Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis discusses new book, 'Navajo Talking Picture'
This past July, Dr. Randy Lewis published his third book, Navajo Talking Picture (University of Nebraska Press). I sat down with Randy to discuss the conception of the book, its challenges, its delights, and how the narrative he tells engages with broader conversations within American Studies and beyond.
Where did the idea for this book come from? How did the film [Navajo Talking Picture] and the filmmaker [Arlene Bowman] come onto your radar screen initially?Probably about ten years ago, I realized that there wasn’t much scholarly literature in film studies and none in American Studies on Native American cinema or indigenous media in a global sense. I started thinking about how to remedy that. I began collecting texts to consider and got deep into Alanis Obomsawin’s work, which I thought was just going to be a chapter of a book that would look at some of the major figures in Native American cinema who had been neglected. It just kept going into a book. It’s hard to imagine this, but it was the first one devoted to a Native filmmaker. This says something about how much “Native art” is narrowly associated with traditional art forms in opposition to modern, technologically-dependent art forms, as well as how rarely Native people have been able to get their points of view on screen, even as they are obsessively represented by outsiders like John Ford.While I was writing the Obomsawin book that came out in 2006, I was aware that I had these other things that I was really interested in. Part of it stemmed from writing in the southwest at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe for a year. I was really close to Navajo Nation, and I was coming across a lot of amazing Navajo artists and getting a sense that not only were they doing a lot with Navajo-language radio on the reservation, but there were a lot of Navajo media professionals doing all kinds of projects that were not on the film studies or American Studies radar. And I learned that there was a Navajo filmmaker named Arlene Bowman, who was really early in this story of Native filmmaking, who seemed to interest and dismay audiences equally. I wanted to see this film she made as a graduate student that had made a little splash in the 1980s when it came out, at a time when she was the first Native woman in film school at UCLA or probably anywhere else.
So I watched the film called Navajo Talking Picture, and I found it kind of confusing and unfamiliar. Then I’d show it to other people, to friends and students. What got me really hooked on it was that I had never seen something upset people and divide audiences so much. Apparently back in the 1980s when she screened it at festivals, Bowman said, there were these camps that were set up. Some people said, “You have the right to make this film, and you have a right to put your traditional grandmother on film even if she appears unwilling.” And other people would say, “This is an example of everything that you should not do in documentary.”As I started to register the depth of the divide and the racially-infused animosity, I became interested in the film itself as a cultural object, as a kind of wound, as I write in the book. I’m probably more interested in this question of wounding – or, let’s use the metaphor of a rock and ripples, because I have to have my eccentric metaphors. The rock is the text under consideration, and it drops into the pond of the culture, and it creates ripples. The ripples are the things that really fascinated me: why there were so many strange responses and strange resonances to this very small film.
The fact that it’s a film almost became incidental. I became fascinated by what you could learn about the way different audiences responded. About why some viewers had such strong expectations about what Native artists, or Native women, were “supposed to do.” About what was “authentic” and “appropriate” for Native artists, things we rarely ask about non-native artists, you know? I ended up writing some of the first pieces about the reception and intentionality involved in the reception of native art. Why do we want it to be this way and not that way? Why do we think it was meant to do x and not y? And who is the “we”? These are revealing questions in terms of race, power, and gender.I’ve done a little bit of reception work, and I took a course in reception studies, and I’m always fascinated by how hard it is. Were there any challenges that you confronted in taking that approach? Was there anything particularly difficult about the process as a whole, if you’d like to broaden it out? It was just one chapter that focused literally on reception of audiences, and the other chapters are addressing larger kinds of ripples and resonances having to do with our ideas about the southwest, ideas about Indian art and earlier kinds of novels about Navajos, family portrait cinema, cultural nationalism, etc. But reception is about the hardest thing you can work on. It’s a maddeningly challenging proposition to try to figure out what audiences are really making of a particular text, based on all the psychological variations and cultural factors that are operating.The best you can do – well, I don’t know if it’s the best you can do – but what I did was I’d watch people watching. Talk to them. Have conversations with them for an hour or so about the screening experience. Collect their Rorschach comments anonymously and wade