Zeitoun + 10, Omar Ibn Said

One of the implicit arguments of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is that Islam is not wholly foreign to America. This message is hard to miss in the almost too perfect American Dream story of the title character and in his marriage to a white, Southern, practicing Muslim. Throughout the book Muslim families and mosques are part of the fabric of the setting, woven into America as often as they are represented as foreign.

In this context, the similarities between Zeitoun's story and that of Omar Ibn Said seem important. Said was born in West Africa in the 1770s and trained as a theologian. He was kidnapped and enslaved in 1807, and lived out the rest of his life in the United States. While enslaved, he wrote an autobiographical essay that has since become an important primary source for the study of antebellum slavery. A fuller exploration of Said's story can be found here, in a great episode of Backstory Radio on Islam in America.

The relevant part of Said's story takes place when he was imprisoned in North Carolina after escaping from the plantation on which he was enslaved. While in prison (and I am drawing heavily here on Backstory's version of events) Said began to write out the Qur'an on the walls of his cell. Crowds came to see the African American man who could write in strange symbols on the wall and, eventually, onlookers figured out that Said was literate in Arabic and was in the process of writing out his holy book.

The image here is strikingly similar to that of Zeitoun during his imprisonment at Camp Greyhound. A Muslim-American immigrant (though I take the point that "immigrant" is not the correct word for an enslaved man), jailed for a "crime" that appears to us as no crime at all, locked in a cell and attracting the attention of his white jailers because of the way he publicly practices Islam. In each case, the Muslim man is confined within America and becomes an object of suspicion as foreign and unusual because of his status as a Muslim.

If there are parallels between Zeitoun and Said, they matter to the text of Zeitoun because of the way they deepen the ideas of Americanness and foreignness that run throughout the book. On the one hand, Zeitoun is rendered foreign, denied his Constitutional rights and forced outside of the American Dream narrative by the events following Hurricane Katrina. The intertextuality with Said's story, though, suggests that this very process of pushing Muslim Americans outside the mainstream itself has a long history in America. Just as Said is imprisoned and rendered Muslim spectacle, so too is Zeitoun. Thus, in a nice twist that gets to the heart of certain jaded liberal view of the Bush era, the un-American act of rejecting religious and racial diversity is, through the resonance with Said's story, itself revealed to be a quintessential American tradition.

Zeitoun + 10, 1

Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is, of course, a book primarily about race and religion. By linking the disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror, Eggers draws our attention to the ways Arab and Islamic people came to bear the brunt of American neuroses during the Bush era. Re-reading the book 10 years after Katrina, however, it is clear that the book is also about capitalism, about the way contradictions in our understanding of market forces help shape our understanding of character.

Both proponents and critics of capitalism have long noted a tension within it between creation and destruction. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx, of course, argues at length the case against capitalist exploitation and brutalization. But he begins by noting the enormous productive powers of the bourgeoisie: "It (the bourgeoisie) has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades." Conversely, capitalism's greatest fans routinely cheerlead with a kind of semi-irony for its destructive realities. Joseph Schumpeter, the rightwing, Austrian School economist, derives from Marx the notion of "creative destruction" and uses it as an argument explicitly in favour of free-market capitalism. Thus capitalism pulls intriguingly (and, for some, appealingly) in two directions at once, balancing destruction against creation.

In the character of Zeitoun and the disaster of Katrina, Eggers finds a man whose story he can tell through precisely this tension.

Zeitoun is Americanized through capitalism. His story, at one level a foreign tale of a Syrian Muslim sailor, is rendered instead as a familiar arc of American self-improvement. Zeitoun begins his life in America as a day-labourer, accrues the capital to start his own business, and ultimately becomes the employer of young immigrants like he once was.

Zeitoun's chosen industry is crucial: He is a home builder. (The word "builder" is Eggers' own.) Here Eggers has found a sweet spot in the American class structure: Zeitoun is both a paternalistic boss who looks out for the best interests of his workers and, at the same time, a working-class labourer who gets his hands dirty doing real work. Thus Zeitoun is the best of the bourgeoisie and the best of the proletariat rolled into one.

When Hurricane Katrina strikes, the tension within capitalism between destruction and creation is brought to within an inch of the surface of the text. For Zeitoun the capitalist, Katrina seems an obvious long-term boon. There are thousands of houses that will need to be renovated and many more that will need to be rebuild entirely. This is exactly the kind of work from which Zeitoun profits, and thus the disaster should be to his ultimate gain. Indeed, the closing section of the book describes the financial success to which this destruction has led: "But now things are moving. The city is rising again. Since Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC has restored 114 houses to their former states, or improved versions thereof" (323). Here is the destruction upon which "creative destruction" relies rendered literal and biblical, and Zeitoun the capitalist is a beneficiary.

