BIBELOTS

bibelot: an attractive or curious trinket; a miniature book otherwise known as random musings on history, Britain, sports, the Caribbean, culture, and academia by christienna fryar cdfryar.com

[cfryar]

The SATCat20 Project, Season 1, Episodes 6-8

Another batch of season 1 episodes:

Episode 6 secret sex, July 12, 1998 The bus dress episode!

Carrie goes on her first date with Big, wearing the dress she’s photographed in for a bus advertisement (the one that rolls by her in the opening credits). After much friend chat about whether someone should have sex on a first date, she has sex on the first date then bumps into a friend at a hidden-away Chinese restaurant, who’s trying to keep his date with a cheesemaker

More inadvertent foreshadowing/problematic  Charlotte has a tryst with a Hasidic artist, which she refuses to tell her friends about because, per her, she can’t get serious with a Jewish man. Funny that.

The Big problem returns I don’t like Big. And I’m of course watching all of this bringing knowledge of the full series run and two movies plus 15 years of adulthood under my belt, so I know this won’t get any better. That said, Carrie’s insecurities are rendered so well here and are so relatable.

Episode 7 the monogamists, July 19, 1998

In hindsight, it’s clear that Miranda Hobbes is the single greatest character of Sex and the City. (Charlotte York is the middle-distant second.) But part of why she has the reputation for casual viewers of being an unappealing harpy is that the show doesn’t yet have a handle on what makes her so great. This episode’s storyline with Skipper—she sees him with a new girlfriend, calls him up for what she intends to be a casual thing, he thinks they’re going to be together forever—is a case in point. Miranda wasn’t cruel or naive. She’s the backbone of the show, and really the sooner we get to Steve, the better.

Classic SATC banter

Carrie: Well no because that would mean that everything that he ever said that I interpreted as sincere is subject to interpretation and in that case what I perceive as his feelings for me may only really be reflected projections of my feelings for him.

Miranda: What?

Classic, made all the better because how perfectly it captures overanalysis about romance among friends, especially among women.

Episode 8 three’s a crowd, July 26, 1998

There’s another way it’s clear the show is still trying to sort out how invested we get in the arcs of Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda. Carrie’s story explores this episode’s theme (threesomes) metaphorically: the crowd is her, Big, and the knowledge that he had an ex-wife he hadn’t mention. For Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda, the threesomes are more literal: Charlotte’s boyfriend of the week wants a threesome. Samantha’s sleeping with a married man whose wife becomes willing to have a threesome out of desperation to save her marriage. Miranda doesn’t want to have a threesome but wants to be wanted for one. These three arcs all end in this episode, while Carrie’s continues. That’s not an unusual pattern for SATC, but it’s one the show will start to breaking up in Season 2, unless we consider Skipper and Miranda a multi-episode arc. Which I don’t.

Yup, it’s the ‘90s Carrie’s smoking is still so jarring. Here, it appears in her pitch to Big’s wife of a children’s book for adults about magic cigarettes to Big’s wife.

Dated tech alert  Three-way calling on the landline, which Samantha has to do to juggle the married couple whose relationship is unraveling because she’s involved.

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The SATCat20 Project Season 1, Episodes 3-5

Already I’ve failed, but now back on track.

Episode Three bay of married pigs, June 21, 1998 The subject matter of this episode is the strongest so far: the reality of life in your 30s, where many/most people are married, and that changes how friendships work and the tenor of dating. Carrie’s take on this feels too antagonistic, too much about “enemy camps” rather than the shifting dynamics of friendship through life changes. But the way her friends who were faux-breezy about marriage used a random lunch to set Carrie up felt real. Not the set up itself, but the idea that married friends often start thinking of their single friends—especially those who are single, as in not in a relationship, not simply not married—as necessarily missing something.

Sharpest quote of this episode

Carrie: I had just experienced single-bashing for the new millennium. I was no longer even considered a person. I was now an egg farm.

Mid-range problem I’m torn on the Miranda plot line: this is probably the best handling of lesbian women the show will have in its run, but that’s not saying much. Ultimately Miranda comes clean to one of her firm’s partners that she wasn’t in a relationship with Sid, the woman she met at the office softball game. But still, this isn’t great.

Keywords in the SATC lexicon Was this the first use of “fabulous”? It might not be, but Carrie’s use of it in the opening vignette was the first one that drew my attention.

Wins No Big.

Episode Four valley of the twenty-something guys, June 28, 1998 The last episode was in part a success because no awkward Big-Carrie banter. To make up for that, apparently, this episode starts with him, pitting his fortysomething self with twentysomethings.

Cameo whose career has yet to blow up Timothy Olyphant is Sam, a twentysomething Carrie dates. The plot’s not interesting enough to recount.

QOTE

Carrie: Men in their forties are like a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle: tricky, complicated, and you’re never really sure you got the right answer.

Triumphs It’s remarkable how quickly SATC establishes the rapport among the quartet of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda. Their conversations are almost always the spark of these episodes, and while it’s easy to look back on the show as not that revolutionary (because, as it turns out the 1990s weren’t that amazing), the taxicab conversation about anal sex still stands out as a moment the show was legitimately pushing boundaries of what women could talk about on television.

Miscellaneous One question that was prominent in the mid-2000s with shows like Alias and Lost was how much had their show runners planned their mysteries out in advance. While not as essential a question for SATC, there’s a clue that there was no long-term arc, at least not for Samantha, who dramatically “gave up twentysomethings then and there.” Yeah, up until Smith Jerrod.

