Tag: Department of English

(Director’s note: Elizabeth Rivlin, teaches in the English department, and her research interests include the history of Shakespeare in American literature and culture, especially cultures of reading; theories of adaptation; and early modern drama and prose. Her current book project is titled Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow, for which she won a NEH Summer Stipend.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

With the stay-at-home orders that arrived in March came a slew of advice about what to do with all the unexpected, homebound leisure that some Americans found themselves with. Reading seemed to be high on the list, judging by a flurry of media pieces with titles like “The Lockdown List: Books to Read During Quarantine.” While some of the recommendations were for new and contemporary literature, the “classics” and “the great books” also had their cheerleaders. Take, for example, the well-publicized “Tolstoy Together,” a project in which the writer Yiyun Li read and discussed War and Peace, book club-style, with members of the public.

Shakespeare, too, has gotten love during the lockdowns. Patrick Stewart read the Sonnets aloud to us daily on Facebook, and, inspired by a Twitter meme claiming that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine for the plague, prominent Shakespeare scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, Emma Smith, and James Shapiro meditated on what Shakespeare has to tell us about being creative in or simply living through a pandemic. Others offered direct advice to help readers tackle Shakespeare. Acknowledging that “many people have said they find reading Shakespeare a bit daunting,” Emma Smith returned with “five tips for how to make it simpler and more pleasurable,” her last bit of counsel being “Don’t worry.” Allie Esiri recommended particular readings from Shakespeare for the lockdown period, on the theory that “Reading Shakespeare concentrates the mind which we are all in need of, lending both a challenge and a reward.” Meanwhile, in the conservative publication The Spectator, Chilton Williamson, Jr. guiltily confessed that “it is too easy to put off reading” Shakespeare and pledged to “rectify” that by putting The Complete Works of Shakespeare on his pandemic reading list.

This lockdown-inspired burst of enthusiasm for reading, and in particular for “classics” like Shakespeare, is just the latest manifestation of a persistent current in American life that has linked reading to a quest for self-improvement in which edification and pleasure are supposed ideally to mix. I’m working on a book, Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow: Reading Publics, 1878-Present, that looks closely at institutions that promoted the reading of Shakespeare with just such aims: Chautauqua is a small town in upstate New York that for several decades at the turn of the last century was the center of the burgeoning self-education movement in the United States; The Book-of-the-Month Club pioneered the mail-order sale of books at large scale in the early- to mid-twentieth century; and the Great Books Movement generated a list at mid-century of what it dubbed “the greatest books of the western tradition” and sold them to the American public in 54 volumes. All three of these institutions promised that learning to read books of a certain “quality” or canonical status would create individual mobility and collective uplift, and all three promised to help readers deal with the perceived difficulties and obstacles that accompanied this ambitious reading.

Arguably, no one entity today has the impact on Americans’ reading habits as these institutions did in their heyday (although Oprah’s Book Club has more recently enjoyed something of the same influence). Even on the diffused internet, however, many voices dispense familiar-sounding wisdom, especially the assurance that the reading of culturally sanctioned, esteemed works is therapeutic and even curative in a time of crisis. In this, they hearken back to earlier reading initiatives, for example, the Great Books Program, which in the midst of the Cold War promoted self-educational reading as a means for the American public to rise to the level of an enlightened democratic citizenry and thereby defeat the insidious threat of communism. The dangers may present themselves in different shapes in 2020, but the prescription remains the same.

One thing that does seem to be changing is Americans’ expanding sense of the kind of reading that can enlighten and improve: witness the recent outpouring of #BlackLivesMatter reading lists. When so much seems to fall outside of people’s control, the lure of reading, whether it’s James Baldwin, Shakespeare, or both, is still that the self can be improved, and that if progress is possible on a personal level, perhaps it can also be imagined on a collective scale.

(Director’s note: Jordan Frith, Pearce Professor of Professional Communication in English, researches mobile technologies, social media, and infrastructure, particularly where those topics intersect through questions of space and place. He’s the author of 30 peer-reviewed articles on these topics and three books, the most recent of which was published by MIT Press in 2019.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Back in March when much of the world was starting to realize that the COVID-19 pandemic was not going to just disappear, various governments and corporations began exploring plans for digital contact tracing applications. Digital contact tracing involves using the data from mobile phones to track whom people come in contact with on a daily basis, so if someone is later diagnosed with COVID-19, anyone they shared a space with can quickly be notified. The apps mostly work through Bluetooth, meaning the phones of anyone who signed up for the contact tracing app would constantly broadcast a Bluetooth signal to nearby phones and record the unique ID of each phone within Bluetooth range. Those unique IDs would link to a database of users, which is how people would be notified if a positive COVID-19 case did occur.