Eggers, though, is careful to choose his wording when it comes to the relationship between destruction and profit, and here Zeitoun's trade as a "builder" is crucial. For when destruction is invoked, Zeitoun's work is rendered not in terms of profit but in the non-economic terms of "building." In the midst of the disaster, Zeitoun thinks of "the damage, how long it would take to rebuild" (96). In the months following he thinks of non-competitive, non-financial building: "Every time he sees a home under construction, no matter who's doing it, he smiles. Build, he thinks. Build, build, build" (323, Eggers' italics). Thus what is, in fact, profitable work for a small business owner is described in the almost pre-economic terms of building structures for the psychological satisfaction of doing so: small business as therapy and small business as ritual.

My point here is not that that Zeitoun is a predatory capitalist. Rather, it is that in the wake of the financial crisis, the ways in which Eggers narrates the book reveal fault lines that were less obvious before. The same system of semi-regulated capitalism that built American homes also took them away in the wake of the housing bubble collapse. The same system that created home equity (the most important form of capital for most Americans)  can destroy that same equity through the vicissitudes of its own functioning. Eggers renders that process almost literal in Zeitoun. Here the man who builds homes also makes his living from their destruction. Home renovation is a business working both sides of the fence and, in Zeitoun, that dialectic is rendered visible as creation and destruction are linked in the adventure of a single protagonist.

The Common Core and Evaluating Aesthetics

For all of their many strengths, the Common Core Standards in English Language Arts have a few quirks, several of which derive from the distinction they make between "Informational Text" and "Literature."

For the purposes of the reading standards, the Common Core creates parallel standards for these two different types of texts. These two sets of reading standards are written to mirror each other and occasionally cross over into what would seem to be the other's terrain.  A craft and structure standard for Informational Text, for example, asks for analysis of the "persuasiveness or beauty of the text"; on the face of it, "beauty" would seem more the realm of literature than the realm of science writing or other obviously "informational" texts.

In other ways, though, the two sets of standards strike different poses. Of particular interest here are their approaches to evaluative criticism. Where the Informational Text standards ask students to "analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses" (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.5), the corresponding literature standard drops the word "evaluate," asking only that students, "analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text...contributes to its overall structure and meaning" (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.5).

This omission of the verb "evaluate" from the literature standard is a mistake for two reasons.

First, let us acknowledge that the vast majority of students will interact with very little literary or otherwise aesthetic criticism in their lifetime and probably produce even less of it. And this is likely as it should be. While bending the curve a little bit, so that students go on to lives slightly more devoted to, say, The New Yorker than to primetime television seems a reasonable goal, it is neither likely nor probably even to be wished for that a significantly higher percentage of high school students end up as career academics in the humanities. So the amount of serious criticism most students will produce or consume is vanishingly small.

There is though, one obvious exception to this rule: evaluative criticism in the form of TV, movie, and book reviews. That form of criticism makes up by far the majority of textual criticism written in the world and is certainly the most accessible to a general audience. Thus the first error the Common Core makes in deleting the verb "evaluate" from its literary standards is that it directs students away from producing exactly the one kind of critical writing they are likely to interact with regularly over the course of their lives. Whether it be deciding which movie review to trust or discussing in the lobby at intermission what they like about a play, evaluative criticism is something students will benefit from mastering. Thus avoiding it in English classes makes little sense.

The second reason the omission of "evaluate" is an error is that it takes away from students one way to access texts and move toward analytical writing. It would be a mistake to have students spout ill-informed opinions about which poems suck. However, asking students why they found a book boring or why they were put off by a play is a very good way to start them on identifying and then analyzing textual details. If a student finds Hamlet utterly boring and impenetrably dense, and if she can point to the apparent endlessness of Hamlet's musings as one reason for that, then she is solidly halfway to a key aspect of Hamlet's character and at least one of the key themes of the play. Starting that conversation with the evaluation "this play is boring" is not all bad.

There is a counter-argument to be made here: The literature standard in question ends with the phrase "as well as its aesthetic impact," meaning that students are being asked to analyze aesthetic impact, a task which could certainly encompass evaluative criticism. The key verb "evaluate," though, is missing, and as anyone who has been taught to unpack a standard knows, the controlling verb is key to doing so. Common Core is correct to include "evaluate" as a controlling verb in its standards for Informational Text; students should be able to describe an argument as weak or strong and explain how they have come to that determination. But there is nothing wrong with doing the same for literary texts. Doing so would engage students in textual criticism and better prepare them for the kinds of criticism they are likely to interact with once they have left the classroom.

2 Lessons from Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is hard to say that something like a MacArthur "Genius Grant" is deserved or undeserved given the breadth of the potential candidates and the relatively small number of grants that can reasonably be awarded. But to the extent that the MacArthur Foundation hopes to fund ongoing work that will have a wide public impact, Ta-Nehisi Coates' award this week seems richly deserved. Two of his Atlantic essays from the last year and a half, "The Case of Reparations" and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," by themselves make the case that Coates has the power to reshape long-standing arguments and tell compelling stories of public import. And that is not to speak of his best-selling memoir released this summer, Between the World and Me. Putting your money behind Coates' continued excellence seems like a safe bet.

