[{"id":127,"date":"2021-01-11T18:34:24","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T18:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=127"},"modified":"2021-01-11T19:21:11","modified_gmt":"2021-01-11T19:21:11","slug":"a-century-and-a-half-of-police-reform-in-ireland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2021\/01\/11\/a-century-and-a-half-of-police-reform-in-ireland\/","title":{"rendered":"(A century and a half of) Police Reform in Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s note: Michael Silvestri<\/a>, Professor of History<\/a> at Clemson, is an expert on policing in Ireland (and through Ireland, across the British colonies).\u00a0 \u00a0Through independence, partition, and the Good Friday Agreement, Ireland has had to successively form and reform police forces.\u00a0 Thinking that maybe the Irish example could inform the current discussions about the police in the US, I asked Michael if he might contribute to this series.\u00a0 He has, below.\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.]<\/p>\n

The issue of police reform has been at the center of political debates in the U. S. over the past year, most recently emphasized by the failure of police to prevent the mob from overtaking the Capitol on January 6th. Policing has had a contentious history in modern Ireland, and the question of police reform has occupied an important role there as well.<\/p>\n

Irish people today continue to debate the legacy of the police force known as the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). The RIC was the police force of Ireland from 1836 to 1922. Considered one of the premier forces of the British Empire and a model for other colonies to emulate, the Irish force was constructed differently from the \u201cBobbies\u201d of the Metropolitan Police and other police forces in Britain. While many of its duties were mundane, the RIC was nonetheless an armed, centralized police force under the control of Dublin Castle, the seat of British administration in Ireland. (The force was given the title \u201cRoyal\u201d in recognition of its role in suppressing the Fenian Rebellion of 1867.) The RIC\u2019s main functions were to provide political intelligence to Dublin Castle and to maintain order in the Irish countryside. The fact that close to 80 percent of its rank and file were Catholic by the twentieth century did not endear it to many Irish nationalists, who regarded the \u201cPeelers\u201d of the RIC as traitors to the cause of Irish freedom.<\/p>\n

During the 1919-1921 War of Independence, members of the RIC were subjected to attack from the Irish Republican Army. The force\u2019s reputation among nationalists was further tarnished both by RIC reprisals, and the recruitment to the force in 1920 of two groups of former British Army soldiers, the \u201cBlack and Tans,\u201d composed of former enlisted men, and the \u201cAuxiliaries,\u201d composed of ex-officers Both groups committed widespread acts of violence as part of the RIC. In all, over 400 members of the regular RIC, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were killed during the conflict.<\/p>\n

Many police forces of former colonies of the British Empire, whether in India, Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, can trace their lineage directly back to their predecessors under the British Empire. When the Irish Free State was established in 1922 in twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, there was no attempt to incorporate the RIC into the structures of government. Instead, the RIC was disbanded and a completely new police force, An Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na (the Guardian of the Peace), usually known as simply the Gardai or \u201cthe Guards,\u201d was established. This too, was a national police force, but with important differences from the RIC. The Gardai were unarmed, and owed their allegiance to the new independent Irish state; many former members of the IRA were appointed to senior positions in order to counter public suspicions that the force was simply the continuation of the RIC. Although a few members of the RIC with nationalist sympathies entered the Gardai, most remained in Ireland and attempted to adjust to civilian life, while over a third chose emigration, leaving Ireland either temporarily or permanently.<\/p>\n

In recent decades, the lives and histories of Irish people who served the British Empire, particularly Irish soldiers during the First World War, have received increasing attention from historians and the Irish public. Yet, while the experiences of those soldiers have been portrayed sympathetically in Irish film and literature, as in the short film Coward (2012) and the novel A Long, Long Way (2005), the RIC continues to be a subject of controversy.<\/p>\n

In 2018 Irish film Black 47, set during the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, it is debatable whether the greatest villains are callous Anglo-Irish landlords indifferent to the sufferings of their Irish Catholic tenants, or the thuggish members of the Irish Constabulary, who in the film (as they did in history) provide protection for landlord agents carrying out evictions and guard shipments of grain intended for export from the starving populace.<\/p>\n

The issue of the RIC\u2019s legacy was thrust into the spotlight a year ago when plans were made to commemorate the RIC as part of Ireland\u2019s Decade of Centenaries marking important events of Ireland\u2019s \u201cRevolutionary Decade\u201d of 1912 to 1923.<\/p>\n

On January 17th, 2020, the Irish government planned a ceremony at Dublin Castle to honor members of the RIC and the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which was responsible for policing the city of Dublin until 1925. The ceremony was explicitly not intended to honor the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, but it quickly attracted widespread public criticism. Although the Prime Minister at the time, Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar, defended the ceremony, arguing that \u201cIt\u2019s about remembering our history, not condoning what happened,\u201d a number of Irish mayors and politicians from both major parties, Fine Gael and Fianna F\u00e1il, said that they would not attend. Sinn F\u00e9in leader Mary Lou MacDonald on Twitter called the ceremony \u201ca calculated insult to all who stood for Irish freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ceremony has been officially postponed, not cancelled, but on January 7th of this year, in response to a question in the Irish parliament, Justice Minister Helen McEntee stated that there are no current plans to reschedule it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s note: Michael Silvestri, Professor of History at Clemson, is an expert on policing in Ireland (and through Ireland, across the British colonies).\u00a0 \u00a0Through independence, partition, and the Good Friday Agreement, Ireland has had to successively form and reform police forces.\u00a0 Thinking that maybe the Irish example could inform the current discussions about the police […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":126,"date":"2021-01-09T18:21:26","date_gmt":"2021-01-09T18:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=126"},"modified":"2021-01-10T16:32:30","modified_gmt":"2021-01-10T16:32:30","slug":"mad-king-george-or-charles-the-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2021\/01\/09\/mad-king-george-or-charles-the-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Jan. 6, 2021: “Mad King George,” or Charles the First?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anonymous White House insider reports<\/a> claim that Donald Trump is behaving like “Mad King George.” In private, maybe he is; in public, though, on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, he acted like Charles the First. Less familiar to Americans today, Charles\u2019s actions in 1640s England inform the eighteenth-century Constitution of the United States.<\/p>\n

Infuriated by Puritans in the House of Commons, Charles the First told the Lord Mayor of London not to call up any troops, and, in the absence of any armed opposition, led a march across the capital city, from Whitehall to Westminster. There, Charles entered Parliament with a group of 80 armed soldiers, and attempted to arrest five prominent members of Parliament who were opposed to him. A marching progress across London was no secret to Parliament, so the Five Members, as they became known, had already evacuated to a secure location, a barge in the Thames, famously undisclosed by the Speaker of the House, William Lenthall, who told the King, \u201cI have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me.\u201d*<\/p>\n