With the COVID-19 outbreaks across the globe, digital contact tracing began being talked about as maybe the number one tool for containing outbreaks without going into full lockdown. A successful system would enable health officials to quickly identify case clusters and quarantine people who were at risk. And in a few cases, digital contact tracing has been useful, particularly in places like South Korea that put these plans into place early in the pandemic and got significant public buy-in. But many of the much-hyped digital contact tracing plans have mostly failed. For example, the UK digital contact tracing app has not made much of an impact, and the United States still does not have a robust Federal digital contact tracing system. So why have these systems not succeeded despite getting so much public attention? I argue that it’s partly because the plans relied too much upon data as a good in itself without the necessary critical reflection necessary for the success of most big data projects. That reflection and interrogation is where the humanities come in. As I explain below, the failure of digital contact tracing projects at the time we need them most shows why we need more data-literate humanists.

Digital contact tracing is obviously somewhat unique because it’s not every day we have a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. But the hype surrounding digital contact tracing is less unique when considered in the greater context of what has been called the “big data revolution.” The supposed big data revolution represents two major shifts in society in the 21^st century. The first is that we are producing far more data than ever before about everything from energy usage to mobility patterns. For some context, according to Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, ‘‘Google processes more than 24 petabytes of data per day, a volume that is thousands of times the quantity of all printed material in the U.S. Library of Congress.’’ And that’s just Google. The second development is closely related. We now have vastly improved computing power necessary to process and act upon huge datasets. These two trends have combined to usher in an increased reliance on data in many walks of life, and according to some proponents, if people just collect enough data, the “data can speak for itself.” This blind belief in data without diving deeper into the unique contexts of data sources is part and parcel with the hype we saw about digital contact tracing.

There’s nothing wrong with the use of large-scale datasets to solve problems. Data informed decision making is often far superior to just winging it and guessing. However, the hype surrounded big data often went too far and did not involve humanists to ask questions about data projects that could have helped them succeed. After all, despite beliefs that data could supposedly speak for itself, that can simply never be the case. Data always needs to be interpreted to be acted upon. In addition, datasets are often a partial picture of a phenomenon, and data collection also often has privacy and personal liberty implications that are not closely enough considered. As Rob Kitchin argues, data projects are often best served by combinations of data scientists and humanists/social scientists who can interrogate the data and how it is used to inform decision making.

The COVID digital contact tracing is an important contemporary example of what critical, data-literate humanists can add to data projects. After all, these digital contact tracing apps, despite all their hype, faced some major issues from the very beginning that were not fully addressed. For one, as anthropologist Genevieve Bell argued, the design of these apps matters significantly for user privacy, and governments did not communicate design choices clearly to the public. The lack of explanation of where data was coming from and how it was stored likely hampered public adoption, and contact data is only useful when enough people buy into the system to provide a comprehensive dataset. Secondly, and maybe most importantly, the design choices in these apps were inherently exclusionary. They required mobile phone data (unlike focusing on a human-driven contact tracing system), so children, some elderly people, the homeless, and other non-adopters simply could not participate. In addition, many cheaper mobile phones do not have low-energy Bluetooth capabilities necessary for the applications. For people without the right devices, they are simply left out of the dataset, which can have major consequences for epidemiological tracking. And finally, digital contact tracing itself cannot work successfully without a rapid testing infrastructure to quickly identify positive cases, and—in my opinion—a social safety net that can financially support people staying home from work if they receive a notice they could be infected. Without these broader systems in place, the data provided through these systems and how actionable the alerts are was always going to be limited.

The issues in the previous paragraph have all limited the efficacy of digital contact tracing, and that’s not even mentioning the major surveillance concerns surrounding location data and whether systems are dismantled once (well, maybe if) the pandemic is under control. After all, Congress just renewed parts of the Patriot Act almost 20 years after it was first passed in the shadow of 9/11. But regardless, many of these issues could have been addressed through more critical engagement and less of a blind embrace of data. In other words, I argue part of the reasons these projects have not succeeded is that they often did not involve the necessary types of critical literacies that are the expertise of the humanities. By interrogating the plans for these datasets, issues of inequality, concerns about design and data storage, fears about surveillance, all could have been addressed from the start and communicated to the public. But instead, governments too often pushed forward with these plans without the types of critical analysis required to make them work.

In conclusion, I’m using digital contact tracing here as an example, but I could point to so many other data projects to make the same case. As humanists, we need to play a role in how data is collected and how data is interpreted. We also have to not be afraid of data. Humanists don’t have to be mathematicians or data scientists, but some of us need to know how to question datasets, how to explore where data comes from, and how to interrogate what it may be missing. And we need to move past antiquated quantitative/qualitative divides that act like numbers are outside the purview of the humanities. Most data projects aren’t going to have major public health consequences like a digital contact tracing app. But regardless, we need to fight for a place at the table for future data projects in both industry and government. We have a role to play to shape the collection and interpretation of data of various types.

(Director’s note: Erin M. Goss, Associate Professor of English, thinks and writes about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing by and about women, especially as it intersects with contemporary gender politics. She is finishing a book currently called Complicity and the Bargains of White Femininity, 1750-1850.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

So much has happened since the morning of Monday, May 25 that it almost seems beside the point to return to the moment when Amy Cooper, formerly employed by Franklin Templeton, was recorded demonstrating what white women’s entitlement looks like when it is aimed at a Black man attempting to protect birds and respect city ordinances while using an area of public municipal space designated for the purpose of nature preservation. Apparently unwilling to accept that anyone might challenge her right to break whatever rules she saw fit to break, she called the police “to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Her premeditated lie demonstrated her very clear sense of the power she could wield, and her performance of vulnerability and need for protection showed just how far she would take the apparent affront to her dignity that was Christian Cooper’s request that she follow the law.