through them. Like I said before, I realized that people had a lot of assumptions about what a Native American artist, and in particular a Native American woman, “should be doing” and “should not be doing.” That fascinated me. I wanted to really dig at these assumptions and all the baggage that audiences bring to this film.Was there any one aspect of the whole process that you found most fulfilling?I’m embarrassed that I’m going to use another metaphor. But there’s a way in which, for people who really love writing, that it’s almost like ironing out wrinkles at a certain point. When you have something that’s drafted pretty well, and you’re really smoothing it so that the prose is very fluid and the ideas are really clear, that’s kind of a joyful experience for me. I love doing that. I know that’s maybe kind of weird, because I do hate literally ironing. But they always say that writing is rewriting. The rewriting, if you feel like it’s close to what you want it to be, is really pleasurable and satisfying.What’s not satisfying is when you’re mystified, wondering, “Why is this not working?” and then you realize that you need to cut that whole page or you don’t have a leg to stand on with what you’re saying somewhere down in the conceptual basement. I think one thing that I really appreciated about the last project was that I gave myself the space to make those pivots, some with humility, some rather boldly I think, where you are moving around a lot, weighing everything that comes into view in this fantastically wide open space of American studies. I feel like there was a kind of poetry and judiciousness simultaneously at work in that process. That was the first time that I let myself do that fully in a book project, I think.I want to ask about how the book is in dialogue with what there is in American Studies. If there isn’t much in the genre itself, what kind of gaps do you see it filling? Is it in conversation with any particular books or scholarly trajectories that you were explicit about?That’s a hard question. There are probably ways that it could have been more explicitly in dialogue with certain texts in American Studies now. But when I started working on Native film, I felt so disappointed by what American Studies had to say about this phenomenon generally that I would have had to stretch to accommodate too much to what was out there. I didn’t want to plug into the normative circuitry. I wanted to do something else, something that came organically out of me and the subject equally.The people who I was in more genuine, organic engagement with - many of them were in Anthropology, English departments, and Native American Studies, and especially Native scholars such as Craig Womack, who wrote Red on Red to get into the vagaries and challenges of tribal centrism and who has a right to speak about native art. Did I have a right to say anything about this? Did Arlene have a right to speak about her more traditional grandmother? These are the questions that Womack and other native literary critics have explored. And the cultural nationalism question afloat in Native American Studies was much more powerful and relevant than anything in “American Studies” broadly. Some of those scholars consider themselves also American Studies as well, of course, but their interests weren’t widely shared in ASA as I saw it five or ten years ago.Can I add one meta-comment about American Studies at a national level? There are certain aporias and also odd emphases in American Studies as a field at any given moment and I feel them quite acutely in recent years. ASA is shifting, and it’s not what it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago even, at least as the field is represented in American Quarterly and ASA as a convention. You go to that conference and it feels like there are some things that are really in motion but that motion is also weirdly static. Like there are a thousand gerbils in a thousand wheels running as fast as they can in the same direction. Yes, of course, there’s a lot of intellectual energy and a lot of brilliant people doing extremely interesting things. But when you step back from it, you realize they’re really running in the same direction, channeling the same energies, the same theories, the same methods.I’m always interested in the people who are running in other directions, fleeing from orthodoxy (or somehow productively unaware of it). The people who don’t fit at ASA but who have a lot to say about the state of this country. You realize that professional conferences like ASA don’t cover 90% of what’s happening in the culture. What’s happening in the streets and in the minds of most Americans is often unaddressed at ASA. I say that with sadness and also a recognition that ASA does provide a great deal of heat and light in its own way. I’m glad it’s there, but it’s not what makes me tick. I suppose it has become narrowed in a way that the interdisciplinary space of American Studies in its ideal form would not be for me. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and probably won’t stay that way. It’s like they say about the weather back in Oklahoma. “If you don’t like it, stick around ‘cuz it’ll change.”
Announcement: AMS Graduate Student Conference, Spring 2013
We are delighted to announce the 2013 American Studies Graduate Student Conference, "Reimagining the American Dream," scheduled for April 4-5, 2013.
The theme of the conference (excerpted below) stems from the Department's annual theme, "Dream!"
