Daughters of Suburbia

Lorraine Kenny, Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2000)

This "autoethnography" has Kenny returning to her Long Island hometown (Shoreham-Waring River) to follow eighth-grade girls around for a year. It is not a book about "self-esteem" or any other Reviving Ophelia-style trope, thank God - it's about how whiteness and middle-class-ness articulate themselves in the form of absence. Kenny intersperses chapters about the kids at SWR Middle School with chapters about famous cases of media attention to white girls from LI - Amy Fisher, Cheryl Pierson (who hired a friend to kill her abusive dad), and Emily Heinrichs (a former white supremacist and teenage mother whose chapter was perhaps the most interesting, as her story was represented so many different ways in the media).

The most interesting sections of this book for me were the ones on narrative and on "multiculturalism" in an all-white school. The chapter on stories that teenage girls tell about and to each other resonated with me very much (as did many of the things that Kenny discusses here). Kenny writes that girls are so obsessed with story because they lead such "normal" or "boring" (aka, non-racialized) lives. "Girls' wild stories make being normal possible," she writes (101).

The chapter on "multiculturalism" and its failures in an all-white context shows how the silences surrounding the real stakes of racial difference create situations in which white kids don't recognize their own privilege - and how these silences are created by the adults around them. Kenny describes how the kids from this school did an exchange with the kids from a blacker adjacent school, and how the real differences between the pedagogical styles, social systems, and infrastructure between the two schools, which could have been a fertile topic of discussion, were instead left to the kids to parse themselves (or not, as the case may be). Adult failures to explicate how being white is actually a subject position leave kids without a leg to stand on when it comes to discussing race.

Kenny is apparently now working for the ACLU, for their Reproductive Freedom project, though I couldn't find any more information on her online.

Do Glaciers Listen?

Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005)

Cruikshank, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, specializes in the ways in which different types of knowledge - scientific, "folk," native - struggle to establish themselves as legitimate; and works in the Yukon and also sometimes in Siberia.

This book is about the way that native Alaskans (Tlingit and Huna in the St. Elias Mountains area) look/ed at glaciers, and the difference between their conception of glacier "consciousness" and the scientific bent of Western explorers with whom they have come into contact. Following Harold Innis' ideas about the way that empire establishes itself by eliminating alternative forms of communication and knowledge; Bahktin's belief that storytelling and folk humor can equal resistance; and Benjamin's understanding of the tragedy of the loss of interactive storytelling, Cruikshank looks at stories told by Tlingit and Huna elders about the place of social glaciers in their cultural history, and compares these stories to white/"scientific" conceptions of the glacier as natural fact.

Glaciers, to the Yukon women Cruikshank interviews, are social beings, sensitive to being excluded or made fun of, and obedient to laws of their own (for example, they hate it when you cook with grease nearby them; glacier travel requires boiled food only). There is a reciprocal relationship between men and glaciers - a relationship not recognized by white men, or at least not by most white men - John Muir is cited as an example of an American who approaches sensitivity when it comes to interactions with the natural world, although his insensitivity to the native people who guided him through that world troubles that approbation a bit.

In a weird coincidence, a couple of days after reading this book I read this article in the New Yorker about a composer who makes music according to the rhythms of various instruments which measure activity of the earth. It would be interesting to know what the Native Alaskans might think about this...

Bananas, Beaches, and Bases

Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Enloe, a political scientist at Clark and author of multiple other books about women, empire, and labor, sets out to prove basically that women exist in the arena of international politics. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious to an American Studies eye - of course there are women at every turn; of course gendered assumptions allow constructions such as military bases and light industry factories and tourism to exist - but may be transgressive when considered in light of assumptions about how diplomacy works.

Considering such figures and sites as Carmen Miranda, diplomatic wives, prostitutes who service military bases, and women who work in garment industries, Enloe tries to show that modernization "relies on women's contentment with traditional roles" - as auxiliaries, sex objects, or consumers. (In other words, "not only is the personal political, but the international is personal.") Enloe also shows instances of resistance to this general trend, as when diplomatic wives campaigned in the 1970s to be granted the status of "private persons" (rather than auxiliaries to their husbands' work), or when Philippine leaders asked that American soldiers be required to be tested for venereal diseases, as the prostitutes around military bases had to be, or when Mexican garment workers protested after the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, after which company indifference killed many of their co-workers.