Amy Cooper later apologized, of course. She “would never have imagined that [she] would be involved in the type of incident that occurred with Chris,” she writes, speaking of a man she does not know by a first name that has not been given to her to use. Calling their interaction “a few mortifying seconds in a lifetime of forty years,” she chooses her words unwisely but well. Those seconds could indeed have been “mortifying,” in that, as so many have noted, there is all too often a straight line from a white woman’s phone call to a black man’s death.

Christina Sharpe writes in “Lose Your Kin” (The New Inquiry, Nov. 2016) that “Whiteness is a political project and it is also a logic, by which I mean it is a calculus, a way of sorting oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable.” Within what Sharpe calls the logic of whiteness, white women – second only, perhaps, to white babies – must be protected, and it is our innocence that generates the demand. Cooper shows that she knows how to embody both her apparent right to protection and her concomitant capacity to deny her own involvement in the violence necessary for that protection to occur.

In the same essay, Sharpe also identifies the “unmoral, unethical anger” that carries “the full support of the state.” I, likely along with many other well-meaning white people, have grown used to recognizing that anger in the white men haunting my computer screen and sometimes the streets of the town I claim as home; these men bear torches and Confederate flags and red hats. They are angry, these men, and their whiteness protects their rage from interrogation. They are angry, apparently, at an eroding sense of certainty, at the idea that they might someday have to share. They are angry that the rest of the world may be noticing that they aren’t actually very important. What I haven’t thought about anywhere near enough until more recently than I should have done, is the anger of white women. When we see today’s obviously angry white ladies, they are angry at absurdities. They are angry that Black people are cooking outdoors in spaces set aside for people to do just that; they are angry that Black people are sitting on park benches; they are angry that Black people are writing on their own walls. Amy Cooper was angry that she was being told to follow rules that exist in order to protect someone and something other than her.

As someone who has spent the past several years reflecting both personally and through my research on the centuries-long project that has created white women as we are, I am struck first and foremost by the claims a woman like Amy Cooper makes to innocence. She is surprised at herself, apparently, and she distances herself even as she claims to apologize. She also shows all the signs of someone tired of being told what to do. Add to the usual rules of white femininity those of quarantine and the ground is set for any number of ultimately meaningless acts of selfish rebellion. Hers involved leash laws. In the Ramble in New York City’s Central Park dogs are to be on leash at all times for the protection of migrating birds and their habitat, as I have learned from both Christian Cooper, the man on whom Amy Cooper attempted to set the police she imagined as her personal security force, and from Clemson Alumni Distinguished Professor Drew Lanham. To Amy Cooper, apparently, such a rule was a hindrance and a stifling of her right to do as she wished with the dog she would later hold in the air by its leash so that she could focus on the phone call she attempted to use to have a Black man removed from the space in which she sought to exercise her freedom from the law.

White women’s anger can be crucial, vital. Adrienne Rich called anger “our birth-pains,” and celebrated the possibility that “we are bearing ourselves” through our anger. White women’s anger, though, is also the twisted faces of the young women spitting on Elizabeth Eckford as she walks to her first day at a newly integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As Audre Lorde reminded in her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), white women’s anger all too often “lies within them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks about racism,” or, Lorde easily could have added, the first Black man to tell us what to do.

In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, often considered a sort of origin text for contemporary (white) feminist thought, Mary Wollstonecraft lamented the modes of power available to the bourgeois white woman, who learns to wield vulnerability as a tool to garner sympathy and produce desire in the white men who allow her no other means to power. Offered opportunities to be either, as she defines her fellow white women, “abject slaves or capricious tyrants,” white women too often choose the latter, and learn to find opportunities to push others into the role of the former. What Wollstonecraft did not recognize, what she could not see, was the way that vulnerability becomes not only a tool but a weapon. Her critique of instrumentalized femininity within heterosexual white relationship – as provocative as it still may be – failed to recognize what such femininity could do and be outside of that relationship and the way that it becomes both a weapon to wield against those outside the heterosexual white dyad and a shield from ever recognizing the weapon that it is. White femininity as Wollstonecraft identifies it in 1792 provides white women a means to power as long as we continue to perform as if we have none at all.

Amy Cooper has reminded me of a thing I already know too well. It is not anger that makes white women dangerous. Anger can provide a means to exceed the instrumentalized helplessness that Mary Wollstonecraft long ago identified as the primary mode by which white women achieve power and attention; anger can give us another way to be. What makes white women dangerous, harmful, deadly is the insistence on our protection. James Baldwin said of white people’s refusal to acknowledge the harm that American racism consistently enacts upon Black lives in this country that it is the innocence that constitutes the crime. If the innocence constitutes the crime, it is protection of that innocence that produces its violence. And nothing seems to make innocence feel more under threat than the eruption of white women’s undetonated and undirected anger.

