mirror-cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/reflections-mirror-stage/"></div>Two key consequences of so many colleges and university systems scrapping the SAT/ACT requirement are that the numbers of applicants at top schools skyrocketed and suddenly more attention is being paid to the college essay. But the essay, a central element of the application “package,” is arguably more biased than standardized tests. One recent <a href="https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-related-household-income-and-sat-scores-evidence-60000-undergraduate-applications">study</a> shows the college essay is tied to household income. Another critic <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/merit-blake-smith">notes</a> that students from elite schools are trained by admissions coaches to write winning essays on current themes. Not surprisingly, The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/us/covid-college-admissions.html">observes</a> that this admission season the vast number of essays in 2020 focused the pandemic, racial justice, family, and science. And a recent <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-abiding-scandal-of-college-admissions">Chronicle of Higher Ed</a> piece laments that the need to demonstrate leadership and “passion” in the college essay was being replaced by the need to demonstrate “authenticity.”
The college essay is supposed to serve as a window that allows admissions committees to peer into the applicant’s life. But the essay also reflects back to applicants the idealized, curated self desired by colleges. Why not get rid of it altogether? Not only does it seem clear that there is plenty of socioeconomic bias in the process, but also college applicants are clearly expected to present an artificial picture of themselves. Encouraging high school students to transform themselves into a standard narrative — to reflect back the image the college desires — may do more harm than good.
Some decades ago in a <a href="https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Lacan%20Mirror%20Stage.pdf">famous essay</a> called “The Mirror Stage,” the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan theorized that we acquire our sense of self through an encounter with the mirror. The infant or small child sees her reflection, and in an aha! moment, realizes that the roundish shape staring back at her actually is her. Before her encounter with the mirror, the child’s experience is precarious and chaotic, the boundaries between interior and exterior porous and ever shifting. After the mirror, the child thinks, “Oh look! I am coherent, not precarious. Inside, I feel a mess of confused and contradictory desires. But I look much better than I feel. I see no self-doubt. I look good!”
While <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/girard/#H2">René Girard</a>’s theory of mimetic desire (wanting what others want) is newly <a href="https://lukeburgis.com/wanting/">popular</a>, Lacan’s mirror stage is the more apt metaphor for the college application process, even more resonant for students who spent the year staring at reflections of themselves on Zoom or Skype, literally comparing their own reflected faces to the faces of classmates.
<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/#MirStaEgoSub">For Lacan</a>, no literal mirror is required. The “mirror” could be a mother’s eyes, the nurse’s “good boy!” or whatever early external voice (say, a friend of a parent) reflects back to the child a sense of organized, gestalt selfhood. Lacan writes,
<blockquote>It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image — an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect.</blockquote>
That is, when you see yourself in the mirror, you identify with the image presented back to you as an “ideal-I.” You are jubilant, not noticing that this idealized self, this reflection of yourself, is also external to you. Your ego, who you are, stands at some distance, like a GoPro stick.
Before the pandemic, a college-bound teenager might spend months if not years in a counselor’s offices or with expensive coaches working on the application packet, compiling, shaping, and packaging disparate pieces of a life into a coherent whole. Internships, extra-curriculars, and community service activities would be carefully selected and organized for the applicant to appear positive but realistic, likeable but not overly concerned with others’ opinions, courageous but prudent, kind, widely respected, resilient, and intellectually curious.  Athletics and volunteering, while praiseworthy, were the sort of activities the savvy applicant knew she had to take part in precisely because they would make her look good to college admissions committees. External, visible, remarkable attributes matter more than inward, private ones.
Lacan suggests that neuroses may lie ahead for anyone identifying with their ideal-I (i.e., everyone). The mirror stage constructs the ego as a fictional object, outside the self, fundamentally compromised, and productive of limitless neuroses. In the best-case scenario, in the college admissions mirror stage, you merge with the aspirational image you presented. The application process’s organizational tasks may yield the secondary benefit of organizing you. Your better self stares back and imprints itself back on you. What’s the harm?
Lacan points to the tragedy of knowing that the ideal-I is not really the self. Who can live up to such an Ideal-I? Who indeed. In the years after an elite college, many graduates carry around idealized, overly coherent versions of themselves, banishing internal contradictions and striving for a sense of completeness. Occasionally they live up to its standards, but more often, especially in the current economy, they fall short. For some, in this desolate distance between you and your mirror image, imposter syndrome takes hold. For others, it means a lifetime of repressing those strange, wonderful, and unclassifiable aspects of yourself that never made it into your college essay. Worst case scenario, your ego hardens into a fixed bundle of data points recognized by your alma mater, and your only consolation is that she loves you, if an institution can be said to love.
Students who spent months on end staring at themselves may come to a different truth. Perhaps old forms of performative self-presentation no longer matter. This might be good in the long run. Mimetic desire may be preferable to desiring to be what you have told others that you are.
At Sonoma State University, where I am Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, I am glad to see students who are not pre-polished. Sonoma State, like the rest of the Cal State system, does not require an application essay. Many first-year students arrive without having gone through the process of reflection and image-shaping that applicants to elite institutions have. They tend to be more interesting, more unpredictable, and more risk-taking in their choices and ambitions. A greater burden is put on the institution to guide these students in finding their strengths and talents. The responsibility of mirroring falls on both faculty and student affairs professionals; the magnitude of the task may be why elite institutions prefer to outsource it to the application process.
Some of our most focused and driven students are transfer students from California’s exceptional community college system. These students are often well into their 20s or 30s (or beyond) and may have families of their own; their sense of self developed in response to work and life rather than in the crucible of the high school application process. The elite institutions now tossing the SAT, removing the barriers for transfer students, and <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/05/06/princeton-offers-admission-13-transfer-students-third-year-reinstated-program">welcoming more students from the military</a>, finally recognize that a diversity of experiences have an invigorating effect on the student body and campus life. Perhaps they recognize that there is no such thing as an “ideal” applicant, and to pretend that there is one does a disservice to their students and to themselves.
Whatever the reasoning, the elimination of the personal statement should be the next change these institutions make to the application process. The personal statement is the last bastion of an outmoded and limiting conception of “the college student,” one that excludes many of the qualities and experiences that make for a truly diverse student body and risks curtailing the very excellence all academic institutions prize.
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Top image: Paul Seignac, Woman and Child Before a Mirror, 1870s, Oil on panel. The Clark Art Institute, 1955.854.
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Reflections on the Mirror Stage

