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Paper Proposal
The entire cap gun fits easily in the palm of my hand. Made of cast iron, the toy pistol is surprisingly weighty despite its diminutive size. The receptacle that holds the cap takes the form of an open mouth belonging to an African American man. When the gun’s hammer is released, it strikes the open mouth exploding the cap. A raised inscription just beneath the man’s inclined head reads, “NIGGER HEAD”.(1) When viewed from the side, the pistol’s visual character is such that the major visual and physical axes--the horizontal thrust of the gun barrel and the vertically oriented s-like configurations of both the hammer and handle--converge at the African American’s head. The hapless figure occupies the vital center, visually, functionally, and psychically.
I first encountered this objectionable artifact five years ago when I selected it as “my” object for an assignment in a museum practicum course at Trinity College (Hartford). We were reading Jules Prown’s edited volume American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture.(2) I was drawn to the cap gun because it raised the specters of violence and race relations, issues largely absent from the case studies in American Artifacts. In the essays, objects as varied as a teapot, Amish quilt, tortoiseshell locket, and lava lamp become sites of interpretive transformation. By the end of each essay, the seemingly innocuous object in question is revealed as fraught with social tensions and unexpected cultural meanings. That the surprise revelation lies at the rhetorical center of these essays makes them somewhat akin in style to the genre of the detective story. In other words, the format requires there be a dramatic contrast between a priori knowledge and the post-analysis conclusions. The greater the discrepancy between the two, the more ably the analytical virtuosity (i.e., detective work) enabled by the Prownian method can appear to have been demonstrated. This establishes a prescriptive focus on the use of “innocent” objects as convenient tabulae rasae that can be problematized, and even dramatized, through the process of analysis. It also seemed to me that such objects facilitated the illusion of the researcher’s ability to maintain objective distance from the subject of her scrutiny. What, then, to make of an object like the cap gun that appears problematic prior to deeper analysis? What of the object the researcher finds in some way objectionable or abhorrent even as she attempts dispassionate detachment?
Since the museum practicum course, I have continued to work with this object in various ways and it is my hope that my paper for ARCH 2100 will 1) pull together the disparate strands of past and current work, 2) connect my efforts to the theoretical traditions we’ve been exploring through our readings, 3) more fully explore the work this object performed in the late 1800s, and 4) bring me closer to a publishable paper. My past work with the object has considered the racial power dynamics embodied in this object in order to more deeply understand the psychological and social forces that brought this toy and other racist commodities into being and popularity during the late 1800s.(3) Very recent work examined a particular type of gender performance that is imagined not only in the cap gun but also in the fiction of post-Reconstruction America. Specifically, I considered narratives in which the adult black male served as the object of masculinity-forming child’s play for white boys.(4) My aim in attempting to connect textual examples of this trope to embodied practices in the material environment is to bring different representational practices into dialogue with one another as a means to construct a fuller cultural history.
A new element I am undertaking for this course is the development of a discourse-based model of object analysis. Here, I’ve taken my cue from John Dixon Hunt who suggested that a useful way to study material culture might be to think about objects in the same manner that Terry Winograd, a cognitive science and artificial intelligence specialist, has proposed we study discourse. (5)
This paper will be a culmination of my work with this object--but I doubt, given the object’s grip on me, that it will be the last word.
References:
1. “NIGGER HEAD” toy cap pistol, attributed to J. & E. Stevens Company of Cromwell, Connecticut, 1887. Accession number 22-1959-1. Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.
2. American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, ed. by Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000).
3. Clarissa Ceglio, “Fully Loaded: Discourse with an Objectionable Object.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, 17 October 2003, Hartford, CT.
4. “Black Men, White Boys, & Masculinity-forming Child’s Play in Post-Reconstruction America.” Presented at the New England American Studies Association, 2 November 2007, Providence, RI.
5. John Dixon Hunt, “The Sign of the Object” in History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993): 293-8, and Terry Winograd, “A Framework for Understanding Discourse” in Cognitive Processes in Comprehension, ed. by Marcel Adam Just and Patricia A. Carpenter (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977): 63-88.
Background:
*1st year doctoral student in American Civilization
Brown University
*MA in American Studies (Museum Studies concentration)
Trinity College, Hartford, CT (2005, with honors)
*BS in Advertising and Marketing
Syracuse University (1984, summa cum laude)
Clarissa Ceglio, as curator of the Backyard Museum, c. 1970
Statement:
My desire to study visual and material culture has its roots in my experiences as senior editor for Antiques & Fine Art magazine, communications officer for the Triton Museum of Art in California, and as a critic for Artweek, the West Coast’s contemporary art journal. Through this work I became interested in how objects function as cultural capital.
Much of my graduate work to date explores the processes through which artifacts acquire and communicate meaning—and thereby participate in the social construction of race, gender, citizenship, and other fluid categories of identity
Recent Work:
*Black Men, White Boys, & Masculinity-forming Child’s Play in Post-Reconstruction America.
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the New England American Studies Association, 2 November 2007, Providence, RI.
*Fully Loaded: Discourse with an Objectionable Object.
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, 17 October 2003, Hartford, CT.
*"Complicating Simplicity: An examination of Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People." American Quarterly, Vol. 54 (2) June 2002: 279-306.
*War Fare: Home Front Exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum During World War II.
Presented at the 25th Annual Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Conference, 8-9 November 2002, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH. Nominated for NEPCA Prize for best conference paper presented by a graduate student.
*‘We’ll Hang ‘em, but They Ain’t Paintings’: Framing Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People.
Presented at the New York Metro American Studies Association conference, “FIELD/WORK: American Studies and Museum Studies in Conversation,” 20 October 2001, New York, NY.