(Director’s note: Will Stockton is a Professor of English. His latest books include Members of His Body: Shakespeare, Paul, and a Theology of Nonmonogamy (Fordham University Press, 2017) and a translation of Sergio Loo’s Nightmare in Narvarte (Literalia, 2020). Find him at willstockton.com.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

As the U.S. reels in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and others, institutions both public and private have faced significant pressure to make substantive and symbolic changes in the name of equality and inclusion. Clemson University is no exception. The university has recently deleted John C. Calhoun’s name from the Honors College. The Board of Trustees has also requested permission from the South Carolina General Assembly to change the name of Tillman Hall back to Old Main. Both moves are laudable and long overdue. They remove the names of notorious racists from places of honor on our campus. They do not “erase history,” but rather reflect our changing history.

A glance at Twitter or Reddit will suggest that both moves are still controversial. The criticisms are now commonplace: besides charging Clemson with erasing history, some deride the changes as “purely symbolic” or the start of a slippery slope that ends in changing the name of the university itself. Presuming that the views expressed on social media reflect to a great extent the views of our varied student body, I take these criticisms seriously. I do not agree with them, but to the extent they’re raised, they are worth talking about, openly and honestly, in a spirit of good faith. 

Of course, social media fosters precisely the opposite of an open and honest conversation conducted in a spirit of good faith. In a university setting, these conversations are more properly the province of the humanities classroom, where instructors invite students to try out ideas, test them against other ideas, and refine their own thinking. This golden world of shared inquiry and intellectual development requires the instructor to construct a classroom environment in which students can advance most ideas without fear of reprisal.

In the middle of a national conversation about the pernicious effects of structural racism, especially in the areas of policing and law enforcement, it can be easy for us to lose sight of the conditions under which education best takes place. Many of us in the humanities have statements on our syllabi aimed at fostering civil discourse, reminding students to treat one another with decency and respect. These statements usually suffice. In my ten years at Clemson, teaching subjects from Shakespeare to contemporary queer literature, I have been tremendously encouraged by the good will and genuine curiosity with which most of my students engage contentious questions, including the definition of race and racism. 

Yet there’s a difference between encouraging students to be respectful and threatening students for advancing arguments or expressing opinions that run afoul of others’ ethical sensibilities. Last week, the Clemson Faculty Senate crossed precisely such a line. The Faculty Senate’s Statement Against Racist and Violence-Inciting Public Expressions reaffirms policies against discriminatory and harassing behavior already present in the Student Code of Conduct. It then “recommends disciplinary action, persona non grata status, and/or expulsion of any past, current, or future student, faculty, or staff who evoke or incite racism and violence.” The statement concludes: “It is imperative that Clemson University demonstrates that racism, encouraged or actual violence, or any statement/act that undermines our shared principles of inclusion, [sic] and tolerance outlined in ClemsonFORWARD is unacceptable and will be met with severe consequences.” 

The law governing public universities like Clemson makes crucial distinctions between speech and action, and between speech that expresses an unpopular, even reprehensible opinion, and speech that incites violence. This statement thoroughly muddles these differences. “Encouraged or actual violence” can and should certainly be met with severe consequences. The Supreme Court has held that so-called fighting words fall outside the realm of protected speech, as “resort to epithets or personal abuse is not in any proper sense communication of information or opinion safeguarded by the Constitution” (Cantwell v Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 309-10 [1940]). But most offensive speech does not rise to this level. Indeed, the ability to offend is precisely what the First Amendment protects: “if it is the speaker’s opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection”(Hustler Magazine v Falwell 485 U.S. 46, 55 [1988]). A statement threatening disciplinary action for “any statement that undermines our shared principles of inclusion and tolerance” strikes me as an encroachment on just this type of offensive, yet constitutionally protected speech.  

The Faculty Senate seems to have issued their Statement in response to racist posts on Instagram. I applaud the Faculty Senate for signaling Clemson’s disdain for racist provocation. At the same time, the Statement itself ignores the constitutional remedy for uninformed or bad speech, which is “more speech, not enforced silence” (Whitney v California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 [1927] [Brandeis J., concurring]). Many Clemson students are already afraid to speak publicly about hot-button issues, not because they are naked racists, but because they are scared that they will be understood as such. I want my students to tell me why they feel the need to reflexively respond “all lives matter” when they see a sign saying “Black lives matter.” I want to know why students believe that “purely symbolic” name changes are unimportant, and the extent to which they register the reality and effects of structural racism. The Faculty Senate’s statement will diminish willingness to have these conversations. It will hinder the important work of refining thought through open debate. 

One might defend the Faculty Senate’s statement by arguing that racist speech inevitably constitutes, if not leads to, racist violence. The argument goes like this: the conditions of race in America are such that violence is continually perpetuated against people of color. This violence comes in many forms, but it includes statements that deny our shared humanity and, en masse, underwrite institutionalized white supremacy. Furthermore, people’s humanity should not be up for debate, and any effort to allow such a debate under the umbrella of “civility” amounts to white supremacy in action. It’s a strong argument, one worth hearing. At the same time, few will hear it — in the deep sense of wrestling with it — unless one invites argument and push back. As free speech advocates from John Milton to John Stuart Mill have argued, exposure to and tolerance for the ideas of others is a prerequisite to intellectual self-development and collective betterment. Certain assertions — such as all lives matter, or “black-on-black” crime presents a more pressing problem than police violence — may strike others as denying people’s humanity. To the extent people make these arguments in good faith, however, the debates that follow are precisely the ones that need to be had. There is no world in which we will all come to the same conclusion about every contentious issue. Yet it’s possible to build worlds either more or less open to conversations that make us sharper thinkers and better citizens. 