160501-milnes-marian-anderson-tease_evfico

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/profits-order/"></div>Some weeks ago I had a terrible nightmare: I was trying to preside over a rowdy campus-wide debate about using Robert’s Rules of Order without an alternative to Robert’s Rules to maintain order. Just at the start of the school year, something disgraceful had been discovered about Henry Martyn Robert. Faculty and students wanted the book banned. Such is the dream life of deans in the age of interrogating history.
To my relief, I read the next morning that Robert was an upstanding citizen, according to the most thorough biographical account available, a <a href="https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd_legacy/755/">master’s thesis</a> by George Hendricks. Robert, born in 1837 to a South Carolina family that moved north before the Civil War, graduated from West Point, fought for the Union, built life-saving fortifications for the Army Corps of Engineers, died in 1923, and is buried in Arlington Cemetery. For good measure, Robert’s abolitionist father, Rev. Joseph Thomas Robert, later became the first President of Morehouse College.
On most campuses, boards and committees rely on Robert’s Rules as a matter of standard practice. I’ve long had a copy on my bookshelf, as have many department chairs and faculty members active in governance. I’m a big fan but did not know the book’s Civil War history — how Henry Robert lost control of a raucous dispute about local defense in a New Bedford church in 1863 for lack of a how-to-run-a-meeting rulebook. We’ve all been here. Robert was smart enough to realize that a guide for civil debate would be useful after the war as citizens assembled in town halls and lodges to exercise self-government. So he wrote one. Following multiple rejections from publishers and after paying for the first print run out of his own pocket, Robert finally had his Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies published in 1876 by S.C. Griggs &amp; Company. The price was seventy-five cents. It was an immediate bestseller, with hundreds of thousands sold at the time of Robert’s death. Now in its 11th edition, more than ten million have been sold.
Robert’s Rules of Order (the official title since the 1893 3rd edition) offers “a simple explanation of the methods of organizing and conducting the business of societies, conventions, and other deliberative assemblies.” Like a cookbook, it describes what should be done and in what sequence: calling a meeting to order, introducing business, making motions, debating, voting, forming committees, defining the role of officers, determining a quorum. As I tell students, much of the satisfaction of following Robert’s Rules comes from agreeing about the rules themselves. The groups who find Robert’s Rules most helpful are those who know who they are and generally where they want to go but disagree about how to get there. For these groups, the process of making motions keeps the body in motion but does not fracture it.
Groups that are deeply divided may find that Robert’s Rules exacerbates differences, giving power to the side that knows the rules best. We’ve all been here too. In the 1960s, standard procedural maneuvers by Robert’s Rules experts effected two dramatic shifts in student protest movements: the December 1964 late-evening vote by leaders of Students for a Democratic Society to focus on the Vietnam War and the December 1966 late evening <a href="https://www.sncclegacyproject.org/we-were-sncc/what-we-did">SNCC</a> vote to expel all white members (19-18, with 24 abstentions). Under Robert’s Rules, silence equals consent. In tallying all views, parliamentary procedure helps make clear what a participatory body wants itself to be. Arguably, both SDS and SNCC were defined by these votes.
Robert would have approved. He believed that active political participation by young and old was good for America. Accordingly, he wanted his guidebook to be affordable. He directed his publishers to donate royalties to charities and Baptist medical missions. He practiced what he preached: Robert and his wife Helen were active church members, supporting temperance causes, the YMCA, and shelters for unwed mothers. And he understood by the time of the 4th edition (1915) that his name represented value. Indeed, as a brand name, Robert’s is a “goodwill asset” that earns its owner profits in the form of a price premium over the competition in exchange for the owner’s pledge of essential, consistent quality.