Here I would like to focus on two issues that Coates' work for The Atlantic raises for how we teach, one about history and the other about writing. The MacArthur Foundation is probably aiming at a broader target than just the high school classroom. However, Coates' essays pose challenges in that specific arena that warrant the study of his work as both history and literature.

1. It's Not Even Past

At first blush, it would seem that the most sensible way to teach history, a discipline devoted to the study of cause and effect, would be chronologically. First this happened, then this, so what are the relationships between those two things? How did one lead to the other? 

The two Coates essays mentioned above, however, suggest that maybe there is a better way to structure our study of history. For if there is one thesis tying together Coates' essay on incarceration with his earlier essay on reparations, it is the old Faulkner line about the past not even being past. 

This argument is clearest in "The Case for Reparations." There, Coates begins with the story of Clyde Ross, a resident of Chicago who suffered considerable financial loss from housing discrimination supported by, and in some cases mandated by, various levels of the U.S. government. This is a bold move. By beginning with Ross's story, Coates immediately draws the issue of reparations out of the seemingly distant history of slavery and into the present. The argument becomes one of precise financial damages done to people who are still alive today, and whose lives could still be changed were they to be awarded recompense for their losses. 

With that framework in place, Coates goes on to sketch in the history of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the "milder" forms of discrimination that replaced them. However, the presentist focus never wavers. Thus the debate over reparations, a matter too often cast as a philosophical debate about the nature of guilt for crimes long past, is recast as a matter of current events. That rhetorical move is the genius of the essay.

The same can be said for "The Black Family." Here Coates takes Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 50 year-old argument and simply shows where its effects are still felt today. And, in this case, felt today by people in their teens and twenties in addition to people in their eighties.

Thus in both of Coates' major essays of the last year or so, he makes an implicit case that you can approach history through the present, that you can begin with the current event and work smartly backwards to the history that caused it. Coates structure poses a challenge to chronology as the mainstay of teaching history, and poses a challenge for teachers to work backwards from problem to cause, rather than forward from cause to effect. Once you have seen Coates do that so well on the page, it is hard not to think that this might be a more effective structure in the classroom as well.  

2. Narrative and Solutionism

In his Longform Podcast interview after the release of "The Case for Reparations," Coates returns several times to the idea that narrative is central to the essay form, at least when it is done well. In particular, he singles out James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" as an essay whose narrative aspect is often overlooked but ultimately crucial to the piece's effect. This emphasis on narrative is part of Coates' argument against what he calls "solutionism," the idea that an essay writer has a responsibility to propose some kind of public policy that would solve the problems she has raised.

Those two ideas, the centrality of narrative and opposition to solutionism, coming from one of the best essayists alive today, ought to give teachers of the essay considerable pause because both run directly counter to how the essay is usually taught. We teach students that an essay should be a series of arguments rather than a story; indeed, every year the AP Literature exam includes at the end of its free-response essay prompt the imperative, "Do not merely summarize the plot." Stories, if they appear at all, are best reserved for a sentence or two at the beginning of the introduction, something extraneous to the argument that we sometimes call the "hook."

Solutionism is probably less universally taught than the non-narrative structure of an essay, but it still plays a prominent role in the way we teach essays on social studies and current events topics. A high school essay on the death penalty, for example, would almost universally be judged lacking if it failed to come down either for or against the death penalty. Stating a position doesn't necessarily mean  advocating a certain policy. Where current events are concerned, though, we usually teach as though it does.

There is an obvious way to duck the challenges Coates' writing poses, and that is simply to say that he is not using the word "essay" in the same sense that we use it in high school classrooms. His "essay," one might argue, is the personal essay, the essai in Montaigne's sense of the term rather than the argumentative essay we are meant to teach when preparing students for university.

The problem, though, is that the two Coates essays under discussion here are precisely argumentative essays rather than personal ones. The title "The Case for Reparations" could not make its specific, argumentative nature much clearer. And Coates' chosen topic, reparations for African Americans, is exactly the kind of current events debate for which a public policy solution seems required. It is just that Coates approaches his arguments with narrative at the centre of his structure and with policy proposals left open to debate and discussion. 

Where that leaves us is with the fact that there might be a better way to write an essay than as a series of points arguing for a policy. But what would that look like for a high school student, with few resources and without months to conduct interviews? Where would the stories come from? What structure would you teach? Is it that high school students couldn't do this? Or is it just that it would be harder to do?

Paris Notes 2: Climate Change, Sustainability, and My Role in Stephen Harper's Rise

Much of the appeal of Stephen Harper's years as Prime Minister of Canada has been a kind of stasis. While the United States experienced economic disaster, its banking system teetering for a moment on the brink of collapse, Canada under Harper just hummed along, seemingly affected by neither financial disaster, government shutdown, and political spectacle to its south nor financial disaster and near political dissolution in Europe. Harper's appeal is that, under his firm and boring hand, plain old Canada will keep doing its thing, insulated from the danger that surrounds it in a violent and difficult world. In this sense, Harper has been more philosophically conservative than his American counterparts who, at least since the mid-sixties, have been far more concerned with overturning the status quo than upholding it. Harper's appeal (and this is by no means necessarily a bad thing) lies in his affinity with the average and the boring.