The king had entered Parliament, attempted to arrest legislators, and failed. It was a stupendous overreach, and disastrous. Within months, England was at war with itself; within years, Charles had been executed by Parliament, and England became a republic. No reigning monarch has entered the House of Commons since that day in 1642. Remarkably, that day was January 4th, technically in 1641, on the Julian calendar the United Kingdom (and its colonies) used until 1752. That is, Charles the First laid seige to Parliament nearly exactly 380 years to the day before Donald Trump told a “Save America March” rally crowd which was chanting \u201dFight for Trump! Fight for Trump!,\u201d \u201cafter this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, there are differences between the two events. For one thing, as it turned out, Donald Trump was not there with them; he was back in the White House watching it all play out on TV. By contrast, Charles actually led troops into Parliament, and, by contrast, kept them out of Commons when he went in. In 1642, it was King Charles who sat in the Speaker Chair, but only after asking to do so; by contrast, it was members of the pro-Trump mob who having chased Congress out of their chambers then sat for selfies in the Speaker\u2019s Chair. Charles and his troops did not damage Parliament; if anything, they damaged the monarchy. Of course, by contrast, those who stormed Congress smashed windows, tore down signs, and, reportedly, relieved\u2014one might say \u201cexpressed\u201d\u2014themselves in the hallways and offices of elected representatives.\u00a0 And, in 1642, no one died.<\/p>\n

We are all still sorting what else Trump and his supporters damaged when they laid siege to the Capitol\u2014possibilities include art works, carpeting, desks, democracy, international reputation, and the future itself.\u00a0 What happened between the White House and the Capitol on the afternoon of January 6 is not unprecedented; it is instead loaded with precedents, which is what makes it so powerfully significant.\u00a0 Every event is unique, and developing a completely accurate picture–every angle of every participant before, during, and after, plus all the angles not available to participants\u2014is beyond us. The events of 1642 vex historians to this day, at a four-century remove. What used to be called the Puritan Revolution became known as the English Revolution, then the English Civil War, then the English Civil Wars, and, most recently, the War of Three Kingdoms.\u00a0 In any case, by definition, historical analogies cannot be exact, and, therefore, in that sense, history cannot be a guide.\u00a0 However, the examination of similarity and difference is one of the advantages of analogies; they constitute a means of a cumulative measurement.<\/p>\n

The most important disadvantage of historical analogy in particular is the contextual narrative in which the historical example is embedded, and thus comes with. In the familiar narrative, for example, George the Third precedes a Revolution. As we saw on Wednesday the 6th, the siege takers saw themselves in George the Third terms: taking on the narrative implied by the analogy, they were re-doing the American revolution, complete with \u201cDon\u2019t Tread on Me,\u201d and with Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi as the malevolent tyrants, apparently. (And like Charles, they arrived ready to arrest their five, albeit with plastic zip ties this time.) Here, too, the glaring inequity in treatment of Black Lives Matter protests and the Capitol siege involves the same racist logic seen in the analogical eighteenth-century \u2018revolution\u2019 against the Mad King George. As Samuel Johnson noted at the time, in his 1775 essay Taxation No Tyranny<\/em><\/a>, \u201cwe hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.\u201d Such iniquitous treatment in the defense of freedom is not unprecedented; it is built into the analogy. Nor, indeed, is racialized mob violence unprecedented. What happened to Congress on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, has happened at countless county court houses in the Jim Crow South, i.e., in America. It just hadn\u2019t happened at Congress before. Fortunately, the stormtroopers were not able to find the people they apparently wanted to place in the nooses and scaffold they set up around the building. This time.<\/p>\n

Despite all the disadvantages of the extraordinarily complicated contextual narrative of Charles the First (two civil wars, execution, Irish conquest, republic, Restoration, and thus interregnum), that analogy does highlight a central constitutional issue, then and now. Not only did the January 6 siege succeed in delaying, if only for a few hours, Congress\u2019s certifying the election results, and thus in breaking the peaceful transfer of power in the US at the federal level. By doing so, the siege obscured the fact that the executive branch supported\u2014seemingly even incited\u2014an attack on the legislative branch, thus breaking the separation of powers at the heart of the US Constitution. Presumably permanently: if not formally rebuked, all future presidents can now hold rallies outside Congress, demanding their followers go there, \u201cfight\u201d and be \u201cstrong,\u201d if there\u2019s a vote whose results they don\u2019t like.<\/p>\n

Since 1642, no reigning monarch has entered the House of Commons, such a violation of the separation of powers was Charles\u2019 arrival understood to be. The framers seeing the English experience with inherited monarchy, tweaked the separation of powers implicit in the English system: courts, a bicameral legislature, and an executive. It was, so to speak, an analogy, a salvage effort. As with all analogies, differences were also highlighted. Instead of a king, a President is elected, which is to say removable, without the execution that ended Charles\u2019 reign. Unfortunately, the Constitutional Convention created and we have retained an indirect and thus analogically aristocratic form of electing the head of the executive branch, and it was that very feature of the eighteenth-century Constitution (in its late nineteenth century codification) which was in process at the time of the January 6 attack. The role of the electoral college will continue to be reexamined as a result. Through it all, though, the president of the United States has always required an invitation before addressing Congress (even for the state of the union address mandated by the Constitution), a separation-of-powers legacy of the English system, and Charles\u2019s shocking disregard for it. On Wednesday, a president\u2019s supporters took the building over, after he told them he would be there with them when they got there. It turns out, that last bit was fake news, straight from the head of the executive branch, but it sure looks like they went in to represent him. The case of Charles the First means both the integrity of US democratic elections and the constitutional separation of powers are both at stake in the aftermath of the invasion of the Capitol from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*Schama, Simon.\u00a0 A History of Britain.\u00a0 Volume II.\u00a0 The Wars of the British, 1603-1776<\/em>.\u00a0 (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 123.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anonymous White House insider reports claim that Donald Trump is behaving like “Mad King George.” In private, maybe he is; in public, though, on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, he acted like Charles the First. Less familiar to Americans today, Charles\u2019s actions in 1640s England inform the eighteenth-century Constitution of the United States. Infuriated by Puritans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":125,"date":"2021-01-07T15:57:40","date_gmt":"2021-01-07T15:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=125"},"modified":"2021-01-08T17:57:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T17:57:49","slug":"january-6-2021-epiphany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2021\/01\/07\/january-6-2021-epiphany\/","title":{"rendered":"January 6, 2021, Epiphany."},"content":{"rendered":"