The distinction between speech and violence is sometimes difficult to draw, hence the litigation of speech issues on an almost case-by-case basis. But maintaining a basic distinction is foundational for education. When I entered college in 1997, I was an outspoken ex-gay who believed the world was 7,000 years old and racism ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Four years later, I was an outspoken, ex-ex-gay atheist who had conceded the earth’s actual age of 4.5 billion years and many of the effects of past institutionalized discrimination in present demographic disparities. That kind of intellectual change could not have happened had the threat of “severe punishment” loomed over my head for what my professors and fellow students doubtless perceived as my many speech crimes. I urge the Faculty Senate to revise its statement such that it condemns racism but reserves severe consequences only for violence-inciting expression. Otherwise, this statement will have a chilling effect on speech at a university that should encourage it.

(Director’s note: Cynthia Haynes is Director of Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Ph.D program and Professor of English. Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, multimodal pedagogy, virtual worlds, critical theory, computer games studies, and the rhetoric of war and terrorism.  Her recent book, The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetoric in the Age of Perpetual Conflict won the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America annual book prize. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Unalienable Rites: The Architecture of Mass Rhetoric.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

The upcoming Presidential Election of 2020 will be perhaps the most complex rhetorical skirmish in this country’s history. I use the term rhetorical skirmish to set a tone, to call to mind a set of tactics. In military history, a skirmish involves vanguard troops that would engage in disruptive activities to delay, demoralize, mislead, and otherwise serve as the annoying “gadfly” in a heavily armored wartime conflict. Our presidential election is in grave danger, again. If the 2016 election was fraught, consider the recent worrisome rhetoric (and actions) that will once again put our democratic processes to the test.

The ongoing efforts to disrupt presidential campaigns in the form of social media disinformation is ramping up. Not going away. Record numbers of tweets, Facebook posts/ads, and headlines will trample our collective ability to parse the rhetorical skirmishes word by loaded word, sentence by arguable sentence. And this is why rhetoric is needed more than ever to take up the challenges of 21^st century democratic elections: unpacking the language and disarming the weaponization of political discourse. Who knew that rhetorician-at-large would be a career option? Who knew that rhetoricians would be hired in droves as ‘fact-checkers’ in post-2016? Who knew that words matter? Parmenides knew. Plato knew. Nietzsche knew. W. E. B. Dubois knew. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew. Angela Davis knows. Gloria Steinem knows. Toni Morrison knows. And now you know.

“They” will tell you that mail-in ballots are rigged. Don’t believe it. Look at who is saying what to whom and who has most to gain by this lie. “They” will tell you that polling places are equipped to handle long lines of “socially distanced” voters. Don’t believe it. Look at Georgia’s primary election just this past week. Chaos. “They” will tell you that there are Democratic candidates under investigation, and they might even tell you that due to the pandemic, the election has to be postponed. Don’t believe it. Read the rhetorical tea-leaves, and count the rhetorical lies. You see, rhetoric can be used for good and bad purposes. It’s the main reason rhetoric has gotten such a bad rap in the last few thousand years. Rhetoric is a way to use language and a way to analyze language. That’s the good news. It’s both/and. Not either/or.

In 2016 bots organized by nefarious groups (some say nations) were highly successful in hardening anti-Hillary sentiment among the voting population. “Fake news” became the latest rhetorical tug-of-war phrase as both Republicans and Democrats hurled it at each other. It’s no wonder that everyone has difficulty parsing the language of millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and mainstream media publications and television news programs. I distinctly remember that on the morning of the 2016 election, my mother forwarded a post on Facebook about a friend of a friend’s aunt in Texas who swore that when she voted that morning, a straight Republican ticket, the voting machine changed her vote for Trump to Clinton. And if she hadn’t checked before leaving the voting booth….etc. etc. Trump claimed he got many calls about such “vote-flipping,” which turned out not to be true (according to Snopes).

Fact checking is a lot of work. Reading is a lot of work. Yet we seem to be reading more and more in the 21^st century. What counts as “reading” is the most urgent rhetorical question we face. I had to look up what “tl;dr” meant when I first started seeing it preface some of my Facebook friends’ posts. As an educator, and a rhetorician, I can tell you it made me frustrated. It means “too long; didn’t read” and would usually link to someone else’s long post/rant or to some long article in the news. Words matter. Words add up. Words change attitudes. Words change election results. That is why teaching my students to understand, rhetorically, how language works, to use rhetoric to understand how motives underpin language, and to split the rhetorical hairs all ways if necessary to get to the truth…these are the reasons I am a rhetorician-at-large in the 21^st century. Please read as much as you can, and then please vote this coming November…no matter what “they” say or how hard “they” try to dissuade you with disinformation.

