The second conference was held at Brown University in June 2004 with participants from the University of Bologna, the Sorbonne, Yale, and Berkeley joining Brown faculty and graduate students to explore “Public Spheres and American Cultures” in connection with the new Public Humanities MA program in the Department of American Civilization. We see public spheres as contested terrains in which the whole range of social identities vie for position and voice in American culture. One central question was be the relationship of the “people”; the “popular” and the “public” and this international group of scholars took a range of approaches to the subject, making use of popular culture, ethnic studies, material culture studies, visual studies, as well historical and literary studies.
The conference was cosponsored by the Department of American Civilization, the Provost's Office and the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization.
first panel: Private Art in Public Spaces
Chair Robert Lee, Brown University
Imagining Race and the American Landscape in 1834: ‘Les Negres’ and ‘Les Sauvages’ in Zuber's Scenic Wallpaper ‘Vues D'amérique Du Nord’
by Robert Emlen, Brown University
In 1834 the French wallpaper company Jean Zuber & Cie first published "Vues d'Amerique du Nord," a forty-seven foot (14.3 meter)-long wallpaper mural depicting the cultural curiosities and natural splendors of the American northeast. Soon thereafter brilliantly-colored images of Native Americans in war dance at the Natural Bridge of Virginia, or African Americans promenading in formal dress overlooking Manhattan could be found adorning the walls of elegant rooms in Europe and the United States. However, no one connected with the design, production, or marketing of this wallpaper had ever set foot in America; its spectacular views were conjectural constructions based on print sources in the Zuber library. This presentation will address the ways in which Zuber's idealized views were designed to market this wallpaper, and how they reflected French visions of Jacksonian America.
Private Paths in Public Places: Bill Viola’s ‘Passions’ Series
by France Jancène-Jaigu, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
In the summer of 1995, Bill Viola's exhibition "Buried Secrets" took up all five rooms of the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennial. In the last room, on a large plasma screen, "The Greeting " focused on the episode of the New Testament when Mary tells Elizabeth that she is with child. Viola here showed a group of two and then of three women and captured, thanks to a specific slow motion technique, the most minute details of their changing expressions. "The Greeting " was the starting point of a project Viola called " The Passion Series." The twenty odd works which make up the series were on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum (January 24th-April 27th 2003), at the National Gallery in London (October 22nd 2003- January 4th 2004) and shown in Munich last spring.
The works in "The Passions " series were a departure from Viola's former installations : to put together these much more intimate and silent works, Viola had traveled back in time, drawing inspiration from the Old Masters, exploring the challenge of depicting and arousing emotion. Interestingly enough however, throughout the exhibition and in order to bring the spectator in close contact with his art, Viola chose to reveal extremely intimate episodes of his personal life, as if only private anecdotes could move the visitor in public places such as a museum. Quite clearly Viola has been moving consistently away from what was formerly considered public or “common ground,” to elect the private and the personal. Thus, rather than moving us as a religious reference to Christ, a work such as " Man of Sorrows " arouses our emotion in a very immediate and straightforward way when we learn that the actor on the plasma screen, John Fleck, was losing his mother to Alzheimer's disease when shooting the video. It could therefore be interesting for us to study Viola's strategy to fight the slow decay of public spheres such as the museum or even religion: with the " story " we all once knew becoming meaningless to us, with museums looking more and more like burial ground for art works (despite the ever increasing number of visitors flocking to them every year), Viola helps us to connect with art through private and intimate references.
second panel: War, Trauma, and Public Discourses
Chair Susan Smulyan, Brown University
‘Save the Shanghai Refugees’: The Aufbau Campaign to Rescue European Refugees in Shanghai, 1946-1950
by Susanne Wiedemann, Brown University
Death, War, and Public Memory: Iwo Jima, Vietnam, and the Wild West
by Margaretta Lovell, University of California at Berkeley
This paper considers the role of public monuments in constructing public memory. Lovell examines the way in which the Vietnam Veteran’s memorial, the Iwo Jima monument, and the new World War Two monument mobilize contrasting aesthetic forms and visual rhetorics, each producing a very different sort of cultural narrative. With its aesthetic abstraction, the Vietnam Veteran’s memorial rejected the narrative of heroism associated with the Iwo Jima monument, but succeeded at constructing another form of public memory by connecting personal, historical, and community experiences of grief.