[Author’s note: Lee Morrissey, Founding Director of the Humanities Hub, and English Professor at Clemson, on media, civil war, and democracy in seventeenth-century England, and early 2021. This is Clemson Humanities Now.]<\/p>\n

In 1995, when I was still a graduate student, I was lucky enough to get a job as an assistant professor of English, and I moved to Clemson from Manhattan, where I had been studying. Over the years, people have understandably inquired about that transition, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes with a presumptuous knowing chuckle. Of course, there were many differences in my experiences in the nation\u2019s largest city, and a town of 11,000 year-round residents, and some of them were improvements (if only because living on a salary in Clemson is better than living on a $10,000 stipend in upper Manhattan).<\/p>\n

One difference, though, that no one has been able to anticipate has weighed on me, for decades now\u2014the utopic excitement about the World Wide Web I encountered when I joined Clemson\u2019s Department of English. The internet was twenty years old when I started at Clemson, although the World Wide Web was nearly brand new. A swath of my new colleagues were convinced not only that it represented the future, which it did, but more importantly that it boded well for democracy.<\/p>\n

My own research in English literature spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period that goes from Civil Wars (culminating in the execution of a monarch) to the Enlightenment. In other words, my \u2018field\u2019 covered the protracted emergence of representative democracy from the ashes of a civil war and interregnum. As a result, my colleagues\u2019 faith in this new technology struck me as na\u00efve at best, even as I share their hopes for democracy.<\/p>\n

Nothing about the democratization of print in the 1640s suggested that the World Wide Web was going to be an unvarnished good for democracy as my colleagues understood it. The experience with my colleagues changed my career: I wrote a book\u2014The Constitution of Literature<\/a> (Stanford UP, 2008)–on the topic, telling the story across nearly a century and a half, exploring different ideas of democracy as they unfolded in that period, and arguing in the end that \u201ctoday\u2019s discussion of the World Wide Web needs to consider each of these facets of the development of literary criticism. For the potential political instability, the possible emergence of critical protocols, and debates over models of democracy will all unfold for digital media, and the constitution of literature can provide a powerful, instructive analogue\u201d (197).<\/p>\n

Legacy broadcast media post-Fairness Doctrine played its part, but the impact and tenor of the Trump presidency have been facilitated by the openness and anonymity of the World Wide Web, especially what was once called the Web 2.0, the web that \u2018you\u2019 could create, which was, it was said, the most democratic form (non-linear and non-hierarchical, they said) of this most democratic technology. At the time, pointing out that there might be a problem with such an understanding of democracy was mistakenly seen as conservative, even though one could also already see, first, that the technology had system requirements that priced participation out for many people, and second, that the architecture was shaping the so-called choices, and third, that the algorithms were replicating real world biases (even as anonymous \u2018users\u2019 were enforcing them).<\/p>\n

For those of us–not so many of us, perhaps–who study seventeenth-century English history and literature knew, the English Civil Wars coincided with, and were accelerated by, a new openness and accessibility of print. Eventually, the English political system stabilized, and a series of legal conventions (copyright, free speech protections, balanced by defamation accountability, etc.) developed to stabilize the political effects of print, too. As I wrote in The Constitution of Literature<\/em>, \u201cEighteenth-century literary critics may have prioritized stability over openness. But early English literary critics describe their visions of reading against the backdrop of the profound instability created, they believe, by other modes of reading. It must also be said that stability is likely preferable to protracted Civil War; even the most libertarian digerati is probably concerned about the democratizing effect the internet seems to have offered global Jihadists. Moreover, within that eighteenth-century preference for stability there is a wide range of differing opinions on how to organize the constitution of literature, on how to understand literacy and political philosophy, and even on how to understand stability itself\u201d (196-7).<\/p>\n

This analogue, from print, has been on my mind throughout the Trump presidency, increasingly during 2020, but no more so than January 6, 2021, Epiphany Day, when Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube banned, albeit temporarily, the President of the United States from participating in the Web 2.0. In order to preserve one form of democracy\u2014the deliberative, representative, and established one\u2014these companies needed to suspend their form of anti-procedural participatory, rules-free democracy. Or, in the end the democracy offered by Web 2.0 had been revealed as a threat to democracy IRL. Of course, we had long suspected that it was a threat, truthiness and whataboutism having replacing reflection, even before the 2016 election hack by Cambridge Analytica and Russia\u2019s IRA. But this is what made January 6, 2021 an epiphany: a new world is struggling to be born, and the supposedly democratizing technologies were enlisted in preventing it (in a seemingly non-linear and non-hierarchical way). Imagine if the three wise men had been sent to Bethlehem by Herod, Twitter, and GPS to trample through the inn, scare away the family, and take selfies.<\/p>\n

The question, unfortunately, is whether yesterday represents an end of such behavior, or its beginning, the culmination, or the starter\u2019s gun. Which epiphany or revelation it turns out to be will depend not only on whether or not to treat the president as if he were only the country\u2019s \u2018cranky uncle.\u2019 It will also depend on a reexamination of technologies of representation. The good news is that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century example shows us we have been here before. Regrettably for us, it took England a century before the final Jacobite Rebellion was quelled, and nearly as long for early copyright laws to be created. Fortunately, though, we have the lessons of their example to draw on; there are vaccines, already developed for print, and offering readily adaptable treatments today.<\/p>\n