Dated tech alert  calling answering machines/voicemails/anything/anyone from a club payphone.

Episode Five the power of female sex, July 5, 1998

Here’s to… The Balzac host and her fascinators

Series-level elephant in the room I’d forgotten that we get an early hint that Carrie’s lifestyle outstrips her actual salary, a major point that will start to rankle as the series goes on. Her card’s declined while she’s buying shoes, and her acquaintance Amalita swoops in with her boyfriend’s card. She tosses bills in the trash, tries to skip nights out because she can’t afford it, mentions she’s broke to a date, “alludes to the fact that [she] was a bit cash-poor these days.” …

This episode is fine. Unremarkable but mostly inoffensive, with our first strong glimpse of how differently Miranda and Samantha think about women, sex, power, and money.

[cfryar]

The SATCat20 Project Season 1, Episode 2

models and mortals, June 14, 1998

The pilot set the tone, established the core four friendship, and introduced Big. Episode 2 gets down to business, moves to Sunday nights, and presents its standard structure. Carrie writes columns, has rapid-fire conversations with her friends, and gets flustered every time Big shows up.

Surprisingly still relevant 

Miranda: “We should just admit that we live in a culture that promotes impossible standards of beauty.” Carrie: “Yeah, except men think they’re possible.”

“I guess this could be relevant to some crowds, but not to this black woman academic in her 30s”  I don’t quite want to say that nobody struggles to get dates because men in their 30s are going for models, but yeah, this is a niche problem that I can’t get too interested in.

Major problem #1: Winking and nodding at major, criminal violations of privacy Gabriel Macht played Barkley, the man who taped his sexual encounters with models without their consent. (And honestly, until a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have recognized Macht, but recently I’ve been marathoning Suits. Thanks, royal wedding!) Here’s a man creating an “art installation” for his own pleasure out of dozens of VHS tapes he’s made without the knowledge of the women he’s sleeping with, and the show mainly just winks. If Carrie’s horrified, it’s only fleeting. She’s fascinated. She does warn Samantha, who mainly views this as an amusing quirk. She chooses to be taped, sure, but unsurprisingly the episode lets Barkley off entirely too easily. SATC is pre-social media, so part of what’s changed is the sense that now these images would not be confined to Barkley’s studio sculpture of box TVs. But criminal violations of privacy are criminal violations of privacy.

Major problem #2: Big Big is aloof, weird, and cryptic. He just pops up here and then at events, creepily talking about how he’s read her column. But the writers are savvy and throw down the one line that will keep us invested in Big for years. 

“But the thing is, after a while you just want to be with the one who makes you laugh.”

Dated tech for laughs alert  enormous cell phones, enormous box tvs, enormous shoulder-rest camcorders.

[cfryar]

The SATCat20 Project: Season 1, Episode 1, sex and the city

Twenty years ago today (June 6), Sex and the City premiered. I started watching about halfway through its run, but like almost everyone who loved the show in its original run, I’ve had the following experience: mid-marathoning SATC years later, you get to a favorite episode, and you think, “yikes, the politics of this are BAAAAAAAAD.” As we’re learning, the 1990s were much worse than we thought they were, and so much of SATC does not hold up.

So the ambitious plan is to write up short reviews on the twentieth anniversary of each episode’s airdate. (*cue my laughter that this will be a thing I’ll accomplish when I already don’t have time for it now*)

It opens on Elizabeth from England, a journalist whose suitcases don’t have wheels. But funny enough, since this is a series about how little SATC holds up, Elizabeth’s problem is surprisingly relevant: she’s been ghosted on.

This first episode had a lot of work to do, as all pilots do. It also has the baggage of the obnoxious and constant breaking of the fourth wall, as well as the interviewing of random men on climbing walls. It also has to introduce Big, and all I can muster is just an enormous eye roll. I’m not a fan.

Major problem #1: we’re about to spend an enormous amount of time with Carrie Bradshaw, but she’s not really that great a person, and the show doesn’t know this. Carrie decides to set up Skipper Johnston with Miranda, even though she knows Miranda will hate him. Carrie’s in her 30s, somewhere between 31 and 35 (I think). So for the first time, I’m watching SATC from start to finish older than Carrie is. Mid-thirties is a few decades past setting up people with people they’ll hate. Why hasn’t she aged out of this? 

This week in unexpectedly bad 2018 resonances:

Samantha, pointing at Big: Ya see that guy? He’s the next Donald Trump, except he’s younger and much better looking. 

