative of immigration built on the agential seizing of opportunity and his own repeated experience of labor leading only to continued homelessness and poverty. Yet, by articulating this traumatic temporality, Bulosan calls attention to a history of disenfranchisement differentially affecting non-European migrant subjects. His calling out of the equation of “planning” with moral worth undercuts the promise of universal rights for those who have arrived in the United States. Further, he suggests that once this history has been witnessed, progressive narrative cannot be recuperated because the “acute sense of time” remains with him. Like Pronh, he continues to reject a narrative framing of deliverance from captivity into US citizenship through an insistence that the time of his captivity has not passed. From this critical stance, he rejects another totalizing narrative of human progress: communism. Like Wright, Carlos eventually crosses paths with the Communist Party. Approached by a young woman and asked, “‘Are you a member of the YCL [Young Communist League]?’” Carlos demurs. He asks, “‘What makes you think I would be useful to the organization? . . . I don’t know anything about it. You see, I have been on the move since I was a little kid’” (224). He might be referring to his piecemeal education or the fact that he has rarely been in one place long enough to join any kind of organization. Putting aside these biographical conjectures about reasons for his disinclination to join a Communist Party–affiliated group, though, we are left with a non sequitur: Carlos sees himself as disqualified from communism as a result of having “‘been on the move since I was a little kid.’” The connection Carlos is making between being on the move and being outside of party politics is opaque, but his experience has clearly led him to distrust or simply not identify with formulaic approaches to human security. Bulosan and Wright represent their interactions with the Communist Party in a way that suggests their experiences have led them to see progressive temporal frameworks as untenable for refugee

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subjects not only in the context of US citizenship but also in the context of forming political identity. Instead of proposing reinvestment in a different progressive narrative, Carlos’s story gives rise to an alternate temporality and economy of cross-racial solidarity. As Macario, the same brother who had been put through school at the expense of the family’s land, prepares to enlist after Pearl Harbor, he tells Carlos, “I think this is really the meaning of life: the extension of little things into the future so that they might be useful to other people” (323). In the modesty of its ambition and its self-conscious contingency we see a stunning revision of the self-aggrandizing American Dream. Macario’s focus on the “extension of little things” posits that the work of fugitive justice begins in understanding the present as an undefined interval in which halting, partial, and contingent efforts accrue. There is no preordained end for these efforts, only a belief that they “might be useful to other people.” Its vision of perpetual work rather than achievement in perpetuity disinvests from a telos of the future self and nation. Like Wright at the close of the full version of Black Boy, Carlos’s brother models how life might proceed in “the interval between the no longer and the not yet” (Best and Hartman 3). Macario’s departure for military service incites one such chain of small extensions that exemplifies the practice of such temporality. As Macario runs to catch the bus that will carry him to basic training for the US Army, he “remember[s] something of great importance” and gives Carlos a dime, telling him, “‘Don’t forget to give this to the Negro bootblack across from my hotel . . . I forgot to pay him today’” (324). His brother’s last act before joining the military is making good on a promise made to a fellow laborer. The fact that the bootblack spotted him a shoeshine in the first place gestures toward an interracial project of finding space for alternate economies within a system of monetary exchange. The bootblack, after being repaid, invites Carlos out to share the single beer that ten cents can buy: “He bought a glass of draught beer with the ten cents. He offered it to me when he had drunk half of it. I took the glass and drank the rest of the beer” (324). Their sharing is a moment of wordless intimacy that transmutes currency into community. After the beer is finished, the bootblack tells Carlos, “If I don’t see [your brother] again, I’ll remember him every time I see the face of an American dime” (324–25). The creativity and humanity of this brief exchange evince what Neferti Tadiar has called “alternative human becoming” (16) through the exercise of “tangential, fugitive, and insurrectionary creative social capacities” (7). These ways of becoming human, as Tadiar notes, are rendered “alternative” only because of the

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centering of the autonomous, agential, property-owning subject as fully human, and in this case, fully American. Bulosan’s refugee temporality opens narrative space to claim acknowledgment for such ways of becoming human/ American and the ongoing histories that are the site of their emergence. By way of offering a contingent next step for the critical interval these readings have sought to open, I want to underscore a point of connection between these juxtaposed narratives not yet addressed: the role of the interlocutor. Pronh’s life narrative is reported and interpreted by a sociologically trained interloc­ utor, and Wright’s and Bulosan’s, though published as single-author autobiographies, are also certainly shaped by editorial interlocutors. The recognition of refugee temporality by Tang and the claiming of it by Wright directly result from this pairing of teller and hearer, a relational site of narration that suggests that if the subjects of refugee temporality are to tell their stories, they must also be heard. Refugee temporality might, then, provide a productive lens for a range of more contemporary life narratives crossing the generic borders of the singleauthor autobiography to hybrid, oral-history driven works such as Dave Eggers’s What Is the What and Zeitoun as well as Peter Orner and Tom Andes’s Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, a title in the Voice of Witness series published by McSweeney’s. These works memorably challenge the immi­ grant narrative in their respective portrayals of Achak Deng, a Sudanese “Lost Boy”; Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian American stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; and a host of undocumented subjects (see also Paik; Peek; Caminero-Santangelo). For if the work of refugee temporality is to provoke a reckoning with the fullness of US history and the impossibility of final redress for that history’s violence and exploitation, it is work that can only be accomplished relationally: it is not the subject of refugee temporality who needs to hear what time it is. Those who want to join this work may find it as important to consider Tang’s positionality as Pronh’s. How can we position ourselves as witnesses and allied interlocutors? We might begin by listening for stories that are not over, whose very ongoingness challenges a deeply ingrained impulse to read the US present as better than its past. Through reading the narratives of a Jim Crow–era Black subject and a Depression-era Filipino national subject as narratives employing a refugee temporality formulated in the autobiographical statements of a Cambodian refugee, I argue not for a transcendent effect of mobility but for the critical importance of the temporal recasting of US immigrant narrative as a foundational template for American identity. It is not the crossing of a national border or a period of itinerancy that defines the subject of refugee temporality. It is the disinvestment from a narrative that portrays movement across and within the

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US border as a telos of agential self-betterment. For Pronh, Wright, and Bulosan, the promised endings to captivity and displacement have come and gone, and the narrators have come to see irresolution as a truer story. Notes 1. I use the term “American” to signify the mythos of US identity. I use the term “US American” to signify historical persons with US citizenship. 2. See Dunst: “The Trump administration is preparing to deport the largest group yet of legal Cambodian immigrants to the United States over the next few days, according to human rights groups and an American official, continuing a wave of deportation that has fallen heavily on refugees who fled the upheaval surrounding the Vietnam War.” 3. The United Nations protocol on the status of refugees—proposed in 1951, adopted in 1954, and revised in 1967—brings formal legal status to the refugee as person in flight from persecution in the person’s place of origin, stating: “The term ‘refugee’ shall apply to any person who . . . owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality” (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 16). 4. See Hakutani for a thorough description of early critical reception for Black Boy and debate over whether it should be considered a novel or an autobiography. As multiple critics have pointed out, Bulosan’s text is at times overtly fictionalized. Michael Denning points out, “He was never in Alaska; he did not work in the fields, being too weak; and he had nothing to do with several of the violent incidents he incorporated into the narrative” (274). 5. Hakutani goes on to argue of Black Boy that, “Even though parts of the book are fictional, it is nevertheless auto-biographical and should not be equated with a novel. No one for a moment can overlook the fact that it portrays Wright himself, and if it concerns others, their lives are necessarily intertwined with his. . . . The attitudes and sentiments expressed by the young Wright are not totally his own but represent the responses of those he called ‘the voiceless Negro boys’” (71). Leigh Gilmore has noted that events attributed to the narrator’s life in America Is in the Heart are, perhaps, more the type of interpellation characteristic of testimonio than outright fabrication (“Jurisdictions,” 696n1). Marilyn Alquizola observes, “Both the dense constitution of events in the text’s plot and the historical accuracy of these isolated events makes it quite possible to posit that Bulosan’s narrative is woven from the collective experiences of some of the firstgeneration Filipino works in the United States, fused into the single character of Carlos the fictive narrator” (211). 6. Cambodian American life writing is a particularly apt locus for the articulation and deployment of refugee temporality. Cathy Schlund-Vials has found similar temporal frames at work in her reading of Cambodian American memoirs of witness,

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characterized by “the instability of place . . . epitomized by the seemingly unending movement of protagonists from city to country, from labor camp to refugee camp, from Southeast Asia to North America” (125). In tandem with this instability of place, Schlund-Vials notes the temporality of “still-to-be-served justice” (125) in Cambodian American memoirs of witness, telling their stories “amid amnesiac frames wherein US bombings [of Cambodia] are strategically forgotten . . . and international justice is . . . for the most part absent” (124). For further discussion of the chronotope of Cambodian American autobiography, see Yamada. 7. William Boelhower, laying out one of the earliest definitions (1981), suggests as framework “an immigrant protagonist(s), representing an ethnic world view, comes to America with great expectations, and through a series of trials is led to reconsider them in terms of his final status” (5). That this framework incorporates a “series of trials” indi­ cates some acknowledgment that immigrant experience never fully affirms idealized notions of “America” as a destination, but the narrative arc as toward US identity is central. Boelhower’s framework, derived principally through readings of texts by immigrants from Europe, is productively challenged by Sau Ling Cynthia Wong’s reading of Chinese American autobiographical texts, which points out the unique legal, historical, and political circumstances of Asian American migration and demonstrates that there is no universal US immigrant narrative. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson add the that the process of “making oneself an American” as represented in life narrative is portrayed as “largely successful for most European immigrants” but “more ambiguous for indigenous peoples, immigrants from Asia and Africa, and Latinos and Latinas at the border” (123). 8. Smith and Watson, via Ken Plummer, define the coaxer as “any person or insti­ tution or set of cultural imperatives that solicits or provokes people to tell their stories” (64). 9. It is possible there is a longer tradition of naming the Black US subject as refugee that Wright draws on indicated in the full name of what is now simply known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was, in its time of operation, formally called the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to pursue this potential linkage, the name suggests that there is a deeper archive to be assembled by future studies. 10. Part 2 was originally published as the stand-alone American Hunger in 1977. The cited text in this chapter is an edition of the 1993 Harper Perennial restoration of the text as originally submitted to the Book of the Month Club and includes the additional material appended to the end of Part 1 for the 1945 publication in its notes. 11. I use “Carlos” to refer to the persona of Bulosan represented in the autobiographical text, sometimes called “Allos” by other characters. When I mean to refer to the historical figure who is the author of the text, I will refer to him as Bulosan. 12. Yên Lê Espiritu provides a précis of this often-occluded history: “Filipino migration to the United States must be understood within the context of US imperialism in the Philippines and in Asia. In 1898, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the

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United States brutally took possession of the Philippines over native opposition and uprising, thereby extending its ‘Manifest Destiny’ to Pacific Asia. The often-ignored Philippine-American War (1899–1902) resulted in the death of about a million Filipinos, the violent destruction of the nationalist forces, and the US territorial annexation of the Philippines—ostensibly to prepare the archipelago for eventual independence” (Home Bound, 25).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is a Paradigm?” European Graduate School, YouTube, August 20, 2002. Video, 2:53. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Wxn1L9Er0. Alquizola, Marilyn. “The Fictive Narrator of America Is in the Heart.” In Frontiers of Asian American Studies, edited by Gail Nomura et al., 211–17. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989. Apuzzo, Matt. “War Gear Flows to Police Departments.” New York Times, June 8, 2014. Baker, Houston A. Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Best, Stephen, and Saidiya Hartman. “Fugitive Justice.” Representations 92, no. 1 (2005): 1–15. Boelhower, William Q. “The Immigrant Novel as Genre.” MELUS 8, no. 1 (1981): 3–13. Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart: A Personal History. 1946. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973. Bulosan, Carlos, and E. San Juan Jr. On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Buss, Helen M. “Kim Thúy’s Ru and the Art of the Anecdote.” a/b Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 3 (2018): 605–12. Caminero-Santangelo, M. “Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of Unauthorized Immigrants.” Biography 35, no. 3 (2012): 449–71. https://doi.org/10.1353 /bio.2012.0040. Chansky, Ricia A. “Moving beyond Boundaries.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 30, no. 1 (2015): 3–15. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. London: Verso, 1996. Dunst, Charles. “Dozens More Cambodian Immigrants to Be Deported from U.S., Officials Say.” New York Times, December 12, 2018. Eggers, Dave. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng; A Novel. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2006. Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2009. Gilmore, Leigh. “Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous SelfRepresentation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma.” Signs 28, no. 2 (2003): 695–718. Gilmore, Leigh. “Refugee/Citizen: Mediating Testimony through Image and Word in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 3 (2017):673–81. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

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Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Creation of the Self in Richard Wright’s Black Boy.” Black American Literature Forum 19, no. 2 (1985): 70–75. Keith, Joseph. Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945–1960. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Lê Espiritu, Yên. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Lê Espiritu, Yên. Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Mata, Irene. Domestic Disturbances: Re-Imagining Narratives of Gender, Labor, and Immigration. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Obama, Barack. “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Immigration.” News release, November 20, 2014. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the -press-office/2014/11/20/remarks-president-address-nation-immigration. Orner, Peter, and Tom Andes. Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. Paik, A. Naomi. Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Peek, M. “Humanitarian Narrative and Posthumanist Critique: Dave Eggers’s What Is the What.” Biography 35 no. 1 (2012): 115–36. https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2012.0002. Perreault, Jeanne, and Marlene Kadar. “Introduction: Tracing the Autobiographical; Unlikely Documents, Unexpected Places.” In Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, 1–7. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Slaughter, J. Human Rights, Inc. The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Tadiar, Neferti X. M. “Life-Times of Becoming Human.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 3 (March 1, 2012): 1–17. Tang, Eric. Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. London: Routledge, 2018. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Convention and Protocol Related to the Status of Refugees. United Nations Refugee Agency. Published December 2010. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/3b66c2aa10.

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Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach.” In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, 142–70. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. Harper Perennial, 2006. Yamada, Teri Shaffer. “Cambodian American Autobiography: Testimonial Discourse.” In Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, edited by Xiaojing Zhou and Samina Najmi, 144–67. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.

Archival Intervention Surviving the “Savage Splintering” in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians Hertha D. Sweet Wong

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s a result of more than five hundred years of settler-colonial oppression, misrepresentation, and attempted erasure (both physically and discursively), Indigenous people in what is now the United States may be the most “invisible” of ethnic groups, the minority of minorities. Of these, California Indians are perhaps the most invisible. In part, because 90 percent of Indigenous people in California were killed. In part, because most California Natives have no (or very little) land. In part, because they have lost (much of) their cultures and (many of) their languages. In spite of such sustained and shattering losses, California Indians, such as Deborah Miranda, survive and actively excavate, reinvigorate, and reimagine Indigenous futures. Like Miranda, Indigenous activists including Corinna Gould (Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone), Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone), Greg Sarris (Miwok and Pomo), and Caleen Sisk (Winnemem Wintu) reveal that the monolithic national narrative of the United States—based on myths of entitlement and exceptionalism such as the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism that allows any hardworking person to improve their lot in life— has never been anything but a tool of settler-colonialism to erase the many contesting narratives that have always existed.1 Ned Blackhawk has argued convincingly that American history has “failed to gauge the violence that remade much of the continent before US expan140

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sion” (1). The overall bloody history of Indigenous people is even more fraught in California, where it was exceptionally brutal, blatant, and state-sanctioned. As Patrick Wolfe describes, settler colonialism works from a “logic of elimination” that requires the destruction of Indigenous people. First came the Spaniards, then the Mexicans, then, most brutal of all, the Americans. During the Mission period (1769–1834), the Spanish built twenty-one Franciscan missions along the California coast. They both stole Indigenous land and forced the people to labor on it under brutal conditions.2 The brief Mexican period (1834–46) brought secularization of the missions and a promise to return some Native land, but ultimately more land theft for the expansive Mexican-owned rancherias, again using an Indigenous labor force. This period ended abruptly when the United States seized California in 1846 in the early stages of the Mexican War. The American period (1846–present) began with the US invasion and the gold rush during which fortune seekers and settlers killed Native people or forced them from their lands. In his 1851 State of the State address, the first governor of California (1849–51), Peter Burnett, proclaimed: “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.”3 That expectation was almost fulfilled. But in the twenty-first century, Indigenous survivors of California history continue to speak out. Participating in the post-1970s phenomenon of interweaving, juxtaposing, and relating image and text in the service of personal and political selfnarration, Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) is a multimodal autobiography that both continues and extends Native American life writing. As Stephanie Fitzgerald notes, Bad Indians is part of “redefining and re-imagining the genre of Native women’s life writing,” but it is also an innovative performance of the conflict between settler-colonial and Indigenous narratives of California. Composed of text and images in the form of photographs, reproductions of archival mission records, letters, ethnographic field notes, newspaper articles, drawings, fourth-grade school projects, reimagined California history assignments, and genealogical charts, interwoven with memories and family stories, Miranda names, corrects, and redefines California Native history, both personal and collective. She emphasizes how generations of Indigenous people have been defined by the narratives imposed by settler colonialism. Through her elaborate research, reclamation, and revision process, Miranda participates in the ongoing process of decolonization, generating a net­ work of Indigenous counternarratives—past and present. Because for California Indians, history is “place-centered” (Bauer ix), Miranda addresses Indigenous identity in relation to place. 4 Place encompasses

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one’s relationship to land, language, culture, and history; and to the dispossession of homeland, language, culture, and history. Place also includes social positioning, where one is located, one’s “place” in society. Place, especially in Indigenous contexts, is wed to time. To know a place, to belong to a place, to be defined by a place, one has to know its history, the stories that arise from it, the lived experience in it. Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, and many other Native writers deftly weave together place and history, revealing palimpsests of place-based stories that define them. Miranda refers to and expands on this Indigenous epistemology as she weds Indigenous historical trauma to familial personal trauma, naming how transgenerational trauma morphs, but does not disappear, through generations. In the process, she dives into historical archives, challenging photography, ethnography, and official records as modes of documentation. In short, she “uses the archive—built out of exploitative settler-colonial research methodologies—against itself ” (Martinez 54). Throughout Bad Indians, an ironic title itself, she performs how to critique photographic and ethnographic documentation of Indigenous people, how to claim a contemporary Indigenous subjectivity, while acknowledging the impossible history it survived. Miranda’s main objective is to tell the history of California Indian peoples in order to understand her own family history and her own story of being the child of a white mother and Native father: “European and Indigenous; nominal Christian and lapsed Catholic; once-good girl and twice-bad boy” (xii). “As a mixed-blood ‘Mission Indian,’” with no knowledge of her language, she explains, “I have spent a lifetime being told I am not a ‘real Indian’” (xiv). This process of claiming herself as “a member of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation” (xix) requires her to dig deep into historical archives and then to offer an Indigenous counternarrative to settler-colonial records, her contribution to a lengthy history of often unacknowledged resistance to settler-colonial efforts to erase Indigenous peoples and cultures. Such a continual “reworking of [Indigenous] understandings of the impact of imperialism and colonialism is an important aspect of Indigenous cultural politics and forms the basis of an Indigenous language of critique” (Smith 23–24), part of an extensive and ongoing network of academic, community, and political activism for restorative justice for Indigenous peoples. Overall, Miranda’s focus is on stories—“the many stories” that construct California (xi). Many of California’s stories about Indigenous people, however, are outright lies, attempts to whitewash an especially gruesome history of genocide, slavery, and abuse as well as to erase Indigenous people altogether.5 Well aware of the power of stories “to rebuild or silence,” Miranda vows to unearth

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silenced voices, to write her own stories, and particularly to end “the Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale” (xix) that depicts the missions as benign, charming relics of a picturesque California past: a time when Native people came willingly to the missions to convert to Christianity, gain alphabetic literacy, and learn the value of labor and clock time. In fact, Indigenous Californians came to the missions to escape violence as their homes were stolen and they were killed; they came to find food because the intruders were destroying their food sources; they came seeking treatment for diseases brought by settlers. Rather than respite, they experienced forced labor, cruel physical punishments for Franciscan-determined infractions, and deadly diseases. The commercialized tourism story of the California missions, Miranda writes, “has done more damage to California Indians than any conquistador, any soldado de cuera (leather-jacket soldier), any smallpox, measles, or influenza virus. This story has not just killed us, it has taught us how to kill ourselves and kill each other with alcohol, domestic violence, horizontal racism, internalized hatred. This story is a kind of evil, a kind of witchery. We have to put an end to it now” (xix). The tourism story of the California missions is part of the narrative building blocks that created a foundational myth of nation for what is now the United States. Bad Indians offers multiple voices—past and present—“telling the antidote to lies” (xx). The multivocality is by design. Miranda refers to Bad Indians as “a collaborative text,” one “created by a long and a very complex series of storytellers” (Dietrich 103–4), one that arises from and contributes to a network of stories, all competing narratives that reveal the Divided, not United, States. Miranda frames her “mosaic of stories” (Dietrich 104)—told through the voices of ancestors, relatives, ethnographers, Franciscans, and others—between two sets of altered official Bureau of Indian Affairs documents printed on the inside of both the front and back pages—“Things You Can Do with Your Chart for Calculating Quantum of Indian Blood” (see Figure 1)—that she has revised with colored pencil, cleverly repurposing them to ridicule the concept of blood quantum, an invention of settler colonialism, another false story arising from the US legal system that has defined and redefined Indigenous people in and out of existence according to its interests. In “Wannabe Creations,” she ironically urges readers to “create a fake ‘Indian’ design” and “sell it for lots of money.” In “Hand of God,” she speculates facetiously about God’s blood quan­ tum. “Patriotism Percentages” depicts a US flag. Miranda asks why blood quantum is “so important to the US government” and suggests that it “must be a measure of Indian patriotism.” Finally, in “Blood Quantum: The Four Sacred Directions,” she writes: “The Four Directions come from, and lead to, everywhere; utterly inclusive,

Figure 1.  “Things You Can Do with Your Chart for Calculating Quantum of Indian Blood.” Used by permission of Heyday Publishers.

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clearly not fullbloods” (front and back interior pages). Miranda is not the first to use blood quantum charts in an artistic project to spoof the concept, but her critique is particularly relevant for California Indians. As an Indigenous person from California, she and other mixed-race Native people are actively resisting erasure. Miranda organizes the book into four chronological historical periods— Missionization (1776–1836), Post-Secularization (1836–1900), Reinvention (1900–1961), and Home (1961–present)—but her narrative is far from linear. Throughout each historical period, she weaves and juxtaposes family genealogies, personal narratives, memories, anecdotes, newspaper articles, official documents, excerpts from ethnologists, and photographs, illustrating how past and present mingle. This seemingly haphazard collection of voices and times is anything but. Miranda models Bad Indians on an Indigenous notion of time in which rather than a linear progression from the past to the present, time is cyclical, spiraling forward and then back and then forward. With each move through the spiral of time, past and present are in close proximity. Sometimes such proximity becomes a palimpsest in which Miranda excavates the many layers of history that produced the California Indians of today. The title, Bad Indians, riffs on representations of Indigenous people on many levels. First, the photograph of Miranda on the cover (see Figure 2) shows her as a very young girl dressed as a fancy cowgirl. She wears matching shirt and chaps decorated with cowboys lassoing bulls, a red kerchief around her neck, and a red cowboy hat. She is perched atop a black-and-white pony, the kind that used to be found in grocery store parking lots in the 1950s, waiting for the photo op that could not be resisted. In a reverse of redface, the Indian girl dressed up as a cowgirl is the first “bad” Indian, one that conflates stereotypical Western film images. A second “bad” Indian is one who is declared not a “real” Indian, but a “wannabe” or a fraud, the fate of many California Indians who lost almost everything. Miranda’s father, Alfred Miranda, might be another “bad” Indian, a passionate, violent man who, when drunk, terrorized his wife and children and yet was a maker and a gardener. Miranda includes, also, a 1909 newspaper article: “‘Bad’ Indian Goes on Rampage at Santa Ynez” (96). The article reports that “Juan Miranda, a bad Indian,” went on “a rampage” due to “fire water.” When he refuses arrest and points a rifle at the officer (an armed Indian is a “bad” Indian), he is knocked out and “subdued and arrested” (96). With its references to “cholo” and “brave,” the racist language of the Los Angeles Times report speaks for itself (96). Miranda repeats the infamous quotation from General Philip Sheridan: “The only good Indians I ever knew were

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Figure 2.  Cover of Bad Indians. Miranda dressed up as a cowgirl. Used by permission of Heyday Publishers.

dead” (97). To be a living Native person, then, is by definition, to be “bad.” Indigenous existence is the primary offense. In “Novena to Bad Indians,” Miranda transitions to a nine-day period of Catholic “prayer to obtain special graces, to implore special favors, or to make special petition” (99). Hers are prayers to a long catalog of “bad” Indians. Day 1: “Indian outlaws, banditos, renegades, rebels, lazy Indians, sinful Indians,” “lusty Indians.” Day 2: “troublemakers, horse thieves, fornicators,” “polygamists,” “heathens.” Day 3: “dirty,” “stupid,” “lazy” Indians who refuse to com-

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ply with Franciscan rules (93). Day 4: women who sold themselves in order to eat, “cattle thieves” (94). Day 5: those who refused to recriminate, who saved others. Day 6: women who aborted after “rape by soldier or priest,” women who resisted rape and were punished. Day 7: shaman revolutionaries (99). Day 8: those who killed priests. And finally, Day 9 encompasses them all: “Oh unholy pagans who refused to convert, oh pagans who converted, oh pagans who recanted, oh converts who survived, hear our supplication make us in your image, grant us your pride, Ancestors, illuminate the dark civilization we endure. Teach us to love untamed, inspire us to break rules, remind us of your brutal wisdom learned so dearly: Even dead Indians are never good enough” (99). Using the labels and language of the colonizers (e.g., “pagan,” “stupid,” “fornicators”), Miranda chronicles and praises the many ways that Indigenous people resisted the mission project. She offers a “praisesong” (98) to “bad Indians”: those who suffered and martyred themselves but also those who did what was required to survive. In her ruminations about “bad” Indians, Miranda sometimes allows the colonizers’ words and representations to stand unremarked, as she does by including the previously quoted Los Angeles Times article. The reporter’s racist language and attitude are evident without Miranda’s editorial commentary; the reporter’s words are self-condemning. In this instance, Miranda lets the archive speak for itself, revealing the unvarnished racism, arrogance, and greed. Sometimes, however, Miranda intervenes, explicitly correcting, editing, and talking back to misrepresentations such as in the “Novena to Bad Indians” in which she invokes and praises the ancestors who “misbehaved,” clearly highlighting the oppression and survival of Indigenous people. These techniques—of allowing the documents to damn themselves or actively critiquing them— continue throughout Bad Indians. In addition to the newspaper article with its overtly racist representations, Miranda includes several sets of letters that describe Indians as objects, as artifacts to be added to the “scientific” archive. Adapted letters from A. P. Ousdal, Doctor of Osteopathy, to Smithsonian ethnologist J. P. Harrington describe Juan Justo and other Indigenous people as simply an assortment of body parts, future specimens. Ousdal proposes digging up burial mounds, anticipates Justo’s death, and assumes that “Juan Justo is Smithsonian property” (103). Miranda follows this section with her direct address to J. P. Harrington, using his own words against him and concluding: “In your wildest dreams, did you ever think that we would survive you”? (105). Near the end of Bad Indians, Miranda proposes a “Post-Colonial Thought Experiment” composed of three parts. Number 1, the “Carmel Mission

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Project” (186), closely resembles the fourth-grade mission assignment still required of every student in California public schools. The student’s task is to research one of the twenty-one missions and make a project illustrating their report. Miranda offers a “Mission Project Worksheet” (187) with ten basic questions to consider, among them: “When was the mission built?” “Which tribes lived at this mission?” Number 2, the “Birmingham Plantation Project” (188), presents almost the same letter to fourth-grade students and parents and includes “Mississippi Plantation Research Notes” (189) that ask ten questions such as “What did this plantation grow or manufacture (make)?” “How is the plantation used today?” By now readers may be feeling uncomfortable, but Number 3, the “Dachau Concentration Camp Project” (190), pushes the point further, with its “Concentration Camp Project Worksheet” (191) with ten questions such as “Which type of ‘undesirables’ lived around the camp?” “What special features are seen at the concentration camp?” Without overtly proselytizing, through mere juxtaposition of California missions, Mississippi slave plantations, and German concentration camps, Miranda links enslavement, abuse, rape, and murder, highlighting the intersectionality of patterns of violence and the narratives that resist them and illustrating why the “Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale,” masking California’s genocidal history, needs to cease. Far more often, however, Miranda talks back. In one example, she includes a photograph, entitled “The Belles of San Luis Rey” (48; see Figure 3) that depicts “three elderly Indigenous women seated in the ruins of Mission San Luis Rey” (47). Since a belle is a young, beautiful woman usually attending a fancy social event, labeling the elderly, poor, Native women sitting in the brush “belles” is simply ridicule. Furthermore, Miranda’s research reveals that a photographer was selling the photograph globally. “Exorbitant amounts of money,” Miranda writes, “are made from the ruins of Native lives, and that angers me” (48). Reminding readers of the ways Indigenous women and girls were sold into slavery, Miranda protests that the three women in the photograph are recast as “objects” (48), as commodities: tourist attractions, historical curiosities. Through her research, however, she rehumanizes them, learning that they had names: “Rosaria, Tomása, Vaselia” (49). She grapples with the representation of them as “beggars.” More likely they are businesswomen, trading stories and pictures for “spare change” (50), for survival. She muses: “This image of these three women about whom we have such limited information—their first names (baptismal, not Indigenous), a fragment of their story—intrigues me, breaks my heart, haunts me” (50). She concludes that what she sees in their faces is “bottom-of-the-barrel, end-of-the-line, tenacious survival” (50). Like the ancestor “converts who survived” (99), Rosaria, Tomása, and Vaselia are survivors of

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Figure 3.  “Photograph of Three Elderly Indigenous Women Seated in the Ruins of Mission San Luis Rey (ca.1895), Mockingly Titled ‘The Belles of San Luis Rey Mission.’” Used by permission of Heyday Publishers.

unimaginable trauma. Here, Miranda illustrates the persistent miscasting of Native people and asks: What do you see when you look at Indigenous women? Objects? Victims? The past? By naming Rosaria, Tomása, and Vaselia, she places them in a network of humanity—women who are daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, lovers—and encourages us to see them as resilient members of a community. When in 2008 Miranda visits Mission Dolores in San Francisco, she is appalled by the commercialized propaganda still promoting the “Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale.” Everything from “histories” to coloring books to premade, readyto-assemble Indian mission projects for the California fourth-grade required mission unit, are all for sale in the mission gift shop. Miranda’s decolonizing efforts are particularly urgent in “A Few Corrections to My Daughter’s Coloring Book” (21; see Figure 4). In this concise one-page example, Miranda parses the “Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale,” line by line. She calls out the lies (the mission “boasts a beautiful mountain and sea setting” that Miranda reminds us is “stolen land”); she notes the linguistic evasions (“buildings were erected” uses the passive voice to avoid admitting that enslaved Indians built the mission), and euphemisms (saying “Indians were uncomfortable so close to the Spanish

Figure 4.  “A Few Corrections to My Daughter’s Coloring Book.” Used by permission of Heyday Publishers.

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soldiers” obfuscates the fact that the soldiers “would catch an Indian woman with their lassos to become prey for their unbridled lust”). Miranda’s renarration from an Indigenous perspective concludes, “California Indian population before missions: one million. Population after missions: twenty thousand or less” (21). The numbers tell the story writ large, but who tells the stories of the 980,000 Indigenous individuals who were killed? In addition to allowing official documents to reveal their own biases and actively criticizing the documents, Miranda redirects attention from the ethnologist and ethnographer’s “scholarly” conclusions, focusing, instead, on the informants. In particular, she singles out Isabel Meadows, a key informant for ethnologist J. P. Harrington. She praises Meadows for sharing the stories of Native people in Carmel, Monterey, and Big Sur, especially the story of the little girl Vicenta who was raped by a Spanish padre. Including this story, concludes Miranda, records the truth that will emerge almost two hundred years later. In a letter addressed to Vicenta, Miranda muses: “Isabel didn’t forget you, though. One hundred years after the padre raped you in the church, Isabel told your story to Harrington,” using your name (Vicenta) and the real name of Padre Real (24). Or “Isabel remembered your story, and she told it to Harrington, and he told it to me, and I’m telling it to everyone I can find” (25). Miranda links the sexual violence against Vicenta to contemporary statistics: thirty-four percent of Indigenous women are raped; “ninety percent of the rapists are non-Indian” (23).6 She credits Meadows with saving Vicenta’s story for future generations: “Isabel seemed to understand that in a perilous time, Vicenta’s narrative had to . . . leave the community of Indian women in order to return to us someday. . . . To me, this means that Isabel herself knew the power of story, and believed in our survival—in the future, there would be Indian women who would need this story!” (28). Just as impressive as Miranda’s insistence that Isabel’s storytelling is a ferocious act of hope for and love of Indigenous women—past and present—is her reverse extraction. Rather than settler-colonizers extracting resources from Indigenous land and cultures, as is the dominant pattern, Miranda extracts Indigenous traces from settler-colonial sources. “Through the vehicle of this field note,” she concludes, “we are engaged in a very Indigenous practice: that of storytelling as education, as thought-experiment, as community action to right a wrong, as resistance to representation as victim” (29). Throughout her accounts of sustained historical violence against California Indians, Miranda interweaves accounts of family violence. One of her earliest memories, she is only three years old, is of her father, Al, holding a knife to her mother’s neck, an image and terror imprinted on her. Her father leaves, then her mother. She is raised briefly by a grandmother, then her mother

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returns for her with a new husband and they move to Oregon, where they live in poverty. When she is seven years old, she and her six-year-old friend are raped by her mother’s lover. Miranda is raped twice. After her estranged father serves an eight-year term in San Quentin Prison for a different rape, he returns to get to know his daughter. The family ends up reuniting, and Miranda imagines that her dreams of a happy family have come true. After several months, Al Senior travels to pick up his young son, Little Al, a beautiful boy with whom Miranda forges a fierce bond. At this point, her father changes, and Miranda must learn how to survive “regular beatings [of her younger brother], unpredictable verbal attacks, and strict discipline” (163). When she protests, her father learns how to control her by threatening her little brother even more. For the next several years, she raises Little Al, trying to protect him from their father’s violence and their mother’s neglect. Too often when “there is the horrifying sound of a belt buckle being flipped open, the clinks of metal on metal, the dull ziiiipp! of a leather belt being pulled angrily through the hard denim loop of [ her] father’s Levis” (33), she is helpless to protect Little Al. Recalling the brutal punishments the mission priests inflicted on Native peoples (being hung upside down, being placed in the stocks, being flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails or beaten with a cudgel), Miranda concludes that violence “has touched every single one of us in an unbroken chain from the first padre or first soldado at the mission to the bared back of the first Indian neophyte, heathen, pagan, savage, who displeased or offended the Spanish Crown’s representative” (34). “More than any­­ thing else we brought with us out of the missions,” Miranda concludes, “we carry the violence we were given along with baptism, confession, last rites” (34). As her father’s violent pattern continues, Miranda’s fear, loathing, and anger simmer until she finds herself at the age of fifteen: “I am standing over my father as he lies passed out on his bed. . . . I am holding the little handgun my father keeps in the trailer. . . . I want to put it to my father’s temple and pull the trigger. . . . I list the reasons: he would never hit Little Al again; he would never cause Mom to drink, cry, ask me to call in sick for her again; he would never read my journals, break into my locked file cabinet, my secrets, again” (113). But she does not pull the trigger. “I put it back on the shelf,” she explains. “I go to bed, cold” (113). Miranda believes her father when he tells her that he was sent to prison for rape simply because the girl claimed to be eighteen and her brother got angry. At some point, Miranda’s sister tells her the harsh truth about her father’s premeditated and brutal rape (171), and Miranda becomes aware of “the terrible cruelty of his crime” (159). At that moment, Miranda declares: “denial fled”

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(171). She sees clearly what lies at the center of the “struggle to reunite a fragmented tribe, a tribe in which my father is a direct link to one of the first Esselen families taken into the Carmel mission” (172). She explains: “That was the first time I wondered if, in order to survive, we had become destroyers, like them. That was the first time I asked the question I had never dared face: Was there no way out of this self-perpetuating cycle of cruelty? That was the first time I really understood, in my bones, the unimaginable savage splintering that my ancestors—and my father, my sisters, my brother, my self—endured” (172). Not surprisingly, the trauma of her lifelong experience of violence and abuse follow her into a too-early marriage to a man almost twice her age, her “ticket out” (169). When her suppressed rage erupts onto his children, she struggles and finally is “saved” through the love and support of women friends, then lovers, but most important, writing. Throughout Bad Indians Miranda interweaves a litany of violence against Indigenous women. And not just in the historical past (rape and murder by priests, soldiers, and settlers) but in the recent past (beatings and rape by husbands, fathers, family friends, and non-Native others), and the present. She depicts the Indigenous perpetrators of violence as well as the Indigenous victims of violence as part of a cycle of transgenerational trauma that was launched by the brutality imposed by mission priests and Spanish soldiers and developed by subsequent waves of dispossession and dehumanization. For Miranda, writing becomes a means of survival. Even as a child in a precarious and violent home, she knows: “But if I could keep marking my presence on the earth, on tables, on scrap paper, if I could keep telling the story, if I could keep making words on the page tell the story, then maybe I could hang on” (119). It is through her writing that she reflects on the “shattering” of California Indian communities. While it is not possible to re-create the culture (“there are too few original pieces of our tribe” and too many “tribal factions” at odds with one another), she proposes a reimagining, instead: “my tribe must reinvent ourselves,” “use the same pieces but . . . create a new design” (135). With her excavation of the archive, Miranda locates and redesigns the shards that help her not only survive the “savage splintering” of settler-colonialism in California, but also reclaim and reimagine an Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen future. In the process, Miranda lays bare Indigenous counternarratives that, though they’ve always existed, were (temporarily) suppressed by settler-colonial stories of entitlement and exceptionalism. Miranda, then, helps dismantle the master narratives of the nation, highlighting how the United States has always been the Divided States—a collection of competing, violently suppressed stories—of Indigeneity,

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slavery, violence against women. Such a story of intersectionality requires a multimodal narrative form, such as Miranda’s, to depict it in all its complexities, contradictions, and convictions. Notes 1. Some examples of current California Indian activism include the following: Corinna Gould (Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone) is cofounder and head of Indian People Organizing for Change (IPOC) and cofounder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (an Indigenous women’s land trust). She organizes actions to protect the West Berkeley Shellmounds (sacred burial sites) and is a spokesperson for the federally unrecognized Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone. Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone), is chair of the Muwekma Language Committee, and is active in Indigenous language reclamation. He and Louis Trevino cofounded Café Ohlone that focuses on Indigenous cuisine prepared from local Native ingredients. Until they closed recently (because of the pandemic), they served dinners during which they would educate diners about California history, Native foods, and cultures. Since 1992 Greg Sarris (Filipino, Miwok, Pomo) has served as the chair of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria that he led through the challenging process of gaining federal recognition. Sarris is also the Graton Endowed Chair in Creative Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. President of the Graton Economic Authority, he built and runs the highly popular Graton Resort and Casino that provides employment for tribal members and has begun “sustainable development” with a tribal organic farm. He has published a novel, short stories, nonfiction, and screenplays. Caleen Sisk (Winnemem Wintu) is an educator and spiritual leader. Chief of the Winnemem Wintu, she has revitalized many cultural practices and advocated for waterways and salmon, forming global Indigenous alliances, particularly with the Maori of New Zealand. 2. Settler-colonial studies often describes land theft (associated with Indigenous people) followed by forced labor (of African slaves) as a sequence that allowed for the development of what is now the United States. Shannon Speed argues that in Mexico and Central America, this model is not accurate: “Both land dispossession and labor extraction” happened to Indigenous peoples simultaneously. In fact, “such labor regimes (encomienda, repartimiento, hacienda) were often the mechanisms that dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands, forcing them to labor in extractive undertakings on the very land that had been taken from them” (785). This simultaneity of Indigenous land theft and Indigenous slavery holds true for California Indians during the Mission period. 3. In the same speech, Burnett admitted: “Among the more immediate causes that have precipitated [California Indian hostilities] may be mentioned the neglect of the General Government to make treaties with them for their lands. We have suddenly

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spread ourselves over the country in every direction, and appropriated whatever portion of it we pleased to ourselves, without their consent and without compensation.” 4. See Martinez for a reading of Bad Indians as Miranda’s “effort to restore indigenous rights to the Río Carmelo” (54). 5. California Indian history is profoundly, blatantly violent: land theft, murder, forced labor, disease, outright massacre, state-mandated bounties on Indians, discrimination, erasure. 6. The disappearances and murders of Indigenous women have never stopped. Much of the scholarship on this has focused on Canada and Mexico, but in a 2019 Forbes essay, Mercedes Bawden refers to “The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Epidemic” in the western states of the United States.

Works Cited Bauer, William J. Jr. California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Bawden, Mercedes. “The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Epidemic.” Forbes, December 6, 2019. Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Burnett, Peter. “State of the State Address.” Delivered to the California Senate and Assembly January 6, 1851. Accessed May 17, 2022. https://governors.library.ca.gov /addresses/s_01-Burnett2.html. Dietrich, René. “Feeding Ourselves with Stories and the Gift of Having a Body: A Conversation with Deborah A. Miranda.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2018): 103–18. Fitzgerald, Stephanie. “Placing Self, Placing Nation: Autobiographical Interventions in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir and Elissa Washuta’s 21st-Century Native Memoir, My Body Is a Book of Rules.” Paper presented at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, November 17, 2016. Martinez, Shanae Aurora. “Intervening in the Archive: Women-Water Alliances, Narrative Agency, and Reconstructing Indigenous Space in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir.” Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL) 30, no. 3–4 (Fall– Winter 2018): 54–71. Miranda, Deborah A. Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2013. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999. Speed, Shannon. “Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala.” American Quarterly 69, no. 4 (December 2017): 783–90. Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. New York: Cassell, 1999.

Juneteenth Angela Ards

A scholarly focus on moving populations, from the magisterial accounts of the Great Migration to chronicles of its reverse, has obscured the everyday lived experiences of Black Americans who never left the US South. Drawing on oral and urban histories, as well as personal narrative and literature, “Juneteenth” chronicles community formation among those who stayed. In foundational 1980s urban histories that tracked the growth of suburbs in post–World War II America, the prevailing portrait of urban riots and white flight eclipsed the story of stable Black subdivisions throughout the South— from Memphis and Miami to Oklahoma City and Orlando (Wilson). This essay focuses on one such community, Hamilton Park—a historic Black neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, and my hometown. Though established to preserve segregation in Dallas just as the US Supreme Court began dis­ mantling it across the nation, Hamilton Park is less a story about Jim Crow misshaping Black lives than lived Black history transforming the South. “Juneteenth,” thus, joins a growing body of contemporary writing that centers Black Americans in current discourses on the South: from scholars Riché Richardson, Zandria Robinson, and Regina Bradley to creative writ­ ers Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon. However, this essay perhaps owes its greatest debt to Thadious Davis’s Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. As the portmanteau title sug­ gests, Southscapes argues that this storied region is a construct, formed on the one hand by the geographic “fact of land” and, on the other, “the social collective that shapes that environment out of its cultural beliefs, practices, and technologies” (Davis 2). A central premise of the text is that 156

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“narrative space is where the social is constituted anew,” with Davis explor­ ing how Black writers such as Ernest Gaines and Alice Walker used their 1980s historical fiction to reclaim the South, from both a segregated soci­ ety and a segregated literary canon (Davis 38). Similarly, “Juneteenth” mines the narrative space of oral histories with Hamilton Park residents, some of which I personally collected and others archived at the University of North Texas Oral History Collection, to consider how residents defined themselves and their community through ritual and tradition. Given the constructed nature of the South, there are, then, multiple Souths: the Old South, defined by the social mores of the Confederacy; the New South, characterized by the gains of the civil rights movement; and the Nuevo South, revitalized by Latinx migration, from Central and South Amer­ ica, in addition to Mexico—to name only the most prominent.1 As part of the former Confederacy and, now, a thriving metropolis with an increasingly im­ migrant face, Dallas arguably sits at the intersection of all three “south­ scapes,” making Hamilton Park a unique case study that not only centers working-class Black southerners in an emerging “transnational” New South narrative but also examines an evolving US South in Black social memory. * * *

I

n 2011, a caravan of convertibles and pickup trucks rolls off the lot of New Mount Zion Baptist Church in Dallas to kick off the twenty-sixth annual Juneteenth parade. Waves of revelers walk between and behind, holding posters and banners high against a warm, welcome breeze. Along the two-and-a-half-mile parade route from the church to the Willie B. Johnson Recreation Center, young and old alike greet a succession of longtime leaders and new community stars. Robert Price, senior pastor of New Mount Zion for more than forty years, waves from a champagne-colored coupe. Realtor Linda Barrett, the mother of local-media personality Nicole, drives a burgundy Ford pickup, with teenage boys riding easy in the back, seen here among friends for who they are—and smiling at the reflection. The first Black woman student body president at Texas A&M–Commerce, Michelle Tolbert, floats by in an electric-yellow convertible. She looks like a homecoming queen in a tiara, pearls, and strapless white prom dress. And, in essence, she is, having earned in the eyes of this community the top prizes of education and leadership. Byron Henry drives a white flatbed with a red “Byron’s Power Washer” logo emblazoned on the side. Growing up, he always knew how to make a dollar detailing cars. Now, with his

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childhood hustle a thriving business, he employs more than a few neighbors— young boys with similar ambitions; grown men who didn’t quite launch but lean into his example. A close-knit community of 750 families in the heart of Dallas, Hamilton Park is the first planned enclave for Black Americans in the city. Its namesake, Richard Theodore Hamilton, was a Black doctor and civil rights advocate in the 1930s with an office in Deep Ellum, a Freedmen’s Town that became the center of Black business and culture after the Civil War. The neighborhood’s intersecting streets recognize national figures and institutions representing the Black American experience: Oberlin Drive, the first street established and where the first families lived, my parents among them. Belafonte and Bunche. Campanella and Dandridge. Ebony.2 Wending its way through the neighborhood, the parade stirs deep communal bonds, like a family reunion held on land ancestors once farmed, or a homecoming weekend to reminisce about youthful good times. But the camaraderie is somehow even more intimate because the honored guests never left. This is a community welcoming itself. A black sports car draped in a banner congratulating all the new graduates ushers in the student delegation from Hamilton Park Pacesetter, the local elementary. In the first Juneteenth parade for many of them, these grade-schoolers learn the steps of ritual and tradition along the way. A handful walking behind a minicar decorated like a DART bus wave to neighbors standing on lawns or sitting curbside who, like our elders taught us, wave right back. The HPP cheerleaders strut lively in pyramid formation, with a lanky sixth-grader up front raising cries of “the mighty, mighty Bobcats,” the school mascot, as she goes. Opened in 1955, one year after the neighborhood itself, the school still anchors the community. Older residents, those over sixty, attended when it was a segregated high school and the proud home of state football champions. Those under forty attended after it became an integrated elementary in the 1970s, the proud home of a magnet curriculum recognized nationwide. That generation gap has brought the neighborhood to the brink of developer buyouts and urban blight in the past, but they are all mighty Bobcats today. This year’s grand marshal, Abe Burton, wears a red T-shirt and white cowboy hat, riding atop a burgundy convertible with white-rimmed tires and matching Mylar balloons. The red and white nod to the school colors. The cowboy hat, to the occasion, Juneteenth, and its Black Texas roots. Juneteenth celebrates the news of freedom finally reaching those enslaved in Texas—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered. When Major General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston to deliver Order Number 3 on June 19, 1865, the jubilation

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shook the heavens and has reverberated through history every year since. My grandfather, an East Texas sharecropper born two generations out of slavery, is said to have celebrated no other holiday all year long. In the early twentieth century, as Black Texans migrated out of those cotton fields, headed for cities such as Dallas or Houston, or points even farther north and west such as New York and Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, they took their big, happy Juneteenth celebrations with them. In that rural-to-urban transit, they encountered those who scoffed: Why mark the discovery of ancestors slaving under a brutal sun and lash, waiting on freedom, two years after it had already arrived? Why celebrate being duped? Why boast of ignorance? Stereotypes of southern “belatedness” compounded the disdain of northerners who considered themselves more urbane than their country cousins, of bourgeois Blacks eager to separate themselves from supposedly backward others. The mockers understood that Black Texans were last to receive the news of freedom by devious design:3 slave owners had fled to the state, on the far western edge of the Confederacy, to escape the reach of the Union Army and any of Lincoln’s laws. They just questioned why anyone would be so loud and proud about the betrayal. The answer ringing in parades that persist summer after summer, all over the nation, is that Juneteenth was never about celebrating a delayed proclamation but a people’s enduring spirit, before and after. The holiday has echoes of Decoration Day, the precursor to Memorial Day, when Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, gave proper burials to the Union dead. Memorial Day now pays tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the fight for freedom. Juneteenth commemorates those who found a way to live and fight another day. Initially called Emancipation Day, one of many such days commemorating the slow, episodic dawn of liberation throughout the African diaspora, Juneteenth reminds that freedom is not only a process but also a practice, like faith and hope, put into action in the face of evidence not seen, or even to the contrary. Which is why, in 2010, when there was no parade, the elders knew the community was out of practice, if not yet faith. From their front porches and sometimes behind curtains cracked a bit, they had tracked the houses of original homeowners passed down to children who weren’t as invested in upkeep, or who rented out to strangers who cared even less. At Civic League meetings, they had weighed the efficacy of police intervention over prayer alone when their own grandchildren started calling this historic community the “’hood”

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and working hard it seemed to make it so. Drug houses popped up along formerly marquee blocks. Break-ins shattered the peace. A spate of once-unheard-of murders, portrayed in the news as drug-related, brought gossip and shame. At one of the wakes, my cousin’s, the sister of a classmate asked in an anguished, raspy whisper that anyone paying attention could hear, Is this what Hamilton Park is known for now? The failure to organize the annual Juneteenth parade the following summer—on the milestone twenty-fifth anniversary, no less—seemed the community’s resigned reply. That’s when the elders decided that enough was enough. Abe Burton, an original homeowner who moved on Dandridge after graduating from Prairie View, rallied his aging neighbors for at least one more parade.4 Perhaps residents wanted to model the power of organizing for a younger generation. Over the decades, their mobilizing had rebuffed city plans to close the school and turn it into a book storage facility, as well as rezoning efforts to dump warehouses, a cement plant, or a lumberyard within the community.5 A dogged ten-year campaign to secure a project that residents actually wanted and needed, a recreation center, had culminated in the neighborhood’s firstever Juneteenth celebration (Wilson 188); staging another parade just might remind their progeny of this history, this inheritance. Perhaps residents wanted to remind themselves of the glory days, when Black families took Sunday drives to tour Hamilton Park and, marveling at the brand-new houses and well-kept lawns, dreamed of living there one day. Perhaps they simply refused to let the neighborhood slip away without a fight, like Claude McKay’s sonneteer: “If we must die, let us nobly die.” Whatever the reason, it was as if the elders were honoring an unspoken vow of “not on my watch,” made to each other more than sixty years before. * * * The first families moved into Hamilton Park in May 1954, two weeks before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision laid the groundwork for the end of American apartheid. Although it was at cross-purposes with the direction of the civil rights movement gaining steam in the nation’s courts, the segregated subdivision met a dire housing need. The single-family homes were modest but a vast, even luxurious, improvement on the options then available: unincorporated shantytowns in West Dallas with no running water and roads that became impassable when the Trinity River flooded. The Roseland Homes, an always full public-housing project. A patch of cabins out in Elm Thicket, which the city dubbed Springvale Courts, but “they were just little huts,” as one

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resident recalled.6 Historians note that the move to Hamilton Park coincided with a national trend toward suburbia in the post–World War II era, and they conclude that Black families, like white ones, were drawn to the single-family homes and manicured lawns. But it really was more desperate than that. “The reason we came to Hamilton Park,” the resident recalled, “to put it this way, there was just nowhere for us to go.”7 The housing crisis was dire, but the city was lackadaisical. For more than a decade, an interracial association charged with finding space for a new Black development rejected proposals as “too close” to adjacent white communities. Two situations forced the city’s hand. First, the expansion of Love Field Airport decimated those huts in Elm Thicket, displacing people who really had nowhere else to go. Second, Black veterans returning from the Korean War, with GI bills in hand, bought homes in white subdivisions that Ku Klux Klansmen promptly bombed. That spate of bombings in the early 1950s recalled the terror campaign of the 1940s, when vigilantes bombed the homes of Black veterans returning from World War II. Fear that the 1950s might replay the 1940s—and that the ugly headlines might be bad for business—spurred the city to action. The interracial association quickly, quietly settled on 233 acres north of downtown. Making civil rights concessions before a social movement demanded them, or bad press embarrassed the city, would come to be known as “the Dallas way” (Allison; see also Schutze). Around the expressway exit leading to the new subdivision, the land rose about five hundred feet, providing an easy “city on a hill” metaphor for purported Dallas exceptionalism. At the dedication ceremony, in the classic Dallas way, business leaders spun segregation into a pose of prosperity. The president of the Negro Chamber of Commerce noted that the neighborhood was “high, beautiful, well-situated,” a place “from which future citizens will come to help and make possible a type of progress” unknown in Dallas. A prominent banker insisted, “No other city has had the courage to do what we have done in the creation of this subdivision” (Wilson 55). The truth is, Hamilton Park wasn’t singular. It was among a half-dozen suburban communities built after World War II for Blacks in the South.8 Despite the self-congratulatory spin, residents pinned high hopes on the historic community. The three selections the gospel choir sang that day—“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Bless This House,” and “Plenty Good Room”—expressed their desires for freedom, safety, and belonging. Residents no doubt knew they were being placed on what one original homeowner called “the backside of nowhere.”9 Little but farmland separated downtown from the new development. Hostile, sundown towns radiated in

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every direction.10 But over time, as they drove that long, quiet stretch home— returning from work downtown, or returning from visits with family up North or out West—the remote landscape became familiar, even dear. From Northwest Highway, the midway point from downtown, “there was only one light, a neon sign [where] that Ford tractor place [is now],” Burton told me after the parade.11 “When you saw that light, you knew you was almost home. And you come on down between two peaks,” he said, explaining that the city carved that fivehundred-foot hill into two when it expanded Central Expressway. “When you saw those two peaks, you knew you’d make your right turn and you’d be almost home—on this turtleback highway.” He smiled at the memory. “That’s what we called them.”12 The “turtleback highway” became as evocative as Pegasus, the red flying horse atop the Magnolia Building in downtown Dallas. Until the late 1970s, when taller skyscrapers transformed the skyline, that thirty-by-forty-foot red flying horse was the city’s Eiffel Tower, its Golden Gate Bridge (Thomas 18). Hamilton Park was built in its civic shadow. And yet, for these first-time homeowners, the remoteness was welcome shade, a buffer from the daily Jim Crow horrors and humiliations beyond those two peaks. There’s a myth that “the Dallas way” undermined the development of a civil rights movement in the city, creating docile Blacks with little ambition or fight in them (Dulaney). But Hamilton Park’s pioneer families, my parents among them, risked all they had to buy a home. And like the characters in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, this daring staked as much a claim to the American Dream as sitting-in at lunch counters or marching on Washington. The difference between Hansberry’s Younger family and mine is that they were moving into an integrated community where bombs awaited, an American tragedy in the making. Mine moved into a segregated neighborhood, in the wake of bombs, an American tragedy too. But they reshaped the community from the inside out, turning what the city had offered simply as good PR into “plenty good room,” not only for those returning at long last from up North and out West, but for all those who had dared to stay. * * * At the corner of Forest Lane, the expressway exit leading to the subdivision, and Schroeder Road, the entrance to the neighborhood, the flag bearers at the parade’s vanguard pass the post office, recently rechristened in honor of Reverend Price. A scout leader in uniform carries the stars and stripes. Boys flanking him hold the red, black, and green. Two flags of a people staking a claim to

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their Black heritage and American citizenship at once—“two unreconciled strivings,” as W. E. B. Du Bois said in The Souls of Black Folk, still. Dallas is a young city with a bad habit of bulldozing the past to make way for “progress.” As the city grew northward, the expansion of Central Expressway not only split that hill. It also eviscerated Black space along the way: Deep Ellum, that Freedmen’s Town–turned–blues alley where Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly teamed up. The Freedmen’s Cemetery. Even New Mount Zion had to relocate from the Anderson Bonner Farm, two thousand acres owned by a former slave whose descendants were among the church’s founding members. And at the corner of Forest and Schroeder, a shopping center of Black-owned shops once sat. “Urban renewal” cleared out Graham’s Barbershop #1 and Myra Christiansen’s beauty salon, making way for a post office. Residents sought to reclaim the space and history by at least naming it after one of their own. A left turn onto Oberlin brings the parade past the three-bedroom house my parents bought in 1957. Like most residents, they heard about Hamilton Park through word of mouth. First, my mother’s sister and her husband came. Then, my mother and father followed. Soon after, my father’s first cousin and his wife. Throughout the neighborhood, similar networks intersected, creating a close-knit community with siblings down the street; cousins, a few blocks over; classmates, just around the corner. A Polaroid picture taken in the backyard of that Oberlin Drive home one Easter Sunday in the late 1960s captures my parents’ hopeful striving. It is two days before I am born. My father stands in a peach polo shirt and a white Kangol cap, hands clasped behind his back, a stance that I’ll come to see in later years is my own. My mother is matching in a peach shift, sporting a Jackie-O flip, and radiant. I’m a curvy ball casting shadows on her dress. Reggie and Rozie, my preteen siblings, squint in the sunlight, church clothes still on, pastel baskets at their feet. Out of the frame, in front of us, is our humble house, where a triptych of Dr. King and the Kennedy brothers, John and Bobby, hangs on the living-room wall, a picture that could have then been found in almost every Black home in America in the early 1970s. By the time I was eight or nine, I couldn’t have told you much about the Kennedys yet, but I could recite passages whole from Dr. King’s sermons. We had this Sunday morning ritual. While getting dressed for church, we would listen to Joe Bagby’s Hour of Power gospel program on KHVN, “Heaven 97.” Right before the music was a segment called Martin Luther King Jr. Speaks, with recordings of his most well-known speeches. My absolute favorite as a child was “The Drum Major Instinct,” an impulse that Dr. King de­­ scribed as “a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first.”