In true Gramscian fashion, though, positions have shifted below Harper's placid surface. These shifts are numerous and seem likely next month to end his tenure as leader of a majority government if not to cost him his job as Prime Minister.

Ten years ago, I played a small role in the election in which Harper first became Prime Minister, serving as both de facto campaign manager and de jure Official Agent for my brother Nigel's campaign on the Green Party ticket. Those were heady days. The campaign stretched a then-longish 60 days through December and January. The Green Party flirted with double digits in national polls and there were high, if unrealistic, hopes that it would win a seat in Parliament. As befits a Green Party campaign with no chance of victory (the Liberal candidate in the riding was the Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale), we ran a low-carbon operation, travelling by bus and foot to events. Despite weather typical of Saskatchewan in December, I rode my bicycle to pick up campaign materials from the Elections Canada office once our petition to be placed on the ballot was accepted. I flatter myself that we were election office favourites for our commitment to principle.

From this distance, one striking aspect of that campaign was the frequency with which we evoked the promise of "sustainability." We uttered the word constantly in conversations and speeches. My most striking memory from the campaign is of Nigel appearing in front of a crowd of a few hundred at a University of Regina all-candidates forum. The NDP candidate touted a Sierra Club report stating that her party had the greenest of all party platforms. Nigel, the dreadlocked outsider candidate, responded directly with a lengthy list of provincial NDP governments' environmental sins, before adding, "And this is the NDP. They're supposed to be the good guys!" He then summed up his position that he had no chance of winning, and the Green Party had no chance of forming government, but someone needed to stand up and point out that if we did not start living sustainably, we were all doomed. This whole election, he concluded, was about sustainability.

Nigel's impassioned speech, one beautifully structured so that it moved from a narrowly partisan attack on the NDP to a philosophical cri de coeur, was very well received. I have surely romanticized this moment of youthful political action, but I recall an ovation that far outstripped anything granted any other candidate that day.

What strikes me today, though, is how quickly the basic message of that speech has become untenable. "Sustainability" as a battle cry has built into it a certain narrative of stasis. There exists, the word implies, a correct balance between human activity and the natural world, and our responsibility is to act only within the boundaries established by that balancing act. Thus we might sustain the earth in its natural state rather than render it changed.

This emphasis on sustaining the current state of things is written all over the hegemonic version of environmentalism: the happily cyclic emblem of recycling suggests that all materials can be returned to an earlier state in a never-ending process; household composting returns food to the dirt from which it came so that food might be grown anew; the very idea of renewable energy sources implies wind, tides, and sunlight that can be harvested forever. Where industrial society is headed toward collapse, sustainable development promises a human civilization that can continue in perpetuity.

But what if all of this is built on a fantasy? For the notion that we humans are in some kind of balance with an external nature, and that this balance might be maintained, seems increasingly fantastical. Slavoj Zizek has been making a version of this critique for some time, and it is clear now that many of the facts are on his side. Global climate change is a part of this; whatever balance may have existed in the past, humans have now committed the earth to significant enough change in the oceans and the atmosphere that sustaining a semblance of the status quo for more than a decade or two is impossible. In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert makes a similar point in the context of species loss; according to her reporting, we are already committed to change so significant it registers in geological time. To the extent that these facts are well established, the idea of sustaining the status quo seems woefully irrelevant.

I argued in an earlier post that climate change in some ways seems to rebut the postmodern notion of the death of metanarratives. Here, though, climate change would seem to push us in the direction of another postmodernist strain: that of contingency and indeterminacy. For if no "sustainable" future is possible, if the climate change and mass extinction die are already cast, then what is left for environmentalism is to make the best of conditions as they change beneath us. That kind of environmentalism could take on the heady, emancipatory swirl theorists like Ernesto Laclau see in the construction of multiple and shifting political coalitions and causes. But it could also look like a late capitalist nightmare of insecurity in an uncertain world. In either case, the old promise of mere stasis cannot be kept.

The battle cry of sustainability is hardly dead. Indeed, headlines about "Sustainable Development Goals" are everywhere in advance of next week's United Nations meeting on the subject, and the Green Party of Canada remains committed to the concept of a "sustainable economy." Stephen Harper may yet hold on to his job on the promise of continued normalcy for the indefinite future. Conditions, though, have shifted underneath the feet of conservatives and environmentalists alike. And those shifting conditions reveal that environmentalists were, in the specific sense outlined here, conservatives all along.