For further reading:

Bizzell, Patricia, Bruce Herzberg, and Robin Reames. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 3^rd ed. Macmillan Publishing, 2020.

“How Donald Trump Answers a Question” video by Evan Puschak. December 30, 2015.

Neely, Brett. “NPR Poll: Majority of Americans Believe Trump Encourages Election Interference” NPR.org. January 21, 2020.

Rowland, Darrel. “What you need to know about the language of disinformation ahead of the 2020 election cycle” USA Today. Feb 24, 2020.

Savoy, Jacques. “Analysis of the style and the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential primaries” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 33, Issue 1, April 2018, Pages 143–159.

(Director’s note: It’s just one week ago today that the Clemson University Board of Trustees voted to un-name the University’s Honors College.  To help contextualize and better understand the complicated legacy of John C. Calhoun, I invited Susanna Ashton, Chair of the Clemson Department of English who specializes in the literature and history of nineteenth century America, particularly the writings of enslaved people,  to share her reflections.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Removing the name of John C. Calhoun from Clemson’s Honors College was a long overdue act that never should have been necessary in the first place.  To anyone who knows about Calhoun, he was never just a preeminent South Carolina politician who happened to be a slave owner (although, heck , that’s certainly reason enough to rethink how to honor him).  He was known as a brilliant man with an interest in education and with an especial interest in deploying education and its capital against others.

At a time when South Carolina had made African American literacy illegal, punishable by law, John C. Calhoun was reported to have commented at a dinner “that if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man.”  As a scholar of African American Life Writing, literacy history, and, in particular the writing of people who survived bondage during the 19^th century, I’ve long assigned in my American Literature classes the stinging rejoinder to Calhoun offered in 1834 by Black classicist and intellectual, the Reverend Alexander Crummell who was the son of a man who had survived enslavement:

“Just think of the crude asininity of even a great man! Mr. Calhoun went to Yale, to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His son went to Yale to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His grandson, in recent years, went to Yale, to learn the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. Schools and Colleges were necessary for the Calhouns, and all other white men to learn the Greek syntax. And yet this great man knew that there was not a school, nor a college in which a black boy could learn his A.B.C.’s. He knew that the law in all the Southern States forbade Negro instruction under the severest penalties. How then was the Negro to learn the Greek syntax? How then was he to evidence to Mr. Calhoun his human nature? Why, it is manifest that Mr. Calhoun expected the Greek syntax to grow in Negro brains by spontaneous generation!”

Our Clemson Calhoun Honors college was therefore named to honor the man who not merely was the architect of the strategy to subsume Federal jurisdiction over the bondage of human beings and to expand slaveholding power across the continent. It was named also for an enslaver of men, women and children. But–and this is yet another reason why removing his name from an honors college matters so very much–it was named for a man who used his own cultural and political capital to advance the argument that Black people lacked the ability to prove their humanity by mastering “the Greek Syntax.”

Calhoun’s invocation of Greek Syntax was, of course, a nonsensical trope, offensive in its suggestion that mastering grammar as the essence of civilization (qua Western Civilization as understood by Calhoun) was a way to measure and demonstrate one’s humanity.  We can easily unpack the troubling assumptions that mastering the supremacist’s language is a liberatory step. And yet: the irony here is a tool – irony always is a method to measure the distance and difference between what is and what should be. In this case, we at Clemson can see that the distance between *our* values of nurturing intellectual growth and the limitless potential of all people from the value of honoring someone who dedicated his career not merely to demeaning and enslaving Black people, but who invoked all the tools at his tremendous command to teach that only certain people would even have the ability, much less a right to participate or be seen as fully human in the world.

The distance between those values about who we are, who we wish to be as a community, and who we publicly honor could not be more stark.  As a scholar, teacher, colleague, and resident of the City of Clemson, I have found it particularly helpful to remind students when discussing the Fort Hill Plantation labor camp that injustice was never a given, never “just the way things were.” There were always people who called it out.  If you listen and look at the record we have of American history, we can see courage in voices across centuries that dissented. We can see the dissent here in the fact that the witnesses to the comment, Samuel Sewell and David Childs, prominent white Abolitionist lawyers, thought the comments so vile and inhumane that they repeated them in presumably aghast terms in the presence of young Alexander Crummell who was working as a teenage errand boy for the Boston Anti-Slavery Office in 1833.  But we can, too, see dissent in the way in which Crummell went on to lead his own life. Calhoun died in 1850 and Crummell’s comments weren’t drafted until 1898. Yet we can see that Crummell led his entire life as a scholar and as a race leader as a defiant rejoinder to the words of Calhoun.

And, of course, any lazy assertion that “that’s just how things were” when seeing cruelties that might be unimaginable today is assuming the people actually actually enslaved and held captive under threat of torture here on what is now our campus were somehow complacent and complicit in their suffering which was, of course, never the case. There was always dissent and we should never relax, I tell my Clemson students, in assuming that “that was just how things were.” We make choices, looking back, about who we choose to listen to.