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It was a drum major instinct that brought these families to Hamilton Park, and brought me back home for Juneteenth. At my cousin’s wake in 2010, I heard my classmate’s sister lamenting the neighborhood’s fall. The following summer, when there had been no parade, I discovered in The Root an article that a neighbor’s journalist-daughter wrote about Juneteenths past in Hamilton Park, only highlighting the sense of loss (Evans). So, in 2011, when the elders rallied the community to remember history and renew faith, I heeded the call, like a backslider making her way to the altar, even though I was living 1,700 miles away, From Oberlin, the parade loops around Townes to pass the school and then head down to the rec center. Vendors selling clothes and jewelry, smoked BBQ , and fried fish line the sidewalk around the park. At picnic benches on the playground, people catch up with old classmates and current neighbors under an arc of red, black, and green balloons. A local troupe showcases African and Indigenous dance out on the field near the creek. Outside the Willie B. Johnson rec center, under the pavilion, a basketball tournament plays. Inside, new members are inducted into the “Wall of Fame,” a glass case filled with framed photographs and bios of homegrown success stories, mine now among them. Before we hop in the car to meet the parade at the park, I snap a photo of my mother in front of the house she paid off herself: its siding still white; the trim now blue; new, high, even hedgerows skirting the front and side. The Jackie-O flip is now a salt-and-pepper Afro; the shift, a forgiving jean skirt, topped by a souvenir tee with “26th Annual Hamilton Park Juneteenth Celebration” across the front. Her faith, as steady as ever.

Notes 1. As Zandria Robinson notes in This Ain’t Chicago, this is not to forget popularcultural representations of the South forwarded by reality television shows such as Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta, VH1’s Love & Hip Hop Atlanta, History Channel’s Swamp People, and TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the spinoff from Toddlers & Tiaras, and the more artistic offerings of Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar, Donald Glover’s Atlanta, and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. 2. Oberlin College is the liberal arts college founded in 1833 that admitted both Blacks and women. Harry Belafonte starred with fellow singer–movie star Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones (1954). Ralph Bunche was the first Black Nobel Peace Prize recipient who, just a few years earlier in 1950, had been recognized for mediating peace agreements between Egypt and Israel. Roy Campanella was an All-Star catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. Ebony is the monthly Black life and culture magazine.

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3. And even after Lee surrendered, the Union had to subdue pockets of resistance throughout the dying Confederacy, including backwater rebels deep in the heart of Texas. See Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize–winning On Juneteenth. 4. Abe Burton, interview by the author, Willie B. Johnson Recreation Center, Dallas, Texas, February 20, 2013. 5. Charles Smith, oral history interview with William Wilson, August 24, 1989, interview OH 0793; Sadye Gee, oral history interview with William Wilson, May 28, 1990, interview OH 0827; Freddie M. Nance, oral history interview with William Wilson, August 31, 1990, interview ID: OH 0895; all from University of North Texas Oral History Collection, Denton, Texas. Smith, Gee, and Nance were all original homeowners. 6. Charles Smith, interview by the author, Willie B. Johnson Recreation Center, Dallas, Texas, February 20, 2013. 7. Smith, interview. 8. Such construction also occurred in Atlanta, Memphis, Miami, Orlando, and Oklahoma City (Wilson 55). 9. Edith Frazier, interview by the author, Dallas, Texas, August 2016. 10. According to BlackPast.org, “Sundown Towns are all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Blacks and other minorities through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Blacks that although they might be allowed to work or travel in a community during the daytime, they must leave by sundown. Although the term most often refers to the forced exclusion of Blacks, the history of sundown towns also includes prohibitions against Jews, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and other minority groups.” https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history /sundown-towns/. For a map of sundown towns in the United States, see Tougaloo College’s History and Social Justice website: https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown -towns/using-the-sundown-towns-database/state-map/. 11. Burton, interview. 12. Burton, interview.

Works Cited Bradley, Regina. Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. “The Dallas Way.” D Magazine, November 21, 2013, https://www.dmagazine.com /publications/d-magazine/2013/november/dallas-1963-the-dallas-way/. Davis, Thadious. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Dulaney, W. Marvin. “Whatever Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in Dallas?” In Essays on The American Civil Rights Movement, edited by John Dittmer, George C. Wright, and W. Marvin Dulaney, 66–95. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993.

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Evans, Erin E. “Smells Like ’Teenth Spirit.” The Root, June 19, 2008, https://www.the root.com/smells-like-teenth-spirit-1790899958. Gordon-Reed, Annette. On Juneteenth. New York: Liveright, 2021. Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir. New York: Scribner, 2018. Laymon, Kiese. Long Division: A Novel. 2013. Reprint, New York: Scribner, 2021. Richardson, Riché. Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Schutze, Jim. The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City. Dallas: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021. Originally published by Citadel Press, 1986. Thomas, Gail. Pegasus. Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1993. Trethewey, Natasha. Native Guard: Poems. Boston: Mariner Books, 2007. Robinson, Zandria. This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-South South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Ward,  Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones: A Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Ward,  Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2017. Wilson, William H. Hamilton Park: A Planned Black Community in Dallas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Katie Hogan There are no absolute truths in terms of the proper place for LGBTQ belonging. Ellie Vainker

A Queer Sense of Place In a recent contribution I made to the burgeoning scholarship on Alison Bech­ del’s work, I drew on the new subfield of rural queer studies to illuminate a rural queer sensibility in Bechdel’s award-winning Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.1 Arguing for an understanding of the book’s pronounced regionalist methodology, I challenged queer metronormativity, an ideology that constructs queerness as urban and white and characterizes rural LGBTQIA2S+ life and culture beyond the metropolis as static, insular, and dangerous.2 The placeretrieval approach is important because it sheds light on the memoir’s rural queer desire, but it also minimizes significant spatial dimensions of Bechdel’s book. As Ellie Vainker indicates in the opening quotation, and as Fun Home ulti­ mately shows, there is no absolute or homogenous sense of queer place and belonging, and the rural place-attachment approach can obscure this crucial insight. Instead of assuming that Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, and New York

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City (the two primary settings for the book) operate as discrete places, I argue in this essay that they are deliberately entangled, signaling how a queer sense of place and home is neither fully rural or urban but an assemblage of both. In other words, the rural is implicated in the urban and the urban is implicated in the rural.3 Numerous texts and images in the memoir reveal how the lifechanging impact of rural and metropolitan queer cultures on Alison and her fa­ ther, Bruce Bechdel, suggest spatial interconnections—instead of fixed borders— between Beech Creek and New York City. To spell out how Fun Home is simultaneously a rural and urban text, I draw on insights from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gordon Waitt, Andrew Gorman-Murray, and a host of other scholars and writers whose work on queer sexualities, mo­ bilities, place, and home offer a framework for discerning Fun Home’s transient sense of place and home. For instance, the book’s fluctuating spatial sensibility recalls novelist Mark Merlis’s observation in his novel American Studies that queer people “are supposed to move: exile isn’t a punishment, it’s our condi­ tion” (Merlis loc. 2934).4 Merlis suggests that, though queer mobility emerges from structures of violence and oppression, it can nevertheless be expansive; queer mobility, as Fun Home reveals, is also less conducive to dichotomous thinking. When it comes to queer place, the pitfalls of dichotomies and place binaries are central topics that warrant investigation. With Fun Home as a lens, I explore how queer antiurbanism—a strain of rural queer studies—tends to reproduce a “for”/“against” binary structure as part of its effort to rescue rural queer cul­ ture and lives from metro domination; this “against urbanism” approach is ac­ tually an incompatible lens for delineating Fun Home’s unique queer spatial vision. Finally, I offer a brief comparison of Fun Home’s hybrid spatial imaginary and contemporary rural-based activism to suggest how the rural-and-urban di­ vide that continues to animate the current political environment is rooted in the same dangerous dualities that Bechdel, Anzaldúa, Waitt and Gorman-Murray, and other scholars try to dismantle. Given such figures as Donald Trump, who exploited the United States’ long-standing (and growing) urban-rural division, it is inspiring how queer artists, writers, theorists, and activists attempt ruralurban coalitions to transcend destructive spatial separations. Fun Home offers a vision of citizenship and belonging that undermines a nationalistic “single story” of American place and identities. In subtle yet profound ways, Bechdel’s memoir rebuts the stereotype of white urban queers thriving in the city and white rural queers languishing in the countryside, illuminating the complexities of identity and place as central features of the US landscape.

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“Despot Duality” Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic text Borderlands/La Frontera outlines the violence of what she calls “despot dualit[ies]”—the bifurcated modes of thinking that feed structural violence and oppression (41).5 Dualist thinking has devastating effects on the lives, cultures, and lands of Indigenous people, immigrants, women, people of color, LGBTQIA2S+, and animals, and Anzaldúa’s work critiques either/or formations and the policies they foster. Laying the groundwork for a more capacious sense of home, identity, and place, Anzaldúa encourages mar­ ginalized people to refuse any structure that “says we are able to be only one [thing] or the other”: rural or urban, queer or heterosexual, “native born” or immigrant (41). Like Anzaldúa’s work, Fun Home moves away from enshrining binary structures that fuel entrenched and destructive narratives—including the narrative that queer urban-rural dichotomies are fixed and “natural.” To show this idea, Bechdel transcends place oppositions by depicting fluid move­ ments between New York City and her hometown, Beech Creek. In images and text, Bechdel presents the city as a possible place of liberation for her nonnor­ mative father, Bruce, but then undermines this notion with extensive and affec­ tionate drawings of rural Pennsylvania that suggest she can’t imagine her father “anywhere but Beech Creek” (144). While Route 80 leads to New York City to the east and the Castro to the west, Bruce chooses Beech Creek as his home. In key scenes, Beech Creek is depicted as a source of comfort and connec­ tion for the white queer father and daughter, with Bechdel’s repeated focus on maps and geography as indicating a deep attachment to place. Gardening, the mountains, the plateau, and maps of Alison’s childhood home—located in re­ lation to the mountains and Route 80—populate the book. Readers see Bruce enmeshed in his hometown and surrounding environs and encounter Bechdel’s startling references to positive memories in nature with her father. Their shared love of sunsets and a poignant dreamscape image based on a dream Alison had the night before her father’s apparent suicide complicate a one-dimensional view of Beech Creek as monolithically dire and dysfunctional (123). The sunset image is particularly significant because, as Alison’s dreamscape panel (123) suggests, she and her father regularly watched sunsets together (150).6 The panel takes up most of a page and includes specific details of their mutual ex­ perience, focusing on how “the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset— from salmon to canary to midnight blue—left [her father] wordless” (150). Queer father and daughter are entwined in the environment instead of

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fantasizing about a neoliberal urban escape or the supposedly inevitable resig­ nation to a life of rural suffering. Bruce and Alison’s “against nature” natures are as natural in the countryside as they are in the city. In fact, the sunset panel brings to mind theorist Stacey Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality, in which “the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (Alaimo 1). Bruce and Alison, spatially situated in “backwards” Appalachia, are “in” place and nature instead of outside or against them. Yet their “in-place” identities are not idealized, doomed, or fixed. The thwarted, closeted, nonnor­ mative father suffers tremendously in this conservative, close-knit German rural community, yet Beech Creek is central to Bruce’s life, and the scenes of distress and lack of affection that characterize much of the memoir are joined by depictions of connection and intimacy. In these ways, the memoir’s queer place enmeshment challenges the simplistic country/city binary narrative. While Bechdel pays close attention to her father’s rural queer place desire, she strategically troubles hegemonic American spatial ideas of a single sense of place and home for him, offering instead a nondichotomous spatial paradigm that resists fixed borders between rural and urban cultures. The memoir’s con­ tradictory yet unique conception of rural place as both constricting and liberat­ ing for queer people replaces a standard spatial binary with a comingled, tentative, and fluctuating one—evoking Anzaldúa’s theoretical conceptualiza­ tion of a porous and interconnected world. Queer geographers Gordon Waitt and Andrew Gorman-Murray also pro­ mote the idea of sexualities, genders, place making, and home as borderless and oscillating. When applied to Fun Home, their ideas emphasize how a queer sense of place and home is “iterative, always in the making, unstable and end­ lessly deferred” (Waitt and Gorman-Murray 1381).7 As Waitt and GormanMurray argue, for queer people, home and place are “made and remade” (1396). This “made and remade” dynamic is a recurring one in Fun Home, seen in the book’s recursive structure, theme of irresolution, and awareness of how heteronormativity and the gender binary forces queers to constantly reposition themselves. Bruce’s untimely death haunts almost every page of the memoir, and it inspires the book’s recurring central preoccupations: why Bruce, a sexual- and gender-nonconforming white man with interests in literature and antiques stayed in a small town that probably drove him to suicide. Kath Weston’s famous article “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration” argues that queers have to leave home to find a home. But the text’s suggestion to the painful dilemma of Bruce Bechdel is not a relo­ cation to Greenwich Village or a clear-cut sense that his demise was caused by the horrific rural Beech Creek. Instead, though he suffered in the often inhos­

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pitable culture of small-town rural Pennsylvania, Beech Creek remains Bruce Bechdel’s home. The town is not a monolith; Bruce managed the courage to stand outside standard sexual and gender narratives of home and place while remaining “in-place” (Waitt and Gorman-Murray 1396). Waitt and Gorman-Murray clarify this concept when they suggest that queer “placelessness” is not always lack: it’s a fleeting, border-free, and oscillat­ ing sense of belonging and home that can be productive and generative, “offer­ ing possibilities to make sense of self through experiences of anonymity, temporariness and displacement” (Waitt and Gorman-Murray 1386). Though homophobia, heteronormativity, and binary gender are formidable structural forces, they are not final; they do not foreclose how a sense of place as “no place” can paradoxically include expansive and unexpected experiences and insights about queer belonging itself. In Bechdel’s Fun Home, she suggests that to be queer, for some people, is a permanent state of uncertainty, a condition that clearly stems from deleterious power dynamics. Helen, Alison’s mother, reacts to her daughter’s coming out letter with silence followed by disapproval. The text also indicates that Bechdel’s father felt thwarted for much of his life, unable to talk openly about his sexuality and nonnormative gender; the lack of hon­ esty and intimacy among the members of the Bechdel family creates much un­ happiness. Not surprisingly, Alison attributes her own suffering to Beech Creek, referring to her “dull, provincial life” there (Bechdel 153). Nonetheless, these dynamics do not have the intended effect of monolithic deprivation or totalized lack of agency. Anzaldúa’s and Waitt and Gorman-Murray’s ideas overlap with one another and with the fluctuating urban-rural hybrid of place and home in Bechdel’s memoir. Just as Anzaldúa’s concept of carrying home with you—“I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back”(43)—imagines home and place as both tangible and nomadic, and Waitt and Gorman-Murray see queer home and place as a constant “work in progress,” Fun Home envisions queer place and home as a crisscross of urban and rural idioms, practices, elements, and move­ ments (Waitt and Gorman-Murray 1390). Fun Home heeds Anzaldúa’s call for “the [ceaseless] coming together of opposite qualities within” (41). Anzaldúa’s fluid vision of place also resonates with Katherine McKittrick’s theoretical analysis of Black placelessness, a condition rooted in centuries of white su­ premacy and anti Blackness: “A black sense of place is not a steady, focused, and homogeneous way of seeing and being in place, but rather a set of chang­ ing and differential perspectives that are illustrative of . . . the denigration of black geographies and their inhabitants” (150). While white queer experiences of the violence of placelessness and geographies are not comparable to Black

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people’s historical experience, queer and trans bodies, like Black bodies, are as­ sumed to be naturally “placeless” and “inhuman.”8 Regrettably, Fun Home doesn’t acknowledge its complicity in white settler narratives and ideologies, but its preoccupation with “no place” for queers is linked to the oppression Ali­ son and her father endure, echoing the Black placelessness that McKittrick theorizes. Bechdel seizes on “no place” for queers as a way expand space for queers. This is evident in the way that she keeps fluidity in play by refusing static idealizations of city life as the promised land and the countryside as a queer rural idyll and the equally problematic idea of the urban as a site of re­ lentless metronormativity and the countryside as a totalized nightmare. In Fun Home, a queer sense of place and home is not monolithically static or diasporic; instead, it moves beyond familiar spatial monoliths and dichotomies to enact a contradictory, dynamic, and unfolding spatial model. Though pervasive media representation of a rural/urban split calcifies the “single” rural/urban story by evoking rural land as inevitably off-limits to LGBTQIA2S+ and racial, ethnic, and religious “outsiders,” Bechdel’s Fun Home undermines simplistic notions of place, citizenship, and American identity.

Decoding Fun Home’s Spatial Hybrid While Bechdel’s sense of place and home eschews a static vision, it is neverthe­ less grounded in specific and concrete rural details. Evidence of its queer spa­ tial world emerges sharply in her hundreds of drawings of the tiny rural Pennsylvania town where Bechdel and her father were born and raised.9 Maps and images of mountain ranges, trees, flowers, yards, streams, campsites, sun­ sets, tractors, the Bechdel dairy farm, and Alison’s family home, as well as refer­ ences to environmental toxins and the construction of local, state, and federal road systems, work in tandem to emphasize a contained, specific place and home. Readers learn that Beech Creek boasts a population of approximately eight hundred people—most of whom are white—and that the Bechdel family has lived there for many generations.10 One panel portrays Alison’s greatgrandfather and grandfather standing outside the family business (the Bechdel funeral parlor), and another explains that “26 Bechdel families [are listed] in the phone book” (126); Alison’s grandmother was a Bechdel “even before she married my grandfather” (126) and family members live within walking dis­ tance, captured in a detailed map illustrating the proximity of the Bechdel household to Bruce’s many relatives (31). Beech Creek has staying power, too: the offspring of aunts and uncles, instead of leaving home for the “wider” world, remain in Beech Creek—depicted in a panel portraying a cousin’s

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prefab house being delivered to the backyard of the family home (31). Some readers have picked up on the significance of place to the text, prompting a New York Times book reviewer, Sean Wilsey, to drive to Beech Creek to compare the memoir’s meticulous drawings and maps to actual locations in the town and its nearby surroundings. At the same time, Fun Home’s rural place-based sensibility coexists with its urban one. Fifty-five panels depict the plentitude and pleasure of New York City queer culture—tying the rural hamlet to a queer metropolis. Referring to a 1976 trip to the city that she took as a fifteen-year-old with her younger broth­ ers and father, Bechdel finds that the experience left her “supple and open to possibility” (189). In a letter Bruce Bechdel sent to his daughter near the end of his life, he positions Beech Creek’s sexual subculture as on par with Greenwich Village’s: “I was never even in New York until I was about twenty. But even see­ ing it then was not quite a revelation. There was not much in the Village that I hadn’t known in Beech Creek” (212). Instead of positioning Beech Creek above or below Greenwich Village, Bruce emphasizes the interplay between the two sexual subcultures. To avoid a narrow queer urban nostalgia, Fun Home includes a memorable image of father and daughter standing, frozen and unimpressed, with the iconic New York City skyline behind them; the city often does not feel like home, even though it is assumed to be a far more welcoming place to be queer, and even though it gives them ample queer role models and community. The memoir’s method of drawing, and then destabilizing, urban-rural di­ chotomies also extends to its elaborate use of literary allusions. In Bechdel’s re­ marks on the similarity between Bruce Bechdel and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, she calls both figures “farm boys”: “Gatsby’s self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is in many ways identical to my father’s” (63). But the comparison between the two breaks down. The farm boy–to–prince trajectory fails to capture the complexities of Bruce’s life. While Gatsby represents a uni­ directional rural-to-urban narrative, Bruce never fully sheds his farm-boy cul­ ture and home; he maintains one foot in rural space and one foot in urban; instead of separating rural and urban elements, Bruce merges them. We see this through his notable focus on the physical home and landscape paired with his passion for interior design, antiques, and flowers. From a rural/urban hy­ brid perspective, Bruce’s physical labor and decorative work are not in opposition. References to Proust’s Swann’s Way, where Bechdel makes use of that text’s metaphor of convergence as inspiration for her own rejection of traditional bi­ nary oppositions, such as “Bourgeois vs. aristocratic, homo vs. hetero, city vs. country,” is another example of how she uses literary allusions to break down

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the urban-rural disconnect (102). Instead of antagonistic dichotomies, Bechdel is moved by Proust’s vision of a “network of transversals” (102).11 What seems separate and opposite is, in fact, entangled—an insight that mirrors Alison’s relationship with her father, which she describes as comprised of “entwined stories” (232). Bechdel also makes use of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to deepen the practice of destabilizing accepted social dichotomies. On one level, evoking Wilde’s play provides Bechdel with a way to focus on her mother, Helen, and her unhappy marriage to Bruce. A stage actress who belongs to a nearby community theater, Helen plays Wilde’s Lady Bracknell and Alison helps her mother learn her lines. The Importance of Being Earnest reverberates with her mother’s relationship with Bruce, a husband who leads a “double life” (“dandyish” men who lead “double lives” constitute a major theme in Wilde’s play). To escape the countryside and secure marriage partners, Wilde’s two main characters, Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing (“Ernest”), practice deceitful behavior that threatens their heterosexual aspirations. But the con­ nection between Fun Home and The Importance of Being Earnest works to suggest how gender, sexuality, and place are intertwined. Through the references to Wilde’s text, Bechdel hints at Bruce’s hybrid identity as a country boy and het­ erosexual husband and father who engages in gender and sexual nonnormative practices. Wilde inspires her to use irony to exploit the instability of normative male/female and country/city binaries—revealing how socially accepted ideas about rural and urban space and gender are not as fixed as they seem. Bechdel also addresses the instability of gender through Bruce and Alison’s consistent exploration of gender in relation to clothing. Her father’s excessive investment in controlling Alison’s gender expression (15; 97–99) irritates her. She tells her father, “Leave me alone!” (99). But as an adult Bechdel realizes that her fa­ ther’s obsession with her physical appearance might also be, as Bechdel points out, his attempt to express “something feminine through” her (98). Alison ex­ plains, “I wanted the muscles and tweed like my father wanted the velvet and pearls” (99). It’s worth noting that Bruce and Alison’s interests in clothing dif­ fers from Helen’s. Her perfectionistic approach to every aspect of her perfor­ mance of the character of the powerful and wealthy Lady Bracknell—including costuming—provides Helen a temporary escape from her lowly life as a house­ wife married to a man who has sex with young men. For Alison and Bruce, clothing and gender relate to their nonnormative sexualities and genders. In the scene in Earnest in which Gwendolen Fairfax meets Cecily Cardew, Wilde toys with traditional gender roles by assigning gendered behavior associ­ ated with women to men. Despite the noble title of Lord Bracknell, Gwendo­

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len’s father, Cecily has never heard of him. Gwendolen says that men like her father are to be quiet, modest, and anonymous: “Outside the family circle, papa, I’m glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?” (36). Wilde’s dialogue humorously exposes the arbitrariness of gender, ascribing to a titled man characteristics expected of women. Women’s “proper sphere” of the home, where they live in obscurity and perform domes­ tic duties, is expected of Lord Bracknell, suggesting that gendered dualities are socially created and therefore unstable. Wilde’s dialogue also evokes the topic of normative spatial dichotomies, as seen in an exchange between Lady Brack­ nell and Jack/Ernest. In the scene, Lady Bracknell is trying to determine whether Jack/Ernest will make a good marriage partner for Gwendolen, and his suitability hinges on the geographic location of his homes and property (13): Jack: I have a country house with some land, of course, attached to it, about fif­ teen hundred acres, I believe; but I don’t depend on that for my real income. Lady Bracknell: You have a town house, I hope? A girl with a simple, unspoiled nature, like Gwendolen, could hardly be expected to reside in the country.

Since Gwendolen is pampered and urban-centric—“I cannot understand how anybody manages to exist in the country, if anybody who is anybody does”—Lady Bracknell’s remark about her “simple, unspoiled nature” lam­ poons the language of the heterosexual pastoral by aligning it with a character who is “fake” and craves the artifice of the city (40). Wilde pokes fun at privi­ leged people who maintain the rural-urban dichotomy, but he also exposes the urban-rural binary as arbitrary. Bechdel similarly uses ironic humor to destabilize gender and spatial as­ sumptions when she describes Bruce as an “effeminate” urbane closeted gay man because of his interests in home decoration. Images of Bruce’s passion for period wallpaper and antiques are emphasized, but, like a rural farmhand he also works himself to exhaustion, single-handedly carrying a heavy wooden porch column while shirtless and wearing shorts and work shoes (7). Bechdel strategically populates the book with drawings of him performing other mascu­ line farm-like activities, such as driving a tractor, clearing brush, restoring a farmhouse, and “manipulate[ing] flagstones that weighed half a ton” (10). Even after he leaves his parents’ family home/dairy farm to attend college and join the army, he still feels responsible for chores at home. In a letter to Helen about her first visit to Beech Creek, Bruce mentions the tasks he must accomplish

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while on leave: “I have things to do at home. A Dogwood to put in the front lawn. Sawdust to put around the foundation plantings” (145). Thus, juxtapos­ ing his rural masculine performance with vivid renderings of him polishing a newly purchased chandelier or rearranging knickknacks, Bechdel implies that Bruce’s hybrid rural-urban masculinity is central to his everyday life, challeng­ ing the assumption of a monolithic white masculine rural type. Both Bechdel and Wilde display an astute awareness of how ideas about urban and rural space are linked to gender. Provocative challenges to the hegemonic urban-rural divide such as these are not the purview of writers, artists, and scholars with an interest in gender and queer geography. In a 2009 special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies orga­ nized around the theme “De-centering White Ruralities: Ethnic Diversity, Ra­ cialisation and Indigenous Countrysides,” the introductory editorial essay argues that “the rural has been an important historical locus for transcultural confrontation, compromise and hybridity” and that “rurality cannot be ideal­ ized as homogenous or fixed along any single, cultural framing of space, society or economy” (Panelli et al. 360; 358). In their review of the work featured in the special issue, the editors celebrate the nuanced analysis of rural-urban hybrids, pointing out in particular cutting-edge research on Indigenous cultures’ rela­ tionships with rural space and the “interweaving interests in urban, regional and non-remote rural societies,” described as “‘scales of co-existence’” (Panelli et al. 358). These scales of “co-existence” “recognize the interconnections be­ tween rural places/people and other interests and spaces” and create “multiple senses of belonging that can persist and be created” (Panelli et al. 358; 359, em­ phasis in original). Likewise, in writing about urban-rural space and development theory in the journal Environment and Urbanization, Cecilia Tacoli focuses on rural-urban entanglements, arguing that “populations and activities described either as ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ are more closely linked both across space and across sectors than is usually thought” and that “[rural/ urban] distinctions are often arbi­ trary” (160). Tacoli’s characterization of urban-rural divides as arbitrary reso­ nates with Fun Home’s (and Wilde’s) deliberate dismantling of spatial, gender, and sexual dichotomies. Bechdel builds a visual world through concrete, de­ tailed images and deploys literary allusions to evoke complexities of ruralurban entanglements, putting forth a queer hybrid text that is not “against” or “for” New York City or Beech Creek but a representation of the dynamic ex­ change between the two. Like academic geographers, Bechdel considers how queer space and place, whether figured in literary texts, journalism, academic research, census data, or everyday life, is multispatial and complex. Evoking a

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queer rural-urban spatial complexity, Bechdel recalls that her father smelled “of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne” (23). Since every drawing and textual line in the memoir is carefully considered—nothing is treated as filler or background information—this seemingly innocuous line about Bruce’s body scent makes a profound queer spatial point. Designer cologne, typically linked to urban white gay culture, coexists with—and not against—the smell of saw­ dust and sweat of the rural “farm boy” engaged in a rural work ethic.12 The line counters an understanding of the rural as a one-dimensional, primitive space where queers are barely alive; but it also questions the idea that Beech Creek is set off from urban and suburban space, resonating with Bechdel’s over­ all method of questioning spatial dichotomies.

Rural Queer Studies, Queer Antiurbanism, and Fun Home It is important to emphasize that Fun Home’s hybrid, fluctuating sense of queer place in no way erases the significance of urban space to queer life, culture, art, and history. Millions of LGBTQIA2S+ people have formed a powerful con­ nection to urban space, a pattern of great interest to writers and scholars and one that courses through the pages of Fun Home. However, treating a geo­ graphic pattern monolithically distorts our understanding of queer mobility, as I have been arguing. It also ignores the complexities of rural queer lives. Robert Aldrich’s 2004 article “Homosexuality and the City” claims an intrinsic link between white queer people and urban space, asserting that “homosexuals [are] creatures of the city” and that a “symbiotic partnership of urban space and homosexual life” exists (1722). While this urbanization of LGBTQIA2S+ may seem self-evident and benign, it directly contributes to queer culture and people being judged by the norms and expectations of mainstream urban cul­ ture. As Chris Stapels explains, “knowledge—even rural knowledge—is vali­ dated on urban terms” (158).13 The field of rural queer studies operates as a corrective to urban-centrism, producing an alternative archive and context for interdisciplinary queer rural exploration. Bruce Snider’s 2017 essay “Trouble and Consolation: Writing the Gay Rural” brilliantly unveils a gay poetic tradition inspired by rural queer ex­ perience and points out how LGBTQIA2S+ remain in rural places—or move to them—despite the formidable power of metronormative ideology. One of the first books to consider the complexities of rural queer space, Jack Halbers­ tam’s 2005 In a Queer Time and Place explores how rural queers’ struggles, depres­ sions, suicides, and murders are assumed to be a function of rurality itself; these

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same misfortunes, when suffered by metropolitan queers, are rarely attributed to city life. Halberstam argues that this spatial double standard allows liberal city dwellers—white, queer, and straight—to displace their racism and ho­ mophobia onto rural places and people (22–46).14 Like the work of Halberstam and Stapels, Silas House’s powerful essay “Looking in the Mirror” addresses how the American South functions as a meta­ phoric dumping ground for the country’s long-standing structures of white su­ premacy and gender oppression: For many Americans, the South is the Other, but in my experience, the South is a mirror, a microcosm of the rest of the country. While things may sometimes seem more pronounced or blatant here—and that’s certainly been the case in the way people have voted here lately—the fact is that the South is a whole lot like the rest of the country. . . . When people blame all the racism, homophobia, and sexism on one part of the country, it lets the rest of the nation off the hook. (8)

These writers and theorists’ queer spatial arguments interpret the US urban/ rural divide as illusory and politically motivated—a view that Fun Home, Anzal­ dúa, and Waitt and Gorman-Murray echo. Also related to the queer spatial discussion is ecocritic Lawrence Buell’s point that “topophilia and topophobia”— love and fear of place—are central elements to spatial theory. A love/fear re­ sponse to place “add[s] up to both an affirmation of bonding to place and a realization that an engagement with place worthy of the name is not just a mat­ ter of instinctive rapport but also hard work” (Buell 16). The hybrid approach Bechdel is exploring; the theoretical spatial insights of Anzaldúa; and the queer geographic expertise that Waitt and Gorman-Murray, McKittrick, Stapels, Snider, Halberstam, and House offer exemplify the kind of critically engaged “hard work” that Buell is advocating. Given the painful life events Fun Home explores, characterizing it as a “hard” story of “topophilia and topophobia” deepens our understanding of its rural queer, place retrieval sensibility. A nar­ rative about life in conservative and white Beech Creek in the 1960s and 1970s, Fun Home features a narrator who comes out as a lesbian to a family and world that is heteronormative, and who has a complicated relationship with her patri­ archal father—who may have committed suicide at forty-four because of his nonnormative sexuality and gender and probable illegal sexual contact with teenage boys. Yet misery, disappointment, loss, and suffering are typical fea­ tures of place retrieval narratives. As Buell explains, literary place retrieval “is a boldly extravagant effort to make what for most American readers might seem a shabby outback, virtually off the chart as it were, the center of the earth” (78).

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Though a queer metronormative framework might lead readers to declare Beech Creek as a site of despair, in much of the memoir Bechdel’s small town is actually at “the center of the earth” (Buell 78). However, not all critical approaches to queer place fully grapple with the contradictory implications of urban-rural spatial hybrids and other placerelated paradoxes of queer texts and cultures. This is particularly evident in queer antiurbanism theory, a rural-centric approach within the field of rural queer studies that focuses heavily on the domination of queer metronormativ­ ity in cultural representations of queer place. The problem with a queer antiur­ banism approach to Fun Home is that, instead of treating queer metronormativity as an aspect of Bechdel’s place-based text, it treats metronormativity as a static, monolithic force that nearly overwhelms other elements in Bechdel’s memoir. An assumption underlying an antiurbanism tactic is that a pure nonmetronor­ mative existence is desirable and attainable. Scott Herring invented the theory of queer antiurbanism and applies it to a chapter on Fun Home in his powerful text Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. Though Herring is careful to qualify his arguments and brings much-needed attention to unique rural queer cultures, his overweening focus on what he calls Fun Home’s “ingrained metronormativity” overlooks alternative interpretations of metronormativity in Bechdel’s book (167). In other words, Bechdel may not be under the spell of hegemonic urban-centrism as forcefully as Herring sug­ gests: there is a difference between metronormative elements in a text or cul­ ture and metronormativity that is a monolith extension of urban domination. Bechdel deploys metronormative elements in her book to challenge fixed ideal­ izations of the city and the country, contributing to her overall vision of rural and urban place as fluid and comingled instead of as stagnant and divided. Throughout Herring’s chapter on Fun Home, however, he reads its metro­ normativity at face value. The book’s images of roads, highways, and maps that link Beech Creek to queer-identified US cities; Bechdel’s rendition of her father’s “country bumpkin” dialect; Alison’s rage at Beech Creek for allegedly causing her father’s death; Bruce’s interest in antiques and home decoration; and Bechdel’s supposed romanticizing of New York City are all, according to Herring, inevitable yet disappointing manifestations of the author’s internal­ ization of queer urban-centrism. Herring even suggests that metronormativity is so pronounced in Fun Home that “its subtitle might well have been A Study in Provincial Life” instead of its cleverer mixed-genre A Family Tragicomic (150).15 Without a doubt, Bechdel expresses criticism of Beech Creek and often finds her father’s rural place-attachment perplexing. With humor and confu­ sion, she writes, “It’s puzzling why my urbane father, with his unwholesome

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interest in the decorative arts, remained in this provincial hamlet” (125). The book’s numerous images of New York City, and the local, state, and federal roads that deliver the Bechdel family to the metropolis, can be read, as Herring does, as a desperate queer yearning for city life. These images “assimilate Bruce into an urbane social space, and . . . set him on the road to a gay migration that incorporates him into a tale of metropolitan liberation” (Herring 169). But these urban elements are not always evidence of a totalized, unmitigated met­ ropolitan allegiance. Instead of seeing the urban-rural border crossings in Fun Home as metro yearnings, they could also suggest urban-rural enmeshment and entanglements. For though Bechdel repeatedly suggests that “a geographical location” (125) could have saved her father’s life, it bears repeating that she also can’t imagine him anywhere else. Another instance of the book’s get-out-of-the sticks mentality is Alison’s rant about Beech Creek at her father’s funeral, where she imagines speaking honestly to family, friends, and townspeople, telling them that her father killed himself because “He couldn’t face living in this small-minded small town one more second” (125). After Bruce dies, Alison visits his grave in Beech Creek and declares he is now “stuck in the mud for good” (54). As Herring puts it, Fun Home “comes to terms with an urbanist perspective that can only see her father as a rural pity” (167). Though Bechdel peddles the rural queer as pitiful stereotype, she ultimately rejects the idea of Beech Creek as a death sentence, describing Bruce as being “planted deep” there. In this language and image, Bechdel evokes rural queerplace inhabitation as a flourishing garden instead of the earlier depiction of rural queer Bruce as being “stuck in the mud.” In addition, on the same page where Bechdel refers to her father’s “bumpkinish,” nonurban voice on the mu­ seum tour tapes she discovers, she also comes to a startling conclusion: that she can’t imagine her father living anywhere but Beech Creek (144). That she makes this momentous announcement just above the panel where she makes fun of her father’s rural central Pennsylvania dialect—one that she has as well—complicates Herring’s claim that Bechdel’s characterization of Bruce’s speech is another instance of metronormative indoctrination (144). Bechdel’s drawings on this page include the impressive Allegheny Front, which evokes powerful memories of her rural queer place-attachment. She also includes a panel of Route 80 “hurtling toward New York City” (away from Beech Creek) and notes how the speed of Route 80 not only “erased” “the names of things, but the particular, intimate contours of the landscape itself ” (144). For all the pain Beech Creek causes Alison and Bruce, they are attached to the mountains, trees, and town and mourn the area’s “development.” Their feelings about this

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place suggest that they are not victims of rurality in any complete or homoge­ nous way, nor do they secretly pine for the city. In other words, the memoir’s antirural slurs are not incontrovertible facts of the text’s “ingrained metronor­ mativity,” and Bruce’s expression of urban queer desire does not signify metro­ normative capitulation. Instead, Bechdel suggests that rural and queer are braided instead of in a dichotomous standoff. In fact, I contend that Fun Home suggests that engaging in activities associ­ ated with urbanity while in a rural space does not symbolize a person’s wish for an urban relocation—as demonstrated in the way Bruce’s identity as rural farm boy consistently coexists with his urbane white queer proclivities. Herring in­ sists that “Bruce, in many respects, is a metronormative white gay man who just doesn’t live in a city”; that he “doesn’t identify with the straight working-class masculinity that surrounds him”; and that his “impeccable taste”—“the gilt cornices, the marble fireplace, the crystal chandelier, the shelves of calf-bound books”—are evidence of his metropolitan longing (155). Herring draws on Craig Alfred Hanson’s 1972 “The Fairy Princess Exposed” to show how Bruce’s preoccupation with surface and appearance hark back to a pre-Stonewall re­ actionary feminine gay white subculture steeped in “fantasy” and “makebelieve”—what Hanson calls “the cultural conservativism of the tired old gay trip” (266). This narrow, insular white, gay urban world is “homobaroque” and symbolizes “feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness” (Hanson 267). But more than any other figure in the memoir, Bruce symbolizes the book’s urban/rural porousness and hybrid vision. As previously stated, he is a nonnor­ mative rural-urban man who mixes “sawdust and sweat and designer cologne” (Bechdel 23). His nonstop work ethic and rural farm boy practices are abun­ dantly illustrated throughout the book: more than eighty panels depict him shirtless, wearing cutoffs and sneakers, and engaging in hard physical labor. Bruce rehabs houses and landscapes yards while teaching high school English and running the family mortuary business—he also collects antiques and ar­ ranges flowers. Instead of a metronormative clone, Bruce is an amalgamation of a white rural work ethic with a professional middle-class urban queer one, indicating how Fun Home exposes—instead of solidifies—the fragile boundaries between Beech Creek and New York. In the introductory chapter to Herring’s book, he acknowledges the possibil­ ity of a rural-urban hybrid—“‘rural’ spots can be urbanized as much as ‘urban’ spots can be ruralized” (27)—but he doesn’t consistently or clearly apply these insights to Fun Home.16 Instead, the antiques, flowers, maps, routes, and roads represent Bechdel’s (and Bruce’s) queer urban brainwashing. What Herring does not fully consider is how Bruce is urbanized but not metronormative. This

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oversight is especially problematic in how Herring attributes urban-centrism to a panel in Fun Home that is actually satirizing urban life, not glorifying it. Her­ ring writes, “Idealizing Greenwich Village, [Bechdel] finds New York’s urban streets ‘a fragrance of stunning richness and complexity’” (Herring 169; see also Bechdel 103). Yet the panel and text in question characterize the Village as a stinking brown sauce. Probably drawing on her personal experience of living in New York City, Bechdel depicts a “hot August afternoon” and then delin­ eates the competing smells of “pastry,” cigars, “urine and electricity,” “shit,” “diesel,” “menthol” from a cigarette, “putrefaction” (rotting garbage), and “Brut” (a men’s cologne from the 1970s). The images and text hardly add up to a glorification of queer Greenwich Village. At times, Herring acknowledges the spatial complexity of Fun Home, argu­ ing that near the end of the memoir Bechdel suggests that “Bruce may have also belonged in Beech Creek, not only at the celebrated piers of lower Man­ hattan’s Christopher Street,” but Bechdel’s text never presents him as mono­ lithically belonging to the cruising piers of Christopher Street. In fact, she states that there was nothing about cruising at the Manhattan piers that Bruce had not encountered in Beech Creek, suggesting themes of spatial comingling and border crossing (177). The recursive and fluctuating stance Fun Home dis­ plays toward rural and urban place refuses a final, homogenous, static queer sense of place or fixed sense of belonging. Just when the reader thinks the book is privileging the urban, Bechdel provides poignant images of rural space; when the text seems to be romanticizing the rural, Bechdel includes characters who spout antirural slurs; when the reader fears the text is promoting the city as a queer paradise, Bechdel illustrates its physical and cultural underside. The memoir rejects monolithic place nostalgia and totalized images of demoni­ zation because both stances offer a narrow understanding of place, hiding its fluidity and capaciousness. To frame Fun Home as espousing either a citycentric view or a rural anti-urban ideology occludes its subtle and graceful portrayal of queer place entanglement. Instead of a flirting with a spatial di­ chotomy, Bechdel’s vision suggests that a queer sense of place is willfully—and productively—unstable.

