Heroic Reading in Emerson and Thoreau

On Thursday 20^th November, the Andrew Hook Centre was delighted to welcome Dr. Lloyd Pratt (University of Oxford) for the fifth seminar in the 2014-15 series. Pratt is the author of numerous articles on American Literature, African American Literature, and Literatures of the American South, and he has written two monographs: The Strangers Book: The Human of an African American Literature (forthcoming) and Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2010), which was a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title for 2010. His talk today on “Heroic Reading in Emerson and Thoreau” draws on the research he has been doing towards a third monograph, and concerns the traditions of reading that different sorts of readers, within and without academia, bring to the writings of Emerson.

Pratt introduced his talk by explaining his interest in two supposedly distinct types of reading: the in-depth, learned analysis which is the bread-and-butter of literary criticism (what Thoreau called “heroic reading”), and the reading done by readers who aren’t expertly trained to read (or, “common reading”). Pratt expressed a concern that heroic, academic reading is fundamentally undemocratic, because it requires that language and writing is fully accessible only to a select few. Pratt’s important contribution to the ongoing discussion about the politics and methods of reading is to acknowledge the importance of nineteenth-century writers like Thoreau who tread this ground before, and whose writing seems to anticipate the major talking points in the contemporary debate.

In true American Studies-fashion, Pratt began by describing the cultural and historical roots of contemporary academic practice. In post-WWII America, the G.I. Bill was passed, opening up university education to veterans of the war. The peculiar structure of university education in the United States meant that a student doing engineering would also have to take a literature course. The intersection of these two circumstances thus meant that Humanities professors were suddenly faced with rooms of students without any literary-education, to whom they had to teach the likes of Milton and Pound. To solve the problem, the methods of close reading which were privileged by the New Critics in Britain were brought across the Atlantic, where they could be used effectively to teach large groups of students the art of reading, closely, the ambiguities and techniques in an isolated bit of text. 

The problem for teachers now, Pratt explained, is how to prevent these reading practices, and thus the liberal arts more broadly, from becoming wholly inward-facing, divorced from an appreciation of cultural and historical context. New schools of literary study like the “New Historicism” have arisen as an “antidote” to the New Critics’ close reading, but it is difficult, Pratt explained, to remedy the very techniques which so usefully level the playing field. Unlike the New Historicists, whose methods are unsustainable for “common readers” outside of academia, close reading as a teaching practice is democratic: it gives reading to everyone. 

Returning to Thoreau, then, Pratt closely read a section from Walden. The written word, writes Thoreau, “is the work of art nearest to life itself”: it is “universal” and can be “breathed from all human lips.” Thoreau also writes, however, that books can “be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line […] It is worth the expense.” For Thoreau, Pratt suggested, the word is at once full of meaning, requiring only a reader’s presence for that meaning to come to light, and yet it can also be empty, absent of meaning unless a reader with sufficient training brings their experience to bear on it. Thoreau seems to hold two incompatible ideas about reading at once. 

Pratt similarly moved between two different sorts of reading. As Pratt pointed out, it is only through his own close reading of Thoreau’s passage – a technique which he learned through a university education – that he can appreciate the tension between the two seemingly incompatible positions. From this self-consciously close reading of Walden, Pratt then shifted (and pointed out his shift) into a different, more “common” register, as he discussed the personal life of a female reader from the American South called Blanche Chenault Junkin, a mother of four and someone who spent time in a mental hospital. Blanche had a very active engagement with Emerson’s writings: she quoted, selected, and rearranged them into a small book called Through the Year with Emerson (1923). Her reading is not heroic in Thoreau’s sense, but the question that Pratt asks of his audience is whether it is less valuable? Does the act of rearranging debase Emerson’s writing?

In an essay on the “Common Reader,” Virginia Woolf quotes a passage from Dr. Johnson: “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices […] must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’ Woolf writes that common reading “bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.” The common reader reads, says Woolf, for their “own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.” Pratt suggested that Woolf and Blanche beg a number of questions: what does it mean to read in a common way? Is the common reader a poor reader? Is the heroic or the common more valuable, and are they irreconcilable?