We can be empowered by knowing, as a tool of the analytical humanities,  that we can always look for dissent in history because mores were always challenged and cruelty was always clearly understood by the people on the receiving end of it, for exactly what it was.

I hope by working with undergraduates to unpack and parse the legacies of language, of educational values, and the specifics of site memory, I honor the true mission of the university without buying into the false goals of mastering Greek Syntax.

Read more here:
https://www.blackpast.org/…/1898-alexander-crummell-attitu…/

Or here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sta…/allow-me-enlighten-you

NOTES:

If anyone is interested in learning more about how Calhoun inadvertently launched the careers of other Black Classicists, check out the career of William Sanders Scarborough as well https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2005/2005.05.12/

(Director’s note: Joseph Mai, Associate Professor of French, with an affiliation in World Cinema, team teaches with Angela Naimou, Associate Professor of English, a Creative Inquiry group,“Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality,” dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

If you are as privileged as I am, the current pandemic has meant inconvenient but bearable modifications to daily life: wearing a mask, more time at home, Zoom meetings, perhaps an ill-starred attempt to cut your own hair. But for immigrants held in US mandatory detention centers, the freedom to make such basic choices in healthcare does not exist. For some, the situation has been catastrophic.

I have been thinking of this because, over the past year, my colleague, Dr. Angela Naimou (English), and I have been mentoring a group of students conducting research on the stories that immigrants tell about detention. One of their central activities is to participate in a visit, organized by the El Refugio hospitality house, with people detained at the Stewart Detention Center, located in Lumpkin GA. Stewart is the second largest ICE detention center in the United States, a country with the largest immigration detention system in the world. During our conversations, which take place in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish, we learn a great deal about life in detention, including much about medical distress.

Here is one alarming recent story, though only scarce details are available. On May 24, Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, a husband and father to three children, became the first person to lose his life to COVID-19 in the Stewart facility. Santiago had been arrested at home in Marietta, Georgia on March 2. By March 26 he had requested and been granted voluntary departure to his home country of Guatemala. By April 17, the 34-year-old was sick enough to require a month-long hospitalization, at the end of which he died. Santiago was clearly not a flight risk. His unnecessary death exposes much of the dysfunction and callousness inherent in immigrant detention.

Like most ICE detention centers, Stewart is operated by a private company (CoreCivic), whose main priority is to increase returns for its shareholders. Much of the company’s cost cutting directly affects people’s health and living conditions: low-quality food, sometimes dirty drinking water, extremely overcrowded sleeping and washing facilities, and a lack of medical technology, medicine, and health-care personnel. When immigrants complain of poor conditions or illness, the undertrained staff often respond with punishment such as solitary confinement. Even mental health incidents receive punitive responses, and two men with documented mental health issues have committed suicide at Stewart after being left in solitary confinement.

Given this structural neglect during routine times, the inability of Stewart’s staff to manage this pandemic has been sadly predictable. Just two days before Santiago was granted voluntary departure, immigrants held a hunger strike to demand more protection and possible release. But still most CDC guidelines have been ignored (staff reportedly do not use personal protection equipment, living conditions have changed little, and ICE continues to transfer people from one center to another). To make matters worse, Stewart County has such a spike of COVID-19 that it has declared a state of emergency. Unsurprisingly, the virus has penetrated deep into the facility. Of some 300 employees, over 50 have tested positive. ICE claims that 16 detainees have been infected but there are reliable reports that many cases go untested.

Indeed, it is not easy to know precisely how far conditions have deteriorated inside. The one “safety measure” that ICE has consistently enforced throughout the country has been the suspension of personal visits. This means that the only communication detainees may now have with the outside is through their attorneys (the vast majority do not have one), letters (if delivered), or telephone accounts. Those who have been detained for up to two years and have come to rely on visits from family or community members have grown more isolated.

Thinking about Santiago Baten-Oxlaj can be overwhelming at a time when we are already worried about tumultuous current events. This is especially true when we consider how Santiago and his family’s story touches upon contexts beyond the walls of the detention center: immigrants who are essential workers and who lack health care; undocumented people who fear arrest by ICE or local police participating in 287(g) agreements; people living in tents and kept just beyond our border due to the ironically named “migrant protection protocols” (better known as “remain in Mexico”); at risk incarcerated people throughout the US…

But despite this burden, our research group has continued to explore forms and practices of hospitality that struggle to affirm dignity within this system. Groups such as El Refugio, Project South, SPLC, and the Tahirih Justice Center have sought new ways to support immigrants (through providing telephone accounts, for instance) and demand accountability, transparency, and the release of vulnerable individuals. This summer our students have been thinking of how to aid these efforts and educate those around them.

Bio: Joseph Mai is an Associate Professor of French with an affiliation in World Cinema. He teaches courses on French society and French cinema and literature, and is currently completing a volume on the post-genocide cinema of the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker, Rithy Panh. “Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality” is a Creative Inquiry group, dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality.

(Introduction to a series, “Clemson Humanities Now,” by Humanities Hub Founding Director, Lee Morrissey, who teaches in the English Department.)

