The third conference was held at the Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle with participants from the Sorbone, the University of Bologna, Yale, Berkeley, and Brown University. The conference examined the status of the United States as a “revolutionary” country, and the contradictory meanings of “revolution” and “reform” in relation to change and history. Panelists considered American history and culture as attempts to reconcile these two contradictory forces: on the one hand, the United States’ image as the land of progress and reform in all fields (e.g., political, social, technical, economic, cultural, literary), and, on the other hand, its revolutionary heritage/myth, which carries with it the urge to appeal constantly to the core values of the American nation and to comment endlessly on its foundation.
first panel
Chair Franco La Polla, University of Bologna
Not Aunt Jemima: Blackface Cuban Memorabilia
by Jill Lane, Yale University
Fragmentation as Revolution in the Novels of David Markson and W. G. Sebald
by Françoise Palleau, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
This paper brings together a contemporary American writer, David Markson (born in 1927), and a contemporary European writer, W.G. Sebald (German born in 1944, died in 2001, wrote in German but lived his adult life in England), to look at what they have in common in their revolutionary transformation of the novel at the turn of the 21st century. Both share a common rejection of the notions of empire and nationalism, which is perceptible formally in their writing. Both look at what lies beneath the national pride and mythology, and dig out the corpses of a nation’s victims not only thematically, but most strikingly, in the very structure of their writing, in the form of their sentences and in their fragmented composition. And finally, both attempt to retrieve memory from the ashes of destruction, a collective memory cleansed of lies. Their fragmentary memory is shaky and problematic, not a conqueror’s Pantheon, but made up of bits and pieces composing a muted but revolutionary starting point.
second panel
Chair Martine Azuelos, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
The (R)Evolution of Speculation in the USA Since the Second World War
by Christine Zumello, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Building Progress and Middle-Class Values into Workers’ Home: Minimal Bungalows in California, 1900-1930
by Paul Groth, University of California at Berkeley
In the early 1900s, industrialists developed huge new factory areas in American cities, prompting the creation nearby of large new blue-collar residential districts. Simultaneously, middle-class reformers and commercial retailers were learning how to further a subtle revolution in the ideas, technologies, and social practices for workers’ homes. Northern California’s “minimal bungalows” – small houses, often less than 800 square feet (74 square meters) – compared to earlier worker-built cottages, record how home buyers, reformers, retailers, and builders promoted and adopted notions of a single, visually uniform, and permanent national home culture for working class America. The resulting minimal bungalow neighborhoods of 1900–1930 represent new rules for house interiors linked to parallel ideas and practices at the larger scales of yard, streetscape, block, and district.
third panel
Chair Robert G. Lee, Brown University
Back to the Future: The Plantation and the New U.S. Imperialism
by Laura Wexler, Yale University
Slavery, Revolution, and Historical Memory: Navigating New England’s Past
by James T. Campbell, Brown University
fourth panel
Chair Jill Lane, Yale University
Memory, Postmemory, and Counter-History: The Historical Novel of Slavery in the Post-Civil Rights Era
by Arlene R. Keizer, Brown University
Selling the Model Minority Abroad: Narratives of Racial Progress in America’s Cold War Cultural Diplomacy
by Mary Lui, Yale University
This paper examines the role minority elites have played in performing state articulations of “model minority” racial discourse during the Cold War. The United States Information Agency (USIA) launched a series of good will missions featuring an accomplished group of minority writers and artists to newly decolonized countries to promote America as a democratic nation committed to racial equality. Chinese American Jade Snow Wong, a successful artist and writer, became one of the many selected. Her autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter, describing her experiences growing up in a working-class family in San Francisco’s Chinatown and later success in a non-traditional career despite racial and gender discrimination, resonated with the USIA’s message. The commodification of Jade Snow Wong as a model minority was critical to this enterprise. She had become an international celebrity largely because of the wide scale publication and distribution of her book by the USIA throughout Asia. While the USIA labored to convey images of minority accomplishments abroad, Wong’s own efforts in self-marketing as a successful artist/writer embodying the model minority should not be underestimated; nor should we assume she merely followed state department dictates. Wong’s letters from her 1953 Asia tour reveal her attempts to reconcile the gains and constraints from her newly found authority as a cultural figure legitimized by the state. The attempts of Wong and other USIA minority spokespeople to define for themselves the meaning of “model minority” suggest the ways in which this racial discourse was not simply a state creation, but actively shaped by these minority elites.
fifth panel
Chair Jean-Loup Bourget, Ecole Normale Supérieure – Ulm
Reform in Popular Culture: Apocalypses Then
by Richard Hutson, University of California at Berkeley
Tocqueville, observing the U.S. in the late 1820s, noted that the U.S. was a revolutionary culture, but also that the U.S. had really not had a revolution. It is possible that the Puritan traditions of Jeremiad sermons have had more to do with the idea of revolution in the U.S. than political theory. By looking at a few instances of popular culture, I wish to note that the apocalyptic imagination in the U.S. is always readily available as a way of clearing the slate of the past and starting over from scratch.
