| Response sheet 20, for lecture class, Thursday | |
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Last week we made light. Today we shall preserve food. Neither an easy task. But we shall be dealing with some enormously important issues on Tuesday with respect to the elusiveness of the “free-soil dream” in the aftermath of the American Civil War, certainly for African Americans subject to invigorated discrimination and reinvigorated terror. Contradicting any ideal of “personal independence,” the North saw a massive increase in wage labor and social inequality; the South saw the rise of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan alongside the global uncompetitiveness of its cotton; and the West saw the brutal dispossession of Native Americans alongside massive subsidies for railroad, mining, and ranching interests. Underpinning it all was equally massive political corruption favoring moneyed interests able to make generous campaign donations, undermining democracy. (Perhaps all this shall sound all too familiar as germinal forms of the grotesque inequality, racism, and political corruption plaguing our Second Gilded Age.) The question for you is: Does the classic American ideal of “personal independence” live on, for you, in this day and age? It was and is certainly not the only ideal available, especially given its intimate connection to patriarchy, whiteness, exclusion, and violence, so is it possible for this ideal to be removed from those associations? Or, is there another, more appealing ideal that drives you forward? Perhaps a hybrid of some sort? When you respond to this question, before you begin, try to imagine how someone very different from you might respond to the question. That might help you step back a bit from your own subject position, without leaving it behind.... |