third panel: Private Lives and Public Images
Chair Franco La Polla, University of Bologna
Hollywood Moguls’ Public Image: The Missing Private Sphere in Harry Cohn’s Constructed Self
by Sara Pesce, University of Bologna
This paper argues that early Hollywood film moguls used the public sphere to construct a new, thoroughly public kind of identity for immigrant Jews in the US. These moguls fashioned a public image of themselves as exotic, powerful, despotic and self-made while concealing private biographical facts, including the fact of their Jewishness. This strategy contributed to the assimilation of Jewish immigrant identity, but it also located the moguls at the center of the public imaginary as American success stories and enabled them to negotiate anti-Semitism.
Private Suffering in the Public Sphere: The Pow Publicity Campaign and the Story of Delia Alvarez
by Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University
My paper explores the campaign to publicize the plight of POWs and their families between 1968 and 1973. Prior to the late 1960s, the government pursued a policy of “quiet diplomacy” regarding US prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. However, by 1968, the Nixon Administration, in collaboration with the newly mobilized wives, parents, and siblings of POWs, launched a full-scale publicity campaign. The paper explores the logic and rhetoric of this campaign. It argues that the campaign advanced a premise that would shape Vietnam War discourse for decades to come: namely, that the private suffering of the wives, mothers, and children of POWs confirmed that the United States was a psychological victim rather than a perpetrator within the wider conflict. But the paper also argues that some POW relatives, including Delia Alvarez (the sister of Everett Alvarez, the longest held prisoner in North Vietnam), refused to be implicated in this narrative of national victimhood. The paper argues that Alvarez rejected her prescribed role of “domestic war victim,” sought to purge the POW story of the excessive sentimentality and emotion that typified it, and used her media visibility to condemn the war, the Nixon Administration, and the campaign itself. The paper uses the publicity campaign to trace how “women and children” can be interpellated by the state during moments of national crisis, while also offering an example of one social actor who subverted the process.
fourth panel: Representing the Social Movement
Chair Laura Wexler, Yale University
Another Tactic for Revolution: The Black Panther Party as a Health Social Movement
by Alondra Nelson, Yale University
My paper concerns two Black Panther Party health activist initiatives--its well-known sickle cell anemia campaign and its lesser-known protest around a planned center to study biomedical sources of individual violent behavior. I argue that these activities, which deployed similar strategies (i.e., asserting the black body as a political site, contesting biomedical knowledge with social knowledge, valuing of lay experience), pre-figured what has come to be known in the sociological literature as health social movements.
Which Side of the Zipper?: Journalism and American Film
by Franco La Polla, University of Bologna
This paper looks at how American cinema depicted journalism over the course of the 20th century. In these films, the journalist represents active, democratic values and a passionate commitment to work. La Polla concludes by considering how representations of female journalists complicate this model: female and male journalists respectively become figures for two competing modes of journalism, ethical and honest reporting versus shrewd and pragmatic professionalism.
fifth panel: The Other in the National Imaginary
Chair Didier Aubert, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Perry Visits Japan: Presenting the Public Sphere in New Media
by Susan Smulyan, Brown University
The John Hay Library at Brown University holds a fascinating, but never studied, Japanese scroll that illustrates Commodore Matthew Perry’s landing in Japan, the first official contact between Americans and Japanese. This work of an anonymous Japanese artist depicts events that took place in 1854 and was painted sometime between then and 1906 when the Chinese scholar, Wang Zhiben, titled the scroll and wrote a commentary on the last panel. With undergraduate students and library staff, I have built a website that includes the scroll, the official American paintings of the same events, and student essays. I will talk about how the study of these visual representations of the public and diplomatic sphere changes when scholarship is presented in the newest public sphere, the World Wide Web. In particular I want to look at how the Web presents the possibility of authentic learning; transnational intellectual exchange; and a more open form of scholarship because of its public nature.