Much to the audience’s delight, Pratt revealed at the end of his talk that Blanche was in fact his great-grandmother, whose book first introduced him to Emerson’s writings. Coming at the end of a talk which was marked by Pratt’s self-conscious interrogation of his own reading practices and their roots, this was a fitting conclusion: it highlights the fact that our methods of reading are necessarily inherited. Pratt noted that as an undergraduate he went to a public university which only existed due to nineteenth-century land grants and New Deal funding. Like the veterans of WWII who were taught close reading, Pratt’s training – like most academics’ training – was only possible thanks to various unpredictable historical and cultural circumstances, and both his academic and familial ancestors. The talk invites us to be more conscious of our own reading practices, to recognise that we are the inheritors of long histories, and that the way we approach texts is not the only way, and perhaps not the most valuable.

By Jamie Redgate

PGR at the University of Glasgow

The Centre’s seminar series continues with Prof. Philip Horne (University College London): ‘Henry James and Emily Dickinson: a Puzzle.’ This is in collaboration with the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, and forms part of the ‘English Visiting Speaker Series,’ co-sponsored by the Andrew Hook Centre. It will be held on Thursday 4^th December 2014 in Room 202, 4 University Gardens, at 5.15pm. All very welcome!

“Feast of the Mau Mau: Christianity, Conjure and the Origins of Soul Food”

On Wednesday 24^th October, the Andrew Hook Centre was delighted to welcome Dr Anthony Stanonis (Queen’s Belfast University) for the fourth seminar in the 2014-15 series. Stanonis is the author of Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Tourism, 1918-1945 (2006) and editor of Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (2008). His forthcoming book is entitled Faith in Bikinis: Politics and Leisure in the Coastal South Since the Civil War. The topic of the discussion was the religious origin of soul food and the centrality of conjure in African-American foodways.

Dr Stanonis began his presentation by playing Louis Jordan’s 1949 song ‘Beans and Cornbread’, which offered a commentary on American race relations, using black and white food staples as a metaphor. Stanonis argued that the song celebrates togetherness and abundance in its final call for interracial unity: ‘We should get up every morning and hang out together like sister and brothers/
Every Saturday night we should hang out like chitterlings and potato salad.’ What connects each food pairing in Jordan’s song is the magical element of conjure or, more specifically, the belief that certain foodstuffs could elicit a supernatural effect, often to the benefit of racial harmony. With this introduction, Stanonis stressed the importance of examining African American music alongside African religious studies in order to fully understand the origins of soul food.

Central to Stanonis’s argument was the notion that, with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the concept of soul food was reconfigured as the black culinary aesthetic was used to promote cultural nationalism and racial pride. In doing so, Stanonis stated that the important legacy of soul food, with its roots in conjure practices, was obscured, as indicated in the apparent void of references to conjure in scholarly analysis relating to African American foodways and culture. In the context of the 1960s, black leaders thus distanced themselves from conjure and, more generally, voodoo – in an effort to demonstrate African American respectability and dedication to Christianity. Soul food thus achieved popular status in the 1960s as it came to denote togetherness, shared heritage and cultural assimilation within a rapidly changing racial landscape. However, in this form, it was stripped of its supernatural folkway traditions.

Dr Stanonis also indicated that conjure practices in the United States had often been stigmatised and, by default, surrounded by secrecy. Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her anthropological study of conjure Mules and Men (1935) that, ‘Nobody knows for sure how many thousands in America are warmed by the fire of hoodoo because the worship is bound in secrecy. It is not the accepted theology of the nation, and so believers conceal their faith. The practice is shrouded in profound silence.’ In order to understand how this came to be, Stanonis turned his attention to the religious origins of soul food and conjure. African slaves brought with them to the New World their own food customs and spiritual traditions. In the popular and national imagination, religious practices such as conjure and hoodoo, which blended African folk belief with Protestant folk belief, became synonymous with voodoo – a more organised religious practice that mixed Catholicism with African religious traditions. White Americans thus conflated African American folk practice under voodoo and increasingly viewed such practices as savage, often highlighting the cannibalistic impulse of both religions, from transubstantiation to records of African trade in human flesh for consumption. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, white representations of African Americans as savage and superstitious led black leaders and the black middle class to disavow conjure while embracing more mainstream and hegemonic forms of Christianity.