The brand name began to sour for me, however, as I read more deeply into the history of Robert’s Rules. Were the protesters in my dream right after all?  I was dismayed to learn the extent to which Robert’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/books/review/Donadio-t.html">descendants</a> have capitalized on the name, keeping the copyright alive by churning out longer, more <a href="http://www.robertsrules.com/speech.html">complicated</a>, and more expensive editions under the auspices of the Robert’s Rules Association. I was startled to learn that the key figure behind the family moneymaking endeavor was Robert’s daughter-in-law, <a href="https://blog.dar.org/arranging-and-describing-papers-president-general-sarah-corbin-robert">Sarah Corbin Robert</a>, the President-General of the Daughters of the American Revolution who personally <a href="https://www.dar.org/national-society/media-center/news-releases/dar-launches-archival-project-celebrate-80th-anniversary">denied</a> Marian Anderson’s request to sing at Constitution Hall in April, 1939 because it was against the DAR’s “white artists only” rules. None of this appears in Robert’s Rules promotional material.
“In the beginning there were no rules except that all events should be of dignity and refinement and not in contradiction to the ideals of the Society,” Sarah Robert <a href="https://www.dar.org/sites/default/files/26_PGII%20b130f1%20April%201939_Excerpt%20from%20PG%20report%20at%20Congress.pdf">explained</a> to the DAR Continental Conference some weeks after Anderson’s recital was moved to the Lincoln Memorial. “[T]here was never a question of one person or one artist. The only question under discussion was whether in view of all existing conditions an exception could be made in rules of long standing… Conditions are the same as when experience dictated the need of the rule.” Which rule would that be exactly? She does not say. In fact, the “white artist only” rule passed by DAR members in 1932 remained in place until 1952, when Dorothy Maynor was “allowed” to sing at Constitution Hall. For many years the DAR was defined by this vote. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR, understanding that silence equaled consent.
My unease about Sarah Robert’s long shadow increased while reading the failed <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/30/1255/471493/">lawsuit</a> of longtime California State University Northridge President James W. Cleary — co-editor of the vastly enlarged 7th edition, Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised (1970), and the 8th edition (1981) — against the Robert’s Rules Association. Cleary had been summarily dropped from the title page of the 9th edition of Robert’s Rules (1990), retaining the name of Sarah Robert, who died in 1972. Cleary had been an advisor on Robert’s Rules since 1965 and had written 15 of the 20 chapters of the 1970 edition. He learned of his dismissal when he saw the book in print. He had been busy expanding CSU Northridge’s campus and diversifying its growing student body. Robert’s Rules Association is a moneymaking family business, not a participatory democracy; Cleary was not given a vote in the matter. Determined not to acquiesce silently, he voiced his opposition in court.
My dream pointed the way to a different truth: I have admiration for Henry Robert but much less now for Robert’s Rules as a brand name, sullied by the dead hand of his daughter-in-law. I’m ready to advocate on my campus against all post-1915 editions (with apologies to Cleary) in part because of her politics and in part because there are plenty of alternatives. My new favorites are Nancy Sylvester’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/359238/the-complete-idiots-guide-to-roberts-rules-2nd-edition-by-nancy-sylvester/9781615640348/">The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Robert’s Rules</a>, and Alice Sturgis’s The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure, both of which begin with foundational concepts on which parliamentary procedure is based, gesturing back in the simplest of terms to Henry Martyn Robert’s commitment to civic accord and to binding up the nation’s wounds: all members are equal before the law and minority voices must be heard.
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Profits of Order