Melodrama, Existentialism, and Gender

In Albert Camus's introduction to Poésies Posthumes by René Leynaud (reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death), he describes the late poet in the following terms: "But I have never known a single person who, loving him, failed to love him without reservation. This is because he inspired confidence. Insofar as it is possible for a man, he gave himself completely to everything he did. He never bargained about anything, and this is why he was assassinated. As solid as the short, stocky oaks of his Ardèche, he was both physically and morally strapping. Nothing could make the slightest dent in him when he had once made up his mind what was fair. It took a burst of bullets to subjugate him" (48).

What immediately follows this passage is a page break, and then this: "Up to now, I have spoken of Leynaud dryly and, so to speak, in a general way." The disconnect here between Camus's actual prose and his description of that prose is striking. What he describes as dry is, in fact, both emotional and laced with figurative language: love, infallible morality, assassination, and a man as solid as the oak trees of his homeland, a man who, in the final clause, stares down a "burst of bullets" in the name of what is right. Far from a dry description, Camus's prose here verges on melodrama.

I want to suggest that this dichotomy between claims of plain-spoken realism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward melodrama, on the other, is pervasive in existentialism. The claim to realism (and I am using "realism" here in its political sense, as the opposite of idealism) is most obvious amongst atheist existentialists. For them, the heart of the movement is a rejection of the comforting fiction that there is a God up there who cares about us and that there is a moral order that we need only adhere to in order to live a good life. In Camus' own terminology, we live in an "absurd" universe, one defined by the enormous gulf between what humans ask of it emotionally and what the cold, largely empty universe is capable of providing. This stripping away of religious illusions is at the centre of both postwar French existentialism and existentialism's pop cultural incarnations.

Christian existentialism, though somewhat more sanguine about our ultimate salvation, often shares this appeal to realism in the face of comforting illusions. For Kierkegaard, there may be a Creator out there, but that fact does not lead to any easy answers: we are still faced with the impossible task of figuring out what morality demands and, more difficult yet, when violation of the moral order is required by the higher call of spiritual demands. In Kierkegaard's most famous title, Either/Or, we are denied even the comforting Hegelian illusion that all dichotomies will be subsumed in a higher stage of dialectical development. For Kierkegaard, theist though he was, it is all choice and no grounds.

Thus both theistic and atheistic existentialism pose themselves as realist antidotes to the illusion of traditional moral and religious teaching. In this sense, they stand on the masculinist (more on that later) grounds of facing facts rather catering to our emotional needs.

At the same time, however, existentialism often poses its arguments, and especially its dramatizations, on melodramatic and therefore, at least as traditional genre distinctions would have it, feminized grounds. (I realize there is one very obvious objection to this characterization, but bear with me for a moment.) Take for example, the most canonical of Sartre's short stories: "The Wall." Here the decision without clear knowledge, the unknowability of consequences, and the absurdity of moral choices are staged in the most emotionally heightened of circumstances: the last hours before the protagonist faces the firing squad. (And not just any firing squad--an enemy firing squad eliminating members of the resistance.) Camus's Les Justes stages its themes on similar terrain, tyrants and the scaffold playing prominent roles in another life-and-death drama. In Camus's letters and essays these figures are, if anything, even more prominent; the title Resistance, Rebellion, and Death tells us much about the tendency toward melodrama to be found within its pages. Throughout the existentialist canon, the ticking clock, the noose, and the bravery of the Resistance figure again and again. Even in Viktor Frankl's relatively upbeat Man's Search for Meaning, the central drama is not the quotidian life of its readers, but the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust.

Now let us turn to the obvious objection to what I have written in the previous paragraph: While the subject matter, as enumerated above, may sound overwrought and melodramatic, these texts do not read as melodramatic. And the reason for that is clear: Sartre and Camus are not overplaying their emotional hand; they are dealing with situations that would seem to be objectively charged with high drama and intense emotion. It is impossible to accuse someone of being melodramatic about the Holocaust because the Holocaust, in its objective reality, demands the most violent of words in its representation. And something similar might be said about the French Resistance, anti-Czarist fighters, and the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. In every case, the objective conditions justify a highly charged representation.

Melodrama, then, is not highly emotional writing, but unjustifiably emotional writing. It is defined by a relationship between the content of a work and how that content is represented.

With that formula in place, I want to turn to the issue of gender. If the existentialists are excused from the category of melodramatists, this is because the subject matter with which they work reads as dramatic, dangerous, difficult, and infused with the highest moral questions. The subject matter of most melodrama does not. But are we as readers free from bias in that assessment? If Sartre reads as morally serious because he was a great man of philosophy, engaged in the serious business of war, why does Harriet Beecher Stowe, concerned with the serious business of slavery, read as melodramatic? If we saw the life of a 19th-century working-class woman as as dangerous, as filled with mortal risk from both assault and childbirth as it may well have been, would we see writing about those lives as melodramatic? Or would we grant that kind of writing the free pass we give Camus and Sartre? A detailed reading of both the facts of 19th century life and the texts representing it would be required to answer that question. However, it may be that our notion of melodrama has as much to do with our assumptions about what life was like for certain groups of people as it does for how those people are written about.