In what proved to be one of the most illuminating aspects of the discussion, Dr Stanonis turned his attention to the role played by jazz and blues musicians in giving voice to spiritual beliefs often denied by racial spokesmen. Stanonis stressed that the ‘soul’ celebrated by black musicians had much in common with soul cooking – both were improvised and possessed a mixed religious heritage. Jazz and blues thus became an important platform in the expression of African American foodways. As the twentieth century progressed, both black and white performers embraced conjure with the aim of subverting the traditionally negative associations. These artistic references to conjure paved the way for a closer examination of the supernatural dimension of soul food, as found within recipes. Stanonis recounted several recipes which claimed to ward off police or to win at cards and dice. Interestingly, some foodstuffs received particular attention amongst conjurers, as indicated by one believer: ‘‘When you peel onions in your home, your supposed to put sugar and salt on the peelings and put in the stove and burn it. That’s keepin’ down the fuss in the house. And if you have any fuss there, put salt on the onion and burn it up.’ Ultimately, Stanonis argued of the importance of conjure at the grassroots level in providing an emotional bulwark against poverty and discrimination. Whilst these conjure practices may on the surface seem like mere superstitions, they were in fact powerful remedies for the African American community during slavery and later, in post-emancipation periods of racial discrimination and unrest. 

Dr Stanonis’s discussion of soul food and conjure in African American foodways was interesting and thought-provoking. In the question and answer session, issues were addressed such as the commercialisation voodoo and soul food on a national and international level. Whilst African American resistance to slavery and discrimination has, in recent decades, received much scholarly attention, Stanonis highlighted an area of study that has remained relatively untapped. By using music to illustrate key aspects of the discussion, Stanonis provided a lively and engaging structure to the presentation and maintained the interest of the audience throughout. In fusing together music studies alongside those of religion and African American society and culture, Dr Stanonis facilitated a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of foodways and conjure which, as he demonstrated, in this context came hand in hand.  

By Rebecca Dunbar

PGR at The University of Glasgow

The Centre’s seminar series continues with Dr Lloyd Pratt  (University of Oxford): ‘Heroic Reading in Emerson and Thoreau’. This is in collaboration with the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, and forms part of the ‘English Visiting Speaker Series’, co-sponsored by the Andrew Hook Centre. It will be held on Thursday 20^th November 2014 in Room 202, 4 University Gardens, at 5:15pm. All very welcome!

‘Little Syria: Early Arab Immigrant Life in America’

 Above image: Syrian-American children whose immigrant families settled in New York’s Syrian quarter

On Wednesday 8^th October, the Andrew Hook Centre was delighted to welcome Professor Akram Khater (North Carolina State University) for the third seminar in the 2014-15 series. Khater is the author of Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class, 1861-1921 (2001), Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East (2009) and Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East (2011). The subject of his talk was the immigrant experience of the first wave of Arab immigrants to the United States, with particular emphasis on the ways in which the immigrants tried to foster a sense of community and identity in their new surroundings. 

Professor Khater began his presentation with a discussion of the immigrant’s motivations for leaving their Eastern Mediterranean homeland. Even at this early stage in the immigrant experience, Khater argued, one finds the historical record plagued by inaccurate assertions of religious persecution as the chief motivating factor. This, Khater explained, belies the relatively unaffected origin point from which they sprang, and speaks more of the advice given to immigrants in Marseilles to exploit the trope of the “Terrible Turk”. Consequentially, the personal or pragmatic motivating factors of many Arab immigrants have been overshadowed by the predominant discourse of religious persecution. A great many Arab immigrants simply sought the better life promised by the economic opportunities of the United States. 

Khater then stressed the importance of early immigrant letters back home in accelerating immigration, as exemplified in the following source: ‘When people of ‘Ayn Arab saw that one man made … [sic] $1000, all of ‘Ayn Arab rushed to come to America … Like a gold rush we left ‘Ayn Arab, there were 72 of us.’ Stories of success, therefore, propelled greater numbers of Arabs to seek a new home in the U.S. For those who made it past the immigration authorities at Ellis Island (of which an estimated 15-20% did not), the reality of life in America garnered mixed responses. For some, New York, or “Nayrik” was like paradise, as indicated in immigrant Saloum Rizk’s statement that ‘“America is a country – but not like Syria. It is really a country like heaven.”’ In contrast, Mikhail Naimy was horrified by the capitalistic impulse in the U.S., describing the nation as the world’s ‘twentieth-century Babylon.’ Thus, the Arab immigrants impressions of America were varied, though Khater noted that daily life was not: For the majority, factory work came to define life in America, and this was reflected in the population dispersal in industrial heartlands such as New York, Detroit, Boston, Chicago and Worchester, Massachusetts, to name a few.