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The law of mortality in Jamaica, from the Report of Alexander Glen Finlaison, Actuary of the National Debt and Government Actuary, in the matter of establishing a Superannuation Fund, for the benefit of persons holding appointments under the Government of the colony of Jamaica, 31st March, 1864. ... ... ... Extract from Mr. Finlaison's Report—'One of the principal inducements of a government to the establishment of a provision in retirement for its worn-out servants, is to be found in the necessity of maintaining the efficiency of the public service. Where no allowances in superannuation are given or expected, the channels of promotion gradually become choked up, and the service is slowly pervaded by a general torpor. If a decision on the point is practically left to the officer's own option, it cannot be reasonaly [sic] expected that he will diminish his emolument by a voluntary retirement, and it is as little to be anticipated that his official superiors will be very ready to consign an old and faithful public servant to a state of destitution at the close of life, by invaliding him without any provision whatever. The way, therefore, is practically stopped against the advancement in due course of younger and more efficient men, and the whole general vigor of the whole official system is gradually sapped. Nor is it to be forgotten, in promoting the grant of a provision in superannuation, that the public servant does not possess the opportunities of other men, for laying up a private fund for his maintenance in after life. He is restricted within the inelastic confines of a fixed stipend, and the whole of his time and talents being devoted to his duties he has no leisure for nursing into fruitful results lucrative enterprises, extraneous to his regular pursuits. But this advantage is within the privileges of professional and commercial men who can frequently enter side paths for their own pecuniary benefit. It upon does not seem extraordinary, therefore, that the condition of the public servant on this point should awaken the solicitude of the Government, and should induce it to provide for his comfort and maintenance in old age, seeing that from the necessities of the case no powers dwell in the man himself for carrying out this most desirable object.'

Jamaica Gleaner, November 3, 1966

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Notes on Australia, #1

Things I’ve done since starting the first, for-real vacation I’ve ever taken: 

Missed a connection thanks to plane delays out of Buffalo. 

Spent an angry 24 hours in LA. 

Had conversations with two families at an LAX restaurant. Apparently when you travel to Australia by yourself, strangers say “good for you.” 

Survived first long-haul flight (15 hours) surprisingly well. 

Slept an enormous amount at odd hours trying to get through the jetlag phase of this trip as soon as possible. 

Been shocked by how cold it was earlier this week. Luckily I packed wisely.

Eaten at four highly recommended cafes (Hardware Société, Grain Store, Hammer and Tong, Auction Rooms). They were delicious. 

Alternated sleep with brisk walks in and around downtown Melbourne. 

Knocked glass bottles of water onto the floor with my hips as I squeezed my horridly jet-lagged self through a narrow opening trying to leave the communal table at a cafe. 

Been told I eat elegantly. G&H Fryar’s life work has been accomplished. 

Sat at two communal tables. 

Been told by two older couples in the space of 5 minutes that they wished they’d known to make reservations at a cafe. It was 8 AM. I hadn’t made a reservation either.

Had a conversation with one of said couples, an emeritus philosophy professor and his wife, in which he tried to insist to me that Britain was a much better society for black people than the US.

Had a conversation with a Welshman who says Brexit will work itself out because everything will in a trillion years. In the next 20, I asked? Oh we’re fucked.

Watched another Welshman, this one a busker, play what was presumably his own composition. The piece? Dull and unremarkable. His playing: Technically brilliant. Too good for the streets.

Had a delightful five hour coffee at a chocolate shop with a historian I met briefly at MBS last summer.

Struggled to stay awake past 9:30 AM.

Visited three Melbourne suburbs.

Largely figured out the tram system. Faked my way through a bus journey.

Bought more books than I should have at the 2016 international bookstore of the year.

Spent Saturday morning reminding myself that I am actually on vacation, and I can actually spend a leisurely morning in the apartment and not feel bad about not “maximizing” time, especially when that morning is one in which a coup is happening in another country

Slowly and not completely adjusted to figuring out how to follow the news when it’s happening a dozen time zones away.

Thought long and hard about the value of social media in times this chaotic.

Next up, Sydney.

[cfryar]

the weekend when Britain fell apart: my thoughts on Brexit and how we’re talking about it

[UPDATE: the Vote Leave campaign’s taken down its entire website. Wayback Machine’s got the original, complete with promises.]

One of the things I try to teach my European history students is that Europe's peace is a very recent development. It's fragile and fitful. The latter part—peace's fragility—I don't always do well. The inevitable haste of the final days of the semester means I don't get into the Troubles, and the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s gets shorter and shorter shrift each semester.

But in recent semesters, emphasizing this has become even more important to combat Eurocentric ideas of Europe as uniquely civilized. Many of my black students wonder why "Africans" were so "easily" conquered, and they feel disappointment that there was no "African conquest" of Europe. I've employed a kind of geographic determinism to explain European imperialism. Yes, racism, of course: but also I emphasize the smallness of Europe, the importance of land as the measure of status, and the inevitable clash when Europeans encountered indigenous peoples who didn't prioritize land because there was no shortage of it. I do this to denaturalize European ideas about land use, settlement, and civilization, and instead contextualize why groups used land in the way that they did. It makes sense that people in tiny countries needed land ownership to be clear. It makes as much sense that African peoples, First Nations peoples, and Aboriginal peoples weren't quite as fussed about land being clearly parceled out and individually owned. But of course my lectures are running up against decades of messaging that's told them that Europe has been peaceful while Africa's been riven by "tribal conflict." 

I mention all of this because it's come to mind as I observe the Brexit fallout, and especially what happened after close of business Friday. Though I was not surprised (I'm a pessimist by nature, and my experiences as a black woman in Britain, though mostly not negative, convinced me years ago that there is a serious race problem running through all segments of British society), the pall that fell over London on Friday was immediate. But it took the weekend to see what a calamitous situation Britain is now in.

And so we get back to my teaching, because what I've really been thinking is this: if Britain wasn't Britain, and if its leaders were brown or black, and if it was in the Global South, and if it was Jamaica, or Haiti, or Guatemala, or Zimbabwe, or Laos, or, or, or....

If Britain wasn't Britain, then we'd all be referring to the stunning events of this weekend with coy, hushed intonations: tribal conflict, corruption, and maybe even failing state.

