Alumni Voices: Author Kevin Smokler
Kevin Smokler received his MA in American Studies in 2000. He is the author of "Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School." (Feb. 2013). His criticism and essays have appeared in the LA Times, The San Francsico Chronicle, Fast Company, the Believer and NPR. He's currently at work on a memoir about being a music fan with lousy taste. He has 65,000 twitter followers at @weegee, the subject of his American Studies Masters Thesis.
How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?I'm a nonfiction book author focusing on music, film and literature and its place in our rapidly changing 21st century. Which means a novel, album, band, filmmaker, or movement are always a gumbo pot of ingredients from linguistics, to political science, to economic history and critical theory. Those things pre-mixed, like gumbo, scream American Studies to me.And selfishly, what gets me out of bed in the morning as an American is not the constitution or baseball or modern dentistry or the folding umbrella or the Internet, all righteous and wonderful things invented right here in this country. No, it's American culture, in all its beautiful diversity and flavors and contradictions.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?It's a big beautiful country out there and an archive can only take you so far. So learn how to talk to people. Real people, strangers even. Don't be afraid of the weird, confused look someone might give you when explaining your research interests but don't be resigned to it either. Learn to talk about your work in plain old English. Whatever it is, it's too valuable to be passed around amongst your peers or even your discipline or the academy itself. Let it breathe. Let it have a life.
5 Questions with AMS Afficilate Faculty Member Dr. Jim Cox
Today we are pleased to bring back a favorite feature here at AMS::ATX----5 Questions! Today's interview introduces you to Dr. James H. Cox, AMS affiliate faculty member in English and author of the forthcoming book, The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico.
What has been your favorite project to work on and why?My most recent project was on American Indian writers who traveled to Mexico and wrote about it and its indigenous population. This was an exciting project because I was thinking about comparative indigeneities, about the way indigeneity is experienced in the United States and Mexico, and how it’s experienced when people are crossing the border as well. I enjoyed it because I was writing about a time period in American Indian writing that has been largely neglected by literature scholars, and overlooked by historians, too. This period falls between the progressive and civil rights eras – it looks like an empty four decades, but the period is actually full of manuscripts and published works that only a few people have studied in depth. The genre diversity within the project is fun as well – I worked with detective novels, worked with plays, which I had never done before, and nonfiction. I was going outside of the more conventional literary genres, reading biographies and memoirs and histories by Native authors.Additionally, I’ve just started a new project that I’m really stoked about. One of the writers in the American Indians in Mexico project is Lynn Riggs, a Cherokee dramatist who published between 15-20 plays, a book of cowboy songs, and a book of poetry during his life. He wrote about 10 other plays that went unproduced and unpublished. In 1931, he also made an experimental film with a director named James Hughes and with guidance from several fairly well known cinematographers from Hollywood, including Henwar Rodakiewicz. It is a 15 minute film of a day in Santa Fe. When the film was complete, he showed it first to the literary crowd--Alice Corbin Henderson, Spud Johnson--in Santa Fe at that time. It’s a silent movie, and he interspersed it with a poem of his called “Santo Domingo Corn Dance.” There are two dominant images in the film. One is of a huge cross outside a church in Santa Fe, and then there’s a dance by local indigenous people. So I’m going to Santa Fe and the New Mexico historical archives. In particular, I want to know who the dancers are. If the dance in the film is actually the corn dance, then Riggs violated a prohibition against filming it. I suspect it wasn’t, but, if so, I’d like to know how and why Riggs staged it the way he did for the film. I’m also interested in his multicultural conception of Santa Fe at the time: there are Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Anglos, interspersed throughout the entire film; and I’m interested in the images too of the cross and the corn dance and how he’s playing with both of them to convey a sense of the religious identity of this place.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy or contemporary society?Obviously I find it very easy to talk to people in American Studies and history, and people with interdisciplinary backgrounds in Native American and indigenous studies. My work is also political in the way I’m interested in foregrounding native voices and native material culture. In that regard, it connects directly to public issues such as the debate over Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry. The Chief of the Cherokee Nation just protested Scott Brown’s staff mocking Warren by doing the tomahawk chop and war whoops and that sort of thing. So when I see something like that, it’s directly related to my work and I’ll talk about that in class. It comes down to issues of representation, but representation as it is deeply entangled in public policy and as it shapes the lives of Native people.What projects, people, and /or things have inspired your work?The fiction writers that I read are the first inspiration. When I was a graduate student and I read