goldenwest

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/founders-opera/"></div>When will we see full-blown operas of the lives of tech billionaires? Operatic treatments of Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Elizabeth Holmes practically write themselves. Their lives are as sensational as their fortunes, with more than enough power struggles, tragedy, adultery, passion, secrets, and betrayal to go around. No American businessman has been the hero of an opera since Colorado silver baron Horace Tabor, the subject of Douglas Moore’s <a href="https://music.stanford.edu/events/ballad-baby-doe">The Ballad of Baby Doe</a> (1956), whose tragic end involves William Jennings Bryan and a wrong bet on the gold standard. “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s film on Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, might be considered the first tech-start-up rock-opera, with its score by Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor, featuring Edvard Grieg’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44BN4cQssgg">In the Hall of the Mountain King</a>.
I offer this advice freely to John Adams and Peter Sellers, who are still trying to fix their ho-hum California gold rush opera, <a href="https://www.earbox.com/girls-golden-west/">Girls of the Golden West</a>, <a href="https://www.sfcv.org/reviews/san-francisco-opera/john-adamss-girls-of-the-golden-west-fails-to-find-the-mother-lode">panned</a> when it premiered in San Francisco in 2017 as “directionless and unmemorable.” It offered itself as a “MeToo” opera about the plight of marginalized Californians past and present, featuring tales of women, Native Americans, and miners of color facing abuse and terror. Their slightly revised version opened in Amsterdam last month, still bent on rejecting “all the rosy myths you’ve heard about the Golden State. It is revisionist — or, rather, corrective — American history, a tale of men turning feral as they swarmed California like an invasive species.” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/arts/music/girls-of-the-golden-west-review-amsterdam.html?action=click&amp;module=Features&amp;pgtype=Homepage">It failed too</a>.
Lots of people didn’t get rich in the gold rush and haven’t gotten rich yet. But audiences want a good story, and Alex Gibney’s recent HBO documentary on Theranos founder Holmes, <a href="https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-inventor-out-for-blood-in-silicon-valley">The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley</a>, would make a better opera than Girls of the Golden West, especially with Holmes’s rich baritone. If Adams’ and Sellars’ goal is to be relevant to the current moment, why not balance dirges of disempowerment with a few high notes of success? While the stories of the voiceless are important, why not also give us a glimpse of the young dungarees entrepreneur Levi Strauss, whose company is just now going public? Or “<a href="https://www.edcgov.us/landing/Living/Stories/pages/wheelbarrow_johnny.aspx">Wheelbarrow Johnny” Studebaker</a>, who made a mint selling carts to miners then jump-started a powerful family brand that lasted a century? Or Philip Danforth Armour, who made $8000 building sluices, went back to the Midwest to start a meatpacking business that provoked Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle? Or Domenico Ghiradelli, who came straight from Peru to open one of the earliest shops selling goods — including sweets — to miners? Or <a href="https://www.wellsfargohistory.com">Henry Wells and Williams Fargo</a> who saw a transportation future in California over the objection of their board of directors at American Express?
For my money, Adams and Sellars should simply start their libretto at the beginning, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutter">John Sutter</a>: good looking, self-made farmer and rancher, visionary entrepreneur, raconteur, legendary host. By 1848 Sutter was internationally famous for his wealth and for his role in attempts to rescue the Donner Party. But when gold was discovered on his property he couldn’t pivot. His property was overrun, fences destroyed, streams diverted, and farmland ruined.
He should have had a bigger moat.
In ten years Sutter had lost almost everything. His downfall was swift, tragic, and instructive for any Silicon Valley founder today.
Sutter — a rich man railing against disruption — is the tragic central character of the California gold rush. Only opera would do his story justice today. The French author Blaise Cendras penned a bestselling 1926 novel, Sutter’s Gold, which praised Sutter’s doomed vision for a peaceful, prosperous, pastoral California. William Faulkner spent years on a film treatment, as did Soviet filmmaker <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25157987?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Sergei Eisenstein</a>. Both were ambivalent about capitalism and innovation; neither could get financial backing for their projects. Universal Studios came out with a treacly version in 1936, which bombed. Sutter’s Gold was Universal’s biggest loss for decades.
But Europeans loved the Sutter story. The 1936 German film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027834/">Der Kaiser von Kalifornien</a>, was a runaway hit, winning the Mussolini Cup at the Venice Film Festival for best foreign film. Adolf Hitler loved it. Considered the first Nazi Western, complete with panoramas of mountains and deserts, Sutter is a visionary superman who smokes peace pipes with Native elders and builds a prosperous “New Helvetia” until he is ruined by gold diggers (who are characterized, in the film, as Jews).
In America, Sutter’s name sank into oblivion. Adams and Sellars don’t even mention him. Instead they focus on Louise Amelia Clappe, a privileged, literary young woman just arrived from the East Coast, a strange choice for “woke” operatic intentions. Clappe was rebounding from a love affair, newly married to a sickly doctor who apparently couldn’t even perform a proper amputation. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=lQ6ekLo9SHEC">Clappe’s dramatic letters home</a>, the basis for Sellars’s libretto, were written with the hope that they’d be read to (or forwarded to) her former lover. She missed the broader narrative. She even ignored <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/14/2-3/383/34602/ALL-THAT-GLITTERSTrans-ing-California-s-Gold-Rush">the rich cross-dressing, all-male camp culture</a> that would come to characterize San Francisco. Girls of the Golden West is mostly a litany of her complaints, in C flat minor.
Most of today’s entrepreneur-founder stories have gold-rush analogues. The tale of the Chilean miners, featured in Girls of the Golden West, was a new-tech success story turned tragic. The Chileans, some of the earliest to arrive, began sifting gold in dry areas using mercury, beating out the amateurs who were swirling creek gravel in pans and picking out specks that glittered. The Chileans were tortured and driven out not because they were dark skinned but because they were better than everyone else. Soon everyone was using the Chilean methods.
The California gold rush was a series of disruptions: new technologies, new forms of payment, and new communication networks. It brought riches to enterprising young men ready to risk everything they owned. It was also tragic, catastrophic, heartbreaking, and endlessly repeating. The literal gold rush gave rise to the metaphor.
The California gold rush clearly needs an opera. While the Klondike gold rush of 1896 gave us Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang and Charlie Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush, all we have from the California gold rush are two short stories, Mark Twain’s “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County” and Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Both take place decades after the rush and neither is about getting rich.
Who will write the first Founder&#8217;s Opera? Walter Isaacson might look into selling the rights to his biography of <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Steve-Jobs/Walter-Isaacson/9781451648539">Steve Jobs</a>, whose signature look famously included Levi’s 501 jeans.
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Why Not a Founder’s Opera?