“Despot Duality” and the Rise of Authoritarianism Though Bechdel’s spatial vision in Fun Home does not directly address the con­ temporary state of US politics, its boundary-breaking aesthetic practices rever­

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berate with activism taking place around the country in response to the promotion of authoritarianism in the United States. Following the lead of for­ mer President Donald Trump’s calculated manipulation of divisive spatial poli­ tics, the Republican Party continues this country’s protracted history of treating Indigenous people, immigrants, the poor, and racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities as the absolute “Other.” From colonial America to the present day, the long-standing economic concerns and complex social/psychological chal­ lenges of rural and working-class people have largely been ignored or deviously manipulated by politicians, education, religion, industry, and the media, who transform people’s suffering into votes or voyeuristic narratives of the antics of “white trash” (Isenberg). During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he tagged rural citizens as the victims of big cities and unmanly liberal elites, ac­ cusing city people of holding excessive power over small towns and rural areas. Trump’s derogatory attitude toward cities inflamed white rural racial resent­ ment and underwrote the idea that cities are part of the “cultural” pollution weakening/feminizing America. The pervasive media representation of a rural/urban split as an explanation for Trump’s 2016 win only emboldened this divide. Writers and intellectuals across the political spectrum linked Trump’s xenophobia as a racist appeal to rural voters. Public historian Elizabeth Catte has taken this outpouring to task. In her article “There Is No Neutral There: Appalachia as Mythic ‘Trump Country,’” Catte characterizes much of this work as “blame” narratives that exude a prurient fascination with rural Appa­ lachia, even though voters in many other states voted for Trump yet those geog­ raphies are not subjected to the same level of media focus. Bringing a complex approach to Appalachia as Catte is doing does not mean overlooking, as Buell points out, how rural cultures can easily become “pathological” and “abet possessiveness, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia” (76). A small-town Trump supporter in Louisiana said that America should be “a society that believes in clean, normal family life” (Hochschild 145). White na­ tionalist nostalgia fuels the idea of rural space as the purview of “real” Ameri­ cans while urbanites, immigrants, and rural minorities are deemed “unnatural” and thus ineligible to represent the nation (Buell 76). As Kyla Wazana Tomp­ kins points outs, ideas about those “who belong and who [do] not belong . . . shape the everyday lives of the nation-state’s queer citizens as well as the lives of the queer non-citizens—migrant workers and undocumented peoples” (180). In the special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies discussed earlier, “Decentering White Ruralities,” the editors challenge the entrenched “single story” of the countryside, contending that “despite the veneer of cultural homogeneity,

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the countryside is—and always has been—a multicultural space” (Panelli et al. 355). Elizabeth Catte’s work also speaks to this too often ignored complexity, doc­ umenting a legacy of cross-racial radical activism in Appalachia and educating people about the racial and queer minority presence there—eschewing myths about a supposedly idyllic white rural past to which the country must return. Catte’s goal is to challenge normative ideas of rurality by pushing back against the reductive idea of cities as cesspools teeming with degenerates, immigrants, and sinful elites, and the rural as pure American space, devoid of immigrants, queers, Black people, Indigenous communities, and other “undesirables.” Though never evoking Fun Home or its spatial politics, progressive activists like Catte know that place is enormously complex and that the urbanrural divide is a powerful weapon for creating spatial “outsiders” and onedimensional victims. Fun Home’s setting in Appalachia; its refusal to treat Bruce and Alison as totalized victims; and its rural-urban hybrid methodology contest static and homogenous understandings. In this way, Bechdel’s complex queer Appalachian comics vision resonates with a long legacy of progressive rural activism and Southern resistance. It challenges readers to move past the idea of rural place as backward and unlivable and urban space as the only authentic place to be queer. The difficulties and challenges that queers encounter in rural space are formidable, but they are neither totalizing nor particularly unique. In other words, Bechdel’s vision has an uncanny resonance with the insights and experiences of rural progressive activists who defang white hetero and cis­ normative nostalgia and show how rural activist cultures can transform rural place in the twenty-first century. Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a queer people of color liberation organization located in Atlanta, has a unique regional/rural outreach in the South, drawing on Southern traditions of radi­ cal social justice action to create new cultures that represent what a rural-urban hybrid might come to mean in the coming decades. Shortly after the election of Trump, SONG put out a conference call entitled “Queer South Rise Up: Organizing in the Time of Trump.” SONG’s conference statement empha­ sizes the South’s legacy of sustained resistance and reminds readers that this history should not be overlooked: “Our efforts have often been looked upon with pity, and our organizing and infrastructure too often under-resourced, abandoned, and not taken seriously. While we live in states deemed ‘red and left for dead,’ in towns and cities that have been forsaken and entire communi­ ties left to fend for ourselves, we’ve learned a thing or two about what it means to survive, to fight back, and to build culture and power in these places” (emphasis in original). SONG asserts that, while the forces of annihilation are real and powerful, they

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are not monolithic and final. Its goal, “to protect and defend our communities, to build sanctuary, to dream and live free from fear,” can be applied to any town or city in the United States and beyond. SONG also believes that queer spatial visions are comprised of contradictory dimensions: community, connec­ tion, and resistance, along with hardship, violence, and hatred. Nevertheless, the organization states that rural-urban queer people of color do not vanish even with a formidable history of white supremacist misogynist power. Another group committed to transgressing political and spatial boundaries is Redneck Revolt, a working-class anticapitalist organization whose mission is to reclaim rural working-class culture from white supremacist groups and capi­ talist elites. A central focus of Redneck Revolt is to defend rural minorities, in­ cluding LGBTQIA2S+, immigrants, Black people, and people of color, against harassment and violence. More than thirty individual chapters are active around the country, from Oregon to North Carolina to New York, and mem­ bers routinely provide security to counter protestors at white supremacist rallies—for example, Redneck Revolt organized an extensive security patrol at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 11–12, 2017. The scholar and activist Cornel West said that because police stood by and allowed the violence to unfold, groups such as Redneck Revolt saved his life and the lives of nonviolent clergy and citizens in Charlottesville (Stockman). An additional organizational focus is antiracism education directed toward white rural working-class communities. By attending gun shows, rodeos, coun­ try music concerts, flea markets, NASCAR races, and events at local commu­ nity centers, Redneck Revolt members talk with rural white people about the growing white supremacist activity in their small towns and remote areas. In addition, Redneck Revolt organizes community gardens to address food inse­ curity; sets up needle-exchange programs; and provides hurricane relief. In 2017, the Suffolk, New York, chapter held a candlelight vigil for individuals and families affected by prescription drug addiction. The organization engages in service beyond the community, too. In 2018, Dwayne Dixon of Silver Valley Red­ neck Revolt spoke at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy shortly after Charlottesville and was joined in conversation by three Harvard Univer­ sity historians (Dixon). The goals of SONG and Redneck Revolt recall queer geographer Katie Schweighofer’s call for “geographies of resistance”—a concept that Schweig­ hofer believes is “perhaps now more important than ever.” Practitioners of geog­ raphies of resistance acknowledge that conservative evangelical Christians, the Freedom Caucus, and white supremacists, alongside progressive LGBTQIA2S+,

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rural feminists, queer farmers, and socialist gun organizations such as Redneck Revolt, all belong in the category called “Rural America.” Additional activist and cultural groups that practice a geography of resistance include the Cow­ boy/Indian Alliance, Modern Farmers, Country Queers, Queer Appalachia, Appalachian Feminist Coalition, Slow Holler, and the Trillbilly Worker’s Party, each suggesting how a wide range of identities can cross ideological and physi­ cal boundaries.17 There is the potential for rural-based activists to communally address, and maybe even reverse, the growing rural/urban divide from which figures such as Trump and his cadre benefit. Admittedly, there are few areas of agreement and little trust between rural queers and rural fundamentalist Christians and white nationalist voters, but the impulse to contest stereotypes of the rural as doomed, backward, and pitiful could become a potential point of connection. Buell also argues that placeattachment can be a catalyst for environmental activism (40), a phenomenon Arlie Hochschild tracks in her focus on Louisianan Tea Party environmentalist and Trump voter Mike Schaff, as discussed in her book Strangers in Their Own Land. Schaff’s beloved small town, Bayou Corne, was destroyed by a sinkhole caused by the Texas Brine Company, an unregulated corporation that does un­ derground oil drilling (Boudreau). Most of the working-class residents in the neighborhood lost their homes and were forced to relocate, but Schaff stayed in his damaged, unlivable home because of his attachment to place. The loss of his community and home catapulted him into environmental activism, and he is currently practicing a conjoined form of Tea Party politics and environmen­ talism. It’s notable how Schaff’s decision to remain “in place” evokes Bruce Bechdel’s reluctance to leave Beech Creek, despite its “disasters” of homopho­ bia, rural conservativism, and mountaintop removal. Similarly, a West Virginia organization, Christians for the Mountains, practices a place-attachment envi­ ronmentalism that integrates Christian scripture with environmental protec­ tion to save homes, communities, and place. Ironically, this organization’s work echoes the queer “Ecosexual Love Story” of Goodbye Gauley Mountain, a docu­ mentary about the quest of two queer women to stop mountaintop removal in West Virginia. One of the women, Beth Stephens, was born and raised in West Virginia. Former rural Ohio resident and UCLA professor Carla Gardina Pestana argues in “Why Rural Voter Bases Are Susceptible to Politicians Who Lie” that, instead of explaining to voters that they would have to relocate or be retrained—the honest message—politicians like Trump promise to “bring back” jobs, which, in the minds of rural Ohioan voters means not having to leave a place where white settler residents and their families have lived for

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generations; if the jobs are brought to them, voters’ children wouldn’t have to leave, either. This misleading economic nationalism is heard as support for white people’s right to place. However, as Winona LaDuke explains, white racist colo­ nial settlers—farmers, ranchers, and homeowners—can also be transformed into what she calls “enlightened settler[s].” As more people’s jobs, land, homes, water, air, and health are compromised by unregulated capitalist plundering of the environment, white settler colonialists can sometimes shift from being what LaDuke calls patriots “to a flag” to being patriots “to a land”; when this hap­ pens, they are more likely to form coalitions with Indigenous people and people of color. Such activist organizing emerges when rural cultures break free from rigid stereotypes and illusory spatial divides. One of the founders of rural queer studies, Will Fellows, says he hopes the dark days of the authoritarian, white supremacist Republican Party will have the potential to bring increased interdisciplinary attention to the discourse and images of the urban/rural breach: “I’m intrigued by the prospect of gaining a more nuanced understanding of what ‘rural America’ really consists of at this stage in the life of this country,” Fellows told me. “We say ‘rural’ or ‘small-town’ and each of us has our own incomplete mental picture of what those labels mean.”18 While more theorizing, writing, and organizing need to be done to understand the specifics of spatial complexities, Bechdel’s graphic vision is un­ intentionally part of an effort to expose the “single story” and to reveal what lies behind illusory spatial divides. Her memoir’s spatial vision quietly shows that a sense of place does not depend upon a static, homogenous and norma­ tive mode of belonging and home-making. Just as contemporary activists scramble generic and uncritical assumptions about the South and Appala­ chia, Bechdel’s Fun Home implies that queerness is everywhere; the country­ side and the city are neither sanctuaries nor hellholes; and categories based on spatial dichotomies obscure more than they reveal. Reading Fun Home as an intertwined rural-urban hybrid in the contemporary political moment al­ lows a poignant illumination of spatial attachments/identities that are com­ plex, in process, and incomplete to emerge. Fun Home’s narrative—painful, tragic, porous, dynamic, and place-attached—offers a paradigm of place-based identities as dynamic and changing. It aligns with current efforts to destabi­ lize homogenous characterizations of the rural as a solely straight, white, Christian, American-born space and reveals instead how diverse rural inhabi­ tants challenge various forms of toxic injustices in ways that are sustainable and worth emulating. Fun Home’s geography of resistance encourages us to practice—to quote again from Anzaldúa—“a way of balancing, of mitigating duality” (41).

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Notes 1. This chapter draws on material from my essay “Decolonizing the Rural in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” In this essay, I use a rural queer feminist studies approach to em­ phasize the centrality of rural place in Fun Home, challenging the idea that Alison’s fa­ ther Bruce Bechdel is a victim of provincial, backward rurality and showing instead how rural space works for him—despite his nonnormative gender and sexuality. 2. Critical work on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home typically uses a genre/comics studies, queer/feminist studies, or historical, autobiographical, literary, or psychoanalytic ap­ proach, or some combination of these—generating rich, lively, and provocative work. However, to my knowledge, there is no research that looks at the implications and reali­ ties of white settler colonialism in Fun Home. I have not specifically written about Fun Home and white settler colonialism, but I recognize that Bechdel’s book flows, in part, out of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, and New York City, geographic areas belonging to the Susquehannock (Beech Creek) and Munsee Lenape and Wappinger (Manhattan, New York City). I hope to contribute an analysis of rural queer studies, white settler co­ lonialism, and Fun Home in the future. Though, as Lawrence Buell points out, “The abuses of place-connectedness hardly invalidate [place-connectedness]” (77), neverthe­ less any emphasis on the significance of land, home, place, and region in the creation of theory, criticism, art, literature, and activism warrants an in-depth queer Native Studies approach. A dialogue between queer ecocriticism/queer ecologies and queer Native Studies is unfolding, and a few authors who explore this include Driskill as well as Hume and Rahimtoolas. I am also aware of a paper that explores the connections among rural queer geographies, whiteness, and white supremacy (Boulay). 3. See the analysis of Askins’s assertion that “rurality is implicated in and implicates other spaces and places” (Panelli et al. 358). 4. Merlis’s characterization of queerness as exile and Fun Home’s construction of a queer sense of place as an endless hybrid resonate with Janet Fiskio’s analysis of tran­ sient communities and the emerging canon of creative literature that explores that ex­ perience. Fiskio argues that transient immigrants deliberately and productively imag­ ine place as “dynamic and mutable,” offering their communities and the world “a new mode for conceptualizing place as a capacity and practice rather than as a static idea” (320). 5. The phrase “despot duality” is Gloria Anzaldúa’s. See “Movimientos de rebeldıa y las culturas que traicionan” in Borderlands/La Frontera for her famous critique of binary oppositions. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Waitt and Gorman-Murray and Katherine McKittrick, which has helped me clarify my argument that Fun Home enacts a hybrid queer urban-rural vision. 6. In addition to the sunset panel’s suggestion of attachment to place, Bechdel’s memoir includes several panels that signal a retrospective environmental awareness of how Beech Creek was violently altered through the practice of mountaintop removal (Bechdel 128–29).

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7. Waitt and Gorman-Murray’s model of a fluctuating sense of place resonates with Katherine McKittrick’s powerful spatial theorizing. 8. See queer theorists Dana Luciano and Mel Chen’s oft-cited article “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” which explores the ways Christian heteronormativity vio­ lently imposes settler sexualities and gender conformity onto the “uncivilized,” “unnat­ ural” other. 9. The idea of the city as the “natural” place for queers referred to in the text is, as William Spurlin has argued, a manifestation of how queer studies is itself deformed by a “Eurocentric, and therefore imperialistic gaze” that ignores complex queer cultures be­ yond metropolitan centers (183). Mark Hain investigates this critique by analyzing how the It Gets Better campaign reproduces the assumption that rural space is monolithi­ cally hostile to LGBTQIA2S+. Hain finds that the majority of videos in the project con­ vey the message that “part of getting better is getting out of the narrow-minded rural area, the oppressive small town, the unenlightened ‘fly over states,’ because happiness, accep­ tance, self-fulfillment, and others like you are to be found only in coastal urban centers” (Hain 164–65; see also Hogan, “Transplacement”). Hain suggests that the IGB cam­ paign inadvertently reinforces the idea that “there must be something wrong with the gay [or trans] person who does not migrate to the city” (165). As Stina Soderling puts it, “Those who are stupid enough to not leave for the city are to blame for their own death” (343). Yet, as Hain points out—and as Bechdel’s Fun Home indicates—it’s not uncom­ mon to encounter rural queer people who are “leading sometimes difficult but also fulfill­ ing lives outside urban environments” (Hain 170; see also Hogan, “Transplacement”). 10. In 2022, the racial makeup of Beech Creek was 98 percent white and 2 percent Black, and the total population had declined to 633 (World Population Review). 11. Bechdel’s interest in transversals recalls Panelli and colleagues’ call for the “ap­ preciation of rurality as networked” (358). 12. For a queer ecological analysis of designer cologne as a referent to urban gay male culture, see McRuer. 13. Queer people are not the only marginalized group to be homogenously urban­ ized. The migration of millions of Black people to midwestern and northeastern cities in the first half of the twentieth century—to escape racism and Jim Crow laws of the South—was a lifesaving mass exodus. But it minimized, and sometimes erased, a Black agrarian past. In her book Belonging: A Culture of Place, bell hooks delineates the way rac­ ism drove Black people out of their rural homes and spaces, making urban Black culture “the yardstick against which everything about blackness would come to be defined” and notes that, “All the aspects of [Black] identity and culture that were deemed relevant came from the city” (195). While racial terrorism and centuries of enslavement, torture, and economic injustice are not equivalent to LGBTQIA2S+ experiences of hatred and violence, hooks’s efforts to document Black rural cultures resonate with a central goal of rural queer studies. 14. Stapels summarizes this pattern succinctly: “It’s as if the homophobia of the city is irrelevant if the urban can collectively imagine a comparatively more intolerant

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countryside” (154). Ironically, this spatial double standard subtly emerges in Amin Gha­ ziani’s There Goes the Gayborhood? In an analysis of urban “post gays,” Ghaziani argues that cities “post gays” actively “suppress the perceptual act of classification that defines them as different” because they don’t need to be “out” (70). The city is a progressive and supportive community; in contrast, in the countryside, decentering one’s gay identity is understood as self-hatred and evidence of a totalized homophobic rural landscape. 15. It’s worth noting that Herring’s proposed subtitle emphasizes a one-dimensional reading of Fun Home, whereas Bechdel’s subtitle echoes the hybrid-like “opposites within” structure that Anzaldúa calls for in efforts to dismantle dualities. 16. Herring asserts that “there’s a world of difference between living in a city and living in a world of metronormativity . . . the two need not go hand in hand” (27). How­ ever, he does not consistently apply this idea to Fun Home or provide a general example. A possible instance of “ruralized urban” space comes from Ash, a resident of Portland, Oregon, and an interviewee in the book Trans/Portraits: “I identify most consistently somewhere along the lines of farmboy. . . . I’m usually covered in dirt wearing Car­ hartts. When I think of myself, gender is not the primary identifier I would use. I view myself most strongly in terms of occupation [farmer], but when I add gender, my iden­ tity goes from farmer to farmboy” (188–89). Ash’s approach to trans identity and trans expression more closely resembles that of rural queers. Occupation—“farmer” and “farmboy”—can be the primary identity, even in an urban location, showing how urban and rural cultures, idioms, and elements can coexist. In other words, an urban inhabi­ tant such as Ash is ruralizing queer urban space (Hogan, “Transplacement”). 17. For an analysis of the Cowboy/Indian Alliance, see Grossman. 18. Will Fellows, email to the author, December 4, 2016.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacey. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Bodily Self. Bloomington: Indi­ ana University Press, 2010. Aldrich, Robert. “Homosexuality and the City: An Historical Overview.” Urban Studies 41, no. 9 (2004): 1719–37. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Ash. “Accidental Activists.” In Trans/Portraits: Voices from Transgender Communities, edited by Jackson Wright Shultz, 165–95. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Boudreau, John. “The Bayou Corne Sinkhole.” New York Times, September 25, 2013. Video, 3:13. https://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000002464501/the -bayou-corne-sinkhole.html. Boulay, Nadine. “Space, Race, and Sexuality: The Legibility of Queer Ruralities in British Columbia.” Paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, November 16–19, 2017.

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Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Catte, Elizabeth. “There Is No Neutral There: Appalachia as Mythic ‘Trump Coun­ try.’” Medium, October 17, 2016. https://medium.com/@elizabethcatte/there-is -no-neutral-there-appalachia-as-a-mythic-trump-country-ee6ed7f300dc. Christians for the Mountains. “About Our Ministry.” Accessed March 4, 2022. https:// www.christiansforthemountains.org/. Dixon, Dwayne. “You Don’t Stand by and Let People Get Hurt: Armed Antifascism after Charlottesville.” Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. February 3, 2018. Video, 2:01:40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0dgg9dXLm0. Driskill, Qwo-Li. “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 69–92. Fiskio, Janet. “Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizen­ ship.” American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012): 301–25. Ghaziani, Amin. There Goes the Gayborhood? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Gray, Mary L., Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley, eds. Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Grossman, Zoltán. Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Land. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Hain, Mark. “‘We Are Here for You’: The It Gets Better Project, Queering Rural Space, and Cultivating Queer Media Literacy.” In Gray, Johnson, and Gilley, Queering the Countryside, 161–80. Halberstam, Judith [now known as J. Jack]. In a Queer Place and Time: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hanson, Craig Alfred. “The Fairy Princess Exposed.” In Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, 20th anniversary edition, edited by Allen Young and Karla Jay, 266–69. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Herring, Scott. “Queer Infrastructure.” In Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism, 149–80. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press, 2016. Hogan, Katie. “Decolonizing the Rural in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” In The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In, edited by Janine Utell, 167–80. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2020. Hogan, Katie. “Transplacement: Nature and Place in Carter Sickels’s ‘Saving’ and ‘Bit­ tersweet.’” In Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, 127–46. London: Routledge, 2020. hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009. House, Silas. “Looking in the Mirror.” Algonquin Reader 7, no. 1 (2018): 47–48. https:// d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616206253_ae .pdf ?1516704224. Hume, Angela, and Samia Rahimtoolas. “Queering Ecopoetics.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 1 (2018): 134–49.

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Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Penguin, 2016. LaDuke, Winona. Foreword to Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Land, by Zoltán Grossman, 1. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Luciano, Dana, and Mel Chen. “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, no. 2–3 (2015): 183–207. McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947–63. McRuer, Robert. “Pink.” In Prismatic Ecology: Eco-Theory beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 63–82. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Merlis, Mark. American Studies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Kindle. Panelli, Ruth, Phil Hubbard, Brad Coombes, and Sandie Suchet-Pearson. “De-centring White Ruralities: Ethnic Diversity, Racialisation and Indigenous Countrysides.” Editorial. Journal of Rural Studies 25, no. 4 (October 2009): 355–64. https://doi.org /10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.05.002. Pestana, Carla Gardina. “Why Rural Voter Bases Are Susceptible to Politicians Who Lie.” Huffington Post, March 27, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/an -angelenas-sojourn-in-rural-ohio_us_58d8726ae4b0c0980ac0e79d. Redneck Revolt. “News and Analysis.” Accessed May 4, 2022. https://www.redneck revolt.org/analysis. Schweighofer, Katie. “Enabling Strategic Sexism: Urban-Rural Divides and Cultural Conflict.” Paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, November 16–19, 2017. Schweighofer, Katherine. “Rethinking the Closet: Queer Life in Rural Geographies.” In Gray, Johnson, and Gilley, Queering the Countryside, 223–43. Snider, Bruce. “Trouble and Consolation: Writing the Gay Rural.” New England Review 38, no. 3 (2017): 165–73. https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2017.0072. Soderling, Stina. 2016. “Queer Rurality and the Materiality of Time.” In Gray, John­ son, and Gilley, Queering the Countryside, 333–48. Southerners on New Ground (SONG). “Queer South Rise Up: Organizing in the Time of Trump.” February 7, 2017. https://southernersonnewground.org/riseupunder trump/. Spurlin, William. “Remapping Same-Sex Desire: Queer Writing and Culture in the American Heartland.” In De-centering Sexualities: Politics and Representation beyond the Metropolis, edited by Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton, 182–98. New York: Routledge, 2000. Stapels, Chris. “‘Fagging’ the Countryside? (De)‘Queering’ Rural Queer Studies.” In Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society, edited by Gregory M. Fulk­ erson and Alexander R. Thomas, 151–62. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Stephens, Elizabeth, dir. Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Exosexual Love Story. San Francisco: Fecund Arts, 2013. DVD. Stockman, Farah. “Who Were the Counterprotesters in Charlottesville?” New York Times, August 14, 2017. Tacoli, Cecilia. “Rural-Urban Interactions: A Guide to the Literature.” Environment and Urbanization 10, no. 1 (1998): 147–66.

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Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Queer of Color Critique.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature, ed­ ited by Scott Herring, 173–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Vainker, Ellie. Review of Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies, edited by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley. Great Plains Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2017): 57–62. https://doi.org/10.1353/gpq.2017.0003. Waitt, Gordon, and Andrew Gorman-Murray. “‘It’s About Time You Came Out’: Sex­ ualities, Mobility and Home.” Antipode 43, no. 4 (2011): 1380–403. Weston, Kath. “Get Thee to a Big City.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 253–78. Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. London: Transcribed from the 1915 Methuen & Co. Ltd. edition by David Price Amazon Digital Services, 2015. Wilsey, Sean. “The Things They Buried.” New York Times, June 16, 2006. World Population Review. “Beech Creek, Pennsylvania Population 2022.” Accessed March 3, 2022. https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/beech-creek-pa -population.

White Privilege and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Eleg   y Stephanie Li

W

hen the authors of the United States Constitution intoned, “We the people,” “we the people” did not mean we the people. “We the people” of 1787 referred to a very select population, those persons deemed worthy of citizenship of our fledgling nation. It did not include women. It did not include African Americans, enslaved or free. It did not include Native Americans nor white men without property. More than two hundred years later, “we the people” has expanded to include these groups even as many others remain excluded from the rights and rhetoric of our nation’s founding. A man like J. D. Vance would have been included as part of the elite “we the people” in the eighteenth century, but in the twenty-first century, this upwardly mobile white man describes himself as part of a culture in crisis. His best-selling memoir, published in 2016 to much fanfare, is, as its title suggests, an elegy to a displaced and desperate people, though there is very little to lament in his exemplary life. Nonetheless, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis seeks to chronicle a population in decline, victim not only of deindustrialization and shifts in globalized economies but also of a pervasive and most often self-induced isolation. This isolation is emblematic of certain racial assumptions and desires that maintain the tacit entitlements of whiteness. As a white man with long-standing generational ties in America, Vance should be at the vanguard of our nation’s elite, but instead he presents himself as an anomaly. His book has much in common with ethnic literature staples like Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982) and even Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995). Like Rodriguez and Obama, 194

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Vance is culturally adrift at institutions of higher education; though he is not the first in his family to attend college, he is the first to graduate from an Ivy League university. This chapter reads Vance’s memoir as a counterpoint to narrative patterns evident in ethnic autobiographies and explores how whiteness is figured—and too often not figured at all—in the text. Hillbilly Elegy adopts a trajectory from culturally distinct self to American identity that reflects the basic journey of many immigrant narratives. In uniting his hillbilly heritage with his upwardly mobile, Yale Law School educated self, however, Vance recenters his roots as distinctly American. This is no elegy of antiquated hillbilly ways but a reassertion of values that reflect racialized privileges and the dominance of American whiteness. Fundamental to my analysis is how Vance presents his race and racial difference in the book. He directly identifies himself as white and in this way suggests that he is racially conscious. Though hardly a progressive, presumably he is no purveyor of color-blind approaches to social life, and he even appears to recognize the dangerous effects of prejudice. He corrects the myth of the “welfare queen” as a “lazy black mom living on the dole” and observes, “I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white” (8). However, there is a troubling slippage in Vance’s approach to race. He refers to it only to dismiss its relevance to his life. He may be white, but as he emphasizes throughout the text, he grows up impoverished in various ways, and this impoverishment is the defining quality of hillbilly life. Notably, for much of his childhood Vance is raised in a household with a combined income of more than $100,000, but he continually bemoans the absence of stable father figures and his mother’s general emotional and psychological instability, which in turn leads to debilitating substance abuse. Class and culture are repeatedly put forward as more salient categories of social impact than race. In this way, Vance ignores how his whiteness has contributed to his success. He is not blind to race, but he proves to be woefully blind to the powerful consequences of white privilege.

Recentering White Achievement Vance begins his book by undermining its very existence. He explains, “My name is J. D. Vance, and I think I should start with a confession: I find the existence of the book you hold in your hands somewhat absurd.” He admits that at thirty-one he has done “nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it.” And yet his book has sold millions and is frequently cited as a text by which to understand the

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shocking electoral victory of President Donald J. Trump (see Garner; Rich). Vance openly admits that he is no global visionary or entrepreneurial prodigy (“I haven’t started a billion-dollar company or a world-changing nonprofit”; 1). By affirming that he has done no more than achieve “something quite ordinary” (1), Vance presents himself as disarmed by his own modest achievements. The implication is obvious: he should not have to write this book. His graduation from Yale Law School, his comfortable life with his wife and two dogs should not be unusual or notable. But perhaps most important, readers should not need the explanation that his memoir seeks to provide. Vance’s success should be a given, rather than a surprise. Despite Vance’s purported modesty and his gratitude to the people who have supported him throughout his life, especially his beloved grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, this rhetorical move operates from an unsettling set of assumptions. It takes for granted white male power in elite professional settings. Vance should not have to write this book. However, the social order is so disturbed that he must resort to penning his life story to elucidate the crisis in our midst, a crisis that leaves men like him in warehouse jobs rather than in corporate boardrooms. Moreover, in presenting his story, Vance adopts tropes and narrative patterns long associated with ethnic and immigrant autobiography. By appropriating these literary techniques, Vance figures himself as a maligned ethnic other on equal footing with other disadvantaged minority groups. This troubling conflation erases the social privileges that have significantly impacted his life choices. Vance may be a hillbilly with a traumatic family history, but he remains a member of America’s most elite social group: heterosexual white men. Without explicitly mentioning race in this opening, Vance nonetheless animates significant racialized assumptions. Soon enough, though, Vance directly acknowledges his racial identity. He does so not only to frame the crisis of his book’s title but also to forcefully dis­ tinguish himself from white people he identifies as privileged. Whiteness for Vance does not equate the whiteness his readers may expect. He explains, “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs [white Anglo-Saxon Protestants] of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scot-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is a family tradition” (3). This self-description establishes a number of paradoxes for Vance. He identifies with working-class people, yet he makes a corporate salary working “as a principal for a leading Silicon Valley investment firm,” according to his website in 2018. He graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University yet calls his people those “who have no college degree” (3). And as his memoir demonstrates, poverty is not really his

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family’s tradition. His grandparents enjoyed a middle-class life in Ohio, and he was raised without the deprivations of penury. As these descriptions demonstrate, Vance is both a member and an outlier of many social groups. In this way, he mimics the unsettling position evident in many ethnic autobiographies. Steven J. Rubin theorizes that the duality of autobiography, “the balance between individual awareness and historical truth” (75) is heightened in experiences of minority populations. Citing W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness and the question posed by Meyer Levin in his memoir In Search (1950), “Was I an American, or a Jew?” (76), Rubin posits that the struggle to merge conflicting identities is at the heart of ethnic autobiography. Just as Richard Rodriguez attempts to reconcile his Mexican American identity with his public American self in Hunger of Memory, Vance both clings to his hillbilly heritage and discards it in his movement toward professional and social success. Both men distinguish themselves from their families through education and upward mobility. For Rodriguez, this rift causes a lasting separation with his parents as he finds it easier to confess his experiences to strangers through his memoir than to share his anxieties with the people who raised him. Rodriguez discovers some peace over the battles of ethnic identification by labeling himself a middle-class man and thus eschewing the complications of minority status altogether. By contrast, Vance describes his experiences at Yale and networking among elite law firms with tongue-in-cheek humor. At a dinner with a prestigious law firm, he is briefly flummoxed by the range of wines available to him. He decides to order “a chardonnay, not because I didn’t know what sauvignon blanc was (though I didn’t) but because it was easier to pronounce. I had dodged my first bullet” (211). In successfully ordering chardonnay, Vance has hardly “dodged a bullet”; the stakes of his performance are minimal, especially as the dinner is hosted by one of six high-profile firms interested in interviewing him. The pathos and longing of Rodriguez is entirely absent in Hillbilly Elegy as Vance presents himself as luckily remembering which fork to use with his appetizer after spitting out his sparkling water. This difference highlights how Vance need not sidestep the complications of a dualistic identity; to use the terms of Rodriguez’s narrative, he need not choose between a public and a private self. Instead, he enthusiastically embraces his hillbilly roots because for him they are the foundation of authentic Americanness. Though he may have mastered the fundamentals of elite dining, he concludes his memoir by aligning himself with his community of origin: “we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth” (255). There is no agonizing self-interrogation here. To rephrase Rubin’s question, we might ask: is he a hillbilly or an American? The question is ridiculous

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because Vance operates from the privileged assumption, an assumption he projects onto readers as well, that the points of this duality are one and the same; he is of course both. The split identity of ethnic autobiographers is for Vance a false dichotomy. This key merger rests upon the silent but powerful force of whiteness.

The Paradox of the Scots-Irish: Minority and Mainstream Vance’s conflation of hillbilly and American identity reflects the racialized roots of his self-identification. Though he in no way denies his whiteness, he specifically categorizes himself among the Scots-Irish. This labeling neatly elides direct discussion of whiteness as it posits an ethnic whiteness that might be paralleled to various racialized identities. However, Vance’s conception of this population is troubling for a number of reasons, beginning with a lack of credible sourcing. In arguing that the “Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America,” Vance quotes “one observer” who writes, “In traveling across America, the Scots Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else” (3). A footnote attributes this quotation to a blog post for Discover magazine by the writer Razib Khan. However, Khan, who on his own website (razib.com) identifies himself as “a public intellectual without a portfolio” who has published for the New York Times, Slate, and the Guardian, is not the author of the quotation. The quotation comes from a comment made by a reader who goes by “Kilbourn” about a blog post written by Khan titled “The Many Americas.” This misattribution masks the suspect source of a quotation which for Vance is critical to his characterization of the Scots-Irish. Are the Scots-Irish really one of the most distinctive subgroups in America? If so, Vance might have relied on more reliable sources to make this claim. Certainly, the Irish constitute a unique subgroup with a cultural history and identifiable set of traditions (see Ignatiev). The same is also true of Scottish Americans. But Scots-Irish? What legacies from Scotland and Ireland adhere to this “subgroup”? How does this population meld the religious, social, and economic histories of the Scottish and the Irish? Vance does not provide answers to such concerns and obviates the need for greater clarity by offering himself as an authority on this population. He need not turn to academic sources—historians or sociologists, for example—presumably because he knows this group better

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than anyone. As a native son of this subgroup, he presents himself as an expert informant whose authority need not be interrogated. Again, this kind of self-fashioning is typical of ethnic autobiography. Richard Wright in Black Boy (1945) and Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior (1977) struggle with identifying themselves as both typical of their racial group and distinct from these communities. However, while Kingston makes a concerted effort to express a marked instability and even distrust of her own experiences, Vance writes with unquestioned authority. Kingston asks in the first chapter of her book, “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (5–6). Such skepticism and self-interrogation are contrary to Vance’s entire project. There is no space in his memoir for such uncertainties of memory and identity, no confusion about what is specific to ethnicity and culture, and what may just be the idiosyncrasies of a single family. Though Kingston inevitably became representative of Chinese American identity, this was never a position she sought and speaks more to mainstream desires to reduce racialized experiences to singular tropes and exceptional voices (see Kingston, Conversations). By contrast, Vance deliberately presents himself as a spokesperson. This purported authority reflects a racialized sense of entitlement. Where Kingston acknowledges the specificity of her personal experiences, Vance quickly generalizes from his observations to define an entire population and the crisis they embody. In noting these differences, I would like to emphasize that I do not doubt any of the factual information Vance provides about his family and personal story. What remains questionable is his description of and authority over a “distinctive subgroup.” Just as readers must be wary of understanding Chinese American experience solely from reading The Woman Warrior, we must be cautious in assuming that Vance is an expert in all things hillbilly or Scots-Irish. This caution and skepticism are crucial because since the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has, in the indelible words of Frank Rich, “become his people’s explainer-in-chief, the Ta-Nehisi Coates, if you will, of White Lives Matter” (“No Sympathy”). As a spokesperson for the white working class, Vance now habitually appears on political news shows and writes frequently for outlets such as the New York Times. In an admiring essay about the former president, Vance wrote of the hope that Obama inspired in him (Vance, “Barack Obama and Me”). He lightly castigated fellow Republicans who failed to recognize the basic decency of Obama and the inspiring message of his personal journey.

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It is one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man. Part of this opposition comes from this uniquely polarized moment in our politics, part of it comes from Mr. Obama’s leadership style—more disconnected and cerebral than personal and emotive—and part of it (though a smaller amount than many on the left suppose) comes from the color of his skin. (Vance, “Barack Obama and Me”)

Consistent with much of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s parenthetical aside here dismisses the importance of race to contemporary political dynamics. Moreover, Vance provides no support for his suggestion that Obama’s blackness was less important than other alienating factors about him. Here we must assume that our hillbilly spokesman naturally knows of what he speaks; here we must assume that white male authority is sufficient. Despite the fact that Vance makes no mention of the historical literature on the legacy of the Scots-Irish in the United States in Hillbilly Elegy, such sources do exist. In 2004, former US senator (D-VA) and secretary of the navy Jim Webb authored the most comprehensive of these texts, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, which argues that the Scots-Irish were instrumental in defining American working-class values and culture. Webb sets out in this book to chronicle the influence of a population that he believes is too often ignored, especially given current discourses about race and ethnicity: And the irony is that modern America has forgotten who they were (and are) so completely that it is rare to find anyone who can even recognize their ethnic makeup or identify their amazing journey and their singular contributions. It is no exaggeration to say that despite its obsession with race and ethnicity, today’s America has a hole in its understanding of its own origins. Not a small hole, as for instance the need to rediscover and recount some long-ago incident in an isolated backwater, but a huge, gaping vacuum that affects virtually every major debate where ethnicity plays a role. (13)

Like Vance, Webb has a troubling relationship to race and ethnicity. For him, the Scots-Irish are absolutely an ethnic group but one that has evolved to define the very ground of “modern America.” The cultural specificity that characterizes the Scots-Irish may have distinctive geographic and historical origins, which he ably chronicles in his book, but there is a conspicuous imbalance here. Other ethnic Americans do not evolve into defining America as a totality, and Webb provides no room for groups such as Asian Americans or Latinos to do so. While these other groups presumably remain unique ethnic entities, the Scots-Irish assume a totalizing position, taking on the mantle of national iden-

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tity denied to every other group. Webb and Vance seemingly want it both ways: for the Scots-Irish to be an ethnic subgroup subject to various forms of prejudice and privation, and to be understood as the foundation of American identity. They are at once minority and mainstream. This troubling conception of the Scots-Irish transforms whiteness into an overly expansive identity that assumes both dominant and imperiled qualities. Webb presents his book as a corrective to a misguided understanding of American history. By acknowledging the triumphs and contributions of a forgotten population, he seeks to chart a new future for the country: The contributions of this culture are too great to be forgotten as America rushes forward into yet another redefinition of itself. And in a society obsessed with multicultural jealousies, those who cannot articulate their ethnic origins are doomed to a form of social and political isolation. My culture needs to rediscover itself, and in so doing to regain its power to shape the direction of America. (8)

Webb’s hope echoes a dangerous form of white nationalism. His assumption that white men like himself are without the “power to shape the direction of America” and thus must “regain” (8) this power resonates with the racist and xenophobic rhetoric that propelled Trump into the White House. His campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” similarly assumes that our present is defined by loss. Trump effectively promised that only by returning to familiar figures of power, specifically white heterosexual men of considerable wealth, can the nation right itself. Webb, like Vance, seeks to establish a new narrative for the Scots-Irish, but one that is precariously balanced between ethnic marginalization and mainstream culture.

White but Not Privileged? Vance also employs the language of ethnic difference to define the unique contours of his memoir. He observes, “There is an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story” (2–3), suggesting that he too must be understood as an ethnic American. He continues, “In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone’s skin—‘black people,’ ‘Asians,’ ‘white privilege.’ Sometimes these broad categories are useful, but to understand my story, you have to delve into the details. I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast” (3). Despite the refreshing willingness of a white man to talk about race, Vance implies a number of disturbing conclusions in this passage. Though he concedes that racial categories can

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“be useful,” he suggests that they offer limited ways of seeing the world. In particular, the notion of “white privilege” becomes suspect when trying to understand the particularities of his experience. Although Vance does not explicitly deny having or benefiting from white privilege, he implies that those identified as “hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash” (3) are best characterized by their poverty and pessimism, not by any totalizing position of privilege. Ultimately, they are not like other whites. Moreover, though he warns that broad categories do not capture the nuance of individuals, he effectively stereotypes WASPs of the Northeast. Not all white people from New England read the New York Times and attend Ivy League schools, and more important, not all WASPs of the Northeast are wealthy. Poor whites exist in every region of America, and white privilege structures all their lives, from Massachusetts to Mississippi. Vance wants to claim that his beloved hillbillies are a distinctive ethnic group, but what is culturally unique about them? He explains that they distrust out­ siders, especially those who talk differently, but how do hillbillies talk? Do they have a dialect comparable to the linguistic sophistication found in African Amer­ ican vernacular? (see Rickford and Rickford). He lingers on the pronunciation of such words as “minnows,” “hollow” and “Mamaw” (Vance admonishes that these are correctly pronounced “minners,” “holler” and “ma’am-aw”), but these deviations hardly constitute a unique linguistic pattern. Similarly, what foods from Scotland and Ireland have evolved to become staples of the hillbilly diet? Vance recalls that at his family’s ancestral home in Kentucky, “we’d eat scrambled eggs, ham, fried potatoes, and biscuits for breakfast; fried bologna sandwiches for lunch; and soup beans and cornbread for dinner” (18). Although this is certainly a distinctive diet, what ethnic component might we identify here? It is critical to point out that Vance notes in the sentence that immediately precedes this description, “Jackson [the town in Kentucky where his grandparents live] taught me that ‘hill people’ and ‘poor people’ usually meant the same thing” (18). What distinguishes Vance’s diet is not his ethnicity but his poverty. This dangerous conflation suggests that poverty is an ethnic characteristic when in fact it is an economic one. Ethnicity refers to a group that shares a common culture, religion, language, or origin. Vance is interested in describing the lives of working-class whites from the Rust Belt. This is indeed a unique population, but calling it an ethnic subgroup requires more consideration. Ethnic whites certainly exist in the United States: the descendants of Irish, Greek, and Jewish immigrants have all established unique cultural traditions, as have recent émigrés from Russia and various Eastern European countries. Webb’s study of the Scots-Irish is helpful here as he defines this group largely through its commitment to personal independence. However, in emphasizing this

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characteristic, he neatly sidesteps the ways in which the terms of ethnicity are not typically applied here: “In their insistent individualism they are not likely to put an ethnic label on themselves when they debate societal issues. Some of them don’t even know their ethnic label, and some who do know don’t particularly care” (9). Scots-Irish are both ethnically distinct and too independent to cater to such labels. Once again, Vance and Webb position the Scots-Irish as both ethnic and universal, a kind of marginalized majority. Vance’s hillbillies are also characterized by their insistent individualism, but in his description, independence breeds a troubling insularity and suspicion of others: “We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.” Vance’s description of the Scots-Irish demonstrates that this subgroup is not so narrowly conceived as he suggests. He extols the “intense sense of loyalty” exhibited by this population, but this loyalty has a specific reach. It involves “a fierce dedication to family and country” (3). The country or nation is presumably figured here as comprised of other like-minded, or rather likeappearing, people. As in Webb’s book, Vance’s description of “one of the most distinctive subgroups in America” implies a dangerous undercurrent of white nationalism. By claiming the nation as its natural extension, this population expresses a noted hostility to anyone marked by otherness. Whiteness here encompasses the totality of the country. Vance’s characterization of difference as located in how others “look,” “act,” or “talk” conveniently obviates any explicit discussion of race, religion, or color. Vance extols the “fierce dedication to family and country” of his people without interrogating the bigotry and hatred this loyalty can engender. And once again though a professed “hillbilly at heart,” Vance proves himself to be quite removed from their fundamental values. While hillbillies are in part defined by their resistance and suspicion of others, Vance is married to Usha Chilukuri Vance, a woman he met at Yale Law School. Early in his description of life at Yale Law School, Vance mentions “the supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants” (200), a woman he meets in a constitutional law seminar. Readers may later infer that this is Usha, but Vance does not directly clarify this connection. Although her Sanskrit first name suggest that she is not white, Vance makes no specific mention of her racial or ethnic identity. Instead he notes, “She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful” (209). Vance’s description universalizes her talents and traits, deracializing her to suggest that any differences of culture or background are incidental.

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He even recalls having joked “with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel” (209). The reference to Rand, a beloved writer among many young conservatives, signals to Vance’s readers that despite her odd name, Usha is more than acceptable; she is transcendent. But if Vance is a true hillbilly, how did he overcome his suspicion and even disdain for a person so different from himself ? Vance provides no such discussion, and readers are never certain of Usha’s background. Instead, he frames their differences primarily as based in the kind of family in which they were raised. Whereas Vance is the emotionally troubled child of a single mother, Usha offers the stability and maturity of an intact nuclear family and warm extended family. In describing their relationship, Vance confesses to running away from conflict rather than confronting their problems because he is scarred from “old demons” (23). Such differences in emotional responses are meaningful, but Vance carefully frames them as the product of family history, not of race or culture. Providing details into the inevitable conflicts and cultural discoveries that he encountered with Usha would have done much to demystify the otherness that hillbillies seem to project onto unfamiliar people. But rather than delve into such complexities, Vance prefers to simplistically align himself with hillbilly ways even as he has clearly rejected them. To his credit, Vance bemoans the insularity of his beloved hillbillies. He notes, “We’re more socially isolated than ever, and we pass that isolation down to our children” (4). Notably, Webb also warns against “a form of social and political isolation” (8). However, for Webb this is an isolation fostered by ignorance of the glorious history of the Scots-Irish. In both cases, isolation is born of a failure to understand the importance of the foundational contributions this form of whiteness has engendered. Vance is ultimately less concerned than Webb about the roots or causes of this social isolation, or with how this quality leads to detrimental outcomes. Instead, he quickly pivots to the consequences of poverty and the destructive mind-set he observes among his peers. Vance argues that the crisis he observes in his hometown, ravaged by deindustrialization and drug addiction, is not a matter that improved economic opportunities alone can remedy. Such an observation troubles his earlier conflation between poverty and ethnicity. To make this key point about the importance of individual agency to social success, Vance cites an emblematic coworker at a tile warehouse who constantly missed work, arrived late, and took excessively long bathroom breaks. When this man was fired, he complained that “something had been done to him,” as if this layabout was an innocent victim. Vance concludes, “There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a

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willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” Vance is absolutely correct to bemoan the “lack of agency” demonstrated by his coworker, but what accounts for his behavior and his seemingly irrational conclusion? What explains his refusal to take responsibility for his own actions? Vance’s former coworker had a girlfriend with a baby on the way. He had, as Vance notes, “every reason to work” but “carelessly toss(ed) aside a good job with excellent health insurance” (7). Why? What explains this self-destructive behavior? Why does the man blame everyone else but himself ? The answer lies in part with the racialized vocabulary that Vance rejects pages earlier: white privilege. White privilege is not solely applicable to WASPs of the Northeast. White privilege also adheres to Vance’s hillbilly brethren with their thirteen-dollars-an-hour jobs at the tile warehouse. His coworker exclaimed that something had been done to him even though he was the one who arrived late and took three or four bathroom breaks a day. And, in fact, something had been done to this man, something which Vance largely ignores. Though he aims to take seriously the concerns of a neglected population, he fails to listen closely to his former coworker’s lament. What, then, has this man suffered? How can he be understood as the victim in this situation? To begin, it bears noting that Vance does not specify the race of his former coworker. Readers know he is white because Vance identifies him as part of his cultural tribe and also because his racial identity is not defined. The text endorses the assumption that whiteness is the norm. This silence works to obscure the import of race to the man’s response. Vance is as blind to the racial significance of the man’s response as he is to whiteness in general. And yet whiteness clearly defines the incident and Vance’s identification with the man. Linda Martín Alcoff explains that historically whites in the United States have eschewed class identification in favor of a collective racial identity that breeds a sense of supremacy and entitlement: “White political attitudes have been disposed toward a communitarianism based on race rather than a solidarity based on class. This translates into an assumption by poor whites that they are entitled to a share of the fat of the land in a way others are not” (11). This observation helps clarify the situation of Vance’s former coworker. He can no longer assume that he can reap rewards solely derived from his racial identity. This is not to suggest that whiteness was ever an absolute assurance of a good job. Rather, what matters here is the assumption at work in his coworker’s mind-set: that he deserves a salary regardless of how he acts. This mind-set exemplifies the sense of entitlement often linked to white privilege. Dalia Rodriguez explains that “this reaction is based on White privilege that supports the idea that rewards are somehow white rewards to begin with” (499). Something has indeed

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been done to this man. He has been denied the privileges of whiteness and the material rewards he can expect simply from his racial identity. Though this was never a just expectation, he has indeed suffered a significant loss. There is a complex dynamic at play in a pattern that Vance witnesses again and again. However, his analysis abruptly ends with his critique of “a lack of agency” as he effectively refuses to explore the roots of entitlement underpinning his coworker’s reaction. He concludes his introduction by stating, “I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism” (7–8). But why shouldn’t race be part of our understanding of his hillbilly heritage? Why can’t whiteness, its privileges and prerogatives, be included in this story? By offering a narrative that largely avoids the language of race, Vance reifies the standardization of whiteness—that is, the assumption that Americanness equates to whiteness and race is only a concern for people of color. There are moments in the text that suggest Vance benefits from white privilege, but he does not cast these encounters as racial. When Mamaw’s lung collapses and she enters a coma, he speeds home from his marine base. He describes being pulled over by a male police officer in West Virginia for going ninety-four miles per hour. After Vance explains the reason for his hurry, the officer “told me that the highway was clear of speed traps for the next seventy miles, after which I’d cross into Ohio, and that I should go as fast as I wanted until then” (168). Could the officer be anything but white? While Vance shares the anecdote as if to suggest that Mamaw deserves any kind of rule breaking, the ramifications of this incident are significant. Vance proceeds to drive over a hundred miles per hour until the Ohio border, endangering countless lives, including his own. And Vance makes use of shared white male power without ever recognizing it as such. This episode suggests Vance’s blindness to his own racial investments and the ways in which they quietly structure and support his life choices. A similar dynamic is at work when Vance conducts a job search in his final year of law school. In this process, he discovers what he calls “social capital,” or the ways in which “networks of people and institutions around us have real economic value.” He further observes, “They connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information. Without them, we’re going it alone” (214). Vance then explains that he learned this important lesson “the hard way” in one of his final interviews. When asked a “softball” question, why he wanted to work for a given law firm, Vance erupts with “I don’t really know, but the pay isn’t bad! Ha ha!” (214–15). Although he is

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certain he will not get the job with this truly awful answer, one of his recommenders pushes his candidacy and he is ultimately offered the position. Nothing about this anecdote suggests that Vance has learned anything “the hard way.” The job is his whether he performs well in the interview or not. He credits his success to the fervor of his recommender, but the hiring partner who interviewed him may also have been satisfied with his venal answer. Perhaps the lesson here is that white men need not be anything special. Vance cannot know for certain what was the secret to his success, but his refusal to even consider how his racial identity factored into his “social capital” demonstrates a troubling lacuna.

The Limits of Class While race is continually undermined in the text, class becomes the focal point of Vance’s analysis. He identifies poverty as a family tradition for hillbillies, but his personal and familial history belies this simplistic description. His grandparents left Kentucky for Ohio to work for Armco, a large steel company. There they had their first child, Vance’s Uncle Jimmy, who described his upbringing as part of “a typical middle-class life” (33). All three Vance children attended “modern high schools,” not “one-room schools of the hills” (36). Nothing in these descriptions suggests privation or even financial worry. But Vance explains that a cultural unease set in: Mamaw was expected to cook dinner, do laundry, and take care of the children. But sewing circles, picnics, and door-to-door vacuum salesmen were not suited to a woman who had almost killed a man at the tender age of twelve. Decades later she would remember how isolated she felt in the slow suburban crawl of midcentury Middletown. Of that era she said with characteristic bluntness: “Women were just shit on all the time.” (34)

There are a number of elements operating in this description, not all of which explain the cultural divide that Vance proposes as key to his grandparents’ alienation in Middletown, Ohio. Understandably, Mamaw is not the type for sewing circles and picnics, but the gender expectations described here would hardly be any different in Jackson. In fact, once the family returns to Kentucky, Mamaw continues to take on all the child-rearing, suggesting that key gender dynamics persist across both locations. Her remark that “women were just shit on all the time” applies to an era, not to a geographic or cultural location. Sexism is hardly unique to hillbilly or suburban life. What, then, is the cultural divide that marginalizes his grandparents from the middle-class families of Ohio?