To be sure, because Britain's Britain, its state isn't actually failing. But I'm not sure US media's fully appreciating the absolute power vacuum that emerged in the UK over the weekend.

Was anybody actually in charge of the country Saturday and Sunday? The country was running, sure, but by anybody? Less clear.

David Cameron? Resigned, but did so by creating what will be a two-month lame duck session and being the first to back out of promise to trigger Article 50 immediately.

George Osborne? Nowhere to be seen until Monday morning. Twitter mocked him by posting "Missing" signs with his picture.

Boris Johnson? Nearly funereal in his "victory" speech and then basically silent until his gobsmackingly naive column in the Telegraph.

Michael Gove? Also funereal. (Has he even made a speech of his own yet?)

Nigel Farage? Gurning, to use the British expression, and ignoring Jo Cox’s death.

Labour? Eating itself.

Sinn Fein? Talking reunification.

Nicola Sturgeon? The only person who seemed to understand that the weekend after Brexit wasn’t actually a holiday, but who’s only in charge of Scottish affairs.

And then there were the other leavers, those left to fill the vacuum Boris and Gove left. What were they doing?

Walking back from the promises they used to induce people to vote to shove the country over a cliff. At times the walkback's been so swift it resembles fast-rewinding footage of an egg-and-spoon race: hasty, chaotic, embarrassing, and a fucking mess. Not only are the following things not happening—the £350 million a week to put back in the NHS, decreasing immigration levels, quick Article 50 trigger, and ending of free movement—apparently the British people were never told that these things were going to.

If these were black people...

To be fair, the news media has been on fiery form this weekend, but where have these tough, holding-feet-to-the-fire questioners been since February? Now it's too late: regardless of what happens (and I am currently very skeptical that the UK is actually leaving the EU), this is a catastrophe for Britain, and a likely one for the United Kingdom. Whether it turns into a cataclysm remains to be seen.

Britain will almost certainly cease to exist as a political unit. It's hard to imagine how Scotland stays in, whether the UK remains in or leaves. Why should Scotland keep being whipped around by the whim of Westminster, which has currently proven itself to be run by Oxbridge elites whose only concern is their personal ambition to be prime minister of a country they view as their playground? Because let's be very clear: Boris clearly doesn't believe they should leave the EU, he's shocked that they're now about to, and he's panicked now that his old Bullingdon chum has left him to it. Middle school student councils are run more responsibly.

If these were black people...

The UK (by which, for today's purposes, I mean the connection between England, Wales, and Northern Ireland) is also looking shaky, given that if the UK leaves the EU, that creates an international border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, something nobody seems to have even remotely considered. (Myself included, but I'm not responsible for getting 17 million people to vote for this.) Fintan O’Toole seems on the mark when he says, 

English nationalists, it turns out, wouldn’t give the froth off a pint of real ale for the Irish peace process.

Americans forget (or never realized) how fragile that situation is, but the evidence is all around. Try reliably finding a trashcan in a train station in London. But no, apparently nobody in government gave any thought to what might happen to the nearby island whose problems until only recently was the source of terrorist attacks in the UK. For a far more detailed description of what this could mean for Northern Ireland, this Storify is crucial.

As for England: the Leavers were happy to whip up racism and xenophobia when it served their political purpose, when it made them credible candidates for PM. Now that the whipped up racism and xenophobia's led to the ostensible purpose of this whole thing—Brexit—senior Leavers are claiming ignorance. They have been entirely silent this weekend as reports of xenophobic abuse have streamed in. Standing in their place have been less senior Leavers, at least one of whom was on Twitter downplaying all reports. This isn't about whether 17 million people are racist (and at any rate, isn't the better point that all of these countries are operating under systems of white supremacy, which is why the better days they're all hearkening back to are the heydays of empire and Jim Crow?). It's about the fact that, purely so that Boris Johnson could be prime minister, senior government officials sanctioned racist and xenophobic positions as legitimate political speech and principles, and then are shocked when that turns out poorly. (There may well be non racist and nonxenophobic arguments for controlling immigration, but they aren't being made. They certainly can't be made from a position of wanting to decrease the numbers of certain kinds of people, like Eastern Europeans, or talking about attracting skilled workers hint hint, or talking about closer relationships with the Commonwealth.)

Setting aside racism and xenophobia briefly, what about the promises that were made to people who have been suffering under conservative and right-leaning Labour governments for over three decades? Their righteous anger was encouraged—again by the proteges of the people who started ruining their economic livelihoods—but where is that anger going to go? If the UK does leave, the promises made have already been backed away from. That's 17 million people rightfully angry at being lied to. If the UK doesn't leave (again, to me the more likely scenario at this point), that's democracy undermined, politically though not legally. And even if internally the anger and recriminations only last for a short time, even if the UK leaves the EU by 2019 and it all "works out," what damage will be done in the meantime?  

If these were black people backtracking from promises they were making with force a mere four days ago...

The clips of chaos are going viral: 

a wan Boris at the leave HQ podium, the £350 mil NHS pledge emblazoned on the wall next to him

SkyNews anchor and analyst both struck silent in disbelief at the lack of Brexit plans 

Newsnight anchor with his head in his hands after a senior Leaver pretends he never said immigration would drop

Increasing reports of people on the streets of Britain being asked why they aren't packing their bags or already on the plane home

I'm doing research in one of the more remote parts of England this week, and for the first time since the knives/stabbings crimewave of 2007-8, I am slightly apprehensive about walking around in areas where I appear to be the only black person in town. Where once my American accent set me up for anti-American/anti-Bush/anti-Iraq War hostility, it now protects me until I get out of this country. I shouldn't need protection, and certainly not from my accent, which only “protects” if I’m talking. I've never before wondered about the wiseness of being here, even though I wouldn't want to be anywhere else at such a momentous and complex moment, but I do now.