republicanclub

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/republican-club-teachable-moment/"></div>How might an art professor talk with students about <a href="https://andythomas.com/product/the-republican-club/">“The Republican Club,”</a> Andy Thomas’s painting of Donald Trump surrounded by notable Republican presidents of years past? Is it any good?  What if a student painted it?  I put the questions to my Sonoma State University colleague, Clea Felien, who trained at <a href="http://theatelier.org/">The Atelier</a>, a 19th Century French Academic portrait painting school with a direct lineage to Jacques Louis David, and studied with Cyd Wicker, who has painted <a href="http://cydwicker.com/portraits.html">portraits</a> of Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton for the Presidential Museum in Odessa, Texas. Is it possible to talk about the painting in the classroom without talking about politics?   
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HOLLIS ROBBINS: What do you make of the painting? 
CLEA FELIEN: Well, to start off, the composition of this painting is good. I’ll have to give it that. The artist is using classic historic rules of composition. You see the painting has numerous ‘golden triangles,’ a composition rule for painters which takes the viewer’s eye in a triangular route around the painting to break the rectangle of the canvas. A triangle moves your eye all around the whole picture.
So the painter knows what he’s doing…
Yes. He’s making us look, making our eyes move from figure to figure. Look at the front row of men in dark suitcoats moving from the right with Richard Nixon to the left to Bush Jr. and up the side of the canvas to Bush Sr. There is a blue diagonal line which brings your eye from the bottom left of canvas to the upper right through the shirts of Bush Jr., then Ronald Reagan, then Gerald Ford and then landing at small blue square in the upper right corner. And look at the beige diagonal from the vest of Teddy Roosevelt in the upper right corner to Dwight Eisenhower to the soda near Bush Jr.’s hand. These diagonals are countered by the vertical poles that Ford and Bush Sr. are leaning on. And do you see the white shirts of Bush Sr., Trump and Roosevelt? They create an inverted golden triangle.
And it’s all meant to emphasize Trump?
Absolutely. The red ties from Trump to Roosevelt to the guy in the way back [Coolidge] emphasize Trump as the central figure. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Roosevelt are all leaning toward Trump, further emphasizing Trump. And I have to say that the rendering of the figures for a student is good. The faces have value and color that is believable. Trump’s posture is very straight and upright, the only one in the painting that way. Trump is the only figure in the white shirt with no coat. There is a soft-focus party off in the distance. Everyone is smiling. There are teeth showing on everyone but Trump. Teeth are hard to do well. For Trump, teeth showing could be a sign of being too casual or weak, guard down.
So would this be an A painting, for an undergraduate? What would you tell the student?
Well, the problems with this painting are not its composition or palette or even its rendering. I’d point out that the painting has an overall saccharine sensibility. All the men have similar shaped heads and bodies. All the skin tones are the same. There is no depth in any of the presidents. This is a novelty illustration of a hypothetical moment.
I see what you mean. Nobody’s face shows any trace of crisis or a tough decision about going into battle.
Exactly. The difference between art and illustration is that art challenges you to think for yourself, and illustration tells you what to think, gives you the answers. Art presents questions and digs into cultural moments, like Picasso’s Guernica, or David’s Death of Marat. Art does not anesthetize the viewer. Art is a form of communication that allows for the viewer&#8217;s interpretation. With these characters the painting should be a novel, not a cartoon strip.
There’s no room for interpretation.
What’s to interpret or question? The painting says everything is under control. But art is not about control. Art is about moving the culture forward, about the preverbal understanding of historical moments.  Good art inspires critical thinking about social and cultural moments.
So what’s the appropriate political critique for the classroom?  If a student painted it, your concern can’t be that the figures belong to one political party or that it hangs in Donald Trump’s White House.
That is a little trickier.  On the one hand, this painting is perfect for the current tenor of the administration.  It is telling us to be calm, everything is under control. Have a drink and relax, a Coke and a smile. One way the painting does this is by adhering to rules of what is called &#8220;Truth and Beauty.&#8221; Recent art history has decided that there are certain &#8220;truths&#8221; in art, these being accurate rendering of humans, landscapes etc. &#8220;Beauty&#8221; usually refers to attractive young white people or a pretty landscape. So, on the other hand, &#8220;Truth and Beauty&#8221; is political. It is in fact reflective of what Adolf Hitler liked in painting. Consider the show <a href="https://legionofhonor.famsf.org/exhibitions/truth-and-beauty-pre-raphaelites-and-old-masters">Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters</a>, the recently ended show at The Legion of Honor in San Francisco. These are fantastic paintings, by fantastic painters. However, the painters are all old white men, and the paintings exemplify wealthy white people. This is not everyone’s version of truth or everyone’s ideal of beauty.
So it’s a little like American history textbooks that leave out details about slavery or Native American genocide?
Exactly. It is also important to note that Andy Thomas painted almost the exact same painting of Obama with all the Democrat presidents. The only difference here, and this is the very important part, the interesting part, and I think the part that actually is art, is that Trump put it up in the Oval office. This is what we need to think about. Trump is being honest about who he is and what he wants us to think and feel about: nothing.
The art is the art of nothingness?
Yes. The painting is a novelty illustration, a happy, calm, saccharine illustration of a moment where nothing happens. There is nothing challenging in the painting’s subjects the content of the painting or in the way it is painted. The artist has done this before for the Democrats, so he has no real party affiliation. This image was made for posters and placemats and other novelty items. But President Donald Trump has decided this is art worthy of display in the Oval Office.  By contrast, President Obama chose Kehinde Whiley to paint his official White House Portrait, Michelle Obama chose Amy Sherald. These artists are serious contemporary artists with an abundance of content critical thinking and context in their brush stroke, paint application, composition, content, style etc. And Trump chose the placemat illustration.
What about the comparison some make to Norman Rockwell, whose work at one time was seen as saccharine and unsophisticated?
I love Norman Rockwell! Norman Rockwell was a brilliant painter technically. He was considered an illustrator because his message was always very literal. He was political, of course. Consider <a href="http://www.nrm.org/thinglink/text/ProblemLiveWith.html">&#8220;The Problem We All Live With,”</a> his painting of Ruby Bridges. But Rockwell was technically a much better painter than Andy Thomas. The Trump painting is soft focus, sanitized, fantasy, with a predictable composition. Norman Rockwell might look old fashioned to some people but he offered new composition and subject matter strategies. We don’t see that here.
So what would you tell your student?
That art has politics that aren’t party politics — though it certainly looks like they’re having a party here.
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“The Republican Club”: A Teachable Moment