By April 2020, as the nation went into the Covid-19 lockdown, I was dismayed: a devastating and mysterious illness was painfully debilitating its sufferers, and even, apparently, presenting a new way of dying—suddenly, from a lack of oxygen, caused, apparently, by a new kind of pneumonia. The world needed so many skilled people—EMTs, nurses, doctors, immunologists, virologists, farmers, grocers, medical equipment manufacturers, supply chain logisticians, social scientists, public health experts.  Overwhelmed at the time by the demonstrable value of the sciences in the moment (and the increasing disregard for it in the infomercials then broadcast nightly from the White House), I also worried, what did the world need from the humanities?  What were the humanities going to do in the new world then emerging?  In May, when I virtually attended the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, we directors of Humanities Centers discussed our priorities for the coming academic year.  The focus of those conversations tended to be on budget pressures, rescheduling, and whether to have face-to-face events in the fall.  All fine questions, but shouldn’t directors of Humanities Centers, I thought, also be asking themselves what we mean by the humanities now?

By early June, however, the social and political consequences of the novel coronavirus, and the national response(s) to it, revealed the continuing importance–and even the increased value–of the humanities.  Systemic needs had become visible, and acute: for effective, consistent communication; for the evaluation of sources; for attention to logical and rhetorical implications; for a sense of historical perspective; for the quality of thinking that can sift for ethical, moral, and political consequences; for deliberative, but fast-moving analysis of great volumes of information; and for imagining other peoples’ lives and imagining new possibilities.  The humanities reflect on and develop each of these, helping people increase their capacities for each of them.

After President Trump began to egg on largely white protesters, often armed, who were opposed to the shutdown he had asked for and had not lifted, I realized that the three ways we were simultaneously being asked to respond to the pandemic—stay home, follow the science, and rise up in armed outrage at the previous two—mapped on to dynamics I had tracked in my book manuscript about seventeenth-century English poetry, which I had just revised and returned to a press for review in January.

More recently, as videos of the deaths of, first, Ahmaud Arbery and then George Floyd emerged (in the former case months after shots were fired into the unarmed jogger), the nation was reminded of another persistent, virulent disease with which it has unfortunately learned to live, and for which vaccines are also regrettably in short supply—racism and anti-black violence.  As I write this, in early June 2020, the US has experienced over a week of daily protests, nationwide, lootings and burnings, and nightly examples of militarized police using batons, shields, tasers, tear gas, paint balls, rubber bullets, and stun grenades against diverse groups of their fellow citizens, maybe even their neighbors.  The protests have gone global, as people around the world chanted “Black Lives Matter,” and took a knee in solidarity.

With George Floyd being at least the second African American man, that we have heard of, in just the last few years to die while telling the police officer choking them, “I can’t breathe,” and with so many videotaped deaths by such a variety of means, too, I have been wondering why it took yet another such death to have the impact George Floyd’s has.  There are lots of factors, of course: the galling callousness of Officer Chauvin as he knelt for 9 minutes with one hand in his pocket, and one knee on a neck; the awful repetition of death by police asphyxiation necessitating a bigger response; a demographically changing America, now about 60% non-Hispanic white; and the internet facilitating decentralized local expressions of sympathetic frustration.  But I believe that the massive response to George Floyd’s death is also part of the Covid-19 story, not only because there are suddenly over 40 million unemployed and frustrated Americans (also, and again, more likely people of color).

In addition to all those factors, “I can’t breathe” resonates today, again today, and maybe more today, when over 111,000 Americans have died of a disease whose signature symptom is respiratory distress, and for which, in the early going, ventilators, or the lack thereof, had been a predominant national topic.  By the time people saw the video of the death of George Floyd, they were attuned to breath, to breathing, and to people taking their last breaths, alone.  By the time George Floyd died, people had also tuned in, one way or another, to task force briefings in which the proposed solutions were themselves sometimes deadly, and in which the principle presenter seemed to comprehend neither the risks in the new conditions nor the proposed ‘treatment.’  When George Floyd died, most people probably knew someone who had had Covid-10, and thus many more people worried that they too might soon be saying, “I can’t breathe,” also through no fault of their own, and also maybe because of a lack of governmental concern for them, an absence some of them could see in Officer Chauvin’s nonchalant demeanor.  In short, maybe there was an opening where more people were feeling their shared vulnerability, which means, in part, a shared humanity.

At this point, I realized that if my research in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature was helping me think about what was happening now (and that what was happening now might inform my research), then the same must be happening for my Clemson Humanities colleagues, too, and maybe even more so for those who work in, say, American history, or American literature, or political philosophy, or, well, you get the idea.  So, with this realization in mind, I wrote to many of my colleagues in the humanities at Clemson, and I asked them if they would like to write a brief, accessible post about how what is happening now informs their research, and vice versa, as part of a series I would call “Clemson Humanities Now.”  I am delighted to say that many colleagues offered to contribute to this series.  Come to think of it, actually, I am honored that they said yes—it is an honor to work with generous colleagues who are so actively thinking about the implications of their work, and the consequences of what is unfolding around them.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.

The series will be updated as Clemson Humanities’ faculty posts arrive, starting this Wednesday afternoon.