Earlier, I mentioned how arriving at Clemson from Manhattan and finding colleagues in an English Department who held techno-utopic hopes for the democratic possibilities of digitized representation changed my career. I mean, for the better. If you had asked me in my earliest post-doctoral years what I expected to be researching, I would have told you about a continuation of my dissertation, on authors who were also architects, topics in which I remain interested. It would be several years before The Constitution of Literature formed as a project for me. It is today my most-cited monograph, and it would not exist had I not been so surprised by my colleagues\u2019 conviction that we were about to enter a golden age of the democratic word. Two decades later, the storming of the Capitol yesterday, by people egged on by the president, and by QAnon, shows how much we all need to sift these new media. My own experience, studying civil war and interregnum England, also shows how much these media were not new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Author’s note: Lee Morrissey, Founding Director of the Humanities Hub, and English Professor at Clemson, on media, civil war, and democracy in seventeenth-century England, and early 2021. This is Clemson Humanities Now.] In 1995, when I was still a graduate student, I was lucky enough to get a job as an assistant professor of English, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[58645,5815,836],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":124,"date":"2020-09-14T20:53:17","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T20:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=124"},"modified":"2020-09-14T20:53:59","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T20:53:59","slug":"the-hidden-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2020\/09\/14\/the-hidden-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Hidden Pandemic”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n
\n
Kapreece Dorrah, a Junior English Major English from Greenville, South Carolina, is a member of the We CU<\/a> Video Campaign ), for which he made this video<\/a> poem.\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kapreece Dorrah, a Junior English Major English from Greenville, South Carolina, is a member of the We CU Video Campaign ), for which he made this video poem.\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[58645,10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":121,"date":"2020-09-02T23:19:11","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T23:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=121"},"modified":"2020-09-04T16:35:35","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T16:35:35","slug":"how-do-we-do-research-in-the-humanities-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2020\/09\/02\/how-do-we-do-research-in-the-humanities-now\/","title":{"rendered":"How do we do research in the humanities now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: Gabriel Hankins<\/a> teaches English literature and digital humanities in the Department of English<\/a> at Clemson University.\u00a0 His research interests include modernism, and digital literary studies.\u00a0 His book,\u00a0Interwar Modernism and Liberal World Order<\/em><\/a>, has been published by Cambridge University Press.\u00a0 He is co-editor of a new series on Digital Literary Studies<\/a><\/em>, also published by Cambridge University Press.\u00a0 As he and I corresponded this summer about online teaching tools suitable for close reading and group discussions, I asked him if he might contribute to this series.\u00a0 He said yes, and this is the result.\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.)<\/p>\n

How do we do research in the humanities now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once, this might have been the title of a quietly confident survey of changing research practices in the humanities, some gradual, some sudden, with the confidence that familiar pathways and byways of humanities research remain largely unchanged. That confidence in the stability and continuity of the present has ended. Now the question has a slight tone of desperation: how are we, in the conditions imposed by a viral pandemic, going to do our research? Particularly in historical fields built around books, libraries, and archives, not to mention conferences, the conditions of our work seem to have changed utterly.<\/p>\n

My response to the titular question is contradictory, like life in the present crisis, but I hope we can learn something by thinking through the contradictions.<\/p>\n

We are all digital researchers now<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Within the digital humanities community, this is a familiar claim made by Lincoln Mullen, among others. I have refined a version of the claim for modernist studies in particular, in which I argue that literary fields are now contiguous with \u201cdigital humanities\u201d methods and approaches along all their fractal boundaries. But, as I conclude in that essay, if we are all digital humanists now, we don\u2019t yet know it. In the time of coronavirus, that knowledge is inescapable. Neither our teaching, research, nor service can escape a confrontation with digital mediation and its consequences. How we confront the digital mediation of our fields cannot be predetermined: in some modes, the dialectic of the digital and humanist plays out in terms of conflict, resistance, or refusal.<\/p>\n

The middle matters: digital mediation is a problem of proximity, distance, and transmission<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Since T. S. Eliot at least, literary studies has seen its problem as that of positioning the individual experience in relation to inherited traditions, cultures, and texts, even if those texts and cultures are \u201cinherited\u201d from our contemporaries. Our method of constituting our traditions has everything to do with the historical moment we are in: Eliot\u2019s particular mode of historical thinking arose out of a crisis in Western political order, a chaotic war, and a viral pandemic that recalls our own. At first the pandemic might seem to separate us from the archives, libraries, and conferences that formed the structure of research in the humanities, as it separates us from a livable past and a thinkable present. Digital mediation of those resources is experienced as distance and remove from the original. But in several senses digital archives and methods bring us unbearably close to our objects and interests, even as they always transmit, mediate, and thereby omit something of the original. All of Shakespeare is now available to the panoptic queries of the researcher; even more unbearably, the entire corpus of eighteenth-century Anglophone fiction, or nineteenth-century women novelists, or detective fictions of the 1930s. Certain archives, too, are available in digital form as they never were before \u2013 I am thinking here of queer fanfictions, but also the letters of Robert Southey, uniquely captured in digital form. The problem of researching these materials opens onto the more general problem of a self-reflective research practice, in which the modes and materials by which we do our work do not simply disappear in the background.<\/p>\n

Digital research has to begin and end with the questions, objects, and interests of the humanities<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This may seem obvious, but it has not been clear for some generations of digital researchers. Our research questions and interests must rise out of the vibrant cultures, languages, traditions, and materials that inspire our work. We can and must think through the implications of our current digital condition, and the ways in which digital mediations of all kinds shape the questions we can ask and the canons we consider. But our questions should remain framed by our attachment to the primary questions of the humanities: what are the ways in which we make meaning, how is that meaning grounded in a history, a time and a place, a specific culture? How does a material history, a technological moment, a set of canonical texts, determine and enliven our response to a given textual and historical situation? What do we want our always-already digital research to transmit from the past to a more human future? In answering these questions, we move from the anxiety of a crisis-ridden present to our grounding in a meaningful past and our work towards a livable future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: Gabriel Hankins teaches English literature and digital humanities in the Department of English at Clemson University.\u00a0 His research interests include modernism, and digital literary studies.\u00a0 His book,\u00a0Interwar Modernism and Liberal World Order, has been published by Cambridge University Press.\u00a0 He is co-editor of a new series on Digital Literary Studies, also published by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[791,58645,10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-caah","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":118,"date":"2020-08-14T17:30:56","date_gmt":"2020-08-14T17:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=118"},"modified":"2020-08-14T17:34:51","modified_gmt":"2020-08-14T17:34:51","slug":"living-in-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2020\/08\/14\/living-in-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in History"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: Walt Hunter<\/a>, author of\u00a0Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization\u00a0<\/em>(Fordham UP, 2019) and co-translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Neyrat\u2019s\u00a0Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism\u00a0<\/em>(Fordham UP, 2017), is an associate professor of World Literature and associate chair of Clemson English<\/a>.\u00a0 Current events have him thinking about this moment in history, our moment in history, and our relationship to it.)<\/p>\n