In The American Political Science Review, Anne Sisson Runyan liked the book, though wished that Enloe had been more specific in describing exactly how international politics becomes "masculinized" (and men render concepts such as risk, security, and nationalism wholly masculine). In The Women's Review of Books, Anne McClintock (she of Imperial Leather, which I haven't read) loved the book; she especially liked how Enloe focused on the gap between women of privilege and women with no social capital, and how the first group is sometimes complicit in the oppression of the second.

Technological Utopianism in American Culture

Howard Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

This book promised to tell me about twenty-five different utopian thinkers in the years 1880-1940ish, all of whom counted on technology to carry out many of their utopian objectives. However, frustratingly, there was only one chapter on the actual plots of the utopias themselves. Segal seemed to dismiss his own sources, calling them stilted and sometimes formulaic, and chose to concentrate instead on the social circumstances surrounding the writing of these utopic texts. That was a bit annoying, considering that there were some really awesome-looking images in that chapter, particularly of the plans for King Camp Gillette's city in The Human Drift (1894) - a book which I think I should check out.

Segal argues that these twenty-five authors turned to writing about technological utopia, rather than creating actual utopian communities (like the Brook Farms and Fourierian phalansteries of the earlier part of the century) because society had grown to be more complex and bureaucratic, and it was harder and harder to imagine change on a community level. In the absence of this, these writers turned to technology on two counts: the technology of writing/imagination; and the technology of social control. Like the efficiency experts I covered in my review essay about Haber, Jordan, et. al, these writers saw administration as the saving technology which would eliminate emotions from politics and leave society running rationally.

These writers favored "megalopoli", as opposed to small towns, as ideal imagined communities. (See picture of Gillette's planned apartment building in his city, "Megalopolis," described in The Human Drift.)

Elements of the technological utopia which Segal argues have actually come to pass include the interpenetration of work and leisure; the elimination of popular political thought (partially as the result of the former); the death of play; the bureaucratization of art; and conformism in personality.

On page 95, Segal criticizes Leo Marx for saying that Americans stopped searching for the middle landscape after the Civil War - says instead that urban, suburban, and regional "middle landscapes" continued to be seen as ideal - ex. Frederick Law Olmsted's parks.

Segal teaches at the University of Maine, and has written on Henry Ford's village industries and a book called Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America.

Engines of Change

Engine and boiler from John Stevens' Little Juliana steamboat, 1804. Hindle and Lubar use steamboatery as an example of how inventions were often co-developed by several different independent people, who then competed to claim credit.

Title: Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790-1860 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986)

Authors: Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar. Hindle, who died in 2001, was apparently a guiding light of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), and an early adopter of the method of studying science, technology, and material culture in historical context. His first books included The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America (1956) and David Rittenhouse (1964), but apparently his most famous book is Emulation and Invention (1981), which was particularly focused on describing early American inventions in verbal terms for a verbally-oriented audience (that would be us, historians). Hindle worked at NYU and the Smithsonian, which published this exhibit companion volume. Lubar, Hindle's co-author, is a professor at Brown in the Department of American Civilization, with interests in material culture, museums, public culture, and the history of technology. Some other interesting books he's written or edited: History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. with W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). Here's his blog about museums.

The painting "Men of Progress," 1863, by Christian Schussele, depicted famous inventors, with Samuel Morse at the center and Benjamin Franklin looking on benevolently from above.

My Review: Hindle and Lubar describe the history of early American invention as being powered by three factors: an abundance of natural resources (wood, iron); an abundance of labor (including slaves); and a cultural climate which favored invention. The "special American conditions," in this story, meant that fewer people rejected or protested against technological advancement, because more people were flexible non-specialists who participated in many different types of production; also, people could see how technology would widen economic gaps, because of the example provided by the European Industrial Revolution, and were able to adjust their speed of technological development to ameliorate its social effects.

Chapters include interesting ones on machine shops, communitarian experiments (the Shakers, New Harmony), and the rise of railroading. There are many good pictures, as you might expect from a book which came from a museum exhibit.

I found the book to be overly invested in a story of American exceptionalism that celebrated the inventiveness of classes of men such as machinists and inventors, without examining the later results of this technological development or questioning the rightness of all of this invention—there's a definite feeling of positivist progressivism about the narrative.

