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26 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Determined not to let the limits & frustrations of hybrid/pandemic in-person classes keep me from sharing William Apess as fully as possible w/my Am Lit I students. He remains one of the 3-4 voices we all most need to listen to, & we're gonna hear & respond to him today!
That means "Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man," rivaled only by Douglass's "What to the Slave..." as a bracing, biting attack on white American hypocrisy & prejudice--& an act of hopeful resistance & challenge to move us toward a more perfect union.
english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson…
& it means "Eulogy on King Philip," a critically patriotic speech as brave as Douglass' as it was delivered in Boston's Odeon Theater & made the case for the Wampanoag chief as a Revolutionary US ancestor at least as worthy of commemoration as Washington.
voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/apess-eulogy-s…
Yeah, 1/2 of us will be here, some of the other 1/2 streaming, everyone masked, me not able to follow up weekly email responses as I usually would, all partial as everything in Fall 2020 is. But we're gonna read & engage Apess together, now more than ever. @PedagogyAmLitSt

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More from @AmericanStudier

Ben Railton Profile picture
28 Oct
#OnThisDay 134 years ago, the Statue of Liberty was formally dedicated in New York Harbor. The moment reflects two frustrating layers to American mythmaking, but nonetheless still embodies some of the best of our ideals & community. A thread: Image
The 1st layer of frustrating mythmaking is the thoroughgoing erasure of the Statue’s original focus on slavery and abolition. Only the broken chains around Liberty’s feet (tellingly invisible to nearly all visitors to the island) reflect those origins. Image
By 1886 the US was fully in the throes of Lost Cause narratives of Civil War, race, & nation, & this erasure of Edouard Laboulaye’s original vision for the Statue reflects those broader collective elisions & myths.

americanstudier.blogspot.com/2019/04/april-…
Read 14 tweets
Ben Railton Profile picture
27 Oct
We’re a week out from not just #ElectionDay, but also the 100th anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre. & for this month’s @SatEvePost Considering History column, I delve into the foundational ties bt voter suppression & racial terrorism. #twitterstorians

saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/10/consid…
Even as we’ve started to better remember histories of white supremacist violence, from the Red Summer of 1919 and Tulsa to the lynching epidemic, I think we still too often see such horrors as spontaneous explosions of mob hate, reflective of deeper prejudices but impromptu.
But in truth, white supremacist violence in America has consistently been carefully planned & orchestrated, w/voter suppression as one of its chief goals. My column traces that legacy through New Orleans, the 1874 massacres, Wilmington, Ocoee, & the 1968 Mississippi murders.
Read 6 tweets
Ben Railton Profile picture
18 Feb
On Toni Morrison’s bday, I’m thinking a lot about the end of her masterpiece Beloved in relationship to the @WoodsonCenter’s #1776woodson project (a direct response to the #1619Project). #twitterstorians
@WoodsonCenter Beloved’s short final chapter's through-line is a repeated phrase: “It was not a story to pass on” (shifted to “This is not a story to pass on” for its final repetition). The section's overtone is forgetting, suggesting the phrase's literal meaning (don’t pass this story on).
@WoodsonCenter That desire to forget—the character of Beloved, but also the histories of enslavement, slave trade, slavery's horrors, & esp what they demand of all those affected by them of which she’s a living reminder—is entirely understandable & to some degree even necessary for survival.
Read 13 tweets
Ben Railton Profile picture
18 Aug 19
Obviously some (well, a good bit) of the criticism of the #1619Project is white supremacist bigotry, full stop. But it seems to me another substantive factor is our collective reliance on celebratory, uncritical patriotism, & a related problem given a clear diagnosis in 1873:
In that year, the Harvard prof & reformer Charles Eliot Norton was on a steamship voyage from England to the US, & Ralph Waldo Emerson was on the same journey. They talked a lot, & Norton noted that even in old age, Emerson maintained his "inveterate & persistent optimism."
Norton acknowledged (this was in letters describing their convos) that such optimism was pleasant in an "such a character as Emerson's," but called it a "dangerous doctrine for a people," as it is "at the root of ... much of our unwillingness to accept hard truths."
Read 9 tweets
Ben Railton Profile picture
4 Aug 19
Let’s be clear: the exclusionary, white supremacist vision of the US has consistently produced some of our most horrific acts of violence & domestic terrorism. Native American massacres & genocides, as early as the Mystic Village massacre of 1636.
americanstudier.blogspot.com/2018/09/septem…
Lynching epidemics, targeting African Americans for more than a century but also targeting Chinese and Mexican Americans throughout the West and Southwest (among other communities).
saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/03/consid…
Massacres of entire American communities of color, from Wilmington, NC’s African American community in 1898…
wilmingtononfire.com
Read 15 tweets
Ben Railton Profile picture
30 May 19
Between @JohnCleese expressing his “culturalist, not racist” views of London and @DouthatNYT lamenting the loss of a “common-culture” America, kinder gentler #MAGA white supremacism is having a moment this morning. #twitterstorians
But here’s the thing: it’s not just that we can’t separate these laments for homogeneous cultural and national identities (English, American, wherever) from white supremacist racism and xenophobia (although we sure can’t and shouldn't).
It’s also and especially that, at least in America (and I’m willing to bet in England too, but UK #twitterstorians feel free to chime in!), that homogeneous cultural/national past is entirely mythic, invented, inaccurate to our history whenever/wherever you look.
Read 12 tweets

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