In the early 20th century, historian James Truslow Adams wrote that the American Dream was “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller,” and yet time and again this promise of opportunity has fallen short: opportunity and prosperity are not demonstrably available to all, and yet this promise, this dream, continues to circulate in the personal and political imagination. After Adams’ early statements on the dream, there emerged a particular vision of dream-status in American postwar prosperity that was countered by global revolutionary and post-colonial movements. Yet the dream bore on into the cocaine-fueled 80s, only to be brought into question once more by a succession of bursting economic bubbles.Given its historical weight, we hope to interrogate and reimagine the American Dream through a series of conversations. To what extent is the American Dream a myth rather than a real possibility? Who has access to its promises? What are the limits of prosperity? How have people leveraged the dream myth? What does the “American Dream” even mean in the 21st century, as the country is in the midst of vast demographic and technological changes? If we have an American dream, what is the American nightmare, and how might American dreams and nightmares coexist or be mutually constitutive?
The conference will feature panel discussions and a keynote by Dr. Claire Jean Kim (University of California Irvine):
Claire Jean Kim holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Asian American Studies. She also holds a courtesy appointment in African American Studies. She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) which won the American Political Science Association's Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism. Her current book project explores the intersections of race, culture, nation, and species in the contemporary U.S. She is also working on two collaborative projects. The first concerns the Obama phenomenon and the question of postraciality, and the second undertakes a comparative and historical analysis of the construction of Asian Americans and Latinos in the national imagination.
More information will soon be available here. The full CFP can be accessed here.
Andrew Gansky Introduces PhotoLab at the Harry Ransom Center
The following post comes to us from UT AMS doctoral student Andrew Gansky, who is co-organizer with Andi Gustavson of a new working group called PhotoLab designed for graduate students and the Austin photographic community.
American studies has a penchant for calling itself interdisciplinary, and our students take classes across campus and read into any number of fields to bear out this constitutive ethos. Yet it’s easy enough to walk into a course in another department and simply meet it on disciplinary terms, trying to satisfy the instructor’s expectations regarding how students should read, write, and think. It can be difficult to figure out how to put varying fields and ways of thinking in conversation without creating an incompatible cacophony of ideas, theoretical language, and methodologies, or feeling as though you’re trespassing on academic territory where you have no real business being. There is no simple formula to figure out precisely what it means to work as an interdisciplinary scholar.With this in mind, Andi Gustavson, my fellow graduate student, has been working for some time with Professor Steven Hoelscher to put together an Institute of Photography at the Harry Ransom Center that brings together scholars, practitioners, and artists from all across campus, drawing faculty from anthropology, art history, English, geography, history, photojournalism, RTF, studio arts, and of course, American studies. The kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations this institute hopes to foster is a promising gesture for those desiring to present and discuss work beyond their specific area of expertise.To help make this institute more accessible to students, Andi and I have been organizing a corollary working group, PhotoLab, open to graduate students and the larger Austin photographic community. We want the group to be useful for participants, so we will spend a large portion of our monthly meetings workshopping papers and bodies of photographic work. In conversation with group members, we will likewise develop public presentations and publishing agendas, and we will facilitate interactions with working photographers and similar groups at a variety of institutions. But we also hope PhotoLab will be fresh, stimulating, and imaginative—that it will foster an environment where students can present their ideas on equal footing and will have no need to maintain jurisdiction over photographic subfields. We are excited that PhotoLab brings together working photographers, students in studio arts, and participants who study or utilize photography for a wide range of research goals.Some of our participants include an anthropologist who uses photos taken by research participants to produce collaborative ethnographies and interactive documentaries; a geographer and active photographer who uses photography as both a tool and a subject to engage with air fields and the city of Marfa, Texas; a studio photographer who backlights newsprint weather maps to reveal verso images or text superimposed in unexpected ways; a Radio/Television/Film student who studies how photographs have historically described, defined, and evoked the often tenuous and shifting threshold between bodies and technology; and a professional photographer whose recent work deals with installation views as a class of photography with implications beyond the utilitarian value of document.Each of these participants will bring substantially different perspectives and sets of practices to PhotoLab, and the photographs each makes or studies encompass a broad range of aesthetics, purposes, and methods. By focusing on photography in its multivalent forms from numerous perspectives, PhotoLab will hopefully shed light on how we can make, manipulate, and write about photographs that are instruments, documents, and artworks, such that the depth of our work can match the inherently undisciplined nature of our photographic subjects.
Announcement: Congratulations to Dr. Stephen Marshall
Hearty congratulations are due to UT American Studies professor Dr. Stephen H. Marshall, who has been awarded the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award from the American Political Science Association for his new book, The City on the Hill from Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics. Well done, Dr. Marshall!