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How does a family tradition of poverty impede their ability to enjoy the fruits of a middle-class life? To highlight his grandparents’ marginalization, Vance describes a striking episode in which his young Uncle Jimmy played with a toy airplane in a pharmacy and was then told to leave by a store clerk. Outraged by this petty injustice, Mamaw and Papaw storm into the store, smash the toy, and tear items off the shelves. Papaw threatens the clerk while Mamaw yells, “Kick his fucking ass! Kick his fucking ass!” (34). The scene is a vivid reminder of the outsize personalities of Vance’s grandparents, and it plays as a vivid piece of family lore. But poverty is not the problem here. Although the clerk may believe that Jimmy is poor and liable to theft, the outrageous response of his parents does not hinge on their poverty, perceived or not. Mamaw and Papaw in fact are not poor, and it is not clear that Jimmy was targeted by the clerk for his perceived poverty or more specifically because he was a hillbilly. The incident is not clearly indicative of poverty of any kind nor of a cultural divide. What it does highlight is that Vance’s grandparents are violent to the point of being unhinged. Vance shares this anecdote with more humor than concern, concluding, “That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid” (40). The absence of any critique or condemnation of this behavior demonstrates Vance’s failure to meaningfully wrestle with the culture he both loves and bemoans. Mamaw and Papaw may have felt horribly displaced and socially adrift by living in Ohio, but Vance does not here demonstrate such a claim. Instead his stories affirm that more than class and culture is at work here. What explains their furious violence? Vance with all his native expertise does not offer any insight but instead seems quietly proud of this outrageous overprotection. Moreover, it is worth noting that the perceived slight Mamaw and Papaw register from the store clerk is commonplace for African Americans, who are routinely surveilled in stores. However, it is simply unimaginable for Black parents to return to a store where their child has been ejected for suspect behavior and enact such a scene. Police would no doubt be called, and the entire family would likely be arrested. This difference again highlights the tacit white privilege operating throughout the text. Though Mamaw and Papaw’s behavior is far from acceptable, it is made possible by their whiteness. Repeatedly in Hillbilly Elegy, the problem is not poverty. The problem is a tendency to immediately turn to violence. Despite his acclaimed hillbilly credentials, Vance does not grow up poor. The first father figure he remembers, his stepfather Bob, remains married to his mother until he is in middle school. Bob is described as “making a good salary” (63), and with his mother employed

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as a nurse, the family brings in a combined income in excess of $100,000. This places Vance well above the middle class in the final decades of the twentieth century. As with his explosive, middle-class grandparents, the greatest challenge that his mother faces is her own violent, combative self, not the threat of penury. Vance recounts habitual acts of physical violence that leave him a nervous, troubled child. After a particularly terrifying encounter, Vance’s mother is brought to court. Though she retains custody because he lies rather than admit the ways in which she threatened his life, Vance explains that there was a new understanding in place allowing him to spend as much time as he liked with his grandparents: “If Mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun. This was hillbilly justice, and it didn’t fail me” (78). Again, Vance seems to take pride in his family’s violent code of honor, and again, poverty is not the root of his family’s difficulties. What, then, explains the crisis that Vance describes among his people? Certainly, poverty is endemic to much of Appalachia, and drug addiction remains an insidious problem among the white working class. However, the violence that characterizes much of Vance’s upbringing suggests an unacknowledged rage, the roots of which remain opaque. Early on in his memoir, Vance cites a recent academic paper on Appalachian Americans (see Markstrom, Marshall, and Tryon), which he says concludes that “hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending other truths exist.” Vance says that, according to the paper, such strategies “significantly predicted resiliency,” but as he notes, they also make “it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly” (20). True to form, Vance proves to be uncommonly resilient. He defies the cycles of abuse, addiction, and abandonment that characterize much of his early home life to become a nationally recognized writer, successful lawyer, and happily married dog owner; the American Dream is his, the reward of his hard work and rugged individualism. But Vance’s resilience may be borne on the denial or at least repression of certain uncomfortable truths. Despite his best efforts to avoid or dismiss the role of race in his life, Vance remains a white man in a white man’s world. Despite his humble upbringing, he has reaped the rewards of white privilege and benefited from a society that still favors the success of men. By failing to recognize such entitlements, Vance has produced a memoir in which, true to his Appalachian roots, he has failed to look at himself honestly. To confront and reverse the crisis he observes, Vance and others need to first acknowledge how the value and nature of whiteness has changed in the United States. Hillbillies are both privileged and imperiled, both dominant and neglected. Understanding these paradoxes

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involves the hard work of reckoning with racialized rage. Only by recognizing how the social construction that is whiteness has impacted this population can remedies be meaningfully considered for a crisis that is only worsening. Works Cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. The Future of Whiteness. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015. Garner, Dwight. “Six Books to Help Understand Trump’s Win.” New York Times, November 9, 2016. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kingston, Maxine. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. Edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998. Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International, 1977. Markstrom, Carol A., Sheila K. Marshall, and Robin J. Tryon. “Resiliency, Social Support, and Coping in Rural Low-Income Appalachian Adolescents from Two Racial Groups.” Journal of Adolescence 23 (2000): 693–703. Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Fatherr: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Times Books, 1995. Rich, Frank. “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly.” New York, March 20, 2017. http://nymag .com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly.html. Rickford, John R., and Russell J. Rickford. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. Danvers, MA: Wiley and Sons, 2000. Rodriguez, Dalia. “The Usual Suspect: Negotiating White Student Resistance and Teacher Authority in a Predominantly White Classroom.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9, no. 4 (August 2009): 483–508. Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam, 1983. Rubin, Steven J. “Ethnic Autobiography: A Comparative Approach.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 8, no. 4 (1981): 75–79. Vance. J. D. “Barack Obama and Me.” New York Times, January 2, 2017. Vance. J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. Webb, Jim. Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: HarperPerennial, 1945.

Indians in Monumental Places Heid Erdrich and Jeff Thomas Laura J. Beard

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uring the divisive years of the Donald Trump presidency (2017– 2021) in the country called the United States, national monuments were increasingly recognized as sites for public reckoning with present and past injustices. Recognizing the need to “transform the nation’s commemorative landscape by supporting public projects that more completely and accurately represent the multiplicity and complexity of American stories,” the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation committed 250 million US dollars to the Monuments Project in October 2020. The foundation underscores the complicated role of monuments in our societies, noting that monuments too often lift up the stories of those who are seen, dominate the stories of those who are unseen, and offer incomplete accounts of the country’s past. When monuments tell only select stories of certain members of a nation, overlooking the lives and contributions of the multitudes and the layered multiplicities of and on those lands, the narratives created fail to reflect the lives lived and lost on those lands. The Mellon Foundation’s five-year project is intended to broaden our understanding of commemorative spaces in the United States and how we define the concept of commemorative spaces, so that they include not just statues, plaques, or historical markers but also storytelling spaces and “ephemeral or temporary installations.” This chapter looks at such commemorative spaces: the storytelling space of Heid Erdrich’s poetry in National Monuments (2008, winner of the Minnesota

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Book Award for Poetry 2009) and the photography of Jeff Thomas. Long be­ fore the Trump presidency or the Monuments Project, Erdrich and Thomas were both lifting up stories of who is visible, who is not visible, and how the national monuments most commonly seen in the United States and Canada “propagate menacingly incomplete accounts” of those countries’ past (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Careful attention to their work helps untie us from false narratives that we perpetuate at the basis of our nation’s formation. Their work helps us see how, until we stop telling those false stories, we cannot open up the spaces for other stories, other bodies, other ways of being and knowing. As artists from sovereign Indigenous nations (Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and Iroquois/ Hadueosaunee/Six Nations) with ties to broad communities that cross the political border that currently delineates what is the United States and what is Canada, Erdrich and Thomas speak powerfully to those ways of being and knowing that were here before these countries currently called the United States and Canada were established, ways of being and knowing that are still here on these lands. I borrow the idea for my chapter title from Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), a text in which he discusses the expectations non-Indigenous people have of Indigenous peoples, expectations often confounded by the actual lives of Indian people. Deloria points to those cultural expectations as “products and tools of domination [, . . . ] an inheritance that haunts each and every one of us” (4). These expectations are “shorthand for the dense economies of meaning, representation, and act that have inflected both American culture writ large and individuals, both Indian and non-Indian” (11) in a country in which “popular culture works to produce—and sometimes to compromise—racism and misogyny” (11). By incorporating national monuments into their works, Erdrich and Thomas force their readers and viewers to recalibrate the assumed center of the national narratives we have so often and so uncritically absorbed, using their work to underscore the enduring colonial legacies behind the monumental stereotypes and disturbing discourses about Indigenous peoples that still need to be unsettled on these lands.

Questioning the Gravitational Centers National monuments and other commemorative spaces are part of that “set of objects and spaces that are beyond property and trade. They are the national treasures, sacred sites and texts, symbols that are a community’s gravitational centre” (Garneau 25). These “objects and spaces” are maintained by what David Garneau terms the “colonial gaze” (35), a gaze that “refus[es] the living, relational value of these entities” (25). A colonial gaze may seek to keep a statue

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of Robert E. Lee frozen in the values it held when it was erected, even though many people in the cultures around it no longer hold (or never held) those values. While monuments may be locations intended to help forge national identity, recent years have increasingly underscored the fissures in these Divided States on these sites and other national gestures and symbols. Monuments hold meaning, and we must face the meanings they embrace. Sometimes the meaning they hold is a celebration of white supremacy (K. Cox), honoring individuals from our past who upheld an undemocratic, unjust vision of the United States. From August 2017, when violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a white nationalist rally planned to protest the removal of the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks in 2020 and beyond, demands have increased to remove all Confederate monuments as well as the names on Army bases, schools, bridges, and more (see, e.g., Cox and Wiggins; Suerth). Colin Kaepernick and the other athletes kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality also remind us that there has never been a shared approach to national monuments and symbols. The violent storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a mob incited by thenPresident Donald J. Trump, marauders intending to disrupt the workings of Congress and “murder the media” (as was written on one of the doors of the building) again showed a deep divide in both how the population responded to the 2020 election results and how law enforcement officials responded to primarily white protestors at the Capitol in January 2021 versus primarily Black or Indigenous protestors during Black Lives Matters or Standing Rock protests in the previous years. Our “one nation, under God” has always been many nations, and the peoples of these nations have never responded univocally to national monuments. The land currently called the United States is a nation built on Indigenous lands, often by enslaved labor, where, from the beginning, settlers built their very sense of being “American”—that shared sense of identity and nationhood—from a common experience of displacing Indigenous peoples and overcoming Indigenous resistance that was promoted as “winning the West” (Ganteaume 10). Contemporary Indigenous artists brilliantly engage with some of “the national treasures, sacred sites and texts” that have been at the gravitational centers of the United States and Canada in order to untie imposed notions of national identity, to reveal fissures and fractures in the mythical, monological identity formation, and to reveal unsettling truths.1 Erdrich and Thomas challenge their readers and viewers to dislodge static meanings imposed by colonial

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structures and systems, using their poetry and photography to begin loosening the colonialist mind-set that has bound us for too long. In these fractious times, in these Divided States, their work offers important lessons.

Poetic Monuments Heid Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is an Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Turtle Mountain is in what are now the north-central portion of the US state of North Dakota and the southwestern portion the Canadian province of Manitoba, within the traditional territory of Plains Ojibwe, and part of the Métis homeland.2 She is the author of eight books of poetry and prose and the editor of the volume New Poets of Native Nations. Her newest book, Little Big Bully, published in 2020, won a National Poetry Series Award. Her 2008 book of poems National Monuments opens with a poem of the same name, the first in a section entitled “Grave Markers.” Here the national monuments are not the bronze bodies of Civil War generals that have populated the news feed as the centers of protests during the Trump administration, but rather “Grave houses, clan marked: / sturgeon scratched in pine, / simple lines of eagle and marten” (10–12). That “Other tribes carve headstones: / Six-Nations’ eel flips its infinity of tail” (14–15) pointedly reminds us of the many nations on this land. Rather than the “one Nation under God” to which we are taught to pledge allegiance in school, we are many nations, the Six Nations, the Anishinabek Nation, and many more. While the unnamed park official in the poem does not know what to do with the grave markers—“Some park official has kept up / what was meant to moss / and rot and fall” (7–9)—staining them “deck-red” (5) and shingling them “with asphalt” (6), Erdrich’s poem recognizes with delight the beauty, the complex genealogy, and the sacredness of the doodemic clan signs on the rough bark houses in the Anishinabek graveyard.3 Erdrich resignifies national monuments with the lines “Doodem signs, national markers / the body makes by being born, / that speak your only, only name” (19–21), so that the Indigenous person becomes a national marker, a marker of nationhood, of national sovereignty, by being born into the nation and into the clan. With the Indigenous nation made up of the people born into that nation, each Indigenous body is a signifier of nationhood with important stories to tell and to pass on. Indeed, in a 2010 essay published with poems from this collection in the journal Museum Anthropology, Erdrich notes that her book of poems started “as a consideration of sacred spaces and the risks we humans pose to the landscape. I was curious about what places Indigenous people would consider their national

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monuments” (249). Then her interest shifted to Indigenous bodies themselves as sacred spaces, as monuments. For Erdrich, “the body itself is the place of monument and has been treated as such by science as well as religion across cultures” (249). Her poetry explores what happens when the Indigenous body “has become a location, a site and a text to scholars” so that “what would seem a violation of sacred space . . . becomes a legitimatized and urgent need of study” (249). By publishing her poems and reflection within a special issue of an anthropology journal dedicated to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a US federal law intended to address the rights of Indian tribes, Native Hawaiian groups, and descendants to the “cultural items,” wherein “cultural items” can be defined as “human remains” and “associated funerary objects” (Bureau of Reclamation), Erdrich guarantees that her poetry will be read by scholars more prone to seeing Indigenous bodies as sites of study than to reading Indigenous-authored poetry. The two editors of Museum Anthropology, both curators of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, published their special issue hoping to “fill the void of anthropological dialogue in journals, providing fresh voices and perspectives, now 20 years past NAGPRA’s inauguration” (Nash and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 101). They see Erdrich’s poems as illustrating “that NAGPRA is not merely a question of law or science but a form of history-inthe-making, a process that engages pulsing questions of identity, culture, and spirituality” (Nash and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 102). As pulsing questions, the issues are alive, have vibrancy, like the sacred objects in the museums that NAGPRA was intended to address. Erdrich’s powerful poems “make us pause to consider—and then re-consider—what it means to be both a museum anthropologist and a human being” today (Nash and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 102). By taking up the self, the sovereign Indigenous self, as a national monument in these poems, Erdrich urges us (scientists, museum curators, and readers of poetry alike) to see the sacred objects in the museums as living beings, as relatives to be treated with honor and respect—indeed, to see all Indigenous persons as relatives to be treated with honor and respect. One of the included poems, “Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects,” gives museum directors pointed and funny advice on how to treat the objects in their care: If the objects emit music, and are made of clay or turtle shell, bathe them in mud at rainy season. Allow to dry, then brush clean

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using only red cloth or newspaper. Play musical objects from time to time. Avoid stereotypical tom-tom beat and under no circumstances dance or sway. (1–8)

The poem gives instructions that are very specific—what to do if the objects “are made of clay or turtle shell” (2), if they “were worn as funerary ornament” (9), if they “appear to be human bone” (41)—but are simultaneously hard to follow if one is not from the culture, immersed in that knowledge; for example, what type of red cloth: cotton, velvet, silk, handwoven? Museum directors are most frequently not from the cultures of the objects in their care, so even if they are well-intentioned, they may not have the knowledge to care for the objects in the culturally appropriate fashion. Erdrich’s guidelines tells us what to call brass bells (“shiny”) and shell ear spools (“handsome”) while “beads of all kinds can be told, / simply, that they are lookin’ good” (11, 13, 14–15). As the stanzas progress, readers learn not just that there are guidelines on how to take care of the sacred objects but also how to treat them in terms of personal interactions, how to admire and speak with them, make music with them, and give them offerings, ranging from the sacred to the humorous, as in the list of offerings for sacred objects “composed of wood, hair (human or otherwise) / and/or horn” which include: “offering smoke, / water, pollen, cornmeal or, in some instances, / honey, chewing gum, tarpaper / and tax incentives” (16–21). That unprepared readers have no idea how to negotiate this terrain is itself a reminder that they should not be treating sacred objects. When Erdrich writes that “If an object’s use is obscure, / or of pleasing avian verisimilitude, place rocks from its place of origin within its display case” (22–15) and proceeds to give further specific instructions about colors of the rocks to be used with the instruction that “All rocks must return to their place of origin / whenever they wish. Use only volunteer rocks, / or stones left by matridescendant patri-tribalists” (18–20), she further underscores the difficulties that those “experts” working in museums will face unless they are from the cultures of the objects they are holding. How will they know when the rocks want to return to their places of origin? Has it ever occurred to them that rocks might “want” anything? Do they consider rocks relatives? How will they know which rocks have volunteered to come? If we take the instructions seriously, the lessons are that most of us do not know enough to hold these sacred objects that come from various sovereign nations. These lessons then further underscore

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that there are multiple sovereign nations within the borders of what is considered the United States, each with linguistic, cultural, and political sovereignty and understandings of nationhood. That Erdrich’s poetry is published in a special issue dedicated specifically to the legacy of NAGPRA, a law which defines Indigenous bodies as cultural items, as “procurable culture” (Cole xix), is significant. Indigenous bodies have been and are treated differently than those of other groups, with it being “commonplace for public agencies to treat Native American dead as archaeological resources, property, pathological material, data, specimens, or library books, but not as human beings” (Trope and Echo-Hawk 127, emphasis in the original). Fractured relationships between anthropology museums and Indigenous communities exist in large part because museums have been positioned as authorities over Indigenous bodies, materials, and knowledges. Rather than approaching the objects taken into those museums from an anthropological viewpoint, Erdrich’s poems “voice the bones,” in a way that “sacred objects, human remains, and Native people are speaking subjects, alive and feeling and worthy of empathy and respect” (Poremski 2). Indeed, the bones in Erdrich’s “Guidelines” have a lot to say, if only we will listen. Erdrich’s revoicing is yet another interruption of the national narratives, another effort to untie us from the damaging narratives and structures imposed on these lands. Poems throughout National Monuments encourage us to listen to bones. Erdrich rejects the notion that they are destined to be archaeological specimens but rather recognizes them as family. In “eBay Bones,” she writes of a “skull [that] goes to the highest bidder” (1), the skull of a woman who “was not much older than me” (4). “My Beloved Is Mine” is a husband’s love poem to Toumai, “a carbon-dated fossil . . ., believed by many scientists to be the oldest known human,” according to the poem’s epigraph from a May 2006 Discovery News story (55). “Pharaoh’s Hair Returns” opens with another Discovery News epigraph, this time about locks of 3,200-year-old hair from the pharaoh Ramses II being returned to Egypt after being offered for sale on the Internet. Shock and dismay at an Internet auction of human remains ends a poem in which readers are advised: Love your own body every moment. It is only yours a while, then no longer Sovereign, if of interest to science, or souvenir seekers or other, as yet Unspecified, future uses. (22–26)

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In a world that does not respect human bodies, sacred or sovereign spaces, Erdrich lands on love as the answer. The powerful love Erdrich promotes in National Monuments is “fully contextualized within an awareness of the colonization process . . . an act of resistance . . . part of the spirit of resistance that has kept Indian people alive these last five hundred years as they have stood against the forces of colonization” (Womack 259). Erdrich shows that fully contextualized love for a sacred space in South Dakota in the poem “Mahto Paha, Bear Butte,” writing of Her blueness, her sleeping back, curled to offer retreat, respite from the dry land surrounding for miles and miles. Who wouldn’t want to pray here? (1–6)

Mahto Paha’s scenic, sacred, and inspirational space is underscored in the descriptions of the poem and in the question “Who wouldn’t want to pray here?”—a question repeated later in the poem as “But who wouldn’t put their church here?” (14). For Mahto Paha appeals not just to those who come to make offerings and share visions but those who “rally up from the interstate on hawgs, / bullying noise like a second cavalry / bound for a biker’s paradise” (9–11). This reference to the 500,000 motorcyclists, concert attendees, and street food fanatics who come to the Black Hills each year for the ten-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally erupts into the poem, like the bikers on their Harley Davidson motorcycles whose “Talk of tailpipes and chrome might drown / sacred words pine speak with wind” (12–13). While there have been conflicts between the Lakota, Cheyenne, and others who visit Mahto Paha for ceremonial reasons and those gathering for the Sturgis bike rally,4 Erdrich’s poem returns the focus to the power and beauty of Mahto Paha herself and her immutability, as she rests, “yawning” while others continue to gather “in the shadow of her curled form” (16). That the 2020 and 2021 Sturgis rallies became superspreader events during the COVID-19 pandemic only seems to underscore the division highlighted in Erdrich’s poem between the serene beauty of Mahto Paha and the bullying noise of those who interrupt the sacred site. It also underscores the ways in which responses to COVID became yet another flashpoint in these Divided States, with some states imposing restrictions, including mask mandates to curb the spread of the disease, while the Republican governor of South Dakota, for

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example, never did, choosing instead to continue to advertise for more tourism and to clash with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe in May 2020 for imposing restrictions on their own tribal lands. Land is also significant in the poem “Black and White Monument, Photo Circa 1977,” which centers on photographs themselves as monuments to our past. The opening lines, “Everything that ever happened / lies outside the white border / of this photo taken in the late 1970s” (1–3), underscore how photographs capture only specific moments of that past, small pieces that never tell the whole tale. Although the photograph itself may not be “one to put in an album or mount in a frame or ever look at again” (8), Erdrich does look at it again, here, at length and with compassion and love for the two young girls photographed, sitting on their grandpa’s land on a reunion weekend, holding babies, the “offspring of older cousins” (11). Thus, the poem provides the story of what is left out of the image, the way a family member does when looking through snapshots in a family album. As Erdrich writes of the photo and recalls the reunion weekend, the importance of the memory comes through: My grandparent’s land stretches beyond us, the real subject of the photo. The light on that land, beyond beautiful, went into me so young it became the color of all yearning, all rest to be hoped for, the face of heaven. Everything. (26–29)

The response to the photo is one of body and affect, as the photo takes her back to the land, to family, to connections with community. In triggering memories and connecting her to a particular place and time, the photo helps the poetic voice recall shared experiences and a fleeting friendship. The two girls in the photo “only knew each other those few hours / before and after the shutter snapped” (9–10). Indeed, it is “the indexical nature of the photo, its status as relic” (Hirsch, “Family Pictures,” 6) that makes the photo into a “Black and White Monument,” a monument to her grandparent’s land, to connections to family and community, to her “pony legs and long wings of bangs above a shoulder-length fall” of hair (23). It is a personal monument that becomes a national monument as it stands as a record of relationships, between generations, with the land, with the cast of light on that land at a particular time of day, with the lives lived in and with community on that land. This black-and-white monument is a moment of nation building and sovereignty, a moment caught in a photograph and captured in a poem. Susan Sontag has argued that “photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction and this link between photography and death

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haunts all photographs of all people” (70). There are notes of innocence and vulnerability in the photograph of the young girls, but it is what lies beyond the border of the frame—the land, the lives, the laughter—that matters. Love as an act of resistance permeates the poem. Indeed, love as an act of resistance permeates National Monuments, decolonial love that holds the promise “not only to chip away at the corporeal and emotional toll of settler colonialism as such, but also to gestate a wider set of worlds and ontologies, ones that we cannot know in advance, but ones that might make life into something more than a taxing state of survival” (Belcourt 4). Erdrich’s volume of poetry takes up national monuments and asks them do the work of decolonization needed in these divided states. Throughout her poetic text, Erdrich tackles many forms of monuments. She challenges the master narratives of national identity formation, rewriting major poets, so that Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright” becomes “The Theft Outright,” in a section called “American Ghosts,” a masterful poem in which the first three lines remind the readers, “We were the land’s before we were. / Or the land was ours before you were a land. / Or this land was our land, it was not your land” (31). This poem not only challenges Frost but also the national narrative of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” a song that children learn in school and that some people claim as an alternative national anthem to “The Star Spangled Banner.” But Erdrich reminds us that the land was already in relationship with other peoples before the arrival of those who sing this song so idealistically. “We were the land’s . . . or the land was ours.” It is less a matter of ownership than of reciprocal relationship and responsibility to the land, concepts erased in the dominant national narrative of the United States. In the last section National Monuments, Erdrich engages yet again anthropology and forensic science in the series of poems “Kennewick Man Tells All,” “Kennewick Man Swims Laps,” “Kennewick Man Attempts Cyber-date,” each of which begins with an epigraph from something in the press, usually from a forensic anthropologist.5 By engaging with the Kennewick Man as present in today’s world, by restoring agency and choice to an individual who has had agency and choice taken away in the colonial constructions of his identity (or lack thereof   ), Erdrich’s poems “assert a consciousness of land and ancestry, of community and kinship ties, of traditions and ceremonies, of survival and presence outside the colonist death narratives” (    Justice 159). Her poems offer what Christopher Teuton has called in another context an excellent “source of reflection on the responsibilities of being” (xiii). With each of these poems, Erdrich brilliantly resists the meanings that the popular press, anthropologists, and forensic science have imposed and proposes meanings generated from a

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powerful space of love “fully contextualized within an awareness of the colonization process” (Womack 259).

Monumental Photographs Iroquois photographer Jeff  Thomas similarly uses his photography as activism, staging interventions at monuments and other public spaces to attack the monumental landscape and to make his own mark on the landscape (Kazimi). He is known for mixing contemporary images with traditional images and, like Erdrich, for “pushing forms against one another” (Keith). Originally from Buffalo, New York, and the Six Nations Reserve in what is now southwestern Ontario, Canada, Thomas is internationally recognized for his work as both a photographer and a curator in which he creates “an image bank of [his] urban-Iroquois experience” and “re-contextualize[s] historical images of First Nations people for a contemporary audience” (     Jessup). Thomas’s multiple photographic series not only engage with national monuments but also with the monumental stereotypes created in the public view of Indigenous peoples, from Edward S. Curtis photographs,6 to sports team mascots, to the plastic figurines of Indians sold as children’s toys. Photography has been a way to address his feelings about living in a country that does not fully recognize him: You live in your own country and you don’t speak your own language and you don’t have your community there. That’s very frustrating. It just pisses me off that this is the way that it is. I mean, who says that you no longer have a right to have those things? And what I’ve found is that through photography I’ve found a way to deal with that, to rebuild that bridge, to find a way, to build a strategy for talking about those issues of alienation. (quoted in Kazimi)

Thomas is an Indigenous subject producing his own images, as a reminder of the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples to this land. In his well-known Bear Portraits series, Thomas photographs his son Bear in urban locations, usually in front of symbols of colonization—monuments, advertisements, or historical images of systemic racism. By placing Bear into these spaces, often wearing a T-shirt or baseball cap with a political message of Indigenous identity, the photograph is a statement, a way of creating conversations as well as a method of injecting Indigenous presence and vitality into a space from which it has been erased. Thomas affirms that the series is specifically intended to explore “the loss of male role models by using Bear as a marker of Indian-ness in sites where it does not exist” (    J. Thomas, “Bear Portraits”).7 Throughout the Bear Portraits series, we can see Thomas working to

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untie us from the narratives of anti-Indigenous racism built into the very structures of these monuments and build a different future and space for his son. The image Culture Revolution is of Bear at age seven in downtown Toronto. As Thomas writes: I noticed some graffiti on a brick wall we had just walked by, and decided to take a photograph of Bear in front of it as a memento portrait for him. The baseball cap Bear is wearing has a reproduction of Edward Curtis’s portrait of Two Moons, a respected Cheyenne leader who fought and defeated Custer at the battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. I was struck by the confluence of the image on the hat and the graffiti on the wall behind Bear. ( J. Thomas, “Bear Portraits”)

Bear looks directly at the camera, with his left hand resting against the brick wall and a knotted white plastic bag in his right hand. The child’s face is in shadow from the still-too-large cap that hints at the string of political apparel to come in the future portraits; the too-small sweatshirt covers a torso leaning up against the hard brick wall. The portrait Chinatown Riding the Dundas Street Car (1990) is a close-up shot of Bear, seated on the public transit car, with a Six Nations baseball cap on his head.8 The cap, like many of his articles of clothing in the Bear portraits, carries personal as well as cultural and political meanings and may be read differently by different viewers. For some viewers of the photo, perhaps for some of the persons riding with him on the Dundas streetcar or for those persons on the street in Chinatown, it is just a baseball cap. For others, particularly for members of the Six Nations confederacy, the words Six Nations and the image of the Great Tree of Peace have meaning. The significance of the cap, the historical and cultural codes embedded therein, can thus be both invisible and hypervisible, and it is that duality of invisibility and hypervisibility—of Indigenous peoples, places, and images—that Thomas plays with throughout his portrait series; indeed, what inspires his work. He started the portrait series with Bear “to pave a way for him to be able to negotiate his indigeneity within a culture of absence and invisibility” ( J. Thomas, “Ground Zero,” 181). To help create a way for his son to understand what it is to be an urban Indian, Thomas “decided then that [his] images would intervene in the city rather than simply respond or reflect it” ( J. Thomas, “Ground Zero,” 181). Bear becomes the personal monument that Thomas places into the urban environment, creating the future for himself and for his son that he would like to see. In the portrait, Bear looks out the window. For the viewer, Bear and the inside of the car are in focus, while the more crowded street outside the window is

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out of focus. Clearly, the photographer’s focus is on Bear, but the portrait also asks us, as viewers, to focus on Bear, to recenter our focus on the Indigenous young man, not on the inhabitants of the busy Chinatown, the majority of whom are ( presumably) not indigenous to this land. All of Thomas’s work asks us to refocus our gaze, our attention, our energy onto Indigenous bodies, Indigenous spaces, Indigenous issues. Thomas centers the national landscape around the Indigenous body. By the third photograph of the series, Little White Lies (1990), the political message is becoming more visible. Little White Lies started as a diptych of Bear standing in front of a grain elevator in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In the photo on the left, he stands facing the photographer, with his eyes closed, wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of Columbus and the caption “Founder of the New World.” The closed eyes reject the message printed on the T-shirt and, perhaps, the gaze of the viewer. In the photo on the right, his back is turned to the camera, showing off the back of the T-shirt, which reads, “Little White Lies.” The bold capital letters show underscore how “little white lies” are not so little, but rather are the dominant narratives of our nations, the false foundation tying together our states and provinces. The three words on the white T-shirt parallel the three-part, white grain elevator rising up behind Bear in the photo. The once-ubiquitous grain elevators across the prairies are themselves a particular kind of monument to settler colonization. Celebrated as a visual symbol in the prairies, grain elevators have been another kind of national monument to economic progress or strength, even referred to in religious and military terms as “prairie icons, prairie cathedrals or prairie sentinels” (Ross). Thomas recontextualizes these monuments, using his photos to decry the narratives of Columbus, western expansion, and progress as little white lies. Thomas’s later expansion of Little White Lies into a triptych, with the addition of a 2015 photo of the Columbus monument in Syracuse, New York, further underscores his critique of the Columbus narrative.9 This image can be read alongside Trackside (2007), which shows Bear holding onto a graffiti-covered railroad car. The grain elevators and the railways traditionally went together throughout the prairies, with the grain elevators built alongside the railways to hold the grain brought in by the local farmers in readiness to be loaded onto the railcars. While the railways and the grain companies celebrated commercial collaborations that served to tie together the farms, the railroads, and the markets, this photographic collaboration between Jeff  Thomas and his son Bear underscores that these monumental grain elevators and railroad lines were a method of asserting settler and

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corporate ownership over lands and resources already important to Indigenous peoples. In the Trackside portrait, Bear’s grip on the railcar is a precarious one. He holds on with his right hand, held slightly above and behind his head, with his body mostly turned away from the railcar. Unlike in the first Bear portrait, when he looked straight at the camera, here Bear looks down, toward the land, with his face obscured by both the black baseball cap and the black headphones he is wearing. Centered in the photo are the words on the railcar, “Doors Must Be Closed Before Moving Car.” As so often in Thomas’s photos, it is the detail—in this case, the words on the railcar—that tears open the work, revealing the flaws, fissures, and disparities that provoke us to think more about what is going on in the photo and in the false foundational myths at the base of our national narratives. That Bear is perilously holding on to a car closed to him, one that intentionally must be closed to him, serves as an indictment of the systemic racism in our society. Many of the Bear portraits are taken at specific markers of national identity. Indian Treaty #1 (1990) is set at Lower Fort Garry, Manitoba, where the original plaque noted that in the August 3, 1871, treaty, “the tribes surrendered all their rights to the lands. . . . This agreement ended the restlessness of the natives and left the way clear for peaceful settlement,” while the existing plaque “clarifies” this explanation by noting that “to promote peaceful settlement of the newly acquired western territories after 1870, Canada negotiated a series of treaties with the native peoples. Here, on 3 August 1871, the first of these treaties was signed by Mis-kee-ke-new, Ka-ke-ka-penais, Na-sha-ke-penais, Na-nawa-nanan, Ke-we-tay-ask, Wa-ko-wush and Oo-za-we-kwun, representing the Ojibway and Swampy Cree people of Manitoba, and Wemyss Simpson on behalf of the Crown. In return for reserves and the promise of annuity payments, livestock and farming implements, the Indians ceded the land comprising the original province of Manitoba” (Parks Canada Directory of Federal Heritage Destinations). The new plaque still presents a settler colonial standpoint: “peaceful settlement,” “newly acquired western territories,” “the Indians ceded the land” and the verbs describing treaties in their description all in the past tense. The plaque does not recognize treaties as living documents which impose obligations on all of us living on treaty lands. With a dual photo of Bear, facing first forward and then with his back to the camera (as he did in the earlier image with his T-shirt reading “Little White Lies”), the impression is that of Bear turning his back on the white lies told in the historical plaque. These photographs work to undo the monumental work of settler colonialism solidified in the historical plaques and monuments rejected within the frame.

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Slow Bull Revealed (1990) echoes the first Bear portrait, in that it is again a portrait of Bear facing the camera, with a graffiti-marked brick wall behind him. It might serve as an antidote to these “historical descriptions,” revealing the bull both in the historical plaques around Indian Treaty No. 1 and in the treaty itself. But Slow Bull Revealed is also a slow revealing of Slow Bull, as Bear pulls back his hoodie to reveal the painted image of the Lakota man previously photographed by Edward Curtis. As always in Thomas’s photographs, there are rich layers of meanings in the photographs and their relations with the captions. Thomas’s photographs and captions form “an act of word-image self-articulation, representing individual subjectivity as an expression of a network of times, places, and people” (Wong 8). Like other forms of visual autobiography, they “demand an intense engagement to read creatively and look mindfully” (Wong 9). In addition to the portraits placing Bear at historical sites, Thomas challenges images of Indians in popular and commercial culture. In How Do You Measure Up? (1994), Bear is again standing in front of a wall in Toronto, in front of a General Store advertising sign featuring an Indian male in a feathered headdress. Images of Indigenous peoples have routinely been used to sell products from cigarettes to sports utility vehicles, with white Americans developing the stereotypes, images, memorabilia and advertising for a white audience and consumer market (Merskin 160–61). Similarly, the ongoing controversy over the use of Indigenous names and images as sports mascots—with the most recent notable cases being the Cleveland and Atlanta baseball teams and the Washington, DC, football team, but with hundreds more at minor league affiliates, colleges, universities, high schools, and junior highs across North America— underscores how the use of these mascots and logos treats Indigenous peoples “as signs rather than as speakers, as caricatures rather than as players and consumers, as commodities rather than as citizens” (Strong 83). Indigenous people can continue to serve as mascots and advertising fodder precisely because “racism against American Indians is so intrinsically part of America’s political mythology” that most people don’t even see it (Roppolo 189).10 By placing his son in front of a sign that uses an image of an Indigenous male as an advertising gimmick, Thomas reminds viewers that Indigenous people are real flesh-andblood persons on this earth. How Do You Measure Up? becomes a two-pronged question. Indigenous people are always being asked to measure themselves up against the stereotypes of the Native Chief; Thomas asks the rest of us how we do on measuring and stereotyping others. Although Indigenous figures are sometimes used as mascots or advertising fodder, they are rarely the principal subjects of national monuments. Three of the Bear portraits engage with one of the only monuments in Ottawa that

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featured an Indigenous figure, albeit one kneeling at the base of the main figure, the Samuel de Champlain Monument. In Thomas’s F.B.I. Samuel de Champlain Monument (1996), F.B.I. is not the Federal Bureau of Investigation but rather the Full Blooded Indians featured on the long-sleeved T-shirt Bear wears in the photo. Champlain’s name and the date of 1613 (the year he explored the Ottawa River) are carved on the stone, but Champlain is not visible in the photo. The photo features Bear seated at the base of the monument, next to the statue of a kneeling Indigenous man. The statues of Champlain and the “Indian Scout” were both created by sculptor Hamilton McCarthy, but whereas the French explorer, mapmaker, and colonial administrator is named, the “Indian Scout,” like the “Chief ” in the General Store ad, is unnamed and without a tribal affiliation. The figure was originally intended to be kneeling in a canoe, representing the Indigenous peoples who helped the explorer navigate the Ottawa River, but the groups who fundraised for the sculpture ran out of money before the canoe could be made, so he was put kneeling at the base of the Champlain Monument (“Aboriginal Artists”). This subservient positioning contributed to the later removal of the sculpture.11 In Thomas’s Bear Portrait image, the Indian Scout is on one knee, looking out over Bear’s head into the distance, but his body turns slightly toward Bear. Bear, while facing the camera, also inclines his head slightly toward the man with the bow. The two Indigenous male bodies reach out toward each other, include each other, while the pointed exclusion of the French explorer is marked by his invisibility in the frame. Thomas returns to the Champlain Monument in Ottawa with Seize the Space: GPS Reading (2005). In the 1915 sculpture, Samuel de Champlain is standing holding an astrolabe, a period navigational instrument. In Thomas’s photo, Bear mimics the posture of the earlier explorer, holding a modern-day device. As the Bear Portraits series unfolds, with photographs taken over a series of years, the collaborative relationship between the father and son becomes clearer. As Thomas told the National Post in 2015, “When I made photographs, I wasn’t just making photographs of Bear for my work. It was a way of teaching him how to look at his relationship to the world around him” (“Jeff  Thomas’s Three Decades”). Bear Thomas deliberately chose his outfits on the days he knew his father would be taking photographs, selecting politically themed T-shirts. “When my dad was hunting for evidence of indigenous people in the urban landscape and not finding it, I was a way to inject that,” he told the National Post (“Jeff Thomas’s Three Decades”). Their collaborative work was a way of empowering Bear as he grew up, showing him the power he has on these lands, in

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these landscapes, so that Thomas’s Bear Portraits series can be read as another powerful act of decolonial love, one that “chip[s] away at the corporeal and emotional toll of settler colonialism . . . [and], gestate[s] a wider set of worlds and ontologies” (Belcourt 4). By engaging with these national monuments intended to aggrandize certain colonial “virtues” and legacies, Thomas challenges his viewers to read them another way. Thomas continues his engagement with Canadian national monuments with Good Friday (2010), in which we see an extreme close-up shot of Bear, in a Chicago Blackhawks ball cap and dark sunglasses, with the river and the Supreme Court of Canada grounds over his left shoulder. In the last portrait of the Bear series, Major’s Hill Park (aka—Major’s Hill Indian Reserve) with Apache Chief (2013), Bear is again in a black ball cap and dark glasses, again in front of buildings representing official Ottawa, the force of Canadian civilization. He holds his right arm up in a fist, mirroring the plastic Apache chief doll he holds in his left hand. The “Apaci Chief ” wording added via Photoshop onto his right arm highlights the ways in which Indigenous bodies have identities imposed upon them, literally being read by others at all times.12 In another context, Shari Huhndorf has argued that Indigenous women’s occupation of public space is “fraught with prior acts of containment” so that theater by Native women becomes a critical means “to engage gendered colonial narratives and to redefine women’s political identities” (118). Thomas’s occupation of these public spaces across Canada, the insertion of the Indigenous male body into the space of national monuments and urban streets, is also a critical means to engage the colonial narratives, to redefine the political identities of Canada, and to highlight the complexities of urban male Indigenous ex­­ perience. The collaborative work of father and son challenges settler viewers like myself to unsettle our gaze, to break us from what Garneau calls a kind of “scopophilia, a drive to look, but also . . . an urge to penetrate, to traverse, to know, to translate, to own and exploit” (23). Our previous states of “knowledge” become untied. Thomas’s engagement with monuments reminds us that these too are sites where our diverse knowledges and lived bodily experiences come into play, where it becomes obvious that we have many “beliefs, relationships of kinship, relations with nature, and ways of living” (Arias 1). As an adult, Jeff  Thomas’s son, now known as “Bear Witness, aka Ehren Thomas,” is a multimedia artist, DJ, and filmmaker, and a founding member of the well-known music group A Tribe Called Red and The NDN Talent Collective. In his autobiographical artist statements, Bear has written of the formative nature of working with his father in this portrait series:

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Some of my earliest memories are of my father’s work. . . . Sometimes it feels like I grew up alongside it; it’s the closest thing I have to a sibling. When I was a boy, I didn’t always know why my dad wanted to take all of these photos of me and I’m not sure he always did himself. But as I grew up, so did the purpose behind the photos he took of me. I became more aware of what my father was doing with these photos. I started to understand my role in my father’s work and connected to the performative nature of being his subject. When I decided to start my own art practice, it was my father who pointed me back in the right direction. So to say that Jeff  Thomas’s work has influenced me is a huge understatement. He jokes that he raised the artist he needed and I try to live up to that every day. (E. Thomas, artist statement in Coyote School )

Both men speak eloquently of their work together in the photo series, with the Bear Portraits series functioning, in part, as a set of self-representations, brief glimpses into a life or a self, often providing “an epiphany or brief insight” ( Wong 2). Not all the monuments with which Jeff  Thomas engages are physical monuments in public spaces. As a curator, he has long been interested in the archival images of Indigenous peoples, for as he notes the “photographs, paintings, and films produced by white society has always left me feeling uneasy due to the silences coming from these images” ( J. Thomas, “My North American Indian”). Not accepting that silence, he creates conversations through the series in which he pairs historical photos from Edward S. Curtis with contemporary photographs of his own, portraits which speak back to the Curtis portraits that themselves have gained a monumental status in their ability to freeze “the proud, sorrowful, and romantic Indian in the American imaginary” (Glass 129). While Curtis clearly saw and presented Indians as already relics of a vanquished past, through the prevailing views of the culture of his time, Thomas is interested both in what the subjects of those photos were thinking and in what conversations we might have with them today. By taking images from a historical archive and making them part of his own photographic practice, Thomas awakens images that have been “in a state of sleep” (quoted in Payne and Thomas 124). Thomas’s photographic interventions dislodge stereotypes, foster the development of fresh perspectives, and encourage dialogue around hard topics connecting the past and the present. In his My North American Indian Volume 21 series, Thomas creates two- or three-part photo displays, either pairing a Curtis photo with one of his own or sometimes sandwiching a Curtis photo between two other photos, as he does

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with Indian Families. This three-part image incorporates the Curtis portrait of Yellow Bone Woman and family, Arikara Tribe, c. 1908, in the center; with another historic photo from the Glenbow Museum of Jim Abikoki and family, in front of the fence surrounding the Anglican Mission on the Blackfoot (Siksika) Reserve, c. 1900, Southern Alberta, on the left; and his own contemporary color photo of Ron Good Eagle Family, taken at a powwow in Bismarck, North Dakota, with a van and a row of “porta-potties” in the background, on the right. While each photo portrays an Indian family, their grouping together suggests broader family relations, an intergenerational relationship “as the past continues to inform the present” ( J. Thomas, “Emergence,” 228). The Curtis Yellow Bone Woman and Ron Good Eagle Family are together as a diptych as part of Thomas’s Rebinding Edward Curtis’ “The North American Indian” series (now in the University of Toronto Art Collection, accession number 2006–056). The Curtis photographs present Indigenous peoples as relics from the past. Through the decolonial work of reclaiming, regrouping, and reframing those Curtis photographs alongside his contemporary photographs, Thomas reverses the gaze, underscoring the sovereignty of the Indigenous subjects and their relations as kin. Thomas enfolds the older Curtis photos back into relationship, rebinding them to contemporary families, reminding us of our responsibilities to each other, to our ancestors, and to the lands. Indeed, the family gathering within the space of Thomas’s work is a theme that runs throughout his photographic and curatorial work and exemplifies Sarah Parsons and Jennifer Orpana’s claim for the “potential for subjects to be empowered through engagements with family photography” (95). His work reframes and reconceptualizes the older photographs of families by placing them in family album–style relationships with newer photographs of Indigenous experiences of family and Indigeneity. Thomas’s photos of powwow dancers, taken before they begin to dress for the dance and then again in their full regalia, in order to document their transformation, marks another kind of monument. Thomas has described these photos of powwow dancers as a “kinetic monument” to survival (quoted in Francis 18). While Curtis was famously careful to photograph his subjects without showing any aspect of the contemporary world that could detract from his vanishing-race narrative, Thomas photographs the powwow dancers on the powwow grounds, so that the pickup trucks, food trucks, and trash cans all provide evidence that Indigenous people live, eat, dance, and continue their tribal cultural traditions in the contemporary world, not in a mythic past. Thomas’s photographic monuments point to “complex lineaments of personal and cultural identity that can never be captured by dichotomies built around crude

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notions of difference and assimilation, white and Indian, primitive and advanced” (Deloria 14). Thomas’s camera finds Indians in expected and unexpected places, reminding us of their active, vibrant, continuing presence on these lands. Jeff  Thomas’s brilliant photographic work is a shot of the eye, one that asks us to see, to respond through body, affect, and intellect, following Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of literary studies and the visual arts in which she writes that “seeing is a form of wounding and being wounded, a ‘shot of the eye,’” so that “to see, to be a spectator, is to respond through body and affect, as well as through the intellect” (“Editor’s Column,” 1211). In another context, José Esteban Muñoz uses the term disidentification to speak to the “survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continually elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (4). Thomas’s photographic practice and critical curatorial eye highlight and celebrate the existence of Indigenous subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative non-Indigenous citizenship. His reframing of monuments, be they the physical monuments or the visual monuments created in and by the Curtis photographs, are a large part of that negotiation. Thomas’s own relationship to monuments and to symbols of citizenship has always been fraught, as we see in this story from Thomas in writer-director Ali Kazimi’s documentary film Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas: I remember being in fifth grade in school and refusing to stand up in assembly for “The Star Spangled Banner” and the Pledge of Allegiance. I couldn’t do it. There are my teachers and here is this kid who is, like, twelve, thirteen years old putting on this act of defiance, and finally what they said is, “Jeff, you don’t have to say the Pledge of Allegiance, you don’t have to put your hand over your heart, but please stand up.”

Protesting the Pledge of Allegiance is not a new act. A twelve-year-old Iroquois boy in Buffalo, New York, in the late 1960s refusing to stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance did not make national news. That the refusals of Kaepernick and other National Football League players in more recent years has reveals how power, politics, wealth, celebrity, and the color of one’s skin are always already tied together in our Untied States. * * * National monuments are intended to bind people, and generations, together, often through meanings that are the creations and curations of colonialism.

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Events in recent years, including the storming of the US Capitol by an insurrectionist mob carrying Confederate flags and raising other alternative (Trumpian) flags, have underscored the divisive nature that national monuments, symbols, and naming practices have always held in the United States and Canada.13 Curtis’s photographs and the nineteenth-century ethnographic project to which they responded and contributed—an ethnographic project that too often continues to influence anthropology and museum studies today—were intended to underscore the supposed inferiority of Indigenous peoples, helping to justify their captivity on reservations or their erasure from the world. In contrast, Thomas’s photography and Erdrich’s poetry highlight the active, vibrant presence of contemporary Indigenous people in the world today, drinking a Diet Pepsi on powwow grounds, gathering at family reunions, posing by national monuments, maybe even cyberdating. Their works help bring Indigenous bodies, families, lives, and love—in the fullest, most contextualized, decolonial sense of the word—back into the picture, each poem and photo untying us just a little from the knots of colonialism and offering alternative ways of seeing our relationships to each other and to these lands. Notes 1. National can mean both “of or relating to a nation” (as in “national boundaries” or “the national flag”) and “belonging to or maintained by the federal government,” as in “the National Museum of American History.” Merriam-Webster, s.v. “national (adj.),” accessed March 1, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/national. Most people expect national to refer to, say, the United States or Canada, but nation has multiple meanings, and we have many nations on these lands. Separatist movements and referendums around the world—in Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland, to name but a few examples—all complicate our notions of nation. When we speak of the nation in relation to the United States or Canada, the term has territorial, political, and legal meanings; an Indigenous nation may have those meanings but also include crucial kinship and cultural dimensions. These myriad and complex meanings of nation are always at play in the rich works of Erdrich and Thomas. 2. The Ojibwe are an Anishinaabe people traditionally living in what is currently considered the northern midwestern part of the country called the United States and the southern part of the country called Canada. 3. Doodem is the stem word for “clan” or “totem” in Ojibwe. “There is no simple independent word for clan, totem. A personal prefix goes with the dependent noun stem /=doodem-/ clan to make a full word: nindoodem, indooden, ndoodem ‘my clan’ (1s–3s).” The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, s.v. “doodem,” accessed March 1, 2022, https://ojibwe.lib .umn.edu/main-entry/doodem-nad.

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4. See Brokaw, for example, regarding such conflicts. The 460,000-person Sturgis rally in 2020 was believed to be one of the largest events held in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic (the population of Sturgis is about 7,000), with attendees clustered together over ten days, from and returning to numerous locations, with few wearing masks, thus becoming a superspreader event in the Dakotas and beyond. 5. Kennewick Man is the name usually given to the bones found in 1996 near the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. Non-Indigenous archaeologists wanted to study the bones. Columbia River Indian tribes and bands asked that the bones be returned for reburial. 6. Edward S. Curtis (1858–1962) was an American photographer known for romanticized and highly aestheticized depictions of Indigenous persons. He often engaged in theatrical staging of his “subjects” for the framing of his photographs; his oft-reprinted photos have had a large influence on the imaginary of the Indian in American culture and beyond. 7. The Bear Portraits series can be viewed on Thomas’s website at http://jeff -thomas.ca/2014/04/the-bear-portraits/. Accessing these images can aid the reader’s appreciation of the subsequent text discussion in this section. 8. His cap has the Tree of Peace, the white pine, with long branches to reach over the confederacy, long roots to reach out to other nations, and an eagle on top to guard over the Iroquois confederacy. 9. Jeff  Thomas, email to the author, March 2018. 10. The sports teams from my own high school, in suburban Washington, DC, were the Indians. The school no longer uses that name, but it was relatively unquestioned when I was in school, in an area with a professional football team that refused to give up its name, mascot, and image for decades. 11. San Francisco, California, has also recently voted to remove a statue with an Indigenous figure kneeling at the base. See Katz. 12. Information about Photoshop addition from Thomas, email to the author. 13. For one example of the discussion of whether the name of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald, should be removed from schools and other public sites because of his role as “an architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples,” see Ballingall. Although the discussion of removing MacDonald’s name from public buildings reached a wider public by 2017, speaking back to the man is not new. See Marilyn Dumont’s brilliant poem “Letter to Sir John A. MacDonald” in her 1996 book A Really Good Brown Girl, in which she reminds him that he is dead, but “I’m still here and halfbreed” (1) and “after all that shuffling us around to suit the settlers, / we’re still here and Metis” (11–12).

Works Cited “Aboriginal Artists in Ottawa Want Traditional Name for ‘Scout’ Statue.” CBC News, August 23, 2013. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/aboriginal-artists-in -ottawa-want-traditional-name-for-scout-statue-1.1344927.

