Cultivating a Climate for Civic Action and Hope: What Our c19 Scholarship Can Teach Us

Cultivating a Climate for Civic Action and Hope: What Our c19 Scholarship Can Teach Us            When we think of “Climate” these days, we gravitate toward such OED-sanctioned meanings linked to the natural... [ view full abstract ]

Cultivating a Climate for Civic Action and Hope:

What Our c19 Scholarship Can Teach Us

           When we think of “Climate” these days, we gravitate toward such OED-sanctioned meanings linked to the natural environment as “weather conditions of a country or region,” or climate change as a global concern. However, much scholarship on 19^th-century life underscores how directing our attention toward a different OED-sanctioned meaning for climate—“the attitudes or conditions prevailing among a body of people or a nation”—can do valuable cultural work. Now, such work is surely crucial to take on. In myriad venues, through often-loud voices, our current historical moment has made long-swirling undercurrents in American life painfully visible. Therefore, by drawing on our studies of the long 19^th century, our roundtable will address questions relevant to the divisive social climate in our nation:

• What tools for engaging with today’s social issues do we find within c19 texts and/or in the public activities of individual authors, organizations, or movements?
• How does the current moment urge us to revisit themes, texts, and issues from c19 American life that call for our attention today—such as the place of immigrants, mixed-race, and other marginalized peoples in our society, and the role of public intellectuals as both individual voices of conscience and community-builders?
• In reflecting on our own scholarly activities (including teaching and community engagement), what pathways can we highlight for cultivating productive civic action?
• How can we tap into our own research to foster constellations of constructive language, and networks of collaborative action, to intervene in the negative political climate undermining our national ethos?

Our session’s conversation will affirm scholarly activism long associated with our field. For instance, we embrace affect as a path to social action. We align our roundtable with such studies as John Ernest’s Chaotic Justice (which honored activist work of leaders like Harriet Wilson and William Wells Brown) and with Glenn Hendler’s emphasis in Public Sentiments on how 19^th-century-inspired sympathetic reading (whether of Martin Delany’s writings, Horatio Alger-type stories, or women’s temperance narratives) invited audiences’ engagement with larger publics. We tap into responses to scholarship like our chair Cari Carpenter’s Seeing Red, such as on the “Indian Country Today” website, where one reader praises Carpenter’s book for “help[ing] us look at what part anger plays as an agent of change . . . in Native discourse and resistance, and in our daily lives.”

Each speaker will ground her remarks in materials and methods associated with her “traditional” scholarship exploring the 19^th century—an era facing challenges that resonate with our own. We will point to ways we draw on our study of 19^th-century climate to respond to social issues today—including public tensions which invoke frustration, as well as a sense of separation from some of our fellow citizens. Each of us will underscore links between our scholarship and our hopeful moves to civic action. Then we’ll dialogue with our audience and welcome their stories, hoping a positive climate cultivated in our session will ripple outward.    

María Carla Sánchez will discuss "undetected climates": The means by which different communities experience a seemingly monolithic social climate (the "body politic," the "American people") in disruptive, disorienting ways. Building upon public scholarship in outlets such as the Huffington Post and Chronicle of Higher Education, and also her current book project The Imagination of Slavery, María describes how the intersections of 2016's presidential election, changing demographics in her home state of North Carolina, and largely unchanged populations within English departments, challenge C19 scholars to adapt rhetorical models of appeal and personal connection to a C21 world that needs them.

In her talk Kathryn Warren, who was a Summer Scholar at the 2017 NEH Institute on Transcendentalism and Reform, will turn to the Transcendentalists for inspiring models of how to promote and engage in the public humanities. She will consider what analogs of the 19^th-century lyceum exist today and reflect on the role academics could play in making the humanities relevant to a broad audience. In addition, she will reflect on the model Henry David Thoreau’s eccentric professional life may offer today’s academics, particularly those off the tenure track (as she herself is).

Sandra Zagarell will discuss Alice Dunbar-Nelson and her work as models for public discourse about race, rights and education. Dunbar-Nelson’s anthologies of African American oratory and writing, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence and The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, and her essays on education remain generative given current debates about the character of secondary education and about the diversity—or uniformity—of American culture and traditions. Because Dunbar-Nelson herself personified unflagging persistence in grim times, Zagarell will also suggest that knowledge about her and others like her can help move us beyond polarization or resignation—as it has for some of Zagarell’s students.

Sarah Robbins will describe how public humanities projects she’s helping facilitate today build upon c19 research for her Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching. “GlobalEX,” a co-curricular program supporting teams of international and “domestic”/US students’ exploration of local/global issues, draws on Sarah’s study of institution-building by Spelman college’s 1880s’ founders. “Writing Home,” a project sponsoring issue-oriented community conversations tied to historic homeplaces around the country, channels research on Hull-House settlement praxis. And her study of Native narratives originally composed in resistance to the boarding school assimilation movement is guiding Robbins’s support of graduate students’ community-based research toward social activism.