A Leopard in California: The New Hollywood Fake Revolution
by Franco Lapolla, University of Bologna
Much has been written about the so called New Hollywood of the late 60s and early 70s. The American film industry underwent, at the time, a deep change that many considered a revolution: new young and independent producers took over the majors, new faces took over celebrated stars of the screen, location shooting took over the studio setting and consequently new techniques were invented to make possible or easier the new way of shooting. The revolution, though, is primarily a revolution of the spirit, of the conscience which finds its most striking expression in a paranoiac feeling running through every filmic and literary issue. In the end, the so called New Hollywood revolution – apart from the changes it brought about in the economic and financial history of Hollywood – did not cause any real overturn in film-making as, generally speaking, the narrative structures remained the same and, actually, it opened the way to a restoration of big budget productions. A number of talents, after contributing to a more honest, truthful and critical cinema, fell again into the trap of the studios and the superproduction, thus proving once again that – following Lampedusa's Leopard theory of history – often revolutions are just a preliminary stage to the return of the past in an updated form.
The Nightmare of Reform: Lars Von Trier’s Reading of American Social Photography
by Didier Aubert, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
In 2003 and 2005, Danish director Lars Von Trier made quite a stir with the first two installments of his planned “USA – Land of Opportunities” trilogy. Both Dogville and Manderlay are supposed to take place in 1930s America. Both were shot on a vast sound stage on which bits and pieces of props and sets are meant to conjure up an entire town (in Dogville) and a large Southern plantation (in Manderlay). Both movies follow the misguided efforts of a young woman called Grace to nurture kindness, dignity and fellowship in two secluded communities she happens to stumble on while crossing the country. Grace is the typical “sentimental soul from the east coast” described by the narrator at the beginning of Dogville. Her idealistic visions fail the test or reality in both movies. The “good, honest folks” of Dogville – to quote the prologue – are intolerant hypocrites. The anachronistic slaves of Manderlay are irresponsible and deceitful. Needless to say, not everyone was enthralled by Von Trier’s take on race, gender, and American history. Nearly all critics agreed that both movies were, at best, confusing. But the absence of a clearly articulated thesis doesn’t necessarily make the films less interesting. To try to deal with their contradictions, this paper focuses on a very specific section which is common to both movies – the final credits sequence – with a specific emphasis on Dogville’s.
sixth panel
Chair Susan Smulyan, Brown University
Watching History: How Fitz H. Lane Painted the Past in Antebellum New England and Inaugurated a Future
by Margaretta M. Lovell, University of California at Berkeley
This paper discusses the paintings of one of New England’s most enigmatic and most interesting artists of the antebellum period. It begins with the current scholarship on this artist, with the history of his recognition in the canon from the mid twentieth-century period, and with the history of interpretation of his oeuvre. Usually valued as a pioneer of what has become known as the Luminists, Lane, in this reinterpretation emerges as a solo actor responsive not just to the light of New England’s coast in his many celebrated landscapes but to the facts of the economies that made use of that landscape. Extractive industries, such as the lumbering of pine in Maine and the quarrying of granite in Massachusetts, are, I argue, central to his vision of the geography he inhabited and portrayed for his patrons. The study also investigates Lane’s participation in the emerging culture of looking, that is tourism, and what was known as summering in coastal New England. It attends to his portrayal of space as invested with history as well as with a light-flooded present. And it tracks the history of ownership of key works, both those made for local consumption in his native Gloucester but also those made for wealthy former-Gloucesterites who lived elsewhere but sought images to freshen their memories of places and activities that they invested with value. Overall the essay takes one of the most important figures in nineteenth-century American art and vigorously re-evaluates his career. He is positioned not as the proto-Modernist that previous scholars have imagined but as an anti-Modernist.
Two Layers of Time: Hans Namuth Capturing the Pollock Revolution
by France Jaigu, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
This paper attempts to show how Jackson Pollock, an uncategorizable artist, came to embody the two conflicting meanings of the word “revolution”: Pollock was both the artist who broke away from traditional art categories and a painter whose art hovered on the edge of time, engaged in a circular motion (as we can readily consider the circle as a Pollockian motif). This paper then attempts to show how a short 9-minute film by Hans Namuth would ultimately be responsible for restricting interpretations of Pollock's work – thus effectively “framing” the Pollockian revolution – with Harold Rosenberg's theory of “action painting.”