Postscript: It is perhaps no coincidence that the one academic article indicting an existentialist for melodrama levels that accusation at Simone de Beauvoir, for all intents and purposes the only female existentialist.

Narrating the Postwar World: AP U.S. History and the New Right

Historical survey courses must aim for a sweet spot between two extremes. On the one hand, they need to cover enough territory to map for students a reasonable junk of world history. You cannot make the classic grad student mistake of offering an undergraduate course about your dissertation topic; "Late Progressivism: America from 1910-1914" is unlikely to get many signups and even less likely to benefit many students. But a survey course can miss in the other direction as well, proposing to cover so much territory that only the thinnest narration is possible. This is a problem for world history courses everywhere, and reaches its reductio ad absurdum with the Bill Gates-endorsed "Big History Movement," which purports to cover everything from the formation of the Earth to the present in one curriculum, largely reducing history to geology in the process.

Advanced Placement U.S. History often threads this needle quite nicely, but when it errs, it errs in the direction of covering too much. The course provides high school students with a much needed framework in which to place later study of American history and it also weaves in "Document-Based Questions" that ask students to form interpretations of historical issues based on primary sources. The exam itself, in addition to a multiple-choice portion, includes a variety of essay questions asking students to demonstrate several different forms of synthesis and analysis.

All of this is to the good. However, in aiming for comprehensive coverage, AP US History also spreads itself thin, a thinness that can result in a certain kind of narrowness as well. The current curriculum asks teachers and students to sift through American history from 1491 to present in a single year; a sample pacing guide from College Board suggests devoting a scant five hours of instructional time to the period between 1491 (and presumably here "1491" is functioning as a synecdoche for "all Native American history prior to European contact") and 1607. The result of this frantic pace can be kind of capsule history of American periods. Any competent APUSH student can give you a 3-sentence Reader's Digest version of the Progressive Era: abuse of workers; industrial reforms; Teddy Roosevelt. Great teachers can find room for interpretive disputes and historical revision. But in a course that needs to clip along at AP's prescribed pace, there is only so much that can fit. Situating the Progressive Era in its postcolonial (or, if you prefer, emerging American colonial) context is not much on the agenda; queer history is even less likely to get a hearing. Spending time debating the merits of these different historiographical emphases is all but impossible.

Because of their reach into thousands of American and international high schools, these brief summaries will frame American history for tens of thousands of students. And from that fact derives the importance of last spring's AP US History exam which, in the 50th anniversary year of the Voting Rights Act, devoted its Document Based Question not to the Civil Rights Movement, but to "a new conservatism" that "rose to prominence in the United States between 1960 and 1989."

This is a signal shift in how we narrate the postwar world for high school students, a shift away from the postwar era as the triumph of progressive causes and toward it as the triumph of conservative reaction.

At least as an intellectual exercise, this reframing is in some ways long overdue. As Lisa McGirr argues in her brilliant rethinking of the sixties, Suburban Warriors, the conservative movement has been largely ignored in histories of the sixties because it has been “overshadowed by the more flamboyant Left and its movement culture.  Images of Martin Luther King proclaiming ‘Let freedom ring’ on the Washington Mall, students burning draft cards at federal induction centers, and flower children gathering in Haight-Ashbury for the ‘summer of love’” dominate our collective memory of the decade (McGirr 6). McGirr refocuses us on the quieter moments in coffee klatches and PTA meetings that, over the sixteen years from Goldwater's disastrous presidential campaign to Reagan's election, would remake America at the deepest political levels. A number of other academic historians, joined notably by Rick Perlstein's popular histories of the New Right, have made similar arguments over the last decade or so. 

But if this shift in narrating postwar America is intellectually interesting, it is also tempting to see it as politically troubling. If we want the high school students of America to remember three sentences of the postwar world, surely we would rather they remember Martin Luther King, Jr. at the pulpit or Abby Hoffman defiant in a Chicago courtroom than William F. Buckley pontificating in The National Review or George Wallace on the campaign trail. With limited instructional time, the appearance of the New Right in the AP US History curriculum cannot help but crowd out the more traditional heroes of the period.

The solution to this problem is obvious if difficult: moving away from the survey model and toward narrower content coverage. A course that took on less would have time to do more with it. In this specific case, that "more" could involve some real historiographical work for students: which reading of the postwar world, the rise of the New Left or the rise of the New Right, is more valid? What criteria would we use to choose? Is there a way to synthesize the two readings into something that grasps more of the contradictions of the period? Who gains and who loses when one of these interpretations dominates? Those are real and difficult questions. Getting at them would be great. But it would demand jettisoning a lot else--losing, say, 1491-1607 in favour of a deeper look at 1960-1989. 