In the second strand of the discussion, Khater turned to the development of an Arab community in the United States and, more specifically, the internal and external tensions that Arabs encountered and negotiated. First, it was critical that the new immigrants retain a sense of group identity, which was achieved primarily through the establishment of multiple newspapers – foremost among them Al-Huda and Mira ‘at al-gharb. In this way, Khater argued, the community created a dialogue and, in this public forum, debated the appropriate levels of acculturation for their people in the United States. One such tension that Khater expanded upon was that of gender: Once in the U.S., Arab immigrants were forced to reconstruct the patriarchal construct of their homeland. Women, who had been expected to remain indoors and adhere to rigid gender roles, found this a difficult prospect in America, compelled as they were to make money for the maintenance of their family, which often involved interacting with men who were not family members, in order to achieve the economic success so coveted. Khater argued that the result of these tensions was often of a hybrid nature, where aspects of Eastern life and customs were fused with that of the West.

Turning to external tensions, Khater discussed the increasing pressures felt by Arab-Americans (and other ethnic groups) to defend their right to enter and remain within the United States. Starting around 1906, and accelerated with the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, the immigration of Arabs to the U.S. was prohibited, threatening the immigration and naturalisation possibilities for thousands of families. In response, a series of legal cases ensued, many of which explicitly raised the issue of race. With particular reference to the landmark Syrian case Dow v. United States, Khater outlined the importance of naturalisation debates. George Dow had been denied citizenship, despite fulfilling the necessary ‘character’ requirements. Therefore, on account of his race, as a non-Caucasian, his application was denied. The Syrian community mobilised in response, aware as they were of the future threat this posed to their entire community. Dow’s legal counsel, comprised of two Jewish lawyers, presented the court with the argument that, if Jesus Christ was semitic, he would have been allowed into the country, therefore they too should be allowed. Ultimately, this case represented the reconceptualisation of race, in what could be described, in the words of Nell Irvin Painter, as an ‘enlargement of American whiteness.’ In overturning the lower court’s decision to deny George Dow citizenship on the grounds that Syrians “were to be classed as white persons”, this represented the moment in which Christianity was mapped onto race. The implications of this, Khater argued, were far-reaching, in that the assimilation of Arab-Americans under the banner of ‘white’ distorted the correct proportions of institutional/welfare support that they were entitled to receive.

Khater concluded his paper with the interesting observation that Middle Eastern history refuses easy cartographical placement. At the height of Arab-U.S. immigration, the Eastern Mediterranean lost one-third of its total population – and this Arab diaspora perforates the notion of a static national history. Thus, Khater encouraged the audience to think about the importance of revising history to include the constantly moving and fluid immigrant communities. During the question-and-answer session, Khater went on to stress that the main difference between Arab-Americans and other ethnic groups is that being an Arab-American has never been a good thing. Beginning in the 1960s, people of Arab descent were retreating from their Middle-Eastern identity, increasingly identifying as ‘Lebanese’. This, Khater stated, has gained greater momentum in post-9/11 American society. Interestingly, Khater noted the extent to which the ‘Lebanese’ identity has successfully gravitated into mainstream American culture, as evinced in one contemporary advert by insurance company Geico, featuring Count Dracula at a blood bank who exclaims, ‘“I love the Lebanese!”'

Professor Khater’s discussion of ‘Little Syria’ and the early Arab community in America was highly engaging and expansive, extending beyond the early Arab experience and into the present-day. At this moment in time, Middle Eastern politics  are in the international spotlight, with discussions over nationalism and multi-nationalism receiving heightened attention. As such, Khater contributed to the much-needed and important discussion of Arab nations and their dispersed peoples. Formulated through an American lens, the discussion also helped to facilitate a greater empathy toward an ethnic sub-set of the American population often overlooked or, as is often the case, misunderstood. 

 By Rebecca Dunbar

PGR at the University of Glasgow   

The Centre’s seminar series continues with Dr Anthony Stanonis  (Queens University Belfast): ‘Feast of the Mau Mau: Christianity, Conjure and the Origins of Soul Food’. This will be held on Wednesday 22^nd October 2014 in Room 208, 2 University Gardens, at 5:15pm. All very welcome!