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Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “The Monuments Project: Our Commemorative Landscape.” Accessed March 21, 2022. https://mellon.org/initiatives/monuments/. Arias, Arturo. “Indigenous Knowledges and Sites of Indigenous Memory.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–17. Belcourt, Billy-Ray. “Masturbatory Ethics, Anarchic Objects: Notes on Decolonial Love.” Undergraduate thesis, University of Alberta, 2016. Brokaw, Chet. “South Dakota Wrestles over Sacred Mountain and Sturgis Biker Rally.” Seattle Times, December 17, 2007. Bureau of Reclamation. “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGRPA).” https://www.usbr.gov/nagpra/index.html. Cole, Douglas. Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts. Rev. ed. Norman: University Oklahoma Press, 1995. Cox, Erin, and Ovetta Wiggins. “Plaque Honoring Confederate Soldiers to Be Removed from Maryland State House.” Washington Post, June 15, 2020. https://www .washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/civil-war-plaque-removed-maryland -state-house/2020/06/15/240e3f42-af29-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html. Cox, Karen L. “The Whole Point of Confederate Monuments Is to Celebrate White Supremacy.” Washington Post, August 16, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com /news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/16/the-whole-point-of-confederate-monuments -is-to-celebrate-white-supremacy/. Deloria, Philip  Joseph. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Dumont, Marilyn. A Really Good Brown Girl. London, ON: Brick Books, 1996. Erdrich, Heid E. Little Big Bully. New York: Penguin Books, 2020. Erdrich, Heid E. National Monuments. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008. Erdrich, Heid E. New Poets of Native Nations. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2018. Francis, Margot. “Reading the Autoethnographic Perspectives of Indians: ‘Shooting Indians.’” Topia 7 (March 2002): 5–26. Ganteaume, Cécile R. Officially Indian: Symbols That Define the United States. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2017. Garneau, David. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 21–41. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. Glass, Aaron. “A Cannibal in the Archive: Performance, Materiality, and (In) Visibility in Unpublished Edward Curtis Photographs of the Kwakw aka’wakw Hamat’sa.” Visual Anthropology Review 25, no. 2 (2009): 128–49. Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage.” PMLA 119, no. 5 (October 2004): 1209–15. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15, no. 2 (1992): 3–29. Huhndorf, Shari M. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. “Jeff  Thomas’s Three Decades of ‘Bear Portraits’ Trace the Evolution of His Son from Child to Grown Up Member of a Tribe Called Red.” National Post, August 12, 2015. http://nationalpost.com/entertainment/music/jeff-thomass-three-decades-of

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-bear-portraits-trace-the-evolution-of-his-son-from-child-to-grown-up-member-of -a-tribe-called-red. Jessup, Linda. “Bio.” Jeff Thomas (website). Accessed March 1, 2022. http://jeff-thomas .ca/bio/. Justice, Daniel Heath. “‘Go Away, Water!’ Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative.” In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton, 147–68. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Katz, Brigit. “San Francisco Votes to Remove Statue with Racist Depiction of Native Americans.” Smithsonian Magazine. Updated March 8, 2018. https://www.smithson ianmag.com/smart-news/san-francisco-votes-remove-statue-racist-depiction-native -americans-180968372/. Kazimi, Ali, dir. Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas. 1997; Toronto: Vtape Distribution, 2005. Videocassette (VHS), 56 min. Keith, Jamie. “Heid Erdrich Brings Together Traditional, Contemporary Native American Art in Artifact Traffic.” Twin Cities Daily Planet, November 22, 2013. Merskin, Debra. “Winnebagos, Cherokees, Apaches, and Dakotas: The Persistence of Stereotyping of American Indians in American Advertising Brands.” Howard  Journal of Communication 12, no. 3 (2001): 159–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/1064617017 53210439. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nash, Stephen E., and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh. “Editorial: NAGPRA after Two Decades.” Museum Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2010): 99–104. Orpana, Jennifer, and Sarah Parsons. “Seeing Family.” Photography and Culture 10, no. 2 (2017): 95–98. Parks Canada Directory of Federal Heritage Destinations. “Indian Treaty No. 1 National Historic Event.” Government of Canada / Gouvernement du Canada. Accessed March 2, 2022. https://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/page_nhs_eng.aspx?id =1538. Payne, Carol, and Jeffrey Thomas. “Aboriginal Interventions into the Photographic Archives: A Dialogue between Carol Payne and Jeffrey Thomas.” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 18, no. 2 (2002): 109–25. https://doi.org/10 .1080/01973760290011789. Poremski, Karen M. “Voicing the Bones: Heid Erdrich’s Poetry and the Discourse of NAGPRA.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 27, no. 1 (2015): 1–32. Roppolo, Kimberly. “Symbolic Racism, History, and Reality: The Real Problem with Indian Mascots.” In Genocide of the Mind: New American Indian Writing, edited by MariJo Moore, 187–98. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press National Books, 2003. Ross, Jane. “Grain Elevators.” Canadian Encyclopedia. Updated April 24, 2015. https:// www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/grain-elevators. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1990. Strong, Pauline Turner. “The Mascot Slot: Cultural Citizenship, Political Correctness, and Pseudo-Indian Sports Symbols.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 28, no. 1 (2004): 79–87.

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Suerth, Jessica. “Here Are the Confederate Memorials That Will Be Removed after Charlottesville.” CNN, August 22, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/15/us/con federate-memorial-removal-us-trnd/index.html. Teuton, Christopher B. Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Thomas, Ehren (Bear Witness). Artist statement in Coyote School, catalog published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized and presented by the McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, ON, June 8–August 19, 2017. https://museum .mcmaster.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/coyote-school-brochure_winsert_lr.pdf. Thomas, Jeff. “The Bear Portraits.” Jeff Thomas (website). Accessed March 1, 2022. http://jeff-thomas.ca/2014/04/the-bear-portraits/. Thomas, Jeff. “Emergence from the Shadow: First Peoples’ Photographic Perspectives.” Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (2011): 212–30. Thomas, Jeff. “Ground Zero: The Bear Portraits.” Photography and Culture 10, no. 2 (2017): 181–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2017.1321293 Thomas, Jeff. “My North America Indian Volume 21.” Jeff  Thomas (website). Accessed March 2, 2022. http://jeff-thomas.ca/2014/04/my-north-american-indian-v21/. Trope, Jack F., and Walter R. Echo-Hawk. “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: Background and Legislative History.” In Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? edited by Devon A. Mihesuah, 123–68. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1999. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Getting Schooled Responses to Education as Neoliberal Identity-Formation in US Life Narratives Megan Brown

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very semester, I teach an introductory-level writing seminar and begin the course by asking my students—mostly first-years and sophomores at a midsize, private, midwestern university that is slowly becoming more diverse to match its urban setting—to reflect on their experiences learning writing within, and for, school settings. In addition to discussing the students’ many stories about particularly inspirational or challenging teachers or about the perceived benefits and drawbacks of practicing the five-paragraph essay structure for standardized tests, we spend time analyzing this quotation from Michel Foucault’s The Discourse on Language, which famously appeared as an epigraph in David Bartholomae’s groundbreaking article on writing pedagogy, “Inventing the University”: Education may well be, as of right now, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it. (Foucault 227; Bartholomae 134)

Students often imagine those “well-trodden battle-lines” as high fences or border walls, with one side (experts and professionals) enjoying the greener grass 236

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of socioeconomic privilege and cultural capital, and the other populated by diverse and sometimes desperate aspirants (newcomers, apprentices, and learners) hoping to cross over. They may and probably do view me, a tenured professor, as on that greener side, ready to judge them and perhaps even find them wanting. On a seemingly cheerier note, however, students often begin with a hopeful interpretation of Foucault’s notion of discourse as a relationship between language and power and of education as a means by which subjects gain access to discourse as they learn to read and deploy it. In short, they might start from the premise that education is uniformly beneficial, and that it confers power and prestige. They give their imagined fences and border walls an imposing gate and station a stern gatekeeper—typically, a teacher or professor—at that gate. Some aspirants will work hard, impress the gatekeeper, and be granted access to the greener-grass side where they will continue to cross other fences and borders with ease. Others—and this is where the interpretation becomes less optimistic— will be denied a walk through the gate. Many students, but certainly not all, remember or recognize that certain aspirants have a far greater probability of successful crossing than others and that access is not merely a matter of chance or of rewarding those who deserve rewards. They see that some subjects have less access to education, to discourse, than others. This gatekeeper scene, then, becomes a way to understand Bartholomae’s larger argument: through a series of successive approximations, some students successfully learn to “invent the university”—that is, to mimic and then to use and become “appropriated by” discipline-specific academic conventions as a means of entering academic discourse and gaining the privilege of that status (Bartholomae 135). Others, however, have less access to learning these discursive conventions from the start. The initial premise of education as a generous gatekeeper for the deserving, and that anyone can and will be deemed “deserving” as long as they work hard, should be unsurprising to anyone operating within a neoliberal framework. Neoliberalism encourages and celebrates self-reliance, self-improvement, and competition among individuals, and it also insists that society is a meritocracy: that hard work will bring deserved rewards. In the United States, the dominant discourses about, and structures of, education (from preschool to graduate and professional programs) perpetuate neoliberal ideologies by inculcating these same values. This ideological work may not sound insidious, especially given the commonly held US belief that education is a “good thing,” available to all and deeply engaged in helping students become thoughtful and responsible citizens. Several recently published memoirs, however, illuminate for readers the multiple, simultaneous, and often troubling effects of an education system built on neoliberal principles. This chapter will discuss three

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best-selling autobiographical narratives—Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and Tara Westover’s Educated—to show the ways in which such narratives, complex in their depiction of their narrators’ schooling, provide a necessary and productive challenge to even the most cherished ideals. Though the story of education as a means of access to liberty, happiness, and accomplishment remains powerful and persistent in these memoirs—indeed, the narratives occasionally depict education as an unproblematic means of access and success for all—readers are also reminded of another, much starker, story: education as a gatekeeping device that can perpetuate rather than dismantle institutional and systemic inequalities linked to race, gender, and social class. These memoirs have also informed my own teaching by helping me frame conversations around my students’ experiences “getting schooled.” I do what I can to push back neoliberal notions of access and accomplishment, and I encourage students to reflect on, and to question, the effects their education has had on their sense of identity and personal development.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “I was made for the library, not the classroom” Given the fact that he won a MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the “genius grant”) in 2015, one might assume that author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has always been on the “greener grass” side of the fence, but his epistolary memoir, Between the World and Me, indicates otherwise. Coates celebrates what certain aspects of education—notably, a life-changing college experience and lifelong encounters with learning to write—can do for individuals and communities. He also offers harsh and much-needed criticisms of a system set up to encourage docility or ensure failure in Black students such as himself. Central to Coates’s critique is the way in which neoliberal ideologies betray students of color in urban public school systems. Reflecting on his childhood and adolescence in Baltimore in a series of letters to his son, Coates describes his younger self as “a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked”—words and phrases associated in most cultures, and certainly in US culture, with success (Coates 28). Elsewhere, I have summarized neoliberal conceptions of “success” as follows: neoliberalism “champions the power of the individual” within a meritocracy with a “tilted foundation, [where] hard-working individuals who begin with disadvantages have less of a chance to become self-reliant, to win competitions, to thrive” (Brown 30). While the young Coates has many of the personal characteristics associated with high achievement in a neoliberal context, his

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race is highly likely to function as a barrier to that achievement owing to structural inequalities inherent in a system that devalues Black children and teens. As Coates suggests, authority figures tasked with assessing and monitoring Black children enter into that process with socially constructed (and socially perpetuated) prejudices: these children are problems to be solved, charity cases, or future criminals to be characterized by their demerits rather than their merits. Looking, specifically, at the effects of neoliberalism on education, Bonnie Urciuoli writes, “Each person becomes responsible for parsing himself or herself into elements whose primary function is productivity—making profit for oneself [such that] every piece of knowledge one acquires can be interpreted and assessed as a skill, an aspect of oneself that can be considered productive by prospective employers” (Urciuoli 162). Here, we can see why students might gravitate toward particular “pragmatic” subjects at school (business; STEM— i.e., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), but we can also see the way in which certain behaviors or mind-sets are cultivated in school environments. Students learn skills and subjects, but they also learn that productivity, self-improvement, and efforts to take responsibility for oneself are valued and will be rewarded with high grades, teachers’ praise, and the promise of future opportunities. In Urciuoli’s description, learning to cultivate the right kind of character becomes a skill in and of itself. On the opposite side, students unable or unwilling to chase this kind of success—more to the point, those who are never given the opportunity or are even actively dissuaded from doing so—find themselves halted at the gate. So, while Coates has some of the attributes associated with success in a neoliberal context, he also experiences the disadvantages of racial prejudice, an underfunded public school system, and a home in a neglected urban neighborhood. Until his college years, Coates’s education cleaves closely to Foucault’s “well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict”—Coates’s schools, as he describes them, reinforce rather than deconstruct existing inequalities, and they serve as a “means of maintaining . . . the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it” (Foucault 227, emphasis mine). In classes primarily concerned with memorization, routine, and discipline, he finds that his curiosity and critical thinking skills are far less appreciated than his compliance (Coates 26). He encounters teachers and other adults who encourage the children of inner-city Baltimore to “grow up and be somebody,” but he cannot un­­ derstand how such a lofty ambition could possibly connect with “an education rendered as rote discipline” (25). Associating primary and secondary education with discipline and compliance is not in itself unusual, but Coates extends his analysis by suggesting that the schools he attended, and schools like them, have

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ideological and even physical effects on students and the communities to which they belong. He describes the ways in which the schools shore up the “battlelines”: separating students based on race and socioeconomic class, helping to ensure that those separations carry through to adulthood, creating a school-toprison pipeline, and selectively preparing certain students for failure (or, at best, a safe mediocrity). For example, Coates points to feelings of fear and vulnerability among the children and teenagers in his neighborhood. He recognizes the role of education in perpetuating those feelings: “I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast” (33). When Coates was young, he needed to memorize rules in both environments, resulting in a kind of double consciousness that allowed him to survive but hampered his ability to thrive in either space. He describes learning the signs and postures that would keep his body safe as he walked to and from school and the expectations for performance and behavior that would allow him to stay within the relative safety of the school environment. He notes, “When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing” (26). Both street and school are focused on survival rather than success, yet the school offers the “false morality” that academic excellence, virtually unobtainable in this context, will protect students throughout their lives, offering privilege, security, and the chance to “be somebody” (25–26). Coates becomes suspicious, too, of his school’s yearly lesson plans and presentations on the civil rights movement because they present as heroic a kind of nonviolence and self-improvement that seem to him impossible, even dangerously naïve, in a violent world with the odds stacked against him and his classmates. He writes, “No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility” (33). His idea calls to mind Henry Giroux’s critique of education under neoliberalism as “a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives” (Giroux 163). Until he reaches college, Coates feels apathetic, resigned to “failure” as it is defined in a neoliberal context and haunted by the idea that important truths are being concealed from him, even by well-meaning teachers. This false morality, with its particular, painful correlation to the school experiences of students of color even regardless of socioeconomic status, becomes evident in the story of Prince Jones, one of Coates’s college classmates. Coates describes Jones as a high-achieving student and an outgoing, upbeat presence at Morehouse College. Years later, Coates learns that Jones was mur-

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dered by a police officer who allegedly mistook him for a crime suspect and claimed that Jones became violent when apprehended. He points out that “the investigation produced no information that would explain why Prince Jones would suddenly shift his ambitions from college to cop killing” (Coates 80). The murder reinforces Coates’s perspective on educational systems driven by neoliberal ideology: even those who succeed may not survive when political and social institutions are invested in their oppression. As he asks, “if [ Jones], good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not?” (81). Even though Prince Jones demonstrated ambition, self-reliance, and other attributes celebrated in US culture and its schools, his chance to benefit from these merits is cut short by racism and violence. Again, an authority figure charged with monitoring Black bodies— in this case, a police officer rather than a teacher or school administrator— assumes demerits rather than merits. Jones’s race supersedes his lifetime of achievement. Though Coates is critical of primary and secondary education as institutions, he does insist on the importance of learning to write and the ways in which writing skills might—as Bartholomae suggests—help people enter into a discourse and find opportunities to shape and change that discourse. While Bartholomae focuses on the university context, Coates—acknowledging the central influence of his years at Morehouse on his development as a writer and scholar—credits teachers outside academic institutions for his ability to move beyond apathetic docility and beyond the typical trappings of institutionally recognized achievement. He does not present his time at Morehouse, which is an elite institution inaccessible to many of his Baltimore public school classmates, as evidence that he has overcome disadvantages through hard work, grit, or other traits prized in neoliberal ideology. As noted in this chapter’s introduction, the memoir’s view of education is complex rather than uniformly critical—college seems largely exempt from Coates’s critique, and his own position as a student able to access the advantages of college life is not interrogated.1 Coates does, however, look beyond classroom and campus to the library, the family home, and the neighborhood as places of learning with fewer potential and actual constraints and barriers. He describes his mother’s efforts to help him process ideas and questions through writing—efforts that also offered him opportunities for self-discovery. His most important learning experiences occur outside the classroom—in libraries, in time spent reading books, in conversations with poets at coffee shops, and with editors from the publications he admires. For example, he finds himself increasingly willing and able to question social beliefs that are, too often, taken as naturally occurring realities rather

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than as the constructed discursive conventions they are. He writes that “racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears in the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men” (Coates 7). Taken together, his experiences beyond school show him the power of language, of writing, to challenge, interrogate, and deconstruct instead of perpetuating long-standing injustices.

Kiese Laymon: “I finally understand revision” Even before opening Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir, readers can get a sense that the book will offer a complicated depiction of popular American mythologies; the dust jacket blurb proclaims, “Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of living in a country wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.” Then, on the prologue’s very first page, Laymon confesses his desire to cling to some of these myths: “I wanted to write a lie. I wanted to write about how fundamental present black fathers, responsible black mothers, magical black grandmothers, and perfectly disciplined black children are to our liberation” (1). From the start, Laymon is clearly thinking about the ways in which his experiences as a Black man demonstrate the fundamental dishonesty of dominant neoliberal narratives about responsibility and self-determination. His commentary on his experiences at school (from elementary school, to college, to his role as a professor at Vassar) operates along these same lines. Laymon has a close connection to the priorities and values of primary, secondary, and higher education: his mother worked as a West Jackson, Mississippi, public school teacher and later became a college professor. Heavy is addressed to her and engages in conversation and argument with her ideas. She believes in the power of “perfectly disciplined black children” to challenge white people’s racist assumptions and to get past the gatekeepers of discourse if they know such conventions as the “correct usage of the verb ‘be’” (Laymon 13). She encourages her students, and her son, not only to assimilate but also to be “twice as excellent” at school and in life, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s friend, Prince Jones (Laymon 69).2 Laymon, however, seems in agreement with Coates’s conclusion that being twice as good will not keep a Black child (or adult) free from harm. When Laymon refuses to write an essay that his mother has assigned to him, she responds that his “not doing the essay was another tired example of refusing to strive for excellence, education, and accountability when excellence, edu-

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cation, and accountability were requirements for keeping the insides of black boys in Mississippi healthy and safe from white folk” (27). Like Coates, Laymon expresses skepticism about this idea that outstanding performance and behavior will protect him, and he critiques his schools’ various attempts to discipline and manage Black students such as himself. One difference between Laymon’s and Coates’s resistance to such ideals of neoliberal education as “accountability” and striving for “excellence” is that Laymon’s sense of getting schooled includes a specific ambition that immersion in neoliberal US culture teaches: striving for wellness. In Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life, Sam Binkley writes, “populations and organizations are induced to become more self-reliant and enterprising, to depend less on government support, and to find their own way in a social world reinvented in the image of the market, [and] happiness as enterprise articulates this rationality on an intimate level as an intentional project of personal well-being” (3). Binkley references Foucault’s notion of governmentality, wherein individuals “govern themselves through the cultivation and optimization” of their personal, behavioral, and intellectual traits (3). As indicated in the book title, Binkley is particularly interested in the ways in which good feelings and a sense of fulfillment can become tools of self-management—the nurturing of an attitude conducive to workplace success and a productive lifestyle. His argument about happiness and well-being having practical, marketable value—and the related idea that individuals are encouraged to see these traits as obligatory—illuminates Laymon’s increasing obsession with losing weight, which is a central theme in Heavy. Laymon realizes that dieting and exercising become, for him, addictions, allowing him to assert control over a life that feels unmanageable. He even suggests that these addictions become substitutes for critical thinking: “Our dishonesty, cowardice, and misplaced self-righteousness, far more than how much, or how little we weigh is part of why we are suffering. In this way, and far too many others, we are studious children of this nation” (Laymon 10). Under neoliberalism, individual self-management and striving for optimal productivity distract from, and perhaps even replace, social and political action. Moreover, the neoliberal self-improvement process can never truly be complete—the individual can always be learning more, becoming healthier, trying harder, managing better. Laymon scoffs at his mother’s claim that by doing poorly in school he is “ruining the only chance [he] had to get free,” in part due to his realization that good grades will not prevent people from judging him, finding him wanting, or seeing him as a token exception rising above disadvantaged circumstances (138). He cannot manage other people’s responses to him, so he endeavors to manage what he thinks he might be able to control: his body. Like Coates’s friend Prince

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Jones, however, Laymon cannot manage or control others’ responses to his Black body, nor can he ever amass enough achievements to guarantee success and security. As was the case in Coates’s memoir, Heavy suggests that less institutionalized forms of education are crucial to intellectual development and are, indeed, central to his growing understanding of injustice—the uneven field on which the competitive game of neoliberal striving is played. Laymon learns to read, write, and think in places and situations outside school. Despite her faith in the power of academic achievement, Laymon’s mother also allows for less progress-oriented learning, providing space for Laymon to experiment and play in his writing and reading: “a black southern laboratory to work with words” (9). Though he is punished with a failing grade (and even with being publicly shamed by teachers) for doing so, he chooses to read and respond to books left out of the curriculum, books he finds on his own that express perspectives beyond the dominant narratives (85, 108). He realizes, too, that the standard curriculum will not allow him to move beyond mimicking the content and style of these same dominant narratives. As he notes, “No one ever taught me how to write to and for my people. They taught me how to imitate Faulkner and how to write to and for my teacher. And all of my teachers were white” (106). Until he comes to these realizations, Laymon cannot move from learning accepted discourses to contributing to their revision and reshaping. Education in a racist system functions as a gatekeeper for Laymon—one that lets him into the academic realm on probationary status, kicks him out again when he uses his voice to challenge racism on campus, and then allows him to reenter provided that he monitor his attitude and performance. He graduates near the bottom of his class, and when he attends Millsaps, a local college, he gets accused of plagiarism when a professor does not believe him capable of using the word ambivalent on his own in an essay (122). Later, he writes student newspaper opinion pieces about race and racism that result in him receiving death threats. These pieces almost get him kicked out of school as well, but the college president finds another excuse for removing him from campus. It’s an improperly borrowed library book, of all things, that ends Laymon’s Millsaps experience. Just when readers might suspect that Laymon has given up on the typical trappings of academic success—a high grade point average (GPA), campus leadership positions, a degree—he gets another chance at Oberlin, a liberal arts college where he “will learn to be good at the things [ he] didn’t want to get good at” (161). The risks he takes in his reading and writing are a hindrance until he reluctantly learns to leverage them. At Oberlin, he finds an audience more receptive to the critical thinking and writing he has taught himself (with his mother’s help in the “laboratory”) to do.

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Finally, the gate opens, and Laymon becomes a far more active participant in academic life. He once sat silently in the classroom because “there was too much at stake to ask questions, to be dumb, to be a curious student, in front of a room of white folk who assumed all black folk were intellectually less than” (123). He is invited inside the gate at Oberlin and later when teaching at Vassar. The privileged status conferred to him is still highly limited by colleagues’ and students’ racist assumptions and by impostor syndrome, and he continues to challenge rather than capitulate to neoliberal norms of achievement and success. Laymon again recalls some of his mother’s lessons: “You said a good question always trumps an average answer. . . . ‘The most important part of writing, and really life,’ you said, ‘is revision’” (85). This kind of education—asking questions rather than finding definitive answers, critical thinking rather than memorization and repetition, ongoing revision rather than focusing on an end product for assessment—is not encouraged or practiced in most US schools. Despite ongoing struggles, Laymon—through the experiences he describes in his writing and through the writing itself—keeps asking, keeps thinking, keeps rejecting neoliberal norms.

Tara Westover: “I call it an education” The line quoted in the heading of this section appears at the end of Tara Westover’s Educated, and represents the conclusion at which the narrator arrives after a complicated journey. The “it” in her sentence refers to a “new self ” that she feels she has forged, a new sense of identity that her family perceives as a “betrayal” of their values and beliefs (329). Though Westover’s memoir celebrates the effects of school on identity formation more than Coates’s or Laymon’s does, Educated does question the ways in which educational institutions can perpetuate existing inequalities—primarily those having to do with gender and with socioeconomic class—and the problematic assumptions that adhere to these inequalities. The book also acknowledges the idea that developing a “new self ” may in fact mean making or experiencing relatively shallow, surfacelevel changes, such as developing a more conventional academic writing style and being rewarded with higher grades. Individual subject positions themselves may not change much, and the social system that defines subject positions and makes them legible remains the same. Unlike Coates and Laymon, Westover, as a child, has no experience whatsoever with public school or with the values it espouses—her paranoid, white supremacist father asserts that school is “a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God,” and her mother rarely disputes his opinions (5). To

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call Westover’s early education “homeschooling” would be a generous interpretation of the childhood learning she describes: “Learning in our family was entirely self-directed; you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done” (46). Westover’s use of the word anything likewise seems generous and inaccurate: her parents scoff at basic principles of scientific knowledge, history beyond false narratives of what happened at Ruby Ridge, and texts other than those espousing Mormon doctrine. Most of her family members suggest that aspiring to learn anything else is a kind of disloyalty, and Westover, at a young age, begins to feel conflicted. She simultaneously distrusts and yearns for the world beyond the Idaho mountain where she lives with her parents and siblings. That feeling is intensified when her brother, Tyler, decides to go to college. Though she feels abandoned by her brother and sees him as “building a new life for himself across enemy lines,” she also realizes that her father’s characterization of school as an evil plot must be untrue (51). As she writes, “Tyler was the least evil person I knew, and he loved school” (60). The longer Tyler stays away, the more he becomes an outsider—Westover, witnessing this change, fears that she will disappoint her family if she decides to pursue formal schooling. The first half of Educated traces Westover’s gradual transition from home to school—a process complicated by threatening behavior from her father and another brother, Shawn. As she encounters textbooks, standardized tests, and filling in bubble sheets with a number 2 pencil for the first time, she comes to various realizations that are likely to surprise readers. Just before applying to at­­ tend college, she discovers algebra and is amazed that math can involve letters in addition to numbers. She gets into college and finds herself unable to distinguish between historical fact and historical fiction: “Napoleon felt no more real to me than Jean Valjean. I had never heard of either” (150). She asks, in a college class, what the word “Holocaust” means and what its historical significance is—a classmate mistakes her naïveté for willful antisemitism and tells her that she should not joke about such matters. The day-to-day realities of being a college student, from sharing living space to encountering diverse perspectives to managing personal finances, are beyond Westover’s understanding. In short, she enters the world of higher education at a significant disadvantage, unable to navigate the academic and social expectations. Unlike Coates and Laymon, who are all too painfully aware of these expectations and the structural inequal­ ities that create and perpetuate them, Westover does not even know, at first, what the expectations are. The longer Westover remains in school environments, the more she learns—not only about the subject matter of specific classes but also about the values and the unwritten conventions of academia. Educated suggests that this

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learning process, while deeply painful and fraught with contradictions, saves Westover from what might have been a lifetime of abuse and ignorance. On a visit home during her college years, she finds that her family now sees her as an enemy, much as Westover herself once saw her brother, Tyler, as a traitor who disavowed the family’s beliefs. She writes, “Dad and Shawn . . . agreed on one thing: that my brush with education had made me uppity” (176). When she asks him to stop making racist remarks, Shawn calls her a “wench” and a “pig,” and she recalls that, until she learned in a college course about Martin Luther King,  Jr. and the civil rights movement, she had uncritically shared his views about race and believed in white supremacy. Even if her professors’ teachings alienate her from her family, they transform Westover from a victim silenced by years of abuse to a more autonomous person capable of empathy, self-reflection, and self-fashioning: “I had started on a path of awareness. . . . I had begun to understand that [my family] had lent our voice to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward” (180). Her new understanding applies not only to dehumanizing “others” but also to the ways in which she herself—because she is a woman and because she is trying to distance herself from extremist viewpoints—has been dehumanized by her family, especially by Shawn. Though his physical and emotional abuse of Westover includes at least three major instances of assault, Westover continually blames herself for his actions and wonders if she is imagining things. Her parents downplay, ignore, and at times outright deny the abuse, which further exacerbates the problem. College education provides access to books, possibilities for reflection, and time away from the family dynamic, and it gives West­over a new vocabulary for making sense of her experiences, allowing her to understand that “Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that” (199). Some of Westover’s memoir, however, shows that academic success does not always or automatically confer the kinds of privilege one might associate with higher education—intellectual satisfaction, personal growth, career opportunities, a sense of belonging or achievement, or the ability to climb a few rungs of the socioeconomic class ladder. She suggests, for instance, that believing that education in and of itself confers power is dangerous. Before she recognizes Shawn’s abuse for what it is, she overrelies on the markers of achievement to measure her self-worth; when she gets a perfect score on an important test, she thinks, “Here’s the proof: nothing touches me” (191). Money problems and their effect on her grades, however, soon force her to rethink the idea that academic success will make her invincible: “Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the

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financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns” (203). Whereas Coates and Laymon discover that race dictates their experiences as students, Westover finds that socioeconomic status is the major factor affecting her education. Financial security, rather than academic merit, will allow her to stay inside the gate. On a visit home during this period, Shawn pins her to the ground, and she imagines him berating her for considering herself a new, better, more powerful individual than before: “This is who you are. You’ve been pretending that you’re someone else. Someone better. But you are just this” (194). Her fragile hold on self-worth evaporates when her performance at school becomes lackluster. It is a realization about money—particularly, the idea that money’s “most powerful advantage” is “the ability to think of things besides money”—that opens up possibilities for her (207). The grants that her father once dismissed as government surveillance and control allow her to see herself as an entity separate from her family. When she allows herself to rely on funding rather than asking her father for financial support, she begin to extricate herself from the abuse and pursue her own scholarly interests—a path that eventually takes her overseas to the University of Cambridge. Westover’s struggles do not end with time and distance away from her family, but her relationship to herself and to her education—albeit still complicated—becomes easier for her to navigate. Educated could easily have become a feel-good tale in which the narrator triumphs over much adversity and lets go of her painful past to become a happy, fulfilled, and successful person. Some readers might even consider Educated an example of what Leigh Gilmore calls “neoconfessionals”—autobiographical narratives that “point away from a critique of the systemic nature of inequalities, and promote an increasingly non-specific and generic self ” (658). Neoconfessionals reinforce, instead, the neoliberal idea that all individuals, no matter their subject position, have an equal chance at redemption, without help from society, if they work hard. Even if Westover’s memoir depicts a certain kind of “progress”—a move away from family trauma and toward some version of self-actualization— Educated never offers a simplistic happy ending. Instead, readers encounter a more complex story, in which the past inevitably affects the future.

Min-Zhan Lu: “Moderate the currents, but teach them from the beginning to struggle” The heading of this section is quoted from Min-Zhan Lu’s “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle,” an essay I see as a response to Bartholomae’s

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“Inventing the University.” Although the two pieces are not necessarily in conflict with each other, there are some important differences between them. Whereas Bartholomae argues that a series of successive approximations may allow the student to enter into a field’s discourse and become a respected expert, Lu suggests that students can never fully disengage from the various discourse communities to which they belong, even if these communities “may seem irrelevant” to the discourse of the classroom or “stand at varying distances” to the discourses taught in the academic realm (447). In their memoirs, Westover, Laymon, and Coates all seem to be moderating the currents (to borrow Lu’s metaphor) by negotiating among differences in belief and convention to work toward an approximation of a scholar-self. The phrase “work toward” is important here because it is clear in all three cases that education has not been a finite experience leading to complete, unproblematic success. In my writing courses, I find myself working with students in a situation similar to the one Lu describes. They are engaged in competition on the tilted playing field of neoliberal meritocracy, trying to figure out who they are as scholars and aspiring professionals. They have not yet begun to reflect on the effects of their education, or they are at the very start of this process. Many of them are frustrated by their perceived inability to adhere to the discursive conventions of their fields of study. Others, some of them first-generation college students, express uncertainty about those conventions. They do not know what “good writing” is supposed to look or sound like, so they do not know how to mimic it. While it would be too simplistic to say that the memoirs under consideration in this chapter remind such students that they are not alone in their struggles, the books’ depictions of “getting schooled” have helped me support students and have informed my classroom practices. For example, all three memoirs remind me that, as an instructor, I should always be mindful of the gatekeeping function of neoliberal schooling and stand ready to challenge it. My reading and writing assignments should reinforce and reward critical thinking rather than emphasize the ability to follow conventions above all else. In one such assignment, I ask my students to write an essay exploring their experiences learning to write. What did their teachers ask of them, and why? How did these teachers respond to their written work? How might various aspects of their identities have affected their schooling or influenced the ways in which they were perceived or assessed in the school environment? How might environments outside school have affected their writing? Rather than asking students to check off boxes on a five-paragraph essay rubric as they answer these questions, I encourage them to keep in mind the origin of the word essay—the Old French verb essayer, meaning to try or to weigh ideas. I

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ask that they focus on autobiographical anecdotes and on guiding readers through their thought process by showing the connections between ideas and examples. My hope is that these guidelines for thinking and for writing will allow students to engage in the kind of reflection that Coates, Laymon, and Westover model. These memoirs also offer possibilities for attempting to dissociate typical markers of achievement from the learning process. The books suggest that learning to think and learning to write are ongoing processes that should always be revisited, rather than finite tasks to be graded and filed away on a transcript. (Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” suggests the same; he encourages writing teachers to see student essays as a series of attempts rather than a collection of errors to be penalized and corrected.) All three remind me, then, to set aside and clearly define space and guidelines for revision in my writing courses—not only peer review or workshop activities but also multistage writing processes and multiple chances to resubmit work for feedback without penalty. Like most institutions of higher learning, my university requires me to submit grades for students, and given the use of grade point averages in assessing candidates for graduate schools, professional schools, or employment, it would be disingenuous of me to tell students that they should not care so much about grades. I can, however, respond to this context of neoliberal meritocracy by reminding students that their effort and engagement in rethinking and revision will be rewarded, and that the meritocracy confers privilege or denies access based on identity markers rather than skill, talent, or intellect. While I would never wish to discourage students by suggesting that their efforts to be “twice as good” are misguided, I do want to urge them to find their own sense of reward in those efforts to learn and develop, rather than relying solely or mainly on approval from others. This lesson also applies outside the writing classroom. I do not want my students to accept, without question, the idea of “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” we so often encounter in American culture, and particularly the belief that grit will automatically be rewarded, or that it will be rewarded at all via the expected means (GPA, salary). So many of us learn that to be a “good citizen” in the United States, we need to achieve success—first the top grades, then the top career heights—by persevering against all odds, but this idea functions as a problematic erasure of the individual citizen’s subject position and life circumstances, as well as of structural inequalities. It perpetuates the notion that success and perseverance look the same for all people. Like many memoirs, the books under consideration here insist that readers pay attention to the ways in which subjectivity and what we think of as “success” are shaped by social forces.

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Lu’s idea of “moderating the currents”—and the illustrations of this idea I see in the autobiographical writing of Coates, Laymon, and Westover—does not necessarily resemble the neoliberal trajectory of education in which the striving student works hard to master the accepted conventions and become a successful expert. Coates, for example, chronicles his struggles negotiating between what he learns in (and about) his schooling and what he learns from experiences outside school. Laymon describes his efforts to find his voice as a writer in the face of harsh judgments and poor grades from teachers. Even as Westover begins to earn the accolades typically awarded to accomplished students, she actively resists the ideal of the deserving aspirant gaining access against all odds: I didn’t tell a single reporter that I’d never gone to school. I didn’t know why I couldn’t tell them. I just couldn’t stand the thought of people patting me on the back, telling me how impressive I was. I didn’t want to be Horatio Alger in someone’s tear-filled homage to the American Dream. I wanted my life to make sense, and nothing in that narrative made sense to me. (249)

Westover seems well aware that the rags-to-riches, outsider-to-insider story is not her story—her upbringing in Idaho will always affect her as a scholar and as a writer, and she will always hear those voices that stand at a distance from the accepted discursive conventions. Only when she stops resisting these multiple, simultaneous voices can she fully inhabit academic discourse and “engage with the great thinkers of the past, rather than revere them to the point of muteness” (269). Foucault questioned the narrative of education as access to success a long time ago, and others have done so since, but the narrative remains powerful and persistent. The memoirs under consideration here simultaneously work to celebrate what education can do for individuals and communities while attempting to dismantle some of its gatekeeping quality and its role in perpetuating neoliberal ideas about cultivating a successful self. Institutional and systemic inequalities persist, and education mostly mimics rather than challenges or erases the “well-trodden battle lines of social conflict” that Foucault describes. As all three of these memoirs do, we can celebrate what education can do for individuals and communities but also criticize pedagogies and structures which, in their adherence to neoliberal principles, perpetuate systemic inequalities. Notes 1. In a famous critique of Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, Cornel West writes that Coates downplays socioeconomic class in his commentary on white supremacy

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and Black activism: “[Coates’s] conception of freedom is neoliberal. Racial groups are homogenous and freedom is individualistic in his world.” Although this chapter is not the place for me to comment on We Were Eight Years in Power, I argue that Between the World and Me does push against neoliberal notions of freedom and success, even if it occasionally neglects or downplays systemic inequalities linked to class. 2. Prince Jones is not specifically mentioned in Heavy, but the parallels in the wording that Coates and Laymon use are too striking to be ignored. Both writers address the idea that Black students must work twice as hard as white students to be appreciated in and by their schools.

Works Cited Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” In When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writer’s Block and Other Composing-Process Problems, edited by Mike Rose, 134–65. New York: Guilford Press, 1985. Binkley, Sam. Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Brown, Megan. “Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times.” In Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph, 29–42. New York: Routledge, 2018. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Gilmore, Leigh. “American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah’s Couch.” Biography 33, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 657–79. Giroux, Henry. “Higher Education and the Plague of Authoritarianism.” symploke 26, no. 1–2 (2018): 157–71. Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir. New York: Scribner, 2018. Lu, Min-Zhan. “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle.” College English 39, no. 4 (April 1987): 437–48. Urciuoli, Bonnie. “Neoliberal Education: Preparing the Student for the New Workplace.” In Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, edited by Carol Greenhouse, 162–76. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. West, Cornel. “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” Guardian, December 17, 2017. Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2018.

Disabling Birth Prognostic Certainty and the Gestating Citizen of the Contemporary Midwifery Movement Ally Day

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arratives about birth and delivery have proliferated since the end of the twentieth century, owing in no small part to the availability of online birth forums. Before the widespread use of the Internet, birth narratives were explored by feminist researchers (in anthropology, sociology, rhetoric, and interdisciplinary studies) following the politics of the feminist health movement that emerges in the late 1960s and 1970s.1 In this chapter, I explore how birth narratives function as a means for promoting a particular kind of citizen-body based on an ideology of prognostic certainty. Prognostic certainty refers to the idea that once we diagnose a body (fetus, child, adult) with a condition, we can predict the outcome of that condition on the living subject, regardless of sociocultural circumstances (Timmermans and Buchbinder 12– 16). Specifically, the logic of prognostic certainty isolates a diagnostic condition within an individual, defining the individual through the condition and limiting that individual’s possibilities with little to no regard for the sociocultural interactions of bodies themselves. In birth narratives, prognostic certainty works through a logic where a particular birth process is better precisely because it produces a particular kind of citizen—an able-bodied citizen. While scholars such as Della Pollack and Kim Hensley Owens have written about birth narratives as performative and therapeutic for the tellers of the narratives, what I am 253

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interested in is how birth narratives function as a pedagogical tool of citizenship; the rhetoric of prognostic certainty is foundational for the pedagogical functions of birth narratives in the contemporary midwifery movement. To analyze prognostic certainty, I explore how birth narratives function as a part of doula and midwifery training, reinforcing an ideology of prognostic certainty that problematizes or erases disabled bodies in pursuit of a low-technology utopian future. While scholars in both disability studies and feminist bioethics have theorized about motherhood, prenatal testing, early pregnancy termination, and assisted reproductive technologies, neither field has addressed the philosophy of labor and delivery. I contend that the pedagogy of midwifery serves as a salient site for theorizing a feminist disability bioethics precisely because the process of labor and delivery illuminates how individuals interact with both the often oppressive and always class-tiered medical system in the United States and the state apparatus of citizenship documentation. Birth politics are the embodiment (quite literally) of imagined futurity. Della Pollack argues: Birth stories are ritually repeated, locking new parents into a narrative script that simply lacks room for stillbirth, miscarriage, abortion, all deformity— aberrations in the “normal” scheme of things apparently too embarrassing to too grotesque to mention. While taboos against talking about birth are beginning to erode . . . , they remain strong—and seem even to be getting stronger— against talking about so-called failed births. (5)

While Pollack theorizes that “failed births” seem to remain in the margins of the ritual telling of birth narratives—perhaps because, for her, birth stories themselves function to demonstrate “progress” (18–22)—I argue that these “failures” are actually central to the pedagogy of natural birth. Kim Hensley Owens echoes the idea of birth narratives being about progress, writing, “The idea of perfection, as applied to childbirth, converts the practice of obstetrics from craft to industry and, in doing so, affects women’s experiences as they are positioned within the realm of obstetrics and the medical progress narrative that guides their choices” (37). With childbirth being about outcome (a healthy baby) more than process, the rhetoric of prognostic certainty is reinforced— what matters is the end result. While I am grateful for the work of Pollack and Owens, in this chapter I am interested in how birth stories circulate as part of the curriculum of the contemporary midwifery movement in the United States. Neither Pollack nor Owens identifies the proliferation of birth stories as part of a larger curriculum

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of training materials for birth practitioners (midwives, doulas). What thinking about the role of birth stories as a pedagogy tool does is move us from understanding birth stories as being about individual narrative or medical agency and into a larger analysis of how the curriculum itself relies on a particular set of narrative devices as a biopolitical tool. As Michel Foucault asserts, as power moves from the sovereign to the discursive, it becomes concerned not with power over death but with managing life. This new kind of power, biopower, is concerned with managing the species (population control) and in disciplining individual bodies (History of Sexuality,135–40). This kind of power uses all sorts of regulating tools to control bodies—medicine and pedagogy being just two. Here, I am concerned with the pedagogy of one particular physiological act (birth) that arises to resist the normalizing pedagogy of hospital birth. I argue, following Lisa Deidrich’s work in Treatments, that midwife and doula training materials that incorporate personal narratives of birth function as a form of what Foucault calls subjugated knowledges—that is, “low-ranking of naive knowledges that remain marginal to institutional knowledges, including the institutional knowledges of medicine” (Diedrich 2). Although subjugated knowledges have the ability to disrupt power structures, and offer new spaces for alternative ways of living and acting (Diedrich 2), I argue in this chapter that they also operate to reinforce dominant ideologies under the guise of resistance to those ideologies. And these narratives operate precisely because they are used under the guise of pedagogy to reinforce the ableist logic of prognostic certainty. I begin by exploring the story of the medicalization of birth itself through commonly taught texts such as Grantly Dick-Read’s Childbirth without Fear, published initially in England in the 1940s and continually taught today as part of doula training curriculum. I then move onto analyze how birth stories are used as a part of Ina May Gaskin’s seminal text Spiritual Midwifery, first published in the 1970s and now in its fourth edition, another text taught as a primary source in doula and midwifery training. Gaskin is a central figure in the contemporary American midwifery movement, and her ideology around birth continues to be central to Generation X and millennial feminists, as explored in my third site of analysis: the 2008 film The Business of Being Born. Interspersed between these sites of analysis are “Scenes” from my own experience as a doula-in-training. These scenes reinforce my own subjective experience as both a feminist working in disability studies and a student of midwifery, providing a second and third layer of pedagogical analysis. In the end of the chapter I briefly explore an alternative framework for understanding birth, drawing on the work of feminist bioethicists and disability scholars in order to imagine and value an uncertain future.

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Scene 1 I am preparing to write. I have just attended my first birth as a doula, a complex hospital birth that ends in a C-section, an elated mom, and a gurgling infant. I want to capture the details of the birth because I have heard this is something doulas do for their clients. I read blogs about how to address these stories—To baby? To parent? Is it a timeline? Do I include my own feelings and emotions? And as I read blogs, I begin to see the controversy in writing these stories. That as a doula, birth stories are not ours to tell. That our version of events may contradict the parents. That some doulas only write these stories if asked specifically. Others do not at all. One doula writes, “I stopped writing birth stories for my client. . . . I had one birth where I felt a little bit like a failure in some aspects of my doula work—it was a little different from my previous births—so how should I write it down for the mom? So I just didn’t. And I didn’t want to write birth stories only for the births I thought were perfect because that didn’t seem fair. So now I don’t write any at all” (Emily). I open a new Word document.

Birthing American Citizen-Products There is a historical narrative that we tell in the birth justice community about the rise of the medicalization of birth. The narrative goes something like this: before the turn of the twentieth century and the rise of urbanization and industrialization, midwives represented the most popular form of pregnancy care in the United States. At this time, the relatively new American Medical Association (AMA, established in 1847) began to recommend physician-attended hospital birth. To promote this practice, there were widespread public health movements that characterized midwives as vestiges from the old country in order to create a modern American medicalized citizen-subject. We see variations of this story told by people across time and disciplines, from mid-twentiethcentury physicians such as Grantly Dick-Read to late twentieth-century anthropologists to millennial journalists. By the early years of the twenty-first century, it was considered common sense that a gestational parent would have a hospital birth attended by an obstetrician—a drastic change in birthing culture and expectations in just a few generations. Feminists in the 1970s would

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argue that this medicalization of birth is the result of a patriarchal takeover of birth practices; feminists proposed that the counteraction to this patriarchal takeover is to promote “natural,” “normal,” and “homebirth” practices. I argue, however, that these feminist solutions themselves have some deeply patriarchal and equally problematic eugenicist roots. One of the first variations of this story of the medicalization of childbirth comes in the British physician Dick-Read’s Childbirth without Fear, first published in 1942 and still used as required reading in many doula training programs. Here, Dick-Read writes of how birth for thousands of years was attended by midwives and priests, making broad generalizations across continents (3); he also writes that as physicians have sought to alleviate the pain of childbirth, beginning with antiseptics in the 1860s, they have failed to investigate the causes of pain (3–6). In an era of heavily drugged “twilight sleep” from an earlier part of the twentieth century, Dick-Read calls for a return to simpler childbirth methods.2 If we read Dick-Read closely, however, we can understand how his project is not simply about alleviating women’s fear of death or pain through childbirth. In the preface to his first edition of 1942 (and included in a 2013 version), Dick-Read makes clear that his project as a medical doctor in proposing a reconsideration of natural birth is about more than birth itself: “The task has not been undertaken, therefore, for academic reasons, but rather as a further step towards proof of the philosophical principle that all progress, both moral and physical, ultimately depends on the perfection of motherhood” (xiii–xiv). DickRead proposes, as a foundation for this philosophy and practice of birthing, that women are designed to birth without fear, limiting pain. They are also designed to birth perfect babies. He does, however, also include the following optimistic caveat: “It is not suggested for one moment that by waving a magic wand over the heads of the community all children will suddenly be born according to the perfect law; but I hope that these pages will contain sufficient evidence to show that this is no dream, that today there are methods of escorting women through pregnancy and parturition which will give these results” (2). One can extrapolate from Dick-Read’s writing that women need not fear childbirth because with competent midwives and low-technology intervention, they have little need to fear pain; but the other reason not to fear is about what the birth itself produces—when done correctly, birth can produce perfection. And the value of this perfection lies in the logic of prognostic certainty—a perfect baby is a hopeful future. Dick-Read writes, “From time to time, pestilence and war sweep through nations, robbing them of much that is best in their stock. If we are to survive as

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a people, and as an empire [the British Empire], we must constantly be alert to improve our stock” (2). This ideology of eugenics underlies the reason behind his advocacy of low-technology birth; this is not a practice purely for women’s health but for the fitness of a nation. For Dick-Read, this is a national project and more sweepingly, a project of empire.3 Dick-Read’s Childbirth without Fear remains in wide circulation as both a philosophical and practical text, influencing the next generation of birth activists. In the United States, Robbie E. Davis-Floyd emphasizes the national project of returning to natural birth with her 1992 book Birth as an American Rite of Passage. In her book, which emerges from a PhD dissertation in anthropology (see Davis-Floyd, “Autobiography”), she lays out a dichotomy between contemporary technocratic birth and wholistic birth—arguing in the preface to her second edition that while a humanistic approach to childbirth is expanding as one way to find middle ground between the two approaches to birth, truly holistic birth is nearly impossible to practice (Davis-Floyd, Birth, xii–xviii, 160–62). Hospitals still mandate technocratic intervention, even with doulas and midwives present. Some of this intervention, such as an epidural, can be humanistic— which is why Davis-Floyd herself advocates for women to have a wide variety of birth choices. Davis-Floyd interviewed more than one hundred women about their birth experience and writes about one common pattern—women who were upset about their technologically driven birth experiences in a hospital setting and made plans to have their second child at home with a midwife: I noticed that as they switched from hospital to home birth, they not only fired their obstetricians and searched for midwives, but also developed decided affinities for naturopaths, massage therapists, recycling, herbs, and whole wheat bread. It seemed that something farther reaching than simple change in birth place was going on with these women. It seemed in fact that they were actually using their births as a means to change their personal belief system. (Birth, 293)

Davis-Floyd, like Dick-Read, recognizes that choosing holistic birth is about more than birth itself; holistic birth is representative of a larger belief system. How we do birth in the United States—understanding women in need of patriarchal intervention and their bodies as machines, babies as products, hospitals as factories (Davis-Floyd, Birth, 160)—is a key practice of citizenship. DavisFloyd argues throughout her text that birth itself is one way in which we socialize Americanness and recognize the deep connection of American colonization with ideologies of science and progress from the Enlightenment; she

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writes, “The efforts of modern medicine to manipulate and control birth and other aspects of female physiology stem from a basic insecurity in American society about the viability of our mechanistic worldview” (Birth, 304). DavisFloyd understands technocracy (the ideology that technological progress is a source of political power) as fundamental to American citizenship; birth is one place where we see this technocracy play out. Like Dick-Read, Davis-Floyd theorizes that birth is about citizenship, elaborating the ideological mechanisms at work in Dick-Read’s classic text. And more precisely, birth is about producing a perfect citizen and these texts about instructing their users (gestating women, medical doctors, prospective midwives) on the value of birth perfection and prognostic certainty. Birth should, in the end, produce a “good” citizen.

Scene 2 We are all cisgender women, sitting in a circle, lights dim, pants and skirts loose so that we can stretch our legs forward, fold our legs inward, kneel, move. Yesterday I defended my dissertation on disability, HIV, and life narrative; today, I am beginning a three-day intensive doula training. Through the undergraduate feminist health class I have been teaching for five years, I have become increasingly passionate about enabling gestational parents’ birth choices—giving women knowledge and resources to choose the kind of birth they imagine as best for their families.4 I have read Ina May Gaskin’s writings from the 1970s and books about the medicalization of birth post-1900s; I have worked with midwives and doulas as guest lecturers in my classes; I have had many long conversations with gestational parents about their difficulties in labor and delivery. I am ready, and thrilled, to be a part of this circle. We begin by introducing ourselves, telling about our motivations to become doulas in between sips of coffee. Many have already been present for the labor of a friend or family member, a presence that awakened their own passion for assisting gestational parents in birth. But as we go around the room, I notice another pattern of motivation—women with traumatic hospital birth experiences of their own; women with complicated relationships to their own children who, because of the circumstances of their children’s birth, have sustained disabling conditions. These women are here to prevent disability. And as a disability justice activist and scholar, I cringe.