Paris Notes 1: Climate Change, Katrina, and the Return (?) of the MetaNarrative

Of all of the ideas to emerge from high postmodern theory, the one that has penetrated the furthest into the wider culture is probably the notion of the collapse of "metanarratives" and their replacement with smaller, local truths. Articulated in its academic forms by Jean-Francois Lyotard (on the Left) and Francis Fukuyama (on the Right), the general contention that totalizing narratives (particularly that of communism versus capitalism) are either deeply flawed or no longer applicable has spread into most every form of multiculturalism, pluralism, and respect for diversities of identity and life experience. It would be hard to imagine today, for example, a university religious studies class that sees one religion as telling the correct story of the universe or that fails to acknowledge the different wisdom to be drawn from every faith tradition. Even cable news journalists now speak reflexively of the different narratives (plural) politicians create, often with no attempt to establish whether one of these narratives is closer to objective truth than the others.

Climate change would seem to pose the strongest possible challenge to the "collapse of metanarratives" theory. With climate change, we have a narrative that is, in the strongest sense, "meta." Here is a phenomenon that ties all life on earth together in a single, increasingly teleological story of ecological collapse. Where the communism vs capitalism story always required some obvious stretching to account especially for events in the colonial and postcolonial world, climate change affects every human and, along with its twin, ocean acidification, reaches even to places that humans do not and cannot visit. Perhaps most strikingly, climate change, unlike the theological and political metanarratives that preceded it, is grounded increasingly in the world of verifiable, scientific fact.

Thus, one could reasonable expect climate change to emerge in our era as a metanarrative even more powerful and all-encompassing than the communism-capitalism story that preceded it. From farming to national security to race to trade agreements, climate change would seem able to subsume every individual event into one story. At the very least, it is a much stronger contender than it post-9/11 rival, the facile story of a "clash of civilizations" promoted by American neoconservatives. With climate change, we have the return of just what Lyotard said could no longer exist: one coherent story that applies everywhere and to everyone.

The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina gives us an opportunity to test this hypothesis. First, let us note that for many years after, Katrina and its aftermath were about race. Both Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke and Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water narrate the event through the lens of black-white race relations. Dave Eggers' Zeitoun shifts the focus slightly to anti-Arab animus, but remains concerned with race and civil rights. Jamelle Bouie's recent 10th-anniversary piece on Katrina makes the case for a race-relations framing most pointedly, arguing that Katrina was "the most defining moment in Black America's relationship to its country" thus far in the 21st-century. (Most famously, Kanye West's public declaration during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people," demonstrated quite clearly how race was, for many Americans, what was at issue in Katrina.)

The one exception to the racial lens is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, where Katrina appears very briefly as an example of possible effects of climate change; Gore subsumes the specific events of Katrina into the larger story of global climate change and, in so doing, provides a (very brief) preview of what I am hypothesizing should become a more popular reading of Katrina as climate change becomes a more powerful metanarrative.

Jelani Cobb's New Yorker essay on the anniversary of Katrina provides an instructive example of how my hypothesis here fails, and why its failure might matter to the politics of climate change. Cobb places the Katrina disaster in the long history of institutionally sanctioned black poverty and black oppression in America, continuing the tradition of narrating Karina primarily in terms of race. In the midst of making this case, he makes the point that the term "natural disaster" is a "linguistic diversion": "Hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are natural phenomena; disasters, however, are often the work of humankind." Thus, Cobb argues, the impacts of natural disasters need to be understood in their specific, local context of differential access to infrastructure, emergency aid, and so forth.

Setting aside the matter of whether hurricanes might not be, at least partially, the work of humankind, Cobb makes quite clearly here what seems to me the correct intellectual point: rather than subsume local events to a totalizing metanarrative, clear understanding requires articulating global phenomena (like earthquakes and hurricanes) through the specific circumstances of the localities they effect. Saying, "Katrina is one example of climate change-driven disaster" is far less precise than saying "here are the ways this climate change-driven disaster ended up having the specific effects it did, given the specific history of race and poverty on the American Gulf Coast." All of this is roughly in keeping with Lyotard's initial reading of the collapse of metanarratives.

But if something is gained here, something also lost. By focusing on the specific and the local, attention is taken away from the general and the global. And that shift in focus makes it harder to see the places where large patterns do, in fact, hold. Moreover, it makes it harder to build the kind of global coalitions needed in advance of the Paris climate talks; if my disaster is primarily the result of my local circumstances, I am less likely to see that you and I are both victims of the same global problem.

If Cobb's essay is emblematic of how we narrate Katrina ten years on, then one of the challenges for climate change politics will be how to re-narrative Katrina as part of a global climate change story, without losing the insights Cobb derives from geographic and historical specificity. How to do that, and how to do it for a mass global audience, remains unclear.