‘Really Reading Junot Diaz: Literature of the “new immigration”’

On Thursday 2^nd October, The University of Glasgow was delighted to welcome Dr Maria Lauret (University of Sussex) to the second lecture of the Andrew Hook Centre’s 2014-2015 seminar series. This lecture was co-sponsored by the English Literature Visiting Speaker Series and, as such, attracted a multi-disciplinary audience with diverse research interests and expertise.

Dr Lauret’s lecture focused on the intricate use of language in Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), described by The New York Times as ‘an extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, [and] confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that’s equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo.’ Diaz’s multi-lingual ‘immigrant’ literary style is of central interest to Dr Lauret whose research interests encompass, amongst other things, twentieth-century immigration and Americanisation and, particularly, the literature of the ‘new immigration.’ Indian-born American writer Bharati Mukherjee identifies the literature of the new immigration as inherently different from old immigrant literature, which performed an assimilatory function. By contrast, the literature of the new immigration demonstrates the powerful ideological and cultural hold of the homeland on ‘new’ arrivals on U.S. soil. Lauret, drawing on this idea, cited Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883) which, engraved at the foot of the State of Liberty, reads ‘Give me your tired, your poor/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’ This, Lauret stated, does not apply to the new wave of Latin American immigrants whose traumatic history finds no refuge in the historically complicit North American states.

The lecture began with a close reading of the opening passage of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which Dr Lauret described as both grandiose and expansive, simultaenously highlighting Diaz’s original and important use of language: ‘despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices.’ Intrigued by the word ‘dique’, Lauret discovered that in Dominican slang, the word, deriving from French-Creole, means ‘supposedly’ or ‘so they say’. In choosing this word, Lauret argued that Diaz makes a daring political statement, namely, in his implicit recognition of Haitian history and culture, so central to (though often denied by) the Dominican Republic. Dr Lauret directed the audience toward Diaz’s political message, calling to mind Toni Morrison’s assertion that racially-marked languages can revolutionise literature. Diaz, through the use of the word ‘dique’, critiques the Dominican disapproval of blackness. It is here, in the minute intricacies of the text’s language, that Diaz’s political agenda is found. 

Thus, in order to fully understand the language and meanings of Diaz’s text, the reader has to delve beyond the surface-level. Diaz does not translate the interwoven foreign words: He leaves it to the reader to probe beneath the surface, in much the same way that immigrants must learn to navigate the nuances of language in their new communities. In this way, Lauret argued, the tables are turned: English, Spanish/Spanglish and Dominican slang are given equal treatment in a narrative that denies the cultural hegemony of one language.

In what prove one of the most intriguing lines of enquiry in the lecture, Dr Lauret stressed the important role of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, alongside Diaz’ short story collections Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012) in initiating and, indeed, mastering, multilingual fusion literature. Dr Lauret noted that fear of contamination of imperial languages by Creoles and fear of miscegenation has traditionally gone hand in hand. The topicality of language discussions in relation to Diaz’s works cannot be overstated, given that, in 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau projected that ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population within a generation. Thus, Diaz’s hybridisation of language reflects the writer’s hopes for a post-imperial, fusion literature which treats all languages and cultures with the appropriate level of respect.

Lastly, Dr Lauret drew attention to the problematic nature of the majority of immigrant literature, as identified by Diaz himself: ‘“I feel I’m not a … [sic] native informer [who is] only there to loot them [the immigrant group] of ideas, and words, and images so that you can coon them to the dominant group.’ To the contrary, Lauret persuasively argued that the meaningful and ground-breaking purpose of Diaz’s work is to create a universal language, a language that, in its fusion of alien tongues, is deeply ‘American’. Thus, by ‘really reading’ Junot Diaz and the seamless integration of languages contained within the pages of his novel, Dr Lauret argued that the astute reader participates in the move toward a universal language. In what was a highly enjoyable and thought-provoking discussion, Dr Lauret encouraged the audience to both think about and engage with multi-lingual texts and to re-think the notion of ‘Americanisation’, which, in this literature of the ‘new’ immigration, strives to integrate the language and culture of the ‘new’ immigrant groups within mainstream American culture.

Rebecca Dunbar

PGR at the University of Glasgow