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Writing Disabled Birth It was in the 1970s that the contemporary home birth movement really began to take hold in the United States through a back-to-the-land counterculture movement and the feminist health movement, perhaps most inspired by the work of Ina May Gaskin and her best-selling book Spiritual Midwifery. The book is written as part instruction manual and part birth story archive, a key pedagogical move for Gaskin as the birth stories open and preface the instructional material and provide an overwhelming emphasis on outcome. The story of Spiritual Midwifery begins through the story of The Farm, a living community founded in 1970 when “200 visionaries left San Francisco on a quest for a new way of life that would establish a stronger connection to the values of humanity” (Farm Midwifery Center). On their way to Tennessee in a caravan of eighty converted school buses, the group had eleven births; over the next ten years, more than two thousand children were born on The Farm. Still in operation today, The Farm’s midwifery services constitute one of its key community services; anyone can contact and procure the services of a Farm midwife. All births attended by Farm midwives begin on The Farm (although hospital transfers can occur “as necessary”); the ideology presented by Gaskin in Spiritual Midwifery has become central to the mission of The Farm, which also promotes environmentally sustainable living education. According to The Farm’s website, “People from around the world, including both lay midwives and nurses, doctors and medical professionals, have come to The Farm Midwifery Center to learn about its unique outlook on childbirth, and to have their babies delivered in the peaceful, loving atmosphere and professional care of The Farm midwives” (Farm Midwifery Center). The first half of Gaskin’s book is composed of individual birth stories written by parents who have had midwife-assisted births. These stories work to demystify a bit of the birth process while also emphasizing the safety of home birth; more important, perhaps, than the safety is the focus on how low-intervention home birth provides a form of spiritual healing for parents who have been mired in a capitalist postindustrial world. As Gaskin writes in her introduction: This is a spiritual book and at the same time it is a revolutionary book. It is spiritual because it is concerned with the sacrament of birth—the passage of a new soul into this plane of existence. The knowledge that each and every childbirth is a spiritual experience has been forgotten by too many people in the world today, especially in countries with high levels of technology. This book is revolutionary because it is our basic belief that the sacrament of birth belongs to the people and that it should not be usurped by a profit-oriented hospital system. (12)

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Indeed, home birth is framed through these birth stories as a cure for capitalism. In this scenario, birthing people are blamed for the choices they make about labor and delivery, obscuring larger systems and structures that reinforce eugenic logic and nation building. In this same passage, Gaskin frames natural birth as a right of the citizen by referring to the Constitution of the United States. In large letters in the center of the page, Gaskin quotes the Ninth Amendment, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Gaskin follows this by writing, “The midwives represented by this book feel that the rights of women, the newborn, and the family during the passage of childbirth are among those unenumerated rights which are to be retained by the people” (12). By framing home birth as not just a cure for capitalism but within a central document of the United States as a right of the people, Gaskin reinforces her ideology that birth itself, and choosing how one births, is a central right of citizenship. Gaskin’s political ideas are reinforced with the use of personal testimonies, updated in each new edition of Spiritual Midwifery—older stories from earlier editions now accompanied by photos of adult children delivered on Ina May Gaskin’s Farm. The stories are titled by the name of child birthed. I want to share with you two stories placed side by side in the fourth edition. Both of these stories, like the majority in the book, take place on The Farm. The first story, called “Eileen,” is told by Martin, Eileen’s father. He begins, “Somehow, I couldn’t get behind shoveling shit.” This is the opening line of the paragraph in which Eileen is delivered: “The birthing was easy and Eileen was born the next morning. . . . The Baby was small and came out without a lot of pushing” (136). It is unusual for a birth story to be so succinct. The rest of the two pages presents a vignette wherein Eileen, a few days after birth, is rushed to a hospital emergency room with labored breathing; we get a sense of a mechanized, rushed space—a contrast to the home birth environment—before learning that Eileen does not survive. After burial, Martin writes, “Ina May tells us, ‘you were lucky to have someone so very pure to come stay with you, even for a short while.’ Her own baby is barely a week old” (136–37). In his final lines, Martin writes, “I know everyone did everything they could. I know how lucky we all are to be here.” This story is interesting because it is not a story of positive outcome—a premature baby born “easily” who does not live for more than a few days. And yet this baby, rather than surviving with potential impairments as a result of her prematurity, is grieved as being “so pure”—this is what disability studies scholar Thomas Couser might call a “rhetoric of spiritual compensation” (184). This is the closest we get in Spiritual Midwifery to any direct recognition of impairments or disability.

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While Martin finishes his reflection with an emphasis on spiritual compensation, this is not the end of this couple’s story. The story immediately following “Eileen” is called “Abner” and is told by Bonnie, mother of Eileen and Abner. She writes, “We got pregnant again about six months after Eileen’s death. We decided we really wanted another baby again soon” (137). Worried about another premature birth, Bonnie talks about how she kept contractions at bay, how she may have been having contractions in empathy with other laboring women on The Farm. “At one point the calves of my legs cramped suddenly and no amount of rubbing would relax them. Ina May said, ‘Why don’t you just push the baby out. So I did. At 3:45 pm, Abner was born—all eight pounds two ounces of him. It felt good to have such a fat healthy baby” (138). The concluding lines of this vignette are accompanied by two pictures—one of Abner at age fourteen, wearing a backward cap and casually leaning against a bookcase. The second picture, unlabeled, is a sleeping baby. We do not know whether this baby is Abner or Eileen. Either way, Abner’s birth is considered a joyful success—a fat, healthy baby delivered by home birth. Reflecting on Spiritual Midwifery as a memoir-meets-manual asks us to take the writing of birth stories seriously as autobiographical practice; it calls us away from what Sidonie Smith calls the “androcentric history of life writing criticism” (82–88). It also takes us “out of the bathtub,” in Marlene Kadar’s formulation (or perhaps, with the risk of sounding too cheeky, out of the bathtub and into the birth tub)—that is to say, the distance between the reader and the writer is shortened, the subject itself seemingly inescapable and at the same time fragmentary (Kadar, 89–93). In drawing on Leigh Gilmore’s conceptualization of “autobiographics,” birth stories present us with both a practice of reading and a practice of self-representation: birth stories force us to ask where the autobiographical is and how is it located in relation to discourses of authority. Foucault might say that birth stories ask us to locate the institutional and subjugated knowledges at work in order to understand how power itself is operating (Discipline and Punish, 28–29). Ina May Gaskin’s work conceptualizes medicalized birth as a symptom of capitalism; capitalism is understood as a spiritual sickness; thus medicalized birth is indeed a disabled birth. If Spiritual Midwifery is a pedagogical text, then this understanding of medicalized birth as disabled birth is a key learning outcome, its importance premised on the logic of prognostic certainty. Medicalized birth is disabled birth precisely because it is capitalist in nature; capitalism relies on a citizen body of predictably productive individuals, individuals who have prognostically certain futures. The second half of Spiritual Midwifery works as a manual for home birth practitioners; here, if normal birth is considered a cure, or a form of rehabilita-

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tion, for capitalist medical systems, then it should be no surprise that bodies already disabled prior to pregnancy are entirely absent from Gaskin’s book. In Gaskin’s presentation of home birth we can understand that disabled bodies, with their reliance on “too much technology,” to use Gaskin’s terminology, are incurable. If we understand bodies that rely on technology (hearing aids, wheelchairs, oxygen machines) in binary opposition to the “spiritual” or “natural” of an anticapitalist movement, then the logical conclusion is that disabled bodies are inherently capitalist obstructions and less than human. This section of Spiritual Midwifery really does have excellent information for taking care of oneself while gestating a fetus, from exercise to nutrition, as well as comprehensive information about the process of labor, birth, postpartum psychiatric and physical care, and infant feeding. There are also careful diagrams of pelvic bones, joints, ligaments, the pubic arch, the womb—essentially what many of us wish we had learned in public education. All of these diagrams and explanations are directed at the so-called normal body. With this framing of home birth, the movement for midwife-assisted care in the United States has become unnecessarily unidirectional and problematically utopian.

Scene 3 I am arranging sandwiches from a local deli in the corner of the conference room when the group members begin to file in. They echo one another as they exclaim over the air-conditioned relief—downtown Chicago feels like an oven in midsummer. I have been interning since June for this local organization that provides pre- and postnatal support for women living with HIV. Largely because of this organization’s work, the state of Illinois has had no new seropositive infants. Today, group members have arrived for a session on labor and delivery practices for gestational parents with HIV; because of my own research on birth and my volunteer work with the organization, I have been given a chance to observe the class, run by a local labor and delivery nurse practitioner. I offer the participants bottles of water before taking my seat in the back corner of the room. I hear a medley of languages; many of the participants today have immigrated from parts of West Africa, others are African American women from the South Side of Chicago, and a few are whiteidentified, as is the nurse practitioner. I soon learn that many of the women are having their second and third babies and are eager to share their experience with first-time parents. Because of the advances in medication for people living with HIV, gestational

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parents can continue to take their regular HIV medication and expect to give birth to a seronegative baby if their viral load remains undetectable. The National Institutes of Health recommends that gestational parents during delivery receive an intravenous drug, particularly if their viral load is unknown during delivery (see HIVinfo). Although vaginal birth can increase the chance of a baby contracting HIV during the birthing process, if a gestational parent’s viral load is undetectable, this risk is negligible. Even so, many obstetricians prefer to schedule a planned caesarean section at thirty-eight weeks. About halfway through the meeting, one of the group participants shares her idea of having a vaginal birth, something she has always wanted. She asks other women if this was possible as long as she was in the hospital. She asks if she is unnecessarily risking the health of her baby. The nurse practitioner, guiding the discussion today, interrupts the group, whose members are at this point advising one another. “I understand that this may be something that is important in your country,” she says, with a wave of her hands. “But that just is not how we do things here in the United States.” In this moment, this nurse practitioner’s whiteness and citizenship privilege become apparent. The woman with the dream of a vaginal birth looks defeated, disappointed; my own mouth is agape and I wonder whether I should say something. Before I can, the conversation moves on to HIV medication and breastfeeding.

Filming Disabled Birth in The Business of Being Born In 2008, independent film director Abby Epstein and executive producer Ricki Lake familiarized a new generation with Ida May Gaskin’s story and the tenets of the contemporary home birth movement with their documentary The Business of Being Born. The promotional material for the film and the DVD cover feature a white blue-eyed baby, with the title of the film in the lower forefront. This film was nominated for best new documentary at the Zurich Film Festival and perhaps because of the celebrity of Ricki Lake herself, whose amateur videos of her own home birth are included in the film, The Business of Being Born received quite a lot of mainstream attention. In one study of screening this film with undergraduates, Katherine F. Kavanagh and colleagues found that whereas more than 60 percent of their participants had no opinion of birth practices in the United States before watching

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The Business of Being Born, almost 80 percent found the film educational, with 57 percent calling it “helpful.” The film itself fits into classic definitions of a participatory documentary film, where the filmmaker becomes an actor in the film, interacting with the film’s subjects and even, in this case, integrating her own birth story (Nichols, 180–82). Bill Nichols writes that documentaries activate our desire to know about the world (39) and that, “we judge representation more by the nature of the pleasure it offers, the value of the insight it provides, and the quality of the perspective it instills” (13). There are reasons to be cautious about The Business of Being Born. Sarah Rudrum argues that, despite its valuable contributions, natural childbirth discourse conveys a troubling message, one that insists on joy over pain, advocates choice over systematic change, and perpetuates a problematic dichotomy between “natural” and “medical” birth (55). Medical technology is coded in the film as “bad” and pain medication is equated with failure, potentially creating feelings of shame in viewers (59). I agree with Rudrum’s critique here and extend it by offering a close reading through disability theory and feminist bioethics to explore how the film itself creates disabled birth. The film’s setup creates a juxtaposition between medicalized, high-technology birth and home birth, even while the opening scene refutes common misconceptions of home birth as negligently anti–medical advancement. The film opens with a darkened room at 3:25 a.m.; we watch a woman in profile as she packs and organizes medical technology (an oxygen tank, various pharmaceuticals, and syringes). She remains faceless as the scene fades to a series of people in New York City responding to Ricki Lake’s question, “Have you ever thought of using a midwife?” There are lots of no answers. A middle-aged white guy says he was not even familiar with the word midwife, another white guy says he thought having a midwife meant “having a baby in a barn somewhere.” These responses are interspersed with a midrange profile of Cara Muhlhahn, the midwife from the opening scene, driving on a dark highway. The camera follows Cara up the stairwell of a New York City apartment, into home of a darkskinned woman wrapped in a colorful cloth who is having labor pains, walking and shifting her hips; Muhlhahn leans in to touch the temperature in the birthing pool set up in the middle of the living room. She says in a soft voice, “Just pretend I am not here. If it is too early, it’s too early. Do whatever you need to do.” This scene serves to foreshadow the hospital experience of time-capped labors and delivery. This scene fades again to a series of statistics. Viewers learn that “midwives attend over 70 percent of births in Europe and Japan” but “in the United States

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they attend less than 8 percent”; these statistics are accompanied by music and birth moans in the background. This scene is followed by an older white medical doctor saying, “Maternity care in the United States is in crisis.” This scene follows a pattern in the film where cisgender men introduce ideas that are then reinforced by cisgender women professionals in the birth industry or academia. The juxtaposition between medicalized birth and midwifery continues as one young white female obstetrician/gynecologist (ob/gyn) says, “Technology is technology. It’s not stopping. So if you are going to have good stuff, you might as well use it to get the best outcome.” A white male doctor tells viewers, “I call it feminist machoism. When you are pushing your baby in a stroller three months later, I don’t think it’s important.” Following this provocation, we get the title of film on a close-up of a medical bracelet on a white baby’s foot. In the first five minutes, the debate is framed. Ricki Lake, famous for her role first as a breakout star in the musical Hair and later as a talk show host in the 1990s, explains early on to the filmmaker, Abby Epstein, and correspondingly, the viewers, her motivation for making the film. “I felt cheated from the experience I was after,” Lake explains as the camera zooms into a copy of Spiritual Midwifery. “This is what got me so inspired. I saw her [ Ina May Gaskin] speak at a midwifery conference. I mean look at her, look at her braids”—the camera zooms into a picture of Gaskin with other women midwives from the early years on The Farm—“It doesn’t get more granola than this, but she blew my mind.” Here the viewer meets Gaskin through her influence on Lake and the famous text; Gaskin becomes central for Lake’s awakening to the politicization of birth. After a few more statistics about the United States having “one of the highest maternal mortality rates among all industrialized countries” a few more interviews with professional birth workers (ob/gyns, nurse midwives, birth activists) we meet Gaskin, who is sitting in a comfortable chair, her braids graying and wrapped in a crown at the top of her head. “The outcome when we are a century or so postmidwife is that you lose a lot of knowledge, and we are the one country that when birth went into the hospital, the midwives didn’t go in there with them,” Gaskin tells the camera operator. Gaskin’s explanation leads into historical footage of early- and mid-twentieth-century hospital birth and a few more statistics (none of which are accompanied by any kind of citation). The combination of historical footage, contemporary live births and interviews, and well-researched explanations of birth processes with diagrams is part of what makes this film such a useful pedagogical tool. Following the historical footage, circus-like music begins playing to accompany a cartoon expla­

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nation of “pharmaceutical snowball intervention”: Pitocin [oxytocin] to speed up birth, epidural to ease pain caused by Pitocin, more Pitocin—all of which increase the likelihood of caesarean section. Twenty minutes into the film the viewers meet Epstein, who, in a documentary coincidence too good to be true, reveals in a phone conversation to a midwife that she just found out she is pregnant. The film proceeds with Muhlhahn taking on Epstein as a client in her first trimester and the two witnessing several births of Muhlhahn’s clients, as well as interviewing practitioners in birthing centers and hospitals. Home births and hospital births are spliced together, fluo­ rescent lights of the hospital juxtaposing the dim lighting of New York City apartments. Muhlhahn, trained as a nurse through Columbia and then as a midwife, practicing for more than twenty years, describes herself as a “guardian of safety, a witness to your process”; telling Mara, a woman we meet in her second trimester, “your body is smarter than me, and I am not that dumb.” Between births, we have interviews with Davis-Floyd on the history of birth practice in the United States, black-and-white photographs of nameless women blindfolded and bound to hospital beds in the 1920s twilight sleep period of hospital birth, and film footage of children affected by thalidomide. The black-and-white photograph and mid-twentieth-century thalidomide crisis film footage are meant to illustrate that medical interventions in labor and delivery are not often well researched; deformity, it would follow, should speak for itself. Gaskin herself comes back into the film as we learn about the counterculture movement of the 1970s and the revival of home birth practices. “We didn’t want someone else making the rules,” she tells the viewer, as her interview fades to video footage of Gaskin in the 1970s. “When I started, only 5 percent of women in the US had caesarean; that went up to one in four in that decade,” Gaskin explains, relating this trend to the rise of internal fetal monitors in hospitals. “In our group, we didn’t need the first caesarean until birth number 187.” The emphasis for Gaskin remains on a low-technology birth. In all the framing of Gaskin’s work on The Farm, there is no explanation of the larger values of The Farm that we read in Spiritual Midwifery. This omission may be because The Farm remains countercultural while the film itself and the larger midwifery movement are working to become mainstream. The film misses the opportunity to discuss the Big Push for Midwives campaign and other policy issues that greatly impact who has access to midwifery. As of 2021, there are thirty-six states that regulate certified professional midwifery (CPM) and one that authorizes it by statute (Big Push for Midwives). That number has been gradually growing since there was no regulation in

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1970; for those states that do not regulate CPM, direct-entry midwifery remains illegal or in legal limbo, with the possibility of midwives being sued at will. Because direct-entry midwifery remains illegal, and thus cannot be covered by insurance models and paid for directly by the client, midwifery itself is framed as a symbol of a particular kind of urban middle-class citizen. The film incorporates amateur footage of both Lake’s home birth and Muhlhahn’s, each woman narrating her experiences for the viewer as we learn about AMA bias against midwifery and birth centers. Muhlhahn discusses how in guidelines that are set to see whether someone is a candidate for home birth, “you have to look at their medical history”—unfortunately, nowhere in the film is there a discussion of what excludes someone from being a home birth candidate. The good home birth candidate is not just able-bodied but, as one activist claims, “feels like superwoman.” There is another way that disability emerges as the pedagogical foil in the film; disability stands in for hospital birth as the able body-mind stands in for home birth. Two-thirds of the way through the film, we learn as viewers about newer research related to oxytocin, “the love hormone,” and how vaginal birth increases oxytocin and enables mother-child bonding. Home birth advocates from the film (medical doctors and midwives) argue that the “increase in neurological disorders and autism” can be correlated with the rise of obstetrical interventions, leading viewers to assume causation. In what is presented as an irrefutable explanation, one medical doctor and natural birth advocate cites a study done with monkeys who had C-sections; these monkeys were completely uninterested in their babies. Feminist science scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor analyzes the scientific literature of this “maternalized brain” theory and presents several critiques of it from her book The Brain Body (107–9). First, the theory itself relies on a binary understanding of maternal and paternal behaviors themselves that are interpreted through a sex/gender binary (a false dimorphism Pitts-Taylor analyzes earlier in the text). The second critique is that there are “highly-idealized impressions of the affective, embodied maternal experience” that “don’t hold up to much scrutiny” (108). Pitts-Taylor provides the example of lactation, wherein some mothers “have positive experiences with lactation, others describe the practice as trying, difficult, painful, disruptive, unpleasant, or even violent” (109). Even for those who describe breastfeeding as successful, they also describe it as a learned process of trial and error. The theories of oxytocin and the “mommy-brain” are simplistic at best and problematic because they foster feelings of guilt and failure for gestational parents who do not live up to an idealized parent-child bonding experience.

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This research leads into the final fifteen minutes of the film, where Epstein goes into birth four weeks early, transferring with Muhlhahn from her home to a hospital for an emergency caesarean section (filmed in part with obstruction through a bag, presumably because they were not allowed to film in parts of the hospital). We see some C-section footage before Epstein asks the filmmaker (her husband) to stop filming when her baby does not cry after the umbilical cord is cut. Viewers do not have to wait long, however, to learn that Epstein’s baby, Matteo, survived. Our next image is of a tiny baby crying from inside an incubator; he is three days old, and he weighs three pounds, five ounces. After a few hospital scenes of Matteo and Epstein breastfeeding, we meet the two again eight months later. Lake asks Epstein, as they are sitting on a carpet, Matteo on his back between them, “Do you feel like you were cheated?” “Yes and no,” she says. “That’s the way he needed to come: he wasn’t strong enough for a vaginal delivery, he was very growth restricted, he was breached.” Epstein continues, telling Lake that it was difficult to breastfeed and to bond. “Luckily, thank God, there was nothing wrong with him.” Epstein’s words are the final words of the film as the scene fades out on baby Matteo and fades in to Abby, off to another home birth in a New York City apartment. If not for Epstein’s birth, the film would solely promote home birth as a binary alternative to hospital birth; hospital birth itself is understood as a purely disabled system beholden to large insurance companies, a system that creates disabled babies, a system that, itself, needs a cure. In this new model, home birth becomes the cure for the disabled system, and in a turn of irony, it is a disabled system that can be rehabilitated only through the birth of an ablebodied infant who, in the moments of advanced labor, was at risk of disability. Hospital birth must be used only to eliminate disability. Disability represents the ultimate embodiment of prognostic uncertainty and therefore ruptures the hopefulness of a strong and productive citizen body.

Scene 4 The room is dim as the late afternoon sunshine streams through the classroom blinds. Thirty sets of eyes are focused ahead on the screen, where a dark-skinned woman moves and moans in a birthing tub. There are no screams and no cussing. In another moment, she leans forward and lifts her baby from the water to her chest. The moaning continues, met in another moment, as the umbilical cord is cut, with the infant’s soft cry. “Wait,”

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says one of my more vocal students, “did she just have the baby?” I smile to the room. Many of them have only ever seen Hollywood births. In my course evaluations at the end of the semester, more than half of my feminist health students will point to this film and our corresponding readings as transformative. One-tenth of my students in this class will change their career course to become nurse midwives—I know because I write their recommendations for grad school.

Beyond Disabled Birth Disability plays an important role in the pedagogical materials and underlying philosophy of the contemporary midwife movement. Returning to some of the earliest works that inspired this movement, Dick-Read’s Childbirth without Fear and Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery, both still used widely as practical and philosophical training materials within doula and midwifery programs, we can understand that the process of birth is not simply about an individual parent or baby’s health. Low-technology birth is conceptualized as an ideal place of nation building, eliminating disability if done perfectly and as a solution to capitalism itself. Babies and children with disability are used as a foil for natural birth and as a metaphor to represent the dangers of capitalism. Medical birth becomes disabled birth. In a twist of irony, in contemporary examples of this metaphor, as represented in the 2008 film The Business of Being Born, we find that disabled birth is sometimes necessary if only to negate the possibility of disability itself. The perfect end result needs no further explanation. We must understand that the politics of birth play out as a tool for nation building, and essential to this nation-building project is the ideology of prognostic certainty, this idea that we can predict the outcome for a living subject based on that subject’s condition as one moment in time (in this case, birth). Low-technology birth has been proposed because it produces perfect babies, and these perfect babies will grow up to be productive and engaged citizens, able-bodied citizens. Disability theorist Tobin Siebers writes that theories of human rights have used disability as an explanatory for refusing rights, that the allocation of human rights, and by extension, citizenship rights, has been based upon assumptions of “cognition, physical health and technological ability” that construct an ideology of ability (176–79). This ideology of ability is exactly what is operationalized in the midwifery movement—low technology birth is emphasized as bioethically responsible because it produces fewer disabled babes while

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medical birth, which is framed as disabled birth, remains necessary in cases in which a baby may become disabled through a vaginal birth process. This irony remains permissible in the logic of the movement because of the ideology of prognostic certainty—this idea that we can predict the life-long outcome of a baby/fetus once they are born regardless of their sociocultural circumstances. Also foundational to this idea is that the able-bodied citizen is the ideal citizen, representative of the most prognostically certain and hopeful future. Siebers proposes that we base a theory of human rights around human fragility in order to resist this ideology of ability. “It is not a matter of understanding disability as weakness but of construing disability as a critical concept that reveals the structure of dependence inherent in all human societies” (176). Through Siebers we can understand how prognostic certainty emerges as an effect of the ideology of ability and is operationalized in the contemporary midwifery movement. If we begin by understanding that all human bodies are fragile and interdependent, and in fact, human life itself is not quantifiable, then there would not be a need to predict the prognostic outcome of individual babies birthed vaginally or by caesarean section, with high-technology intervention or low-technology intervention. We know that babies who have the greatest likelihood of thriving has less to do with disability or birth process and more to do with maternal-child poverty.5 The distinctions between those who can afford alternative maternity care and those who cannot only increases with capitalist medical systems and risks shaming individuals and reinforcing dichotomies between deserving and undeserving disabled people. If a person is disabled because of the fault of the gestational parent making what are deemed “poor decisions” versus as the fault of medical professionals, the state can create policies for those deserving of state assistance and those not, those deserving of keeping their children and those not. Those not deserving fall outside of protections of citizenship. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Barnes reminds us that able-bodied people are notoriously bad at actually predicting how a disabled person feels about being disabled; in their efforts to understand the experience of people with disability, able-bodied people commit testimonial injustice by disbelieving that the disabled people can actually have a positive self-image or happy life (119–42, 178–84). In her arguments for valuing disabled bodies—bodies that are unified not through common experience but through solidarity with one another— Barnes proposes a “mere-difference” view of disability (143–67). In this view, disability in and of itself is neither positive nor negative; it is its relationship to other systems of oppression that inflect disability with positive and negative outcomes (Barnes 143–67). Barnes argues:

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There’s nothing wrong with disabled people wanting to be non-disabled. And there’s nothing wrong with those disabled people wanting to be non-disabled seeking the means to make themselves non-disabled. But there is something wrong with the expectation that becoming non-disabled is the ultimate hope in the lives of disabled people and their families. Such an expectation makes it harder for disabled people—who in their circumstances might be perfectly happy with their disability—to accept what their bodies are like, and it makes it less likely that society’s ableism will change. . . . And it makes it less likely that society will change its norms to accommodate disability if society can instead change disabled people in a way that conforms them to their extant norms. (Barnes 164)

Barnes also discusses how the mere-difference view of disability allows for understanding that causing disability can be wrong but it is not wrong simply because disability is caused. “It’s causing disability where there is a lack of accessibility and there are no economic resources to accommodate disability, it’s causing disability where there is severe social stigma against the disabled, it’s causing disability where it will incur transition costs,” Barnes explains (166–67). The contemporary midwifery movement, through the ideology of prognostic certainty, problematizes or erases disabled bodies in pursuit of a low-technology future, a future imagined beyond capitalism. What it misses in this process is that it is not the disabled bodies that are the problem or the development and use of technology (as many bodies, disabled or not, will benefit from the use of advanced technology throughout their lives) but the system that values particular kinds of choice for some bodies (white, able-bodied, class-privileged, cisgender) and negates that opportunity for choice for other bodies. If we resist the ideology of prognostic certainty in favor of an ideology of fragility, we can work to address structural problems of poverty and medical access, all of which are affected by intersectional oppressions, and support the creative development of birth choice that neither blames nor rewards the gestational parents for the perceived perfections or imperfections of their children’s body-minds. Instead, we need to understand the future of the citizen-body as reliant on the health of our structures and institutions; imagine a world where after birth we do not ask, “Does my baby have all ten fingers and toes?” and instead rest in the certainty of an uncertain future.

Notes 1. Contemporaneous to Ina May Gaskin’s first edition of Spiritual Midwifery in 1975 was the publication of the Boston Women Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves

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(OBOS ). I would argue that central to the women’s health movement in the United States are the production and circulation of personal essays, and certainly as early as the second edition, OBOS does publish birth narratives, though these are much shorter and tend to be aligned with particular practices that are being described medically. In some ways we could talk about OBOS as being a manual-meets-anthology of life writing; for a larger version of this project, I would like to trace a genealogy of the use of birth narratives through all seven editions of OBOS and their special edition: Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth (2008). A key difference, as I see it now, is that the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective is less directive about kinds of birth and birth options while Gaskin’s memoir-meets-manual is much more prescriptive of home birth and midwifery as the balm for capitalism. 2. Twilight sleep was a practice used widely in the 1920s where women were injected with scopolamine and morphine during labor and delivery; they lost all control of their birth process and were often blindfolded and strapped to beds for the delivery process. For more on twilight sleep, see Sandelowski. 3. Thanks to my editors for emphasizing the British nation as a project, in and of itself, of empire. 4. I use the term gestational parents in my own writing to recognize the diversity of gender expressions and gender-identified people who give birth; when discussing texts by other authors, I use their terminology (“mothers,” “women”) because it speaks to the limitations of their discussions. 5. For research that highlights the disparity in infant death between wealthy and poor Americans, see Strauss. (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/06/07 /the_u_s_infant_mortality_rate_is_high_due_to_wealth_disparities_according.html). Additionally, research also suggests that maternal mortality can be linked to socioeconomic conditions (Maron).

Works Cited Barnes, Elizabeth. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Big Push for Midwives. “What Are We Pushing For? Licensure for Certified Professional Midwives: State Trends.” Accessed March 7, 2022. http://pushformidwives.org/. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves. 7th ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth. New York: Atria, 2008. Chansky, Ricia Anne, and Emily Hipchen. The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2016. Couser, Thomas G. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.

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Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. “Autobiography: My Dissertation and First Book.” Robbie David Floyd, PhD (website). Accessed August 30, 2017. http://www.davis-floyd .com/autobiography/. Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Dick-Read, Grantly. Childbirth without Fear: The Principles and Practice of Natural Childbirth. London: Pinter and Martin, 2013. Diedrich, Lisa. Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Emily. “Writing Client Birth Stories.” Anthro Doula (blog), November 1, 2011. http:// anthrodoula.blogspot.com/2011/11/writing-client-birth-stories.html. Epstein, Abby, dir. The Business of Being Born. Burbank, CA: Barranca Productions, 2008. DVD. Farm Midwifery Center. “Our History.” Accessed March 6, 2022. http://thefarmmid wives.org/our-history/. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1977. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Gaskin, Ina May. Spiritual Midwifery. 4th ed. Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company, 2002. Gilmore, Leigh. “Autobiographics.” In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 183–89. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. HIVinfo. “HIV Medicines during Pregnancy and Childbirth.” Office of AIDS Research, National Institutes of Health. Reviewed August 18, 2021. https://hivinfo .nih.gov/understanding-hiv/fact-sheets/hiv-medicines-during-pregnancy-and -childbirth. Kadar, Marlene. “Whose Life Is It Anyway? Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative.” In Chansky and Hipchen, Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, 89–94. Kavanagh, Katherine F., et al. “Knowledge of the Birth Process among Undergraduates: Impact of Screening of a Documentary Featuring Natural Childbirth in LowRisk Pregnancies.” International Journal of Childbirth 2, no. 1 (2012): 20–28. Maron, Dina Fine. “Has Maternal Mortality Really Doubled in the U.S.?” Scientific American, June 8, 2015. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-maternal -mortality-really-doubled-in-the-u-s/. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Owens, Kim Hensley. Writing Childbirth: Women Rhetorical Agency in Labor and Online. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pollock, Della. Telling Bodies, Performing Birth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Rudrum, Sarah. “Joy and Pain: An Affect Studies Perspective on Natural Birth Films.” Atlantis 36, no. 1 (2013): 55–64.

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Sandelowski, Margarete. Pain, Pleasure, and American Childbirth: From the Twilight Sleep to the Read Method, 1914–1960. Contributions in Medical History13. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Smith, Sidonie. “The Impact of Critical Theory on the Study of Autobiography: Marginality, Gender, and Autobiographical Practice.” In Chansky and Hipchen, Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, 82–88. Strauss, Elissa. “Turns Out the Infant Mortality Rate in the U.S. Is Not That Bad—If You’re Rich.” The XX Factor (blog). Slate, June 7, 2016. http://www.slate.com/blogs /xx_factor/2016/06/07/the_u_s_infant_mortality_rate_is_high_due_to_wealth _disparities_according.html. Timmermans, Stefan, and Mara Buchbinder. Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

“A small flashlight in a great dark space” Elizabeth Warren, Autobiography, and Populism Rachael McLennan

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n the fourth chapter of This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class (2018),1 following her discussion (or rather, indict­ ment) of the close relationships between Wall Street and government in the Trump administration, Elizabeth Warren assesses her efforts: “In these pages, I haven’t written a comprehensive exposé, and I haven’t listed every example that I can think of. In fact, I’ve barely waved a flashlight around in a great dark space” (209). The seemingly innocuous claim that “I’ve barely waved a flashlight around in a great dark space” hardly does justice to the extensive task of uncovering rela­ tionships of influence that Warren has been documenting in the chapter, but it nonetheless stands as a revealing comment about the purpose of her text as a whole, in which Warren turns the flashlight on “the great dark space” of Amer­ ica itself to document how government and the rich have worked together in ways that benefit themselves rather than ordinary Americans. Indeed, Warren antic­ ipates her comment about the flashlight earlier in the text, when she claims that “The overall economic statistics—the GDP, the stock market, corporate profit­ ability, unemployment—are powerfully important, but the rosy picture they paint has huge blind spots, and those blind spots hide much of America’s lived experience” (22). The motifs of uncovering and revelation, light and dark, are 276

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present in both excerpts—in this early reference, the implication is that the “rosy picture” represents only partial truth, and “blind spots” are what Warren will eliminate (the later excerpt suggests, by wielding her flashlight) to reveal not only questionable relationships among the powerful but also uncomfortable truths about “America’s lived experience.” It is clear that Warren’s text can be read as a political manifesto. She is con­ cerned to agitate for change to America’s “lived experience,” as this pertains to the less-than-rosy conditions of life for its “working people.” More specifically, it can be read as a text with far-reaching political ambitions. At the time of its original publication in 2017, Warren would have been relatively well-known to the American public as a US senator and potential presidential candidate. She notes that “people began asking if I was planning to run for president” as early as 2013 (218). She did not run for president in 2016, but it is likely that her text is conceived with a 2020 campaign in mind, although this is not explicitly dis­ cussed. (Warren ran for candidacy in the 2020 US election but withdrew in March of that year.) Indeed, in 2019 Jill Lepore understands This Fight Is Our Fight as one of a number of “confessions of a presidential candidate” (to use the title of her article about them) and refers to the texts she examines as “cam­ paign books.” But the text also, I argue, should be read as autobiography. Lepore’s claim that Warren’s text is “part memoir, part political manifesto” is too simplistic, as is her observation that Warren “tells the story of her own life alongside the sto­ ries of other people’s lives.” These formulations pay insufficient attention to the complex ways in which autobiography—Warren’s and others—is central to achieving her objectives of shining the flashlight on dark spaces, uncovering “America’s lived experience.” I should note here, as I have written elsewhere, that I prefer the term autobiography to memoir—partly because, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note, it speaks to the vexed relationships between self, life, and writing that the word autobiography suggests and that are so integral to the genre. This preference is also because the term autobiography speaks to the Enlighten­ ment ideologies of identity that produced the white, male, public subject that the genre’s early examples so often represented and whose narratives (meaning their constructions of self, their conceptions of truth) contemporary life writing about the self must inevitably still engage, even to disavow.2 On initial reading, Warren’s contention that she has merely “waved a flashlight around in a great dark space” does not sound much like autobiography, which is usually con­ strued as a truthful story of the subject’s life, told by the subject.3 Warren does not, it seems, turn the flashlight on herself. Yet autobiography does reside in her remark. Autobiography is both the flashlight and what the flashlight reveals.

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The autobiographical text we read is what results from Warren turning the flashlight on America’s dark spaces, but autobiography (Warren’s life story) is also the medium through which what is uncovered is revealed. Warren is the au­ thor responsible for directing the flashlight’s focus and relaying what it reveals, but also she deliberately filters her analysis of American culture through her personal experiences, illuminating the political values and positions she favors. Lepore claims that “Most recent campaign books aim to combine memoir and platform, no mean feat,” and praises Warren’s text as one of the best re­ cent political memoirs. As noted, I disagree with Lepore’s clam that the text is “part memoir, part political manifesto” (indeed, Lepore’s discussion of parts risks suggesting that there has been no effort to “combine” at all). Her contention that the relationship between “memoir and platform” is important and fraught is more useful. This chapter, then, aims to read This Fight Is Our Fight as an Ameri­ can autobiography that combines “memoir and platform” to engage in ambiv­ alent ways with the concept of populism. Descriptions of Warren as “populist” have been made frequently in relation to her campaign to be the 2020 Demo­ cratic presidential nominee, but her engagement with populism is present and vital in this earlier text (and as I have been arguing, it is likely that the text was written with a campaign in mind).4 This chapter aims to show that while War­ ren uses both autobiography and populism to great advantage to make her argu­ ments about problems in American culture and advance solutions, auto­biography also exposes the ways in which Warren’s position does not comfortably align with populism. Specifically, her use of autobiography as platform—something Lepore does not consider in her distinction between memoir and (implicitly, political) platform—works both for and against her in enacting a relationship to popu­ lism (and this can be revealed even in her reference to the flashlight, as I will show). This is partly because of the relationships between American autobiog­ raphy and populism more broadly. Conversely, Warren’s engagement with populism sheds light on how her text both conforms to and resists ways in which American autobiography is understood and theorized. Warren’s claim that she has “barely waved a small flashlight around in a great dark space” would not initially seem to have a relation to populism, but it does. Warren’s reliance on binaries, on opposing forces—light and dark, great and small—is key to her central “fight,” at least partially resonating with George Packer’s claim that populism “speaks of a battle of good against evil, demand­ ing simple answers to difficult questions.” More specifically, the “fight” she de­ scribes supports Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser’s claim regarding the central divide on which populism relies: “Beyond the lack of scholarly agreement on the defining features of populism, agreement is general that all

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forms of populism include some kind of appeal to ‘the people’ and a denuncia­ tion of ‘the elite.’”5 For Warren, “the people” refers to the middle class (and aspiring middle class), and “the elite” refers to billionaires and big corpora­ tions, or to Donald Trump and his Republican administration, or to both. War­ ren’s depiction of herself wielding the flashlight in the “great dark space” aligns herself with the people, on whose behalf she is trying to uncover operations of power working against their interests and to show how their lives have been af­ fected. She argues that “people are angry, and they are right to be angry. Be­ cause this hard-won, ruggedly built, infinitely precious democracy of ours has been hijacked” (4). However, this position of alignment with the people is diffi­ cult to maintain, as Warren’s role as a politician might bring her closer to the “elite” than she would wish. Indeed, throughout the text Warren works to main­ tain the “insider-outsider” position that Mudde and Kaltwasser assert “nearly all successful populists” occupy,6 and it is important to consider how she uses auto­ biography to negotiate this position. Arguably, Warren’s text is not entirely or easily recognizable as autobiogra­ phy in its most conventional sense. This is primarily because she does not cen­ ter herself, the “I,” in her text to the extent that many autobiographical texts do (recall that she claims she turns her flashlight toward the “great dark space” of America, not herself ). Relatedly, she does not chart a chronological, linear his­ tory of her life. Many texts do none of these things and can still be autobiogra­ phy. Warren does not ever refer to her text as autobiography. She does not engage self-consciously and reflectively with many of the features autobiogra­ phy studies explores (and expects to find) when studying autobiographical texts: she does not meditate on memory, truth, identity, or the relationship between the narrated and narrating “I.”7 Warren mentions no other American autobi­ ographers; she is not concerned to place herself in a tradition of American au­ tobiographical writing. Indeed, it seems that she wishes to create the effect that she is talking to readers, rather than writing. She rarely foregrounds her work’s textual status unless she wishes to encourage readers to note particular things: for example, she discusses “across the board tax cuts—the kind that would show up on charts like the one on the next page” (114). None of this is surprising given her concerns: to convince readers about her representation of American reality, via documenting issues and presenting so­ lutions, and to make the case for herself as a possible presidential candidate. However, Warren’s populist “insider-outsider” position does align her, however complexly, with many American autobiographies. That role of “insider-outsider” is one many American autobiographers have sought to cultivate, endeavoring to emphasize both the uniqueness of their story and their capacity to represent

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the lives of others.8 Although this means that American autobiography lends itself well to the communication of a populist perspective, one need not be popu­ list to embrace the “insider-outsider” position of many American autobiogra­ phers, a tension Warren exploits in her text. It is also the case that while it may suit Warren to avoid explicitly engaging with the more frequently encountered (or studied) aspects of autobiography described earlier, she nonetheless both utilizes and effaces them, so that she does indeed employ autobiography (her own, and the genre itself    ) strategically and creatively when it suits her. It usually suits her when making use of populist strategies to communicate her ideas. For example, while Warren does use the first-person voice and discloses de­ tails about her own life, she deliberately decenters the narrating and narrated “I” to further underscore her sense of herself as a part of the “we,” the people. The autobiographical “I,” therefore, is present in Warren’s text but found through its location within the “we” or “our” that Warren is much more ex­ plicit in using: “Surely we are a better people than that” (42); “the war effort put millions of people to work fighting for our country” (74). This maneuver works to inscribe her as at one with the American public, sharing their concerns and anxieties and not standing aside from them. In other words, she shines the flashlight on their behalf. Indeed, on more than one occasion Warren describes “the elite” in terms that suggest they are un-American, referring to how “the divine right of kings had translated in the New World into a divine right of CEOs” (75) and claiming that “bank CEOs displayed a boldness that would put a medieval royal prince to shame” (83). This gesture reveals one further way in which Warren can be considered an “insider-outsider” in relation to American autobiographical tradition. She is an insider in that she does indeed use the autobiographical “I,” an outsider in that she does so less overtly and explicitly than many other autobiographers. Key to understanding her text as autobiog­ raphy, then, is that she forges a close relationship between “memoir and plat­ form” (for Warren’s purposes, perhaps better specified as “autobiography” and “populism”) by making strategic use of that position of “insider-outsider,” which is key to, although it functions differently for, both. The insider-outsider dynamic that melds memoir and platform is at work when Warren shares the autobiographical stories of others in her own words. Most strikingly, she describes teaching a Sunday school class, asking the chil­ dren to think about “What do we owe to each other? Not just what do we decide to give or not give, but what are the basic things everyone should promise to do?” (98) She is delighted with the response of Jesse, a boy who usually causes trouble and is quiet in discussions. He raises his hand and says, “‘Everybody gets a turn’” (99). The remainder of the chapter in which this incident is related

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is devoted to the notion of “everybody gets a turn” as an imperative that should be followed nationally, expressing the principle that everyone is equal and de­ serves opportunities and second chances. It also is enacted by Warren, both in the recounted episode itself—when Jesse raises his hand, she gives him his turn, noting that “I went straight to him” (99)—and throughout the text. When War­ ren shares the stories of Gina, Michael, and Kai, individuals whom she dis­ cusses in the first chapter but who make appearances throughout the text, she is shining the flashlight on them, giving them their turn, allowing other members of the “we” to be the center of the story, to have their lives the focus of atten­ tion, to have their struggles recognized. In living her life and constructing her narrative according to the principle of “everybody gets a turn,” Warren also shows how she has learned to take on the wisdom of others. In her survey of recent political memoirs, Lepore asserts: So far, just about everyone who’s declared [his or her candidacy for president] has written a book, or, let’s be honest, has had a book written—political mem­ oirs that flicker with primal scenes that explain the candidates’ rise from obscu­ rity to fame, and, if not their rendezvous with destiny, at least their do-si-dos. The life is the message; the child is father of the man, the kindergartner the mother of the candidate.

Typically, Warren’s text is fascinating because of the ways it does and does not bear out this claim. Her text does contain a “primal scene,” one that pro­ vides her with the ability to detect and then apply the insight in a phrase like “everybody gets a turn.” In the first chapter, she recounts a conversation with her father that took place in the aftermath of a bad fight with her mother. It is a fight exacerbated by the continual strains and tensions caused by the family’s economic circumstances. Indeed, it is a fight about those circumstances—Warren wants to go to college, and her mother asks her why she thinks she is special and how they can afford it (11). Warren leaves the family home and goes to the bus station; her father finds her there and reminds her of a time when he had suf­ fered a stroke, the family home was under threat of repossession, and he wanted to die. He tells her, “‘Life gets better, punkin’” (12). This is a vital lesson for Warren, who claims that “I had carried that story in my pocket for decades. . . . When­ ever things got really tough, I would pull out that story and hold it in my mind” (13). It instills her with optimism, something of an article of faith, held onto in the absence of evidence to support it, present throughout her text alongside or de­ spite her articulation of a nation in crisis. Concluding her account of the inci­ dent, she says, “By now, his line was a part of me” (13). Her father provides her with an ethos present in her formulation about the flashlight, as well as

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providing her with a sense of how others’ stories can become hers. Warren is en­­ gaged in the positive, hopeful work of illumination; she is trying to work toward making her lesson true for other Americans in the future: life gets better. This “primal scene” does not account for a “rise from obscurity to fame,” as Lepore suggests, but it nonetheless does much to explain who Warren is at the time of writing her autobiography and how she writes it. This recollection of receiving a vital lesson provides Warren with a template, or platform, for use of the autobiographies of others to illuminate the individual experiences of mem­ bers of that disappearing middle class. Her first chapter focuses on the stories of Gina, Michael, and Kai (Warren notes that these are not their real names), individuals Warren has encountered in the course of her political activities. Al­ though Warren occasionally quotes them directly, functioning as a reminder that they have told her their stories in their own words, she substantially retells their stories in her own words, with her own commentary (outraged, sympathetic, imparting the message that these are people who have not been dealt a fair hand and deserve better)—so that the autobiographies of others are folded into, and perhaps even become, her own—a part of her, like her father’s reassuring “Life gets better.” As Warren’s father provides a lesson for her, War­ ren, Gina, Michael, and Kai provide lessons for her readers. Gina, Michael, Kai and their stories have impressed themselves on Warren because she feels a sense of kinship with them given her own history. Including their stories functions as further evidence of Warren’s attempt to arrest the dis­ appearance of the middle class, and it ensures that the human dimension of the crisis she outlines is centered, not lost in the charts, statistics, and structural forces she documents. Less altruistically, perhaps, their stories also testify to Warren’s hard work, empathy, and sensitivity. She implicitly emerges as some­ one who listens to people, is trusted with the details of their personal lives, and perhaps also with the ability and task to change those lives. Warren’s motivat­ ing “Life gets better” also resonates with Franklin Delano Roosevelt—she says that he “was right: we can do better” (96). While she does not take pains to ex­ plicitly locate herself within any American autobiographical tradition, she does wish to be found in a political one; it is Roosevelt who is her major influence (and again, implicitly, the message may be that she intends to model herself on his career). Warren writes (and uses) autobiography, then, in ways that establish her as an insider-outsider populist and autobiographer. It is from this position that she endeavors to shine the flashlight on America, diagnosing its problems and find­ ing solutions, revealing the American lives she wishes to change. Her text re­ veals (relentlessly so, through various examples) her sense that America’s middle

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class is at risk (her first chapter is entitled “The Disappearing Middle Class”). More specifically, it reveals the operations of power that collude to effect this disappearance. She identifies the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s policies of trickledown economics as critical in undoing the provisions begun by Roosevelt’s presidency (78–79), reversing an era in which government worked for the peo­ ple and inaugurating an increasing move toward government in the service of the rich and corporations. Her chapters turn the flashlight on the ways Ameri­ can individuals and families are priced out of their dreams of a home, educa­ tion, and retirement, with chapter 4, “The Rich and Powerful Tighten Their Grip,” as Warren tells it, constituting the most explosive in the sense that it de­ tails those close relationships between Wall Street and government, with the Trump administration only a particularly egregious example of an ongoing situation. Her chapters do not only document a persuasive case for the threat to the middle class, though. In every instance, Warren explains her ideas about how the threat can be diminished and the middle class rescued, so that she reveals potential solutions to the problems she has uncovered. Broadly, these can be summarized as involving more government intervention in regulating big cor­ porations and offering more opportunities for its citizens, so that government shifts toward working more for the people rather than the elite. Implicit in her discussion of solutions is the fact that only someone with significant (presiden­ tial?) power would be able to enact such changes; Warren is the person who would enact the change but needs the power. Yet this implicit claim that she has the capacity to enact change risks undermining her sense of inclusion in the “we,” the people. Warren’s personal history is integral to this national narrative. This is par­ ticularly obvious in the first chapter, in which she focuses on her own family and their battles with poverty when she was growing up. She discusses her mother’s ability to find a job paying a reasonable wage that could support their household (a situation credited to the Roosevelt government and its legacies), in comparison to contemporary America, in which two-wage households can still struggle to stay afloat, and in the absence of a livable minimum wage (13–14, 26). Warren therefore uses her own life story to connect with the members of the disappearing middle class who are her focus. She is also able to use her own age and history (she was born in 1949 and notes the centrality of the Great De­ pression in her family history) to forge a connection to periods in the past when she believes American governments provided greater safety and protections for the middle class. So when she writes about the benefits of Roosevelt’s policies, she can show how they affected her and her family directly.

