British Association for American Studies Conference, University of Edinburgh, 27-30 March 2008
Image: ‘Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat’ (1826), engraving by William Miller after H W Williams (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Guest Post: Theresa Saxon (University of Central Lancashire)
The annual conference of the British Association for American Studies was this year hosted at the University of Edinburgh, rather fetchingly situated in the shade of Holyrood Park. There was no overarching theme for the conference, and papers had been invited on any subject relating to the United States of America and to early America across a wide range of disciplines, including history, literary studies, political science, cultural studies, film and media studies, and visual culture and art history, among others. Over 280 people attended the conference. This blog will presents an overview of sessions attended and hopefully, along the way, an account of the overall conference atmosphere.
Thursday’s initiating plenary lecture, delivered by Brenda Gayle Plummer, Professor in History at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Peace Was the Glue: Europe and African American Freedom,” offered a reading of the impact of transatlantic relations on the activism of African Americans. The lecture was followed by a reception at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, with speeches from Christopher Harvie (MSP) and First Minister of Scotland, the Right Honorable Alex Salmon, on prospects for Higher Education in Scotland. This first day of the conference was rounded off with a performance of American folk and bluegrass by Woody Guthrie Research Fellow Will Kaufman, amongst others. The impromptu backing singers were particularly good!
Demonstrating the diversity of panels, the first session I attended on Friday, the second day of the conference, discussed Contemporary American Comics. Paul Williams (University of Plymouth) delivered a paper on Jim Woodring’s Frank series and allegories of capitalism, focussing on Frank as both subscribing to and extending the range of the concept of the “funny animal comic” genre. Drawing on examples from Disney’s Donald Duck, counterpoising Marxist critical interpretations of the “funny animal comic” as a means of maintaining the machinery of capitalism against readings of the genre as a challenge to order where plucky little characters succeed in dethroning the bigger creatures, Williams intriguingly argued that Frank constitutes a grotesque presentation of social relations, an allegory of capitalism and a vehicle of social critique. Then Brian Ireland’s (University of Glamorgan), ‘Errand into the Wilderness: The Cursed Earth as Apocalyptic Road Narrative,’ gave an account of the 2000AD Judge Dredd “Cursed Earth” epic as a road narrative, moving from east to west, following the impulse of the genre’s urge to the pastoral space, which, in its tracing of the impact of apocalypse, also challenges the key features of the genre. More particularly, argued Ireland, we see the major impulse of the road narrative in the development of insights into the psyche of the previously two-dimensional, stiff and unbending officer for justice, Dredd himself. Chairing this session was a joy. The panel’s enthusiasm and knowledge was rewarded by a series of astute questions from the audience; when time ran out, the sense of disappointment was palpable – this was as good a start to conference panels as one could get. At the break, I heard talk of other excellent panel sessions. The conference tone had indeed been set very high.
Another session attended on that second day featured three papers on Sources of Women’s Reform Movements. Rachel Cope (Syracuse University), “Religious Showers: The Impact of Revivalism on Nineteenth-Century New York Women” discussed, through reference to archival resources, the impact of Second Great Awakening in Upstate New York on women, particularly how this revival served as one of the first platforms of social reform, yet at the same time proposing that women exposed to revivals were accepting religion for theological beliefs as well as social opportunities. Louis J. Kern (Hofstra University) then spoke about “What Shall be ‘the Credo of the New New Woman?’ Representations of Joan of Arc as Iconic Vessel of Women’s Role in the Age of First Wave Feminism in the United States,” drawing on images from popular as well as classical texts to argue that Joan of Arc was recuperated as the militant champion of the female hero, and a physical embodiment of feminist activism in the suffrage movement, in opposition to the more conventional representation of Joan of Arc as subjugated by paternal authority. Elizabeth Nolan (Manchester Metropolitan University) completed this session, with a paper on “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Early Twentieth Century Women’s Magazine Culture,” which offered a fascinating analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ambitious venture of 1909, launching her own periodical, The Forerunner, as a challenge to publishers who were reluctant to place her writings. This journal, argued Nolan, with its determined promotion of Gilman’s unique brand of reform, demonstrates a keen awareness of and dialogue with the wider world of women’s magazine culture in this period whilst operating outside both conventional and more feminist leanings of those publications.