Social scientists and economists have singled out 1973 as a pivotal year in the history of global capitalism\u2014the end of the post-war, Bretton Woods model of \u201cembedded liberalism\u201d and the beginning of the \u201clong downturn<\/a>\u201d\u2014but could the humanities add something new to this narrative? I\u2019m interested in the cultural shifts in literature and art in the early 1970s that coincide with the end of what the French call the trente glorieuses<\/em>, the years before the current period of globalization and of dramatically increased inequality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One of the relatively minor, and yet, for me, ultimately illuminating events of 1973 is the publication of a book of sonnets by Robert Lowell called History<\/em> (1973). In 1969 Lowell had published many of these sonnets in a collection called Notebook<\/em> (1969) that, four years and two editions later, became History<\/em>. \u201cI am learning to live in history,\u201d Lowell writes in the second edition of the fifth poem of a twelve-part sonnet sequence called \u201cMexico.\u201d \u201cWhat is history? What you cannot touch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lowell\u2019s reflection in this particular poem is prompted by the passing of the end of the day: the \u201cfull sun,\u201d the \u201csilhouetting sunset,\u201d then the \u201cundimmed lights of the passing car.\u201d Typical of Lowell\u2019s sonnets, the intimacy of personal experience occasions a reflection on large-scale processes: though he\u2019s often received as a confessional poet, Lowell\u2019s style in fact reflects his globalized present. The question \u201cwhat is history?\u201d comes to life as part of a larger American cultural, historical, political, and economic predicament in the early 70s.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, the sonnet is probably not the first cultural form that springs to mind when we think about the late 1960s and early 1970s. 1973 was not a marquee year for the sonnet\u2014though it was for Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>, Dark Side of the Moon<\/em>, \u201cKilling Me Softly,\u201d The Exorcist,<\/em> \u201cLove Is a Hurtin\u2019 Thing,\u201d Badlands<\/em>, Linda Ronstadt, and \u201cGoodbye Yellow Brick Road.\u201d This list has very little in common except a vague sense that something was over and it was now, as Joan Didion writes<\/a>, the \u201cmorning after the 60s.\u201d Americans in the early 1970s suspect that time is out of joint, that their lives fit into their country and their country fits in the world in a different way.<\/p>\n

I take Lowell\u2019s comment seriously: what is it to \u201clearn to live in history\u201d and how can a sonnet, of all things, help do that? Whose history is he talking about, this white scion of a patrician New England family? Why is history \u201cwhat you cannot touch\u201d?<\/p>\n

One of the sonnet\u2019s oldest motifs is noli me tangere<\/em>\u2014literally, \u201cdon\u2019t touch me\u201d\u2014<\/em>which appears in Thomas Wyatt\u2019s mid-sixteenth-century sonnet<\/a> \u201cWhoso List to Hunt.\u201d The sonnet\u2019s noli me tangere<\/em>, a phrase Wyatt borrows from the Latin Vulgate, is figured by Wyatt and later sonneteers as the gendered body. Its perspective is one of suspended or thwarted desire\u2014usually, though not always, rooted in a male gaze. The sonnet man is probably a close cousin to the \u201clonging man,\u201d as Merve Emre describes<\/a> this enduringly odious figure.<\/p>\n

But in Notebook<\/em>, history becomes the object of the sonnet instead. In this way, Lowell speaks quite clearly to the present, his and ours. Living with the \u201cI\u201d in history remains, perhaps, one of the most intractable questions for the United States in 2020. Later, Claudia Rankine will write this through in a different way, while nodding at Lowell<\/a>: \u201cdrag that first person out of the social death of history,\u201d she writes<\/a> in Citizen: An American Lyric<\/em>, \u201cthen we\u2019re kin.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sonnet is not a form in which history lives comfortably. It\u2019s a pretty room<\/a> or a narrow cell<\/a>, the place where poets argue with themselves. The schematic grace of the sonnet allows for two positions to be reconciled, or to be held in tension. And the sonnet\u2019s closure, if it comes, is not the closure of an event, but the closure of logic or rhyme. When something happens in the sonnet, it is often a product of the energy created by the poem\u2019s own forces, married to the poet\u2019s thoughts and feelings. While the sonnet sequence might elaborate the emotional conditions in which an \u201cI\u201d is forged, we leave it to Tasso\u2019s ottava rima stanza or Milton\u2019s blank verse to provide the historical sweep.<\/p>\n

So when Lowell writes a sonnet, he already knows that it\u2019s not going to accommodate historical narratives very easily\u2014which makes the sonnet\u2019s aversion to history perfectly compatible with its history of adversion. But there\u2019s also something about history itself which, for Lowell, is untouchable, even though he must learn to live in it.<\/p>\n

Writing a sonnet can require some grappling with the long and cumbrous European history of the poetic form itself. Traveling to English from Italian, the sonnet loosens up dramatically in English, which lacks the availability of Italian rhymes. Sonnets by Wyatt, Wroth, Wordsworth, Meredith, Frost, McKay, and Brooks are closer to the language as it\u2019s spoken than sonnets by Dante or Petrarch. The sonnet always arrives, in other words, with a lot of baggage\u2014not the least of which is its co-emergence with early modern capitalism and colonialism in Europe.<\/p>\n

Lowell struggles with the sonnet\u2019s grandiosity, flattening its music out and grounding its images in material from \u201cthe abundance of reality.\u201d He puts it this way at the of Notebook<\/em> (1970):<\/p>\n

My meter, fourteen-line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and<\/p>\n

elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose. Even with this<\/p>\n

license, I fear I have failed to avoid the themes and gigantism of the sonnet.<\/p>\n

I have been thinking so far about the sonnet as a way of dramatizing Lowell\u2019s discomfort with making history while learning to live in it. This is a predicament that, I think, is only more pressing for US artists today. Given the US influence in remaking the world within its own global framework, how can one shape that history from a position that is effectively inside it, complicit with it, part of its continuation? For Lowell, the sonnet, with its own elaborate history in poetry, becomes a convenient vehicle on which the poet can displace his anxiety about his position and privilege in American history.<\/p>\n