If these were black people who, because they wanted individual power, were preying on the vulnerability, anger, and indeed prejudices of working-class people by making promises they had no intention of keeping because they had no intention of really winning, but in the process sent their country off the cliff, our media would hint that these aren't people really capable of ruling themselves.

But this is Britain, so we assume it'll all work itself out somehow. But once you step back from the plummy tones and the whiteness and the now-proved-false sense of civilizational superiority (especially in comparison to the US), the chaos of this weekend suggests very much otherwise. 

P.S. At least one historian, Helen McCarthy, who is far better equipped than myself to rank where this falls in the scope of British political crises, shares my concern.

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In desperate need of some empire analysis

“This information, that ministers sometimes sung Psalm 100 in Cornish in the church of Paul, shows that Cornish in church use had not died out with the last sermons in Cornish reputedly preached by the vicar of Landewednack in 1667. If we are to believe Polwhele, Cornish was used on a number of monuments in Cornwall. He claimed [98] to have collected a great many of these epitaphs although the only Cornish epitaph to survive comes from a monument in Paul church and dates from the period in question:

In memory of Captain Stephen Hutchins   of this parish who departed life at Port Royall in Jamaica the 24th Day of August 1709 and was buried by the Communion Table in Kingstown Church in the one   and 40th year of his age. Bounas heb dueth eu poes karens wei Tha pobl bohadzak Paull han egles nei.

[Life eternal is the reward of your kindness towards the poor folk of Paul and our church.]”

From Peter Beresford Ellis, The Cornish Language and its Literature, pp. 97-98, translation definitely not mine.

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Here we are again: Euro 2016 begins in a little over a week, so it’s time to check back in on the state of racism in Europe, for which Euro 2016 is such a good indicator.

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New Books in British Studies is here!!!

Though somewhat unnecessary—given my earlier announcement and the two podcasts that I’ve already done—let me make a formal announcement: New Books in British Studies is here!!! 

If you haven’t seen them already, I’ve done two interviews already:

Caroline Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace

Kennetta Hammond Perry, London Is the Place for Me

As I said back in November, NBBS is part of the New Books Network, and I’ve launched the British Studies channel with a few things in mind: 1) find new ways to continue a transatlantic conversation among British Studies scholars; 2) read and publicize cutting edge work in our field; 3) use the podcast as one way to build the most capacious field we can. 

On point 3: as I see it, British Studies should be as capacious as possible not because Britain had so much impact on the world—although that’s true—but because the world had so much impact on Britain. And methodologically, it also strikes me that I don’t know a ton about what’s going on in the sociology, anthropology, and linguistic study of Britain. And I’d like to know more.

So as I said last time: I’m taking book suggestions—though no guarantees made, of course—at cdfryar [at] gmail [dot] com. I’m really excited about this, and I hope y’all enjoy!

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Big announcement: New Books in British Studies

This past summer, in a very long post I wrote about the Modern British Studies conference, I wondered whether social and digital media could help forge the kind of transatlantic ties among British studies scholars that perhaps the archival year used to foster. At the time, I had begun a secret project, one that I suspected was one way of answering my question.

Some of you may be familiar with the New Books Network, a series of podcast channels in which hosts interview authors of new books. Each channel has a disciplinary or geographic focus, but until now, there hasn’t been a NBN channel devoted to British Studies.

That’s the project, which I’m announcing now during NACBS: next month I’m launching and hosting the New Books in British Studies channel.

Send recommendations for books—though no promises, of course—my way: cdfryar [at] gmail [dot] com. The channel should be as capacious as our field: all disciplines, all time periods, all methodologies.

I can’t wait to get started!

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When American Pharoah crossed the finish line at the Belmont Stakes, winning the first Triple Crown since 1979, I called my father  even before the horse had slowed down. At the time my father was quite ill and had been for a few years, so I wrote on Twitter that my mother and father had been around for the last Triple Crown, my father and I were around for this one, and in all likelihood, given how rare a feat the Triple Crown has become, it will only be me for the next one.

My father and I weren't especially close, which made the things we did enjoy together all the more meaningful: horse racing, EastEnders, sports, and politics. I called him at 5 AM in the morning from London when Barack Obama was first elected president, an accomplishment neither of us thought we would see in our lifetimes. I called him again four years later, when Obama was elected again. And I called him this past June the second a horse raced into history at full stretch.

Today, our country gives its final thanks for his service.

Today, I bury my father.

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the Salaita affair emails that unintentionally make the case for the humanities

Well, this data dump from UIUC is quite the vital cache of documents, isn’t it?

Ironic how, in the midst of a heated debate that has by all accounts divided humanities departments from STEM on UIUC’s campus (and some of the emails allude to this fact), these emails themselves prove the need for a robust humanities/liberal arts education.