stanford-junipero

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/reactionary-renaming-stanford-english-language-politics/"></div>Last month, Stanford University announced its <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/2018/09/13/naming-report/">plan to remove from campus most references to Junipero Serra</a>, the Spanish Franciscan priest who founded nine Catholic missions in California between 1769 and 1784.
The decision was not unexpected, given recent national opposition to statues memorializing figures from America’s violent past, even in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/cal-state-prospector-pete-statue.html">California</a>. But I have mixed feelings about the removal of Serra’s name. The underlying politics seem more reactionary than progressive. Junipero Serra was no saint, although he was in fact canonized, amidst controversy, by Pope Francis in 2015, as the <a href="https://carmelmission.org/visit/st-junipero-serra/">first Hispanic saint in the United States</a>.
By removing the name of a Catholic Spanish Californian and replacing it with a Protestant English-speaking figure — Jane Stanford — the university threatens to further the dominant national narrative that English is the language of American history. As much as I support the policy of honoring women, the erasure of Serra’s name means less public attention to the Spanish-speaking foundations of the United States at a moment when debates about Hispanic immigration and citizenship are at the forefront.
Many Americans outside of California have little understanding of the role Spanish explorers and missionaries had in settling the western part of the continent. While Serra biographer Gregory Orfalea asserts that Serra is “<a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/hungry-souls">virtually a household name in California</a>, where all fourth graders are required to study him and the missions,” American history textbooks generally minimize the nation’s Spanish-speaking colonial past. Nor do more populist histories correct this slight: Serra’s name does not even appear in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People (1997), or even Jill Lepore’s new, nearly 1000-page These Truths: The History of the United States (2018).
It is certainly true, as the Advisory Committee on Renaming Junipero Serra Features <a href="https://campusnames.stanford.edu/pdf/Serra-Report.pdf">states</a>, that “the mission system subjected Native Americans to great violence and, together with other colonial activities, had devastating effects on California’s Native American tribes and communities” and that Serra “was a zealous proponent of the mission system and its leader in California.”
And as Benjamin Madley describes in An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale UP 2016), native Californians were seen by missionaries as “pagans and gente sin razón, or people without reason,” to be transformed “into Catholic workers by replacing indigenous religious, cultures, and traditions with Hispanic ones.” Spanish soldiers preyed on Native women and Serra endeavored — but regularly failed — to protect them.
But on the Atlantic coast, what founding American figure isn’t equally implicated in the destruction of native culture even if most lived and wrote long after native populations on the Atlantic coast were decimated, destroyed, and driven west? What if in the 1750s Benjamin Franklin had somehow found himself on the other side of the continent? Recently reading Orfelea’s Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California (2014), I saw Serra as a kind of Spanish Franklin, playing the role of influencer, community builder, and power broker during the exact same years that Franklin was influencing, building, and brokering on the East.
The witty and energetic Junipero Serra (1713-1784) was born in Europe, joined the Franciscan order in his twenties and worked as a university professor before volunteering to become a missionary in Mexico in his thirties. Serra was so successful in establishing mission churches in the 1750s that he was sent to Baja on the Pacific coast and subsequently north to California to establish missions and baptize native communities from San Diego to Monterey. It was on the basis of Serra’s importance as a founding father of California that Stanford named so many campus features after him.
The witty and energetic Ben Franklin (1706-1790) arrived in Philadelphia, in 1723, after most of the native Delaware and Shawnee population had been killed or urged West by gunpoint or bribery. For three decades Franklin had a relatively conflict-free stage to establish himself as a printer, scientist, and community builder. But an uprising in 1755 and 1756, in the context of the French and Indian wars, required military action. Franklin’s duty, as he describes in his Autobiography, was to “take charge of our North-western frontier, which was infested by the enemy, and provide for the defense of the inhabitants by raising troops and building a line of forts.” While the 560 armed men under Franklin’s command saw no direct action, he describes deadly skirmishes with casualties on both sides all around him.
In short, one of these two men went into battle against Native Americans and it was not Junipero Serra.
The Stanford Advisory Committee acknowledges that larger structural forces were more to blame for the devastation of native communities and cultures than Junipero Serra himself: “Historical references indicate that he combined piety, self-sacrifice, a love for Native Americans, and a religious passion for their salvation with strict and punitive paternalism, sometimes moderated by significant acts of leniency.”
Meanwhile Walter Isaacson, in his highly praised <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=L64OOJGaCKIC&amp;">biography</a>, all but ignores Franklin’s role as an armed combatant. “Franklin enjoyed his stint as a frontier commander,” Isaacson writes, focusing on Franklin’s efforts to get militiamen to go to worship services and his interest in the marriage customs of nearby Moravians. “After seven weeks on the frontier, Franklin returned to Philadelphia.”
So while the California Mission system was devastating to native culture and that the Spanish military presence was genocidal, perhaps Serra’s life and work ought to be evaluated in comparison to the Colonial-era Native American experience on the Atlantic coast. The devastation of native communities by English speaking colonists was arguably more brutal.
Accordingly, I was particularly disappointed in Jill Lepore’s omission of Serra, given her scholarship on the<a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/publications/name-war-king-philip’s-war-and-origins-american-identity"> Indian Wars of New England</a> and on Jane Franklin, Benjamin’s sister.
Erasing Serra’s name because of the broader narrative of Spanish cruelty toward indigenous people in the New World lessens English responsibility for Native American genocide. The Stanford committee might note how anti-Spanish sentiment was deployed a century ago by Stephen Austin, the “founder” of Anglo-American Texas (and whose name still graces universities and office buildings today), to describe “a war of barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.”
As the historian Tony Horowitz described twelve years ago in an article for The New York Times, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/opinion/09horwitz.html">Immigration — and the Curse of the Black Legend</a>,” erasing the Spanish history of America is a matter of “national amnesia” that is “glaring and supremely paradoxical at a moment when politicians warn of the threat posed to our culture and identity by an invasion of immigrants from across the Mexican border.”
The genocide of Native Americans is a collective guilt that is shared intersectionally, from the Jamestown settlers to Calamity Jane to the African American Buffalo Soldiers, now honored annually at <a href="https://www.blackpressusa.com/57th-annual-buffalo-soldiers-memorial-ceremony/">West Point</a>. Perhaps Stanford might reconsider its decision and ask: whose politics is being served by the erasure of Junipero Serra’s name and the privileging of English language history?
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A Reactionary Renaming: Stanford and English Language Politics