For the humanities, grappling with the history of poetry can be an effective way of studying history writ large. So one question that came to me as I was writing this piece was not what the true facts are, but what the right forms might be. This could be the question that animates Rankine\u2019s Citizen<\/em>, too, as it situates everyday moments of racism within its \u201cAmerican lyric,\u201d and Terrance Hayes\u2019s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin<\/em>, a sequence of 70 sonnets<\/a> written immediately after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. To \u201ctouch\u201d history might be to possess it, as a new national myth; it might be to touch it up, as an old national lie. But the process of learning to live in<\/em> history, to deal with what happened honestly, is to embrace one\u2019s own role\u2014not in remaking the past, but in continuing to make a future.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: Walt Hunter, author of\u00a0Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization\u00a0(Fordham UP, 2019) and co-translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Neyrat\u2019s\u00a0Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism\u00a0(Fordham UP, 2017), is an associate professor of World Literature and associate chair of Clemson English.\u00a0 Current events have him thinking about this moment in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[791,58645,10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-caah","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":116,"date":"2020-08-05T20:10:38","date_gmt":"2020-08-05T20:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=116"},"modified":"2020-08-05T20:10:38","modified_gmt":"2020-08-05T20:10:38","slug":"one-of-the-best-living-american-writers-and-a-clemson-english-alum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2020\/08\/05\/one-of-the-best-living-american-writers-and-a-clemson-english-alum\/","title":{"rendered":"“One of the best living American writers,” and a Clemson English alum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Directors note: A few years ago, Clemson English<\/a> MA alum Ron Rash<\/a> generously spoke at a celebration for the\u00a050th anniversary of the Clemson MA in English program. \u00a0I remember him saying something about how when he was a graduate student at Clemson, \u201cpeople thought we were part of a cult, because we were always carrying books and reading.\u201d\u00a0 Well, reading is<\/em> central to the Humanities, and it seems to have stood Ron in good stead.\u00a0 In\u00a0this review<\/a>\u00a0of his new book, Janet Maslin of the New York Times–the paper of record–describes Ron as \u201cone of the best living American writers.\u201d\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Directors note: A few years ago, Clemson English MA alum Ron Rash generously spoke at a celebration for the\u00a050th anniversary of the Clemson MA in English program. \u00a0I remember him saying something about how when he was a graduate student at Clemson, \u201cpeople thought we were part of a cult, because we were always carrying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[791,58645,10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-caah","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":115,"date":"2020-08-03T15:34:20","date_gmt":"2020-08-03T15:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=115"},"modified":"2020-08-03T17:20:22","modified_gmt":"2020-08-03T17:20:22","slug":"still-made-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2020\/08\/03\/still-made-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Still Made in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: Maria Bose<\/a> is assistant professor of media and cultural studies in the Clemson English<\/a> department. Her current project is \u201cCinema\u2019s Hegemony,\u201d a cultural-materialist account of cinema\u2019s primacy to an unfolding phase of Asia-led global political economy.)\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Midway through Age of Extinction<\/em> (Paramount, 2014), Michael Bay\u2019s fourth installment for the Transformers<\/em> franchise\u2019s live-action film series, robotics magnate Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) mistakes amateur inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and race car driver Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor) for \u201cgrease monkeys\u201d in his Chicago facility. There, Joyce has recently authorized the Chinese manufacture of a fleet of Galvatrons: sentient, modular automobiles-cum-super-soldiers reverse engineered from the \u201cliving metal\u201d out of which the Transformer <\/em>robots are composed. Irked to discover two low-level technicians in his pristine showroom, Joyce challenges Yeager and Dyson to define the products on which, he believes, they are all at work. \u201cWhat do you think it is that we make here?\u201d the CEO asks. \u201cWe make poetry. We\u2019re poets.\u201d Later, Joyce learns that his outsourced Galvatrons lack \u201csouls,\u201d their corruption and insurgency implicated in Chinese assembly. Having modeled the robots on benevolent, democratic Autobot leader Optimus Prime, Joyce is baffled by their similarity to evil, authoritarian Decepticon leader Megatron. Faced with this discrepancy\u2014between soulful poetry and corrupt machinery, American design and Chinese execution\u2014Joyce\u2019s metaphors begin to harden. \u201cSimple coding. Algorithms! Math! Why can\u2019t we make what we want to make, the way we want to make it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Age of Extinction<\/em>\u2019s lurking resentment at shifts in the global balance of power away from the US and toward China is nearly lost in the film\u2019s explicit narrative of US-China collaboration. The American Joyce is volubly enamored of his Chinese associate Su Yueming (Li Bingbing), who defends him valiantly in the film\u2019s final Hong Kong sequence. But read as a reflexive parable, Age of Extinction<\/em>\u2019s preoccupation with production\u2019s shifting centers appears immanently self-theorizing and complexly historical, offering both an index of Bay\u2019s frustrated \u201cpoetic\u201d autonomy in co-producing the film with Jiaflix Enterprises and the China Movie Channel, and also a broad systemic critique of US hegemony\u2019s decline in conjunction with a \u201crising China.\u201d Age of Extinction <\/em>opens with Yeager purchasing analog film projectors from a shuttered Texas movie theater where Optimus Prime lies in hiding, disguised as a semi-truck manufactured by the now-defunct American brand, Marmon. Walking past a poster for Howard Hawks\u2019 El Dorado<\/em> (Paramount, 1966), the theater owner laments the current state of cinema. \u201cThe movies nowadays, that\u2019s the trouble,\u201d the old man sighs. \u201cSequels and remakes, bunch of crap.\u201d If Joyce articulates Bay\u2019s anxiety that his \u201cpoetry\u201d will, by dint of global media conglomeration, runaway production, and foreign-market pandering, be reduced to \u201ccrap,\u201d then Yeager simultaneously locates the source of that anxiety in late-twentieth-century US deindustrialization and binds it to the film\u2019s nostalgia for a contemporaneous era of American studio auteurism putatively immune to conglomerate oversight, new-media competition, and foreign-market pressure. Surprisingly, then, given the film\u2019s outpouring of nationalist bombast, Age of Extinction<\/em> is less neoliberal-imperial jingo than neo-protectionist post-imperial swansong, less a refutation of US hegemony\u2019s unraveling than its strategic diagnosis. Age of Extinction<\/em>\u2019s moral and geopolitical lesson is that global industrialists like Joyce are ultimately responsible for disenfranchising hardworking Americans like Yeager\u2014corporate hardliners who offshore jobs in the automobile sector to China and speed blue-collar American workers\u2019 deskilling and redundancy in the advent of automation. The film is willing to risk these admissions\u2014driven, in fact, to solicit a rigorous account of American declension and the breakdown of the liberal-democratic project\u2014because they serve its corporate-existential stakes, which are, on the one hand, to align the fates of state and cinema by synchronizing its account of American decline with that of Hollywood\u2019s progressive evanescence in an increasingly diversified global media complex and, on the other, to motivate that synchronization toward Bay\u2019s and Paramount\u2019s auteurist self-promotion.<\/p>\n

Since Age of Extinction<\/em>\u2019s release, the US-China tension it registers has only escalated, fueled by a hawkish Trump administration bent on hobbling Chinese firms\u2019 forays into European markets and on portraying Chinese authoritarianism as the single greatest threat to US democracy. Amid a prolonged trade war and an unprecedented global downturn triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, American CEOs like Joyce and Hollywood filmmakers like Bay have been castigated for ongoing collaboration with Beijing. The film\u2019s underlying diagnosis of the \u201cChinese threat,\u201d and its nostalgic appeal to the competitive and autonomous US industrial sector foreclosed by deindustrialization is thus entirely familiar. Across party lines, presidential candidates have called for US manufacturers to maximize native production. \u201cWe\u2019re bringing it back,\u201d Trump said at a Ford factory plant in Michigan, just earlier this year. \u201cThe global pandemic has proven once and for all that to be a strong nation, America must be a manufacturing nation.\u201d That statement captures both the promise of closing America\u2019s gaping trade deficit with China and the threat of global supply chains\u2019 overexposure in Chinese markets increasingly susceptible to rolling shutdowns and political oversight.<\/p>\n

