Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Hybrids and Social Justice

         This week's readings are perhaps the most challenging of the semester because they ask us to consider some larger connections to our relationship with things.

         Brian Latour's "Crisis" certainly gave me a sense of unease just based on the title. In his essay, Latour explains that the way that we create our scholarship and understand ourselves fails to link how they relate to larger chains of networks. He identifies three different categories - nature, politics, and discourse - that we use to distinguish the study of the world around us. Latour critiques this separation and connects it to his conversation about what it really means to be modern. The reason Latour's essay made me feel uncomfortable - and probably rightfully so - was because it made me realize how much the discipline of history, the one I'm most familiar with, fails to engage with so much around it. The irony isn't lost on me that, in theory, history is supposed to be everything, right? And yet, and I include myself in this, we often fail to connect the past to so many different chains of networks that makes me think that historians aren't doing enough when we separate categories that don't really exist. Talk about an existential crisis...

         Shifting gears a bit, Laura Levitt's essay in her upcoming manuscript explores how objects relate to understanding trauma. Levitt uses Edmund de Waal's book The Hare with the Amber Eyes as a lens towards understanding how objects serve as a window looking at the Holocaust. The way that Levitt explores how objects can also serve as a route to justice in situations such as these reminds me of the shifting emotional responses that crop up when we have these conversations about our relationships to objects. It has certainly defined my own project for me. I initially thought that my emotional response to my license plate was unimportant. The most that I felt when I looked at or thought about it was slight nostalgia for a time that I never live through. But as I discovered how an everyday object with such high visibility was manufactured in a prison with such poor conditions - a seemingly invisible place - I was repulsed and intrigued by it. I wondered what my findings meant beyond my project. I'm still trying to figure that out, but Levitt's essay helps me to think about how objects can relate to social justice.

Monday, April 11, 2016

The Senses

                This week’s readings on soundscapes are helpful in trying to understand another facet of material culture study. Mark M. Smith traces the historiography of sound in history and argues that the history of sound allows historians to enhance our understanding of the past and helps us to see how past peoples interacted with their environments. Looking at three different examples, Smith shows that sound studies are not just a minor perspective, but that this entire methodology is an opportunity to explore more than just the things that we can see.

                One example that Smith draws upon in his historiography is Emily Thompson’s Soundscape of Modernity. Focusing on the first three decades of the twentieth century, Thompson looks at architecture, among other things, to understand how Americans in urban spaces such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles shaped their built environment around their cultural constructions of sound. Sound, shows Thompson, helped to create modernity, which she defines as efficient, a commodity available for consumption, and an overall sense that humans had “technical mastery” over the environment. Thompson shows us how we can use sounds to understand place and time, which will certainly be helpful in my project.           


                When I first began researching my project on the license plate, all I could think about was the loud noises that must have been created as it was manufactured. Once I located my plate’s provenance, the sounds, conversations, and uproars of the Western State Penitentiary and the male inmates who made these plates between 1971 and 1976 became even more intriguing to me. This made me think about how its location shaped the area's sounds as well. Located just outside the city of Pittsburgh, a major steel manufacturing town until 1980 or so, is equally important to understanding Western State’s surrounding conditions. As deindustrialization crippled Pittsburgh during these years, I wonder about how the city’s soundscapes changed over time. I wonder if they became quieter over time as factories were abandoned, rendering Western State and the surrounding area even more invisible than they may have already been. Thompson’s source base is helpful in my project in the sense that it helps me to understand how the built environment of the penitentiary created a soundscape that shaped the reality of those who encountered and created it every day. 

Monday, April 4, 2016

Memory and Materiality

            With last week’s readings still fresh in my mind, I see concepts from Daniel Miller’s work in Stuff within historian Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. Miller reminded us that objects make us, just as we shape them. Savage shows us the politics of this exchange during one of the most defining periods of American history – Reconstruction. Specifically, Savage examines the monuments designed and erected throughout the United States that served to commemorate and memorialize the Civil War. He comments on how the academic traditions of sculpture literally shaped and limited how sculptors created monumental designs to reimagine and recreate the new racial order supposedly created after the abolishment of slavery. Sculptors and commemorative groups contended with these new meanings, but often ended up harkening back to a time that perceived blacks in a childlike, liminal phase and celebrated a white, male paternalistic model of civilization. What this shows us is that monuments offer a window into understanding how blacks and whites, the North and South, visualized their post-Civil War reality that the American Revolution had failed to achieve. Through the structural study of these monuments, we see that while slavery was abolished, the underlying paradox of oppression and freedom was perpetuated. Civil War monuments allowed privileged Americans to shape the past on their terms to face their nebulous present.


            Which raises the point that Savage not only succeeds in talking about the history of memorialization, but his work serves as a good public history conversation as well. Savage helps us understand how late nineteenth century Americans built their history through objects, but what about now? How are the objects we choose in the museum setting shaping the audiences we will work with every day? Ken Yellis offers some insight into this conversation. Focusing on the Mining the Museum exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society in the early 1990s, Yellis explores the sometimes contentious relationship between museums and their audiences. The artist behind Mining the Museum brokered an interesting juxtaposition of objects, such as the Ku Klux Klan hood and the baby carriage, to explore the museum’s history, but it was also at the cost of some backlash as well as positive responses. That was over twenty years ago – have we learned better ways to talk about the objects public historians use to tell stories about the past? Because if we are to listen to Savage and Yellis, this stuff matters and has tinges of a moral imperative as well. I admit that I don’t have an answer to the questions I’m asking, but it’s made me remember the pressures and responsibilities that come with public historical work. Even when objects are no longer used for the same intent for which they were first built, we’re still using them for different purposes. We need to be better about talking about the fluidity of objects and the built environment if we are to show our public that artifacts and history never existed in a fixed past.