Electronic data dumps like this will likely become the common method of achieving “transparency” in the midst of all manner of political crises, and as traditional journalism continues to streamline, the burden will continue to shift to citizens to make sense of them. But only those trained to read, contextualize, and analyze texts will be able to swiftly sift through hundreds or thousands of pages of emails and other arcane documents. Right now it’s relatively obscure—to the lay person—matters of Salaita, academic freedom, and faculty governance. But in future it'll be matters of much more widely understood importance like municipal and corporate malfeasance, school board dramas, housing discrimination, police corruption, and the like.

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Emancipation thoughts on Emancipation Day

A few weeks ago, Adam Rothman wrote a fabulous and compelling piece about Rose Herera, a freedwoman who, in 1865, took her former owner’s wife to trial for kidnapping her children and taking them to Cuba, where slavery was still legal.

There is much to say about this piece, not least the way that, once again, microhistory sheds piercing light on abstract phenomena like abolition/emancipation.

What I’m most interested in, though, is the claim at the heart of the essay: “abolition and emancipation were not the same thing.” 

Rose Herera’s quest for justice reveals the vast gulf between abolition and emancipation. It was one thing for the Union to overthrow slavery in law and practice during and after the Civil War. It was another for ex-slaves to enjoy the experience of freedom.

They were not, and yet we act as though they were. For the US context, Rothman’s making a subtle but necessary point. But within British history, this axiom also needs saying, for the point isn’t so subtle. 

If you look at British historical scholarship on slavery/abolition/emancipation, there remains an overwhelming emphasis on abolition. Not even abolition of slavery, though, but abolition of the slave trade. I don’t want to downplay the significance of ending the slave trade—although given the “captured Africans” phenomenon, I can’t get too congratulatory about it. But it strikes me that British history focuses on abolition of the slave trade to such a degree that the field barely seems to care about the moment, three decades later, when enslaved people were made free. (Rothman’s caution about the lived substance of this freedom holds true in the British Empire as well.)

Seven decades after Eric Williams eviscerated the self-congratulatory arguments about abolition as an accomplishment that supposedly stemmed from Britain’s uniquely Protestant and humanitarian character, historians still seem to hover around 1807. True, they do so not to validate the older arguments, but to explain how such dramatic morality shifts were politicized in so short a span of time and to show how these morality shifts became justifications for later British imperial enterprise.

But in doing so, the continued focus on 1807 continues to affirm that it’s 1807 that matters most, not 1838. And if 1807 matters most, that suggests that who matters most were white elite politicians and abolitionists, not the black people creating British wealth by toiling and dying in the Caribbean who did not become legal persons until 1834 and who did not have any measure, no matter how limited, of full freedom until 1838.

Happy Emancipation Day!

[cfryar]

A few brief Cecil thoughts

Two disclaimers:

I don’t condone big-game hunting or dogfighting.

I don’t condone death threats and doxxing.

That said:

Why is Palmer getting so much more social media/international justice blowback? Is it because Cecil was known? Or is it because, unlike the scions of royalty and big enterprise who also shoot big game in Africa, with upper-middle-class Palmer, we feel like we’re punching up within reach?

There’s no need for me to add to the numerous comments about the glaring double standard in overwhelming outcry about Cecil vs. the much more narrowly shared concerns about Sandra Bland or Sam Dubose. But it’s interesting that evangelicals and Black Lives Matter supporters are using the same rhetoric—calling valuing human life over (or at least as much as) animal life—albeit to very different political purposes.

On both counts, I’m reminded of Michael Vick: while his cruelty to his dogs was unconscionable, the social outcry against him specifically was far stronger and sustained than that against horse racing, factory farming, and even Sea World. That outcry—which was of course very much racially inflected—also vastly outweighed that against football players, then and now, accused of or convicted of domestic violence, sexual assault, or rape. 

In addition to punching up within reach, I suspect that part of the reason for these glaring double standards is that concern about animals, especially concerns about individual animals that we can see and identify, crosses political lines, while issues about human life—indeed how it is even defined—are at the core of current political polarization in the US.

[cfryar]

On #MBS2015

How to describe MBS2015, one of the best conferences I’ve been to in a while—and certainly the best of its size? The only way I’ve managed to corral my thoughts is through a set of realizations I had during and after the conference. Though given how long it’s taken me to finish this post and how long the post is, “corral” and “manage” should be taken loosely.[1] 

1. Generosity of spirit. Yes, there were some spirited debates. But MBS2015 had an warmth about it, weather pun not intended, and felt much more open and welcoming than many conferences of its size.

2. Intellectual exhaustion/invigoration. Never have I left a conference so exhausted and drained. I agree with all of the notes about more breaks, longer lunches, thinking about Twitter, etc. But I wouldn’t want for future MBSes to have less content. Even if it needs to be spread over an additional half day, the number of concurrent sessions was great as were the shorter plenaries. It created more sustained conversations and allowed for a few mini-conferences to emerge. And I certainly left Birmingham mulling over countless ideas and inspirations. 

3. Never has my favorite conference tactic paid off so thoroughly. I try to go to at least one panel on a subject I know nothing about so I can see what else is going on in British history (or whatever field). The quality of MBS2015 was so high that some of my favorite papers of the conference were at panels I decided to attend at the last minute.