But despite Trump\u2019s longing for a new \u201cgolden age\u201d of industrialization and his apparent willingness to confront China on matters of trade\u2014in less than two years Trump has imposed sanctions and tariffs on Chinese imports, revoked Hong Kong\u2019s special trade status, pressured European allies to ostracize Chinese firms, and offered inducements to lure investors away from China\u2014manufacturing job-growth in America has barely kept pace with the total workforce. At the same time, and in the recent course of the pandemic especially, China\u2019s export shares have risen, a testament to the indispensability, competitiveness, and innovation of the nation\u2019s industrial base. And while there is evidence that many firms plan to relocate some or all of their manufacturing facilities away from China, there is also widespread concern that manufacturing itself is swiftly becoming less labor intensive, as low-tech industries transition to the automated and robotic systems for which China is the largest market.<\/p>\n

At a moment of reckoning for American manufacturing, and the reassessment of just-in-time global supply chains, then, calls to divest from \u201cFactory Asia\u201d unfold ideological debates about the fate of the global political order. But these debates carry significance less in terms of the overblown contest between \u201cAmerican democracy\u201d and \u201cChinese authoritarianism\u201d (pace<\/em> Trump, or Bay). Rather, their significance lies in the exfoliation of far subtler processes of hegemonic rebalancing involving America\u2019s wary retreat from, and China\u2019s equally wary advance upon, a vertiginous neoliberal system, as both nations confront the potential boons and perils of a return to\u2014or the continuation of\u2014an anachronistic state-led capitalism. More likely than serious geo-economic overhaul is the emergence of regional hegemonies ordered to suit the state\u2019s immediate desire for market, political, and military supremacy (China seeks such supremacy in the Indo-Pacific; America plans to carve it out by further industrializing hubs in Mexico and Canada). Perhaps, then, it\u2019s only a matter of time before we can \u201cmake what we want to make, the way we want to make it.\u201d For now, it\u2019s all still made in China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: Maria Bose is assistant professor of media and cultural studies in the Clemson English department. Her current project is \u201cCinema\u2019s Hegemony,\u201d a cultural-materialist account of cinema\u2019s primacy to an unfolding phase of Asia-led global political economy.)\u00a0 Midway through Age of Extinction (Paramount, 2014), Michael Bay\u2019s fourth installment for the Transformers franchise\u2019s live-action film […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[791,58645,10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-caah","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":114,"date":"2020-07-31T19:30:08","date_gmt":"2020-07-31T19:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=114"},"modified":"2020-07-31T19:34:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-31T19:34:23","slug":"the-humanities-as-meaning-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2020\/07\/31\/the-humanities-as-meaning-making\/","title":{"rendered":"The Humanities as meaning-making"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: David Sweeney Coombs<\/a> is associate professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Clemson English Department<\/a>. He is the author of\u00a0Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science<\/a><\/em>, published in 2019 by University of Virginia Press.\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.)<\/p>\n

\u201cA dreadful Plague in London was,<\/p>\n

In the Year Sixty Five<\/p>\n

Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls<\/p>\n

Away; yet I alive!\u201d<\/p>\n

These lines appear as the conclusion of Daniel Defoe\u2019s Journal of the Plague Year<\/em>, appended as a kind of epigram on the record of the fictitious author H. F.\u2019s impressions of the bubonic plague epidemic in London in 1665. \u201cYet I alive!\u201d: at once minimized in comparison to the preceding lines and the scale of the disaster they invoke and yet granted the importance of serving as the quatrain\u2019s parting words, this concluding expression of baffled triumph and gratitude distills the confused sense of H. F. throughout the rest of the narrative that his survival is thanks to an inextricable combination of prudence, providence, and sheer dumb luck. Even though this is the end of the line for the novel, and this epigram might also be justly described as, in a sense, an epitaph, a question hangs over H. F.\u2019s affirmation of having outlived the plague: I survived. Why, and what do I do now?<\/p>\n

It is, of course, too early in the Covid-19 pandemic for us to ask ourselves this question in all earnestness. As I write, case-counts in South Carolina have been rising rapidly for several weeks and Clemson has just announced that it will delay bringing students back to campus until September. But if we can\u2019t yet congratulate ourselves on being survivors, reading Defoe\u2019s novel with the pandemic ongoing is nonetheless an occasion to ask what it means to survive and what survival might look like. Covid-19 has given that question a new urgency for us all as individuals, but it has also given a sharper ring to a version of that question that had already begun being sounded in American universities in the last few years even before the upheavals created by the novel coronavirus: can the academic humanities survive?<\/p>\n

Enrollments in the academic humanities have fallen dramatically since the 2008 Financial Crisis. Nationally, the declines have been particularly sharp in the core disciplines that together represent the Humanities at Clemson: English, Languages, Philosophy and Religion, and History. The number of Bachelor\u2019s Degrees awarded in those fields at U.S. universities declined by 17 percent from 2012-2015 (according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences<\/a>), with the downward trend continuing afterwards. I am now the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the English Department at Clemson, where the number of English majors decline by approximately 25 percent between 2011 and 2018.<\/p>\n

The proximate cause of these drops is what Christopher Newfield in The Great Mistake <\/em>has analyzed as the devolutionary cycle of privatization in American public universities, intensified by the long recession and fiscal austerity after 2008. As Clemson, like other public universities, has become locked into a cycle of slashed state funding, tuition hikes, and attempts to raise revenues and cut costs through partnering with private sector sponsors, more and more students have entered the university staggering under the pressure to monetize their studies so as to compete for the well-paid jobs requiring a bachelor\u2019s degree. Under that burden, a major in the humanities look like a risk, or worse, a luxury. While there were some signs that enrollments in the humanities were ticking back up in the last two years, the economic fallout from the pandemic might wipe out those small gains and then some.<\/p>\n