seventh panel
Chair Marie-Christine Lemardeley, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
A Revolution in American Literature? The Impact of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan
by Christine Lorre, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
This paper starts from the emblematic pair formed by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, two tutelary figures whose names are associated with the emergence of a literature referred to as Chinese-American or Asian-American. The publication of Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in 1976, of Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in 1986, and of their subsequent books, marked the beginning of a new category of fiction and confirmed its popular growth. The work of Hong Kingston and Tan changed the way the Asian-American minority is perceived and perceives itself in the United States. What the two writers have in common is their will to give a voice to a minority that for a long time was mostly silent, and to make American literature inclusive of writers from ethnic minority groups. They diverge in the styles they employ, however, and in the notions of the function of writing implicit in their works. Hong Kingston’s writing, which experiments with new modes of narration, may be considered as revolutionary, while Tan’s, which revisits the traditional realist mode to integrate Chinese themes and motifs, adopts a reformist strategy.
Race, Relevance, and Revolution: W.E.B. Dubois’ Novel, Dark Princess, Pan-Ethnic Revolution, and Afro-Asian Connection
by Sandra Lwin, Yale University
eight panel
Chair Laura Wexler, Yale University
“He Was The Only Man…”: Frederick Douglass, a “Woman’s Rights Man”
by Hélène Quanquin, 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.
From the Mitchell Brothers to Larry Flynt: Visual Forms of the Sexual Revolution
by Giacomo Manzoli, University of Bologna
ninth panel
Chair Margaretta M. Lovell, University of California at Berkeley
Economic Aspects of the Conservative Revolution
by Ruxandra Pavelchievici, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
The “Great Exception”?: Carey Mcwilliams and the California Challenge to Racial Liberalism in the 1940s
by Mark Brilliant, University of California at Berkeley
"To most Americans," observed a book reviewer in the Nation in 1943, "the race problem means only the Negro problem, and few even know that the term 'colored people' applies to any races other than the Negro." Among those exceptional few, no one was more perceptive and prescient than California journalist and activist Carey McWilliams. In his 1949 book, California: The Great Exception, and other writings, McWilliams made the case for California as America's "racial frontier." "In most areas of the United States," McWilliams wrote, "the racial pattern is two-dimensional – Negroes and whites – but in California it has four dimensions: Negroes, whites, Orientals, and Mexicans." The demographic differences of which McWilliams spoke shaped the political and legal contours of California's civil rights history. They exposed a racial landscape better viewed as criss-crossed with color lines, rather than bisected by a single color line as per the prevailing conceptualization of the "race problem" associated with the emerging racial liberalism of the 1940s. This paper explores the challenge to racial liberalism posed by Carey McWilliams' writings about race relations in California in the 1930s and 1940s and as reflected in a handful of court cases that dismantled the state's crazy-quilt, multi-racial system of legalized segregation in the late 1940s. These cases mounted against the state's school segregation, alien land, and anti-miscegenation laws pointed to particular axes of discrimination for Californians of color – language, citizenship status, and race – that required particular avenues of legal redress. It is in these different axes of discrimination and different avenues of redress that McWilliams' case for California as America's "racial frontier" resides. At the same time, as "exceptional" as California might have been with its particular "racial pattern" in the 1940s, it was also a harbinger of the multiracial demographics – and accompanying civil rights struggles – in the U.S. more generally that began to unfold in earnest with the onset of World War II. It is this issue of California as both "great exception" and "great harbinger" with respect to racial politics and law that this paper explores.
Social Gospel, Revolution, and Social Reform in San Francisco Chinatown, 1900-1930
by Robert G. Lee, Brown University
tenth panel
Chair Richard Hutson, University of California at Berkeley
Property, Poverty, Poetry: Lorine Niedecker’s Quiet Revolution
by Marie-Christine Lemardeley, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Reformist and Revolutionary Rhetoric: The New York Intellectuals and Advertising Novels Critique Consumption
by Susan Smulyan, Brown University
Between 1946 and 1960, advertising industry insiders wrote and published at least twenty three novels set in advertising agencies and eight others that took up allied institutions like television stations and public relations firms. These novels presented a sustained critique of mass culture written by the forward scouts of the culture of consumption, those who worked in advertising, broadcasting, marketing, and public relations. Working to expand the realm of consumption, advertising professionals saw, before most people, the drawbacks to a consumer culture. Their novels outlined the dishonesty of the advertising business and the meaninglessness of advertising as a profession; bemoaned the conformity of commodified life; and decried the emptiness of consumption.
The critiques presented by the novelists have been dismissed because they occurred in popular novels or because they were formulaic. Yet, I maintain that the fiction writers’ trenchant social protests sometimes succeeded as important explorations of the individual’s place in mass culture and usually failed to present a radical alternative to the culture of consumption that they deplored. But their critiques shared these successes and failures with more well-known radicals and need to be considered alongside them.