Me, during Lucy Robinson and Chris Warne’s paper “‘Embracing the Divine Chaos.’” All caps is an unusual level of excitement on my twitter feed:

my favorite conference tactic: go to at least one panel that I know absolutely nothing about. #mbs2015

— cfryar (@jamaicandale) July 2, 2015

(2/3) to that end, brushing off my dusty and vague memories of hebdige and attending the subcultures panel. #mbs2015

— cfryar (@jamaicandale) July 2, 2015

(3/3) very good choice, bc I am LOVING this paper on evangelical rave culture. LOVING IT. #mbs2015

— cfryar (@jamaicandale) July 2, 2015

Similarly, the one sentence that I’ve been intently mulling over since the conference also came from a random panel choice, this time the Creative Histories panel where Alison Twells asked, “Is our work accessible if it’s impenetrable?”

4. A subtle but persistent sense of doom about the consequences of the recent election for higher education. Intellectually I knew what a Conservative-only government meant, but I hadn’t translated that into practical consequences. So I was especially caught off guard during the “Future Histories of Race” panel when Caroline Bressey pointed out that there’s no guarantee that vital archives will even survive the next five years. What a dire thought.

5. The numerous operational definitions of when “modern Britain” actually was clashed during the conference. MBS defines modern Britain as between 1850 to the present. Most US-based historians probably see modern Britain as including some portion of the eighteenth century, if not all. And at times during the actual conference, “modern Britain” seemed synonymous with “postwar Britain.” Does this matter? Maybe, if the confusion has larger repercussions for debates about modernity or if it’s closing down lines of inquiry across time periods or if it’s restricting our search for crucial antecedents to the things we study. (And as somebody who almost has an allergy to anything before 1833, this is as much a note for me as anybody else.)

6. Imperial history. Modern British history in the US has almost been completely taken over by empire. The vast majority of graduate students and recent PhDs in British history work on some aspect of Britain’s encounter with the wider world, as do an increasing number of senior scholars. Jobs are increasingly posted as “Britain and the World” or “British Empire,” a response to the drastic shift that already happened in the field. What’s more, while new imperial history no longer has the purchase it did when I began graduate study ten years ago, you get the sense that it wasn’t rejected so much as thoroughly absorbed and accepted. (To put it another way, while questions remain about how total British society’s immersion in empire was and whether said immersion can be quantified, the basic idea is now an accepted commonplace.)

So imagine my astonishment when I realized that this was not at all the case in UK British history. The domestic/imperial silos seem firmly in place, as was the question, rarely voiced but subtly present, about whether in fact imperial histories speak to the theme of British studies. Catherine Hall’s brilliant plenary felt like a call to action rather than a timely reminder that #BlackLivesMatter, the way I suspect the same talk would have felt in a US context.

So why is empire so prominent in US British history?

Some of “the why” is quite obvious: In the UK, British history is national history, so institutions have many modern British historians, who each cover a specific facet and relatively narrow time period. For British historians in the US, however, we are usually the only modern British historian in the department. Some of us may be the only British historian, period, and at small institutions, we could be the only Europeanist. Increasingly, we’re hired as global/world historians or as area specialists. What’s more, while British history used to form part of the undergraduate history canon, it does so no longer. British historians at US institutions have to cover a much wider range of material, all the while trying to convince undergraduates that there are interesting things happening in British history.

But some of “the why” is less obvious: while funding’s dwindling for everyone in every field, it’s surely becoming more difficult for US scholars, especially graduate students, to get funding to do certain kinds of British history projects. Those whose research takes them to parts of the developing world are probably more likely to get funding for that kind of research than those whose research is entirely in the British Isles.

7. Never the twain... The other question, though, is what’s being done in UK British history. If we go by the MBS2015 program and the conversations had at the conference, here’s what’s happening instead.

the history of emotions: I didn’t attend any of these panels and missed both Seth Koven and Stephen Brooke’s plenaries, so I won’t wade into the debate that emerged other than to say I’m not surprised that US-based scholars were the most flummoxed by the field.

urban history: no surprise it’s still thriving since it began in British history.

regional history: I really wish I could have gone to the regional history panel, which was scheduled at the same time as my own. But there were other papers, like Daisy Payling’s on leftist activism in Sheffield, that spoke to the richness that a regional lens can add to political history.

very recent history: I didn’t make it to the 1970s panel, but by all accounts it, and the 1980s panel which I did attend, were especially vibrant, as was the subcultures panel, which featured papers on the 1980s and 1990s.

Sure, I’d argue that this work should clearly proceed, if it doesn’t already, from the agreement that Britain was an imperial nation in the Hall/Kathleen Wilson/Antoinette Burton sense of the term. But work of this kind would likely be crowded out if imperial history had overtaken British history in Britain to the degree that it has in the US. So clearly the task is to build something together, using the numerous institutional contexts and pressures to our advantage as a field. That requires, however...

8. True connections. I started my PhD in 2005, so this is only an impression: but it seems to me that there are fewer connections between American scholars of my generation and UK-based scholars than there used to be. The “archives year” is harder to do, given immigration/visa difficulties. To add to the funding point above, it’s also harder to argue that it’s necessary to spend a year in the UK now that digital archives and liberal camera policies seem to make research quicker while living in the UK is still so expensive, weaker pound notwithstanding. 

Now that American scholars are spending less and less time in the country, we’re missing out on the kinds of generative connections our predecessors may have had. If a scholar only has a few weeks to do dissertation work, popping into IHR seminars will be more difficult. S/he might not have time to attend the IHR conference or meet other scholars who are based outside of London.