Reviews of Others: In the Journal of American History, John Staudenmeier lauded the exhibit and the book for having respect for technological achievements of the past, rather than making fun of bygoners' missteps (is that really so endemic an attitude?) But he says that extending the exhibit's scope beyond the 1860s would bring some of the more negative consequences of technological development to light, a move which he says the exhibit attempts to make, but is often thwarted by the sheer impressiveness (or "sensuality") of the machinery. In the Winterthur Portfolio, John Skemer wrote that the book avoided the "one-man, one-invention" schema of history, but criticized it for portraying the America of this time period as focused exclusively on technological advancement, citing works which have found that there were other, more flexible, cottage-type modes of production co-existing with this Whiggish drive for industrial advancement.

The Hall rifle, invented by John Hall, was the first American rifle with fully interchangeable parts. The government ordered 1,000 of them in 1819 and it took Hall four years to complete the order. Things got a lot better in the mass-produced gun business later on. Hindle and Lubar hold that the invention of fully interchangeable parts was one of the most significant American contributions to the world economy in the nineteenth century.

Disciplines of Virtue

Title: Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

Author: Lynn Vallone, professor of English at Texas A&M. Her most recent book is Becoming Victoria (2001), about Queen Victoria's childhood in cultural context. Vallone was also an editor for the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature (2005).

My review: This collection of previously published essays moves from England to America and roughly chronologically, delineating how books, both novels and "conduct books," instructed female children in the arts of self-discipline and virtue. Vallone visits discourses around reclaimed prostitutes, Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), dowries, humor, and dirt. Her ultimate idea: the concept of "virtue" is used to signal to girls and young women that they can add value to themselves through their efforts to be good. If they self-negate enough, eventually they might be seen as virtuous enough that they could marry "up" in class, as Pamela does. Side casualties of this ideology are tomboys (liminal figures) and humor: "the ultimate lesson is that girlhood is not funny" (132).

(Ironically, Vallone writes, one of the ways of self-negating or being "good" in eighteenth-century England is by helping reform penitent prostitutes. Thus, through the act of helping, the "good" female accrues sexual value, while the prostitute is scrubbed of her one-time value and left in position of being suitable only for domestic service.)

Finally, Vallone points out, usefully, that in girls' fiction, as opposed to boys', the danger comes from within, not from the world.

The reviews of others: In American Literature, Barbara Ryan wrote that the choice of texts reads oddly to Americanists (yes) and wishes that Vallone had juxtaposed her textual readings with understandings of how girls read the books (as opposed to aligning them with general cultural practices). In the American Historical Review, Lori D. Ginzburg agreed that Vallone's work would have done well to pay better attention to the books' audiences, and added that she wished Vallone had paid more attention to the lives of the women, not dealt with in the book, who remain tomboys or never marry (and some of whom become authors of children's books).

Words: "abecedarian" ("a person who is learning the words of the alphabet, or a beginning learner of any kind"); "eudemonism" ("the doctrine that the basis of moral obligations is to be found in the tendency of right actions to produce happiness"); "soteriological" ("the theological doctrine of salvation as effected by Jesus").

Leads: Secondary: Anne Scott MacLeod, A Moral Tale: Children's Fiction and American Culture (1975); Elliot West and Paula Petrik, Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950 (1992)

The Word in Black and White

Title: The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Author: Dana D. Nelson, professor of English at Vanderbilt. Her other book is National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press, 1998). Looks like she's working on a project about the history of alternative ideas of democracy.

My review: I'm going to have to get over my distaste for the use of quotation marks around words like "race" or "black" or "white", and the capitalization of the word "Other", and a host of other early-90s-race-lit-crit things which just distract and annoy me. This book is about the "ingraining" of categories of race through literature, in the pre-Civil War US. Basic philosophy: "to write is to know is to dominate" (see Lepore). The authors discussed include Edgar Allen Poe (for the awesome Arthur Gordon Pym book), Cotton Mather, Fenimore Cooper, Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child, the last being the only author Nelson describes as fulfilling the ultimate liberal white authorial mission of both disdaining racism and proposing alternative modes of racial interaction. Other authors, including Melville, whose "Benito Cereno" comes under Nelson's scrutiny, manage to criticize white slave-owning but don't move beyond into prescriptiveness.

Nelson borrows ideas from Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, Richard Drinnon, Mary Louise Pratt, Karen Halttunen, and Abdul JanMohammed.

Books: Secondary: Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (1982)