Sherman Alexie and Thomas King for the first time; I thought it was the most compelling and provocative literature I had ever read. It had a sense of urgency that I liked, a sense of urgency that showed how much storytelling and literature matter in our lives. King’s novel Green Grass Running Water is just a brilliant piece of writing – an extraordinary work, a classic of literature in English. In terms of scholarship – you know, I think that I’m inspired by people who do what I want to do better than I could ever do it – particularly literature scholars who work really well with history and culture more broadly speaking. Recent books that come to mind like this are Phillip Round’s Removable Type, which is a study of early American Indian print culture, or Lisa Brooks’ The Common Pot, which is a study of early American Indian writing in the northeast – both of those are two scholars who, because I’m a literature scholar and the text matters to me a little more than everything else, I admire the way that they combine their analyses of texts with discussions of really broad and deep contexts.Also when I was a graduate student, New Historicism was a new and influential critical practice. It approached texts as objects that circulate throughout a culture in all kinds of fascinating and wonderful ways, a culture that also informs their production and consumption – that was really influential. I remember the most significant critical collection for me as a graduate student was Aram Veeser’s The New Historicism. I never approached books as a critic as if they were isolated from the real world -- from economics and race and sexuality and so on -- so the approach agreed with me.What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?I always knew this is what I wanted to do. I always thought of myself as someone who studied literature – maybe not a lit scholar but someone who studied literature. My training is primarily in American and British literature and both American and European history – that’s the basis. Even as a graduate student, I didn’t limit myself to one period or one genre or one century. I spent much of my time in the Renaissance, and I took classes in Greek mythology and the history of Western literary criticism and so on. I had classic liberal arts training. So as a Master’s student I was very much a generalist, and I applied to grad school as a Renaissance scholar. It didn’t take me long to decide that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.I hope that I’m one of the last people who wanted to study native literature but had to do it without ever taking a class in it. I had one independent study with a professor at Nebraska, but otherwise, there was a lot of self-training and working with my peers in the graduate program who wanted to do the same thing. We sought people out and asked them what to read, and we went to conferences, and every time a scholar was quoted we wrote her name down, and then we went home and read her book. We did that for years. Eventually that’s what I decided to do. And even after I graduated the training continued – I was probably 6 or 7 years out when I thought I finally could call myself a Native Americanist. I had refrained from doing so because I just didn’t think that I knew enough. But by that point I had enough guidance from mentors, I’d read enough books, went to conferences that focused on Native literature, and I thought, okay, I can speak comfortably in this field now.What projects would you like to work on in the future?Well, I’m thinking about a project on American Indian-published periodicals since they reached a broader audience than most of the literary works that I study. They have a kind of political and historical immediacy that I’m interested in – I’m talking about weeklies and monthlies. This summer I spent a week at the Native Press Archives at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and read the National Indian Youth Council’s Americans Before Columbus, for one example. I’ve read some of Rupert Costo’s San Francisco-based Indian Historical Society journal the Indian Historian as well. And Akwesasne Notes, which in its original form was produced by somebody on the Mohawk reservation sitting in his house stapling articles about political events into a new publication – he would staple them all together and then send them out to subscribers. Eventually they hired their own writers and were able to put together their own publication with original writing, but to me it’s an almost heroic endeavor for somebody who felt so strongly about people knowing what was happening at the time.But I’d also like to take my training in Native American and indigenous studies and look at celebrated non-Native authors such as Philip Roth and Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. Roth, for example, is thinking about the status of immigrant Jewish families in The Plot Against America at a time during which federal Indian policy was about to swing back towards assimilation after a brief period of reform. In that novel he imagines an alternative history of removal and relocation for Jewish families immediately prior to an actual period of relocation for Native people. Tennessee Williams incorporates native characters into some of his plays in very strange ways, and I hope to work with a colleague on an article about that.As far as teaching goes, I just started a Hemingway course, which I taught for the first time this summer. I grew up reading Hemingway, so it has been fun to return to him. I would very much like to do a graduate course in native American and Mexican American indigeneity to expand the scope of what I teach and build from what I’m already doing in my research.If you could describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?American Studies is the Antiques Roadshow of the liberal arts.