8711566355_f79fbe7304_k

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/dancing-chains/"></div>A prediction: China will produce some of the world’s most interesting scholarship on American literature within a generation. A secondary effect of this production will be a boost for the humanities, if from a most unexpected quarter.
I just returned from my third trip to China since 2011 lecturing to English language scholars about American and African American literature. This time, after giving five talks on five different campuses in China over the course of a week and a half, talking with scores of students and scholars with nearly perfect English studying American authors from Melville to Ellison, Poe to Plath, I am convinced that Chinese scholars pose a real challenge to the academic study of our own literature.
Maybe I am overstating the case. But we are in their gaze. And as Wesleyan president Michael Roth <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/02/22/college-president-reflects-liberal-education-china-and-us-opinion">noted a few months ago</a>, Chinese students are asking better and more interesting questions than we are about academia and academic subjects. Free from the invisible social constraints of academic norms — the trends and fashions of academic study — young Chinese scholars are writing with wild abandon about Sidney Sheldon, slave narratives, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Mitchell, “Chick Lit,” and Michael Chabon. I met a scholar studying Neil Simon and Toni Morrison, a combination for which I can’t imagine a supportive dissertation committee here.
Systematic Chinese study of American literature is nearly 50 years old. Since 1978, Chinese textbooks on American literature have presented to students works by Stowe, Mailer, and Doctorow, as explicitly critical of capitalism and sympathetic to the oppressed. Two of the first American works of fiction translated into Chinese were Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hemingway’s “The Killers” for reasons that are obvious. More recent studies feature Stephen King, Philip Roth, and zombie movies as critiques of American culture and politics. And while English language essays by Chinese scholars sometimes feature jarring word choices (<a href="http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/sll/article/download/7974/8824">a recent essay on The Great Gatsby</a> describes Fitzgerald as attending “a noble school for the wealthy kids”), such choices are rarely actually wrong.
The Chinese scholars I met know their literary theory, too, and think about theory and culture in refreshingly relevant ways. During a lecture to film students at Nanjing University, a grad student, drawing on Foucault and Levi-Strauss, asked about the scholarship on class politics in Quentin Tarantino’s films. I heard a talk at Zheijiang Gongshang University on Mikhail Bakhtin’s applicability to the African American call-and-response tradition. A young professor who just finished a book about orphans as “freethinkers” in Mary Shelley’s novels, asked about theories of orphans in African American literature. At Dianzi University last summer I met a student writing on the resonance of Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim to a culture in which so many people have no siblings. At a foreign language high school lecture on American Westerns, after I ended with a clip from Red Planet, a student asked if today’s Americans would ever see themselves as Native Americans after a Martian invasion and whether anyone had written on the subject. I laughed and said I didn’t think so.
The Chinese are fascinated with our scholarship, not just our texts, and are delighted with tales of “political correctness” on America college campuses leaving so many topics unexamined.
Unlike the grim MLA conference in January of this year, there is no gloom and doom about jobs. Pretty much every Chinese scholar studying English or American literature will find a post. If they are not as well paid as American star professors they are at least much more secure than the growing American adjunct labor force. Young academics see that there’s a future in being an expert on the stories Americans tell about themselves.
Of course academic life in China has its own severities and worries. The stories of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/09/cambridge-university-press-headed-for-showdown-with-china-over-censorship">government censorship</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/us/xi-student-protest-china.html">self-silencing</a> are alarming. Within a few days of arriving I heard the phrase “<a href="https://journalofchinesesociology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40711-017-0053-6">dancing with chains</a>” to describe the situation of Chinese scholars working in the social sciences on projects that may be uncomfortable or inconvenient to the Chinese government.
I am on a leash, one scholar said. I can only stray so far. I will write up my data accurately, said a political scientist, but my tone has to be right. Another scholar said she could no longer teach classes on feminist theory. The knowledge industry has to support the public good and must unite, not divide.
But these are old conversations about scholarship, politics, and art. The phrase “dancing with chains” (or “dancing in chains”) itself is over a century old: Friedrich Nietzsche used it in 1880 to describe constraining conventions that limit artistic innovation. The Chinese poet Wen Yiduo <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH27WWMbd9Y">used it in the 1930s</a> to suggest that constraints provoke more imaginative art. The entire history of African American literature since the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley is a matter of negotiating real chains as well as metaphorical ones. This was the topic that brought me to China, in fact.