In 2010, Susan Pedersen said to a group of graduate students in British history (myself included) that one of the great strengths of our field is that we have two robust halves, one on each side of the Atlantic, that are unencumbered by a language barrier. But this is only a strength if we are indeed in continual conversation with each other. Yes, some of these connections can be forged at NACBS, a conference I also love. But NACBS is in the middle of the year, probably lowering the number of UK-based scholars who attend, and it’s certainly more hectic than MBS2015 was. Which brings me to...

9. Social media. Twitter was the story of the conference. I came to know about the conference through Twitter—I follow Matt Houlbrook and so found out first about the creation of Modern British Studies and second about the conference.[2] Twitter was the most quantifiable measure of MBS2015′s vibrancy, as were the Storifies put together by Lauren Piko and others.[3] 

But are there ways, once conferences are over, that social media can build transatlantic ties the way that “archival years” used to? I don’t have any concrete ideas yet, but it feels as though social media (Twitter, blogs, other things?) might be one way to maintain—if not create—connections across the field in this era of minimal funding and maximum pressure.[4]

MBS2015 was brilliant. It'll be even more brilliant if we can figure out ways to keep up some aspect of the intellectual engagement when we aren't all face to face.

[1] Brief note on terms: I refer to US- and UK-based scholars, because the differences I mention below come down mainly to the specific pressures of national academies, not to training or nationality. [2] Full thanks go to Caroline Shaw, who approached me at AHA about putting together a panel. While it was clear to me that MBS2015 was THE conference of the year, I was mid-family crisis this past winter and probably wouldn’t have had the foresight to push through and organize a panel. [3] The second would be that we all survived the first day in such good spirits. As a Southerner, I know my way around heat, but the situation on Day 1 was truly unbearable. Thank goodness for all the water. [4] I say this while keeping in mind the comments of Lucy Robinson, who sounded a note of caution at the Creative Histories panel about taking on all of this extra, unpaid labor.

[cfryar]

#NationalAdjunctWalkoutDay

What I posted on Facebook earlier about adjunct labor and student education:

Here's why National Adjunct Walkout Day (which is today) matters to you, whether you are an academic or not (Long post alert; if you already know what adjuncts are and how much they're paid, scroll down to tl;dr):

Adjuncts are professors who are not full-time faculty members. Full-time faculty members are either tenured or on the path to tenure (tenure-track). They have offices, they attend faculty meetings and have a say in department matters, they get benefits/retirement, and they're paid a salary.

On the other hand, adjuncts are not full-time faculty members. They have no path to tenure or even the tenure-track. The chances they will be hired for full-time positions at their current institution are slim to none. Many of them do not have offices (or if they do, they usually share them with 1, 2, 3, or many more people), they cannot attend faculty meetings and have no say in department matters, many receive no benefits, and they are paid by the course. Even worse, many don't have access to departmental resources like paper, copy machines, printers, and in some cases, even learning management systems or school email.

Adjunct pay can vary widely, with the elite colleges paying reasonably and everybody else paying abominably. For comparison purposes: when I was an adjunct at Duke, they paid me $7000 (once I had my Ph.D) per course per semester. I taught two courses each semester, so $28,000/year. At my current institution, where I am full-time faculty, adjuncts are paid $2300 per course per semester, which is a much more typical per-course rate. Doing the same two-course a semester load is $9200/year. Many adjuncts are on food stamps and other welfare programs.

None of this would really matter to you if adjuncts weren't now the majority of the college teaching workforce. As many as 75% of all college professors are adjuncts, and while it would be nice to think that most of these people are retirees looking to teach a course or two, or industry experts giving back to the community, the majority of these people are recent PhDs who can't find full-time jobs. (And while this post is too long to get into why they can't find jobs, let me be clear: it is not because they aren't qualified. It's because there are fewer full-time jobs—because they're being transitioned into cheaper adjunct jobs—and more qualified people applying. In any given year in my field, it's common for there to be only 20 or so jobs in the country for which 200-300 or more people are applying.)

This probably still wouldn't matter to nonacademics if it didn't seriously impact student instruction. But it does.

Most adjuncts are strong teachers who are up-to-date in their fields and who have tons of fresh ideas to share with students. But the conditions of their labor make it impossible for them to be fully present for those students.

To make ends meet at $2300 per class per semester, adjuncts often have to cobble together teaching schedules at a number of institutions. They may teach anywhere from 5-8 courses at 2-4 different campuses. Instead of holding office hours, which would be in a crowded office anyway, they're driving all over town or between cities trying to get to the next class. Without access to basic departmental resources like copiers, printers, and even paper, they are hampered in what kind of teaching they can do and what kind of handouts they can give. They also often aren't valued members of their departments.

TL;DR: So if you or someone you know is being taught by an adjunct, chances are you won't be able to get a lot of help outside of class, or if you can, it won't be private help. You may struggle to communicate with your professor, b/c they have to spend more time in the car than on campus. Your professor will likely have to spend much of the fall and spring semesters on the job market. From experience, I can tell you that being on the job market pulls focus away from teaching and, if all goes well, also pulls that professor away from the classroom for campus visits. If you like an adjunct professor and find that that professor's methods work well with your learning style, that's great, except that chances are you will never be able to take another class with that professor or do advanced work with that professor, either because they are only teaching introductory classes or because they have moved on to a permanent, full-time position elsewhere (best case) or have moved onto another adjunct position somewhere else (more typical).

In other words, nobody benefits from adjunct labor other than university administration. Certainly not departments, and certainly not the students. ‪#‎NAWD‬