Ann Rule May Be a More Important Cultural Icon than Truman Capote

With the publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote famously claimed to have invented a new genre, "the nonfiction novel." As with much Capote said, this was not exactly true. When In Cold Blood came out in 1965, it was riding the crest of an almost twenty-year wave of book-length creative nonfiction, much of it generated at The New Yorker, including Capote's own The Muses are Heard. What Capote did do was move the nonfiction novel on to the terrain of what was, at the time, a very, very lowbrow genre: true crime. In so doing, Capote in one fell-swoop elevated true crime to the cultural level of The New Yorker and extended it to a book-length genre rather than the stuff of pulp magazines. These were significant accomplishments.

After that, though, Capote bailed. Capote never again returned to true crime (but for a kind of late self-parody entitled "Hand-Carved Coffins"). Indeed, In Cold Blood represents more less the end of Capote's nonfiction career rather than the beginning of it.

The person who did do the heavy lifting to establish true crime as a major genre was Ann Rule, who died in July at the age of 83. Rule was a tireless author and promoter of true crime whose The Stranger Beside Me is perhaps the most important example of true crime as a mass-market genre rather than as the self-consciously literary texts of Capote and, later, Norman Mailer. Capote will certainly be remembered as a great prose stylist. Rule, however, may ultimately be seen as the more important cultural figure. Rule's version of true crime exists at the intersection of a new conservative movement and the women's movement, two things that go a long way to defining late twentieth-century American history. In light of Rule's understanding of contemporary politics and culture, Capote's foray into true crime seems surprisingly divorced from its time and place.

Rule's true crime, as with most true crime, is in many ways very conservative, often an unabashed cheerleader for the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the New Right. As I argued in my dissertation, true crime creates something of a conservative fantasy about what America and American crime look like:

         "First, true crime skews America’s demographics.  In a nation in which people of colour and the poor are far more likely to be the victims of crime, true crime presents a world in which victims, criminals, and police are almost exclusively white and middle class.  Moreover, the victims are almost always women, thus often turning misogynistic violence into a kind of entertainment.  As Jean Murley argues, the demographics of true crime represent 'a countercurrent to the social progress and cultural changes—feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness—that have transformed American life in the past four decades' (3).
          Second, true crime is almost always about the restoration of the status quo.  By definition, the genre describes a person or people who subvert society’s norms and, if they are murderers, violate its most sacred taboo.  In the end, however, the police get their man: 'In true crime, the killers are usually incarcerated or executed at the end of the story, reassuring us with a good old-fashioned reordering of the chaos wrought by crime' (Murley 3).  While there may have been a psychopath on the loose, true crime assures the reader that order has been restored, usually by brave and earnest officers of the law.
            Third, true crime’s means of production tends to underscore its close affiliation with law-and-order ideology.  As Laura Browder points out, 'True crime writers are often affiliated with victims’ rights groups, and some, like former policewoman Ann Rule [arguably True Crime’s most successful writer], work with law enforcement agencies' (936).  In the case of televised true crime, the link between text and law enforcement is even more pronounced.  Shows like America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries actively solicit the viewer’s participation in restoring the social order; by calling in tips, viewers become an arm of the state, assisting in the capture and incarceration of wrongdoers."

At the same time that is a very conservative genre, however, true crime as Rule produced it is also in some ways a female-dominated, even feminist genre: (quoting my dissertation again)

           "Browder argues that, while they may be overtly reactionary in their stated aims, some true crime texts 'are also subversive, in that they tend to question the very foundations of patriarchal culture—the family in true crime is often a poisonous unit' (Browder 936).  Moreover, in her interviews with female true crime readers (by all accounts, the genre’s readers are overwhelming women), Browder discovered something other than the passive consumption of misogynistic violence: 'Many [fans] read true crime to help themselves cope with the patriarchal violence they have encountered in the past, and fear in the present' (Browder 928).  'As read actively by female fans, what seems…to be anti-feminist can be read as feminist, and what is often perceived as sick, warping material can become a form of therapy, however flawed' (949).  Thus it is possible to see True Crime’s depictions of violence not as a normalization of that violence, but as a critique of a society in which that violence is normalized."

Thus true crime in general, and Rule's books in particular, sits right in the tangled intersection of the two biggest American cultural shifts in the last third of the twentieth century: the shift away from the New Deal consensus and toward Reaganism, on the one hand, and the rapid cultural successes of the women's movement, on the other. And to drive the point home, Rule demonstrates the tangled ways in which these movements over lap. The women's movement was a progressive, liberatory movement--except when it wasn't: for example, when empowered female voters favoured Phyllis Schlafly over the ERA. And the New Right was a regressive, reactionary movement except when, as Rule makes clear, its concerns about rising violent crime actually served the cause of greater daily freedoms for women. (Perhaps these political contradictions go someway to explaining the riddle posed by Amanda Marcotte at Slate, why Rule initially had to publish under a male nom de plume.) 

This is not the place to sort out the precise relationship between the women's movement and the New Right. It is only the place to say that Rule captured the tensions between these cultural poles in ways far beyond anything Capote ever did. And, in the end, crystallising cultural history into specific narratives might be what great writers do.