The Journal of American Studies sponsored Lecture: Byron E. Shafer (University of Wisconsin–Madison), “Where are We in History? Political Orders and Political Eras in the Postwar United States,” introduced by Professor Susan Castillo, was followed by a reception hosted by the University of Nottingham, which will be the venue for next year’s event
The third day of the conference also set off at a sprightly intellectual pace. I attended a fascinating session on the Transatlantic American Renaissance. Jeff Einboden (Northern Illinois University), spoke on “Transatlanticism, Translation and Transmigration: Thoreau’s Rendition of the Harivamsa” an intriguing account of Thoreau’s language use in his translation of the Sanskrit in The Transmigration of the Seven Brahmans, noting several variations in the use of specifically mystic terms and the relations between Thoreau’s interpretation, and that of the French Langlois. Tom Wright’s (University of Cambridge) “The ‘Moral Landscape’ of England in mid-Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writing,” proposed an ‘ecocritical’ framework through which we should read the ‘moral landscape’ of nineteenth century travel writers such as Margaret Fuller, Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederic Law Olmsted and Elihu Burrit. Clare Elliott (University of Glasgow) also addressed the transatlantic New England in “‘We talked only about Blake’: New England Coteries, James John Garth Wilkinson and the Transatlantic Dissemination of William Blake’s Poetry,” which claimed that Emerson’s access to Blake came from Wilkinson’s promotion of the English poet, which also inspired an American readership that emerged well before that in Britain. Michael Collins’ (University of Nottingham) “‘The Rule of Men Entirely Great’: Melville’s Use of Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu in “The Two Temples,” argued that Melville both assimilates and disrupts Bulwer-Lytton’s Utilitarianism. An account of the Astor Place Riot of 1849, “The Two Temples,” argued Collins, suggests that Melville demonstrated a growing support for cultural elitism and republicanism over democracy and individual liberty, a point of view that critics have consistently chosen to ignore.
The mid-morning session I attended was dedicated to Personal and National Identity: Perspectives on Art History, which provided an account of photography and artists – Dena Gilbert (Endicott College) and Marianne Woods (University of Texas of the Permian Basin) spoke about The Gerhard Sisters’ portraits and Wallace Notting’s interiors respectively, and William Morris Welch (Troy University) offered a reading of James McNeill Whistler in the context of the transatlantic, a fascinating session to chair and once again we ran right out of time for questions.
Late afternoon sessions featured my panel on American Theatre, and I pass on my thanks to the conference audience, whose attendance did not diminish with the passing of daylight. I gave a paper on “Articulation, Declamation, Stagecraft: The Specifying of American Theatre,” which argued that melodrama provided a forum for the expression of the inherent ambivalences of what constituted the ‘American voice,’ where authenticity was not found and fixed but was rendered viable and valid as a subject of debate and discussion, proposing that Edwin Forrest’s vernacular style informed a pluralizing effect that found its home on, and stimulated the range of performances that appeared across, American stages. I was joined by Teresa Botelho (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), whose paper on ‘Perspectives on Stasis and Change in the Dramatic Work of Tony Kushner,’ produced close readings of drama, music and songs in Kushner’s play A Bright Room Called Day and musical the Caroline, or Change.
The Eccles Centre sponsored lecture, “John Cage was all the Rage” by Peter Dickinson (University of London and Keele University) constituted an account of Cage’s processes of composition that was accompanied by excerpts from several of his musical pieces. The evening’s banquet was a culinary feast that just about matched the intellectual sustenance, and a ‘speakeasy’ disco rounded out a busy yet invigorating day.
It is with regret that I had to depart early on the morning of the fourth and final day, which featured panels on a range of topics from African American communities, New Perspective on African Americans during the Long Nineteenth Century, Artistic Interdisciplinarity in US Writing and Rethinking the Origins of American politics.
Throughout all the coffee, lunch and dinner breaks, the song remained the same – there were so many excellent sessions on offer that audiences in one session were perpetually expressing their interest in others running concurrently, for fear of missing out. This level of interest and debate is a sign of excellent organisation and thoughtful planning – congratulations indeed should go to the conference planners, the University of Edinburgh and particular praise to Dr Robert Mason, the conference secretary.
Throughout the conference, attention had been drawn to the development of an interdisciplinary American Studies with the potential to excite scholarship and engage in cultural and political debate. I recommend interested parties to the website: http://www.baas.ac.uk/administration/programme.asp, for further information and, in many instances, online provision of abstracts which provide a brief record of a substantial, intellectually compelling and at the same time entertaining conference.
Tags: American literature, BAAS