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Warren therefore writes with the experiential authority of having lived through many of the historical changes she documents. Her story allows her to make a move very familiar in the American autobiographical tradition, one usually more complex and fraught for women, and which Warren’s insideroutside populist position renders even more delicate. She installs herself, largely implicitly and by inference, as a “representative American,” a successful exam­ ple of the American Dream for the middle class (she is a product of her con­ struction of the better America of the past); a national symbol, to the extent that for Warren the middle class and aspiring middle class represent “the peo­ ple.”9 Paradoxically, her path to success reveals her share in, and understanding of, struggles similar to those that middle class (presumably, her intended read­ ers) are enduring. This is particularly dexterous because it allows Warren to offset the risk that the “representative” status increases her distance from read­ ers, who may or may not see themselves in her depiction of “the people”; she is, additionally, comfortable and successful, whereas they may not be (indeed, she has been showing all the ways they may not be). The relation of her personal history exploits her insider-outsider status (as autobiographer and as populist) to skirt the problem raised by the fact that Warren does not in fact share the struggles of the “disappearing middle class” at the time of writing. It constitutes evidence to support the implicit argument that she is the person to change the course of the nation (in this sense she does turn the flashlight on herself, after all). Her repeated use of sarcastic phrases like “Before we raise our glasses” (18), and “Pass the caviar” (208) function in the same way; they allude to the privileged circles Warren moves in but show her estrangement from them. Additionally, her documentation of her family history reminds readers that while she is a public figure, Warren has a private, personal life, an unprivileged history, and humanizes her in the way that her stories about Gina, Michael, and Kai humanize them. More problematically, to the extent Warren attempts to install herself as precarious insider-outsider symbol, savior, or representative of the nation, this is predicted on eliding middleclass interests with the nation at large, something that will exclude all those who do not feel represented by her description of the middle class, its struggles and concerns. This is a perennial problem with establishing oneself as a “national representative” in American autobiography. Warren’s depiction of America in crisis also relies on the insider-outsider populist position: “My small addition . . . is to say as loudly as I can that this is an emergency: we need to act now with a comprehensive strategy for ending this money madness” (166). Indeed, Benjamin Moffitt asserts that “the neces­ sary perpetuation of crisis” is a key element of populism.10 For Warren, the

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middle class is disappearing, nation is being destroyed: in response to the Ku Klux Klan endorsement of Trump, she writes, “I wanted to find the In Case of Emergency Break Glass box, because I believed America was in real danger” (229). The sense of crisis denotes Warren’s representation of reality, one that will feel accurate to many readers. But it is also a construction of reality that works in her favor. Moffitt notes that the frequent contentions that there is a “crisis of faith in democracy” have a particular effect: “The stage has been set for popu­ lists to sweep in, appeal to ‘the people’ and enjoy great success by capitalizing on a general loss of faith and disaffection with their representatives, ‘the elite’ and politics in general.”11 If there is a crisis or emergency, then someone needs to come in and save the day, and that “someone” is Warren, champion of the people. Moffitt notes that “populist performances of crisis never really end,”12 which is borne out by Warren’s text. Her 2018 afterword is important not be­ cause it adds anything Warren has not said before but because it allows her to stress that the crisis to democracy is still ongoing, people need to continue to fight, and her/their work is only beginning. Despite the fact that Warren substantially writes from the position of a pop­ ulist insider-outsider perspective, her embrace of populism is neither consistent nor wholehearted. Mudde and Kaltwasser claim that “just as the boundaries between insider and outsider are sometimes blurred, the distinction between populist and non-populist politician is not always easy to discern.”13 This con­ tention is seen most clearly in the ways Warren discusses Trump. It is not sim­ ply because Trump is president, presiding over and responsible for enabling the state of crisis she describes (and additionally a hypothetical future political rival) that Warren constructs herself as his antagonist. In doing so, she implic­ itly suggests her own capacity for great political power. Of the coverage her Twitter exchanges with him receive, she says, “Now there was a fresh story line: someone had found a way to get under Donald Trump’s skin and fight back” (226). This is risky—as far as Warren adopts a populist position, then she risks being more closely associated with Trump than she might wish.14 After all, Trump too campaigned on a populist vision of an America divided by “us” and “them”—it is simply that he and Warren diverge in terms of whom they would place on either side of the divide. Yet, for Warren, Trump has only pretended to be on the side of the people. She describes him as introducing a government of “trickle-down economics on steroids” (60), and, once in power, quickly align­ ing himself with the interests he had supposedly wanted to excise from govern­ ment, encapsulated in his famous intention to “‘drain the swamp’” (60). She claims of his actions and statements that “this is not populism” (60). Warren is not explicit, but it can be inferred that she is suggesting that there might be a

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more convincing version of populism to be found, even that she represents it (at no point in the text, though, does she refer to herself as populist). It is clear that she sees Trump as insincere: “He called out the anger that people like Gina felt, and he lied about the solutions to their problems” (222). If we follow the logic of binary opposition so key to Warren’s arguments, she positions herself on the side of truth, representing a more authentic politician as well as a more accu­ rate version of America (and she does so in that supposedly truthful genre, autobiography). Despite this alignment with truth, it is important to note here that Warren is more than a little disingenuous in discussing her fight with Trump. She claims that his attempts to attack her are ineffective. Of his “Pocahontas” name for her, she comments, “Really? He thought he could bully me into silence by at­ tacking what our family had told my brothers and me about our Native Ameri­ can ancestry? Nice try, but no” (224). Not only does Warren distort reality— Trump’s attack was effective and damaging to her—but she sidesteps altogether the controversy about whether her claims to Native American ancestry were legitimate, evasively avoiding detail about the particulars of what precisely her family has told her about it.15 The controversy about Warren’s supposed Native American identity additionally damaged her reputation with some Native Americans.16 This might legitimately be construed as a crisis, one which risks damaging Warren’s political ambitions, calling her alignment with truth into question—and it is directly related to her personal history. But she does not portray the issue in this way. It is also revealing that her discussion of being told about Native American identity by family members does not conform to the other ways she imparts lessons from them or relays the stories of others, as re­ counted in the text. This discussion, then, shows both that Warren effectively dims the flashlight or turns it off when it suits her; she is content to preserve some “blind spots” of her own (her precise relationship to populism might itself be one such blind spot). By extension, it makes it clear (should any more illus­ tration be needed) that her other uses of her own and others’ autobiographical episodes are careful constructions, too. While Warren may be at pains to distinguish herself from Trump, the more she does so, the less she can be construed as populist. Perhaps this need not be a concern, but it compromises Warren’s “insider-outsider” status and means that Warren is more likely to be read as an insider. One of her most-repeated phrases is the claim that the game, or economic system, is “rigged” (16, 62, 81); for example, “Here’s how I saw it, rigged process, rigged outcome” (184). The rigged system is one she accuses Trump of tolerating, perpetuating, and bene­

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fiting from. But she still believes in systems, she believes in rules: “regulations matter” (91). In stating, for example, that “I’ll sing the song again: Markets without rules don’t provide value to customers and don’t work for small busi­ nesses, but they make the big guys as happy as pigs in mud” (89), she maintains the populist binary of the people against the rich elite, but she positions herself against the lawlessness or unfairnesses that she believes constitutes the Trump administration by aligning herself with a form of governance that intervenes more strongly in the lives of its citizens (the influence of Roosevelt on her think­ ing once more is obvious). This stance does distance her from populism, whose varieties tend to privilege the supposed and possibly unregulated “will of the people,” often as distinct from the interventions and influence of experts and established political and public figures. It is worth revisiting Packer’s claim that populism “speaks of good and evil, demanding simple answers to difficult problems.” Warren does write of good and evil, but she does not provide simple answers (although she may try to ex­ press them simply). Benjamin Wallace-Wells claims that Warren’s presidential campaign “is a populist undertaking in that it seeks to organize rage at Wash­ ington and the elites, but does so with expert efficiency.” But does this reliance on expertise constitute a new kind of populism or a break with it? After all, Warren does not sanction the unfettered will of the people, and she does not seek to totally dismantle existing systems of power. There are also indications that she does not feel entirely comfortable with her own totalizing, “us and them” rhetoric, and that she is aware that her reliance on direct and clear argu­ mentation can be too simplistic; for example, she acknowledges that the story she tells about America and the middle class story might be more complex than she describes: “Sure, there are lots of other pieces to the puzzle, and I’ll talk about some of them later” (92); that “not everyone will agree with me on each of these of these proposals” (94), and that “I don’t love all regulations—no one does” (93).17 There is some validity to claiming, as Wallace-Wells does, that the issues Warren documents are populist, but her solutions are not. It may be even more accurate to say that Warren is not in fact populist in substance but uses some of its apparatus—its rhetoric, its framing, its key concepts (could the same can be said about her use of autobiography?). Using Moffitt’s terms, it might be more valuable to say that Warren invokes populism as a “performative political style.”18 Moffitt contends that this style contains three key elements: “the leader is seen as the performer, ‘the people’ as the audience, and crisis and media as the stage on which populism plays out upon.”19 I would suggest that for Warren, her autobiography

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(her own story, the genre more broadly, and the text generally) constitutes one additional “stage” (or “platform”) where she performs her relationship to pop­ ulism. Moffitt claims there has been a “blind spot” when considering the im­ portance of mediation in political style (he seems to particularly mean the importance of media in influencing political communications generally and how this relates to populism in particular) and accounts for the blind spot as follows: “Populists are not particularly keen to reveal the artifice behind their own media performances, nor the professional machinery behind them, given that much of their appeal stems from appearing to connect with ‘the people’ in an unmediated way that is different from ‘politics as usual.’”20 One function of using autobiography as stage or platform for Warren’s populist position, then, is that it draws attention away from considering the ways that populist position and Warren’s autobiography itself are mediated. It also means that Warren is per­ forming autobiography. This is not to claim that she is somehow faking or lying about being populist (or doing autobiography) but that Warren is much more knowing about exploiting features of both than may appear. It is not by accident that I have used the word inferred a number of times when discussing ways of reading Warren’s claims. Warren’s use of inference is a key rhetorical strategy in her text. It has already been noted that her folding of the autobiographical “I” into the “we” works to align her with “the people”; one consequence of this usage is that while the attitudes of the autobiographi­ cal “I” can still be detected, this detection must often be done via inference, and so with varying degrees of certainty. Her reliance on positions and attitudes that can largely be inferred (rather than explicitly stated) means that she can exploit ambiguity (again, like using a flashlight selectively). For example, I men­ tioned earlier that Warren notes how others have asked her if she is thinking about running for president (218). She does not say that she wants to run in the future, but she does not say that she will not run, either, which allows her to sug­ gest the possibility of running for president to readers without explicitly stating her ambitions. I also suggested that Warren largely constructs herself as a rep­ resentative American by inference. That Warren’s most ambitious claims on her own behalf are made via inference indicate that it is through this rhetorical recourse that she is able to perform what Sidonie Smith, writing about Hillary Clinton’s Living History, calls the “social work of convincing the voting public that a woman could assume national leadership.”21 It is a strategy however, seemingly predicated on the assumption that explicit statements of female am­ bition are dangerous, even that explicitly drawing attention to one’s femaleness is dangerous (think of how Warren’s “I” is effectively folded into a “great dark space” as she turns her flashlight on the “we”). As such, it finds a great deal of

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resonance with the long history of women autobiographers frequently claim­ ing that they write their life stories at the urging of others because they are bound up with anxieties about what it safe for a woman to declare about her­ self in public, especially if she is asserting her own importance and value.22 The use of inference also allows Warren to express anger in ways that make it palatable. It allows her to circumvent cultural prescriptions about its suitabil­ ity when expressed by women. In the introduction to her book Good and Mad, Rebecca Traister notes that women’s anger has been “censured, vilified, ridi­ culed, tsked as incivility,” and observes its double-edged power: “Anger at injus­ tice and inequality is in many ways exactly like fuel. A necessary accelerant, it can drive—on some level must drive—noble and difficult crusades. But it is also combustible, explosive; its power can be unpredictable and can burn.”23 Not only is such anger often less threatening to the self ’s reputation when per­ formed by men, but it is effective in performing populism, as (more often) per­ formed by men. Moffitt argues that populist leaders often attempt to align themselves with “‘the people’ by utilizing ‘bad manners’ to distance themselves from other political actors in terms of legitimacy and authenticity, often break­ ing the unwritten rules about how politicians are ‘supposed’ to conduct them­ selves.”24 Moffitt does not give much attention to the fact that it is far more difficult for women populist leaders to use “bad manners” in this way; indeed, Mudde and Kaltwasser note that women are more likely to try to connect to “the people” by emphasizing “features of the ‘good woman’ as defined by their culture, often presenting themselves as mothers or wives.”25 Warren does portray herself as a wife and mother in the text, but she is not concerned to employ the construction of the “good woman.” Instead, she uses “bad manners,” but primarily deploys them via inference in ways that make their actuality indeterminate. Consider the multiple expressions of anger in the following passage: When I sit in meetings or conferences and listen to people who have investment portfolios and second homes worry about the impact of raising the minimum wage on giant businesses like McDonald’s and Best Buy without a single thought about how the fry cooks or checkout clerks support themselves and their families from week to week, I grind my teeth until my head hurts. When I hear senators make oh-so-clever theoretical economic arguments while ignor­ ing rock-solid data, I want to scream. When President Trump nominates a labor secretary who has opposed a living wage and who made his own fortune by squeezing fast-food workers, I get the urge to bang my head on the table. And when I hear my colleagues in Congress express their deep concern for those who have already made it even as they cheerfully dismiss everyone who is busting their rear just to get by, the fury rises in me like a physical force. (16)

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The expressions of anger above are rooted in Warren’s body and are both real and imagined. She tells us that she grinds her teeth, which gives her a head­ ache, but her references to screaming and banging her head on the table are only desires—she does not act on them. What can we infer from these expres­ sions of anger? Warren is committed and passionate about her causes; she feels deeply about them. Her anger is channeled inward, visited on her body rather than directed outward at others. In describing what she wants to do (but does not do), she manages both to express her anger (which is, notably, on behalf of “the people”) and show that she controls it. Warren does not seriously trans­ gress standards of appropriate behavior in women; her capacity for disruption via anger is contained, confined to the pages of her autobiography—yet also expressed (confessed) in them, expressed in ways which further her aims, yet are safely confined to the page. This tension between expressing and controlling anger, and between actual and fantasized angry responses, is present throughout Warren’s text. She writes that “that’s the part of [Gina’s] story that makes me want to pound the table in frustration” (21); “Kai’s story breaks my heart—and the unfairness of it makes me want to spit” (52); “I was so furious my hands were shaking” (86); “I wanted to climb to the top of the Capitol, hang off its side like King Kong, and shout at the top of my lungs, Unfair! Wrong! Stop this craziness Right Now!” (123); “I was too angry to sit down” (156); “Even [Trump’s] claim to return power to the people made me clench my teeth” (266). Perhaps one of the best examples oc­ curs when Warren writes: Here we go, I thought—time to grab the bull**** whistle. I fired off a letter to the President of Brookings, asking about the connections between a reputable think tank and a study that had been bought and paid for by the financial ser­ vices industry to advance its political agenda. (Okay, I said all those things in much more polite language, but I don’t think anyone missed the point). (196)

Warren manages to represent both her anger and herself as disruptive, by telling us about what she does not say in her letter, which is (she also tells us) more forceful than what she does say (but does not tell us). Her censoring of herself in asterisks also manages to evince a sense of propriety (she is polite, she doesn’t want to offend). This recounting is also crucial in revealing that Warren is highly aware of the effects of what she discloses and does not disclose in her text in general. This might allow for further confidence in claiming that she performs autobiography and populism, despite not stating explicitly that she is engaging with either.

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Warren’s use of inference poses risks to her autobiographical project and can even be threatening to her sense of self. She claims, “On days in the Senate when I feel like I’m running into a brick wall over and over and my head hurts from getting smashed so many times, I sometimes sit at my desk, take a deep breath, and ask myself, ‘Girl, does it make any difference at all that you are here?’” (235–36). Having a headache from imaginary brick walls reveals that Warren’s sense of her own materiality is confused and in question. Her con­ cern about whether it matters if she is “here” is translated into a larger fear about whether she is “here,” matter, at all. This fear about the status of her own existence is related to her concerns about the disappearing middle class, to whom she has bound herself so tightly with her “we”; in the foregoing quota­ tion, she frets about the efficacy of her efforts on their behalf. That this is about the costs of occluding her gendered identity is also indicated by the emphasis on “Girl.” But it also shows the perils associated with the decentering of her autobiographical “I,” which may threaten its presence altogether. A similar fear is present in Warren’s description of being invited to attend the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council: “I showed up at the appointed hour, and the gathering was just about what you’d expect: lots of white men and a few other people. All of them were seated in a darkened room while the main dish (me) was placed on a low stage, ready to be carved up” (250). Warren only tells us that she has “been asked to come” to the event but again inference is in use; the reference to the stage and the depiction of Warren as subject to the gaze of the mostly male audience suggests that she is an invited speaker. Perhaps she down­ plays this for its implications that she is an “insider,” not the vulnerable woman at the mercy of those more powerful, who could consume her (she is the carvedup dish). Being on display, offering herself for public consumption, is some­ thing that Warren has done in her autobiography—her reluctance to state that she turns the flashlight on herself now sounds like an act of self-preservation necessary to engage in autobiography at all. In This Fight Is Our Fight, autobiography is a stage or platform for communi­ cating Warren’s political ideas. Considered in these broad terms, this may make it not particularly distinctive as the autobiography of a political figure. But it would be a grave mistake to think that Warren is not extremely sophisticated in her employment of her own life story and her manipulation of some of the features of autobiography, particularly in its American forms. After listing her suggestions about how America could follow rules that will improve the futures of all, she says that “this isn’t about magic wands and glitter dust and economic theories that make no sense. This is about living our values, about making our

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laws and our rules line up with what we believe in” (150). It seems clear that this is no less true for her autobiography itself, which is conceived of as not merely a platform, in the sense of communicating ideas, but a stage where those ideas are performed and enacted: Warren’s autobiography is to display and enact the values that matter to her. What makes her text fascinating is that some of her most sophisticated uses of autobiography tend to take the form of deliberately creating what could be called “blind spots” or “flickers” (Lepore’s word); that is, when inference and attention to what is not said are required to fully appreciate her strategies and how she attempts to achieve her aims. There are costs to this; her use of autobiography can be so subtle, the flickering so unstable, that her position as populist, her text’s status as autobiography (as truth, as belonging to the genre) threaten to extinguish themselves. Throughout the text she effec­ tively turns the flashlight on and off to shift her focus and to redesignate to what light and dark refer. This deliberate switching reveals that she thinks and writes in terms that are much more complex than the binaries she overtly relies on when articulating populist attitudes. I would suggest that Warren’s text stands as an exemplar of a kind of text to which autobiography studies does not al­ ways pay sufficient attention—texts that do not explicitly advertise themselves as autobiography or engage self-reflectively about their own processes, tradi­ tions, and key features but nonetheless deploy some of those features in the act of making autobiography a stage and a platform for their authors’ values.

Notes 1. Originally published in 2017, Elizabeth Warren’s memoir was republished in 2018 with a new afterword. Subsequent references are taken from this edition. 2. McLennan 8. 3. I am deliberately refusing to offer or cite a strict definition of autobiography because such definitions can so easily be challenged and exceptions can so easily be found; Philippe Lejeune’s definitions of autobiography are most often cited for the purposes of refuting them (McLennan 4). It seems that autobiography is notable precisely because it is nearly impossible to define. 4. Descriptions of Warren as “populist” are nearly always accompanied by a quali­ fier, which perhaps suggests a level of doubt about whether the term populist comfort­ ably applies to her. To give only a couple of random examples, see “The Ideas Primary” and Bott. 5. Mudde and Kaltwasser 5. 6. Mudde and Kaltwasser 75.

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7. There is a wealth of criticism on all these areas in their own right, but a useful overview of important current theorists and debates can be found in Chansky and Hip­ chen. Another useful starting point is Anderson. 8. Laura Marcus identifies the relationship between inside-outside tension as impor­ tant to the study of autobiography, too—she notes that sometimes an autobiography aims to close the gaps between self, life, and writing, but at other times it aims to pre­ serve the distinctions between them (the self within and outside the text, for example). 9. In American autobiographies this gesture of installing oneself as a representative American goes back at least to Benjamin Franklin, who in the course of telling his life story makes himself a symbol of the new nation; a much more recent example is Barack Obama, who uses his mixed-race identity and life history to construct himself as a rep­ resentative of America’s multicultural population in Dreams from My Father. It is not acci­ dental that these examples are both male; it is much more difficult for women autobiog­ raphers to claim such representative status because their gender means that their stories are too often understood as other, as particular and not universal. For an excellent dis­ cussion of the difficulties of gendered representation in autobiography, see Gilmore. 10. Moffitt 130. 11. Moffitt 113. 12. Moffitt 131. 13. Mudde and Kaltwasser 76. 14. The confusion about Warren’s and Trump’s relations to populism and to each other are borne out in news article headlines and underscore the dangers for Warren of association with Trump. Compare, for example, the following headlines: a BBC news item, “Trump v Warren Rallies Preview Possible 2020 Populist Duel” (Zurcher), and one from the Washington Post, “When We Hear Populism, We Think Donald Trump. But We Should Be Thinking Elizabeth Warren” (Cantrell). 15. By focusing only on Trump’s nickname for her, Warren avoids the fact that con­ troversy about her claims to Native American ancestry or identity had been present for years, going back to her race for the US Senate, as illustrated by Franke-Ruta. Trump himself was aware of the efficacy of his attacks, claiming that “I hit her really hard, and it looked like she was down and out. But that was too long ago. I should’ve waited. But don’t worry, we will revive it” (cited in Scher). 16. In 2019, Warren made a public apology for her claims about ancestry at a Native American forum in Iowa, along with a promise to develop policies that would benefit Native Americans. As reported by Kaplan, these actions did not result in unanimous approval or forgiveness from Native Americans. 17. Although this is not my central concern in this chapter, it is worth noting that Warren’s reliance on binary opposition of the middle-class “people” and the rich elite may place real restrictions on the persuasiveness of her arguments because it is too re­ ductive, primarily because it obscures thinking about other divisions and inequalities in relation to gender and race. Warren acknowledges these inequalities, but it is fair to say

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that they are not incorporated fully into her discussion. Her reliance on this binary op­ position can be seen as a blind spot (which could be described as a failure to attend to intersectionality). It also problematizes her insistence that life was better for the middle class under Roosevelt’s government and its legacies, and it means her claims that there were more opportunities for ordinary Americans in the past are open to charges of ro­ manticism, nostalgia, and oversimplification. 18. Moffitt 4. 19. Moffit 5. 20. Moffitt 79. 21. Smith 524. 22. One of the earliest examples of this in the American autobiographical tradition is Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. 23. Traister xxiii. 24. Moffitt 52. 25. Mudde and Kaltwasser 70.

Works Cited Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. 2nd. ed. London: Routledge, 2011. Bott, Uwe. “Elizabeth Warren, Smart Populist.” Globalist, June 27, 2019, https://www .theglobalist.com/elizabeth-warren-smart-populist/. Cantrell, Gregg. “When We Hear Populism, We Think Donald Trump. But We Should Be Thinking Elizabeth Warren.” Washington Post, July 30, 2019. https://www.wash ingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/30/when-we-hear-populism-we-think-donald -trump-we-should-be-thinking-elizabeth-warren/. Chansky, Ricia Anne, and Emily Hipchen, eds. The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2016. Clinton, Hillary. Living History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Franke-Ruta, Garance. “Is Elizabeth Warren Native American or What?” Atlantic, May 20, 2012. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Self-Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cor­ nell University Press, 1994. “The Ideas Primary: Elizabeth Warren’s Unusual Brand of Wonkish Populism.” Economist, February 9, 2019, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/09 /elizabeth-warrens-unusual-brand-of-wonkish-populism. Kaplan, Thomas. “Elizabeth Warren Apologises at Native American Forum: ‘I Have Listened and I Have Learned.’” New York Times, August 19, 2019. Lepore, Jill. “Confessions of a Presidential Candidate.” New Yorker, May 20, 2019. Marcus, Laura. Auto/Biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice. Manchester: Man­ chester University Press, 1994. McLennan, Rachael. American Autobiography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

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Moffitt, Benjamin. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Mudde, Cas, and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers, 2004. Packer, George. “The Populists.” New Yorker, August 30, 2015. Rowlandson, Mary. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson [1682]. Sioux City: NuVision Publications, 2007. Scher, Bill. “‘Pocahontas’ Could Still Be Elizabeth Warren’s Biggest Vulnerability.” Politico, August 27, 2019. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/27 /pocahontas-elizabeth-warrens-biggest-vulnerability-227912. Smith, Sidonie. “‘America’s Exhibit A’: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Authenticity.” American Literary History 24, no. 3 (2012): 523–42. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Traister, Rebecca. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “The Expert Efficiency of Elizabeth Warren’s Populist Cam­ paign.” New Yorker, January 10, 2019. Warren, Elizabeth. This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class. With new afterword. New York: Picador, 2018. Zurcher, Anthony. “Trump v Warren Rallies Preview Possible 2020 Populist Duel.” BBC News, September 17, 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada -49642461.

Autobiographical Reckonings in America’s Restless Twenty-First Century Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson This country’s recent dysfunction is bigger than Covid. It is a dark new form of American exceptionalism. David Leonhardt, “Nine Mass Shootings”

Americans have traditionally demanded coherent and simple national narrative stories. Now many of these stories no longer make any sense. But so far nothing has replaced them. We are in story limbo, and for a storyteller this is an intensely interesting place to be. Laurie Anderson, quoted in “Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans”

Introduction “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” This refrain of the play Hamilton has taken on new meaning with the cataclysmic events of the 2020s: a global pandemic; a deepening economic crisis differentially affecting the wealthy and the millions of people who have lost their livelihoods; worldwide protests against structural racism and police brutality; and in the United States ominous attacks on the United States Postal Service, voting rights, and the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. Those crises are joined to ongoing concerns with what is now called “climate chaos” seen in melting

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polar ice caps and intensified temperature extremes; sexual harassment and predation lending renewed urgency to MeToo witnessing; body politics around gender identity and women’s right to choose; and alarming death tolls from addiction to opioids and hard drugs. Not only is the union of the United States divided; civility is increasingly frayed and fractured by political polarization, insurrection in the Capitol, and anxiety about what constitutes “truth” in the socalled Age of Fake News. Intensified populism with fascistic overtones threatens the stability of governments here at home and around the world, most recently in Europe with the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Devastation on ecological, economic, and health fronts threatens both developed and developing nations. In this moment of uncertainty when the world is poised at a cataclysmic convergence of events, life narrative assumes new importance as a mode of telling and sharing personal stories with collective implications. As readers and viewers continue to devour these stories—for instruction and distraction— what issues might we, as scholars and consumers, foresee about how to invest our energies and concentrate our conversations about autobiographical acts and practices in the coming decade? Whose stories are now being told? What are the effects of social media platforms in shaping those stories? What mixes of graphic and verbal narration now compellingly communicate the stories being told? How are these stories grounded in, or how do they return to, archives of past experience and insight? What genres of telling combine or disentangle in this fraying environment? Finally, what are the theoretical implications of these new formations? We offer here a panoramic take on new and diverse kinds of life stories, organized around six broad categories of events: pandemic precarity; the Black Lives Matter movement; ecocrisis, environmental justice, and planet survival; the plight of migrants and refugees; feminisms at the American suffrage centennial; and new-model addiction narratives. Rather than analyze a few texts or present a theoretical approach to them, we propose an itinerary for discerning patterns in life writing of the last two decades, a time of reckoning in the “divided” United States. Additionally, we gesture to future avenues for transnational and comparative conversations about life writing. “Reckoning” implies an assessment, a settling of accounts, or a calculation of where one is at. More colloquially, on a “day of reckoning” one is called to account for one’s actions. An autobiographical reckoning, then, links self-appraisal to accounts of pressures exerted by larger historical forces. In the wake of 2020, our itinerary charting this unfolding moment is a restless essay for an unquiet and disturbing time.

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Pandemic Precarity The year 2020 exploded in an unanticipated direction—the global pandemic of COVID-19 that infected massive populations, killed more than a million people by year end, and left many more with compromised health and psychic trauma. Months into calls for public health protocols, including mandatory face masks, social distancing, hand sanitizing, periodic lockdowns, and other safety measures, and with no end in sight, the Divided States had no unified national leadership on the epidemic and found itself insufficiently prepared. There is no way to predict how, when, and what will emerge from this crisis; but life narratives in many media are acutely registering the impact of COVID-19. Some stories are individual and introspective, others are collective narratives of group struggles that suggest the range of the pandemic’s outreach. Impact varies with many factors—the geographic and social location, income level, profession, ethnicity, age group, and health status of their narrators. There is no single pandemic narrative or, indeed, response. Writing has taken many forms. Diaries capturing the progress of the epidemic include diurnal chronicles of individual experience by sufferers and their relatives published in newspapers, journals, and blogs, from the droll “Dear Diary 2020” of Jeff Holland to such daily cartoon drawings as Alison Bechdel’s “now that all the days are really blurring into one another” (quoted in Loos F-8) and Lynda Berry’s “Documenting All the Small Things That Are Easily Lost,” to the virus diaries of artists mentioned in Amelia Nierenberg’s “The Quarantine Diaries.” There has been increased use of Death Cafés on Zoom, “deathpositive” gatherings of strangers whose personal stories explore how mortality affects the living.1 Online sites now archive life stories of “loss” and “gain,” such as “Coronavirus Lost and Found.” Testimonies from health-care workers, recorded online and for television shows, register exhaustion and anger about insufficient personal protective equipment, inadequate safety and medical protocols, and the anguish of patients dying alone. For example, Dr. Thomas Fisher’s The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER narrates how in 2020 the epidemic complicated pressure in the rapid evaluation unit to diagnose each incoming patient on Chicago’s underserved South Side in three minutes, as required by the American system’s inadequate and inequitable healthcare. Obituary pages condense the life stories of ordinary but exemplary people suddenly dead of the disease. Graphic diary and memoir pages by comics artists in 2020 register how days blur together from the month of March’s “patriotic nods, rainbow chalk drawings and recognition for healthcare and essential

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workers” to June’s “structural racism, healthcare inequality, police violence [that] ended all the empty sentiment” (Watson). Literary reflections have also been published, such as Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays and Leslie Jamison’s essay “When the World Went Away, We Made a New One,” which tracks how, after a bout of COVID, she found “an unexpected abundance inside a state of loss.” Clearly, documentary books and films, personal and collective memoirs by doctors and nurses narrating their experiences of extreme stress and grief, and comics responding to the shock and violence of the pandemic will appear in myriad venues and probe issues of agency, responsibility, guilt, and complicity, and the terms and tenors of mourning. Questions: As life narratives are generated by responses to the varied and on­­ going stages of the pandemic, questions such as the following will surely emerge: How do life narratives focused on COVID-19–related illnesses and the pandemic’s impact reframe questions of relationality and connection to proximate others, including the newfound intimacy of teleconferences with one’s doctor from within the home? How is our sense of what constitutes embodiment and health tempered by global vulnerability to a highly infectious virus? How are issues of temporality—the sense that normalcy, “the Before Time,” will return— engaged? Is “the After Time” an emerging paradigm for an unanticipated mode of the Anthropocene?2 In what ways do notions of “the bubble” redefine membership in and limits of community, be it actual or virtual? How has self-presentation been modified by the technology of Zoom, and what features of the intimately personal (if sweatpants-clad) life does it foreground? How will stories of illness and disability be modified by shifting doctor-patient encounters in the virtual space between doctors’ offices and patients’ homes via telemedicine and by the context in which medical professionals themselves are subjects of this collective crisis?

Black Lives Matter Revaluations As news commentators observed, in 2020–21 the United States suffered from two viruses: the world’s highest infection and death rate from the COVID pandemic; and a vitriolic surge of white-supremacist activism, culminating in an unprecedented mob insurrection and sack of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. The pandemic exacerbated and dramatically exposed the brutal truth that a history of systemic racism in the American health-care system has led to greater rates of infection, complications, and death from COVID-19 among African Americans, Hispanics/Latinx, Indigenous people, and refugees of color. The call for reckoning with and redress of structural inequality intensified with

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the successive shocks of recurring police violence directed at African American lives. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, was captured on video by a horrified onlooker for the eight minutes and forty-six seconds that white police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee against the neck of the prostrate Black man, who repeatedly cried, “I can’t breathe!” before expiring, during which time three fellow officers either helped hold Floyd down or stood by without intervening.3 As the video circulated, an outcry arose worldwide, ranging from walkouts by professional athletes to protests in both large cities and small towns, about the history of American state-sanctioned brutality in the service of maintaining a regime of white supremacy originating long before the nation was even established. The shock waves from this and other killings reignited the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and its offspring, the Say Her Name movement, to recognize Breonna Taylor and other African American women murdered by the police.4 Memorials to a history of racist brutality are also being mounted even as public sculptures celebrating the American Confederacy are being taken down. For example, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public in 2018, is a six-acre site housing “the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence” (Equal Justice Initiative). Calls for “abolition,” the dismantling of carceral policies and institutions and racist modes of policing, resound in the streets and in chambers of government. This critique reflects the work of such scholar-activists as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whose discussion of “carceral geography” explicates the effects of the conjoined assemblage of landscape and natural resources, material and ideological infrastructures, political economy and forms of control and punishment (Change Everything; Abolition Geography). Similarly, Jackie Wang has explored how, in the “racializing processes” of “carceral capitalism, logics of differentiation mediate capitalist accumulation” (quoted in Buna). The Black Lives Matter movement and its attendant activist projects have generated memoirs by activists prominent in it. Among those memoirs is When They Call You a Terrorist by cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors with journalist Asha Bandele. Strikingly, its subtitle is not personal but collective—A Black Lives Matter Memoir. Drawing on a cosmological metaphor, Khan-Cullors asserts that “I am a survivor. I am stardust,” and extends her “I” to the Black “we” of the movement who are waging a fight for both social justice and the recognition of its spiritual core as a “divine-right mix.” The trajectory of her own religious history shifts from being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness to discovering in the

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writings of Audre Lorde an alternative spirituality celebrating female sexuality and repudiating “the master’s tools.” Her memoir offers a basis for redefining the notion of “terrorist” imposed on BLM and linking it to the history of African American movements for social justice. In No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, BLM member and journalist Darnell L. Moore sketches a set of “snapshots” of a boy growing up in Camden, New Jersey, a black city made into a racialized “hood” through “invisible forces” that “rendered my blackness criminal, my black manhood vile, my black queerness sinful, and my black city hood” (7). Through the “dance of memories,” including his traumatic memory of being doused with gasoline and set afire by neighborhood boys hounding him for what they see as his queerness, he “discovers” and “names” the intersectional dynamics of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Intersectionality becomes both a historical effect of heteronormative racialization and a theoretical lens for exposing the beauty of Camden and its people, as well as the damage to it. Ashes in the Fire concludes with Moore’s euphoric recognition that the moment his mother “affirmed the full expression of my humanity” brought him the wisdom to reject the larger culture’s representations of single Black girlmothers as “the cause of the problems in the black families and the reason black boys like me made poor choices” (211). The ongoing demonstrations, commemorations, and appeals for social justice have a correlative in the rise, during the 2010s, of new models of African American life narrative in which narrators give breath to subjectivity in several forms while critiquing the illusory formula of uplift, emancipation, and progress delineated in some earlier narratives of enslavement and liberation. The autobiographical essay, as practiced by James Baldwin and memorably reinvoked in Raoul Peck’s documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), has been adapted, in the mode of a letter to his son, by Ta-Nahesi Coates. In Between the World and Me (2015), Coates recounts his own life trajectory to critique the marginalization and destruction of Black men by violence and discrimination (see also Megan Brown’s discussion of this text in her chapter). Similarly, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2015), made into a film in 2019 (Cretton), indicts the racially driven inequities of the American criminal justice system, particularly in the South, by linking his own struggle as a young lawyer to stories of incarcerated victims of unjust prosecution. In a different vein, memoirs of the family such as past poet laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020) reflect on the complexities of growing up after her white mother was brutally murdered by her Black stepfather. Expanding this framework, in her incantatory book-length poem Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), poet Claudia Rankine blends allusions to several forms of lyric

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poetry and media to make a collage speaking the polyvocality of a collectivized American subject. Her recent Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) continues this dialogistic inquiry by interrogating others—white and black—as well as herself on the terms of citizenship and belonging. Such explorations in autobiog­ raphical relationality to proximate others both situate personal life stories within the ongoing operations of systemic racism and probe its complex repercussions. In a summative fifteen-year project of meditation on Blackness, nonidentity, and thought itself, writer, poet, and theorist Fred Moten published his powerful trilogy entitled consent not to be a single being. Spanning three-volumes—Black and Blur (2017), Stolen Life (2018), and The Universal Machine (2018)—consent not is a portrait and improvisational performance. Intellectually, Moten probes the conjunctions of reading across the history of Western universalizing thought, art, and sociopolitical praxis for “fugitive” eruptions of blackness. Performatively he enacts a contemplative self-other-study, a practice of calculated resistance—of disordering and reorganizing thought and knowledge itself—that he delivers as sonic suites of essays. Moten describes this practice as “a devotional, sacramental, anamonastic (or maybe animagnostic) kind of intellectual practice” (Stolen Life 230). Biofiction is another means of inserting seemingly autobiographical voices into the historical narration of systemic disenfranchisement and murder. For example, Colson Whitehead in The Nickel Boys (2019), set in the Dozier reform school of Florida, renders an account of the systemic abuse of a young boy. Whitehead draws on the figure of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 was never prosecuted but became a rallying point for the civil rights movement. More recently, the historicizing of American violence toward Black citizens circulates in such recent archive projects as the Emmett Till Project website and The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History (2020), a pedagogical comic book concerned with the question of Till’s agency, by scholar Karlos K. Hill and artist David Dodson. Observing changes in contemporary biographical treatments of the Till story, comics scholar Qiana Whitted notes that, after a half century of graphic representation, autographics in the current moment focus on critiquing the denial of “the social protections of childhood to black male youth” (71). Similarly, while the self-presentation of assertive Black male subjectivity in rap and hip-hop has flourished since the 1990s, it remains a timely register of the duress under which many African Amer­ icans come of age. Other writers may employ biofictional strategies to different ends. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019), returns to early twentieth-century

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New York and Philadelphia to engage the question of what constitutes a free life by creating the imagined voices of several young Black women who experimented with unsanctioned forms of intimacy and refused degrading work in ways that produced a radical change in subjectivity. Koritha Mitchell argues that countervailing currents in canonical texts of Black women’s writing attest to the sustaining vibrancy of African American communities where their accomplishments have centered on what she calls a “homemade citizenship . . . a deep sense of success and belonging that does not rely on civic inclusion or mainstream recognition, or depend on protest to pursue success and belonging (3). In these weaves of autobiographical detail and fictive voices, new subjectivities are being asserted through communal belonging. Furthermore, as contemporary life narrators return to grim, informal archives of violence and brutality, they not only reflect on the legacy and achievements of Black American culture but also ask anew, Where do we go from here? Questions: How do twenty-first-century life stories differently narrate the struggle for equity and enfranchisement than earlier generations of African American life writing such as that of the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and the Black Power movement? What revisions to the teaching canon of Black life narratives might be made? In what ways do reworkings of the horror-film genre present an analysis of embodied white supremacy and racism as sites of monstrous power in film, television, performance art, or memoir? How might the call for reparations or the development in whites of what Isabel Wilkerson has called “radical empathy”—“putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel” (386)—enable new models of African American self-presentation? How do emerging narratives by white de­­ scendants of slaveholders or Ku Klux Klansmen who deployed their white priv­ ilege inform projects of acknowledging the terrors of history, lodging claims for reparation, condemning white supremacy, and calling white beneficiaries to account?

Ecocrisis, Environmental Justice, and Survival In 2020, while narratives of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter activism commanded daily attention, a series of climate eruptions such as the devastating late summer fires ravaging the West Coast and inland Rockies of the United States further unsettled our confidence about generational survival. Indeed, Washington governor Jay Inslee refers to them as “climate fires” (quoted in

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Bice). Further, the Air Quality Index, reported daily by the Environmental Protection Agency, operates much as stock exchange valuations do because both are indexes of collective health. The intensification of climate extremes and the suffering brought on by ecological degradation are contributing to mass human displacement, pollution of lakes and oceans, destruction of the Amazon rain forest, advancing desertification, increased greenhouse gases, and the mass extinction of flora and fauna. In the Divided States, there is consensus among scientists about the human contribution to climate change; and there is public dissensus, stoked by climate change deniers, that forestalls, delays, and impedes national action to slow the pace of global warming, or what Katharine Hayhoe terms “global weirding” (quoted in Leonhardt, “A Times Climate Reporter”). Linguists, scientists, philosophers, and journalists struggle to find language adequate to the changes taking place now and threats to the future ahead, coining such terms as “apex guilt,” “shadowtime,” “thickspeech,” and “anthropocentric hubris.” Shadowtime, for instance, acknowledges a “parallel timescale that follows one around throughout day to day experience of regular time. Shadowtime manifests as a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present” (Bureau of Linguistic Reality, “Shadowtime”). And thickspeech captures the sense of sluggish stuttering, the stickiness some people experience as they try to talk about, even in words of mourning for, the effects of the Anthropocene (Macfarlane 364), that “event horizon of human signature” (Bristow 35). Several strands of scientific and scholarly inquiry now direct extensive attention to global climate change, variously termed studies in critical disasters, studies in the Anthropocene, and posthumanist and transhumanist studies. In autobiography studies as well, scholars are exploring ecocrises and their effects, most recently in a 2020 special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on the Anthropocene coedited by Gillian Whitlock and Jessica White. The vast scope of environmental crises requires radical reorientation to the fragility, precarity, and interconnectedness of the natural world in order to mobilize humanity around the work of ecosurvival. Contemporary modes of life narrative capture aspects of this reorientation and provide grounds for mobilizing activists. One mode of acknowledging our interconnectedness to the land has become an increasingly common practice at academic and activist gatherings: namely, land acknowledgment, situating one’s identity in relationship to the location and history of the site from which one speaks. These acknowledgments serve as witness to the territorial history of Indigenous kinship and

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embodiment. Our Hawai’ian, Canadian, Australian, and some Western US colleagues have taken up this practice common to Indigenous ceremonies for centuries, while noting, as Tarren Andrews observes, that “gatherings . . . take place on stolen land—which in the Americas and the Pacific is every gathering.” Andrews goes on to observe that “at their best . . . land acknowledgements give us an opportunity to be unsettled and uncomfortable” (5). But, as Ryan Fong compellingly argues, it is not sufficient to state inherited identities within American contexts; rather scholars need to recognize the epistemological foundations of their disciplines and situate their texts in relation to them and to the Indigenous contexts that they often overwrote. Further, as Grace Moore observes, to write a life in the Anthropocene is to inscribe afterlives from ecological itineraries of broken kinship. The ethics of autobiographical reflection involved in land acknowledgments and the search for restorative kinship make such practices a focus for our field going forward. Other kinds of life narrative have emerged out of the paradox of living in and thinking beyond the Anthropocene, life narrative that adopts the attitude of “Ghomanidad”: “a reframing of humanity from being, and viewing itself as, a force that is extractive to one that is regenerative and energizing” (Bureau of Linguistic Reality, “Ghomanidad”). A second mode of ecocrisis writing is immersing oneself “bone-deep in landscape,” as Montanan Mary Clearman Blew described it, to forge an intimate connection with the grandeur and otherness of the natural world (7). In Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020), Ben Ehrenreich combines essay, travel narrative, reportage, and shamanic citation, invoking along the way “Mayan creation myths, anthropological accounts of the decimated Sioux, and Presidential tweets” in order “to chronicle humankind’s destructive nature” and thereby situate himself both in the present and in a historical genealogy (quoted in “Briefly Noted”). Similarly, in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013), Robin Wall Kimmerer celebrates sweetgrass, “hierochloe odorata,” the characteristic plant of the Western high plains, as “the fragrant, holy grass” and honors its metaphorical power to create social braiding (ix). Her own narrative braids three strands: “indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinaabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most” (x). In a long tradition of Indigenous activists, chronicled in Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (2019), Kimmerer laments the failure of human action and mourns those lands threatened with an­­ nihilation, even as she praises the efficacy of sweetgrass and calls for justice to the earth.

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In another parallel, the posthumanist vision of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard (a Canadian professor of forestry), joins a memoir of education in the “professional life” of scientific training, method, and publication practice to thick description of scientific notebooks and a manifesto for recognition of the “wood wide web” (165) of trees and mycorrhizal fungi that connect mother trees, shrubs, and younger trees in a cooperative network of nitrogen and nutrients across compatible, interacting forest partners. Her conclusion asserts a posthumanist ethic of care that “begins by recognizing that trees and plants have agency. They perceive, relate, and communicate; they exercise various behaviors. They cooperate, make decisions, learn, and remember—qualities we normally ascribe to sentience, wisdom, intelligence. By noting how trees, animals, and even fungi— any and all nonhuman species—have this agency, we can acknowledge that they deserve as much regard as we accord ourselves” (294). Another mode of ecocritical life narrative analyzes how governments have disadvantaged poor and minority communities by inequitably calculating water and waste resources and allocating healthy and contaminated lands in ways that reflect racialized structures and policies. In the notorious 2014 Flint water crisis, Michigan’s leadership switched the water system of the city of Flint from the reliable quality of the Detroit River to the unreliable quality of the local Flint River, as a cost-cutting measure with deadly consequences. Old lead pipes leaked neurotoxins into residents’ water, threatening the lives and flourishing of thousands of children and older residents; state officials concealed the data.5 Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatric physician and the director of the pe­­ diatric residency program at a teaching hospital affiliated with Michigan State University, wrote a compelling memoir, What the Eyes Don’t See: The Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City (2018), in which she links her struggle to protect babies to a recognition that “the very people responsible for keeping us safe care more about money and power than they care about us, or our children” (13). Examples of malicious neglect centered on the management of water and waste are also occurring in other Divided States. In The Yellow House: A Memoir, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Sarah M. Broom represents her mother’s family home as a thirteenth child, a living presence that suctions off energy and compels those who leave to return. The house becomes an embodied effect of how Hurricane Katrina revealed racialized negligence on the part of government agencies and the precarity of the poor, particularly people of color. In a narrative of her prodigal flight and return, Bloom recounts and mourns the house as symbolic of structures that hold, fray, and sus-

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tain families amid the legacies and lived realities of environmental racism. Similarly, Waste: One Woman’s Fight against America’s Dirty Secret (2020) by Catherine Colman Flowers exposes the environmental degradation of Lowndes County, Alabama, where she grew up. Flowers documents how the flow of wastewater across the surface of yards in communities of color and the poor, driven by climate change, intensifies environmental racism and classism. This analysis of sanitation politics in the American South is intertwined with her narrative of being educated as an activist. Such memoirists serve as a kind of warrior calling people to acknowledge and redress environmental inequities and hazards. As poet-memoirist Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Nation, the first Native American poet laureate, and the author of the memoir Poet Warrior, told an interviewer: “A warrior is a protector—of land, water, culture, children. [Being] a warrior is . . . about standing up and promoting that which feeds the spirit of a people” (Gilson). In yet another mode of ecocrisis life writing, narratives by and about millennial and Generation Z activists in the United States and throughout the world defy climate change deniers and call for change to “save the planet.” Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, now a meme and rallying point for youth power around the globe, chronicles her young life in Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis (2020). This collective, collaboratively composed family memoir weaves together the story of Thunberg’s activism with the story of her autism; in so doing, she yokes a neurodiverse vision of autistic subjectivity to an activist embrace of a world suffering from global degradation (Ernman et al.). Testimonial narratives by other young people, incorporated into human rights documents or posted on nongovernmental organization (NGO) websites such as those at Global Witness and New York–based WITNESS, also document the effects of climate change on young lives. For example, the series of videos “Fighting for Climate Justice in the United States” emphasizes “how climate change and government inaction is [sic] affecting the everyday lives of our youth.”6 A feature of such life writing by millennial and Gen Z activists is its potential refraction of what the Bureau of Linguistic Reality describes as “PreTraumatic-Stress Disorder”—“a condition in which a researcher experiences symptoms of trauma as they learn more about the future as it pertains to climate change and watch the world around them not taking necessary precautions.” Another potential generic mode of such life narrative is its alignment with horror narratives, emerging out of “solastalgia”—”a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment has been altered and feels unfamiliar” (Bureau of Linguistic Reality, “Solastalgia”). In sum, for

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younger generations just coming to reflect on their situatedness in a world in climate crisis, the automedial aspects of life narrative may make it both an expressive outlet for outrage and mourning and a call to social justice—in bold, often collectivized multimedial forms, such as comics, blogs, public art, flash mobs, and performance art. Questions: In this moment when salutary acknowledgments of the land’s sedimented past converge with dire, heterogeneous manifestations of ecocrisis, troubling questions arise. What forms of ecocrisis writing will emerge to register the ways in which humans return some form of agency to the earth? How might testimonial modes of life writing adapt to or revise the acts and practices of witnessing to climate change and the intersection of climate degradation with public planning that privilege white entrepreneurial claims? How might new modes of trauma narrative engage the horrors of solastalgia? What new entanglements of human and nonhuman actors, distributed agencies, and cross-species relationality will attend storytelling of the Anthropocene? How might the subject positions of witnessing be reframed in posthuman terms (Connor)? How might new, expansive kinds of personal narrative represent the temporalities of shadowtime and the challenges of acknowledging individual and collective culpability for climate disasters in calls for effective action?

The Plight of Migrants and Refugees While suspicion of and resistance to the in-migration of people to the United States has a long, often sordid history, animus toward those regarded as alien others, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, intensified during the Trump administration. Such actions as the following make this clear: the Trump administration’s barring of tens of thousands of Muslims from immigrating to the United States, diversion of funds to extend the border wall, and use of family separation and child incarceration to discourage migrants from crossing the southern border. Refugees and migrants journeying toward the United States, some formally seeking asylum, found access to the country denied at borders and international airports, and visa programs eliminated or reduced. International students, crucial to US educational institutions, became pawns in toxic political battles. Despite the change of administrations, to date delays continue in deciding the fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients seeking a path to citizenship. Throughout the last decade, human rights NGOs, journalists, and other activists have continued to document the lived histories and acts of witnessing of those who, unsettled by poverty, violence, environmental racism, and the

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effects of climate change, seek safety and opportunity elsewhere. Some have reported on how refugees use cell phones and access social media platforms to document lives being lived under the duress of displacement. NGO websites collect, frame, and publish testimonies from users enlisted to share their stories. Cameras distributed by the human rights NGO called WITNESS have been used to document the violence of human rights violations and the precarious journeys of flight and survival. Migrant and refugees themselves have mobilized the “how-to” genre of personal storytelling by addressing in like, as they document details of survival and relocation and instruct others on how to successfully manage transit and entry. Small presses promote these life stories as guidebooks to help those trying to settle in an unfamiliar country and find support, community resources, safe housing, and employment while seeking legitimacy. Acts of witnessing to violence, radical suffering, and displacement in places of origin become entangled in and constrained by the varied protocols, policies, and politics of receiving nations, with the result that the kind of stories that can be told for successful acceptance by US immigration authorities are continually being modified. As Gillian Whitlock observes, the “agency of testimony is contingent; it responds to changing parameters in law and public policy, new technologies and the communities they engender, changing values in the affective economy, eruptions of violence, and negotiations for social justice in global networks of peace and justice” (95).7 And Clare Brant, Tobias Heinrich, and Monica Soeting raise an important issue: “What languages, literal and figurative, accompany their transition from one life to another?” (625). For some immigrants who have settled in “America,” the experience may produce contemporary versions of the narrative of disillusionment and cynicism that critique the myth of “American Exceptionalism” and America as a place of promise and dreams fulfilled are circulating in the United States. In her 2021 memoir Beautiful Country, Qian Julie Wang “endeavor[s] to document my family’s undocumented years as authentically and intimately as possible” (3). She mines her memory archive and the traumatic legacies of the Cultural Revolution in China, the transit of the seven-year-old girl in 1994, and the years of underground or “shadow” survival living in the darkness of being undocumented. Adopting the voice and language of a child and young girl who comes of age in the time and space of “gei,” she mobilizes a migration narrative that renders visible and palpable the experiences and fortitude of those who negotiate the state of “undocumentation” in the United States, as well as those who elect leaders who perpetuate or challenge the struggles of the undocumented. Both interviews with DACA recipients and narratives by migrants chronicle the realities of rejection and harassment and register feelings of betrayal

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about “America’s” promise (see Benuto et al.). For example, Javier Zamora’s 2017 poetry collection, entitled Unaccompanied, attests in poetic shards to his multiple attempts to cross into the United States, the precarity and violence of crossings, and the death and disappearance of others who accompany him. Such narratives will likely increase as undocumented migrants bear witness to the violence done to those seeking asylum in the United States, to disenfranchisement, and to the forced repatriation of loved ones. Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a Vietnamese American refugee, gathers migration stories of several writers in his collection Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018). In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2017), he meditates on the personal and collective struggle to forge “a just memory” of the traumatic legacies of that war. It is important to note, as Leigh Gilmore observes, that American citizens of color may be represented as refugees if they are dispossessed by catastrophic events, as were Black residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina when “images of Black embodied suffering” were sutured “to names and implied narratives of statelessness” (“Refugee/ Citizen,” 673). Automedial genres are increasingly mobilized to tell stories of traumatic flight, transit, migration, and citizenship. Graphic memoir has become a powerful medium for telling generational stories of particular communities of refugees that attract a wide readership. GB Tran recovers his family’s history of transit in the graphic memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010), which chronicles two stories: that of the parents’ struggle to survive the war and escape Vietnam as refugees and that of the son’s Gen X apathy and indifference toward that traumatic past. Tran organizes the points of memory, from divergent historical moments and locations, syncopating chapters that move the parents’ story forward and his own backward in time until they merge in the final frames and gutters. Film and public art can be profoundly automedial sites for narrating one’s life in relation to others. Manthia Diawara, African-born memoirist, filmmaker, and professor of film, has throughout his life chronicled his experience as an African migrant. In An Opera of the World Diawara composes “strategic ruminations” about the situation of refugees in the Mediterranean by crosscutting among interviews with migrants, writers, filmmakers, and critics, and interweaves scenes from a griot opera to dramatize the plight of migrants dependent on smugglers, with interspersed chapters of his own expatriate past. Other artist-migrants to the United States, such as Ai Weiwei in New York, use art installations to document and dramatize the plight of refugees, including himself.