The Nature of the Enemy
by Laura Wexler, Yale University
sixth panel: Globalizations and Public Spheres
Chair Richard Hutson, University of California at Berkeley
Cosmopolitics, Gender, and the Public Sphere
by Elizabeth Dillon, Yale University
I plan to examine the relation(s) between and among gender, the public/private divide
and national vs. transnational concepts of civic space and the public sphere. I have just published a book about gender, the literary public sphere, and early American literature (The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere). In this
paper, I want to connect some of the questions of gender I explore in the book with more contemporary manifestations of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and gender. I will start by looking at CEDAW--the UN convention to eliminate the discrimination against women--and consider some of the arguments that have been made against the convention (which the US has not signed). Then I will look more specifically at the way gender functions in the transnational public sphere.
The Agent, the Preacher, and the Smoking Beetle: Globalization And Performative Critique
by Jill Lane, Yale University
seventh panel: The Public Spheres of Bourgeois Domesticity
Chair Robert Lee, Brown University
Changing the American Public Sphere Through Marriage in the Nineteenth Century: The Example of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell
by Hélène Quanquin, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell married in May 1855, after a five-year courtship spent writing long letters to each other and confronting their divergent conceptions of marriage. Already active in the women’s movement, Lucy Stone feared that unequal marriage, as was the norm at the time, might deprive her of her freedom and become an obstacle to her public activism in favor of women’s rights. For five years, Henry Backwell relentlessly tried to convince her that the equal marriage he advocated could be an opportunity for both of them to thrive intellectually as well as spiritually. Their five-year discussion on marriage resulted in a joint declaration issued on their wedding day and denouncing laws which, at the time, deprived married women of all their rights.
The marriage of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell was the result of the constant interaction between, on the one hand, their private lives and, on the other hand, their ideas and activism, which is consistent with the ambivalent nature of marriage, as both private and public [Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Cambridge, Mas., Harvard University Press, 2000]. Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were in fact aware that their idea and practice of equal marriage might have had broader implications: On July 27, 1853, Lucy Stone wrote Henry Blackwell, “ How soon the character of the race would change if pure, and equal marriages could take place of the horrible relations that now bear that sacred name!”. In the case of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, marriage became a way to force a redefinition of the American public sphere and government.
The Novel and the Public Sphere: The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
by Richard Hutson, University of California at Berkeley
Through a reading of The Rise of Silas Lapham, this essay suggests that for William Dean Howells, the realist novel was the mode of expression of an American public sphere. Hutson argues that in Howells’s theory, novels transform the private concerns of individuals into matters of public discussion. Further, Howells thought that the novel was a mirror for the public, though rather than simply reflecting public attitudes and behavior, the novel would generate a new model of civic morality for the public to follow. In the context of laissez-faire political attitudes of the period, Howells saw the literary public sphere as absolutely necessary.
The Graphic Sphere: Images and Civic Conscience in the Progressive Era
by Didier Aubert, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
This paper reconsiders the argument that the rise of mass visual media in the 19th century transformed the public sphere from a place for rational debate into a site where a consuming public was passively influenced by “publicity.” Looking specifically at Progressive civic exhibitions, Aubert argues that Progressive reformers constructed a “graphic” public sphere, where visual information was meant to operate as an interface between experts and citizens, in order to foster the development of an enlightened public opinion. At the same time, however, the use of photography and other types of "graphic" displays also tended to neutralize the possibilities of a genuine public debate as images supposedly “spoke for themselves,” offering in fact little room for interaction and contradiction.
keynote address
The Museum as Public Sphere
by Steven Lubar, Brown University
Recent work in museum studies suggest that museums might become a vibrant piece of the public sphere, a place where diverse groups can discuss important issues. The paper traces the genealogy of this notion, contrasting three pairs of contemporaneous museums (Pahin de la Blancherie’s Commercial Cabinet of Curiosity with the Louvre, P.T. Barnum’s and Charles Wilson Peale’s American Museums, and the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Newark Museum). It suggests that there are interesting models in the history of museums that contemporary museums might consider as they find ways to break down barriers between curators and their publics.