One task for humanities scholars at this moment is to take every opportunity to reiterate that the retreat from the humanities in search of supposedly more marketable majors rests on a popular misconception that humanities degrees don\u2019t translate into good jobs. The economic value of Humanities BAs is in fact broadly similar to that of degrees in Business and STEM fields like Biology. A 2018 study<\/a> found that an average 25-29 year-old Business major earns about $50,000 annually compared to the $45,000 of an average English or History major of the same age, but that Business major is slightly more likely to be unemployed than the History major. When students in one of Clemson colleague Tharon Howard\u2019s courses conducted a survey last year, they found that 90 percent of graduates from Clemson English had found jobs within a year of graduation (and more than 60 percent of them did so within the first three months of graduating). While the coronavirus pandemic is currently destabilizing labor markets in new ways, a humanities degree is likely to continue serving our students\u2019 career prospects well once the recovery is underway. If they were judged by their actual return on investment, as opposed to the caricature of the unemployed Philosophy major, the academic humanities could survive.<\/p>\n

But do the humanities deserve to survive? Do they have value that can\u2019t be reduced to the market? Considered intellectually and ethically, what elements of prudence or providence justify their survival as areas of study within the university? The humanities are difficult to discuss, let alone define, in a unified way, but I accept Helen Small\u2019s working definition from The Value of the Humanities<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The humanities study the meaning-making practices of human culture, past and present, focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation, primarily in terms of the individual response and with an ineliminable element of subjectivity.<\/p>\n

This definition is perhaps recognizably the work of an English professor, and some historians might not necessarily identify \u201cthe meaning-making practices of human culture\u201d as their sole or primary object of study. At the risk of disciplinary chauvinism, though, Small\u2019s placing practices of meaning-making at the center of what we do in the humanities strikes me as capturing something important about them.<\/p>\n

When Coluccio Salutati articulated the first modern version of the studia humanitatis <\/em>in the fourteenth century, his basic criterion for each mode of inquiry\u2019s inclusion was a commitment to studying languages in order to understand the human. The modern humanities, that is, study meaning-making with the aim of self-understanding. That aim might be more or less implicit in practice but it is the humanities\u2019 first and most important justification. While Small\u2019s analysis is too cool to veer into anything with the potential for such embarrassing earnestness, it can\u2019t but hint at one of the tacit promises we make our students: by teaching you how meaning is made, the humanities will also help you to cultivate the interpretive and critical skills that can make your own life more meaningful.<\/p>\n

Seen along these lines, the humanities are vulnerable to the degree that their ineliminable element of subjectivity can metastasize, or be perceived to have metastasized. The charge that the humanities have turned away from the world and become a mere solipsistic exercise in personal enrichment is a recurring feature of sharp-elbowed public debates about their relationship with the sciences in particular. Some version of that claim is central to the Matthew Arnold-T.H. Huxley debates about education in the nineteenth century, the C. P. Snow-F. R. Leavis debate about the so-called two cultures of the sciences and the humanities in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Sokal Hoax and the debates it occasioned about post-structuralism and social construction in the 1990s. What tends to be obscured by these debates is that self-understanding, pursued doggedly enough, leads inevitably back to the world of which that self is a part. If the humanities without the sciences (or the social sciences) risk solipsism, their study of meaning-making practices can teach the sciences about the terms they use to study the world. An explicit critical engagement with those terms is in fact the very reason-for-being for multiple humanities sub-disciplines: intellectual history, literature and medicine, the history and philosophy of science, and so on.<\/p>\n

The spectacular failures of the U.S. health system in the face of Covid-19 underscore the necessity for attention to that humanities\u2019 scholarship in understanding what has gone so very wrong here and how we might fix it. The pandemic has given us a searchingly thorough diagnosis of our society: we live in a country riven by stark economic and racial inequality, its state capacity for anything but administering violence hollowed out by decades of disinvestment. In this respect, our world is not so very different from the London of 1665 presented in Defoe\u2019s narrative. Published in 1722 amid the real possibility that another plague epidemic might spread from Marseilles to London, Journal of the Plague Year <\/em>is an attempt by Defoe to persuade the public to support some of the controversial quarantine measures adopted by the Walpole government (which seems to have been paying him at the time). To accomplish this aim, Defoe put the extensive research into the 1665 plague that he, the real author, had made into the mouth of a fictional author imagined as living through the plague. The result is a strange hybrid of public health reporting, history, and fiction, one that, as Margaret Healy puts it, yields \u201ca complex texture of interwoven relationships between the subjective and the social, the private and the collective\u2014the kernel of any novel.\u201d We might also identify this particular kind of interweaving as something like the kernel of the humanities. Let\u2019s hope they survive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: David Sweeney Coombs is associate professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Clemson English Department. He is the author of\u00a0Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science, published in 2019 by University of Virginia Press.\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.) \u201cA dreadful Plague in London was, In the Year Sixty Five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[791,58645,10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-caah","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":111,"date":"2020-07-24T20:39:43","date_gmt":"2020-07-24T20:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/?p=111"},"modified":"2020-07-24T20:41:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T20:41:38","slug":"remembering-chris-dickey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/2020\/07\/24\/remembering-chris-dickey\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Chris Dickey"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: In the summer of 2008, I had just arrived at my destination in Istanbul, connected to wifi, checked my email, and saw that I had a received a message from Will Cathcart, Clemson English, Class of 2005.\u00a0 In it, Will rightly predicted that Russia was about to invade the country of Georgia, and announced that he was boarding a plane to go interview the then President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.\u00a0 The invasion announced the arrival of a multipolar world, and established a pattern Russia would repeat in Crimea, the Ukraine, and Syria.\u00a0 Will, who has lived in and reported from Georgia ever since, was inducted in the Clemson Alumni Council’s Roaring 10<\/a>\u00a0in 2014.\u00a0 His reporting can be seen in CNN, Foreign Policy<\/em>, and, most frequently, seems to me, The Daily Beast<\/em>.\u00a0 There, his editor was “renowned foreign correspondent<\/a>,” Christopher Dickey, whose father, James Dickey, author of Deliverance<\/em>, was a student at Clemson for his first year of college, before serving in World War II (and later graduating from USC).\u00a0 Christopher Dickey, a regular visitor to and speaker at Clemson over the years, passed away on July 16th.\u00a0 In a new post on Lit Hub<\/a>, Will reflects on the loss of a friend, an advocate, and an editor.\u00a0 This is Clemson Humanities Now.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Director’s note: In the summer of 2008, I had just arrived at my destination in Istanbul, connected to wifi, checked my email, and saw that I had a received a message from Will Cathcart, Clemson English, Class of 2005.\u00a0 In it, Will rightly predicted that Russia was about to invade the country of Georgia, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19675,1],"tags":[791,58645,10,5815,836,5959],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities-hub","category-uncategorized","tag-caah","tag-clemson-humanities-now","tag-clemson-university","tag-college-of-architecture-arts-and-humanities","tag-department-of-english","tag-humanities"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/humanitieshub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]