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Graphic journalism is the mode of some reflexive comics: visual journalist Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees (2018); author-illustrator Don Brown’s The Unwanted: Stories of Syrian Refugees (2018); and British cartoonist-artist-activist Kate Evans’s Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017). Evans situates the narrative strands of Threads in the “Calais Jungle” of France’s refugee camps, using lacemaking as a kind of visual leitmotif to represent and embed relationships that develop within the refugee camp, the factors that led to migration, and the social stigmas that their dilemma evokes. These comics of witness interweave stories of refugees struggling to keep themselves and others afloat and alive while in transit or in what Candida Rifkind calls the “carceral infrastructures of trauma” (298) as they seek to educate people in receiving countries, enlist support, and affect financial and policy interventions. In coming decades, the genres of refugee witness narrative will likely expand as the profound effects of global warming intensify and the number of people displaced by climate crises increases exponentially. Some will seek refuge in the United States, but US citizens may also become climate emigrants. Those who bear the brunt of environmental racism—disproportionately people of color across the United States—may be displaced as they struggle to survive, becoming refugees, as occurred with Black victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. With the stunning shift to Democratic representation in the state of Georgia’s 2020 elections, New York Times journalist Charles M. Blow calls for Black people to “reverse the Great Migration” to spur African Americans in the North and Midwest to return to the South and join activists in enfranchising communities of color. Blow’s call is for an early twenty-first-century reworking of the journey of the northward Great Migration of African Americans in the 1910s and 1920s. We wonder, as well, whether new narratives critiquing white privilege will take hold, perhaps referencing Jim Crow–era complicity in order to stimulate reparations for slavery. Questions: What vehicles, media, story forms, and strategies are survivors and activists devising to join the narrative of the lived experience of displacement and survival with recognition and analysis of structural racism, white supremacy, and extractive capitalism? How do witnesses and activists negotiate the tensions between the singularity of the lived experience and the collective call to a shared experience? What kinds of narratives are emerging to tell stories of climate refugees fleeing such intensifying conditions as flooding, famine, fire, and desertification? How might the form, rhetoric, and terms of narrated citizenship change for those US citizens displaced by the effects of global

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warming? How and by what means do those who tell such stories establish and shift affective registers to connect with and move readers, viewers, or users? What ethics of reading traumatic stories of violence and survival is adequate to the current political climate in which the border is becoming less porous, a viral pandemic is threatening lives and livelihoods, democratic institutions are under assault, and conspiracy theories rage across the Internet?

Feminisms at the Suffrage Centennial The year 2020 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution legislating women’s suffrage in the United States. Celebrations of this centennial have been intensified by outrage and widespread activism on many fronts: the #MeToo Movement; the contentious Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings for a Supreme Court judgeship in the US Senate; the Say Her Name strand of Black Lives Matter activism and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls activism; controversy about trans subjects in the military, academia, and the arts; assaults on transgender women, especially Black, Latinx, and Indian women; the successful Democratic Party vice presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris, the first elected Black, South Asian, and female candidate for the office. Despite the pandemic, issues of suffrage, sex/gender liberation, choice, and violence against women remain urgent, generating heterogeneous kinds of autobiographical storytelling and inviting new theoretical frameworks to engage them. Leigh Gilmore observes that “#MeToo underscores the importance of an emergent culture of witness in hailing survivors into testimonial agency, rather than shaming and silencing them” (“#MeToo,” 162). Assuredly, that hashtag generated a community and cacophony of survivors witnessing to sexual predation online and in print, in documentary and NGO data gathering. Recent memoirs narrate stories of sexual assault and its consequences; biodocumentaries focus on well-known predator-perpetrators, such as Harvey Weinstein; analyses by reporters, such as Ronan Farrow in Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predator (2019) and Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, coauthors of The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation (2019), that report the back stories of women’s narratives of sexual assault and offer a structural analysis of rape culture and institutional ecologies of sexual predation and cover-up. A few memoirists have emerged from the witness stand to identify themselves. In Know My Name: A Memoir (2019), Chanel Miller—the Stanford student referred to as “Emily Doe” in the Brock Turner sexual assault case—claims her name as a

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survivor, expands on her widely read victim impact statement, starkly chronicles the afterlife of her assault, analyzes how the structural conditions of prosecution advantaged the perpetrator over the victim, and wields a poet’s passionate commitment to the power of words to say her truth. Rachael Denhollander addresses another scandal, campus harassment of athletes by team physicians, in What Is a Girl Worth? My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics (2019). She entwines a student’s traumatic comingof-age narrative with a lawyer’s clear-eyed analysis of the structural conditions for prosecuting serial sexual offenders in organized sports, an advocate’s chronicling of facts and the search for witnesses, a mother’s investment in the safety of little girls, and a spiritual seeker’s faith-based vision of mission, survival, and peace. Other witnesses, some narrating from a social margin, link their stories of growing up Black or Brown, gay or trans, to legacies of colonialism and slavery, imperialism and daily microaggressions, as do the “dispatches” assembled in Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018), edited by Roxane Gay. Yet, some victims cannot speak their truth—for example, the Indigenous girls and young women murdered or missing in and around Indian Country. The 2020 documentary film Somebody’s Daughter, directed by Rain and realized by an all-Indigenous team, focuses on missing and murdered women and girls of the Blackfeet Nation and the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes of Montana (Mabie).8 The documentary opens: “I am a full-blooded Native American woman. Being that, I am the most stalked, raped, murdered, sexually assaulted and abused of any woman of any ethnic group.” In saying the names of the girls and women, the film situates personal stories within the contexts of colonialism, genocide, and systemic racism and sexism, articulating from within the deep silence around Native women’s experience. Its voices resonate with the #SayHerName activism launched in 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies that aims to make visible the Black women and girls victimized by racist violence, as activists and protestors did in 2020 by saying the name of the murdered Breonna Taylor (AAPF, “#SayHerName”). These movements spur a new kind of life writing as creative activism that is also evident in the play Say Her Name: The Lives That Should Have Been, a creation of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Julia Sharpe-Levine, and G’Ra Asim, which they based on extensive interviews with mothers who lost daughters. The project’s website proclaims: “The resulting script bears the imprint of asymptotic recovery, a process of real-life data collection that spans the chasm between the reality of Black women’s experiences and the dominant narratives that circumscribe

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their lives” (AAPF, Say Her Name). In the interviews, mothers engaged in a speculative project of imagining a “might have been life”—how their daughters’ lives might have unfolded if they had been spared police violence. In one part of the performance space, six mothers mourn together while elsewhere in it six daughters “carry on in a world their mothers know is possible and yearn to deliver into being” (AAPF, Say Her Name). As these diverse projects and voices suggest, a reckoning with many aspects of racialized violence is now under way. Historicizing the women’s suffrage movement and its pledges to continuing activism on behalf of women is sparking new kinds of life narrative projects that engage fundamental questions: Whose suffrage and at what cost? Whose liberation and of what kind? In this time of reckoning with the histories of subordinated subjects erased from national myths and narratives, historians are beginning to confront how the history of women’s suffrage in the United States suppressed the voices and activities of African American women in the movement in order to get legislation passed. They ask how heterogeneous communities of women and individ­ uals came together to make a case for women’s suffrage. And they probe how the exclusions, hierarchies, and privileged standpoint of narrating that history reproduced the myth of a suffrage movement led only by white women. Now, too, scholars and cultural workers are consulting archives to find the names of activists from marginalized communities and sometimes discovering their life writing in the archives, which may exist in the fragments and ephemera of material culture, or be discernable in their absence. In Latinx studies, for instance, scholar Maria Cotera and filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant have pioneered and piloted new platforms in the digital humanities to advance this work of recovery. Since 2009, their Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, a digital oral history and archive collection, works to recover the stories and personal archives of understudied Chicana/Latina activists from the 1950s to 1980s.9 This work, exemplary of the intellectual labor of passionate conviction, is committed to making the personal stories and archives of activists accessible by historicizing and preserving them for the general public. There are more reckonings in the life narratives of a new generation of writers redefining their feminist practices. Roxane Gay began with online diaristic writing and in 2012 published a manifesto entitled “Feminism (Plural),” which became the first essay of her Bad Feminist: Essays (2014). Gay narrates her coming-of-age story in fragments, making good trouble with popular culture stereotypes and providing searing takes on what constitutes a “bad feminist” or “good feminist” (Bad Feminist, 114). Maggie Nelson’s memoirs, such as The Argonauts (2015), propose a reckoning with gender, sexuality, pregnancy, mother-

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hood, and queerness in a hybrid form sometimes called “autotheory.” Nelson’s provocative language inaugurates a journey that both exposes the risks of and celebrates desire and caring. In Canada, Heart Berries (2018) by Seabird Island Reserve writer Terese Marie Mailhot is a fragmented yet searing narrative that reckons with how the legacy of settler colonialism and forced separation of children from their Indigenous communities created conditions for childhood sexual abuse, even as she grieves the loss of her first child in divorce. Leigh Gilmore argues that Mailhot’s memoir, “written from breakage and representing a fierce aesthetic achievement,” emerges “as matriarchal Indigenous practice, as survival skill, and as literary art” (“#MeToo,” 164). As these reckonings suggest, feminist writers and artists are narrating new stories that call for care of self and community within troubling times. Questions: How is suffrage, as a political right, related to the practice and expression of alternative forms and understandings of belonging and citizenship in hybrid modes of life narrative? What new locales of narrated citizenship in life writing beyond the ballot box are emerging, such as Koritha Mitchell’s concept of “handmade citizenship” (discussed in the earlier section Black Lives Matter Revaluation)? What contemporary practices and platforms attest to lives that were “lost”? How might the sedimentations of conventional historical formation, mythical storytelling, and modes of witnessing be linked to assaults on women’s bodies? What limits to testimony and accountability for hearing and acknowledging names are emerging, in legal and informal jurisdictions? Where do you note the migration of platforms for witnessing?

New-Model Addictions and Recoveries In the turbulent year 2020, nearly 400,000 American lives were lost to COVID-19, and many more upended by job loss and economic downturn and fractured in strangely reconfigured domestic spaces. As 2020 saw an increase in what columnist Nicholas Kristof terms “deaths of despair,” narratives of health and well-being concerned with addiction—to alcohol or drugs, particularly opiates— became increasingly in demand. The epidemic of addiction has been overwritten by the pandemic crisis; but before it set in, the rise in opiate addiction had been the chief health crisis in the United States, and it has long-standing roots both as a phenomenon and in the culture of memoir. Popular genres of life narrative have been registering this contemporary epidemic and generating new stories that readers seek out, in books, blogs, and podcasts, to make sense of their disordered lives and discover means of healing. The acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by

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J. D. Vance, and its subsequent film adaptation (2020), exposed widespread opiate addiction within poor white families in Appalachia, including his own mother’s addiction to opiates and heroin (see Stephanie Li’s chapter in this volume). Riveting titles about alcohol addiction such as Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola (2015) and prescription-drug abuse memoirs such as How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell (2017) invite readers to identify vicariously in exploring possible causes of addiction. For narratives of lives wrecked and in part recovered, one dominant model of recovery is that of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which ultimately relies on the spiritual intervention of a higher power.10 Alex Williams notes that a template derived from the AA Twelve-Step Program designates the three stages of addiction memoirs as, typically, “Hitting Bottom,” “Getting Clean,” and “Making Amends,” with the degree of emphasis on each part varying with the author’s stage of life, degree of success in recovering, and endorsement of, or skepticism about, the addictionand-recovery process. While a centuries-old model links addiction to moral failing, new models are emerging. A competing model focuses on the social and emotional disconnection from others experienced by addicted individuals. For example, the dislocation model is prominent in the memoir by Canadian Indigenous writer Helen Knott, In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience (2019). While it connects her experience as an Indigenous woman sent to a Canadian residential school with intergenerational trauma and her own and other young women’s experiences as victims of sexual violence, it emphasizes her resilience through healing practices when she reconnects with her First Nations culture. Another competing model, the brain-disease model of addiction, addresses the genetics and biochemistry of the human body in terms of the medicalization of hard drugs now used to combat pain after personal injury. For example, Travis Rieder’s In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids (2019) offers readers his hard-earned advice and urges them to avoid addiction by resisting their doctors’ overprescribing of pain medication after injury and advocating that people control their addictions to recover. Alternately, an addiction memoir may emphasize multiphase recovery, as does Leslie Jamison in Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), which recounts how she identified states of intoxication with success as a writer by constructing her narrative in relation to the lives of other alcoholic writers, such as John Cheever and Jean Rhys, but ultimately returned to a modified version of the AA model. Overall, many new-model addiction memoirists combine a critique of roman­ ticizing alcohol or drugs in contemporary consumer culture with an emphasis on how achieving recovery enabled them to reclaim their humanity. Such nar­

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ratives offer both a degree of empathy for readers who may be similarly afflicted and a vicarious, voyeuristic glimpse into the degradation of once-healthy lives. In these politically polarized times, extreme ideological notions of identity have an addictive power for some people. Religious fundamentalism is portrayed as a kind of consuming belief system that warps the well-being of individuals and communities in Tara Westover’s Educated (2018). A stirring memoir of recovery as escape from extremist beliefs in poor rural America, it narrates Westover’s coming of age in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho where she is isolated from even her relatives. Although she works in the family junkyard, has no formal elementary or secondary schooling and must struggle to resist her alcoholic brother’s physical and psychological abuse of her as a teenager, she eventually recovers and succeeds to the extent that she is awarded a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge. Her reeducation requires not only rejection of the values with which she is raised but acquisition of a humanist belief system (see also Megan Brown’s chapter in this volume). Extremist ideologies now are fueled by misinformation and disinformation on social media. For example, alt-right sites may target particular demographics, such as unaffiliated young people or disenfranchised rural Americans, for membership in groups that increasingly reveal their white supremacist orientation and calls for rebellious action, such as culminated in the January 6, 2021, insurrection and sack of the US Capitol in Washington, DC. From centers of grievance, another kind of “recovery” narrative has also emerged in the memoirs of those who participated in white nationalist movements and then narrated their struggle to disengage. Such examples as Michaelis Arno’s My Life After Hate (2012) and Christian Picciolini’s White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out (2017) suggest the intensity of their efforts to come to terms with hate-driven movements. Internationally, similar narratives of infatuation, then disillusion, with the extremist politics of ISIS are waging a narrative struggle against the intoxicating calls of such movements. At a divided American moment, these memoirs provide possible means of suturing lives that have moved from disarray through intoxication with extreme belief systems toward recovery, rehabilitation, and the possibility of membership in new kinds of community. Questions: How does the focus in recent alcohol addiction memoirs on a multiplicity of causes revise dominant AA and moral-failing models? In what ways could addiction-and-recovery memoirs be called a new kind of captivityand-conversion story, and what are the limits of this comparison? In what sense do memoirs critiquing religious-fundamentalist and political ideologies exhi­ bit aspects of addiction to extreme belief systems? Where do critiques of the

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triumphant ending of overcoming inform popular memoirs? How is the notion of “recovery” inadequate to these pandemic times, and how might it be retheorized and reframed?

Conclusion In sum, the events of 2020 and 2021 may indeed produce a reckoning, a turning point of as-yet unclear forks in the contested paths of American democracy. The challenges and conflicts such acts and practices produce are reflected in the robust circulation of American memoirs and life stories in many media. As life narrators situate themselves within the fractious temper of these times and seek to understand their experiences relationally, their stories—imaged and voiced—are reverberating with larger historical and aesthetic currents throughout the nation and configuring new modes of representation to express the complexities of American identification and citizenship. Not only are different kinds of stories being narrated; a new paradigm of investigation may be necessary to listen to and assess them. With the new knowledges—many as yet chaotic and uncodified—that the years 2020 and 2021 produced, which stories of personal and collective experience will prove to be signposts for an uncertain and uneasy future? To what extent will new modes and models of life writing gesture toward where we go from here? To what extent will texts and documents from past archives be retrieved and regenerated—as insightful and possibly prophetic? Through what acts of communication and sharing might the work of our field attract new kinds of stories and fuel the energy to discover and narrate them? What new automedial formation might emerge? In our view, new generations, more attentive than we can now be, are being called on to chart the seismic shifts wrought by these calamitous years and their aftermath and to explore whether new kinds of ties can bind the fractured United States through insight and effective action. For, as President Joseph Biden acutely observed in his inaugural address on January 20, 2021, with all its challenges, the United States “requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.”

Notes 1. Death Cafés were inspired by Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, who started the first “café mortel” in 2004, as well as British web developer Jon Underwood, who refined the model and convened a Death Café in his home in London in 2011. Such gatherings

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provide a venue for telling a range of stories spanning ages, genders, and races that encourage sharing and invite the “death-curious” to revive the practice of family care around dying in earlier centuries. While participation in death cafés is often virtual on websites such as Deathcafe.com, they respond to the desire for communal mourning around the passing of loved ones and friends. See Italie and Leshner. 2. Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock note that, as a geological epoch, “The Anthropocene is distinguished by its grasp of humans as a geophysical force, shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels and production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, transformation of the earth’s land surface and water flows, and mass extinction” (1). 3. On June 25, 2021, Chauvin was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison after being found guilty on the three counts of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter for his role in the death of Floyd. On February 24, 2022, former Minneapolis police officers Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J. Alexander Kueng, present on the scene, were found guilty of violating Floyd’s civil rights by a federal jury. 4. On March 3, 2022, Officer Brett Hankinson, on trial for wanton endangerment in the death of Taylor, was cleared of culpability by a Kentucky jury. 5. In what is expected to be a series of lawsuits deriving from the Flint water crisis, in February 2022, a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of four Flint children exposed to tainted water and brought against two engineering companies consulted during the crisis was opened in Michigan. In another action, tens of thousands of affected Flint residents have applied to join the beneficiaries of a $626 million settlement of claims against the State of Michigan, the city of Flint, Rowe Professional Services, and McLaren Flint Hospital. 6. This project was a joint effort of WITNESS, Our Children’s Trust, the iMatter Campaign, and MFA students in the Science and Natural History Filmmaking Program at Montana State University. The videos of personal stories of young people are accessible through the WITNESS website (see WITNESS). 7. For recent work in autobiography studies on refugee narratives, see “Forum: Refugee Narratives.” 8. For more information about the film, including a trailer to view, see Alter-Native Media. 9. See Chicana por mi Raza, “Digital Memory Collective.” Maria Cotera, at the University of Texas–Austin, has also advocated tirelessly for humanities scholars to have access to a robust cyber-infrastructure for preserving and maintaining access to Small Data projects, as contributions to the expansion of historical databases and archives. 10. Throughout this discussion of alcohol addiction, we are indebted to insights in the MA thesis of Kevin van Egdom for Royal Roads University, entitled “Re-Constructing the Past: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Three Alcohol Memoirs,” for which Julia was the external reader.

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Gilson, Nancy. “First Native Poet Laureate Joy Harjo Uses Words to Show Humanities and Importance of Genre.” The Columbus Dispatch. February 13, 2022. https://www .dispatch.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/02/13/native-american-poet-lau reate-joy-harjo-appear-feb-15-denison/9313503002/. Global Witness. “About Us.” Accessed August 22, 2020. https://www.globalwitness .org/en/about-us/. Hanna-Attisha, Mona. What the Eyes Don’t See: The Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City. New York: One World, 2018. Harjo,  Joy. Poet Warrior. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Hepola, Sarah. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. New York: Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, 2015. Hill, Karlos K., and David Dodson. The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Holland, Jeff. “Dear Diary 2020.” Medium. July 3, 2020. https://medium.com/@ffej dnalloh21/dear-diary-2020-edition-9406f477d7b7. Italie, Leanne, and Emily Leshner. “Death Cafés Help Ease Grief, Loss.” Columbus Dispatch, July 5, 2020. Jamison, Leslie. Make It Scream, Make It Burn. New York: Little, Brown, 2019. Jamison, Leslie. “When the World Went Away, We Made a New One.” New York Times Magazine, May 19, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/19/mag azine/covid-quarantine-recovery.html. Khan-Cullors, Patrisse, and Asha Bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist—A Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s, 2017. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Knott, Helen. In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience. Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 2019. Kugler, Olivier. Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press with Myriad Editions, 2018. Leonhardt, David. “A Times Climate Reporter Answers Questions About This Week’s Weather.” New York Times, February 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02 /18/us/a-times-climate-reporter-answers-questions-about-this-weeks-weather.html. Leonhardt, David. “Nine Mass Shootings.” New York Times, March 23, 2022. https:// www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/briefing/crime-shootings-anomie-america.html. Loos, Ted. “What Has Lockdown Meant for L.G.B.T.Q. Writers?” New York Times, June 21, 2020. Mabie, Nora. “New Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman Documentary Premieres Today.” Great Falls Tribune / Statesman Journal, January 15, 2020. https://www .statesmanjournal.com/story/news/2020/01/15/missing-murdered-indigenous -women-mmiw-documentary-native-american-tribe/4479649002/. Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Mailhot, Terese Marie. Heart Berries: A Memoir. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2018. Marnell, Cat. How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

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Contributors

Angela Ards teaches African American and contemporary American literature, with special interests in Black women’s writing and intellectual thought, narrative nonfiction, and New South studies. She is the author of Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era (2015), and her current book project uses oral histories to chronicle the lives of Black Americans who bypassed the Great Migration to remain in the South. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Laura J. Beard is associate vice president (research) and a professor of modern languages and cultural studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her own research interests include life narratives, women writers of the Americas, Indigenous literatures and cultures, and equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education. She has held internal and external funding—including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright—for work in Mexico, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. She is a founding member of, and serves on the steering committee for, the International Auto/Biography Association Chapter of the Americas. Author of Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Writing in the Americas (2009), she is currently writing on the 1939 memoir of John S. McClintock, Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers. Megan Brown is a professor of English at Drake University, where she teaches courses on nonfiction narrative (including memoir/autobiography and the 325

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Contributors

personal essay) as well as twentieth century and contemporary US literature/ cultural studies. The author of The Cultural Work of Corporations (2009) as well as American Autobiography after 9/11 (2017), she has also published widely in journals, including Biography, Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Assay. Ricia Anne Chansky is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is the editor of the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series. She is the director of the award-winning mass-listening project “Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane” and currently serves as a research fellow on two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded projects: “Climates of Inequality and the COVID Crisis: Building Leadership at Minority Serving Institutions,” an initiative at the Humanities Action Lab, and the “Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico.” Her recent books include Mi María: Surviving the Storm: Voices from Puerto Rico (2021) and Maxy Survives the Hurricane/Maxy sobrevive el huracán (2021). She has recently won awards from the Modern Language Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Oral History Association, and was recognized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance as a global human rights leader for her work in environmental justice. Ally Day is an associate professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo. Her book, The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir, Medicine, and Crip Positionalities (2021), addresses the complicated interactions between those living with HIV and AIDS service providers, as well as the neoliberal production and exploitation of narrative within the medical industrial complex. In addition to coproducing a feature length film about an HIV hospice in Toledo, Ohio, she is working on a second book project about the intersection of disability and birth wherein she analyzes several sites of pregnancy and disability, from Zika virus to doula trainings, home birth movements to infertility industries; this project is tentatively titled “Grappling with Gestational Ableism: Disability, Pregnancy and Radical Futures.” Steven Hoelscher’s research interests include the history of photography, North American and European urbanism, social constructions of space and place, race and racism, and cultural memory. His books include Reading Magnum (recognized as a 2013 Photo Book of the Year by American Photo Magazine), Picturing Indians (winner of the 2009 Wisconsin Historical Society Book Award of Merit), Heritage on Stage, and Textures of Place (coedited with Karen Till and Paul Adams), and he has published more than fifty book chapters and articles in such journals as American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Quarterly,

Contributors

327

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Ecumene (now Cultural Geographies), Geographical Review, GeoHumanities, GeoJournal, History of Photography, Journal of Historical Geography, Public Historian, Rundbrief Fotografie, and Social and Cultural Geography. Katie Hogan is a professor of English and faculty affiliate in women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Hogan’s book Women Take Care: Gender, Race, and the Culture of AIDS (2001) was a finalist for the CGS Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities. Katie’s current project is “Imaging Climate Change through Queer and Trans Literature.” Hogan’s teaching interests include the literature of environmental justice, queer and trans ecologies, girl cultures, and LGBTQIA2S+ literature. Stephanie Li is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Her first monograph, Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women (2010), analyzes literary examples in which African American women decide to remain within or enter into conditions of bondage. Her next book, Signifying without Spe­c­ ifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama (2012), describes a new mode of racial discourse for the twenty-first century, what Toni Morrison calls “race-specific, race-free language.” Her interest in Obama’s writings led her to guest coedit with Professor Gordon Hutner the fall 2012 special issue of American Literary History, entitled “Writing the Presidency.” Her third monograph, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (2015), considers how postwar African American authors represent whiteness. Her most recent book, Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century (2018), is dedicated to charting the contours of Pan-African American literature. Rachael McLennan is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Her research activities focus on age, autobiography, and gender in a wide range of interdisciplinary postwar and contemporary texts. She has published several articles on these areas as well as three books: In Different Rooms: Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature (2016), American Autobiography (2012), and Developing Figures: Adolescence, America, and Postwar Fiction (2009). Joycelyn K. Moody teaches African American literature, life writing, and Black feminisms as the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is series editor of African American Literature in Transition and editor of A History of African American Autobiography (2021). With John Ernest, since 2009, she has coedited the book reprint series Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture.

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Contributors

Margaret Noodin received an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English and linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a professor and associate dean of the humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anish­inaabe Language and Literature (2014) and two bilingual collections of poetry in Ojibwe and English: Weweni (2015) and Gijigijigaaneshiinh Gikendaan (What the Chickadee Knows) (2020). Her poems and essays have been anthologized and published in New Poets of Native Nations, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Poetry Magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Water Stone Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. She is a strong advocate for education and community engagement through relevant research and teaching. To see and hear current projects, visit the website www.ojibwe. net, where she and other students and speakers of Ojibwe have created a space for language to be shared by academics and the native community. Elizabeth Rodrigues is an associate professor and humanities and digital scholarship librarian at Grinnell College. Her research focuses on life writing, critical data studies, and comparative approaches to multiethnic US literatures. She is the author of Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures (2022). Other work has appeared in Biography and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. Sidonie Smith regularly bakes her own bread, ardently weeds her extensive gardens, and, in season, hangs her laundry to dry on her home’s rear deck overlooking a creek. She loves dancing to Motown and its descendants. She has lectured and taught in twenty-six countries. With Julia Watson she has published several books and essays, as well as many books separately or with others. Their most recent collaborative volume is the online collection Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader (2017). Julia Watson saves organic garbage for composting her year-round herb garden and strives to fulfill the wishes of her cats and grandchildren. She loves dancing to Motown and its descendants. She has lectured and taught in more than twenty countries. With Sidonie Smith she has published several books and essays, as well as many essays separately. Their most recent collaborative volume is the online collection Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader (2017). Hertha D. Sweet Wong is a professor of English and associate dean of arts and humanities. She writes about and teaches autobiography, Native American lit­ eratures, ethnic American literatures, and visual studies. Her most recent book is Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text (2018). She

Contributors

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is also the author of Sending My Heart Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography (1992) as well as numerous articles on Native American literatures, autobiography, visual culture, and environmental nonfiction. She is editor of Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine”: A Casebook (2000). With Jana Sequoya Magdaleno and Lauren Stuart Muller, she is coeditor of Reckonings: Contemporary Short Fiction by Native American Women (2008) and with John Elder, coeditor of Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales of Nature from around the World (1994). Daniel Worden is an associate professor in the School of Art at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A scholar of print and visual culture, he is the author of Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (2020) and Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism (2011). He is also the editor of The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum (2021) and The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World (2015) and most recently the coeditor of New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture (2022).

Index

activism, 17, 23, 140, 183–86, 221, 251n1, 258, 300–307, 312. See also Black Lives Matter; civil rights movement; MeToo; Say Her Name; Thunberg, Greta addiction, 315–17 African American females. See Black women Agawa Rock Pictographs, 30, 36n2 “Age of Trump,” 9, 11, 24. See also Trump, Donald the Alamo, 92, 104–8 Alcoholics Anonymous, 316–17 Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD), 62–63, 67 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan), 121, 129, 135n5 American Autobiography: Retrospect and Pros­ pect (Eakin), 11, 22n10 American Dream, 18, 122, 133, 209, 251, 284 American Hunger (Wright). See Black Boy (Wright) American Medical Association (AMA), 256, 268 American Revolution, 31–32

American studies, 9, 20, 22n9. See also new American studies American Studies (Merlis), 168 the Americas, 27–34 anger, 289–90 Anglo settlers, 94–97, 101, 105–7, 112–14. See also colonialism Anishinaabe, 212–14 Anishinaabeg, 28–29, 33–35, 36n1 Anishinaabemowin, 28, 33 Anishinaabewakiing, 27–33 Anthropocene, 299, 304–5, 308, 319n2 anthropology, 215–17, 220, 231 antiblackness, 42, 48, 171. See also racism antiurbanism, 168, 179 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 168–71, 178, 187, 188n5 atomic bomb, 77–78 autobiography: and climate change, 304–5; diaries as, 42–51, 52n14; and education, 248–51; and identity, 225, 262, 303, 312; and nation, 5–19, 21n1–6, 24, 195–99, 297–302; and populism, 277– 92, 292n3, 293n8–9; refugee, 119–26, 132–34, 141; visual, 58, 310. See also life stories; memoir; primal scene

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332

Index

Bad Indians (Miranda), 16, 141–53 Baldwin, James, 301 Barcello, Sergio da Silva, 45–46, 52n10 Barnes, Elizabeth, 271–72 Barthes, Roland, 58 Bartholomae, David, 236–37, 241, 248–50 Bechdel, Alison, 12, 17, 103, 167–84, 187, 188n6, 298 belonging, 3–8, 11, 168, 171, 176, 183, 302–3, 315 Belonging: A Culture of Place (hooks), 189n13 Between the World and Me (Coates), 18, 238, 244, 301 Biden, Joe, 23, 44, 296, 318 bioethics, 254, 265 Birmingham, Alabama, 73 Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), 73–74, 86n29 birth, 254–71 Birth as an American Rite of Passage (DavisFloyd), 258 birth narrative, 18, 253–56, 260–62, 265 Black Americans, 16, 99, 122, 136n9, 156, 158–59 Black Boy (Wright), 44, 121, 124, 128, 133, 135n4–135n5, 199 Black Lives Matter, 123, 213, 297, 300– 303, 312. See also activism Blackness, 15, 43, 46–48, 51, 301–2 The Black Notebooks (Derricotte), 45, 50 Black people, 16, 99, 122–23, 136n9, 156– 63, 171–72, 200, 238–45, 299–303, 313 Black women, 38–51, 52n13, 303, 313–14 Black writers, 40, 43, 47, 52n13, 157, 303 Bland, Sandra, 44 bodies, 253–55, 258, 263, 269–72 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), 169 Bowie, Jim, 97–99 Brown v. Board of Education, 160 Buell, Lawrence, 178, 183

Bulosan, Carlos, 119–23, 129–34, 135n4–135n5 The Business of Being Born (Epstein), 255, 264–70 California, 141–45, 148–54 California Indians, 140–45, 151–54. See also Indigenous people The Cancer Journals (Lorde), 42, 49 capitalism, 127, 261–62, 270–72, 300, 311 captivity, 118, 128, 132, 135 caricatures, 97–99 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 56, 70 Catte, Elizabeth, 183–84 Chauvin, Derek, 300, 319n3 Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, 314, 319n9 Childbirth Without Fear (Dick-Read), 255– 58, 270 Chute, Hillary, 93–94, 102 citizenship, 39–49, 116–33, 135n1, 163–72, 183, 194, 230–37, 250–72, 302–18 city. See urbanity civil rights movement, 4, 21n2, 71–73, 160–62, 240, 247, 303. See also activism Civil War, 97–99, 102 class, 207–8, 245–48, 268, 279–87, 291, 293n17 climate change, 303–4, 307–9, 312. See also ecocrisis Clinton, Hillary, 288 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 18, 238–51, 252n2, 301 Cold War, 7, 11, 15, 56, 61, 75, 82–83 Collins, Kathleen, 43, 46–48, 52n6, 52n13 Collins, Nina Lorez, 43, 46–48, 52n6 colonialism, 5, 15–16, 90–118, 140–43, 153, 154n2, 188n2, 213–30, 258, 313–15. See also Anglo settlers Combahee River Collective, 45. See also feminism

Index Comic Books as History (Witek), 92, 102, 114n5 comics, 90–95, 101–3, 112–14, 114n2, 298– 99, 311. See also documentary comics; Western comics Common Sense (Paine), 31–32 communism, 57, 69, 75, 128, 132 Contact Sheet (Erwitt), 70, 80 counternarrative, 16, 40, 44, 48, 141–42, 153 COVID-19 pandemic, 218, 296–99, 312, 315 Crockett, Davy, 90–92, 114n1 Crumb, R., 103, 112 cultural geography, 16–17 Curtis, Edward, 225, 228–31, 232n6 Dallas, 15, 94, 156–63 Dallas Morning News, 15, 94 Davis, Thadious, 156–57 Davis-Floyd, Robbie R., 258–59, 267 Davy Crockett (Avon Periodicals), 90–91, 94, 114n1 Death Cafes, 298, 318n1 Declaration of Independence, 5–6, 31 decolonization, 141, 220 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 308–9 deindustrialization, 17, 194, 204 Demonstration during the trial of Julius Rosen­ berg (Erwitt), 76. See also Rosenberg, Ethel; Rosenberg, Julius Derricotte, Toi, 45, 50 diary, 15, 38–51, 52n14, 59–61, 70, 73–75, 78, 83, 298 Diary as Literature (Hooks), 48–49 Dick-Read, Grantly, 255–59, 270 disability, 18, 254, 259–63, 268–72, 299 disability studies, 18, 254, 261, 265 Disaster Drawn (Chute), 93 discourse, 236–39, 249 Discourse on Language (Foucault), 236

333 disease. See illness displacement, 118–20, 123, 127, 135, 309, 311 documentary comics, 93–94. See also comics “Documenting All the Small Things” (Berry), 298 double consciousness, 197, 240. See also Du Bois, W. E. B. Douglass, Frederick, 58, 84n5 Dove, Rita, 45 Dreams from My Father (Obama), 194, 293n9 Duane, Anna Mae, 5, 10, 14 Du Bois, W. E. B., 40, 163, 197. See also double consciousness Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 39, 43 ecocrisis, 303–8. See also climate change ecocriticism, 188n2, 303 Educated (Westover), 18, 238, 245–48, 317 education, 18, 236–51, 306 Emancipation Proclamation, 158–59 Enlightenment, 258, 277 environmentalism, 19, 186, 260, 307 environmental racism, 307–8, 311 Epstein, Abby, 264–69 Erdrich, Heid, 17, 211–21, 231 Erwitt, Elliott, 11, 15, 56–83, 84n1–7, 84n14, 85n20 eugenics, 258, 261 exceptionalism, 4–8, 11, 16–17, 22n9, 118, 121, 161, 296, 309 The Farm, 260–62, 266–67 feminism, 4, 21n2, 253–57, 260, 265, 297, 315. See also Combahee River Collective feminist health movement, 253, 260, 270 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 124–25 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 6, 9 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 22n7, 173

334

Index

Flint, Michigan, 306, 319n5 Floyd, George, 7, 213, 300, 319n3 Foucault, Michel, 236–39, 243, 251, 255, 262. See also governmentality; subjugated knowledges Franklin, Benjamin, 132, 293n9 “From Silence to Words” (Lu), 248 frontier stereotypes, 91–92, 112 Frost, Robert, 220 fugitive justice, 122–23, 133 fugitivity, 42, 45–46 Fun Home (Bechdel), 12, 167–84, 187, 188n1–6, 190n16 Gaskin, Ina May, 255, 259–67, 270, 272n1 gender, 4, 155n6, 169–78, 207, 227, 245–47, 268, 284–91, 297–303, 312–14 Gichigaming, 29, 33 Gichimookomaanakiing, 27–28, 32, 35 “The Gift Outright” (Frost), 220 Gillepsie, Marcia Ann, 40–41 Gilmore, Leigh, 125, 248, 262, 310–12, 315 Giroux, Henry, 240 God’s Bosom and Other Stories (  Jackson), 102–4 Good Friday (Thomas), 227 Gorman-Murray, Andrew, 168–71, 178, 189n7 governmentality, 243. See also Foucault, Michel Goya, Francisco de, 93 Great Depression, 283 Great Lakes Basin, 29 Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, 42–43 Guthrie, Woody, 220 Halberstam, Jack, 177–78 Hamilton Park, Dallas, 156–64 Happiness as Enterprise (Binkley), 243 Harlem Renaissance, 303 Harrington, J. P., 147, 151

Harris, Kamala, 44, 312 Haudenosaunee/Six Nations (tribal nation), 33, 36n1, 212–14 Heavy (Laymon), 18, 238, 242–44, 251n1 Hegman Lake Pictographs, 30, 36n2 Herring, Scott, 179–82, 190n16 hibakusha (A-Bomb Survivors), 78, 81, 86n39 hillbillies, 195–98, 202–9 Hillbilly Elegy (Vance), 11, 194–208, 315 Hiroshima, Japan, 61, 77–82, 86n43, 93 Hiroshima Maidens, 77–78 Hirsch, Marianne, 58, 230 history, 94–96, 102–4, 107–9, 112–14, 114n2 HIV, 263–64 Ho-Chunk, 33, 36n5 Holiday magazine, 56–58, 77 home, 167–72 home birth movement, 260–69 “Homosexuality and the City” (Aldrich), 177 Hooks, Angela R., 48–49 hooks, bell, 52n14, 189n13 Hornung, Alfred, 13, 22n10 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez), 194, 197 Hurricane Katrina, 125, 310–11 I Am Not Your Negro (Peck), 301 identity: Black, 38–50; and education, 245, 250; Indigenous, 27–37, 213, 220; and life stories, 5–20, 21n4, 22n10, 23, 297–302; national, 8–14, 318; and photography, 58, 68, 83; and place, 172, 198–201, 317; refugee, 116–34, 135n1 illness, 39, 49–51, 299 immigrant narrative, 117–22, 130, 134, 136n7 immigration, 4, 9, 15–16, 83, 117–22, 129– 34, 136n7, 169, 297, 308–11 imperialism, 42, 120, 123, 129, 142, 313

335

Index The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), 174–75 Indians in Unexpected Places (Deloria), 212 Indian Treaty #1 (Thomas), 224 Indigenous people: and colonialism, 99, 105, 112; and identity, 4–5, 16, 299, 304–5, 313, 315–16; and language, 31; and life stories, 140–53, 154n1–2, 155n6, 169; and monuments, 212–31. See also California Indians individualism, 140, 203, 209 industrialization, 256 inference, 288–91 insider-outsider, 279–86, 291, 293n8 interdisciplinarity, 13, 24 intersectionality, 40, 48, 301 Intimations (Smith), 299 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, 297 Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women (Washington), 42 “Inventing the University” (Bartholomae), 236, 249–50 itinerancy, 16, 123, 129–30, 134 Jackson, Jack, 15, 92, 101–14, 114n2 Jackson, Ketenji Brown, 312 January 6th insurrection of the US Capitol, 7, 17, 20, 24, 213, 231, 297–99, 317 Jim Crow, 61, 69–71, 156, 189n13, 300, 311. See also segregation Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (Stevenson), 45, 49 Juneteenth, 157–60, 164 Justice, Daniel Heath, 10–11 Just Mercy (Stevenson), 301 Just Us (Rankine), 302 juxtaposition, 71, 75, 83, 112, 119 Kaepernick, Colin, 213, 230 Kaltwasser, Cristobal Rovira, 278–79, 285, 289 Kavanaugh, Brett, 312

Kennedy, John, 163 Kennedy, Robert, 163 King, Martin Luther, 163, 247 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 69, 285, 303 Lake, Ricki, 264–69 land acknowledgment, 304–5 Laymon, Kiese, 18, 156, 238, 242–51, 252n2 Lê Espiritu, Yê´n, 119, 125 Lee, Robert E., 158, 165n3, 213 Lepore, Jill, 277–78, 281–82 LGBTQIA2S+, 12, 167–69, 177, 189n13 life experience. See life stories Life magazine, 66, 75, 82 life narratives. See life stories life stories: and addiction, 315–16; Black, 156, 303; and climate change, 305–8; diary as, 40, 48–49; identity, 5–20, 21n4, 22n10, 23, 297–302; immigration, 309–10; Indigenous, 140–53, 154n1–2, 155n6, 169; and populism, 278–83, 289; refugee, 119–34; visual, 94; women’s, 314–15. See also autobiography; memoir life writing. See life stories Little Big Bully (Erdrich), 214 Little White Lies (Thomas), 223 Living History (Clinton), 288 Lorde, Audre, 42, 49, 301 Lost Cause (  Jackson), 102 Los Tejanos (  Jackson), 102, 107–10 Lowe, Lisa, 84n7, 116 Lu, Min-Zhan, 248–49, 251 Magnum Photos, 56–57, 68, 71–75, 82, 84n1, 84n7, 85n27 Major’s Hill Park (Thomas), 227 manifest destiny, 28, 140 McCloud, Scott, 107–9 McKittrick, Katherine, 171–72, 178, 189n7 medicalization, 255–59, 265–66, 316

336

Index

memoir, 8–18, 168–70, 238–41, 247–51, 277–81, 298–318. See also autobiography; life stories; primal scene Menominee (tribal nation), 33, 36n6 meritocracy, 18, 238, 249–50 MeToo, 297, 312. See also activism metronormativity, 167, 172, 179, 190n16. See also urban-centrism; urbanism Mexican-American War, 90, 95–96 Mexico, 96, 109 midwifery, 18, 254–72 militarism, 120, 123 Miranda, Deborah, 140–53 mirrors (photographic medium), 59, 71 misogynoir, 40–41, 48–49, 52n5 Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 312 Moffitt, Benjamin, 284–89 Monroe, Marilyn, 75 monuments, 18, 211–31 Monuments Project, 211–12 Morrison, Toni, 47 Mudde, Cas, 278–79, 285, 289 Muhlhahn, Cara, 265–69 Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives (Payne), 22n10 The Murder of Emmett Till (Hill & Dodson), 302 museums, 73, 215–17, 231 My North American Indian Volume (Thomas), 228 naming, 14, 28–30, 33 narrated lives. See life stories National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 69 nationalism, 41, 187, 201–3, 317 National Monuments (Erdrich), 17, 211, 217–20 national narrative, 8–9, 19, 40, 224, 283 nation building, 18, 219, 261, 270

nation space, 5–6, 38 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 215–17 Native people. See Indigenous people nature, 169–70 neoliberalism, 18, 237–45, 248–51, 251n1 new American studies, 5–8, 22n10, 23. See also American Studies New Texas History Movies (  Jackson), 102–6, 109–12 Nitoguri, Tsukasa, 80–81 the North (US), 124–25 Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (Collins), 43, 46 nuclear war, 75–77, 82 Obama, Barack, 4, 8–9, 15, 24, 116, 194, 200, 293n9 Odawa (tribal nation), 33 Oglala Sioux Tribe, 219 Ojibwe (tribal nation), 33, 212–14, 231n2–3 oral history, 16, 20n1, 156–57 Ortega, Dave, 112–14 Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston) Women Health Book Collective, 272n1 Our House Is on Fire (Thurnberg), 307 Owens, Kim Hensley, 253–54 Packer, George, 278, 287 Paine, Thomas, 31–32 Patton, Jack, 94–101, 108 Pearl Harbor, 80, 133 “Personal Writings and the Quest for National Identity in Brazil” (Barcellos), 45 photography, 24, 58–83, 85n23, 93–94, 219–31 Pittsburgh, 61–66, 84n14, 85n20 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Erwitt), 66 place, 16–17, 27, 126, 136n6, 141–42, 168– 87, 188n1–4, 189n7, 198–200, 317 Pledge of Allegiance, 230

Index Pollack, Della, 253–54 popularism, 7, 18 populism, 7, 10, 18–19, 277–92, 292n3–4, 293n8–14, 297 Potawatomi (tribal nation), 33 poverty, 196, 204, 207–9, 271, 283, 308 The Practice of Citizenship (Spires), 43 primal scene, 281–82. See also autobiography; memoir privacy, 43–44, 49 prognostic certainty, 253–62, 269–72 progressive narrative, 132–33 Proust, Marcel, 173–74 “The Quarantine Diaries” (Nierenberg), 298 queer ecologies, 188n2 queer Native Studies, 188n2 queer people, 168–72, 177, 181, 189n9–13, 301, 314–15 racialization, 117, 127 racism, 40–41, 48–50, 120–26, 189n13, 221–25, 241–44, 296–303, 311. See also antiblackness Rankine, Claudia, 301–2 Reagan, Ronald, 283 Rebinding Edward Curtis’ “The North Ameri­ can Indian” (Thomas), 229 refugees, 9–16, 60, 81, 116–29, 132–34, 135n1–2, 136n9, 141, 297–99, 308–11 refugee temporality, 118–29, 134 Republican Party, 183, 187, 200, 279 Revelations: Diaries of Women (Moffat & Painter), 42 Revolutionary War, 21n6 “The Rise and Rapid Decline of Austin Tacious” (  Jackson), 103–4 River (Ortega), 112–13 Rodriguez, Richard, 194, 197 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 282–83, 287, 294n17

337 Rosenberg, Ethel, 75. See also Demonstra­ tion during the trial of Julius Rosenberg (Erwitt) Rosenberg, Julius, 75. See also Demonstration during the trial of Julius Rosenberg (Erwitt) Rosenfield, John, Jr., 94–101, 108 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 52n10 Rowe, John Carlos, 6, 10, 23 rural-and-urban divide, 17, 168–80, 183–87 rurality, 168–70, 176, 181–84, 188n1 rural queer studies, 12, 17, 167–68, 177–79, 187, 188n1 Russia, 7, 23, 297 Rust Belt, 202 Sanilac Petroglyphs, 30, 36n2 San Juan, E., Jr., 129–31 Santa Anna, 96, 107–8 Say Her Name, 300, 312–13. See also activism Sayre, Robert F., 5–6, 22n7 segregation, 68–73, 300. See also Jim Crow Seguin, Juan, 102–4, 107–9 Seize the Space: GPS Reading (Thomas), 226 shadowtime, 304, 308 Sharpe, Christina, 122–23. See also wake work Short History of America (Crumb), 112 sicknesses. See illness Siebers, Tobin, 270–71 “A Sistah Outsider” (Riley), 45 Six Nations (Thomas), 222 slavery, 44, 97, 122–23, 148, 159, 301, 311, 313. See also transatlantic slave trade Slow Bull Revealed (Thomas), 225 Smith, Zadie, 299 Snider, Bruce, 177–78 solastalgia, 307–8 Sontag, Susan, 219 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 163

338

Index

the South (US), 67–69, 124–26, 156–57, 164n1, 178, 189n13, 307, 311 Southerners on New Ground (SONG), 184–85 Southscapes (Davis), 156 Soviet Union, 7, 75 speech act, 5–6 Spiegelman, Art, 92–93, 103 Spiritual Midwifery (Gaskin), 255, 260–63, 266–67, 270, 272n1 Sputnik, 75–77 Standard Oil, 61–62 Stapels, Chris, 177–78 Stryker, Roy, 62, 65 subjugated knowledges, 255, 262. See also Foucault, Michel Swann’s Way (Proust), 173 Tang, Eric, 117–24, 134 Taylor, Breonna, 213, 300 technology, 263–67, 270–72 Texas, 7, 69, 94–109, 112, 114n2, 158 Texas History Movies (  Jackson), 15, 94–101, 104, 107–8, 112 “There Is No Neutral There” (Catte), 183 This Fight Is Our Fight (Warren), 19, 276–81, 284–86, 289–91 “This Land Is Your Land” (Guthry), 220 Thomas, Jeff, 17, 212–13, 221–31, 232n7 Thunberg, Greta, 23, 307. See also activism Trackside (Thomas), 223–24 transatlantic slave trade, 44, 118–22. See also slavery trans people, 172, 312 trauma, 142, 149, 153, 298, 308, 316 Treatments (Diedrich), 255 “Trouble and Consolation: Writing the Gay Rural” (Snider), 177 Truman, Harry, 80

Trump, Donald, 9–11, 17–24, 44, 168, 183–86, 196–201, 211–14, 231, 276– 90, 293n14–293n15. See also “Age of Trump” Truth, Sojourner, 44 Turner, Brock, 312 2016 presidential election, 7, 183 Ukraine, 7, 23, 297 Underground America: Narratives of Undocu­ mented Lives (Orner), 134 Understanding Comics (McCloud), 107–9 undocumented workers, 9, 183, 310 Unsettled (Tang), 117 urban-centrism, 177–79, 182. See also metronormativity urbanism, 168, 256. See also metronormativity urbanity, 63, 156, 168–70, 173, 177, 181–83, 189n9, 190n16 urban renewal, 61–62, 65, 163 Urban Tumbleweed (Mullen), 45 Vance, J. D., 11, 17, 194–209, 316 violence, 15–16, 50–51, 67–71, 99–103, 122–43, 151–55, 165–71, 185–89, 208– 13, 299–308 Waitt, Gordon, 168–71, 178, 189n7 wake work, 122–23. See also Sharpe, Christina Walker, Alice, 47, 157 Wall Street, 276, 283 Warren, Elizabeth, 19, 276–92, 292n4, 293n14–293n17 Washington, George, 31 Webb, Jim, 200–204 Weinstein, Harvey, 312 West, Cornel, 185, 251n1 Western comics, 102–3. See also comics Weston, Kath, 170

Index Westover, Tara, 18, 238, 245–51, 317 We Were Eight Years in Power (Coates), 251n1 whiteness, 17, 42–44, 156, 194–98, 201–10, 264 white supremacy, 41, 51, 73, 83, 120–28, 171–78, 213, 247, 251n1, 299–317

339 Wilde, Oscar, 174–76 Wilmington, North Carolina, 1950 (Erwitt), 71–73 Witek, Joseph, 92–93, 102, 114n5 women’s suffrage, 312–15 Wright, Richard, 44, 119–28, 132–34, 135n5, 136n9, 199

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