My keynote presentation at the International Conference on Ethnic Writings and 2nd International Conference on Jewish Studies at Zhejiang Gongshang University was about the establishment of Black Studies as an academic discipline. There are two foundational narratives, I explained: one, the student protests in San Francisco and across the country advocating for university programs to study the ongoing history of peoples of African descent; and two, the decision by McGeorge Bundy and the Ford Foundation to underwrite this endeavor. I drew on Nathaniel Huggins’s <a href="https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/1748/2007-inclusive_scholarship.pdf">remarkable 1985 assessment</a> of results, “Afro-American Studies: A Report to the Ford Foundation,” to describe the field as partly academic, partly social, partly political, and always convenient for institutions concerned about campus racial diversity. Politics outside the classroom have always structured discussion inside the classroom and among academics.
For me, the absence of identity politics in China is liberating. Chinese scholars do not care about my background or ancestors, only my arguments and my evidence. I’m seen as objective. During my talk I remarked that two Jewish scholars whose talks included old photographs of family members killed in the Holocaust were engaging in a very American form of scholarship. American eyebrows shot up, but not Chinese. The Chinese scholars sharing the panel could not — and would not — make a personal appeal during an academic presentation. An “unspoken assumption” of Chinese interest in Holocaust studies, a prominent Chinese scholar remarked, is that while comparisons to the Nanjing Massacre may be made, one must be warily respectful of American scholars’ emotional attachment to their topic. The personal attachments that are the norm in American academia are absent in China.
“Do you really think the politics of personal identity has no place in academia?” an American graduate student challenged during the Q&amp;A. The phenomenon of aligning one’s ethnicity, gender, gender orientation, religion, class, et cetera, to one’s scholarship is only a few decades old. It is too early to tell if this new subjectivity is normal or good but it should be noticed that China is taking a very different path. Chinese scholars dancing with chains to negotiate strict state limitations on their own academic freedom are keeping a close eye on the self- and socially-imposed constraints binding American scholars.
I was peppered by Chinese graduate students after my talk for examples of fear limiting academic discussion in America. I mentioned the student protesters protesting a humanities course at Reed College in Oregon <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/the-surprising-revolt-at-reed/544682/">last year</a>.
I also mentioned an earlier University of Minnesota controversy after the Charlie Hebdo murders. A poster announcing an academic discussion had featured a fairly benign cartoon drawing with CENSORED stamped on it. Some students complained. A months-long formal university <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/05/charlie-hebdo-censorship-controversy-at-the-university-of-minnesota/?utm_term=.e08535766244">investigation followed</a> that found no wrongdoing but cautioned faculty to be careful about what subjects should be publicized. Ah, “dancing with chains,” one student said, and everyone laughed. The Chinese can’t get enough of these stories.
Those arguing for the uselessness of a university education should recognize that American literature is quite obviously useful to the Chinese. I am brought back to the foundations of why we study literature and history in the first place: to understand a culture and a country. The Chinese scholars studying ethnic and minority literature specifically are interested in questions of what constitutes or separates a culture and whether courses devoted to specific literatures brings people together or drives them apart. These are questions worth asking and what the Chinese are learning from the American experience is grim.
Chinese scholars are close-reading our cultural texts and our scholarship from a critical distance, and we might feel the sting of being pinned to cardboard as objects of study. And yet the phenomenon of another nation’s interest in our literature might offer the best argument for the relevance of the humanities for those who don’t see why literary studies is vitally important to national well being. We would do well to take notice.
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Dancing with Chains

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence

Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage

Hollis Robbins is dean of humanities at the University of Utah.&nbsp;Her most recent book is <a href="https://ugapress.org/book/9780820357645/forms-of-contention/">Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition</a> (2020). Her previous book, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305/305047/the-portable-nineteenth-century-african-american-women-writers/9780143105992.html">The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers</a> (Penguin, 2017), co-edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr., was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017. She can be followed on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/anecdotal">@Anecdotal</a>.

Hollis Robbins

Poetry, Biography, and the Unknowable: On Two New Books About Phillis Wheatley

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn

Biography &amp; Autobiography

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

Examining Phillis Wheatley

Watermelon Nights

Interconnected Lives: On Greg Sarris’s “Watermelon Nights”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Hollis Robbins is dean of humanities at the University of Utah.&nbsp;Her most recent book is <a href="https://ugapress.org/book/9780820357645/forms-of-contention/">Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition</a> (2020). Her previous book, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305/305047/the-portable-nineteenth-century-african-american-women-writers/9780143105992.html">The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers</a> (Penguin, 2017), co-edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr., was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017. She can be followed on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/anecdotal">@Anecdotal</a>.