Announcement: Digital Humanities Project, "The End of Austin," Seeks Contributors
Last year, we featured a fascinating digital humanities project, "The End of Austin," that emerged from a graduate seminar led by Dr. Randy Lewis. This week, we're pleased to share the news that a small editorial collective will be continuing the project and broadening their call for content to the community at large. Randy offers this call for contributions:
We are moving forward on the second issue of The End of Austin, a digital humanities project that explores the idea of endings in our fair city. We would love to have a contribution from you--a bit of writing, photos, video, art, a song, anything that somehow explores this idea that things are dying, ending, expiring, collapsing in the midst of our growth-obsessed sunbelt burg.If you are curious, here is an article about the original project, and here is the first installment of the project.We hope to do something bigger and wilder for issue number two. Our goal is to assemble something interesting, beautiful, meaningful, and disconcerting for release in early 2013. If you would like to contribute something, that's wonderful. But also think about sharing this with friends, students, and colleagues who might be good at exploring this nexus of art, documentary and cultural geography broadly conceived.
If you have questions, comments, or a submission for the project, get in touch with the board at endofaustin (at) gmail (dot) com. And, again, the first installment can be found here.
Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis to Deliver Keynote at "Circus and the City" Symposium
Attention, New Yorkers! Dr. Janet Davis, one of our faculty members, will be giving a keynote lecture to the Bard Graduate Center's Symposium, "Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010."From the Bard Graduate Center:
This half-day symposium is being held in conjunction with the Circus and the City exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center. The exhibition is made possible, in part, with support from the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts and anonymous donors. The symposium focuses on the animals and performers that made the circus into such a spectacular and iconic form of entertainment in the United States. Brett Mizelle, “Contesting the Circus in American History: Animal Exhibitions and the Emergence of Animal Welfare,” historicizes debates over the legitimacy of the circus and charts the evolving relationship between the American public and animals over the course of the nineteenth century. Janet M. Davis, “Circus Queen in New York City: Flight, Spectacle, and the Fantastical Life of Tiny Kline,” uses the varied career of performer Tiny Kline to explore the world of popular amusements in the city during the early decades of the twentieth century. The symposium showcases the rich history and cultural legacy of the circus in New York City, and the two speakers will be joined by exhibition curator Matthew Wittmann, who will provide commentary.
The event is on Monday, October 15, 1:30pm-4:00pm. Be sure to RSVP if you're interested in attending. All details available here.In case you'd like to know more about the accompanying exhibition, the New York Times has a fabulous review, excerpted below:
Scholars of the arts in New York have long ignored the circus in favor of the city’s theatrical, musical and literary histories. But an ambitious new exhibition aims to fill that void. “Circus and the City: New York 1793-2010,” opening on Friday at the Bard Graduate Center Galleries, chronicles the rise, triumph and ultimate fragmentation of the circus through the lens of the city, making the case that the circus transformed entertainment, media and advertising and that the city itself played an important role in the evolution of the American circus.“Circus has primarily been thought of as a global and national phenomenon,” said Matthew Wittmann, curator of the show. “But New York City was an incubator for circus since it first arrived in America.”
Dr. Davis is also on the advisory board for this exhibition and contributed an essay to The American Circus, published in conjunction with this event.